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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13154 ***
+
+Note: The Table of Contents and the list of illustrations were added
+      by the transcriber.
+
+
+
+
+LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE OF POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE
+
+February, 1876.
+
+Vol. XVII, No. 98.
+
+
+
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS
+
+  THE CENTURY--ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.
+    II.--AMERICAN PROGRESS.
+
+  UP THE THAMES.
+    CONCLUDING PAPER, by EDWARD C. BRUCE.
+
+  THE POET'S PEN, by F.A. HILLARD.
+
+  SKETCHES OF INDIA.
+    II.
+
+  FRA ALOYSIUS, by EMMA LAZARUS.
+
+  A FEW HOURS IN BOHEMIA.
+
+  PROFESSOR AND TEACHER, by JAMES MORGAN HART.
+
+  CONTRASTED MOODS, by CHARLOTTE F. BATES.
+
+  THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, by MRS. E. LYNN LINTON
+    CHAPTER XXI. CHANGES.
+    CHAPTER XXII. EDGAR HARROWBY.
+    CHAPTER XXIII. ON THE MOOR.
+    CHAPTER XXIV. THE CHILD FINA.
+
+  LETTERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA, by LADY BARKER.
+
+  ON SANKOTA HEAD, by ETHEL C. GALE.
+
+  AT THE OLD PLANTATION.
+    TWO PAPERS.--II, by ROBERT WILSON.
+
+  OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
+    A GERMAN AGRICULTURAL FAIR.
+    A PAIR OF WHEELS AND AN OLD PARASOL.
+    MEDICAL EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES, by R.A.F. PENROSE.
+
+  OUR EARLY NEWSPAPERS.
+
+  LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
+    _Books Received._
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+  POST-OFFICE DEPARTMENT BUILDING AT WASHINGTON.
+  THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON AND CARPENTERS' HALL, WHERE THE FIRST
+    COLONIAL CONGRESS MET.
+  HOE'S NEW PERFECTING PRINTING-PRESS, PRINTING 12,000 DOUBLE
+    IMPRESSIONS PER HOUR, AND THE OLD EPHRATA PRESS.
+  THE CITY OF TOKYO, THE LARGEST STEAMSHIP BUILT IN AMERICA, AND
+    FITCH'S STEAMBOAT, THE FIRST CONSTRUCTED.
+  THE COTTON GIN.
+  GRAIN ELEVATOR.
+  INTERIOR OF A POSTAL CAR.
+  PROF. S.F.B. MORSE, THE INVENTOR OF THE ELECTRO-MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH.
+  THE SCHOOL-HOUSE OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.
+  WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM ETON.
+  MORTON CHURCH.
+  MILTON'S PEAR TREE.
+  GRAY.
+  BEACONSFIELD CHURCH.
+  TOMB OF BURKE.
+  HEDSOR AND COOKHAM CHURCHES.
+  ETON COLLEGE AND CHAPEL.
+  ETON COLLEGE, FROM NORTH TERRACE, WINDSOR.
+  STAINES CHURCH.
+  NORMAN GATE AND ROUND TOWER, WINDSOR.
+  HERNE'S OAK.
+  EAST FRONT, WINDSOR CASTLE.
+  QUEEN ELIZABETH'S BUILDING, WINDSOR.
+  EARL OF SURREY.
+  WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM BISHOPSGATE.
+  LOCK AT WINDSOR.
+  THE THAMES EMBANKMENT.
+  ELMS NEAR THE HERONRY.
+  HINDU TEMPLES NEAR POONA.
+  GÓNDS.
+  CENOTAPHS IN THE VALLEY OF THE TONSA.
+  THE GAUR, OR INDIAN BISON.
+  BANJARIS.
+
+
+
+LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE
+
+OF
+
+_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE_.
+
+FEBRUARY, 1876.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CENTURY--ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.
+
+II.--AMERICAN PROGRESS.
+
+[Illustration: POST-OFFICE DEPARTMENT BUILDING AT WASHINGTON.]
+
+From showing the world's right to the epoch of '76, and sketching the
+progress of the century in its wider aspect, a natural transition is
+to the part played in illustrating the period by the people from whose
+political birth it dates, and who have made the task of honoring it
+their own. They have reached their first resting-place, and pardonably
+enjoy the opportunity of looking back at the road they have traversed.
+They pause to contemplate its gloomy beginning, the perilous
+precipices along which it wound, and the sudden quagmires that often
+interrupted it, all now softened by distance and by the consciousness
+of success. Opening with a forest-path, it has broadened and
+brightened into a highway of nations.
+
+So numerous and various were the influences, formative and impellent,
+which combined to bring the colonies up to the precise ripening-point
+of their independence, as to make it difficult to assign each its
+proper force. In the concentric mass, however, they stand out sharp
+and clear, and the conjoint effect seems preordained. That the event
+should have come when it did, and not before or after, is as obvious
+as any of history's predictions after the fact. Looking through the
+glasses of to-day, we find it hard to realize that the Continental
+Congress renewed its expressions of loyalty to the king three weeks
+after the battle of Bunker Hill, so distinct before us rises the
+completed and symmetrical edifice of separation ready for its
+capstone, from its foundations growing steadily through the past.
+
+Thirteen years--one for each State--were occupied in the topping-off.
+The Seven Years' War, that created the new central power of modern
+Europe, had a great deal to do with creating the new American power.
+It taught the colonies their strength, gave them several thousand
+native soldiers, and sent them from over the water the material,
+some of it completely wrought, for more in the German immigration
+consequent upon it. Out of it grew the obnoxious enactments that
+brought on the end. So closely simultaneous were these with the king's
+proclamation of October 7, 1763, prohibiting all his subjects "from
+making any purchases or settlements whatever, or taking possession of
+any of the lands, beyond the sources of any of the rivers which fall
+into the Atlantic Ocean from the west or north-west," as to support
+the suspicion that the British ministry had a premonitory sense of the
+coming struggle, and meant to prepare for it by checking the expansion
+of the colonies. The pressure applied to front and rear was part of
+one and the same movement; and is incompatible with the accepted
+view that neither cabinet nor Parliament anticipated, in the first
+instance, any American opposition to the Stamp Act and the system of
+legislation to which it was the opening wedge. The England of that day
+proposed to rule America after much the same fashion with Ireland,
+the Alleghanies presenting themselves very conveniently for an
+Indian Pale. This line of policy was in harmony with the ideas then
+predominant in England, and was fully understood by the colonists.
+They could not possibly have been blind to it, in view of the
+continuous and repeated claims of absolute legislative supremacy
+formally put forth, from the bill to that effect passed coincidently
+with the repeal of the Stamp Act down to the alterations made in the
+Massachusetts charter in 1774; the latter proceeding being in close
+harmony, both in time and motive, with the extension of the province
+of Quebec to the Ohio--one of the very rare evidences of sagacity and
+foresight discernible in the course of the ministry; for, while it did
+not avail to dam the westward flood, it certainly contributed, with
+other concessions made at the same time to the Canadians, to save the
+St. Lawrence to the Crown.
+
+As apropos to this point, we transcribe from the original
+manuscript, written in the round, clear, unhesitating but steady hand
+characteristic of all Washington's letters, the following to James
+Wood of Winchester, afterward governor of Virginia, but then little
+more than a stripling:
+
+    "MOUNT VERNON, Feb'y 20th, 1774.
+
+    "DEAR SIR: I have to thank you, for your obliging acc't of
+    your trip down the Mississippi, contained in a Letter of the
+    18th of Octob'r from Winchester--the other Letter, therein
+    refer'd to, I have never yet receiv'd, nor did this come
+    to hand till some time in November, as I was returning from
+    Williamsburg.
+
+    "The contradictory acc'ts given of the Lands upon the
+    Mississippi are really astonishing--some speak of the Country
+    as a terrestrial Paradise, whilst others represent it as
+    scarce fit for anything but Slaves and Brutes. I am well
+    satisfied, however, from your description of it, that I have
+    no cause to regret my disappointment:--The acc't of Lord
+    Hillsborough's sentiments of the Proclamation of 1763, I can
+    view in no other light than as one, among many other proofs,
+    of his Lordship's malignant disposition towards us poor
+    Americans, formed equally in malice, absurdity, and error; as
+    it would have puzzled this noble Peer, I am persuaded, to have
+    assigned any plausible reason in support of this opinion.
+
+    "As I do not know but I may shortly see you in Frederick, and
+    assuredly shall before the Assembly, I shall add no more than
+    that, it will always give me pleasure to see you at this place
+    whenever it is convenient to you, and that with compliments
+    to your good Mother I remain, D'r Sir, Y'r most Obed't H'ble
+    Serv't,
+
+    "G'o WASHINGTON."
+
+[Illustration: THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON AND CARPENTERS' HALL, WHERE
+THE FIRST COLONIAL CONGRESS MET.]
+
+This private note, discussing casually and curtly the great river
+of the West, and the minister who endeavored to make it a _flumen
+clausum_ to the colonists, nearly equidistant in date between the
+Boston Tea-party and the meeting of the Assembly which called the
+first Continental Congress, has some public interest. The West
+always possessed a peculiar attraction for Washington. He explored
+it personally and through others, and lost no occasion of procuring
+detailed information in regard to its capabilities. He acquired large
+bodies of land along the Ohio at different points, from its affluents
+at the foot of the Alleghany to the Great Kanawha and below. Now we
+see him gazing farther, over the yet unreddened battle-grounds of
+Boone and Lewis, to the magnificent province France and Spain were
+carefully holding in joint trusteeship for the infant state he was to
+nurse. The representative in the provincial legislature of a frontier
+county stretching from the Potomac to the Ohio, we may fancy him
+inspired, as he looked around from his post on the vertebral range of
+the continent, with "something of prophetic strain." If so, he was
+not long to have leisure for indulging it. Within eighteen months his
+life's work was to summon him eastward to the sea-shore. The Dark and
+Bloody Ground must wait. For its tillage other guess implements than
+the plough were preparing--the same that beckoned him to Cambridge and
+the new century.
+
+The slender driblet of population which at this juncture flowed
+toward the Lower Mississippi was due to the anxiety of Spain to get a
+home-supply of wheat, hemp and such-like indispensables of temperate
+extraction for her broad tropical empire. A newspaper of August 20,
+1773 gives news from New York of the arrival at that port of "the
+sloop Mississippi, Capt. Goodrich, with the Connecticut Military
+Adventurers from the Mississippi, but last from Pensacola, the 16th
+inst." They had "laid out twenty-three townships at the Natchez,"
+where lands were in process of rapid occupation, the arrivals
+numbering "above four hundred families within six weeks, down the Ohio
+from Virginia and the Carolinas." The Connecticut men doubtless came
+back prepared, a little later, to vindicate their martial cognomen;
+and to aid them in that they were met by Transatlantic recruits in
+unusual force. The same journal mentions the arrival at Philadelphia
+of 1050 passengers in two ships from Londonderry; this valuable
+infusion of Scotch-Irish brawn, moral, mental and muscular, being
+farther supplemented by three hundred passengers and servants in the
+ship Walworth from the same port for South Carolina. The cash value to
+the country of immigrants was ascertainable by a much less circuitous
+computation then than now; many of them being indentured for a term
+of years at an annual rate that left a very fair sum for interest and
+sinking fund on the one thousand dollars it is the practice of our
+political economist of to-day to clap on each head that files
+into Castle Garden. The German came with the Celt in almost equal
+force--enough to more than balance their countrymen under Donop,
+Riedesel and Knyphausen. The attention drawn to the colonies by the
+ministerial aggressions thus contributed to strengthen them for the
+contest.
+
+But with all these accessions in the nick of time, two millions and
+a quarter of whites was a meagre outfit for stocking a virgin farm of
+fifteen hundred miles square, to say nothing of its future police and
+external defence against the wolves of the deep. It barely equaled the
+original population, between the two oceans, of nomadic Indians, who
+were, by general consent, too few to be counted or treated as owners
+of the land. It fell far short of the numbers that had constituted,
+two centuries earlier, the European republic from which our federation
+borrowed its name. The task, too, of the occidental United States
+was double. Instead of being condensed into a small, wealthy and
+defensible territory, they had at once to win their independence
+from a maritime power stronger than Spain, and to redeem from utter
+crudeness and turn into food, clothing and the then recognized
+appliances of civilized life the wilderness thus secured. The result
+could not vary nor be doubted; but that the struggle, in war and in
+peace, must be slow and wearing, was quite as certain. It is dreary to
+look back upon its commencement now, and upon the earlier decades
+of its progress; and we cannot wonder that those who had it to look
+forward to half shrank from it. Among them there may have been a
+handful who could scan the unshaped wilderness as the sculptor does
+his block, and body forth in imagination the glory hidden within. That
+which these may have faintly imagined stands before us palpable if not
+yet perfected, the amorphous veil of the shapely figure hewn away,
+and the long toil of drill and chisel only in too much danger of being
+forgotten.
+
+Population, the most convenient gauge of national strength and
+progress, is far from being a universally reliable one. We shall find
+sometimes as wide a difference between two given millions as between
+two given individuals. Either may grow without doing much else. They
+may direct their energies to different fields. Compared with the
+United States, France and Germany, for example, have advanced but
+little in population. They have, however, done wonders for themselves
+and the world by activities which we have, in comparison, neglected.
+The old city of London gains in wealth as it loses in inhabitants.
+
+[Illustration: HOE'S NEW PERFECTING PRINTING-PRESS, PRINTING 12,000
+DOUBLE IMPRESSIONS PER HOUR, AND THE OLD EPHRATA PRESS.]
+
+Yet success in the multiplication of souls within their own
+borders--depopulate as they may elsewhere--is eagerly coveted and
+regularly measured by all the nations. Since 1790, when we set them
+the example, they have one by one adopted the rule of numbering heads
+every five, six or ten years, recognizing latterly as well, more and
+more, the importance of numbering other things, until men, women and
+children have come to be embedded in a medley of steam-engines,
+pigs, newspapers, schools, churches and bolts of calico. For twenty
+centuries this taking of stock by governments had been an obsolete
+practice, until revived by the framers of the American Constitution
+and made a vital part of that instrument. The right of the most--and
+not of the richest, the best, the bravest, the cleverest, or the
+oldest in blood--to rule being formally recognized and set down on
+paper, it became necessary to ascertain at stated intervals who were
+the most. The lords of the soil, instead of being inducted into power
+on the death of their parents with great pother of ointment, Te Deum,
+heraldry, drum and trumpet, were chosen every ten years by a corps of
+humble knights of the pencil and schedule.
+
+To these disposers of empire, the enhancement and complication of
+whose toil has been a labor of love with each decennial Congress, we
+owe the knowledge that eighty years, out of the hundred, brought the
+people of the Union up from a tally of 3,929,214 in 1790 to 38,558,371
+in 1870, and that down to the beginning of the last decade the rate of
+increment adhered closely to 35 per cent. On that basis of growth the
+latest return falls nearly four millions short. One of the causes of
+this is "too obvious" (and too disagreeable) "to mention;" but it
+is inadequate. The sharp demarcation of the western frontier by the
+grasshopper and the hygrometer is another, which will continue to
+operate until, by irrigation, tree-planting or some other device, a
+new climate can be manufactured for the Plains. The teeming West, that
+of old needed only to be tickled with a hoe to laugh with a harvest,
+has disappeared. At least what is left of it has lost the power of
+suction that was wont to reach across the ocean, pull Ballys and Dorfs
+up by the roots and transplant them bodily to the Muskingum and
+the Des Moines. A third cause, operating more especially within
+the current decade, is attributable to another mode in which that
+attractive power has been exerted--the absorption from the European
+purse for the construction of railways of seven or eight times as much
+as the thirty-five millions in specie it took to fight through the
+Revolutionary war. For a while, Hans came with his thalers, but they
+outfooted him--"fast and faster" behind came "unmerciful disaster,"
+and he was fain to turn his back on the land of promise and promises.
+Similar set-backs, however, are interspersed through our previous
+history, and the influence of the last one may be over-rated.
+
+In truth, the Old World's fund of humanity is not sufficiently ample
+to keep up the pace; and the rate of natural increase is no longer
+what it was when the country was all new, and cornfield and nursery
+vied in fecundity. That the former source of augmentation is gaining
+in proportion upon the latter is apparent from the last three returns.
+The ratio of foreign-born inhabitants to the aggregate in 1850 was
+9.68 per cent. in 1860, 13.16, and in 1870, 14.44. In the last-named
+year, moreover, 10,892,015, or 28 per cent. of the entire population,
+white and black, are credited with foreign parentage on one or both
+sides. Excluding the colored element, ranked as all native, this
+proportion rises to 32 per cent.
+
+Judged by the test of language, three-fifths of those who are of
+foreign birth disappear from the roll of foreigners, 3,119,705 out
+of 5,567,229 having come from the British Isles and British America.
+Germany, including Bohemia, Holland and Switzerland, sums up
+1,883,285; Scandinavia, 241,685; and France and Belgium, 128,955. The
+Celtic influx from Ireland, and the Teutonic and Norse together, form
+two currents of almost identical volume. Compared with either,
+the contribution of the Latin or the Romance races sinks into
+insignificance--an insignificance, however, that shows itself chiefly
+in numbers, the traces of their character and influence being,
+relatively to their numerical strength, marked. The immigrants from
+Northern and Southern Europe have a disposition, in choosing their
+new homes, to follow latitude, or rather the isotherms; the North-men
+skirting the Canadian frontier and grouping themselves on the coldest
+side of Lake Michigan, while the Italians, Spaniards and French drift
+toward the Gulf States. The Irish and Germans are more cosmopolitan,
+each in a like degree. They disperse with less regard to climate or
+surroundings, and are more rapidly and imperceptibly absorbed and
+blended, thus promoting rather than marring the homogeneity of the
+American people. The Germans are, however, more prone to colonizing
+than the Irish--a circumstance due in great measure to their differing
+in language from the mass of their new neighbors. This cause of
+isolation is gradually losing its weight, the recognition of the
+German tongue by State legislatures, municipalities, etc. being less
+common than formerly, notwithstanding the immense immigratior so
+calculated to extend it.
+
+While assimilation has been growing more complete, and a fixed
+resultant becoming more discernible, the ingredients of this ethnic
+medley do not seem to have materially varied in their proportions
+since the beginning of the century. They present a tolerably close
+parallel to the like process in Northern France, where Celt and Teuton
+combined in nearly equal numbers, with, as in our case, a limited
+local infusion of the Norse. The result cannot, however, be identical,
+the French lacking our Anglo-Saxon substratum, with its valuable
+traditions and habitudes of political thought. The balance between
+impulse and conservatism has never been, in this country, long or
+seriously disturbed, and is probably as sound now as a hundred
+years ago. In the discussions of the twenty years which embrace our
+Revolutionary period we find abundance of theory, but they were never
+carried by abstractions out of sight of the practical. Our publicists
+were not misled by convictions of the "infinite perfectibility of
+the human mind," the motive proclaimed by Condorcet, writing in sweet
+obliviousness of the guillotine, as explaining "how much more pure,
+accurate and profound are the principles upon which the constitution
+and laws of France have been formed than those which directed the
+Americans." The lack of this equilibrium among the pure, and, as we
+may venture to term them, the untrained races, we have occasional
+opportunities of noting on our own soil when for a passing cause they
+resort to isolated action.
+
+[Illustration: THE CITY OF TOKYO, THE LARGEST STEAMSHIP BUILT IN
+AMERICA, AND FITCH'S STEAMBOAT, THE FIRST CONSTRUCTED.]
+
+A race-question of a character that cannot be supplied by
+differentiation within Caucasian limits haunts us as it has done from
+the very birth of the colonies. Like the Wild Huntsman, we have had
+the sable spectre close beside us through the whole run. But, more
+fortunate than he, we see it begin to fade. At least its outlines are
+contracting. The ratio of colored inhabitants to the aggregate,
+in 1790 19.26 per cent., or one-fifth, fell in 1860 to 14.12, or
+one-seventh, and in 1870 to 12.65, or an eighth. The next census will
+beyond doubt point more strongly in the same direction. If, whilst
+dwindling in magnitude, the dusky shape perplex us by assuming
+suddenly a novel form, we may yet be assured that it is the same in
+substance and in manageability. Its hue is whitening with the fleece
+of five millions of cotton bales. The cloud has a silver lining--a
+golden one in fact--for ours is pecuniarily a serviceable phantom to
+the extent of adding to our annual income a sum equal to eight or ten
+times the entire yearly export of the colonies. Should he lead us,
+like the Land--und--Wild--Graf, into the pit of ruin, he will have
+first bottomed it with an ample and soft cushion of lint whereon to
+fall.
+
+Extremes meet, and modern culture, like ancient anarchy, drives its
+people into cities. Such is the tendency on both sides of the ocean.
+Improvement must result from associated effort, and of that cities are
+the last expression. All the European towns are outgrowing the rural
+districts. With us the change states itself in an advance, since 1790,
+of the city population from 3.4 to 20.9 per cent. of the aggregate.
+Broadcloth has gained on homespun in the proportion of six to one,
+Giles having thus six mouths to fill where he formerly had but one.
+We shall show farther on how gallantly he meets this draft. New York,
+with its suburbs, contains more Germans than any German city save
+Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than Dublin, and more English-speaking
+inhabitants than Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol and
+Leeds together. All the colonial towns in a lump would scarce add a
+twentieth to her numbers, and her militia embraces nearly twice as
+many men as served, first and last, in the Continental army.
+
+[Illustration: THE COTTON GIN.]
+
+But the column that sums the souls does not state the complete life of
+the cities. Man has in our day a host of allies that work with him and
+at his command--slaves of iron, steel and brass wholly unknown to our
+great--grand-fathers--fed also by the farmer, through the miner as an
+intermediate. Steam-engines, to the number of 40,191, and of 1,215,711
+horse-power--all of the stationary variety, and exclusive of nearly
+half as many that traverse the country and may be classed among the
+rural population--have succeeded the websters and spinners who were
+wont to clothe all the world and his wife, and who survive only in
+the surnames of some of our statesmen and financiers. Not that they
+confine their labors to textile fabrics. Their iron fingers are in
+every pie, including that of the printer, who is answered, when he
+calls the roll of his serfs of steam, by 691 whistles. And he is
+one of the smallest of the slaveholders--a mere ten-bale man.
+India-rubber, a product known a century ago only by some little black
+lumps used by draughtsmen to erase pencil-marks, owns enough of them
+to equal 4412 horses or 22,000 No. 1 field hands. Boots and shoes not
+of the India-rubber variety employ 3212 horse-power or 15,000 steam
+Crispins, over and above their Christian fellows who stick solitary
+to the last, and who, it must be owned, produce an article more of the
+Revolutionary type and more solid and durable. As a cord-wainer Steam
+is a failure; but he works cheaply, and will continue to hammer on,
+and disseminate his commodity of brown paper throughout the temperate
+zone. Three-fourths of the population of the globe still runs unshod,
+however, and it is obvious that this crying want cannot be met by
+the old system. Steam will perforce keep pegging away till Cathay,
+Xipangu, India and all the isles awaken to the absurdity of walking on
+cotton or undressed human skin. Could one of our 299 fire-fed cobblers
+have been set to work at Valley Forge, backed by one of the 1057
+makers of woolen that are similarly nourished!
+
+But we do Mr. Watt's lusty bantling injustice in assigning him
+exclusively the tastes of a cit. He is not insensible to pastoral
+charms, and often selects a home among the hemlocks and under the
+broad-armed oaks, by bosky glen or open mead, wherever the brooklet
+brawls or dreams, for he sticks to the waterside like a beaver. Here
+he sits down, like an artist as he is, until he has got all the choice
+bits of the grove. The large and bustling family of the sawyers, both
+top and bottom, he has utterly banished from their ancient haunts.
+'There would be needed a million and a half of them to take the places
+of 11,199 steam-engines, of 314,774 horse-power, that are devastating
+our forests. An equal number is replaced by the 16,559 water-wheels,
+of 326,728 horse-power, engaged in the same field of havoc. Armed
+with the handsaw, all the Revolutionary patriots and Tories together,
+withdrawing their attention entirely from military affairs, as well as
+from all other mundane concerns, would not have turned out one-sixth
+of the quantity of lumber demanded by their descendants of a period
+that boasts itself the age of iron, and has as little as possible
+to do with wood. And if we place in the hands of the patriarchs the
+ancestral axes, and tell them to get out charcoal for three millions
+of tons of iron, to be hauled an average of a hundred miles to
+market by oxen over roads whose highest type was the corduroy, the
+imagination reels at the helplessness of the heroes.
+
+[Illustration: GRAIN ELEVATOR.]
+
+The paternal thoughtfulness of the home government employed itself in
+relieving the colonist from such exhausting drafts upon his energies.
+It sedulously prohibited his throwing himself away on the manufacture
+of iron or anything else. In 1750 it placed him under a penalty of
+£200 for erecting a rolling-mill, tilt-hammer or steel-furnace. Lest
+the governor of the colony should fail to enforce this statute
+and protect the pioneer from such a waste of time, it held that
+functionary to a personal forfeit of £500 for failing, within thirty
+days after presentment by two witnesses on oath, to abate as a
+nuisance every such mill, engine, etc. As this mulct would have made a
+serious inroad on the emoluments of the royal governors, even with the
+addition of the inaugural douceur customarily given by the provincial
+assemblies to each new incumbent--in Virginia regularly £500, doubled
+in the instance of Fauquier in 1758, when it was desired to drive
+the entering wedge of disestablishment and razee the parsons--we are
+prepared to believe that the iron business was not flourishing. Under
+a despotism tempered so very moderately by bribes, a similar blight
+fell upon all other branches of manufacture. Among these, wool, flax,
+paper, hats and leather are specified in a Parliamentary report as
+interfering with "the trade, navigation and manufactures" of
+the mother-country. An act of Parliament accordingly forbade the
+exportation of hats to foreign countries, and even from one colony to
+another.
+
+That, after such a course of repression, the country found itself
+wholly unprepared on the attainment of independence to make any
+headway in this field, is no matter of surprise. Thirty years elapsed
+before the manufacturing statistics of the Union became presentable.
+In 1810 they were reckoned at $198,613,471. This embraces every fruit
+of handicraft, from a barrel of flour and a bushel of lime to a silk
+dress. We had 122,647 spindles and 325,392 looms, made 53,908 tons of
+pig iron, and refined about one pound of sugar for each head of the
+population. In 1870, after sixty years of tossing between the
+Scylla and Charybdis of tariffs, "black" and white, the yield of our
+factories had mounted to the respectable sum of $4,232,325,442. They
+employed 2,053,996 operatives. Of these, the average wages were $377,
+against $289 in 1860 and $247 in 1850, yearly. The advance in the
+product of refined sugar may be cited as illustrative of the progress
+of the people in comfort and luxury. It reached a value of one hundred
+and nine millions, representing nearly ten times as many pounds, or
+twenty-eight pounds a head. This exemplification is but one in an
+endless list.
+
+Manufactures have come to figure respectably in our exports. They
+exceed in that list, by three or four to one, the entire exports of
+all kinds in 1790; and they equal the average aggregate of the years
+from 1815 to 1824. But the multiplication of the wants of a people
+rapidly growing in numbers and refinement will, with the comparatively
+high price of labor, scarcity of capital and distance of most of our
+ports from the markets supplied by European manufactures, for a long
+time to come make the home-supply the chief care of our artisans. They
+have, for such and other reasons, in some points lost ground of
+late. The revolution in the propulsion and construction of ships, for
+instance, has not found them prepared to take the advantage they have
+usually done of improvements. Not only do the British screw-steamers
+take undisputed possession of our trade with their own country, but
+they expel our once unrivaled craft from the harbors of other quarters
+of the globe, and threaten to monopolize the most profitable part
+of our carrying-trade with all countries. This result is more easily
+explained than the inroads made on our more ordinary foreign traffic,
+in sailing vessels, by the mercantile marine of second- and third-rate
+powers. This is eloquently told by the annual government returns and
+the daily shipping-list. While our coastwise tonnage increases, that
+employed in foreign trade remains stationary or declines. The bearing
+of this upon our naval future becomes an imperative question for
+our merchants and legislators. The United States is benevolently and
+gratuitously building up a marine for each of half a dozen European
+states which possess little or no commerce of their own, and
+multiplying the ships and sailors of our chief maritime rival. We have
+long since ceased to import locomotives, and have, within the past two
+years, almost ceased to import railroad iron. Our iron-workers obtain
+coal at nearly or quite as low prices as do those of Birkenhead or the
+Clyde. They have recently sent to sea some large screw-steamers that
+perform well. No insurmountable difficulty appears to prevent the
+launching of more until we have enough to serve at least our direct
+trade with Europe and China. That determined, it may be possible
+to ascertain whether we cannot assist Norway, Belgium and Sicily in
+carrying our cotton, wheat and tobacco to the purchasers of it.
+
+[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A POSTAL CAR.]
+
+This decline in American tonnage is, it must be added, only relative,
+whether the comparison be made with other countries or with our own
+past. The returns show a carrying capacity in our ships more than
+twentyfold that of 1789, and three times that of 1807; when, on the
+other hand, it exceeded in the ratio of fourteen to twelve that of
+1829, twenty-two years later. This interest is peculiarly subject to
+fluctuations; some of which in the past have been less explicable than
+the one it is now undergoing. Another decade may turn the tables, and
+restore the flag of the old Liverpool liners to their fleeter but less
+shapely supplanters. The steamer and the clipper are both American
+inventions. Why not their combination ours as well? The centenary of
+Rumsey's boat, not due till December 11, 1887, should not find its
+descendants lording the ocean under another flag.
+
+The monthly Falmouth packet of a century ago, sufficient till within
+the past two generations for the mail communication of the two
+continents, has grown into six or eight steamships weekly, each
+capable of carrying a pair of the old sloops in her hold, and making
+the passage westwardly in a fifth and eastwardly in a third of the
+time. Can it be but ninety years ago that the latest dates at New
+York (February 14, 1786) from London (December 7, 1785) brought as a
+leading item from Paris (November 20) the news that Philippe Égalité
+had by his father's death just come into four millions of livres a
+year, that six hundred thousand livres paid by the Crown to his father
+thereupon devolved to Monsieur (afterward Louis XVIII.), and that the
+latter had kept up the game of shuttlecock with the treasure of the
+French by "a donation of all his estates to the duke of Normandy, the
+younger son of their Majesties, preserving for himself the use and
+profits thereof during his life"? That was a short winter-passage,
+too--more speedy than the land-trip of a letter in the same journal
+"from a gentleman in the Western country to his friend in Connecticut,
+dated River Muskingum, November 5, 1785," describing a voyage down the
+Ohio from Fort Pitt and the wonders of the country much as Livingstone
+and Du Chaillu do those of Africa. The time is less now to Japan, and
+about the same to New South Wales, with both which countries we have
+postal conventions-i.e., a practically consolidated service--far
+cheaper and more convenient than that maintained on the adoption of
+the present Constitution between our own cities. Our foreign service
+with leading countries is combined, moreover, with an institution
+undreamed of in that day--the money-order system. Under this admirable
+contrivance the post-offices of the world will ere long be so many
+banks of deposit and exchange for the benefit of the masses, effecting
+transfers mutually with much greater facility, rapidity and security
+than the regular banks formerly attained.
+
+Still in its infancy, the international money-order system has already
+reached importance in the magnitude of its operations. The sums sent
+by means of it were, in 1874, $1,499,320 to Great Britain, $701,634 to
+Germany, and to the little inland republic of Switzerland $72.287.
+
+The dimensions to which this new method of financial intercourse
+between the different peoples of the globe is destined to reach may be
+inferred from the growth of the domestic money--order service. In 1874
+the number of orders issued was 4,620,633, representing $74,424,854.
+The erroneous payments having been but one in 59,677, it is plain that
+this mode of remittance must make further inroads on the old routine
+of cheque and draft, and become, among its other advantages, a
+currency regulator of no trifling value.
+
+Our post-office may almost be said to head the development of the
+century. The other lines of progress in some sense converge to it. The
+advance of intelligence, of settlement, of transit by land and water
+and of mechanical and philosophical discovery have all fostered
+the post, while its return to them has been liberal. Thus aided
+and spurred, its extension has approached the rate of geometrical
+progression. Its development resembles that from the Annelids to the
+Vertebrata, the simple canal which constitutes the internal anatomy of
+the simplest animal forms finding a counterpart in the line of mails
+vouchsafed by the British postmaster-general to the colonies in 1775
+from Falmouth to Savannah, "with as many cross-posts as he shall
+see fit." Fifteen years of independence had caused the accretion
+of wonderfully few ganglia on this primeval structure. In 1790 four
+millions of inhabitants possessed but seventy-five post-offices
+and 1875 miles of post-roads. The revenue of the department was
+$37,935--little over a thousandth of what it is at present under rates
+of postage but a fraction of the old. New York and Boston heard
+from each other three times a week in summer and twice in winter.
+Philadelphia and New York were more social and luxurious, and insisted
+on a mail every week-day but one, hurrying it through in two days each
+way, or a twentieth of the present speed. On the interior routes chaos
+ruled supreme. Newspapers and business-men combined to employ riders
+who meandered along the mud roads as it pleased Heaven.
+
+When the new government machine had smoothed down its bearings matters
+rapidly improved. In 1800 we had 903 post-offices and 20,817 miles of
+road. In 1820 these figures changed to 4500 and 92,492, and in 1870
+to 28,492 offices and 231,232 miles. Five years later 70,083 miles of
+railway, 15,788 by steamboat and 192,002 of other routes represented
+the web woven since the Falmouth and Savannah shuttle commenced its
+weary way. Of course, neither the number of offices nor extent of
+routes fully measures the change from past to present; mails having
+become more frequent over the same route, and a new style of office,
+the locomotive variety, having been added to the old. This innovation,
+of mounting postmaster and post-office with the mailbags on wheels,
+and hurling the whole through space at thirty or forty miles an hour,
+already furnishes us with gigantic statistics. In 1875 there were
+sixty-two lines of railway postal-cars covering 16,932 miles with
+40,109 miles of daily service and 901 peripatetic clerks. These
+gentlemen, under the demands of the fast mail-trains, will ere long
+swell from a regiment into a brigade, and so into a division, till
+poets and painters be called on to drop the theme of "waiting for the
+mail."
+
+The greater portion of the fifty-odd thousand employés of the
+department do not give it their whole time, many of the country
+postmasters being engaged in other business. But the undivided efforts
+of them all, with an auxiliary corps, would be demanded for the
+handling of eight hundred and fifty millions of letters and cards,
+and a greater bulk of other mail-matter, under the old plan of
+rates varying according to distance and number of sheets, and not
+weight--stamps unknown. The introduction of stamps, with coincident
+reduction and unification of rates, has been the chief factor in the
+extraordinary increase of correspondence within the past thirty years;
+the number of letters passing through the mails having within that
+period multiplied twenty-fold. The number transmitted in the British
+Islands, then three times greater than in the United States, is
+now but little in excess, having been in 1874 nine hundred and
+sixty--seven millions. The immense difference between the two
+countries in extent, and consequently in the average distance of
+transportation, is enough to account for the contrast between the two
+balance-sheets, our department showing a heavy annual deficit, while
+in Great Britain this is replaced by a profit. As regards post-office
+progress in the United States, the question is rather an abstract one;
+for there is not the least probability of an advance in rates. The
+discrepancy between receipts and expenses will be attacked rather
+by seeking to reduce the latter at the same time that the former
+are enhanced by natural growth and by improvement in the details of
+service and administration.
+
+[Illustration: PROF. S.F.B. MORSE, THE INVENTOR OF THE
+ELECTRO-MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH.]
+
+Difficult as it is adequately to state or to measure the extension of
+the mails within the century, it is far from telling the whole
+story of the amplitude and celerity with which the people of our day
+interchange intelligence.
+
+Only to the last third of the period under review has the electric
+telegraph been known. It is now a necessity of the public and private
+life of every civilized spot upon the globe. It traverses all lands
+and all seas. The forty miles of wire with which it started from
+Washington City have become many millions. Its length of line in the
+United States is about the same with that of the mail-routes, and a
+similar equality probably obtains in other parts of the world. We have
+nearly as much line as all Europe together, though the extent of wire
+may not be so great. It is little to say that this continent, so
+dim to the founders of the Union, has been by the invention of Morse
+compressed within whispering distance, the same advantage having been
+conferred on other countries. It is the property of mankind, and
+the comparison must be between present and past, not between any two
+countries of the present. Strictly, a comparison is not possible,
+nothing like magnetic communication having been known forty years
+ago, unless to the half imagination, half realization of one or two
+scientific experimenters. Steam and stamps wrought a difference in
+degree--the telegraph one of kind. Against eighteen hundred miles of
+wagon-road we set seventy-three thousand of railway; but two hundred
+thousand miles of telegraph are opposed by nothing, unless by
+Franklin's kite-string. Looked at along the perspective of poles, the
+old days disappear entirely--the patriots become pre-historic. Yet
+modern self-conceit is somewhat checked by the reflection that the
+career of these two great agents of intercommunication has but just
+opened; that their management even yet remains a puzzle to us; and
+that the next generation may wonder how we happened to get hold of
+implements whose use and capabilities we so poorly comprehended.
+So far as prediction can now be ventured, a force and pathway more
+economical than coal and the rail will not soon be forthcoming; nor
+is Canton apt to "interview" New York at the rate of more words in a
+minute over a single wire than she can now. Some day dynamite may be
+harnessed to the balloon, which stands, or drifts, where it did with
+Montgolfier, and we may all become long-range projectiles; but even
+this age of hurry will contentedly wait a little for that.
+
+Possibly the Post-office Department would be less of a valetudinarian,
+financially, had it confined itself to its legitimate occupation, the
+speeding of intercourse and wafting of sighs, and not yielded to the
+heavy temptation of disseminating shoes, pistols and *garden-seeds
+over three millions of square miles. Newspapers are enough to test its
+powers as a freight-agent. Where these and their literary kindred
+of books, magazines, etc. used to be estimated by the dozen and the
+ounce, the ton is becoming too small a unit.
+
+West of the Blue Ridge, or the front line of the Alleghany, so called
+in most of its length, there was not a newspaper published in
+1776. Ten years later, scarcely more than one--the _Pittsburg
+Gazette_--existed west of the mountains. The few in the seaboard
+towns kept alive the name, and little more. In 1850, '60 and '70 the
+periodicals of the Union numbered, respectively, 2526, 4051 and 5871,
+with an average circulation, at the three periods, of twenty-one
+hundred, thirty-four hundred and thirty-six hundred copies each. The
+circulation thus outgrew the numbers in the proportion of nearly
+two to one. And both are largely in excess of the increase of the
+population, that being in the twenty years but 65 percent. The number
+of daily papers (254 in 1850 and 574 in 1870) must now be equal to the
+entire number of periodicals in France outside of Paris (796 in 1875),
+with an average issue less than half that of ours. The proportion of
+readers to the population, certainly in this class of literature, thus
+appears to be rapidly growing: and the change is most striking if we
+take, for example, that group of periodicals which are most purely
+literary and most remote from the mere chronicle. The returns for
+the three periods place the monthlies at, respectively, 100, 280 and
+622--an advance of sixfold.
+
+The magazine leads us to the door of the library; and here the exhibit
+is still more marked, significant and gratifying. The census figures
+are, for many reasons, extremely confused, but in the general result
+they cannot be outrageously wrong, and they can mislead us only in
+degree as to the immense multiplication of books in both public and
+private libraries. The returns are manifestly far below the truth.
+To give them here without the explanations accompanying them in
+the census volumes would mislead; and those explanations, or a fair
+synopsis of them, would occupy too much space, and would, after all,
+leave the problem unsolved. That the supply of books has fully
+kept pace with every other means of culture is patent enough. The
+Congressional Library has risen in half the century from the shelves
+of a closet to nearly four hundred thousand volumes--an accumulation
+not surpassed in '76 by more than two libraries in Europe. It now
+demands a separate edifice of its own, fit to stand by the side of
+the fine structures which have within a generation recreated the
+architectural aspect of the Federal metropolis with the most stately
+government-offices in the world. Other public libraries, belonging to
+colleges, schools, societies and independent endowments, show similar
+progress. While none of them are equal, for reference, to some of the
+great European establishments, they are generally better adapted to
+the purposes of popular instruction. Their literary wealth is fresh
+and available, little encumbered by lumber kept merely because old or
+curious. Thus adjuncts, in some sort, of the newspaper and the common
+school, their catalogues prove, as do the bookcases of private houses,
+that the newest and deepest results of European thought and inquiry
+are eagerly sought and used by our people.
+
+[Illustration: THE SCHOOL-HOUSE OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.]
+
+Our system of public schools, long classed among the "peculiar
+institutions" of the country, is notably gaining in scope and
+efficiency, be the English and Prussians right or not in their claim
+of greater thoroughness and a higher curriculum. The different States
+have engaged in a series of competitive experiments for the common
+good, and cities and counties, in their sphere, labor to the same end.
+Schools of higher grade are being multiplied, and the examination of
+teachers, still lax enough, becomes more exact and faithful, as befits
+the drill of an army of two hundred and forty thousand charged with
+the intellectual police of eight millions of children--the number said
+by the new "National Bureau of Education" to have been enrolled in
+1875, against 7,209,938, 5,477,037 and 3,642,694 by the censuses of
+1870, '60 and '50. Little more than half this number is estimated by
+the Bureau to represent the average daily attendance, which is
+quite compatible with the attendance, for the greater part of the
+school-year, of nine-tenths of the whole number on the lists. A
+comparison of the number enrolled and the entire supposed number
+of children between six and sixteen leaves an excess of nearly two
+millions and a half outside the public schools. Of these private
+schools will account, and account well, for a large proportion.
+These are fulfilling indispensable offices, one being that of normal
+schools--a want likely to be inadequately satisfied for a long time to
+come.
+
+In one respect our public schools are beyond, though not above,
+comparison with those of the most advanced European states. An annual
+outlay of a trifle less than seventy-five millions of dollars, with
+an investment in buildings, ground, etc. of a hundred and sixty-six
+millions, implies a determination that should be rewarded with the
+most unexceptionable results. It reaches eighteen dollars yearly,
+leaving out the interest on the fixed stock, for each child in
+daily attendance. Such an expenditure, trebling, we believe, that
+of Prussia, ought to secure better teachers and a higher range
+of instruction. It must be said, however, that the duties of the
+school-boards are as honestly and economically discharged as those of
+any other public bodies; that the cost for each pupil is highest
+where common schools have been longest established and most thoroughly
+studied; and that the statistics certainly show a steady advance in
+their efficiency. That is the truest test. Any pecuniary means are
+justifiable by the end. If common schools, themselves a means to a
+higher education, mental and moral, than they can directly afford,
+take some part of the wealth we accumulate to prevent our men's
+decaying, it is well used. It helps to purchase for us progress
+more genuine than that whereof railways and cotton-factories are the
+exponents.
+
+It is thus a guarantee of a brighter century even than the one just
+closed that, in the wildest quarter of the still unkempt continent,
+the school actually precedes the pioneer. Choose his homestead where
+he may, the sixteenth section is staked out before it. From it the
+rills of knowledge soon trickle along the first furrows, as strange
+to the soil as its new products. It provides the modern settler
+in advance with an equipment, mental and material, if not moral,
+altogether superior to that of his colonial prototype, that enables
+him in a shorter time to impart a higher stamp to his surroundings. He
+attacks the prairie with a plough unimagined by his predecessor;
+cuts his wheat with a cradle--or, given a neighbor or two, a
+reaper--instead of a sickle; sends into the boundless pasture the
+nucleus of a merino flock, and returns at evening to a home rugged
+enough, in unison with its surroundings, but brightened by traits of
+culture and intelligence which must adhere to any ménage of to-day
+and were out of reach of any of the olden time. The civilization that
+travels West now is a different thing from that which went West a
+hundred years ago.
+
+Science has done much for the farmer, though not as much as he has
+done for it and its hotbeds, the towns. In one point his shortcomings
+are notable. He has not learned how to eat his cake and have it. He
+works the virgin soil as the miner does the coal-seam. What Nature has
+placed in it he takes out, and, until forced by the pressure of
+his friends and enemies, the cities, returns no nest-egg of future
+fertility. So it is that many portions of the rural East have to
+be resettled and started afresh in the process of agricultural
+redemption. A hundred years ago England grew fifteen bushels of wheat
+to the acre. Her standard is now thirty-two. Within three-quarters of
+the century New York has fallen from twenty-five to twelve; and
+half that period, again, has brought Ohio and Indiana from thirty to
+fifteen. But this process is a natural part of the sum of American
+progress. Land was the only property of the country originally, and
+subsequently of different parts of it in succession. It was used like
+any other commodity, and worn out like leather or cloth. The original
+cuticle of the continent has disappeared for ever. The task, now is
+to induce the granulation of a new one. The restorative process may
+be complete by the time we have four hundred souls to the square
+mile, like England and Flanders. Meanwhile, the exporting of Iowa and
+California in the shape of wheat is going on at what must be esteemed
+a profitable rate; for our farmers, as a class, do not seem to be
+losing ground. Their glebes have risen in value from thirty-two
+hundred millions in 1850 to sixty-six hundred ten years later,
+and ninety-three hundred in 1870. This has been accompanied by a
+diminution of their average extent, the farm of 1870 covering a
+hundred and fifty-three acres. This is small enough, considering
+the capital necessary for stock in these days of improved and costly
+implements, when a farmer can no longer pack his entire kit in a cart.
+It matches closely the size of English holdings, where agricultural
+science is at its height. The French peasant-farmers, with their plats
+of three and four acres, are chained to the spade and hoe, and their
+steading becomes a poultry-yard--a consummation we are not yet in
+sight of, as is proved by the legions of pigs and beeves, barreled
+or bellowing, that roll in from the ancient realms of Pontiac and
+the Prophet with a smoothness and velocity unattained by the most
+luxurious coach that carried a First Congressman.
+
+Everything that makes a nation, we are told, and the nation itself,
+is the product of the soil. But the less immediate, finer and
+most delicate fruits cannot usually be garnered until the soil is
+thoroughly subdued. The mass of matter keeps the intellectual in
+abeyance. Were Europe enlarged one-half, and her population reduced
+to one-eighth what it actually is, the spectacle of culture she now
+presents would be an impossibility. It is our merit that, thus brought
+to American conditions, she would in no way compare with American
+achievement. An offset wherewith we must at the same time be debited
+is the aid we have, in so many forms, derived from her. Making every
+allowance for this, it is a clear credit in our favor that one-tenth
+of Christendom should have done so much more than a tenth of its
+effective thinking simultaneously with taming the most savage half
+of its domain. We have more than our share of laborers in the mental
+vineyard, though fewer of them are master-workmen. We utilize for
+Europe herself, and send back to her in its first available shape,
+much of what her students produce. As between thought and substance,
+the two continents interchange offices. We import the crude material
+her philosophers harvest or mine, work it up and return it, just as
+she takes the yield of our non-metaphorical fields and strata and
+restores it manufactured. Much of the social, political and industrial
+advancement of Europe within the century she may be said to owe to
+the United States. Her governmental reforms certainly and confessedly
+found here their germ. These gave birth to others of a social
+character. In this manner, as well as more directly by our commerce,
+inventions and example, we have stimulated her industry. We have
+spread before her the two oceans, and taught her to traverse them with
+a firm and masterful mien, no longer
+
+  As one who in a lonely road doth walk in fear and dread.
+
+We have created cities upon her havens, Parliaments in her capitals,
+and stronger hearts and quicker hands in her villages. No community on
+her varied surface but is the better for America. That our people and
+their labors have done it all it would be absurd to say; but the Old
+World's progress in the period under review can be but very partially
+accounted for by any internal force of its own. None of its rulers or
+peoples adventure a reform of any kind without a preliminary, if often
+only a half-conscious, glance of inquiry westward. Collectively as
+members of a European republic of nations, and internally each
+within itself, they have in this way learned, after many recalcitrant
+struggles, to recognize and respect local independence. Municipal law
+has gained new life. The commune has become an entity everywhere, and
+the nations which it informs have established the right to readjust or
+recast their constitutions without being hounded down as disturbers
+of the peace. The contribution of the American Union to such results
+would earn it honor at the hands of history were it to sink into
+nothing to-morrow. Had no such tangible fruits hitherto ripened, some
+portion of such honor would still accrue to it for having shown that a
+people may grow from a handful to an empire without hereditary rulers,
+without a privileged class, without a state Church, without a standing
+army, without tumult in the largest cities and without stagnant
+savagery in the remotest wilds.
+
+
+
+
+UP THE THAMES.
+
+CONCLUDING PAPER.
+
+[Illustration: WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM ETON.]
+
+Let our demonstration to-day be on the monarchical citadel of England,
+the core and nucleus of her kingly associations, her architectural
+_eikon basiliké_, Windsor. To reach the famous castle it will not do
+to lounge along the river. We must cut loose from the suburbs of the
+suburbs, and launch into a more extended flight. Our destination
+is nearly an hour distant by rail; and though it does not take us
+altogether out of sight of the city, it leads us among real farms and
+genuine villages, tilled and inhabited as they have been since the
+Plantagenets, instead of market-gardens and villas.
+
+We go to Paddington and try the Great Western, the parent of the broad
+gauges with no very numerous family, Erie being one of its unfortunate
+children. That six-foot infant is not up to the horizontal stature of
+its seven-foot progenitor, but has still sixteen inches too many
+to fare well in the contest with its little, active, and above all
+numerous, foes of the four-feet-eight-and-a-half-inch "persuasion."
+The English and the American giants can sympathize with each other.
+Both have drained the bitter cup that is tendered by a strong majority
+to a weak minority. Neither the American nor the British constitution,
+with their whole admirable array of checks and balances, has shielded
+them from this evil. In the battle of the gauges both have gone to
+the wall, and will stay there until they can muster strength enough to
+reel over into the ranks of their enemies.
+
+This relative debility is, at the same time, more apparent to the
+stockholders than to their customers. The superstructure and "plant"
+of the Erie has lately stood interested inspection from abroad with
+great credit, and that of the Great Western is unexceptionable. The
+vote of travelers may be safely allotted to the broad gauge. They
+have more elbow room. The carriages attain the requisite width without
+unpleasantly, not to say dangerously, overhanging the centre of
+gravity; and, other things equal, the movement is steadier. Nor is the
+financial aspect of the question apt to impress gloomily the tourist
+as he enters the Paddington station and looks around at its blaze of
+polychrome and richness of decoration generally. As the coach doors
+are slammed upon you, the guard steps into his "van," the vast
+drivers, taller than your head plus the regulation stove-pipe, slowly
+begin their whirl, and you roll majestically forth through a long
+file of liveried servants of the company, drawn up or in action on the
+platform, the sensation of patronizing a poverty-stricken corporation
+is by no means likely to harass you. You cease to realize that the
+Napoleon of engineers, Monsieur Brunel, made a disastrous mistake in
+the design of this splendid highway, and that, as some will have it,
+it was his Moscow. His error, if one there was, existed only in the
+selection of the width of track. Whatever the demerits of the design
+in that one particular, the execution is in all above praise. The road
+was his pet. Once finished, it was his delight, as with the breeder of
+a fine horse, to mount it and try its mettle. Over and again would
+he occupy the footboard between London and Bristol, and rejoice as a
+strong man in running his race at close to seventy miles an hour. He
+and Stephenson were capital types of the Gaul and Briton, striving
+side by side on the same field, as it will be good for the world that
+they should ever do.
+
+[Illustration: MORTON CHURCH.]
+
+Combats of another character--in fact, of two other characters--recur
+to our reflections as we find that we have shuffled off the coil
+of bricks and mortar and are rattling across Wormwood Scrubs. More
+fortunate than some who have been there before us, we have no call to
+alight. Calls to this ancient field of glory, whether symbolized by
+the gentlemanly pistol or the plebeian fist, have ceased to be in
+vogue. Dueling and boxing are both frowned down effectually, one by
+public opinion and the other by the police. It is only of late years
+that they finally succumbed to those twin discouragers; but it seems
+altogether improbable that the ordeal by combat in either shape
+will again come to the surface in a land where tilting-spear and
+quarter-staff were of old so rife. In France chivalry still asserts,
+in a feeble way, the privilege of winking and holding out its iron,
+and refuses to be comforted with a suit for damages.
+
+Southall, a station or two beyond, suggests sport of a less lethal
+character, being an ancient meeting-place for the queen's stag-hounds.
+John Leach may have collected here some of his studies of Cockney
+equestrianism. The sportsmen so dear to his pencil furnished him
+wealth of opportunities on their annual concourse at the cart's tail.
+The unloading of the animal, his gathering himself up for a leisurely
+canter across country, the various styles and degrees of horsemanship
+among his lumbering followers, and the business-like replacing of
+the quarry in his vehicle, to be hauled away for another day's sport,
+served as the most complete travesty imaginable of the chase. It has
+the compensation of placing a number of worthy men in the saddle at
+least once in the year and compelling them to do some rough riding.
+The English have always made it their boast that they are more at home
+on horseback than any other European nation, and they claim to have
+derived much military advantage from it. Lever's novels would lose
+many of their best situations but for this national accomplishment and
+the astounding development it reaches in his hands.
+
+[Illustration: MILTON'S PEAR TREE.]
+
+To the left lies the fine park of Osterley, once the seat of the
+greatest of London's merchant princes, Sir Thomas Gresham. An
+improvement proposed by Queen Bess, on a visit to Gresham in 1578,
+does not speak highly for her taste in design. She remarked that in
+her opinion the court in front of the house would look better split up
+by a wall. Her host dutifully acceded to the idea, and surprised Her
+Majesty next morning by pointing out the wall which he had erected
+during the night, sending to London for masons and material for the
+purpose. The conceit was a more ponderous one than that of Raleigh's
+cloak--bricks and mortar _versus_ velvet.
+
+A greater than Gresham succeeded, after the death of his widow, to the
+occupancy of Osterley--Chief-justice Coke. His compliment to Elizabeth
+on the occasion of a similar visit to the same house took the more
+available and acceptable shape of ten or twelve hundred pounds
+sterling in jewelry. She had more than a woman's weakness for finery,
+and Coke operated upon it very successfully. His gems outlasted
+Gresham's wall, which has long since disappeared with the court it
+disfigured. In place of both stands a goodly Ionic portico, through
+which one may pass to a staircase that bears a representation by
+Rubens of the apotheosis of Mr. Motley's hero, William the Silent. The
+gallery offers a collection of other old pictures. Should we, however,
+take time for even a short stop in this vicinity, it would probably be
+for the credit of saying that we walked over Hounslow Heath intact in
+purse and person. The gentlemen of the road live only in the classic
+pages of Ainsworth, Reynolds and, if we may include Sam Weller in such
+worshipful company, that bard of "the bold Tur_pin_." Another class
+of highwaymen had long before them been also attracted by the fine
+manoeuvring facilities of the heath, beginning with the army of the
+Cæsars and ending with that of James II. Jonathan Wild and his merry
+men were saints to Kirke and his lambs.
+
+Hurrying on, we skirt one of Pope's outlying manors, in his time the
+seat of his friend Bathurst and the haunt of Addison, Prior, Congreve
+and Gay, and leave southward, toward the Thames, Horton, the cradle of
+Milton. A marble in its ivy-grown church is inscribed to the memory
+of his mother, _ob_. 1637. At Horton were composed, or inspired,
+_Lycidas, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus_ and others of his nominally
+minor but really sweetest and most enjoyable poems. In this retirement
+the Muse paid him her earliest visits, before he had thrown himself
+away on politics or Canaanitish mythology. Peeping in upon his
+handsome young face in its golden setting of blonde curls,
+
+  Through the sweetbrier or the vine,
+  Or the twisted eglantine,
+
+she wooed him to better work than reporting the debates of the
+archangels or calling the roll of Tophet. Had he confined himself to
+this tenderer field, the world would have been the gainer. He might
+not have "made the word Miltonic mean sublime," but we can spare a
+little of the sublime to get some more of the beautiful.
+
+To reach Milton, however, we have run off of the track badly. His Eden
+is no station on the Great Western. We shall balance this southward
+divergence with a corresponding one to the north from Slough, the last
+station ere reaching Windsor. We may give a go-by for the moment to
+the halls of kings, do homage to him who treated them similarly, and
+point, in preference, to where,
+
+         in many a mouldering heap,
+  The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
+
+They show Gray's tomb in Stoke Pogis church, and his house, West End
+Cottage, half a mile distant. The ingredients of his _Elegy_--actually
+the greatest, but in his judgment among the least, of his few
+works--exist all around. "The rugged elm," "the ivy-mantled tower,"
+and "the yew tree's shade," the most specific among the simple
+"properties" of his little spectacle, are common to so many places
+that there are several competitors for the honor of having furnished
+them. The cocks, ploughmen, herds and owls cannot, of course, at this
+late day be identified. Gray could not have done it himself. He
+drew from general memory, in his closet, and not bit by bit on
+his thumb-nail from chance-met objects as he went along. Had
+his conception and rendering of the theme been due to the direct
+impression upon his mind of its several aspects and constituents,
+he would have more thoroughly appreciated his work. He could not
+understand its popularity, any more than Campbell could that of _Ye
+Mariners of England_, which he pronounced "d----d drum-and-trumpet
+verses." Gray used to say, "with a good deal of acrimony," that the
+_Elegy_ "owed its popularity entirely to the subject, and the public
+would have received it as well had it been written entirely in prose."
+Had it been written in prose or in the inventory style of poetry, it
+would have been forgotten long ago, like so much else of that kind.
+
+[Illustration: GRAY.]
+
+Not far hence is Beaconsfield, which gave a home to Burke and a title
+to the wife of Disraeli, the nearest approach to a peerage that the
+haughty Israelite, soured by a life of struggle against peers and
+their prejudices, would deign to accept. We know it will be objected
+to this remark that Disraeli is, and has been for most of his career,
+associated with Toryism. But that was part of his game. A man of
+culture, thought and fastidious taste, he would, had he been of the
+_sangre azul_, have been the steadiest and sincerest of Conservatives.
+Privilege would have been his gospel. As it is, it has only been his
+weapon, to use in fighting for himself. "The time will come when you
+shall listen to me," were his words when he was first coughed down.
+The time has come. The most cynical of premiers, he governs England,
+and he scorns to take a place among those who ruled her before him.
+
+Extending our divergence farther west toward "Cliefden's proud alcove,
+the bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love," we find ourselves in a
+luxuriant rolling country, rural and slumberous. Cookham parish,
+which we should traverse, claims quite loudly American kinship on
+the strength of its including an estate once the property of Henry
+Washington, who is alleged, without sufficient ground, to have been
+a relative of the general. But we are within the purlieus of Windsor.
+The round tower has been looking down upon us these many miles, and we
+cannot but yield to its magnetism.
+
+[Illustration: BEACONSFIELD CHURCH.]
+
+Eton, on the north bank, opposite Windsor, and really a continuous
+town with that which nestles close to the castle walls, is on our way
+from Slough. The red-brick buildings of the school, forming a fine
+foil to the lighter-colored and more elegantly designed chapel, are on
+our left, the principal front looking over a garden toward the river
+and Windsor Home Park beyond. We become aware of a populace of boys,
+the file-closers of England's nineteenth century worthies, and her
+coming veterans of the twentieth. We may contemplatively view them in
+that light, but it has little place in their reflections. Their ruddy
+faces and somewhat cumbrous forms belong to the animal period of life
+that links together boyhood, colthood and calfhood. Education of the
+physique, consisting chiefly in the indulgence and employment of it in
+the mere demonstration of its superabundant vitality, is a large
+part of the curriculum at English schools. The playground and the
+study-room form no unequal alliance. Rigid as, in some respects, the
+discipline proper of the school may be, it does not compare with the
+severity of that maintained by the older boys over the younger ones.
+The code of the lesser, and almost independent, republic of the
+dormitory and the green is as clear in its terms as that of the
+unlimited monarchy of the school-room, and more potent in shaping the
+character. The lads train themselves for the battle of the world,
+with some help from the masters. It is a sound system on the whole, if
+based, to appearance, rather too much on the principle of the weaker
+to the wall. The tendency of the weaker inevitably is to the wall, and
+if he is to contend against it effectively, it will be by finding
+out his weakness and being made to feel it at the earliest possible
+moment.
+
+[Illustration: TOMB OF BURKE.]
+
+Not on land only, but on the river, whereinto it so gradually blends,
+does lush young England dissipate. Cricket and football order into
+violent action both pairs of extremities, while the upper pair and the
+organs of the thorax labor profitably at the oar. The Thames, in its
+three bends from Senly Hall, the Benny Havens of Eton, down to Datchet
+Mead, where Falstaff overflowed the buck-basket, belongs to the boys.
+In this space it is split into an archipelago of aits. In and out of
+the gleaming paths and avenues of silvery water that wind between them
+glide the little boats. The young Britons take to the element like
+young ducks. Many a "tall admiral" has commenced his "march over the
+mountain wave" among these water-lilies and hedges of osier.
+
+Shall we leave the boys at play, and, renewing our youth, go
+ourselves to school? Entering the great gate of the western of the two
+quadrangles, we are welcomed by a bronze statue of the founder of the
+institution, Henry VI. He endowed it in 1440. The first organization
+comprised "a provost, four clerks, ten priests, six choristers,
+twenty-five poor grammar-scholars, and twenty-five poor infirm men to
+pray for the king." The prayers of these invalids were sorely needed
+by the unhappy scion of Lancaster, but did him little good in a
+temporal sense. The provost is always rector of the parish. Laymen are
+non-eligible. Thus it happens that the list does not include two
+names which would have illuminated it more than those of any of the
+incumbents--Boyle the philosopher, "father of chemistry and brother
+of the earl of Cork," and Waller the poet. The modern establishment
+consists of a provost, vice-provost, six fellows, a master,
+under-master, assistants, seventy foundation scholars, seven lay
+clerks and ten choristers, with a cortege of "inferior officers and
+servants"--a tolerably full staff. The pay-students, as they would be
+termed in this country, numbering usually five to six hundred, do not
+live in the college precincts, but at boarding-houses in the town,
+whence their designation of oppidans, the seventy gowns-men only
+having dormitories in the college. The roll of the alumni contains
+such names as the first earl of Chatham, Harley, earl of Oxford,
+Bolingbroke, Fox, Gray, Canning, Wellington and Hallam. That is enough
+to say for Eton. The beauties of the chapel, the treasures of the
+library and the other shows of the place become trivial by the side of
+the record.
+
+[Illustration: HEDSOR AND COOKHAM CHURCHES.]
+
+Over the "fifteen-arch" bridge, which has but three or four arches, we
+pass to the town of Windsor, which crouches, on the river-side, close
+up to the embattled walls of the castle--so closely that the very
+irregular pile of buildings included in the latter cannot at first
+glance be well distinguished from the town. High over all swells the
+round tower to a height above the water of two hundred and twenty
+feet--no excessive altitude, if we deduct the eminence on which it
+stands, yet enough, in this level country, to give it a prospect of
+a score or two of miles in all directions. The Conqueror fell in love
+with the situation at first sight, and gave a stolen monastery in
+exchange for it. The home so won has provided a shelter--at times very
+imperfect, indeed--to British sovereigns for eight centuries. From
+the modest erection of William it has been steadily growing--with the
+growth of the empire, we were near saying, but its chief enlargements
+occurred before the empire entered upon the expansion of the past
+three centuries. It is more closely associated with Edward III. than
+with any other of the ancient line. He was born at Windsor, and
+almost entirely rebuilt it, William of Wykeham being superintending
+architect, with "a fee of one shilling a day whilst at Windsor, and
+two shillings when he went elsewhere on the duties of his office,"
+three shillings a week being the pay of his clerk. It becomes at once
+obvious that the margin for "rings" was but slender in those days.
+The labor question gave not the least trouble. The law of supply
+and demand was not consulted. "Three hundred and sixty workmen were
+impressed, to be employed on the building at the king's wages; some
+of whom having clandestinely left Windsor and engaged in other
+employments to greater advantage, writs were issued prohibiting all
+persons from employing them on pain of forfeiting all their goods and
+chattels." In presence of so simple and effective a definition of the
+rights of the workingman, strikes sink into nothingness. And Magna
+Charta had been signed a hundred and fifty years before! That
+document, however, in honor of which the free and enlightened Briton
+of to-day is wont to elevate his hat and his voice, was only in the
+name and on behalf of the barons. The English people derived under it
+neither name, place nor right. English liberty is only incidental, a
+foundling of untraced parentage, a _filius nullius_. True, its
+growth was indirectly fostered by aught that checked the power of the
+monarch, and the nobles builded more wisely than they knew or intended
+when they brought Lackland to book, or to parchment, at Runnymede,
+not far down the river and close to the edge of the royal park. The
+memorable plain is still a meadow, kept ever green and inviolate of
+the plough. A pleasant row it is for the Eton youngsters to this spot.
+On Magna Charta island, opposite, they may take their rest and their
+lunch, and refresh their minds as well with the memories of the place.
+The task of reform is by no means complete. There is room and call
+for further concessions in favor of the masses. These embryo statesmen
+have work blocked out for them in the future, and this is a good place
+for them to adjust to it the focus of their bright young optics.
+
+[Illustration: ETON COLLEGE AND CHAPEL.]
+
+The monarchical idea is certainly predominant in our present
+surroundings. The Thames flows from the castle and the school under
+two handsome erections named the Victoria and Albert bridges; and
+when, turning our back upon Staines, just below Runnymede, with its
+boundary-stone marking the limit of the jurisdiction of plebeian
+London's fierce democracy, and inscribed "God preserve the City of
+London, 1280," we strike west into the Great Park, we soon come plump
+on George III, a great deal larger than life. The "best farmer that
+ever brushed dew from lawn" is clad in antique costume with toga and
+buskins. Bestriding a stout horse, without stirrups and with no bridle
+to speak of, the old gentleman looks calmly into the distance while
+his steed is in the act of stepping over a perpendicular precipice.
+This preposterous effort of the glyptic art has the one merit of
+serving as a finger-board. The old king points us to his palace, three
+miles off, at the end of the famous Long Walk. He did not himself care
+to live at the castle, but liked to make his home at an obscure lodge
+in the park, the same from which, on his first attack of insanity, he
+set out in charge of two of his household on that melancholy ride
+to the retreat of Kew, more convenient in those days for medical
+attendance from London, and to which he returned a few months later
+restored for the time. Shortly after his recovery he undertook to
+throw up one of the windows of the lodge, but found it nailed down. He
+asked the cause, and was told, with inconsiderate bluntness, that
+it had been done during his illness to prevent his doing himself an
+injury. The perfect calmness and silence with which he received this
+explanation was a sufficient evidence of his recovery.
+
+[Illustration: ETON COLLEGE, FROM NORTH TERRACE, WINDSOR.]
+
+Bidding the old man a final farewell, we accept the direction of
+his brazen hand and take up the line of march, wherein all traveling
+America has preceded us, to the point wherefrom we glanced off so
+suddenly in obedience to the summons of Magna Charta. On either
+hand, as we thread the Long Walk, open glades that serve as so many
+emerald-paved courts to the monarchs of the grove, some of them older
+than the whole Norman dynasty, with Saxon summers recorded in their
+hearts. One of them, thirty-eight feet round, is called after the
+Conqueror. Among these we shall not find the most noted of Windsor
+trees. It was in the Home Park, on the farther or northern side of the
+castle, that the fairies were used to perform their
+
+    --dance of custom round about the oak
+  Of Herne the hunter.
+
+Whether the genuine oak was cut down at the close of the last century,
+or was preserved, carefully fenced in and labeled, in an utterly
+leafless and shattered state, to our generation, is a moot point.
+Certain it is that the most ardent Shakespearean must abandon the hope
+of securing for a bookmark to his _Merry Wives of Windsor_ one of the
+leaves that rustled, while "Windsor bell struck twelve," over the head
+of fat Jack. He has the satisfaction, however, of looking up at the
+identical bell-tower of the sixteenth century, and may make tryst with
+his imagination to await its midnight chime. Then he may cross the
+graceful iron bridge--modern enough, unhappily--to Datchet, and
+ascertain by actual experiment whether the temperature of the Thames
+has changed since the dumping into it of Falstaff, "hissing hot."
+
+[Illustration: STAINES CHURCH.]
+
+Back at the castle, we must "do" it, after the set fashion. Reminders
+meet us at the threshold that it is in form a real place of defence,
+contemplative of wars and rumors of wars, and not a mere dwelling by
+any means in original design. A roadway, crooked and raked by frowning
+embrasures, leads up from the peaceful town to the particularly
+inhospitable-looking twin towers of Henry VIII.'s gateway, in their
+turn commanded by the round tower on the right, in full panoply of
+artificial scarp and ditch. Sentinels in the scarlet livery that
+has flamed on so many battlefields of all the islands and continents
+assist in proving that things did not always go so easy with majesty
+as they do now. But two centuries and more have elapsed since
+there happened any justification for this frown of stone, steel and
+feathers; Rupert's futile demonstration on it in 1642 having been
+Windsor's last taste of war, its sternest office after that having
+been the safe-keeping of Charles I., who here spent his "sorrowful and
+last Christmas." Once inside the gate, visions of peace recur. The eye
+first falls on the most beautiful of all the assembled structures,
+St. George's Chapel. It, with the royal tomb house, the deanery and
+Winchester tower, occupies the left or north side of the lower or
+western ward. In the rear of the chapel of St. George are quartered in
+cozy cloisters the canons of the college of that ilk--not great guns
+in any sense, but old ecclesiastical artillery spiked after a more or
+less noisy youth and laid up in varnished black for the rest of their
+days. Watch and ward over these modern equipments is kept by Julius
+Cæsar's tower, as one of the most ancient erections is of course
+called. Still farther to our left as we enter are the quarters of
+sundry other antiquated warriors, the Military Knights of Windsor.
+These are a few favored veterans, mostly decayed officers of the army
+and navy, who owe this shelter to royal favor and an endowment. The
+Ivy tower, west of the entrance, is followed in eastward succession by
+those of the gateway, Salisbury, Garter and Bell towers.
+
+[Illustration: NORMAN GATE AND ROUND TOWER, WINDSOR.]
+
+The fine exterior of St. George's is more than matched by the carving
+and blazonry of the interior. The groined roof bears the devices of
+half a dozen early kings, beginning with Edward the Confessor. Along
+the choir stretch the stalls of the sovereign and knights-companions
+of the order of the Garter, each hung with banner, mantle, sword and
+helmet. Better than these is the hammered steel tomb of Edward IV., by
+Quentin Matsys, the Flemish blacksmith. In the vaults beneath rest the
+victim of Edward, Henry VI., Henry VIII., Jane Seymour and Charles I.
+The account of the appearance of Charles' remains when his tomb was
+examined in 1813 by Sir Henry Halford, accompanied by several of the
+royal family, is worth quoting. "The complexion of the face was dark
+and discolored. The forehead and temples had lost little or nothing of
+their muscular substance. The cartilage of the nose was gone; but the
+left eye, in the moment of first exposure, was open and full,
+though it vanished almost immediately, and the pointed beard so
+characteristic of the reign of King Charles was perfect. The shape
+of the face was a long oval; many of the teeth remained; and the
+left ear, in consequence of the interposition of some unctuous matter
+between it and the cere-cloth, was found entire. The hair was thick at
+the back part of the head, and in appearance nearly black. A portion
+of it, which has since been cleaned and dried, is of a beautiful
+dark-brown color. That of the beard was a reddish-brown. On the back
+part of the head it was not more than an inch in length, and had
+probably been cut so short for the convenience of the executioner,
+or perhaps by the piety of friends after death in order to furnish
+memorials of the unhappy king. On holding up the head to determine
+the place of separation from the body, the muscles of the neck had
+evidently contracted themselves considerably, and the fourth cervical
+vertebra was found to be cut through its substance transversely,
+leaving the face of the divided portions perfectly smooth and even--an
+appearance which could have been produced only by a heavy blow
+inflicted with a very sharp instrument, and which furnished the last
+proof wanting to identify Charles I."
+
+[Illustration: HERNE'S OAK.]
+
+A highly-edifying spectacle this must have been to the prince regent
+and his brother Cumberland. The certainties of the past and the
+possibilities of the future were calculated to be highly suggestive.
+A French sovereign had but a few years before shared the fate of
+Charles, and a cloud of other kings were drifting about Europe with
+no very flattering prospect of coming soon to anchor. Napoleon was
+showing his banded foes a good double front in Germany and Spain.
+His dethronement and the restoration of the Bourbons were not as yet
+contemplated. The Spanish succession was whittled down to a girl--that
+is, by Salic law, to nothing at all. The Hanoverian was in a similar
+condition, or worse, none of the old sons of the crazy old king
+having any legitimate children. The prince regent himself was highly
+unpopular with the mass of his people; and the classes that formed
+his principal support were more so, by reason of the arrogance and
+exactions of the landed interest, the high price of grain and
+other heavy financial burdens consequent on the war, the arbitrary
+prosecutions and imprisonment of leaders of the people, and the
+irregularities of his private life.
+
+But these sinister omens proved illusory. Leigh Hunt, Wraxall and the
+rest made but ineffectual martyrs; the Bourbons straggled back into
+France and Spain, with such results as we see; George IV. weathered,
+by no merit of his own, a fresh series of storms at home; the clouds
+that lowered upon his house were made glorious summer by the advent of
+a fat little lady in 1819--the fat old lady of 1875; and we step from
+the tomb of Charles in St. George's Chapel to that where George and
+William slumber undisturbed in the tomb-house, elaborately decorated
+by Wolsey. Wolsey's fixtures were sold by the thrifty patriots of
+Cromwell's Parliament, and bought in by the republican governor of the
+castle as "old brass." George was able, too, to add another story to
+the stature of the round tower or keep that marks the middle ward
+of the castle and looks down, on the rare occasion of a sufficiently
+clear atmosphere, on prosperous and no longer disloyal London. This
+same keep has quite a list of royal prisoners; John of France and
+David II. and James I. of Scotland enjoyed a prolonged view of its
+interior; so did the young earl of Surrey, a brother-poet, a century
+removed, of James.
+
+Leaving behind us the atmosphere of shackles and dungeons, we emerge,
+through the upper ward and the additions of Queen Bess, upon the ample
+terrace, where nothing bounds us but the horizon. Together, the north,
+east and south terraces measure some two thousand feet. The first
+looks upon Eton, the lesser park of some five hundred acres which
+fills a bend of the Thames and the country beyond for many miles. The
+eastern platform, lying between the queen's private apartments and an
+exquisite private garden, is not always free to visitors. The south
+terrace presents to the eye the Great Park of thirty-eight hundred
+acres, extending six miles, with a width of from half a mile to
+two miles. The equestrian statue at the end of the Long Walk is a
+conspicuous object. The prevailing mass of rolling woods is broken by
+scattered buildings, glades and avenues, which take from it monotony
+and give it life. Near the south end is an artificial pond called
+Virginia Water, edged with causeless arches and ruins that never were
+anything but ruins, Chinese temples and idle toys of various other
+kinds, terrestrial and aquatic. The ancient trees, beeches and elms,
+of enormous size, and often projected individually, are worth studying
+near or from a distance. The elevation is not so great as to bring
+out low-lying objects much removed. We see the summits of hills, each
+having its name, as St. Leonard's, Cooper's, Highstanding, etc., and
+glimpses of the river and of some country-seats. St. Anne's Hill was
+the home of Fox; at St. Leonard's dwelt the father of his rival and
+rival of his father, and at Binfield, Pope, of whom it is so hard
+to conceive as having ever been young, "lisped in numbers, for the
+numbers came," natural descriptions, ethical reflections, _vers de
+societé_ and all, for around him here there was food for them all. To
+descend from Pope in point of both time and romance, the view
+includes the scenes of Prince Albert's agricultural experiments. Quite
+successful many of them were. He was a thoroughly practical man--a
+circumstance which carried him by several routes across ploughed
+fields and through well-built streets, straight to the hearts of the
+English people. His memory is more warmly cherished, and impressed
+upon the stranger by more monuments, than that of any other of the
+German strain. It might have been less so had he succeeded in the
+efforts he is now known to have made soon after his marriage to attain
+a higher nominal rank. He possessed, through the alliance of Leopold
+and Stockmar and the devotion of Victoria, kingly power without the
+name and the responsibility, and with that he became content. He used
+it cautiously and well when he employed it at all. His position was a
+trying one, but he steered well through its difficulties, and died
+as generally trusted as he was at first universally watched. The
+love-match of 1840 was every way a success.
+
+[Illustration: EAST FRONT, WINDSOR CASTLE.]
+
+Another figure, more rugged and less majestic, but not less
+respectable, will be associated with Victoria in the memories, if not
+the history proper, of her reign. This is John Brown, the canny and
+impassive Scot, content, like the Rohans, to be neither prince nor
+king, and, prouder than they, satisfied honestly to discharge the
+office of a flunkey without the very smallest trace of the flunkey
+spirit. He too has lived down envy and all uncharitableness.
+Contemptuous and serene amid the hootings of the mob and the squibs
+of the newspapers, he carries, as he has done for years, Her Majesty's
+shawl and capacious India-rubbers, attends her tramps through the
+Highlands and the Home Park, engineers her special trains and looks
+after her personal comfort even to the extent of ordering her to
+wear "mair claes" in a Scotch mist. The queen has embalmed him in
+her books, and he will rank among the heroes of royal authors as his
+namesake and countryman the Cameronian, by favor of very similar moral
+qualities, does with those of more democratic proclivities.
+
+[Illustration: QUEEN ELIZABETH'S BUILDING, WINDSOR.]
+
+We cannot apply literally to the view from Windsor Thackeray's lines
+on "the castle towers of Bareacres:"
+
+  I stood upon the donjon keep and viewed the country o'er;
+  I saw the lands of Bareacres for fifty miles or more.
+
+[Illustration: EARL OF SURREY.]
+
+We scan what was once embraced in Windsor Forest, where the Norman
+laid his broad palm on a space a hundred and twenty miles round, and,
+like the lion in the fable of the hunting-party, informed his subjects
+that that was his share. The domain dwindled, as did other royal
+appurtenances. Yet in 1807 the circuit was as much as seventy-seven
+miles. In 1789 it embraced sixty thousand acres. The process of
+contraction has since been accelerated, and but little remains outside
+of the Great and Little Parks. Several villages of little note stand
+upon it. Of these Wokingham has the distinction of an ancient hostelry
+yclept the Rose; and the celebrity of the Rose is a beautiful daughter
+of the landlord of a century and a half ago. This lady missed her
+proper fame by the blunder of a merry party of poets who one evening
+encircled the mahogany of her papa. It was as "fast" a festivity as
+such names as Gay and Swift could make it. Their combined efforts
+resulted in the burlesque of _Molly Mog_. These two and some others
+contributed each a verse in honor of the fair waiter. But they mistook
+her name, and the crown fell upon the less charming brow of her
+sister, whose cognomen was depraved from Mary into Molly. Wiclif's Oak
+is pointed out as a corner of the old forest, a long way east of the
+park. Under its still spreading branches that forerunner of Luther
+is said to have preached. Messrs. Moody and Sankey should have sought
+inspiration under its shade.
+
+In the vast assemblage of the arboreal commonwealth that carpets the
+landscape the centuries are represented one with another. It is a
+leafy parliament that has never been dissolved or prorogued. One hoary
+member is coeval with the Confessor. Another sheltered William Rufus,
+tired from the chase. Under another gathered recruits bound with
+Coeur de Lion for the Holy Land. Against the bole of this was set up
+a practicing butt for the clothyard shafts that won Agincourt, and
+beneath that bivouacked the pickets of Cromwell. As we look down upon
+their topmost leaves there floats, high above our own level, "darkly
+painted on the crimson sky," a member, not so old, of another
+commonwealth quite as ancient that has flourished among their branches
+from time immemorial. There flaps the solitary heron to the evening
+tryst of his tribe. Where is the hawk? Will he not rise from some fair
+wrist among the gay troop we see cantering across yonder glade? Only
+the addition of that little gray speck circling into the blue is
+needed to round off our illusion. But it comes not. In place of it
+comes a spirt of steam from the railway viaduct, and the whistle of
+an engine. Froissart is five hundred years dead again, and we turn to
+Bradshaw.
+
+[Illustration: WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM BISHOPSGATE.]
+
+Yet we have a "view of an interior" to contemplate before facing the
+lower Thames. And first, as the day is fading, we seek the dimmest
+part. We dive into the crypt of the bell-tower, or the curfew-tower,
+that used to send far and wide to many a Saxon cottage the hateful
+warning that told of servitude. How old the base of this tower is
+nobody seems to know, nor how far back it has served as a prison.
+The oldest initials of state prisoners inscribed on its cells date
+to 1600. The walls are twelve feet thick, and must have begotten a
+pleasant feeling of perfect security in the breasts of the involuntary
+inhabitants. They did not know of a device contrived for the security
+of their jailers, which has but recently been discovered. This is a
+subterranean and subaqueous passage, alleged to lead under the river
+to Burnham Abbey, three miles off. The visitor will not be disposed to
+verify this statement or to stay long in the comparatively airy crypt.
+Damp as the British climate may be above ground, it is more so below.
+We emerge to the fine range of state apartments above, and submit to
+the rule of guide and guide-book.
+
+[Illustration: LOCK AT WINDSOR.]
+
+St. George's Hall, the Waterloo gallery, the council-chamber and the
+Vandyck room are the most attractive, all of them for the historical
+portraits they contain, and the first, besides, for its merit as an
+example of a Gothic interior and its associations with the order of
+the Garter, the knights of which society are installed in it. The
+specialty of the Waterloo room is the series of portraits of the
+leaders, civil and military, English and continental, of the last and
+successful league against Napoleon. They are nearly all by Lawrence,
+and of course admirable in their delineation of character. In that
+essential of a good portrait none of the English school have excelled
+Lawrence. We may rely upon the truth to Nature of each of the heads
+before us; for air and expression accord with what history tells us
+of the individuals, its verdict eked out and assisted by instructive
+minutiæ of lineament and meaning detected, in the "off-guard" of
+private intercourse, by the eye of a great painter and a lifelong
+student of physiognomy. We glance from the rugged Blucher to the
+wily Metternich, and from the philosophic Humboldt to the semi-savage
+Platoff. The dandies George IV. and Alexander are here, but Brummel
+is left out. The gem of the collection is Pius VII., Lawrence's
+masterpiece, widely familiar by engravings. Raphael's Julius II. seems
+to have been in the artist's mind, but that work is not improved on,
+unless in so far as the critical eye of our day may delight in the
+more intricate tricks of chiaroscuro and effect to which Lawrence has
+recourse. "Brunswick's fated chieftain" will interest the votaries of
+Childe Harold. Could he have looked forward to 1870, he would perhaps
+have chosen a different side at Waterloo, as his father might at Jena,
+and elected to figure in oils at Versailles rather than at Windsor.
+Incomparably more destructive to the small German princes have been
+the Hohenzollerns than the Bonapartes.
+
+[Illustration: THE THAMES EMBANKMENT.]
+
+We forget these nineteenth-century people in the council-chamber,
+wherein reign Guido, Rembrandt, Claude, and even Da Vinci. If
+Leonardo really executed all the canvases ascribed to him in English
+collections, the common impressions of his habits of painting but
+little, and not often finishing that, do him great injustice. Martin
+Luther is here, by Holbein, and the countess of Desmond, the merry old
+lady
+
+  Who lived to the age of twice threescore and ten,
+  And died of a fall from a cherry tree then,
+
+is embalmed in the bloom of one hundred and twenty and the gloom of
+Rembrandt. The two dozen pictures in this room form nearly as odd an
+association as any like number of portraits could do. Guercino's Sibyl
+figures with a cottage interior by Teniers, and Lely's Prince Rupert
+looks down with lordly scorn on Jonah pitched into the sea by the
+combined efforts of the two Poussins. The link between Berghem's cows
+and Del Sarto's Holy Family was doubtless supplied to the minds of
+the hanging committee by recollections of the manger. Our thrifty
+Pennsylvanian, West, is assigned the vestibule. Five of his "ten-acre"
+pictures illustrate the wars of Edward III. and the Black Prince.
+The king's closet and the queen's closet are filled mostly by the
+Flemings. Vandyck's room finally finishes the list. It has, besides
+a portrait of himself and several more of the first Charles and his
+family in every pose, some such queer, or worse than queer, commoners
+as Tom Killigrew and Sir Kenelm Digby and Venetia his hopeful spouse,
+so dear to novelists of a certain school.
+
+[Illustration: ELMS NEAR THE HERONRY.]
+
+Vast sums have been expended on the renovation and improvement of the
+castle during the past half century. With Victoria it has been more
+popular as a residence than with any of her predecessors since
+the fourteenth century. What, however, with its greater practical
+proximity to London, due to railways, and what with the queen's liking
+for solitude since the death of her consort, the more secluded
+homes of Osborne and Balmoral have measurably superseded it in her
+affections. Five hundred miles of distance to the Dee preclude the
+possibility of the dumping on her, by means of excursion trains, of
+loyal cockneydom. She is as thoroughly protected from that inundation
+in the Isle of Wight, the average Londoner having a fixed horror of
+sea-sickness. The running down, by her private steamer, of a few more
+inquisitive yachts in the Solent would be a hazardous experiment, if
+temporarily effective in keeping home invaders at bay. Holding as her
+right and left bowers those two sanctuaries at the opposite ends of
+her island realm, she can play a strong hand in the way of personal
+independence, and cease to feel that hers is a monarchy limited by the
+rights of the masses. It is well for the country that she should be
+left as far as possible to consult her own comfort, ease and health
+at least as freely as the humblest of her subjects. The continuance
+of her life is certainly a political desideratum. It largely aids in
+maintaining a wholesome balance between conservatism and reform. So
+long as she lives there will be no masculine will to exaggerate the
+former or obstruct the latter, as notably happened under George
+III. and William IV. Her personal bearing is also in her favor. Her
+popularity, temporarily obscured a few years ago, is becoming as great
+as ever. It has never been weakened by any misstep in politics, and so
+long as that can be said will be exposed to no serious danger.
+
+We are far from being at the end of the upper Thames. Oxford, were
+there no other namable place, is beyond us. But we have explored
+the denser portion--the nucleus of the nebula of historic stars that
+stretches into the western sky as seen from the metropolis. We lay
+aside our little lorgnette. It has shown us as much as we can map in
+these pages, and that we have endeavored to do with at least the merit
+of accuracy.
+
+EDWARD C. BRUCE.
+
+
+
+
+THE POET'S PEN.
+
+      I am an idle reed;
+  I rustle in the whispering air;
+      I bear my stalk and seed
+  Through spring-time's glow and summer's glare.
+
+      And in the fiercer strife
+  Which winter brings to me amain,
+      Sapless, I waste my life,
+  And, murmuring at my fate, complain.
+
+      I am a worthless reed;
+  No golden top have I for crown,
+      No flower for beauty's meed,
+  No wreath for poet's high renown.
+
+      Hollow and gaunt, my wand
+  Shrill whistles, bending in the gale;
+      Leafless and sad I stand,
+  And, still neglected, still bewail.
+
+      O foolish reed! to wail!
+  A poet came, with downcast eyes,
+      And, wandering through the dale,
+  Saw thee and claimed thee for his prize.
+
+      He plucked thee from the mire;
+  He pruned and made of thee a pen,
+      And wrote in words of fire
+  His flaming song to listening men;
+
+      Till thou, so lowly bred,
+  Now wedded to a nobler state,
+      Utt'rest such pæans overhead
+  That angels listen at their gate.
+
+  F.A. HILLARD.
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES OF INDIA.
+
+II.
+
+
+I had now learned to place myself unreservedly in the hands of Bhima
+Gandharva. When, therefore, on regaining the station at Khandallah, he
+said, "The route by which I intend to show you India will immediately
+take us quite away from this part of it; first, however, let us go and
+see Poona, the old Mahratta capital, which lies but a little more than
+thirty miles farther to the south-eastward by rail,"--I accepted the
+proposition as a matter of course, and we were soon steaming down the
+eastern declivity of the Gháts. As we moved smoothly down into the
+treeless plains which surround Poona I could not resist a certain
+feeling of depression.
+
+"Yes," said Bhima Gandharva when I mentioned it to him, "I understand
+exactly what you mean. On reaching an unbroken expanse of level
+country, after leaving the tops of mountains, I always feel as if my
+soul had come bump against a solid wall of rock in the dark. I seem
+to hear a dull _thud_ of discouragement somewhere back in my soul, as
+when a man's body falls dead on the earth. Nothing, indeed, could
+more heighten such a sensation than the contrast between this and
+the Bombay side of the Gháts. There we had the undulating waters,
+the lovely harbor with its wooded and hilly islands, the ascending
+terraces of the Gháts: everything was energetic, the whole invitation
+of Nature was toward air, light, freedom, heaven. But here one spot
+is like another spot; this level ground is just the same level ground
+there was a mile back; this corn stands like that corn; there is an
+oppressive sense of bread-and-butter about; one somehow finds one's
+self thinking of ventilation and economics. It is the sausage-grinding
+school of poetry--of which modern art, by the way, presents several
+examples--as compared with that general school represented by the
+geniuses who arise and fly their own flight and sing at a great
+distance above the heads of men and of wheat."
+
+Having arrived and refreshed ourselves at our hotel, whose proprietor
+was, as usual, a Parsee, we sallied forth for a stroll about Poona. On
+one side of us lay the English quarter, consisting of the houses and
+gardens of the officers and government employés, and of the two or
+three hundred other Englishmen residing here. On the other was the
+town, extending itself along the banks of the little river Moota.
+We dreamed ourselves along in the lovely weather through such of
+the seven quarters of the town as happened to strike the fancy of my
+companion. Occasionally we were compelled to turn out of our way
+for the sacred cattle, which, in the enjoyment of their divine
+prerogatives, would remain serenely lying across our path; but
+we respected the antiquity, if not the reasonableness, of their
+privileges, and murmured not.
+
+Each of the seven quarters of Poona is named after a day of the week.
+As we strolled from Monday to Tuesday, or passed with bold anachronism
+from Saturday back to Wednesday, I could not help observing how
+these interweavings and reversals of time appeared to take an actual
+embodiment in the scenes through which we slowly moved, particularly
+in respect of the houses and the costumes which went to make up
+our general view. From the modern-built European houses to the
+mediæval-looking buildings of the Bhoodwar quarter, with their massive
+walls and loop-holes and crenellations, was a matter of four or five
+centuries back in a mere turn of the eye; and from these latter to
+the Hindu temples here and there, which, whether or not of actual age,
+always carry one straight into antiquity, was a further retrogression
+to the obscure depths of time. So, too, one's glance would often sweep
+in a twinkling from a European clothed in garments of the latest mode
+to a Hindu whose sole covering was his _dhotee_, or clout about the
+loins, taking in between these two extremes a number of distinct
+stages in the process of evolution through which our clothes have
+gone. In the evening we visited the _Sangam_, where the small streams
+of the Moola and the Moota come together. It is filled with cenotaphs,
+but, so far from being a place of weeping, the pleasant air was full
+of laughter and of gay conversation from the Hindus, who delight to
+repair here for the purpose of enjoying the cool breath of the evening
+as well as the pleasures of social intercourse.
+
+[Illustration: HINDU TEMPLES NEAR POONA.]
+
+But I did not care to linger in Poona. The atmosphere always had to me
+a certain tang of the assassinations, the intrigues, the treacheries
+which marked the reign of that singular line of usurping ministers
+whose capital was here. In the days when the Peishwas were in the
+height of their glory Poona was a city of a hundred and fifty thousand
+inhabitants, and great traffic was here carried on in jewelry and
+such luxuries among the Mahratta nobles. The Mahrattas once, indeed,
+possessed the whole of India practically; and their name is composed
+of _Mahu_, a word meaning "great," and often to be met with in the
+designations of this land, where so many things really _are_ great,
+and _Rachtra_, "kingdom," the propriety of the appellation seeming to
+be justified by the bravery and military character of the people. They
+have been called the Cossacks of India from these qualities combined
+with their horsemanship. But the dynasty of the usurping ministers had
+its origin in iniquity; and the corruption of its birth quickly broke
+out again under the stimulus of excess and luxury, until it culminated
+in the destruction of the Mahratta empire in 1818. So, when we had
+seen the palace of the Peishwa, from one of whose balconies the young
+Peishwa Mahadeo committed suicide by leaping to the earth in the
+year 1797 through shame at having been reproved by his minister
+Nana Farnavese in presence of his court, and when we had visited the
+Hira-Bâgh, or Garden of Diamonds, the summer retreat of the Peishwas,
+with its elegant pavilion, its balconies jutting into the masses of
+foliage, its cool tank of water, reposing under the protection of the
+temple-studded Hill of Pararati, we took train again for Bombay.
+
+The Great Indian Peninsula Railway's main line leads out of Bombay
+over the Gháts to Jabalpúr, six hundred miles; thence a railway of
+some two hundred and twenty miles runs to Allahabad, connecting them
+with the great line, known as the East Indian Railway, which extends
+for more than a thousand miles north-westward from Calcutta _viâ_
+Patna, Benares, Allahabad, Cawnpore, Lucknow, Agra and Delhi. Our
+journey, as marked out by Bhima Gandharva, was to be from Bombay
+to Jabalpúr by rail; thence by some slow and easy conveyance across
+country to Bhopal, and from Bhopal northward through Jhansi to Delhi
+and the northern country, thence returning by rail to Calcutta.
+
+As one ascends the Western Gháts shortly after leaving Bombay one has
+continual occasion to remark the extraordinary resources of modern
+railway engineering. Perhaps the mechanical skill of our time has not
+achieved any more brilliant illustrations of itself than here occur.
+For many miles one is literally going up a flight of steps by rail.
+The word Ghát indeed means the steps leading up from pools or rivers,
+whose frequent occurrence in India attests the need of easy access
+to water, arising from the important part which it plays both in the
+civil and religious economies of the Hindu. The Gháts are so called
+from their terraced ledges, rising one above another from the shores
+of the ocean like the stairs leading up from a pool. In achieving the
+ascent of these gigantic stairs all the expedients of road-makers have
+been resorted to: the zigzag, the trestle, the tunnel, the curve, have
+been pushed to their utmost applications; for five continuous miles
+on the Thull Ghát Incline there is a grade of one in thirty-seven,
+involving many trying curves, and on nineteen miles of the Bhore Ghát
+Incline there are thirty tunnels.
+
+That which gives tone and character to a general view of the interior
+of a railway-car in traveling is, from the nature of things, the
+head-covering of the occupants, for it is this which mostly meets the
+eye; and no one who has traveled in the United States, for example,
+can have failed to observe the striking difference between the aspect
+of a car in the South, where the felt slouch prevails, and of one
+in the North, where the silk hat is more affected. But cars full
+of turbans! There were turbans of silk, of muslin, of woolen; white
+turbans, red, green and yellow turbans; turbans with knots, turbans
+with ends hanging; neat turbans, baggy turbans, preternatural turbans,
+and that curious spotted silk inexpressible mitre which the Parsee
+wears.
+
+[Illustration: GÓNDS.]
+
+Bhima Gandharva was good enough to explain to me the turban; and
+really, when within bounds, it is not so nonsensical a headdress as
+one is apt at first to imagine. It is a strip of cloth from nine to
+twelve inches wide, and from fifteen to twenty-five yards long. They
+are known, however, of larger dimensions, reaching to a yard in width
+and sixty yards in length. The most common color is white; next,
+perhaps, red, and next yellow; though green, blue, purple and black
+are worn, as are also buff, shot colors and gray, these latter being
+usually of silk; but this does not exhaust the varieties, for there
+are many turbans made of cotton cloth printed in various devices to
+suit the fancies of the wearers.
+
+"The _puttee-dar_ (_pugri_, or turban)," continued my companion, "is
+a neat compact turban, in general use by Hindus and Mohammedans; the
+_joore-dar_ is like the _puttee-dar_, except that it has the addition
+of a knot on the crown; the _khirkee-dar_ is the full-dress turban of
+gentlemen attached to native courts; the _nustalik_ is a small turban
+which fits closely to the head, and is worn for full dress at the
+Mohammedan _durbars_ or royal receptions; the _mundeel_ is the
+military turban, with stripes of gold and ends; the _séthi_ is
+like the _nustalik_, and is worn by bankers; the _shumla_ is
+a shawl-turban; and I fear you do not care to know the other
+varieties--the _morassa_, the _umamu_, the _dustar_, the--"
+
+"Thank you," I said: "life is short, my dear Bhima, and I shall know
+nothing but turbans if this goes on, which will be inconvenient,
+particularly when I return to my home and my neighbor Smith asks me
+that ghastly question, 'What do I think of India?'"
+
+"It is a more 'ghastly' question as to India than as to any other
+country in the world," said the Hindu. "Some years ago, when Mr.
+Dilke was traveling in this country, a witty officer of one of the
+hill-stations remarked to him that _all general observations about
+India were absurd_. This is quite true. How could it be otherwise?
+Only consider, for example, the languages of India--the Assamese, with
+its two branches of the Deccan-göl and the Uttar-göl; the Bengalee;
+the Maithilee, Tirhutiya or Tirabhucti, spoken between the Coosy and
+the Gunduck; the Orissan, of the regions around Cuttack; the Nepalese;
+the Kosalese, about Almora; the Dogusee, between Almora and Cashmere;
+the Cashmiran; the Panjabee; the Mooltanee, or Vuchee, on the middle
+Indus; the two dialects of Sindhí, or Tatto, on the lower Indus; the
+Cutché, on the west coast of the peninsula; the Guseraté, spoken
+on the islands of Salsette and Bombay and the opposite coast of the
+Coucan, as well as by the Parsees in the cities, where it is corrupted
+with many words of other languages through the influence of commercial
+relations; the Coucané, from Bombay to Goa and along the parallel
+Gháts where it is called Ballagate; the Bikaneeré, the Marvaré, the
+Jeyporé, the Udayaporé, of Rajpootana; the Vraja-bhasha (the cow-pen
+language) of the Doab, between the Ganges and the Jumna, which is
+probably the parent of Hindi (or Oordú); the Malooé, of the tableland
+of Malwa; the Bundelakhandé, of the Bundelkhand; the Mogadhé, of
+Behar; the Maharachtré, of the country south of the Vindhyas; the--"
+
+"It gives me pain to interrupt you, Bhima Gandharva," I said
+(fervently hoping that this portion of my remark might escape the
+attention of the recording angel); "but I think we are at Jabalpúr."
+
+_Apropos_ of Jubbulpoor, it is well enough to remark that by the rules
+of Indian orthography which are now to be considered authentic, the
+letter "a" without an accent has a sound equivalent to short "u," and
+a vowel with an acute accent has what is usually called its long
+sound in English. Accordingly, the word written "Jabalpúr" should
+be pronounced as if retaining the "u" and the "oo" with which it was
+formerly written, "Jubbulpoor". The termination _púr_, so common in
+the designation of Indian places, is equivalent to that of _ville_
+in English, and means the same. The other common termination, _abad_,
+means "dwelling" or "residence": e.g., Ahmedabad, the residence of
+Ahmed. Jabalpúr is but about a mile from the right bank of the Nerbadá
+(_Nerbudda_) River; and as I wished to see the famous Marble Rocks
+of that stream, which are found a short distance from Jabalpúr, my
+companion and I here left the railway, intending to see a little of
+the valley of the Nerbadá, and then to strike across the Vindhyas,
+along the valley of the Tonsa, to Bhopal, making our journey by such
+slow, irregular and easy stages as should be compatible with that
+serene and philosophic disposition into which the Hindu's beautiful
+gravity had by this time quite converted my American tendencies toward
+rushing through life at the killing pace.
+
+[Illustration: CENOTAPHS IN THE VALLEY OF THE TONSA.]
+
+It was a little past midday when we made our first journey along the
+river between the Marble Rocks. Although the weather was as nearly
+perfect as weather could be, the mornings being deliciously cool and
+bracing and the nights cold enough to produce often a thin layer of
+ice over a pan of water left exposed till daybreak, yet the midday sun
+was warm enough, especially after a walk, to make one long for leaves
+and shade and the like. It would be difficult, therefore, to convey
+the sensations with which we reclined at our ease in a flat-bottomed
+punt while an attendant poled us up toward the "Fall of Smoke," where
+the Nerbadá leaps out eagerly toward the low lands he is to fertilize,
+like a young poet anxious to begin his work of grace in the world. On
+each side of us rose walls of marble a hundred feet in height, whose
+pure white was here and there striped with dark green or black: all
+the colors which met the eye--the marmoreal whites, the bluish grays
+of the recesses among the ledges, the green and black seams, the
+limpid blue of the stream--were grateful, calm-toned, refreshing; we
+inhaled the coolness as if it had been a mild aroma out of a distant
+flower. This pleasant fragrance, which seemed to come up out of
+all things, was presently intensified by a sort of spiritual
+counterpart--a gentle breath that blew upon us from the mysterious
+regions of death; for on a _ghát_ we saw a small company of Hindus
+just launching the body of a pious relative into the waters of
+Mother Nerbadá in all that freedom from grief, and even pleasant
+contemplation, with which this singular people regard the transition
+from present to future existence. These corpses, however, which are
+thus committed to the wave, do not always chime so happily in with the
+reveries of boating-parties on the Nerbadá. The Marble Rocks are often
+resorted to by pic-nic parties in the moonlit evenings; and one can
+easily fancy that to have a dusky dead body float against one's boat
+and sway slowly round alongside in the midst of a gay jest or of a
+light song of serenade, as is said to have happened not unfrequently
+here, is not an occurrence likely to heighten the spirits of revelers.
+Occasionally, also, the black, ugly double snout of the _magar_ (or
+Nerbadá crocodile) may pop up from the surface, which may here serve
+as a warning to the young lady who trails her hand in the water--and
+I have yet to be in a boating-party where the young lady did not trail
+her hand in the water--that on the Nerbadá it is perhaps as well to
+resign an absent-minded hand to the young officer who sits by her in
+the boat lest Magar should snap it off.
+
+Leaving the Nerbadá we now struck off northward toward the Tonsa,
+intending to pass round by way of Dumoh, Sangor, Bhilsa and Sanchi
+to Bhopal. We might have pursued a route somewhat more direct by
+following directly down the valley of the Nerbadá to Hoshangabad,
+and thence straight across to Bhopal, but my companion preferred
+the circuitous route indicated, as embracing a greater variety of
+interesting objects. He had procured for our conveyance a vehicle
+which was in all respects suitable to the placidity of his temper; and
+I make bold to confess that, American as I am--born on the railroad,
+so to speak--I have never enjoyed traveling as I did in this novel
+carriage. It was what is called a _chapaya_. It consisted of a body
+nearly ten feet in length by more than five in breadth, and was
+canopied by a top supported upon sculptured pillars of wood.
+The wheels were massive and low. There were no springs; but this
+deficiency was atoned for by the thick cushionment of the rear portion
+of the vehicle, which allowed us to lie at full length in luxurious
+ease as we rolled along. Four white bullocks, with humps and horns
+running nearly straight back on the prolongation of the forehead line,
+drew us along in a very stately manner at the rate of something like a
+mile and a half an hour.
+
+We were now in the Góndwana, in some particulars one of the most
+interesting portions of the country. Here are the Highlands of Central
+India; here rise the Nerbadá and the Tapti--which flow to the westward
+in a generally parallel direction, and empty into the Gulf of Cambaye,
+the one at Broode and the other at Surat--as well as the Sôn, the
+Keyn (or Cane) and the Tonsa, which flow northward into the Jumna. The
+valley of the Keyn and that of the Tonsa here run across the Vindhyas,
+which are known to the eastward of this as the Kyrmores, and afford
+communication between Northern and Southern India. It is along the
+depression of the latter stream that the railway has been built from
+Jabalpúr to Allahabad.
+
+The eight hundred thousand Gónds of the Góndwana are supposed to be
+members of the great autochthonal family of ancient India. These hills
+of the Góndwana country appear to have been considered by the incoming
+Aryans for a long time as a sort of uncanny land, whose savage
+recesses were filled with demons and snakes: indeed, in the epics of
+the Máhábháráta and Rámáyana this evil character is attributed to that
+portion of India lying south of the Vindhyas. The forest of Spenser's
+Fairy Queen, in which wandering knights meet with manifold beasts and
+maleficent giants, and do valorous battles against them in the rescue
+of damsels and the like--such seem to have been the Góndwana woods to
+the ancient Hindu imagination. It was not distressed damsels,
+however, whom they figured as being assisted by the arms of the errant
+protectors, but religious devotees, who dwelt in the seclusion of the
+forest, and who were protected from the pranks and machinations of the
+savage denizens by opportune heroes of the northern race. It appears,
+however, that the native demons of the Góndwana had fascinating
+daughters; for presently we find the rajahs from the north coming
+down and marrying them; and finally, in the fourteenth and fifteenth
+centuries, the keen urgency of the conquering Mohammedans sends great
+numbers of Rajpúts down into the Góndwana, and a considerable mixture
+of the two bloods takes place. With this incursion of Hindu peoples
+come also the Hindu gods and tenets; and Mahadeo, the "great god,"
+whose home had been the Kailas of the Himalayas, now finds himself
+domesticated in the mountains of Central India. In the Mahadeo
+mountain is still a shrine of Siva, which is much visited by pilgrims
+and worshipers.
+
+[Illustration: THE GAUR, OR INDIAN BISON.]
+
+The Gónd--he who lives back in the hills, far off from the
+neighborhood of the extensive planting districts, which have attracted
+many of those living near them to become at least half-civilized
+laborers in harvest-time--is a primitive being enough.
+
+"Only look," said Bhima Gandharva, "at that hut if you desire to see
+what is perhaps one of the most primitive houses since ever the banyan
+tree gave to man (as is fabled) the idea of sheltering himself from
+the elements artificially." It was simply made of stakes driven into
+the ground, between which were wattled branches. This structure was
+thatched with grass, and plastered with mud.
+
+The Gónd, like the American Indian, has his little patch of grain,
+which he cultivates, however, in a fashion wholly his own. His sole
+instrument of agriculture seems to be the axe. Selecting a piece of
+ground which presents a growth of small and easily-cut saplings--and
+perhaps, by the way, thus destroying in a few hours a whole cargo
+of teak trees worth more than all the crops of his agricultural
+lifetime--he hews down the growth, and in the dry season sets fire to
+the fallen timber. The result is a bed of ashes over a space of two or
+three acres. His soil is now ready. If the patch thus prepared happens
+to be level, he simply flings out a few handfuls of grain, coarse
+rice, kútki (ponicum) or kódon (paspalum), and the thing is done. The
+rest is in the hands of the god who sends the rains. If the patch be
+on a declivity, he places the grain at the upper part, where it will
+be washed down by the rains over the balance of the field. Next year
+he will burn some more wood--the first burning will have left many
+charred stumps and trunks, which he supplements with a little wood
+dragged from other parts of the forest--on the same spot, and so
+the next year, by which time it will become necessary to begin a new
+clearing, or _dhya_. The _dhya_ thus abandoned does not renew the
+original growth which clothed it, like the pinelands of the Southern
+United States, which, if allowed to run waste after having been
+cleared and cultivated, clothe themselves either with oaks or with a
+wholly different species of pine from the original growth. The waste
+_dhya_, which may have perhaps nourished a splendid growth of teak,
+becomes now only a dense jungle.
+
+The Gónd also raises pumpkins and beans; and this vegetable diet
+he supplements with game ensnared in the _dhyas_, to which peafowl,
+partridges, hares and the like resort. Many of the villages, however,
+have a professional huntsman, who will display the most incredible
+patience in waiting with his matchlock for the game to appear.
+
+Besides these articles of diet, the aborigines of the Góndwana have
+their mhowa tree, which stands them in much the same multifarious
+stead as the palm does to its beneficiaries. The flowers of the mhowa
+fall and are eaten, or are dried and pressed, being much like raisins:
+they also produce a wine by fermentation and the strong liquor of the
+hill-people by distillation. Of the seed cakes are made, and an oil is
+expressed from them which is an article of commerce.
+
+In addition, the poor Gónd appears to have a periodical godsend
+resulting from a singular habit of one of the great Indian plants.
+The bamboo is said to undergo a general seeding every thirty years: at
+this period, although, in the mean time, many individual bamboos may
+have passed through the process of reproduction, it is said that the
+whole bamboo growth of a section will simultaneously drop its leaves
+and put forth large panicles of flowers, after which come great
+quantities of seeds much like rice. These are gathered for food by
+the inhabitants with all the greater diligence in consequence of a
+tradition--which, however, does not seem to be at all supported by
+facts--that the general seeding of the bamboo portends a failure of
+the regular crops. The liberal forests of the Góndwana furnish still
+other edibles to their denizens. The ebony plums, the wild mango,
+the seeds of the sál tree, the beans of the giant banhinia creeper, a
+species of arrowroot, and a wild yam, are here found and eaten.
+
+[Illustration: BANJARIS.]
+
+It is not long since the Gónds had arrived at a melancholy condition
+under the baleful influences of the kulars, or liquor-dealers, who
+resided among them and created an extraordinary demand for their
+intoxicating wares by paying for service and for produce in liquor.
+The kulars have, however, been thrown into the background by wise
+efforts toward their suppression, and matters have improved for the
+poor autoch-thones.
+
+We spent our first night in our chapaya, my companion having so
+arranged matters that we were quite independent of the bungaloos which
+the Englishmen have erected at suitable distances along the great
+roads for the convenience of travelers. The night was clear; betwixt
+the corner pillars which upheld our canopy a thousand friendly
+salutations from the stars streamed in upon us; the tranquil
+countenance of my friend seemed, as he lay beside me, like the face of
+the Past purified of old errors and calm with great wisdom got through
+great tribulation, insomuch that betwixt the Hindu and the stars I
+felt myself to be at once in communication with antiquity and with
+eternity.
+
+Thus we pursued our ambulatory meditations through the Góndwana. If
+we had been sportsmen, we should have found full as varied a field for
+the bagging of game as for that more spiritual hunt after new ideas
+and sensations in which we were engaged. Gray quail, gray partridges,
+painted partridges (_Francolinus pictus_), snipe and many varieties
+of water-fowl, the sambor, the black antelope, the Indian gazelle or
+ravine deer, the gaur or Indian bison, chewing the cud in the midday
+shade or drinking from a clear stream, troops of _nilgaé_ springing
+out from the long grass and dwarf growth of polás and jujube trees
+which covered the sites of abandoned villages and fields,--all
+these revealed themselves to us in the most tempting situations. But
+although I had been an ardent devotee of the double-barrel, the large
+and manly tenderness which Bhima Gandharva invariably displayed toward
+all animals, whether wild or tame, had wrought marvels upon me, and
+I had grown fairly ashamed--nay, horrified--at the idea that anything
+which a generous and brave man could call _sport_ should consist
+wholly in the most keen and savage cruelties inflicted upon creatures
+whom we fight at the most unknightly odds, we armed, they unarmed.
+While I knew that our pleasures are by the divine order mostly
+distillations from pain, I could not now help recognizing at the same
+time that this circumstance was part of an enormous plan which the
+slaughter of innocent creatures in the way of "sport" did in nowise
+help to carry out.
+
+The truth is, although I had been for some days wavering upon the
+brink of these conclusions in a quiet way, I found the old keen ardor
+of the sportsman still burning too strongly, and I had started out
+with a breech-loader, intent upon doing much of the Góndwana route gun
+in hand. It was not long before a thoughtless shot operated to
+bring my growing convictions sharply face to face with my decreasing
+practice, and thus to quite frown the latter out of existence. It
+happened in this wise: One day, not far from sunset, I was walking
+idly along behind the chapaya, in which Bhima Gandharva was dreamily
+reclining, when suddenly a pair of great _sáras_ cranes rose from the
+low banks of a small stream and sailed directly across the road. Quick
+as thought--indeed, quicker than thought; for if I _had_ thought, I
+would not have done it--I fired, and brought down one of the monstrous
+birds. As I started to approach it, Bhima Gandharva said, in a tone
+just a trifle graver than usual, "Stop! wait a moment," and at the
+same time halted the chapaya. The mate of the bird I had shot, seeing
+him fall, alighted on the same spot, then flew up, then returned,
+flew up again, returned again, with an exhibition of sad and lingering
+affection of which I had not dreamed, and which penetrated me beyond
+expression; so I stood half stolid outwardly and wholly ashamed
+and grieved inwardly. "The sáras," said my friend, "is the type of
+conjugal affection among the Hindus. The birds nearly always go
+in pairs; and when one is killed, the other invariably makes those
+demonstrations of tenderness which you have just seen."
+
+As we journeyed along in the dusk came notes from another pair of
+feathered lovers, "chukwa, chukwi," "chukwa, chukwi," in a sort of
+mournful alternation. They were the branning ducks, he on one side,
+she on the other side of the stream, as is their habit, whence they
+are fabled to be a pair of lovers who must yearn unavailingly through
+the long nights from opposite banks of the river.
+
+That night, when Bhima Gandharva was asleep, I gently arose, took my
+double-barrel--thou dear Manton! how often has not Jonesville admired
+thee returning from the field at late evening slanting at a jaunty
+angle high above my bagful of snipe or of quail as the case might
+be!--yes, I took this love of a gun, together with the cartridges,
+accoutrements and all other rights, members and appurtenances
+thereunto belonging or in any wise appertaining, and slid the whole
+lot softly into a deep green pool of the very stream from which had
+flown my sáras.
+
+The taste of gypsy life which I was now enjoying contributed to add
+a sort of personal element to that general interest which hangs about
+the curious Banjaris, whom we met constantly, with their families
+and their bullocks, along our road. _Banjara_ is literally
+"forest-wanderer." The women were especially notable for their tall
+stature, shapely figures and erect carriage; which circumstances are
+all the more wonderful from the life of hardship which they lead,
+attending as they do at once to the foraging of the cattle, the
+culinary preparations for the men and the cares of the children. From
+the profusion of ornaments which they wore, one may imagine, however,
+that they were well cared for by their lords in return for their
+affectionate labors; and the general bearing of the tall Banjara who
+bore a long two-handed sword gave evidence of a certain inward sense
+of protection over his belongings which probably found vent in many an
+affectionate gift of rings and bracelets to his graceful partner. It
+must be confessed that the gypsying of these Eastern Bohemians is not
+so free a life as is popularly supposed. The _naik_ or sovereign of
+each _tanda_, or camp, seems to be possessed of absolute power, and in
+this connection the long two-handed sword suggested much less gentle
+reflections. The Banjara, however, though a nomad, is a serviceable
+one, for he is engaged in trade. With his bullocks he is the carrier
+of Central India, and is to be met with all over that section,
+bringing salt and other commodities and returning with interior
+produce.
+
+
+
+
+FRA ALOYSIUS
+
+  Fra Aloysius, vexed with skeptic fears,
+    Nigh crazed with thought to all the saints did pray
+    For faith in those mysterious words that say,
+  "One day is with the Lord a thousand years,
+    A thousand years with Him are as a day."
+
+  An erudite and holy monk was he,
+    And yet his brethren trembled lest his brain
+    Should lose its poise, so long he dwelt in vain
+  On that perplexing verse to find its key,
+    And strove to make its hidden meaning plain.
+
+  Racked by a sleepless night, one fresh spring morn
+    Forth from the cloister Aloysius strolled.
+    The wood was dewy-bright, clear beams of gold
+  Illumined it, and to his heart was borne
+    A sense of freedom, peace and joy untold.
+
+  Beside a laughing brook he sat to rest,
+    Above whose wave did long-haired willows weep;
+    Midmost the dense green forest, still and deep,
+  Lulled by the trickling waters and possessed
+    By tranquil thoughts, the friar fell asleep.
+
+  And, overworn, he slept the livelong day,
+    Nor waked until the twilight shadows fell,
+    That flung a brown night o'er that leafy dell.
+  Then up he rose refreshed and went his way,
+    And, half ashamed, he heard the vesper-bell.
+
+  Back to the convent fared he; at the gate
+    A stranger gave him entrance, but he passed
+    Into the chapel with meek eyes downcast,
+  In truant guise returning home thus late,
+    And toward his wonted seat made seemly haste.
+
+  Too late! a stranger filled it. Looking round,
+    Amazed, he could discern no face he knew.
+    The abbot's self had changed; his wonder grew,
+  When, after the familiar chant, he found
+    These crazy monks held him for crazy too.
+
+  They gathered round with curious, eager eyes.
+   "What cloister's this?" he asked. They named its name:
+    The one he left that morning was the same.
+  His name he gave; with many a wild surmise
+    They guessed who he might be and whence he came.
+
+  He asked them where the abbot was at last,
+    From whom he parted but the night before.
+   "He hath been dead three hundred years and more!"
+  They answered with a single voice, aghast.
+    Then spake a friar versed in monkish lore:
+
+  "Brethren, a miracle! This man I know:
+   'Tis Aloysius, who, as I have read,
+    Beset with doubts, forth from this convent fled,
+  And vanished, some three hundred years ago,
+    And all the world hath counted him as dead."
+
+  Then Aloysius felt the blessed tears
+    Fulfill his eyes, whence dropped the scales away.
+    Kneeling, he cried, "Oh, brethren, let us pray.
+  One day is with the Lord a thousand years,
+    A thousand years with Him are as a day."
+
+EMMA LAZARUS.
+
+
+
+
+A FEW HOURS IN BOHEMIA.
+
+
+The beauty of this country is that no turbulent sea confines its
+borders, nor are martello-towers needed to guard its coast: no jealous
+neighbor threatens its frontier, no army oppresses its citizens, and
+no king can usurp its throne. Its locality is hard to define: like the
+Fata Morgana, it is here to-day and gone to-morrow, for its territory
+is the mind of men, and in extent it is as boundless as thought.
+Natives of every clime are enrolled among its freemen, and all lands
+contain its representatives, but it is in the picturesque streets of
+the older continental cities of Europe, where rambling lodgings and
+cheap apartments are many, that the invisible mother-country founds
+her colonies. I will tell you how I went and what I saw there.
+
+Afra was a cosmopolite, and consequently knew Bohemia, its byways and
+thoroughfares. If any one could fill the office of guide thereto,
+Afra could, and when one evening she rushed into my room saying, "Come
+along if you want to go to Bohemia," I did not hesitate a moment, but
+made ready for the journey, with the simple precaution of putting on
+my bonnet and shawl.
+
+"A cab?" I asked as we moved from the door.
+
+"Who ever heard of entering Bohemia in a cab?" laughed Afra dryly.
+"People have been known to drive _out_ in their own carriages, but
+they always make their first appearance there on foot, or at best in
+an omnibus."
+
+"As you please," I replied, trying to keep pace with her rapid step,
+which showed constant practice.
+
+"I wonder you did not propose a balloon," she continued pettishly.
+"The gods don't give everything to one person: now, they give us
+brains, and they give other people--money."
+
+"If you would understand, I--"
+
+"No, you wouldn't. I sha'n't ride in cabs until I can pay for them
+myself; meanwhile, I have gros sous enough in my pocket for an omnibus
+fare, and if you have the same we will stop here." At this she entered
+a bureau, and as I followed I saw her get some tickets from a man who
+sat behind a small counter, and then composedly sit down on a bench
+while she said, "We shall have some time to wait for our luxury:" then
+showing me the tickets, "Twelve and thirteen: it is a full night, and
+all these people ahead of us."
+
+"Is it a lottery?" I asked ignorantly.
+
+"Very much of a lottery," Afra replied grimly--"like all the ways of
+Bohemia, remarkably uncertain. You get a ticket for something in the
+giving of the Muses, and you wait until your number is called. The
+worst of it is, the most unlikely people are called before you, and
+some get disgusted and leave: there goes one out at the door at this
+moment. Well, he may be better or he may be worse off than those who
+finally win: who knows if any race is worth the running? Still, if you
+have courage to hold on, I believe there is no doubt that every one
+ultimately gets something." Seeing my perplexity, she twisted the
+round tickets between her fingers and added, "Do not be alarmed: these
+are only good for a seat in the first empty 'bus that comes up. The
+conductor will call out the numbers in rotation, and if ours is among
+them we shall go. It is frightful that you have never ridden in a 'bus
+before. I wonder where we should get ideas if we shut ourselves up in
+cabs and never walked or were hungry or tired, and thought only of our
+own comfort from morning till night? You don't know what you miss, you
+poor deluded, unfortunate rich people. I will tell you of something
+I saw the other evening; and, as it is worthy of a name, it shall be
+called 'The Romance of an Omnibus.' Listen! isn't that our numbers I
+heard? Yes: come quick or we shall lose our chance."
+
+"Well," said I when we had successfully threaded the crowd and were
+seated--"the romance."
+
+"You have no idea of the fitness of things. My story is pathetic: it
+will look badly to see you drowned in tears--people will stare."
+
+"I promise not to cry."
+
+"Oh, if you are one of those stolid, unemotional beings who are never
+moved, I sha'n't waste my tale upon you. Wait until to-morrow: we
+will get Monsieur C---- to recount, and you shall hear something worth
+listening to. He is a regular troubadour--has the same artless vanity
+they were known to possess, their charming simplicity, their
+gestures, and their power of investing everything with romance. One is
+transported to the Middle Ages while he speaks: no book written on the
+subject could so fully give you the flavor of the times. He recalls
+Froissart. If you are not affected by C----'s stories, you had better
+pretend to be. But that, I am sure, will not be necessary: a great
+tragedian was lost when he became a great painter."
+
+"Might I ask how and when and where I am to meet this wonderful man?"
+
+"At the garden-party."
+
+"In what way am I to get there?"
+
+"By strategy. There is a little reunion to-night of what may be called
+female Bohemians. They are going to settle the preliminaries of this
+party, and if you happen to be present they will invite you; not that
+they particularly care for your company, but because, as I said, you
+happen to be there. Only don't get yourself into a mess by tramping on
+any one's toes."
+
+"Have they corns?"
+
+"Yes, on every inch of surface: they are dreadfully thin-skinned. But
+they hate sham even more than a hard knock, and are quicker than
+a police-officer in detecting it; so be careful not to talk about
+anything you are ignorant of."
+
+"Give me a few rules, and I promise to conduct myself properly."
+
+"Well, don't be snobbish and patronize them, and don't look shocked
+at any strange opinions you hear, nor act as if you were at an animal
+show and were wondering what would happen next. Be sure not to assent
+when you see they wish to argue, and don't argue when they expect
+acquiescence. If any of them speak in broken English, and you can't
+for the life of you understand, don't ask them to repeat, but answer
+immediately, for you can imagine when one has taken pains to learn a
+foreign language one likes it to be appreciated, and don't--But here
+we are. In short, make yourself at home, as if you had been there all
+your life."
+
+"Afra," I said, laying my hand on her arm as she took to her swift
+pace again, "perhaps I had better go home: I am afraid I can't--I
+think--that is--"
+
+"Nonsense! as if you could not get on after all those hints! Anyway,
+you cannot return alone, and I am unable to go with you. Make up your
+mind to blunder, and do it. There was an amateur visited the studio
+about three months ago: her absurdities have lasted us for laughing
+material ever since. As she is getting rather stale, you can take her
+place. This is the house: come in."
+
+With this doubtful prospect in view I followed my peremptory guide
+from the narrow street into what appeared to be a spacious court, but
+as the only light it received was from a blinking candle in the window
+of the conciergerie, I could not determine. After exchanging some
+cabalistic sentences with a toothless old woman, the proprietor of the
+candle, Afra turned to the right, and walking a few steps came to a
+door opening on a stairway, which we mounted. I can think of nothing
+black enough for comparison with the darkness surrounding us. At last
+a faint glimmer showed an old lamp standing in a corner of a hall bare
+and carpetless. A series of doors flanked the place, looking to my
+unaccustomed eyes all alike, but Afra without a moment's hesitation
+went to one of them and knocked. It was opened by a lady, who smiled
+and said, "Enter. You are just in time: school is over and the model
+about going."
+
+I found myself in a high-ceiled room, at one end of which was
+suspended a row of perhaps a dozen lamps. Here, at least, there was-no
+lack of light: it required some moments to accustom our eyes to the
+sudden contrast. The yellow blaze was directed by reflectors into the
+space immediately beneath the lamps, which left the rest of the room
+pleasantly tempered. Some easels, a few chairs and screens, plaster
+casts on shelves, sketches in all stages of progress on the wall,
+a tea-kettle singing over a bright fire in a stove, and a curtain
+enclosing a corner used as a bedroom, completed the list of furniture.
+It was a night-school for lady artists. The class had finished for the
+evening, and a number of the students were moving about or seated near
+the fire, talking in an unlimited number of languages.
+
+I was given several random introductions, and did my best to follow
+Afra's directions; but there was an indescribable quaintness about the
+appearance and manners of my new acquaintance that made it difficult
+not to stare. I found, however, that little notice was taken of me,
+as a lively discussion was being carried on over a study of an arm and
+hand which one of them was holding up for inspection.
+
+"It is a style I should call the lantern," said she. "The redness of
+the flesh can only be accounted for on the supposition that a light is
+shining through it."
+
+"I should call it raw beef," remarked another.
+
+"It is a shame, mademoiselle!" began the model in an injured tone.
+She had been tying on her bonnet before a bit of looking-glass she
+had taken from her pocket. "Does my arm look like that?" Here she
+indignantly drew up her sleeve and held out that dimpled member,
+meanwhile gazing wrathfully at the sketch. "It ought not to be
+allowed. The silver tones of my flesh are entirely lost; and see how
+you have caricatured the elegance of my beautiful hand. Will not some
+one help mademoiselle to put it right before my reputation is ruined?"
+
+"Jeanne, a model is not a critic," said the author of the drawing,
+coming forward and grasping the canvas with no gentle hand.--"Ladies,
+if you wish to find fault, turn to your own studies. That proportion
+is frightful"--she pointed to different sketches as she spoke--"that
+ear is too large; and, madame, if you take a crust of paint like yours
+for freedom of touch, I pity you."
+
+This dispute was by no means the last during the evening. Opinions
+seemed to be plentiful in Bohemia, each individual being furnished
+with a set of her own on every subject broached; and as no diffidence
+was shown in putting them forth, the company quarreled with great
+good-nature and evident enjoyment. A pot of tea was then brewed by the
+owner of the studio, who had been English before she became Bohemian,
+and the beverage was handed round in tea-cups which, like the opinions
+of the guests, differed widely from each other. In the silence that
+attended this diversion Afra took the floor and said, "How about the
+garden-party to the country? Who is going?"
+
+Several spoke, and one asked, "Shall we take lunch with us?"
+
+"No, something will be provided for us there."
+
+"So much the better. When are we to meet, and where?"
+
+"Twelve o'clock, midday, at ----."
+
+"What messieurs are going?"
+
+"Quite a number--a tenor from the Grand Opera, and the leader of the
+orchestra, who is a magnificent violinist; that new Spanish painter
+who plays the guitar divinely; a poet--that is, he has written some
+pretty songs--besides plenty more."
+
+"That promises well."
+
+"You will bring your friend?" and the speaker nodded her head toward
+me.
+
+"I shall be delighted: I am so curious to see those eccentric--" Here
+a warning glance from Afra stopped me.
+
+But the lady only laughed and said, "You will see eccentricity enough
+to-morrow, if that is what you want. People who devote their minds to
+great objects have no time to think of little things. You had better
+see that Afra has on her bonnet or she will go without one."
+
+"Nonsense!" replied Afra.--"Miss," this to the owner of the studio,
+who was so called in honor of her English birth, "are you ever
+troubled by the ghost of that young painter who hung himself up
+there?"
+
+"Those who have occasion to commit suicide are not likely to come
+back: they have had enough of this world," said the Englishwoman.
+
+"Did some one really die here?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, really;" and Afra mimicked my tone of horror. "You know, a
+Bohemian is at home anywhere, so a change of country don't affect him
+much. If we find a place disagreeable, we travel."
+
+"Was he insane?"
+
+"Not more than the rest of us, but _you_ can't understand the feeling
+that would induce a man to do such a thing. This young fellow painted
+a picture: he put his mind, his soul, himself, into it, and sent it to
+the Exhibition. It was rejected--that is, he was rejected--and he came
+here and died. They found him suspended from that beam where the lamps
+hang now."
+
+"I thought your Bohemia was so gay?"
+
+"So it is, but the brightest light makes the deepest shadows."
+
+The conversation went on. These ladies discussed politics, literature,
+art and society with absolute confidence. One of the topics was Alfred
+de Musset. The Englishwoman was praising the English Alfred, when
+a pale-faced girl, who up to this moment had been intently reading,
+oblivious of all about her, closed her book with a snap (it was a
+much-worn edition of one of the classics, bought for a few sous on the
+quay) and broke out with--"Your Tennyson is childish. His King Arthur
+puts me in mind of our Louis Philippe and his umbrella. Did you know
+Louis carried an umbrella with him when he was obliged to fly from
+Paris? One would have looked well held over Arthur's dragon helmet
+that disagreeable night he left the queen to go and fight his nephew.
+But perhaps Guinevere had lent it to Launcelot, and even the best
+friends, alas! do not return umbrellas. Your poet writes in white
+kid gloves, and thinks in them too. Imagine the magnificent rush and
+struggle of those ancient days, the ecstasy of battle, the intensity
+of life, and then read your Tennyson's milk-and-water tales, with
+their modern English-ménage feelings. Arthur would have been much more
+likely to give his wife a beating, as did the hero of the _Nibelungen
+Lied_, than that high-flown lecture; and it would have done the
+Guinevere of that time more good."
+
+"And what is your Alfred, Anita?"
+
+"He is divine."
+
+"After the heathen pattern. He dipped his pen in mire."
+
+"What is mire?--water and earth. What are we?--water and earth. Mire
+is humanity, and holds in itself not only the roots of the tree,
+but the germ of the flower. A poet who is too delicate to plant
+his thought in earth must be content to give it but the life of a
+parasite: it can have no separate existence of its own."
+
+"But one need not be bad to be great."
+
+"Nor need one be good to be great," returned Anita sarcastically.
+"Alfred de Musset was a peculiar type of a peculiar time. He did not
+imagine: he felt, he lived, he was himself, and was original, like a
+new variety of flower or a new species of insect. Tennyson has gleaned
+from everybody's fields: our Alfred gathered only from his own. The
+one is made, the other is born."
+
+"Come away," said Afra impatiently: "no one can speak while Anita
+is on her hobby. Besides, I must get home early to trim a bonnet for
+to-morrow;" and without more leavetaking than a "Good-evening," which
+included every one, we found ourselves in the street.
+
+"Who is Anita?" I asked.
+
+"She is nobody just now: what she will be remains to be seen. Her
+family wish her to be an artist: she wishes to adopt the stage as a
+profession, and is studying for it _sub rosa_. Did you ever see a more
+tragic face?"
+
+"Poor thing!" I involuntarily exclaimed.
+
+"Don't pity her," said Afra, more seriously than she had yet spoken.
+"The best gift that can be bestowed upon a mortal is a strong natural
+inclination for any particular life and the opportunity of following
+it. The man or woman who has that can use the wheel of Fate for a
+spinning-wheel."
+
+The next morning at the appointed time I met Afra at the station.
+"How do I look?" she asked, standing up for my inspection as soon as I
+appeared in sight, at the same time regarding as much of her dress as
+it was possible for her to see. But before I could reply the satisfied
+expression of her face changed: an unpleasant discovery had been
+made. "I have shoes on that are not mates," she exclaimed--"cloth and
+leather: that looks rather queer, doesn't it? Do you think it will be
+noticed? I could not decide which pair to wear, and put on one of each
+to see the effect: afterward I forgot them. Now, I suppose that would
+be thought eccentric, though any one might make the same mistake. It
+shows I have two pairs of shoes," she added more cheerfully, "and they
+are both black. How is my bonnet?"
+
+The bonnet was black velvet, and we were in midsummer. The material,
+however, was skillfully draped with a veil, and a profusion of pink
+flowers gave it a seasonable air. A crimson bow was also tied at
+her neck; she complacently remarked that "pink and crimson harmonize
+beautifully;" and others of the party arriving at that moment, I was
+saved the trouble of making a polite answer.
+
+The ride through ripening grain-fields and moss-thatched hamlets
+need not be described; suffice it to say, it was France and June. An
+omnibus was waiting at the station where we dismounted: it carried us
+near, but not to, our destination. After leaving it we walked through
+the streets of a low-roofed village, then followed a path bordered
+with wild mignonette and apple trees that wound up the side of a hill
+covered with vineyards. A couple of chattering magpies ran before
+us, an invisible cuckoo was heard between snatches of Italian melody
+warbled by the tenor _sotto voce_ and the little company overflowed
+with gayety.
+
+The house we arrived at looked as if it might be a castle in the air
+materialized--pointed windows hidden in ivy, through which you saw
+the chintz-covered walls of the interior; turrets on the roof and
+a stair-tower; odd nooks for pigeons and cattle; the color a
+weather-toned red, met by gray roofs, green trees and blue sky. We
+passed through it to the quaint garden: rows of dwarf pears bordered
+its paths, and trellises and walls supported nectarines and vines,
+with sunshine and shadow caressing the half-ripe fruit.
+
+The shady spaces were occupied by guests who had arrived before us,
+and we saw with pleasure that ceremony had not been invited to attend.
+The host's kindly manner was sufficient to put the company at once
+at ease. We wandered at will from group to group, listening or
+conversing: introductions were sometimes given, but more often not.
+
+At one table some ladies and gentlemen were playing the artistic game
+of "five points." A more difficult pastime was never invented. The
+materials necessary are simply a piece of paper and a pencil: it is
+their use that is extraordinary. A person puts five dots on the paper
+in whatever position fancy may dictate: on this slight foundation
+another is expected to design a figure, the puzzle being to include
+all the marks given. One that I saw had four of the dots placed
+unusually close together, and the fifth in a distant corner:
+this latter, in the opinion of the lookers-on, would surely prove
+refractory. After some moments of consideration, with pencil suspended
+and eye attentive, the artist commenced drawing. In ten minutes the
+sketch was finished. It was an angel: her upturned head took in the
+highest of the group of dots; one hand hanging by her side the next;
+a knee the third; and the flowing hem of her robe the fourth; but the
+fifth in the corner--what could reach it? With a touch of the pencil
+the angel's other hand appeared flinging up a censer attached to
+a long chain, which struck the solitary dot like a shot amid
+acclamations. To show that he did not consider the feat a _tour de
+force_, the artist turned the paper, and taking the same marks drew
+a devil in an entirely different attitude, the difficult point being
+reached by his pitchfork. This gave rise to a learned discussion as
+to whether the devil's emblematic pitchfork was not a descendant of
+Neptune's trident, which I did not stay to hear, as Afra whispered she
+wanted to present me to Monsieur C----, and I was taken to a gentleman
+of no great height, but of such wondrous width that Nature must have
+formed him in a most generous mood.
+
+"You are American?" said this wide man to me as I was introduced, and
+without waiting for a reply went on: "I like your country-people:
+they admire frankly. Show them a picture, they exclaim, 'Beautiful!
+magnificent! lovely! exquisite! name your price;' and they buy it.
+Here the public look and look. 'Not bad,' they say, 'but the color is
+from Veronese, and that attitude is surely Raphael's. What a mine that
+man's genius has been to ambitious but less gifted artists!' and so
+they go on. I wish they would let the dead rest in peace. Are you
+acquainted with Mr. B---- of New York?"
+
+I was obliged to say "No."
+
+"I wish to send a message to him," he continued grandly: "tell him
+that I paint now for him alone."
+
+"You are court-painter to Mr. B----," I remarked laughingly.
+
+"Don't speak of courts," he exclaimed pettishly. "I was to have
+painted the baptism of the prince imperial for the state: it gave me
+no end of annoyance, and in the end was never finished."
+
+"I understood that you insisted on painting the little prince nude,
+after the Rubens manner, and that was one ground of objection to the
+design," said Afra.
+
+"The baby would have had on plenty of clothes: one of his dresses was
+sent from the Tuileries for Monsieur C---- to paint, and I sewed a
+rosette on it myself." This from the painter's wife.
+
+"A countryman of yours sat for the head of a young priest at the
+ceremony. He had a fine countenance: he was studying art with me
+at the time, and has since been professor of drawing at your Naval
+Academy. Teaching is a sad trade--Pegasus dragging the plough."
+
+"At least, your other great picture brought you nothing but praise."
+
+"The public have since repented of being so good to me. Then, they
+could not say enough in my favor: now, if a person asks what I am
+doing, every one repeats like a parrot, 'C---- doesn't paint, C----
+doesn't paint.' I have heard it so often that I begin to believe
+it myself, and when I am asked join the general cry, 'C---- doesn't
+paint.'"
+
+I laughed, thinking this a joke, but I soon found that though
+C---- might be cynical, sarcastic or bitter, though he might excite
+unintentional laughter by his remarks, he was too sensitive a man to
+take any but a serious view of life. The imperfections of the world
+excited his disgust, his anger, never his mirth.
+
+"Ah but, monsieur," said Afra, "you should be satisfied, and leave
+some little honor for the rest of us to gather. The stories one hears
+of your youth are like fairy-tales."
+
+"And they are true," replied the artist with evident enjoyment. "In
+those days I was pointed out to people when I walked the street;
+which, by the way, gave rise to an odd incident. A gentleman thought
+he had seen me in a crowd, but he had taken an older and taller man
+for the great painter. He believed big pictures were painted by big
+men, and I had not then my present circumference. This gentleman sent
+me an invitation to dine with him. On the day appointed I arrived at
+the house, and was met at the door by my host, a look of surprise and
+annoyance on his face which he tried to conceal by a low bow, at the
+same time asking politely, 'How is your father?'--'Very well, thank
+you,' I returned, although I could not understand why my father's
+health should be a matter of interest to him.--'You have come to
+tell me of some catastrophe which prevents his attendance here
+to-day?'--'Not at all: I have come to dine with you, according to this
+invitation.' Here I pulled out the card, which I happened to have in
+my pocket.--'Are you the person here addressed?' he said, staring at
+me.--'I am'.--'I beg your pardon, there is a mistake: I meant it for
+your father, the painter of the "Décadence des Romains."'--'I am the
+painter of the "Décadence," but I am not my father.'--'You ought to
+be an older man.'--'I should have been, monsieur, had I been born
+sooner.'--At that moment a friend, overhearing the conversation and
+divining the cause, came and explained to my wonder-struck host that I
+was really the artist in question. With many apologies I was led into
+a hall adorned with floral arches in my honor, next to a beautiful
+salon, likewise decorated, and finally we reached the dining-room,
+which was arranged to represent my picture. Columns wreathed with
+flowers supported the roof; flowers festooned the white table-linen
+and adorned the antique vessels that covered it; couches of different
+colored silk were laid after the Roman fashion for the guests to
+recline upon; and lovely women dressed in costly Roman costumes, their
+heads crowned with flowers, were placed in the attitudes that you
+will see on my celebrated canvas. Was it not a graceful tribute to my
+genius?"
+
+"If a Frenchman wants to pay a compliment, he never uses one that has
+done duty before, but invents something new," said Afra emphatically.
+
+"What are you painting now, monsieur?" I asked.
+
+"A series of pictures called 'Pierrot the Clown.' He succeeds in
+tricking the world in every station of life. I am just finishing his
+deathbed. All his friends are weeping about him: the doctor feels
+his pulse and gives some learned name to the disease--doctors know so
+much--while hidden everywhere around the room are empty bottles. The
+drunken clown plays with even death for a mask."
+
+"I thought he painted such romantic pictures," said I to Afra as we
+turned from the master.
+
+"So he does: there is one in his studio now. A girl clad in gray and
+shadow--open-air shade which in his hands is so clear and luminous.
+She walks along a garden-path, her head bent down, dreaming as she
+goes, and unconsciously nearing a half-open gateway, through which the
+sunshine is streaming. Above the rustic gate two doves are billing and
+cooing. You feel sure the girl is about to pass through this typical,
+sunshiny, invitingly half-open door; and--what is beyond?"
+
+Just then we were called to lunch, a plentiful but not luxurious
+repast. There was no lack of lively repartees and anecdotes, and
+we had speeches and songs afterward. I wonder if I ever heard "'Tis
+better to laugh than be sighing" given with more zest than on that
+day? One could easily imagine that it was such an occasion as this
+that had inspired it.
+
+Lunch being over, Monsieur C---- was asked to relate one of his own
+stories. I cannot give it entire, but the plot was this: A pilgrim,
+whom he called poor Jacques, hearing much of heaven, set out to find
+his way to the blessed abode, with only a little dog to accompany him
+on the journey. As he went he met many of his contemporaries, who
+had made what a walker would style but poor time. The allusions to
+well-known peculiarities in the various people and their occupation in
+the other life caused much amusement. For instance, Ingres the painter
+was seated by the roadside playing Rossini's music on the violin, on
+which instrument he was a great proficient. But he was known to detest
+the Italian's music before he started heavenward: his taste must then
+have grown _en route_. (Critics might object to this supposition.)
+However, Jacques was anxious to push on, and spent little time
+listening. But he was a good-hearted man, and, though he would
+not delay for his own amusement, he could not refuse to stop when
+fellow-pilgrims asked him for assistance. Little children were
+continually straying from the path, and without Jacques and his little
+dog would inevitably have been lost. Feeble old people were standing
+looking with despair at some obstacle that without Jacques's friendly
+arm they would have found it impossible to pass. Young men who never
+looked where they were walking were continually calling on him for a
+hand to help them out of the ditch where they had fallen; and young
+girls--well, one would have supposed they had never been given feet
+of their own to walk with, from the trouble they were to poor Jacques.
+The worst of it was, that when all these good people were well over
+their troubles they called Jacques a simpleton for his pains, and
+refused to have any intercourse with him, giving him the worst side of
+the road and laughing at his old-fashioned staff and scrip, and even
+at his little dog, to which they gave many a sly kick. Nor was it
+any wonder, for there were many in the company robed in silk, wearing
+precious stones and with well-filled wallets by their sides. Jacques
+was but human, and often he wished he had never set out for heaven at
+all in such company; but even in their bitterest moods neither
+Jacques nor the little dog could ever hear a cry of distress without
+forgetting all unkindness and rushing at once to the rescue.
+
+These labors exhausted Jacques's strength: the little dog, too, was
+worn to a shadow, and so timid from ill-treatment that it was only
+when some great occasion called out his mettle that you saw what a
+noble little dog-heart he had. He did his best to comfort his master,
+but when Jacques's sandals were worn out and his cloak in rags, and
+when he looked forward and saw nothing yet of the holy city in view,
+though he still tried to go forward, Nature gave way: he sank to the
+ground, and the little dog licked his hands in vain to awaken him.
+
+There is a band of angels who each night descend the holy mount
+whereon is built the city, in search of such pilgrims as have failed
+through fatigue to reach the gate. They are clothed in robes woven of
+good deeds, which never lose their lustre, for they are renewed every
+day. It was this company which found Jacques in his swoon by the
+roadside. One gently touched his tired body, and more than the vigor
+of youth leapt through his veins. Another whispered "Come," and he
+rose and walked with them. As he moved on with eyes abashed, thinking
+of the rents in his garments and regretting their poverty, he noticed
+that they too were changed, and were as bright as those of his
+companions. "Who has done this?" he said, venturing to address the
+one that walked at his right hand. "You wore them always," he answered
+with an angelic smile, "but it is this light which shows their
+beauty;" and he pointed to that which streamed from the celestial
+walls.
+
+There was much applause. I saw Afra wipe a tear from her eye; only, a
+thin-faced individual who sat near me whispered that it was too long.
+The delicacy and pathos of expression and language it is impossible
+to give, and, though old in form, the story was skillfully new in
+incident; nor must I forget that the little dog slipped through the
+eternal gate with his master. Some one asked the troubadour why he
+did not write it out. He shook his head and threw up his hands as
+he replied, "I wrote one book and gave it to a literary man for
+correction. You should have seen the manuscript when he sent it home:
+not a page but was scarred and cut. He called that 'style.' Now, what
+did I want with style? I wanted to write as I talked."
+
+"Certainly," said one. "What did you do?"
+
+"I quickly put Monsieur le Rédacteur's style out of my book; then
+I published it. George Sand promised to write the preface, but some
+busybody told her that I was attacking the whole world, so she would
+have nothing to do with it. She was misled: I blamed nothing in my
+book but what deserved censure."
+
+Having heard this excellent representation of the ancient minstrel,
+we were shortly given a touch of the modern usurper of the name. A
+gentleman was present who in the many turns of Fortune's wheel had
+once found himself a follower of the burnt-cork persuasion. He gave us
+a negro melody with a lively accompaniment on the guitar. A melancholy
+Spanish song followed. The company again dispersed into congenial
+groups, and in the long twilight you heard the murmur of voices broken
+by occasional snatches of melody or the nightingale's song.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And what do you think of Bohemia?" asked Afra as we returned that
+night.
+
+"It is different from what I expected. They are refined, and, though
+frank, never rude. I think--"
+
+Afra laughed: "You had unconsciously thought them a set of sharpers;
+but there is a great difference between living by your brains and
+living by your wits. My dear, you have broken bread with giants
+to-day: such men live in another world that they may rule this one."
+
+ITA ANIOL PROKOP.
+
+
+
+
+PROFESSOR AND TEACHER.
+
+
+The two words that recur most frequently perhaps in the discussion of
+matters of education are "teacher" and "professor;" yet there are
+no two that are used so carelessly and loosely. It seems as if the
+thought that they may not be synonymous seldom, if ever, occurs to
+those using them. If one of our writers or speakers upon education
+were suddenly called upon to state exactly what he meant by a
+"professor" in distinction from a "teacher," he would be at a loss for
+an answer. He might reply, after some hesitation, "Why, a teacher is
+a man who teaches at a school or an academy, and a professor is a man
+who teaches at a college." If he were pressed still more closely, and
+asked to give the precise difference between a "school or an academy"
+and a "college," it is safe to assume that he would find himself
+nonplussed. There are colleges in the country, some large and others
+small, some old and others young, some good and others poor; but aside
+from the fact that they provide a curriculum of four years and teach
+a certain amount of Latin, Greek and mathematics, they do not possess
+features enough in common to enable us to define with exactness "a
+college." It is not in the power of language to devise a formula so
+elastic as to embrace Harvard, Brown, Princeton, Trinity, Cornell
+and Michigan University, without at the same time ignoring the
+characteristic features of one or the other. Even if we admit that
+there is a vague ideal unity underlying the so-called college system,
+by virtue of which it is a system and not a mere aggregate, we shall
+not make much progress in our search after the proper definition
+of the term "professor." The utmost that can be said of our college
+system, as a system, is that it stands on a somewhat higher plane than
+the schools, that it is supposed to finish a young man's education,
+and consequently that the men whom it employs for such a purpose--its
+professors--are, or at least ought to be, abler men than the teachers
+proper. The difference, then, between professor and teacher is one of
+degree, and not of kind. Both teach, and both teach in great part the
+same subjects and in substantially the same way; that is, by means
+of textbook and recitation. Herein lies the explanation of the
+disposition evinced by some of our best schools to call their teachers
+"professors." An institution like Phillips Exeter or Andover can
+scarcely be said to assume more than it is entitled to in putting
+itself on an equality with Hobart College or Racine.
+
+On turning to Germany, we observe no such laxity in the use of the
+term "professor." He, and he only, is professor who "professes" to
+have made himself eminent in his special branch, and whose claims have
+been allowed officially by a university or by the government. He is
+not even a teacher in the English or American sense. He is a scholar
+and investigator who has produced results worthy of distinction, and
+it is upon the strength of those results, and not because of his real
+or supposed ability to impart knowledge and stimulate industry among
+students, that he receives his call to a university chair.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: The circumstance that some of the gymnasium-teachers in
+Germany have the title of "professor" does not affect the above view.
+The title has been expressly conferred upon them by the government as
+a mark of special distinction, either for long services or for unusual
+scholarship--in most cases for the latter. Where schools of the
+highest order are so numerous as they are in Germany, it is not
+surprising that they should count among their teachers men of profound
+scholarship. The official recognition paid to such men is only an
+additional proof of the care with which the title is used. It is given
+to the teacher, not so much because he is a good teacher, as because
+he has done something over and above school-room work.]
+
+The words of one who is himself a leading professor in one of the
+most renowned universities are so explicit upon this point that they
+deserve to be translated and carefully studied. Heinrich von Sybel, in
+his academic address delivered at Bonn in 1868, says: "The excellence
+of our universities is to be found in the fact that they are not
+mere institutions where instruction is given, but are workshops
+of science[2]--that their vital principle is unceasing scientific
+productivity. Hence it is that the state assembles the best men of
+all Germany as professors at its universities, so that the phenomenon,
+common enough in England and France, of a distinguished savant without
+a university chair is with us a very unusual exception. Hence it is
+that in appointing to such a chair the first and last demand is for
+published evidences of such activity. As for the so-called ability to
+teach _(Lehrtalent im formellen Sinne),_ we are satisfied if it is not
+utterly and notoriously wanting. The question upon which everything
+turns is, Has the candidate given evidence of his capacity for
+original investigation and production? Whoever has this capacity
+is sufficiently qualified, according to our German notions, for
+fulfilling the essential function of university instruction."
+
+[Footnote 2: _Science_ is used here in the broad German sense to
+denote any study, whether in the direction of natural phenomena,
+history or philosophy, which is pursued systematically and with a view
+to eliciting truth.]
+
+In other words, a German professor is a man who has devoted himself
+to special and original research--to "science" as Von Sybel uses the
+term--and whose discoveries and works give strength and increase of
+dignity to the university with which he is connected. He is
+appointed upon his merits as a discoverer or an author. The further
+consideration--namely, whether he is what we Americans style a "good
+teacher"--was not so much as an afterthought in the minds of those who
+gave him his call. The explanation of this disregard of the personal
+element in the professorial character is obvious. The professor is not
+called upon to teach. It does not constitute any part of his vocation
+to spur up the sluggish, to keep the idle busy, to give each student
+enough to do, and make first principles perfectly clear to all. So far
+from coming down to the level of the students, the professor expects
+that the students will make every possible exertion to rise to his
+level, while he himself can scarcely be said to lend a helping hand.
+To the sentimentalist, then, he might appear a very selfish mortal.
+But by going beneath the surface of the relation between professor and
+student, and examining into its essence, we shall find that it is an
+eminently healthful relation, because it is based upon the recognition
+of mutual rights and duties. The professor, as a man of science, has a
+right to the free direction of his talents. The student has the right
+to develop what there is in him without supervision or interference.
+He is to make a man of himself by seeking diligently after the truth
+in a manly, independent spirit. All that the professor can do for him
+is to point out the road to the truth.
+
+This view of the functions of a professor may appear obscure and
+exaggerated to one who has not studied at a German university. But it
+gives the clew to the entire German system of university education,
+and accounts in great part for the high standard of scholarship. Only
+in part, for the innate proneness of the German mind to research must
+be credited with some share in the result. It is safe to say that
+Germany, under any system, would be a land of erudition.
+
+However pleasant it might be to go into the details of the
+professional position and character in Germany, it will be more
+profitable, and certainly more practical, to compare this fundamental
+German idea, as already given, with the salient features of
+professional life in America. The American professor, then, is a
+teacher. Unless he is the fortunate occupant of an exceptionally
+favored chair, his chief, and even his sole, function in the college
+body is to teach, in the strictest sense of the term. He has to
+prescribe textbooks, assign and hear lessons, grade recitations, mark
+examination-papers, submit carefully prepared term and annual reports
+to the faculty. When the question of conditioning or dismissing a
+student on the ground of defective scholarship comes up for decision,
+his opinion must be given and weighed in connection with that of
+others, in order that the faculty may strike a fair general average.
+The number of hours that he is compelled, by the college curriculum,
+to pass per week in the recitation-room is seldom less than fifteen,
+and may be as high as twenty. The classes themselves are ill-sorted
+and often troublesome, and are usually unwieldy by reason of their
+size. The professor's mind must be continually on the watch to prevent
+disorder and enforce attention. Besides, as every one knows full well
+who has tried it, there is nothing so exhausting as to supply "brains"
+to those who either have not received their portion from Nature or
+else have squandered it for a mess of pottage. Every professor-teacher
+can bear witness to the truism that one hour in the recitation-room
+is fully equal, in its drain upon the vital energy, to two passed in
+private study or authorship. The sense of responsibility, we might
+say, is omnipresent. It does not cease with the recitation: it follows
+him to his study, and haunts him with the recollection of absurd
+blunders made by young men who should have done better--the
+dispiriting reflection that despite his best efforts the stupid and
+indifferent will not learn. If to this normal wear and tear and these
+every-day annoyances we add the participation in what is
+pleasingly styled enforcement of discipline--that is, protracted
+faculty-meetings, interviews with anxious or irate parents,
+exhortations to the vicious to mend their ways--we shall probably come
+to the conclusion that the professor's burden is anything but light.
+We all have heavy burdens. But while admitting the universality of the
+adage, we are nevertheless at liberty to ascertain if we cannot make
+the burden of a particular man or class easier to bear by fitting it
+to the back.
+
+Editors, essayists, college presidents and reformers assure us that
+we are on the verge of a change, and perhaps a great change, in our
+system of higher education. They dilate upon the indisputable fact
+that most of our older colleges have made rapid strides within
+the past ten years, augmenting their endowments, erecting handsome
+buildings, establishing new departments of study and increasing the
+number of students. Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Amherst, Princeton,
+Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, were never so well off, in
+point of money and men, as they are at this day. The inference is, of
+course, if so much has been done in ten years, what may we not expect
+by the end of the century? The University of Virginia holds its own,
+notwithstanding the desolation wrought by the late civil war, and Ann
+Arbor and Cornell have shot up with extraordinary vigor. There can be
+no doubt that our institutions of learning are full of robust life.
+And it is no less certain that this growth of resources is due to
+private enterprise. Our colleges have grown because graduates, and
+even non-graduates, have taken an interest in them, and endowed them
+with a munificence which seems incredible to a Frenchman or a German.
+But in studying the aspect of higher education it behooves us not to
+lose sight of the fundamental principle that education is something
+spiritual in its nature, and that it cannot be gauged by buildings,
+by endowments, by the trappings of wealth--in short, by anything
+material. Endowments and buildings are only the means; unless the
+end to which these means are subservient be clearly perceived and
+persistently followed, the means themselves may prove a hindrance
+rather than a help. Of this Oxford is a notable proof.
+
+Have, then, the end and aim, the method and agencies, of college
+instruction changed essentially within the past fifteen years, or are
+they likely to change essentially within the coming twenty-five? In
+the year 1770 the greatest genius of Germany entered the walls of the
+old university-town of Strasburg, there to complete his education. He
+has bequeathed to us a faithful record of his studies, his amusements,
+his daily life. Connecting this Strasburg experience with the previous
+experience at Leipsic, we know what it meant in the eighteenth century
+to be a German student. We know that the professors in those days were
+pedagogues in the Anglo-American sense, and that university-life stood
+little if at all higher than our own present college-life. But when
+Goethe died, in 1832, the universities of Germany had reached their
+prime. Since then they have made no gain. It may be doubted if the
+professors, on the whole, rank quite so high to-day for originality
+and vigor of research as did their predecessors forty years ago.
+Wherein lies the secret, then, of this wonderful change wrought in
+the brief span of two generations, between 1770 and 1830, and amid
+the dire confusion of the great Revolution and the Napoleonic era? The
+change was twofold. It consisted, first, in allowing to the professor
+the free play of his individuality; second, in providing him with a
+properly trained body of students. From the practical recognition
+of these two principles, which have nothing to do with wealth and
+buildings, proceed the power and glory of the German universities.
+Viewed from the English, or even the American point, some of these
+universities might be pronounced poor, not to say starvelings. The
+buildings are old and out of repair, the professors are scantily paid,
+the students are needy, there is a general atmosphere of want and
+discomfort. But the work they do is noble, and its nobility consists
+in its freedom, its heartiness, its strict devotion to truth.
+
+We are not concerned in this place with the study of the growth of the
+German school system that prepares the German student. We have to do
+with the professor. Although the gymnasium and the university are
+not to be dissevered in actual practice, the one being the necessary
+prelude to the other, still we can discuss either one of them
+separately with a view to ascertaining its salient features.
+
+The German university allows to the professor the free play of his
+individuality. By this is meant that each professor has his specialty,
+which he teaches as a specialty and after his own fashion. He has been
+appointed because of his specialty, and to the end that he may teach
+it. His salary is paid to him, not so much for what he does as for
+what he is. It is in a measure the reward for having made for himself
+a name. His standing in the university is based, not so much upon the
+number of students that he may attract to his lectures as upon the
+quality of scholarship that he exhibits and his general repute in
+the world of letters. He has the satisfaction of feeling that his
+researches, even the most abstruse, can be brought to bear directly
+upon his official intercourse with his students. A discovery that he
+makes is usually communicated to them in the first instance, before it
+finds its way into print. The neglect to take account of this element
+of originality in the lectures of a German professor has led to an
+unfair estimate of the lecture-system. Americans and English are apt
+to regard it as merely the oral inculcation of established truths.
+Were that the case, we might be right in questioning its superiority
+over our method of teaching by textbook. But it is not the case.
+The lecture is the vehicle for conveying the latest discoveries made
+either by the professor himself or gleaned by him from the labors of
+his colleagues. So far from merely repeating established truths,
+it rather promulgates truths in process of establishment. German
+university lectures, taken all in all, represent the most advanced
+stage of thought. The instances are not infrequent where a professor
+refrains from publishing his lectures, lest he should lose his
+hearers, who are attracted to him by reports of his originality and
+thoroughness.
+
+The evident tendency of such a system is to encourage productivity
+and the highest degree of accuracy. A man who has to teach only one
+subject, and teach it to such students only as are ready and anxious
+to receive it, can afford to take the time for being thorough. The
+tendency of the American system, on the other hand, is to beget a
+spirit of routine and to check productivity. The professor falls
+into a way of contenting himself with meeting the requirements of the
+college curriculum. The effects of this curriculum upon the professors
+are deeper and farther-reaching than is usually perceived. It is
+in accordance with facts to call American professors, as a class,
+unproductive. But it would be unjust and inconsiderate to ascribe this
+want of productivity to the disposition called laziness. Laziness is
+not a national fault of Americans. On the contrary, we are pushing,
+active, restless: we yearn, Alexander-like, for something new to
+overcome. Our professors are of the same stock as our business-men,
+our lawyers, our doctors, our politicians. But the spirit of progress,
+if we choose to call it by that name, has been repressed in them. The
+spirit of emulation, of aggressive competition, which marks our trade,
+our banking, our manufacturing interests, our railroads, and even our
+professions, stops at the threshold of our colleges. There is rivalry,
+true, between Harvard and Yale, for instance. If the former erects a
+handsome dormitory, the latter must have one larger and finer. If the
+former establishes a new professorship, the latter must do likewise.
+The colleges compete among themselves. But we see no signs of
+competition among the professors of a college, or between the
+professors of different colleges--competition, be it observed, in the
+sense that the individual professor regards his attainments and views
+as a proper subject for comparison with the attainments and views of
+another professor in the same branch. Once established in his chair,
+his individuality is merged in the general character of the college.
+His time, his knowledge and his energy are subordinated to the
+curriculum. He can teach only so much as may be fitted into his share
+of the time and may be suited to the capacities of a mixed audience.
+It matters little whether the curriculum be good or bad, whether it
+take in a wide or a narrow range of subjects, whether it be behind
+or up to the times: so long as it is a real curriculum it tends to
+prevent the full assertion of his individual excellence. He may study
+for himself, but he cannot teach more than the regulations permit.
+However advanced he may be in his specialty, however sincere and
+earnest his wish to impart the choicest fruits of his research, he
+must admit to himself that there is a point beyond which he is unable
+to carry his students. They are borne off to something else; they have
+no more time for him; they slip from his hold, perhaps at the very
+moment when he flatters himself that he has acquired some formative
+influence over them.
+
+If this view of the necessary effect of a curriculum is correct,
+it will enable us to set a more accurate value upon the so-called
+improvements that have been introduced of late years in our colleges.
+These improvements, stripped of the éclat with which they are
+invested, will be found to amount to little more than expansions
+and slight modifications of a system which remains unaltered in
+its fundamental features. New studies have been introduced, such as
+physics, chemistry, geology, the share of attention assigned to
+modern languages has been increased, a higher standard of admission is
+enforced, and the salaries of professors have been raised. But in
+all this there is no radical change of the method of instruction. The
+establishment of a chair of physics, for instance, can scarcely be
+said to enable the professor of Greek to exhibit his attainments
+more fully. The professor of Latin does not perceive that his pupils,
+because they are now instructed in physical geography, can be carried
+by him to a more advanced stage of Latin scholarship. In fact, so far
+as the older studies are concerned, those which made up the curriculum
+thirty years ago, they seem to be slightly the worse for the recent
+improvements. The college course of 1840 or 1850 was a comparatively
+simple thing. It covered only a few studies, and those of a
+general nature; it taught more thoroughly and with less pretence to
+universality; in short, it did its work more after the fashion of a
+good school. At the present day the curriculum embraces a much wider
+range of subjects--we need only recall to our minds the introduction
+of general history, chemistry, physiology and the modern
+languages--but the time has not been lengthened by a single year. The
+student's time is more broken up than before: the direct influence
+exerted by the professor is less. Our recognition of these and kindred
+facts, however, should be something more than a vain regret for the
+good old past. All these changes are concessions made to the spirit
+of the age. Our generation demands--and very rightfully, too--that the
+sphere of knowledge be enlarged, that the sciences of Nature receive
+sufficient attention. To attempt to undo what has been done, to
+restore the curriculum to the antiquated cadre of Latin and Greek,
+trigonometry, mental science and rhetoric, would be a reaction as
+senseless as hopeless.
+
+Let us be just to ourselves and just to our colleges. We, the public,
+clamored for new studies, and the colleges had to meet the demand,
+because, by force of circumstances, they were the only places where
+the changes could be effected. But in our praisworthy desire for
+progress we have not considered sufficiently whether the colleges were
+in truth the proper places for innovation; whether we were bringing
+in our innovations in the right way and at the right time; whether
+we were in a fair way of making our colleges what we seek to make
+them--namely, centres of learning. To discuss all these points would
+be equivalent to discussing the question of education in all its
+phases, from the primary school to the university. For the present
+we must limit ourselves to understanding and appreciating fairly the
+position of our professors.
+
+That position is not only a trying, but a discouraging one. The
+greater part of the professor's time is spent--from the point of
+view of pure science we might almost say wasted--in teaching the same
+things over and over again. After a few years' practice his round of
+hours becomes mechanical. Familiarity with the textbooks and with the
+uniformly-recurring blunders of each successive class begets a feeling
+of weariness that is not remote from aversion and contempt. So far
+as his prescribed official duties are concerned, he feels that he has
+nothing more to learn. There being, then, no stimulus from without, he
+is open to one of two temptations--either to rest on his past labors,
+or, which is far more likely, to keep on studying for himself, but
+to keep the results to himself. It is not only more soothing to our
+pride, it is juster to our professors, to regard them thus as men who
+have hid their lights under a bushel, and also to confess that we, our
+institutions and ways of thinking, have made the bushel for them
+and held it down over their heads. It is not every man who has the
+persistency and stamina of Professor Whitney, for instance, who can
+toil for years with beginning classes in French and German, never
+losing sight of his real aim, never neglecting an opportunity of
+bringing it forward, until at last he achieves the success he has
+especially desired, and is acknowledged to be one of the foremost
+comparative philologists and Sanskrit scholars in the world. Where a
+Professor Whitney may succeed in spite of untoward circumstances, a
+dozen will probably fail because of circumstances. We naturally look
+to our colleges for the evidences of learning, of enlightenment and
+culture. We think of the capital invested in them, of the part they
+play in moulding the character of our young men, and we deem it a
+matter of course that they should be continually producing something
+original and independent. But when we compare them with the German
+universities--and the comparison is forced upon us whenever one of our
+graduates goes abroad to complete his studies or whenever we look into
+a recent German publication--we are forced to exclaim, "What are our
+colleges about? Are they incompetent, or asleep?" Neither one nor
+the other. Most of our professors do the best they can. But they are
+fettered by routine: they are not stimulated and sustained by
+the consciousness that their private studies may be made directly
+available in the classroom. They lead two lives, as it were--one
+as professor, the other as thinker and reader--and there is not the
+proper action and reaction between the two.
+
+The remedy is as easy to propose as it would be difficult to apply.
+We have only to convert our colleges into universities, our college
+instructors into professors after the German model. Let us relegate
+all teaching, so called, to the schools, and let us give our
+professors permission to expand into veritable scholars discoursing to
+young men of kindred spirit. Any one can see at a glance that from
+the wish to the accomplishment is a long way. Upon some of us the
+consciousness is beginning to dawn that perhaps we have not even taken
+the first decisive step. The best that can be said of our colleges is
+that they are in a state of transition. We have increased the number
+of studies, as well as the number of colleges; we have established
+schools of law and schools of science, sometimes independent of,
+sometimes co-ordinate with or subordinate to, the college. We have
+also established post-graduate courses, in the hope of inducing our
+young men to complete their studies at home. Yet every year we see a
+larger number going abroad. In those days of golden memory, both for
+Germany and for America, when Longfellow was gliding down the
+Rhine with Freiligrath, and Bancroft and Bismarck were comrades at
+Göttingen, an American in Germany was something of a rarity. In most
+instances he was a man of wealth and high social standing, who
+looked upon his semester or two as a romantic episode. But now every
+outward-bound steamer carries with it one or more who, emerging from
+obscurity and poverty, have saved up a few hundred dollars and are
+bent upon plain, hard, practical business. "We go," they can be
+imagined as saying, "because we can get in Germany what we cannot get
+at home. Your schools of science and your post-graduate courses may be
+well enough in their way, but they do not give us what we are after,
+and we cannot afford to wait until they may be able to give it. Some
+of the professors are first-rate men--perhaps just as good as any
+we may meet in Germany--but what does their learning, their science,
+avail us, so long as they are obliged to withhold from us the best
+that they know? They trained themselves in Germany, and if we are ever
+to rival them we must do the same."
+
+It is not pleasant to listen to such reasonings, much less to see them
+carried into effect. But the defect which they bring to light will not
+be cured by closing our eyes to it and trusting to time, the sovereign
+healer. Time is a negative factor: it only enables the forces of
+Nature to do their positive work. But schools and colleges are not the
+product of the elemental forces of Nature: they are distinctively
+the work of man as a free agent. If we are free to shape any of our
+institutions to suit our needs, we are certainly free to shape our
+educational institutions. By having a definite result in view, and
+willing its attainment, we may succeed; but if we fail either in
+clearness of vision or persistency of will, we cannot expect the
+result to come of itself. The present university system of Germany,
+which might seem to a careless observer the natural outgrowth
+of German life, is the result of hard thinking and strenuous,
+well-directed effort. We should not commit much of an exaggeration
+were we to call it the deliberate creation of Frederick the Great, Von
+Zedlitz and Wolf, who dragged with them Prussia, and the other
+German states in her wake. They and their associates and followers,
+Schleiermacher and William von Humboldt, clear-headed, iron-willed
+men, perceived what was needed, and bent all their energies to the
+task. They emancipated the schools from the control of the clergy,
+and established the principle that teaching is a distinct vocation,
+requiring special training, over which the state has supervision;
+furthermore, that the state should pronounce who is fit and who is
+not fit for university education, thereby abolishing
+entrance-examinations, and putting an end to the ignoble practice on
+the part of the universities of lowering the standard for the purpose
+of increasing the number of students. They abolished the last vestiges
+of the scholastic system by raising the faculty of philosophy from its
+position as a quasi-preparatory course to the others, and placing it
+on a footing of perfect equality with law, theology and medicine.[3]
+They removed all restrictions from the _Lehrfreiheit_, or professional
+freedom of instruction, while at the same time they preserved the
+right of the state to control indirectly the quality of university
+instruction by means of state-examinations for pastors, teachers,
+lawyers, physicians and officeholders. Ever since then the university
+system of Germany has rested upon a secure and lasting basis.
+
+[Footnote 3: The subordination of the philosophical faculty as a sort
+of preparatory course to the others remained in force in Austria until
+1850. It is not surprising, then, that Austria should have compared
+so unfavorably with Germany in philology, history, philosophy and
+literary criticism until within our own times.]
+
+Is the course pursued by Prussia to be regarded as a mere incident in
+history, or may it serve as an example and model for us? Prussia is a
+monarchy, clothed with some constitutional forms but at bottom a
+state where the personal will of the sovereign has always made,
+and continues to make, itself felt in the final instance. We are
+a republic, or rather a cluster of republics under an imperfectly
+centralized national government. It is evident that the agencies and
+mode of reform with us must differ from those that have been employed
+in Prussia and in the rest of Germany. But it does not follow that
+the reform itself is impossible. What has elsewhere sprung from the
+autocratic will of a single man and his cabinet may be effected here
+through that other force, equally great and perhaps more pervasive,
+to which we give the vague name of "popular opinion." We know that
+popular opinion in our country is irresistible. It makes everything
+bend to it. It broke up the Tweed Ring, seemingly impregnable, in a
+single campaign. But this popular opinion is not a natural product: it
+is the work of a few men who devote themselves to awakening the sense
+of right and wrong and guiding the understanding of their fellows.
+But for popular leaders like Mr. O'Conor and Governor Tilden, the
+late Tweed Ring might be in power at this day. Education is not
+so different from politics but that we can regard it as subject to
+similar laws of cause and effect. Our present common-school system is
+an off-spring of popular opinion, as that opinion was created and led
+to action by a few men. And whether our common schools are to stand
+or fall is again becoming a question of the day, and will be decided
+according as popular opinion may be swayed by a few zealous friends or
+enemies. Our colleges, it may be said, do not occupy the same
+relation to the state that our schools do. They are nearly all private
+corporations, enjoying vested rights which the state is powerless to
+touch. Undoubtedly true, but it is no less true that what cannot be
+done directly may be done indirectly. The state need not make so much
+as the attempt to lay hands upon college property or to interfere with
+college studies. It has only to say, "I, the state, exact such and
+such qualifications of all who seek to practice law or medicine within
+my limits or to become my officeholders. I establish my own free
+colleges and schools of law and medicine, and I proceed to tax
+all others at their full valuation." There is not a college in the
+country, not even Harvard, that could compete upon such terms. The
+state need not even express its sovereign will so precisely. It
+can content itself with establishing a university of its own, and
+facilitating the direct influence of this university over the public
+and private schools. We see the operations of such a system very
+plainly in Michigan. Not only does the university at Ann Arbor
+overshadow completely the private colleges, but the "union schools,"
+administered under its auspices, are--to borrow the expression of one
+of its graduates--"killing" the private schools. We may rest assured
+that whatever the people of a State or of the United States is
+earnestly bent upon having, will come.
+
+Whether all our States are to act as Michigan has done--whether we are
+indeed ripe for thorough change--whether a change is to be effected
+by direct State action or indirectly by the mere pressure of public
+sentiment--whether we have real need of a body of professors and a set
+of universities such as Germany possesses--whether we are to make
+our higher as well as our primary education non-sectarian,--are all
+questions which may rest in abeyance for a long time to come. It is
+also possible that one or the other of them may, in legal phraseology,
+be sprung upon us at any time. Not to be taken unawares, we have
+to bear steadily in mind several fixed principles and to disabuse
+ourselves of one misconception.
+
+The misconception is this: that what Germany accomplished in the
+eighteenth century we cannot accomplish in the nineteenth, because
+circumstances are so very different, chiefly because Germany is an old
+country and we are a young country. The circumstances are not so very
+different, and the difference, however great it may be estimated, is
+in our favor. We are a union of thirty or forty States: in the Germany
+of the eighteenth century there were three hundred. Ever since the
+adoption of our Federal Constitution we have enjoyed common rights of
+citizenship, common laws of commerce, common legal protection. Will
+it be necessary to remind the student of history that the Germans have
+acquired these blessings only within our own day? We are a nation of
+forty millions, rich and prosperous, free to develop our resources.
+The Germany of 1775 could count barely twenty millions, its soil was
+poorly tilled, its mineral wealth undeveloped, manufactures in an
+embryonic state, trade fettered in a thousand ways, the peasantry
+brutally ignorant and servile, the national character--to all
+appearance--ruined by cruel religious wars, the sense of national
+unity blunted by the recollections of a hundred petty feuds reaching
+back to the gloom of the Middle Ages, the national taste dominated by
+poor French models to an extent that now seems incredible, learning
+either dry pedantry or shallow cox-combry. We are indeed a young
+country, but we are young in hope; Germany was old, but it was old in
+weakness, in poverty, in despondency. Whoever doubts our ability to do
+as much as Germany did one hundred years ago, fails to profit by the
+teachings of history--overlooks the fact that Germany in 1840 was
+only where she had been in 1618. That we should take Germany for our
+standard of comparison, rather than England or France, is a postulate
+which has one circumstance unmistakably in its favor. Although we are
+connected with England by common descent, institutions and language,
+although the politics and philosophy of France have exerted
+considerable influence over our own, we do not observe our young
+men going in numbers to England and France to receive their final
+training. Their instinct leads them to Germany. For one American
+graduate of Oxford or Cambridge or of the French _écoles_, it would
+be easy to count ten doctors of Göttingen or Heidelberg. Our young
+men are not attracted to the German universities by such factitious
+considerations as cheapness of living or the acquisition of the
+language, but by sympathy with German methods and academic liberty.
+
+Some of the most important fixed principles have been already touched
+upon, but only one can be developed in this place. It is, that if
+we are to establish a system of higher education, we must begin by
+recognizing freely and fully the distinction between teacher and
+professor. We must perceive the importance of having two sets of
+men--the one to teach, the other to investigate; the one engaged in
+training boys to learn, the other in showing young men how to think.
+When and how this distinction is to be established, in what special
+form it is to be embodied, is a secondary matter. The chief thing is
+to admit that it is essential and feasible. The young man who returns
+after a three years' absence in Germany, exhibiting with dignified
+pride his well-earned doctor's diploma, looks of course upon the
+institution that conferred it as the _ne plus ultra_. But riper
+experience, contact with the sharp corners of American prejudices
+and peculiarities, renewed familiarity with our social, political,
+commercial and literary life, will gradually convince him that a
+German university is not a thing to be plucked up by the roots and
+transplanted bodily to American soil. We have rather to take our
+native stock as we find it, and engraft upon it a slip from the
+German. One trial may fail, another may succeed. Our first efforts
+will be like those of a man groping about in the dark. More than
+one department in a German university will be of little avail in an
+American, and conversely we shall have to create some that do not
+exist elsewhere. For instance, in view of the great power exerted by
+the newspaper press, it might be desirable to have a course of study
+for those who think of taking up journalism as a profession. In such
+a course, political economy, constitutional and international law,
+English and American history, and the modern languages and literatures
+should constitute a full and serious discipline. It is not probable
+that the study of philology will ever attract the same attention here
+that it does abroad. Our needs lie in the direction of the natural
+sciences rather than in the direction of history and linguistics. But
+we should be derelict to our duty were we to sacrifice these sciences
+of the spirit, as the Germans call them, to the sciences of Nature.
+A culture without them would be the bleakest and most repulsive
+materialism.
+
+The practical recognition of the difference between teacher and
+professor would be a decided step. By the side of it those which
+we have already taken would appear insignificant. The addition of
+chemistry, geology, or physiology to the previous curriculum does
+not change its character, so long as the professors of those branches
+instruct after the fashion of the professors of Latin and Greek. The
+advantage that the men of natural science have over their colleagues
+is one which the nature of the subject brings with it. In order to
+teach at all, they must come in close personal contact with their
+pupils, and to escape falling behind in their department, where
+new theories succeed one another with such rapid bounds, they must
+continue a certain amount at least of original research. Supplementing
+the present curriculum by post-graduate courses will hardly suffice.
+Such courses are open to serious objections. If conducted by the
+regular professors, they impose additional burdens upon men who have
+already more than enough. If conducted by special professors, they
+will tend to raise those professors at the expense of the regular
+faculty. A lecturer to graduates must necessarily appear, in the eyes
+of the undergraduate, superior to the man who hears recitations and
+prepares term-reports. Besides, young men who have passed four years
+at one college need "a change of air:" they will develop more rapidly
+if brought into contact with new ideas and new instructors. Every
+institution has an atmosphere of its own, which ceases after a time to
+act upon the student as a stimulant.
+
+There is one additional point that should not be overlooked. A careful
+discrimination between the functions of the professor and those of the
+teacher would benefit both classes of men. Such has been the effect in
+Germany. The gymnasium-teacher has a high sense of the dignity of
+his vocation and a keen sense of its responsibilities, because he
+perceives that he must bring his labors to a well-rounded conclusion.
+He knows that the university does not supplement the gymnasium--that
+the university professors do not undertake to make good his
+shortcomings. The gymnasial course is a completed phase of training.
+It aims at giving the pupil all the general knowledge that he requires
+previous to his professional studies. What is lost or overlooked in
+the gymnasium cannot be acquired at the university. Hence the peculiar
+conscientiousness of the German teacher, his almost painful anxiety to
+make sure that his pupils master every subject, his unwillingness to
+let them go before they are "ripe." With us the change from school
+to college is not an abrupt transition, like that from gymnasium to
+university. The college course, certainly during the two lower years
+at least, is a continuation of the school course: the same or
+similar subjects are taught, and taught in the same way. Hence the
+school-teacher is tempted to regulate his efforts according to the
+college standard of admission. If he can only "get his men into
+college," as the saying is, he thinks that he is doing enough. To say
+this of all schools and all teachers would be flagrant injustice.
+Not a few of our older schools compare favorably with the best German
+gymnasiums, and in the large cities we find schools of even recent
+origin that endeavor faithfully to give a well-rounded discipline. But
+it remains nevertheless true that our schools, taken as a whole, give
+no more than the colleges require, and that only too many of them
+give less, trusting to the colleges to be lenient and eke out the
+deficiency. Moreover, when we read in the daily papers advertisements
+like the following, "Mr. Smith, a graduate of Harvard (or Yale or some
+other college, as the case may be), prepares young men for college,"
+what inference are we to draw? Simply, that Mr. Smith, having gone
+through Harvard or Yale, knows exactly what is required there, and
+will undertake to "coach" any young man for admission in two or three
+years. Such coaching, if the young man is dull or backward, will
+consist in cramming him with required studies, to the neglect of
+everything not required. Teaching is not easy work. In many respects
+it is more difficult to be a good teacher than to be an original
+investigator. Whatever operates to strengthen and elevate the
+teacher's position, therefore, must be a gain. The highest
+incentive would be the consciousness that his school is not a mere
+stepping-stone to another school of larger growth, but the place where
+he must in truth prepare the youthful mind for independent study.
+
+JAMES MORGAN HART.
+
+
+
+
+CONTRASTED MOODS.
+
+            WANT.
+
+  Where is the power I fancied mine?
+    Can I have emptied my soul of thought?
+  In yesterday's fullness lay no sign
+    That to-day would be a time of drought.
+  What if thought fail me for evermore?
+    The world that awaits a well-filled plan
+  Must, railing, cry at my long-closed door,
+    "He cannot finish what he began."
+
+            PLENTY.
+
+  Thought dashes on thought within my soul:
+    Time will not serve for the bounding-line.
+  I think it would fail to mete the whole
+    If old Methuselah's years were mine.
+  Like the famous spring that is sometimes dry,
+    Then flows with a river's whelming might,
+  The current of thought now runs so high
+    It covers the earthy bed from sight.
+
+CHARLOTTE F. BATES.
+
+
+
+
+THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS.
+
+BY MRS. E. LYNN LINTON, AUTHOR OF "PATRICIA KEMBALL."
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+CHANGES.
+
+
+Four years had come and gone since Mr. Dundas had laid his second
+wife in the grave beside his first, and the county had discussed
+the immorality of taking cherry-water as a calmant. For it was to
+an overdose of this that the verdict at the coroner's inquest had
+assigned the cause of poor madame's awful and sudden death; though why
+the medicine should have been found so loaded with prussic acid as
+to have caused instant death on this special night, when it had been
+taken so often before with impunity, was a mystery to which there was
+no solution. Not a trace of poison was to be found anywhere in the
+house, and no evidence was forthcoming to show how it might have been
+bought or where procured. Alick Corfield, who understood it all,
+was not called as a witness, and he told no one what he knew. On the
+contrary, he burdened his soul with the, to him, unpardonable crime
+of falsehood that he might shield Leam from detection; for when his
+father, missing the sixty-minim bottle of hydrocyanic acid, asked him
+what had become of it, Alick answered, with that wonderful coolness
+of virtue descending to sin for the protection of the beloved which is
+sometimes seen in the ingenuous, "I broke it by accident, father, and
+forgot to tell you."
+
+As the boy had never been known to tell a falsehood in his life, he
+reaped the reward of good repute, and his father, saying quietly,
+"That was a bad job, my boy," laid the matter aside as a _caput
+mortuum_ of no value.
+
+To be sure, he thought more than once that it was an odd coincidence,
+but he could see no connection between the two circumstances
+of madame's sudden death and Alick's fracture of that bottle of
+hydrocyanic acid; and even if there should be any, he preferred not
+to trace it. So the inquest was a mere show so far as getting at the
+truth was concerned, and madame died and was buried in the mystery in
+which she had lived.
+
+Meantime, Leam had been sent to school, whence she was expected
+to return a little more like other English girls than she had been
+hitherto, and Mr. Dundas shut up Ford House--he went back to the
+original name after madame's death--and left England to shake off in
+travel the deadly despair that had fallen like a sickness on him and
+taken all the flavor out of his life. He had never cared to search out
+the real history of that fair beloved woman. Enough had come to his
+knowledge, in the bills which had poured in from several Sherrington
+tradesmen on the announcement of her marriage and then of her death,
+to convince him that he had been duped in facts if not in feeling. For
+among these bills was one from the local geologist for "a beginner's
+cabinet of specimens," delivered just about the time when he,
+Sebastian, had spent so many pleasant hours in arranging the fragments
+which madame said represented both her knowledge and her lost
+happiness; also one from the fancy repository, which sold everything,
+for sundry water-color drawings and illuminated texts, a Table of
+the Ten Commandments illustrated, and the like, which sufficiently
+explained all on this side, and settled for ever the dead woman's
+claims to the artistic and scientific merit with which Mr. Dundas and
+the rector had credited her.
+
+Also, certain ugly letters from a person of the name of Lowes, in
+London, put him on the track, had he cared to follow it up, of a
+deception even worse than that of pretended art or mock science. These
+letters, written in the same handwriting as that wherein Julius de
+Montfort, her brother-in-law, the present marquis, had told her of
+the defalcations of the family solicitor and trustee, called Virginie,
+Madame la Marquise de Montfort, plain Susan bluntly, and reminded her
+of the screw that would be turned if the writer was not satisfied;
+and were letters that demanded money, always money, as the price of
+continued silence.
+
+But Sebastian had loved his second wife too well to seek to know the
+truth, if that truth would be to her discredit. He preferred to
+be deceived; and he had what he preferred. He stifled all doubts,
+darkened all chinks by which the obtrusive light might penetrate, kept
+his love if not his faith unshaken, caring only to remember her as
+beautiful, seductive, soothing, and mourning her as deeply, doubtful
+as she had proved herself to be, as he had loved her fondly when he
+believed her honest. It was a curious mental condition for a man to
+cherish, but it satisfied him, and his regret was not robbed of its
+pathos by knowledge.
+
+Now that the four years were completed, the widower had to return to
+his desolate home and make the best he could of the fragments of peace
+and happiness left to him. Leam was nineteen: it was time for her to
+be taken from school and given the protection of her father's house.
+It went against the man's heart to have her, but he was compelled, if
+he wished to stand well with his friends, and he hoped that the girl
+would be found improved from these years of discipline and training,
+and be rational and like other people. Wherefore he came home one
+dry dull day in October, and the neighborhood welcomed him, if not as
+their prodigal returned, yet as their lunatic restored to his right
+mind.
+
+During these four years a few changes had taken place at North Aston.
+Carry Fairbairn had married--not Frank Harrowby: he had found a rich
+wife, not in the least to his personal taste, but greatly to his
+profit; and Carry, after having cried a good deal for a month, had
+consoled herself with a young clergyman from the North, whom she loved
+quite as much as if she had never fancied Frank at all, and spoilt in
+the first months by such submission as caused her to repent for all
+the years of her life after.
+
+The things of the rectory were much in their old state. Little Fina,
+madame's child, was there under Mrs. Birkett's motherly care; but
+as the child was nearly six years old now, the good creature's
+instinctive love for infants was wearing out, and she was often heard
+to say how much she wished she could have kept Fina always a baby,
+and, sighing, how difficult she was to manage! She was an exceedingly
+pretty little girl, with fair skin, fair hair and dark eyes--willful
+of course, and spoilt of course; the only one in the house who took
+her in hand to correct being Adelaide. And as she took her in hand too
+smartly, Mrs. Birkett generally interfered, and the servants combined
+to screen her; the result being that the little one was mistress of
+the situation, after the manner of willful children, and made every
+one more or less anxious and uncomfortable as her return for their
+care.
+
+Alick Corfield was the rector's curate. On the whole, this was the
+most important of all the North Aston events which had taken place
+during the last four years. Soon after madame's death and Leam's
+transfer from home to school Alick had a strange and sudden illness.
+No one knew what to make of it, nor how it came, nor what it was, but
+the doctor called it cerebral fever, and when the families got hold
+of the word they were content. Cerebral fever does as well as anything
+else for an illness of which no one knows and no one seeks to know the
+cause, and to the origin of which the patient himself gives no clew.
+It was a peg, and a peg was all that was wanted.
+
+On his recovery he announced his intention of going to Oxford to read
+for holy orders. His mother was piteously distressed, as might be
+expected. She feared all sorts of evil for her boy, from damp sheets
+and unmended linen to over-study, wine-parties and bold-faced minxes
+weaving subtle webs of fascination. But for the first time in his life
+Alick stood out against her insistance, and his will conquered hers.
+The sequel of the struggle was, that he went to Oxford, took his
+degree, read for orders, passed, and that Mr. Birkett gave him his
+title as his curate.
+
+It could hardly be said that the relations were entirely harmonious
+between the military-minded rector, who held to the righteousness of
+helotry and the value of ignorance in the class beneath him, and the
+young curate burning with zeal and oppressed with the desire to put
+all the crooked things of life straight. The one pooh-poohed the
+enthusiasm of the other, derided his belief in humanity and assured
+him of failure: the other felt as if he had been taken behind the
+scenes and shown the blue fire of which the awful lightning of his
+youth was made. Mr. Birkett could not quite forbid the greater
+faith, the more loving endeavor which the young man threw into his
+ministrations, but he was the Sadducee who scoffed and made the
+work heavy and uphill throughout. He gave a grudging assent to the
+Bible-classes, the Wednesday evening services at the Sunday-school,
+the lectures on great men on the first Monday in the month, which
+Alick proposed and established. He thought it all weariness to the
+flesh and a waste of time and energy; but the traditions of his order
+were strong, if he himself did not share them, and he had to give way
+in the end. He consoled himself with the reflection that the boy would
+find out his mistake before long, and that then he would know who had
+been right throughout.
+
+But even zeal and hope and diligence in his work could not lighten the
+persistent sadness which was Alick's chief characteristic now. Gaunt
+and silent, with the eyes of a man whose inner self is absent and
+whose thoughts are not with his company, he looked as if he had passed
+through the fire, and had not passed through unscathed. No one knew
+what had happened to him, and, though many made conjectures, none came
+near the truth. Meanwhile, he seemed as if he lived only to work, and,
+the clearer-sighted might have added, to wait.
+
+For a further local change, Lionnet was tenanted again by a strange
+and solitary man, who never went to church and did not visit in
+the neighborhood. He was in consequence believed to be a forger, an
+escaped convict in hiding, or, by the more charitable, a maniac as yet
+not dangerous. North Aston held him in deeper horror than it had held
+even Pepita, and his true personality exercised its wits more keenly
+than had even the true personality of madame. In point of fact, he was
+a quiet, inoffensive, amiable man, who gave his mind to Sanskrit for
+work and to entomology for play, and did not trouble himself about his
+own portrait as drawn in the local vernacular. Nevertheless, for all
+his reserved habits and quiet ways, he had learnt the whole history of
+the place and people before he had been at Lionnet a month.
+
+At the Hill things remained unchanged for the ladies, save for the
+additional burden of years and the pleasant news that Edgar was
+expected home daily. Adelaide, now twenty-four, took the news as a
+personal grace, and blossomed into smiles and glad humor of which only
+Josephine understood the source. But Josephine held her tongue, and
+received the confidence of her young friend with discretion. As she
+had never dispossessed her own old idol, she could feel for Adelaide,
+and she was not disposed to look on her patient determination with
+displeasure. The constancy of the two, however, was very different in
+essential meaning. With Josephine it was the constancy that is born of
+an affectionate disposition and the absence of rival Lotharios: with
+Adelaide it was the result of calculation and decision. The one would
+have worshiped Sebastian as she worshiped him now had he been ruined,
+a cripple, a criminal even: the other would have shut out Edgar
+inexorably from her very dreams had not his personality included
+the Hill. With the one it was self-abasement--with the other
+self-consideration; but it came to the same thing in the end, and the
+men profited equally.
+
+All these changes Sebastian Dundas found to have taken place when he
+returned to North Aston with gray hair instead of brown, his smooth,
+fair skin tanned and roughened, and his weak, finely-cut, effeminate
+mouth hidden by a moustache of a reddish tint, mingled with white.
+Still, he was Sebastian; and after the first shock of his altered
+appearance had been got over, Josephine carried her incense in the old
+way, and found her worship as dear and as tantalizing as ever.
+
+Lastly, as the crowning change of all, Leam came home from school;
+no longer the arrogant, embittered child, looking at life through the
+false medium of pride and ignorance, saying rude things and doing odd
+ones with the most perfect unconsciousness; but well-bred, graceful,
+sufficiently instructed not to make patent mistakes, and more
+beautiful by far than she had even promised to be. Her very eyes were
+lovelier, lovely as they had always been: they had more variety of
+expression, were more dewy and tender, and, if less tragic, were more
+spiritual. That hard, dry, burning passion which had devoured her of
+old time seemed to have gone, as also her savage Spanish pride. She
+had rounded and softened in body too, as in mind. Her skin was fairer;
+her lips were not so firmly closed, so rigid in line, so constricted
+in motion; her brows were more flexible and not so often knit
+together; and her slight, lithe figure was perfect in line and
+movement. Still, she had enough of her former manner of being for
+identity. Grave, quiet, laconic, direct, she was but a modification
+of the former Leam as they had known her--Leam, Pepita's daughter,
+and with blood in her veins that was not the ordinary blood of the
+ordinary British miss.
+
+Her father's artistic perceptions were gratified as he met her at the
+station and Leam turned her cheek to him voluntarily with tears in her
+eyes. Turning her cheek was apparently her idea of kissing; but if not
+too intense an expression of affection, it was at least an improvement
+on the old hard repulsion, and Sebastian accepted it as the concession
+it was meant to be. Indeed, they met somewhat as foes reconciled, or
+rather seeking to be reconciled, and Mr. Dundas did not wish to keep
+open old sores. Her cheek, turned to him somewhere about the ear,
+represented to his mind a peace-offering: her eyes full of tears were
+as a confession of past sins and a promise of amendment. Not that he
+understood why she was so much more effusive than of old, but if it
+augured a happier life together, he was glad.
+
+As they drove up to the door of the old home, crowded with memories
+and associations, a shudder passed over the girl: she grasped her
+father's hand in her own almost convulsively, and he heard her say
+below her breath, "Poor papa!"
+
+He wondered why she pitied him. The place must surely be full of
+memories of her mother for her: why did she say "Poor papa!" to him?
+He did not see what she saw--that peaceful September evening, and the
+bottle of cherry-water on the table, with the little phial of thirty
+deaths in her hand; and now the contents emptied into the harmless
+draught; and now madame pale and dead. The whole scene transacted
+itself vividly before her, and she shuddered at her memories and her
+past self, as always with a kind of vague wonder how she could have
+been so wicked, and where did she get the force, the courage, for such
+a cruel crime?
+
+For all these four years at school the shadow of that dreadful deed
+had been ever in the background of her life; and as time went on, and
+she came to a better understanding of morality, it grew clear to her
+as a crime. Its consciousness of guilt had broken down her pride, and
+thus had made her more malleable, more humble. She could no longer
+harden herself in her belief that she was superior to every one else.
+Those girls, her companions--they had not had an Andalusian mother,
+truly; they did not pray to the saints, and the Holy Virgin took no
+care of them; they were Protestants and English, frogs and pigs; but
+they had not committed murder. If she should stand up in the middle
+of the room and tell them what she had done, which of them would touch
+her hand again? which of them speak to her? English and Protestants as
+they were, how far superior in their innocence to her, an Andalusian
+Catholic, in her guilt! But no one lives with remorse. It comes and
+goes gustily, fitfully; but the things of the present are stronger
+than the things of the past, else the man with a shameful secret in
+his life would go mad.
+
+One of these gusty storms broke over Leam as she passed through the
+gates of the old home, and for the moment she felt as if she must
+confess the truth to her father and tell him what evil thing she had
+done. Yet it passed, as other such storms had passed: the things of
+the present took their natural place of prominence, and those of the
+past sank again into the background, shadows that never faded quite
+away, but that were not actualities pressing against her.
+
+The news of Leam's home-coming created quite a pleasurable excitement
+in the neighborhood, and the families flocked to Ford House to
+welcome her among them as one of themselves, all anxious to see if
+the Ethiopian of North Aston had shed her skin, if the leopardess had
+changed her spots. They were divided among themselves as to whether
+she had or had not. Some said she was charming, and like any one else,
+but others shook their heads, and, like experts in brain disease,
+professed to see traces of the old lunacy, and to be doubtful as to
+her cure. At the worst, however, here she was--one of themselves whom
+they must receive; and common sense dictated that they should make the
+best of her, and hope all things till they proved some.
+
+There was one among them whom Leam longed yet dreaded to meet. This
+was Alick Corfield. She wondered what he knew, or rather what he
+suspected, and she was anxious to have her ordeal over. But,
+though Mrs. Corfield came, and was just the same as ever, bustling,
+inquisitive, dogmatic, before ten minutes were over having put the
+girl through her scholastic facings and got from her the whole of her
+curriculum, yet Alick did not appear. He waited until after Sunday,
+when he should see her first in church, and so nerve himself as it
+were behind the barrier of his sacred office; but after Sunday had
+passed and he had seen her in her old place, he called, and found her
+alone.
+
+When they met, and she looked into his face and laid her hand in his,
+she knew all. He shared her secret, and knew what she had done. It was
+not that he was either distant or familiar, cold or disrespectful,
+or anything but glad and reverent; nevertheless, he knew. He was no
+longer the boy adorer, her slave, her dog: he was her friend, and
+he wished to make her feel that she was safe with him--known, in his
+power, but safe.
+
+"You are changed," he said awkwardly.
+
+He thought of her as Leam, heard her always called Leam, but he dared
+not use the familiar name, and yet she was not "Miss Dundas" to him.
+
+"It is four years since you saw me," she said with a grave smile. "It
+was time to change."
+
+"But you are your old self too," he returned eagerly. He would have
+no disloyalty done to the queen of his boyish dreams: what worm soever
+was at its root, his royal pomegranate flower should be always set
+fair in the sun where he might be.
+
+"You seem much changed too," she said after a short pause--"graver and
+older. Is that because you are a clergyman?"
+
+Alick turned his eyes away from the girl's face, and looked mournfully
+out onto the autumn woods. "Partly," he said.
+
+"And the other part?" asked Leam, pressing to know the worst.
+
+"And the other part?" He looked at her, and his wan face grew paler.
+"Well, never mind the other part. There are things which sometimes
+come into a man's life and wither it for ever, as a fire passing over
+a green tree, but we do not speak of them."
+
+"To no one?"
+
+"To no one."
+
+Leam sighed. No proclamation could have made the thing clearer between
+them. Henceforth she was in Alick's power: let him be faithful,
+chivalrous, loyal, devoted, what you will, she was no longer her own
+unshared property. He knew what she was, and in so far was her master.
+
+Poor Alick! This was not the light in which he held his fatal secret.
+True, he knew what she had done, and that his young queen, his ideal,
+was a murderess, who, if the truth were made public, would be degraded
+below the level of the poorest wretch that had kept an honest name;
+but he felt himself more accursed than she, in that he had been the
+means whereby she had gotten both her knowledge and the power to use
+it. He was the doomed if innocent, as of old tragic times--the sinless
+Cain guilty of murder, but guiltless in intent. It was for this, as
+much as for the love and poetry of the boyish days, that he felt he
+owed himself to Leam--that his life was hers, and all his energies
+were to be devoted for her good. It was for this that he had prayed
+with such intensity of earnestness it seemed to him sometimes as if
+his soul had left his body, and had gone up to the Most High to pluck
+by force of passionate entreaty the pardon he besought: "Pardon her, O
+Lord! Turn her heart, enlighten her understanding, convince her of her
+sin; but pardon her, pardon her, dear Lord! And with her, pardon me."
+
+The man's whole life was spent in this one wild, fervid prayer. All
+that he did was tinged with the sentiment of winning grace for her and
+pardon for both. In his own mind they stood hand in hand together;
+and if he was the intercessor, they were both to benefit, and neither
+would be saved without the other. And he believed in the value of his
+prayers and in the objective reality of their influence.
+
+For the final changes in the ordering of home and society at North
+Aston, the week after Leam returned Edgar Harrowby came from India,
+and took up his position as the owner of the Hill estate; and the
+child Fina was brought to Ford House, and formally invested with
+her new name and condition as Miss Fina Dundas, Sebastian's younger
+daughter. Mindful of the past, Mr. Dundas expected to have a stormy
+scene with Leam when he told her his intentions respecting poor
+madame's child; but Leam answered quietly, "Very well, papa," and
+greeted Fina when she arrived benevolently, if not effusively. She was
+not one of those born mothers who love babies from their early nursery
+days, but she was kind to the child in her grave way, and seemed
+anxious to do well by her.
+
+The ladies all bestowed on her their nursery recipes and systems
+in rich abundance--especially Mrs. Birkett, who, though glad to be
+relieved from the hourly task of watching and contending, was still
+immensely interested in the little creature, and gave daily counsel
+and superintendence. So that on the whole Leam was not left unaided
+with her charge. On the contrary, she ran great risk of being
+bewildered by her multiplicity of counselors, and of entering in
+consequence on that zigzag course which covers much ground and makes
+but little progress.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+EDGAR HARROWBY.
+
+
+Thirty-two years of age; tall, handsome, well set-up, and every inch
+a soldier; manly in bearing, but also with that grace of gesture and
+softness of speech which goes by the name of polished manner; a
+bold sportsman, ignorant of physical fear, to whom England was the
+culmination of the universe, and such men as he--gentlemen, officers,
+squires--the culmination of humanity; a man who loved women as
+creatures, but despised them as intelligences; who respected socially
+the ladies of his own class, and demanded that they should be without
+stain, as befits the wives and mothers and sisters of gentlemen, but
+who thought women of a meaner grade fair game for the roving fowler; a
+conservative, holding to elemental differences whence arise the value
+of races, the dignity of family and the righteousness of caste; an
+hereditary landowner, regarding landed property as a sacred possession
+meant only for the few and not to be suffered to lapse into low-born
+hands; a gentleman, incapable of falsehood, treachery, meanness,
+social dishonor, but not incapable of injustice, tyranny, selfishness,
+even cruelty, if such came in his way as the privilege of his
+rank,--this was Edgar Harrowby as the world saw and his friends knew
+him, and as North Aston had henceforth to know him.
+
+His return caused immense local excitement and great rejoicing. It
+seemed to set the social barometer at "fair," and to promise a spell
+of animation such as North Aston had been long wanting. And indeed
+personally for himself it was time that Major Harrowby was at home and
+at the head of his own affairs. Matters had been going rather badly on
+the estate without him, and the need of a strong hand to keep agents
+straight and tenants up to the mark had been making itself somewhat
+disastrously felt during the last three or four years. Wherefore
+he had sold out, broken all his ties in India handsomely, as he had
+broken them in London handsomely once before, when, mad with jealousy,
+he had fled like a thief in the night, burned his boats behind him,
+and, as he thought, obliterated every trace by which that loved and
+graceless woman could discover his real name or family holding; and
+now had come home prepared to do his duty to society and himself. That
+is, prepared to marry a nice girl of his own kind, keep the estate
+well in hand, and set an example of respectability and orthodoxy,
+family prayers and bold riding, according to the ideal of the English
+country gentleman.
+
+But, above all, he must marry. And the wife provided for him by the
+eternal fitness of things was Adelaide Birkett. Who else could be
+found to suit the part so perfectly? She was well-born, well-mannered;
+though not coarsely robust, yet healthy in the sense of purity
+of blood; and she was decidedly pretty. So far to the good of the
+Harrowby stock in the future. Neither was she too young, though by
+reason of her quiet country life her twenty-four years did not count
+more to her in wear and tear of feeling and the doubtful moulding of
+experience than if she had lived through one London season. She was a
+girl of acknowledged good sense, calm, equable, holding herself in the
+strictest leash of ladylike reserve, and governing all her emotions
+without trouble, patent or unconfessed. Hers was a character which
+would never floreate into irregular beauties to give her friends
+anxiety and crowd her life with embarrassing consequences. She
+despised sentiment and ridiculed enthusiasm, thought skepticism both
+wicked and disreputable, but at the same time fanaticism was silly,
+and not nearly so respectable as that quiet, easy-going religion which
+does nothing of which society would disapprove, but does not break its
+heart in trying to found the kingdom of God on earth.
+
+All her relations with life and society would be blameless, orthodox,
+ladylike and thoroughly English. As a wife she would preach submission
+in public and practice domination and the moral repression belonging
+to the superior being in private. As a mother she would take care
+to have experienced nurses and well-bred governesses, who would look
+after the children properly, when she would wash her hands of further
+trouble and responsibility, save to teach them good manners at
+luncheon and self-control in their evening visit to the drawing-room
+for the "children's half hour" before dinner. As the mistress of an
+establishment she would be strict, demanding perfect purity in the
+morals of her servants, not suffering waste, nor followers, nor
+kitchen amusements that she knew of, nor kitchen individuality anyhow.
+Her servants would be her serfs, and she would assume to have bought
+them by food and wages in soul as well as body, in mind as well as
+muscle. She would give broken meat in moderation to the deserving
+poor, but she would let those who are not deserving do the best they
+could with want at home and inclemency abroad; and she would have
+called it fostering vice had she fed the husbandless mother when
+hungry or clothed the drunkard's children when naked. She would never
+be talked about for extremes or eccentricities of any kind; and the
+world would be forced to mention her with respect when it mentioned
+her at all, having indeed no desire to do otherwise. For she was of
+the kind dear to the heart of England--one of those who are called the
+salt of the earth, and who are assumed to keep society safe and
+pure. She was incredulous of science, contemptuous of superstition,
+impatient of new ideas--appreciating art, but holding artists as
+inferior creatures, like actors, acrobats and newspaper writers. She
+was loyal to the queen and royal family, the nobility and Established
+Church, bracketing republicans with atheists, and both with unpunished
+felons; as also classing immorality, the facts of physiology and the
+details of disease in a group together, as things horrible and not to
+be spoken of before ladies. She was not slow to believe evil of her
+neighbors, maintaining, indeed, that to be spoken of at all was proof
+sufficient of undesirable conduct; but she would never investigate a
+charge, preferring rather to accept it in its vile integrity than to
+soil her hands by attempting to unweave its dirty threads; hence she
+would be pitiless, repellent, but she would never make herself the
+focus of gossip. She was a human being if you will, a Christian in
+creed and name assuredly; but beyond and above all things she was
+a well-mannered, well-conducted English lady, a person of spotless
+morals and exquisite propriety, in the presence of whom humanity must
+not be human, truth truthful, nor Nature natural.
+
+This was the wife for Edgar Harrowby as a country gentleman--the
+woman whom Mrs. Harrowby would have chosen out of thousands to be her
+daughter-in-law, whom his sisters would like, who would do credit to
+his name and position; and whom he himself would find as good for his
+purpose as any within the four seas.
+
+For when Edgar married he would marry on social and rational grounds:
+he would not commit the mistake of fancying that he need love the
+woman as he had loved some others. He would marry her, whoever
+she might be, because she would be of a good family and reasonable
+character, fairly handsome, unexceptionable in conduct, not tainted
+with hereditary disease nor disgraced by ragged relatives, having
+nothing to do with vice or poverty in the remotest link of her
+connections--a woman fit to be the keeper of his house, the bearer
+of his name, the mother of his children. But for love, passion,
+enthusiasm, sentiment--Edgar thought all such emotional impedimenta
+as these not only superfluous, but oftentimes disastrous in the grave
+campaign of matrimony.
+
+It was for this marriage that Adelaide had saved herself. She believed
+that any woman can marry any man if she only wills to do so; and from
+the day when she was seventeen, and they had had a picnic at Dunaston,
+she had made up her mind to marry Edgar Harrowby. When he came home
+for good, unmarried and unengaged, she knew that she should succeed;
+and Edgar knew it too. He knew it so well after he had been at home
+about a week that if anything could have turned him against the wife
+carved out for him by circumstance and fitness, it would have been the
+almost fatal character of that fitness, as if Fortune had not left him
+a choice in the matter.
+
+"And what do you think of Adelaide?" asked Mrs. Harrowby one day when
+her son said that he had been to the rectory. "You have seen her twice
+now: what is your impression of her?'"
+
+"She is prettier than ever--improved, I should say, all through," was
+his answer.
+
+Mrs. Harrowby smiled. "She is a girl I like," she said. "She is so
+sensible and has such nice feeling about things."
+
+"Yes," answered Edgar, "she is thoroughly well-bred."
+
+"We have seen a great deal of her of late years," Mrs. Harrowby
+continued, angling dexterously. "She and the girls are fast friends,
+especially she and Josephine, though there is certainly some slight
+difference of age between them. But Adelaide prefers their society
+to that of any one about the neighborhood. And I think that of itself
+shows such good taste and nice feeling."
+
+"So it does," said Edgar with dutiful assent, not exactly seeing for
+himself what constituted Adelaide's good taste and nice feeling in
+this preference for his dull and doleful sisters over the brighter
+companionship of the Fairbairns, say, or any other of the local
+nymphs. To him those elderly maiden sisters of his were rather bores
+than otherwise, but he was not displeased that Adelaide Birkett
+thought differently. If it "ever came to anything," it would be better
+that they satisfied her than that she should find them uncongenial.
+
+"She is coming up to dinner this evening," Mrs. Harrowby went on to
+say; and Edgar smiled, pulled his moustaches and looked half puzzled
+if wholly pleased.
+
+"She is a pretty girl," he said with the imbecility of a man who ought
+to speak and who has nothing to say, also who has something that he
+does not wish to say.
+
+"She is better than pretty--she is good," returned Mrs. Harrowby;
+and Edgar, not caring to discuss Adelaide on closer ground with his
+mother, strolled away into his private room, where he sat before the
+fire smoking, meditating on his life in the past and his prospects
+in the future, and wondering how he would like it when he had finally
+abjured the freedom of bachelorhood and had taken up with matrimony
+and squiredom for the remainder of his natural life.
+
+Punctually at seven Adelaide Birkett appeared. This, too, was one
+of her minor virtues: she was exact. Mind, person, habits, all were
+regulated with the nicest method, and she knew as little of hurry as
+of delay, and as little of both as of passion.
+
+"You are such a dear, good punctual girl!" said Josephine
+affectionately--Josephine, whose virtues had a few more, loose ends
+and knots untied than had her friend's.
+
+"It is so vulgar to be unpunctual," said Adelaide with her calm
+good-breeding. "It seems to me only another form of uncleanliness and
+disorder."
+
+"And Edgar is so punctual too!" cried Josephine by way of commentary.
+
+Adelaide smiled, not broadly, not hilariously, only to the exact shade
+demanded by conversational sympathy. "Then we shall agree in this,"
+she said quietly.
+
+"Oh I am sure you will agree, and in more than this," Josephine
+returned, almost with enthusiasm.
+
+Had she not been the willing nurse of this affair from the
+beginning?--if not the open confidante, yet secretly holding the key
+to her younger friend's mind and actions? and was she not, like all
+the kindly disappointed, intensely sympathetic with love-matters,
+whether wise or foolish, hopeful or hopeless?
+
+"Who is it that you are sure will agree with Miss Adelaide, if any one
+indeed could be found to disagree with her?" asked Edgar, standing in
+the doorway.
+
+Josephine laughed with the silliness of a weak woman "caught." She
+looked at Adelaide slyly. Adelaide turned her quiet face, unflushed,
+unruffled, and neither laughed sillily nor looked slyly.
+
+"She was praising me for punctuality; and then she said that you were
+punctual too," she explained cheerfully.
+
+"We learn that in the army," said Edgar.
+
+"But I have had to learn it without the army," she answered.
+
+"Which shows that you have by the grace of nature what I have attained
+only by discipline and art," said Edgar gallantly.
+
+Adelaide smiled. She did not disdain the compliment. On the contrary,
+she wished to impress it on Edgar that she accepted his praises
+because they were her due. She knew that the world takes us if not
+quite at our own valuation, yet as being the character we assume to
+be. It all depends on our choice of a mask and to what ideal self we
+dress. If we are clever and dress in keeping, without showing chinks
+or discrepancies, no one will find out that it is only a mask; and
+those of us are most successful in gaining the good-will of our
+fellows who understand this principle the most clearly and act on it
+the most consistently.
+
+The evening was a pleasant one for Adelaide, being an earnest of the
+future for which, if she had not worked hard, she had controlled much.
+Edgar sang solos to her accompaniment, and put in his rich baritone to
+her pure if feeble soprano; he played chess with her for an hour, and
+praised her play, as it deserved: naturally, not thinking it necessary
+to make love to his sisters, he paid her almost exclusive attention,
+and looked the admiration he felt. She really was a very pretty young
+woman, and she had unexceptionable manners; and having cut himself
+adrift from his ties and handsomely released himself from his
+obligations, he was not disposed to take much trouble in looking far
+afield for a wife when here was one ready-made to his hand. Still,
+he was not so rash as to commit himself too soon. Fine play is never
+precipitate; and even the most lordly lover, if an English gentleman,
+thinks it seemly to pretend to woo the woman whom he means to take,
+and who he knows will yield.
+
+And on her side Adelaide was too well-bred for the one part, and too
+wise for the other, to clutch prematurely at the prize she had willed
+should be hers. Her actions must be like her gestures, graceful,
+rhythmic, rather slow than hurried, and bearing the stamp of purpose
+and deliberation. When Edgar should make his offer, as she knew he
+would, she would ask for time to reflect and make up her mind. This
+would be doing the thing properly and with due regard to her own
+dignity; for no husband of hers should ever have cause to think that
+she held her marriage with him as a thing so undeniably advantageous
+there was no doubt of her acceptance from the first. Every woman must
+make herself difficult, thought Adelaide, if she wishes to be prized,
+even the woman who for seven years has fixed her eyes steadily on one
+point, and has determined that she will finally capture a certain man
+and land him as her lifelong possession.
+
+Thus the evening passed, with a subtle undercurrent of concealed
+resolves flowing beneath its surface admiration that gave it a
+peculiar charm to the two people principally concerned--the one
+feeling that she had advanced her game by an important move; the
+other, that the eternal fitness of things 'was making itself more
+and-more evident, and that it was manifest to all his senses
+whom Providence had destined for his wife, and for what ultimate
+matrimonial end he had been shaped and spared.
+
+A book of photographs was on the table.
+
+"Are you here?" asked Edgar, lowering his bright blue eyes on
+Adelaide as she sat on a small chair at Mrs. Harrowby's feet, carrying
+daughterly incense to that withered shrine.
+
+"Yes, I think so," she answered.
+
+He turned the pages carefully--passing over his sisters in wide
+crinolines and spoon bonnets; his mother, photographed from an old
+picture, in a low dress and long dropping bands of hair, like a
+mouflon's ears, about her face; Fred and himself, both as boys in
+Scotch suits, set stiffly against the table like dolls--with gradual
+improvement in art and style, till he came to a page where Adelaide's
+fair vignetted head of large size was placed side by side with
+another, also vignetted and also large.
+
+"Ah! there you are; and what a capital likeness!" cried Edgar, with
+the joyous look and accent of one meeting an old friend, giving that
+gauge of interest which we all unconsciously give when we first see
+the photograph of a well-known face. He looked at the portrait long
+and critically. "Only not so pretty," he added gallantly. "Those
+fellows cannot catch the spirit: they give only the outside forms, and
+not always these correctly. Here is a striking face," he continued,
+pointing to Adelaide's companion-picture--a girl with masses of dark
+hair, dark eyes, large, mournful, heavily fringed with long lashes,
+and a grave, sad face, that seemed listening rather than looking. "Who
+is she? She looks foreign."
+
+Adelaide glanced at the page, as if she did not know it by heart.
+"That? Oh! that is only Leam Dundas," she said with the faintest,
+finest flavor of scorn in her voice.
+
+"Leam Dundas?" repeated Edgar--"the daughter of that awful woman?"
+
+"Yes, and nearly as odd as the mother," answered Adelaide, still in
+the same cold manner and with the same accent of superior scorn.
+
+"At least she used to be, you mean, dear, but she is more like other
+people now," said kindly Josephine, more just than politic.
+
+Adelaide looked at her calmly, indifferently. "Yes, I suppose she is
+rather less savage than of old," was her reply, "but I do not see much
+of her,"
+
+"I do not remember to have ever seen her: she must have been a mere
+child when I was here last," said Edgar.
+
+"She is nineteen now, I think," said Mrs. Harrowby.
+
+"Not more?" repeated Adelaide. "I imagined she was one-and-twenty at
+the least. She looks so very much older than even this--five or six
+and twenty, full; dark people age so quickly."
+
+"She seems to be superbly handsome," Edgar said, still looking at the
+portrait.
+
+"For those who like that swarthy kind of beauty. For myself, I do not:
+it always reminds me of negroes and Lascars."
+
+Adelaide leaned forward, and made pretence to examine Leam's portrait
+with critical independence of judgment. She spoke as if this was the
+first time she had seen it, and her words the thought of the moment
+resulting.
+
+"There is no negroid taint here," Edgar answered gravely. "It is the
+face of a sibyl, of a tragedian."
+
+"Do you think so? It is fine in outline certainly, but too monotonous
+to please me, and too lugubrious; and the funny part of it is,
+there is nothing in her. She looks like a sibyl, but she is the most
+profoundly stupid person you can imagine."
+
+"Not now, Addy: she has wakened up a good deal," again interposed
+Josephine with her love of justice and want of tact.
+
+"But do you not see the mother in her, Josephine? I do, painfully; and
+the mother was such a horror! Leam is just like her. She will grow her
+exact counterpart"
+
+"A bad model enough," said Edgar; "but this face is not bad. It has
+more in it than poor old Pepita's. How fat she was!"
+
+"So will Leam be when she is as old," said Adelaide quietly. "And do
+you think these dark people ever look clean? I don't,"
+
+"That is a drawback certainly," laughed Edgar, running through the
+remainder of the book.
+
+But he turned back again to the page which held Leam and Adelaide side
+by side, and he spoke of the latter while he looked at the former. The
+face of Leam Dundas, mournful, passionate, concentrated as it was,
+had struck his imagination--struck it as none other had done since the
+time when he had met that grand and graceful woman wandering, lost in
+a fog, in St. James's Park, and had protected from possible annoyance
+till he had landed her in St. John's Wood. He was glad that Leam
+Dundas lived in North Aston, and that he should see her without
+trouble or overt action; and as he handed Adelaide into her carriage
+he noticed for the first time that her blue eyes were not quite even,
+that her flaxen hair had not quite enough color, and that her face, if
+pure and fair, was slightly insipid.
+
+"Poor, dear Adelaide!" he said when he returned to the drawing-room,
+"how nice she is! but how tart she was about this Leam Dundas of
+yours! Looks like jealousy; and very likely is. All you women are so
+horribly jealous."
+
+"Not all of us," said Maria hastily.
+
+"And I do not think that Adelaide is," said Josephine. "She has no
+cause; for though Leam is certainly very lovely, and seems to have
+improved immensely for being at school, still she and Addy do not come
+into collision any way, and I do not see why she should be jealous."
+
+"Perhaps Edgar admired her photograph too much," said Fanny, who
+was the stupid one of the three, but on occasions made the shrewdest
+remarks.
+
+Edgar laughed, not displeasedly. "That would be paying me too high a
+compliment," he said.
+
+Whereat his three sisters echoed "Compliment!" in various tones of
+deprecation, and Josephine added a meaning little laugh for her own
+share, for which Edgar gave her a kiss, and said in a bantering kind
+of voice, "Now, Joseph! mind what you are about!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+ON THE MOOR.
+
+
+It was a gray and gusty day in November, with heavy masses of
+low-lying clouds rolling tumultuously overhead, and a general look
+of damp and decay about the fields and banks--one of those melancholy
+days of the late autumn which make one long for the more varied
+circumstances of confessed winter, when the deep blue shadows in the
+crisp snow suggest the glory of southern skies, and the sparkle of the
+sun on the delicate tracery of the frosted branches has a mimicry of
+life, such as we imagine strange elves and fairies might create.
+
+There was no point of color in the landscape save the brown foliage of
+the shivering beech trees, a few coarse splashes of yellow weeds, and
+here and there a trail of dying crimson leaves threading the barren
+hedgerows. Everything was "sombre, lifeless, mournful", and even Edgar
+Harrowby, though by no means sentimentally impressionable to outward
+conditions, felt, as he rode through the deserted lanes and looked
+abroad over the stagnant country, that life on the off-hunt days was
+but a slow-kind of thing at North Aston, and that any incident which
+should break the dead monotony of the scene would be welcome.
+
+He had been thinking a great deal of Adelaide for the last four or
+five days, since she had dined at the Hill, and making up his mind to
+take the final plunge before long. He was not in love with her, but
+she suited, as has been said; and that was as good as love to
+Edgar, who had now to take up his squiredom and country gentleman's
+respectability, after having had his share of a young man's "fling" in
+rather larger proportion than falls to the lot of most. All the same,
+he wished that her face had more expression and that her eyes were
+perfectly straight; and he wanted to see Leam Dundas.
+
+He had made a long round to-day, and was turning now homeward, when,
+as he had almost crossed the moor, athwart which his road led, he saw
+standing on a little hillock, away from the main track, the slight
+figure of a woman sharply defined against the sky. She was alone,
+doing nothing, not seeming to be looking at anything--just standing
+there on the hillock, facing the north-west, as if for pleasure in the
+rough freshness of the breeze.
+
+The wind blew back her dress, and showed her girlish form, supple,
+flexible, graceful, fashioned like some nymph of olden time. From her
+small feet, arched and narrow, gripping the ground like feet of steel,
+to the slender throat on which her head was set with so much grace
+of line, yet with no sense of over-weighting in its tender curves, an
+expression of nervous energy underlying her fragile litheness of form,
+a look of strength--not muscular nor the strength of bulk or weight,
+but the strength of fibre, will, tenacity--seemed to mark her out as
+something different from the herd.
+
+Edgar scarcely gave this vague impression words in his own mind, but
+he was conscious of a new revelation of womanhood, and he scented an
+adventure in this solitary figure facing the north-west wind on the
+lonely moor.
+
+Her very dress, too, had a character of its own in harmony with the
+rest--black all through, save for the scarlet feather in her hat,
+which burnt like a flame against the gray background of the sky;
+and her whole attitude had something of defiance in its profound
+stillness, while standing so boldly against the strong blasts that
+swept across the heights, which caught his imagination, at that
+moment ready to be inflamed. All things depend on times and moods, and
+Edgar's mood at this moment of first seeing Leam Dundas was favorable
+for the reception of new impressions.
+
+For, of course, it was Leam--Leam, who, since her return from school,
+alone and without companionship, was feverish often, and often
+impelled to escape into the open country from something that oppressed
+her down in the valley too painfully to be borne. She had never been
+a confidential nor an expansive schoolfellow; not even an affectionate
+one as girls count affection, seeing that she neither kissed nor
+cried, nor quarreled nor made up--neither stood as a model of
+fidelity nor changed her girl-lovers in anticipation of future
+inconstancies--writing a love-letter to Ada to-day and a copy of
+verses to Ethel to-morrow--but had kept with all the same quiet
+gravity and gentle reticence which seemed to watch rather than share,
+and to be more careful not to offend than solicitous to win.
+
+All the same, she missed her former comrades now that she had lost
+them; but most of all she missed the wholesome occupation and mental
+employment of her studies. Left as she was to herself, thoughts and
+memories were gathering up from the background where they had lain
+dormant if extant all these years, and through her solitude were
+getting a vitality which made her stand still in a kind of breathless
+agony, wondering where they would lead her and in what they would end.
+At times such a burning sense of sin would flash over her that she
+felt as if she must confess that hideous fact of her girlish past. It
+seemed so shameful that she should be living there among the rest, a
+criminal with the innocent, and not tell them what she was. Then the
+instinct of self-preservation would carry it over her conscience, and
+she would press back her thoughts and go out, as to-day, to cool her
+feverish blood, and grow calm to bear and strong to hold the heavy
+burden which she had fashioned by her own mad deed and laid for life
+on her own hands.
+
+If only the ladies had not insisted so strongly on mamma's personality
+in heaven! if only they had not lighted up her imagination, her
+loyalty, by this tremendous torch of faith and love! How bitterly she
+regretted the childish fanaticism which had made her imagine herself
+the providence of that beloved memory, the avenger of those shadowy
+wrongs! Oh, if she could undo the past and call madame back to life!
+She would kiss her now, and even call her mamma if it would please her
+and papa. So she stood on the hillock facing the north-west, thinking
+these things and regretting in vain.
+
+As Edgar came riding by his large black hound dashed off to Leam and
+barked furiously, all four paws planted on the ground as if preparing
+for a spring. The beast had probably no malice, and might have meant
+it merely as his method of saying, "Who are you?" but he looked
+formidable, and Leam started back and cried, "Down, dog! go away!" in
+a voice half angry and half afraid.
+
+Then Edgar saw the face, and knew who she was. He rode across the
+turf, calling off his dog, and came up to her. It was an opportunity,
+and Edgar Harrowby was a man who knew how to take advantage of
+opportunities. It was in his creed to thank Providence for favorable
+chances by making the most of them, and this was a chance of which it
+would be manifestly ungrateful not to make the most. It was far more
+picturesque to meet her for the first time, as now, on the wild moor
+on a gusty gray November day, than in the gloomy old drawing-room at
+the Hill. It gave a flavor of romance and the forbidden which was not
+without its value in the beginning of an acquaintance with such a face
+as Leam's. Nevertheless, in spite of the romance that hung about the
+circumstance, his first words were common-place enough. "I hope my dog
+has not alarmed you?" he said, lifting his hat.
+
+Leam looked at him with those wonderful eyes of hers, that seemed
+somehow to look through him. She, standing on her hillock, was
+slightly higher than Edgar sitting on his horse; and her head was bent
+as she looked down on him, giving her attitude and gesture something
+of a dignified assumption of superiority, more like the Leam of the
+past than of the present. "No, I was not alarmed," she said. "But I
+do not like to be barked at," she added, an echo of the old childish
+sense of injury from circumstance that was so quaint and pretty in her
+half-complaining voice.
+
+"I suppose not: how should you?" answered Edgar with sympathetic
+energy. "Rover is a good-old fellow, but he has the troublesome trick
+of giving tongue unnecessarily. He would not have hurt you, but I
+should be very sorry to think he had frightened you. To heel, sir!"
+angrily.
+
+"No, he did not frighten me." repeated Leam.
+
+Never loquacious, there was something about this man's face and
+manner, his masterful spirit underneath his courteous bearing, his
+look of masculine power and domination, his admiring eyes that fixed
+themselves on her so unflinchingly--not with insolence, but as if he
+had the prescriptive right of manhood to look at her, only a woman, as
+he chose, he commanding and she obeying--that quelled and silenced
+her even beyond her wont. He was the first gentleman of noteworthy
+appearance who had ever spoken to her--not counting Alick, nor
+the masters who had taught her at school, nor Mr. Birkett, nor Mr.
+Fairbairn, as gentlemen of noteworthy appearance--and the first of all
+things has a special influence over young minds.
+
+"You are brave to walk so far alone: you ought to have a dog like
+Rover to protect you," Edgar said, still looking at her with those
+unflinching eyes, which oppressed her even when she did not see them.
+
+"I am not brave, and I do not care for dogs. Besides, I do not often
+walk so far as this; but I felt the valley stifling to-day," answered
+Leam, in her matter-of-fact, categorical way.
+
+"All the same, you ought to have protection," Edgar said
+authoritatively, and Leam did not reply.
+
+She only looked at him earnestly, wondering against what she should
+be protected, having abandoned by this time her belief in banditti and
+wild beasts.
+
+If his eyes oppressed her, hers half embarrassed him. There was such
+a strange mixture of intensity and innocence in them, he scarcely knew
+how to meet them.
+
+"It is absurd to pretend that we do not know each other," then said
+Edgar after a short pause, smiling; and his smile was very sweet and
+pleasant. "You are Miss Dundas--I am Edgar Harrowby."
+
+"Yes, I know," Leam answered.
+
+"How is that?" he asked, "_I_ knew _you_ from your photograph--once
+seen not to be forgotten again," gallantly--"but how should you know
+me?"
+
+Leam raised her eyes from the ground where she had cast them. Those
+slow full looks, intense, tragic, fixed, had a startling effect of
+which she was wholly unconscious. Edgar felt his own grow dark and
+tender as he met hers. If the soul and mind within only answered to
+the mask without, what queen or goddess could surpass this half-breed
+Spanish girl, this country-born, unnoted, but glorious Leam Dundas? he
+thought.
+
+"And I knew you from yours," she answered.
+
+"An honor beyond my deserts," said Edgar.
+
+Not that he thought the notice of a girl, even with such a face
+as this, beyond his deserts. Indeed, if a queen or a goddess had
+condescended to him, it would not have been a grace beyond his merits;
+but it sounded pretty to say so, and served to make talk as well as
+anything else. And to make talk was the main business on hand at this
+present moment.
+
+"Why an honor?" asked Leam, ignorant of the elements of flirting.
+
+Edgar smiled again, and this time his smile without words troubled
+her. It seemed the assertion of superior intelligence, contemptuous,
+if half pitiful of her ignorance. Once so serenely convinced of her
+superiority, Leam was now as suspicious of her shortcomings, and was
+soon abashed.
+
+Edgar did not see that he had troubled her. Masterful and masculine
+to an eminent degree, the timid doubts and fears of a young girl were
+things he could not recognize. He had no point in his own nature with
+which they came in contact, so that he should sympathize with them.
+He knew the whole fence and foil of coquetry, the signs of silent
+flattery, the sweet language of womanly self-conscious love, whether
+wooing or being won; but the fluttering misgivings of youth and
+absolute inexperience were dark to him. All of which he felt conscious
+was that here was something deliciously fresh and original, and that
+Leam was more beautiful to look at than Adelaide, and a great deal
+more interesting to talk to.
+
+"If you will allow me, now that I have had the pleasure of meeting
+you, I will see you safe for at least part of your way home," he said,
+passing by her naïve query "Why an honor?" as a thing to be answered
+only by that smile of superior wisdom.
+
+Flinging himself from his horse, he took the bridle in his hand and
+turned toward home, looking to the girl to accompany him. Leam felt
+that she could not refuse his escort offered as so much a matter of
+course. Why should she? It was very pleasant to have some one to walk
+with--some one not her father, with whom she still felt shy, if not
+now absolutely estranged; nor yet Alick, in whose pale face she was
+always reading the past, and who, though he was so good and kind
+and tender, was her master and held her in his hand. This handsome,
+courteous gentleman was different from either, and she liked his
+society and superior ways. And as he began now to talk to her of
+things not trenching on nor admitting of flirtation--chiefly of the
+places he had visited, India, Egypt, Italy, Spain--she was not so much
+abashed by his unflinching looks and masterful manner.
+
+When he entered on Spain and his recollections of what he had seen
+there, the girl's heart throbbed, and her pale face grew whiter still
+with the passionate thrill that stirred her. The old blood was in her
+veins yet, and, though modified, and in some sense transformed, she
+was still Pepita's daughter and the child of Andalusia. And here was
+truth; not like that poor wretched madame's talk, which even she had
+found out to be false and only making believe to know what she did not
+know. Spain was the name of power with Learn, as it had been with her
+mother, and she lifted her face, white with its passionate desires,
+listening as if entranced to all that Edgar said.
+
+It was a good opening, and the handsome soldier-squire congratulated
+himself on his lucky hit and serviceable memory. Presently he touched
+on Andalusia, and Leam, who hitherto had been listening without
+comment, now broke in eagerly. "That is my own country!" she cried.
+"Mamma came from Andalusia, beautiful Andalusia! Ah! how I should like
+to go there!"
+
+"Perhaps you will some day," Edgar answered a little significantly.
+
+Had she been more instructed in the kind of thing he meant, she would
+have seen that he wished to convey the idea of a love-journey made
+with him.
+
+She shook her head and her eyes grew moist and dewy. "Not now," she
+said mournfully. "Poor mamma has gone, and there is no one now to take
+me."
+
+"I will make up a party some day, and you shall be one of us," said
+Edgar.
+
+She brightened all over. "Ah! that would be delightful!" she cried,
+taking him seriously. "When do you think we shall go?"
+
+"I will talk about it," Edgar answered, though smiling again--Leam
+wished he would not smile so often--a little aghast at her
+literalness, and saying to himself in warning that he must be careful
+of what he said to Leam Dundas. It was evident that she did not
+understand either badinage or a joke. But her very earnestness pleased
+him for all its oddity. It was so unlike the superficiality and
+levity of the modern girl--that hateful Girl of the Period, in whose
+existence he believed, and of whose influence he stood in almost
+superstitious awe. He liked that grave, intense way of hers, which was
+neither puritanical nor stolid, but, on the contrary, full of unspoken
+passion, rich in latent concentrated power.
+
+"They are very beautiful, are they not?" Leam asked suddenly.
+
+"What? who?" was Edgar's answer.
+
+"The Andalusian women, and the men," returned Leam.
+
+"The men are fine-looking fellows enough," answered Edgar
+carelessly--"a little too brutal for my taste, but well-grown men for
+all that. But I have seen prettier women out of Spain than in it."
+
+"Mamma used to say they were so beautiful--the most beautiful of
+all the women in the world; and the best." Leam said this with a
+disappointed air and her old injured accent.
+
+Edgar laughed softly. "The prettiest Andalusian woman I have ever
+seen has an English father," he answered, with a sudden flush on his
+handsome face as he bent it a little nearer to hers.
+
+"How odd!" said Leam. "An English father? That is like me."
+
+Edgar looked at her, to read how much of this was real ingenuousness,
+how much affected simplicity. He saw only a candid inquiring face with
+a faint shade of surprise in its quiet earnestness, unquestionably not
+affected.
+
+"Just so," he answered. "Exactly like you."
+
+His voice and manner made Leam blush uncomfortably. She was conscious
+of something disturbing, without knowing what it was. She first looked
+up into his face with the same expression of inquiry as before, then
+down to the earth perplexedly, when suddenly the truth came upon her;
+he meant herself--she was the prettiest Andalusian he had ever seen.
+
+She was intensely humiliated at her discovery. Not one of those girls
+who study every feature, every gesture, every point, till there is
+not a square inch of their personality of which they are not painfully
+conscious, Leam had never taken herself into artistic consideration
+at all. She had been proud of her Spanish blood, of her mantilla, her
+high comb and her fan; but of herself as a woman among women she knew
+nothing, nor whether she was plain or pretty. Indeed, had she had to
+say offhand which, she would have answered plain. The revelation which
+comes sooner or later to all women of the charms they possess had not
+yet come to her; and Edgar's words, making the first puncture in
+her ignorance, pained her more by the shock which they gave her
+self-consciousness than they pleased her by their flattery.
+
+She said no more, but walked by his side with her head held very high
+and slightly turned away. She was sorry that he had offended her. They
+had been getting on together so well until he had said this foolish
+thing, and now they were like friends who had quarreled. She was quite
+sorry that he had been so foolish as to offend her, but she must not
+forgive him--at least not just yet. It was very wrong of him to tell
+her that she was prettier than the true children of the soil; and she
+resented the slight to Spain and to her mother, as well as the wrong
+done to herself, by his saying that which was not true. So she walked
+with her little head held high, and Edgar could get nothing more out
+of her. When Leam was offended coaxings to make her forget were of no
+avail. She had to wear through an impression by herself, and it was
+useless to try for a premature pardon.
+
+Edgar saw that he had overshot the mark, and that his best policy now
+was absence; wherefore, after a few moments' silence, he remounted his
+horse, looking penitent, handsome, full of admiration and downcast.
+
+"I hope we shall soon see you at the Hill, Miss Dundas," he said,
+holding her hand in his for his farewell a little longer than was
+quite necessary for good breeding or even cordiality.
+
+"I very seldom go to the Hill," answered Leam, looking past his head.
+
+"But you will come, and soon?" fervently.
+
+"Perhaps: I do not know," answered Leam, still looking past his head,
+and embarrassed to a most uncomfortable extent.
+
+"Thank you," he said, as if he had been thanking her for the grace of
+his life; and with a long look, lifting his hat again, he rode off,
+just escaping by a few hundred yards the danger of being met walking
+with Leam by his sisters and Adelaide Birkett. They were all driving
+together in the phaeton, and the sisters were making much of their
+young friend.
+
+At that moment Edgar preferred to be met alone and not walking with
+Leam. He did not stop the carriage--simply nodded to them all with
+familiar kindness, as a group of relatives not demanding extra
+courtesy, flinging a few words behind him as he rode on smiling. Nor
+did the ladies in their turn stop for Leam, whom they met soon after
+walking slowly along the road; but Josephine said, as they passed, how
+pretty Learn looked to-day, and how much softer her face was than it
+used to be; and Maria, even Maria, agreed with kindly Joseph, and
+was quite eulogistic on the object of her old disdain. Adelaide sat
+silent, and did not join in their encomiums.
+
+It would have been a nice point to ascertain if the Misses Harrowby
+would have praised the girl's beauty as they did had they known
+that she had grown soft and dewy-eyed by talking of Spain with their
+brother Edgar, though she had hardened a little afterward when he told
+her that she was the prettiest Andalusian he had ever seen.
+
+During the dinner at the Hill, where Adelaide was one of the family
+party, Edgar mentioned casually how that he had met Miss Dundas on the
+moor, and had had to speak to her because of Rover's misbehavior.
+
+"Yes? and what do you think of her?" asked Mrs. Harrowby with a sharp
+glance.
+
+"I scarcely know: I have hardly seen her as yet," he answered.
+
+"Did she say or do anything very extraordinary to-day?" asked
+Adelaide with such an air of contemptuous curiosity as seemed to him
+insufferably insolent.
+
+"No, nothing. Is she in the habit of saying or doing extraordinary
+things?" he answered back, arching his eyebrows and speaking in a
+well-affected tone of sincere inquiry.
+
+"At times she is more like a maniac than a sane person," said
+Adelaide, breaking her bread with deliberation. "What can you expect
+from such a parentage and education as hers?"
+
+Edgar looked down and smiled satirically. "Poor Pepita's sins lie
+heavy on your mind," he answered.
+
+"Yes, I believe in race," was her reply.
+
+"Mother," then said Edgar after a short silence, "why do you not have
+Miss Dundas to dine here with Adelaide? It would be more amusing
+to her, for it must be dull"--turning to their guest and speaking
+amiably, considerately--"I am afraid very dull--to be so often quite
+alone with us."
+
+He did not add what he thought, that it was almost indelicate in her
+to be here so often. He was out of humor with her to-day.
+
+"She is such an uncertain girl we never know how she may be. I had her
+to stay here once, and I do not want to repeat the experiment," was
+Mrs. Harrowby's answer.
+
+"But, mamma, that was before she went to school, when she was quite a
+child. She is so much improved now," pleaded Josephine.
+
+"Good little soul!" said Edgar under his breath.--"Wine, Joseph?"
+aloud, as his recognition of her good offices.
+
+"And I like coming alone best, thanks," said Adelaide with unruffled
+calmness. "Leam has never been my friend; indeed, I do not like her,
+and you all," to the sisters, with a gracious smile and prettily,
+"have always been my favorite companions."
+
+"Still, she is very lonely, and it would be kind. Besides, she is good
+to look at," said Edgar.
+
+"Do you think so?" said Mrs. Harrowby with crisp lips and
+ill-concealed displeasure.
+
+"Do I think so, mother? I should have no eyes else. She is superb. I
+have never seen such a face. She is the most beautiful creature I have
+ever known of any nation."
+
+Adelaide's delicate pink cheeks turned pale, and then they flushed a
+brilliant rose as she laid down her spoon and left her jelly untasted.
+
+There were no trials of skill at chess, no duets, no solos, this
+evening. After dinner Edgar went to his own room and sat there
+smoking. He felt revolted at the idea of spending two or three hours
+with what he irreverently called "a lot of dull women," and preferred
+his own thoughts to their talk. He sauntered into the drawing-room
+about ten minutes before Adelaide had to leave, apologizing for his
+absence on the man's easy plea of "business," saying he was sorry to
+have missed her charming society, and he hoped they should see her
+there soon again, and so on--all in the proper voice and manner,
+but with a certain ring of insincerity in the tones which Adelaide
+detected, if the others did not. But she accepted his excuses with the
+most admirable tact, smiling to the sisters as she said, "Oh, we
+have been very happy, Josephine, have we not? though," with a nice
+admission of Edgar's claims, not too broadly stated nor too warmly
+allowed, "of course it would have been very pleasant if you could have
+come in too."
+
+"It has been my loss," said Edgar.
+
+She smiled "Yes" by eyes, lips and turn of her graceful head. In
+speech she answered, "Of that, of course, you are the best judge for
+yourself; but none of us here feel as some girls do, lost without
+gentlemen to amuse them. We can get on very well by ourselves. Cannot
+we, Joseph?"
+
+And Josephine said gallantly, "Yes," but her heart was more rueful
+than her voice, and she thought that some gentlemen were very
+nice, and that Sebastian Dundas especially made the dull time pass
+pleasantly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+THE CHILD FINA.
+
+
+Nothing surprised the North Astonians more than what it was the
+fashion to call "the admirable manner in which Leam behaved to
+the child Fina." If the world which praised her had known all the
+compelling circumstances, would it have called her admirable then? Yet
+beyond those natural promptings of remorse which forced her to do
+the best she could for the child whom her fatal crime had rendered
+motherless, Leam did honestly behave well, if this means doing irksome
+things without complaint and sacrificing self to a sense of right. And
+this was all the more praiseworthy in that sympathy of nature between
+these two young creatures there was none, and the girl's maternal
+instinct was not of that universal kind which makes all children
+pleasant, whatever they may be. Hence, she did nobly when she did her
+duty with the uncompromising exactness characteristic of her; but then
+it was only duty, it was not love.
+
+How should it be love? Her tenacity and reserve were ill matched with
+Fina's native inconstancy of purpose and childish incontinence of
+speech; her pride of race resented her father's adoption of a stranger
+into the penetralia of the family; and to share the name she had
+inherited from her mother with the daughter of that mother's rival
+seemed to her a wrong done to both the living and the dead. Naturally
+taciturn, unjoyful, and ever oppressed by that brooding consciousness
+of guilt hanging like a cloud over her memory, formless, vague, but
+never lifting, Fina's changeful temper and tumultuous vivacity were
+intensely wearisome to her. Nevertheless, she was forbearing if not
+loving, and the people said rightly when they said she was admirable.
+
+Her grave patience with the little one did more to open her father's
+heart to her than did even her own wonderful beauty, which gratified
+his paternal pride of authorship, or than her efforts after docility
+to himself--efforts that would have been creditable to any one, and
+that with her were heroic. For Mr. Dundas, being of those clinging,
+clasping natures which must love some one, had taken poor madame's
+child into his affections in the wholesale manner so emphatically his
+own, now in these first days of his new paternity seeming to live only
+for the little Fina, and never happy but when he had her with him. It
+was the first time that he felt he had had a child of his own; and he
+gave her the love which would have been Leam's had Pepita been less
+of a savage than she was, and more discreet in the matter of
+doll-dressing.
+
+The little round, fair-haired creature, with her picturesque
+Gainsborough head and rose-red lips, pretty, pleasant, facile, easily
+amused if easily made cross, divertible from her purpose if she was
+but coaxed and caressed, and if the substitute offered was to her
+liking--without tenacity, fluid, floating on the surface of things and
+born of their froth; loving only those who ministered to her pleasure
+and were in sight; forgetting yesterday's joys as though they had
+never been, and her dearest the moment they were absent--a child
+deliciously caressing because sensual by temperament and instinctively
+diplomatic, with no latent greatness to be developed as time went on
+and the flower set into the fruit. Epitomizing the characteristics of
+the class of which her mother had been a typical example, she was the
+pleasantest thing of his life to a man who cared mainly to be amused,
+and who liked with a woman's liking to be loved.
+
+The strong love of children inherent in him, which had never been
+satisfied till now, seemed now to have gathered tenfold strength, and
+the love of the man, who had never cared for his own, for this his
+little daughter by adoption was almost a passion. If Leam could have
+been jealous where she did not love, she would have been jealous of
+her father and Fina. But she was not. On the contrary, it seemed to
+soften some of the bitterness of her self-reproach, and she was glad
+that madame's motherless child was not deserted, but had found a
+substitute for the protection which she had taken from her; for Leam,
+criminal, was not ignoble.
+
+A few days after the meeting on the moor between Learn and Edgar, Mr.
+Dundas drove to the Hill, carrying Fina with him. Leam had a fit of
+shyness and refused to go: thus Sebastian had the child to himself,
+and was not sorry to be without his elder and less congenial daughter.
+He owned to himself that she was good, very good indeed, and a great
+deal better than he ever expected she would be; yet for all that, with
+her more than Oriental gravity and reserve, and that look of tragedy
+haunting her face, she was not an amusing companion, and the little
+one was.
+
+Mr. Dundas had begun to take up his old habits again with the
+Harrowbys. He found the patient constancy of his friend Josephine not
+a disagreeable salve for a wounded heart and broken life; albeit poor
+dear Joseph was getting stout and matronly, and took off the keen edge
+of courtship by a willingness too manifest for wisdom. Sebastian liked
+to be loved, but he did not like to be bored by being made overmuch
+love to. The things are different, and most men resent the latter, how
+much soever they desire the former.
+
+Edgar was in the drawing-room when Mr. Dundas was announced. He was
+booted and spurred, waiting his horse to be brought round. "What a
+pretty little girl!" he said after a time. True to his type, he was
+fond of children and animals, and children and animals liked him.
+"Come and speak to me," he continued, holding out his hand to
+Fina.--"Whose child is she?" vaguely to the company in general.
+
+"Mine," said Mr. Dundas emphatically--"my youngest daughter, Fina
+Dundas."
+
+Edgar knew what he meant. He had often heard the story from his
+sisters, and since his return home he had had Adelaide Birkett's
+comments thereon. He looked then with even more interest on the
+pretty little creature in dark-blue velvet and swansdown, careless,
+unconscious, happy, as the child of a mystery and a tragedy in one.
+
+"Ah!" he said sympathetically. "Come to me, little one," again,
+coaxingly.
+
+Fina, with her finger in her mouth, went up to him half shyly, half
+boldly, and wholly prettily. She let him take her on his knee and kiss
+her without remonstrance. She was of the kind to like being taken on
+knees and kissed--especially by gentlemen who were strong and matronly
+women who were soft--and she soon made friends. Not many minutes
+elapsed before, kneeling upon his knees, she was stroking his tawny
+beard and plaiting it in threes, pulling his long moustache, playing
+with his watch-guard, and laughing in his face with the pretty
+audacity of six.
+
+"What a dear little puss!" cried Edgar, caressing her. "Very like
+you, Joseph, I should think, when you were her age, judging by your
+picture. Is she not, mother?"
+
+"They say so, but I do not see it," answered Mrs. Harrowby primly.
+
+She did not like to hear about this resemblance. There was something
+in it that annoyed her intensely, she scarcely knew why, and the more
+so because it was true.
+
+"Poor madame used to say so: she saw it from the first, when Fina was
+quite a little baby," said Josephine in a low voice.
+
+She was kneeling by her brother's side caressing Fina. She always made
+love to the little girl: it was one of her methods of making love to
+the father.
+
+"Is she like her mother?" asked Edgar in the same low tones, looking
+at the child critically.
+
+"A little," answered Josephine--"not much. It is odd, is it not, that
+she should be more like me?"
+
+Just then Fina laid her fresh sweet lips against Edgar's, and he
+kissed her with a strange thrill of tenderness.
+
+"Why, Edgar, I never saw you take so to a child before," cried Mrs.
+Harrowby, not quite pleasantly; and on Sebastian adding with his
+nervous little laugh, which meant the thing it assumed only to play
+at, "I declare I shall be quite jealous, Edgar, if you make love to
+my little girl like this." Edgar, who had the Englishman's dislike
+to observation, save when he offered himself for personal admiration,
+laughed too and put Fina away.
+
+But the child had taken a fancy to him, and could scarcely be induced
+to leave him. She clung to his hand still, and went reluctantly when
+her stepfather called her. It was a very little matter, but men being
+weak in certain directions, it delighted Edgar and annoyed Sebastian
+beyond measure.
+
+"I hope your elder daughter is well," then said Edgar, emphasizing the
+adjective, the vision of Leam as he first saw her, breasting the wind,
+filling his eyes with a strange light.
+
+"Leam? Quite well, thanks. But how do you know anything about her?"
+was Sebastian's reply.
+
+"I met her yesterday on the moor, and Rover introduced us," answered
+Edgar laughing.
+
+"How close she is!" said her father fretfully. "She never told me a
+word about it."
+
+"Perhaps she thought the incident too trifling," suggested Edgar, a
+little chagrined.
+
+"Oh no, not at all! In a place like North Aston the least thing counts
+as an adventure; and meeting for the first time one of the neighbors
+is not an incident to be forgotten as if it were of no more value than
+meeting a flock of sheep."
+
+Mr. Dundas spoke peevishly. To a man who liked to be amused and who
+lived on crumbs this reserved companionship was disappointing and
+tiresome.
+
+"Leam is at home making music," said Fina disdainfully. She had caught
+the displeased accent of her adopted father, and echoed it.
+
+"Does she make much music?" asked Edgar with his hand under her chin,
+turning up her face.
+
+The child shrugged her little shoulders. "She makes a noise," she
+said; and those who heard her laughed.
+
+"That is not a very polite way of putting it," said Edgar a little
+gravely.
+
+"No," said Josephine.
+
+"You should speak nicely of your sister, my little one," put in
+Sebastian.
+
+Fina looked up into his face reproachfully. "You called it a noise
+yourself, papa," she said, pouting. "You made her leave off yesterday
+as soon as you came in, because you said she made your head ache with
+her noise, and set your teeth--something, I don't know what."
+
+"Did I, dear?" he repeated carelessly. "Well, we need not discuss the
+subject. I dare say it amuses her to make music, as you call it, and
+so we need say no more about it."
+
+"But you did say it was a noise," persisted Fina, climbing on to his
+knees and putting her arms round his neck. "And I think it a noise
+too."
+
+"Poor Leam's music cannot be very first-rate," remarked Maria, who
+was a proficient and played almost as well as a "professional." "Four
+years ago she did not know her notes, and four years' practice cannot
+be expected to make a perfect pianiste."
+
+"But a person may play very sweetly and yet not be what you call
+perfect," said Edgar.
+
+"Do you think so?" Maria answered with a frosty smile. "I do not." Of
+what use to have toiled for thirty years early and late at scales
+and thorough-bass if a stupid girl like Leam could be allowed to play
+sweetly after four years' desultory practice? "Adelaide Birkett, if
+you will, plays well," she added; "but Leam, poor child! how should
+she?"
+
+"I hope I shall have an opportunity of judging for myself," said
+Edgar with his company manner.--"When will you come and dine here,
+Dundas?--to-morrow? You and your elder daughter: we shall be very glad
+to see you."
+
+He looked to his mother. Mrs. Harrowby had drawn her lips tight, and
+wore an injured air doing its best to be resigned. This was
+Edgar's first essay in domestic mastership, and it pained her, not
+unnaturally.
+
+"Thanks," said Sebastian. "Willingly, if--" looking to Mrs. Harrowby.
+
+"I have no engagement, and Edgar is master now," said that lady.
+
+"And mind that Leam comes too," said Josephine, sharing her favorite
+brother's action by design.
+
+"And me," cried Fina.
+
+Whereat they all laughed, which made Fina cry, to be consoled only by
+some sweetmeats which Josephine found in her work-basket.
+
+It was agreed, then, that the next day Leam and her father should dine
+at the Hill.
+
+"Only ourselves," Edgar said, wanting the excuse of her "being the
+only lady" to devote himself to Leam. It was strange that he should
+be so anxious to see her nearer, and in company with his sisters and
+mother; for after all, why should he? What was she to him, either near
+or afar off, alone or in the inner circle of his family?
+
+But when the next day came Mr. Dundas appeared alone. Leam had been
+taken with a fit of shyness, pride--who shall say?--and refused to
+accept her share of the invitation. Her father made the stereotyped
+excuse of "headache;" but headaches occur too opportunely to be
+always real, and Leam's to-night was set down to the fancy side of
+the account, and not believed in by the hearers any more than by the
+bearer.
+
+Edgar raged against her in his heart, and decided that she was not
+worth a second thought, while the ladies said in an undertone from
+each to each, "How rude!" Maria adding, "How like Leam!" the chain
+of condemnation receiving no break till it came to Josephine, whose
+patient soul refrained from wrath, and gave as her link, "Poor Leam!
+perhaps she is shy or has really a headache."
+
+In spite of his decision that she was not worth a second thought,
+the impression which Leam had made on Edgar deepened with his
+disappointment, and he became restless and unpleasant in his temper,
+casting about for means whereby he might see her again. He cast
+about in vain. This fit of shyness, pride, reluctance--who knows
+what?--continued with Leam for many days after this. If she went out
+at all, she went where she knew she should not be met; and if Edgar
+called at Ford House, she was not to be found. She mainly devoted
+herself to Fina and some books lent her by Alick, and kept the house
+with strange persistency. Perhaps this was because the weather was
+bad, for Leam, who could bear wind and frost and noonday sun, could
+not bear wet. When it rained she shut herself up in her own room, and
+pitied herself for the ungenial skies as she had pitied herself for
+some other things before now.
+
+Sitting thus reading one miserably dark, cold, misty day, the child
+Fina came in to her with her lessons, which she repeated well. They
+were very small and insignificant little lessons, for Leam had a
+fellow-feeling for the troubles of ignorance, and laid but a light
+hand on the frothy mind inside that curly head. When they were
+finished the little one said coaxingly, "Now play with me, Leam! You
+never play with me."
+
+"What can I do, Fina?" poor Leam replied.
+
+She had never learnt to play when she was a child: she had never built
+towers and towns, made railway trains and coaches with the sofa and
+chairs, played at giants through the dark passages and screamed when
+she was caught. She had only sat still when mamma was asleep, or when
+she was awake played on the zambomba, or listened to her when she told
+her of the things of Spain, and made up stories with her dolls that
+were less edifying than those of Mother Bunch. She could scarcely,
+however, unpack that old box full of waxen puppets, with the one
+dressed in scarlet and black, with fishbone horns and a worsted tail,
+and a queer clumped kind of foot made of folds of leather, cleft in
+the middle, that used to go by the name of "El señor papa." What could
+she do?
+
+"Shall I tell you a story?" she then said in a mild fit of
+desperation, for story-telling was as little in her way as anything
+else.
+
+"Yes, yes, tell me a story!" Fina clapped her chubby hands together
+and climbed up into Leam's lap.
+
+"What shall it be about--bears or tigers, or what?" asked Leam
+dutifully.
+
+"Tell me about mamma, my own mamma, not Aunty Birkett," said Fina.
+
+Leam shuddered from head to foot. This was the first time the little
+girl had mentioned her mother's name to her. Indeed, she did not know
+that she had ever heard of her at all--ever known that she had had
+a mother; but the servants had talked, and the child's curiosity was
+aroused. The dead mother is as much a matter of wondering inquiry
+as the angels and the stars; and Fina's imagination was beginning to
+bestir itself on the mysteries of childish life.
+
+"I have nothing to tell you about her," said Leam, controlling
+herself, though she still shivered.
+
+"Yes, you have--everything," insisted Fina. "Was mamma pretty?"
+playing with a corner of her sister's ribbon.
+
+"People said so," answered Leam.
+
+"As pretty as Cousin Addy?" she asked.
+
+"About," said Leam, who thought neither supreme.
+
+"Prettier than you?"
+
+"I don't know: how can I tell?" she answered a little impatiently.
+
+The mother's blood that ran in her, the mother's mould in which she
+had been formed, forbade her to put herself below madame in anything;
+but, as she was neither vain nor conscious, she found Fina's question
+difficult to answer.
+
+"Oh," cried Fina, in a tone of disappointment, "then she could not
+have been very pretty."
+
+"I dare say she was, but I do not know," returned Leam.
+
+"And she died?" continued Fina, yawning in a childishly indifferent
+manner.
+
+"Yes, she died."
+
+"Why? Who killed her? Did papa?" asked Fina.
+
+Leam's face was very white: "No, not papa."
+
+"Did God?"
+
+"I cannot tell you, Fina," said Leam, to whom falsehoods were
+abhorrent and the truth impossible.
+
+"Did you?" persisted Fina with childish obstinacy.
+
+"Now go," said Leam, putting her off her lap and rising from her chair
+in strange disorder. "You are troublesome and ask too many questions."
+
+Fina began to cry loudly, and Mr. Dundas, from his library below,
+heard her. He came up stairs with his fussy, restless kindness, and
+opened the door of the room where his two daughters, of nature and by
+adoption, were.
+
+"Heyday! what's all this about?" he cried. "What's the matter, my
+little Fina? what are you crying for? Tut, tut! you should not cry
+like this, darling; and, Leam," severely, "you should really keep the
+child better amused and happy. She is as good as gold with me: with
+you there is always something wrong."
+
+Fina ran into his arms sobbing. "Leam is cross," she said. "She will
+not tell me who killed mamma."
+
+The man's ruddy face, reddened and roughened with travel, grew white
+and pitiful. "God took her away, my darling," he said with a sob.
+"She was too good for me, and He took her to live with the angels in
+heaven,"
+
+"And Leam's mamma? Is she in heaven too with the angels?" asked Fina,
+opening her eyes wide through their tears,
+
+"I hope so," Sebastian answered in an altered voice.
+
+Leam covered her face in her hands; then lifting it up, she said
+imploringly, "Papa, do not talk to her of mamma. It is sacrilege."
+
+"I agree with you, Leam," said Mr, Dundas in a steady voice. "We meet
+at the same point, but perhaps by different methods."
+
+[TO BE CONTINUED.]
+
+
+
+
+LETTERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA
+
+BY LADY BARKER.
+
+
+    CAPE TOWN, October 16, 1875.
+
+    Safe, safe at last, after twenty-four days of nothing but sea
+    and sky, of white-crested waves--which made no secret of their
+    intention of coming on board whenever they could or of tossing
+    the good ship Edinburgh Castle hither and thither like a
+    child's plaything--and of more deceitful sluggish rolling
+    billows, looking tolerably calm to the unseafaring eye, but
+    containing a vast amount of heaving power beneath their slow,
+    undulating water-hills and valleys. Sometimes sky and sea
+    have been steeped in dazzling haze of golden glare, sometimes
+    brightened to blue of a sapphire depth. Again, a sudden change
+    of wind has driven up serried clouds from the south and east,
+    and all has been gray and cold and restful to eyes wearied
+    with radiance and glitter of sun and sparkling water.
+
+    Never has there been such exceptional weather, although the
+    weather of my acquaintance invariably _is_ exceptional. No
+    sooner had the outlines of Madeira melted and blended into
+    the soft darkness of a summer night than we appeared to sail
+    straight into tropic heat and a sluggish vapor, brooding on
+    the water like steam from a giant geyser. This simmering,
+    oily, exhausting temperature carried us close to the line.
+    "What is before us," we asked each other languidly, "if it be
+    hotter than this? How can mortal man, woman, still less child,
+    endure existence?" Vain alarms! Yet another shift of the
+    light wind, another degree passed, and we are all shivering in
+    winter wraps. The line was crossed in greatcoats and shawls,
+    and the only people whose complexion did not resemble a
+    purple plum were those lucky ones who had strength of mind
+    and steadiness of body to lurch up and down the deck all
+    day enjoying a strange method of movement which they called
+    walking.
+
+    The exceptional weather pursued us right into the very
+    dock. Table Mountain ought to be seen--and very often is
+    seen--seventy miles away. I am told it looks a fine bold bluff
+    at that distance, Yesterday we had blown off our last pound of
+    steam and were safe under its lee before we could tell
+    there was a mountain there at all, still less an almost
+    perpendicular cliff more than three thousand feet high. Robben
+    Island looked like a dun-colored hillock as we shot past it
+    within a short distance, and a more forlorn and discouraging
+    islet I don't think I have ever beheld. When I expressed
+    something of this impression to a cheery fellow-voyager, he
+    could only urge in its defence that there were a great many
+    rabbits on it. If he had thrown the lighthouse into the
+    bargain, I think he would have summed up all its attractive
+    features. Unless Langalibalele is of a singularly
+    unimpressionable nature, he must have found his sojourn on
+    it somewhat monotonous, but he always says he was very
+    comfortable there.
+
+    And now for the land. We are close alongside of a wharf,
+    and still a capital and faithful copy of a Scotch mist wraps
+    houses, trees and sloping uplands in a fibry fantastic veil,
+    and the cold drizzle seems to curdle the spirits and energies
+    of the few listless Malays and half-caste boys and men who are
+    lounging about. Here come hansom cabs rattling up one after
+    the other, all with black drivers in gay and fantastic head
+    and shoulder gear; but their hearts seem precisely as
+    the hearts of their London brethren, and they single out
+    new-comers at a glance, and shout offers to drive them a
+    hundred yards or so for exorbitant sums, or yell laudatory
+    recommendations of sundry hotels. You must bear in mind that
+    in a colony every pot-house is a hotel, and generally rejoices
+    in a name much too imposing to fit across its frontage. These
+    hansoms are all painted white with the name of some ship in
+    bright letters on the side, and are a great deal cleaner,
+    roomier and more comfortable than their London "forbears." The
+    horses are small and shabby, but rattle along at a good pace;
+    and soon each cab has its load of happy home-comers and swings
+    rapidly away to make room for fresh arrivals hurrying up for
+    fares. Hospitable suggestions come pouring in, and it is as
+    though it were altogether a new experience when one steps
+    cautiously on the land, half expecting it to dip away
+    playfully from under one's feet. A little boy puts my thoughts
+    into words when he exclaims, "How steady the ground is!"
+    and becomes a still more faithful interpreter of a wave-worn
+    voyager's sensations when, a couple of hours later, he demands
+    permission to get _out_ of his delicious little white bed
+    that he may have the pleasure of getting _into_ it again. The
+    evening is cold and raw and the new picture is all blurred and
+    soft and indistinct, and nothing seems plain except the
+    kindly grace of our welcome and the
+    never-before-sufficiently-appreciated delights of space and
+    silence.
+
+    OCTOBER 17.
+
+    How pleasant is the process familiarly known as "looking
+    about one," particularly when performed under exceptionally
+    favorable circumstances! A long and happy day commenced with a
+    stroll through the botanic gardens, parallel with which runs,
+    on one side, a splendid oak avenue just now in all the
+    vivid freshness of its young spring leaves. The gardens are
+    beautifully kept, and are valuable as affording a sort of
+    experimental nursery in which new plants and trees can be
+    brought up on trial and their adaptability to the soil and
+    climate ascertained. For instance, the first thing that caught
+    my eye was the gigantic trunk of an Australian blue-gum tree,
+    which had attained to a girth and height not often seen in its
+    own land. The flora of the Cape Colony is exceptionally varied
+    and beautiful, but one peculiarity incidentally alluded to by
+    my charming guide struck me as very noticeable. It is that
+    in this dry climate and porous soil all the efforts of
+    uncultivated nature are devoted to the _stems_ of the
+    vegetation: on their sap-retaining power depends the life of
+    the plant, so blossom and leaf, though exquisitely indicated,
+    are fragile and incomplete compared to the solidity and
+    bulbous appearance of the stalk. Everything is sacrificed to
+    the practical principle of keeping life together, and it is
+    not until these stout-stemmed plants are cultivated and
+    duly sheltered and watered, and can grow, as it were, with
+    confidence, that they are able to do justice to the inherent
+    beauty of penciled petal and veined leaf. Then the stem
+    contracts to ordinary dimensions, and leaf and blossom expand
+    into things which may well be a joy to the botanist's eye.
+    A thousand times during that shady saunter did I envy my
+    companions their scientific acquaintance with the beautiful
+    green things of earth, and that intimate knowledge of a
+    subject which enhances one's appreciation of its charms as
+    much as bringing a lamp into a darkened picture-gallery. There
+    are the treasures of form and color, but from ignorant eyes
+    more than half their charms and wonders are held back.
+
+    A few steps beyond the garden stand the library and natural
+    history museum. The former is truly a credit to the Colony.
+    Spacious, handsome, rich in literary treasures, It would
+    bear comparison with similar institutions in far older and
+    wealthier places. But I have often noticed in colonies how
+    much importance is attached to the possession of a good public
+    library, and how fond, as a rule, colonists are of books. In
+    a new settlement other shops may be ill supplied, but there
+    is always a good bookseller's, and all books are to be bought
+    there at pretty nearly the same prices as in England. Here
+    each volume costs precisely the same as it would in London,
+    and it would puzzle ever so greedy a reader to name a book
+    which would not be instantly handed to him.
+
+    The museum is well worth a visit of many more hours than we
+    could afford minutes, and, as might be expected, contains
+    numerous specimens of the _Bok_ family, whose tapering horns
+    and slender legs are to be seen at every turn of one's head.
+    Models are there also of the largest diamonds, and especially
+    well copied is the famous "Star of South Africa," a
+    magnificent brilliant of purest water, sold here originally
+    for something like twelve thousand pounds, and resold for
+    double that sum three or four years back. In these few hours I
+    perceive, or think I perceive, a certain soreness, if one
+    may use the word, on the part of the Cape Colonists about the
+    unappreciativeness of the English public toward their produce
+    and possessions. For Instance, an enormous quantity of wine is
+    annually exported, which reaches London by a devious route and
+    fetches a high price, as it is fairly entitled to do from its
+    excellence. If that same wine were sent direct to a London
+    merchant and boldly sold as Cape wine, it is said that the
+    profit on it would be a very different affair. The same
+    prejudice exists against Cape diamonds. Of course, as in other
+    things, a large proportion of inferior stones are forced into
+    the market and serve to give the diamonds that bad name which
+    we all know is so fatal to a dog. But it is only necessary to
+    pretend that a really fine Cape diamond has come from Brazil
+    to ensure its fetching a handsome price, and in that way even
+    jewelers themselves have been known to buy and give a good
+    round sum, too, for stones they would otherwise have looked
+    upon with suspicion. Already I have seen a straw-colored
+    diamond from "Du Zoit's pan" in the diamond-fields cut in
+    Amsterdam and set in London, which could hold its own for
+    purity, radiance and color against any other stone of the same
+    rare tint, without fear or favor; but of course such gems are
+    not common, and fairly good diamonds cost as much here as in
+    any other part of the world.
+
+    The light morning mists from that dampness of yesterday have
+    rolled gradually away as the beautiful sunshine dried the
+    atmosphere, and by midday the table-cloth, as the colonists
+    affectionately call the white, fleece-like vapor which so
+    often rests on their pet mountain, has been folded up and laid
+    aside in Cloudland for future use. I don't know what picture
+    other people may have made to their own minds of the shape and
+    size of Table Mountain, but it was quite a surprise and the
+    least little bit in the world of a disappointment to me to
+    find that it cuts the sky (and what a beautiful sky it is!)
+    with a perfectly straight and level line. A gentle, undulating
+    foreground broken into ravines, where patches of green _velts_
+    or fields, clumps of trees and early settlers' houses nestle
+    cosily down, guides the eye half-way up the mountain. There
+    the rounder forms abruptly cease, and great granite cliffs
+    rise, bare and straight, up to the level line stretching ever
+    so far along. "It is so characteristic," and "You grow to be
+    so fond of that mountain," are observations I have heard made
+    in reply to the carping criticisms of travelers, and already
+    I begin to understand the meaning of the phrases. But you
+    need to see the mountain from various points of view and under
+    different influences of sun and cloud before you can take in
+    its striking and peculiar charms.
+
+    On each side of the straight line which is emphatically Table
+    Mountain, but actually forming part of it, is a bold headland
+    of the shape one is usually accustomed to in mountains. The
+    "Devil's Peak" is uncompromising enough for any one's taste,
+    whilst the "Lion's Head" charms the eye by its bluff form
+    and deep purple fissures. These grand promontories are not,
+    however, half so beloved by Cape Colonists as their own Table
+    Mountain, and it is curious and amusing to notice how the
+    influence of this odd straight ridge, ever before their eyes,
+    has unconsciously guided and influenced their architectural
+    tastes. All the roofs of the houses are straight--straight
+    as the mountain; a gable is almost unknown, and even the few
+    steeples are dwarfed to an imperceptible departure from the
+    prevailing straight line. The very trees which shade the
+    Parade-ground and border the road in places have their tops
+    blown absolutely straight and flat, as though giant shears
+    had trimmed them; but I must confess, in spite of a
+    natural anxiety to carry out my theory, that the violent
+    "sou'-easters" are the "straighteners" in their case.
+
+    Cape Town is so straggling that it is difficult to form any
+    idea of its real size, but the low houses are neat and the
+    streets are well kept and look quaint and lively enough to my
+    new eyes this morning. There are plenty of people moving about
+    with a sociable, business-like air; lots of different shades
+    of black and brown Malays, with pointed hats on the men's
+    heads: the women encircle their dusky, smiling faces with a
+    gay cotton handkerchief and throw another of a still brighter
+    hue over their shoulders. When you add to this that they
+    wear a full, flowing, stiffly-starched cotton gown of a third
+    bright color, you can perhaps form some idea of how they
+    enliven the streets. Swarms of children everywhere, romping
+    and laughing and showing their white teeth in broadest
+    of grins. The white children strike me at once as looking
+    marvelously well--such chubby cheeks, such sturdy fat
+    legs--and all, black or white, with that amazing air of
+    independence peculiar to baby-colonists. Nobody seems to mind
+    them and nothing seems to harm them. Here are half a dozen
+    tiny boys shouting and laughing at one side of the road, and
+    half a dozen baby-girls at the other (they all seem to play
+    separately): they are all driving each other, for "horses" is
+    the one game here. By the side of a pond sit two toddles of
+    about three years old, in one garment apiece and pointed hats:
+    they are very busy with string and a pin; but who is taking
+    care of them and why don't they tumble in? They are as fat as
+    ortolans and grin at us in the most friendly fashion.
+
+    We must remember that this chances to be the very best moment
+    of the whole year in which to see the Cape and the dwellers
+    thereat. The cold weather has left its bright roses on the
+    children's cheeks, and the winter rains exceptionally having
+    this year made every blade of grass and leaf of tree to laugh
+    and sing in freshest green. After the dry, windy summer I am
+    assured there is hardly a leaf and never a blade of grass to
+    be seen in Cape Town, and only a little straggling verdure
+    under the shelter of the mountain. The great want of this
+    place is water. No river, scarcely a brook, refreshes one's
+    eye for many and many a league inward. The necessary water for
+    the use of the town is brought down by pipes from the numerous
+    springs which trickle out of the granite cliffs of Table
+    Mountain, but there is never a sufficiency to spare for
+    watering roads or grassplots. This scarcity is a double loss
+    to residents and visitors, for one misses it both for use and
+    beauty.
+
+    Everybody who comes here rides or drives round the "Kloof."
+    That may be; but what I maintain is that very few do it so
+    delightfully as I did this sunny afternoon with a companion
+    who knew and loved every turn of the romantic road, who could
+    tell me the name of every bush or flower, of every distant
+    stretch of hills, and helped me to make a map in my head of
+    the stretching landscape and curving bay. Ah! how delicious it
+    was, the winding, climbing road, at whose every angle a fresh
+    fair landscape fell away from beneath our feet or a shining
+    stretch of sea, whose transparent green and purple shadows
+    broke in a fringe of feathery spray at the foot of bold, rocky
+    cliffs, or crept up to a smooth expanse of silver sand in a
+    soft curling line of foam! "Kloof" means simply cleft, and is
+    the pass between the Table Mountain and the Lion's Head, The
+    road first rises, rises, rises, until one seems half-way up
+    the great mountain, and the little straight--roofed white
+    houses, the green velts or fields and the parallel lines of
+    the vineyards have sunk below one's feet far, far away. The
+    mountain gains in grandeur as one approaches it, for the
+    undulating spurs which run from it down to the sea-shore take
+    away from the height looking upward. But when these are left
+    beneath, the perpendicular Walls of granite, rising sheer
+    and straight up to the bold sky-line, and the rugged, massive
+    strength of the buttress-like cliffs, begin to gain something
+    of their true value to the stranger's eye. The most beautiful
+    part of the road, however, to my taste, is the descent, when
+    the shining expanse of Camp's Bay lies shimmering in the warm
+    afternoon haze with a thousand lights and shadows from cloud
+    and cliff touching and passing over the crisp water-surface.
+    By many a steep zigzag we round the Lion's Head, and drop once
+    more on a level road running parallel to the sea-shore, and so
+    home in the balmy and yet bracing twilight. The midday sun is
+    hot and scorching even at this time of year, but it is always
+    cool in the shade, and no sooner do the afternoon shadows grow
+    to any length than the air freshens into sharpness, and by
+    sundown one is glad of a good warm shawl.
+
+
+    OCTOBER 18.
+
+    Another bright, ideal day, and the morning passed in a
+    delicious flower-filled room looking over old books and
+    records and listening to odd, quaint little scraps from the
+    old Dutch records. But directly after luncheon (and how hungry
+    we all are, and how delicious everything tastes on shore!) the
+    open break with four capital horses comes to the door, and we
+    start for a long, lovely drive. Half a mile or so takes us
+    out on a flat red road with Table Mountain rising straight up
+    before it, but on the left stretches away a most enchanting
+    panorama. It is all so soft in coloring and tone, distinct and
+    yet not hard, and exquisitely beautiful!
+
+    The Blue-Berg range of mountains stretch beyond the great bay,
+    which, unless a "sou'-easter" is tearing over it, lies glowing
+    in tranquil richness. This afternoon it is colored like an
+    Italian lake. Here are lines of chrysoprase, green-fringed,
+    white with little waves, and beyond lie dark, translucent,
+    purple depths, which change with every passing cloud. Beyond
+    these amethystic shoals again stretches the deep blue water,
+    and again beyond, and bluer still, rise the five ranges
+    of "Hottentots' Holland," which encircle and complete the
+    landscape, bringing the eye round again to the nearer cliffs
+    of the Devil's Peak. When the Dutch came here some two hundred
+    years ago, they seized upon this part of the coast and called
+    it Holland, driving the Hottentots beyond the neighboring
+    range and telling them that was to be their Holland--a name it
+    keeps to this day. Their consciences must have troubled them
+    after this arbitrary division of the soil, for up the highest
+    accessible spurs of their own mountain they took the
+    trouble to build several queer little square houses called
+    "block-houses," from which they could keep a sharp look-out
+    for foes coming over the hills from Hottentots' Holland.
+    The foes never came, however, and the roofs and walls of
+    the block-houses have gradually tumbled in, and the
+    gun-carriages--for they managed to drag heavy ordnance up the
+    steep hill-side--have rotted away, whilst the old-fashioned
+    cannon lie, grim and rusty, amid a tangled profusion of wild
+    geranium, heath and lilies, I scrambled up to one of the
+    nearest block-houses, and found the date on the dismounted gun
+    to be more than a hundred years old. The view was beautiful
+    and the air fresh and fragrant with scent of flowers.
+
+    But to return to our drive. I could gaze and gaze for ever at
+    this lovely panorama, but am told this is the ugliest part of
+    the road. The road itself is certainly not pretty just here,
+    and is cloudy with a fine red dust, but this view of sea and
+    distant hills is enchanting. Soon we get under the lee of
+    the great mountain, and then its sheltering arms show their
+    protective power; for splendid oak avenues begin to border the
+    road all the way, and miniature forests of straight-stemmed
+    pines and shimmering belts of the ghostly silver tree run up
+    all the mountain-clefts. Stem and leaf of the silver tree are
+    all of purest white; and when one gets a gleam of sunlight
+    on a distant patch of these trees, the effect is quite
+    indescribable, contrasting, as they do, with green of field
+    and vineyard. The vines all about here and towards Constantia,
+    thirteen miles off, are dwarf-plants, and only grow to the
+    height of gooseberry-bushes. It is a particular species, which
+    is found to answer best as requiring less labor to train and
+    cultivate, and is less likely to be blown out of the ground
+    by the violent "sou'-easters" which come sweeping over the
+    mountain. These gales are evidently the greatest annoyance
+    which Cape Colonists have to endure; and although everybody
+    kindly suggests that I _ought_ to see one, just to understand
+    what it is like, I am profoundly thankful that I only know it
+    from their description and my own distinct recollection of the
+    New Zealand "nor'-westers." Those were hot winds, scorching
+    and curling up everything, whereas this is rather a cold
+    breeze, although it blows chiefly in summer. It whirls along
+    clouds of dust from the red clay roads and fields which
+    penetrates and clings to everything in the most extraordinary
+    manner. All along the road the stems and lower branches of the
+    trees are dyed a deep brick-dust color, and I hear moving and
+    pathetic stories of how it ruins clothes, not only utterly
+    spoiling black silk dresses, but staining white petticoats and
+    children's frocks and pinafores with a border of color exactly
+    like the ruddle with which sheep are branded. Especially is
+    it the terror of sailors, rendering the navigation along the
+    coast dangerous and difficult; for it blends land and water
+    into one indistinct whirl of vaporous cloud, confusing and
+    blurring everything until one cannot distinguish shore from
+    sea.
+
+    The vineyards of Constantia originally took their pretty name
+    from the fair daughter of one of the early Dutch governors,
+    but now it has grown into a generic word, and you see
+    "Cloete's Constantia," "Von Reybeck Constantia," written upon
+    great stone gateways leading by long avenues into the various
+    vine-growing plantations. It was to the former of these
+    constantias, which was also the farthest off, that we were
+    bound that pleasant summer afternoon, and from the time we got
+    out of the carriage until the moment we re-entered it--all
+    too soon, but it is a long drive back in the short cold
+    twilight--I felt as though I had stepped through a magic
+    portal into the scene of one of Washington Irving's
+    stories. It was all so simple and homely, so quaint and so
+    inexpressibly picturesque. The house had stood there for a
+    couple of hundred years, and looks as though it might last for
+    ever, with its air of cool, leisurely repose and comfort and
+    strength.
+
+    In the flagged hall stands a huge stalactite some ten feet
+    high, brought a hundred years ago from caves far away in the
+    distant ranges. It is shaped something like a Malay's hat,
+    only the peak tapers to a point about eight feet high. The
+    drawing-room--though it seems a profanation to call that
+    venerable stately room by so flippant and modern a name--is
+    large, ceiled with great beams of cedar, and lighted by lofty
+    windows, which must contain many scores of small panes of
+    glass. There were treasures of rarest old china and delfware,
+    and curious old carved stands for fragile dishes. A wealth of
+    swinging-baskets of flowers and ferns and bright girl-faces
+    lighted up the solemn, shady old room, in which we must not
+    linger, for there is much to see outside. First to the cellar,
+    as it is called, though it is far from being under ground,
+    and is, in fact, a spacious stone building with an
+    elaborately-carved pediment. Here are rows and rows of giant
+    casks, stretching on either hand into avenues in the black
+    distance, but these are mere children in the nursery, compared
+    to those we are going to see. First we must pause in a middle
+    room full of quaintest odds and ends--crossbows, long whips of
+    hippopotamus hide, strange rusty old swords and firearms--to
+    look at a map of South Africa drawn somewhere about 1640. It
+    hangs on the wall and is hardly to be touched, for the paint
+    and varnish crack and peel off at a breath. It is a marvel of
+    accurate geographical knowledge, and is far better filled
+    in than the maps of yesterday. All poor Livingstone's great
+    geographical discoveries are marked on it as being--perhaps
+    only from description--known or guessed at all that long time
+    ago. It was found impossible to photograph it on account of
+    the dark shade which age has laid over the original yellow
+    varnish, but a careful tracing has been made and, I believe,
+    sent home to the Geographical Society. It is in the long
+    corridor beyond this that the "stuck-vats" live--puncheons
+    which hold easily some thousand gallons or so, and are of a
+    solemn rotundity calculated to strike awe into the beholder's
+    heart. Here is white constantia, red constantia, young
+    constantia, middle-aged constantia, and constantia so old as
+    to be a liqueur almost beyond price. When it has been kept
+    all these years, the sweetness by which it is distinguished
+    becomes so absorbed and blended as to be hardly perceptible.
+
+    Presently one of the party throws a door suddenly open, and,
+    behold, we are standing right over a wild wooded glen with a
+    streamlet running through it, and black washerwomen beating
+    heaps of white clothes on the strips of shingle. Turtle-doves
+    are cooing, and one might almost fancy one was back again on
+    the wild Scotch west coast, until some one else says calmly,
+    "Look at the ostriches!" Here they come, with a sort of
+    dancing step, twisting their long necks and snake-like heads
+    from side to side in search of a tempting pebble or trifle of
+    hardware. Their wings are slightly raised, and the long fringe
+    of white feathers rustles softly as they trot easily and
+    gracefully past us. They are young male birds, and in a few
+    months more their plumage, which now resembles that of a
+    turkey-cock, will be jet black, except the wing-feathers. A
+    few drops of rain are falling, so we hurry back to where the
+    carriage is standing under some splendid oak trees, swallow a
+    sort of stirrup-cup of delicious hot tea, and so home again as
+    fast as we can go.
+
+
+    OCTOBER 19.
+
+    It is decided that I must take a drive in a Cape cart; so
+    directly after breakfast a smart workman-like-looking vehicle,
+    drawn by a pair of well-bred iron-gray cobs, dashes up under
+    the portico. There are capital horses here, but they fetch
+    a good price, and such a pair as these would easily find
+    purchasers at one hundred and fifty pounds. The cart itself
+    is very trim and smart, with a framework sort of head, which
+    falls back at pleasure, and it holds four people easily. It
+    is a capital vehicle, light and strong and uncommonly
+    comfortable, but I am warned not to imagine that all Cape
+    carts are as easy as this one. Away we go at a fine pace
+    through the delicious sparkling morning sunshine and crisp
+    air, soon turning off the red high-road into a sandy, marshy
+    flat with a sort of brackish back-water standing in pools here
+    and there. We are going to call on Langalibalele, and his
+    son, Malambuli, who are located at Uitvlugt on the Cape
+    downs, about four miles from the town. It is a sort of
+    farm-residence; and considering that the chief has hitherto
+    lived in a reed hut, he is not badly off, for he has plenty
+    of room out of doors as well as a good house over his head. We
+    bump over some strange and rough bits of sandy road and climb
+    up and down steep banks in a manner seldom done on wheels.
+    There is a wealth of lovely flowers blooming around, but I
+    can't help fixing my eyes on the pole of the cart, which is
+    sometimes sticking straight up in the air, its silver hook
+    shining merrily in the sun, or else it has disappeared
+    altogether, and I can only see the horses' haunches. That
+    is when we are going _down_ hill, and I think it is a more
+    terrible sensation than when we are playfully scrambling up
+    some sandy hillock as a cat might.
+
+    Here is the location at last, thank Heaven! and there is
+    Langalibalele sitting in the verandah stoep (pronounced
+    "stoup") on his haunches on a brick. He looks as comfortable
+    as if he were in an arm-chair, but it must be a difficult
+    thing to do if you think seriously of it. The etiquette seems
+    to be to take no notice of him as we pass into the parlor,
+    where we present our pass and the people in authority satisfy
+    themselves that we are quite in rule. Then the old chief walks
+    quietly in, takes off his soft felt hat and sits himself
+    down in a Windsor arm-chair with grave deliberation. He is
+    uncommonly ugly; but when one remembers that he is nearly
+    seventy years of age, it is astonishing to see how young
+    he looks. Langalibalele is not a true Kafir at all: he is a
+    Fingor, a half-caste tribe contemptuously christened by the
+    Kafirs "dogs." His wool grows in distinct and separate clumps
+    like hassocks of grass all over his head. He is a large and
+    powerful man and looks the picture of sleek contentment, as
+    well he may. Only one of his sons, a good-natured, fine
+    young man, black as ebony, is with him, and the chief's one
+    expressed grievance is that none of his wives will come to
+    him. In vain he sends commands and entreaties to these dusky
+    ladies to come and share his solitude. They return for answer
+    that "they are working for somebody else;" for, alas! the only
+    reason their presence is desired is that they may cultivate
+    some of the large extent of ground placed at the old chief's
+    disposal. Neither he nor his stalwart son would dream for
+    a moment of touching spade or hoe; but if the ladies of the
+    family could only be made to see their duty, an honest penny
+    might easily be turned by oats or rye. I gave him a large
+    packet of sugar-plums, which he seized with childish delight
+    and hid away exactly like the big monkeys at the Zoo.
+
+    By way of a joke, Malambuli pretended to want to take them
+    away, and the chattering and laughing which followed was
+    almost deafening. But by and by a gentleman of the party
+    presented a big parcel of the best tobacco, and the chuckling
+    old chief made over at once all my sweetmeats "jintly" to
+    his son, and proceeded to hide away his new treasure. He
+    was dressed exactly like a dissenting minister, and declared
+    through the interpreter he was perfectly comfortable. The
+    impression here seems to be that he is a restless, intriguing
+    and mischief-making old man, who may consider himself as
+    having come out of the hornets' nest he tried to stir up
+    uncommonly well.
+
+    We don't want to bump up and down the sandy plain again, so
+    a lively conversation goes on in Dutch about the road between
+    one of my gentlemen and somebody who looks like a "stuck-vat"
+    upon short legs. The dialogue is fluent and lively, beginning
+    with "Ja, ja!" and ending with "All right!" but it leads to
+    our hitting off the right track exactly, and coming out at a
+    lovely little cottage-villa under the mountain, where we rest
+    and lunch and then stroll about up the hill spurs, through
+    myrtle hedges and shady oak avenues. Then, before the
+    afternoon shadows grow too long, we drive off to "Groote
+    Schuur," the ancient granary of the first settlers, which is
+    now turned into a roomy, comfortable country-house, perfect
+    as a summer residence, and securely sheltered from the
+    "sou'-easters." We approach it through a double avenue of tall
+    Italian pines, and after a little while go out once more for
+    a ramble up some quaint old brick steps, and so through a
+    beautiful glen all fringed and feathered with fresh young
+    fronds of maiden-hair ferns, and masses of hydrangea bushes,
+    which must be beautiful as a poet's dream when they are
+    covered with their great bunches of pale blue blossom. That
+    will not be until Christmas-tide, and, alas! I shall not be
+    here to see, for already my three halcyon days of grace are
+    ended and over, and this very evening we must steam away
+    from a great deal yet unvisited of what is interesting
+    and picturesque, and from friends who three days ago were
+    strangers, but who have made every moment since we landed
+    stand out as a bright and pleasant landmark on life's highway.
+
+
+
+
+ON SANKOTA HEAD.
+
+
+"Yay, Jim, there ain't no doubt but Sairy Macy's a mighty nice gal,
+but, thee sees, what I'm a-contendin' fur is that she's tew nice fur
+thee--that is, not tew nice egzackly, but a leetle tew fine-feathered.
+No, not that egzackly, nuther; but she's a leetle tew fine in the
+feelin's, an' I don't b'lieve that in the long run thee an' she'll
+sort well tugether. Shell git eout o' conceit with thy ways--thee
+_ain't_ the pootiest-mannered feller a gal ever see--an' thee'll git
+eout o' conceit with hern. Thee'll think she's a-gittin' stuck up, an'
+she'll think thee's a-gittin'low-minded. Neow, Jim, my 'dvice is
+good; an' ef thee'll take it, an' not go on with this thing no furder,
+thee'll both be glad on it arterwa'ds. 'Spesh'ly 's she ain't very
+rugged, an' sickly gals had oughter hev rich husbands."
+
+"But, father, Sairy an' me loves o' 'nother."
+
+"Oh, wal, then it's tew late ter say nothin'," said the old man with
+a mingled sigh and smile as, raising his basket of quahaugs to his
+shoulder, he walked off, pressing his bare feet into the yielding sand
+with the firm but clumsy tread of vigorous old age. The rough hat
+of plaited straw was pushed back from a brow that with a cultivated
+nature would have been considered as evidence of considerable
+intellectual power, but, as it was, only showed the probable truth
+of the opinion of his neighbors, that "Stephen Starbuck was a shrewd,
+common-sense ole feller."
+
+Jim was of a little finer grade than his father, having inherited some
+of the traits of his gentle mother, but the young Hercules could by no
+means have been mistaken for an Apollo; neither did his somewhat heavy
+features bear the expression of unselfish loyalty which would have
+given better promise than any mere refinement of features or manner
+for the future happiness of Sarah Macy. But she found nothing wanting
+in her lover as she stood on the cliff-head gazing down upon him.
+Sarah knew that the man she loved was not considered her equal, but
+because she loved him she believed him capable of becoming all that
+she or others could desire. There is in the world no faith so absolute
+as that of a woman in the possibilities of the man she loves. Had
+Sarah read of Sir Galahad--but this was in 1779, and the fame of the
+search for the Holy Grail had not reached the popular ear--she would
+have said to herself, "My Jim is just so pure and holy." Had "her Jim"
+been a Royalist during the English Revolution, Prince Rupert's laurels
+would not have been unshared. Had Jim been a Puritan--though the
+little Quaker maiden did not love Puritans over well, and did not
+fancy her Jim as fighting on that side--England's Protector would
+not have borne the name of Cromwell. Or if Jim were not one of the
+peace-loving Friends, and would enlist in the present struggle for
+liberty, the fame of Commodore James Starbuck should soon eclipse that
+of Paul Jones.
+
+Not for the world would Sarah have given voice to the heretical
+desire, but in her inmost heart was even now a wish that her dear Jim
+held religious opinions that would not interfere with his showing
+to the country how talented, noble and valiant he was; while the
+fair-haired, sunburnt, indolent young Hercules idly gazing out to sea
+was fired with no higher ambition for himself than to be able soon
+to erect on the Head another small house like that of his father, to
+which he might bring "the sweet little girl who loved him, so much."
+For Sarah had committed the common mistake of loving women, and had
+let Jim see how dear he was to her. So now, instead of dwelling on his
+love for her and scheming how he might be worthy of her heart, he was
+fully satisfied with himself, and inclined to grumble at Fortune for
+not at once bestowing the trifle he asked at her hands.
+
+"Jim, how long's thee goin' ter stan' there? If the water _is_ pretty,
+thee can see it any day, so 't ain't worth while to look at it all day
+ter a time."
+
+As, the sweet tones floated down the cliff Jim turned lazily to smile
+up at the speaker, and, raising his heavy basket of quahaugs, came
+leisurely up the steep sand-path, which seemed to shrink from his
+weight at every step: "Wal', Sairy, I wa'n't a-thinkin' much o' the
+water: I was a-thinkin' o' thee, an' o' what fayther said a little
+spell ago."
+
+"What was that, Jim?" Sarah's tone was a little anxious, for she knew
+that there was a jealousy among some of the islanders of the facts
+that her father had brought with him a few heavy articles of "real
+mahogany furnitur," and that her stepmother had always been able to
+hire others to do her spinning and weaving, and even to "help her at
+odd spells with the heft o' the housework."
+
+"Oh, nothin'," replied Jim, passing his free arm carelessly round the
+girl's waist--"othin', undly th' old story 'beout heow we'd best not
+merry, 'cause by'm-by thee'll git ter feelin' better nor me."
+
+"But thee don't believe him, Jim? Thee knows better. Thee knows,"
+adding this with the sweet and sincere but often sadly mistaken
+humility of love--"thee knows thou art better than me. Thou art so
+grand and so noble! If folks only knew thee better they would wonder
+at thee fur puttin' up wi' me. I wish I could make thee a better wife.
+But, Jim, if I ain't very strong, I'm pretty good at contrivin', an'
+I don't believe but what I can manage so's to git along a'most as well
+as them that's tougher."
+
+"Git along? O' course thee'll git along," answered Jim patronizingly.
+"I telled mother th'other day that I didn't cafe ef thee wa'n't 's
+strong as Mary Allen: thee was a good deal smarter, an' I'd be willin'
+tu resk but what I'd hev as little waitin' on ter dew fur thee 's fur
+her. Besides"--and here a gleam of real if shallow affection sprang
+from Jim's eyes as he looked down at the loving creature by his
+side--"besides, I'd _like_ to take care o' thee, Sairy--I would
+indeed."
+
+It is said that the sky has no color of its own--that the deep blue
+we think so beautiful is only owing to the atmosphere through which we
+view it. To Sarah this very slight expression of her lover's care
+for her bore more weight than the most passionate protestations of
+affection could have done to a colder nature, for it was colored by
+the glowing tints of her own warm love; and when the two parted that
+day she carried with her a sweet, satisfying sense of being beloved by
+the "best man on the earth" even as she loved him; while he whistled
+cheerily over his net-mending, thinking "what a sweet little thing it
+was!" "how pretty its eyes were!" and "how kitten-like its ways!" and
+only checked his whistling once in a while to wonder whether the day
+would ever really come when "Sairy would feel herself better than
+him," and to think it also a little hard that old Thomas Macy was "so
+sot agin' the match" that he would give his daughter no portion but an
+outfit of clothes and household linen. "He might jest's well's not,"
+reasoned Jim to himself, "give us a little lift: I guess he would if
+Sairy's own mother was alive; but them step-mothers never wants to
+give nothin' ter the fust wives' childern." In which opinion Jim did
+the second Mrs. Macy much injustice, for it was owing solely to her
+influence that Sarah's father had consented to provide his daughter
+with even a new dress in which to be married to "that big, lazy boy
+o'old Steve Starbuck's."
+
+Meantime, sad, gentle old Mrs. Starbuck had been turning over
+many things in her mind. She felt her son's defects; she knew that
+warm-hearted, imaginative Sarah Macy would be doing a foolish thing to
+marry Jim--as foolish a thing as in her inmost heart she felt, rather
+than acknowledged, that she herself had done when she married Jim's
+father. But the mother-heart longed that her son should grow to be
+what she desired (and what poor Sarah thought he already was), and she
+hoped much from the elevating influence of so good a wife.
+
+So, as she sat knitting, while Jim and his father sat, hats on heads
+and pipes in mouths, mending their nets, old Mrs. Starbuck had "made a
+plan." "Father," said, she at last, "I've be'n thinkin'--"
+
+"Yay," replied the old man gruffly but not unkindly--"yay, I 'spect
+so. Thee's pooty nigh allus a-thinkin' o' suthin. What is it neow?
+Eout with it!"
+
+"I've be'n thinkin' that Jim's all the child we've got--"
+
+"Wal, yay. Hain't had no other--not's I knows on. What o' that?"
+
+"Well, I was a-thinkin' that, that bein' so, an' Jim an' Sairy
+thinkin' so much o' 'nother, it wa'n't o' no use fur them ter keep
+waitin' along year eout an' year in fur a chance tu keep house by
+'emselves. They'd best git married right off an' come an' live along
+o' us."
+
+"W'y, ole woman!"
+
+"W'y, mother!"
+
+"Yay; I hear both on ye," said the gentle old mother with a half
+smile. "I s'posed likely ye'd think strange on't at fust; but ye
+h'ain't no need ter, fur it's a sens'ble thing ter dew, an' yell see't
+so when ye've thought on't a spell: see if ye don't."
+
+So well was the proposal liked that very soon the simple ceremony of
+the Friends made James and Sarah husband and wife; and for a while all
+seemed happiness in the humble cottage on the cliff--cottage so humble
+that it scarcely deserved even that lowly name.
+
+Sarah Macy's father owned one of the largest dwellings on Nantucket--a
+two-story "double house" with two rooms on each side of a broad hall
+running through the house from front to rear. On one side of this hall
+was the "best bedroom," ghostly with tightly-closed white shutters
+and long white dimity curtains to the "four-poster" and shining white
+sanded floor, and the "best-room," terrible in its grandeur of cold
+white walls, straight hard sofa, "spider-legged" table, grenadier-like
+chairs and striped woolen carpet underlaid with straw. In the rear, on
+the other side of the hall, was the kitchen with its big brick oven,
+its yawning fireplace overhung with corpulent iron pots or shining
+copper kettles depending from numerous gallows-like cranes; with its
+glittering copper, brass and pewter utensils arrayed on snowy-shelves;
+with its spotless tables, Its freshly-sanded floor and its
+heavily-beamed, whitewashed ceiling, from which hung many a bunch of
+savory herbs or string of red pepper-pods or bunch of seed-corn, or
+perhaps even a round-backed ham, to get a little browner in the smoke
+that would sometimes pour out from the half-ignited mass of peat. In
+front of the kitchen was the "living-room," in one corner of which
+stood a carved high-post bedstead--glory of the Macys and envy of
+their neighbors--with its curtains of big figured chintz, brown
+sunflowers sprawling over a white ground, drawn aside in the daytime
+to display the marvelous patchwork of the quilt beneath. Fuel was
+scarce even then on the sandy isle; and economy compelled Mr. and
+Mrs. Macy to make use of this living-room as a bedchamber also, since
+Thomas Macy confessed to "bein rather tender," and to liking a warm
+room to sleep In, though his neighbors often insinuated that he was
+killing himself by the Indulgence. And indeed the heat must have been
+stifling when we consider the size of the fireplace, nine feet wide by
+four deep, with a yawning throat, through which the rain poured freely
+down on stormy nights, putting out the best arranged mass of coals,
+ashes and peat, and, in spite of the little gutter purposely made
+round the broad brick hearth, sometimes overflowing and drenching
+a portion of the neat rag carpet, in which, with true Quaker
+consistency, no gay-colored fragment had been allowed a place.
+
+In striking contrast to all this magnificence was the lowly home to
+which James Starbuck brought his happy bride. This little house was
+"double" also--that Is, it was entered in the centre by a small square
+passage just big enough for the outer door to swing in. On one side
+of this entry was a tiny parlor, as dismal as rag carpet, fireless
+hearth, dingy paper and dark-green paper shades to the small windows
+could make it. On the other side of the entry was the tiny and cold
+bedroom of the senior Starbucks. In the centre of the house rose a
+massive chimney, big enough to retain all the heat from a dozen fires.
+Across the rear of parlor, chimney and bedroom ran the long, low
+sunshiny kitchen. At one end of this certain ladder-like stairs
+conducted to the loft, which had served Jim for a "roosting-place"
+ever since he had grown big enough to be trusted o' nights so far
+away from his mother. On Sarah's advent into the family the
+dismal "best-room" was made habitable by the addition of a
+"four-poster"--which Mrs. Starbuck senior regretted was only of
+cherry-wood and not carved--and by sundry little feminine contrivances
+of Sarah's own.
+
+I said that for a time all seemed to go on happily in this humble
+home. And the seeming would have been reality had Jim possessed the
+faith in his wife which she had in him. True, he loved and believed in
+her after his fashion, and his mother was a strong ally on his wife's
+side; but Jim had one fatal weakness of character. He resented the
+slightest look that was anything but simple admiration on the part of
+his wife. A strong nature is not afraid of censure, but a weak one,
+pleading sensitiveness, is easily roused to small retaliations,
+repaying what is good in intention with what is evil. Jim, as his
+father had truly told him, was "not the pootiest-mannered feller a gal
+ever see," and in the daily home-life this became apparent to Sarah
+as it had never been in all the years they had been near neighbors.
+Naturally, she wished her husband to be pleasing to her father, and at
+last ventured to hint, as delicately as she could, at various little
+points in which improvements might be made. At first Jim did not seem
+very restless under such reproofs, given, as they were, with many
+a loving kiss and winsome look; but as months went on his wife's
+caresses were more carelessly received, and her hinted corrections
+with more of resentment. One evening stately old Thomas Macy had
+"happened in," and Jim had greatly grieved his wife by his curt,
+uncivil manner to her father. After he had gone Sarah spoke in a low
+tone and kindly as always, but with more spirit than she had ever
+before manifested or felt, of her husband's disrespectful ways to the
+aged.
+
+For a moment after his wife had ceased, Jim sat with his hat
+pulled closely over his eyes, fiercely biting into the apple he was
+eating--biting and throwing the bits into the glowing mass of peat on
+the hearth. Then he sprang to his feet, exclaiming, "I see! It's all
+come true, what ev'rybody said. Thee thinks thee an' thy folks is
+better'n me an' my folks, an' keeps all the time a-naggin' on me. I
+wish I'd merried Mary Allen! I won't stan' no more o' this talk. If I
+ain't to be maaster o' my own house I won't stay in't." (The house was
+his father's, but angry men never think of such trifles.) And waxing
+pitiful of himself, he continued in a broken and injured tone, "The
+bed o' the sea's the bes' place fur a man whose own wife's got tew big
+feelin' ter put up wi' his ways."
+
+With this dignified burst of eloquence the angry fellow flung himself
+out of the house, letting in at the door as he went a dash of cold,
+sleety rain and a gust of wind that put out the flickering tallow dip
+that was enabling Sarah to take the last stitches in the tiny
+white slip that now fell from her fingers. Too sorely wounded for
+resentment, too fond of her husband to wish even his parents to see
+him in the light in which he was now revealed to her, Sarah silently
+stooped to recover her work, and as she did so her hand was met under
+the table by a sympathizing pressure from that of her mother-in-law.
+This was too much, and, laying her head in the elder woman's lap,
+poor Sarah wept without restraint; while the mother sorrowfully and
+tenderly stroked her soft brown tresses. The father, quietly puffing
+at his pipe, seemed to take no notice, only now and then glancing with
+kindly eye covertly from under his hat-brim at the two grieving women.
+
+Silently, but for the roaring of the wind and surf and fitful dashing
+of the rain, the hours passed on till the high clock in the kitchen
+corner sharply struck eleven. This was a late hour for those times,
+and a faint fear began to come upon them all. Could it be that Jim had
+really meant what he said? "Had he--" And the two women looked blankly
+at each other. Not a word had been uttered, but each felt the other's
+dread.
+
+The father rose and said with a well-affected yawn, "Guess likely
+Jim's went deown ter Uncle Will'amses, an' they thought as 't's so
+stormy he'd bes' not come back. So guess I'll jest go eout ter the
+shed and git some more peat, fur ter keep the fire."
+
+Thus leaving the mother and wife partially reassured, the old
+father slipped out and down the track, cut deeply in the sand by the
+one-horse carts, to "Uncle Will'amses," as fast as the storm would
+permit. But no Jim had been seen there; and still more anxiously the
+stout old man fought his way back against winds that seemed strong"
+enough to blow him like a feather over the cliff's edge, and against
+the spray which shot up from the beach below, smitten by the sounding
+surf, clear over the high top of Sankota Head.
+
+Reaching his door during a brief lull in the wind, he heard faintly
+but distinctly the booming of guns fired by a ship in distress. "It
+mus' be some vessil on the shoals, an' mos' likely Jim's heard her an'
+got some o' th' other boys, an' 's went off in 's boat ter help her.
+Poor soul!" With this comforting reflection the father cheered the
+watchers inside, who had grown fearfully anxious, as the clock had
+long ago struck for midnight.
+
+"We mus' build a fire on the Head ter light 'em," said the old man.
+"There hed oughter be a light'us here, but 's there ain't none, we
+mus' dew the bes' we kin,"
+
+So saying, he harnessed the horse--almost as old as himself--and with
+the aid of the two women loaded the sled with dry wood and started
+with it to the cliff, while the mother and daughter followed behind as
+best they might, struggling to keep alive without being set on fire
+by the coals in the iron pot which they carried between them. It was
+a weary half mile, wind, spray and rain all contending against the
+feeble folk who had come out to help back to land and home the brave
+fellows who had gone to succor the distressed. They made all the more
+sure that this was the case, because Jim's new boat, the pride and joy
+of his life, was not to be found at the spot where he had only that
+day drawn, it high above the reach of even such a storm as this, ready
+for building over it on the morrow its winter house of pine-boughs and
+turf.
+
+At last a fire was kindled; and leaving the women to watch it, old
+Stephen took several weary trips back to the cottage after fuel,
+making serious inroads upon a stock at the best not too large to meet
+the demands of the coming winter. The flame, fanned by the blast even
+more than dashed by the spray and rain, sprang upward, casting its
+ruddy lances of light backward over the sandy downs, destitute even
+then of tree or shrub to break the force of the gale, and forward over
+the frothing white tops and deep, black troughs of waves that seemed
+to the excited eyes of the watching women like so many separate fiends
+leaping upward and stretching out white hands to clutch helpless
+victims and hurry them to the hell beneath. And all the while the
+surf thundered at the foot of the trembling cliff. No form could be
+discovered through the darkness beyond the near neighborhood of the
+shore; and but for the flash of the gun, which was seen continually,
+though its sound was but seldom heard above the surf and the wind, the
+watchers would have thought there was no ship near.
+
+By and by the rain ceased, but there was no moon, and impenetrable
+wind-clouds still hid the stars. Out through the blackness of the
+night the flame-light quivered in long, bright streams over the
+endless lines of ever-advancing waves, but revealed to the watchers
+no ship, no boat, no tokens even of wreck, only the ceaseless reaching
+upward of the beckoning white hands; and the wind bore no sound, save
+at intervals the dull distant boom of the cannon. But ever the solemn
+surf thundered on the beach below, and the sand-cliff trembled and
+crumbled beneath its resounding blows.
+
+The old man, who, with a seaman's owl-like eyesight, kneeled intently
+gazing out through the darkness in the direction of the flash,
+suddenly exclaimed, "I don't un'erstan' it! That air ship hadn't
+oughter be in 'stress off where she is. She ain't on no shoal, nor
+nothin'. She's jest a-lyin' tew. An' I don't see no signs o' no boats
+nuther; an's fur's I kin see, them folks is a firin' off that air gun
+jest fur the musicalness on't. Blast 'em! Come, gals: we mought as
+well be walkin' along hum as ter stop a-yawpin' here in the wind an'
+spray, a-burnin' up the winter's kindlin' fur folks 'at's a-foolin' on
+us. 'Spesh'ly as I think she's a Britisher. Blast her!"
+
+The old Quaker was not accustomed to use strong language of any sort,
+but evidently the human nature in him was so powerful in this instance
+that he could not help indulging in the most emphatic admissible
+invective.
+
+But the mother and wife were not so easily satisfied. In their eyes
+the strange ship and all on board her were not of as much consequence
+as the unworthy missing Jim, whose fate they associated with it.
+Jim's boat, they said, was gone. No one could have taken her but Jim
+himself. He would never have put out on such a night as this save to
+go to the help of the distressed ship; and if he was on the water, the
+light burning on Sankota Head would guide him safely back. So, in the
+midst of spray and wind, the three kneeled on the cliff and kept the
+blaze alight till the rising dawn made it useless, when, to the dismay
+of the watchers, the ship hoisted sail and bore away. She showed no
+colors, but the old islander, once a whaler, declared that she was a
+British man-o'-war.
+
+But where was Jim? The unanswering surf still boomed at the foot of
+the cliff, though the height of the waves was rapidly diminishing, and
+the water was gradually assuming the peculiarly bland expression that
+often comes after a storm, reminding one of the cat that has "eaten
+the canary," but there was no sign of incoming boat or men.
+
+Chilled to the bone with the wind and cold sea-spray of the November
+night, and to the heart with sorrow and disappointment, the three
+returned to the lonely house. Running to meet them came Mary Allen,
+breathlessly crying, "Where's Eben and Jim?"
+
+Poor Sarah could not answer, but the brave old mother, a veteran in
+sorrows, replied with trembling lips, "We don't know anythin' o' thy
+brother, Mary; an' Jim hain't b'en hum sence las' night. His boat's
+gone, an' we thought he might ha' went out to help the ship that was
+a-firin' all night. But she's sailed off this mornin' all right; an'
+father, he says she was a Britisher an' undly a-firin' ter fool us
+folks. So I don't know nothin' about it," uttering the last words in a
+drearily hopeless tone that gave them exceeding pathos.
+
+For a moment Mary stood in dismay; then she cried wildly, "Oh, they're
+drowned, they're drowned! Jim come deown ter eour heouse las' night
+a-sayin' he'd heard the firin' o' a ship in 'stress, an' askin' Eb
+ter go with him an' help him git his boat eout, an' telled me ter run
+along deown to Zack Tumnaydoo's An' ax Zack an' Ellery ter go with
+'em. An' I did, an' that's the las' anybody's seen o' any one on 'em.
+Oh dear! oh dear!" And wringing her hands, the sobbing girl ran back
+as quickly as she had come to impart to her mother and sisters the
+full extent of her evil tidings.
+
+The cold, sad, desolate weeks and months that now rolled slowly on
+are to this day remembered on Nantucket as those of the "hard winter."
+Provisions were scarce, fuel was difficult to obtain, the harbor
+was frozen over, so that few fish could be taken there, and all
+communication with "the main" was cut off by British cruisers. In
+January the cherished old horse was killed because there was no longer
+hay to feed him, and even oats were "too precious to be fed to dumb
+beasts." In February the stalwart old Stephen lay grimly down to die,
+saying pityingly, "It's time, gals: I can't dew ye no more good by
+stayin'; an' I'm so tired."
+
+The day succeeding the silent funeral, where two women had dropped the
+few tears that were left them to shed, good old Thomas Macy came and
+took his daughter and her mother to his own home. And in windy, still
+frozen March the wail of a tiny baby was heard in the house.
+
+Under all the trouble the two brave women made no moan. Silently
+clinging together, never losing sight of each other for more than a
+few moments at a time, they yet said nothing of their greatest grief,
+that Jim should have disappeared with such unworthy words on his lips
+and thoughts in his heart, until, a few days after the baby's birth,
+Sarah said to her mother, "I know he's not dead. If he'd ha' died,
+he'd ha' come back and told me he was sorry. Fur I dew think he'd be
+sorry. Don't thee, mother?" And the mother nodded assent and smiled
+through her tears.
+
+But, in truth, they had a more substantial reason than poor Sarah's
+wistful fancy for thinking that Jim was living. When the ice broke up,
+his boat was found in a little cove, where it had floated right-side
+up, without any serious injury except the carrying away of the sails.
+Of course this discovery roused new hopes in the homes of the missing
+men. It did not "stand to reason" that four big strong, temperate
+young fellows, brought up to the hardy, amphibious island-life, had
+all fallen overboard, any more than it "stood to sense" that the boat
+had upset and then righted of itself. Besides, "none of the boy's
+corpuses had ever floated up." So the Tucketers took courage and
+felt sure that, whatever had become of the missing men, they were not
+drowned.
+
+But still the slow months came and went, till the summer and autumn
+and another winter had passed by; and patient old Rachel Starbuck grew
+daily a little quieter and a little grayer; and the brave young wife
+grew a little stronger to bear, but not a whit less loving or prone to
+suffer, and stately old Thomas Macy grew daily more gentle and pitying
+in his ways as he looked long at the winsome face of the happy, wee
+grandchild, that throve and crowed and tried to utter sweet little
+hesitating words as gayly as if the world had never a sin, a sorrow or
+a weakness in it.
+
+One day Sarah and her mother had carried the baby down to the small
+cottage at the back of the cliff, whither they went to attend to
+some little household matter; for, although they did not mention the
+subject, even to themselves, they still kept all there in readiness
+against Jim's coming home. Here, in the soft May sunshine, the
+red-frocked baby was sitting on the green turf step, playing with
+some "daffies," first of the season, which Sarah had plucked from the
+little garden in the rear. The mother and daughter were in the house,
+when both were alarmed by a scream from the usually merry child. A man
+had it closely clasped in his arms, kissing it and calling it between
+half-choked sobs his "own pretty, pretty baby." The man was thin,
+pock-marked, bald, and clad in a ragged uniform of a British sailor,
+but to the faithful, longing eyes of mother and wife there was no
+mistaking their Jim.
+
+It was long ere the story could be told, but at last they learned that
+on that sad November night Jim and his companions had gone out to the
+relief of the signaling ship. She was, as old Stephen had conjectured,
+a British man-o'-war. Being short of hands, and having on board as
+pilot a renegade native of the island, who knew where a ship could
+"lay-to" in safety, she had taken advantage of the storm to attract
+strong men within the range of her guns, then to command them to
+surrender, and thus to impress them into "His Majesty's service" as
+"able seamen."
+
+For a long time Jim had managed to keep alive his resentful feelings
+toward his wife, accusing of being the source of all his misfortunes
+the poor little woman who was loving and longing so sincerely for him.
+But when illness came he could hold out no longer. "I made up my mind
+then," said he, "that if ever I got hum agin, I'd go deown on my knees
+an' ax pardin' o' my Sairy."
+
+But she had never been angry, and was now only too thankful that Jim
+and his friends had escaped safely.
+
+"Ah!" said Jim in telling his adventures, "we hed a clus run on 't,
+Sairy, but thee'd better believe that air British navy's a fust-rate
+place fur larnin' a feller ter know when he's well off. An' Sairy,
+when I longed so fur thee an' mother, an' thought o' what a wretch I
+was to speak so ter the dearest little woman in the world, I c'u'd see
+that I hadn't knowed when I was well off."
+
+Jim's was not an unselfish kind of repentance, but it was the best it
+was in his nature to offer, and Sarah had long ago learned that her
+Jim was not the saint and hero she had once dreamed, but only a weak
+and common-place man; and she asked for nothing higher from him. To
+his best she had a right, and with that she was content, smiling on
+her husband with eyes full of a love as tender and true as when in the
+old days she had gazed down upon her lover from the cliff-head, while
+the mother laid her hand softly on his scanty hair, and said solemnly,
+"May God keep thee thus, my son!" adding, after a moment's pause,
+"But I wish thy fayther was here to see." And a tender silence for
+the memory of the rough but kindly-natured old man fell over them all;
+while the baby, reconciled to the stranger, poked her little fingers
+in the marks on his face, and cried because she could not get them
+off.
+
+ETHEL C. GALE.
+
+
+
+
+AT THE OLD PLANTATION.
+
+TWO PAPERS.--II.
+
+
+The eastern sky is just beginning to assume that strange neutral tint
+which tells of the approaching dawn when we open the heavy hall door
+and step out into the crisp, frosty air. No moonlight hunting for me,
+with the cold, deceitful light making phantom pools of every white
+sand-patch in the road, and ghostly logs and boulders of every
+wavering shadow. You are always gathering up your reins for leaps
+over imaginary fence-panels, which your horse goes through like a
+nightmare, and always unprepared for the real ones, which he clears
+when you are least expecting it. If the cry bears down on you, and you
+rein up for a view, the fox is sure to dodge by invisibly under cover
+of some dark little bay, and you get home too late for a morning nap
+and too early for the breakfast, which you have been longing after for
+the last two hours. Then, too, your horse has lost his night's rest,
+and will be jaded for two days in consequence. No: the time to throw
+the dogs off for a fox-hunt is that weird hour which the negroes
+significantly call "gray-day:" it is the surest time to strike a
+trail, and by the time Reynard begins to dodge and double there will
+be plenty of light to ride by and to get a good view. If the fox gets
+away or the cover is drawn without a find, you are always sure of
+having your spirits raised by the cheerful sunrise: by the time you
+get home, tired and spattered, the ladies are down stairs ready to
+make pretty exclamations over the brush or to chaff you pleasantly
+for your want of success; and then there is just time to get your hair
+brushed and your clothes changed before the mingled aromas of fried
+sausage and old Java put the keen edge on your already whetted
+appetite.
+
+A ride across country after a rattling pack of English hounds on
+a thoroughbred hunter with a field of red-coated squires is an
+experience which few hunters on this side of the water have ever
+enjoyed, but with the incidents of which every reader of English
+novels is familiar. The chase of the red fox in Maryland or Virginia
+has some features in common with the British national sport, but that
+of the gray fox in the more southern States differs materially from
+both. The latter animal is smaller and possessed of less speed and
+endurance than his more northern brother, but he is far more common
+and quite as cunning. He makes shorter runs, but over very different
+ground, always keeping in the woods and dodging about like a rabbit,
+so that a different style of horse and a different method of riding
+are required for his capture. There is no risk of breaking your neck
+over a five-barred gate or a stone wall, but you may be hung in a
+grapevine, or knocked out of the saddle by a low limb, or have your
+knee scraped against a tree-trunk. It is true you may catch your fox
+in twenty minutes, and three hours is an extraordinary run, but then
+you may catch four or five between daylight and ten o'clock of an
+autumn morning.
+
+The horses stretch their necks toward the stables and whinny as they
+think of the bundles of untasted fodder: the dogs require no notes
+of the horn to rouse them, for they know the signs and are already
+capering about in eager merriment, throwing their heads into the air
+occasionally to utter a long and musical bay. This wakes up the
+curs about the negro-yard, and their barking stirs up the geese, the
+combined chorus rousing all the cocks in the various poultry-houses,
+so that we ride off amid a hub-bub of howling, cackling, neighing and
+crowing which would awaken the Seven Sleepers. We are first at the
+meet, and the old woods ring with the mellow, winding notes of
+our horns--no twanging brass reeds in the mouth-pieces, but honest
+cow-horn bugles, which none but a true hunter can blow. The hounds
+grow wild at the cheering sound, and howl through every note of the
+canine gamut; the echoes catch the strain and fling it from brake to
+bay; the dying cadence strengthens into an answering blast, and the
+party is soon increased to half a dozen bold riders and twenty eager
+dogs. Venus, the beautiful "flag-star of heaven," is just toning her
+brilliancy into harmony with the pale light which creeps slowly up
+from the eastern horizon, and some wakeful crow in the pine-thicket
+gives an answering caw to the goblin laugh of the barred owl in the
+cypress, as we leap our horses into a field of sedge and cheer on the
+dogs to their work. For half an hour we ride in silence save the
+words of encouragement to the hounds, which are snuffing about
+unsuccessfully and whipping the hoar-frost with their tails from the
+dry yellow stems of the grass. Now and then some eager young dog opens
+on the trail of a rabbit which has started from its form, but the
+crack of a whip restrains him, and the other hounds pay no attention
+to him. Suddenly a sharp, quick yelp comes from the farthest corner of
+the field, and the older dogs stop instantly and raise their heads
+to listen. Hark to old Blucher! There he is again, and the whole pack
+give tongue and dash off to the call which never deceives them. We
+catch a glimpse of the old fellow's white throat as he trots about in
+a zigzag course, poking his tan muzzle into every clump of tall grass
+and giving tongue occasionally as he sniffs the cold trail. Presently
+a long, quavering cry comes from old Firefly; again and again Blucher
+opens more and more eagerly; another and another dog takes it up, and
+the trot quickens into a lope. The trail grows warmer as they follow
+the line of fence, and just as we settle ourselves in the saddle for
+a run it all stops and the dogs are at fault. But Blucher is hard to
+puzzle and knows every trick of his cunning game. Running a few panels
+down the fence, he rears up on it and snuffs the top rail, and then,
+with a yell of triumph, dashes over it into the woods, with the whole
+pack in full cry at his heels. A ringing cheer announces that the
+fox has "jumped," and the field scatters in pursuit. Two only, the
+subscriber being one, follow the dogs with a flying leap. Some dash
+off in search of a low panel, others to head off the cry through the
+distant gate, while others stop to pull the rails and make a gap.
+For ten minutes we keep well behind the hounds, with a tight rein and
+heads bent to avoid the hanging oak limbs. But the fox has turned and
+plunged into a brake which no horse can go through, and we draw up
+and listen to decide where we can head him off with the greatest
+certainty; then turn in different directions and spur through the
+young black-jacks. Ah! there he goes, with dragging brush and open
+mouth, and the pack, running close enough together to be covered by
+a table-cloth, not sixty yards behind him. I am in at the death this
+time, for he cannot run a hundred yards farther, and the brush is
+mine, for there's no one else in sight. With a savage burst the dogs
+dash after him into the thicket and then--dead silence, not a yelp,
+as they scatter and run backward and forward, nosing under every dead
+leaf and up the trunk of every tree. The fault is complete, and the
+young dogs give it up and lie down panting, while the older hounds try
+every expedient to puzzle out the trail and take up the scent again.
+He certainly has not treed, there is neither earth nor hollow to hide
+him, and yet the scent has gone! And it never came back. If any reader
+can tell what became of that fox, he is a wiser man than I. Certain
+it is that we never heard of him again; and for aught I know to the
+contrary, he may have been that identical Japanese animal which turns
+into tea-kettles and vanishes in puffs of smoke. It does not take
+long, however, to make another find, and we go home after a three
+hours' chase with two fine brushes and appetites which would ruin any
+hotel-keeper in a week.
+
+After breakfast a walk to the cotton-houses would be in order, for the
+successful planter is he who trusts nothing to the overseer which can
+have his personal supervision, and he must excuse himself to such of
+his guests as prefer a cigar by the library fire to an hour spent in
+observing the details of plantation work. In the days of which I write
+horse-power was preferred to steam, and negro-power to both; and few
+planters of the fine black-seed cotton could be convinced that any
+"power-gin" could be invented which would not injure the long, silky
+"staple" or fibre of the lint. The old-time "foot-gins" were used
+exclusively, and the gin-house was a place of curious interest to all
+visitors. In one end of the long room was the huge pile of seed-cotton
+which was to pass through the rollers as the first step toward
+its preparation for the market. How simply does a sudden stroke of
+inventive genius solve a problem which wise men have regarded as
+insoluble! Not much more than a century ago a commission of practical
+English _savans_ discouraged the cultivation of a textile fabric
+which "might be useful but for the impossibility of clearing it of the
+seeds!" But the foot-gin appeared on the scene, and indigo went down
+before cotton. Ranged along the walls of the room are some twenty
+rough wooden frames, looking like a compromise between a straw-cutter
+and a sewing-machine, each furnished with two strong rollers operated
+by a treadle and acting precisely like those of a clothes-wringer.
+Behind each of these machines stands a man or woman with one
+ever-moving foot upon the treadle-board, feeding the seed-cotton from
+a large bag to the greedy rollers, which seize it and pass the lint
+in fleecy rolls into another bag prepared for it, while the seed, like
+shirt-buttons touched by the afore-mentioned wringer, rolls off from
+the hither side to form a pile upon the floor. Thence it will be
+carted to the seed-house to be rotted into manure for the next crop,
+there being no better fertilizer for cotton than a compost of which
+it forms the base. A portion of it, however, will be reserved to
+be boiled with cow-peas and fed to the milch-cattle, no food being
+superior to its rich, oily kernel in milk-producing qualities. The
+negro mothers use it largely in decoction as a substitute for cocoa,
+and the white mothers under similar circumstances having it parched
+and ground like coffee, when it makes an exceedingly palatable and
+nutritious beverage. The "green-seed" or short-staple variety is far
+inferior to the black for this purpose, and produces white, sticky,
+cottony-looking butter; indeed, most dairywomen insist that "you
+can pick the lint out of it." The ginned cotton is carried to the
+platforms, where it is "specked" by the women--leaves, dirt and other
+impurities being picked out by hand--and spread out to dry and bleach
+in the sun; thence we follow it to the "moting-room," where it is
+thoroughly and finally overhauled, every minute particle of dirt or
+other foreign matter and every flock of stained and discolored cotton
+being picked out. This room is always in the second story, and at one
+end of it a circular hole is cut in the floor; through this hole hangs
+the bag of strong, close gunny-cloth, very different from the coarse
+covering which suffices for the lower grades of "short-staple,"
+supported by a stout iron hoop larger by some inches than the hole
+in the floor, and to which the end of the bag is securely sewed. The
+cotton is thrown into this bag and packed with an iron rammer by a man
+who stands in it, his weight assisting in the packing, each bag being
+made to contain upward of four hundred pounds.
+
+Everything seeming to go on as it ought and all the necessary orders
+and directions being given, we walk out to take a look at the poultry.
+There are fowls in abundance and superabundance, but our kind host
+is most proud of his flock of three hundred white turkeys; and a
+beautiful sight they are, scattered over the grassy lawn. Ranging, as
+these fine birds will, over a mile or two of woods abounding in their
+wild brethren, convenient mistakes were often made by the pineland
+gunners, whose rifles were always ready to pick off a stray gobbler
+without waiting to know whether he was wild or tame, and so the old
+gentleman introduced the white stock to prevent the possibility of
+such errors. For a similar reason no ducks were raised except those
+which wear top-knots. It is no unusual thing for wild gobblers and
+mallards to come up with the tame stock to the poultry-yard, and
+the bronze feathers and shy habits of many of the young turkeys show
+evidence of their free parentage.
+
+It is just impossible for a city man to remain indoors in the country
+with the broad fields, the shady woods, the bright blue sky and
+the merry pipe of birds calling him out to active exercise and
+unaccustomed sport. He is sure to think himself a sportsman, even if
+uncertain whether the shot or powder should first enter the gun;
+and if an old hand at the trigger, his uneasiness while in the house
+becomes almost painful. Every article of hunting-gear is
+overhauled again and again; boots are greased, shot-pouches filled,
+powder-charges remeasured, guns cleaned and ramrods oiled; and I
+once had a fine Manton--as sweet a piece as ever came to the
+shoulder--almost ruined by an eager friend, who, after going through
+all this during a stormy morning, insisted on taking off the locks
+and triggers, just to while away the time. The introduction of the
+breech-loader most happily obviates all this, since such lagging hours
+may now be occupied in charging and crimping cartridges. But there is
+nothing to detain us longer to-day: the "Bob Whites" are waiting for
+us among the pea-vines, and the snipe among the tussocky grass of the
+old rice-field. Di and Sancho have caught sight of the guns, and are
+capering about in the wildest excitement, for it is a long time since
+they have seen anything more "gamey" than a city pigeon. Birding over
+good dogs is the very poetry of field-sports. The silken-haired setter
+and the lithe pointer are as far the superiors of the half-savage
+hound as the Coldstream Guards are of the Comanches. The hound has no
+affection and but little intelligence, and the qualities which make
+him valuable are purely those of instinct. The long, hungry cry with
+which he follows the deer and the sharp, angry yelp which he utters
+when chasing the fox tell plainly that the motives which prompt him
+thus to use his delicate nose and unwearying powers of endurance are
+precisely those which carry the Indian to the hunt or on the war-path.
+He hunts for any master who will cheer him on, has no tactics but to
+stick to the trail and give tongue as long as the scent will lie, and
+must be whipped off the game when caught to prevent his devouring
+it on the spot. The setter, on the other hand, is intelligent,
+affectionate and faithful. If properly trained and reared, he loves
+his master and will hunt for no one else, learns to understand human
+language to an astonishing degree and exhibits reasoning powers of no
+mean order. He hunts purely for sport, understands the habits of his
+game, and regulates his tactics accordingly, and delivers the birds
+uninjured to his master, sometimes controlling his appetite and
+carrying the game long distances for this purpose. I have frequently
+discovered that my dogs, brought up in the house, understood words
+which had never been taught them. My old favorite Di always answers
+the dinner-bell and stands near my chair for odd scraps. Being
+somewhat annoyed one day by her eagerness, I said playfully, "Go to
+the kitchen and tell Annie to feed you." She at once rushed off and
+scratched the kitchen door until the girl opened it, and then stood by
+the tray of scraps looking at her and wagging her tail. Wanting one of
+my little sons one evening, I said, "Di, go find the boys!" She rushed
+off, looking and smelling about their usual haunts, but returned
+unsuccessful. I scolded and sent her a second and third time, with the
+same result: a few minutes after she came quietly behind me with the
+_hat_ of my youngest boy in her mouth: she had taken it from a table
+in the passage, and her wagging tail said plainly, "Will this answer?
+It's the best I can do." The same dog will creep carefully upon
+partridges, and stand as if cut in marble lest they should fly, but
+will chase turkeys at full speed, giving tongue like a hound, and then
+lie still for hours while they are called up and shot, nor will she
+ever confound the different habits of the two birds or the different
+methods of hunting them.
+
+Such are the highly-bred and intelligent animals which are eagerly
+waiting for us to-day--Di, with her white coat, soft as wavy silk, her
+chestnut ears and one spot on the back alone marring its snowy purity;
+Sancho, jet black, with "featherings" like a King Charles spaniel.
+They are over the fence already, and tearing about the field so
+recklessly in the exuberance of their joy that they must certainly
+startle any game which may be there. The timid little field-buntings
+glide away on silent wing through the grass; the meadow-larks rise
+with gentle flappings and sail off with that easy flight so tempting
+to very young wing-shots; now and then a flock of doves whistle off
+too far for a certain shot, and clouds of crow-blackbirds rise with
+hoarse chirps and seek less public feeding-grounds; a rabbit dashes
+off from a brier-patch and both dogs rush pell-mell at his heels, but
+a single note from the whistle brings them to a sudden halt and makes
+them look thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Off they go again, as
+wild as deer; but suddenly Di's whole action changes: crouching to the
+ground and beating her sides rapidly with her tail, she runs hither
+and thither, snuffing eagerly in the grass. Now Sancho comes up and
+catches the cold trail, for a covey has certainly been in that place
+to-day. Most probably they rose from the spot, frightened by the swoop
+of a hawk, and made for the nearest cover, for the dogs can do nothing
+with the scent. But that little whiff of the exciting effluvia has
+brought them down to their work, and a beautiful sight it is as they
+quarter the ground with quickly-beating tails and noses high in the
+air, crossing and recrossing the wind in zigzag lines and concentric
+circles, hunting the ground so closely that no trail, however cold,
+can escape their keen sense of smell. A wave of the hand to Sancho,
+and the sagacious fellow is off toward the far corner of the field,
+when suddenly Di stops in mid-career with a jerk that must try every
+sinew in her frame. The birds are right under her nose, and she dares
+not move a muscle, but stands as if changed into stone, her eyes
+starting with excitement, her nostrils expanded, her feathery stern
+quivering stiffly out behind and every line of her figure standing out
+like whipcord. "Toho!" The black dog catches the sound and turns his
+head: he sees her rigid form, and backs her where he stands as firmly
+as if he too had the scent. There is no hurry, for the dogs are true
+as steel and will stand there as long as the frightened birds lie,
+while the latter, obedient to the instinct of sudden terror, will
+cower where they are for an hour, with their heads drawn back, their
+mottled breasts pressed to the earth and their legs gathered under
+them, ready to spring into the air. We cock our guns, agree to shoot
+respectively at the birds which go right or left or straight before
+us, and then advance to flush the covey ourselves. The staunch dog
+never winces as we pass her: two paces, three, a sudden rush and whirr
+as of many wings, five sharp reports in quick succession and four
+birds down! Another, wild with fright, rises straight up for twenty
+feet and darts off behind us, but his beautiful head droops as the
+crack of my last barrel resounds on the air and a cloud of feathers
+floats downward. The shot has struck him in the line of flight, and he
+goes to the ground with a bounce, some thirty yards away, as if hurled
+there by a vigorous arm. The well-trained dogs come to the "Down!
+charge!" while we reload our guns, and then seek the dead birds and
+bring them carefully in to us.
+
+Leaving the broken covey to be worked up on our return, we push on to
+another part of the large pea-field, where, perched upon the topmost
+limb of a tall dead pine, we see a red-tailed hawk engaged in quiet
+observation. There is no surer sign of birds, but it takes close
+hunting to find them, for they dare not move about while their savage
+enemy is on the watch. As we approach the hawk stretches out his neck,
+jerks his wings two or three times and oscillates his ungainly body,
+and then, with a loud scream of angry disappointment, he is off. The
+tree stands in a little piece of sedge, not far from a dense growth of
+pine-saplings, and we know that the moment the hawk left his perch the
+birds started for the cover, and our only chance for shooting is to
+head them off and turn them. The dogs have struck the running trail,
+and their action is totally different from what it was with the first
+covey. Crouching flat to the ground, they glide after the startled
+birds with a snake-like movement, now stopping, now running swiftly
+in. Suddenly Di leaves the trail and dashes off at full speed to the
+right. Making a wide circuit, she skirts the pines, and, turning short
+round, comes to a firm stand in the very face of the retreating covey,
+while Sancho lies prone with his nose between his paws. It is an
+old trick of hers thus to "huddle" running birds, and we follow her
+example, come up behind her, and get six with four barrels as the
+birds rise in a bunch.
+
+But if the reader follows us too closely, he will have all the fatigue
+of a long tramp without the compensation of healthful excitement
+and full game-pockets. Thirty-five fine birds in a pile on the
+pantry-table offer a capital _raison d'être_ for weary feet and soiled
+fingers when we reach home just in time for the supper-bell. There
+have been some arrivals while we were gone, for Christmas is near at
+hand, and the old house is filling up with guests. To-morrow the "St.
+John's Hunting-Club" has its monthly deer-hunt and dinner at Black
+Oak, and we need a good night's rest to prepare us for an experience
+the omission of which would render imperfect any truthful reminiscence
+of life at the old plantation.
+
+During the months spent at the plantation there is little social
+visiting among the gentlemen, and, except on Sundays and occasions
+of public meetings, the various local clubs offer their only
+opportunities for seeing each other, Another object--at least, under
+the old _régime_--was to bring together those who occupied somewhat
+different social positions. Formerly the clubs were strictly
+exclusive, and, indeed, this feature was never lost, but in every
+community there would be some _novi homines_, clever men many of them,
+whom the old gentry were quite willing to recognize, though a marked
+difference in culture prevented family visiting. These could be
+admitted to membership, and at the club-house could be met on equal
+terms. The hunting feature was always preserved, though few of the
+older members ever joined in the sport. Under the rules there was a
+place, a day and an hour for the weekly meet; and I remember when it
+was a safe thing to be at "the White Bridge" on the Santee Canal any
+Saturday morning at nine o'clock. Somebody was sure to be there with
+dogs and driver, prepared for a "wallet-hunt"--i.e., an all-day hunt
+with wallets at the crupper well filled with hunter's cheer. Once a
+month the club met for dinner, each member "finding" in turn, and
+on that day a single drive, or at most two, was all that could be
+enjoyed. The club-house was a plain frame building in the woods, with
+a huge fireplace at each end, heavy stationary pine table extending
+the length of the room, and broad soft-pine benches. The dishes,
+wines, liquors and cigars were all specified in the rules, the
+finder being allowed two extra dishes at will, and supplying all the
+crockery, cutlery and glass. The kitchen was a rough shed close to the
+cool and shaded spring of pure, clear water. Being myself but a guest,
+I have not the privilege of extending an invitation to the reader;
+so, by his leave, we will drop the present tense and I will assume the
+part of _raconteur_. How vividly do the scenes of that day come back
+through the highways of memory, crowded as they are with experiences
+of more than twenty varied years! As I rode up to the bridge on that
+bright December morning I found a party which promised rare sport.
+There was Kit Gillam with his crooked nose, and Tom Clifton with his
+deadly Manton and fine cry of dogs, and cheery Jack Parker, who hunted
+only for the good company, and whose gun was as likely as not to be
+unloaded when the deer came out to him. Two drives were decided on
+which might be relied on for shooting, and yet were small enough to
+give ample time for reaching the club-house before dinner.
+
+As we rode toward our stands I thought it a good chance to settle
+a point which had long excited my curiosity. "Kit," said I, "I have
+often wondered how your nose got out of plumb. What caused it?"
+
+"When I was a little bit of a boy I fell down and stepped on it."
+
+This very satisfactory explanation brought us to our ground, and
+we were soon at our respective stands and listening eagerly for the
+trail-notes of the old hounds. The deer have regular runs, from which
+they rarely deviate, and which do not vary in the course of years.
+These are guarded by the standers while the game is driven down
+from the opposite direction. A large drive may have a dozen of these
+stands, by one of which the deer will almost certainly pass, but which
+one nobody knows. Quiet is absolutely necessary and a cigar is fatal
+to sport, but concealment is useless, as these animals see imperfectly
+in daylight.
+
+I had not to wait long before I caught the distant cheering and
+hand-clapping of the drivers as they encouraged the dogs to hunt.
+In the quiet of the sombre woods every sound was distinctly audible.
+Suddenly three or four quick, sharp yelps brought my gun to the
+"ready," and the hammers clicked as a burst of music followed. But
+above the clamor of the hounds came the crack of the driver's whip,
+and his voice, mellowed by distance, was heard in angry tones: "Come
+back yah, you good-for-nuttin', wutless lee' rabbit-dog, you! I sway
+maussa ha' for shoot da' puppy 'fore he spile ebery dog in de pack!"
+
+Soon, however, came another open, deep and musical, and there was no
+mistaking old Drummer's trail-note: then Killbuck joined in, and then
+the cry became general. For a while the broken, quavering tongue tells
+that the dogs are only trailing and the deer is still cowering in his
+bed, or perhaps has sneaked out of the drive at the first sound of the
+horn. Hark! what a burst! They had "started" within two hundred yards
+of me. The next moment there was a rustle of leaves, and a yearling
+doe dashed by. I am not a dead shot, and have nothing to say about
+that first barrel, but the second sent her down and over with a roll
+that almost broke her neck. The dogs were stopped and the deer
+thrown over the pommel of one of the boys, and we rode on to try the
+Brunswick swamp. The boy had assured us that "One pow'ful big buck bin
+in day (there) las' night. I see all he track gwine in, an' I nebber
+see none come out."
+
+We were soon strung along the narrow dam across which the game was to
+be forced by the drivers, who had to make their way through an ugly
+bog among cypress "knees" and dense brier-patches. Jack Parker stood
+next to me, fidgeting about uneasily, because it was against rules to
+talk on stand. Jack's prominent feature was his nose, and he had
+an incorrigible trick of blowing it "out loud" whenever there was a
+particular reason for keeping perfectly quiet. The dogs had begun
+to open, and their loose, scattering trail-notes indicated turkeys.
+Looking directly before me, I saw seven noble gobblers stepping
+cautiously toward my stand. Their glossy breasts glittered with
+coppery lustre in the straggling sunbeams as, with drooping wings and
+expanded tails, they advanced, looking fearfully about and uttering
+their low alarm-notes, "Quit! quit! quit!" Three more steps will make
+a certain shot, and--out rang Jack's nasal clarion, loud and clear as
+the _morte_ at a fox-chase. I looked round in horror, and there
+stood my hunter complacently eying me and flourishing his white silk
+handkerchief, while his gun leaned against a tree ten paces distant:
+"Expect I'd better go back to my stand, eh? Are those dogs barking at
+a deer?"
+
+I jumped to my feet for a snap-shot at the old gobbler which flew over
+me, making a clear miss. Bang! bang! went two more guns; a woodcock
+whistled up from the bog and two swamp-rabbits dashed into the
+brier. The dogs came out, shaking the water from their coats, and the
+spattered drivers rode through the creek. There was not a feather to
+show, and of course everybody was "down" on Jack, but with an air of
+deep injury he put it off on me with the question, "Why didn't you
+tell me the turkeys were coming? How can a fellow help having a cold?"
+
+We reached the club-house just in time to take our seats as dinner was
+served, and were in capital condition to enjoy the rich mutton, the
+fat turkey, the juicy home-cured ham and the rare old madeira which
+graced the board. This last was a specialty with the gentlemen of
+those days, and probably no cellars in the world could boast choicer
+vintage than the "Newton & Gordon" and "Old Leacock" which cheered the
+table of that "hunting-club." There were stronger liquors, too, though
+these were chiefly used as appetizers before dinner. The moderate use
+of brandy was universal, but the drunkenness which blots these days of
+prohibitory laws was comparatively rare. Few ever left the club-house
+"disguised" by liquor except the young men, who then, as now and
+always, would occasionally indulge in a "frolic." With the clearing of
+the board came the regular and volunteer toasts, and then an hour of
+"crop-talk" and "horse-talk" and hunting-stories over the wine and
+cigars. With the departure of the older members came the inevitable
+quarter-race, with its accompaniment of riding feats which would have
+done credit to a Don Cossack. The equestrian performance was commenced
+by Kit Gillam (who now dismounts and leads over every little
+ditch) forcing his active chestnut up the wooden steps and into
+the club-room, and rearing him on the dining-table. Then came a
+leaping-match over a ten-railed fence, resulting in the barking of
+some shins and the demolition of sundry panels of rail. Joe Keating,
+the wildest rider I ever knew, had emptied his tumbler too often, and
+insisted on running his horse home through the woods. An hour after
+he was overtaken trudging along the road, perfectly sober, with the
+saddle on his shoulders and the bridle over his arm.
+
+"Why, Joe, where's your horse?"
+
+"Dead!" was the laconic reply.
+
+Sure enough. He had run full against a huge pine, and the horse had
+gone down with a broken skull. He never tried it again.
+
+Christmas Eve has come at last, and the old plantation is in all its
+glory. Carriage after carriage has deposited its freight of blooming
+girls and merry-eyed children at the broad, open hall-door. There is
+not a vacant stall in the stables, nor an unoccupied bedroom among all
+the seventeen of the spacious mansion. The broad dinner-table is
+set diagonally in the long dining-room, and to-morrow, at least, the
+guests will have to take two turns at filling its twenty seats, while
+the children go through the same manoeuvre in the pantry. Where they
+will all sleep to-night is a mystery which none can unravel save the
+busy, hospitable "lady of the manor;" but it makes little
+difference, for there will be little sleeping done. The day passes
+in riding-parties and rowing-parties and similar amusements, as
+each freely follows the bent of his inclination. "Brass," the negro
+fiddler, has been summoned, and "Newport" comes with his stirrup and
+steel for the "triangle" accompaniment, and the merry feet of the
+dancers are soon keeping time to the homely but inspiriting music. The
+"German" and the "Boston" have not usurped the places of the old-time
+cotillon, quadrille and Virginia reel, and the dance is often varied
+by romping games of "Blindman's Buff," "Move-House" and "Stage-Coach,"
+in which old and young unite with equal zest.
+
+But this is not the limit of the fun. From time immemorial Christmas
+Eve has been licensed for the performance of all sorts of tricks,
+and demure little faces are flitting about convulsed by the effort to
+conceal the merry sense of mischief. The stockings are duly hung for
+Saint Nicholas, and the holly, with its glossy leaves and scarlet
+berries, stands ready to be planted in the parlor, to bloom to-morrow
+into all kinds of rich flowers and gift-fruit. At nine o'clock the
+work of arranging the Christmas tree begins. The ladies retire, and
+after a quiet smoke by the roaring hall-fire the gentlemen follow
+suit. To bed, but not to sleep. Jack Parker is the first man ready,
+and bounces into the best bed to secure the softest place; but the
+bars have been skillfully removed, and he is the centre of a rather
+mixed pile on the floor. I feel another, to be sure that all is right,
+and slip cozily between the sheets, but some graceless little wretch
+has placed a walking-cane "athwart-ships," which nearly breaks my
+back. None escape. Some find their sheets strewed with chaff or
+cockle-burs, some find no sheets at all. At midnight a fearful roar
+comes from the girls' room, followed by pretty shrieks and terrible
+confusion; but it is only the old Cochin rooster, which was slyly shut
+up in the empty chimney-place before they retired, indulging in his
+first crow.
+
+Daylight puts an end to all sleep, for the boys are on the piazza
+ready to welcome Christmas with innumerable packages of fire-crackers.
+We rise to find our pantaloons sewed up, our boots stuffed with wet
+cotton, our tooth-brushes dusted with quinine and our _café noir_
+sweetened with salt. These practical jokes are all taken in good
+part and made to contribute to the jollity of the season. At
+the breakfast-table lumps of cracked marble serve admirably for
+loaf-sugar, except that the hottest coffee will not dissolve them, and
+boiled eggs tempt the appetite only to disappoint with their sawdust
+filling. Then all assemble on the piazza to witness the merriment
+of the crowd of negroes who have assembled to claim little gifts of
+tobacco and sugar and to receive the annual glass of whisky which a
+time-honored custom bestows. The liquor is served in a wine-glass, and
+swallowed eagerly by men, women and boys from ten years old upward.
+Then they disperse to get their portion of the Christmas beef which
+has been slaughtered for their special benefit, and we prepare for
+service at the parish church, which stands among the shadows of the
+old forest oaks an easy walk from the house. There the solemn services
+temper and soften, but do not check or lessen, the joy and good-will
+which so well become the season, and which find their appropriate
+manifestation in all kinds of innocent amusement. The religious and
+the social observances of the day react each upon the other, and
+harmonize most admirably in the impressions which they produce. The
+interchange of gifts and tokens around the Christmas tree follows
+most appropriately, and the Christmas feast is marked by profuse
+hospitality and keen enjoyment unmarred by riot or excess.
+
+Ah, well! there are piles of dusty memories in the old cockloft still
+untouched, but I shall rummage no more to-night. The scenes which have
+floated past me with the wreathing smoke of my cigar are green and
+fragrant to me with a freshness which time can never blight, but they
+never can harden into reality again for any mortal experience. They
+have gone into the irretrievable past with a state of things which
+some may regret and others rejoice in, and well will it be if the new
+_régime_ shall supply their places with other pictures which twenty
+years hence it may be no less pleasant to remember.
+
+ROBERT WILSON.
+
+
+
+
+OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
+
+A GERMAN AGRICULTURAL FAIR.
+
+
+From the 27th to the 30th of September all Stuttgart flocks to
+Cannstatt for the _Volksfest_; and this year every good Würtemberger
+was bound to feel an additional interest in the fête on account of
+the opening ceremony, the inauguration of a statue to the late king,
+Wilhelm I.--and "well beloved," one is tempted to add from the way
+in which his people still speak of him. "The old king" and "this one"
+they say with an inflection of voice anything but flattering to
+the latter. Our landlady assures us that let the weather look as
+threatening as it would, the sun always contrived to burst out when in
+former times the late king rode into the arena to give the prizes; and
+she is evidently by no means certain it will not pour all three days
+of the fair this year. However, to judge from the skies, "this one" is
+not so bad as he might be: the sun shines propitious on him too, and
+consequently on us as we set forth to see what we can see. The second
+is the great day, as the prizes are then distributed; but already on
+Monday the booths and shows were on the field, and Cannstatt was gay
+with banners and wreaths and garlands of green. The carpenters were
+still hard at work hammering at seats for us to occupy next day,
+but the wonderful triumphal arch stood quite completed and worthy of
+sincere admiration. No one knows who has not seen it worked into an
+architectural design how beautiful a string of onions can be, how
+gorgeous a row of vegetable-marrows, how delicate a cluster of
+turnips. It sounds puerile, but it was lovely nevertheless. Imagine a
+temple-like construction all composed of odorous pine, with an arched
+portal on either hand, and then every line and curve, every niche and
+pillar and balustrade, defined with glowing fruit. It was looped in
+festoons and hung in tassels of red and white and gold: the arms of
+Würtemberg even were traced in yellow corn, while above it all rose
+a graceful column, a mosaic from base to summit of every fruit that
+autumn can bring to perfection.
+
+That was the great show: after that, mammoth cucumbers and carrots or
+rows of agricultural implements did not detain us long. The next best
+thing was to see the booths and the crowd on the outskirts of the
+exhibition. There the circus was in full blast, and triumphant,
+brazen-throated opposition to all smaller attractions that had
+ventured into that neighborhood. The performing dogs in red petticoats
+were reduced to making an appearance before their tent to entice
+spectators, and Harlequin and Columbine had to shout themselves hoarse
+inviting people to come in and split with laughter for sixpence. Those
+who did not aspire to a seat under painted canvas gathered round a
+melancholy bear dancing a _pas seul_ on the grass with heartbroken
+gravity. Then came the _Schützhallen_, where the marksmen stationed
+themselves three feet from the target and cracked away at it with no
+other visible effect than that produced on a monkey doing its tricks
+close by: at every shot the poor little creature stopped fiddling and
+looked over its shoulder with a distressed air of "If I'm not hit this
+time!" Hand-organs, penny trumpets and rattles quite drowned the voice
+of a street-songstress with a large assortment of vocal music before
+her, from which she was giving the public a selection. Whether the
+songs had any reference to the pictures that formed her background we
+did not discover, but, at all events, the latter were tragic in the
+extreme. "The twenty-four-year-old murderer of his mother and six
+brothers and sisters" was there portrayed in a neat suit of black,
+with a hatchet in his hand and a very irresolute expression of
+countenance, while the various members of his family, seen through
+the open bedroom doors, awaited their fate in peaceful slumber. The
+booths, with toys, gingerbread, sausages, cheese and light literature
+tastefully intermingled, went on and on like the restaurants that
+lined each side of the long avenue. Around primitive tables family
+parties clinked foaming glasses and hailed with demonstrative
+hospitality any stray cousin who chanced that way. In one of the last
+of these improvised _Trinkhallen_ we came upon a young man and maiden
+who had the place quite to themselves. Her brown parasol kept the
+sun off them both, and it was of no sort of consequence that they had
+nothing more interesting than the back of a shed to look at. Future
+prospects were the only ones they cared for: the present had no need
+of anything but a faint beeriness, conducive to day-dreaming.
+
+As we get into the carriage again our coachman says we must see the
+new statue. Accordingly, we drive through the town and halt before it
+in the square. It is very fine, glowing like gold from the mint.
+The king sits his charger well, and gazes majestically at nothing in
+particular: still, one must be a little critical, and we imagine the
+horse's tail is not quite right. But then is not the whisk of a tail
+in bronze almost impossible to conceive of? If the artist suffers no
+severer censure than that, he will probably call himself a happy
+man. The inscription on the pedestal of the statue reads, "From his
+grateful people." High and low have contributed to it, and gladly.
+"That was a man!" says our driver. He was a soldier under him, and
+knows. And in fact the old king seems to have been always doing
+something for the country, so that the gratitude is not without a
+cause. The inhabitants of Cannstatt have special reason to remember
+him kindly: he himself was grateful to them and showed it. In the
+troublous times of 1848 he was sadly in need of money: Ludwigsburg
+(another satellite of Stuttgart) refused it, while Cannstatt came
+up to the mark handsomely. The royal creditor never forgot that. He
+instituted the _Volksfest_ as a sort of memorial, and Cannstatt is
+proud and prosperous, while Ludwigsburg is like a city of the dead.
+So the coachman affirms; and once conversation is opened between us it
+flows without intermission. His head is over his shoulder all the way
+as we roll back to the city under the beautiful trees of the palace
+grounds. "If the old king had been living, Würtemberg would never have
+joined in the last war: he would have told Prussia to fight it out by
+herself." Apropos of the war, we ask what he thinks of Bismarck.
+He evidently thinks a great deal of him, though not perhaps in the
+generally accepted sense of that expression. He states as a fact that
+there _are_ limits, leaving it to us to understand that the chancellor
+of the empire has overstepped them. He declares further that a
+Prussian, and especially a Berliner, is always to him an obnoxious
+member of society through his insisting on knowing everything (except
+his own place) better than anybody else. "Now, there was the Prussian
+general before this last one," he continues, changing from politics
+to court-gossip (naturally, since 1870, military matters in Würtemberg
+flourish under Prussian auspices): "the first ball he went to at the
+palace he asked the queen to dance! _Our_ queen!! And then he took his
+whole family, and they sat in chairs that never were meant for them,
+so that the king had to say to him next day, "Mr. General, first come
+I, and then my ministers, and then this one, and then that one, and
+_then_ you." He went back to Berlin soon after. It is pleasanter to
+sit one's self down where one doesn't belong than to be set down
+by somebody else." Our driver chuckles, and then bursts out afresh,
+"Asking the _queen_ to dance!" He certainly has perfect faith in his
+own stories.
+
+We saw the successor of that presumptuous military man next day
+among the greater and lesser lights that revolve around the throne of
+Würtemberg. We ourselves were stationary, crowded into the foremost of
+the tiers of seats that rose surrounding the immense enclosure, and
+in the best place for observation, close by the royal pavilion.
+The hills, bright in the sun and velvet in shadow, made a natural
+amphitheatre beyond, a little church with its pretty tower looked
+picturesquely down from a neighboring height, and the whole place
+was gay with flags and branches, glittering uniforms and gorgeous
+liveries. We were to see the _hohe Herrschaften_ come in at the
+farthest entrance and drive around directly before our seats. As the
+trumpets flourish and the first magnificence sweeps by we hear all
+about us, "The princess Vera," and "No, the duchess of Uhra," and "Is
+it?" "Isn't it?" "Which is it?" till we finally settle down to the
+serene conclusion that it is either one or the other. There is no
+mistaking the queen, however, with the outriders, six superb black
+horses and postilions in scarlet and gold. The Majesty herself looks
+pale and resigned, bending to the right and left in answer to the
+bows and _hochs._ Our neighbors "the Weimars" come in full force. A
+superfluous prince of that family appears to have drifted to these
+regions, and makes our street aristocratic for us. Young Weimar looks
+uncommonly well in his hussar uniform, and the old prince and his wife
+and daughter are resplendent. We met them later that same day in town,
+but they had taken off their best clothes, and truth compels us sadly
+to admit that we should hardly have known them.
+
+In the course of time, after various false alarms on our part, the
+band confidently strikes up "God Save the King!" and there is a
+flashing and prancing in the distance that creates a great stir. The
+citizen guard, a stately body of burghers, rides out with the king on
+this day of all the year, and comes caracoling by in fine style, he in
+the midst bowing and smiling. And now, after the _Herrschaften--hohe_
+and _höchste_--come the animals. First, horses haughtily stepping,
+and then splendid bulls with wreaths on their horns and garlands round
+their--waists shall we say?--are led before the king, standing at the
+foot of the steps and handing the prizes to the farmers, who present
+themselves, ducking and scraping. It seems a shame to tie up the
+creatures' legs so, and put rings through their noses: some have
+even a cloth bound over their heads; and if all these precautionary
+measures are necessary, it ought to be a relief when the procession of
+mild cows begins, They look out amiably from under the floral crowns
+that have slipped low on their brows, or turn with half-conscious
+pride to the handsome little calves that trot beside them. The sheep,
+seeking to attract too early the notice of royalty, dash out in a
+flock, and are driven back with jeering and hooting, as they deserve
+to be. Then the pigs stagger by: their garlands are excessively
+unbecoming. Such of the family of swine as are too young to stagger
+are wheeled in handcarts in the rear; and so the ceremonies are
+closed, except for a couple of races which take place immediately, and
+with no great éclat. The burgher races these are called, while on the
+third and last day are the officers' races. The rain prevented our
+attending them, and we consoled ourselves, hearing it intimated by
+those who had been at Ascot and Longchamps that we had not lost a
+great deal.
+
+G.H.P.
+
+
+
+
+A PAIR OF WHEELS AND AN OLD PARASOL.
+
+
+The threads from which the tissue of history is being woven are ever
+in unceasing and rapid motion in the hands of the Fates. But these
+deities for the most part love to work unseen, like the bees. It is
+only when the spinning is going on with exceptional rapidity and
+vigor that the movements of the threads and the characteristics of the
+operation can be observed on the surface of social life, Such is
+the case in these days at Rome, and it is not necessary to watch the
+actions of governments or listen to the discussions of legislative
+chambers in order to assure one's self of the fact. One cannot walk
+the streets without having the phenomena which are the outward and
+visible signs of it thrust in a thousand ways on the observation
+of our senses. The other day I read a whole chapter of contemporary
+history compressed into the appearance of a pair of wheels engaged in
+their ordinary daily duty in the streets. It was in that central and
+crowded part of the city which is between the church of the Gesù and
+the Farnese palace, a labyrinth of tortuous streets and lanes,
+not often visited by foreigners unless when bent on some special
+expedition of sight-seeing. There are no sidewalks for foot-passengers
+in these streets. They are narrow, very tortuous and very crowded.
+Foot-passengers and vehicles of all sorts find their way along as best
+they may in one confused mass. It was there I saw the historic pair
+of wheels in question. They were attached to the barrow of a
+coster-monger, who was retailing a stock of onions, carrots and
+"cavolo Romano" which he had just purchased at the neighboring market
+of the "Campo de' Fiori." His wares, I fear, had been selected from
+the refuse of the market, and he and his barrow were in a state of
+dilapidated shabbiness that matched his stock in trade. But not so the
+wheels on which his barrow was supported. They were wheels of the most
+gorgeous description. The spokes and the circumference were painted
+of the most brilliant scarlet, and the entire nave was gilded so as
+to have the appearance of a solid mass of gold. It is impossible to
+imagine anything more _bizarre_ than the effect of these magnificent
+wheels doing the work of carrying such an equipage. Nevertheless,
+the apparition seemed to attract very little attention in the crowded
+street. The grand scarlet and gilded wheels flamed along among the
+crowd of shabby men and shabby vehicles with their load of onions and
+cabbages, and scarcely anybody turned his head to stare at them. I
+suppose the denizens of the district were used to the apparition of
+them. To me they looked as if they had been the originals from
+which Guido Reni painted those of the car in which he has placed the
+celebrated Aurora of his world-famous fresco. They were solidly and
+heavily built wheels--very barbarous an English carriage-builder would
+have considered them in their heavy and clumsy magnificence--but they
+were very gorgeous. What could be the meaning of their appearance in
+public under such circumstances? I was walking with an Italian friend
+at the time, who saw my state of amazement at so strange a phenomenon,
+and explained it all by a single remark.
+
+"Yes," said he, "there go a pair of His Eminence's wheels. They are
+sharing the fortunes of their late master in a manner that is at once
+dramatic and historical."
+
+The wheels from a cardinal's carriage! Of course they were. How was
+it possible that such wheels should be mistaken for any other in the
+world? A few years ago, when pope and cardinals had not yet suffered
+the horrible eclipse which has overtaken them, one of the most notable
+features of the Roman streets and suburban roads used to consist
+of the carriages of the members of the Sacred College taking their
+diurnal drive. It was not etiquette for a cardinal to walk in the
+streets, or indeed anywhere else, without his carriage following him.
+There was no mistaking these barbarously gorgeous vehicles. They were
+all exactly like each other, and unlike any other carriages to be
+seen in the nineteenth century--heavy, clumsy, coarsely built and
+gorgeously painted of the most flaming scarlet, and largely gilded.
+They were drawn by long-tailed black horses covered with heavy harness
+richly plated with silver, or something that looked like it, and
+driven by a coachman whose livery, always as shabby as magnificent,
+was as heavily laden with huge masses of worsted lace of the kind that
+used to be placed on carriage-linings some five-and-twenty years ago.
+Two similarly bedizened footmen always stood on the monkey-board
+at the rear, who descended and walked behind His Eminence and
+his chaplain when the cardinal left his carriage to get his
+constitutional. Ichabod! Ichabod! The glory has departed! Such
+cavalcades are no longer to be seen crawling along the Via Appia,
+or following His Eminence on a fine and sunny afternoon about four
+o'clock as he walks on the footpath between the Porta Pia and the
+Basilica of St. Agnes in search of an appetite for his dinner. The
+world will never see such carriages and such servants any more. _Fuit
+Ilium!_ I thought of the old lines on the "high--mettled racer," and
+of "imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay, stopping a hole to keep
+the wind away." To see such splendor reduced to the service of such
+vile uses! Yes, as my Italian friend said, "There go the cardinal's
+wheels," and it is impossible not to feel sure that the phenomenon
+is symbolical of the way the cardinal is going himself. When an
+institution, a dignity, a social arrangement of any sort, has grown
+to be purely ornamental, has become so splendid that its splendor has
+come to be the essence of it, it will no longer be able to exist shorn
+of its splendor, however much it may in its origin have been adapted
+for use rather than for show. The wheels were heavy, cumbrous and
+ill put together; they were not well adapted for the costermonger's
+purpose, and will probably fall to pieces before long. Their fate is
+a type of that of their once master. That ornamental individual, shorn
+of his ornamental character, is useless. His _raison d'être_ is gone
+as entirely as Othello's occupation was. And it will probably not be
+long before the fate of the cardinal's wheels overtakes the cardinal
+himself.
+
+The second little bit of street incident which recently occurred to me
+was in itself less striking, but seemed to me to symbolize changes of
+yet higher moment and wider significance. This time what I saw was in
+the Ghetto. Many of my readers probably know what the Ghetto at Rome
+is, but untraveled stayers-at-home may very excusably never have heard
+of it. The Ghetto is the Jews' quarter in Rome--the district in which
+they were for many generations compelled to reside and to be locked
+in by night, and where from habit the greater part, especially of the
+poorer members of the Jewish community, still live. As will be easily
+believed, it is the worst and most wretched quarter of the city--the
+lowest physically as well as morally--and inundated with tolerable
+certainty every year by the rising of the Tiber. The dilapidated and
+filthy streets of the other parts of old papal Rome used to look
+clean and spruce by comparison with the lurid and darksome dens of
+the Ghetto. There are Ghettos in London--streets where the children of
+Israel congregate, not in obedience to any law old or new, but drawn
+together by mutual attraction and similarity of occupation. And the
+occupations there are very much of the same nature as those pursued
+in the Ghetto of Rome--the buying and selling of old clothes and
+second-hand property of all sorts, the preparation and distribution of
+fried fish, and here and there a little usury. But the _genius loci_
+here impresses on the trade in discarded odds and ends a peculiar
+character of its own. A much larger number of old pictures figure
+among the hoards of useless "property" than would be the case
+elsewhere. The constant decay of noble and once wealthy families
+furnishes to the second-hand market a much more abundant supply of
+the remains of articles that were once rich and rare in their day--old
+damask hangings torn from walls that have witnessed the princely
+revelry of many a generation; rich brocades and stuffs that have made
+part of the moving pageant in the same saloons; lace of the finest
+and rarest from the vestments of deceased prelates, whose heirs, as
+regards such property, have probably been their serving-men; purple
+and scarlet articles from the wardrobes of cardinals and princes of
+the Church; and odds and ends of various sorts widely different in
+kind from aught that could be found in similar repositories in other
+cities. And another specialty of the Roman Ghetto is that it is not
+altogether easy to obtain a sight of the miscellaneous treasures of
+this rag-fair. Partly because the low-lying and narrow lanes of the
+Ghetto are too murky and filthy to permit of the advantageous exposure
+of the merchandise in question; partly, probably, from an habitual
+consciousness on the part of the dealers that the details of their
+traffic in all its particulars are not of a nature to be safely
+submitted to the public eye; partly from that secretiveness which is
+the natural result of living for many generations from father to son
+under the tyranny of an alien race, whose bitterly hostile prejudices
+were but little restrained by law or justice; and partly also, no
+doubt, from the genuine Roman laziness, which in its perfection is
+capable of overriding even Jewish keenness of trade,--the Jew brokers
+of the Ghetto are often unwilling to show their hidden stores to the
+first comer. Some amount of diplomacy and some show of the probability
+of effecting an advantageous deal must be had recourse to in order to
+attain the purpose of the explorer.
+
+On the recent occasion to which I have referred these difficulties had
+been overcome, and I had made my way into the interior of one of
+the dens I have described in the company of a lady friend who is a
+confirmed and irreclaimable lace-hunter, and who in pursuit of her
+game would have confronted worse obstacles than any that we had
+to encounter. For, in truth, the exterior appearance and the
+entrance-chambers are the worst part of the Ghetto dwellings. One is
+curiously reminded of the old mediæval stories of Jewish dwellings,
+where the utmost squalor and poverty of exterior was a mere blind for
+an interior gorgeous with every manifestation of wealth and luxury. I
+will not say that much of the latter is to be found in the dwellings
+of the Ghetto, but a degree of comfortable decency and indications
+of the possession of capital may be met with which the exterior
+appearances would not have led one to anticipate. Well, we had reached
+the third floor of one of these sinister-looking abodes, conducted by
+a fat old Jewess with a pair of huge black eyes, a large smooth face
+as yellow as a guinea, and a vast development of bust clad in dirty
+white wrappers of some sort. A door on the landing-place jealously
+locked with two huge keys admitted us into a suite of three good-sized
+rooms crammed from floor to ceiling with a collection of articles more
+heterogeneous than can easily be conceived--far more so than can be
+described.
+
+Those who have ever accompanied a lady lace-hunter when she has struck
+a promising trail know that the business in hand is likely to be a
+somewhat long one. My companion on the present occasion very soon
+convinced the Jewess that she knew quite as much about the matter as
+she, the dealer, did. But I presume that some of the old yellow stores
+produced were "the real thing;" for my friend and the old Jewess soon
+became immersed in an eager and, as it seemed to me interminable,
+discussion as to qualities, condition and values. Meantime, I had to
+amuse myself as best I might by looking at the multifarious objects.
+I must content myself with mentioning one article, the appearance
+of which in such a place struck me as strange and not a little
+significant. It was simply an old parasol, very much faded and a
+little tattered, but not such a parasol as your fair hands ever
+carried, my dear madam, nor such as the once equally fair hands of any
+generation of your ancestors ever carried. The article in question was
+more like the shelter which we see represented in Chinese paintings as
+carried over the heads of persons of high rank among the Celestials.
+It was very large, not much curved into the shape of a dome when
+expanded, very clumsily and coarsely put together, but of gorgeous
+magnificence of material. It was made of a very thick and rich damask
+silk, additionally ornamented by embroidery in gold and silver thread,
+and the handle and points of the supports were richly gilt. In a word,
+I perceived at once, not being a novice in such matters, that the
+article before me was one of the canopies used for holding over the
+"Host" when the holy sacrament is carried by the priest through the
+streets to a dying person. It needs but a moment's reflection on the
+Roman Catholic theory of the sacrament of the "Last Supper" to be
+aware of the extremely sacred nature of the uses to which this parasol
+had been put, and of the associations connected with it. Nevertheless,
+I found this bit of sacred church property in the hands of a Jew
+broker, exposed to sale for a few francs to the first comer, heretic,
+scoffer or infidel, that might take a fancy to buy it. This would
+hardly have been the case when the pope was absolute master of Rome
+and of all in it. The thing could not have happened save by the
+dishonesty and cynical disbelief of some priest, and indeed probably
+of more than one. And, upon the whole, it struck me as a second
+curious indication of the somewhat breakneck speed with which the
+threads of history are spinning themselves in these days and in these
+latitudes.
+
+T.A.T.
+
+
+
+
+MEDICAL EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+
+A great deal of discussion has recently taken place on the subject of
+medical education in the United States. To a foreigner, or to one not
+acquainted with the influences that have led to and have kept up this
+discussion, it might seem to be the result of a spontaneous outburst
+of popular feeling, earnestly demanding much-needed progress. Really,
+however, the very reverse is the case; and the revolutionists are
+those whose _kind_ and _sympathetic_ interest in the welfare of the
+community is prompted solely by selfish considerations. The changes
+urged by these self-condemning philanthropists are not demanded by the
+medical profession nor by the public; neither have they been, nor will
+they be, sustained by both or by either. This assertion is clearly
+proved by the experience of the University of Pennsylvania, In 1846
+the American Medical Association recommended to all medical colleges
+certain changes and improvements in their courses of instruction.
+In consequence of this recommendation the University of Pennsylvania
+extended its session to six months: not a _single medical college in
+the country followed_ its progressive lead, and after continuing the
+experiment for six years at great pecuniary loss, it was reluctantly
+obliged to retrace its steps, and to return to the old standard as to
+length of session. During the period of this advance the classes of
+the University fell off greatly, and the classes of other medical
+schools correspondingly increased. Even medical men sent their sons
+to other medical schools, to save the time and money necessary for the
+longer course. Indeed, medical men, as a rule, have sought to evade
+the restrictions as to length of time of study, etc. more than any
+other class; and the statement, that the "student usually dates his
+medical studies from the time he buys his first _Chemistry_" applies
+more frequently to the sons of _physicians_ than to any others. Hence,
+I declare that these proposed changes are not demanded by the medical
+profession nor by the public.
+
+The writer of a recent article in _Lippincott's Magazine_ (Dr. H.C.
+Wood) on "Medical Education in the United States" seems to have
+been so lost in admiration at the methods of instruction followed in
+European medical colleges as to be utterly blind to the good in the
+system of medical education as it exists in this country--a system the
+_necessary_ result of our political, social, financial and territorial
+conditions; a system which, though in the abstract may not be the
+best, is certainly, judging from its results, the best _possible_
+under our peculiar circumstances. This much abused system of
+medical education (only greatly improved in its extent and
+thoroughness--improvements developed by the constant advances in
+knowledge) is the same system which has produced the great medical
+men of the United States during the past seventy-five years--medical
+practitioners whose success has been surpassed by none in Europe;
+surgeons whose skill has been, and is, world-wide in reputation;
+authors whose works are standard authorities everywhere. It is the
+same system of medical instruction--I quote verbatim (italics mine)
+from this article that holds it up to scorn--which "accomplished such
+_splendid results_ during the late rebellion." The writer says: "The
+great resources of the medical profession were proved during the
+civil war, when there was created in a few months a service which
+for magnitude and efficiency has rarely if ever been equaled. Indeed,
+military medicine was raised by it to a point _never reached before
+that time in Europe_ and the results achieved have, in many points,
+_worked a revolution in science_." After this frank declaration of the
+inestimable value and glorious results of American medical education,
+the writer draws the _logical_(?) sequence that it (American medical
+education) is responsible for a case of most heartrending malpractice,
+which he relates, compared to which the Japanese hari-kari were
+merciful mildness, and approaching more nearly the tortures by
+crucifixion as administered by this same _kind-hearted_ people. With
+about as much reason and justice might he conclude that the _American
+system_ of Sunday-school education is lamentably inferior to that of
+Great Britain, _because_(!) Jesse Pomeroy was a possibility in that
+most respectable town of Boston.
+
+Dr. Wood alludes to the ignorance of the American medical student,
+and makes a statement "not founded on the authority of official
+publication," in which he endeavors to show that from "six to ten
+per cent." of American medical students have an ignorance of vulgar
+fractions and rudimentary astronomy that would exclude them from an
+ordinary infant-school. Every one familiar with the students attending
+our first-class American medical colleges knows perfectly well that
+in origin and in culture they compare favorably with the young men
+engaged in the study of law and divinity, or with those entering upon
+mercantile or manufacturing pursuits. True, there are some imperfectly
+educated, but certainly not "six or ten per cent." destitute of
+that knowledge taught even in _American_ infant-schools, and without
+knowing, and without the statement "being founded on the authority of
+any official publication," I _infer_ that in _Europe_, owing to their
+"better methods," similar knowledge is communicated to the average
+European child many months _before its birth_.
+
+Next follows a comment on the poverty of the American medical student.
+Dr. Wood says: "Even worse than this, however, is the fact that the
+summer between the winter courses is often not spent in study, but
+in idleness, or, not rarely, in acquiring in the school-room or
+harvest-field the pecuniary means of spending the subsequent winter in
+the city." Alas! this _is_ too true. Providence seems to have ordained
+that our young _American_ doctors are not always reared in the lap of
+luxury and wealth as the fittest preparation for the trials, hardships
+and self-denials of their future lives. It is also true that some
+_other_ young American professional men have been compelled "in the
+school-room or harvest-field" to acquire the means to prosecute their
+professional studies. Daniel Webster, the son of a New England farmer,
+taught school at Fryeburg, Maine, "upon a salary of about one dollar
+per diem." "His salary was all saved ... as a fund for his _own
+professional_ education and to help his brother through college."
+"During his residence at Fryeburg, Mr. Webster borrowed (he was too
+poor to buy) Blackstone's _Commentaries_." Mr. Webster's great rival,
+Henry Clay, also was compelled to resort to the "school-room and
+harvest-field to obtain the pecuniary means," etc. etc. etc. The son
+of the poor widow with seven children "applied himself to the labor of
+the field with alacrity and diligence;" "and there yet live those who
+remember to have seen him oftentimes riding his sorry horse, with a
+rope bridle, no saddle, and a bag of grain." "By the familiar name
+of the Mill-boy of the Slashes do these men ... perpetuate the
+remembrance of his lowly yet dutiful and unrepining employments."
+American biography is so filled with similar instances, showing how
+the great characters of her great men acquired their development and
+strength in the stern gymnasium of poverty, even in "the school-room
+and harvest-field," that I could fill volumes with the glowing
+records. The youngest American school-boy recognizes Abraham Lincoln
+and Henry Wilson in this _American_ galaxy. Whose heart has not been
+stirred by the life-story of the great Hugh Miller, the stonecutter's
+pick earning for him humble means, thereby enabling him to acquire
+that learning which made his name a household word even in America.
+Truth, then, as I have remarked, obliges me to admit that we have in
+our medical colleges some young men who labor "in harvest-fields and
+school-rooms" in order that they may honorably pay their way, rather
+than eat the bread or accept the gratuities of pauperism.
+
+Last March there graduated at the medical department of the University
+of Pennsylvania one of these self-supporting young men. He was the son
+of a missionary clergyman: the father was poor in pocket, but the son
+was not poor in spirit. During the interval between his winter courses
+of lectures, rather than be a burden to his father, rather than accept
+gratuitous instruction from the school, he went into the coal regions
+of Pennsylvania and worked in a coal-mine, as a common miner, to
+procure funds to enable him to complete his professional studies;
+and, _strange_ as it may seem, this young miner passed an excellent
+examination, and received the unanimous vote of the medical faculty
+for his degree. I mention this case, but every year there are several
+similar; and we always find that the school-teachers and miners are by
+no means at the foot of the graduating class.
+
+Concerning clinical teaching, we have the following statement:
+"The clinical teaching in an American hospital is comprised in the
+following routine: Once or twice a week, from one to five hundred men
+being congregated in an amphitheatre, the professor lectures upon a
+case brought into the arena, perhaps operates, and when the hour has
+expired the class is dismissed. Evidently, under such circumstances
+there cannot be the training of the senses, the acquiring of a
+knowledge of the hourly play of symptoms of disease and of familiarity
+with the proper handling of the sick and wounded, which is of such
+vital importance, and which can be the outcome only of daily contact
+with patients." What can the writer of this sentence mean? Certainly,
+no one knows better than he does that such _is not_ the practice in
+the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, in Bellevue and in
+many other large hospitals, where clinics and dispensary services
+are held for _several hours daily_ throughout the year, and where the
+student has furnished him abundant opportunities four "acquiring a
+knowledge of the ... symptoms of disease, ... of handling the sick and
+wounded," etc. etc. That the American medical student profits by these
+opportunities, and learns his clinic lessons well, is proved by the
+unexpected and evidently unintended testimony which occurs toward the
+close of the article, where Dr. Wood says, "The great resources of the
+medical profession in America were proved during the civil war, when
+there was created in a _few months_ a service which for _magnitude_
+and _efficiency_ has _rarefy if ever been equaled_. Indeed, military
+medicine was raised by it to a point _never reached before_ that time
+_in Europe_, and the results achieved have in many points worked a
+_revolution in science_." The italics in this quotation are mine, as
+they also are in those which follow.
+
+But (says the article under review) "the largest proportion of our
+prominent physicians have educated themselves after graduation." As
+if this were an extraordinary or unusual circumstance! Certainly,
+they have; and so have all prominent men in all professions and all
+pursuits of life, in every age and every country, not even excepting
+the much-lauded men of Great Britain and the continent of Europe. What
+young lawyer is entrusted with an important cause immediately after
+admission to the Bar? And as the young doctor (according to the
+aforesaid showing) "gains his first practical knowledge while serving
+as a hospital resident, under the supervision of experienced men,"
+so the young lawyer, _even in Great Britain_, must gain _his_ first
+practical knowledge by constant attention at the courts, and by
+diligently following the proceedings of his preceptor's and other
+offices. Even the young clergyman, whose business it is to save
+_souls_, has to do very much as the young doctor does, and, like him,
+is often "thrown at once on his own resources, gaining his experience
+without supervision, and at the _expense_ of the _poorer classes_,
+who _naturally_ fall to his charge, and whose ignorance precludes them
+from an even approximately correct estimate of" his fitness. "It is
+one of the saddest features of our system that the famed skill of our
+best" _(clergymen)_ "should so often be acquired at such a cost."
+
+What can be more unphilosophical and illogical than to compare the
+young doctor, or any other young professional man, to a new piece of
+machinery, fresh from the manufactory, complete and perfect in all
+its parts? And yet something like this is _attempted_ in the article
+before us. Even as Minerva sprang from the brain of Jove the complete
+and perfect goddess of learning, so would our Utopian writer have
+the young doctors to come from the brains of their medical professors
+complete and perfect; only, if his idea be correct, their medical
+professors have so little brains that the annual graduating medical
+classes of the United States would be immediately reduced from
+the frightful army of three thousand "legalized murderers" to the
+comparatively small and easily counted number of _one graduate_ (of
+course, springing from one head). No; the young doctor, at graduation,
+cannot be compared to a new, complete and perfect machine fresh from
+the manufactory; rather, let him be compared to the young marsupial
+creature at birth, extremely rudimentary, whose natural, and hence
+fittest, place is the parental pouch, but which in due time becomes
+the vigorous and well-developed specimen. I suppose, if I compare
+the young doctor to the young marsupial, I should also say that _his_
+protecting parental pouch, in which he acquires growth and vigor, is
+the hospital where he goes after graduation, or the practice which he
+sees under his preceptor's supervision.
+
+The article continues: "The remarks which follow do not apply to
+the medical department of Harvard College or to _one or two other
+schools_" (the italics are mine); and farther on it continues: "In
+other words, Harvard has copied the European plan of medical teaching
+in some of its essential features, and as a consequence its medical
+diploma is the _only one_ issued by _any prominent medical American_
+college which is a _guarantee_ that its possessor has been well
+educated in the science and practice of medicine." Where can we
+find meekness and modesty like this?--modesty as becoming as it
+is unexpected and surprising, seeing that the writer fills _two_
+professorships in the University of Pennsylvania, Does he hang his
+head so low in his--I was about to say _singular_--self-abasement
+(but, considering, the _two_ professorships, I suppose I should say
+_doubled_ self-abasement) that he cannot see? or are his eyes so
+blinded by the effulgence of "Harvard" and "European" plans that he
+fails to recognize and appreciate the immense advantages offered by
+his own home institutions? I do not propose to make any invidious
+remarks concerning Harvard, but I maintain that an _honest_ and _just_
+comparison of the schools, of their requirements, of the character of
+their teachings and the facilities they furnish their students, _must_
+show that modesty alone prevented Professor "H.C. Wood, Jr., M.D.,"
+also excepting from his sweeping denunciations the two great schools
+of Philadelphia, though I only speak for and defend the medical
+department of the University of Pennsylvania from an attack unjust,
+uncalled-for and untrue.
+
+R.A.F. PENROSE.
+
+
+The party opposed to any reforms in medical education has, of course,
+a right to be heard, and Dr. Penrose is well entitled to represent it
+both by his position and by the evident heartiness with which he is
+prepared to defend the existing system at every point. In impugning
+the motives of those who have attacked it he lays himself open to an
+obvious retort; but it is sufficient to remark that the contest is
+not of a nature to call for or justify the use of personalities, which
+could serve only to divert attention from the real issues.
+
+The arguments put forward by Dr. Penrose may be summarized as follows:
+1st, that the proposed changes are not demanded either by the public
+or by the profession; 2d, that the present system is the best possible
+in a nation constituted like ours; 3d, that the preparatory education
+of our medical students is equal to that of law or divinity students,
+or of young men entering upon mercantile or manufacturing pursuits;
+4th, that in certain cases obstacles in the way of a regular and
+thorough training have been overcome and success achieved in spite of
+them; and 5th, that it is unavoidable and proper that medical men, as
+well as members of other professions, should educate themselves after
+graduation.
+
+It will be observed that none of these arguments except the last,
+which is based on a mere verbal ambiguity, touches the two subjects
+discussed in Dr. Wood's article--namely, the _need_ of reform and the
+_methods_ by which, if practicable, it is to be effected. Dr. Penrose
+does not venture to assert that the existing system is perfect, or
+to deny that the suggested changes are in the nature of improvements.
+What he wishes us to believe is that the system, whatever its defects,
+is as good a one as Americans have a right to demand, and that it is
+so closely interwoven with our political and social institutions as to
+admit of no separate handling. Similar arguments are frequently urged
+against the desire to raise the standard and widen the avenues of the
+"higher education." We are thus taught to regard ourselves as a poor
+and struggling nation with no claim to the possession of intellectual
+luxuries, or as having bound ourselves to forego any aspirations to an
+equality with other nations in respect of culture when we secured the
+advantages of popular government and its social concomitants. It would
+seem, however, to be a sounder, as it is certainly a more gratifying
+belief, that precisely because we have attained these advantages
+it will be easier for us to appropriate all the benefits which
+civilization has to offer--possible for us to make more rapid strides
+than have been made by other nations, impeded by a diversity of
+interests and conflicts between the government and the people. No
+doubt the comparative youthfulness of the nation will account for
+our backward condition in certain respects; but surely it is time to
+abandon this and every similar plea as an argument against any attempt
+at progress.
+
+We have not space, and for the reasons indicated we see no necessity,
+to discuss Dr. Penrose's positions in detail. It will be sufficient
+to notice generally what seems to us their inherent weakness. His
+assertion that no changes are _now_ demanded by the public or the
+profession is, he thinks, "clearly proved" by the fact that thirty
+years ago some that were introduced in the University of Pennsylvania
+at the suggestion of the American Medical Association ended in
+failure. But what this experience really proves is, that the defects
+of the system were even then admitted, while the remedies are still to
+be applied. At Harvard this has been done; and the question for other
+medical schools is whether they are to follow the example or to
+be deterred by a bugbear--whether, for example, the University of
+Pennsylvania, after raising her scientific and art departments to
+a higher level, shall be content to let her medical school remain
+stationary. It is the opinion of intelligent physicians who are not
+parties to this controversy that the experiment which failed in 1846
+would succeed now. The new plan adopted at Harvard, which exacts
+three years of study, and embraces lectures, recitations, clinical
+conferences and written examinations of the most stringent character,
+has, we are informed, attracted a class of very superior men. Compared
+with the effort made here in 1846, this change may be described as a
+revolution, and it has proved a success.
+
+We are at a loss to understand what Dr. Penrose wishes to prove by his
+citation of cases in which eminence has been reached--chiefly, it
+is to be noticed, in politics or the law--by persons who have
+had insufficient opportunities for study. If the disadvantage was
+imaginary, where was the merit of overcoming it? If it was real, as
+most people would admit, what is the objection to insisting on it as
+such? In the great majority of cases it is _not_ overcome, and the
+result is, that the country is overstocked with men engaged in the
+practice of professions for which they are inadequately qualified. As
+to the skill that is gained by practice, the ripe knowledge that may
+result from experience, this cannot without a confusion of terms
+be described as "education." It will in general be most surely and
+rapidly acquired by those who have received the best training, and
+the great object of our higher educational institutions should be
+to provide such training--not, by maintaining a low standard, to
+facilitate the efforts of those who, from whatever cause, would find
+it difficult to meet the demands of a higher one. Such persons may
+have a claim to encouragement and assistance in their endeavors to
+reach the mark; but they have no right to expect that the distance
+shall be regulated to suit their convenience.
+
+Dr. Wood's admissions in regard to the excellence of the army medical
+service during the war are seized upon with natural exultation by his
+opponent, who draws from them a legitimate inference in favor of the
+general status of medical skill and knowledge throughout the country.
+If Dr. Wood really intended to say--what his language, we confess,
+would seem to imply--that the service attained its high state of
+efficiency in a few months, we do not well see how he is to resist the
+conclusion thus pressed upon him. But we conceive the truth to be that
+either his phraseology or his recollection of the facts was at fault.
+It is well known that at the beginning of the war it was impossible to
+find competent surgeons in anything like the number that was
+needed, and that the examining boards were consequently forced to be
+ridiculously lenient. We know of an able surgeon who after a battle
+found that he had not a single assistant in his corps who could be
+trusted to perform an operation. This state of matters was the direct
+result of the imperfect education given in the schools. Not one man in
+ten who leaves them has ever been practically exercised in operations
+on the cadaver, and the proportion was still smaller before the war.
+It is easy therefore to understand, while it would be painful to
+recall, the circumstances under which the great bulk of our army
+surgeons acquired the requisite proficiency. The ultimate success
+of our medical service, like the final triumph of our armies, was
+preceded by many woeful blunders and mishaps, and, like that, was due
+in great measure to a lavish outlay which would scarcely have been
+possible in any European war, and to the general devotion and united
+efforts which drew out all the resources of the country, of whatever
+kind, and directed them to the furtherance of a single aim.
+
+
+
+
+OUR EARLY NEWSPAPERS.
+
+
+In looking over the contents of the old newspapers of this country, of
+which there was a considerable number as early as the year 1730, one
+is specially struck by the number of advertisements of slave sales and
+of runaway slaves, apprentices and servants. The following are common
+examples:
+
+"To be sold, a very likely Negro woman about 30 years of Age, has been
+in this city about 10. She is a fine Cook, has been brought up to all
+sorts of House Work, and speaks very good English. She has had the
+small Pox, and has now a Young Child. Enquire further concerning
+her and the Conditions of Sale of Mary Kippen, or the Printer
+hereof."--_New York Weekly Journal_, May 9, 1735.
+
+"Just arrived from _Great Britain_, and are to be Sold on board the
+Ship Alice and Elizabeth, Capt. _Paine_ Commander several likely
+_Welch_ and _English_ Servant Men, most of them Tradesmen. Whoever
+inclines to purchase any of them may agree with said Commander, or Mr.
+_Thomas Noble_, Merchant, at Mr. Hazard's, in New York; where also
+is to be Sold several Negro Girls and a Negro Boy, and likewise good
+_Cheshire_ Cheese."--_New York Gazette_, Sept. 11, 1732.
+
+Here is a notice from the same paper, date 1735, which shows very
+clearly the position of the apprentice one hundred and forty years
+ago:
+
+"Run away on the 5th. Instant from John Bell of the city of New York
+Carpenter, an Apprentice Boy named James Harding, aged about 19 years,
+being a tall well-set Lad of a Fresh Complexion, he wears a Wig, he
+is spley-footed and shuffles with his feet as he Walks, has a Copper
+coloured Kersey Coat with large flat white Mettle Buttons, a grey
+Duroy Coat lined with Silk, it is pretty much faded by wearing, a
+broad blue striped Waistcoat and Breeches and a pair of blue striped
+Tickin Breeches, in warm weather he often bleeds at the nose."
+Then follows the offer of forty shillings to any one who will give
+information whereby his master, John Bell, can regain possession of
+the runaway.
+
+That the women of that time were strong-minded, or at least that they
+were disposed to assist in the reformation of bad husbands, is shown
+by the following from the same journal, date December 31, 1733. The
+subject, or victim, was one William Drinkwater, living near New York,
+who had proved quarrelsome with his neighbors and abusive to his wife:
+"The good Women of the Place took the Matter into Consideration and
+laid hold of an Opportunity, to get him tied to a Cart, and there with
+Rods belaboured him on his Back, till, in striveing to get away, he
+pulled one of his Arms out of Joint, and then they unti'd him. Mr.
+_Drinkwater_ Complained to Sundrie Magistrates of this useage, but all
+he got by it was to be Laughed at; Whereupon he removed to New Milford
+where we hear he proves a good Neighhour and a loving Husband. _A
+Remarkable Reformation ariseing from the Justice of the good Women._"
+
+Another advertisement indicates a toilet article now out of fashion:
+
+"To be Sold by _Peter Lynch_, near Mr. _Rutgers_ Brewhouse, very good
+Orange Butter, it is excellent for Gentlewomen to comb up their Hair
+with, it also cures Children's sore Heads."
+
+The next sounds quite as odd:
+
+"_James Munden_ Partner with _Thomas Butwell_ from London, Maketh
+Gentlewomens Stays and Childrens Coats in the Newest Fashion, that
+Crooked Women and Children will appear strait," Same paper, date
+February, 1735.
+
+It is a curious fact that the deaths at that time, both in the New
+York and New England papers, were announced not by the names of the
+deceased, but by the churches to which they belonged. For example:
+"Buried in the city last week, _viz._, Church of England 26, Dutch 24,
+Lutheran 2, French 1, Presbyterians 3. The number of Blacks we
+refer till Next Week."--_New England Weekly Journal_, Nov. 1, 1731.
+Sometimes the number is recorded as four or five, or even less:
+therefore the record must be very imperfect, and there seems to have
+been no notice taken of those who were not buried from any church.
+
+M.H.
+
+
+
+
+LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
+
+
+    Dante and his Circle; with the Italian Poets preceding him.
+    Edited and translated in the original Metres by Dante Gabriel
+    Rossetti. Revised and rearranged edition, Boston: Roberts
+    Bros.
+
+Dante is so great a figure in Italian literature that he hides from
+sight the host of minor poets who preceded him, and throws his own
+contemporaries so into the shade that we are apt to think that Italian
+poetry began with him, and that its second exponent is Petrarch. Such
+a view is to be regretted, not only because it overlooks much that
+is in itself valuable, but because it attributes to a period of
+slow development a phenomenal character. There were many poets worth
+listening to before the great Florentine wrote the _New Life_ or the
+_Divine Comedy_, and many whom he listened to and praised, although
+his prophetic foresight told him that he would one day bear their
+glory from them.
+
+It was to make us acquainted with these forgotten singers that Mr.
+Rossetti wrote some years ago his charming book. _The Early Italian
+Poets_, which, after being long out of print, he now presents to us in
+a revised and rearranged edition. The author's wish is not merely to
+give us a glimpse of the quaint conceits of a school that continued in
+Italy the waning influence of the Troubadours, but to open to us the
+intimate social life of the literary men of that period as reflected
+in their vague Platonic rhapsodies, their friendly letters, their
+jests and quarrels, their joy and sadness. Interwoven with all this
+are stately _canzoni_, and dainty sonnets full of quaint conceits,
+like that wherein Jacopo da Lentino (1250) sings _Of his Lady in
+Heaven_:
+
+  I have it in my heart to serve God so
+  That into Paradise I shall repair--
+  The holy place through the which everywhere
+  I have heard say that joy and solace flow.
+  Without my lady I were loath to go--
+  She who has the bright face and the bright hair--
+  Because if she were absent, I being there,
+  My pleasure would be less than naught, I know.
+  Look you, I say not this to such intent
+  As that I there would deal in any sin:
+  I only would behold her gracious mien,
+  And beautiful soft eyes, and lovely face,
+  That so it should be my complete content
+  To see my lady joyful in her place.
+
+We seem, in turning over these pages, to see the brilliant,
+ever-changing current of Italian thirteenth and fourteenth century
+life--from Palermo, where Frederick II. held an almost Oriental
+court, to the communes of Central Italy, the best type of which is
+the merchant-city of the Arno, whose sons in those days could fight as
+well as wield the yardstick, and sing in strains that have rarely
+been equaled. In the first division of the work the great poet and his
+friends are brought vividly before us from the time when, a sensitive
+child, his eyes first beheld Beatrice and his new life began, to the
+painful hours of bereavement and exile. The poet, it is known, made
+a curious sonnet out of a dream he had after his first meeting with
+Beatrice, and, in accordance with the fashion of the day, sent it to
+various well-known poets, asking them to interpret his vision. The
+answers are all given here; and among those whose attention was thus
+attracted to the precocious youth was one whom he calls his "first
+friend," Guido Cavalcanti--after Dante one of the most interesting
+literary personages of the day. Rash and chivalrous, we can follow him
+in his poems from the time he made his pilgrimage to the shrine of St.
+James, and fell in love on the way with Mandetta of Toulouse, to the
+turbulent days of Florentine party strife, when he rides down Messer
+Corso Donati, "the baron," and wounds him with his javelin, and then
+goes into exile at Sarzana, where he sings his dying song and sends
+it to his lady, "who," he says, "of her noble grace shall show thee
+courtesy." All the poets were not as constant as their own lines
+would have us believe. Dante reproaches the famous Cino da Pistoja
+for fickleness, and the latter confesses the charge, and declares he
+cannot get "free from Love's pitiless aim." Guido Cavalcanti rebukes
+Dante himself for his way of life after the death of Beatrice; and
+this valuable sonnet should be read in connection with the beautiful
+passage in the _Purgatory_ (xxx. 55-75) where Beatrice herself
+upbraids the tearful poet.
+
+In the second part, comprising _Poets chiefly before Dante_, we have
+specimens of the Sicilian school--a _canzone_ by the great Frederick,
+and a sonnet by his luckless son Enzo, who died in prison at Bologna
+after a confinement of nearly twenty-three years. Of more importance
+are the poems of Guido Guinicelli, of which the philosophical one
+entitled "Of the Gentle Heart" was a nine days' wonder, but which,
+even in Rossetti's elegant version, seems cold and formal. The
+most natural and pleasing pieces among much that is artificial and
+conventional are a ballad and two "catches" by Sacchetti, who died
+just after 1400, and properly does not belong to Dante's circle.
+Mr. Rossetti's readers will, however, be grateful to him for his
+delightful versions of the two catches, one "On a Fine Day," the other
+"On a Wet Day," giving the experiences of a band of young girls who
+have gone to spend the afternoon in the fields and are overtaken by a
+shower.
+
+Poems like these, unfortunately, are rare. The range is a limited
+one--Platonic love in its conventional form, or the still more
+conventional form of chivalric love, imported bodily from the
+Troubadours. Scattered here and there are some noble poems; as, for
+instance, the one attributed to Fazio degli Uberti on his lady's
+portrait, which begins--
+
+  I look at the crisp golden-threaded hair,
+  Whereof, to thrall my heart, Love twists a net;
+  Using at times a string of pearls for bait,
+  And sometimes with a single rose therein.
+
+Mr. Rossetti has performed his task in a way to deserve the warmest
+praise. The difficulties he has overcome are very great, consisting
+not merely of intricate rhyme and assonance, which he has faithfully
+reproduced, but a text often corrupt and meaning often obscure.
+He says himself in his preface that "The life-blood of rhythmical
+translation is this commandment--that a good poem shall not be turned
+into a bad one;" and this commandment, as far as we can see, he has
+not broken in a single case, while in some instances, we are bold
+enough to say, the translation is better than the original.
+
+    History of the Army of the Cumberland, its Organization,
+    Campaigns and Battles. Written at the request of Maj.-Gen.
+    George H. Thomas, chiefly from his private military journal
+    and other official documents furnished by him. By Thomas B.
+    Van Horne, U.S. Army. Illustrated with campaign and
+    battle maps compiled by Edward Ruger, late Superintendent
+    Topographical Engineer Office, Head quarters Department of the
+    Cumberland. 2 vols. and atlas. Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co.
+
+It was natural that General Thomas should make choice of some one to
+whom he could entrust the task of writing his military history. For
+that purpose he chose Mr. T.B. Van Home, a chaplain in the regular
+army, and the work, which was begun in 1865 and finished in 1872, was
+subject to Thomas's own examination. The result is now, after this
+long delay, presented to the public in a shape that does great credit
+to the publishers, whose imprint is almost synonymous with good
+workmanship. Of the literary skill, or want of it, on the part of the
+author not much need be said: he is evidently zealous in his anxiety
+to do honor to the memory of General Thomas, and to do justice to all
+who served with him; but he is sadly lacking in the art of suitably
+clothing his ideas with fitting words, and much of his elaborate
+composition is badly wasted in trying to find extravagant language
+for the recital of important events. In some cases, where the official
+reports printed at the close of each chapter recite in simple words
+the actual occurrences, the text of the book is overlaid with unusual
+words and involved sentences, in which the statement of the same facts
+is lost in a cloud of phraseology of a very curious and original kind.
+"Primal success," "the expression of a stride," "the belligerence of
+the two armies," "philosophy of the victory," "palpable co-operation,"
+"the expression of an insurrection,"--these are some of the odd
+inventions of the author; and for instances of passages just as odd,
+but too long for citation, we refer to the description of the battle
+of Shiloh--a weak imitation of Kinglake's worst style--where we
+are told that "change is the prophecy of unexpected conditions."
+Fortunately, the second volume is much less marred by such faults, and
+the great event of Thomas's career, the battle of Nashville, is told
+with clearness and in full detail.
+
+Although Thomas is the hero of the book from the time when he took
+command at Camp Dick Robinson in August of 1861, it was not till
+October, 1863, which brings us to page 394 of the first volume, that
+he succeeded to the command of the Army of the Cumberland, after
+Rosecrans, who had followed Buell and Sherman and Anderson. Under the
+other generals Thomas had served with marked ability and fidelity, and
+his dealing with them is fairly reflected by the author of this work,
+for he rarely criticises either of Thomas's commanding officers--for
+the most part merely records the operations of the army, and puts in
+most prominence Thomas's own services, just as his military journal no
+doubt supplied the material. Of all that long and dreary marching and
+countermarching through Kentucky and Tennessee the account is full and
+clear, and we find Buell and Halleck saying that they know nothing of
+any plan of campaign in the very midst of their operations. At last
+with Halleck, and still more with Grant in authority, there were
+movements ordered that had some relation to each other and a general
+plan of operations, and then the overwhelming strength of the North
+began to turn the scale. Thomas was called on by Rosecrans, as he had
+been by Buell, for advice, but he was obliged to act independently
+too; and then, as at Stone River, he showed an energy and a capacity
+that ought to have secured his earlier promotion. At Chickamauga he
+was actually left in command by Rosecrans, and while the latter
+was looking for new help elsewhere, Thomas at the front saved the
+shattered army and led it safely back to Chattanooga, where it
+underwent its famous long siege. The measures for its relief were
+planned by Rosecrans, approved by Grant, and executed by Thomas, with
+large assistance from "Baldy" Smith, whose skill as an engineer was
+fully attested then. When Thomas did at last succeed to the command
+of the Army of the Cumberland, he showed his superiority to his
+predecessors by marked improvement in his method of securing supplies,
+in his use of cavalry, and in the increased efficiency of his
+infantry. When Johnston, thanks to Davis's unwise interference with
+the Confederate armies, gave way to Hood, the latter almost at once
+gave token of his inferior skill by being defeated by the Army of the
+Cumberland--by less than half of it, in fact--in an attack intended to
+destroy three armies of more than five times the number of the Union
+force actually engaged. Thomas was in command at this battle of
+Peach-tree Creek, one of the sharpest and most significant actions
+of the campaign, though no official report is found at the end of
+the chapter in which it is described. The events that led up to the
+victory of Nashville are always worth the telling, and the account
+given in this work may be looked upon as in some respects Thomas's own
+version of them. A brief chapter by Colonel Merrill of the Engineers
+gives a very good description of three of the leading features of the
+work done by that corps in the Army of the Cumberland. To cross great
+rivers there was need of pontoon-bridges; to protect the long lines
+of railroads it was necessary to provide block-houses; to go through
+a country that was often a trackless forest, and always badly provided
+with real high-roads, it was all-important to have maps, and to
+reproduce them rapidly and plentifully. Colonel Merrill's chapter
+is pithy, pointed and to the purpose, showing how well our technical
+troops did their share of work, and how large and important that share
+was in securing the general result. The maps are also well done, and
+therefore useful in enabling a reader to follow out the details of the
+narrative.
+
+
+
+
+_BOOKS RECEIVED._
+
+
+Dissertations and Discussions; Political, Philosophical and
+Historical. By John Stuart Mill. Vol. V. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
+
+From Everglade to Canon with the Second Dragoons, 1836-75, Compiled by
+Theo. F. Rodenbough. New York: D. Van Nostrand.
+
+Grand'ther Baldwin's Thanksgiving, with other Ballads and Poems. By
+Horatio Alger, Jr. Boston: Loring.
+
+Shakespeare Hermeneutics; or, The Still Lion. By C.M. Ingleby, M.A.,
+LL.D. London: Trübner & Co.
+
+Minutes of the Ohio State Archæological Convention. Columbus: Printed
+for the Society by Paul & Thrall.
+
+Strength of Beams under Transverse Loads. By Prof. W. Allan. New York:
+D. Van Nostrand.
+
+The Illustrated Catholic Family Almanac for 1876. New York: Catholic
+Publication Society.
+
+Report of the Commissioner of Education for 1874. Washington:
+Government Printing-office.
+
+Our Poetical Favorites. Second Series. By Aschel C. Kendrick. New
+York: Sheldon &Co.
+
+Camp-Life in Florida. By Charles Hallock. New York: Forest and Stream
+Publishing Co.
+
+Lectures on Art. Second Series. By H. Taine. New York: Henry Holt &
+Co.
+
+Pretty Miss Bellew. By Theo. Gift. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
+
+Drawn from. Life. By Charles Dickens. New York: E.J. Hale & Son.
+
+The Conquest of Europe: A Poem of the Future. By Confucius.
+
+Cartoons. By Margaret J. Preston. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Lippincott's Magazine of Popular
+Literature and Science, by Various
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13154 ***
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+
+    <title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Lippincott's Magazine of
+    Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII, No. 98, February,
+    1876.</title>
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13154 ***</div>
+
+    <div class="trans-note">
+        Transcriber's Note: The Table of Contents and the list of
+        illustrations were added by the transcriber.
+    </div>
+    <hr class="full" />
+
+    <h1>LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE</h1>
+
+    <h3>OF</h3>
+
+    <h2><i>POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.</i></h2>
+    <hr class="short" />
+
+    <h4>February, 1876.</h4>
+
+    <h4>Vol. XVII.</h4>
+    <hr class="short" />
+
+    <h3>TABLE OF CONTENTS</h3>
+
+    <div class="toc">
+        <p><a href="#illustrations">ILLUSTRATIONS</a></p>
+
+        <p>THE CENTURY--ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.</p>
+
+        <p class="i4">II.--AMERICAN PROGRESS.
+        <a href="#page137">137</a></p>
+
+        <p>UP THE THAMES.</p>
+
+        <p class="i4">CONCLUDING PAPER, by EDWARD C. BRUCE.
+        <a href="#page154">154</a></p>
+
+        <p>THE POET'S PEN, by F.A. HILLARD.
+        <a href="#page171">171</a></p>
+
+        <p>SKETCHES OF INDIA.</p>
+
+        <p class="i4">II. <a href="#page172">172</a></p>
+
+        <p>FRA ALOYSIUS, by EMMA
+        LAZARUS.<a href="#page183">183</a></p>
+
+        <p>A FEW HOURS IN BOHEMIA. <a href="#page185">185</a></p>
+
+        <p>PROFESSOR AND TEACHER, by JAMES MORGAN
+        HART.<a href="#page193">193</a></p>
+
+        <p>CONTRASTED MOODS, by CHARLOTTE F. BATES.
+        <a href="#page203">203</a></p>
+
+        <p>THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS.</p>
+
+        <p class="i4">by MRS. E. LYNN LINTON, AUTHOR OF "PATRICIA
+        KEMBALL."</p>
+
+        <p class="i4">CHAPTER XXI.
+        &mdash;CHANGES.<a href="#page204">204</a></p>
+
+        <p class="i4">CHAPTER XXII. &mdash;EDGAR HARROWBY.
+        <a href="#page209">209</a></p>
+
+        <p class="i4">CHAPTER XXIII. &mdash;ON THE
+        MOOR.<a href="#page215">215</a></p>
+
+        <p class="i4">CHAPTER XXIV. &mdash;THE CHILD
+        FINA.<a href="#page221">221</a></p>
+
+        <p>LETTERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA, by LADY
+        BARKER.<a href="#page226">226</a></p>
+
+        <p>ON SANKOTA HEAD, by ETHEL C. GALE.
+        <a href="#page234">234</a></p>
+
+        <p>AT THE OLD PLANTATION.</p>
+
+        <p class="i4">TWO PAPERS.&mdash;II., by ROBERT WILSON.
+        <a href="#page241">241</a></p>
+
+        <p>OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.</p>
+
+        <p class="i4">A GERMAN AGRICULTURAL FAIR.
+        <a href="#page250">250</a></p>
+
+        <p class="i4">A PAIR OF WHEELS AND AN OLD PARASOL.
+        <a href="#page252">252</a></p>
+
+        <p class="i4">MEDICAL EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES, by
+        R.A.F. PENROSE.<a href="#page256">256</a></p>
+
+        <p class="i4">OUR EARLY NEWSPAPERS.
+        <a href="#page260">260</a></p>
+
+        <p>LITERATURE OF THE DAY. <a href="#page262">262</a></p>
+
+        <p class="i4"><i>Books Received.</i>
+        <a href="#page264">264</a></p>
+    </div>
+    <br />
+    <hr />
+    <br />
+    <a name="illustrations"
+          id="illustrations"></a>
+
+    <h4>ILLUSTRATIONS</h4>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig137">POST-OFFICE
+    DEPARTMENT BUILDING AT WASHINGTON.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig139-1">THE CAPITOL AT
+    WASHINGTON AND CARPENTERS' HALL, WHERE THE FIRST COLONIAL
+    CONGRESS MET.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig141-1">HOE'S NEW
+    PERFECTING PRINTING-PRESS, PRINTING 12,000 DOUBLE MPRESSIONS
+    PER HOUR, AND THE OLD EPHRATA PRESS.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig143-1">THE CITY OF TOKYO,
+    THE LARGEST STEAMSHIP BUILT IN AMERICA, AND FITCH'S STEAMBOAT,
+    THE FIRST CONSTRUCTED.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig144">THE COTTON
+    GIN.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig145">GRAIN
+    ELEVATOR.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig147">INTERIOR OF A POSTAL
+    CAR.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig149">PROF. S.F.B. MORSE,
+    THE INVENTOR OF THE ELECTRO-MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig151-1">THE SCHOOL-HOUSE
+    OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig154">WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM
+    ETON.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig155">MORTON
+    CHURCH.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig156">MILTON'S PEAR
+    TREE.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig157">GRAY.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig158-1">BEACONSFIELD
+    CHURCH.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig158-2">TOMB OF
+    BURKE.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig159">HEDSOR AND COOKHAM
+    CHURCHES.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig160">ETON COLLEGE AND
+    CHAPEL.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig161">ETON COLLEGE, FROM
+    NORTH TERRACE, WINDSOR.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig162">STAINES
+    CHURCH.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig163">NORMAN GATE AND
+    ROUND TOWER, WINDSOR.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig164">HERNE'S OAK.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig165">EAST FRONT, WINDSOR
+    CASTLE.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig166-1">QUEEN ELIZABETH'S
+    BUILDING, WINDSOR.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig166-2">EARL OF
+    SURREY.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig167">WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM
+    BISHOPSGATE.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig168">LOCK AT
+    WINDSOR.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig169">THE THAMES
+    EMBANKMENT.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig170">ELMS NEAR THE
+    HERONRY.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig173">HINDU TEMPLES NEAR
+    POONA.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig175">GÓNDS.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig177">CENOTAPHS IN THE
+    VALLEY OF THE TONSA.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig179">THE GAUR, OR INDIAN
+    BISON.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig181">BANJARIS.</a></p>
+    <hr />
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page137"
+       id="page137"></a>[pg 137]</span>
+
+    <h2>THE CENTURY&mdash;ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.</h2>
+
+    <h3>II.&mdash;AMERICAN PROGRESS.</h3>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/137.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig137"
+             id="fig137"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/137.jpg"
+             alt="POST-OFFICE DEPARTMENT BUILDING AT WASHINGTON." />
+             </a>POST-OFFICE DEPARTMENT BUILDING AT WASHINGTON.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>From showing the world's right to the epoch of '76, and
+    sketching the progress of the century in its wider aspect, a
+    natural transition is to the part played in illustrating the
+    period by the people from whose political birth it dates, and
+    who have made the task of honoring it their own. They have
+    reached their first resting-place, and pardonably enjoy the
+    opportunity of looking back at the road they have traversed.
+    They pause to contemplate its gloomy beginning, the perilous
+    precipices along which it wound, and the sudden quagmires that
+    often interrupted it, all now softened by distance and by the
+    consciousness of success. Opening with a forest-path, it has
+    broadened and brightened into a highway of nations.</p>
+
+    <p>So numerous and various were the
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page138"
+       id="page138"></a>[pg 138]</span> influences, formative and
+       impellent, which combined to bring the colonies up to the
+       precise ripening-point of their independence, as to make it
+       difficult to assign each its proper force. In the concentric
+       mass, however, they stand out sharp and clear, and the
+       conjoint effect seems preordained. That the event should
+       have come when it did, and not before or after, is as
+       obvious as any of history's predictions after the fact.
+       Looking through the glasses of to-day, we find it hard to
+       realize that the Continental Congress renewed its
+       expressions of loyalty to the king three weeks after the
+       battle of Bunker Hill, so distinct before us rises the
+       completed and symmetrical edifice of separation ready for
+       its capstone, from its foundations growing steadily through
+       the past.</p>
+
+    <p>Thirteen years&mdash;one for each State&mdash;were occupied
+    in the topping-off. The Seven Years' War, that created the new
+    central power of modern Europe, had a great deal to do with
+    creating the new American power. It taught the colonies their
+    strength, gave them several thousand native soldiers, and sent
+    them from over the water the material, some of it completely
+    wrought, for more in the German immigration consequent upon it.
+    Out of it grew the obnoxious enactments that brought on the
+    end. So closely simultaneous were these with the king's
+    proclamation of October 7, 1763, prohibiting all his subjects
+    "from making any purchases or settlements whatever, or taking
+    possession of any of the lands, beyond the sources of any of
+    the rivers which fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the west or
+    north-west," as to support the suspicion that the British
+    ministry had a premonitory sense of the coming struggle, and
+    meant to prepare for it by checking the expansion of the
+    colonies. The pressure applied to front and rear was part of
+    one and the same movement; and is incompatible with the
+    accepted view that neither cabinet nor Parliament anticipated,
+    in the first instance, any American opposition to the Stamp Act
+    and the system of legislation to which it was the opening
+    wedge. The England of that day proposed to rule America after
+    much the same fashion with Ireland, the Alleghanies presenting
+    themselves very conveniently for an Indian Pale. This line of
+    policy was in harmony with the ideas then predominant in
+    England, and was fully understood by the colonists. They could
+    not possibly have been blind to it, in view of the continuous
+    and repeated claims of absolute legislative supremacy formally
+    put forth, from the bill to that effect passed coincidently
+    with the repeal of the Stamp Act down to the alterations made
+    in the Massachusetts charter in 1774; the latter proceeding
+    being in close harmony, both in time and motive, with the
+    extension of the province of Quebec to the Ohio&mdash;one of
+    the very rare evidences of sagacity and foresight discernible
+    in the course of the ministry; for, while it did not avail to
+    dam the westward flood, it certainly contributed, with other
+    concessions made at the same time to the Canadians, to save the
+    St. Lawrence to the Crown.</p>
+
+    <p>As apropos to this point, we transcribe from the original
+    manuscript, written in the round, clear, unhesitating but
+    steady hand characteristic of all Washington's letters, the
+    following to James Wood of Winchester, afterward governor of
+    Virginia, but then little more than a stripling:</p>
+
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>"MOUNT VERNON, Feb'y 20th, 1774.</p>
+
+        <p>"DEAR SIR: I have to thank you, for your obliging acc't
+        of your trip down the Mississippi, contained in a Letter of
+        the 18th of Octob'r from Winchester&mdash;the other Letter,
+        therein refer'd to, I have never yet receiv'd, nor did this
+        come to hand till some time in November, as I was returning
+        from Williamsburg.</p>
+
+        <p>"The contradictory acc'ts given of the Lands upon the
+        Mississippi are really astonishing&mdash;some speak of the
+        Country as a terrestrial Paradise, whilst others represent
+        it as scarce fit for anything but Slaves and Brutes. I am
+        well satisfied, however, from your description of it, that
+        I have no cause to regret my disappointment:&mdash;The
+        acc't of Lord Hillsborough's sentiments of the Proclamation
+        of 1763, I can view in no other light than as one, among
+        many other proofs, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page139"
+           id="page139"></a>[pg 139]</span> of his Lordship's
+           malignant disposition towards us poor Americans, formed
+           equally in malice, absurdity, and error; as it would
+           have puzzled this noble Peer, I am persuaded, to have
+           assigned any plausible reason in support of this
+           opinion.</p>
+
+        <p>"As I do not know but I may shortly see you in
+        Frederick, and assuredly shall before the Assembly, I shall
+        add no more than that, it will always give me pleasure to
+        see you at this place whenever it is convenient to you, and
+        that with compliments to your good Mother I remain, D'r
+        Sir, Y'r most Obed't H'ble Serv't,</p>
+
+        <p>"G'o WASHINGTON."</p>
+    </blockquote>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/139-1.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig139-1"
+             id="fig139-1"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/139-1.jpg"
+             alt="THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON." />
+        </a>THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON AND CARPENTERS' HALL, WHERE
+        THE FIRST COLONIAL CONGRESS MET.
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="figleft"
+         style="width:50%;">
+        <a href="images/139-2.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig139-2"
+             id="fig139-2"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/139-2.jpg"
+             alt="CARPENTERS' HALL." /></a>
+    </div>
+
+    <p>This private note, discussing casually and curtly the great
+    river of the West, and the minister who endeavored to make it a
+    <i>flumen clausum</i> to the colonists, nearly equidistant in
+    date between the Boston Tea-party and the meeting of the
+    Assembly which called the first Continental Congress, has some
+    public interest. The West always possessed a peculiar
+    attraction for Washington. He explored it personally and
+    through others, and lost no occasion of procuring detailed
+    information in regard to its capabilities. He acquired large
+    bodies of land along the Ohio at different points, from its
+    affluents at the foot of the Alleghany to the Great Kanawha and
+    below. Now we see him gazing farther, over the yet unreddened
+    battle-grounds of Boone and Lewis, to the magnificent province
+    France and Spain were carefully holding in joint trusteeship
+    for the infant state he was to nurse. The representative in the
+    provincial legislature of a frontier county stretching from the
+    Potomac to the Ohio, we may fancy him inspired, as he looked
+    around from his post on the vertebral range of the continent,
+    with "something of prophetic strain." If so, he was not long to
+    have leisure for indulging it. Within eighteen months his
+    life's work was to summon him eastward to the sea-shore. The
+    Dark and Bloody Ground must wait. For its tillage other guess
+    implements than the plough were
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page140"
+       id="page140"></a>[pg 140]</span> preparing&mdash;the same
+       that beckoned him to Cambridge and the new century.</p>
+
+    <p>The slender driblet of population which at this juncture
+    flowed toward the Lower Mississippi was due to the anxiety of
+    Spain to get a home-supply of wheat, hemp and such-like
+    indispensables of temperate extraction for her broad tropical
+    empire. A newspaper of August 20, 1773 gives news from New York
+    of the arrival at that port of "the sloop Mississippi, Capt.
+    Goodrich, with the Connecticut Military Adventurers from the
+    Mississippi, but last from Pensacola, the 16th inst." They had
+    "laid out twenty-three townships at the Natchez," where lands
+    were in process of rapid occupation, the arrivals numbering
+    "above four hundred families within six weeks, down the Ohio
+    from Virginia and the Carolinas." The Connecticut men doubtless
+    came back prepared, a little later, to vindicate their martial
+    cognomen; and to aid them in that they were met by
+    Transatlantic recruits in unusual force. The same journal
+    mentions the arrival at Philadelphia of 1050 passengers in two
+    ships from Londonderry; this valuable infusion of Scotch-Irish
+    brawn, moral, mental and muscular, being farther supplemented
+    by three hundred passengers and servants in the ship Walworth
+    from the same port for South Carolina. The cash value to the
+    country of immigrants was ascertainable by a much less
+    circuitous computation then than now; many of them being
+    indentured for a term of years at an annual rate that left a
+    very fair sum for interest and sinking fund on the one thousand
+    dollars it is the practice of our political economist of to-day
+    to clap on each head that files into Castle Garden. The German
+    came with the Celt in almost equal force&mdash;enough to more
+    than balance their countrymen under Donop, Riedesel and
+    Knyphausen. The attention drawn to the colonies by the
+    ministerial aggressions thus contributed to strengthen them for
+    the contest.</p>
+
+    <p>But with all these accessions in the nick of time, two
+    millions and a quarter of whites was a meagre outfit for
+    stocking a virgin farm of fifteen hundred miles square, to say
+    nothing of its future police and external defence against the
+    wolves of the deep. It barely equaled the original population,
+    between the two oceans, of nomadic Indians, who were, by
+    general consent, too few to be counted or treated as owners of
+    the land. It fell far short of the numbers that had
+    constituted, two centuries earlier, the European republic from
+    which our federation borrowed its name. The task, too, of the
+    occidental United States was double. Instead of being condensed
+    into a small, wealthy and defensible territory, they had at
+    once to win their independence from a maritime power stronger
+    than Spain, and to redeem from utter crudeness and turn into
+    food, clothing and the then recognized appliances of civilized
+    life the wilderness thus secured. The result could not vary nor
+    be doubted; but that the struggle, in war and in peace, must be
+    slow and wearing, was quite as certain. It is dreary to look
+    back upon its commencement now, and upon the earlier decades of
+    its progress; and we cannot wonder that those who had it to
+    look forward to half shrank from it. Among them there may have
+    been a handful who could scan the unshaped wilderness as the
+    sculptor does his block, and body forth in imagination the
+    glory hidden within. That which these may have faintly imagined
+    stands before us palpable if not yet perfected, the amorphous
+    veil of the shapely figure hewn away, and the long toil of
+    drill and chisel only in too much danger of being
+    forgotten.</p>
+
+    <p>Population, the most convenient gauge of national strength
+    and progress, is far from being a universally reliable one. We
+    shall find sometimes as wide a difference between two given
+    millions as between two given individuals. Either may grow
+    without doing much else. They may direct their energies to
+    different fields. Compared with the United States, France and
+    Germany, for example, have advanced but little in population.
+    They have, however, done wonders for themselves and the world
+    by activities which we have, in comparison, neglected. The old
+    city of London gains in wealth as it loses in inhabitants.
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page141"
+       id="page141"></a>[pg 141]</span></p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/141-1.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig141-1"
+             id="fig141-1"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/141-1.jpg"
+             alt="HOE'S NEW PERFECTING PRINTING-PRESS." />
+        </a><br />HOE'S NEW PERFECTING PRINTING-PRESS, PRINTING 12,000
+        DOUBLE IMPRESSIONS PER HOUR, AND THE OLD EPHRATA PRESS.
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="figleft"
+         style="width:40%;">
+        <a href="images/141-2.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig141-2"
+             id="fig141-2"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/141-2.jpg"
+             alt="THE OLD EPHRATA PRESS." /></a>
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Yet success in the multiplication of souls within their own
+    borders&mdash;depopulate as they may elsewhere&mdash;is eagerly
+    coveted and regularly measured by all the nations. Since 1790,
+    when we set them the example, they have one by one adopted the
+    rule of numbering heads every five, six or ten years,
+    recognizing latterly as well, more and more, the importance of
+    numbering other things, until men, women and children have come
+    to be embedded in a medley of steam-engines, pigs, newspapers,
+    schools, churches and bolts of calico. For twenty centuries
+    this taking of stock by governments had been an obsolete
+    practice, until revived by the framers of the American
+    Constitution and made a vital part of that instrument. The
+    right of the most&mdash;and not of the richest, the best, the
+    bravest, the cleverest, or the oldest in blood&mdash;to rule
+    being formally recognized and set down on paper, it became
+    necessary to ascertain at stated intervals who were the most.
+    The lords of the soil, instead of being inducted into power on
+    the death of their parents with great pother of ointment, Te
+    Deum, heraldry, drum and trumpet, were chosen every ten years
+    by a corps of humble knights of the pencil and schedule.</p>
+
+    <p>To these disposers of empire, the enhancement and
+    complication of whose toil has been a labor of love with each
+    decennial Congress, we owe the knowledge that eighty years, out
+    of the hundred, brought the people of the Union up from a tally
+    of 3,929,214 in 1790 to 38,558,371 in 1870, and that down to
+    the beginning of the last decade the rate of increment adhered
+    closely to 35 per cent. On that basis of growth the latest
+    return falls nearly four millions short. One of the causes of
+    this is "too obvious" (and too disagreeable) "to mention;" but
+    it is inadequate. The sharp demarcation of the western frontier
+    by the grasshopper and the hygrometer is another, which will
+    continue to operate until, by irrigation, tree-planting or some
+    other device, a new climate can be manufactured for the Plains.
+    The teeming West, that of old needed only to be tickled with a
+    hoe to laugh with a harvest, has disappeared. At least what is
+    left of it has lost the power of suction that was wont to reach
+    across the ocean, pull Ballys and Dorfs up by the roots and
+    transplant them bodily to the Muskingum and the Des Moines. A
+    third cause, operating more especially within the current
+    decade, is attributable to another mode in which that
+    attractive power has been exerted&mdash;the absorption from the
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page142"
+       id="page142"></a>[pg 142]</span> European purse for the
+       construction of railways of seven or eight times as much as
+       the thirty-five millions in specie it took to fight through
+       the Revolutionary war. For a while, Hans came with his
+       thalers, but they outfooted him&mdash;"fast and faster"
+       behind came "unmerciful disaster," and he was fain to turn
+       his back on the land of promise and promises. Similar
+       set-backs, however, are interspersed through our previous
+       history, and the influence of the last one may be
+       over-rated.</p>
+
+    <p>In truth, the Old World's fund of humanity is not
+    sufficiently ample to keep up the pace; and the rate of natural
+    increase is no longer what it was when the country was all new,
+    and cornfield and nursery vied in fecundity. That the former
+    source of augmentation is gaining in proportion upon the latter
+    is apparent from the last three returns. The ratio of
+    foreign-born inhabitants to the aggregate in 1850 was 9.68 per
+    cent. in 1860, 13.16, and in 1870, 14.44. In the last-named
+    year, moreover, 10,892,015, or 28 per cent. of the entire
+    population, white and black, are credited with foreign
+    parentage on one or both sides. Excluding the colored element,
+    ranked as all native, this proportion rises to 32 per cent.</p>
+
+    <p>Judged by the test of language, three-fifths of those who
+    are of foreign birth disappear from the roll of foreigners,
+    3,119,705 out of 5,567,229 having come from the British Isles
+    and British America. Germany, including Bohemia, Holland and
+    Switzerland, sums up 1,883,285; Scandinavia, 241,685; and
+    France and Belgium, 128,955. The Celtic influx from Ireland,
+    and the Teutonic and Norse together, form two currents of
+    almost identical volume. Compared with either, the contribution
+    of the Latin or the Romance races sinks into
+    insignificance&mdash;an insignificance, however, that shows
+    itself chiefly in numbers, the traces of their character and
+    influence being, relatively to their numerical strength,
+    marked. The immigrants from Northern and Southern Europe have a
+    disposition, in choosing their new homes, to follow latitude,
+    or rather the isotherms; the North-men skirting the Canadian
+    frontier and grouping themselves on the coldest side of Lake
+    Michigan, while the Italians, Spaniards and French drift toward
+    the Gulf States. The Irish and Germans are more cosmopolitan,
+    each in a like degree. They disperse with less regard to
+    climate or surroundings, and are more rapidly and imperceptibly
+    absorbed and blended, thus promoting rather than marring the
+    homogeneity of the American people. The Germans are, however,
+    more prone to colonizing than the Irish&mdash;a circumstance
+    due in great measure to their differing in language from the
+    mass of their new neighbors. This cause of isolation is
+    gradually losing its weight, the recognition of the German
+    tongue by State legislatures, municipalities, etc. being less
+    common than formerly, notwithstanding the immense immigratior
+    so calculated to extend it.</p>
+
+    <p>While assimilation has been growing more complete, and a
+    fixed resultant becoming more discernible, the ingredients of
+    this ethnic medley do not seem to have materially varied in
+    their proportions since the beginning of the century. They
+    present a tolerably close parallel to the like process in
+    Northern France, where Celt and Teuton combined in nearly equal
+    numbers, with, as in our case, a limited local infusion of the
+    Norse. The result cannot, however, be identical, the French
+    lacking our Anglo-Saxon substratum, with its valuable
+    traditions and habitudes of political thought. The balance
+    between impulse and conservatism has never been, in this
+    country, long or seriously disturbed, and is probably as sound
+    now as a hundred years ago. In the discussions of the twenty
+    years which embrace our Revolutionary period we find abundance
+    of theory, but they were never carried by abstractions out of
+    sight of the practical. Our publicists were not misled by
+    convictions of the "infinite perfectibility of the human mind,"
+    the motive proclaimed by Condorcet, writing in sweet
+    obliviousness of the guillotine, as explaining "how much more
+    pure, accurate and profound are the principles upon which the
+    constitution and laws of France have been formed than those
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page10"
+       id="page10"></a>[pg 10]</span> which directed the
+       Americans." The lack of this equilibrium among the pure,
+       and, as we may venture to term them, the untrained races, we
+       have occasional opportunities of noting on our own soil when
+       for a passing cause they resort to isolated action.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/143-1.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig143-1"
+             id="fig143-1"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/143-1.jpg"
+             alt="THE CITY OF TOKYO." />
+        </a>THE CITY OF TOKYO, THE LARGEST STEAMSHIP BUILT IN
+        AMERICA, AND FITCH'S STEAMBOAT, THE FIRST CONSTRUCTED.
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="figleft"
+         style="width:40%;">
+        <a href="images/143-2.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig143-2"
+             id="fig143-2"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/143-2.jpg"
+             alt="FITCH'S STEAMBOAT." /></a>
+    </div>
+
+    <p>A race-question of a character that cannot be supplied by
+    differentiation within Caucasian limits haunts us as it has
+    done from the very birth of the colonies. Like the Wild
+    Huntsman, we have had the sable spectre close beside us through
+    the whole run. But, more fortunate than he, we see it begin to
+    fade. At least its outlines are contracting. The ratio of
+    colored inhabitants to the aggregate, in 1790 19.26 per cent.,
+    or one-fifth, fell in 1860 to 14.12, or one-seventh, and in
+    1870 to 12.65, or an eighth. The next census will beyond doubt
+    point more strongly in the same direction. If, whilst dwindling
+    in magnitude, the dusky shape perplex us by assuming suddenly a
+    novel form, we may yet be assured that it is the same in
+    substance and in manageability. Its hue is whitening with the
+    fleece of five millions of cotton bales. The cloud has a silver
+    lining&mdash;a golden one in fact&mdash;for ours is pecuniarily
+    a serviceable phantom to the extent of adding to our annual
+    income a sum equal to eight or ten times the entire yearly
+    export of the colonies. Should he lead us, like the
+    Land&mdash;und&mdash;Wild&mdash;Graf, into the pit of ruin, he
+    will have first bottomed it with an ample and soft cushion of
+    lint whereon to fall.</p>
+
+    <p>Extremes meet, and modern culture, like ancient anarchy,
+    drives its people into cities. Such is the tendency on both
+    sides of the ocean. Improvement must result from associated
+    effort, and of that cities are the last expression. All the
+    European towns are outgrowing the rural districts. With us the
+    change states itself in an advance, since 1790, of the city
+    population from 3.4 to 20.9 per cent. of the aggregate.
+    Broadcloth has gained on homespun in the proportion of six to
+    one, Giles having thus six mouths to fill where he formerly had
+    but one. We shall show farther on how gallantly he meets this
+    draft. New York, with its suburbs, contains more Germans than
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page144"
+       id="page144"></a>[pg 144]</span> any German city save Vienna
+       and Berlin, more Irish than Dublin, and more
+       English-speaking inhabitants than Liverpool, Birmingham,
+       Manchester, Bristol and Leeds together. All the colonial
+       towns in a lump would scarce add a twentieth to her numbers,
+       and her militia embraces nearly twice as many men as served,
+       first and last, in the Continental army.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/144.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig144"
+             id="fig144"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/144.jpg"
+             alt="THE COTTON GIN." /></a>THE COTTON GIN.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>But the column that sums the souls does not state the
+    complete life of the cities. Man has in our day a host of
+    allies that work with him and at his command&mdash; slaves of
+    iron, steel and brass wholly unknown to our
+    great&mdash;grand-fathers&mdash; fed also by the farmer,
+    through the miner as an intermediate. Steam-engines, to the
+    number of 40,191, and of 1,215,711 horse-power&mdash;all of the
+    stationary variety, and exclusive of nearly half as many that
+    traverse the country and may be classed among the rural
+    population&mdash;have succeeded the websters and spinners who
+    were wont to clothe all the world and his wife, and who survive
+    only in the surnames of some of our statesmen and financiers.
+    Not that they confine their labors to textile fabrics. Their
+    iron fingers are in every pie, including that of the printer,
+    who is answered, when he calls the roll of his serfs of steam,
+    by 691 whistles. And he is one of the smallest of the
+    slaveholders&mdash;a mere ten-bale man. India-rubber, a product
+    known a century ago only by some little black lumps used by
+    draughtsmen to erase pencil-marks, owns enough of them to equal
+    4412 horses or 22,000 No. 1 field hands. Boots and shoes not of
+    the India-rubber variety employ 3212 horse-power or 15,000
+    steam Crispins, over and above their Christian fellows who
+    stick solitary to the last, and who, it must be owned, produce
+    an article more of the Revolutionary type and more solid and
+    durable. As a cord-wainer Steam is a failure; but he works
+    cheaply, and will continue to hammer on, and disseminate his
+    commodity of brown paper throughout the temperate zone.
+    Three-fourths of the population of the globe still runs unshod,
+    however, and it is obvious that this crying want cannot be met
+    by the old system. Steam will perforce keep pegging away till
+    Cathay, Xipangu, India and all the isles awaken to the
+    absurdity of walking on cotton or undressed human skin. Could
+    one of our 299 fire-fed cobblers have been set to work at
+    Valley Forge, backed by one of the 1057 makers of woolen that
+    are similarly nourished!</p>
+
+    <p>But we do Mr. Watt's lusty bantling
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page145"
+       id="page145"></a>[pg 145]</span> injustice in assigning him
+       exclusively the tastes of a cit. He is not insensible to
+       pastoral charms, and often selects a home among the hemlocks
+       and under the broad-armed oaks, by bosky glen or open mead,
+       wherever the brooklet brawls or dreams, for he sticks to the
+       waterside like a beaver. Here he sits down, like an artist
+       as he is, until he has got all the choice bits of the grove.
+       The large and bustling family of the sawyers, both top and
+       bottom, he has utterly banished from their ancient haunts.
+       'There would be needed a million and a half of them to take
+       the places of 11,199 steam-engines, of 314,774 horse-power,
+       that are devastating our forests. An equal number is
+       replaced by the 16,559 water-wheels, of 326,728 horse-power,
+       engaged in the same field of havoc. Armed with the handsaw,
+       all the Revolutionary patriots and Tories together,
+       withdrawing their attention entirely from military affairs,
+       as well as from all other mundane concerns, would not have
+       turned out one-sixth of the quantity of lumber demanded by
+       their descendants of a period that boasts itself the age of
+       iron, and has as little as possible to do with wood. And if
+       we place in the hands of the patriarchs the ancestral axes,
+       and tell them to get out charcoal for three millions of tons
+       of iron, to be hauled an average of a hundred miles to
+       market by oxen over roads whose highest type was the
+       corduroy, the imagination reels at the helplessness of the
+       heroes.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/145.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig145"
+             id="fig145"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/145.jpg"
+             alt="GRAIN ELEVATOR." /></a>GRAIN ELEVATOR.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>The paternal thoughtfulness of the home government employed
+    itself in relieving the colonist from such exhausting drafts
+    upon his energies. It sedulously prohibited his throwing
+    himself away on the manufacture of iron or anything else. In
+    1750 it placed him under a penalty of £200 for erecting a
+    rolling-mill, tilt-hammer or steel-furnace. Lest the governor
+    of the colony should fail to enforce this statute and protect
+    the pioneer from such a waste of time, it held that functionary
+    to a personal forfeit of £500 for failing, within thirty days
+    after presentment by two witnesses on oath, to abate as a
+    nuisance every such mill, engine, etc. As this mulct would have
+    made a serious inroad on the emoluments of the royal governors,
+    even with the addition of the inaugural douceur customarily
+    given by the provincial assemblies to each new
+    incumbent&mdash;in Virginia regularly £500, doubled in the
+    instance of Fauquier in <span class="pagenum"><a name="page146"
+       id="page146"></a>[pg 146]</span> 1758, when it was desired
+       to drive the entering wedge of disestablishment and razee
+       the parsons&mdash;we are prepared to believe that the iron
+       business was not flourishing. Under a despotism tempered so
+       very moderately by bribes, a similar blight fell upon all
+       other branches of manufacture. Among these, wool, flax,
+       paper, hats and leather are specified in a Parliamentary
+       report as interfering with "the trade, navigation and
+       manufactures" of the mother-country. An act of Parliament
+       accordingly forbade the exportation of hats to foreign
+       countries, and even from one colony to another.</p>
+
+    <p>That, after such a course of repression, the country found
+    itself wholly unprepared on the attainment of independence to
+    make any headway in this field, is no matter of surprise.
+    Thirty years elapsed before the manufacturing statistics of the
+    Union became presentable. In 1810 they were reckoned at
+    $198,613,471. This embraces every fruit of handicraft, from a
+    barrel of flour and a bushel of lime to a silk dress. We had
+    122,647 spindles and 325,392 looms, made 53,908 tons of pig
+    iron, and refined about one pound of sugar for each head of the
+    population. In 1870, after sixty years of tossing between the
+    Scylla and Charybdis of tariffs, "black" and white, the yield
+    of our factories had mounted to the respectable sum of
+    $4,232,325,442. They employed 2,053,996 operatives. Of these,
+    the average wages were $377, against $289 in 1860 and $247 in
+    1850, yearly. The advance in the product of refined sugar may
+    be cited as illustrative of the progress of the people in
+    comfort and luxury. It reached a value of one hundred and nine
+    millions, representing nearly ten times as many pounds, or
+    twenty-eight pounds a head. This exemplification is but one in
+    an endless list.</p>
+
+    <p>Manufactures have come to figure respectably in our exports.
+    They exceed in that list, by three or four to one, the entire
+    exports of all kinds in 1790; and they equal the average
+    aggregate of the years from 1815 to 1824. But the
+    multiplication of the wants of a people rapidly growing in
+    numbers and refinement will, with the comparatively high price
+    of labor, scarcity of capital and distance of most of our ports
+    from the markets supplied by European manufactures, for a long
+    time to come make the home-supply the chief care of our
+    artisans. They have, for such and other reasons, in some points
+    lost ground of late. The revolution in the propulsion and
+    construction of ships, for instance, has not found them
+    prepared to take the advantage they have usually done of
+    improvements. Not only do the British screw-steamers take
+    undisputed possession of our trade with their own country, but
+    they expel our once unrivaled craft from the harbors of other
+    quarters of the globe, and threaten to monopolize the most
+    profitable part of our carrying-trade with all countries. This
+    result is more easily explained than the inroads made on our
+    more ordinary foreign traffic, in sailing vessels, by the
+    mercantile marine of second- and third-rate powers. This is
+    eloquently told by the annual government returns and the daily
+    shipping-list. While our coastwise tonnage increases, that
+    employed in foreign trade remains stationary or declines. The
+    bearing of this upon our naval future becomes an imperative
+    question for our merchants and legislators. The United States
+    is benevolently and gratuitously building up a marine for each
+    of half a dozen European states which possess little or no
+    commerce of their own, and multiplying the ships and sailors of
+    our chief maritime rival. We have long since ceased to import
+    locomotives, and have, within the past two years, almost ceased
+    to import railroad iron. Our iron-workers obtain coal at nearly
+    or quite as low prices as do those of Birkenhead or the Clyde.
+    They have recently sent to sea some large screw-steamers that
+    perform well. No insurmountable difficulty appears to prevent
+    the launching of more until we have enough to serve at least
+    our direct trade with Europe and China. That determined, it may
+    be possible to ascertain whether we cannot assist Norway,
+    Belgium and Sicily in carrying our cotton, wheat and tobacco to
+    the purchasers of
+    it.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page147"
+       id="page147"></a>[pg 147]</span>
+
+    <div class="figright"
+         style="width:70%;">
+        <a href="images/147.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig147"
+             id="fig147"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/147.jpg"
+             alt="INTERIOR OF A POSTAL CAR." /></a>INTERIOR OF A
+             POSTAL CAR.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>This decline in American tonnage is, it must be added, only
+    relative, whether the comparison be made with other countries
+    or with our own past. The returns show a carrying capacity in
+    our ships more than twentyfold that of 1789, and three times
+    that of 1807; when, on the other hand, it exceeded in the ratio
+    of fourteen to twelve that of 1829, twenty-two years later.
+    This interest is peculiarly subject to fluctuations; some of
+    which in the past have been less explicable than the one it is
+    now undergoing. Another decade may turn the tables, and restore
+    the flag of the old Liverpool liners to their fleeter but less
+    shapely supplanters. The steamer and the clipper are both
+    American inventions. Why not their combination ours as well?
+    The centenary of Rumsey's boat, not due till December 11, 1887,
+    should not find its descendants lording the ocean under another
+    flag.</p>
+
+    <p>The monthly Falmouth packet of a century ago, sufficient
+    till within the past two generations for the mail communication
+    of the two continents, has grown into six or eight steamships
+    weekly, each capable of carrying a pair of the old sloops in
+    her hold, and making the passage westwardly in a fifth and
+    eastwardly in a third of the time. Can it be but ninety years
+    ago that the latest dates at New York (February 14, 1786) from
+    London (December 7, 1785) brought as a leading item from Paris
+    (November 20) the news that Philippe Égalité had by his
+    father's death just come into four millions of livres a year,
+    that six hundred thousand livres paid by the Crown to his
+    father thereupon devolved to Monsieur (afterward Louis XVIII.),
+    and that the latter had kept up the game of shuttlecock with
+    the treasure of the French by "a donation of all his estates to
+    the duke of Normandy, the younger son of their Majesties,
+    preserving for himself the use and profits thereof during his
+    life"? That was a short winter-passage, too&mdash;more speedy
+    than the land-trip of a letter in the same journal "from a
+    gentleman in the Western country to his friend in Connecticut,
+    dated River Muskingum, November 5, 1785," describing a voyage
+    down the Ohio from Fort Pitt and the wonders of the country
+    much as Livingstone and Du Chaillu do those of Africa. The time
+    is less now to Japan, and about the same to New South Wales,
+    with both which countries we have postal conventions-i.e., a
+    practically consolidated service&mdash;far cheaper and more
+    convenient than that maintained on the adoption of
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page148"
+       id="page148"></a>[pg 148]</span> the present Constitution
+       between our own cities. Our foreign service with leading
+       countries is combined, moreover, with an institution
+       undreamed of in that day&mdash;the money-order system. Under
+       this admirable contrivance the post-offices of the world
+       will ere long be so many banks of deposit and exchange for
+       the benefit of the masses, effecting transfers mutually with
+       much greater facility, rapidity and security than the
+       regular banks formerly attained.</p>
+
+    <p>Still in its infancy, the international money-order system
+    has already reached importance in the magnitude of its
+    operations. The sums sent by means of it were, in 1874,
+    $1,499,320 to Great Britain, $701,634 to Germany, and to the
+    little inland republic of Switzerland $72.287.</p>
+
+    <p>The dimensions to which this new method of financial
+    intercourse between the different peoples of the globe is
+    destined to reach may be inferred from the growth of the
+    domestic money&mdash;order service. In 1874 the number of
+    orders issued was 4,620,633, representing $74,424,854. The
+    erroneous payments having been but one in 59,677, it is plain
+    that this mode of remittance must make further inroads on the
+    old routine of cheque and draft, and become, among its other
+    advantages, a currency regulator of no trifling value.</p>
+
+    <p>Our post-office may almost be said to head the development
+    of the century. The other lines of progress in some sense
+    converge to it. The advance of intelligence, of settlement, of
+    transit by land and water and of mechanical and philosophical
+    discovery have all fostered the post, while its return to them
+    has been liberal. Thus aided and spurred, its extension has
+    approached the rate of geometrical progression. Its development
+    resembles that from the Annelids to the Vertebrata, the simple
+    canal which constitutes the internal anatomy of the simplest
+    animal forms finding a counterpart in the line of mails
+    vouchsafed by the British postmaster-general to the colonies in
+    1775 from Falmouth to Savannah, "with as many cross-posts as he
+    shall see fit." Fifteen years of independence had caused the
+    accretion of wonderfully few ganglia on this primeval
+    structure. In 1790 four millions of inhabitants possessed but
+    seventy-five post-offices and 1875 miles of post-roads. The
+    revenue of the department was $37,935&mdash;little over a
+    thousandth of what it is at present under rates of postage but
+    a fraction of the old. New York and Boston heard from each
+    other three times a week in summer and twice in winter.
+    Philadelphia and New York were more social and luxurious, and
+    insisted on a mail every week-day but one, hurrying it through
+    in two days each way, or a twentieth of the present speed. On
+    the interior routes chaos ruled supreme. Newspapers and
+    business-men combined to employ riders who meandered along the
+    mud roads as it pleased Heaven.</p>
+
+    <p>When the new government machine had smoothed down its
+    bearings matters rapidly improved. In 1800 we had 903
+    post-offices and 20,817 miles of road. In 1820 these figures
+    changed to 4500 and 92,492, and in 1870 to 28,492 offices and
+    231,232 miles. Five years later 70,083 miles of railway, 15,788
+    by steamboat and 192,002 of other routes represented the web
+    woven since the Falmouth and Savannah shuttle commenced its
+    weary way. Of course, neither the number of offices nor extent
+    of routes fully measures the change from past to present; mails
+    having become more frequent over the same route, and a new
+    style of office, the locomotive variety, having been added to
+    the old. This innovation, of mounting postmaster and
+    post-office with the mailbags on wheels, and hurling the whole
+    through space at thirty or forty miles an hour, already
+    furnishes us with gigantic statistics. In 1875 there were
+    sixty-two lines of railway postal-cars covering 16,932 miles
+    with 40,109 miles of daily service and 901 peripatetic clerks.
+    These gentlemen, under the demands of the fast mail-trains,
+    will ere long swell from a regiment into a brigade, and so into
+    a division, till poets and painters be called on to drop the
+    theme of "waiting for the mail."</p>
+
+    <p>The greater portion of the fifty-odd thousand employés of
+    the department do <span class="pagenum"><a name="page149"
+       id="page149"></a>[pg 149]</span> not give it their whole
+       time, many of the country postmasters being engaged in other
+       business. But the undivided efforts of them all, with an
+       auxiliary corps, would be demanded for the handling of eight
+       hundred and fifty millions of letters and cards, and a
+       greater bulk of other mail-matter, under the old plan of
+       rates varying according to distance and number of sheets,
+       and not weight&mdash;stamps unknown. The introduction of
+       stamps, with coincident reduction and unification of rates,
+       has been the chief factor in the extraordinary increase of
+       correspondence within the past thirty years; the number of
+       letters passing through the mails having within that period
+       multiplied twenty-fold. The number transmitted in the
+       British Islands, then three times greater than in the United
+       States, is now but little in excess, having been in 1874
+       nine hundred and sixty&mdash;seven millions. The immense
+       difference between the two countries in extent, and
+       consequently in the average distance of transportation, is
+       enough to account for the contrast between the two
+       balance-sheets, our department showing a heavy annual
+       deficit, while in Great Britain this is replaced by a
+       profit. As regards post-office progress in the United
+       States, the question is rather an abstract one; for there is
+       not the least probability of an advance in rates. The
+       discrepancy between receipts and expenses will be attacked
+       rather by seeking to reduce the latter at the same time that
+       the former are enhanced by natural growth and by improvement
+       in the details of service and administration.</p>
+
+    <div class="figright"
+         style="width:65%;">
+        <a href="images/149.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig149"
+             id="fig149"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/149.jpg"
+             alt="PROF. S.F.B. MORSE, THE INVENTOR OF THE ELECTRO-MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH." />
+        </a>PROF. S.F.B. MORSE, THE INVENTOR OF THE
+        ELECTRO-MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Difficult as it is adequately to state or to measure the
+    extension of the mails within the century, it is far from
+    telling the whole story of the amplitude and celerity with
+    which the people of our day interchange intelligence.</p>
+
+    <p>Only to the last third of the period under review has the
+    electric telegraph been known. It is now a necessity of the
+    public and private life of every civilized spot upon the globe.
+    It traverses all lands and all seas. The forty miles of wire
+    with which it started from Washington City have become many
+    millions. Its length of line in the United States is about the
+    same with that of the mail-routes, and a similar equality
+    probably obtains in other parts of the world. We have nearly as
+    much line as all Europe together, though the extent of wire may
+    not be so great. It is little to say that this continent, so
+    dim to the founders of the Union, has been by the invention of
+    Morse compressed within whispering distance, the same advantage
+    having been conferred on other countries. It is the property of
+    mankind, and the comparison must be between present and past,
+    not between any two countries of the present. Strictly, a
+    comparison is not possible, nothing like magnetic communication
+    having been known forty years ago, unless to the half
+    imagination, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page150"
+       id="page150"></a>[pg 150]</span> half realization of one or
+       two scientific experimenters. Steam and stamps wrought a
+       difference in degree&mdash;the telegraph one of kind.
+       Against eighteen hundred miles of wagon-road we set
+       seventy-three thousand of railway; but two hundred thousand
+       miles of telegraph are opposed by nothing, unless by
+       Franklin's kite-string. Looked at along the perspective of
+       poles, the old days disappear entirely&mdash;the patriots
+       become pre-historic. Yet modern self-conceit is somewhat
+       checked by the reflection that the career of these two great
+       agents of intercommunication has but just opened; that their
+       management even yet remains a puzzle to us; and that the
+       next generation may wonder how we happened to get hold of
+       implements whose use and capabilities we so poorly
+       comprehended. So far as prediction can now be ventured, a
+       force and pathway more economical than coal and the rail
+       will not soon be forthcoming; nor is Canton apt to
+       "interview" New York at the rate of more words in a minute
+       over a single wire than she can now. Some day dynamite may
+       be harnessed to the balloon, which stands, or drifts, where
+       it did with Montgolfier, and we may all become long-range
+       projectiles; but even this age of hurry will contentedly
+       wait a little for that.</p>
+
+    <p>Possibly the Post-office Department would be less of a
+    valetudinarian, financially, had it confined itself to its
+    legitimate occupation, the speeding of intercourse and wafting
+    of sighs, and not yielded to the heavy temptation of
+    disseminating shoes, pistols and *garden-seeds over three
+    millions of square miles. Newspapers are enough to test its
+    powers as a freight-agent. Where these and their literary
+    kindred of books, magazines, etc. used to be estimated by the
+    dozen and the ounce, the ton is becoming too small a unit.</p>
+
+    <p>West of the Blue Ridge, or the front line of the Alleghany,
+    so called in most of its length, there was not a newspaper
+    published in 1776. Ten years later, scarcely more than
+    one&mdash;the <i>Pittsburg Gazette</i>&mdash;existed west of
+    the mountains. The few in the seaboard towns kept alive the
+    name, and little more. In 1850, '60 and '70 the periodicals of
+    the Union numbered, respectively, 2526, 4051 and 5871, with an
+    average circulation, at the three periods, of twenty-one
+    hundred, thirty-four hundred and thirty-six hundred copies
+    each. The circulation thus outgrew the numbers in the
+    proportion of nearly two to one. And both are largely in excess
+    of the increase of the population, that being in the twenty
+    years but 65 percent. The number of daily papers (254 in 1850
+    and 574 in 1870) must now be equal to the entire number of
+    periodicals in France outside of Paris (796 in 1875), with an
+    average issue less than half that of ours. The proportion of
+    readers to the population, certainly in this class of
+    literature, thus appears to be rapidly growing: and the change
+    is most striking if we take, for example, that group of
+    periodicals which are most purely literary and most remote from
+    the mere chronicle. The returns for the three periods place the
+    monthlies at, respectively, 100, 280 and 622&mdash;an advance
+    of sixfold.</p>
+
+    <p>The magazine leads us to the door of the library; and here
+    the exhibit is still more marked, significant and gratifying.
+    The census figures are, for many reasons, extremely confused,
+    but in the general result they cannot be outrageously wrong,
+    and they can mislead us only in degree as to the immense
+    multiplication of books in both public and private libraries.
+    The returns are manifestly far below the truth. To give them
+    here without the explanations accompanying them in the census
+    volumes would mislead; and those explanations, or a fair
+    synopsis of them, would occupy too much space, and would, after
+    all, leave the problem unsolved. That the supply of books has
+    fully kept pace with every other means of culture is patent
+    enough. The Congressional Library has risen in half the century
+    from the shelves of a closet to nearly four hundred thousand
+    volumes&mdash;an accumulation not surpassed in '76 by more than
+    two libraries in Europe. It now demands a separate edifice of
+    its own, fit to stand by the side of the fine structures which
+    have within a generation recreated the architectural aspect of
+    the Federal metropolis with the most stately
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page151"
+       id="page151"></a>[pg 151]</span> government-offices in the
+       world. Other public libraries, belonging to colleges,
+       schools, societies and independent endowments, show similar
+       progress. While none of them are equal, for reference, to
+       some of the great European establishments, they are
+       generally better adapted to the purposes of popular
+       instruction. Their literary wealth is fresh and available,
+       little encumbered by lumber kept merely because old or
+       curious. Thus adjuncts, in some sort, of the newspaper and
+       the common school, their catalogues prove, as do the
+       bookcases of private houses, that the newest and deepest
+       results of European thought and inquiry are eagerly sought
+       and used by our people.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/151-1.jpg"
+             name="fig151-1"
+             id="fig151-1"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/151-1.jpg"
+             alt="THE SCHOOL-HOUSE OF THE PRESENT." />
+             </a>THE SCHOOL-HOUSE OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="figleft"
+         style="width:40%;">
+        <a href="images/151-2.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig151-2"
+             id="fig151-2"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/151-2.jpg"
+             alt="THE SCHOOL-HOUSE OF THE PAST." /></a>
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Our system of public schools, long classed among the
+    "peculiar institutions" of the country, is notably gaining in
+    scope and efficiency, be the English and Prussians right or not
+    in their claim of greater thoroughness and a higher curriculum.
+    The different States have engaged in a series of competitive
+    experiments for the common good, and cities and counties, in
+    their sphere, labor to the same end. Schools of higher grade
+    are being multiplied, and the examination of teachers, still
+    lax enough, becomes more exact and faithful, as befits the
+    drill of an army of two hundred and forty thousand charged with
+    the intellectual police of eight millions of children&mdash;the
+    number said by the new "National Bureau of Education" to have
+    been enrolled in 1875, against 7,209,938, 5,477,037 and
+    3,642,694 by the censuses of 1870, '60 and '50. Little more
+    than half this number is estimated by the Bureau to represent
+    the average daily attendance, which is quite compatible with
+    the attendance, for the greater part of the school-year, of
+    nine-tenths of the whole number on the lists. A comparison of
+    the number enrolled and the entire supposed number of children
+    between six and sixteen leaves an excess of nearly two millions
+    and a half outside the public schools. Of these private schools
+    will account, and account well, for a large proportion. These
+    are fulfilling indispensable offices, one being that of normal
+    schools&mdash;a want likely to be inadequately satisfied for a
+    long time to come.</p>
+
+    <p>In one respect our public schools are beyond, though not
+    above, comparison with those of the most advanced European
+    states. An annual outlay of a trifle less than seventy-five
+    millions of dollars, with an investment in buildings, ground,
+    etc. of a hundred and sixty-six millions, implies a
+    determination that should be rewarded with the most
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page152"
+       id="page152"></a>[pg 152]</span> unexceptionable results. It
+       reaches eighteen dollars yearly, leaving out the interest on
+       the fixed stock, for each child in daily attendance. Such an
+       expenditure, trebling, we believe, that of Prussia, ought to
+       secure better teachers and a higher range of instruction. It
+       must be said, however, that the duties of the school-boards
+       are as honestly and economically discharged as those of any
+       other public bodies; that the cost for each pupil is highest
+       where common schools have been longest established and most
+       thoroughly studied; and that the statistics certainly show a
+       steady advance in their efficiency. That is the truest test.
+       Any pecuniary means are justifiable by the end. If common
+       schools, themselves a means to a higher education, mental
+       and moral, than they can directly afford, take some part of
+       the wealth we accumulate to prevent our men's decaying, it
+       is well used. It helps to purchase for us progress more
+       genuine than that whereof railways and cotton-factories are
+       the exponents.</p>
+
+    <p>It is thus a guarantee of a brighter century even than the
+    one just closed that, in the wildest quarter of the still
+    unkempt continent, the school actually precedes the pioneer.
+    Choose his homestead where he may, the sixteenth section is
+    staked out before it. From it the rills of knowledge soon
+    trickle along the first furrows, as strange to the soil as its
+    new products. It provides the modern settler in advance with an
+    equipment, mental and material, if not moral, altogether
+    superior to that of his colonial prototype, that enables him in
+    a shorter time to impart a higher stamp to his surroundings. He
+    attacks the prairie with a plough unimagined by his
+    predecessor; cuts his wheat with a cradle&mdash;or, given a
+    neighbor or two, a reaper&mdash;instead of a sickle; sends into
+    the boundless pasture the nucleus of a merino flock, and
+    returns at evening to a home rugged enough, in unison with its
+    surroundings, but brightened by traits of culture and
+    intelligence which must adhere to any ménage of to-day and were
+    out of reach of any of the olden time. The civilization that
+    travels West now is a different thing from that which went West
+    a hundred years ago.</p>
+
+    <p>Science has done much for the farmer, though not as much as
+    he has done for it and its hotbeds, the towns. In one point his
+    shortcomings are notable. He has not learned how to eat his
+    cake and have it. He works the virgin soil as the miner does
+    the coal-seam. What Nature has placed in it he takes out, and,
+    until forced by the pressure of his friends and enemies, the
+    cities, returns no nest-egg of future fertility. So it is that
+    many portions of the rural East have to be resettled and
+    started afresh in the process of agricultural redemption. A
+    hundred years ago England grew fifteen bushels of wheat to the
+    acre. Her standard is now thirty-two. Within three-quarters of
+    the century New York has fallen from twenty-five to twelve; and
+    half that period, again, has brought Ohio and Indiana from
+    thirty to fifteen. But this process is a natural part of the
+    sum of American progress. Land was the only property of the
+    country originally, and subsequently of different parts of it
+    in succession. It was used like any other commodity, and worn
+    out like leather or cloth. The original cuticle of the
+    continent has disappeared for ever. The task, now is to induce
+    the granulation of a new one. The restorative process may be
+    complete by the time we have four hundred souls to the square
+    mile, like England and Flanders. Meanwhile, the exporting of
+    Iowa and California in the shape of wheat is going on at what
+    must be esteemed a profitable rate; for our farmers, as a
+    class, do not seem to be losing ground. Their glebes have risen
+    in value from thirty-two hundred millions in 1850 to sixty-six
+    hundred ten years later, and ninety-three hundred in 1870. This
+    has been accompanied by a diminution of their average extent,
+    the farm of 1870 covering a hundred and fifty-three acres. This
+    is small enough, considering the capital necessary for stock in
+    these days of improved and costly implements, when a farmer can
+    no longer pack his entire kit in a cart. It matches closely the
+    size of English holdings, where agricultural science is at its
+    height. The <span class="pagenum"><a name="page153"
+       id="page153"></a>[pg 153]</span> French peasant-farmers,
+       with their plats of three and four acres, are chained to the
+       spade and hoe, and their steading becomes a
+       poultry-yard&mdash;a consummation we are not yet in sight
+       of, as is proved by the legions of pigs and beeves, barreled
+       or bellowing, that roll in from the ancient realms of
+       Pontiac and the Prophet with a smoothness and velocity
+       unattained by the most luxurious coach that carried a First
+       Congressman.</p>
+
+    <p>Everything that makes a nation, we are told, and the nation
+    itself, is the product of the soil. But the less immediate,
+    finer and most delicate fruits cannot usually be garnered until
+    the soil is thoroughly subdued. The mass of matter keeps the
+    intellectual in abeyance. Were Europe enlarged one-half, and
+    her population reduced to one-eighth what it actually is, the
+    spectacle of culture she now presents would be an
+    impossibility. It is our merit that, thus brought to American
+    conditions, she would in no way compare with American
+    achievement. An offset wherewith we must at the same time be
+    debited is the aid we have, in so many forms, derived from her.
+    Making every allowance for this, it is a clear credit in our
+    favor that one-tenth of Christendom should have done so much
+    more than a tenth of its effective thinking simultaneously with
+    taming the most savage half of its domain. We have more than
+    our share of laborers in the mental vineyard, though fewer of
+    them are master-workmen. We utilize for Europe herself, and
+    send back to her in its first available shape, much of what her
+    students produce. As between thought and substance, the two
+    continents interchange offices. We import the crude material
+    her philosophers harvest or mine, work it up and return it,
+    just as she takes the yield of our non-metaphorical fields and
+    strata and restores it manufactured. Much of the social,
+    political and industrial advancement of Europe within the
+    century she may be said to owe to the United States. Her
+    governmental reforms certainly and confessedly found here their
+    germ. These gave birth to others of a social character. In this
+    manner, as well as more directly by our commerce, inventions
+    and example, we have stimulated her industry. We have spread
+    before her the two oceans, and taught her to traverse them with
+    a firm and masterful mien, no longer</p>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>As one who in a lonely road doth walk in fear and
+            dread.</p>
+        </div>
+    </div>
+
+    <p>We have created cities upon her havens, Parliaments in her
+    capitals, and stronger hearts and quicker hands in her
+    villages. No community on her varied surface but is the better
+    for America. That our people and their labors have done it all
+    it would be absurd to say; but the Old World's progress in the
+    period under review can be but very partially accounted for by
+    any internal force of its own. None of its rulers or peoples
+    adventure a reform of any kind without a preliminary, if often
+    only a half-conscious, glance of inquiry westward. Collectively
+    as members of a European republic of nations, and internally
+    each within itself, they have in this way learned, after many
+    recalcitrant struggles, to recognize and respect local
+    independence. Municipal law has gained new life. The commune
+    has become an entity everywhere, and the nations which it
+    informs have established the right to readjust or recast their
+    constitutions without being hounded down as disturbers of the
+    peace. The contribution of the American Union to such results
+    would earn it honor at the hands of history were it to sink
+    into nothing to-morrow. Had no such tangible fruits hitherto
+    ripened, some portion of such honor would still accrue to it
+    for having shown that a people may grow from a handful to an
+    empire without hereditary rulers, without a privileged class,
+    without a state Church, without a standing army, without tumult
+    in the largest cities and without stagnant savagery in the
+    remotest wilds.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page154"
+       id="page154"></a>[pg 154]</span>
+
+    <h2>UP THE THAMES.</h2>
+
+    <h3>CONCLUDING PAPER.</h3>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/154.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig154"
+             id="fig154"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/154.jpg"
+             alt="WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM ETON." /></a>WINDSOR CASTLE,
+             FROM ETON.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Let our demonstration to-day be on the monarchical citadel
+    of England, the core and nucleus of her kingly associations,
+    her architectural <i>eikon basiliké</i>, Windsor. To reach the
+    famous castle it will not do to lounge along the river. We must
+    cut loose from the suburbs of the suburbs, and launch into a
+    more extended flight. Our destination is nearly an hour distant
+    by rail; and though it does not take us altogether out of sight
+    of the city, it leads us among real farms and genuine villages,
+    tilled and inhabited as they have been since the Plantagenets,
+    instead of market-gardens and villas.</p>
+
+    <p>We go to Paddington and try the Great Western, the parent of
+    the broad gauges with no very numerous family, Erie being one
+    of its unfortunate children. That six-foot infant is not up to
+    the horizontal stature of its seven-foot progenitor, but has
+    still sixteen inches too many to fare well in the contest with
+    its little, active, and above all numerous, foes of the
+    four-feet-eight-and-a-half-inch "persuasion." The English and
+    the American giants can sympathize with each other. Both have
+    drained the bitter cup that is tendered by a strong majority to
+    a weak minority. Neither the American nor the British
+    constitution, with their whole admirable array of checks and
+    balances, has shielded them from this evil. In the battle of
+    the gauges both have gone to the wall, and will stay there
+    until they can muster strength enough to reel over into the
+    ranks of their enemies.</p>
+
+    <p>This relative debility is, at the same time, more apparent
+    to the stockholders than to their customers. The superstructure
+    and "plant" of the Erie has lately stood interested inspection
+    from abroad with great credit, and that of the Great Western is
+    unexceptionable. The vote of travelers may be safely allotted
+    to the broad gauge. They have more elbow room. The carriages
+    attain the requisite width without unpleasantly, not to say
+    dangerously, overhanging the centre of gravity; and, other
+    things equal, the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page155"
+       id="page155"></a>[pg 155]</span> movement is steadier. Nor
+       is the financial aspect of the question apt to impress
+       gloomily the tourist as he enters the Paddington station and
+       looks around at its blaze of polychrome and richness of
+       decoration generally. As the coach doors are slammed upon
+       you, the guard steps into his "van," the vast drivers,
+       taller than your head plus the regulation stove-pipe, slowly
+       begin their whirl, and you roll majestically forth through a
+       long file of liveried servants of the company, drawn up or
+       in action on the platform, the sensation of patronizing a
+       poverty-stricken corporation is by no means likely to harass
+       you. You cease to realize that the Napoleon of engineers,
+       Monsieur Brunel, made a disastrous mistake in the design of
+       this splendid highway, and that, as some will have it, it
+       was his Moscow. His error, if one there was, existed only in
+       the selection of the width of track. Whatever the demerits
+       of the design in that one particular, the execution is in
+       all above praise. The road was his pet. Once finished, it
+       was his delight, as with the breeder of a fine horse, to
+       mount it and try its mettle. Over and again would he occupy
+       the footboard between London and Bristol, and rejoice as a
+       strong man in running his race at close to seventy miles an
+       hour. He and Stephenson were capital types of the Gaul and
+       Briton, striving side by side on the same field, as it will
+       be good for the world that they should ever do.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/155.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig155"
+             id="fig155"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/155.jpg"
+             alt="MORTON CHURCH." /></a>MORTON CHURCH.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Combats of another character&mdash;in fact, of two other
+    characters&mdash;recur to our reflections as we find that we
+    have shuffled off the coil of bricks and mortar and are
+    rattling across Wormwood Scrubs. More fortunate than some who
+    have been there before us, we have no call to alight. Calls to
+    this ancient field of glory, whether symbolized by the
+    gentlemanly pistol or the plebeian fist, have ceased to be in
+    vogue. Dueling and boxing are both frowned down effectually,
+    one by public opinion and the other by the police. It is only
+    of late years that they finally succumbed to those twin
+    discouragers; but it seems altogether improbable that the
+    ordeal by combat in either shape will again come to the surface
+    in a land where tilting-spear and quarter-staff were of old so
+    rife. In France chivalry still asserts, in a feeble way, the
+    privilege of winking and holding out its iron, and refuses to
+    be comforted with a suit for damages.</p>
+
+    <p>Southall, a station or two beyond, suggests sport of a less
+    lethal character, being an ancient meeting-place for the
+    queen's stag-hounds. John Leach may have collected here some of
+    his studies of Cockney equestrianism. The sportsmen so dear to
+    his pencil furnished him wealth of opportunities on their
+    annual concourse at the cart's tail. The unloading of the
+    animal, his gathering himself up for a leisurely canter across
+    country, the various styles and degrees of horsemanship among
+    his lumbering followers, and the business-like replacing
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page156"
+       id="page156"></a>[pg 156]</span> of the quarry in his
+       vehicle, to be hauled away for another day's sport, served
+       as the most complete travesty imaginable of the chase. It
+       has the compensation of placing a number of worthy men in
+       the saddle at least once in the year and compelling them to
+       do some rough riding. The English have always made it their
+       boast that they are more at home on horseback than any other
+       European nation, and they claim to have derived much
+       military advantage from it. Lever's novels would lose many
+       of their best situations but for this national
+       accomplishment and the astounding development it reaches in
+       his hands.</p>
+
+    <div class="figleft"
+         style="width:50%;">
+        <a href="images/156.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig156"
+             id="fig156"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/156.jpg"
+             alt="MILTON'S PEAR TREE." /></a>MILTON'S PEAR TREE.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>To the left lies the fine park of Osterley, once the seat of
+    the greatest of London's merchant princes, Sir Thomas Gresham.
+    An improvement proposed by Queen Bess, on a visit to Gresham in
+    1578, does not speak highly for her taste in design. She
+    remarked that in her opinion the court in front of the house
+    would look better split up by a wall. Her host dutifully
+    acceded to the idea, and surprised Her Majesty next morning by
+    pointing out the wall which he had erected during the night,
+    sending to London for masons and material for the purpose. The
+    conceit was a more ponderous one than that of Raleigh's
+    cloak&mdash;bricks and mortar <i>versus</i> velvet.</p>
+
+    <p>A greater than Gresham succeeded, after the death of his
+    widow, to the occupancy of Osterley&mdash;Chief-justice Coke.
+    His compliment to Elizabeth on the occasion of a similar visit
+    to the same house took the more available and acceptable shape
+    of ten or twelve hundred pounds sterling in jewelry. She had
+    more than a woman's weakness for finery, and Coke operated upon
+    it very successfully. His gems outlasted Gresham's wall, which
+    has long since disappeared with the court it disfigured. In
+    place of both stands a goodly Ionic portico, through which one
+    may pass to a staircase that bears a representation by Rubens
+    of the apotheosis of Mr. Motley's hero, William the Silent. The
+    gallery offers a collection of other old pictures. Should we,
+    however, take time for even a short stop in this vicinity, it
+    would probably be for the credit of saying that we walked over
+    Hounslow Heath intact in purse and person. The gentlemen of the
+    road live only in the classic pages of Ainsworth, Reynolds and,
+    if we may include Sam Weller in such worshipful company, that
+    bard of "the bold Tur<i>pin</i>." Another class of highwaymen
+    had long before them been also attracted by the fine
+    manoeuvring facilities of the heath, beginning with the army of
+    the Cæsars and ending with that of James II. Jonathan Wild and
+    his merry men were saints to Kirke and his lambs.</p>
+
+    <p>Hurrying on, we skirt one of Pope's outlying manors, in his
+    time the seat of his friend Bathurst and the haunt of Addison,
+    Prior, Congreve and Gay, and leave southward, toward the
+    Thames, Horton, the cradle of Milton. A marble in its ivy-grown
+    church is inscribed to the memory of his mother, <i>ob</i>.
+    1637. At Horton were composed, or inspired, <i>Lycidas,
+    L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus</i> and others of his nominally
+    minor but really sweetest and most enjoyable poems. In this
+    retirement the Muse paid him her earliest visits, before he had
+    thrown himself away on politics or Canaanitish mythology.
+    Peeping in upon his handsome young face in its golden setting
+    of blonde curls,</p>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>Through the sweetbrier or the vine,</p>
+
+            <p>Or the twisted eglantine,</p>
+        </div>
+    </div><span class="pagenum"><a name="page157"
+       id="page157"></a>[pg 157]</span>
+
+    <p>she wooed him to better work than reporting the debates of
+    the archangels or calling the roll of Tophet. Had he confined
+    himself to this tenderer field, the world would have been the
+    gainer. He might not have "made the word Miltonic mean
+    sublime," but we can spare a little of the sublime to get some
+    more of the beautiful.</p>
+
+    <p>To reach Milton, however, we have run off of the track
+    badly. His Eden is no station on the Great Western. We shall
+    balance this southward divergence with a corresponding one to
+    the north from Slough, the last station ere reaching Windsor.
+    We may give a go-by for the moment to the halls of kings, do
+    homage to him who treated them similarly, and point, in
+    preference, to where,</p>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i6">in many a mouldering heap,</p>
+
+            <p>The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.</p>
+        </div>
+    </div>
+
+    <p>They show Gray's tomb in Stoke Pogis church, and his house,
+    West End Cottage, half a mile distant. The ingredients of his
+    <i>Elegy</i>&mdash;actually the greatest, but in his judgment
+    among the least, of his few works&mdash;exist all around. "The
+    rugged elm," "the ivy-mantled tower," and "the yew tree's
+    shade," the most specific among the simple "properties" of his
+    little spectacle, are common to so many places that there are
+    several competitors for the honor of having furnished them. The
+    cocks, ploughmen, herds and owls cannot, of course, at this
+    late day be identified. Gray could not have done it himself. He
+    drew from general memory, in his closet, and not bit by bit on
+    his thumb-nail from chance-met objects as he went along. Had
+    his conception and rendering of the theme been due to the
+    direct impression upon his mind of its several aspects and
+    constituents, he would have more thoroughly appreciated his
+    work. He could not understand its popularity, any more than
+    Campbell could that of <i>Ye Mariners of England</i>, which he
+    pronounced "d&mdash;&mdash;d drum-and-trumpet verses." Gray
+    used to say, "with a good deal of acrimony," that the
+    <i>Elegy</i> "owed its popularity entirely to the subject, and
+    the public would have received it as well had it been written
+    entirely in prose." Had it been written in prose or in the
+    inventory style of poetry, it would have been forgotten long
+    ago, like so much else of that kind.</p>
+
+    <div class="figright"
+         style="width:35%;">
+        <a href="images/157.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig157"
+             id="fig157"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/157.jpg"
+             alt="GRAY." /></a>GRAY.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Not far hence is Beaconsfield, which gave a home to Burke
+    and a title to the wife of Disraeli, the nearest approach to a
+    peerage that the haughty Israelite, soured by a life of
+    struggle against peers and their prejudices, would deign to
+    accept. We know it will be objected to this remark that
+    Disraeli is, and has been for most of his career, associated
+    with Toryism. But that was part of his game. A man of culture,
+    thought and fastidious taste, he would, had he been of the
+    <i>sangre azul</i>, have been the steadiest and sincerest of
+    Conservatives. Privilege would have been his gospel. As it is,
+    it has only been his weapon, to use in fighting for himself.
+    "The time will come when you shall listen to me," were his
+    words when he was first coughed down. The time has come. The
+    most cynical of premiers, he governs England, and he scorns to
+    take a place among those who ruled her before him.</p>
+
+    <p>Extending our divergence farther west toward "Cliefden's
+    proud alcove, the bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love," we find
+    ourselves in a luxuriant rolling country, rural and slumberous.
+    Cookham parish, which we should traverse, claims quite loudly
+    American kinship on the strength of its including an estate
+    once the property of Henry Washington, who is alleged, without
+    sufficient ground, to have been a relative of the general. But
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page158"
+       id="page158"></a>[pg 158]</span> we are within the purlieus
+       of Windsor. The round tower has been looking down upon us
+       these many miles, and we cannot but yield to its
+       magnetism.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:90%;">
+        <a href="images/158-1.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig158-1"
+             id="fig158-1"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/158-1.jpg"
+             alt="BEACONSFIELD CHURCH." /></a>BEACONSFIELD CHURCH.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Eton, on the north bank, opposite Windsor, and really a
+    continuous town with that which nestles close to the castle
+    walls, is on our way from Slough. The red-brick buildings of
+    the school, forming a fine foil to the lighter-colored and more
+    elegantly designed chapel, are on our left, the principal front
+    looking over a garden toward the river and Windsor Home Park
+    beyond. We become aware of a populace of boys, the file-closers
+    of England's nineteenth century worthies, and her coming
+    veterans of the twentieth. We may contemplatively view them in
+    that light, but it has little place in their reflections. Their
+    ruddy faces and somewhat cumbrous forms belong to the animal
+    period of life that links together boyhood, colthood and
+    calfhood. Education of the physique, consisting chiefly in the
+    indulgence and employment of it in the mere demonstration of
+    its superabundant vitality, is a large part of the curriculum
+    at English schools. The playground and the study-room form no
+    unequal alliance. Rigid as, in some respects, the discipline
+    proper of the school may be, it does not compare with the
+    severity of that maintained by the older boys over the younger
+    ones. The code of the lesser, and almost independent, republic
+    of the dormitory and the green is as clear in its terms as that
+    of the unlimited monarchy of the school-room, and more potent
+    in shaping the character. The lads train themselves for the
+    battle of the world, with some help from the masters. It is a
+    sound system on the whole, if based, to appearance, rather too
+    much on the principle of the weaker to the wall. The tendency
+    of the weaker inevitably is to the wall, and if he is to
+    contend against it effectively, it will be by finding out his
+    weakness and being made to feel it at the earliest possible
+    moment.</p>
+
+    <div class="figleft"
+         style="width:35%;">
+        <a href="images/158-2.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig158-2"
+             id="fig158-2"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/158-2.jpg"
+             alt="TOMB OF BURKE." /></a>TOMB OF BURKE.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Not on land only, but on the river, whereinto it so
+    gradually blends, does lush young England dissipate. Cricket
+    and football order into violent action
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page159"
+       id="page159"></a>[pg 159]</span> both pairs of extremities,
+       while the upper pair and the organs of the thorax labor
+       profitably at the oar. The Thames, in its three bends from
+       Senly Hall, the Benny Havens of Eton, down to Datchet Mead,
+       where Falstaff overflowed the buck-basket, belongs to the
+       boys. In this space it is split into an archipelago of aits.
+       In and out of the gleaming paths and avenues of silvery
+       water that wind between them glide the little boats. The
+       young Britons take to the element like young ducks. Many a
+       "tall admiral" has commenced his "march over the mountain
+       wave" among these water-lilies and hedges of osier.</p>
+
+    <p>Shall we leave the boys at play, and, renewing our youth, go
+    ourselves to school? Entering the great gate of the western of
+    the two quadrangles, we are welcomed by a bronze statue of the
+    founder of the institution, Henry VI. He endowed it in 1440.
+    The first organization comprised "a provost, four clerks, ten
+    priests, six choristers, twenty-five poor grammar-scholars, and
+    twenty-five poor infirm men to pray for the king." The prayers
+    of these invalids were sorely needed by the unhappy scion of
+    Lancaster, but did him little good in a temporal sense. The
+    provost is always rector of the parish. Laymen are
+    non-eligible. Thus it happens that the list does not include
+    two names which would have illuminated it more than those of
+    any of the incumbents&mdash;Boyle the philosopher, "father of
+    chemistry and brother of the earl of Cork," and Waller the
+    poet. The modern establishment consists of a provost,
+    vice-provost, six fellows, a master, under-master, assistants,
+    seventy foundation scholars, seven lay clerks and ten
+    choristers, with a cortege of "inferior officers and
+    servants"&mdash;a tolerably full staff. The pay-students, as
+    they would be termed in this country, numbering usually five to
+    six hundred, do not live in the college precincts, but at
+    boarding-houses in the town, whence their designation of
+    oppidans, the seventy gowns-men only having dormitories in the
+    college. The roll of the alumni contains such names as the
+    first earl of Chatham, Harley, earl of Oxford, Bolingbroke,
+    Fox, Gray, Canning, Wellington and Hallam. That is enough to
+    say for Eton. The beauties of the chapel, the treasures of the
+    library and the other shows of the place become trivial by the
+    side of the record.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/159.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig159"
+             id="fig159"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/159.jpg"
+             alt="HEDSOR AND COOKHAM CHURCHES." /></a>HEDSOR AND
+             COOKHAM CHURCHES.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Over the "fifteen-arch" bridge, which has but three or four
+    arches, we pass to the town of Windsor, which crouches, on the
+    river-side, close up to the embattled walls of the
+    castle&mdash;so closely that the very irregular pile of
+    buildings included in the latter cannot at first glance be well
+    distinguished from the town. High
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page160"
+       id="page160"></a>[pg 160]</span> over all swells the round
+       tower to a height above the water of two hundred and twenty
+       feet&mdash;no excessive altitude, if we deduct the eminence
+       on which it stands, yet enough, in this level country, to
+       give it a prospect of a score or two of miles in all
+       directions. The Conqueror fell in love with the situation at
+       first sight, and gave a stolen monastery in exchange for it.
+       The home so won has provided a shelter&mdash;at times very
+       imperfect, indeed&mdash;to British sovereigns for eight
+       centuries. From the modest erection of William it has been
+       steadily growing&mdash;with the growth of the empire, we
+       were near saying, but its chief enlargements occurred before
+       the empire entered upon the expansion of the past three
+       centuries. It is more closely associated with Edward III.
+       than with any other of the ancient line. He was born at
+       Windsor, and almost entirely rebuilt it, William of Wykeham
+       being superintending architect, with "a fee of one shilling
+       a day whilst at Windsor, and two shillings when he went
+       elsewhere on the duties of his office," three shillings a
+       week being the pay of his clerk. It becomes at once obvious
+       that the margin for "rings" was but slender in those days.
+       The labor question gave not the least trouble. The law of
+       supply and demand was not consulted. "Three hundred and
+       sixty workmen were impressed, to be employed on the building
+       at the king's wages; some of whom having clandestinely left
+       Windsor and engaged in other employments to greater
+       advantage, writs were issued prohibiting all persons from
+       employing them on pain of forfeiting all their goods and
+       chattels." In presence of so simple and effective a
+       definition of the rights of the workingman, strikes sink
+       into nothingness. And Magna Charta had been signed a hundred
+       and fifty years before! That document, however, in honor of
+       which the free and enlightened Briton of to-day is wont to
+       elevate his hat and his voice, was only in the name and on
+       behalf of the barons. The English people derived under it
+       neither name, place nor right. English liberty is only
+       incidental, a foundling of untraced parentage, a <i>filius
+       nullius</i>. True, its growth was indirectly fostered by
+       aught that checked the power of the monarch, and the nobles
+       builded more wisely than they knew or intended when they
+       brought Lackland to book, or to parchment, at Runnymede, not
+       far down the river and close to the edge of the royal park.
+       The memorable plain is still a meadow, kept ever green and
+       inviolate of the plough. A pleasant row it is for the Eton
+       youngsters to this spot. On Magna Charta island, opposite,
+       they may take their rest
+       <span class="pagenum"><a name="page161"
+       id="page161"></a>[pg 161]</span> and their lunch, and
+       refresh their minds as well with the memories of the place.
+       The task of reform is by no means complete. There is room
+       and call for further concessions in favor of the masses.
+       These embryo statesmen have work blocked out for them in the
+       future, and this is a good place for them to adjust to it
+       the focus of their bright young optics.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/160.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig160"
+             id="fig160"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/160.jpg"
+             alt="ETON COLLEGE AND CHAPEL." /></a>ETON COLLEGE AND
+             CHAPEL.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>The monarchical idea is certainly predominant in our present
+    surroundings. The Thames flows from the castle and the school
+    under two handsome erections named the Victoria and Albert
+    bridges; and when, turning our back upon Staines, just below
+    Runnymede, with its boundary-stone marking the limit of the
+    jurisdiction of plebeian London's fierce democracy, and
+    inscribed "God preserve the City of London, 1280," we strike
+    west into the Great Park, we soon come plump on George III, a
+    great deal larger than life. The "best farmer that ever brushed
+    dew from lawn" is clad in antique costume with toga and
+    buskins. Bestriding a stout horse, without stirrups and with no
+    bridle to speak of, the old gentleman looks calmly into the
+    distance while his steed is in the act of stepping over a
+    perpendicular precipice. This preposterous effort of the
+    glyptic art has the one merit of serving as a finger-board. The
+    old king points us to his palace, three miles off, at the end
+    of the famous Long Walk. He did not himself care to live at the
+    castle, but liked to make his home at an obscure lodge in the
+    park, the same from which, on his first attack of insanity, he
+    set out in charge of two of his household on that melancholy
+    ride to the retreat of Kew, more convenient in those days for
+    medical attendance from London, and to which he returned a few
+    months later restored for the time. Shortly after his recovery
+    he undertook to throw up one of the windows of the lodge, but
+    found it nailed down. He asked the cause, and was told, with
+    inconsiderate bluntness, that it had been done during his
+    illness to prevent his doing himself an injury. The perfect
+    calmness and silence with which he received this explanation
+    was a sufficient evidence of his recovery.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/161.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig161"
+             id="fig161"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/161.jpg"
+             alt="ETON COLLEGE, FROM NORTH TERRACE, WINDSOR." />
+             </a>ETON COLLEGE, FROM NORTH TERRACE, WINDSOR.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Bidding the old man a final farewell, we accept the
+    direction of his brazen hand and take up the line of march,
+    wherein all traveling America has preceded us, to the point
+    wherefrom we glanced off so suddenly in obedience to the
+    summons of Magna Charta. On either hand, as we thread the Long
+    Walk, open glades that serve as so many emerald-paved courts to
+    the monarchs of the grove, some of them older than the whole
+    Norman dynasty, with <span class="pagenum"><a name="page162"
+       id="page162"></a>[pg 162]</span> Saxon summers recorded in
+       their hearts. One of them, thirty-eight feet round, is
+       called after the Conqueror. Among these we shall not find
+       the most noted of Windsor trees. It was in the Home Park, on
+       the farther or northern side of the castle, that the fairies
+       were used to perform their</p>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i2">&mdash;dance of custom round about the
+            oak</p>
+
+            <p>Of Herne the hunter.</p>
+        </div>
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Whether the genuine oak was cut down at the close of the
+    last century, or was preserved, carefully fenced in and
+    labeled, in an utterly leafless and shattered state, to our
+    generation, is a moot point. Certain it is that the most ardent
+    Shakespearean must abandon the hope of securing for a bookmark
+    to his <i>Merry Wives of Windsor</i> one of the leaves that
+    rustled, while "Windsor bell struck twelve," over the head of
+    fat Jack. He has the satisfaction, however, of looking up at
+    the identical bell-tower of the sixteenth century, and may make
+    tryst with his imagination to await its midnight chime. Then he
+    may cross the graceful iron bridge&mdash;modern enough,
+    unhappily&mdash;to Datchet, and ascertain by actual experiment
+    whether the temperature of the Thames has changed since the
+    dumping into it of Falstaff, "hissing hot."</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/162.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig162"
+             id="fig162"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/162.jpg"
+             alt="STAINES CHURCH." /></a>STAINES CHURCH.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Back at the castle, we must "do" it, after the set fashion.
+    Reminders meet us at the threshold that it is in form a real
+    place of defence, contemplative of wars and rumors of wars, and
+    not a mere dwelling by any means in original design. A roadway,
+    crooked and raked by frowning embrasures, leads up from the
+    peaceful town to the particularly inhospitable-looking twin
+    towers of Henry VIII.'s gateway, in their turn commanded by the
+    round tower on the right, in full panoply of artificial scarp
+    and ditch. Sentinels in the scarlet livery that has flamed on
+    so many battlefields of all the islands and continents assist
+    in proving that things did not always go so easy with majesty
+    as they do now. But two centuries and more have elapsed since
+    there happened any justification for this frown of stone, steel
+    and feathers; Rupert's futile demonstration on it in 1642
+    having been Windsor's last taste of war, its sternest office
+    after that having been the safe-keeping of Charles I., who here
+    spent his "sorrowful and last Christmas." Once inside the gate,
+    visions of peace <span class="pagenum"><a name="page163"
+       id="page163"></a>[pg 163]</span> recur. The eye first falls
+       on the most beautiful of all the assembled structures, St.
+       George's Chapel. It, with the royal tomb house, the deanery
+       and Winchester tower, occupies the left or north side of the
+       lower or western ward. In the rear of the chapel of St.
+       George are quartered in cozy cloisters the canons of the
+       college of that ilk&mdash;not great guns in any sense, but
+       old ecclesiastical artillery spiked after a more or less
+       noisy youth and laid up in varnished black for the rest of
+       their days. Watch and ward over these modern equipments is
+       kept by Julius Cæsar's tower, as one of the most ancient
+       erections is of course called. Still farther to our left as
+       we enter are the quarters of sundry other antiquated
+       warriors, the Military Knights of Windsor. These are a few
+       favored veterans, mostly decayed officers of the army and
+       navy, who owe this shelter to royal favor and an endowment.
+       The Ivy tower, west of the entrance, is followed in eastward
+       succession by those of the gateway, Salisbury, Garter and
+       Bell towers.</p>
+
+    <div class="figright"
+         style="width:70%;">
+        <a href="images/163.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig163"
+             id="fig163"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/163.jpg"
+             alt="NORMAN GATE AND ROUND TOWER, WINDSOR." />
+             </a>NORMAN GATE AND ROUND TOWER, WINDSOR.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>The fine exterior of St. George's is more than matched by
+    the carving and blazonry of the interior. The groined roof
+    bears the devices of half a dozen early kings, beginning with
+    Edward the Confessor. Along the choir stretch the stalls of the
+    sovereign and knights-companions of the order of the Garter,
+    each hung with banner, mantle, sword and helmet. Better than
+    these is the hammered steel tomb of Edward IV., by Quentin
+    Matsys, the Flemish blacksmith. In the vaults beneath rest the
+    victim of Edward, Henry VI., Henry VIII., Jane Seymour and
+    Charles I. The account of the appearance of Charles' remains
+    when his tomb was examined in 1813 by Sir Henry Halford,
+    accompanied by several of the royal family, is worth quoting.
+    "The complexion of the face was dark and discolored. The
+    forehead and temples had lost little or nothing of their
+    muscular substance. The cartilage of the nose was gone; but the
+    left eye, in the moment of first exposure, was open and full,
+    though it vanished almost immediately, and the pointed beard so
+    characteristic of the reign of King Charles was perfect. The
+    shape of the face was a long oval; many of the teeth remained;
+    and the left ear, in consequence of the interposition of some
+    unctuous matter between it and the cere-cloth, was found
+    entire. The hair was thick at the back part of the head, and in
+    appearance nearly black. A portion of it, which has since been
+    cleaned and dried, is of a beautiful dark-brown color. That of
+    the beard was a reddish-brown. On the back part of the head it
+    was not more than an inch in length, and had probably been cut
+    so short for the convenience of the executioner, or perhaps by
+    the piety of friends after death in order to furnish memorials
+    of the unhappy king. On holding up the head to determine the
+    place of separation from the body, the muscles of the neck had
+    evidently contracted themselves considerably, and the fourth
+    cervical vertebra <span class="pagenum"><a name="page164"
+       id="page164"></a>[pg 164]</span> was found to be cut through
+       its substance transversely, leaving the face of the divided
+       portions perfectly smooth and even&mdash;an appearance which
+       could have been produced only by a heavy blow inflicted with
+       a very sharp instrument, and which furnished the last proof
+       wanting to identify Charles I."</p>
+
+    <div class="figleft"
+         style="width:60%;">
+        <a href="images/164.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig164"
+             id="fig164"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/164.jpg"
+             alt="HERNE'S OAK." /></a>HERNE'S OAK.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>A highly-edifying spectacle this must have been to the
+    prince regent and his brother Cumberland. The certainties of
+    the past and the possibilities of the future were calculated to
+    be highly suggestive. A French sovereign had but a few years
+    before shared the fate of Charles, and a cloud of other kings
+    were drifting about Europe with no very flattering prospect of
+    coming soon to anchor. Napoleon was showing his banded foes a
+    good double front in Germany and Spain. His dethronement and
+    the restoration of the Bourbons were not as yet contemplated.
+    The Spanish succession was whittled down to a girl&mdash;that
+    is, by Salic law, to nothing at all. The Hanoverian was in a
+    similar condition, or worse, none of the old sons of the crazy
+    old king having any legitimate children. The prince regent
+    himself was highly unpopular with the mass of his people; and
+    the classes that formed his principal support were more so, by
+    reason of the arrogance and exactions of the landed interest,
+    the high price of grain and other heavy financial burdens
+    consequent on the war, the arbitrary prosecutions and
+    imprisonment of leaders of the people, and the irregularities
+    of his private life.</p>
+
+    <p>But these sinister omens proved illusory. Leigh Hunt,
+    Wraxall and the rest made but ineffectual martyrs; the Bourbons
+    straggled back into France and Spain, with such results as we
+    see; George IV. weathered, by no merit of his own, a fresh
+    series of storms at home; the clouds that lowered upon his
+    house were made glorious summer by the advent of a fat little
+    lady in 1819&mdash;the fat old lady of 1875; and we step from
+    the tomb of Charles in St. George's Chapel to that where George
+    and William slumber undisturbed in the tomb-house, elaborately
+    decorated by Wolsey. Wolsey's fixtures were sold by the thrifty
+    patriots of Cromwell's Parliament, and bought in by the
+    republican governor of the castle as "old brass." George was
+    able, too, to add another story to the stature of the round
+    tower or keep that marks the middle ward of the castle and
+    looks down, on the rare occasion of a sufficiently clear
+    atmosphere, on prosperous and no longer disloyal London. This
+    same keep has quite a list of royal prisoners; John of France
+    and David II. and James I. of Scotland enjoyed a prolonged view
+    of its interior; so did the young earl of Surrey, a
+    brother-poet, a century removed, of James.</p>
+
+    <p>Leaving behind us the atmosphere of shackles and dungeons,
+    we emerge, through the upper ward and the additions of Queen
+    Bess, upon the ample terrace, where nothing bounds us but the
+    horizon. Together, the north, east and south terraces measure
+    some two thousand feet. The first looks upon Eton, the lesser
+    park of some five hundred acres which fills a bend of the
+    Thames <span class="pagenum"><a name="page165"
+       id="page165"></a>[pg 165]</span> and the country beyond for
+       many miles. The eastern platform, lying between the queen's
+       private apartments and an exquisite private garden, is not
+       always free to visitors. The south terrace presents to the
+       eye the Great Park of thirty-eight hundred acres, extending
+       six miles, with a width of from half a mile to two miles.
+       The equestrian statue at the end of the Long Walk is a
+       conspicuous object. The prevailing mass of rolling woods is
+       broken by scattered buildings, glades and avenues, which
+       take from it monotony and give it life. Near the south end
+       is an artificial pond called Virginia Water, edged with
+       causeless arches and ruins that never were anything but
+       ruins, Chinese temples and idle toys of various other kinds,
+       terrestrial and aquatic. The ancient trees, beeches and
+       elms, of enormous size, and often projected individually,
+       are worth studying near or from a distance. The elevation is
+       not so great as to bring out low-lying objects much removed.
+       We see the summits of hills, each having its name, as St.
+       Leonard's, Cooper's, Highstanding, etc., and glimpses of the
+       river and of some country-seats. St. Anne's Hill was the
+       home of Fox; at St. Leonard's dwelt the father of his rival
+       and rival of his father, and at Binfield, Pope, of whom it
+       is so hard to conceive as having ever been young, "lisped in
+       numbers, for the numbers came," natural descriptions,
+       ethical reflections, <i>vers de societé</i> and all, for
+       around him here there was food for them all. To descend from
+       Pope in point of both time and romance, the view includes
+       the scenes of Prince Albert's agricultural experiments.
+       Quite successful many of them were. He was a thoroughly
+       practical man&mdash;a circumstance which carried him by
+       several routes across ploughed fields and through well-built
+       streets, straight to the hearts of the English people. His
+       memory is more warmly cherished, and impressed upon the
+       stranger by more monuments, than that of any other of the
+       German strain. It might have been less so had he succeeded
+       in the efforts he is now known to have made soon after his
+       marriage to attain a higher nominal rank. He possessed,
+       through the alliance of Leopold and Stockmar and the
+       devotion of Victoria, kingly power without the name and the
+       responsibility, and with that he became content. He used it
+       cautiously and well when he employed it at all. His position
+       was a trying one, but he steered well through its
+       difficulties, and died as generally trusted as he was at
+       first universally watched. The love-match of 1840 was every
+       way a success.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/165.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig165"
+             id="fig165"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/165.jpg"
+             alt="EAST FRONT, WINDSOR CASTLE." /></a>EAST FRONT,
+             WINDSOR CASTLE.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Another figure, more rugged and less majestic, but not less
+    respectable, will be associated with Victoria in the memories,
+    if not the history proper, of her reign. This is John Brown,
+    the canny and impassive Scot, content, like the Rohans, to be
+    neither prince nor king, and, prouder
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page166"
+       id="page166"></a>[pg 166]</span> than they, satisfied
+       honestly to discharge the office of a flunkey without the
+       very smallest trace of the flunkey spirit. He too has lived
+       down envy and all uncharitableness. Contemptuous and serene
+       amid the hootings of the mob and the squibs of the
+       newspapers, he carries, as he has done for years, Her
+       Majesty's shawl and capacious India-rubbers, attends her
+       tramps through the Highlands and the Home Park, engineers
+       her special trains and looks after her personal comfort even
+       to the extent of ordering her to wear "mair claes" in a
+       Scotch mist. The queen has embalmed him in her books, and he
+       will rank among the heroes of royal authors as his namesake
+       and countryman the Cameronian, by favor of very similar
+       moral qualities, does with those of more democratic
+       proclivities.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:90%;">
+        <a href="images/166-1.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig166-1"
+             id="fig166-1"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/166-1.jpg"
+             alt="QUEEN ELIZABETH'S BUILDING, WINDSOR." /></a>QUEEN
+             ELIZABETH'S BUILDING, WINDSOR.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>We cannot apply literally to the view from Windsor
+    Thackeray's lines on "the castle towers of Bareacres:"</p>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>I stood upon the donjon keep and viewed the country
+            o'er;</p>
+
+            <p>I saw the lands of Bareacres for fifty miles or
+            more.</p>
+        </div>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="figleft"
+         style="width:40%;">
+        <a href="images/166-2.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig166-2"
+             id="fig166-2"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/166-2.jpg"
+             alt="EARL OF SURREY." /></a>EARL OF SURREY.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>We scan what was once embraced in Windsor Forest, where the
+    Norman laid his broad palm on a space a hundred and twenty
+    miles round, and, like the lion in the fable of the
+    hunting-party, informed his subjects that that was his share.
+    The domain dwindled, as did other royal appurtenances. Yet in
+    1807 the circuit was as much as seventy-seven miles. In 1789 it
+    embraced sixty thousand acres. The process of contraction has
+    since been accelerated, and but little remains outside of the
+    Great and Little Parks. Several villages of little note stand
+    upon it. Of these Wokingham has the distinction of an ancient
+    hostelry yclept the Rose; and the celebrity of the
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page167"
+       id="page167"></a>[pg 167]</span> Rose is a beautiful
+       daughter of the landlord of a century and a half ago. This
+       lady missed her proper fame by the blunder of a merry party
+       of poets who one evening encircled the mahogany of her papa.
+       It was as "fast" a festivity as such names as Gay and Swift
+       could make it. Their combined efforts resulted in the
+       burlesque of <i>Molly Mog</i>. These two and some others
+       contributed each a verse in honor of the fair waiter. But
+       they mistook her name, and the crown fell upon the less
+       charming brow of her sister, whose cognomen was depraved
+       from Mary into Molly. Wiclif's Oak is pointed out as a
+       corner of the old forest, a long way east of the park. Under
+       its still spreading branches that forerunner of Luther is
+       said to have preached. Messrs. Moody and Sankey should have
+       sought inspiration under its shade.</p>
+
+    <p>In the vast assemblage of the arboreal commonwealth that
+    carpets the landscape the centuries are represented one with
+    another. It is a leafy parliament that has never been dissolved
+    or prorogued. One hoary member is coeval with the Confessor.
+    Another sheltered William Rufus, tired from the chase. Under
+    another gathered recruits bound with Coeur de Lion for the Holy
+    Land. Against the bole of this was set up a practicing butt for
+    the clothyard shafts that won Agincourt, and beneath that
+    bivouacked the pickets of Cromwell. As we look down upon their
+    topmost leaves there floats, high above our own level, "darkly
+    painted on the crimson sky," a member, not so old, of another
+    commonwealth quite as ancient that has flourished among their
+    branches from time immemorial. There flaps the solitary heron
+    to the evening tryst of his tribe. Where is the hawk? Will he
+    not rise from some fair wrist among the gay troop we see
+    cantering across yonder glade? Only the addition of that little
+    gray speck circling into the blue is needed to round off our
+    illusion. But it comes not. In place of it comes a spirt of
+    steam from the railway viaduct, and the whistle of an engine.
+    Froissart is five hundred years dead again, and we turn to
+    Bradshaw.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/167.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig167"
+             id="fig167"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/167.jpg"
+             alt="WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM BISHOPSGATE." /></a>WINDSOR
+             CASTLE, FROM BISHOPSGATE.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Yet we have a "view of an interior" to contemplate before
+    facing the lower Thames. And first, as the day is fading,
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page168"
+       id="page168"></a>[pg 168]</span> we seek the dimmest part.
+       We dive into the crypt of the bell-tower, or the
+       curfew-tower, that used to send far and wide to many a Saxon
+       cottage the hateful warning that told of servitude. How old
+       the base of this tower is nobody seems to know, nor how far
+       back it has served as a prison. The oldest initials of state
+       prisoners inscribed on its cells date to 1600. The walls are
+       twelve feet thick, and must have begotten a pleasant feeling
+       of perfect security in the breasts of the involuntary
+       inhabitants. They did not know of a device contrived for the
+       security of their jailers, which has but recently been
+       discovered. This is a subterranean and subaqueous passage,
+       alleged to lead under the river to Burnham Abbey, three
+       miles off. The visitor will not be disposed to verify this
+       statement or to stay long in the comparatively airy crypt.
+       Damp as the British climate may be above ground, it is more
+       so below. We emerge to the fine range of state apartments
+       above, and submit to the rule of guide and guide-book.</p>
+
+    <div class="figleft"
+         style="width:70%;">
+        <a href="images/168.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig168"
+             id="fig168"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/168.jpg"
+             alt="LOCK AT WINDSOR." /></a>LOCK AT WINDSOR.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>St. George's Hall, the Waterloo gallery, the council-chamber
+    and the Vandyck room are the most attractive, all of them for
+    the historical portraits they contain, and the first, besides,
+    for its merit as an example of a Gothic interior and its
+    associations with the order of the Garter, the knights of which
+    society are installed in it. The specialty of the Waterloo room
+    is the series of portraits of the leaders, civil and military,
+    English and continental, of the last and successful league
+    against Napoleon. They are nearly all by Lawrence, and of
+    course admirable in their delineation of character. In that
+    essential of a good portrait none of the English school have
+    excelled Lawrence. We may rely upon the truth to Nature of each
+    of the heads before us; for air and expression accord with what
+    history tells us of the individuals, its verdict eked out and
+    assisted by instructive minutiæ of lineament and meaning
+    detected, in the "off-guard" of private intercourse, by the eye
+    of a great painter and a lifelong student of physiognomy. We
+    glance from the rugged Blucher to the wily Metternich, and from
+    the philosophic Humboldt to the semi-savage Platoff. The
+    dandies George IV. and Alexander are here, but Brummel is left
+    out. The gem of the collection is Pius VII., Lawrence's
+    masterpiece, widely familiar by engravings. Raphael's Julius
+    II. seems <span class="pagenum"><a name="page169"
+       id="page169"></a>[pg 169]</span> to have been in the
+       artist's mind, but that work is not improved on, unless in
+       so far as the critical eye of our day may delight in the
+       more intricate tricks of chiaroscuro and effect to which
+       Lawrence has recourse. "Brunswick's fated chieftain" will
+       interest the votaries of Childe Harold. Could he have looked
+       forward to 1870, he would perhaps have chosen a different
+       side at Waterloo, as his father might at Jena, and elected
+       to figure in oils at Versailles rather than at Windsor.
+       Incomparably more destructive to the small German princes
+       have been the Hohenzollerns than the Bonapartes.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/169.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig169"
+             id="fig169"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/169.jpg"
+             alt="THE THAMES EMBANKMENT." /></a>THE THAMES
+             EMBANKMENT.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>We forget these nineteenth-century people in the
+    council-chamber, wherein
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page170"
+       id="page170"></a>[pg 170]</span> reign Guido, Rembrandt,
+       Claude, and even Da Vinci. If Leonardo really executed all
+       the canvases ascribed to him in English collections, the
+       common impressions of his habits of painting but little, and
+       not often finishing that, do him great injustice. Martin
+       Luther is here, by Holbein, and the countess of Desmond, the
+       merry old lady</p>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>Who lived to the age of twice threescore and
+            ten,</p>
+
+            <p>And died of a fall from a cherry tree then,</p>
+        </div>
+    </div>
+
+    <p>is embalmed in the bloom of one hundred and twenty and the
+    gloom of Rembrandt. The two dozen pictures in this room form
+    nearly as odd an association as any like number of portraits
+    could do. Guercino's Sibyl figures with a cottage interior by
+    Teniers, and Lely's Prince Rupert looks down with lordly scorn
+    on Jonah pitched into the sea by the combined efforts of the
+    two Poussins. The link between Berghem's cows and Del Sarto's
+    Holy Family was doubtless supplied to the minds of the hanging
+    committee by recollections of the manger. Our thrifty
+    Pennsylvanian, West, is assigned the vestibule. Five of his
+    "ten-acre" pictures illustrate the wars of Edward III. and the
+    Black Prince. The king's closet and the queen's closet are
+    filled mostly by the Flemings. Vandyck's room finally finishes
+    the list. It has, besides a portrait of himself and several
+    more of the first Charles and his family in every pose, some
+    such queer, or worse than queer, commoners as Tom Killigrew and
+    Sir Kenelm Digby and Venetia his hopeful spouse, so dear to
+    novelists of a certain school.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:90%;">
+        <a href="images/170.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig170"
+             id="fig170"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/170.jpg"
+             alt="ELMS NEAR THE HERONRY." /></a>ELMS NEAR THE
+             HERONRY.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Vast sums have been expended on the renovation and
+    improvement of the castle during the past half century. With
+    Victoria it has been more popular as a residence than with any
+    of her predecessors since the fourteenth century. What,
+    however, with its greater practical proximity to London, due to
+    railways, and what with the queen's liking for solitude since
+    the death of her consort, the more secluded homes of Osborne
+    and Balmoral have measurably superseded it in her affections.
+    Five hundred miles of distance to the Dee preclude the
+    possibility of the dumping on her, by means of excursion
+    trains, of loyal cockneydom. She is as thoroughly protected
+    from that inundation in the Isle of Wight, the average Londoner
+    having a fixed horror of sea-sickness. The running down, by her
+    private steamer, of a few more inquisitive yachts in the Solent
+    would be a hazardous experiment, if temporarily effective in
+    keeping home invaders at bay. Holding as her right and left
+    bowers those two sanctuaries at the opposite ends of her island
+    realm, she can play a strong hand in the way of personal
+    independence, and cease to feel that hers is a monarchy limited
+    by the rights of the masses. It is well for the country that
+    she should be left as far as possible to consult her own
+    comfort, ease and health at least as freely as
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page171"
+       id="page171"></a>[pg 171]</span> the humblest of her
+       subjects. The continuance of her life is certainly a
+       political desideratum. It largely aids in maintaining a
+       wholesome balance between conservatism and reform. So long
+       as she lives there will be no masculine will to exaggerate
+       the former or obstruct the latter, as notably happened under
+       George III. and William IV. Her personal bearing is also in
+       her favor. Her popularity, temporarily obscured a few years
+       ago, is becoming as great as ever. It has never been
+       weakened by any misstep in politics, and so long as that can
+       be said will be exposed to no serious danger.</p>
+
+    <p>We are far from being at the end of the upper Thames.
+    Oxford, were there no other namable place, is beyond us. But we
+    have explored the denser portion&mdash;the nucleus of the
+    nebula of historic stars that stretches into the western sky as
+    seen from the metropolis. We lay aside our little lorgnette. It
+    has shown us as much as we can map in these pages, and that we
+    have endeavored to do with at least the merit of accuracy.</p>
+
+    <p class="author">EDWARD C. BRUCE.</p>
+
+    <h2>THE POET'S PEN.</h2>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i4">I am an idle reed;</p>
+
+            <p>I rustle in the whispering air;</p>
+
+            <p class="i4">I bear my stalk and seed</p>
+
+            <p>Through spring-time's glow and summer's glare.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i4">And in the fiercer strife</p>
+
+            <p>Which winter brings to me amain,</p>
+
+            <p class="i4">Sapless, I waste my life,</p>
+
+            <p>And, murmuring at my fate, complain.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i4">I am a worthless reed;</p>
+
+            <p>No golden top have I for crown,</p>
+
+            <p class="i4">No flower for beauty's meed,</p>
+
+            <p>No wreath for poet's high renown.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i4">Hollow and gaunt, my wand</p>
+
+            <p>Shrill whistles, bending in the gale;</p>
+
+            <p class="i4">Leafless and sad I stand,</p>
+
+            <p>And, still neglected, still bewail.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i4">O foolish reed! to wail!</p>
+
+            <p>A poet came, with downcast eyes,</p>
+
+            <p class="i4">And, wandering through the dale,</p>
+
+            <p>Saw thee and claimed thee for his prize.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i4">He plucked thee from the mire;</p>
+
+            <p>He pruned and made of thee a pen,</p>
+
+            <p class="i4">And wrote in words of fire</p>
+
+            <p>His flaming song to listening men;</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i4">Till thou, so lowly bred,</p>
+
+            <p>Now wedded to a nobler state,</p>
+
+            <p class="i4">Utt'rest such pæans overhead</p>
+
+            <p>That angels listen at their gate.</p>
+        </div>
+    </div>
+
+    <p class="author">F.A.
+    HILLARD.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page172"
+       id="page172"></a>[pg 172]</span>
+
+    <h2>SKETCHES OF INDIA.</h2>
+
+    <h3>II.</h3>
+
+    <p>I had now learned to place myself unreservedly in the hands
+    of Bhima Gandharva. When, therefore, on regaining the station
+    at Khandallah, he said, "The route by which I intend to show
+    you India will immediately take us quite away from this part of
+    it; first, however, let us go and see Poona, the old Mahratta
+    capital, which lies but a little more than thirty miles farther
+    to the south-eastward by rail,"&mdash;I accepted the
+    proposition as a matter of course, and we were soon steaming
+    down the eastern declivity of the Gháts. As we moved smoothly
+    down into the treeless plains which surround Poona I could not
+    resist a certain feeling of depression.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes," said Bhima Gandharva when I mentioned it to him, "I
+    understand exactly what you mean. On reaching an unbroken
+    expanse of level country, after leaving the tops of mountains,
+    I always feel as if my soul had come bump against a solid wall
+    of rock in the dark. I seem to hear a dull <i>thud</i> of
+    discouragement somewhere back in my soul, as when a man's body
+    falls dead on the earth. Nothing, indeed, could more heighten
+    such a sensation than the contrast between this and the Bombay
+    side of the Gháts. There we had the undulating waters, the
+    lovely harbor with its wooded and hilly islands, the ascending
+    terraces of the Gháts: everything was energetic, the whole
+    invitation of Nature was toward air, light, freedom, heaven.
+    But here one spot is like another spot; this level ground is
+    just the same level ground there was a mile back; this corn
+    stands like that corn; there is an oppressive sense of
+    bread-and-butter about; one somehow finds one's self thinking
+    of ventilation and economics. It is the sausage-grinding school
+    of poetry&mdash;of which modern art, by the way, presents
+    several examples&mdash;as compared with that general school
+    represented by the geniuses who arise and fly their own flight
+    and sing at a great distance above the heads of men and of
+    wheat."</p>
+
+    <p>Having arrived and refreshed ourselves at our hotel, whose
+    proprietor was, as usual, a Parsee, we sallied forth for a
+    stroll about Poona. On one side of us lay the English quarter,
+    consisting of the houses and gardens of the officers and
+    government employés, and of the two or three hundred other
+    Englishmen residing here. On the other was the town, extending
+    itself along the banks of the little river Moota. We dreamed
+    ourselves along in the lovely weather through such of the seven
+    quarters of the town as happened to strike the fancy of my
+    companion. Occasionally we were compelled to turn out of our
+    way for the sacred cattle, which, in the enjoyment of their
+    divine prerogatives, would remain serenely lying across our
+    path; but we respected the antiquity, if not the
+    reasonableness, of their privileges, and murmured not.</p>
+
+    <p>Each of the seven quarters of Poona is named after a day of
+    the week. As we strolled from Monday to Tuesday, or passed with
+    bold anachronism from Saturday back to Wednesday, I could not
+    help observing how these interweavings and reversals of time
+    appeared to take an actual embodiment in the scenes through
+    which we slowly moved, particularly in respect of the houses
+    and the costumes which went to make up our general view. From
+    the modern-built European houses to the mediæval-looking
+    buildings of the Bhoodwar quarter, with their massive walls and
+    loop-holes and crenellations, was a matter of four or five
+    centuries back in a mere turn of the eye; and from these latter
+    to the Hindu temples here and there, which, whether or not of
+    actual age, always carry one straight into antiquity, was a
+    further retrogression to the obscure depths of time. So, too,
+    one's glance would often sweep in a twinkling from a European
+    clothed in <span class="pagenum"><a name="page173"
+       id="page173"></a>[pg 173]</span> garments of the latest mode
+       to a Hindu whose sole covering was his <i>dhotee</i>, or
+       clout about the loins, taking in between these two extremes
+       a number of distinct stages in the process of evolution
+       through which our clothes have gone. In the evening we
+       visited the <i>Sangam</i>, where the small streams of the
+       Moola and the Moota come together. It is filled with
+       cenotaphs, but, so far from being a place of weeping, the
+       pleasant air was full of laughter and of gay conversation
+       from <span class="pagenum"><a name="page174"
+       id="page174"></a>[pg 174]</span> the Hindus, who delight to
+       repair here for the purpose of enjoying the cool breath of
+       the evening as well as the pleasures of social
+       intercourse.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/173.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig173"
+             id="fig173"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/173.jpg"
+             alt="HINDU TEMPLES NEAR POONA." /></a>HINDU TEMPLES
+             NEAR POONA.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>But I did not care to linger in Poona. The atmosphere always
+    had to me a certain tang of the assassinations, the intrigues,
+    the treacheries which marked the reign of that singular line of
+    usurping ministers whose capital was here. In the days when the
+    Peishwas were in the height of their glory Poona was a city of
+    a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, and great traffic was
+    here carried on in jewelry and such luxuries among the Mahratta
+    nobles. The Mahrattas once, indeed, possessed the whole of
+    India practically; and their name is composed of <i>Mahu</i>, a
+    word meaning "great," and often to be met with in the
+    designations of this land, where so many things really
+    <i>are</i> great, and <i>Rachtra</i>, "kingdom," the propriety
+    of the appellation seeming to be justified by the bravery and
+    military character of the people. They have been called the
+    Cossacks of India from these qualities combined with their
+    horsemanship. But the dynasty of the usurping ministers had its
+    origin in iniquity; and the corruption of its birth quickly
+    broke out again under the stimulus of excess and luxury, until
+    it culminated in the destruction of the Mahratta empire in
+    1818. So, when we had seen the palace of the Peishwa, from one
+    of whose balconies the young Peishwa Mahadeo committed suicide
+    by leaping to the earth in the year 1797 through shame at
+    having been reproved by his minister Nana Farnavese in presence
+    of his court, and when we had visited the Hira-Bâgh, or Garden
+    of Diamonds, the summer retreat of the Peishwas, with its
+    elegant pavilion, its balconies jutting into the masses of
+    foliage, its cool tank of water, reposing under the protection
+    of the temple-studded Hill of Pararati, we took train again for
+    Bombay.</p>
+
+    <p>The Great Indian Peninsula Railway's main line leads out of
+    Bombay over the Gháts to Jabalpúr, six hundred miles; thence a
+    railway of some two hundred and twenty miles runs to Allahabad,
+    connecting them with the great line, known as the East Indian
+    Railway, which extends for more than a thousand miles
+    north-westward from Calcutta <i>viâ</i> Patna, Benares,
+    Allahabad, Cawnpore, Lucknow, Agra and Delhi. Our journey, as
+    marked out by Bhima Gandharva, was to be from Bombay to
+    Jabalpúr by rail; thence by some slow and easy conveyance
+    across country to Bhopal, and from Bhopal northward through
+    Jhansi to Delhi and the northern country, thence returning by
+    rail to Calcutta.</p>
+
+    <p>As one ascends the Western Gháts shortly after leaving
+    Bombay one has continual occasion to remark the extraordinary
+    resources of modern railway engineering. Perhaps the mechanical
+    skill of our time has not achieved any more brilliant
+    illustrations of itself than here occur. For many miles one is
+    literally going up a flight of steps by rail. The word Ghát
+    indeed means the steps leading up from pools or rivers, whose
+    frequent occurrence in India attests the need of easy access to
+    water, arising from the important part which it plays both in
+    the civil and religious economies of the Hindu. The Gháts are
+    so called from their terraced ledges, rising one above another
+    from the shores of the ocean like the stairs leading up from a
+    pool. In achieving the ascent of these gigantic stairs all the
+    expedients of road-makers have been resorted to: the zigzag,
+    the trestle, the tunnel, the curve, have been pushed to their
+    utmost applications; for five continuous miles on the Thull
+    Ghát Incline there is a grade of one in thirty-seven, involving
+    many trying curves, and on nineteen miles of the Bhore Ghát
+    Incline there are thirty tunnels.</p>
+
+    <p>That which gives tone and character to a general view of the
+    interior of a railway-car in traveling is, from the nature of
+    things, the head-covering of the occupants, for it is this
+    which mostly meets the eye; and no one who has traveled in the
+    United States, for example, can have failed to observe the
+    striking difference between the aspect of a car in the South,
+    where the felt slouch prevails, and of one in the North, where
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page175"
+       id="page175"></a>[pg 175]</span> the silk hat is more
+       affected. But cars full of turbans! There were turbans of
+       silk, of muslin, of woolen; white turbans, red, green and
+       yellow turbans; turbans with knots, turbans with ends
+       hanging; neat turbans, baggy turbans, preternatural turbans,
+       and that curious spotted silk inexpressible mitre which the
+       Parsee wears.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/175.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig175"
+             id="fig175"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/175.jpg"
+             alt="GÓNDS." /></a>GÓNDS.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Bhima Gandharva was good enough
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page176"
+       id="page176"></a>[pg 176]</span> to explain to me the
+       turban; and really, when within bounds, it is not so
+       nonsensical a headdress as one is apt at first to imagine.
+       It is a strip of cloth from nine to twelve inches wide, and
+       from fifteen to twenty-five yards long. They are known,
+       however, of larger dimensions, reaching to a yard in width
+       and sixty yards in length. The most common color is white;
+       next, perhaps, red, and next yellow; though green, blue,
+       purple and black are worn, as are also buff, shot colors and
+       gray, these latter being usually of silk; but this does not
+       exhaust the varieties, for there are many turbans made of
+       cotton cloth printed in various devices to suit the fancies
+       of the wearers.</p>
+
+    <p>"The <i>puttee-dar</i> (<i>pugri</i>, or turban)," continued
+    my companion, "is a neat compact turban, in general use by
+    Hindus and Mohammedans; the <i>joore-dar</i> is like the
+    <i>puttee-dar</i>, except that it has the addition of a knot on
+    the crown; the <i>khirkee-dar</i> is the full-dress turban of
+    gentlemen attached to native courts; the <i>nustalik</i> is a
+    small turban which fits closely to the head, and is worn for
+    full dress at the Mohammedan <i>durbars</i> or royal
+    receptions; the <i>mundeel</i> is the military turban, with
+    stripes of gold and ends; the <i>séthi</i> is like the
+    <i>nustalik</i>, and is worn by bankers; the <i>shumla</i> is a
+    shawl-turban; and I fear you do not care to know the other
+    varieties&mdash;the <i>morassa</i>, the <i>umamu</i>, the
+    <i>dustar</i>, the&mdash;"</p>
+
+    <p>"Thank you," I said: "life is short, my dear Bhima, and I
+    shall know nothing but turbans if this goes on, which will be
+    inconvenient, particularly when I return to my home and my
+    neighbor Smith asks me that ghastly question, 'What do I think
+    of India?'"</p>
+
+    <p>"It is a more 'ghastly' question as to India than as to any
+    other country in the world," said the Hindu. "Some years ago,
+    when Mr. Dilke was traveling in this country, a witty officer
+    of one of the hill-stations remarked to him that <i>all general
+    observations about India were absurd</i>. This is quite true.
+    How could it be otherwise? Only consider, for example, the
+    languages of India&mdash;the Assamese, with its two branches of
+    the Deccan-göl and the Uttar-göl; the Bengalee; the Maithilee,
+    Tirhutiya or Tirabhucti, spoken between the Coosy and the
+    Gunduck; the Orissan, of the regions around Cuttack; the
+    Nepalese; the Kosalese, about Almora; the Dogusee, between
+    Almora and Cashmere; the Cashmiran; the Panjabee; the
+    Mooltanee, or Vuchee, on the middle Indus; the two dialects of
+    Sindhí, or Tatto, on the lower Indus; the Cutché, on the west
+    coast of the peninsula; the Guseraté, spoken on the islands of
+    Salsette and Bombay and the opposite coast of the Coucan, as
+    well as by the Parsees in the cities, where it is corrupted
+    with many words of other languages through the influence of
+    commercial relations; the Coucané, from Bombay to Goa and along
+    the parallel Gháts where it is called Ballagate; the Bikaneeré,
+    the Marvaré, the Jeyporé, the Udayaporé, of Rajpootana; the
+    Vraja-bhasha (the cow-pen language) of the Doab, between the
+    Ganges and the Jumna, which is probably the parent of Hindi (or
+    Oordú); the Malooé, of the tableland of Malwa; the
+    Bundelakhandé, of the Bundelkhand; the Mogadhé, of Behar; the
+    Maharachtré, of the country south of the Vindhyas;
+    the&mdash;"</p>
+
+    <p>"It gives me pain to interrupt you, Bhima Gandharva," I said
+    (fervently hoping that this portion of my remark might escape
+    the attention of the recording angel); "but I think we are at
+    Jabalpúr."</p>
+
+    <p><i>Apropos</i> of Jubbulpoor, it is well enough to remark
+    that by the rules of Indian orthography which are now to be
+    considered authentic, the letter "a" without an accent has a
+    sound equivalent to short "u," and a vowel with an acute accent
+    has what is usually called its long sound in English.
+    Accordingly, the word written "Jabalpúr" should be pronounced
+    as if retaining the "u" and the "oo" with which it was formerly
+    written, "Jubbulpoor". The termination <i>púr</i>, so common in
+    the designation of Indian places, is equivalent to that of
+    <i>ville</i> in English, and means the same. The other common
+    termination, <i>abad</i>, means "dwelling" or "residence":
+    <i>e.g.</i>, Ahmedabad, the residence of Ahmed. Jabalpúr is but
+    about a mile from the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page177"
+       id="page177"></a>[pg 177]</span> right bank of the Nerbadá
+       (<i>Nerbudda</i>) River; and as I wished to see the famous
+       Marble Rocks of that stream, which are found a short
+       distance from Jabalpúr, my companion and I here left the
+       railway, intending to see a little of the valley of the
+       Nerbadá, and then to strike across the Vindhyas, along the
+       valley of the Tonsa, to Bhopal, making our journey by such
+       slow, irregular and easy stages as should be compatible with
+       that serene and philosophic disposition into which the
+       Hindu's beautiful gravity had by this time quite converted
+       my American tendencies toward rushing through life at the
+       killing pace.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/177.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig177"
+             id="fig177"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/177.jpg"
+             alt="CENOTAPHS IN THE VALLEY OF THE TONSA." />
+             </a>CENOTAPHS IN THE VALLEY OF THE TONSA.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>It was a little past midday when we made our first journey
+    along the river between the Marble Rocks. Although the weather
+    was as nearly perfect as weather could be, the mornings being
+    deliciously cool and bracing and the nights cold enough to
+    produce often a thin layer of ice over a pan of water left
+    exposed till daybreak, yet the midday sun was warm enough,
+    especially after a walk, to make one long for leaves and shade
+    and the like. It would be difficult, therefore, to convey the
+    sensations with which we reclined at our ease in a
+    flat-bottomed punt while an attendant poled us up toward the
+    "Fall of Smoke," where the Nerbadá leaps out eagerly toward the
+    low lands he is to fertilize, like a young poet anxious to
+    begin his work of grace in the world. On each side of us rose
+    walls of marble a hundred feet in height, whose pure white was
+    here and there striped with dark green or black: all the colors
+    which met the eye&mdash;the marmoreal whites, the bluish grays
+    of the recesses among the ledges, the green and black seams,
+    the limpid blue of the stream&mdash;were grateful, calm-toned,
+    refreshing; we inhaled the coolness as if it had been a mild
+    aroma out of a distant flower. This pleasant fragrance, which
+    seemed to come up out of all things, was presently intensified
+    by a sort of spiritual counterpart&mdash;a gentle breath that
+    blew upon us from the mysterious regions of death; for on a
+    <i>ghát</i> we saw a small company of Hindus just launching the
+    body of a pious relative into the waters of Mother
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page178"
+       id="page178"></a>[pg 178]</span> Nerbadá in all that freedom
+       from grief, and even pleasant contemplation, with which this
+       singular people regard the transition from present to future
+       existence. These corpses, however, which are thus committed
+       to the wave, do not always chime so happily in with the
+       reveries of boating-parties on the Nerbadá. The Marble Rocks
+       are often resorted to by pic-nic parties in the moonlit
+       evenings; and one can easily fancy that to have a dusky dead
+       body float against one's boat and sway slowly round
+       alongside in the midst of a gay jest or of a light song of
+       serenade, as is said to have happened not unfrequently here,
+       is not an occurrence likely to heighten the spirits of
+       revelers. Occasionally, also, the black, ugly double snout
+       of the <i>magar</i> (or Nerbadá crocodile) may pop up from
+       the surface, which may here serve as a warning to the young
+       lady who trails her hand in the water&mdash;and I have yet
+       to be in a boating-party where the young lady did not trail
+       her hand in the water&mdash;that on the Nerbadá it is
+       perhaps as well to resign an absent-minded hand to the young
+       officer who sits by her in the boat lest Magar should snap
+       it off.</p>
+
+    <p>Leaving the Nerbadá we now struck off northward toward the
+    Tonsa, intending to pass round by way of Dumoh, Sangor, Bhilsa
+    and Sanchi to Bhopal. We might have pursued a route somewhat
+    more direct by following directly down the valley of the
+    Nerbadá to Hoshangabad, and thence straight across to Bhopal,
+    but my companion preferred the circuitous route indicated, as
+    embracing a greater variety of interesting objects. He had
+    procured for our conveyance a vehicle which was in all respects
+    suitable to the placidity of his temper; and I make bold to
+    confess that, American as I am&mdash;born on the railroad, so
+    to speak&mdash;I have never enjoyed traveling as I did in this
+    novel carriage. It was what is called a <i>chapaya</i>. It
+    consisted of a body nearly ten feet in length by more than five
+    in breadth, and was canopied by a top supported upon sculptured
+    pillars of wood. The wheels were massive and low. There were no
+    springs; but this deficiency was atoned for by the thick
+    cushionment of the rear portion of the vehicle, which allowed
+    us to lie at full length in luxurious ease as we rolled along.
+    Four white bullocks, with humps and horns running nearly
+    straight back on the prolongation of the forehead line, drew us
+    along in a very stately manner at the rate of something like a
+    mile and a half an hour.</p>
+
+    <p>We were now in the Góndwana, in some particulars one of the
+    most interesting portions of the country. Here are the
+    Highlands of Central India; here rise the Nerbadá and the
+    Tapti&mdash;which flow to the westward in a generally parallel
+    direction, and empty into the Gulf of Cambaye, the one at
+    Broode and the other at Surat&mdash;as well as the Sôn, the
+    Keyn (or Cane) and the Tonsa, which flow northward into the
+    Jumna. The valley of the Keyn and that of the Tonsa here run
+    across the Vindhyas, which are known to the eastward of this as
+    the Kyrmores, and afford communication between Northern and
+    Southern India. It is along the depression of the latter stream
+    that the railway has been built from Jabalpúr to Allahabad.</p>
+
+    <p>The eight hundred thousand Gónds of the Góndwana are
+    supposed to be members of the great autochthonal family of
+    ancient India. These hills of the Góndwana country appear to
+    have been considered by the incoming Aryans for a long time as
+    a sort of uncanny land, whose savage recesses were filled with
+    demons and snakes: indeed, in the epics of the Máhábháráta and
+    Rámáyana this evil character is attributed to that portion of
+    India lying south of the Vindhyas. The forest of Spenser's
+    Fairy Queen, in which wandering knights meet with manifold
+    beasts and maleficent giants, and do valorous battles against
+    them in the rescue of damsels and the like&mdash;such seem to
+    have been the Góndwana woods to the ancient Hindu imagination.
+    It was not distressed damsels, however, whom they figured as
+    being assisted by the arms of the errant protectors, but
+    religious devotees, who dwelt in the seclusion of the forest,
+    and who were protected from the pranks and machinations of the
+    savage denizens by opportune heroes
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page179"
+       id="page179"></a>[pg 179]</span> of the northern race. It
+       appears, however, that the native demons of the Góndwana had
+       fascinating daughters; for presently we find the rajahs from
+       the north coming down and marrying them; and finally, in the
+       fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the keen urgency of the
+       conquering Mohammedans sends great numbers of Rajpúts down
+       into the Góndwana, and a considerable mixture of the
+       <span class="pagenum"><a name="page180"
+       id="page180"></a>[pg 180]</span> two bloods takes place.
+       With this incursion of Hindu peoples come also the Hindu
+       gods and tenets; and Mahadeo, the "great god," whose home
+       had been the Kailas of the Himalayas, now finds himself
+       domesticated in the mountains of Central India. In the
+       Mahadeo mountain is still a shrine of Siva, which is much
+       visited by pilgrims and worshipers.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/179.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig179"
+             id="fig179"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/179.jpg"
+             alt="THE GAUR, OR INDIAN BISON." /></a>THE GAUR, OR
+             INDIAN BISON.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>The Gónd&mdash;he who lives back in the hills, far off from
+    the neighborhood of the extensive planting districts, which
+    have attracted many of those living near them to become at
+    least half-civilized laborers in harvest-time&mdash;is a
+    primitive being enough.</p>
+
+    <p>"Only look," said Bhima Gandharva, "at that hut if you
+    desire to see what is perhaps one of the most primitive houses
+    since ever the banyan tree gave to man (as is fabled) the idea
+    of sheltering himself from the elements artificially." It was
+    simply made of stakes driven into the ground, between which
+    were wattled branches. This structure was thatched with grass,
+    and plastered with mud.</p>
+
+    <p>The Gónd, like the American Indian, has his little patch of
+    grain, which he cultivates, however, in a fashion wholly his
+    own. His sole instrument of agriculture seems to be the axe.
+    Selecting a piece of ground which presents a growth of small
+    and easily-cut saplings&mdash;and perhaps, by the way, thus
+    destroying in a few hours a whole cargo of teak trees worth
+    more than all the crops of his agricultural lifetime&mdash;he
+    hews down the growth, and in the dry season sets fire to the
+    fallen timber. The result is a bed of ashes over a space of two
+    or three acres. His soil is now ready. If the patch thus
+    prepared happens to be level, he simply flings out a few
+    handfuls of grain, coarse rice, kútki (ponicum) or kódon
+    (paspalum), and the thing is done. The rest is in the hands of
+    the god who sends the rains. If the patch be on a declivity, he
+    places the grain at the upper part, where it will be washed
+    down by the rains over the balance of the field. Next year he
+    will burn some more wood&mdash;the first burning will have left
+    many charred stumps and trunks, which he supplements with a
+    little wood dragged from other parts of the forest&mdash;on the
+    same spot, and so the next year, by which time it will become
+    necessary to begin a new clearing, or <i>dhya</i>. The
+    <i>dhya</i> thus abandoned does not renew the original growth
+    which clothed it, like the pinelands of the Southern United
+    States, which, if allowed to run waste after having been
+    cleared and cultivated, clothe themselves either with oaks or
+    with a wholly different species of pine from the original
+    growth. The waste <i>dhya</i>, which may have perhaps nourished
+    a splendid growth of teak, becomes now only a dense jungle.</p>
+
+    <p>The Gónd also raises pumpkins and beans; and this vegetable
+    diet he supplements with game ensnared in the <i>dhyas</i>, to
+    which peafowl, partridges, hares and the like resort. Many of
+    the villages, however, have a professional huntsman, who will
+    display the most incredible patience in waiting with his
+    matchlock for the game to appear.</p>
+
+    <p>Besides these articles of diet, the aborigines of the
+    Góndwana have their mhowa tree, which stands them in much the
+    same multifarious stead as the palm does to its beneficiaries.
+    The flowers of the mhowa fall and are eaten, or are dried and
+    pressed, being much like raisins: they also produce a wine by
+    fermentation and the strong liquor of the hill-people by
+    distillation. Of the seed cakes are made, and an oil is
+    expressed from them which is an article of commerce.</p>
+
+    <p>In addition, the poor Gónd appears to have a periodical
+    godsend resulting from a singular habit of one of the great
+    Indian plants. The bamboo is said to undergo a general seeding
+    every thirty years: at this period, although, in the mean time,
+    many individual bamboos may have passed through the process of
+    reproduction, it is said that the whole bamboo growth of a
+    section will simultaneously drop its leaves and put forth large
+    panicles of flowers, after which come great quantities of seeds
+    much like rice. These are gathered for food by the inhabitants
+    with all the greater diligence in consequence of a
+    tradition&mdash;which, however, does not seem to be at all
+    supported by facts&mdash;that the general seeding of the
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page181"
+       id="page181"></a>[pg 181]</span> bamboo portends a failure
+       of the regular crops. The liberal forests of the Góndwana
+       furnish still other edibles to their denizens. The ebony
+       plums, the wild mango, the seeds of the sál tree, the beans
+       of the giant banhinia creeper, a species of arrowroot, and a
+       wild yam, are here found and eaten.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/181.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig181"
+             id="fig181"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/181.jpg"
+             alt="BANJARIS." /></a>BANJARIS.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>It is not long since the Gónds had arrived at a melancholy
+    condition under the baleful influences of the kulars, or
+    liquor-dealers, who resided among them and created an
+    extraordinary demand for their intoxicating wares by paying for
+    service and for produce in liquor. The kulars have, however,
+    been thrown <span class="pagenum"><a name="page182"
+       id="page182"></a>[pg 182]</span> into the background by wise
+       efforts toward their suppression, and matters have improved
+       for the poor autoch-thones.</p>
+
+    <p>We spent our first night in our chapaya, my companion having
+    so arranged matters that we were quite independent of the
+    bungaloos which the Englishmen have erected at suitable
+    distances along the great roads for the convenience of
+    travelers. The night was clear; betwixt the corner pillars
+    which upheld our canopy a thousand friendly salutations from
+    the stars streamed in upon us; the tranquil countenance of my
+    friend seemed, as he lay beside me, like the face of the Past
+    purified of old errors and calm with great wisdom got through
+    great tribulation, insomuch that betwixt the Hindu and the
+    stars I felt myself to be at once in communication with
+    antiquity and with eternity.</p>
+
+    <p>Thus we pursued our ambulatory meditations through the
+    Góndwana. If we had been sportsmen, we should have found full
+    as varied a field for the bagging of game as for that more
+    spiritual hunt after new ideas and sensations in which we were
+    engaged. Gray quail, gray partridges, painted partridges
+    (<i>Francolinus pictus</i>), snipe and many varieties of
+    water-fowl, the sambor, the black antelope, the Indian gazelle
+    or ravine deer, the gaur or Indian bison, chewing the cud in
+    the midday shade or drinking from a clear stream, troops of
+    <i>nilgaé</i> springing out from the long grass and dwarf
+    growth of polás and jujube trees which covered the sites of
+    abandoned villages and fields,&mdash;all these revealed
+    themselves to us in the most tempting situations. But although
+    I had been an ardent devotee of the double-barrel, the large
+    and manly tenderness which Bhima Gandharva invariably displayed
+    toward all animals, whether wild or tame, had wrought marvels
+    upon me, and I had grown fairly ashamed&mdash;nay,
+    horrified&mdash;at the idea that anything which a generous and
+    brave man could call <i>sport</i> should consist wholly in the
+    most keen and savage cruelties inflicted upon creatures whom we
+    fight at the most unknightly odds, we armed, they unarmed.
+    While I knew that our pleasures are by the divine order mostly
+    distillations from pain, I could not now help recognizing at
+    the same time that this circumstance was part of an enormous
+    plan which the slaughter of innocent creatures in the way of
+    "sport" did in nowise help to carry out.</p>
+
+    <p>The truth is, although I had been for some days wavering
+    upon the brink of these conclusions in a quiet way, I found the
+    old keen ardor of the sportsman still burning too strongly, and
+    I had started out with a breech-loader, intent upon doing much
+    of the Góndwana route gun in hand. It was not long before a
+    thoughtless shot operated to bring my growing convictions
+    sharply face to face with my decreasing practice, and thus to
+    quite frown the latter out of existence. It happened in this
+    wise: One day, not far from sunset, I was walking idly along
+    behind the chapaya, in which Bhima Gandharva was dreamily
+    reclining, when suddenly a pair of great <i>sáras</i> cranes
+    rose from the low banks of a small stream and sailed directly
+    across the road. Quick as thought&mdash;indeed, quicker than
+    thought; for if I <i>had</i> thought, I would not have done
+    it&mdash;I fired, and brought down one of the monstrous birds.
+    As I started to approach it, Bhima Gandharva said, in a tone
+    just a trifle graver than usual, "Stop! wait a moment," and at
+    the same time halted the chapaya. The mate of the bird I had
+    shot, seeing him fall, alighted on the same spot, then flew up,
+    then returned, flew up again, returned again, with an
+    exhibition of sad and lingering affection of which I had not
+    dreamed, and which penetrated me beyond expression; so I stood
+    half stolid outwardly and wholly ashamed and grieved inwardly.
+    "The sáras," said my friend, "is the type of conjugal affection
+    among the Hindus. The birds nearly always go in pairs; and when
+    one is killed, the other invariably makes those demonstrations
+    of tenderness which you have just seen."</p>
+
+    <p>As we journeyed along in the dusk came notes from another
+    pair of feathered lovers, "chukwa, chukwi," "chukwa, chukwi,"
+    in a sort of mournful <span class="pagenum"><a name="page183"
+       id="page183"></a>[pg 183]</span> alternation. They were the
+       branning ducks, he on one side, she on the other side of the
+       stream, as is their habit, whence they are fabled to be a
+       pair of lovers who must yearn unavailingly through the long
+       nights from opposite banks of the river.</p>
+
+    <p>That night, when Bhima Gandharva was asleep, I gently arose,
+    took my double-barrel&mdash;thou dear Manton! how often has not
+    Jonesville admired thee returning from the field at late
+    evening slanting at a jaunty angle high above my bagful of
+    snipe or of quail as the case might be!&mdash;yes, I took this
+    love of a gun, together with the cartridges, accoutrements and
+    all other rights, members and appurtenances thereunto belonging
+    or in any wise appertaining, and slid the whole lot softly into
+    a deep green pool of the very stream from which had flown my
+    sáras.</p>
+
+    <p>The taste of gypsy life which I was now enjoying contributed
+    to add a sort of personal element to that general interest
+    which hangs about the curious Banjaris, whom we met constantly,
+    with their families and their bullocks, along our road.
+    <i>Banjara</i> is literally "forest-wanderer." The women were
+    especially notable for their tall stature, shapely figures and
+    erect carriage; which circumstances are all the more wonderful
+    from the life of hardship which they lead, attending as they do
+    at once to the foraging of the cattle, the culinary
+    preparations for the men and the cares of the children. From
+    the profusion of ornaments which they wore, one may imagine,
+    however, that they were well cared for by their lords in return
+    for their affectionate labors; and the general bearing of the
+    tall Banjara who bore a long two-handed sword gave evidence of
+    a certain inward sense of protection over his belongings which
+    probably found vent in many an affectionate gift of rings and
+    bracelets to his graceful partner. It must be confessed that
+    the gypsying of these Eastern Bohemians is not so free a life
+    as is popularly supposed. The <i>naik</i> or sovereign of each
+    <i>tanda</i>, or camp, seems to be possessed of absolute power,
+    and in this connection the long two-handed sword suggested much
+    less gentle reflections. The Banjara, however, though a nomad,
+    is a serviceable one, for he is engaged in trade. With his
+    bullocks he is the carrier of Central India, and is to be met
+    with all over that section, bringing salt and other commodities
+    and returning with interior produce.</p>
+
+    <h2>FRA ALOYSIUS</h2>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>Fra Aloysius, vexed with skeptic fears,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Nigh crazed with thought to all the
+            saints did pray</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">For faith in those mysterious words that
+            say,</p>
+
+            <p>"One day is with the Lord a thousand years,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">A thousand years with Him are as a
+            day."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>An erudite and holy monk was he,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">And yet his brethren trembled lest his
+            brain</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Should lose its poise, so long he dwelt
+            in vain</p>
+
+            <p>On that perplexing verse to find its key,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">And strove to make its hidden meaning
+            plain.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page184"
+               id="page184"></a>[pg 184]</span>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>Racked by a sleepless night, one fresh spring
+            morn</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Forth from the cloister Aloysius
+            strolled.</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">The wood was dewy-bright, clear beams of
+            gold</p>
+
+            <p>Illumined it, and to his heart was borne</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">A sense of freedom, peace and joy
+            untold.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>Beside a laughing brook he sat to rest,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Above whose wave did long-haired willows
+            weep;</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Midmost the dense green forest, still and
+            deep,</p>
+
+            <p>Lulled by the trickling waters and possessed</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">By tranquil thoughts, the friar fell
+            asleep.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>And, overworn, he slept the livelong day,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Nor waked until the twilight shadows
+            fell,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">That flung a brown night o'er that leafy
+            dell.</p>
+
+            <p>Then up he rose refreshed and went his way,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">And, half ashamed, he heard the
+            vesper-bell.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>Back to the convent fared he; at the gate</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">A stranger gave him entrance, but he
+            passed</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Into the chapel with meek eyes
+            downcast,</p>
+
+            <p>In truant guise returning home thus late,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">And toward his wonted seat made seemly
+            haste.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>Too late! a stranger filled it. Looking round,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Amazed, he could discern no face he
+            knew.</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">The abbot's self had changed; his wonder
+            grew,</p>
+
+            <p>When, after the familiar chant, he found</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">These crazy monks held him for crazy
+            too.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>They gathered round with curious, eager eyes.</p>
+
+            <p>"What cloister's this?" he asked. They named its
+            name:</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">The one he left that morning was the
+            same.</p>
+
+            <p>His name he gave; with many a wild surmise</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">They guessed who he might be and whence
+            he came.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>He asked them where the abbot was at last,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">From whom he parted but the night
+            before.</p>
+
+            <p>"He hath been dead three hundred years and
+            more!"</p>
+
+            <p>They answered with a single voice, aghast.</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Then spake a friar versed in monkish
+            lore:</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>"Brethren, a miracle! This man I know:</p>
+
+            <p>'Tis Aloysius, who, as I have read,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Beset with doubts, forth from this
+            convent fled,</p>
+
+            <p>And vanished, some three hundred years ago,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">And all the world hath counted him as
+            dead."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>Then Aloysius felt the blessed tears</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Fulfill his eyes, whence dropped the
+            scales away.</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Kneeling, he cried, "Oh, brethren, let us
+            pray.</p>
+
+            <p>One day is with the Lord a thousand years,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">A thousand years with Him are as a
+            day."</p>
+        </div>
+    </div>
+
+    <p class="author">EMMA
+    LAZARUS.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page185"
+       id="page185"></a>[pg 185]</span>
+
+    <h2>A FEW HOURS IN BOHEMIA.</h2>
+
+    <p>The beauty of this country is that no turbulent sea confines
+    its borders, nor are martello-towers needed to guard its coast:
+    no jealous neighbor threatens its frontier, no army oppresses
+    its citizens, and no king can usurp its throne. Its locality is
+    hard to define: like the Fata Morgana, it is here to-day and
+    gone to-morrow, for its territory is the mind of men, and in
+    extent it is as boundless as thought. Natives of every clime
+    are enrolled among its freemen, and all lands contain its
+    representatives, but it is in the picturesque streets of the
+    older continental cities of Europe, where rambling lodgings and
+    cheap apartments are many, that the invisible mother-country
+    founds her colonies. I will tell you how I went and what I saw
+    there.</p>
+
+    <p>Afra was a cosmopolite, and consequently knew Bohemia, its
+    byways and thoroughfares. If any one could fill the office of
+    guide thereto, Afra could, and when one evening she rushed into
+    my room saying, "Come along if you want to go to Bohemia," I
+    did not hesitate a moment, but made ready for the journey, with
+    the simple precaution of putting on my bonnet and shawl.</p>
+
+    <p>"A cab?" I asked as we moved from the door.</p>
+
+    <p>"Who ever heard of entering Bohemia in a cab?" laughed Afra
+    dryly. "People have been known to drive <i>out</i> in their own
+    carriages, but they always make their first appearance there on
+    foot, or at best in an omnibus."</p>
+
+    <p>"As you please," I replied, trying to keep pace with her
+    rapid step, which showed constant practice.</p>
+
+    <p>"I wonder you did not propose a balloon," she continued
+    pettishly. "The gods don't give everything to one person: now,
+    they give us brains, and they give other
+    people&mdash;money."</p>
+
+    <p>"If you would understand, I&mdash;"</p>
+
+    <p>"No, you wouldn't. I sha'n't ride in cabs until I can pay
+    for them myself; meanwhile, I have gros sous enough in my
+    pocket for an omnibus fare, and if you have the same we will
+    stop here." At this she entered a bureau, and as I followed I
+    saw her get some tickets from a man who sat behind a small
+    counter, and then composedly sit down on a bench while she
+    said, "We shall have some time to wait for our luxury:" then
+    showing me the tickets, "Twelve and thirteen: it is a full
+    night, and all these people ahead of us."</p>
+
+    <p>"Is it a lottery?" I asked ignorantly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Very much of a lottery," Afra replied grimly&mdash;"like
+    all the ways of Bohemia, remarkably uncertain. You get a ticket
+    for something in the giving of the Muses, and you wait until
+    your number is called. The worst of it is, the most unlikely
+    people are called before you, and some get disgusted and leave:
+    there goes one out at the door at this moment. Well, he may be
+    better or he may be worse off than those who finally win: who
+    knows if any race is worth the running? Still, if you have
+    courage to hold on, I believe there is no doubt that every one
+    ultimately gets something." Seeing my perplexity, she twisted
+    the round tickets between her fingers and added, "Do not be
+    alarmed: these are only good for a seat in the first empty 'bus
+    that comes up. The conductor will call out the numbers in
+    rotation, and if ours is among them we shall go. It is
+    frightful that you have never ridden in a 'bus before. I wonder
+    where we should get ideas if we shut ourselves up in cabs and
+    never walked or were hungry or tired, and thought only of our
+    own comfort from morning till night? You don't know what you
+    miss, you poor deluded, unfortunate rich people. I will tell
+    you of something I saw the other evening; and, as it is worthy
+    of a name, it shall be called 'The Romance of an Omnibus.'
+    Listen! isn't that our numbers I heard? Yes: come quick or we
+    shall lose our chance."</p>
+
+    <p>"Well," said I when we had successfully
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page186"
+       id="page186"></a>[pg 186]</span> threaded the crowd and were
+       seated&mdash;"the romance."</p>
+
+    <p>"You have no idea of the fitness of things. My story is
+    pathetic: it will look badly to see you drowned in
+    tears&mdash;people will stare."</p>
+
+    <p>"I promise not to cry."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, if you are one of those stolid, unemotional beings who
+    are never moved, I sha'n't waste my tale upon you. Wait until
+    to-morrow: we will get Monsieur C&mdash;&mdash; to recount, and
+    you shall hear something worth listening to. He is a regular
+    troubadour&mdash;has the same artless vanity they were known to
+    possess, their charming simplicity, their gestures, and their
+    power of investing everything with romance. One is transported
+    to the Middle Ages while he speaks: no book written on the
+    subject could so fully give you the flavor of the times. He
+    recalls Froissart. If you are not affected by C&mdash;&mdash;'s
+    stories, you had better pretend to be. But that, I am sure,
+    will not be necessary: a great tragedian was lost when he
+    became a great painter."</p>
+
+    <p>"Might I ask how and when and where I am to meet this
+    wonderful man?"</p>
+
+    <p>"At the garden-party."</p>
+
+    <p>"In what way am I to get there?"</p>
+
+    <p>"By strategy. There is a little reunion to-night of what may
+    be called female Bohemians. They are going to settle the
+    preliminaries of this party, and if you happen to be present
+    they will invite you; not that they particularly care for your
+    company, but because, as I said, you happen to be there. Only
+    don't get yourself into a mess by tramping on any one's
+    toes."</p>
+
+    <p>"Have they corns?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, on every inch of surface: they are dreadfully
+    thin-skinned. But they hate sham even more than a hard knock,
+    and are quicker than a police-officer in detecting it; so be
+    careful not to talk about anything you are ignorant of."</p>
+
+    <p>"Give me a few rules, and I promise to conduct myself
+    properly."</p>
+
+    <p>"Well, don't be snobbish and patronize them, and don't look
+    shocked at any strange opinions you hear, nor act as if you
+    were at an animal show and were wondering what would happen
+    next. Be sure not to assent when you see they wish to argue,
+    and don't argue when they expect acquiescence. If any of them
+    speak in broken English, and you can't for the life of you
+    understand, don't ask them to repeat, but answer immediately,
+    for you can imagine when one has taken pains to learn a foreign
+    language one likes it to be appreciated, and don't&mdash;But
+    here we are. In short, make yourself at home, as if you had
+    been there all your life."</p>
+
+    <p>"Afra," I said, laying my hand on her arm as she took to her
+    swift pace again, "perhaps I had better go home: I am afraid I
+    can't&mdash;I think&mdash;that is&mdash;"</p>
+
+    <p>"Nonsense! as if you could not get on after all those hints!
+    Anyway, you cannot return alone, and I am unable to go with
+    you. Make up your mind to blunder, and do it. There was an
+    amateur visited the studio about three months ago: her
+    absurdities have lasted us for laughing material ever since. As
+    she is getting rather stale, you can take her place. This is
+    the house: come in."</p>
+
+    <p>With this doubtful prospect in view I followed my peremptory
+    guide from the narrow street into what appeared to be a
+    spacious court, but as the only light it received was from a
+    blinking candle in the window of the conciergerie, I could not
+    determine. After exchanging some cabalistic sentences with a
+    toothless old woman, the proprietor of the candle, Afra turned
+    to the right, and walking a few steps came to a door opening on
+    a stairway, which we mounted. I can think of nothing black
+    enough for comparison with the darkness surrounding us. At last
+    a faint glimmer showed an old lamp standing in a corner of a
+    hall bare and carpetless. A series of doors flanked the place,
+    looking to my unaccustomed eyes all alike, but Afra without a
+    moment's hesitation went to one of them and knocked. It was
+    opened by a lady, who smiled and said, "Enter. You are just in
+    time: school is over and the model about going."</p>
+
+    <p>I found myself in a high-ceiled room, at one end of which
+    was suspended a row of perhaps a dozen lamps. Here, at least,
+    there was-no lack of light: it
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page187"
+       id="page187"></a>[pg 187]</span> required some moments to
+       accustom our eyes to the sudden contrast. The yellow blaze
+       was directed by reflectors into the space immediately
+       beneath the lamps, which left the rest of the room
+       pleasantly tempered. Some easels, a few chairs and screens,
+       plaster casts on shelves, sketches in all stages of progress
+       on the wall, a tea-kettle singing over a bright fire in a
+       stove, and a curtain enclosing a corner used as a bedroom,
+       completed the list of furniture. It was a night-school for
+       lady artists. The class had finished for the evening, and a
+       number of the students were moving about or seated near the
+       fire, talking in an unlimited number of languages.</p>
+
+    <p>I was given several random introductions, and did my best to
+    follow Afra's directions; but there was an indescribable
+    quaintness about the appearance and manners of my new
+    acquaintance that made it difficult not to stare. I found,
+    however, that little notice was taken of me, as a lively
+    discussion was being carried on over a study of an arm and hand
+    which one of them was holding up for inspection.</p>
+
+    <p>"It is a style I should call the lantern," said she. "The
+    redness of the flesh can only be accounted for on the
+    supposition that a light is shining through it."</p>
+
+    <p>"I should call it raw beef," remarked another.</p>
+
+    <p>"It is a shame, mademoiselle!" began the model in an injured
+    tone. She had been tying on her bonnet before a bit of
+    looking-glass she had taken from her pocket. "Does my arm look
+    like that?" Here she indignantly drew up her sleeve and held
+    out that dimpled member, meanwhile gazing wrathfully at the
+    sketch. "It ought not to be allowed. The silver tones of my
+    flesh are entirely lost; and see how you have caricatured the
+    elegance of my beautiful hand. Will not some one help
+    mademoiselle to put it right before my reputation is
+    ruined?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Jeanne, a model is not a critic," said the author of the
+    drawing, coming forward and grasping the canvas with no gentle
+    hand.&mdash;"Ladies, if you wish to find fault, turn to your
+    own studies. That proportion is frightful"&mdash;she pointed to
+    different sketches as she spoke&mdash;"that ear is too large;
+    and, madame, if you take a crust of paint like yours for
+    freedom of touch, I pity you."</p>
+
+    <p>This dispute was by no means the last during the evening.
+    Opinions seemed to be plentiful in Bohemia, each individual
+    being furnished with a set of her own on every subject
+    broached; and as no diffidence was shown in putting them forth,
+    the company quarreled with great good-nature and evident
+    enjoyment. A pot of tea was then brewed by the owner of the
+    studio, who had been English before she became Bohemian, and
+    the beverage was handed round in tea-cups which, like the
+    opinions of the guests, differed widely from each other. In the
+    silence that attended this diversion Afra took the floor and
+    said, "How about the garden-party to the country? Who is
+    going?"</p>
+
+    <p>Several spoke, and one asked, "Shall we take lunch with
+    us?"</p>
+
+    <p>"No, something will be provided for us there."</p>
+
+    <p>"So much the better. When are we to meet, and where?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Twelve o'clock, midday, at &mdash;&mdash;."</p>
+
+    <p>"What messieurs are going?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Quite a number&mdash;a tenor from the Grand Opera, and the
+    leader of the orchestra, who is a magnificent violinist; that
+    new Spanish painter who plays the guitar divinely; a
+    poet&mdash;that is, he has written some pretty
+    songs&mdash;besides plenty more."</p>
+
+    <p>"That promises well."</p>
+
+    <p>"You will bring your friend?" and the speaker nodded her
+    head toward me.</p>
+
+    <p>"I shall be delighted: I am so curious to see those
+    eccentric&mdash;" Here a warning glance from Afra stopped
+    me.</p>
+
+    <p>But the lady only laughed and said, "You will see
+    eccentricity enough to-morrow, if that is what you want. People
+    who devote their minds to great objects have no time to think
+    of little things. You had better see that Afra has on her
+    bonnet or she will go without one."</p>
+
+    <p>"Nonsense!" replied Afra.&mdash;"Miss," this to the owner of
+    the studio, who was so called in honor of her English birth,
+    "are you ever troubled by the ghost of
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page188"
+       id="page188"></a>[pg 188]</span> that young painter who hung
+       himself up there?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Those who have occasion to commit suicide are not likely to
+    come back: they have had enough of this world," said the
+    Englishwoman.</p>
+
+    <p>"Did some one really die here?" I asked.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, really;" and Afra mimicked my tone of horror. "You
+    know, a Bohemian is at home anywhere, so a change of country
+    don't affect him much. If we find a place disagreeable, we
+    travel."</p>
+
+    <p>"Was he insane?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Not more than the rest of us, but <i>you</i> can't
+    understand the feeling that would induce a man to do such a
+    thing. This young fellow painted a picture: he put his mind,
+    his soul, himself, into it, and sent it to the Exhibition. It
+    was rejected&mdash;that is, he was rejected&mdash;and he came
+    here and died. They found him suspended from that beam where
+    the lamps hang now."</p>
+
+    <p>"I thought your Bohemia was so gay?"</p>
+
+    <p>"So it is, but the brightest light makes the deepest
+    shadows."</p>
+
+    <p>The conversation went on. These ladies discussed politics,
+    literature, art and society with absolute confidence. One of
+    the topics was Alfred de Musset. The Englishwoman was praising
+    the English Alfred, when a pale-faced girl, who up to this
+    moment had been intently reading, oblivious of all about her,
+    closed her book with a snap (it was a much-worn edition of one
+    of the classics, bought for a few sous on the quay) and broke
+    out with&mdash;"Your Tennyson is childish. His King Arthur puts
+    me in mind of our Louis Philippe and his umbrella. Did you know
+    Louis carried an umbrella with him when he was obliged to fly
+    from Paris? One would have looked well held over Arthur's
+    dragon helmet that disagreeable night he left the queen to go
+    and fight his nephew. But perhaps Guinevere had lent it to
+    Launcelot, and even the best friends, alas! do not return
+    umbrellas. Your poet writes in white kid gloves, and thinks in
+    them too. Imagine the magnificent rush and struggle of those
+    ancient days, the ecstasy of battle, the intensity of life, and
+    then read your Tennyson's milk-and-water tales, with their
+    modern English-ménage feelings. Arthur would have been much
+    more likely to give his wife a beating, as did the hero of the
+    <i>Nibelungen Lied</i>, than that high-flown lecture; and it
+    would have done the Guinevere of that time more good."</p>
+
+    <p>"And what is your Alfred, Anita?"</p>
+
+    <p>"He is divine."</p>
+
+    <p>"After the heathen pattern. He dipped his pen in mire."</p>
+
+    <p>"What is mire?&mdash;water and earth. What are
+    we?&mdash;water and earth. Mire is humanity, and holds in
+    itself not only the roots of the tree, but the germ of the
+    flower. A poet who is too delicate to plant his thought in
+    earth must be content to give it but the life of a parasite: it
+    can have no separate existence of its own."</p>
+
+    <p>"But one need not be bad to be great."</p>
+
+    <p>"Nor need one be good to be great," returned Anita
+    sarcastically. "Alfred de Musset was a peculiar type of a
+    peculiar time. He did not imagine: he felt, he lived, he was
+    himself, and was original, like a new variety of flower or a
+    new species of insect. Tennyson has gleaned from everybody's
+    fields: our Alfred gathered only from his own. The one is made,
+    the other is born."</p>
+
+    <p>"Come away," said Afra impatiently: "no one can speak while
+    Anita is on her hobby. Besides, I must get home early to trim a
+    bonnet for to-morrow;" and without more leavetaking than a
+    "Good-evening," which included every one, we found ourselves in
+    the street.</p>
+
+    <p>"Who is Anita?" I asked.</p>
+
+    <p>"She is nobody just now: what she will be remains to be
+    seen. Her family wish her to be an artist: she wishes to adopt
+    the stage as a profession, and is studying for it <i>sub
+    rosa</i>. Did you ever see a more tragic face?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Poor thing!" I involuntarily exclaimed.</p>
+
+    <p>"Don't pity her," said Afra, more seriously than she had yet
+    spoken. "The best gift that can be bestowed upon a mortal is a
+    strong natural inclination for any particular life and the
+    opportunity of following it. The man or woman who has
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page189"
+       id="page189"></a>[pg 189]</span> that can use the wheel of
+       Fate for a spinning-wheel."</p>
+
+    <p>The next morning at the appointed time I met Afra at the
+    station. "How do I look?" she asked, standing up for my
+    inspection as soon as I appeared in sight, at the same time
+    regarding as much of her dress as it was possible for her to
+    see. But before I could reply the satisfied expression of her
+    face changed: an unpleasant discovery had been made. "I have
+    shoes on that are not mates," she exclaimed&mdash;"cloth and
+    leather: that looks rather queer, doesn't it? Do you think it
+    will be noticed? I could not decide which pair to wear, and put
+    on one of each to see the effect: afterward I forgot them. Now,
+    I suppose that would be thought eccentric, though any one might
+    make the same mistake. It shows I have two pairs of shoes," she
+    added more cheerfully, "and they are both black. How is my
+    bonnet?"</p>
+
+    <p>The bonnet was black velvet, and we were in midsummer. The
+    material, however, was skillfully draped with a veil, and a
+    profusion of pink flowers gave it a seasonable air. A crimson
+    bow was also tied at her neck; she complacently remarked that
+    "pink and crimson harmonize beautifully;" and others of the
+    party arriving at that moment, I was saved the trouble of
+    making a polite answer.</p>
+
+    <p>The ride through ripening grain-fields and moss-thatched
+    hamlets need not be described; suffice it to say, it was France
+    and June. An omnibus was waiting at the station where we
+    dismounted: it carried us near, but not to, our destination.
+    After leaving it we walked through the streets of a low-roofed
+    village, then followed a path bordered with wild mignonette and
+    apple trees that wound up the side of a hill covered with
+    vineyards. A couple of chattering magpies ran before us, an
+    invisible cuckoo was heard between snatches of Italian melody
+    warbled by the tenor <i>sotto voce</i> and the little company
+    overflowed with gayety.</p>
+
+    <p>The house we arrived at looked as if it might be a castle in
+    the air materialized&mdash;pointed windows hidden in ivy,
+    through which you saw the chintz-covered walls of the interior;
+    turrets on the roof and a stair-tower; odd nooks for pigeons
+    and cattle; the color a weather-toned red, met by gray roofs,
+    green trees and blue sky. We passed through it to the quaint
+    garden: rows of dwarf pears bordered its paths, and trellises
+    and walls supported nectarines and vines, with sunshine and
+    shadow caressing the half-ripe fruit.</p>
+
+    <p>The shady spaces were occupied by guests who had arrived
+    before us, and we saw with pleasure that ceremony had not been
+    invited to attend. The host's kindly manner was sufficient to
+    put the company at once at ease. We wandered at will from group
+    to group, listening or conversing: introductions were sometimes
+    given, but more often not.</p>
+
+    <p>At one table some ladies and gentlemen were playing the
+    artistic game of "five points." A more difficult pastime was
+    never invented. The materials necessary are simply a piece of
+    paper and a pencil: it is their use that is extraordinary. A
+    person puts five dots on the paper in whatever position fancy
+    may dictate: on this slight foundation another is expected to
+    design a figure, the puzzle being to include all the marks
+    given. One that I saw had four of the dots placed unusually
+    close together, and the fifth in a distant corner: this latter,
+    in the opinion of the lookers-on, would surely prove
+    refractory. After some moments of consideration, with pencil
+    suspended and eye attentive, the artist commenced drawing. In
+    ten minutes the sketch was finished. It was an angel: her
+    upturned head took in the highest of the group of dots; one
+    hand hanging by her side the next; a knee the third; and the
+    flowing hem of her robe the fourth; but the fifth in the
+    corner&mdash;what could reach it? With a touch of the pencil
+    the angel's other hand appeared flinging up a censer attached
+    to a long chain, which struck the solitary dot like a shot amid
+    acclamations. To show that he did not consider the feat a
+    <i>tour de force</i>, the artist turned the paper, and taking
+    the same marks drew a devil in an entirely different attitude,
+    the difficult point being reached by his pitchfork.
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page190"
+       id="page190"></a>[pg 190]</span> This gave rise to a learned
+       discussion as to whether the devil's emblematic pitchfork
+       was not a descendant of Neptune's trident, which I did not
+       stay to hear, as Afra whispered she wanted to present me to
+       Monsieur C&mdash;&mdash;, and I was taken to a gentleman of
+       no great height, but of such wondrous width that Nature must
+       have formed him in a most generous mood.</p>
+
+    <p>"You are American?" said this wide man to me as I was
+    introduced, and without waiting for a reply went on: "I like
+    your country-people: they admire frankly. Show them a picture,
+    they exclaim, 'Beautiful! magnificent! lovely! exquisite! name
+    your price;' and they buy it. Here the public look and look.
+    'Not bad,' they say, 'but the color is from Veronese, and that
+    attitude is surely Raphael's. What a mine that man's genius has
+    been to ambitious but less gifted artists!' and so they go on.
+    I wish they would let the dead rest in peace. Are you
+    acquainted with Mr. B&mdash;&mdash; of New York?"</p>
+
+    <p>I was obliged to say "No."</p>
+
+    <p>"I wish to send a message to him," he continued grandly:
+    "tell him that I paint now for him alone."</p>
+
+    <p>"You are court-painter to Mr. B&mdash;&mdash;," I remarked
+    laughingly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Don't speak of courts," he exclaimed pettishly. "I was to
+    have painted the baptism of the prince imperial for the state:
+    it gave me no end of annoyance, and in the end was never
+    finished."</p>
+
+    <p>"I understood that you insisted on painting the little
+    prince nude, after the Rubens manner, and that was one ground
+    of objection to the design," said Afra.</p>
+
+    <p>"The baby would have had on plenty of clothes: one of his
+    dresses was sent from the Tuileries for Monsieur
+    C&mdash;&mdash; to paint, and I sewed a rosette on it myself."
+    This from the painter's wife.</p>
+
+    <p>"A countryman of yours sat for the head of a young priest at
+    the ceremony. He had a fine countenance: he was studying art
+    with me at the time, and has since been professor of drawing at
+    your Naval Academy. Teaching is a sad trade&mdash;Pegasus
+    dragging the plough."</p>
+
+    <p>"At least, your other great picture brought you nothing but
+    praise."</p>
+
+    <p>"The public have since repented of being so good to me.
+    Then, they could not say enough in my favor: now, if a person
+    asks what I am doing, every one repeats like a parrot,
+    'C&mdash;&mdash; doesn't paint, C&mdash;&mdash; doesn't paint.'
+    I have heard it so often that I begin to believe it myself, and
+    when I am asked join the general cry, 'C&mdash;&mdash; doesn't
+    paint.'"</p>
+
+    <p>I laughed, thinking this a joke, but I soon found that
+    though C&mdash;&mdash; might be cynical, sarcastic or bitter,
+    though he might excite unintentional laughter by his remarks,
+    he was too sensitive a man to take any but a serious view of
+    life. The imperfections of the world excited his disgust, his
+    anger, never his mirth.</p>
+
+    <p>"Ah but, monsieur," said Afra, "you should be satisfied, and
+    leave some little honor for the rest of us to gather. The
+    stories one hears of your youth are like fairy-tales."</p>
+
+    <p>"And they are true," replied the artist with evident
+    enjoyment. "In those days I was pointed out to people when I
+    walked the street; which, by the way, gave rise to an odd
+    incident. A gentleman thought he had seen me in a crowd, but he
+    had taken an older and taller man for the great painter. He
+    believed big pictures were painted by big men, and I had not
+    then my present circumference. This gentleman sent me an
+    invitation to dine with him. On the day appointed I arrived at
+    the house, and was met at the door by my host, a look of
+    surprise and annoyance on his face which he tried to conceal by
+    a low bow, at the same time asking politely, 'How is your
+    father?'&mdash;'Very well, thank you,' I returned, although I
+    could not understand why my father's health should be a matter
+    of interest to him.&mdash;'You have come to tell me of some
+    catastrophe which prevents his attendance here
+    to-day?'&mdash;'Not at all: I have come to dine with you,
+    according to this invitation.' Here I pulled out the card,
+    which I happened to have in my pocket.&mdash;'Are you the
+    person here addressed?' he said, staring at me.&mdash;'I
+    am'.&mdash;'I beg your pardon, there is a mistake: I meant it
+    for your father, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page191"
+       id="page191"></a>[pg 191]</span> the painter of the
+       "Décadence des Romains."'&mdash;'I am the painter of the
+       "Décadence," but I am not my father.'&mdash;'You ought to be
+       an older man.'&mdash;'I should have been, monsieur, had I
+       been born sooner.'&mdash;At that moment a friend,
+       overhearing the conversation and divining the cause, came
+       and explained to my wonder-struck host that I was really the
+       artist in question. With many apologies I was led into a
+       hall adorned with floral arches in my honor, next to a
+       beautiful salon, likewise decorated, and finally we reached
+       the dining-room, which was arranged to represent my picture.
+       Columns wreathed with flowers supported the roof; flowers
+       festooned the white table-linen and adorned the antique
+       vessels that covered it; couches of different colored silk
+       were laid after the Roman fashion for the guests to recline
+       upon; and lovely women dressed in costly Roman costumes,
+       their heads crowned with flowers, were placed in the
+       attitudes that you will see on my celebrated canvas. Was it
+       not a graceful tribute to my genius?"</p>
+
+    <p>"If a Frenchman wants to pay a compliment, he never uses one
+    that has done duty before, but invents something new," said
+    Afra emphatically.</p>
+
+    <p>"What are you painting now, monsieur?" I asked.</p>
+
+    <p>"A series of pictures called 'Pierrot the Clown.' He
+    succeeds in tricking the world in every station of life. I am
+    just finishing his deathbed. All his friends are weeping about
+    him: the doctor feels his pulse and gives some learned name to
+    the disease&mdash;doctors know so much&mdash;while hidden
+    everywhere around the room are empty bottles. The drunken clown
+    plays with even death for a mask."</p>
+
+    <p>"I thought he painted such romantic pictures," said I to
+    Afra as we turned from the master.</p>
+
+    <p>"So he does: there is one in his studio now. A girl clad in
+    gray and shadow&mdash;open-air shade which in his hands is so
+    clear and luminous. She walks along a garden-path, her head
+    bent down, dreaming as she goes, and unconsciously nearing a
+    half-open gateway, through which the sunshine is streaming.
+    Above the rustic gate two doves are billing and cooing. You
+    feel sure the girl is about to pass through this typical,
+    sunshiny, invitingly half-open door; and&mdash;what is
+    beyond?"</p>
+
+    <p>Just then we were called to lunch, a plentiful but not
+    luxurious repast. There was no lack of lively repartees and
+    anecdotes, and we had speeches and songs afterward. I wonder if
+    I ever heard "'Tis better to laugh than be sighing" given with
+    more zest than on that day? One could easily imagine that it
+    was such an occasion as this that had inspired it.</p>
+
+    <p>Lunch being over, Monsieur C&mdash;&mdash; was asked to
+    relate one of his own stories. I cannot give it entire, but the
+    plot was this: A pilgrim, whom he called poor Jacques, hearing
+    much of heaven, set out to find his way to the blessed abode,
+    with only a little dog to accompany him on the journey. As he
+    went he met many of his contemporaries, who had made what a
+    walker would style but poor time. The allusions to well-known
+    peculiarities in the various people and their occupation in the
+    other life caused much amusement. For instance, Ingres the
+    painter was seated by the roadside playing Rossini's music on
+    the violin, on which instrument he was a great proficient. But
+    he was known to detest the Italian's music before he started
+    heavenward: his taste must then have grown <i>en route</i>.
+    (Critics might object to this supposition.) However, Jacques
+    was anxious to push on, and spent little time listening. But he
+    was a good-hearted man, and, though he would not delay for his
+    own amusement, he could not refuse to stop when fellow-pilgrims
+    asked him for assistance. Little children were continually
+    straying from the path, and without Jacques and his little dog
+    would inevitably have been lost. Feeble old people were
+    standing looking with despair at some obstacle that without
+    Jacques's friendly arm they would have found it impossible to
+    pass. Young men who never looked where they were walking were
+    continually calling on him for a hand to help them out of the
+    ditch where they had fallen; and young girls&mdash;well, one
+    would have supposed they had never been given feet of their own
+    to walk with, from the trouble they were to poor Jacques. The
+    worst of it was, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page192"
+       id="page192"></a>[pg 192]</span> that when all these good
+       people were well over their troubles they called Jacques a
+       simpleton for his pains, and refused to have any intercourse
+       with him, giving him the worst side of the road and laughing
+       at his old-fashioned staff and scrip, and even at his little
+       dog, to which they gave many a sly kick. Nor was it any
+       wonder, for there were many in the company robed in silk,
+       wearing precious stones and with well-filled wallets by
+       their sides. Jacques was but human, and often he wished he
+       had never set out for heaven at all in such company; but
+       even in their bitterest moods neither Jacques nor the little
+       dog could ever hear a cry of distress without forgetting all
+       unkindness and rushing at once to the rescue.</p>
+
+    <p>These labors exhausted Jacques's strength: the little dog,
+    too, was worn to a shadow, and so timid from ill-treatment that
+    it was only when some great occasion called out his mettle that
+    you saw what a noble little dog-heart he had. He did his best
+    to comfort his master, but when Jacques's sandals were worn out
+    and his cloak in rags, and when he looked forward and saw
+    nothing yet of the holy city in view, though he still tried to
+    go forward, Nature gave way: he sank to the ground, and the
+    little dog licked his hands in vain to awaken him.</p>
+
+    <p>There is a band of angels who each night descend the holy
+    mount whereon is built the city, in search of such pilgrims as
+    have failed through fatigue to reach the gate. They are clothed
+    in robes woven of good deeds, which never lose their lustre,
+    for they are renewed every day. It was this company which found
+    Jacques in his swoon by the roadside. One gently touched his
+    tired body, and more than the vigor of youth leapt through his
+    veins. Another whispered "Come," and he rose and walked with
+    them. As he moved on with eyes abashed, thinking of the rents
+    in his garments and regretting their poverty, he noticed that
+    they too were changed, and were as bright as those of his
+    companions. "Who has done this?" he said, venturing to address
+    the one that walked at his right hand. "You wore them always,"
+    he answered with an angelic smile, "but it is this light which
+    shows their beauty;" and he pointed to that which streamed from
+    the celestial walls.</p>
+
+    <p>There was much applause. I saw Afra wipe a tear from her
+    eye; only, a thin-faced individual who sat near me whispered
+    that it was too long. The delicacy and pathos of expression and
+    language it is impossible to give, and, though old in form, the
+    story was skillfully new in incident; nor must I forget that
+    the little dog slipped through the eternal gate with his
+    master. Some one asked the troubadour why he did not write it
+    out. He shook his head and threw up his hands as he replied, "I
+    wrote one book and gave it to a literary man for correction.
+    You should have seen the manuscript when he sent it home: not a
+    page but was scarred and cut. He called that 'style.' Now, what
+    did I want with style? I wanted to write as I talked."</p>
+
+    <p>"Certainly," said one. "What did you do?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I quickly put Monsieur le Rédacteur's style out of my book;
+    then I published it. George Sand promised to write the preface,
+    but some busybody told her that I was attacking the whole
+    world, so she would have nothing to do with it. She was misled:
+    I blamed nothing in my book but what deserved censure."</p>
+
+    <p>Having heard this excellent representation of the ancient
+    minstrel, we were shortly given a touch of the modern usurper
+    of the name. A gentleman was present who in the many turns of
+    Fortune's wheel had once found himself a follower of the
+    burnt-cork persuasion. He gave us a negro melody with a lively
+    accompaniment on the guitar. A melancholy Spanish song
+    followed. The company again dispersed into congenial groups,
+    and in the long twilight you heard the murmur of voices broken
+    by occasional snatches of melody or the nightingale's song.</p>
+    <hr />
+
+    <p>"And what do you think of Bohemia?" asked Afra as we
+    returned that night.</p>
+
+    <p>"It is different from what I expected. They are refined,
+    and, though frank, never rude. I
+    think&mdash;"</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page193"
+       id="page193"></a>[pg 193]</span>
+
+    <p>Afra laughed: "You had unconsciously thought them a set of
+    sharpers; but there is a great difference between living by
+    your brains and living by your wits. My dear, you have broken
+    bread with giants to-day: such men live in another world that
+    they may rule this one."</p>
+
+    <p class="author">ITA ANIOL PROKOP.</p>
+
+    <h2>PROFESSOR AND TEACHER.</h2>
+
+    <p>The two words that recur most frequently perhaps in the
+    discussion of matters of education are "teacher" and
+    "professor;" yet there are no two that are used so carelessly
+    and loosely. It seems as if the thought that they may not be
+    synonymous seldom, if ever, occurs to those using them. If one
+    of our writers or speakers upon education were suddenly called
+    upon to state exactly what he meant by a "professor" in
+    distinction from a "teacher," he would be at a loss for an
+    answer. He might reply, after some hesitation, "Why, a teacher
+    is a man who teaches at a school or an academy, and a professor
+    is a man who teaches at a college." If he were pressed still
+    more closely, and asked to give the precise difference between
+    a "school or an academy" and a "college," it is safe to assume
+    that he would find himself nonplussed. There are colleges in
+    the country, some large and others small, some old and others
+    young, some good and others poor; but aside from the fact that
+    they provide a curriculum of four years and teach a certain
+    amount of Latin, Greek and mathematics, they do not possess
+    features enough in common to enable us to define with exactness
+    "a college." It is not in the power of language to devise a
+    formula so elastic as to embrace Harvard, Brown, Princeton,
+    Trinity, Cornell and Michigan University, without at the same
+    time ignoring the characteristic features of one or the other.
+    Even if we admit that there is a vague ideal unity underlying
+    the so-called college system, by virtue of which it is a system
+    and not a mere aggregate, we shall not make much progress in
+    our search after the proper definition of the term "professor."
+    The utmost that can be said of our college system, as a system,
+    is that it stands on a somewhat higher plane than the schools,
+    that it is supposed to finish a young man's education, and
+    consequently that the men whom it employs for such a
+    purpose&mdash;its professors&mdash;are, or at least ought to
+    be, abler men than the teachers proper. The difference, then,
+    between professor and teacher is one of degree, and not of
+    kind. Both teach, and both teach in great part the same
+    subjects and in substantially the same way; that is, by means
+    of textbook and recitation. Herein lies the explanation of the
+    disposition evinced by some of our best schools to call their
+    teachers "professors." An institution like Phillips Exeter or
+    Andover can scarcely be said to assume more than it is entitled
+    to in putting itself on an equality with Hobart College or
+    Racine.</p>
+
+    <p>On turning to Germany, we observe no such laxity in the use
+    of the term "professor." He, and he only, is professor who
+    "professes" to have made himself eminent in his special branch,
+    and whose claims have been allowed officially by a university
+    or by the government. He is not even a teacher in the English
+    or American sense. He is a scholar and investigator who has
+    produced results worthy of distinction, and it is upon the
+    strength of those results, and not because of his real or
+    supposed ability to impart knowledge and stimulate industry
+    among students, that he receives his call to a university
+    chair.<a id="footnotetag1" target="blank" name="footnotetag1"></a>
+    <a href="#footnote1"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page194"
+       id="page194"></a>[pg 194]</span>
+
+    <p>The words of one who is himself a leading professor in one
+    of the most renowned universities are so explicit upon this
+    point that they deserve to be translated and carefully studied.
+    Heinrich von Sybel, in his academic address delivered at Bonn
+    in 1868, says: "The excellence of our universities is to be
+    found in the fact that they are not mere institutions where
+    instruction is given, but are workshops of
+    science<a id="footnotetag2"
+       target="blank"
+       name="footnotetag2"></a><a href="#footnote2"><sup>2</sup></a>&mdash;that
+       their vital principle is unceasing scientific productivity.
+       Hence it is that the state assembles the best men of all
+       Germany as professors at its universities, so that the
+       phenomenon, common enough in England and France, of a
+       distinguished savant without a university chair is with us a
+       very unusual exception. Hence it is that in appointing to
+       such a chair the first and last demand is for published
+       evidences of such activity. As for the so-called ability to
+       teach <i>(Lehrtalent im formellen Sinne),</i> we are
+       satisfied if it is not utterly and notoriously wanting. The
+       question upon which everything turns is, Has the candidate
+       given evidence of his capacity for original investigation
+       and production? Whoever has this capacity is sufficiently
+       qualified, according to our German notions, for fulfilling
+       the essential function of university instruction."</p>
+
+    <p>In other words, a German professor is a man who has devoted
+    himself to special and original research&mdash;to "science" as
+    Von Sybel uses the term&mdash;and whose discoveries and works
+    give strength and increase of dignity to the university with
+    which he is connected. He is appointed upon his merits as a
+    discoverer or an author. The further
+    consideration&mdash;namely, whether he is what we Americans
+    style a "good teacher"&mdash;was not so much as an afterthought
+    in the minds of those who gave him his call. The explanation of
+    this disregard of the personal element in the professorial
+    character is obvious. The professor is not called upon to
+    teach. It does not constitute any part of his vocation to spur
+    up the sluggish, to keep the idle busy, to give each student
+    enough to do, and make first principles perfectly clear to all.
+    So far from coming down to the level of the students, the
+    professor expects that the students will make every possible
+    exertion to rise to his level, while he himself can scarcely be
+    said to lend a helping hand. To the sentimentalist, then, he
+    might appear a very selfish mortal. But by going beneath the
+    surface of the relation between professor and student, and
+    examining into its essence, we shall find that it is an
+    eminently healthful relation, because it is based upon the
+    recognition of mutual rights and duties. The professor, as a
+    man of science, has a right to the free direction of his
+    talents. The student has the right to develop what there is in
+    him without supervision or interference. He is to make a man of
+    himself by seeking diligently after the truth in a manly,
+    independent spirit. All that the professor can do for him is to
+    point out the road to the truth.</p>
+
+    <p>This view of the functions of a professor may appear obscure
+    and exaggerated to one who has not studied at a German
+    university. But it gives the clew to the entire German system
+    of university education, and accounts in great part for the
+    high standard of scholarship. Only in part, for the innate
+    proneness of the German mind to research must be credited with
+    some share in the result. It is safe to say that Germany, under
+    any system, would be a land of erudition.</p>
+
+    <p>However pleasant it might be to go into the details of the
+    professional position and character in Germany, it will be more
+    profitable, and certainly more practical, to compare this
+    fundamental German idea, as already given, with the salient
+    features of professional life in America. The American
+    professor, then, is a teacher. Unless he is the fortunate
+    occupant of an exceptionally favored chair, his chief, and even
+    his sole, function <span class="pagenum"><a name="page195"
+       id="page195"></a>[pg 195]</span> in the college body is to
+       teach, in the strictest sense of the term. He has to
+       prescribe textbooks, assign and hear lessons, grade
+       recitations, mark examination-papers, submit carefully
+       prepared term and annual reports to the faculty. When the
+       question of conditioning or dismissing a student on the
+       ground of defective scholarship comes up for decision, his
+       opinion must be given and weighed in connection with that of
+       others, in order that the faculty may strike a fair general
+       average. The number of hours that he is compelled, by the
+       college curriculum, to pass per week in the recitation-room
+       is seldom less than fifteen, and may be as high as twenty.
+       The classes themselves are ill-sorted and often troublesome,
+       and are usually unwieldy by reason of their size. The
+       professor's mind must be continually on the watch to prevent
+       disorder and enforce attention. Besides, as every one knows
+       full well who has tried it, there is nothing so exhausting
+       as to supply "brains" to those who either have not received
+       their portion from Nature or else have squandered it for a
+       mess of pottage. Every professor-teacher can bear witness to
+       the truism that one hour in the recitation-room is fully
+       equal, in its drain upon the vital energy, to two passed in
+       private study or authorship. The sense of responsibility, we
+       might say, is omnipresent. It does not cease with the
+       recitation: it follows him to his study, and haunts him with
+       the recollection of absurd blunders made by young men who
+       should have done better&mdash;the dispiriting reflection
+       that despite his best efforts the stupid and indifferent
+       will not learn. If to this normal wear and tear and these
+       every-day annoyances we add the participation in what is
+       pleasingly styled enforcement of discipline&mdash;that is,
+       protracted faculty-meetings, interviews with anxious or
+       irate parents, exhortations to the vicious to mend their
+       ways&mdash;we shall probably come to the conclusion that the
+       professor's burden is anything but light. We all have heavy
+       burdens. But while admitting the universality of the adage,
+       we are nevertheless at liberty to ascertain if we cannot
+       make the burden of a particular man or class easier to bear
+       by fitting it to the back.</p>
+
+    <p>Editors, essayists, college presidents and reformers assure
+    us that we are on the verge of a change, and perhaps a great
+    change, in our system of higher education. They dilate upon the
+    indisputable fact that most of our older colleges have made
+    rapid strides within the past ten years, augmenting their
+    endowments, erecting handsome buildings, establishing new
+    departments of study and increasing the number of students.
+    Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Amherst, Princeton, Columbia, the
+    University of Pennsylvania, were never so well off, in point of
+    money and men, as they are at this day. The inference is, of
+    course, if so much has been done in ten years, what may we not
+    expect by the end of the century? The University of Virginia
+    holds its own, notwithstanding the desolation wrought by the
+    late civil war, and Ann Arbor and Cornell have shot up with
+    extraordinary vigor. There can be no doubt that our
+    institutions of learning are full of robust life. And it is no
+    less certain that this growth of resources is due to private
+    enterprise. Our colleges have grown because graduates, and even
+    non-graduates, have taken an interest in them, and endowed them
+    with a munificence which seems incredible to a Frenchman or a
+    German. But in studying the aspect of higher education it
+    behooves us not to lose sight of the fundamental principle that
+    education is something spiritual in its nature, and that it
+    cannot be gauged by buildings, by endowments, by the trappings
+    of wealth&mdash;in short, by anything material. Endowments and
+    buildings are only the means; unless the end to which these
+    means are subservient be clearly perceived and persistently
+    followed, the means themselves may prove a hindrance rather
+    than a help. Of this Oxford is a notable proof.</p>
+
+    <p>Have, then, the end and aim, the method and agencies, of
+    college instruction changed essentially within the past fifteen
+    years, or are they likely to change essentially within the
+    coming twenty-five? In the year 1770 the greatest genius of
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page196"
+       id="page196"></a>[pg 196]</span> Germany entered the walls
+       of the old university-town of Strasburg, there to complete
+       his education. He has bequeathed to us a faithful record of
+       his studies, his amusements, his daily life. Connecting this
+       Strasburg experience with the previous experience at
+       Leipsic, we know what it meant in the eighteenth century to
+       be a German student. We know that the professors in those
+       days were pedagogues in the Anglo-American sense, and that
+       university-life stood little if at all higher than our own
+       present college-life. But when Goethe died, in 1832, the
+       universities of Germany had reached their prime. Since then
+       they have made no gain. It may be doubted if the professors,
+       on the whole, rank quite so high to-day for originality and
+       vigor of research as did their predecessors forty years ago.
+       Wherein lies the secret, then, of this wonderful change
+       wrought in the brief span of two generations, between 1770
+       and 1830, and amid the dire confusion of the great
+       Revolution and the Napoleonic era? The change was twofold.
+       It consisted, first, in allowing to the professor the free
+       play of his individuality; second, in providing him with a
+       properly trained body of students. From the practical
+       recognition of these two principles, which have nothing to
+       do with wealth and buildings, proceed the power and glory of
+       the German universities. Viewed from the English, or even
+       the American point, some of these universities might be
+       pronounced poor, not to say starvelings. The buildings are
+       old and out of repair, the professors are scantily paid, the
+       students are needy, there is a general atmosphere of want
+       and discomfort. But the work they do is noble, and its
+       nobility consists in its freedom, its heartiness, its strict
+       devotion to truth.</p>
+
+    <p>We are not concerned in this place with the study of the
+    growth of the German school system that prepares the German
+    student. We have to do with the professor. Although the
+    gymnasium and the university are not to be dissevered in actual
+    practice, the one being the necessary prelude to the other,
+    still we can discuss either one of them separately with a view
+    to ascertaining its salient features.</p>
+
+    <p>The German university allows to the professor the free play
+    of his individuality. By this is meant that each professor has
+    his specialty, which he teaches as a specialty and after his
+    own fashion. He has been appointed because of his specialty,
+    and to the end that he may teach it. His salary is paid to him,
+    not so much for what he does as for what he is. It is in a
+    measure the reward for having made for himself a name. His
+    standing in the university is based, not so much upon the
+    number of students that he may attract to his lectures as upon
+    the quality of scholarship that he exhibits and his general
+    repute in the world of letters. He has the satisfaction of
+    feeling that his researches, even the most abstruse, can be
+    brought to bear directly upon his official intercourse with his
+    students. A discovery that he makes is usually communicated to
+    them in the first instance, before it finds its way into print.
+    The neglect to take account of this element of originality in
+    the lectures of a German professor has led to an unfair
+    estimate of the lecture-system. Americans and English are apt
+    to regard it as merely the oral inculcation of established
+    truths. Were that the case, we might be right in questioning
+    its superiority over our method of teaching by textbook. But it
+    is not the case. The lecture is the vehicle for conveying the
+    latest discoveries made either by the professor himself or
+    gleaned by him from the labors of his colleagues. So far from
+    merely repeating established truths, it rather promulgates
+    truths in process of establishment. German university lectures,
+    taken all in all, represent the most advanced stage of thought.
+    The instances are not infrequent where a professor refrains
+    from publishing his lectures, lest he should lose his hearers,
+    who are attracted to him by reports of his originality and
+    thoroughness.</p>
+
+    <p>The evident tendency of such a system is to encourage
+    productivity and the highest degree of accuracy. A man who has
+    to teach only one subject, and teach it to such students only
+    as are ready and <span class="pagenum"><a name="page197"
+       id="page197"></a>[pg 197]</span> anxious to receive it, can
+       afford to take the time for being thorough. The tendency of
+       the American system, on the other hand, is to beget a spirit
+       of routine and to check productivity. The professor falls
+       into a way of contenting himself with meeting the
+       requirements of the college curriculum. The effects of this
+       curriculum upon the professors are deeper and
+       farther-reaching than is usually perceived. It is in
+       accordance with facts to call American professors, as a
+       class, unproductive. But it would be unjust and
+       inconsiderate to ascribe this want of productivity to the
+       disposition called laziness. Laziness is not a national
+       fault of Americans. On the contrary, we are pushing, active,
+       restless: we yearn, Alexander-like, for something new to
+       overcome. Our professors are of the same stock as our
+       business-men, our lawyers, our doctors, our politicians. But
+       the spirit of progress, if we choose to call it by that
+       name, has been repressed in them. The spirit of emulation,
+       of aggressive competition, which marks our trade, our
+       banking, our manufacturing interests, our railroads, and
+       even our professions, stops at the threshold of our
+       colleges. There is rivalry, true, between Harvard and Yale,
+       for instance. If the former erects a handsome dormitory, the
+       latter must have one larger and finer. If the former
+       establishes a new professorship, the latter must do
+       likewise. The colleges compete among themselves. But we see
+       no signs of competition among the professors of a college,
+       or between the professors of different
+       colleges&mdash;competition, be it observed, in the sense
+       that the individual professor regards his attainments and
+       views as a proper subject for comparison with the
+       attainments and views of another professor in the same
+       branch. Once established in his chair, his individuality is
+       merged in the general character of the college. His time,
+       his knowledge and his energy are subordinated to the
+       curriculum. He can teach only so much as may be fitted into
+       his share of the time and may be suited to the capacities of
+       a mixed audience. It matters little whether the curriculum
+       be good or bad, whether it take in a wide or a narrow range
+       of subjects, whether it be behind or up to the times: so
+       long as it is a real curriculum it tends to prevent the full
+       assertion of his individual excellence. He may study for
+       himself, but he cannot teach more than the regulations
+       permit. However advanced he may be in his specialty, however
+       sincere and earnest his wish to impart the choicest fruits
+       of his research, he must admit to himself that there is a
+       point beyond which he is unable to carry his students. They
+       are borne off to something else; they have no more time for
+       him; they slip from his hold, perhaps at the very moment
+       when he flatters himself that he has acquired some formative
+       influence over them.</p>
+
+    <p>If this view of the necessary effect of a curriculum is
+    correct, it will enable us to set a more accurate value upon
+    the so-called improvements that have been introduced of late
+    years in our colleges. These improvements, stripped of the
+    éclat with which they are invested, will be found to amount to
+    little more than expansions and slight modifications of a
+    system which remains unaltered in its fundamental features. New
+    studies have been introduced, such as physics, chemistry,
+    geology, the share of attention assigned to modern languages
+    has been increased, a higher standard of admission is enforced,
+    and the salaries of professors have been raised. But in all
+    this there is no radical change of the method of instruction.
+    The establishment of a chair of physics, for instance, can
+    scarcely be said to enable the professor of Greek to exhibit
+    his attainments more fully. The professor of Latin does not
+    perceive that his pupils, because they are now instructed in
+    physical geography, can be carried by him to a more advanced
+    stage of Latin scholarship. In fact, so far as the older
+    studies are concerned, those which made up the curriculum
+    thirty years ago, they seem to be slightly the worse for the
+    recent improvements. The college course of 1840 or 1850 was a
+    comparatively simple thing. It covered only a few studies, and
+    those of a general nature; it taught more thoroughly and with
+    less pretence to universality; in short, it did its work
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page198"
+       id="page198"></a>[pg 198]</span> more after the fashion of a
+       good school. At the present day the curriculum embraces a
+       much wider range of subjects&mdash;we need only recall to
+       our minds the introduction of general history, chemistry,
+       physiology and the modern languages&mdash;but the time has
+       not been lengthened by a single year. The student's time is
+       more broken up than before: the direct influence exerted by
+       the professor is less. Our recognition of these and kindred
+       facts, however, should be something more than a vain regret
+       for the good old past. All these changes are concessions
+       made to the spirit of the age. Our generation
+       demands&mdash;and very rightfully, too&mdash;that the sphere
+       of knowledge be enlarged, that the sciences of Nature
+       receive sufficient attention. To attempt to undo what has
+       been done, to restore the curriculum to the antiquated cadre
+       of Latin and Greek, trigonometry, mental science and
+       rhetoric, would be a reaction as senseless as hopeless.</p>
+
+    <p>Let us be just to ourselves and just to our colleges. We,
+    the public, clamored for new studies, and the colleges had to
+    meet the demand, because, by force of circumstances, they were
+    the only places where the changes could be effected. But in our
+    praisworthy desire for progress we have not considered
+    sufficiently whether the colleges were in truth the proper
+    places for innovation; whether we were bringing in our
+    innovations in the right way and at the right time; whether we
+    were in a fair way of making our colleges what we seek to make
+    them&mdash;namely, centres of learning. To discuss all these
+    points would be equivalent to discussing the question of
+    education in all its phases, from the primary school to the
+    university. For the present we must limit ourselves to
+    understanding and appreciating fairly the position of our
+    professors.</p>
+
+    <p>That position is not only a trying, but a discouraging one.
+    The greater part of the professor's time is spent&mdash;from
+    the point of view of pure science we might almost say
+    wasted&mdash;in teaching the same things over and over again.
+    After a few years' practice his round of hours becomes
+    mechanical. Familiarity with the textbooks and with the
+    uniformly-recurring blunders of each successive class begets a
+    feeling of weariness that is not remote from aversion and
+    contempt. So far as his prescribed official duties are
+    concerned, he feels that he has nothing more to learn. There
+    being, then, no stimulus from without, he is open to one of two
+    temptations&mdash;either to rest on his past labors, or, which
+    is far more likely, to keep on studying for himself, but to
+    keep the results to himself. It is not only more soothing to
+    our pride, it is juster to our professors, to regard them thus
+    as men who have hid their lights under a bushel, and also to
+    confess that we, our institutions and ways of thinking, have
+    made the bushel for them and held it down over their heads. It
+    is not every man who has the persistency and stamina of
+    Professor Whitney, for instance, who can toil for years with
+    beginning classes in French and German, never losing sight of
+    his real aim, never neglecting an opportunity of bringing it
+    forward, until at last he achieves the success he has
+    especially desired, and is acknowledged to be one of the
+    foremost comparative philologists and Sanskrit scholars in the
+    world. Where a Professor Whitney may succeed in spite of
+    untoward circumstances, a dozen will probably fail because of
+    circumstances. We naturally look to our colleges for the
+    evidences of learning, of enlightenment and culture. We think
+    of the capital invested in them, of the part they play in
+    moulding the character of our young men, and we deem it a
+    matter of course that they should be continually producing
+    something original and independent. But when we compare them
+    with the German universities&mdash;and the comparison is forced
+    upon us whenever one of our graduates goes abroad to complete
+    his studies or whenever we look into a recent German
+    publication&mdash;we are forced to exclaim, "What are our
+    colleges about? Are they incompetent, or asleep?" Neither one
+    nor the other. Most of our professors do the best they can. But
+    they are fettered by routine: they are not stimulated and
+    sustained by the consciousness that their private studies may
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page199"
+       id="page199"></a>[pg 199]</span> be made directly available
+       in the classroom. They lead two lives, as it were&mdash;one
+       as professor, the other as thinker and reader&mdash;and
+       there is not the proper action and reaction between the
+       two.</p>
+
+    <p>The remedy is as easy to propose as it would be difficult to
+    apply. We have only to convert our colleges into universities,
+    our college instructors into professors after the German model.
+    Let us relegate all teaching, so called, to the schools, and
+    let us give our professors permission to expand into veritable
+    scholars discoursing to young men of kindred spirit. Any one
+    can see at a glance that from the wish to the accomplishment is
+    a long way. Upon some of us the consciousness is beginning to
+    dawn that perhaps we have not even taken the first decisive
+    step. The best that can be said of our colleges is that they
+    are in a state of transition. We have increased the number of
+    studies, as well as the number of colleges; we have established
+    schools of law and schools of science, sometimes independent
+    of, sometimes co-ordinate with or subordinate to, the college.
+    We have also established post-graduate courses, in the hope of
+    inducing our young men to complete their studies at home. Yet
+    every year we see a larger number going abroad. In those days
+    of golden memory, both for Germany and for America, when
+    Longfellow was gliding down the Rhine with Freiligrath, and
+    Bancroft and Bismarck were comrades at Göttingen, an American
+    in Germany was something of a rarity. In most instances he was
+    a man of wealth and high social standing, who looked upon his
+    semester or two as a romantic episode. But now every
+    outward-bound steamer carries with it one or more who, emerging
+    from obscurity and poverty, have saved up a few hundred dollars
+    and are bent upon plain, hard, practical business. "We go,"
+    they can be imagined as saying, "because we can get in Germany
+    what we cannot get at home. Your schools of science and your
+    post-graduate courses may be well enough in their way, but they
+    do not give us what we are after, and we cannot afford to wait
+    until they may be able to give it. Some of the professors are
+    first-rate men&mdash;perhaps just as good as any we may meet in
+    Germany&mdash;but what does their learning, their science,
+    avail us, so long as they are obliged to withhold from us the
+    best that they know? They trained themselves in Germany, and if
+    we are ever to rival them we must do the same."</p>
+
+    <p>It is not pleasant to listen to such reasonings, much less
+    to see them carried into effect. But the defect which they
+    bring to light will not be cured by closing our eyes to it and
+    trusting to time, the sovereign healer. Time is a negative
+    factor: it only enables the forces of Nature to do their
+    positive work. But schools and colleges are not the product of
+    the elemental forces of Nature: they are distinctively the work
+    of man as a free agent. If we are free to shape any of our
+    institutions to suit our needs, we are certainly free to shape
+    our educational institutions. By having a definite result in
+    view, and willing its attainment, we may succeed; but if we
+    fail either in clearness of vision or persistency of will, we
+    cannot expect the result to come of itself. The present
+    university system of Germany, which might seem to a careless
+    observer the natural outgrowth of German life, is the result of
+    hard thinking and strenuous, well-directed effort. We should
+    not commit much of an exaggeration were we to call it the
+    deliberate creation of Frederick the Great, Von Zedlitz and
+    Wolf, who dragged with them Prussia, and the other German
+    states in her wake. They and their associates and followers,
+    Schleiermacher and William von Humboldt, clear-headed,
+    iron-willed men, perceived what was needed, and bent all their
+    energies to the task. They emancipated the schools from the
+    control of the clergy, and established the principle that
+    teaching is a distinct vocation, requiring special training,
+    over which the state has supervision; furthermore, that the
+    state should pronounce who is fit and who is not fit for
+    university education, thereby abolishing entrance-examinations,
+    and putting an end to the ignoble practice on the part of the
+    universities of lowering the standard for the purpose of
+    increasing the number of
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page200"
+       id="page200"></a>[pg 200]</span> students. They abolished
+       the last vestiges of the scholastic system by raising the
+       faculty of philosophy from its position as a
+       quasi-preparatory course to the others, and placing it on a
+       footing of perfect equality with law, theology and
+       medicine.<a id="footnotetag3"
+       target="blank"
+       name="footnotetag3"></a><a href="#footnote3"><sup>3</sup></a>
+       They removed all restrictions from the <i>Lehrfreiheit</i>,
+       or professional freedom of instruction, while at the same
+       time they preserved the right of the state to control
+       indirectly the quality of university instruction by means of
+       state-examinations for pastors, teachers, lawyers,
+       physicians and officeholders. Ever since then the university
+       system of Germany has rested upon a secure and lasting
+       basis.</p>
+
+    <p>Is the course pursued by Prussia to be regarded as a mere
+    incident in history, or may it serve as an example and model
+    for us? Prussia is a monarchy, clothed with some constitutional
+    forms but at bottom a state where the personal will of the
+    sovereign has always made, and continues to make, itself felt
+    in the final instance. We are a republic, or rather a cluster
+    of republics under an imperfectly centralized national
+    government. It is evident that the agencies and mode of reform
+    with us must differ from those that have been employed in
+    Prussia and in the rest of Germany. But it does not follow that
+    the reform itself is impossible. What has elsewhere sprung from
+    the autocratic will of a single man and his cabinet may be
+    effected here through that other force, equally great and
+    perhaps more pervasive, to which we give the vague name of
+    "popular opinion." We know that popular opinion in our country
+    is irresistible. It makes everything bend to it. It broke up
+    the Tweed Ring, seemingly impregnable, in a single campaign.
+    But this popular opinion is not a natural product: it is the
+    work of a few men who devote themselves to awakening the sense
+    of right and wrong and guiding the understanding of their
+    fellows. But for popular leaders like Mr. O'Conor and Governor
+    Tilden, the late Tweed Ring might be in power at this day.
+    Education is not so different from politics but that we can
+    regard it as subject to similar laws of cause and effect. Our
+    present common-school system is an off-spring of popular
+    opinion, as that opinion was created and led to action by a few
+    men. And whether our common schools are to stand or fall is
+    again becoming a question of the day, and will be decided
+    according as popular opinion may be swayed by a few zealous
+    friends or enemies. Our colleges, it may be said, do not occupy
+    the same relation to the state that our schools do. They are
+    nearly all private corporations, enjoying vested rights which
+    the state is powerless to touch. Undoubtedly true, but it is no
+    less true that what cannot be done directly may be done
+    indirectly. The state need not make so much as the attempt to
+    lay hands upon college property or to interfere with college
+    studies. It has only to say, "I, the state, exact such and such
+    qualifications of all who seek to practice law or medicine
+    within my limits or to become my officeholders. I establish my
+    own free colleges and schools of law and medicine, and I
+    proceed to tax all others at their full valuation." There is
+    not a college in the country, not even Harvard, that could
+    compete upon such terms. The state need not even express its
+    sovereign will so precisely. It can content itself with
+    establishing a university of its own, and facilitating the
+    direct influence of this university over the public and private
+    schools. We see the operations of such a system very plainly in
+    Michigan. Not only does the university at Ann Arbor overshadow
+    completely the private colleges, but the "union schools,"
+    administered under its auspices, are&mdash;to borrow the
+    expression of one of its graduates&mdash;"killing" the private
+    schools. We may rest assured that whatever the people of a
+    State or of the United States is earnestly bent upon having,
+    will come.</p>
+
+    <p>Whether all our States are to act as Michigan has
+    done&mdash;whether we are indeed ripe for thorough
+    change&mdash;whether a change is to be effected by direct State
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page201"
+       id="page201"></a>[pg 201]</span> action or indirectly by the
+       mere pressure of public sentiment&mdash;whether we have real
+       need of a body of professors and a set of universities such
+       as Germany possesses&mdash;whether we are to make our higher
+       as well as our primary education non-sectarian,&mdash;are
+       all questions which may rest in abeyance for a long time to
+       come. It is also possible that one or the other of them may,
+       in legal phraseology, be sprung upon us at any time. Not to
+       be taken unawares, we have to bear steadily in mind several
+       fixed principles and to disabuse ourselves of one
+       misconception.</p>
+
+    <p>The misconception is this: that what Germany accomplished in
+    the eighteenth century we cannot accomplish in the nineteenth,
+    because circumstances are so very different, chiefly because
+    Germany is an old country and we are a young country. The
+    circumstances are not so very different, and the difference,
+    however great it may be estimated, is in our favor. We are a
+    union of thirty or forty States: in the Germany of the
+    eighteenth century there were three hundred. Ever since the
+    adoption of our Federal Constitution we have enjoyed common
+    rights of citizenship, common laws of commerce, common legal
+    protection. Will it be necessary to remind the student of
+    history that the Germans have acquired these blessings only
+    within our own day? We are a nation of forty millions, rich and
+    prosperous, free to develop our resources. The Germany of 1775
+    could count barely twenty millions, its soil was poorly tilled,
+    its mineral wealth undeveloped, manufactures in an embryonic
+    state, trade fettered in a thousand ways, the peasantry
+    brutally ignorant and servile, the national character&mdash;to
+    all appearance&mdash;ruined by cruel religious wars, the sense
+    of national unity blunted by the recollections of a hundred
+    petty feuds reaching back to the gloom of the Middle Ages, the
+    national taste dominated by poor French models to an extent
+    that now seems incredible, learning either dry pedantry or
+    shallow cox-combry. We are indeed a young country, but we are
+    young in hope; Germany was old, but it was old in weakness, in
+    poverty, in despondency. Whoever doubts our ability to do as
+    much as Germany did one hundred years ago, fails to profit by
+    the teachings of history&mdash;overlooks the fact that Germany
+    in 1840 was only where she had been in 1618. That we should
+    take Germany for our standard of comparison, rather than
+    England or France, is a postulate which has one circumstance
+    unmistakably in its favor. Although we are connected with
+    England by common descent, institutions and language, although
+    the politics and philosophy of France have exerted considerable
+    influence over our own, we do not observe our young men going
+    in numbers to England and France to receive their final
+    training. Their instinct leads them to Germany. For one
+    American graduate of Oxford or Cambridge or of the French
+    <i>écoles</i>, it would be easy to count ten doctors of
+    Göttingen or Heidelberg. Our young men are not attracted to the
+    German universities by such factitious considerations as
+    cheapness of living or the acquisition of the language, but by
+    sympathy with German methods and academic liberty.</p>
+
+    <p>Some of the most important fixed principles have been
+    already touched upon, but only one can be developed in this
+    place. It is, that if we are to establish a system of higher
+    education, we must begin by recognizing freely and fully the
+    distinction between teacher and professor. We must perceive the
+    importance of having two sets of men&mdash;the one to teach,
+    the other to investigate; the one engaged in training boys to
+    learn, the other in showing young men how to think. When and
+    how this distinction is to be established, in what special form
+    it is to be embodied, is a secondary matter. The chief thing is
+    to admit that it is essential and feasible. The young man who
+    returns after a three years' absence in Germany, exhibiting
+    with dignified pride his well-earned doctor's diploma, looks of
+    course upon the institution that conferred it as the <i>ne plus
+    ultra</i>. But riper experience, contact with the sharp corners
+    of American prejudices and peculiarities, renewed familiarity
+    with our social, political, commercial and
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page202"
+       id="page202"></a>[pg 202]</span> literary life, will
+       gradually convince him that a German university is not a
+       thing to be plucked up by the roots and transplanted bodily
+       to American soil. We have rather to take our native stock as
+       we find it, and engraft upon it a slip from the German. One
+       trial may fail, another may succeed. Our first efforts will
+       be like those of a man groping about in the dark. More than
+       one department in a German university will be of little
+       avail in an American, and conversely we shall have to create
+       some that do not exist elsewhere. For instance, in view of
+       the great power exerted by the newspaper press, it might be
+       desirable to have a course of study for those who think of
+       taking up journalism as a profession. In such a course,
+       political economy, constitutional and international law,
+       English and American history, and the modern languages and
+       literatures should constitute a full and serious discipline.
+       It is not probable that the study of philology will ever
+       attract the same attention here that it does abroad. Our
+       needs lie in the direction of the natural sciences rather
+       than in the direction of history and linguistics. But we
+       should be derelict to our duty were we to sacrifice these
+       sciences of the spirit, as the Germans call them, to the
+       sciences of Nature. A culture without them would be the
+       bleakest and most repulsive materialism.</p>
+
+    <p>The practical recognition of the difference between teacher
+    and professor would be a decided step. By the side of it those
+    which we have already taken would appear insignificant. The
+    addition of chemistry, geology, or physiology to the previous
+    curriculum does not change its character, so long as the
+    professors of those branches instruct after the fashion of the
+    professors of Latin and Greek. The advantage that the men of
+    natural science have over their colleagues is one which the
+    nature of the subject brings with it. In order to teach at all,
+    they must come in close personal contact with their pupils, and
+    to escape falling behind in their department, where new
+    theories succeed one another with such rapid bounds, they must
+    continue a certain amount at least of original research.
+    Supplementing the present curriculum by post-graduate courses
+    will hardly suffice. Such courses are open to serious
+    objections. If conducted by the regular professors, they impose
+    additional burdens upon men who have already more than enough.
+    If conducted by special professors, they will tend to raise
+    those professors at the expense of the regular faculty. A
+    lecturer to graduates must necessarily appear, in the eyes of
+    the undergraduate, superior to the man who hears recitations
+    and prepares term-reports. Besides, young men who have passed
+    four years at one college need "a change of air:" they will
+    develop more rapidly if brought into contact with new ideas and
+    new instructors. Every institution has an atmosphere of its
+    own, which ceases after a time to act upon the student as a
+    stimulant.</p>
+
+    <p>There is one additional point that should not be overlooked.
+    A careful discrimination between the functions of the professor
+    and those of the teacher would benefit both classes of men.
+    Such has been the effect in Germany. The gymnasium-teacher has
+    a high sense of the dignity of his vocation and a keen sense of
+    its responsibilities, because he perceives that he must bring
+    his labors to a well-rounded conclusion. He knows that the
+    university does not supplement the gymnasium&mdash;that the
+    university professors do not undertake to make good his
+    shortcomings. The gymnasial course is a completed phase of
+    training. It aims at giving the pupil all the general knowledge
+    that he requires previous to his professional studies. What is
+    lost or overlooked in the gymnasium cannot be acquired at the
+    university. Hence the peculiar conscientiousness of the German
+    teacher, his almost painful anxiety to make sure that his
+    pupils master every subject, his unwillingness to let them go
+    before they are "ripe." With us the change from school to
+    college is not an abrupt transition, like that from gymnasium
+    to university. The college course, certainly during the two
+    lower years at least, is a continuation of the school course:
+    the same or similar subjects are
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page203"
+       id="page203"></a>[pg 203]</span> taught, and taught in the
+       same way. Hence the school-teacher is tempted to regulate
+       his efforts according to the college standard of admission.
+       If he can only "get his men into college," as the saying is,
+       he thinks that he is doing enough. To say this of all
+       schools and all teachers would be flagrant injustice. Not a
+       few of our older schools compare favorably with the best
+       German gymnasiums, and in the large cities we find schools
+       of even recent origin that endeavor faithfully to give a
+       well-rounded discipline. But it remains nevertheless true
+       that our schools, taken as a whole, give no more than the
+       colleges require, and that only too many of them give less,
+       trusting to the colleges to be lenient and eke out the
+       deficiency. Moreover, when we read in the daily papers
+       advertisements like the following, "Mr. Smith, a graduate of
+       Harvard (or Yale or some other college, as the case may be),
+       prepares young men for college," what inference are we to
+       draw? Simply, that Mr. Smith, having gone through Harvard or
+       Yale, knows exactly what is required there, and will
+       undertake to "coach" any young man for admission in two or
+       three years. Such coaching, if the young man is dull or
+       backward, will consist in cramming him with required
+       studies, to the neglect of everything not required. Teaching
+       is not easy work. In many respects it is more difficult to
+       be a good teacher than to be an original investigator.
+       Whatever operates to strengthen and elevate the teacher's
+       position, therefore, must be a gain. The highest incentive
+       would be the consciousness that his school is not a mere
+       stepping-stone to another school of larger growth, but the
+       place where he must in truth prepare the youthful mind for
+       independent study.</p>
+
+    <p class="author">JAMES MORGAN HART.</p>
+
+    <h2>CONTRASTED MOODS.</h2>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i10">WANT.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>Where is the power I fancied mine?</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Can I have emptied my soul of
+            thought?</p>
+
+            <p>In yesterday's fullness lay no sign</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">That to-day would be a time of
+            drought.</p>
+
+            <p>What if thought fail me for evermore?</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">The world that awaits a well-filled
+            plan</p>
+
+            <p>Must, railing, cry at my long-closed door,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">"He cannot finish what he began."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i10">PLENTY.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>Thought dashes on thought within my soul:</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Time will not serve for the
+            bounding-line.</p>
+
+            <p>I think it would fail to mete the whole</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">If old Methuselah's years were mine.</p>
+
+            <p>Like the famous spring that is sometimes dry,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Then flows with a river's whelming
+            might,</p>
+
+            <p>The current of thought now runs so high</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">It covers the earthy bed from sight.</p>
+        </div>
+    </div>
+
+    <p class="author">CHARLOTTE F.
+    BATES.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page204"
+       id="page204"></a>[pg 204]</span>
+
+    <h2>THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS.</h2>
+
+    <h3>BY MRS. E. LYNN LINTON, AUTHOR OF "PATRICIA KEMBALL."</h3>
+
+    <h3>CHAPTER XXI.</h3>
+
+    <h3>CHANGES.</h3>
+
+    <p>Four years had come and gone since Mr. Dundas had laid his
+    second wife in the grave beside his first, and the county had
+    discussed the immorality of taking cherry-water as a calmant.
+    For it was to an overdose of this that the verdict at the
+    coroner's inquest had assigned the cause of poor madame's awful
+    and sudden death; though why the medicine should have been
+    found so loaded with prussic acid as to have caused instant
+    death on this special night, when it had been taken so often
+    before with impunity, was a mystery to which there was no
+    solution. Not a trace of poison was to be found anywhere in the
+    house, and no evidence was forthcoming to show how it might
+    have been bought or where procured. Alick Corfield, who
+    understood it all, was not called as a witness, and he told no
+    one what he knew. On the contrary, he burdened his soul with
+    the, to him, unpardonable crime of falsehood that he might
+    shield Leam from detection; for when his father, missing the
+    sixty-minim bottle of hydrocyanic acid, asked him what had
+    become of it, Alick answered, with that wonderful coolness of
+    virtue descending to sin for the protection of the beloved
+    which is sometimes seen in the ingenuous, "I broke it by
+    accident, father, and forgot to tell you."</p>
+
+    <p>As the boy had never been known to tell a falsehood in his
+    life, he reaped the reward of good repute, and his father,
+    saying quietly, "That was a bad job, my boy," laid the matter
+    aside as a <i>caput mortuum</i> of no value.</p>
+
+    <p>To be sure, he thought more than once that it was an odd
+    coincidence, but he could see no connection between the two
+    circumstances of madame's sudden death and Alick's fracture of
+    that bottle of hydrocyanic acid; and even if there should be
+    any, he preferred not to trace it. So the inquest was a mere
+    show so far as getting at the truth was concerned, and madame
+    died and was buried in the mystery in which she had lived.</p>
+
+    <p>Meantime, Leam had been sent to school, whence she was
+    expected to return a little more like other English girls than
+    she had been hitherto, and Mr. Dundas shut up Ford
+    House&mdash;he went back to the original name after madame's
+    death&mdash;and left England to shake off in travel the deadly
+    despair that had fallen like a sickness on him and taken all
+    the flavor out of his life. He had never cared to search out
+    the real history of that fair beloved woman. Enough had come to
+    his knowledge, in the bills which had poured in from several
+    Sherrington tradesmen on the announcement of her marriage and
+    then of her death, to convince him that he had been duped in
+    facts if not in feeling. For among these bills was one from the
+    local geologist for "a beginner's cabinet of specimens,"
+    delivered just about the time when he, Sebastian, had spent so
+    many pleasant hours in arranging the fragments which madame
+    said represented both her knowledge and her lost happiness;
+    also one from the fancy repository, which sold everything, for
+    sundry water-color drawings and illuminated texts, a Table of
+    the Ten Commandments illustrated, and the like, which
+    sufficiently explained all on this side, and settled for ever
+    the dead woman's claims to the artistic and scientific merit
+    with which Mr. Dundas and the rector had credited her.</p>
+
+    <p>Also, certain ugly letters from a person of the name of
+    Lowes, in London, put him on the track, had he cared to follow
+    it up, of a deception even worse than that of pretended art or
+    mock science. These letters, written in the same handwriting as
+    that wherein Julius de Montfort, her brother-in-law, the
+    present <span class="pagenum"><a name="page205"
+       id="page205"></a>[pg 205]</span> marquis, had told her of
+       the defalcations of the family solicitor and trustee, called
+       Virginie, Madame la Marquise de Montfort, plain Susan
+       bluntly, and reminded her of the screw that would be turned
+       if the writer was not satisfied; and were letters that
+       demanded money, always money, as the price of continued
+       silence.</p>
+
+    <p>But Sebastian had loved his second wife too well to seek to
+    know the truth, if that truth would be to her discredit. He
+    preferred to be deceived; and he had what he preferred. He
+    stifled all doubts, darkened all chinks by which the obtrusive
+    light might penetrate, kept his love if not his faith unshaken,
+    caring only to remember her as beautiful, seductive, soothing,
+    and mourning her as deeply, doubtful as she had proved herself
+    to be, as he had loved her fondly when he believed her honest.
+    It was a curious mental condition for a man to cherish, but it
+    satisfied him, and his regret was not robbed of its pathos by
+    knowledge.</p>
+
+    <p>Now that the four years were completed, the widower had to
+    return to his desolate home and make the best he could of the
+    fragments of peace and happiness left to him. Leam was
+    nineteen: it was time for her to be taken from school and given
+    the protection of her father's house. It went against the man's
+    heart to have her, but he was compelled, if he wished to stand
+    well with his friends, and he hoped that the girl would be
+    found improved from these years of discipline and training, and
+    be rational and like other people. Wherefore he came home one
+    dry dull day in October, and the neighborhood welcomed him, if
+    not as their prodigal returned, yet as their lunatic restored
+    to his right mind.</p>
+
+    <p>During these four years a few changes had taken place at
+    North Aston. Carry Fairbairn had married&mdash;not Frank
+    Harrowby: he had found a rich wife, not in the least to his
+    personal taste, but greatly to his profit; and Carry, after
+    having cried a good deal for a month, had consoled herself with
+    a young clergyman from the North, whom she loved quite as much
+    as if she had never fancied Frank at all, and spoilt in the
+    first months by such submission as caused her to repent for all
+    the years of her life after.</p>
+
+    <p>The things of the rectory were much in their old state.
+    Little Fina, madame's child, was there under Mrs. Birkett's
+    motherly care; but as the child was nearly six years old now,
+    the good creature's instinctive love for infants was wearing
+    out, and she was often heard to say how much she wished she
+    could have kept Fina always a baby, and, sighing, how difficult
+    she was to manage! She was an exceedingly pretty little girl,
+    with fair skin, fair hair and dark eyes&mdash;willful of
+    course, and spoilt of course; the only one in the house who
+    took her in hand to correct being Adelaide. And as she took her
+    in hand too smartly, Mrs. Birkett generally interfered, and the
+    servants combined to screen her; the result being that the
+    little one was mistress of the situation, after the manner of
+    willful children, and made every one more or less anxious and
+    uncomfortable as her return for their care.</p>
+
+    <p>Alick Corfield was the rector's curate. On the whole, this
+    was the most important of all the North Aston events which had
+    taken place during the last four years. Soon after madame's
+    death and Leam's transfer from home to school Alick had a
+    strange and sudden illness. No one knew what to make of it, nor
+    how it came, nor what it was, but the doctor called it cerebral
+    fever, and when the families got hold of the word they were
+    content. Cerebral fever does as well as anything else for an
+    illness of which no one knows and no one seeks to know the
+    cause, and to the origin of which the patient himself gives no
+    clew. It was a peg, and a peg was all that was wanted.</p>
+
+    <p>On his recovery he announced his intention of going to
+    Oxford to read for holy orders. His mother was piteously
+    distressed, as might be expected. She feared all sorts of evil
+    for her boy, from damp sheets and unmended linen to over-study,
+    wine-parties and bold-faced minxes weaving subtle webs of
+    fascination. But for the first time in his life Alick stood out
+    against her insistance, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page206"
+       id="page206"></a>[pg 206]</span> and his will conquered
+       hers. The sequel of the struggle was, that he went to
+       Oxford, took his degree, read for orders, passed, and that
+       Mr. Birkett gave him his title as his curate.</p>
+
+    <p>It could hardly be said that the relations were entirely
+    harmonious between the military-minded rector, who held to the
+    righteousness of helotry and the value of ignorance in the
+    class beneath him, and the young curate burning with zeal and
+    oppressed with the desire to put all the crooked things of life
+    straight. The one pooh-poohed the enthusiasm of the other,
+    derided his belief in humanity and assured him of failure: the
+    other felt as if he had been taken behind the scenes and shown
+    the blue fire of which the awful lightning of his youth was
+    made. Mr. Birkett could not quite forbid the greater faith, the
+    more loving endeavor which the young man threw into his
+    ministrations, but he was the Sadducee who scoffed and made the
+    work heavy and uphill throughout. He gave a grudging assent to
+    the Bible-classes, the Wednesday evening services at the
+    Sunday-school, the lectures on great men on the first Monday in
+    the month, which Alick proposed and established. He thought it
+    all weariness to the flesh and a waste of time and energy; but
+    the traditions of his order were strong, if he himself did not
+    share them, and he had to give way in the end. He consoled
+    himself with the reflection that the boy would find out his
+    mistake before long, and that then he would know who had been
+    right throughout.</p>
+
+    <p>But even zeal and hope and diligence in his work could not
+    lighten the persistent sadness which was Alick's chief
+    characteristic now. Gaunt and silent, with the eyes of a man
+    whose inner self is absent and whose thoughts are not with his
+    company, he looked as if he had passed through the fire, and
+    had not passed through unscathed. No one knew what had happened
+    to him, and, though many made conjectures, none came near the
+    truth. Meanwhile, he seemed as if he lived only to work, and,
+    the clearer-sighted might have added, to wait.</p>
+
+    <p>For a further local change, Lionnet was tenanted again by a
+    strange and solitary man, who never went to church and did not
+    visit in the neighborhood. He was in consequence believed to be
+    a forger, an escaped convict in hiding, or, by the more
+    charitable, a maniac as yet not dangerous. North Aston held him
+    in deeper horror than it had held even Pepita, and his true
+    personality exercised its wits more keenly than had even the
+    true personality of madame. In point of fact, he was a quiet,
+    inoffensive, amiable man, who gave his mind to Sanskrit for
+    work and to entomology for play, and did not trouble himself
+    about his own portrait as drawn in the local vernacular.
+    Nevertheless, for all his reserved habits and quiet ways, he
+    had learnt the whole history of the place and people before he
+    had been at Lionnet a month.</p>
+
+    <p>At the Hill things remained unchanged for the ladies, save
+    for the additional burden of years and the pleasant news that
+    Edgar was expected home daily. Adelaide, now twenty-four, took
+    the news as a personal grace, and blossomed into smiles and
+    glad humor of which only Josephine understood the source. But
+    Josephine held her tongue, and received the confidence of her
+    young friend with discretion. As she had never dispossessed her
+    own old idol, she could feel for Adelaide, and she was not
+    disposed to look on her patient determination with displeasure.
+    The constancy of the two, however, was very different in
+    essential meaning. With Josephine it was the constancy that is
+    born of an affectionate disposition and the absence of rival
+    Lotharios: with Adelaide it was the result of calculation and
+    decision. The one would have worshiped Sebastian as she
+    worshiped him now had he been ruined, a cripple, a criminal
+    even: the other would have shut out Edgar inexorably from her
+    very dreams had not his personality included the Hill. With the
+    one it was self-abasement&mdash;with the other
+    self-consideration; but it came to the same thing in the end,
+    and the men profited equally.</p>
+
+    <p>All these changes Sebastian Dundas found to have taken place
+    when he <span class="pagenum"><a name="page207"
+       id="page207"></a>[pg 207]</span> returned to North Aston
+       with gray hair instead of brown, his smooth, fair skin
+       tanned and roughened, and his weak, finely-cut, effeminate
+       mouth hidden by a moustache of a reddish tint, mingled with
+       white. Still, he was Sebastian; and after the first shock of
+       his altered appearance had been got over, Josephine carried
+       her incense in the old way, and found her worship as dear
+       and as tantalizing as ever.</p>
+
+    <p>Lastly, as the crowning change of all, Leam came home from
+    school; no longer the arrogant, embittered child, looking at
+    life through the false medium of pride and ignorance, saying
+    rude things and doing odd ones with the most perfect
+    unconsciousness; but well-bred, graceful, sufficiently
+    instructed not to make patent mistakes, and more beautiful by
+    far than she had even promised to be. Her very eyes were
+    lovelier, lovely as they had always been: they had more variety
+    of expression, were more dewy and tender, and, if less tragic,
+    were more spiritual. That hard, dry, burning passion which had
+    devoured her of old time seemed to have gone, as also her
+    savage Spanish pride. She had rounded and softened in body too,
+    as in mind. Her skin was fairer; her lips were not so firmly
+    closed, so rigid in line, so constricted in motion; her brows
+    were more flexible and not so often knit together; and her
+    slight, lithe figure was perfect in line and movement. Still,
+    she had enough of her former manner of being for identity.
+    Grave, quiet, laconic, direct, she was but a modification of
+    the former Leam as they had known her&mdash;Leam, Pepita's
+    daughter, and with blood in her veins that was not the ordinary
+    blood of the ordinary British miss.</p>
+
+    <p>Her father's artistic perceptions were gratified as he met
+    her at the station and Leam turned her cheek to him voluntarily
+    with tears in her eyes. Turning her cheek was apparently her
+    idea of kissing; but if not too intense an expression of
+    affection, it was at least an improvement on the old hard
+    repulsion, and Sebastian accepted it as the concession it was
+    meant to be. Indeed, they met somewhat as foes reconciled, or
+    rather seeking to be reconciled, and Mr. Dundas did not wish to
+    keep open old sores. Her cheek, turned to him somewhere about
+    the ear, represented to his mind a peace-offering: her eyes
+    full of tears were as a confession of past sins and a promise
+    of amendment. Not that he understood why she was so much more
+    effusive than of old, but if it augured a happier life
+    together, he was glad.</p>
+
+    <p>As they drove up to the door of the old home, crowded with
+    memories and associations, a shudder passed over the girl: she
+    grasped her father's hand in her own almost convulsively, and
+    he heard her say below her breath, "Poor papa!"</p>
+
+    <p>He wondered why she pitied him. The place must surely be
+    full of memories of her mother for her: why did she say "Poor
+    papa!" to him? He did not see what she saw&mdash;that peaceful
+    September evening, and the bottle of cherry-water on the table,
+    with the little phial of thirty deaths in her hand; and now the
+    contents emptied into the harmless draught; and now madame pale
+    and dead. The whole scene transacted itself vividly before her,
+    and she shuddered at her memories and her past self, as always
+    with a kind of vague wonder how she could have been so wicked,
+    and where did she get the force, the courage, for such a cruel
+    crime?</p>
+
+    <p>For all these four years at school the shadow of that
+    dreadful deed had been ever in the background of her life; and
+    as time went on, and she came to a better understanding of
+    morality, it grew clear to her as a crime. Its consciousness of
+    guilt had broken down her pride, and thus had made her more
+    malleable, more humble. She could no longer harden herself in
+    her belief that she was superior to every one else. Those
+    girls, her companions&mdash;they had not had an Andalusian
+    mother, truly; they did not pray to the saints, and the Holy
+    Virgin took no care of them; they were Protestants and English,
+    frogs and pigs; but they had not committed murder. If she
+    should stand up in the middle of the room and tell them what
+    she had done, which of them would touch her hand
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page208"
+       id="page208"></a>[pg 208]</span> again? which of them speak
+       to her? English and Protestants as they were, how far
+       superior in their innocence to her, an Andalusian Catholic,
+       in her guilt! But no one lives with remorse. It comes and
+       goes gustily, fitfully; but the things of the present are
+       stronger than the things of the past, else the man with a
+       shameful secret in his life would go mad.</p>
+
+    <p>One of these gusty storms broke over Leam as she passed
+    through the gates of the old home, and for the moment she felt
+    as if she must confess the truth to her father and tell him
+    what evil thing she had done. Yet it passed, as other such
+    storms had passed: the things of the present took their natural
+    place of prominence, and those of the past sank again into the
+    background, shadows that never faded quite away, but that were
+    not actualities pressing against her.</p>
+
+    <p>The news of Leam's home-coming created quite a pleasurable
+    excitement in the neighborhood, and the families flocked to
+    Ford House to welcome her among them as one of themselves, all
+    anxious to see if the Ethiopian of North Aston had shed her
+    skin, if the leopardess had changed her spots. They were
+    divided among themselves as to whether she had or had not. Some
+    said she was charming, and like any one else, but others shook
+    their heads, and, like experts in brain disease, professed to
+    see traces of the old lunacy, and to be doubtful as to her
+    cure. At the worst, however, here she was&mdash;one of
+    themselves whom they must receive; and common sense dictated
+    that they should make the best of her, and hope all things till
+    they proved some.</p>
+
+    <p>There was one among them whom Leam longed yet dreaded to
+    meet. This was Alick Corfield. She wondered what he knew, or
+    rather what he suspected, and she was anxious to have her
+    ordeal over. But, though Mrs. Corfield came, and was just the
+    same as ever, bustling, inquisitive, dogmatic, before ten
+    minutes were over having put the girl through her scholastic
+    facings and got from her the whole of her curriculum, yet Alick
+    did not appear. He waited until after Sunday, when he should
+    see her first in church, and so nerve himself as it were behind
+    the barrier of his sacred office; but after Sunday had passed
+    and he had seen her in her old place, he called, and found her
+    alone.</p>
+
+    <p>When they met, and she looked into his face and laid her
+    hand in his, she knew all. He shared her secret, and knew what
+    she had done. It was not that he was either distant or
+    familiar, cold or disrespectful, or anything but glad and
+    reverent; nevertheless, he knew. He was no longer the boy
+    adorer, her slave, her dog: he was her friend, and he wished to
+    make her feel that she was safe with him&mdash;known, in his
+    power, but safe.</p>
+
+    <p>"You are changed," he said awkwardly.</p>
+
+    <p>He thought of her as Leam, heard her always called Leam, but
+    he dared not use the familiar name, and yet she was not "Miss
+    Dundas" to him.</p>
+
+    <p>"It is four years since you saw me," she said with a grave
+    smile. "It was time to change."</p>
+
+    <p>"But you are your old self too," he returned eagerly. He
+    would have no disloyalty done to the queen of his boyish
+    dreams: what worm soever was at its root, his royal pomegranate
+    flower should be always set fair in the sun where he might
+    be.</p>
+
+    <p>"You seem much changed too," she said after a short
+    pause&mdash;"graver and older. Is that because you are a
+    clergyman?"</p>
+
+    <p>Alick turned his eyes away from the girl's face, and looked
+    mournfully out onto the autumn woods. "Partly," he said.</p>
+
+    <p>"And the other part?" asked Leam, pressing to know the
+    worst.</p>
+
+    <p>"And the other part?" He looked at her, and his wan face
+    grew paler. "Well, never mind the other part. There are things
+    which sometimes come into a man's life and wither it for ever,
+    as a fire passing over a green tree, but we do not speak of
+    them."</p>
+
+    <p>"To no one?"</p>
+
+    <p>"To no one."</p>
+
+    <p>Leam sighed. No proclamation could have made the thing
+    clearer between <span class="pagenum"><a name="page209"
+       id="page209"></a>[pg 209]</span> them. Henceforth she was in
+       Alick's power: let him be faithful, chivalrous, loyal,
+       devoted, what you will, she was no longer her own unshared
+       property. He knew what she was, and in so far was her
+       master.</p>
+
+    <p>Poor Alick! This was not the light in which he held his
+    fatal secret. True, he knew what she had done, and that his
+    young queen, his ideal, was a murderess, who, if the truth were
+    made public, would be degraded below the level of the poorest
+    wretch that had kept an honest name; but he felt himself more
+    accursed than she, in that he had been the means whereby she
+    had gotten both her knowledge and the power to use it. He was
+    the doomed if innocent, as of old tragic times&mdash;the
+    sinless Cain guilty of murder, but guiltless in intent. It was
+    for this, as much as for the love and poetry of the boyish
+    days, that he felt he owed himself to Leam&mdash;that his life
+    was hers, and all his energies were to be devoted for her good.
+    It was for this that he had prayed with such intensity of
+    earnestness it seemed to him sometimes as if his soul had left
+    his body, and had gone up to the Most High to pluck by force of
+    passionate entreaty the pardon he besought: "Pardon her, O
+    Lord! Turn her heart, enlighten her understanding, convince her
+    of her sin; but pardon her, pardon her, dear Lord! And with
+    her, pardon me."</p>
+
+    <p>The man's whole life was spent in this one wild, fervid
+    prayer. All that he did was tinged with the sentiment of
+    winning grace for her and pardon for both. In his own mind they
+    stood hand in hand together; and if he was the intercessor,
+    they were both to benefit, and neither would be saved without
+    the other. And he believed in the value of his prayers and in
+    the objective reality of their influence.</p>
+
+    <p>For the final changes in the ordering of home and society at
+    North Aston, the week after Leam returned Edgar Harrowby came
+    from India, and took up his position as the owner of the Hill
+    estate; and the child Fina was brought to Ford House, and
+    formally invested with her new name and condition as Miss Fina
+    Dundas, Sebastian's younger daughter. Mindful of the past, Mr.
+    Dundas expected to have a stormy scene with Leam when he told
+    her his intentions respecting poor madame's child; but Leam
+    answered quietly, "Very well, papa," and greeted Fina when she
+    arrived benevolently, if not effusively. She was not one of
+    those born mothers who love babies from their early nursery
+    days, but she was kind to the child in her grave way, and
+    seemed anxious to do well by her.</p>
+
+    <p>The ladies all bestowed on her their nursery recipes and
+    systems in rich abundance&mdash;especially Mrs. Birkett, who,
+    though glad to be relieved from the hourly task of watching and
+    contending, was still immensely interested in the little
+    creature, and gave daily counsel and superintendence. So that
+    on the whole Leam was not left unaided with her charge. On the
+    contrary, she ran great risk of being bewildered by her
+    multiplicity of counselors, and of entering in consequence on
+    that zigzag course which covers much ground and makes but
+    little progress.</p>
+
+    <h3>CHAPTER XXII.</h3>
+
+    <h3>EDGAR HARROWBY.</h3>
+
+    <p>Thirty-two years of age; tall, handsome, well set-up, and
+    every inch a soldier; manly in bearing, but also with that
+    grace of gesture and softness of speech which goes by the name
+    of polished manner; a bold sportsman, ignorant of physical
+    fear, to whom England was the culmination of the universe, and
+    such men as he&mdash;gentlemen, officers, squires&mdash;the
+    culmination of humanity; a man who loved women as creatures,
+    but despised them as intelligences; who respected socially the
+    ladies of his own class, and demanded that they should be
+    without stain, as befits the wives and mothers and sisters of
+    gentlemen, but who thought women of a meaner grade fair game
+    for the roving fowler; a conservative, holding to elemental
+    differences whence arise the value of races, the dignity of
+    family and the righteousness of caste; an
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page210"
+       id="page210"></a>[pg 210]</span> hereditary landowner,
+       regarding landed property as a sacred possession meant only
+       for the few and not to be suffered to lapse into low-born
+       hands; a gentleman, incapable of falsehood, treachery,
+       meanness, social dishonor, but not incapable of injustice,
+       tyranny, selfishness, even cruelty, if such came in his way
+       as the privilege of his rank,&mdash;this was Edgar Harrowby
+       as the world saw and his friends knew him, and as North
+       Aston had henceforth to know him.</p>
+
+    <p>His return caused immense local excitement and great
+    rejoicing. It seemed to set the social barometer at "fair," and
+    to promise a spell of animation such as North Aston had been
+    long wanting. And indeed personally for himself it was time
+    that Major Harrowby was at home and at the head of his own
+    affairs. Matters had been going rather badly on the estate
+    without him, and the need of a strong hand to keep agents
+    straight and tenants up to the mark had been making itself
+    somewhat disastrously felt during the last three or four years.
+    Wherefore he had sold out, broken all his ties in India
+    handsomely, as he had broken them in London handsomely once
+    before, when, mad with jealousy, he had fled like a thief in
+    the night, burned his boats behind him, and, as he thought,
+    obliterated every trace by which that loved and graceless woman
+    could discover his real name or family holding; and now had
+    come home prepared to do his duty to society and himself. That
+    is, prepared to marry a nice girl of his own kind, keep the
+    estate well in hand, and set an example of respectability and
+    orthodoxy, family prayers and bold riding, according to the
+    ideal of the English country gentleman.</p>
+
+    <p>But, above all, he must marry. And the wife provided for him
+    by the eternal fitness of things was Adelaide Birkett. Who else
+    could be found to suit the part so perfectly? She was
+    well-born, well-mannered; though not coarsely robust, yet
+    healthy in the sense of purity of blood; and she was decidedly
+    pretty. So far to the good of the Harrowby stock in the future.
+    Neither was she too young, though by reason of her quiet
+    country life her twenty-four years did not count more to her in
+    wear and tear of feeling and the doubtful moulding of
+    experience than if she had lived through one London season. She
+    was a girl of acknowledged good sense, calm, equable, holding
+    herself in the strictest leash of ladylike reserve, and
+    governing all her emotions without trouble, patent or
+    unconfessed. Hers was a character which would never floreate
+    into irregular beauties to give her friends anxiety and crowd
+    her life with embarrassing consequences. She despised sentiment
+    and ridiculed enthusiasm, thought skepticism both wicked and
+    disreputable, but at the same time fanaticism was silly, and
+    not nearly so respectable as that quiet, easy-going religion
+    which does nothing of which society would disapprove, but does
+    not break its heart in trying to found the kingdom of God on
+    earth.</p>
+
+    <p>All her relations with life and society would be blameless,
+    orthodox, ladylike and thoroughly English. As a wife she would
+    preach submission in public and practice domination and the
+    moral repression belonging to the superior being in private. As
+    a mother she would take care to have experienced nurses and
+    well-bred governesses, who would look after the children
+    properly, when she would wash her hands of further trouble and
+    responsibility, save to teach them good manners at luncheon and
+    self-control in their evening visit to the drawing-room for the
+    "children's half hour" before dinner. As the mistress of an
+    establishment she would be strict, demanding perfect purity in
+    the morals of her servants, not suffering waste, nor followers,
+    nor kitchen amusements that she knew of, nor kitchen
+    individuality anyhow. Her servants would be her serfs, and she
+    would assume to have bought them by food and wages in soul as
+    well as body, in mind as well as muscle. She would give broken
+    meat in moderation to the deserving poor, but she would let
+    those who are not deserving do the best they could with want at
+    home and inclemency abroad; and she would have called it
+    fostering vice had she fed the husbandless mother when hungry
+    or clothed the drunkard's
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page211"
+       id="page211"></a>[pg 211]</span> children when naked. She
+       would never be talked about for extremes or eccentricities
+       of any kind; and the world would be forced to mention her
+       with respect when it mentioned her at all, having indeed no
+       desire to do otherwise. For she was of the kind dear to the
+       heart of England&mdash;one of those who are called the salt
+       of the earth, and who are assumed to keep society safe and
+       pure. She was incredulous of science, contemptuous of
+       superstition, impatient of new ideas&mdash;appreciating art,
+       but holding artists as inferior creatures, like actors,
+       acrobats and newspaper writers. She was loyal to the queen
+       and royal family, the nobility and Established Church,
+       bracketing republicans with atheists, and both with
+       unpunished felons; as also classing immorality, the facts of
+       physiology and the details of disease in a group together,
+       as things horrible and not to be spoken of before ladies.
+       She was not slow to believe evil of her neighbors,
+       maintaining, indeed, that to be spoken of at all was proof
+       sufficient of undesirable conduct; but she would never
+       investigate a charge, preferring rather to accept it in its
+       vile integrity than to soil her hands by attempting to
+       unweave its dirty threads; hence she would be pitiless,
+       repellent, but she would never make herself the focus of
+       gossip. She was a human being if you will, a Christian in
+       creed and name assuredly; but beyond and above all things
+       she was a well-mannered, well-conducted English lady, a
+       person of spotless morals and exquisite propriety, in the
+       presence of whom humanity must not be human, truth truthful,
+       nor Nature natural.</p>
+
+    <p>This was the wife for Edgar Harrowby as a country
+    gentleman&mdash;the woman whom Mrs. Harrowby would have chosen
+    out of thousands to be her daughter-in-law, whom his sisters
+    would like, who would do credit to his name and position; and
+    whom he himself would find as good for his purpose as any
+    within the four seas.</p>
+
+    <p>For when Edgar married he would marry on social and rational
+    grounds: he would not commit the mistake of fancying that he
+    need love the woman as he had loved some others. He would marry
+    her, whoever she might be, because she would be of a good
+    family and reasonable character, fairly handsome,
+    unexceptionable in conduct, not tainted with hereditary disease
+    nor disgraced by ragged relatives, having nothing to do with
+    vice or poverty in the remotest link of her connections&mdash;a
+    woman fit to be the keeper of his house, the bearer of his
+    name, the mother of his children. But for love, passion,
+    enthusiasm, sentiment&mdash;Edgar thought all such emotional
+    impedimenta as these not only superfluous, but oftentimes
+    disastrous in the grave campaign of matrimony.</p>
+
+    <p>It was for this marriage that Adelaide had saved herself.
+    She believed that any woman can marry any man if she only wills
+    to do so; and from the day when she was seventeen, and they had
+    had a picnic at Dunaston, she had made up her mind to marry
+    Edgar Harrowby. When he came home for good, unmarried and
+    unengaged, she knew that she should succeed; and Edgar knew it
+    too. He knew it so well after he had been at home about a week
+    that if anything could have turned him against the wife carved
+    out for him by circumstance and fitness, it would have been the
+    almost fatal character of that fitness, as if Fortune had not
+    left him a choice in the matter.</p>
+
+    <p>"And what do you think of Adelaide?" asked Mrs. Harrowby one
+    day when her son said that he had been to the rectory. "You
+    have seen her twice now: what is your impression of her?'"</p>
+
+    <p>"She is prettier than ever&mdash;improved, I should say, all
+    through," was his answer.</p>
+
+    <p>Mrs. Harrowby smiled. "She is a girl I like," she said. "She
+    is so sensible and has such nice feeling about things."</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes," answered Edgar, "she is thoroughly well-bred."</p>
+
+    <p>"We have seen a great deal of her of late years," Mrs.
+    Harrowby continued, angling dexterously. "She and the girls are
+    fast friends, especially she and Josephine, though there is
+    certainly some slight difference of age between them. But
+    Adelaide prefers their society to that of any one about the
+    neighborhood. And <span class="pagenum"><a name="page212"
+       id="page212"></a>[pg 212]</span> I think that of itself
+       shows such good taste and nice feeling."</p>
+
+    <p>"So it does," said Edgar with dutiful assent, not exactly
+    seeing for himself what constituted Adelaide's good taste and
+    nice feeling in this preference for his dull and doleful
+    sisters over the brighter companionship of the Fairbairns, say,
+    or any other of the local nymphs. To him those elderly maiden
+    sisters of his were rather bores than otherwise, but he was not
+    displeased that Adelaide Birkett thought differently. If it
+    "ever came to anything," it would be better that they satisfied
+    her than that she should find them uncongenial.</p>
+
+    <p>"She is coming up to dinner this evening," Mrs. Harrowby
+    went on to say; and Edgar smiled, pulled his moustaches and
+    looked half puzzled if wholly pleased.</p>
+
+    <p>"She is a pretty girl," he said with the imbecility of a man
+    who ought to speak and who has nothing to say, also who has
+    something that he does not wish to say.</p>
+
+    <p>"She is better than pretty&mdash;she is good," returned Mrs.
+    Harrowby; and Edgar, not caring to discuss Adelaide on closer
+    ground with his mother, strolled away into his private room,
+    where he sat before the fire smoking, meditating on his life in
+    the past and his prospects in the future, and wondering how he
+    would like it when he had finally abjured the freedom of
+    bachelorhood and had taken up with matrimony and squiredom for
+    the remainder of his natural life.</p>
+
+    <p>Punctually at seven Adelaide Birkett appeared. This, too,
+    was one of her minor virtues: she was exact. Mind, person,
+    habits, all were regulated with the nicest method, and she knew
+    as little of hurry as of delay, and as little of both as of
+    passion.</p>
+
+    <p>"You are such a dear, good punctual girl!" said Josephine
+    affectionately&mdash;Josephine, whose virtues had a few more,
+    loose ends and knots untied than had her friend's.</p>
+
+    <p>"It is so vulgar to be unpunctual," said Adelaide with her
+    calm good-breeding. "It seems to me only another form of
+    uncleanliness and disorder."</p>
+
+    <p>"And Edgar is so punctual too!" cried Josephine by way of
+    commentary.</p>
+
+    <p>Adelaide smiled, not broadly, not hilariously, only to the
+    exact shade demanded by conversational sympathy. "Then we shall
+    agree in this," she said quietly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh I am sure you will agree, and in more than this,"
+    Josephine returned, almost with enthusiasm.</p>
+
+    <p>Had she not been the willing nurse of this affair from the
+    beginning?&mdash;if not the open confidante, yet secretly
+    holding the key to her younger friend's mind and actions? and
+    was she not, like all the kindly disappointed, intensely
+    sympathetic with love-matters, whether wise or foolish, hopeful
+    or hopeless?</p>
+
+    <p>"Who is it that you are sure will agree with Miss Adelaide,
+    if any one indeed could be found to disagree with her?" asked
+    Edgar, standing in the doorway.</p>
+
+    <p>Josephine laughed with the silliness of a weak woman
+    "caught." She looked at Adelaide slyly. Adelaide turned her
+    quiet face, unflushed, unruffled, and neither laughed sillily
+    nor looked slyly.</p>
+
+    <p>"She was praising me for punctuality; and then she said that
+    you were punctual too," she explained cheerfully.</p>
+
+    <p>"We learn that in the army," said Edgar.</p>
+
+    <p>"But I have had to learn it without the army," she
+    answered.</p>
+
+    <p>"Which shows that you have by the grace of nature what I
+    have attained only by discipline and art," said Edgar
+    gallantly.</p>
+
+    <p>Adelaide smiled. She did not disdain the compliment. On the
+    contrary, she wished to impress it on Edgar that she accepted
+    his praises because they were her due. She knew that the world
+    takes us if not quite at our own valuation, yet as being the
+    character we assume to be. It all depends on our choice of a
+    mask and to what ideal self we dress. If we are clever and
+    dress in keeping, without showing chinks or discrepancies, no
+    one will find out that it is only a mask; and those of us are
+    most successful in gaining the good-will of our fellows who
+    understand this principle the most clearly and act on it the
+    most consistently.</p>
+
+    <p>The evening was a pleasant one for Adelaide, being an
+    earnest of the future <span class="pagenum"><a name="page213"
+       id="page213"></a>[pg 213]</span> for which, if she had not
+       worked hard, she had controlled much. Edgar sang solos to
+       her accompaniment, and put in his rich baritone to her pure
+       if feeble soprano; he played chess with her for an hour, and
+       praised her play, as it deserved: naturally, not thinking it
+       necessary to make love to his sisters, he paid her almost
+       exclusive attention, and looked the admiration he felt. She
+       really was a very pretty young woman, and she had
+       unexceptionable manners; and having cut himself adrift from
+       his ties and handsomely released himself from his
+       obligations, he was not disposed to take much trouble in
+       looking far afield for a wife when here was one ready-made
+       to his hand. Still, he was not so rash as to commit himself
+       too soon. Fine play is never precipitate; and even the most
+       lordly lover, if an English gentleman, thinks it seemly to
+       pretend to woo the woman whom he means to take, and who he
+       knows will yield.</p>
+
+    <p>And on her side Adelaide was too well-bred for the one part,
+    and too wise for the other, to clutch prematurely at the prize
+    she had willed should be hers. Her actions must be like her
+    gestures, graceful, rhythmic, rather slow than hurried, and
+    bearing the stamp of purpose and deliberation. When Edgar
+    should make his offer, as she knew he would, she would ask for
+    time to reflect and make up her mind. This would be doing the
+    thing properly and with due regard to her own dignity; for no
+    husband of hers should ever have cause to think that she held
+    her marriage with him as a thing so undeniably advantageous
+    there was no doubt of her acceptance from the first. Every
+    woman must make herself difficult, thought Adelaide, if she
+    wishes to be prized, even the woman who for seven years has
+    fixed her eyes steadily on one point, and has determined that
+    she will finally capture a certain man and land him as her
+    lifelong possession.</p>
+
+    <p>Thus the evening passed, with a subtle undercurrent of
+    concealed resolves flowing beneath its surface admiration that
+    gave it a peculiar charm to the two people principally
+    concerned&mdash;the one feeling that she had advanced her game
+    by an important move; the other, that the eternal fitness of
+    things 'was making itself more and-more evident, and that it
+    was manifest to all his senses whom Providence had destined for
+    his wife, and for what ultimate matrimonial end he had been
+    shaped and spared.</p>
+
+    <p>A book of photographs was on the table.</p>
+
+    <p>"Are you here?" asked Edgar, lowering his bright blue eyes
+    on Adelaide as she sat on a small chair at Mrs. Harrowby's
+    feet, carrying daughterly incense to that withered shrine.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, I think so," she answered.</p>
+
+    <p>He turned the pages carefully&mdash;passing over his sisters
+    in wide crinolines and spoon bonnets; his mother, photographed
+    from an old picture, in a low dress and long dropping bands of
+    hair, like a mouflon's ears, about her face; Fred and himself,
+    both as boys in Scotch suits, set stiffly against the table
+    like dolls&mdash;with gradual improvement in art and style,
+    till he came to a page where Adelaide's fair vignetted head of
+    large size was placed side by side with another, also vignetted
+    and also large.</p>
+
+    <p>"Ah! there you are; and what a capital likeness!" cried
+    Edgar, with the joyous look and accent of one meeting an old
+    friend, giving that gauge of interest which we all
+    unconsciously give when we first see the photograph of a
+    well-known face. He looked at the portrait long and critically.
+    "Only not so pretty," he added gallantly. "Those fellows cannot
+    catch the spirit: they give only the outside forms, and not
+    always these correctly. Here is a striking face," he continued,
+    pointing to Adelaide's companion-picture&mdash;a girl with
+    masses of dark hair, dark eyes, large, mournful, heavily
+    fringed with long lashes, and a grave, sad face, that seemed
+    listening rather than looking. "Who is she? She looks
+    foreign."</p>
+
+    <p>Adelaide glanced at the page, as if she did not know it by
+    heart. "That? Oh! that is only Leam Dundas," she said with the
+    faintest, finest flavor of scorn in her voice.</p>
+
+    <p>"Leam Dundas?" repeated Edgar&mdash;"the daughter of that
+    awful woman?"</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page214"
+       id="page214"></a>[pg 214]</span>
+
+    <p>"Yes, and nearly as odd as the mother," answered Adelaide,
+    still in the same cold manner and with the same accent of
+    superior scorn.</p>
+
+    <p>"At least she used to be, you mean, dear, but she is more
+    like other people now," said kindly Josephine, more just than
+    politic.</p>
+
+    <p>Adelaide looked at her calmly, indifferently. "Yes, I
+    suppose she is rather less savage than of old," was her reply,
+    "but I do not see much of her,"</p>
+
+    <p>"I do not remember to have ever seen her: she must have been
+    a mere child when I was here last," said Edgar.</p>
+
+    <p>"She is nineteen now, I think," said Mrs. Harrowby.</p>
+
+    <p>"Not more?" repeated Adelaide. "I imagined she was
+    one-and-twenty at the least. She looks so very much older than
+    even this&mdash;five or six and twenty, full; dark people age
+    so quickly."</p>
+
+    <p>"She seems to be superbly handsome," Edgar said, still
+    looking at the portrait.</p>
+
+    <p>"For those who like that swarthy kind of beauty. For myself,
+    I do not: it always reminds me of negroes and Lascars."</p>
+
+    <p>Adelaide leaned forward, and made pretence to examine Leam's
+    portrait with critical independence of judgment. She spoke as
+    if this was the first time she had seen it, and her words the
+    thought of the moment resulting.</p>
+
+    <p>"There is no negroid taint here," Edgar answered gravely.
+    "It is the face of a sibyl, of a tragedian."</p>
+
+    <p>"Do you think so? It is fine in outline certainly, but too
+    monotonous to please me, and too lugubrious; and the funny part
+    of it is, there is nothing in her. She looks like a sibyl, but
+    she is the most profoundly stupid person you can imagine."</p>
+
+    <p>"Not now, Addy: she has wakened up a good deal," again
+    interposed Josephine with her love of justice and want of
+    tact.</p>
+
+    <p>"But do you not see the mother in her, Josephine? I do,
+    painfully; and the mother was such a horror! Leam is just like
+    her. She will grow her exact counterpart"</p>
+
+    <p>"A bad model enough," said Edgar; "but this face is not bad.
+    It has more in it than poor old Pepita's. How fat she was!"</p>
+
+    <p>"So will Leam be when she is as old," said Adelaide quietly.
+    "And do you think these dark people ever look clean? I
+    don't,"</p>
+
+    <p>"That is a drawback certainly," laughed Edgar, running
+    through the remainder of the book.</p>
+
+    <p>But he turned back again to the page which held Leam and
+    Adelaide side by side, and he spoke of the latter while he
+    looked at the former. The face of Leam Dundas, mournful,
+    passionate, concentrated as it was, had struck his
+    imagination&mdash;struck it as none other had done since the
+    time when he had met that grand and graceful woman wandering,
+    lost in a fog, in St. James's Park, and had protected from
+    possible annoyance till he had landed her in St. John's Wood.
+    He was glad that Leam Dundas lived in North Aston, and that he
+    should see her without trouble or overt action; and as he
+    handed Adelaide into her carriage he noticed for the first time
+    that her blue eyes were not quite even, that her flaxen hair
+    had not quite enough color, and that her face, if pure and
+    fair, was slightly insipid.</p>
+
+    <p>"Poor, dear Adelaide!" he said when he returned to the
+    drawing-room, "how nice she is! but how tart she was about this
+    Leam Dundas of yours! Looks like jealousy; and very likely is.
+    All you women are so horribly jealous."</p>
+
+    <p>"Not all of us," said Maria hastily.</p>
+
+    <p>"And I do not think that Adelaide is," said Josephine. "She
+    has no cause; for though Leam is certainly very lovely, and
+    seems to have improved immensely for being at school, still she
+    and Addy do not come into collision any way, and I do not see
+    why she should be jealous."</p>
+
+    <p>"Perhaps Edgar admired her photograph too much," said Fanny,
+    who was the stupid one of the three, but on occasions made the
+    shrewdest remarks.</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar laughed, not displeasedly. "That would be paying me
+    too high a compliment," he said.</p>
+
+    <p>Whereat his three sisters echoed "Compliment!" in various
+    tones of deprecation, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page215"
+       id="page215"></a>[pg 215]</span> and Josephine added a
+       meaning little laugh for her own share, for which Edgar gave
+       her a kiss, and said in a bantering kind of voice, "Now,
+       Joseph! mind what you are about!"</p>
+
+    <h3>CHAPTER XXIII.</h3>
+
+    <h3>ON THE MOOR.</h3>
+
+    <p>It was a gray and gusty day in November, with heavy masses
+    of low-lying clouds rolling tumultuously overhead, and a
+    general look of damp and decay about the fields and
+    banks&mdash;one of those melancholy days of the late autumn
+    which make one long for the more varied circumstances of
+    confessed winter, when the deep blue shadows in the crisp snow
+    suggest the glory of southern skies, and the sparkle of the sun
+    on the delicate tracery of the frosted branches has a mimicry
+    of life, such as we imagine strange elves and fairies might
+    create.</p>
+
+    <p>There was no point of color in the landscape save the brown
+    foliage of the shivering beech trees, a few coarse splashes of
+    yellow weeds, and here and there a trail of dying crimson
+    leaves threading the barren hedgerows. Everything was "sombre,
+    lifeless, mournful", and even Edgar Harrowby, though by no
+    means sentimentally impressionable to outward conditions, felt,
+    as he rode through the deserted lanes and looked abroad over
+    the stagnant country, that life on the off-hunt days was but a
+    slow-kind of thing at North Aston, and that any incident which
+    should break the dead monotony of the scene would be
+    welcome.</p>
+
+    <p>He had been thinking a great deal of Adelaide for the last
+    four or five days, since she had dined at the Hill, and making
+    up his mind to take the final plunge before long. He was not in
+    love with her, but she suited, as has been said; and that was
+    as good as love to Edgar, who had now to take up his squiredom
+    and country gentleman's respectability, after having had his
+    share of a young man's "fling" in rather larger proportion than
+    falls to the lot of most. All the same, he wished that her face
+    had more expression and that her eyes were perfectly straight;
+    and he wanted to see Leam Dundas.</p>
+
+    <p>He had made a long round to-day, and was turning now
+    homeward, when, as he had almost crossed the moor, athwart
+    which his road led, he saw standing on a little hillock, away
+    from the main track, the slight figure of a woman sharply
+    defined against the sky. She was alone, doing nothing, not
+    seeming to be looking at anything&mdash;just standing there on
+    the hillock, facing the north-west, as if for pleasure in the
+    rough freshness of the breeze.</p>
+
+    <p>The wind blew back her dress, and showed her girlish form,
+    supple, flexible, graceful, fashioned like some nymph of olden
+    time. From her small feet, arched and narrow, gripping the
+    ground like feet of steel, to the slender throat on which her
+    head was set with so much grace of line, yet with no sense of
+    over-weighting in its tender curves, an expression of nervous
+    energy underlying her fragile litheness of form, a look of
+    strength&mdash;not muscular nor the strength of bulk or weight,
+    but the strength of fibre, will, tenacity&mdash;seemed to mark
+    her out as something different from the herd.</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar scarcely gave this vague impression words in his own
+    mind, but he was conscious of a new revelation of womanhood,
+    and he scented an adventure in this solitary figure facing the
+    north-west wind on the lonely moor.</p>
+
+    <p>Her very dress, too, had a character of its own in harmony
+    with the rest&mdash;black all through, save for the scarlet
+    feather in her hat, which burnt like a flame against the gray
+    background of the sky; and her whole attitude had something of
+    defiance in its profound stillness, while standing so boldly
+    against the strong blasts that swept across the heights, which
+    caught his imagination, at that moment ready to be inflamed.
+    All things depend on times and moods, and Edgar's mood at this
+    moment of first seeing Leam Dundas was favorable for the
+    reception of new impressions.</p>
+
+    <p>For, of course, it was Leam&mdash;Leam, who, since her
+    return from school, alone and without companionship, was
+    feverish <span class="pagenum"><a name="page216"
+       id="page216"></a>[pg 216]</span> often, and often impelled
+       to escape into the open country from something that
+       oppressed her down in the valley too painfully to be borne.
+       She had never been a confidential nor an expansive
+       schoolfellow; not even an affectionate one as girls count
+       affection, seeing that she neither kissed nor cried, nor
+       quarreled nor made up&mdash;neither stood as a model of
+       fidelity nor changed her girl-lovers in anticipation of
+       future inconstancies&mdash;writing a love-letter to Ada
+       to-day and a copy of verses to Ethel to-morrow&mdash;but had
+       kept with all the same quiet gravity and gentle reticence
+       which seemed to watch rather than share, and to be more
+       careful not to offend than solicitous to win.</p>
+
+    <p>All the same, she missed her former comrades now that she
+    had lost them; but most of all she missed the wholesome
+    occupation and mental employment of her studies. Left as she
+    was to herself, thoughts and memories were gathering up from
+    the background where they had lain dormant if extant all these
+    years, and through her solitude were getting a vitality which
+    made her stand still in a kind of breathless agony, wondering
+    where they would lead her and in what they would end. At times
+    such a burning sense of sin would flash over her that she felt
+    as if she must confess that hideous fact of her girlish past.
+    It seemed so shameful that she should be living there among the
+    rest, a criminal with the innocent, and not tell them what she
+    was. Then the instinct of self-preservation would carry it over
+    her conscience, and she would press back her thoughts and go
+    out, as to-day, to cool her feverish blood, and grow calm to
+    bear and strong to hold the heavy burden which she had
+    fashioned by her own mad deed and laid for life on her own
+    hands.</p>
+
+    <p>If only the ladies had not insisted so strongly on mamma's
+    personality in heaven! if only they had not lighted up her
+    imagination, her loyalty, by this tremendous torch of faith and
+    love! How bitterly she regretted the childish fanaticism which
+    had made her imagine herself the providence of that beloved
+    memory, the avenger of those shadowy wrongs! Oh, if she could
+    undo the past and call madame back to life! She would kiss her
+    now, and even call her mamma if it would please her and papa.
+    So she stood on the hillock facing the north-west, thinking
+    these things and regretting in vain.</p>
+
+    <p>As Edgar came riding by his large black hound dashed off to
+    Leam and barked furiously, all four paws planted on the ground
+    as if preparing for a spring. The beast had probably no malice,
+    and might have meant it merely as his method of saying, "Who
+    are you?" but he looked formidable, and Leam started back and
+    cried, "Down, dog! go away!" in a voice half angry and half
+    afraid.</p>
+
+    <p>Then Edgar saw the face, and knew who she was. He rode
+    across the turf, calling off his dog, and came up to her. It
+    was an opportunity, and Edgar Harrowby was a man who knew how
+    to take advantage of opportunities. It was in his creed to
+    thank Providence for favorable chances by making the most of
+    them, and this was a chance of which it would be manifestly
+    ungrateful not to make the most. It was far more picturesque to
+    meet her for the first time, as now, on the wild moor on a
+    gusty gray November day, than in the gloomy old drawing-room at
+    the Hill. It gave a flavor of romance and the forbidden which
+    was not without its value in the beginning of an acquaintance
+    with such a face as Leam's. Nevertheless, in spite of the
+    romance that hung about the circumstance, his first words were
+    common-place enough. "I hope my dog has not alarmed you?" he
+    said, lifting his hat.</p>
+
+    <p>Leam looked at him with those wonderful eyes of hers, that
+    seemed somehow to look through him. She, standing on her
+    hillock, was slightly higher than Edgar sitting on his horse;
+    and her head was bent as she looked down on him, giving her
+    attitude and gesture something of a dignified assumption of
+    superiority, more like the Leam of the past than of the
+    present. "No, I was not alarmed," she said. "But I do not like
+    to be barked at," she added, an echo of the old childish sense
+    of injury from <span class="pagenum"><a name="page217"
+       id="page217"></a>[pg 217]</span> circumstance that was so
+       quaint and pretty in her half-complaining voice.</p>
+
+    <p>"I suppose not: how should you?" answered Edgar with
+    sympathetic energy. "Rover is a good-old fellow, but he has the
+    troublesome trick of giving tongue unnecessarily. He would not
+    have hurt you, but I should be very sorry to think he had
+    frightened you. To heel, sir!" angrily.</p>
+
+    <p>"No, he did not frighten me." repeated Leam.</p>
+
+    <p>Never loquacious, there was something about this man's face
+    and manner, his masterful spirit underneath his courteous
+    bearing, his look of masculine power and domination, his
+    admiring eyes that fixed themselves on her so
+    unflinchingly&mdash;not with insolence, but as if he had the
+    prescriptive right of manhood to look at her, only a woman, as
+    he chose, he commanding and she obeying&mdash;that quelled and
+    silenced her even beyond her wont. He was the first gentleman
+    of noteworthy appearance who had ever spoken to her&mdash;not
+    counting Alick, nor the masters who had taught her at school,
+    nor Mr. Birkett, nor Mr. Fairbairn, as gentlemen of noteworthy
+    appearance&mdash;and the first of all things has a special
+    influence over young minds.</p>
+
+    <p>"You are brave to walk so far alone: you ought to have a dog
+    like Rover to protect you," Edgar said, still looking at her
+    with those unflinching eyes, which oppressed her even when she
+    did not see them.</p>
+
+    <p>"I am not brave, and I do not care for dogs. Besides, I do
+    not often walk so far as this; but I felt the valley stifling
+    to-day," answered Leam, in her matter-of-fact, categorical
+    way.</p>
+
+    <p>"All the same, you ought to have protection," Edgar said
+    authoritatively, and Leam did not reply.</p>
+
+    <p>She only looked at him earnestly, wondering against what she
+    should be protected, having abandoned by this time her belief
+    in banditti and wild beasts.</p>
+
+    <p>If his eyes oppressed her, hers half embarrassed him. There
+    was such a strange mixture of intensity and innocence in them,
+    he scarcely knew how to meet them.</p>
+
+    <p>"It is absurd to pretend that we do not know each other,"
+    then said Edgar after a short pause, smiling; and his smile was
+    very sweet and pleasant. "You are Miss Dundas&mdash;I am Edgar
+    Harrowby."</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, I know," Leam answered.</p>
+
+    <p>"How is that?" he asked, "<i>I</i> knew <i>you</i> from your
+    photograph&mdash;once seen not to be forgotten again,"
+    gallantly&mdash;"but how should you know me?"</p>
+
+    <p>Leam raised her eyes from the ground where she had cast
+    them. Those slow full looks, intense, tragic, fixed, had a
+    startling effect of which she was wholly unconscious. Edgar
+    felt his own grow dark and tender as he met hers. If the soul
+    and mind within only answered to the mask without, what queen
+    or goddess could surpass this half-breed Spanish girl, this
+    country-born, unnoted, but glorious Leam Dundas? he
+    thought.</p>
+
+    <p>"And I knew you from yours," she answered.</p>
+
+    <p>"An honor beyond my deserts," said Edgar.</p>
+
+    <p>Not that he thought the notice of a girl, even with such a
+    face as this, beyond his deserts. Indeed, if a queen or a
+    goddess had condescended to him, it would not have been a grace
+    beyond his merits; but it sounded pretty to say so, and served
+    to make talk as well as anything else. And to make talk was the
+    main business on hand at this present moment.</p>
+
+    <p>"Why an honor?" asked Leam, ignorant of the elements of
+    flirting.</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar smiled again, and this time his smile without words
+    troubled her. It seemed the assertion of superior intelligence,
+    contemptuous, if half pitiful of her ignorance. Once so
+    serenely convinced of her superiority, Leam was now as
+    suspicious of her shortcomings, and was soon abashed.</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar did not see that he had troubled her. Masterful and
+    masculine to an eminent degree, the timid doubts and fears of a
+    young girl were things he could not recognize. He had no point
+    in his own nature with which they came in contact, so that he
+    should sympathize with them. He knew the whole fence and foil
+    of <span class="pagenum"><a name="page218"
+       id="page218"></a>[pg 218]</span> coquetry, the signs of
+       silent flattery, the sweet language of womanly
+       self-conscious love, whether wooing or being won; but the
+       fluttering misgivings of youth and absolute inexperience
+       were dark to him. All of which he felt conscious was that
+       here was something deliciously fresh and original, and that
+       Leam was more beautiful to look at than Adelaide, and a
+       great deal more interesting to talk to.</p>
+
+    <p>"If you will allow me, now that I have had the pleasure of
+    meeting you, I will see you safe for at least part of your way
+    home," he said, passing by her naïve query "Why an honor?" as a
+    thing to be answered only by that smile of superior wisdom.</p>
+
+    <p>Flinging himself from his horse, he took the bridle in his
+    hand and turned toward home, looking to the girl to accompany
+    him. Leam felt that she could not refuse his escort offered as
+    so much a matter of course. Why should she? It was very
+    pleasant to have some one to walk with&mdash;some one not her
+    father, with whom she still felt shy, if not now absolutely
+    estranged; nor yet Alick, in whose pale face she was always
+    reading the past, and who, though he was so good and kind and
+    tender, was her master and held her in his hand. This handsome,
+    courteous gentleman was different from either, and she liked
+    his society and superior ways. And as he began now to talk to
+    her of things not trenching on nor admitting of
+    flirtation&mdash;chiefly of the places he had visited, India,
+    Egypt, Italy, Spain&mdash;she was not so much abashed by his
+    unflinching looks and masterful manner.</p>
+
+    <p>When he entered on Spain and his recollections of what he
+    had seen there, the girl's heart throbbed, and her pale face
+    grew whiter still with the passionate thrill that stirred her.
+    The old blood was in her veins yet, and, though modified, and
+    in some sense transformed, she was still Pepita's daughter and
+    the child of Andalusia. And here was truth; not like that poor
+    wretched madame's talk, which even she had found out to be
+    false and only making believe to know what she did not know.
+    Spain was the name of power with Learn, as it had been with her
+    mother, and she lifted her face, white with its passionate
+    desires, listening as if entranced to all that Edgar said.</p>
+
+    <p>It was a good opening, and the handsome soldier-squire
+    congratulated himself on his lucky hit and serviceable memory.
+    Presently he touched on Andalusia, and Leam, who hitherto had
+    been listening without comment, now broke in eagerly. "That is
+    my own country!" she cried. "Mamma came from Andalusia,
+    beautiful Andalusia! Ah! how I should like to go there!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Perhaps you will some day," Edgar answered a little
+    significantly.</p>
+
+    <p>Had she been more instructed in the kind of thing he meant,
+    she would have seen that he wished to convey the idea of a
+    love-journey made with him.</p>
+
+    <p>She shook her head and her eyes grew moist and dewy. "Not
+    now," she said mournfully. "Poor mamma has gone, and there is
+    no one now to take me."</p>
+
+    <p>"I will make up a party some day, and you shall be one of
+    us," said Edgar.</p>
+
+    <p>She brightened all over. "Ah! that would be delightful!" she
+    cried, taking him seriously. "When do you think we shall
+    go?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I will talk about it," Edgar answered, though smiling
+    again&mdash;Leam wished he would not smile so often&mdash;a
+    little aghast at her literalness, and saying to himself in
+    warning that he must be careful of what he said to Leam Dundas.
+    It was evident that she did not understand either badinage or a
+    joke. But her very earnestness pleased him for all its oddity.
+    It was so unlike the superficiality and levity of the modern
+    girl&mdash;that hateful Girl of the Period, in whose existence
+    he believed, and of whose influence he stood in almost
+    superstitious awe. He liked that grave, intense way of hers,
+    which was neither puritanical nor stolid, but, on the contrary,
+    full of unspoken passion, rich in latent concentrated
+    power.</p>
+
+    <p>"They are very beautiful, are they not?" Leam asked
+    suddenly.</p>
+
+    <p>"What? who?" was Edgar's answer.</p>
+
+    <p>"The Andalusian women, and the men," returned Leam.</p>
+
+    <p>"The men are fine-looking fellows
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page219"
+       id="page219"></a>[pg 219]</span> enough," answered Edgar
+       carelessly&mdash;"a little too brutal for my taste, but
+       well-grown men for all that. But I have seen prettier women
+       out of Spain than in it."</p>
+
+    <p>"Mamma used to say they were so beautiful&mdash;the most
+    beautiful of all the women in the world; and the best." Leam
+    said this with a disappointed air and her old injured
+    accent.</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar laughed softly. "The prettiest Andalusian woman I have
+    ever seen has an English father," he answered, with a sudden
+    flush on his handsome face as he bent it a little nearer to
+    hers.</p>
+
+    <p>"How odd!" said Leam. "An English father? That is like
+    me."</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar looked at her, to read how much of this was real
+    ingenuousness, how much affected simplicity. He saw only a
+    candid inquiring face with a faint shade of surprise in its
+    quiet earnestness, unquestionably not affected.</p>
+
+    <p>"Just so," he answered. "Exactly like you."</p>
+
+    <p>His voice and manner made Leam blush uncomfortably. She was
+    conscious of something disturbing, without knowing what it was.
+    She first looked up into his face with the same expression of
+    inquiry as before, then down to the earth perplexedly, when
+    suddenly the truth came upon her; he meant herself&mdash;she
+    was the prettiest Andalusian he had ever seen.</p>
+
+    <p>She was intensely humiliated at her discovery. Not one of
+    those girls who study every feature, every gesture, every
+    point, till there is not a square inch of their personality of
+    which they are not painfully conscious, Leam had never taken
+    herself into artistic consideration at all. She had been proud
+    of her Spanish blood, of her mantilla, her high comb and her
+    fan; but of herself as a woman among women she knew nothing,
+    nor whether she was plain or pretty. Indeed, had she had to say
+    offhand which, she would have answered plain. The revelation
+    which comes sooner or later to all women of the charms they
+    possess had not yet come to her; and Edgar's words, making the
+    first puncture in her ignorance, pained her more by the shock
+    which they gave her self-consciousness than they pleased her by
+    their flattery.</p>
+
+    <p>She said no more, but walked by his side with her head held
+    very high and slightly turned away. She was sorry that he had
+    offended her. They had been getting on together so well until
+    he had said this foolish thing, and now they were like friends
+    who had quarreled. She was quite sorry that he had been so
+    foolish as to offend her, but she must not forgive him&mdash;at
+    least not just yet. It was very wrong of him to tell her that
+    she was prettier than the true children of the soil; and she
+    resented the slight to Spain and to her mother, as well as the
+    wrong done to herself, by his saying that which was not true.
+    So she walked with her little head held high, and Edgar could
+    get nothing more out of her. When Leam was offended coaxings to
+    make her forget were of no avail. She had to wear through an
+    impression by herself, and it was useless to try for a
+    premature pardon.</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar saw that he had overshot the mark, and that his best
+    policy now was absence; wherefore, after a few moments'
+    silence, he remounted his horse, looking penitent, handsome,
+    full of admiration and downcast.</p>
+
+    <p>"I hope we shall soon see you at the Hill, Miss Dundas," he
+    said, holding her hand in his for his farewell a little longer
+    than was quite necessary for good breeding or even
+    cordiality.</p>
+
+    <p>"I very seldom go to the Hill," answered Leam, looking past
+    his head.</p>
+
+    <p>"But you will come, and soon?" fervently.</p>
+
+    <p>"Perhaps: I do not know," answered Leam, still looking past
+    his head, and embarrassed to a most uncomfortable extent.</p>
+
+    <p>"Thank you," he said, as if he had been thanking her for the
+    grace of his life; and with a long look, lifting his hat again,
+    he rode off, just escaping by a few hundred yards the danger of
+    being met walking with Leam by his sisters and Adelaide
+    Birkett. They were all driving together in the phaeton, and the
+    sisters were making much of their young friend.</p>
+
+    <p>At that moment Edgar preferred to be met alone and not
+    walking with Leam. He did not stop the carriage&mdash;simply
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page220"
+       id="page220"></a>[pg 220]</span> nodded to them all with
+       familiar kindness, as a group of relatives not demanding
+       extra courtesy, flinging a few words behind him as he rode
+       on smiling. Nor did the ladies in their turn stop for Leam,
+       whom they met soon after walking slowly along the road; but
+       Josephine said, as they passed, how pretty Learn looked
+       to-day, and how much softer her face was than it used to be;
+       and Maria, even Maria, agreed with kindly Joseph, and was
+       quite eulogistic on the object of her old disdain. Adelaide
+       sat silent, and did not join in their encomiums.</p>
+
+    <p>It would have been a nice point to ascertain if the Misses
+    Harrowby would have praised the girl's beauty as they did had
+    they known that she had grown soft and dewy-eyed by talking of
+    Spain with their brother Edgar, though she had hardened a
+    little afterward when he told her that she was the prettiest
+    Andalusian he had ever seen.</p>
+
+    <p>During the dinner at the Hill, where Adelaide was one of the
+    family party, Edgar mentioned casually how that he had met Miss
+    Dundas on the moor, and had had to speak to her because of
+    Rover's misbehavior.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes? and what do you think of her?" asked Mrs. Harrowby
+    with a sharp glance.</p>
+
+    <p>"I scarcely know: I have hardly seen her as yet," he
+    answered.</p>
+
+    <p>"Did she say or do anything very extraordinary to-day?"
+    asked Adelaide with such an air of contemptuous curiosity as
+    seemed to him insufferably insolent.</p>
+
+    <p>"No, nothing. Is she in the habit of saying or doing
+    extraordinary things?" he answered back, arching his eyebrows
+    and speaking in a well-affected tone of sincere inquiry.</p>
+
+    <p>"At times she is more like a maniac than a sane person,"
+    said Adelaide, breaking her bread with deliberation. "What can
+    you expect from such a parentage and education as hers?"</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar looked down and smiled satirically. "Poor Pepita's
+    sins lie heavy on your mind," he answered.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, I believe in race," was her reply.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mother," then said Edgar after a short silence, "why do you
+    not have Miss Dundas to dine here with Adelaide? It would be
+    more amusing to her, for it must be dull"&mdash;turning to
+    their guest and speaking amiably, considerately&mdash;"I am
+    afraid very dull&mdash;to be so often quite alone with us."</p>
+
+    <p>He did not add what he thought, that it was almost
+    indelicate in her to be here so often. He was out of humor with
+    her to-day.</p>
+
+    <p>"She is such an uncertain girl we never know how she may be.
+    I had her to stay here once, and I do not want to repeat the
+    experiment," was Mrs. Harrowby's answer.</p>
+
+    <p>"But, mamma, that was before she went to school, when she
+    was quite a child. She is so much improved now," pleaded
+    Josephine.</p>
+
+    <p>"Good little soul!" said Edgar under his
+    breath.&mdash;"Wine, Joseph?" aloud, as his recognition of her
+    good offices.</p>
+
+    <p>"And I like coming alone best, thanks," said Adelaide with
+    unruffled calmness. "Leam has never been my friend; indeed, I
+    do not like her, and you all," to the sisters, with a gracious
+    smile and prettily, "have always been my favorite
+    companions."</p>
+
+    <p>"Still, she is very lonely, and it would be kind. Besides,
+    she is good to look at," said Edgar.</p>
+
+    <p>"Do you think so?" said Mrs. Harrowby with crisp lips and
+    ill-concealed displeasure.</p>
+
+    <p>"Do I think so, mother? I should have no eyes else. She is
+    superb. I have never seen such a face. She is the most
+    beautiful creature I have ever known of any nation."</p>
+
+    <p>Adelaide's delicate pink cheeks turned pale, and then they
+    flushed a brilliant rose as she laid down her spoon and left
+    her jelly untasted.</p>
+
+    <p>There were no trials of skill at chess, no duets, no solos,
+    this evening. After dinner Edgar went to his own room and sat
+    there smoking. He felt revolted at the idea of spending two or
+    three hours with what he irreverently called "a lot of dull
+    women," and preferred his own thoughts to their talk. He
+    sauntered into the drawing-room about ten minutes before
+    Adelaide had to leave, apologizing for his absence on the man's
+    easy plea <span class="pagenum"><a name="page221"
+       id="page221"></a>[pg 221]</span> of "business," saying he
+       was sorry to have missed her charming society, and he hoped
+       they should see her there soon again, and so on&mdash;all in
+       the proper voice and manner, but with a certain ring of
+       insincerity in the tones which Adelaide detected, if the
+       others did not. But she accepted his excuses with the most
+       admirable tact, smiling to the sisters as she said, "Oh, we
+       have been very happy, Josephine, have we not? though," with
+       a nice admission of Edgar's claims, not too broadly stated
+       nor too warmly allowed, "of course it would have been very
+       pleasant if you could have come in too."</p>
+
+    <p>"It has been my loss," said Edgar.</p>
+
+    <p>She smiled "Yes" by eyes, lips and turn of her graceful
+    head. In speech she answered, "Of that, of course, you are the
+    best judge for yourself; but none of us here feel as some girls
+    do, lost without gentlemen to amuse them. We can get on very
+    well by ourselves. Cannot we, Joseph?"</p>
+
+    <p>And Josephine said gallantly, "Yes," but her heart was more
+    rueful than her voice, and she thought that some gentlemen were
+    very nice, and that Sebastian Dundas especially made the dull
+    time pass pleasantly.</p>
+
+    <h3>CHAPTER XXIV.</h3>
+
+    <h3>THE CHILD FINA.</h3>
+
+    <p>Nothing surprised the North Astonians more than what it was
+    the fashion to call "the admirable manner in which Leam behaved
+    to the child Fina." If the world which praised her had known
+    all the compelling circumstances, would it have called her
+    admirable then? Yet beyond those natural promptings of remorse
+    which forced her to do the best she could for the child whom
+    her fatal crime had rendered motherless, Leam did honestly
+    behave well, if this means doing irksome things without
+    complaint and sacrificing self to a sense of right. And this
+    was all the more praiseworthy in that sympathy of nature
+    between these two young creatures there was none, and the
+    girl's maternal instinct was not of that universal kind which
+    makes all children pleasant, whatever they may be. Hence, she
+    did nobly when she did her duty with the uncompromising
+    exactness characteristic of her; but then it was only duty, it
+    was not love.</p>
+
+    <p>How should it be love? Her tenacity and reserve were ill
+    matched with Fina's native inconstancy of purpose and childish
+    incontinence of speech; her pride of race resented her father's
+    adoption of a stranger into the penetralia of the family; and
+    to share the name she had inherited from her mother with the
+    daughter of that mother's rival seemed to her a wrong done to
+    both the living and the dead. Naturally taciturn, unjoyful, and
+    ever oppressed by that brooding consciousness of guilt hanging
+    like a cloud over her memory, formless, vague, but never
+    lifting, Fina's changeful temper and tumultuous vivacity were
+    intensely wearisome to her. Nevertheless, she was forbearing if
+    not loving, and the people said rightly when they said she was
+    admirable.</p>
+
+    <p>Her grave patience with the little one did more to open her
+    father's heart to her than did even her own wonderful beauty,
+    which gratified his paternal pride of authorship, or than her
+    efforts after docility to himself&mdash;efforts that would have
+    been creditable to any one, and that with her were heroic. For
+    Mr. Dundas, being of those clinging, clasping natures which
+    must love some one, had taken poor madame's child into his
+    affections in the wholesale manner so emphatically his own, now
+    in these first days of his new paternity seeming to live only
+    for the little Fina, and never happy but when he had her with
+    him. It was the first time that he felt he had had a child of
+    his own; and he gave her the love which would have been Leam's
+    had Pepita been less of a savage than she was, and more
+    discreet in the matter of doll-dressing.</p>
+
+    <p>The little round, fair-haired creature, with her picturesque
+    Gainsborough head and rose-red lips, pretty, pleasant, facile,
+    easily amused if easily made cross, divertible from her purpose
+    if she was but coaxed and caressed, and if the substitute
+    offered was to her liking&mdash;without
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page222"
+       id="page222"></a>[pg 222]</span> tenacity, fluid, floating
+       on the surface of things and born of their froth; loving
+       only those who ministered to her pleasure and were in sight;
+       forgetting yesterday's joys as though they had never been,
+       and her dearest the moment they were absent&mdash;a child
+       deliciously caressing because sensual by temperament and
+       instinctively diplomatic, with no latent greatness to be
+       developed as time went on and the flower set into the fruit.
+       Epitomizing the characteristics of the class of which her
+       mother had been a typical example, she was the pleasantest
+       thing of his life to a man who cared mainly to be amused,
+       and who liked with a woman's liking to be loved.</p>
+
+    <p>The strong love of children inherent in him, which had never
+    been satisfied till now, seemed now to have gathered tenfold
+    strength, and the love of the man, who had never cared for his
+    own, for this his little daughter by adoption was almost a
+    passion. If Leam could have been jealous where she did not
+    love, she would have been jealous of her father and Fina. But
+    she was not. On the contrary, it seemed to soften some of the
+    bitterness of her self-reproach, and she was glad that madame's
+    motherless child was not deserted, but had found a substitute
+    for the protection which she had taken from her; for Leam,
+    criminal, was not ignoble.</p>
+
+    <p>A few days after the meeting on the moor between Learn and
+    Edgar, Mr. Dundas drove to the Hill, carrying Fina with him.
+    Leam had a fit of shyness and refused to go: thus Sebastian had
+    the child to himself, and was not sorry to be without his elder
+    and less congenial daughter. He owned to himself that she was
+    good, very good indeed, and a great deal better than he ever
+    expected she would be; yet for all that, with her more than
+    Oriental gravity and reserve, and that look of tragedy haunting
+    her face, she was not an amusing companion, and the little one
+    was.</p>
+
+    <p>Mr. Dundas had begun to take up his old habits again with
+    the Harrowbys. He found the patient constancy of his friend
+    Josephine not a disagreeable salve for a wounded heart and
+    broken life; albeit poor dear Joseph was getting stout and
+    matronly, and took off the keen edge of courtship by a
+    willingness too manifest for wisdom. Sebastian liked to be
+    loved, but he did not like to be bored by being made overmuch
+    love to. The things are different, and most men resent the
+    latter, how much soever they desire the former.</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar was in the drawing-room when Mr. Dundas was announced.
+    He was booted and spurred, waiting his horse to be brought
+    round. "What a pretty little girl!" he said after a time. True
+    to his type, he was fond of children and animals, and children
+    and animals liked him. "Come and speak to me," he continued,
+    holding out his hand to Fina.&mdash;"Whose child is she?"
+    vaguely to the company in general.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mine," said Mr. Dundas emphatically&mdash;"my youngest
+    daughter, Fina Dundas."</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar knew what he meant. He had often heard the story from
+    his sisters, and since his return home he had had Adelaide
+    Birkett's comments thereon. He looked then with even more
+    interest on the pretty little creature in dark-blue velvet and
+    swansdown, careless, unconscious, happy, as the child of a
+    mystery and a tragedy in one.</p>
+
+    <p>"Ah!" he said sympathetically. "Come to me, little one,"
+    again, coaxingly.</p>
+
+    <p>Fina, with her finger in her mouth, went up to him half
+    shyly, half boldly, and wholly prettily. She let him take her
+    on his knee and kiss her without remonstrance. She was of the
+    kind to like being taken on knees and kissed&mdash;especially
+    by gentlemen who were strong and matronly women who were
+    soft&mdash;and she soon made friends. Not many minutes elapsed
+    before, kneeling upon his knees, she was stroking his tawny
+    beard and plaiting it in threes, pulling his long moustache,
+    playing with his watch-guard, and laughing in his face with the
+    pretty audacity of six.</p>
+
+    <p>"What a dear little puss!" cried Edgar, caressing her. "Very
+    like you, Joseph, I should think, when you were her age,
+    judging by your picture. Is she not,
+    mother?"</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page223"
+       id="page223"></a>[pg 223]</span>
+
+    <p>"They say so, but I do not see it," answered Mrs. Harrowby
+    primly.</p>
+
+    <p>She did not like to hear about this resemblance. There was
+    something in it that annoyed her intensely, she scarcely knew
+    why, and the more so because it was true.</p>
+
+    <p>"Poor madame used to say so: she saw it from the first, when
+    Fina was quite a little baby," said Josephine in a low
+    voice.</p>
+
+    <p>She was kneeling by her brother's side caressing Fina. She
+    always made love to the little girl: it was one of her methods
+    of making love to the father.</p>
+
+    <p>"Is she like her mother?" asked Edgar in the same low tones,
+    looking at the child critically.</p>
+
+    <p>"A little," answered Josephine&mdash;"not much. It is odd,
+    is it not, that she should be more like me?"</p>
+
+    <p>Just then Fina laid her fresh sweet lips against Edgar's,
+    and he kissed her with a strange thrill of tenderness.</p>
+
+    <p>"Why, Edgar, I never saw you take so to a child before,"
+    cried Mrs. Harrowby, not quite pleasantly; and on Sebastian
+    adding with his nervous little laugh, which meant the thing it
+    assumed only to play at, "I declare I shall be quite jealous,
+    Edgar, if you make love to my little girl like this." Edgar,
+    who had the Englishman's dislike to observation, save when he
+    offered himself for personal admiration, laughed too and put
+    Fina away.</p>
+
+    <p>But the child had taken a fancy to him, and could scarcely
+    be induced to leave him. She clung to his hand still, and went
+    reluctantly when her stepfather called her. It was a very
+    little matter, but men being weak in certain directions, it
+    delighted Edgar and annoyed Sebastian beyond measure.</p>
+
+    <p>"I hope your elder daughter is well," then said Edgar,
+    emphasizing the adjective, the vision of Leam as he first saw
+    her, breasting the wind, filling his eyes with a strange
+    light.</p>
+
+    <p>"Leam? Quite well, thanks. But how do you know anything
+    about her?" was Sebastian's reply.</p>
+
+    <p>"I met her yesterday on the moor, and Rover introduced us,"
+    answered Edgar laughing.</p>
+
+    <p>"How close she is!" said her father fretfully. "She never
+    told me a word about it."</p>
+
+    <p>"Perhaps she thought the incident too trifling," suggested
+    Edgar, a little chagrined.</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh no, not at all! In a place like North Aston the least
+    thing counts as an adventure; and meeting for the first time
+    one of the neighbors is not an incident to be forgotten as if
+    it were of no more value than meeting a flock of sheep."</p>
+
+    <p>Mr. Dundas spoke peevishly. To a man who liked to be amused
+    and who lived on crumbs this reserved companionship was
+    disappointing and tiresome.</p>
+
+    <p>"Leam is at home making music," said Fina disdainfully. She
+    had caught the displeased accent of her adopted father, and
+    echoed it.</p>
+
+    <p>"Does she make much music?" asked Edgar with his hand under
+    her chin, turning up her face.</p>
+
+    <p>The child shrugged her little shoulders. "She makes a
+    noise," she said; and those who heard her laughed.</p>
+
+    <p>"That is not a very polite way of putting it," said Edgar a
+    little gravely.</p>
+
+    <p>"No," said Josephine.</p>
+
+    <p>"You should speak nicely of your sister, my little one," put
+    in Sebastian.</p>
+
+    <p>Fina looked up into his face reproachfully. "You called it a
+    noise yourself, papa," she said, pouting. "You made her leave
+    off yesterday as soon as you came in, because you said she made
+    your head ache with her noise, and set your
+    teeth&mdash;something, I don't know what."</p>
+
+    <p>"Did I, dear?" he repeated carelessly. "Well, we need not
+    discuss the subject. I dare say it amuses her to make music, as
+    you call it, and so we need say no more about it."</p>
+
+    <p>"But you did say it was a noise," persisted Fina, climbing
+    on to his knees and putting her arms round his neck. "And I
+    think it a noise too."</p>
+
+    <p>"Poor Leam's music cannot be very first-rate," remarked
+    Maria, who was a proficient and played almost as well as a
+    "professional." "Four years ago she did not know her notes, and
+    four years' <span class="pagenum"><a name="page224"
+       id="page224"></a>[pg 224]</span> practice cannot be expected
+       to make a perfect pianiste."</p>
+
+    <p>"But a person may play very sweetly and yet not be what you
+    call perfect," said Edgar.</p>
+
+    <p>"Do you think so?" Maria answered with a frosty smile. "I do
+    not." Of what use to have toiled for thirty years early and
+    late at scales and thorough-bass if a stupid girl like Leam
+    could be allowed to play sweetly after four years' desultory
+    practice? "Adelaide Birkett, if you will, plays well," she
+    added; "but Leam, poor child! how should she?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I hope I shall have an opportunity of judging for myself,"
+    said Edgar with his company manner.&mdash;"When will you come
+    and dine here, Dundas?&mdash;to-morrow? You and your elder
+    daughter: we shall be very glad to see you."</p>
+
+    <p>He looked to his mother. Mrs. Harrowby had drawn her lips
+    tight, and wore an injured air doing its best to be resigned.
+    This was Edgar's first essay in domestic mastership, and it
+    pained her, not unnaturally.</p>
+
+    <p>"Thanks," said Sebastian. "Willingly, if&mdash;" looking to
+    Mrs. Harrowby.</p>
+
+    <p>"I have no engagement, and Edgar is master now," said that
+    lady.</p>
+
+    <p>"And mind that Leam comes too," said Josephine, sharing her
+    favorite brother's action by design.</p>
+
+    <p>"And me," cried Fina.</p>
+
+    <p>Whereat they all laughed, which made Fina cry, to be
+    consoled only by some sweetmeats which Josephine found in her
+    work-basket.</p>
+
+    <p>It was agreed, then, that the next day Leam and her father
+    should dine at the Hill.</p>
+
+    <p>"Only ourselves," Edgar said, wanting the excuse of her
+    "being the only lady" to devote himself to Leam. It was strange
+    that he should be so anxious to see her nearer, and in company
+    with his sisters and mother; for after all, why should he? What
+    was she to him, either near or afar off, alone or in the inner
+    circle of his family?</p>
+
+    <p>But when the next day came Mr. Dundas appeared alone. Leam
+    had been taken with a fit of shyness, pride&mdash;who shall
+    say?&mdash;and refused to accept her share of the invitation.
+    Her father made the stereotyped excuse of "headache;" but
+    headaches occur too opportunely to be always real, and Leam's
+    to-night was set down to the fancy side of the account, and not
+    believed in by the hearers any more than by the bearer.</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar raged against her in his heart, and decided that she
+    was not worth a second thought, while the ladies said in an
+    undertone from each to each, "How rude!" Maria adding, "How
+    like Leam!" the chain of condemnation receiving no break till
+    it came to Josephine, whose patient soul refrained from wrath,
+    and gave as her link, "Poor Leam! perhaps she is shy or has
+    really a headache."</p>
+
+    <p>In spite of his decision that she was not worth a second
+    thought, the impression which Leam had made on Edgar deepened
+    with his disappointment, and he became restless and unpleasant
+    in his temper, casting about for means whereby he might see her
+    again. He cast about in vain. This fit of shyness, pride,
+    reluctance&mdash;who knows what?&mdash;continued with Leam for
+    many days after this. If she went out at all, she went where
+    she knew she should not be met; and if Edgar called at Ford
+    House, she was not to be found. She mainly devoted herself to
+    Fina and some books lent her by Alick, and kept the house with
+    strange persistency. Perhaps this was because the weather was
+    bad, for Leam, who could bear wind and frost and noonday sun,
+    could not bear wet. When it rained she shut herself up in her
+    own room, and pitied herself for the ungenial skies as she had
+    pitied herself for some other things before now.</p>
+
+    <p>Sitting thus reading one miserably dark, cold, misty day,
+    the child Fina came in to her with her lessons, which she
+    repeated well. They were very small and insignificant little
+    lessons, for Leam had a fellow-feeling for the troubles of
+    ignorance, and laid but a light hand on the frothy mind inside
+    that curly head. When they were finished the little one said
+    coaxingly, "Now play with me, Leam! You never play with
+    me."</p>
+
+    <p>"What can I do, Fina?" poor Leam
+    replied.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page225"
+       id="page225"></a>[pg 225]</span>
+
+    <p>She had never learnt to play when she was a child: she had
+    never built towers and towns, made railway trains and coaches
+    with the sofa and chairs, played at giants through the dark
+    passages and screamed when she was caught. She had only sat
+    still when mamma was asleep, or when she was awake played on
+    the zambomba, or listened to her when she told her of the
+    things of Spain, and made up stories with her dolls that were
+    less edifying than those of Mother Bunch. She could scarcely,
+    however, unpack that old box full of waxen puppets, with the
+    one dressed in scarlet and black, with fishbone horns and a
+    worsted tail, and a queer clumped kind of foot made of folds of
+    leather, cleft in the middle, that used to go by the name of
+    "El señor papa." What could she do?</p>
+
+    <p>"Shall I tell you a story?" she then said in a mild fit of
+    desperation, for story-telling was as little in her way as
+    anything else.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, yes, tell me a story!" Fina clapped her chubby hands
+    together and climbed up into Leam's lap.</p>
+
+    <p>"What shall it be about&mdash;bears or tigers, or what?"
+    asked Leam dutifully.</p>
+
+    <p>"Tell me about mamma, my own mamma, not Aunty Birkett," said
+    Fina.</p>
+
+    <p>Leam shuddered from head to foot. This was the first time
+    the little girl had mentioned her mother's name to her. Indeed,
+    she did not know that she had ever heard of her at
+    all&mdash;ever known that she had had a mother; but the
+    servants had talked, and the child's curiosity was aroused. The
+    dead mother is as much a matter of wondering inquiry as the
+    angels and the stars; and Fina's imagination was beginning to
+    bestir itself on the mysteries of childish life.</p>
+
+    <p>"I have nothing to tell you about her," said Leam,
+    controlling herself, though she still shivered.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, you have&mdash;everything," insisted Fina. "Was mamma
+    pretty?" playing with a corner of her sister's ribbon.</p>
+
+    <p>"People said so," answered Leam.</p>
+
+    <p>"As pretty as Cousin Addy?" she asked.</p>
+
+    <p>"About," said Leam, who thought neither supreme.</p>
+
+    <p>"Prettier than you?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I don't know: how can I tell?" she answered a little
+    impatiently.</p>
+
+    <p>The mother's blood that ran in her, the mother's mould in
+    which she had been formed, forbade her to put herself below
+    madame in anything; but, as she was neither vain nor conscious,
+    she found Fina's question difficult to answer.</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh," cried Fina, in a tone of disappointment, "then she
+    could not have been very pretty."</p>
+
+    <p>"I dare say she was, but I do not know," returned Leam.</p>
+
+    <p>"And she died?" continued Fina, yawning in a childishly
+    indifferent manner.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, she died."</p>
+
+    <p>"Why? Who killed her? Did papa?" asked Fina.</p>
+
+    <p>Leam's face was very white: "No, not papa."</p>
+
+    <p>"Did God?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I cannot tell you, Fina," said Leam, to whom falsehoods
+    were abhorrent and the truth impossible.</p>
+
+    <p>"Did you?" persisted Fina with childish obstinacy.</p>
+
+    <p>"Now go," said Leam, putting her off her lap and rising from
+    her chair in strange disorder. "You are troublesome and ask too
+    many questions."</p>
+
+    <p>Fina began to cry loudly, and Mr. Dundas, from his library
+    below, heard her. He came up stairs with his fussy, restless
+    kindness, and opened the door of the room where his two
+    daughters, of nature and by adoption, were.</p>
+
+    <p>"Heyday! what's all this about?" he cried. "What's the
+    matter, my little Fina? what are you crying for? Tut, tut! you
+    should not cry like this, darling; and, Leam," severely, "you
+    should really keep the child better amused and happy. She is as
+    good as gold with me: with you there is always something
+    wrong."</p>
+
+    <p>Fina ran into his arms sobbing. "Leam is cross," she said.
+    "She will not tell me who killed mamma."</p>
+
+    <p>The man's ruddy face, reddened and roughened with travel,
+    grew white and pitiful. "God took her away, my darling," he
+    said with a sob. "She was too
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page226"
+       id="page226"></a>[pg 226]</span> good for me, and He took
+       her to live with the angels in heaven,"</p>
+
+    <p>"And Leam's mamma? Is she in heaven too with the angels?"
+    asked Fina, opening her eyes wide through their tears,</p>
+
+    <p>"I hope so," Sebastian answered in an altered voice.</p>
+
+    <p>Leam covered her face in her hands; then lifting it up, she
+    said imploringly, "Papa, do not talk to her of mamma. It is
+    sacrilege."</p>
+
+    <p>"I agree with you, Leam," said Mr, Dundas in a steady voice.
+    "We meet at the same point, but perhaps by different
+    methods."</p>
+
+    <p class="center">[TO BE CONTINUED.]</p>
+
+    <h2>LETTERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA</h2>
+
+    <h3>BY LADY BARKER.</h3>
+
+    <blockquote>
+        <p class="author">CAPE TOWN, October 16, 1875.</p>
+
+        <p>Safe, safe at last, after twenty-four days of nothing
+        but sea and sky, of white-crested waves&mdash;which made no
+        secret of their intention of coming on board whenever they
+        could or of tossing the good ship Edinburgh Castle hither
+        and thither like a child's plaything&mdash;and of more
+        deceitful sluggish rolling billows, looking tolerably calm
+        to the unseafaring eye, but containing a vast amount of
+        heaving power beneath their slow, undulating water-hills
+        and valleys. Sometimes sky and sea have been steeped in
+        dazzling haze of golden glare, sometimes brightened to blue
+        of a sapphire depth. Again, a sudden change of wind has
+        driven up serried clouds from the south and east, and all
+        has been gray and cold and restful to eyes wearied with
+        radiance and glitter of sun and sparkling water.</p>
+
+        <p>Never has there been such exceptional weather, although
+        the weather of my acquaintance invariably <i>is</i>
+        exceptional. No sooner had the outlines of Madeira melted
+        and blended into the soft darkness of a summer night than
+        we appeared to sail straight into tropic heat and a
+        sluggish vapor, brooding on the water like steam from a
+        giant geyser. This simmering, oily, exhausting temperature
+        carried us close to the line. "What is before us," we asked
+        each other languidly, "if it be hotter than this? How can
+        mortal man, woman, still less child, endure existence?"
+        Vain alarms! Yet another shift of the light wind, another
+        degree passed, and we are all shivering in winter wraps.
+        The line was crossed in greatcoats and shawls, and the only
+        people whose complexion did not resemble a purple plum were
+        those lucky ones who had strength of mind and steadiness of
+        body to lurch up and down the deck all day enjoying a
+        strange method of movement which they called walking.</p>
+
+        <p>The exceptional weather pursued us right into the very
+        dock. Table Mountain ought to be seen&mdash;and very often
+        is seen&mdash;seventy miles away. I am told it looks a fine
+        bold bluff at that distance, Yesterday we had blown off our
+        last pound of steam and were safe under its lee before we
+        could tell there was a mountain there at all, still less an
+        almost perpendicular cliff more than three thousand feet
+        high. Robben Island looked like a dun-colored hillock as we
+        shot past it within a short distance, and a more forlorn
+        and discouraging islet I don't think I have ever beheld.
+        When I expressed something of this impression to a cheery
+        fellow-voyager, he could only urge in its defence that
+        there were a great many rabbits on it. If he had thrown the
+        lighthouse into the bargain, I think he would have summed
+        up all its attractive features. Unless Langalibalele is of
+        a singularly unimpressionable nature, he must have found
+        his sojourn on it somewhat monotonous, but he always says
+        he was very comfortable
+        there.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page227"
+           id="page227"></a>[pg 227]</span>
+
+        <p>And now for the land. We are close alongside of a wharf,
+        and still a capital and faithful copy of a Scotch mist
+        wraps houses, trees and sloping uplands in a fibry
+        fantastic veil, and the cold drizzle seems to curdle the
+        spirits and energies of the few listless Malays and
+        half-caste boys and men who are lounging about. Here come
+        hansom cabs rattling up one after the other, all with black
+        drivers in gay and fantastic head and shoulder gear; but
+        their hearts seem precisely as the hearts of their London
+        brethren, and they single out new-comers at a glance, and
+        shout offers to drive them a hundred yards or so for
+        exorbitant sums, or yell laudatory recommendations of
+        sundry hotels. You must bear in mind that in a colony every
+        pot-house is a hotel, and generally rejoices in a name much
+        too imposing to fit across its frontage. These hansoms are
+        all painted white with the name of some ship in bright
+        letters on the side, and are a great deal cleaner, roomier
+        and more comfortable than their London "forbears." The
+        horses are small and shabby, but rattle along at a good
+        pace; and soon each cab has its load of happy home-comers
+        and swings rapidly away to make room for fresh arrivals
+        hurrying up for fares. Hospitable suggestions come pouring
+        in, and it is as though it were altogether a new experience
+        when one steps cautiously on the land, half expecting it to
+        dip away playfully from under one's feet. A little boy puts
+        my thoughts into words when he exclaims, "How steady the
+        ground is!" and becomes a still more faithful interpreter
+        of a wave-worn voyager's sensations when, a couple of hours
+        later, he demands permission to get <i>out</i> of his
+        delicious little white bed that he may have the pleasure of
+        getting <i>into</i> it again. The evening is cold and raw
+        and the new picture is all blurred and soft and indistinct,
+        and nothing seems plain except the kindly grace of our
+        welcome and the never-before-sufficiently-appreciated
+        delights of space and silence.</p>
+
+        <p class="author">OCTOBER 17.</p>
+
+        <p>How pleasant is the process familiarly known as "looking
+        about one," particularly when performed under exceptionally
+        favorable circumstances! A long and happy day commenced
+        with a stroll through the botanic gardens, parallel with
+        which runs, on one side, a splendid oak avenue just now in
+        all the vivid freshness of its young spring leaves. The
+        gardens are beautifully kept, and are valuable as affording
+        a sort of experimental nursery in which new plants and
+        trees can be brought up on trial and their adaptability to
+        the soil and climate ascertained. For instance, the first
+        thing that caught my eye was the gigantic trunk of an
+        Australian blue-gum tree, which had attained to a girth and
+        height not often seen in its own land. The flora of the
+        Cape Colony is exceptionally varied and beautiful, but one
+        peculiarity incidentally alluded to by my charming guide
+        struck me as very noticeable. It is that in this dry
+        climate and porous soil all the efforts of uncultivated
+        nature are devoted to the <i>stems</i> of the vegetation:
+        on their sap-retaining power depends the life of the plant,
+        so blossom and leaf, though exquisitely indicated, are
+        fragile and incomplete compared to the solidity and bulbous
+        appearance of the stalk. Everything is sacrificed to the
+        practical principle of keeping life together, and it is not
+        until these stout-stemmed plants are cultivated and duly
+        sheltered and watered, and can grow, as it were, with
+        confidence, that they are able to do justice to the
+        inherent beauty of penciled petal and veined leaf. Then the
+        stem contracts to ordinary dimensions, and leaf and blossom
+        expand into things which may well be a joy to the
+        botanist's eye. A thousand times during that shady saunter
+        did I envy my companions their scientific acquaintance with
+        the beautiful green things of earth, and that intimate
+        knowledge of a subject which enhances one's appreciation of
+        its charms as much as bringing a lamp into a darkened
+        picture-gallery. There are the treasures of form and color,
+        but from ignorant eyes more than half their charms and
+        wonders are held back.</p>
+
+        <p>A few steps beyond the garden stand the library and
+        natural history museum. The former is truly a credit to the
+        Colony. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page228"
+           id="page228"></a>[pg 228]</span> Spacious, handsome,
+           rich in literary treasures, It would bear comparison
+           with similar institutions in far older and wealthier
+           places. But I have often noticed in colonies how much
+           importance is attached to the possession of a good
+           public library, and how fond, as a rule, colonists are
+           of books. In a new settlement other shops may be ill
+           supplied, but there is always a good bookseller's, and
+           all books are to be bought there at pretty nearly the
+           same prices as in England. Here each volume costs
+           precisely the same as it would in London, and it would
+           puzzle ever so greedy a reader to name a book which
+           would not be instantly handed to him.</p>
+
+        <p>The museum is well worth a visit of many more hours than
+        we could afford minutes, and, as might be expected,
+        contains numerous specimens of the <i>Bok</i> family, whose
+        tapering horns and slender legs are to be seen at every
+        turn of one's head. Models are there also of the largest
+        diamonds, and especially well copied is the famous "Star of
+        South Africa," a magnificent brilliant of purest water,
+        sold here originally for something like twelve thousand
+        pounds, and resold for double that sum three or four years
+        back. In these few hours I perceive, or think I perceive, a
+        certain soreness, if one may use the word, on the part of
+        the Cape Colonists about the unappreciativeness of the
+        English public toward their produce and possessions. For
+        Instance, an enormous quantity of wine is annually
+        exported, which reaches London by a devious route and
+        fetches a high price, as it is fairly entitled to do from
+        its excellence. If that same wine were sent direct to a
+        London merchant and boldly sold as Cape wine, it is said
+        that the profit on it would be a very different affair. The
+        same prejudice exists against Cape diamonds. Of course, as
+        in other things, a large proportion of inferior stones are
+        forced into the market and serve to give the diamonds that
+        bad name which we all know is so fatal to a dog. But it is
+        only necessary to pretend that a really fine Cape diamond
+        has come from Brazil to ensure its fetching a handsome
+        price, and in that way even jewelers themselves have been
+        known to buy and give a good round sum, too, for stones
+        they would otherwise have looked upon with suspicion.
+        Already I have seen a straw-colored diamond from "Du Zoit's
+        pan" in the diamond-fields cut in Amsterdam and set in
+        London, which could hold its own for purity, radiance and
+        color against any other stone of the same rare tint,
+        without fear or favor; but of course such gems are not
+        common, and fairly good diamonds cost as much here as in
+        any other part of the world.</p>
+
+        <p>The light morning mists from that dampness of yesterday
+        have rolled gradually away as the beautiful sunshine dried
+        the atmosphere, and by midday the table-cloth, as the
+        colonists affectionately call the white, fleece-like vapor
+        which so often rests on their pet mountain, has been folded
+        up and laid aside in Cloudland for future use. I don't know
+        what picture other people may have made to their own minds
+        of the shape and size of Table Mountain, but it was quite a
+        surprise and the least little bit in the world of a
+        disappointment to me to find that it cuts the sky (and what
+        a beautiful sky it is!) with a perfectly straight and level
+        line. A gentle, undulating foreground broken into ravines,
+        where patches of green <i>velts</i> or fields, clumps of
+        trees and early settlers' houses nestle cosily down, guides
+        the eye half-way up the mountain. There the rounder forms
+        abruptly cease, and great granite cliffs rise, bare and
+        straight, up to the level line stretching ever so far
+        along. "It is so characteristic," and "You grow to be so
+        fond of that mountain," are observations I have heard made
+        in reply to the carping criticisms of travelers, and
+        already I begin to understand the meaning of the phrases.
+        But you need to see the mountain from various points of
+        view and under different influences of sun and cloud before
+        you can take in its striking and peculiar charms.</p>
+
+        <p>On each side of the straight line which is emphatically
+        Table Mountain, but actually forming part of it, is a bold
+        headland of the shape one is usually accustomed to in
+        mountains. The "Devil's Peak" is uncompromising enough for
+        <span class="pagenum"><a name="page229"
+           id="page229"></a>[pg 229]</span> any one's taste, whilst
+           the "Lion's Head" charms the eye by its bluff form and
+           deep purple fissures. These grand promontories are not,
+           however, half so beloved by Cape Colonists as their own
+           Table Mountain, and it is curious and amusing to notice
+           how the influence of this odd straight ridge, ever
+           before their eyes, has unconsciously guided and
+           influenced their architectural tastes. All the roofs of
+           the houses are straight&mdash;straight as the mountain;
+           a gable is almost unknown, and even the few steeples are
+           dwarfed to an imperceptible departure from the
+           prevailing straight line. The very trees which shade the
+           Parade-ground and border the road in places have their
+           tops blown absolutely straight and flat, as though giant
+           shears had trimmed them; but I must confess, in spite of
+           a natural anxiety to carry out my theory, that the
+           violent "sou'-easters" are the "straighteners" in their
+           case.</p>
+
+        <p>Cape Town is so straggling that it is difficult to form
+        any idea of its real size, but the low houses are neat and
+        the streets are well kept and look quaint and lively enough
+        to my new eyes this morning. There are plenty of people
+        moving about with a sociable, business-like air; lots of
+        different shades of black and brown Malays, with pointed
+        hats on the men's heads: the women encircle their dusky,
+        smiling faces with a gay cotton handkerchief and throw
+        another of a still brighter hue over their shoulders. When
+        you add to this that they wear a full, flowing,
+        stiffly-starched cotton gown of a third bright color, you
+        can perhaps form some idea of how they enliven the streets.
+        Swarms of children everywhere, romping and laughing and
+        showing their white teeth in broadest of grins. The white
+        children strike me at once as looking marvelously
+        well&mdash;such chubby cheeks, such sturdy fat
+        legs&mdash;and all, black or white, with that amazing air
+        of independence peculiar to baby-colonists. Nobody seems to
+        mind them and nothing seems to harm them. Here are half a
+        dozen tiny boys shouting and laughing at one side of the
+        road, and half a dozen baby-girls at the other (they all
+        seem to play separately): they are all driving each other,
+        for "horses" is the one game here. By the side of a pond
+        sit two toddles of about three years old, in one garment
+        apiece and pointed hats: they are very busy with string and
+        a pin; but who is taking care of them and why don't they
+        tumble in? They are as fat as ortolans and grin at us in
+        the most friendly fashion.</p>
+
+        <p>We must remember that this chances to be the very best
+        moment of the whole year in which to see the Cape and the
+        dwellers thereat. The cold weather has left its bright
+        roses on the children's cheeks, and the winter rains
+        exceptionally having this year made every blade of grass
+        and leaf of tree to laugh and sing in freshest green. After
+        the dry, windy summer I am assured there is hardly a leaf
+        and never a blade of grass to be seen in Cape Town, and
+        only a little straggling verdure under the shelter of the
+        mountain. The great want of this place is water. No river,
+        scarcely a brook, refreshes one's eye for many and many a
+        league inward. The necessary water for the use of the town
+        is brought down by pipes from the numerous springs which
+        trickle out of the granite cliffs of Table Mountain, but
+        there is never a sufficiency to spare for watering roads or
+        grassplots. This scarcity is a double loss to residents and
+        visitors, for one misses it both for use and beauty.</p>
+
+        <p>Everybody who comes here rides or drives round the
+        "Kloof." That may be; but what I maintain is that very few
+        do it so delightfully as I did this sunny afternoon with a
+        companion who knew and loved every turn of the romantic
+        road, who could tell me the name of every bush or flower,
+        of every distant stretch of hills, and helped me to make a
+        map in my head of the stretching landscape and curving bay.
+        Ah! how delicious it was, the winding, climbing road, at
+        whose every angle a fresh fair landscape fell away from
+        beneath our feet or a shining stretch of sea, whose
+        transparent green and purple shadows broke in a fringe of
+        feathery spray at the foot of bold, rocky cliffs, or crept
+        up to a smooth expanse of silver sand in a soft curling
+        line of foam! "Kloof" means simply cleft, and
+        <span class="pagenum"><a name="page230"
+           id="page230"></a>[pg 230]</span> is the pass between the
+           Table Mountain and the Lion's Head, The road first
+           rises, rises, rises, until one seems half-way up the
+           great mountain, and the little straight&mdash;roofed
+           white houses, the green velts or fields and the parallel
+           lines of the vineyards have sunk below one's feet far,
+           far away. The mountain gains in grandeur as one
+           approaches it, for the undulating spurs which run from
+           it down to the sea-shore take away from the height
+           looking upward. But when these are left beneath, the
+           perpendicular Walls of granite, rising sheer and
+           straight up to the bold sky-line, and the rugged,
+           massive strength of the buttress-like cliffs, begin to
+           gain something of their true value to the stranger's
+           eye. The most beautiful part of the road, however, to my
+           taste, is the descent, when the shining expanse of
+           Camp's Bay lies shimmering in the warm afternoon haze
+           with a thousand lights and shadows from cloud and cliff
+           touching and passing over the crisp water-surface. By
+           many a steep zigzag we round the Lion's Head, and drop
+           once more on a level road running parallel to the
+           sea-shore, and so home in the balmy and yet bracing
+           twilight. The midday sun is hot and scorching even at
+           this time of year, but it is always cool in the shade,
+           and no sooner do the afternoon shadows grow to any
+           length than the air freshens into sharpness, and by
+           sundown one is glad of a good warm shawl.</p>
+
+        <p class="author">OCTOBER 18.</p>
+
+        <p>Another bright, ideal day, and the morning passed in a
+        delicious flower-filled room looking over old books and
+        records and listening to odd, quaint little scraps from the
+        old Dutch records. But directly after luncheon (and how
+        hungry we all are, and how delicious everything tastes on
+        shore!) the open break with four capital horses comes to
+        the door, and we start for a long, lovely drive. Half a
+        mile or so takes us out on a flat red road with Table
+        Mountain rising straight up before it, but on the left
+        stretches away a most enchanting panorama. It is all so
+        soft in coloring and tone, distinct and yet not hard, and
+        exquisitely beautiful!</p>
+
+        <p>The Blue-Berg range of mountains stretch beyond the
+        great bay, which, unless a "sou'-easter" is tearing over
+        it, lies glowing in tranquil richness. This afternoon it is
+        colored like an Italian lake. Here are lines of
+        chrysoprase, green-fringed, white with little waves, and
+        beyond lie dark, translucent, purple depths, which change
+        with every passing cloud. Beyond these amethystic shoals
+        again stretches the deep blue water, and again beyond, and
+        bluer still, rise the five ranges of "Hottentots' Holland,"
+        which encircle and complete the landscape, bringing the eye
+        round again to the nearer cliffs of the Devil's Peak. When
+        the Dutch came here some two hundred years ago, they seized
+        upon this part of the coast and called it Holland, driving
+        the Hottentots beyond the neighboring range and telling
+        them that was to be their Holland&mdash;a name it keeps to
+        this day. Their consciences must have troubled them after
+        this arbitrary division of the soil, for up the highest
+        accessible spurs of their own mountain they took the
+        trouble to build several queer little square houses called
+        "block-houses," from which they could keep a sharp look-out
+        for foes coming over the hills from Hottentots' Holland.
+        The foes never came, however, and the roofs and walls of
+        the block-houses have gradually tumbled in, and the
+        gun-carriages&mdash;for they managed to drag heavy ordnance
+        up the steep hill-side&mdash;have rotted away, whilst the
+        old-fashioned cannon lie, grim and rusty, amid a tangled
+        profusion of wild geranium, heath and lilies, I scrambled
+        up to one of the nearest block-houses, and found the date
+        on the dismounted gun to be more than a hundred years old.
+        The view was beautiful and the air fresh and fragrant with
+        scent of flowers.</p>
+
+        <p>But to return to our drive. I could gaze and gaze for
+        ever at this lovely panorama, but am told this is the
+        ugliest part of the road. The road itself is certainly not
+        pretty just here, and is cloudy with a fine red dust, but
+        this view of sea and distant hills is enchanting. Soon we
+        get under the lee of the great mountain, and then its
+        sheltering arms show their protective power; for splendid
+        oak <span class="pagenum"><a name="page231"
+           id="page231"></a>[pg 231]</span> avenues begin to border
+           the road all the way, and miniature forests of
+           straight-stemmed pines and shimmering belts of the
+           ghostly silver tree run up all the mountain-clefts. Stem
+           and leaf of the silver tree are all of purest white; and
+           when one gets a gleam of sunlight on a distant patch of
+           these trees, the effect is quite indescribable,
+           contrasting, as they do, with green of field and
+           vineyard. The vines all about here and towards
+           Constantia, thirteen miles off, are dwarf-plants, and
+           only grow to the height of gooseberry-bushes. It is a
+           particular species, which is found to answer best as
+           requiring less labor to train and cultivate, and is less
+           likely to be blown out of the ground by the violent
+           "sou'-easters" which come sweeping over the mountain.
+           These gales are evidently the greatest annoyance which
+           Cape Colonists have to endure; and although everybody
+           kindly suggests that I <i>ought</i> to see one, just to
+           understand what it is like, I am profoundly thankful
+           that I only know it from their description and my own
+           distinct recollection of the New Zealand "nor'-westers."
+           Those were hot winds, scorching and curling up
+           everything, whereas this is rather a cold breeze,
+           although it blows chiefly in summer. It whirls along
+           clouds of dust from the red clay roads and fields which
+           penetrates and clings to everything in the most
+           extraordinary manner. All along the road the stems and
+           lower branches of the trees are dyed a deep brick-dust
+           color, and I hear moving and pathetic stories of how it
+           ruins clothes, not only utterly spoiling black silk
+           dresses, but staining white petticoats and children's
+           frocks and pinafores with a border of color exactly like
+           the ruddle with which sheep are branded. Especially is
+           it the terror of sailors, rendering the navigation along
+           the coast dangerous and difficult; for it blends land
+           and water into one indistinct whirl of vaporous cloud,
+           confusing and blurring everything until one cannot
+           distinguish shore from sea.</p>
+
+        <p>The vineyards of Constantia originally took their pretty
+        name from the fair daughter of one of the early Dutch
+        governors, but now it has grown into a generic word, and
+        you see "Cloete's Constantia," "Von Reybeck Constantia,"
+        written upon great stone gateways leading by long avenues
+        into the various vine-growing plantations. It was to the
+        former of these constantias, which was also the farthest
+        off, that we were bound that pleasant summer afternoon, and
+        from the time we got out of the carriage until the moment
+        we re-entered it&mdash;all too soon, but it is a long drive
+        back in the short cold twilight&mdash;I felt as though I
+        had stepped through a magic portal into the scene of one of
+        Washington Irving's stories. It was all so simple and
+        homely, so quaint and so inexpressibly picturesque. The
+        house had stood there for a couple of hundred years, and
+        looks as though it might last for ever, with its air of
+        cool, leisurely repose and comfort and strength.</p>
+
+        <p>In the flagged hall stands a huge stalactite some ten
+        feet high, brought a hundred years ago from caves far away
+        in the distant ranges. It is shaped something like a
+        Malay's hat, only the peak tapers to a point about eight
+        feet high. The drawing-room&mdash;though it seems a
+        profanation to call that venerable stately room by so
+        flippant and modern a name&mdash;is large, ceiled with
+        great beams of cedar, and lighted by lofty windows, which
+        must contain many scores of small panes of glass. There
+        were treasures of rarest old china and delfware, and
+        curious old carved stands for fragile dishes. A wealth of
+        swinging-baskets of flowers and ferns and bright girl-faces
+        lighted up the solemn, shady old room, in which we must not
+        linger, for there is much to see outside. First to the
+        cellar, as it is called, though it is far from being under
+        ground, and is, in fact, a spacious stone building with an
+        elaborately-carved pediment. Here are rows and rows of
+        giant casks, stretching on either hand into avenues in the
+        black distance, but these are mere children in the nursery,
+        compared to those we are going to see. First we must pause
+        in a middle room full of quaintest odds and
+        ends&mdash;crossbows, long whips of hippopotamus hide,
+        strange rusty old swords and firearms&mdash;to look at a
+        map of South Africa drawn somewhere
+        <span class="pagenum"><a name="page232"
+           id="page232"></a>[pg 232]</span> about 1640. It hangs on
+           the wall and is hardly to be touched, for the paint and
+           varnish crack and peel off at a breath. It is a marvel
+           of accurate geographical knowledge, and is far better
+           filled in than the maps of yesterday. All poor
+           Livingstone's great geographical discoveries are marked
+           on it as being&mdash;perhaps only from
+           description&mdash;known or guessed at all that long time
+           ago. It was found impossible to photograph it on account
+           of the dark shade which age has laid over the original
+           yellow varnish, but a careful tracing has been made and,
+           I believe, sent home to the Geographical Society. It is
+           in the long corridor beyond this that the "stuck-vats"
+           live&mdash;puncheons which hold easily some thousand
+           gallons or so, and are of a solemn rotundity calculated
+           to strike awe into the beholder's heart. Here is white
+           constantia, red constantia, young constantia,
+           middle-aged constantia, and constantia so old as to be a
+           liqueur almost beyond price. When it has been kept all
+           these years, the sweetness by which it is distinguished
+           becomes so absorbed and blended as to be hardly
+           perceptible.</p>
+
+        <p>Presently one of the party throws a door suddenly open,
+        and, behold, we are standing right over a wild wooded glen
+        with a streamlet running through it, and black washerwomen
+        beating heaps of white clothes on the strips of shingle.
+        Turtle-doves are cooing, and one might almost fancy one was
+        back again on the wild Scotch west coast, until some one
+        else says calmly, "Look at the ostriches!" Here they come,
+        with a sort of dancing step, twisting their long necks and
+        snake-like heads from side to side in search of a tempting
+        pebble or trifle of hardware. Their wings are slightly
+        raised, and the long fringe of white feathers rustles
+        softly as they trot easily and gracefully past us. They are
+        young male birds, and in a few months more their plumage,
+        which now resembles that of a turkey-cock, will be jet
+        black, except the wing-feathers. A few drops of rain are
+        falling, so we hurry back to where the carriage is standing
+        under some splendid oak trees, swallow a sort of
+        stirrup-cup of delicious hot tea, and so home again as fast
+        as we can go.</p>
+
+        <p class="author">OCTOBER 19.</p>
+
+        <p>It is decided that I must take a drive in a Cape cart;
+        so directly after breakfast a smart workman-like-looking
+        vehicle, drawn by a pair of well-bred iron-gray cobs,
+        dashes up under the portico. There are capital horses here,
+        but they fetch a good price, and such a pair as these would
+        easily find purchasers at one hundred and fifty pounds. The
+        cart itself is very trim and smart, with a framework sort
+        of head, which falls back at pleasure, and it holds four
+        people easily. It is a capital vehicle, light and strong
+        and uncommonly comfortable, but I am warned not to imagine
+        that all Cape carts are as easy as this one. Away we go at
+        a fine pace through the delicious sparkling morning
+        sunshine and crisp air, soon turning off the red high-road
+        into a sandy, marshy flat with a sort of brackish
+        back-water standing in pools here and there. We are going
+        to call on Langalibalele, and his son, Malambuli, who are
+        located at Uitvlugt on the Cape downs, about four miles
+        from the town. It is a sort of farm-residence; and
+        considering that the chief has hitherto lived in a reed
+        hut, he is not badly off, for he has plenty of room out of
+        doors as well as a good house over his head. We bump over
+        some strange and rough bits of sandy road and climb up and
+        down steep banks in a manner seldom done on wheels. There
+        is a wealth of lovely flowers blooming around, but I can't
+        help fixing my eyes on the pole of the cart, which is
+        sometimes sticking straight up in the air, its silver hook
+        shining merrily in the sun, or else it has disappeared
+        altogether, and I can only see the horses' haunches. That
+        is when we are going <i>down</i> hill, and I think it is a
+        more terrible sensation than when we are playfully
+        scrambling up some sandy hillock as a cat might.</p>
+
+        <p>Here is the location at last, thank Heaven! and there is
+        Langalibalele sitting in the verandah stoep (pronounced
+        "stoup") on his haunches on a brick. He looks as
+        comfortable as if he were in an arm-chair, but it must be a
+        difficult thing to do if you think seriously of it. The
+        etiquette seems to be to take
+        <span class="pagenum"><a name="page233"
+           id="page233"></a>[pg 233]</span> no notice of him as we
+           pass into the parlor, where we present our pass and the
+           people in authority satisfy themselves that we are quite
+           in rule. Then the old chief walks quietly in, takes off
+           his soft felt hat and sits himself down in a Windsor
+           arm-chair with grave deliberation. He is uncommonly
+           ugly; but when one remembers that he is nearly seventy
+           years of age, it is astonishing to see how young he
+           looks. Langalibalele is not a true Kafir at all: he is a
+           Fingor, a half-caste tribe contemptuously christened by
+           the Kafirs "dogs." His wool grows in distinct and
+           separate clumps like hassocks of grass all over his
+           head. He is a large and powerful man and looks the
+           picture of sleek contentment, as well he may. Only one
+           of his sons, a good-natured, fine young man, black as
+           ebony, is with him, and the chief's one expressed
+           grievance is that none of his wives will come to him. In
+           vain he sends commands and entreaties to these dusky
+           ladies to come and share his solitude. They return for
+           answer that "they are working for somebody else;" for,
+           alas! the only reason their presence is desired is that
+           they may cultivate some of the large extent of ground
+           placed at the old chief's disposal. Neither he nor his
+           stalwart son would dream for a moment of touching spade
+           or hoe; but if the ladies of the family could only be
+           made to see their duty, an honest penny might easily be
+           turned by oats or rye. I gave him a large packet of
+           sugar-plums, which he seized with childish delight and
+           hid away exactly like the big monkeys at the Zoo.</p>
+
+        <p>By way of a joke, Malambuli pretended to want to take
+        them away, and the chattering and laughing which followed
+        was almost deafening. But by and by a gentleman of the
+        party presented a big parcel of the best tobacco, and the
+        chuckling old chief made over at once all my sweetmeats
+        "jintly" to his son, and proceeded to hide away his new
+        treasure. He was dressed exactly like a dissenting
+        minister, and declared through the interpreter he was
+        perfectly comfortable. The impression here seems to be that
+        he is a restless, intriguing and mischief-making old man,
+        who may consider himself as having come out of the hornets'
+        nest he tried to stir up uncommonly well.</p>
+
+        <p>We don't want to bump up and down the sandy plain again,
+        so a lively conversation goes on in Dutch about the road
+        between one of my gentlemen and somebody who looks like a
+        "stuck-vat" upon short legs. The dialogue is fluent and
+        lively, beginning with "Ja, ja!" and ending with "All
+        right!" but it leads to our hitting off the right track
+        exactly, and coming out at a lovely little cottage-villa
+        under the mountain, where we rest and lunch and then stroll
+        about up the hill spurs, through myrtle hedges and shady
+        oak avenues. Then, before the afternoon shadows grow too
+        long, we drive off to "Groote Schuur," the ancient granary
+        of the first settlers, which is now turned into a roomy,
+        comfortable country-house, perfect as a summer residence,
+        and securely sheltered from the "sou'-easters." We approach
+        it through a double avenue of tall Italian pines, and after
+        a little while go out once more for a ramble up some quaint
+        old brick steps, and so through a beautiful glen all
+        fringed and feathered with fresh young fronds of
+        maiden-hair ferns, and masses of hydrangea bushes, which
+        must be beautiful as a poet's dream when they are covered
+        with their great bunches of pale blue blossom. That will
+        not be until Christmas-tide, and, alas! I shall not be here
+        to see, for already my three halcyon days of grace are
+        ended and over, and this very evening we must steam away
+        from a great deal yet unvisited of what is interesting and
+        picturesque, and from friends who three days ago were
+        strangers, but who have made every moment since we landed
+        stand out as a bright and pleasant landmark on life's
+        highway.</p>
+    </blockquote><span class="pagenum"><a name="page234"
+       id="page234"></a>[pg 234]</span>
+
+    <h2>ON SANKOTA HEAD.</h2>
+
+    <p>"Yay, Jim, there ain't no doubt but Sairy Macy's a mighty
+    nice gal, but, thee sees, what I'm a-contendin' fur is that
+    she's tew nice fur thee&mdash;that is, not tew nice egzackly,
+    but a leetle tew fine-feathered. No, not that egzackly, nuther;
+    but she's a leetle tew fine in the feelin's, an' I don't
+    b'lieve that in the long run thee an' she'll sort well
+    tugether. Shell git eout o' conceit with thy ways&mdash;thee
+    <i>ain't</i> the pootiest-mannered feller a gal ever
+    see&mdash;an' thee'll git eout o' conceit with hern. Thee'll
+    think she's a-gittin' stuck up, an' she'll think thee's
+    a-gittin'low-minded. Neow, Jim, my 'dvice is good; an' ef
+    thee'll take it, an' not go on with this thing no furder,
+    thee'll both be glad on it arterwa'ds. 'Spesh'ly 's she ain't
+    very rugged, an' sickly gals had oughter hev rich
+    husbands."</p>
+
+    <p>"But, father, Sairy an' me loves o' 'nother."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, wal, then it's tew late ter say nothin'," said the old
+    man with a mingled sigh and smile as, raising his basket of
+    quahaugs to his shoulder, he walked off, pressing his bare feet
+    into the yielding sand with the firm but clumsy tread of
+    vigorous old age. The rough hat of plaited straw was pushed
+    back from a brow that with a cultivated nature would have been
+    considered as evidence of considerable intellectual power, but,
+    as it was, only showed the probable truth of the opinion of his
+    neighbors, that "Stephen Starbuck was a shrewd, common-sense
+    ole feller."</p>
+
+    <p>Jim was of a little finer grade than his father, having
+    inherited some of the traits of his gentle mother, but the
+    young Hercules could by no means have been mistaken for an
+    Apollo; neither did his somewhat heavy features bear the
+    expression of unselfish loyalty which would have given better
+    promise than any mere refinement of features or manner for the
+    future happiness of Sarah Macy. But she found nothing wanting
+    in her lover as she stood on the cliff-head gazing down upon
+    him. Sarah knew that the man she loved was not considered her
+    equal, but because she loved him she believed him capable of
+    becoming all that she or others could desire. There is in the
+    world no faith so absolute as that of a woman in the
+    possibilities of the man she loves. Had Sarah read of Sir
+    Galahad&mdash;but this was in 1779, and the fame of the search
+    for the Holy Grail had not reached the popular ear&mdash;she
+    would have said to herself, "My Jim is just so pure and holy."
+    Had "her Jim" been a Royalist during the English Revolution,
+    Prince Rupert's laurels would not have been unshared. Had Jim
+    been a Puritan&mdash;though the little Quaker maiden did not
+    love Puritans over well, and did not fancy her Jim as fighting
+    on that side&mdash;England's Protector would not have borne the
+    name of Cromwell. Or if Jim were not one of the peace-loving
+    Friends, and would enlist in the present struggle for liberty,
+    the fame of Commodore James Starbuck should soon eclipse that
+    of Paul Jones.</p>
+
+    <p>Not for the world would Sarah have given voice to the
+    heretical desire, but in her inmost heart was even now a wish
+    that her dear Jim held religious opinions that would not
+    interfere with his showing to the country how talented, noble
+    and valiant he was; while the fair-haired, sunburnt, indolent
+    young Hercules idly gazing out to sea was fired with no higher
+    ambition for himself than to be able soon to erect on the Head
+    another small house like that of his father, to which he might
+    bring "the sweet little girl who loved him, so much." For Sarah
+    had committed the common mistake of loving women, and had let
+    Jim see how dear he was to her. So now, instead of dwelling on
+    his love for her and scheming how he might be worthy of her
+    heart, he was fully satisfied with himself, and inclined to
+    grumble at Fortune for not at once bestowing the trifle he
+    asked at her hands.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page235"
+       id="page235"></a>[pg 235]</span>
+
+    <p>"Jim, how long's thee goin' ter stan' there? If the water
+    <i>is</i> pretty, thee can see it any day, so 't ain't worth
+    while to look at it all day ter a time."</p>
+
+    <p>As, the sweet tones floated down the cliff Jim turned lazily
+    to smile up at the speaker, and, raising his heavy basket of
+    quahaugs, came leisurely up the steep sand-path, which seemed
+    to shrink from his weight at every step: "Wal', Sairy, I wa'n't
+    a-thinkin' much o' the water: I was a-thinkin' o' thee, an' o'
+    what fayther said a little spell ago."</p>
+
+    <p>"What was that, Jim?" Sarah's tone was a little anxious, for
+    she knew that there was a jealousy among some of the islanders
+    of the facts that her father had brought with him a few heavy
+    articles of "real mahogany furnitur," and that her stepmother
+    had always been able to hire others to do her spinning and
+    weaving, and even to "help her at odd spells with the heft o'
+    the housework."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, nothin'," replied Jim, passing his free arm carelessly
+    round the girl's waist&mdash;"othin', undly th' old story
+    'beout heow we'd best not merry, 'cause by'm-by thee'll git ter
+    feelin' better nor me."</p>
+
+    <p>"But thee don't believe him, Jim? Thee knows better. Thee
+    knows," adding this with the sweet and sincere but often sadly
+    mistaken humility of love&mdash;"thee knows thou art better
+    than me. Thou art so grand and so noble! If folks only knew
+    thee better they would wonder at thee fur puttin' up wi' me. I
+    wish I could make thee a better wife. But, Jim, if I ain't very
+    strong, I'm pretty good at contrivin', an' I don't believe but
+    what I can manage so's to git along a'most as well as them
+    that's tougher."</p>
+
+    <p>"Git along? O' course thee'll git along," answered Jim
+    patronizingly. "I telled mother th'other day that I didn't cafe
+    ef thee wa'n't 's strong as Mary Allen: thee was a good deal
+    smarter, an' I'd be willin' tu resk but what I'd hev as little
+    waitin' on ter dew fur thee 's fur her. Besides"&mdash;and here
+    a gleam of real if shallow affection sprang from Jim's eyes as
+    he looked down at the loving creature by his
+    side&mdash;"besides, I'd <i>like</i> to take care o' thee,
+    Sairy&mdash;I would indeed."</p>
+
+    <p>It is said that the sky has no color of its own&mdash;that
+    the deep blue we think so beautiful is only owing to the
+    atmosphere through which we view it. To Sarah this very slight
+    expression of her lover's care for her bore more weight than
+    the most passionate protestations of affection could have done
+    to a colder nature, for it was colored by the glowing tints of
+    her own warm love; and when the two parted that day she carried
+    with her a sweet, satisfying sense of being beloved by the
+    "best man on the earth" even as she loved him; while he
+    whistled cheerily over his net-mending, thinking "what a sweet
+    little thing it was!" "how pretty its eyes were!" and "how
+    kitten-like its ways!" and only checked his whistling once in a
+    while to wonder whether the day would ever really come when
+    "Sairy would feel herself better than him," and to think it
+    also a little hard that old Thomas Macy was "so sot agin' the
+    match" that he would give his daughter no portion but an outfit
+    of clothes and household linen. "He might jest's well's not,"
+    reasoned Jim to himself, "give us a little lift: I guess he
+    would if Sairy's own mother was alive; but them step-mothers
+    never wants to give nothin' ter the fust wives' childern." In
+    which opinion Jim did the second Mrs. Macy much injustice, for
+    it was owing solely to her influence that Sarah's father had
+    consented to provide his daughter with even a new dress in
+    which to be married to "that big, lazy boy o'old Steve
+    Starbuck's."</p>
+
+    <p>Meantime, sad, gentle old Mrs. Starbuck had been turning
+    over many things in her mind. She felt her son's defects; she
+    knew that warm-hearted, imaginative Sarah Macy would be doing a
+    foolish thing to marry Jim&mdash;as foolish a thing as in her
+    inmost heart she felt, rather than acknowledged, that she
+    herself had done when she married Jim's father. But the
+    mother-heart longed that her son should grow to be what she
+    desired (and what poor Sarah thought he already was), and she
+    hoped much from the elevating influence of so good a wife.</p>
+
+    <p>So, as she sat knitting, while Jim and his father sat, hats
+    on heads and pipes <span class="pagenum"><a name="page236"
+       id="page236"></a>[pg 236]</span> in mouths, mending their
+       nets, old Mrs. Starbuck had "made a plan." "Father," said,
+       she at last, "I've be'n thinkin'&mdash;"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yay," replied the old man gruffly but not
+    unkindly&mdash;"yay, I 'spect so. Thee's pooty nigh allus
+    a-thinkin' o' suthin. What is it neow? Eout with it!"</p>
+
+    <p>"I've be'n thinkin' that Jim's all the child we've
+    got&mdash;"</p>
+
+    <p>"Wal, yay. Hain't had no other&mdash;not's I knows on. What
+    o' that?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Well, I was a-thinkin' that, that bein' so, an' Jim an'
+    Sairy thinkin' so much o' 'nother, it wa'n't o' no use fur them
+    ter keep waitin' along year eout an' year in fur a chance tu
+    keep house by 'emselves. They'd best git married right off an'
+    come an' live along o' us."</p>
+
+    <p>"W'y, ole woman!"</p>
+
+    <p>"W'y, mother!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yay; I hear both on ye," said the gentle old mother with a
+    half smile. "I s'posed likely ye'd think strange on't at fust;
+    but ye h'ain't no need ter, fur it's a sens'ble thing ter dew,
+    an' yell see't so when ye've thought on't a spell: see if ye
+    don't."</p>
+
+    <p>So well was the proposal liked that very soon the simple
+    ceremony of the Friends made James and Sarah husband and wife;
+    and for a while all seemed happiness in the humble cottage on
+    the cliff&mdash;cottage so humble that it scarcely deserved
+    even that lowly name.</p>
+
+    <p>Sarah Macy's father owned one of the largest dwellings on
+    Nantucket&mdash;a two-story "double house" with two rooms on
+    each side of a broad hall running through the house from front
+    to rear. On one side of this hall was the "best bedroom,"
+    ghostly with tightly-closed white shutters and long white
+    dimity curtains to the "four-poster" and shining white sanded
+    floor, and the "best-room," terrible in its grandeur of cold
+    white walls, straight hard sofa, "spider-legged" table,
+    grenadier-like chairs and striped woolen carpet underlaid with
+    straw. In the rear, on the other side of the hall, was the
+    kitchen with its big brick oven, its yawning fireplace overhung
+    with corpulent iron pots or shining copper kettles depending
+    from numerous gallows-like cranes; with its glittering copper,
+    brass and pewter utensils arrayed on snowy-shelves; with its
+    spotless tables, Its freshly-sanded floor and its
+    heavily-beamed, whitewashed ceiling, from which hung many a
+    bunch of savory herbs or string of red pepper-pods or bunch of
+    seed-corn, or perhaps even a round-backed ham, to get a little
+    browner in the smoke that would sometimes pour out from the
+    half-ignited mass of peat. In front of the kitchen was the
+    "living-room," in one corner of which stood a carved high-post
+    bedstead&mdash;glory of the Macys and envy of their
+    neighbors&mdash;with its curtains of big figured chintz, brown
+    sunflowers sprawling over a white ground, drawn aside in the
+    daytime to display the marvelous patchwork of the quilt
+    beneath. Fuel was scarce even then on the sandy isle; and
+    economy compelled Mr. and Mrs. Macy to make use of this
+    living-room as a bedchamber also, since Thomas Macy confessed
+    to "bein rather tender," and to liking a warm room to sleep In,
+    though his neighbors often insinuated that he was killing
+    himself by the Indulgence. And indeed the heat must have been
+    stifling when we consider the size of the fireplace, nine feet
+    wide by four deep, with a yawning throat, through which the
+    rain poured freely down on stormy nights, putting out the best
+    arranged mass of coals, ashes and peat, and, in spite of the
+    little gutter purposely made round the broad brick hearth,
+    sometimes overflowing and drenching a portion of the neat rag
+    carpet, in which, with true Quaker consistency, no gay-colored
+    fragment had been allowed a place.</p>
+
+    <p>In striking contrast to all this magnificence was the lowly
+    home to which James Starbuck brought his happy bride. This
+    little house was "double" also&mdash;that Is, it was entered in
+    the centre by a small square passage just big enough for the
+    outer door to swing in. On one side of this entry was a tiny
+    parlor, as dismal as rag carpet, fireless hearth, dingy paper
+    and dark-green paper shades to the small windows could make it.
+    On the other side of the entry was the tiny and cold bedroom of
+    the senior Starbucks. In the centre of the house rose a massive
+    chimney, big enough to retain all the
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page237"
+       id="page237"></a>[pg 237]</span> heat from a dozen fires.
+       Across the rear of parlor, chimney and bedroom ran the long,
+       low sunshiny kitchen. At one end of this certain ladder-like
+       stairs conducted to the loft, which had served Jim for a
+       "roosting-place" ever since he had grown big enough to be
+       trusted o' nights so far away from his mother. On Sarah's
+       advent into the family the dismal "best-room" was made
+       habitable by the addition of a "four-poster"&mdash;which
+       Mrs. Starbuck senior regretted was only of cherry-wood and
+       not carved&mdash;and by sundry little feminine contrivances
+       of Sarah's own.</p>
+
+    <p>I said that for a time all seemed to go on happily in this
+    humble home. And the seeming would have been reality had Jim
+    possessed the faith in his wife which she had in him. True, he
+    loved and believed in her after his fashion, and his mother was
+    a strong ally on his wife's side; but Jim had one fatal
+    weakness of character. He resented the slightest look that was
+    anything but simple admiration on the part of his wife. A
+    strong nature is not afraid of censure, but a weak one,
+    pleading sensitiveness, is easily roused to small retaliations,
+    repaying what is good in intention with what is evil. Jim, as
+    his father had truly told him, was "not the pootiest-mannered
+    feller a gal ever see," and in the daily home-life this became
+    apparent to Sarah as it had never been in all the years they
+    had been near neighbors. Naturally, she wished her husband to
+    be pleasing to her father, and at last ventured to hint, as
+    delicately as she could, at various little points in which
+    improvements might be made. At first Jim did not seem very
+    restless under such reproofs, given, as they were, with many a
+    loving kiss and winsome look; but as months went on his wife's
+    caresses were more carelessly received, and her hinted
+    corrections with more of resentment. One evening stately old
+    Thomas Macy had "happened in," and Jim had greatly grieved his
+    wife by his curt, uncivil manner to her father. After he had
+    gone Sarah spoke in a low tone and kindly as always, but with
+    more spirit than she had ever before manifested or felt, of her
+    husband's disrespectful ways to the aged.</p>
+
+    <p>For a moment after his wife had ceased, Jim sat with his hat
+    pulled closely over his eyes, fiercely biting into the apple he
+    was eating&mdash;biting and throwing the bits into the glowing
+    mass of peat on the hearth. Then he sprang to his feet,
+    exclaiming, "I see! It's all come true, what ev'rybody said.
+    Thee thinks thee an' thy folks is better'n me an' my folks, an'
+    keeps all the time a-naggin' on me. I wish I'd merried Mary
+    Allen! I won't stan' no more o' this talk. If I ain't to be
+    maaster o' my own house I won't stay in't." (The house was his
+    father's, but angry men never think of such trifles.) And
+    waxing pitiful of himself, he continued in a broken and injured
+    tone, "The bed o' the sea's the bes' place fur a man whose own
+    wife's got tew big feelin' ter put up wi' his ways."</p>
+
+    <p>With this dignified burst of eloquence the angry fellow
+    flung himself out of the house, letting in at the door as he
+    went a dash of cold, sleety rain and a gust of wind that put
+    out the flickering tallow dip that was enabling Sarah to take
+    the last stitches in the tiny white slip that now fell from her
+    fingers. Too sorely wounded for resentment, too fond of her
+    husband to wish even his parents to see him in the light in
+    which he was now revealed to her, Sarah silently stooped to
+    recover her work, and as she did so her hand was met under the
+    table by a sympathizing pressure from that of her
+    mother-in-law. This was too much, and, laying her head in the
+    elder woman's lap, poor Sarah wept without restraint; while the
+    mother sorrowfully and tenderly stroked her soft brown tresses.
+    The father, quietly puffing at his pipe, seemed to take no
+    notice, only now and then glancing with kindly eye covertly
+    from under his hat-brim at the two grieving women.</p>
+
+    <p>Silently, but for the roaring of the wind and surf and
+    fitful dashing of the rain, the hours passed on till the high
+    clock in the kitchen corner sharply struck eleven. This was a
+    late hour for those times, and a faint fear began to come upon
+    them all. Could it be that Jim had really meant what he said?
+    "Had he&mdash;" And the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page238"
+       id="page238"></a>[pg 238]</span> two women looked blankly at
+       each other. Not a word had been uttered, but each felt the
+       other's dread.</p>
+
+    <p>The father rose and said with a well-affected yawn, "Guess
+    likely Jim's went deown ter Uncle Will'amses, an' they thought
+    as 't's so stormy he'd bes' not come back. So guess I'll jest
+    go eout ter the shed and git some more peat, fur ter keep the
+    fire."</p>
+
+    <p>Thus leaving the mother and wife partially reassured, the
+    old father slipped out and down the track, cut deeply in the
+    sand by the one-horse carts, to "Uncle Will'amses," as fast as
+    the storm would permit. But no Jim had been seen there; and
+    still more anxiously the stout old man fought his way back
+    against winds that seemed strong" enough to blow him like a
+    feather over the cliff's edge, and against the spray which shot
+    up from the beach below, smitten by the sounding surf, clear
+    over the high top of Sankota Head.</p>
+
+    <p>Reaching his door during a brief lull in the wind, he heard
+    faintly but distinctly the booming of guns fired by a ship in
+    distress. "It mus' be some vessil on the shoals, an' mos'
+    likely Jim's heard her an' got some o' th' other boys, an' 's
+    went off in 's boat ter help her. Poor soul!" With this
+    comforting reflection the father cheered the watchers inside,
+    who had grown fearfully anxious, as the clock had long ago
+    struck for midnight.</p>
+
+    <p>"We mus' build a fire on the Head ter light 'em," said the
+    old man. "There hed oughter be a light'us here, but 's there
+    ain't none, we mus' dew the bes' we kin,"</p>
+
+    <p>So saying, he harnessed the horse&mdash;almost as old as
+    himself&mdash;and with the aid of the two women loaded the sled
+    with dry wood and started with it to the cliff, while the
+    mother and daughter followed behind as best they might,
+    struggling to keep alive without being set on fire by the coals
+    in the iron pot which they carried between them. It was a weary
+    half mile, wind, spray and rain all contending against the
+    feeble folk who had come out to help back to land and home the
+    brave fellows who had gone to succor the distressed. They made
+    all the more sure that this was the case, because Jim's new
+    boat, the pride and joy of his life, was not to be found at the
+    spot where he had only that day drawn, it high above the reach
+    of even such a storm as this, ready for building over it on the
+    morrow its winter house of pine-boughs and turf.</p>
+
+    <p>At last a fire was kindled; and leaving the women to watch
+    it, old Stephen took several weary trips back to the cottage
+    after fuel, making serious inroads upon a stock at the best not
+    too large to meet the demands of the coming winter. The flame,
+    fanned by the blast even more than dashed by the spray and
+    rain, sprang upward, casting its ruddy lances of light backward
+    over the sandy downs, destitute even then of tree or shrub to
+    break the force of the gale, and forward over the frothing
+    white tops and deep, black troughs of waves that seemed to the
+    excited eyes of the watching women like so many separate fiends
+    leaping upward and stretching out white hands to clutch
+    helpless victims and hurry them to the hell beneath. And all
+    the while the surf thundered at the foot of the trembling
+    cliff. No form could be discovered through the darkness beyond
+    the near neighborhood of the shore; and but for the flash of
+    the gun, which was seen continually, though its sound was but
+    seldom heard above the surf and the wind, the watchers would
+    have thought there was no ship near.</p>
+
+    <p>By and by the rain ceased, but there was no moon, and
+    impenetrable wind-clouds still hid the stars. Out through the
+    blackness of the night the flame-light quivered in long, bright
+    streams over the endless lines of ever-advancing waves, but
+    revealed to the watchers no ship, no boat, no tokens even of
+    wreck, only the ceaseless reaching upward of the beckoning
+    white hands; and the wind bore no sound, save at intervals the
+    dull distant boom of the cannon. But ever the solemn surf
+    thundered on the beach below, and the sand-cliff trembled and
+    crumbled beneath its resounding blows.</p>
+
+    <p>The old man, who, with a seaman's owl-like eyesight, kneeled
+    intently gazing out through the darkness in the
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page239"
+       id="page239"></a>[pg 239]</span> direction of the flash,
+       suddenly exclaimed, "I don't un'erstan' it! That air ship
+       hadn't oughter be in 'stress off where she is. She ain't on
+       no shoal, nor nothin'. She's jest a-lyin' tew. An' I don't
+       see no signs o' no boats nuther; an's fur's I kin see, them
+       folks is a firin' off that air gun jest fur the musicalness
+       on't. Blast 'em! Come, gals: we mought as well be walkin'
+       along hum as ter stop a-yawpin' here in the wind an' spray,
+       a-burnin' up the winter's kindlin' fur folks 'at's a-foolin'
+       on us. 'Spesh'ly as I think she's a Britisher. Blast
+       her!"</p>
+
+    <p>The old Quaker was not accustomed to use strong language of
+    any sort, but evidently the human nature in him was so powerful
+    in this instance that he could not help indulging in the most
+    emphatic admissible invective.</p>
+
+    <p>But the mother and wife were not so easily satisfied. In
+    their eyes the strange ship and all on board her were not of as
+    much consequence as the unworthy missing Jim, whose fate they
+    associated with it. Jim's boat, they said, was gone. No one
+    could have taken her but Jim himself. He would never have put
+    out on such a night as this save to go to the help of the
+    distressed ship; and if he was on the water, the light burning
+    on Sankota Head would guide him safely back. So, in the midst
+    of spray and wind, the three kneeled on the cliff and kept the
+    blaze alight till the rising dawn made it useless, when, to the
+    dismay of the watchers, the ship hoisted sail and bore away.
+    She showed no colors, but the old islander, once a whaler,
+    declared that she was a British man-o'-war.</p>
+
+    <p>But where was Jim? The unanswering surf still boomed at the
+    foot of the cliff, though the height of the waves was rapidly
+    diminishing, and the water was gradually assuming the
+    peculiarly bland expression that often comes after a storm,
+    reminding one of the cat that has "eaten the canary," but there
+    was no sign of incoming boat or men.</p>
+
+    <p>Chilled to the bone with the wind and cold sea-spray of the
+    November night, and to the heart with sorrow and
+    disappointment, the three returned to the lonely house. Running
+    to meet them came Mary Allen, breathlessly crying, "Where's
+    Eben and Jim?"</p>
+
+    <p>Poor Sarah could not answer, but the brave old mother, a
+    veteran in sorrows, replied with trembling lips, "We don't know
+    anythin' o' thy brother, Mary; an' Jim hain't b'en hum sence
+    las' night. His boat's gone, an' we thought he might ha' went
+    out to help the ship that was a-firin' all night. But she's
+    sailed off this mornin' all right; an' father, he says she was
+    a Britisher an' undly a-firin' ter fool us folks. So I don't
+    know nothin' about it," uttering the last words in a drearily
+    hopeless tone that gave them exceeding pathos.</p>
+
+    <p>For a moment Mary stood in dismay; then she cried wildly,
+    "Oh, they're drowned, they're drowned! Jim come deown ter eour
+    heouse las' night a-sayin' he'd heard the firin' o' a ship in
+    'stress, an' askin' Eb ter go with him an' help him git his
+    boat eout, an' telled me ter run along deown to Zack
+    Tumnaydoo's An' ax Zack an' Ellery ter go with 'em. An' I did,
+    an' that's the las' anybody's seen o' any one on 'em. Oh dear!
+    oh dear!" And wringing her hands, the sobbing girl ran back as
+    quickly as she had come to impart to her mother and sisters the
+    full extent of her evil tidings.</p>
+
+    <p>The cold, sad, desolate weeks and months that now rolled
+    slowly on are to this day remembered on Nantucket as those of
+    the "hard winter." Provisions were scarce, fuel was difficult
+    to obtain, the harbor was frozen over, so that few fish could
+    be taken there, and all communication with "the main" was cut
+    off by British cruisers. In January the cherished old horse was
+    killed because there was no longer hay to feed him, and even
+    oats were "too precious to be fed to dumb beasts." In February
+    the stalwart old Stephen lay grimly down to die, saying
+    pityingly, "It's time, gals: I can't dew ye no more good by
+    stayin'; an' I'm so tired."</p>
+
+    <p>The day succeeding the silent funeral, where two women had
+    dropped the few tears that were left them to shed, good old
+    Thomas Macy came and took his daughter and her mother to his
+    own home. And in windy, still frozen March
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page240"
+       id="page240"></a>[pg 240]</span> the wail of a tiny baby was
+       heard in the house.</p>
+
+    <p>Under all the trouble the two brave women made no moan.
+    Silently clinging together, never losing sight of each other
+    for more than a few moments at a time, they yet said nothing of
+    their greatest grief, that Jim should have disappeared with
+    such unworthy words on his lips and thoughts in his heart,
+    until, a few days after the baby's birth, Sarah said to her
+    mother, "I know he's not dead. If he'd ha' died, he'd ha' come
+    back and told me he was sorry. Fur I dew think he'd be sorry.
+    Don't thee, mother?" And the mother nodded assent and smiled
+    through her tears.</p>
+
+    <p>But, in truth, they had a more substantial reason than poor
+    Sarah's wistful fancy for thinking that Jim was living. When
+    the ice broke up, his boat was found in a little cove, where it
+    had floated right-side up, without any serious injury except
+    the carrying away of the sails. Of course this discovery roused
+    new hopes in the homes of the missing men. It did not "stand to
+    reason" that four big strong, temperate young fellows, brought
+    up to the hardy, amphibious island-life, had all fallen
+    overboard, any more than it "stood to sense" that the boat had
+    upset and then righted of itself. Besides, "none of the boy's
+    corpuses had ever floated up." So the Tucketers took courage
+    and felt sure that, whatever had become of the missing men,
+    they were not drowned.</p>
+
+    <p>But still the slow months came and went, till the summer and
+    autumn and another winter had passed by; and patient old Rachel
+    Starbuck grew daily a little quieter and a little grayer; and
+    the brave young wife grew a little stronger to bear, but not a
+    whit less loving or prone to suffer, and stately old Thomas
+    Macy grew daily more gentle and pitying in his ways as he
+    looked long at the winsome face of the happy, wee grandchild,
+    that throve and crowed and tried to utter sweet little
+    hesitating words as gayly as if the world had never a sin, a
+    sorrow or a weakness in it.</p>
+
+    <p>One day Sarah and her mother had carried the baby down to
+    the small cottage at the back of the cliff, whither they went
+    to attend to some little household matter; for, although they
+    did not mention the subject, even to themselves, they still
+    kept all there in readiness against Jim's coming home. Here, in
+    the soft May sunshine, the red-frocked baby was sitting on the
+    green turf step, playing with some "daffies," first of the
+    season, which Sarah had plucked from the little garden in the
+    rear. The mother and daughter were in the house, when both were
+    alarmed by a scream from the usually merry child. A man had it
+    closely clasped in his arms, kissing it and calling it between
+    half-choked sobs his "own pretty, pretty baby." The man was
+    thin, pock-marked, bald, and clad in a ragged uniform of a
+    British sailor, but to the faithful, longing eyes of mother and
+    wife there was no mistaking their Jim.</p>
+
+    <p>It was long ere the story could be told, but at last they
+    learned that on that sad November night Jim and his companions
+    had gone out to the relief of the signaling ship. She was, as
+    old Stephen had conjectured, a British man-o'-war. Being short
+    of hands, and having on board as pilot a renegade native of the
+    island, who knew where a ship could "lay-to" in safety, she had
+    taken advantage of the storm to attract strong men within the
+    range of her guns, then to command them to surrender, and thus
+    to impress them into "His Majesty's service" as "able
+    seamen."</p>
+
+    <p>For a long time Jim had managed to keep alive his resentful
+    feelings toward his wife, accusing of being the source of all
+    his misfortunes the poor little woman who was loving and
+    longing so sincerely for him. But when illness came he could
+    hold out no longer. "I made up my mind then," said he, "that if
+    ever I got hum agin, I'd go deown on my knees an' ax pardin' o'
+    my Sairy."</p>
+
+    <p>But she had never been angry, and was now only too thankful
+    that Jim and his friends had escaped safely.</p>
+
+    <p>"Ah!" said Jim in telling his adventures, "we hed a clus run
+    on 't, Sairy, but thee'd better believe that air British navy's
+    a fust-rate place fur larnin' a feller ter know when he's well
+    off. An' <span class="pagenum"><a name="page241"
+       id="page241"></a>[pg 241]</span> Sairy, when I longed so fur
+       thee an' mother, an' thought o' what a wretch I was to speak
+       so ter the dearest little woman in the world, I c'u'd see
+       that I hadn't knowed when I was well off."</p>
+
+    <p>Jim's was not an unselfish kind of repentance, but it was
+    the best it was in his nature to offer, and Sarah had long ago
+    learned that her Jim was not the saint and hero she had once
+    dreamed, but only a weak and common-place man; and she asked
+    for nothing higher from him. To his best she had a right, and
+    with that she was content, smiling on her husband with eyes
+    full of a love as tender and true as when in the old days she
+    had gazed down upon her lover from the cliff-head, while the
+    mother laid her hand softly on his scanty hair, and said
+    solemnly, "May God keep thee thus, my son!" adding, after a
+    moment's pause, "But I wish thy fayther was here to see." And a
+    tender silence for the memory of the rough but kindly-natured
+    old man fell over them all; while the baby, reconciled to the
+    stranger, poked her little fingers in the marks on his face,
+    and cried because she could not get them off.</p>
+
+    <p class="author">ETHEL C. GALE.</p>
+
+    <h2>AT THE OLD PLANTATION.</h2>
+
+    <h3>TWO PAPERS.&mdash;II.</h3>
+
+    <p>The eastern sky is just beginning to assume that strange
+    neutral tint which tells of the approaching dawn when we open
+    the heavy hall door and step out into the crisp, frosty air. No
+    moonlight hunting for me, with the cold, deceitful light making
+    phantom pools of every white sand-patch in the road, and
+    ghostly logs and boulders of every wavering shadow. You are
+    always gathering up your reins for leaps over imaginary
+    fence-panels, which your horse goes through like a nightmare,
+    and always unprepared for the real ones, which he clears when
+    you are least expecting it. If the cry bears down on you, and
+    you rein up for a view, the fox is sure to dodge by invisibly
+    under cover of some dark little bay, and you get home too late
+    for a morning nap and too early for the breakfast, which you
+    have been longing after for the last two hours. Then, too, your
+    horse has lost his night's rest, and will be jaded for two days
+    in consequence. No: the time to throw the dogs off for a
+    fox-hunt is that weird hour which the negroes significantly
+    call "gray-day:" it is the surest time to strike a trail, and
+    by the time Reynard begins to dodge and double there will be
+    plenty of light to ride by and to get a good view. If the fox
+    gets away or the cover is drawn without a find, you are always
+    sure of having your spirits raised by the cheerful sunrise: by
+    the time you get home, tired and spattered, the ladies are down
+    stairs ready to make pretty exclamations over the brush or to
+    chaff you pleasantly for your want of success; and then there
+    is just time to get your hair brushed and your clothes changed
+    before the mingled aromas of fried sausage and old Java put the
+    keen edge on your already whetted appetite.</p>
+
+    <p>A ride across country after a rattling pack of English
+    hounds on a thoroughbred hunter with a field of red-coated
+    squires is an experience which few hunters on this side of the
+    water have ever enjoyed, but with the incidents of which every
+    reader of English novels is familiar. The chase of the red fox
+    in Maryland or Virginia has some features in common with the
+    British national sport, but that of the gray fox in the more
+    southern States differs materially from both. The latter animal
+    is smaller and possessed of less speed and endurance than his
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page242"
+       id="page242"></a>[pg 242]</span> more northern brother, but
+       he is far more common and quite as cunning. He makes shorter
+       runs, but over very different ground, always keeping in the
+       woods and dodging about like a rabbit, so that a different
+       style of horse and a different method of riding are required
+       for his capture. There is no risk of breaking your neck over
+       a five-barred gate or a stone wall, but you may be hung in a
+       grapevine, or knocked out of the saddle by a low limb, or
+       have your knee scraped against a tree-trunk. It is true you
+       may catch your fox in twenty minutes, and three hours is an
+       extraordinary run, but then you may catch four or five
+       between daylight and ten o'clock of an autumn morning.</p>
+
+    <p>The horses stretch their necks toward the stables and whinny
+    as they think of the bundles of untasted fodder: the dogs
+    require no notes of the horn to rouse them, for they know the
+    signs and are already capering about in eager merriment,
+    throwing their heads into the air occasionally to utter a long
+    and musical bay. This wakes up the curs about the negro-yard,
+    and their barking stirs up the geese, the combined chorus
+    rousing all the cocks in the various poultry-houses, so that we
+    ride off amid a hub-bub of howling, cackling, neighing and
+    crowing which would awaken the Seven Sleepers. We are first at
+    the meet, and the old woods ring with the mellow, winding notes
+    of our horns&mdash;no twanging brass reeds in the mouth-pieces,
+    but honest cow-horn bugles, which none but a true hunter can
+    blow. The hounds grow wild at the cheering sound, and howl
+    through every note of the canine gamut; the echoes catch the
+    strain and fling it from brake to bay; the dying cadence
+    strengthens into an answering blast, and the party is soon
+    increased to half a dozen bold riders and twenty eager dogs.
+    Venus, the beautiful "flag-star of heaven," is just toning her
+    brilliancy into harmony with the pale light which creeps slowly
+    up from the eastern horizon, and some wakeful crow in the
+    pine-thicket gives an answering caw to the goblin laugh of the
+    barred owl in the cypress, as we leap our horses into a field
+    of sedge and cheer on the dogs to their work. For half an hour
+    we ride in silence save the words of encouragement to the
+    hounds, which are snuffing about unsuccessfully and whipping
+    the hoar-frost with their tails from the dry yellow stems of
+    the grass. Now and then some eager young dog opens on the trail
+    of a rabbit which has started from its form, but the crack of a
+    whip restrains him, and the other hounds pay no attention to
+    him. Suddenly a sharp, quick yelp comes from the farthest
+    corner of the field, and the older dogs stop instantly and
+    raise their heads to listen. Hark to old Blucher! There he is
+    again, and the whole pack give tongue and dash off to the call
+    which never deceives them. We catch a glimpse of the old
+    fellow's white throat as he trots about in a zigzag course,
+    poking his tan muzzle into every clump of tall grass and giving
+    tongue occasionally as he sniffs the cold trail. Presently a
+    long, quavering cry comes from old Firefly; again and again
+    Blucher opens more and more eagerly; another and another dog
+    takes it up, and the trot quickens into a lope. The trail grows
+    warmer as they follow the line of fence, and just as we settle
+    ourselves in the saddle for a run it all stops and the dogs are
+    at fault. But Blucher is hard to puzzle and knows every trick
+    of his cunning game. Running a few panels down the fence, he
+    rears up on it and snuffs the top rail, and then, with a yell
+    of triumph, dashes over it into the woods, with the whole pack
+    in full cry at his heels. A ringing cheer announces that the
+    fox has "jumped," and the field scatters in pursuit. Two only,
+    the subscriber being one, follow the dogs with a flying leap.
+    Some dash off in search of a low panel, others to head off the
+    cry through the distant gate, while others stop to pull the
+    rails and make a gap. For ten minutes we keep well behind the
+    hounds, with a tight rein and heads bent to avoid the hanging
+    oak limbs. But the fox has turned and plunged into a brake
+    which no horse can go through, and we draw up and listen to
+    decide where we can head him off with the greatest certainty;
+    then turn in different directions and spur
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page243"
+       id="page243"></a>[pg 243]</span> through the young
+       black-jacks. Ah! there he goes, with dragging brush and open
+       mouth, and the pack, running close enough together to be
+       covered by a table-cloth, not sixty yards behind him. I am
+       in at the death this time, for he cannot run a hundred yards
+       farther, and the brush is mine, for there's no one else in
+       sight. With a savage burst the dogs dash after him into the
+       thicket and then&mdash;dead silence, not a yelp, as they
+       scatter and run backward and forward, nosing under every
+       dead leaf and up the trunk of every tree. The fault is
+       complete, and the young dogs give it up and lie down
+       panting, while the older hounds try every expedient to
+       puzzle out the trail and take up the scent again. He
+       certainly has not treed, there is neither earth nor hollow
+       to hide him, and yet the scent has gone! And it never came
+       back. If any reader can tell what became of that fox, he is
+       a wiser man than I. Certain it is that we never heard of him
+       again; and for aught I know to the contrary, he may have
+       been that identical Japanese animal which turns into
+       tea-kettles and vanishes in puffs of smoke. It does not take
+       long, however, to make another find, and we go home after a
+       three hours' chase with two fine brushes and appetites which
+       would ruin any hotel-keeper in a week.</p>
+
+    <p>After breakfast a walk to the cotton-houses would be in
+    order, for the successful planter is he who trusts nothing to
+    the overseer which can have his personal supervision, and he
+    must excuse himself to such of his guests as prefer a cigar by
+    the library fire to an hour spent in observing the details of
+    plantation work. In the days of which I write horse-power was
+    preferred to steam, and negro-power to both; and few planters
+    of the fine black-seed cotton could be convinced that any
+    "power-gin" could be invented which would not injure the long,
+    silky "staple" or fibre of the lint. The old-time "foot-gins"
+    were used exclusively, and the gin-house was a place of curious
+    interest to all visitors. In one end of the long room was the
+    huge pile of seed-cotton which was to pass through the rollers
+    as the first step toward its preparation for the market. How
+    simply does a sudden stroke of inventive genius solve a problem
+    which wise men have regarded as insoluble! Not much more than a
+    century ago a commission of practical English <i>savans</i>
+    discouraged the cultivation of a textile fabric which "might be
+    useful but for the impossibility of clearing it of the seeds!"
+    But the foot-gin appeared on the scene, and indigo went down
+    before cotton. Ranged along the walls of the room are some
+    twenty rough wooden frames, looking like a compromise between a
+    straw-cutter and a sewing-machine, each furnished with two
+    strong rollers operated by a treadle and acting precisely like
+    those of a clothes-wringer. Behind each of these machines
+    stands a man or woman with one ever-moving foot upon the
+    treadle-board, feeding the seed-cotton from a large bag to the
+    greedy rollers, which seize it and pass the lint in fleecy
+    rolls into another bag prepared for it, while the seed, like
+    shirt-buttons touched by the afore-mentioned wringer, rolls off
+    from the hither side to form a pile upon the floor. Thence it
+    will be carted to the seed-house to be rotted into manure for
+    the next crop, there being no better fertilizer for cotton than
+    a compost of which it forms the base. A portion of it, however,
+    will be reserved to be boiled with cow-peas and fed to the
+    milch-cattle, no food being superior to its rich, oily kernel
+    in milk-producing qualities. The negro mothers use it largely
+    in decoction as a substitute for cocoa, and the white mothers
+    under similar circumstances having it parched and ground like
+    coffee, when it makes an exceedingly palatable and nutritious
+    beverage. The "green-seed" or short-staple variety is far
+    inferior to the black for this purpose, and produces white,
+    sticky, cottony-looking butter; indeed, most dairywomen insist
+    that "you can pick the lint out of it." The ginned cotton is
+    carried to the platforms, where it is "specked" by the
+    women&mdash;leaves, dirt and other impurities being picked out
+    by hand&mdash;and spread out to dry and bleach in the sun;
+    thence we follow it to the "moting-room," where it is
+    thoroughly and finally overhauled, every minute particle of
+    dirt or other <span class="pagenum"><a name="page244"
+       id="page244"></a>[pg 244]</span> foreign matter and every
+       flock of stained and discolored cotton being picked out.
+       This room is always in the second story, and at one end of
+       it a circular hole is cut in the floor; through this hole
+       hangs the bag of strong, close gunny-cloth, very different
+       from the coarse covering which suffices for the lower grades
+       of "short-staple," supported by a stout iron hoop larger by
+       some inches than the hole in the floor, and to which the end
+       of the bag is securely sewed. The cotton is thrown into this
+       bag and packed with an iron rammer by a man who stands in
+       it, his weight assisting in the packing, each bag being made
+       to contain upward of four hundred pounds.</p>
+
+    <p>Everything seeming to go on as it ought and all the
+    necessary orders and directions being given, we walk out to
+    take a look at the poultry. There are fowls in abundance and
+    superabundance, but our kind host is most proud of his flock of
+    three hundred white turkeys; and a beautiful sight they are,
+    scattered over the grassy lawn. Ranging, as these fine birds
+    will, over a mile or two of woods abounding in their wild
+    brethren, convenient mistakes were often made by the pineland
+    gunners, whose rifles were always ready to pick off a stray
+    gobbler without waiting to know whether he was wild or tame,
+    and so the old gentleman introduced the white stock to prevent
+    the possibility of such errors. For a similar reason no ducks
+    were raised except those which wear top-knots. It is no unusual
+    thing for wild gobblers and mallards to come up with the tame
+    stock to the poultry-yard, and the bronze feathers and shy
+    habits of many of the young turkeys show evidence of their free
+    parentage.</p>
+
+    <p>It is just impossible for a city man to remain indoors in
+    the country with the broad fields, the shady woods, the bright
+    blue sky and the merry pipe of birds calling him out to active
+    exercise and unaccustomed sport. He is sure to think himself a
+    sportsman, even if uncertain whether the shot or powder should
+    first enter the gun; and if an old hand at the trigger, his
+    uneasiness while in the house becomes almost painful. Every
+    article of hunting-gear is overhauled again and again; boots
+    are greased, shot-pouches filled, powder-charges remeasured,
+    guns cleaned and ramrods oiled; and I once had a fine
+    Manton&mdash;as sweet a piece as ever came to the
+    shoulder&mdash;almost ruined by an eager friend, who, after
+    going through all this during a stormy morning, insisted on
+    taking off the locks and triggers, just to while away the time.
+    The introduction of the breech-loader most happily obviates all
+    this, since such lagging hours may now be occupied in charging
+    and crimping cartridges. But there is nothing to detain us
+    longer to-day: the "Bob Whites" are waiting for us among the
+    pea-vines, and the snipe among the tussocky grass of the old
+    rice-field. Di and Sancho have caught sight of the guns, and
+    are capering about in the wildest excitement, for it is a long
+    time since they have seen anything more "gamey" than a city
+    pigeon. Birding over good dogs is the very poetry of
+    field-sports. The silken-haired setter and the lithe pointer
+    are as far the superiors of the half-savage hound as the
+    Coldstream Guards are of the Comanches. The hound has no
+    affection and but little intelligence, and the qualities which
+    make him valuable are purely those of instinct. The long,
+    hungry cry with which he follows the deer and the sharp, angry
+    yelp which he utters when chasing the fox tell plainly that the
+    motives which prompt him thus to use his delicate nose and
+    unwearying powers of endurance are precisely those which carry
+    the Indian to the hunt or on the war-path. He hunts for any
+    master who will cheer him on, has no tactics but to stick to
+    the trail and give tongue as long as the scent will lie, and
+    must be whipped off the game when caught to prevent his
+    devouring it on the spot. The setter, on the other hand, is
+    intelligent, affectionate and faithful. If properly trained and
+    reared, he loves his master and will hunt for no one else,
+    learns to understand human language to an astonishing degree
+    and exhibits reasoning powers of no mean order. He hunts purely
+    for sport, understands the habits of his game, and regulates
+    his tactics accordingly, and delivers the birds
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page245"
+       id="page245"></a>[pg 245]</span> uninjured to his master,
+       sometimes controlling his appetite and carrying the game
+       long distances for this purpose. I have frequently
+       discovered that my dogs, brought up in the house, understood
+       words which had never been taught them. My old favorite Di
+       always answers the dinner-bell and stands near my chair for
+       odd scraps. Being somewhat annoyed one day by her eagerness,
+       I said playfully, "Go to the kitchen and tell Annie to feed
+       you." She at once rushed off and scratched the kitchen door
+       until the girl opened it, and then stood by the tray of
+       scraps looking at her and wagging her tail. Wanting one of
+       my little sons one evening, I said, "Di, go find the boys!"
+       She rushed off, looking and smelling about their usual
+       haunts, but returned unsuccessful. I scolded and sent her a
+       second and third time, with the same result: a few minutes
+       after she came quietly behind me with the <i>hat</i> of my
+       youngest boy in her mouth: she had taken it from a table in
+       the passage, and her wagging tail said plainly, "Will this
+       answer? It's the best I can do." The same dog will creep
+       carefully upon partridges, and stand as if cut in marble
+       lest they should fly, but will chase turkeys at full speed,
+       giving tongue like a hound, and then lie still for hours
+       while they are called up and shot, nor will she ever
+       confound the different habits of the two birds or the
+       different methods of hunting them.</p>
+
+    <p>Such are the highly-bred and intelligent animals which are
+    eagerly waiting for us to-day&mdash;Di, with her white coat,
+    soft as wavy silk, her chestnut ears and one spot on the back
+    alone marring its snowy purity; Sancho, jet black, with
+    "featherings" like a King Charles spaniel. They are over the
+    fence already, and tearing about the field so recklessly in the
+    exuberance of their joy that they must certainly startle any
+    game which may be there. The timid little field-buntings glide
+    away on silent wing through the grass; the meadow-larks rise
+    with gentle flappings and sail off with that easy flight so
+    tempting to very young wing-shots; now and then a flock of
+    doves whistle off too far for a certain shot, and clouds of
+    crow-blackbirds rise with hoarse chirps and seek less public
+    feeding-grounds; a rabbit dashes off from a brier-patch and
+    both dogs rush pell-mell at his heels, but a single note from
+    the whistle brings them to a sudden halt and makes them look
+    thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Off they go again, as wild as
+    deer; but suddenly Di's whole action changes: crouching to the
+    ground and beating her sides rapidly with her tail, she runs
+    hither and thither, snuffing eagerly in the grass. Now Sancho
+    comes up and catches the cold trail, for a covey has certainly
+    been in that place to-day. Most probably they rose from the
+    spot, frightened by the swoop of a hawk, and made for the
+    nearest cover, for the dogs can do nothing with the scent. But
+    that little whiff of the exciting effluvia has brought them
+    down to their work, and a beautiful sight it is as they quarter
+    the ground with quickly-beating tails and noses high in the
+    air, crossing and recrossing the wind in zigzag lines and
+    concentric circles, hunting the ground so closely that no
+    trail, however cold, can escape their keen sense of smell. A
+    wave of the hand to Sancho, and the sagacious fellow is off
+    toward the far corner of the field, when suddenly Di stops in
+    mid-career with a jerk that must try every sinew in her frame.
+    The birds are right under her nose, and she dares not move a
+    muscle, but stands as if changed into stone, her eyes starting
+    with excitement, her nostrils expanded, her feathery stern
+    quivering stiffly out behind and every line of her figure
+    standing out like whipcord. "Toho!" The black dog catches the
+    sound and turns his head: he sees her rigid form, and backs her
+    where he stands as firmly as if he too had the scent. There is
+    no hurry, for the dogs are true as steel and will stand there
+    as long as the frightened birds lie, while the latter, obedient
+    to the instinct of sudden terror, will cower where they are for
+    an hour, with their heads drawn back, their mottled breasts
+    pressed to the earth and their legs gathered under them, ready
+    to spring into the air. We cock our guns, agree to shoot
+    respectively at the birds which go right or left or straight
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page246"
+       id="page246"></a>[pg 246]</span> before us, and then advance
+       to flush the covey ourselves. The staunch dog never winces
+       as we pass her: two paces, three, a sudden rush and whirr as
+       of many wings, five sharp reports in quick succession and
+       four birds down! Another, wild with fright, rises straight
+       up for twenty feet and darts off behind us, but his
+       beautiful head droops as the crack of my last barrel
+       resounds on the air and a cloud of feathers floats downward.
+       The shot has struck him in the line of flight, and he goes
+       to the ground with a bounce, some thirty yards away, as if
+       hurled there by a vigorous arm. The well-trained dogs come
+       to the "Down! charge!" while we reload our guns, and then
+       seek the dead birds and bring them carefully in to us.</p>
+
+    <p>Leaving the broken covey to be worked up on our return, we
+    push on to another part of the large pea-field, where, perched
+    upon the topmost limb of a tall dead pine, we see a red-tailed
+    hawk engaged in quiet observation. There is no surer sign of
+    birds, but it takes close hunting to find them, for they dare
+    not move about while their savage enemy is on the watch. As we
+    approach the hawk stretches out his neck, jerks his wings two
+    or three times and oscillates his ungainly body, and then, with
+    a loud scream of angry disappointment, he is off. The tree
+    stands in a little piece of sedge, not far from a dense growth
+    of pine-saplings, and we know that the moment the hawk left his
+    perch the birds started for the cover, and our only chance for
+    shooting is to head them off and turn them. The dogs have
+    struck the running trail, and their action is totally different
+    from what it was with the first covey. Crouching flat to the
+    ground, they glide after the startled birds with a snake-like
+    movement, now stopping, now running swiftly in. Suddenly Di
+    leaves the trail and dashes off at full speed to the right.
+    Making a wide circuit, she skirts the pines, and, turning short
+    round, comes to a firm stand in the very face of the retreating
+    covey, while Sancho lies prone with his nose between his paws.
+    It is an old trick of hers thus to "huddle" running birds, and
+    we follow her example, come up behind her, and get six with
+    four barrels as the birds rise in a bunch.</p>
+
+    <p>But if the reader follows us too closely, he will have all
+    the fatigue of a long tramp without the compensation of
+    healthful excitement and full game-pockets. Thirty-five fine
+    birds in a pile on the pantry-table offer a capital <i>raison
+    d'être</i> for weary feet and soiled fingers when we reach home
+    just in time for the supper-bell. There have been some arrivals
+    while we were gone, for Christmas is near at hand, and the old
+    house is filling up with guests. To-morrow the "St. John's
+    Hunting-Club" has its monthly deer-hunt and dinner at Black
+    Oak, and we need a good night's rest to prepare us for an
+    experience the omission of which would render imperfect any
+    truthful reminiscence of life at the old plantation.</p>
+
+    <p>During the months spent at the plantation there is little
+    social visiting among the gentlemen, and, except on Sundays and
+    occasions of public meetings, the various local clubs offer
+    their only opportunities for seeing each other, Another
+    object&mdash;at least, under the old <i>régime</i>&mdash;was to
+    bring together those who occupied somewhat different social
+    positions. Formerly the clubs were strictly exclusive, and,
+    indeed, this feature was never lost, but in every community
+    there would be some <i>novi homines</i>, clever men many of
+    them, whom the old gentry were quite willing to recognize,
+    though a marked difference in culture prevented family
+    visiting. These could be admitted to membership, and at the
+    club-house could be met on equal terms. The hunting feature was
+    always preserved, though few of the older members ever joined
+    in the sport. Under the rules there was a place, a day and an
+    hour for the weekly meet; and I remember when it was a safe
+    thing to be at "the White Bridge" on the Santee Canal any
+    Saturday morning at nine o'clock. Somebody was sure to be there
+    with dogs and driver, prepared for a "wallet-hunt"&mdash;i.e.,
+    an all-day hunt with wallets at the crupper well filled with
+    hunter's cheer. Once a month the club met for dinner, each
+    member "finding" in turn, and on that day a single drive, or at
+    most two, was all that could be enjoyed. The club-house was a
+    plain frame building in the woods, with
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page247"
+       id="page247"></a>[pg 247]</span> a huge fireplace at each
+       end, heavy stationary pine table extending the length of the
+       room, and broad soft-pine benches. The dishes, wines,
+       liquors and cigars were all specified in the rules, the
+       finder being allowed two extra dishes at will, and supplying
+       all the crockery, cutlery and glass. The kitchen was a rough
+       shed close to the cool and shaded spring of pure, clear
+       water. Being myself but a guest, I have not the privilege of
+       extending an invitation to the reader; so, by his leave, we
+       will drop the present tense and I will assume the part of
+       <i>raconteur</i>. How vividly do the scenes of that day come
+       back through the highways of memory, crowded as they are
+       with experiences of more than twenty varied years! As I rode
+       up to the bridge on that bright December morning I found a
+       party which promised rare sport. There was Kit Gillam with
+       his crooked nose, and Tom Clifton with his deadly Manton and
+       fine cry of dogs, and cheery Jack Parker, who hunted only
+       for the good company, and whose gun was as likely as not to
+       be unloaded when the deer came out to him. Two drives were
+       decided on which might be relied on for shooting, and yet
+       were small enough to give ample time for reaching the
+       club-house before dinner.</p>
+
+    <p>As we rode toward our stands I thought it a good chance to
+    settle a point which had long excited my curiosity. "Kit," said
+    I, "I have often wondered how your nose got out of plumb. What
+    caused it?"</p>
+
+    <p>"When I was a little bit of a boy I fell down and stepped on
+    it."</p>
+
+    <p>This very satisfactory explanation brought us to our ground,
+    and we were soon at our respective stands and listening eagerly
+    for the trail-notes of the old hounds. The deer have regular
+    runs, from which they rarely deviate, and which do not vary in
+    the course of years. These are guarded by the standers while
+    the game is driven down from the opposite direction. A large
+    drive may have a dozen of these stands, by one of which the
+    deer will almost certainly pass, but which one nobody knows.
+    Quiet is absolutely necessary and a cigar is fatal to sport,
+    but concealment is useless, as these animals see imperfectly in
+    daylight.</p>
+
+    <p>I had not to wait long before I caught the distant cheering
+    and hand-clapping of the drivers as they encouraged the dogs to
+    hunt. In the quiet of the sombre woods every sound was
+    distinctly audible. Suddenly three or four quick, sharp yelps
+    brought my gun to the "ready," and the hammers clicked as a
+    burst of music followed. But above the clamor of the hounds
+    came the crack of the driver's whip, and his voice, mellowed by
+    distance, was heard in angry tones: "Come back yah, you
+    good-for-nuttin', wutless lee' rabbit-dog, you! I sway maussa
+    ha' for shoot da' puppy 'fore he spile ebery dog in de
+    pack!"</p>
+
+    <p>Soon, however, came another open, deep and musical, and
+    there was no mistaking old Drummer's trail-note: then Killbuck
+    joined in, and then the cry became general. For a while the
+    broken, quavering tongue tells that the dogs are only trailing
+    and the deer is still cowering in his bed, or perhaps has
+    sneaked out of the drive at the first sound of the horn. Hark!
+    what a burst! They had "started" within two hundred yards of
+    me. The next moment there was a rustle of leaves, and a
+    yearling doe dashed by. I am not a dead shot, and have nothing
+    to say about that first barrel, but the second sent her down
+    and over with a roll that almost broke her neck. The dogs were
+    stopped and the deer thrown over the pommel of one of the boys,
+    and we rode on to try the Brunswick swamp. The boy had assured
+    us that "One pow'ful big buck bin in day (there) las' night. I
+    see all he track gwine in, an' I nebber see none come out."</p>
+
+    <p>We were soon strung along the narrow dam across which the
+    game was to be forced by the drivers, who had to make their way
+    through an ugly bog among cypress "knees" and dense
+    brier-patches. Jack Parker stood next to me, fidgeting about
+    uneasily, because it was against rules to talk on stand. Jack's
+    prominent feature was his nose, and he had an incorrigible
+    trick of blowing it "out loud" whenever there was a particular
+    reason for keeping perfectly quiet. The dogs had begun to open,
+    and their loose, scattering trail-notes indicated
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page248"
+       id="page248"></a>[pg 248]</span> turkeys. Looking directly
+       before me, I saw seven noble gobblers stepping cautiously
+       toward my stand. Their glossy breasts glittered with coppery
+       lustre in the straggling sunbeams as, with drooping wings
+       and expanded tails, they advanced, looking fearfully about
+       and uttering their low alarm-notes, "Quit! quit! quit!"
+       Three more steps will make a certain shot, and&mdash;out
+       rang Jack's nasal clarion, loud and clear as the
+       <i>morte</i> at a fox-chase. I looked round in horror, and
+       there stood my hunter complacently eying me and flourishing
+       his white silk handkerchief, while his gun leaned against a
+       tree ten paces distant: "Expect I'd better go back to my
+       stand, eh? Are those dogs barking at a deer?"</p>
+
+    <p>I jumped to my feet for a snap-shot at the old gobbler which
+    flew over me, making a clear miss. Bang! bang! went two more
+    guns; a woodcock whistled up from the bog and two swamp-rabbits
+    dashed into the brier. The dogs came out, shaking the water
+    from their coats, and the spattered drivers rode through the
+    creek. There was not a feather to show, and of course everybody
+    was "down" on Jack, but with an air of deep injury he put it
+    off on me with the question, "Why didn't you tell me the
+    turkeys were coming? How can a fellow help having a cold?"</p>
+
+    <p>We reached the club-house just in time to take our seats as
+    dinner was served, and were in capital condition to enjoy the
+    rich mutton, the fat turkey, the juicy home-cured ham and the
+    rare old madeira which graced the board. This last was a
+    specialty with the gentlemen of those days, and probably no
+    cellars in the world could boast choicer vintage than the
+    "Newton &amp; Gordon" and "Old Leacock" which cheered the table
+    of that "hunting-club." There were stronger liquors, too,
+    though these were chiefly used as appetizers before dinner. The
+    moderate use of brandy was universal, but the drunkenness which
+    blots these days of prohibitory laws was comparatively rare.
+    Few ever left the club-house "disguised" by liquor except the
+    young men, who then, as now and always, would occasionally
+    indulge in a "frolic." With the clearing of the board came the
+    regular and volunteer toasts, and then an hour of "crop-talk"
+    and "horse-talk" and hunting-stories over the wine and cigars.
+    With the departure of the older members came the inevitable
+    quarter-race, with its accompaniment of riding feats which
+    would have done credit to a Don Cossack. The equestrian
+    performance was commenced by Kit Gillam (who now dismounts and
+    leads over every little ditch) forcing his active chestnut up
+    the wooden steps and into the club-room, and rearing him on the
+    dining-table. Then came a leaping-match over a ten-railed
+    fence, resulting in the barking of some shins and the
+    demolition of sundry panels of rail. Joe Keating, the wildest
+    rider I ever knew, had emptied his tumbler too often, and
+    insisted on running his horse home through the woods. An hour
+    after he was overtaken trudging along the road, perfectly
+    sober, with the saddle on his shoulders and the bridle over his
+    arm.</p>
+
+    <p>"Why, Joe, where's your horse?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Dead!" was the laconic reply.</p>
+
+    <p>Sure enough. He had run full against a huge pine, and the
+    horse had gone down with a broken skull. He never tried it
+    again.</p>
+
+    <p>Christmas Eve has come at last, and the old plantation is in
+    all its glory. Carriage after carriage has deposited its
+    freight of blooming girls and merry-eyed children at the broad,
+    open hall-door. There is not a vacant stall in the stables, nor
+    an unoccupied bedroom among all the seventeen of the spacious
+    mansion. The broad dinner-table is set diagonally in the long
+    dining-room, and to-morrow, at least, the guests will have to
+    take two turns at filling its twenty seats, while the children
+    go through the same manoeuvre in the pantry. Where they will
+    all sleep to-night is a mystery which none can unravel save the
+    busy, hospitable "lady of the manor;" but it makes little
+    difference, for there will be little sleeping done. The day
+    passes in riding-parties and rowing-parties and similar
+    amusements, as each freely follows the bent of his inclination.
+    "Brass," the negro fiddler, has been summoned, and "Newport"
+    comes with his <span class="pagenum"><a name="page249"
+       id="page249"></a>[pg 249]</span> stirrup and steel for the
+       "triangle" accompaniment, and the merry feet of the dancers
+       are soon keeping time to the homely but inspiriting music.
+       The "German" and the "Boston" have not usurped the places of
+       the old-time cotillon, quadrille and Virginia reel, and the
+       dance is often varied by romping games of "Blindman's Buff,"
+       "Move-House" and "Stage-Coach," in which old and young unite
+       with equal zest.</p>
+
+    <p>But this is not the limit of the fun. From time immemorial
+    Christmas Eve has been licensed for the performance of all
+    sorts of tricks, and demure little faces are flitting about
+    convulsed by the effort to conceal the merry sense of mischief.
+    The stockings are duly hung for Saint Nicholas, and the holly,
+    with its glossy leaves and scarlet berries, stands ready to be
+    planted in the parlor, to bloom to-morrow into all kinds of
+    rich flowers and gift-fruit. At nine o'clock the work of
+    arranging the Christmas tree begins. The ladies retire, and
+    after a quiet smoke by the roaring hall-fire the gentlemen
+    follow suit. To bed, but not to sleep. Jack Parker is the first
+    man ready, and bounces into the best bed to secure the softest
+    place; but the bars have been skillfully removed, and he is the
+    centre of a rather mixed pile on the floor. I feel another, to
+    be sure that all is right, and slip cozily between the sheets,
+    but some graceless little wretch has placed a walking-cane
+    "athwart-ships," which nearly breaks my back. None escape. Some
+    find their sheets strewed with chaff or cockle-burs, some find
+    no sheets at all. At midnight a fearful roar comes from the
+    girls' room, followed by pretty shrieks and terrible confusion;
+    but it is only the old Cochin rooster, which was slyly shut up
+    in the empty chimney-place before they retired, indulging in
+    his first crow.</p>
+
+    <p>Daylight puts an end to all sleep, for the boys are on the
+    piazza ready to welcome Christmas with innumerable packages of
+    fire-crackers. We rise to find our pantaloons sewed up, our
+    boots stuffed with wet cotton, our tooth-brushes dusted with
+    quinine and our <i>café noir</i> sweetened with salt. These
+    practical jokes are all taken in good part and made to
+    contribute to the jollity of the season. At the breakfast-table
+    lumps of cracked marble serve admirably for loaf-sugar, except
+    that the hottest coffee will not dissolve them, and boiled eggs
+    tempt the appetite only to disappoint with their sawdust
+    filling. Then all assemble on the piazza to witness the
+    merriment of the crowd of negroes who have assembled to claim
+    little gifts of tobacco and sugar and to receive the annual
+    glass of whisky which a time-honored custom bestows. The liquor
+    is served in a wine-glass, and swallowed eagerly by men, women
+    and boys from ten years old upward. Then they disperse to get
+    their portion of the Christmas beef which has been slaughtered
+    for their special benefit, and we prepare for service at the
+    parish church, which stands among the shadows of the old forest
+    oaks an easy walk from the house. There the solemn services
+    temper and soften, but do not check or lessen, the joy and
+    good-will which so well become the season, and which find their
+    appropriate manifestation in all kinds of innocent amusement.
+    The religious and the social observances of the day react each
+    upon the other, and harmonize most admirably in the impressions
+    which they produce. The interchange of gifts and tokens around
+    the Christmas tree follows most appropriately, and the
+    Christmas feast is marked by profuse hospitality and keen
+    enjoyment unmarred by riot or excess.</p>
+
+    <p>Ah, well! there are piles of dusty memories in the old
+    cockloft still untouched, but I shall rummage no more to-night.
+    The scenes which have floated past me with the wreathing smoke
+    of my cigar are green and fragrant to me with a freshness which
+    time can never blight, but they never can harden into reality
+    again for any mortal experience. They have gone into the
+    irretrievable past with a state of things which some may regret
+    and others rejoice in, and well will it be if the new
+    <i>régime</i> shall supply their places with other pictures
+    which twenty years hence it may be no less pleasant to
+    remember.</p>
+
+    <p class="author">ROBERT
+    WILSON.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page250"
+       id="page250"></a>[pg 250]</span>
+
+    <h2>OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.</h2>
+
+    <h4>A GERMAN AGRICULTURAL FAIR.</h4>
+
+    <p>From the 27th to the 30th of September all Stuttgart flocks
+    to Cannstatt for the <i>Volksfest</i>; and this year every good
+    Würtemberger was bound to feel an additional interest in the
+    fête on account of the opening ceremony, the inauguration of a
+    statue to the late king, Wilhelm I.&mdash;and "well beloved,"
+    one is tempted to add from the way in which his people still
+    speak of him. "The old king" and "this one" they say with an
+    inflection of voice anything but flattering to the latter. Our
+    landlady assures us that let the weather look as threatening as
+    it would, the sun always contrived to burst out when in former
+    times the late king rode into the arena to give the prizes; and
+    she is evidently by no means certain it will not pour all three
+    days of the fair this year. However, to judge from the skies,
+    "this one" is not so bad as he might be: the sun shines
+    propitious on him too, and consequently on us as we set forth
+    to see what we can see. The second is the great day, as the
+    prizes are then distributed; but already on Monday the booths
+    and shows were on the field, and Cannstatt was gay with banners
+    and wreaths and garlands of green. The carpenters were still
+    hard at work hammering at seats for us to occupy next day, but
+    the wonderful triumphal arch stood quite completed and worthy
+    of sincere admiration. No one knows who has not seen it worked
+    into an architectural design how beautiful a string of onions
+    can be, how gorgeous a row of vegetable-marrows, how delicate a
+    cluster of turnips. It sounds puerile, but it was lovely
+    nevertheless. Imagine a temple-like construction all composed
+    of odorous pine, with an arched portal on either hand, and then
+    every line and curve, every niche and pillar and balustrade,
+    defined with glowing fruit. It was looped in festoons and hung
+    in tassels of red and white and gold: the arms of
+    Wüuuml;rtemberg even were traced in yellow corn, while above it
+    all rose a graceful column, a mosaic from base to summit of
+    every fruit that autumn can bring to perfection.</p>
+
+    <p>That was the great show: after that, mammoth cucumbers and
+    carrots or rows of agricultural implements did not detain us
+    long. The next best thing was to see the booths and the crowd
+    on the outskirts of the exhibition. There the circus was in
+    full blast, and triumphant, brazen-throated opposition to all
+    smaller attractions that had ventured into that neighborhood.
+    The performing dogs in red petticoats were reduced to making an
+    appearance before their tent to entice spectators, and
+    Harlequin and Columbine had to shout themselves hoarse inviting
+    people to come in and split with laughter for sixpence. Those
+    who did not aspire to a seat under painted canvas gathered
+    round a melancholy bear dancing a <i>pas seul</i> on the grass
+    with heartbroken gravity. Then came the <i>Schützhallen</i>,
+    where the marksmen stationed themselves three feet from the
+    target and cracked away at it with no other visible effect than
+    that produced on a monkey doing its tricks close by: at every
+    shot the poor little creature stopped fiddling and looked over
+    its shoulder with a distressed air of "If I'm not hit this
+    time!" Hand-organs, penny trumpets and rattles quite drowned
+    the voice of a street-songstress with a large assortment of
+    vocal music before her, from which she was giving the public a
+    selection. Whether the songs had any reference to the pictures
+    that formed her background we did not discover, but, at all
+    events, the latter were tragic in the extreme. "The
+    twenty-four-year-old murderer of his mother and six brothers
+    and sisters" was there portrayed in a neat suit of black, with
+    a hatchet in his hand and a very irresolute expression of
+    countenance, while the various members of his family, seen
+    through the open bedroom doors, awaited their fate in peaceful
+    slumber. The booths, with toys, gingerbread,
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page251"
+       id="page251"></a>[pg 251]</span> sausages, cheese and light
+       literature tastefully intermingled, went on and on like the
+       restaurants that lined each side of the long avenue. Around
+       primitive tables family parties clinked foaming glasses and
+       hailed with demonstrative hospitality any stray cousin who
+       chanced that way. In one of the last of these improvised
+       <i>Trinkhallen</i> we came upon a young man and maiden who
+       had the place quite to themselves. Her brown parasol kept
+       the sun off them both, and it was of no sort of consequence
+       that they had nothing more interesting than the back of a
+       shed to look at. Future prospects were the only ones they
+       cared for: the present had no need of anything but a faint
+       beeriness, conducive to day-dreaming.</p>
+
+    <p>As we get into the carriage again our coachman says we must
+    see the new statue. Accordingly, we drive through the town and
+    halt before it in the square. It is very fine, glowing like
+    gold from the mint. The king sits his charger well, and gazes
+    majestically at nothing in particular: still, one must be a
+    little critical, and we imagine the horse's tail is not quite
+    right. But then is not the whisk of a tail in bronze almost
+    impossible to conceive of? If the artist suffers no severer
+    censure than that, he will probably call himself a happy man.
+    The inscription on the pedestal of the statue reads, "From his
+    grateful people." High and low have contributed to it, and
+    gladly. "That was a man!" says our driver. He was a soldier
+    under him, and knows. And in fact the old king seems to have
+    been always doing something for the country, so that the
+    gratitude is not without a cause. The inhabitants of Cannstatt
+    have special reason to remember him kindly: he himself was
+    grateful to them and showed it. In the troublous times of 1848
+    he was sadly in need of money: Ludwigsburg (another satellite
+    of Stuttgart) refused it, while Cannstatt came up to the mark
+    handsomely. The royal creditor never forgot that. He instituted
+    the <i>Volksfest</i> as a sort of memorial, and Cannstatt is
+    proud and prosperous, while Ludwigsburg is like a city of the
+    dead. So the coachman affirms; and once conversation is opened
+    between us it flows without intermission. His head is over his
+    shoulder all the way as we roll back to the city under the
+    beautiful trees of the palace grounds. "If the old king had
+    been living, Würtemberg would never have joined in the last
+    war: he would have told Prussia to fight it out by herself."
+    Apropos of the war, we ask what he thinks of Bismarck. He
+    evidently thinks a great deal of him, though not perhaps in the
+    generally accepted sense of that expression. He states as a
+    fact that there <i>are</i> limits, leaving it to us to
+    understand that the chancellor of the empire has overstepped
+    them. He declares further that a Prussian, and especially a
+    Berliner, is always to him an obnoxious member of society
+    through his insisting on knowing everything (except his own
+    place) better than anybody else. "Now, there was the Prussian
+    general before this last one," he continues, changing from
+    politics to court-gossip (naturally, since 1870, military
+    matters in Würtemberg flourish under Prussian auspices): "the
+    first ball he went to at the palace he asked the queen to
+    dance! <i>Our</i> queen!! And then he took his whole family,
+    and they sat in chairs that never were meant for them, so that
+    the king had to say to him next day, "Mr. General, first come
+    I, and then my ministers, and then this one, and then that one,
+    and <i>then</i> you." He went back to Berlin soon after. It is
+    pleasanter to sit one's self down where one doesn't belong than
+    to be set down by somebody else." Our driver chuckles, and then
+    bursts out afresh, "Asking the <i>queen</i> to dance!" He
+    certainly has perfect faith in his own stories.</p>
+
+    <p>We saw the successor of that presumptuous military man next
+    day among the greater and lesser lights that revolve around the
+    throne of Würtemberg. We ourselves were stationary, crowded
+    into the foremost of the tiers of seats that rose surrounding
+    the immense enclosure, and in the best place for observation,
+    close by the royal pavilion. The hills, bright in the sun and
+    velvet in shadow, made a natural amphitheatre beyond, a little
+    church with its pretty tower looked picturesquely down from a
+    neighboring <span class="pagenum"><a name="page252"
+       id="page252"></a>[pg 252]</span> height, and the whole place
+       was gay with flags and branches, glittering uniforms and
+       gorgeous liveries. We were to see the <i>hohe
+       Herrschaften</i> come in at the farthest entrance and drive
+       around directly before our seats. As the trumpets flourish
+       and the first magnificence sweeps by we hear all about us,
+       "The princess Vera," and "No, the duchess of Uhra," and "Is
+       it?" "Isn't it?" "Which is it?" till we finally settle down
+       to the serene conclusion that it is either one or the other.
+       There is no mistaking the queen, however, with the
+       outriders, six superb black horses and postilions in scarlet
+       and gold. The Majesty herself looks pale and resigned,
+       bending to the right and left in answer to the bows and
+       <i>hochs.</i> Our neighbors "the Weimars" come in full
+       force. A superfluous prince of that family appears to have
+       drifted to these regions, and makes our street aristocratic
+       for us. Young Weimar looks uncommonly well in his hussar
+       uniform, and the old prince and his wife and daughter are
+       resplendent. We met them later that same day in town, but
+       they had taken off their best clothes, and truth compels us
+       sadly to admit that we should hardly have known them.</p>
+
+    <p>In the course of time, after various false alarms on our
+    part, the band confidently strikes up "God Save the King!" and
+    there is a flashing and prancing in the distance that creates a
+    great stir. The citizen guard, a stately body of burghers,
+    rides out with the king on this day of all the year, and comes
+    caracoling by in fine style, he in the midst bowing and
+    smiling. And now, after the <i>Herrschaften&mdash;hohe</i> and
+    <i>höchste</i>&mdash;come the animals. First, horses haughtily
+    stepping, and then splendid bulls with wreaths on their horns
+    and garlands round their&mdash;waists shall we say?&mdash;are
+    led before the king, standing at the foot of the steps and
+    handing the prizes to the farmers, who present themselves,
+    ducking and scraping. It seems a shame to tie up the creatures'
+    legs so, and put rings through their noses: some have even a
+    cloth bound over their heads; and if all these precautionary
+    measures are necessary, it ought to be a relief when the
+    procession of mild cows begins, They look out amiably from
+    under the floral crowns that have slipped low on their brows,
+    or turn with half-conscious pride to the handsome little calves
+    that trot beside them. The sheep, seeking to attract too early
+    the notice of royalty, dash out in a flock, and are driven back
+    with jeering and hooting, as they deserve to be. Then the pigs
+    stagger by: their garlands are excessively unbecoming. Such of
+    the family of swine as are too young to stagger are wheeled in
+    handcarts in the rear; and so the ceremonies are closed, except
+    for a couple of races which take place immediately, and with no
+    great éclat. The burgher races these are called, while on the
+    third and last day are the officers' races. The rain prevented
+    our attending them, and we consoled ourselves, hearing it
+    intimated by those who had been at Ascot and Longchamps that we
+    had not lost a great deal.</p>
+
+    <p class="author">G.H.P.</p>
+
+    <h4>A PAIR OF WHEELS AND AN OLD PARASOL.</h4>
+
+    <p>The threads from which the tissue of history is being woven
+    are ever in unceasing and rapid motion in the hands of the
+    Fates. But these deities for the most part love to work unseen,
+    like the bees. It is only when the spinning is going on with
+    exceptional rapidity and vigor that the movements of the
+    threads and the characteristics of the operation can be
+    observed on the surface of social life, Such is the case in
+    these days at Rome, and it is not necessary to watch the
+    actions of governments or listen to the discussions of
+    legislative chambers in order to assure one's self of the fact.
+    One cannot walk the streets without having the phenomena which
+    are the outward and visible signs of it thrust in a thousand
+    ways on the observation of our senses. The other day I read a
+    whole chapter of contemporary history compressed into the
+    appearance of a pair of wheels engaged in their ordinary daily
+    duty in the streets. It was in that central and crowded part of
+    the city which is between the church of the Gesù and the
+    Farnese palace, a labyrinth of tortuous
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page253"
+       id="page253"></a>[pg 253]</span> streets and lanes, not
+       often visited by foreigners unless when bent on some special
+       expedition of sight-seeing. There are no sidewalks for
+       foot-passengers in these streets. They are narrow, very
+       tortuous and very crowded. Foot-passengers and vehicles of
+       all sorts find their way along as best they may in one
+       confused mass. It was there I saw the historic pair of
+       wheels in question. They were attached to the barrow of a
+       coster-monger, who was retailing a stock of onions, carrots
+       and "cavolo Romano" which he had just purchased at the
+       neighboring market of the "Campo de' Fiori." His wares, I
+       fear, had been selected from the refuse of the market, and
+       he and his barrow were in a state of dilapidated shabbiness
+       that matched his stock in trade. But not so the wheels on
+       which his barrow was supported. They were wheels of the most
+       gorgeous description. The spokes and the circumference were
+       painted of the most brilliant scarlet, and the entire nave
+       was gilded so as to have the appearance of a solid mass of
+       gold. It is impossible to imagine anything more
+       <i>bizarre</i> than the effect of these magnificent wheels
+       doing the work of carrying such an equipage. Nevertheless,
+       the apparition seemed to attract very little attention in
+       the crowded street. The grand scarlet and gilded wheels
+       flamed along among the crowd of shabby men and shabby
+       vehicles with their load of onions and cabbages, and
+       scarcely anybody turned his head to stare at them. I suppose
+       the denizens of the district were used to the apparition of
+       them. To me they looked as if they had been the originals
+       from which Guido Reni painted those of the car in which he
+       has placed the celebrated Aurora of his world-famous fresco.
+       They were solidly and heavily built wheels&mdash;very
+       barbarous an English carriage-builder would have considered
+       them in their heavy and clumsy magnificence&mdash;but they
+       were very gorgeous. What could be the meaning of their
+       appearance in public under such circumstances? I was walking
+       with an Italian friend at the time, who saw my state of
+       amazement at so strange a phenomenon, and explained it all
+       by a single remark.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes," said he, "there go a pair of His Eminence's wheels.
+    They are sharing the fortunes of their late master in a manner
+    that is at once dramatic and historical."</p>
+
+    <p>The wheels from a cardinal's carriage! Of course they were.
+    How was it possible that such wheels should be mistaken for any
+    other in the world? A few years ago, when pope and cardinals
+    had not yet suffered the horrible eclipse which has overtaken
+    them, one of the most notable features of the Roman streets and
+    suburban roads used to consist of the carriages of the members
+    of the Sacred College taking their diurnal drive. It was not
+    etiquette for a cardinal to walk in the streets, or indeed
+    anywhere else, without his carriage following him. There was no
+    mistaking these barbarously gorgeous vehicles. They were all
+    exactly like each other, and unlike any other carriages to be
+    seen in the nineteenth century&mdash;heavy, clumsy, coarsely
+    built and gorgeously painted of the most flaming scarlet, and
+    largely gilded. They were drawn by long-tailed black horses
+    covered with heavy harness richly plated with silver, or
+    something that looked like it, and driven by a coachman whose
+    livery, always as shabby as magnificent, was as heavily laden
+    with huge masses of worsted lace of the kind that used to be
+    placed on carriage-linings some five-and-twenty years ago. Two
+    similarly bedizened footmen always stood on the monkey-board at
+    the rear, who descended and walked behind His Eminence and his
+    chaplain when the cardinal left his carriage to get his
+    constitutional. Ichabod! Ichabod! The glory has departed! Such
+    cavalcades are no longer to be seen crawling along the Via
+    Appia, or following His Eminence on a fine and sunny afternoon
+    about four o'clock as he walks on the footpath between the
+    Porta Pia and the Basilica of St. Agnes in search of an
+    appetite for his dinner. The world will never see such
+    carriages and such servants any more. <i>Fuit Ilium!</i> I
+    thought of the old lines on the "high&mdash;mettled racer," and
+    of "imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay, stopping a hole to
+    keep the wind away." To see such
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page254"
+       id="page254"></a>[pg 254]</span> splendor reduced to the
+       service of such vile uses! Yes, as my Italian friend said,
+       "There go the cardinal's wheels," and it is impossible not
+       to feel sure that the phenomenon is symbolical of the way
+       the cardinal is going himself. When an institution, a
+       dignity, a social arrangement of any sort, has grown to be
+       purely ornamental, has become so splendid that its splendor
+       has come to be the essence of it, it will no longer be able
+       to exist shorn of its splendor, however much it may in its
+       origin have been adapted for use rather than for show. The
+       wheels were heavy, cumbrous and ill put together; they were
+       not well adapted for the costermonger's purpose, and will
+       probably fall to pieces before long. Their fate is a type of
+       that of their once master. That ornamental individual, shorn
+       of his ornamental character, is useless. His <i>raison
+       d'être</i> is gone as entirely as Othello's occupation was.
+       And it will probably not be long before the fate of the
+       cardinal's wheels overtakes the cardinal himself.</p>
+
+    <p>The second little bit of street incident which recently
+    occurred to me was in itself less striking, but seemed to me to
+    symbolize changes of yet higher moment and wider significance.
+    This time what I saw was in the Ghetto. Many of my readers
+    probably know what the Ghetto at Rome is, but untraveled
+    stayers-at-home may very excusably never have heard of it. The
+    Ghetto is the Jews' quarter in Rome&mdash;the district in which
+    they were for many generations compelled to reside and to be
+    locked in by night, and where from habit the greater part,
+    especially of the poorer members of the Jewish community, still
+    live. As will be easily believed, it is the worst and most
+    wretched quarter of the city&mdash;the lowest physically as
+    well as morally&mdash;and inundated with tolerable certainty
+    every year by the rising of the Tiber. The dilapidated and
+    filthy streets of the other parts of old papal Rome used to
+    look clean and spruce by comparison with the lurid and darksome
+    dens of the Ghetto. There are Ghettos in London&mdash;streets
+    where the children of Israel congregate, not in obedience to
+    any law old or new, but drawn together by mutual attraction and
+    similarity of occupation. And the occupations there are very
+    much of the same nature as those pursued in the Ghetto of
+    Rome&mdash;the buying and selling of old clothes and
+    second-hand property of all sorts, the preparation and
+    distribution of fried fish, and here and there a little usury.
+    But the <i>genius loci</i> here impresses on the trade in
+    discarded odds and ends a peculiar character of its own. A much
+    larger number of old pictures figure among the hoards of
+    useless "property" than would be the case elsewhere. The
+    constant decay of noble and once wealthy families furnishes to
+    the second-hand market a much more abundant supply of the
+    remains of articles that were once rich and rare in their
+    day&mdash;old damask hangings torn from walls that have
+    witnessed the princely revelry of many a generation; rich
+    brocades and stuffs that have made part of the moving pageant
+    in the same saloons; lace of the finest and rarest from the
+    vestments of deceased prelates, whose heirs, as regards such
+    property, have probably been their serving-men; purple and
+    scarlet articles from the wardrobes of cardinals and princes of
+    the Church; and odds and ends of various sorts widely different
+    in kind from aught that could be found in similar repositories
+    in other cities. And another specialty of the Roman Ghetto is
+    that it is not altogether easy to obtain a sight of the
+    miscellaneous treasures of this rag-fair. Partly because the
+    low-lying and narrow lanes of the Ghetto are too murky and
+    filthy to permit of the advantageous exposure of the
+    merchandise in question; partly, probably, from an habitual
+    consciousness on the part of the dealers that the details of
+    their traffic in all its particulars are not of a nature to be
+    safely submitted to the public eye; partly from that
+    secretiveness which is the natural result of living for many
+    generations from father to son under the tyranny of an alien
+    race, whose bitterly hostile prejudices were but little
+    restrained by law or justice; and partly also, no doubt, from
+    the genuine Roman laziness, which in its perfection is capable
+    of overriding even Jewish keenness of trade,&mdash;the Jew
+    brokers <span class="pagenum"><a name="page255"
+       id="page255"></a>[pg 255]</span> of the Ghetto are often
+       unwilling to show their hidden stores to the first comer.
+       Some amount of diplomacy and some show of the probability of
+       effecting an advantageous deal must be had recourse to in
+       order to attain the purpose of the explorer.</p>
+
+    <p>On the recent occasion to which I have referred these
+    difficulties had been overcome, and I had made my way into the
+    interior of one of the dens I have described in the company of
+    a lady friend who is a confirmed and irreclaimable lace-hunter,
+    and who in pursuit of her game would have confronted worse
+    obstacles than any that we had to encounter. For, in truth, the
+    exterior appearance and the entrance-chambers are the worst
+    part of the Ghetto dwellings. One is curiously reminded of the
+    old mediæval stories of Jewish dwellings, where the utmost
+    squalor and poverty of exterior was a mere blind for an
+    interior gorgeous with every manifestation of wealth and
+    luxury. I will not say that much of the latter is to be found
+    in the dwellings of the Ghetto, but a degree of comfortable
+    decency and indications of the possession of capital may be met
+    with which the exterior appearances would not have led one to
+    anticipate. Well, we had reached the third floor of one of
+    these sinister-looking abodes, conducted by a fat old Jewess
+    with a pair of huge black eyes, a large smooth face as yellow
+    as a guinea, and a vast development of bust clad in dirty white
+    wrappers of some sort. A door on the landing-place jealously
+    locked with two huge keys admitted us into a suite of three
+    good-sized rooms crammed from floor to ceiling with a
+    collection of articles more heterogeneous than can easily be
+    conceived&mdash;far more so than can be described.</p>
+
+    <p>Those who have ever accompanied a lady lace-hunter when she
+    has struck a promising trail know that the business in hand is
+    likely to be a somewhat long one. My companion on the present
+    occasion very soon convinced the Jewess that she knew quite as
+    much about the matter as she, the dealer, did. But I presume
+    that some of the old yellow stores produced were "the real
+    thing;" for my friend and the old Jewess soon became immersed
+    in an eager and, as it seemed to me interminable, discussion as
+    to qualities, condition and values. Meantime, I had to amuse
+    myself as best I might by looking at the multifarious objects.
+    I must content myself with mentioning one article, the
+    appearance of which in such a place struck me as strange and
+    not a little significant. It was simply an old parasol, very
+    much faded and a little tattered, but not such a parasol as
+    your fair hands ever carried, my dear madam, nor such as the
+    once equally fair hands of any generation of your ancestors
+    ever carried. The article in question was more like the shelter
+    which we see represented in Chinese paintings as carried over
+    the heads of persons of high rank among the Celestials. It was
+    very large, not much curved into the shape of a dome when
+    expanded, very clumsily and coarsely put together, but of
+    gorgeous magnificence of material. It was made of a very thick
+    and rich damask silk, additionally ornamented by embroidery in
+    gold and silver thread, and the handle and points of the
+    supports were richly gilt. In a word, I perceived at once, not
+    being a novice in such matters, that the article before me was
+    one of the canopies used for holding over the "Host" when the
+    holy sacrament is carried by the priest through the streets to
+    a dying person. It needs but a moment's reflection on the Roman
+    Catholic theory of the sacrament of the "Last Supper" to be
+    aware of the extremely sacred nature of the uses to which this
+    parasol had been put, and of the associations connected with
+    it. Nevertheless, I found this bit of sacred church property in
+    the hands of a Jew broker, exposed to sale for a few francs to
+    the first comer, heretic, scoffer or infidel, that might take a
+    fancy to buy it. This would hardly have been the case when the
+    pope was absolute master of Rome and of all in it. The thing
+    could not have happened save by the dishonesty and cynical
+    disbelief of some priest, and indeed probably of more than one.
+    And, upon the whole, it struck me as a second curious
+    indication of the somewhat breakneck
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page256"
+       id="page256"></a>[pg 256]</span> speed with which the
+       threads of history are spinning themselves in these days and
+       in these latitudes.</p>
+
+    <p class="author">T.A.T.</p>
+
+    <h4>MEDICAL EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES.</h4>
+
+    <p>A great deal of discussion has recently taken place on the
+    subject of medical education in the United States. To a
+    foreigner, or to one not acquainted with the influences that
+    have led to and have kept up this discussion, it might seem to
+    be the result of a spontaneous outburst of popular feeling,
+    earnestly demanding much-needed progress. Really, however, the
+    very reverse is the case; and the revolutionists are those
+    whose <i>kind</i> and <i>sympathetic</i> interest in the
+    welfare of the community is prompted solely by selfish
+    considerations. The changes urged by these self-condemning
+    philanthropists are not demanded by the medical profession nor
+    by the public; neither have they been, nor will they be,
+    sustained by both or by either. This assertion is clearly
+    proved by the experience of the University of Pennsylvania, In
+    1846 the American Medical Association recommended to all
+    medical colleges certain changes and improvements in their
+    courses of instruction. In consequence of this recommendation
+    the University of Pennsylvania extended its session to six
+    months: not a <i>single medical college in the country
+    followed</i> its progressive lead, and after continuing the
+    experiment for six years at great pecuniary loss, it was
+    reluctantly obliged to retrace its steps, and to return to the
+    old standard as to length of session. During the period of this
+    advance the classes of the University fell off greatly, and the
+    classes of other medical schools correspondingly increased.
+    Even medical men sent their sons to other medical schools, to
+    save the time and money necessary for the longer course.
+    Indeed, medical men, as a rule, have sought to evade the
+    restrictions as to length of time of study, etc. more than any
+    other class; and the statement, that the "student usually dates
+    his medical studies from the time he buys his first
+    <i>Chemistry</i>" applies more frequently to the sons of
+    <i>physicians</i> than to any others. Hence, I declare that
+    these proposed changes are not demanded by the medical
+    profession nor by the public.</p>
+
+    <p>The writer of a recent article in <i>Lippincott's
+    Magazine</i> (Dr. H.C. Wood) on "Medical Education in the
+    United States" seems to have been so lost in admiration at the
+    methods of instruction followed in European medical colleges as
+    to be utterly blind to the good in the system of medical
+    education as it exists in this country&mdash;a system the
+    <i>necessary</i> result of our political, social, financial and
+    territorial conditions; a system which, though in the abstract
+    may not be the best, is certainly, judging from its results,
+    the best <i>possible</i> under our peculiar circumstances. This
+    much abused system of medical education (only greatly improved
+    in its extent and thoroughness&mdash;improvements developed by
+    the constant advances in knowledge) is the same system which
+    has produced the great medical men of the United States during
+    the past seventy-five years&mdash;medical practitioners whose
+    success has been surpassed by none in Europe; surgeons whose
+    skill has been, and is, world-wide in reputation; authors whose
+    works are standard authorities everywhere. It is the same
+    system of medical instruction&mdash;I quote verbatim (italics
+    mine) from this article that holds it up to scorn&mdash;which
+    "accomplished such <i>splendid results</i> during the late
+    rebellion." The writer says: "The great resources of the
+    medical profession were proved during the civil war, when there
+    was created in a few months a service which for magnitude and
+    efficiency has rarely if ever been equaled. Indeed, military
+    medicine was raised by it to a point <i>never reached before
+    that time in Europe</i> and the results achieved have, in many
+    points, <i>worked a revolution in science</i>." After this
+    frank declaration of the inestimable value and glorious results
+    of American medical education, the writer draws the
+    <i>logical</i>(?) sequence that it (American medical education)
+    is responsible for a case of most heartrending malpractice,
+    which he relates, compared to which the Japanese hari-kari were
+    merciful mildness, and approaching more nearly the tortures by
+    crucifixion as administered by this same <i>kind-hearted</i>
+    people. With about as much reason and justice might he conclude
+    that the <i>American system</i> of Sunday-school education is
+    lamentably inferior to that of Great Britain, <i>because</i>(!)
+    Jesse Pomeroy was a possibility in that most respectable town
+    of Boston.</p>
+
+    <p>Dr. Wood alludes to the ignorance of the American medical
+    student, and makes a statement "not founded on the authority of
+    official publication," in which he endeavors to show that from
+    "six to ten per cent." of American medical students have an
+    ignorance of vulgar fractions and rudimentary astronomy that
+    would exclude them from an ordinary infant-school. Every one
+    familiar with the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page257"
+       id="page257"></a>[pg 257]</span> students attending our
+       first-class American medical colleges knows perfectly well
+       that in origin and in culture they compare favorably with
+       the young men engaged in the study of law and divinity, or
+       with those entering upon mercantile or manufacturing
+       pursuits. True, there are some imperfectly educated, but
+       certainly not "six or ten per cent." destitute of that
+       knowledge taught even in <i>American</i> infant-schools, and
+       without knowing, and without the statement "being founded on
+       the authority of any official publication," I <i>infer</i>
+       that in <i>Europe</i>, owing to their "better methods,"
+       similar knowledge is communicated to the average European
+       child many months <i>before its birth</i>.</p>
+
+    <p>Next follows a comment on the poverty of the American
+    medical student. Dr. Wood says: "Even worse than this, however,
+    is the fact that the summer between the winter courses is often
+    not spent in study, but in idleness, or, not rarely, in
+    acquiring in the school-room or harvest-field the pecuniary
+    means of spending the subsequent winter in the city." Alas!
+    this <i>is</i> too true. Providence seems to have ordained that
+    our young <i>American</i> doctors are not always reared in the
+    lap of luxury and wealth as the fittest preparation for the
+    trials, hardships and self-denials of their future lives. It is
+    also true that some <i>other</i> young American professional
+    men have been compelled "in the school-room or harvest-field"
+    to acquire the means to prosecute their professional studies.
+    Daniel Webster, the son of a New England farmer, taught school
+    at Fryeburg, Maine, "upon a salary of about one dollar per
+    diem." "His salary was all saved ... as a fund for his <i>own
+    professional</i> education and to help his brother through
+    college." "During his residence at Fryeburg, Mr. Webster
+    borrowed (he was too poor to buy) Blackstone's
+    <i>Commentaries</i>." Mr. Webster's great rival, Henry Clay,
+    also was compelled to resort to the "school-room and
+    harvest-field to obtain the pecuniary means," etc. etc. etc.
+    The son of the poor widow with seven children "applied himself
+    to the labor of the field with alacrity and diligence;" "and
+    there yet live those who remember to have seen him oftentimes
+    riding his sorry horse, with a rope bridle, no saddle, and a
+    bag of grain." "By the familiar name of the Mill-boy of the
+    Slashes do these men ... perpetuate the remembrance of his
+    lowly yet dutiful and unrepining employments." American
+    biography is so filled with similar instances, showing how the
+    great characters of her great men acquired their development
+    and strength in the stern gymnasium of poverty, even in "the
+    school-room and harvest-field," that I could fill volumes with
+    the glowing records. The youngest American school-boy
+    recognizes Abraham Lincoln and Henry Wilson in this
+    <i>American</i> galaxy. Whose heart has not been stirred by the
+    life-story of the great Hugh Miller, the stonecutter's pick
+    earning for him humble means, thereby enabling him to acquire
+    that learning which made his name a household word even in
+    America. Truth, then, as I have remarked, obliges me to admit
+    that we have in our medical colleges some young men who labor
+    "in harvest-fields and school-rooms" in order that they may
+    honorably pay their way, rather than eat the bread or accept
+    the gratuities of pauperism.</p>
+
+    <p>Last March there graduated at the medical department of the
+    University of Pennsylvania one of these self-supporting young
+    men. He was the son of a missionary clergyman: the father was
+    poor in pocket, but the son was not poor in spirit. During the
+    interval between his winter courses of lectures, rather than be
+    a burden to his father, rather than accept gratuitous
+    instruction from the school, he went into the coal regions of
+    Pennsylvania and worked in a coal-mine, as a common miner, to
+    procure funds to enable him to complete his professional
+    studies; and, <i>strange</i> as it may seem, this young miner
+    passed an excellent examination, and received the unanimous
+    vote of the medical faculty for his degree. I mention this
+    case, but every year there are several similar; and we always
+    find that the school-teachers and miners are by no means at the
+    foot of the graduating class.</p>
+
+    <p>Concerning clinical teaching, we have the following
+    statement: "The clinical teaching in an American hospital is
+    comprised in the following routine: Once or twice a week, from
+    one to five hundred men being congregated in an amphitheatre,
+    the professor lectures upon a case brought into the arena,
+    perhaps operates, and when the hour has expired the class is
+    dismissed. Evidently, under such circumstances there cannot be
+    the training of the senses, the acquiring of a knowledge of the
+    hourly play of symptoms of disease and of familiarity with the
+    proper handling of the sick and wounded, which is of such vital
+    importance, and which can be the outcome only of daily contact
+    with patients." What can the writer of this sentence mean?
+    Certainly, no <span class="pagenum"><a name="page258"
+       id="page258"></a>[pg 258]</span> one knows better than he
+       does that such <i>is not</i> the practice in the hospital of
+       the University of Pennsylvania, in Bellevue and in many
+       other large hospitals, where clinics and dispensary services
+       are held for <i>several hours daily</i> throughout the year,
+       and where the student has furnished him abundant
+       opportunities four "acquiring a knowledge of the ...
+       symptoms of disease, ... of handling the sick and wounded,"
+       etc. etc. That the American medical student profits by these
+       opportunities, and learns his clinic lessons well, is proved
+       by the unexpected and evidently unintended testimony which
+       occurs toward the close of the article, where Dr. Wood says,
+       "The great resources of the medical profession in America
+       were proved during the civil war, when there was created in
+       a <i>few months</i> a service which for <i>magnitude</i> and
+       <i>efficiency</i> has <i>rarefy if ever been equaled</i>.
+       Indeed, military medicine was raised by it to a point
+       <i>never reached before</i> that time <i>in Europe</i>, and
+       the results achieved have in many points worked a
+       <i>revolution in science</i>." The italics in this quotation
+       are mine, as they also are in those which follow.</p>
+
+    <p>But (says the article under review) "the largest proportion
+    of our prominent physicians have educated themselves after
+    graduation." As if this were an extraordinary or unusual
+    circumstance! Certainly, they have; and so have all prominent
+    men in all professions and all pursuits of life, in every age
+    and every country, not even excepting the much-lauded men of
+    Great Britain and the continent of Europe. What young lawyer is
+    entrusted with an important cause immediately after admission
+    to the Bar? And as the young doctor (according to the aforesaid
+    showing) "gains his first practical knowledge while serving as
+    a hospital resident, under the supervision of experienced men,"
+    so the young lawyer, <i>even in Great Britain</i>, must gain
+    <i>his</i> first practical knowledge by constant attention at
+    the courts, and by diligently following the proceedings of his
+    preceptor's and other offices. Even the young clergyman, whose
+    business it is to save <i>souls</i>, has to do very much as the
+    young doctor does, and, like him, is often "thrown at once on
+    his own resources, gaining his experience without supervision,
+    and at the <i>expense</i> of the <i>poorer classes</i>, who
+    <i>naturally</i> fall to his charge, and whose ignorance
+    precludes them from an even approximately correct estimate of"
+    his fitness. "It is one of the saddest features of our system
+    that the famed skill of our best" <i>(clergymen)</i> "should so
+    often be acquired at such a cost."</p>
+
+    <p>What can be more unphilosophical and illogical than to
+    compare the young doctor, or any other young professional man,
+    to a new piece of machinery, fresh from the manufactory,
+    complete and perfect in all its parts? And yet something like
+    this is <i>attempted</i> in the article before us. Even as
+    Minerva sprang from the brain of Jove the complete and perfect
+    goddess of learning, so would our Utopian writer have the young
+    doctors to come from the brains of their medical professors
+    complete and perfect; only, if his idea be correct, their
+    medical professors have so little brains that the annual
+    graduating medical classes of the United States would be
+    immediately reduced from the frightful army of three thousand
+    "legalized murderers" to the comparatively small and easily
+    counted number of <i>one graduate</i> (of course, springing
+    from one head). No; the young doctor, at graduation, cannot be
+    compared to a new, complete and perfect machine fresh from the
+    manufactory; rather, let him be compared to the young marsupial
+    creature at birth, extremely rudimentary, whose natural, and
+    hence fittest, place is the parental pouch, but which in due
+    time becomes the vigorous and well-developed specimen. I
+    suppose, if I compare the young doctor to the young marsupial,
+    I should also say that <i>his</i> protecting parental pouch, in
+    which he acquires growth and vigor, is the hospital where he
+    goes after graduation, or the practice which he sees under his
+    preceptor's supervision.</p>
+
+    <p>The article continues: "The remarks which follow do not
+    apply to the medical department of Harvard College or to <i>one
+    or two other schools</i>" (the italics are mine); and farther
+    on it continues: "In other words, Harvard has copied the
+    European plan of medical teaching in some of its essential
+    features, and as a consequence its medical diploma is the
+    <i>only one</i> issued by <i>any prominent medical American</i>
+    college which is a <i>guarantee</i> that its possessor has been
+    well educated in the science and practice of medicine." Where
+    can we find meekness and modesty like this?&mdash;modesty as
+    becoming as it is unexpected and surprising, seeing that the
+    writer fills <i>two</i> professorships in the University of
+    Pennsylvania, Does he hang his head so low in his&mdash;I was
+    about to say <i>singular</i>&mdash;self-abasement (but,
+    considering, the <i>two</i> professorships, I suppose I should
+    say <i>doubled</i> self-abasement) that he cannot see? or are
+    his eyes so blinded by the effulgence of
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page259"
+       id="page259"></a>[pg 259]</span> "Harvard" and "European"
+       plans that he fails to recognize and appreciate the immense
+       advantages offered by his own home institutions? I do not
+       propose to make any invidious remarks concerning Harvard,
+       but I maintain that an <i>honest</i> and <i>just</i>
+       comparison of the schools, of their requirements, of the
+       character of their teachings and the facilities they furnish
+       their students, <i>must</i> show that modesty alone
+       prevented Professor "H.C. Wood, Jr., M.D.," also excepting
+       from his sweeping denunciations the two great schools of
+       Philadelphia, though I only speak for and defend the medical
+       department of the University of Pennsylvania from an attack
+       unjust, uncalled-for and untrue.</p>
+
+    <p class="author">R.A.F. PENROSE.</p>
+    <hr />
+
+    <p>The party opposed to any reforms in medical education has,
+    of course, a right to be heard, and Dr. Penrose is well
+    entitled to represent it both by his position and by the
+    evident heartiness with which he is prepared to defend the
+    existing system at every point. In impugning the motives of
+    those who have attacked it he lays himself open to an obvious
+    retort; but it is sufficient to remark that the contest is not
+    of a nature to call for or justify the use of personalities,
+    which could serve only to divert attention from the real
+    issues.</p>
+
+    <p>The arguments put forward by Dr. Penrose may be summarized
+    as follows: 1st, that the proposed changes are not demanded
+    either by the public or by the profession; 2d, that the present
+    system is the best possible in a nation constituted like ours;
+    3d, that the preparatory education of our medical students is
+    equal to that of law or divinity students, or of young men
+    entering upon mercantile or manufacturing pursuits; 4th, that
+    in certain cases obstacles in the way of a regular and thorough
+    training have been overcome and success achieved in spite of
+    them; and 5th, that it is unavoidable and proper that medical
+    men, as well as members of other professions, should educate
+    themselves after graduation.</p>
+
+    <p>It will be observed that none of these arguments except the
+    last, which is based on a mere verbal ambiguity, touches the
+    two subjects discussed in Dr. Wood's article&mdash;namely, the
+    <i>need</i> of reform and the <i>methods</i> by which, if
+    practicable, it is to be effected. Dr. Penrose does not venture
+    to assert that the existing system is perfect, or to deny that
+    the suggested changes are in the nature of improvements. What
+    he wishes us to believe is that the system, whatever its
+    defects, is as good a one as Americans have a right to demand,
+    and that it is so closely interwoven with our political and
+    social institutions as to admit of no separate handling.
+    Similar arguments are frequently urged against the desire to
+    raise the standard and widen the avenues of the "higher
+    education." We are thus taught to regard ourselves as a poor
+    and struggling nation with no claim to the possession of
+    intellectual luxuries, or as having bound ourselves to forego
+    any aspirations to an equality with other nations in respect of
+    culture when we secured the advantages of popular government
+    and its social concomitants. It would seem, however, to be a
+    sounder, as it is certainly a more gratifying belief, that
+    precisely because we have attained these advantages it will be
+    easier for us to appropriate all the benefits which
+    civilization has to offer&mdash;possible for us to make more
+    rapid strides than have been made by other nations, impeded by
+    a diversity of interests and conflicts between the government
+    and the people. No doubt the comparative youthfulness of the
+    nation will account for our backward condition in certain
+    respects; but surely it is time to abandon this and every
+    similar plea as an argument against any attempt at
+    progress.</p>
+
+    <p>We have not space, and for the reasons indicated we see no
+    necessity, to discuss Dr. Penrose's positions in detail. It
+    will be sufficient to notice generally what seems to us their
+    inherent weakness. His assertion that no changes are <i>now</i>
+    demanded by the public or the profession is, he thinks,
+    "clearly proved" by the fact that thirty years ago some that
+    were introduced in the University of Pennsylvania at the
+    suggestion of the American Medical Association ended in
+    failure. But what this experience really proves is, that the
+    defects of the system were even then admitted, while the
+    remedies are still to be applied. At Harvard
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page260"
+       id="page260"></a>[pg 260]</span> this has been done; and the
+       question for other medical schools is whether they are to
+       follow the example or to be deterred by a
+       bugbear&mdash;whether, for example, the University of
+       Pennsylvania, after raising her scientific and art
+       departments to a higher level, shall be content to let her
+       medical school remain stationary. It is the opinion of
+       intelligent physicians who are not parties to this
+       controversy that the experiment which failed in 1846 would
+       succeed now. The new plan adopted at Harvard, which exacts
+       three years of study, and embraces lectures, recitations,
+       clinical conferences and written examinations of the most
+       stringent character, has, we are informed, attracted a class
+       of very superior men. Compared with the effort made here in
+       1846, this change may be described as a revolution, and it
+       has proved a success.</p>
+
+    <p>We are at a loss to understand what Dr. Penrose wishes to
+    prove by his citation of cases in which eminence has been
+    reached&mdash;chiefly, it is to be noticed, in politics or the
+    law&mdash;by persons who have had insufficient opportunities
+    for study. If the disadvantage was imaginary, where was the
+    merit of overcoming it? If it was real, as most people would
+    admit, what is the objection to insisting on it as such? In the
+    great majority of cases it is <i>not</i> overcome, and the
+    result is, that the country is overstocked with men engaged in
+    the practice of professions for which they are inadequately
+    qualified. As to the skill that is gained by practice, the ripe
+    knowledge that may result from experience, this cannot without
+    a confusion of terms be described as "education." It will in
+    general be most surely and rapidly acquired by those who have
+    received the best training, and the great object of our higher
+    educational institutions should be to provide such
+    training&mdash;not, by maintaining a low standard, to
+    facilitate the efforts of those who, from whatever cause, would
+    find it difficult to meet the demands of a higher one. Such
+    persons may have a claim to encouragement and assistance in
+    their endeavors to reach the mark; but they have no right to
+    expect that the distance shall be regulated to suit their
+    convenience.</p>
+
+    <p>Dr. Wood's admissions in regard to the excellence of the
+    army medical service during the war are seized upon with
+    natural exultation by his opponent, who draws from them a
+    legitimate inference in favor of the general status of medical
+    skill and knowledge throughout the country. If Dr. Wood really
+    intended to say&mdash;what his language, we confess, would seem
+    to imply&mdash;that the service attained its high state of
+    efficiency in a few months, we do not well see how he is to
+    resist the conclusion thus pressed upon him. But we conceive
+    the truth to be that either his phraseology or his recollection
+    of the facts was at fault. It is well known that at the
+    beginning of the war it was impossible to find competent
+    surgeons in anything like the number that was needed, and that
+    the examining boards were consequently forced to be
+    ridiculously lenient. We know of an able surgeon who after a
+    battle found that he had not a single assistant in his corps
+    who could be trusted to perform an operation. This state of
+    matters was the direct result of the imperfect education given
+    in the schools. Not one man in ten who leaves them has ever
+    been practically exercised in operations on the cadaver, and
+    the proportion was still smaller before the war. It is easy
+    therefore to understand, while it would be painful to recall,
+    the circumstances under which the great bulk of our army
+    surgeons acquired the requisite proficiency. The ultimate
+    success of our medical service, like the final triumph of our
+    armies, was preceded by many woeful blunders and mishaps, and,
+    like that, was due in great measure to a lavish outlay which
+    would scarcely have been possible in any European war, and to
+    the general devotion and united efforts which drew out all the
+    resources of the country, of whatever kind, and directed them
+    to the furtherance of a single aim.</p>
+
+    <h3>OUR EARLY NEWSPAPERS.</h3>
+
+    <p>In looking over the contents of the old newspapers of this
+    country, of which there was a considerable number as early as
+    the year 1730, one is specially struck by the number of
+    advertisements of slave sales and of runaway slaves,
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page261"
+       id="page261"></a>[pg 261]</span> apprentices and servants.
+       The following are common examples:</p>
+
+    <p>"To be sold, a very likely Negro woman about 30 years of
+    Age, has been in this city about 10. She is a fine Cook, has
+    been brought up to all sorts of House Work, and speaks very
+    good English. She has had the small Pox, and has now a Young
+    Child. Enquire further concerning her and the Conditions of
+    Sale of Mary Kippen, or the Printer hereof."&mdash;<i>New York
+    Weekly Journal</i>, May 9, 1735.</p>
+
+    <p>"Just arrived from <i>Great Britain</i>, and are to be Sold
+    on board the Ship Alice and Elizabeth, Capt. <i>Paine</i>
+    Commander several likely <i>Welch</i> and <i>English</i>
+    Servant Men, most of them Tradesmen. Whoever inclines to
+    purchase any of them may agree with said Commander, or Mr.
+    <i>Thomas Noble</i>, Merchant, at Mr. Hazard's, in New York;
+    where also is to be Sold several Negro Girls and a Negro Boy,
+    and likewise good <i>Cheshire</i> Cheese."&mdash;<i>New York
+    Gazette</i>, Sept. 11, 1732.</p>
+
+    <p>Here is a notice from the same paper, date 1735, which shows
+    very clearly the position of the apprentice one hundred and
+    forty years ago:</p>
+
+    <p>"Run away on the 5th. Instant from John Bell of the city of
+    New York Carpenter, an Apprentice Boy named James Harding, aged
+    about 19 years, being a tall well-set Lad of a Fresh
+    Complexion, he wears a Wig, he is spley-footed and shuffles
+    with his feet as he Walks, has a Copper coloured Kersey Coat
+    with large flat white Mettle Buttons, a grey Duroy Coat lined
+    with Silk, it is pretty much faded by wearing, a broad blue
+    striped Waistcoat and Breeches and a pair of blue striped
+    Tickin Breeches, in warm weather he often bleeds at the nose."
+    Then follows the offer of forty shillings to any one who will
+    give information whereby his master, John Bell, can regain
+    possession of the runaway.</p>
+
+    <p>That the women of that time were strong-minded, or at least
+    that they were disposed to assist in the reformation of bad
+    husbands, is shown by the following from the same journal, date
+    December 31, 1733. The subject, or victim, was one William
+    Drinkwater, living near New York, who had proved quarrelsome
+    with his neighbors and abusive to his wife: "The good Women of
+    the Place took the Matter into Consideration and laid hold of
+    an Opportunity, to get him tied to a Cart, and there with Rods
+    belaboured him on his Back, till, in striveing to get away, he
+    pulled one of his Arms out of Joint, and then they unti'd him.
+    Mr. <i>Drinkwater</i> Complained to Sundrie Magistrates of this
+    useage, but all he got by it was to be Laughed at; Whereupon he
+    removed to New Milford where we hear he proves a good Neighhour
+    and a loving Husband. <i>A Remarkable Reformation ariseing from
+    the Justice of the good Women.</i>"</p>
+
+    <p>Another advertisement indicates a toilet article now out of
+    fashion:</p>
+
+    <p>"To be Sold by <i>Peter Lynch</i>, near Mr. <i>Rutgers</i>
+    Brewhouse, very good Orange Butter, it is excellent for
+    Gentlewomen to comb up their Hair with, it also cures
+    Children's sore Heads."</p>
+
+    <p>The next sounds quite as odd:</p>
+
+    <p>"<i>James Munden</i> Partner with <i>Thomas Butwell</i> from
+    London, Maketh Gentlewomens Stays and Childrens Coats in the
+    Newest Fashion, that Crooked Women and Children will appear
+    strait," Same paper, date February, 1735.</p>
+
+    <p>It is a curious fact that the deaths at that time, both in
+    the New York and New England papers, were announced not by the
+    names of the deceased, but by the churches to which they
+    belonged. For example: "Buried in the city last week,
+    <i>viz.</i>, Church of England 26, Dutch 24, Lutheran 2, French
+    1, Presbyterians 3. The number of Blacks we refer till Next
+    Week."&mdash;<i>New England Weekly Journal</i>, Nov. 1, 1731.
+    Sometimes the number is recorded as four or five, or even less:
+    therefore the record must be very imperfect, and there seems to
+    have been no notice taken of those who were not buried from any
+    church.</p>
+
+    <p class="author">
+    M.H.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page262"
+       id="page262"></a>[pg 262]</span>
+
+    <h2>LITERATURE OF THE DAY.</h2>
+
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>Dante and his Circle; with the Italian Poets preceding
+        him. Edited and translated in the original Metres by Dante
+        Gabriel Rossetti. Revised and rearranged edition, Boston:
+        Roberts Bros.</p>
+    </blockquote>
+
+    <p>Dante is so great a figure in Italian literature that he
+    hides from sight the host of minor poets who preceded him, and
+    throws his own contemporaries so into the shade that we are apt
+    to think that Italian poetry began with him, and that its
+    second exponent is Petrarch. Such a view is to be regretted,
+    not only because it overlooks much that is in itself valuable,
+    but because it attributes to a period of slow development a
+    phenomenal character. There were many poets worth listening to
+    before the great Florentine wrote the <i>New Life</i> or the
+    <i>Divine Comedy</i>, and many whom he listened to and praised,
+    although his prophetic foresight told him that he would one day
+    bear their glory from them.</p>
+
+    <p>It was to make us acquainted with these forgotten singers
+    that Mr. Rossetti wrote some years ago his charming book.
+    <i>The Early Italian Poets</i>, which, after being long out of
+    print, he now presents to us in a revised and rearranged
+    edition. The author's wish is not merely to give us a glimpse
+    of the quaint conceits of a school that continued in Italy the
+    waning influence of the Troubadours, but to open to us the
+    intimate social life of the literary men of that period as
+    reflected in their vague Platonic rhapsodies, their friendly
+    letters, their jests and quarrels, their joy and sadness.
+    Interwoven with all this are stately <i>canzoni</i>, and dainty
+    sonnets full of quaint conceits, like that wherein Jacopo da
+    Lentino (1250) sings <i>Of his Lady in Heaven</i>:</p>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>I have it in my heart to serve God so</p>
+
+            <p>That into Paradise I shall repair&mdash;</p>
+
+            <p>The holy place through the which everywhere</p>
+
+            <p>I have heard say that joy and solace flow.</p>
+
+            <p>Without my lady I were loath to go&mdash;</p>
+
+            <p>She who has the bright face and the bright
+            hair&mdash;</p>
+
+            <p>Because if she were absent, I being there,</p>
+
+            <p>My pleasure would be less than naught, I know.</p>
+
+            <p>Look you, I say not this to such intent</p>
+
+            <p>As that I there would deal in any sin:</p>
+
+            <p>I only would behold her gracious mien,</p>
+
+            <p>And beautiful soft eyes, and lovely face,</p>
+
+            <p>That so it should be my complete content</p>
+
+            <p>To see my lady joyful in her place.</p>
+        </div>
+    </div>
+
+    <p>We seem, in turning over these pages, to see the brilliant,
+    ever-changing current of Italian thirteenth and fourteenth
+    century life&mdash;from Palermo, where Frederick II. held an
+    almost Oriental court, to the communes of Central Italy, the
+    best type of which is the merchant-city of the Arno, whose sons
+    in those days could fight as well as wield the yardstick, and
+    sing in strains that have rarely been equaled. In the first
+    division of the work the great poet and his friends are brought
+    vividly before us from the time when, a sensitive child, his
+    eyes first beheld Beatrice and his new life began, to the
+    painful hours of bereavement and exile. The poet, it is known,
+    made a curious sonnet out of a dream he had after his first
+    meeting with Beatrice, and, in accordance with the fashion of
+    the day, sent it to various well-known poets, asking them to
+    interpret his vision. The answers are all given here; and among
+    those whose attention was thus attracted to the precocious
+    youth was one whom he calls his "first friend," Guido
+    Cavalcanti&mdash;after Dante one of the most interesting
+    literary personages of the day. Rash and chivalrous, we can
+    follow him in his poems from the time he made his pilgrimage to
+    the shrine of St. James, and fell in love on the way with
+    Mandetta of Toulouse, to the turbulent days of Florentine party
+    strife, when he rides down Messer Corso Donati, "the baron,"
+    and wounds him with his javelin, and then goes into exile at
+    Sarzana, where he sings his dying song and sends it to his
+    lady, "who," he says, "of her noble grace shall show thee
+    courtesy." All the poets were not as constant as their own
+    lines would have us believe. Dante reproaches the famous Cino
+    da Pistoja for fickleness, and the latter confesses the charge,
+    and declares he cannot get "free from Love's pitiless aim."
+    Guido Cavalcanti rebukes Dante himself for his way of life
+    after the death of Beatrice; and this valuable sonnet should be
+    read in connection with the beautiful passage in the
+    <i>Purgatory</i> (xxx. 55-75) where Beatrice herself upbraids
+    the tearful poet.</p>
+
+    <p>In the second part, comprising <i>Poets chiefly before
+    Dante</i>, we have specimens of the Sicilian school&mdash;a
+    <i>canzone</i> by the great Frederick, and a sonnet by his
+    luckless son Enzo, who died in prison at Bologna after a
+    confinement <span class="pagenum"><a name="page263"
+       id="page263"></a>[pg 263]</span> of nearly twenty-three
+       years. Of more importance are the poems of Guido Guinicelli,
+       of which the philosophical one entitled "Of the Gentle
+       Heart" was a nine days' wonder, but which, even in
+       Rossetti's elegant version, seems cold and formal. The most
+       natural and pleasing pieces among much that is artificial
+       and conventional are a ballad and two "catches" by
+       Sacchetti, who died just after 1400, and properly does not
+       belong to Dante's circle. Mr. Rossetti's readers will,
+       however, be grateful to him for his delightful versions of
+       the two catches, one "On a Fine Day," the other "On a Wet
+       Day," giving the experiences of a band of young girls who
+       have gone to spend the afternoon in the fields and are
+       overtaken by a shower.</p>
+
+    <p>Poems like these, unfortunately, are rare. The range is a
+    limited one&mdash;Platonic love in its conventional form, or
+    the still more conventional form of chivalric love, imported
+    bodily from the Troubadours. Scattered here and there are some
+    noble poems; as, for instance, the one attributed to Fazio
+    degli Uberti on his lady's portrait, which begins&mdash;</p>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>I look at the crisp golden-threaded hair,</p>
+
+            <p>Whereof, to thrall my heart, Love twists a net;</p>
+
+            <p>Using at times a string of pearls for bait,</p>
+
+            <p>And sometimes with a single rose therein.</p>
+        </div>
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Mr. Rossetti has performed his task in a way to deserve the
+    warmest praise. The difficulties he has overcome are very
+    great, consisting not merely of intricate rhyme and assonance,
+    which he has faithfully reproduced, but a text often corrupt
+    and meaning often obscure. He says himself in his preface that
+    "The life-blood of rhythmical translation is this
+    commandment&mdash;that a good poem shall not be turned into a
+    bad one;" and this commandment, as far as we can see, he has
+    not broken in a single case, while in some instances, we are
+    bold enough to say, the translation is better than the
+    original.</p>
+
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>History of the Army of the Cumberland, its Organization,
+        Campaigns and Battles. Written at the request of Maj.-Gen.
+        George H. Thomas, chiefly from his private military journal
+        and other official documents furnished by him. By Thomas B.
+        Van Horne, U.S. Army. Illustrated with campaign and battle
+        maps compiled by Edward Ruger, late Superintendent
+        Topographical Engineer Office, Head quarters Department of
+        the Cumberland. 2 vols. and atlas. Cincinnati: Robert
+        Clarke &amp; Co.</p>
+    </blockquote>
+
+    <p>It was natural that General Thomas should make choice of
+     some one to whom he could entrust the task of writing
+     his military history. For that purpose he chose Mr. T.B. Van
+     Home, a chaplain in the regular army, and the work, which
+     was begun in 1865 and finished in 1872, was subject to
+     Thomas's own examination. The result is now, after this long
+     delay, presented to the public in a shape that does great
+     credit to the publishers, whose imprint is almost synonymous
+     with good workmanship. Of the literary skill, or want of it,
+     on the part of the author not much need be said: he is
+     evidently zealous in his anxiety to do honor to the memory
+     of General Thomas, and to do justice to all who served with
+     him; but he is sadly lacking in the art of suitably clothing
+     his ideas with fitting words, and much of his elaborate
+     composition is badly wasted in trying to find extravagant
+     language for the recital of important events. In some cases,
+     where the official reports printed at the close of each
+     chapter recite in simple words the actual occurrences, the
+     text of the book is overlaid with unusual words and involved
+     sentences, in which the statement of the same facts is lost
+     in a cloud of phraseology of a very curious and original
+     kind. "Primal success," "the expression of a stride," "the
+     belligerence of the two armies," "philosophy of the
+     victory," "palpable co-operation," "the expression of an
+     insurrection,"&mdash;these are some of the odd inventions of
+     the author; and for instances of passages just as odd, but
+     too long for citation, we refer to the description of the
+     battle of Shiloh&mdash;a weak imitation of Kinglake's worst
+     style&mdash;where we are told that "change is the prophecy
+     of unexpected conditions." Fortunately, the second volume is
+     much less marred by such faults, and the great event of
+     Thomas's career, the battle of Nashville, is told with
+     clearness and in full detail.</p>
+
+    <p>Although Thomas is the hero of the book from the time when
+    he took command at Camp Dick Robinson in August of 1861, it was
+    not till October, 1863, which brings us to page 394 of the
+    first volume, that he succeeded to the command of the Army of
+    the Cumberland, after Rosecrans, who had followed Buell and
+    Sherman and Anderson. Under the other generals Thomas had
+    served with marked ability and fidelity, and his dealing with
+    them is fairly reflected by the author of this work, for he
+    rarely criticises either of Thomas's commanding
+    officers&mdash;for the most part merely records the operations
+    of the army, and puts in most prominence Thomas's own
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page264"
+       id="page264"></a>[pg 264]</span> services, just as his
+       military journal no doubt supplied the material. Of all that
+       long and dreary marching and countermarching through
+       Kentucky and Tennessee the account is full and clear, and we
+       find Buell and Halleck saying that they know nothing of any
+       plan of campaign in the very midst of their operations. At
+       last with Halleck, and still more with Grant in authority,
+       there were movements ordered that had some relation to each
+       other and a general plan of operations, and then the
+       overwhelming strength of the North began to turn the scale.
+       Thomas was called on by Rosecrans, as he had been by Buell,
+       for advice, but he was obliged to act independently too; and
+       then, as at Stone River, he showed an energy and a capacity
+       that ought to have secured his earlier promotion. At
+       Chickamauga he was actually left in command by Rosecrans,
+       and while the latter was looking for new help elsewhere,
+       Thomas at the front saved the shattered army and led it
+       safely back to Chattanooga, where it underwent its famous
+       long siege. The measures for its relief were planned by
+       Rosecrans, approved by Grant, and executed by Thomas, with
+       large assistance from "Baldy" Smith, whose skill as an
+       engineer was fully attested then. When Thomas did at last
+       succeed to the command of the Army of the Cumberland, he
+       showed his superiority to his predecessors by marked
+       improvement in his method of securing supplies, in his use
+       of cavalry, and in the increased efficiency of his infantry.
+       When Johnston, thanks to Davis's unwise interference with
+       the Confederate armies, gave way to Hood, the latter almost
+       at once gave token of his inferior skill by being defeated
+       by the Army of the Cumberland&mdash;by less than half of it,
+       in fact&mdash;in an attack intended to destroy three armies
+       of more than five times the number of the Union force
+       actually engaged. Thomas was in command at this battle of
+       Peach-tree Creek, one of the sharpest and most significant
+       actions of the campaign, though no official report is found
+       at the end of the chapter in which it is described. The
+       events that led up to the victory of Nashville are always
+       worth the telling, and the account given in this work may be
+       looked upon as in some respects Thomas's own version of
+       them. A brief chapter by Colonel Merrill of the Engineers
+       gives a very good description of three of the leading
+       features of the work done by that corps in the Army of the
+       Cumberland. To cross great rivers there was need of
+       pontoon-bridges; to protect the long lines of railroads it
+       was necessary to provide block-houses; to go through a
+       country that was often a trackless forest, and always badly
+       provided with real high-roads, it was all-important to have
+       maps, and to reproduce them rapidly and plentifully. Colonel
+       Merrill's chapter is pithy, pointed and to the purpose,
+       showing how well our technical troops did their share of
+       work, and how large and important that share was in securing
+       the general result. The maps are also well done, and
+       therefore useful in enabling a reader to follow out the
+       details of the narrative.</p>
+
+    <h5><i>Books Received.</i></h5>
+
+    <p>Dissertations and Discussions; Political, Philosophical and
+    Historical. By John Stuart Mill. Vol. V. New York: Henry Holt
+    &amp; Co.</p>
+
+    <p>From Everglade to Canon with the Second Dragoons, 1836-75,
+    Compiled by Theo. F. Rodenbough. New York: D. Van Nostrand.</p>
+
+    <p>Grand'ther Baldwin's Thanksgiving, with other Ballads and
+    Poems. By Horatio Alger, Jr. Boston: Loring.</p>
+
+    <p>Shakespeare Hermeneutics; or, The Still Lion. By C.M.
+    Ingleby, M.A., LL.D. London: Trübner &amp; Co.</p>
+
+    <p>Minutes of the Ohio State Archæological Convention.
+    Columbus: Printed for the Society by Paul &amp; Thrall.</p>
+
+    <p>Strength of Beams under Transverse Loads. By Prof. W. Allan.
+    New York: D. Van Nostrand.</p>
+
+    <p>The Illustrated Catholic Family Almanac for 1876. New York:
+    Catholic Publication Society.</p>
+
+    <p>Report of the Commissioner of Education for 1874.
+    Washington: Government Printing-office.</p>
+
+    <p>Our Poetical Favorites. Second Series. By Aschel C.
+    Kendrick. New York: Sheldon &amp;Co.</p>
+
+    <p>Camp-Life in Florida. By Charles Hallock. New York: Forest
+    and Stream Publishing Co.</p>
+
+    <p>Lectures on Art. Second Series. By H. Taine. New York: Henry
+    Holt &amp; Co.</p>
+
+    <p>Pretty Miss Bellew. By Theo. Gift. New York: Henry Holt
+    &amp; Co.</p>
+
+    <p>Drawn from. Life. By Charles Dickens. New York: E.J. Hale
+    &amp; Son.</p>
+
+    <p>The Conquest of Europe: A Poem of the Future. By
+    Confucius.</p>
+
+    <p>Cartoons. By Margaret J. Preston. Boston: Roberts
+    Brothers.</p>
+    <hr class="full" />
+
+    <blockquote class="footnote">
+        <a id="footnote1"
+                    name="footnote1"></a><b>Footnote 1:</b>
+                    <a href="#footnotetag1">(return)</a>
+
+        <p>The circumstance that some of the gymnasium-teachers in
+        Germany have the title of "professor" does not affect the
+        above view. The title has been expressly conferred upon
+        them by the government as a mark of special distinction,
+        either for long services or for unusual
+        scholarship&mdash;in most cases for the latter. Where
+        schools of the highest order are so numerous as they are in
+        Germany, it is not surprising that they should count among
+        their teachers men of profound scholarship. The official
+        recognition paid to such men is only an additional proof of
+        the care with which the title is used. It is given to the
+        teacher, not so much because he is a good teacher, as
+        because he has done something over and above school-room
+        work.</p>
+    </blockquote>
+
+    <blockquote class="footnote">
+        <a id="footnote2"
+                    target="blank"
+                    name="footnote2"></a><b>Footnote 2:</b>
+                    <a href="#footnotetag2">(return)</a>
+
+        <p><i>Science</i> is used here in the broad German sense to
+        denote any study, whether in the direction of natural
+        phenomena, history or philosophy, which is pursued
+        systematically and with a view to eliciting truth.</p>
+    </blockquote>
+
+    <blockquote class="footnote">
+        <a id="footnote3"
+                    target="blank"
+                    name="footnote3"></a><b>Footnote 3:</b>
+                    <a href="#footnotetag3">(return)</a>
+
+        <p>The subordination of the philosophical faculty as a sort
+        of preparatory course to the others remained in force in
+        Austria until 1850. It is not surprising, then, that
+        Austria should have compared so unfavorably with Germany in
+        philology, history, philosophy and literary criticism until
+        within our own times.</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <hr class="full" />
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13154 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
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+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #13154 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13154)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature
+and Science, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science
+       February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98.
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: August 10, 2004 [EBook #13154]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Sandra Brown and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+Note: The Table of Contents and the list of illustrations were added
+      by the transcriber.
+
+
+
+
+LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE OF POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE
+
+February, 1876.
+
+Vol. XVII, No. 98.
+
+
+
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS
+
+  THE CENTURY--ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.
+    II.--AMERICAN PROGRESS.
+
+  UP THE THAMES.
+    CONCLUDING PAPER, by EDWARD C. BRUCE.
+
+  THE POET'S PEN, by F.A. HILLARD.
+
+  SKETCHES OF INDIA.
+    II.
+
+  FRA ALOYSIUS, by EMMA LAZARUS.
+
+  A FEW HOURS IN BOHEMIA.
+
+  PROFESSOR AND TEACHER, by JAMES MORGAN HART.
+
+  CONTRASTED MOODS, by CHARLOTTE F. BATES.
+
+  THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, by MRS. E. LYNN LINTON
+    CHAPTER XXI. CHANGES.
+    CHAPTER XXII. EDGAR HARROWBY.
+    CHAPTER XXIII. ON THE MOOR.
+    CHAPTER XXIV. THE CHILD FINA.
+
+  LETTERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA, by LADY BARKER.
+
+  ON SANKOTA HEAD, by ETHEL C. GALE.
+
+  AT THE OLD PLANTATION.
+    TWO PAPERS.--II, by ROBERT WILSON.
+
+  OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
+    A GERMAN AGRICULTURAL FAIR.
+    A PAIR OF WHEELS AND AN OLD PARASOL.
+    MEDICAL EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES, by R.A.F. PENROSE.
+
+  OUR EARLY NEWSPAPERS.
+
+  LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
+    _Books Received._
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+  POST-OFFICE DEPARTMENT BUILDING AT WASHINGTON.
+  THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON AND CARPENTERS' HALL, WHERE THE FIRST
+    COLONIAL CONGRESS MET.
+  HOE'S NEW PERFECTING PRINTING-PRESS, PRINTING 12,000 DOUBLE
+    IMPRESSIONS PER HOUR, AND THE OLD EPHRATA PRESS.
+  THE CITY OF TOKYO, THE LARGEST STEAMSHIP BUILT IN AMERICA, AND
+    FITCH'S STEAMBOAT, THE FIRST CONSTRUCTED.
+  THE COTTON GIN.
+  GRAIN ELEVATOR.
+  INTERIOR OF A POSTAL CAR.
+  PROF. S.F.B. MORSE, THE INVENTOR OF THE ELECTRO-MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH.
+  THE SCHOOL-HOUSE OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.
+  WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM ETON.
+  MORTON CHURCH.
+  MILTON'S PEAR TREE.
+  GRAY.
+  BEACONSFIELD CHURCH.
+  TOMB OF BURKE.
+  HEDSOR AND COOKHAM CHURCHES.
+  ETON COLLEGE AND CHAPEL.
+  ETON COLLEGE, FROM NORTH TERRACE, WINDSOR.
+  STAINES CHURCH.
+  NORMAN GATE AND ROUND TOWER, WINDSOR.
+  HERNE'S OAK.
+  EAST FRONT, WINDSOR CASTLE.
+  QUEEN ELIZABETH'S BUILDING, WINDSOR.
+  EARL OF SURREY.
+  WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM BISHOPSGATE.
+  LOCK AT WINDSOR.
+  THE THAMES EMBANKMENT.
+  ELMS NEAR THE HERONRY.
+  HINDU TEMPLES NEAR POONA.
+  G�NDS.
+  CENOTAPHS IN THE VALLEY OF THE TONSA.
+  THE GAUR, OR INDIAN BISON.
+  BANJARIS.
+
+
+
+LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE
+
+OF
+
+_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE_.
+
+FEBRUARY, 1876.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CENTURY--ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.
+
+II.--AMERICAN PROGRESS.
+
+[Illustration: POST-OFFICE DEPARTMENT BUILDING AT WASHINGTON.]
+
+From showing the world's right to the epoch of '76, and sketching the
+progress of the century in its wider aspect, a natural transition is
+to the part played in illustrating the period by the people from whose
+political birth it dates, and who have made the task of honoring it
+their own. They have reached their first resting-place, and pardonably
+enjoy the opportunity of looking back at the road they have traversed.
+They pause to contemplate its gloomy beginning, the perilous
+precipices along which it wound, and the sudden quagmires that often
+interrupted it, all now softened by distance and by the consciousness
+of success. Opening with a forest-path, it has broadened and
+brightened into a highway of nations.
+
+So numerous and various were the influences, formative and impellent,
+which combined to bring the colonies up to the precise ripening-point
+of their independence, as to make it difficult to assign each its
+proper force. In the concentric mass, however, they stand out sharp
+and clear, and the conjoint effect seems preordained. That the event
+should have come when it did, and not before or after, is as obvious
+as any of history's predictions after the fact. Looking through the
+glasses of to-day, we find it hard to realize that the Continental
+Congress renewed its expressions of loyalty to the king three weeks
+after the battle of Bunker Hill, so distinct before us rises the
+completed and symmetrical edifice of separation ready for its
+capstone, from its foundations growing steadily through the past.
+
+Thirteen years--one for each State--were occupied in the topping-off.
+The Seven Years' War, that created the new central power of modern
+Europe, had a great deal to do with creating the new American power.
+It taught the colonies their strength, gave them several thousand
+native soldiers, and sent them from over the water the material,
+some of it completely wrought, for more in the German immigration
+consequent upon it. Out of it grew the obnoxious enactments that
+brought on the end. So closely simultaneous were these with the king's
+proclamation of October 7, 1763, prohibiting all his subjects "from
+making any purchases or settlements whatever, or taking possession of
+any of the lands, beyond the sources of any of the rivers which fall
+into the Atlantic Ocean from the west or north-west," as to support
+the suspicion that the British ministry had a premonitory sense of the
+coming struggle, and meant to prepare for it by checking the expansion
+of the colonies. The pressure applied to front and rear was part of
+one and the same movement; and is incompatible with the accepted
+view that neither cabinet nor Parliament anticipated, in the first
+instance, any American opposition to the Stamp Act and the system of
+legislation to which it was the opening wedge. The England of that day
+proposed to rule America after much the same fashion with Ireland,
+the Alleghanies presenting themselves very conveniently for an
+Indian Pale. This line of policy was in harmony with the ideas then
+predominant in England, and was fully understood by the colonists.
+They could not possibly have been blind to it, in view of the
+continuous and repeated claims of absolute legislative supremacy
+formally put forth, from the bill to that effect passed coincidently
+with the repeal of the Stamp Act down to the alterations made in the
+Massachusetts charter in 1774; the latter proceeding being in close
+harmony, both in time and motive, with the extension of the province
+of Quebec to the Ohio--one of the very rare evidences of sagacity and
+foresight discernible in the course of the ministry; for, while it did
+not avail to dam the westward flood, it certainly contributed, with
+other concessions made at the same time to the Canadians, to save the
+St. Lawrence to the Crown.
+
+As apropos to this point, we transcribe from the original
+manuscript, written in the round, clear, unhesitating but steady hand
+characteristic of all Washington's letters, the following to James
+Wood of Winchester, afterward governor of Virginia, but then little
+more than a stripling:
+
+    "MOUNT VERNON, Feb'y 20th, 1774.
+
+    "DEAR SIR: I have to thank you, for your obliging acc't of
+    your trip down the Mississippi, contained in a Letter of the
+    18th of Octob'r from Winchester--the other Letter, therein
+    refer'd to, I have never yet receiv'd, nor did this come
+    to hand till some time in November, as I was returning from
+    Williamsburg.
+
+    "The contradictory acc'ts given of the Lands upon the
+    Mississippi are really astonishing--some speak of the Country
+    as a terrestrial Paradise, whilst others represent it as
+    scarce fit for anything but Slaves and Brutes. I am well
+    satisfied, however, from your description of it, that I have
+    no cause to regret my disappointment:--The acc't of Lord
+    Hillsborough's sentiments of the Proclamation of 1763, I can
+    view in no other light than as one, among many other proofs,
+    of his Lordship's malignant disposition towards us poor
+    Americans, formed equally in malice, absurdity, and error; as
+    it would have puzzled this noble Peer, I am persuaded, to have
+    assigned any plausible reason in support of this opinion.
+
+    "As I do not know but I may shortly see you in Frederick, and
+    assuredly shall before the Assembly, I shall add no more than
+    that, it will always give me pleasure to see you at this place
+    whenever it is convenient to you, and that with compliments
+    to your good Mother I remain, D'r Sir, Y'r most Obed't H'ble
+    Serv't,
+
+    "G'o WASHINGTON."
+
+[Illustration: THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON AND CARPENTERS' HALL, WHERE
+THE FIRST COLONIAL CONGRESS MET.]
+
+This private note, discussing casually and curtly the great river
+of the West, and the minister who endeavored to make it a _flumen
+clausum_ to the colonists, nearly equidistant in date between the
+Boston Tea-party and the meeting of the Assembly which called the
+first Continental Congress, has some public interest. The West
+always possessed a peculiar attraction for Washington. He explored
+it personally and through others, and lost no occasion of procuring
+detailed information in regard to its capabilities. He acquired large
+bodies of land along the Ohio at different points, from its affluents
+at the foot of the Alleghany to the Great Kanawha and below. Now we
+see him gazing farther, over the yet unreddened battle-grounds of
+Boone and Lewis, to the magnificent province France and Spain were
+carefully holding in joint trusteeship for the infant state he was to
+nurse. The representative in the provincial legislature of a frontier
+county stretching from the Potomac to the Ohio, we may fancy him
+inspired, as he looked around from his post on the vertebral range of
+the continent, with "something of prophetic strain." If so, he was
+not long to have leisure for indulging it. Within eighteen months his
+life's work was to summon him eastward to the sea-shore. The Dark and
+Bloody Ground must wait. For its tillage other guess implements than
+the plough were preparing--the same that beckoned him to Cambridge and
+the new century.
+
+The slender driblet of population which at this juncture flowed
+toward the Lower Mississippi was due to the anxiety of Spain to get a
+home-supply of wheat, hemp and such-like indispensables of temperate
+extraction for her broad tropical empire. A newspaper of August 20,
+1773 gives news from New York of the arrival at that port of "the
+sloop Mississippi, Capt. Goodrich, with the Connecticut Military
+Adventurers from the Mississippi, but last from Pensacola, the 16th
+inst." They had "laid out twenty-three townships at the Natchez,"
+where lands were in process of rapid occupation, the arrivals
+numbering "above four hundred families within six weeks, down the Ohio
+from Virginia and the Carolinas." The Connecticut men doubtless came
+back prepared, a little later, to vindicate their martial cognomen;
+and to aid them in that they were met by Transatlantic recruits in
+unusual force. The same journal mentions the arrival at Philadelphia
+of 1050 passengers in two ships from Londonderry; this valuable
+infusion of Scotch-Irish brawn, moral, mental and muscular, being
+farther supplemented by three hundred passengers and servants in the
+ship Walworth from the same port for South Carolina. The cash value to
+the country of immigrants was ascertainable by a much less circuitous
+computation then than now; many of them being indentured for a term
+of years at an annual rate that left a very fair sum for interest and
+sinking fund on the one thousand dollars it is the practice of our
+political economist of to-day to clap on each head that files
+into Castle Garden. The German came with the Celt in almost equal
+force--enough to more than balance their countrymen under Donop,
+Riedesel and Knyphausen. The attention drawn to the colonies by the
+ministerial aggressions thus contributed to strengthen them for the
+contest.
+
+But with all these accessions in the nick of time, two millions and
+a quarter of whites was a meagre outfit for stocking a virgin farm of
+fifteen hundred miles square, to say nothing of its future police and
+external defence against the wolves of the deep. It barely equaled the
+original population, between the two oceans, of nomadic Indians, who
+were, by general consent, too few to be counted or treated as owners
+of the land. It fell far short of the numbers that had constituted,
+two centuries earlier, the European republic from which our federation
+borrowed its name. The task, too, of the occidental United States
+was double. Instead of being condensed into a small, wealthy and
+defensible territory, they had at once to win their independence
+from a maritime power stronger than Spain, and to redeem from utter
+crudeness and turn into food, clothing and the then recognized
+appliances of civilized life the wilderness thus secured. The result
+could not vary nor be doubted; but that the struggle, in war and in
+peace, must be slow and wearing, was quite as certain. It is dreary to
+look back upon its commencement now, and upon the earlier decades
+of its progress; and we cannot wonder that those who had it to look
+forward to half shrank from it. Among them there may have been a
+handful who could scan the unshaped wilderness as the sculptor does
+his block, and body forth in imagination the glory hidden within. That
+which these may have faintly imagined stands before us palpable if not
+yet perfected, the amorphous veil of the shapely figure hewn away,
+and the long toil of drill and chisel only in too much danger of being
+forgotten.
+
+Population, the most convenient gauge of national strength and
+progress, is far from being a universally reliable one. We shall find
+sometimes as wide a difference between two given millions as between
+two given individuals. Either may grow without doing much else. They
+may direct their energies to different fields. Compared with the
+United States, France and Germany, for example, have advanced but
+little in population. They have, however, done wonders for themselves
+and the world by activities which we have, in comparison, neglected.
+The old city of London gains in wealth as it loses in inhabitants.
+
+[Illustration: HOE'S NEW PERFECTING PRINTING-PRESS, PRINTING 12,000
+DOUBLE IMPRESSIONS PER HOUR, AND THE OLD EPHRATA PRESS.]
+
+Yet success in the multiplication of souls within their own
+borders--depopulate as they may elsewhere--is eagerly coveted and
+regularly measured by all the nations. Since 1790, when we set them
+the example, they have one by one adopted the rule of numbering heads
+every five, six or ten years, recognizing latterly as well, more and
+more, the importance of numbering other things, until men, women and
+children have come to be embedded in a medley of steam-engines,
+pigs, newspapers, schools, churches and bolts of calico. For twenty
+centuries this taking of stock by governments had been an obsolete
+practice, until revived by the framers of the American Constitution
+and made a vital part of that instrument. The right of the most--and
+not of the richest, the best, the bravest, the cleverest, or the
+oldest in blood--to rule being formally recognized and set down on
+paper, it became necessary to ascertain at stated intervals who were
+the most. The lords of the soil, instead of being inducted into power
+on the death of their parents with great pother of ointment, Te Deum,
+heraldry, drum and trumpet, were chosen every ten years by a corps of
+humble knights of the pencil and schedule.
+
+To these disposers of empire, the enhancement and complication of
+whose toil has been a labor of love with each decennial Congress, we
+owe the knowledge that eighty years, out of the hundred, brought the
+people of the Union up from a tally of 3,929,214 in 1790 to 38,558,371
+in 1870, and that down to the beginning of the last decade the rate of
+increment adhered closely to 35 per cent. On that basis of growth the
+latest return falls nearly four millions short. One of the causes of
+this is "too obvious" (and too disagreeable) "to mention;" but it
+is inadequate. The sharp demarcation of the western frontier by the
+grasshopper and the hygrometer is another, which will continue to
+operate until, by irrigation, tree-planting or some other device, a
+new climate can be manufactured for the Plains. The teeming West, that
+of old needed only to be tickled with a hoe to laugh with a harvest,
+has disappeared. At least what is left of it has lost the power of
+suction that was wont to reach across the ocean, pull Ballys and Dorfs
+up by the roots and transplant them bodily to the Muskingum and
+the Des Moines. A third cause, operating more especially within
+the current decade, is attributable to another mode in which that
+attractive power has been exerted--the absorption from the European
+purse for the construction of railways of seven or eight times as much
+as the thirty-five millions in specie it took to fight through the
+Revolutionary war. For a while, Hans came with his thalers, but they
+outfooted him--"fast and faster" behind came "unmerciful disaster,"
+and he was fain to turn his back on the land of promise and promises.
+Similar set-backs, however, are interspersed through our previous
+history, and the influence of the last one may be over-rated.
+
+In truth, the Old World's fund of humanity is not sufficiently ample
+to keep up the pace; and the rate of natural increase is no longer
+what it was when the country was all new, and cornfield and nursery
+vied in fecundity. That the former source of augmentation is gaining
+in proportion upon the latter is apparent from the last three returns.
+The ratio of foreign-born inhabitants to the aggregate in 1850 was
+9.68 per cent. in 1860, 13.16, and in 1870, 14.44. In the last-named
+year, moreover, 10,892,015, or 28 per cent. of the entire population,
+white and black, are credited with foreign parentage on one or both
+sides. Excluding the colored element, ranked as all native, this
+proportion rises to 32 per cent.
+
+Judged by the test of language, three-fifths of those who are of
+foreign birth disappear from the roll of foreigners, 3,119,705 out
+of 5,567,229 having come from the British Isles and British America.
+Germany, including Bohemia, Holland and Switzerland, sums up
+1,883,285; Scandinavia, 241,685; and France and Belgium, 128,955. The
+Celtic influx from Ireland, and the Teutonic and Norse together, form
+two currents of almost identical volume. Compared with either,
+the contribution of the Latin or the Romance races sinks into
+insignificance--an insignificance, however, that shows itself chiefly
+in numbers, the traces of their character and influence being,
+relatively to their numerical strength, marked. The immigrants from
+Northern and Southern Europe have a disposition, in choosing their
+new homes, to follow latitude, or rather the isotherms; the North-men
+skirting the Canadian frontier and grouping themselves on the coldest
+side of Lake Michigan, while the Italians, Spaniards and French drift
+toward the Gulf States. The Irish and Germans are more cosmopolitan,
+each in a like degree. They disperse with less regard to climate or
+surroundings, and are more rapidly and imperceptibly absorbed and
+blended, thus promoting rather than marring the homogeneity of the
+American people. The Germans are, however, more prone to colonizing
+than the Irish--a circumstance due in great measure to their differing
+in language from the mass of their new neighbors. This cause of
+isolation is gradually losing its weight, the recognition of the
+German tongue by State legislatures, municipalities, etc. being less
+common than formerly, notwithstanding the immense immigratior so
+calculated to extend it.
+
+While assimilation has been growing more complete, and a fixed
+resultant becoming more discernible, the ingredients of this ethnic
+medley do not seem to have materially varied in their proportions
+since the beginning of the century. They present a tolerably close
+parallel to the like process in Northern France, where Celt and Teuton
+combined in nearly equal numbers, with, as in our case, a limited
+local infusion of the Norse. The result cannot, however, be identical,
+the French lacking our Anglo-Saxon substratum, with its valuable
+traditions and habitudes of political thought. The balance between
+impulse and conservatism has never been, in this country, long or
+seriously disturbed, and is probably as sound now as a hundred
+years ago. In the discussions of the twenty years which embrace our
+Revolutionary period we find abundance of theory, but they were never
+carried by abstractions out of sight of the practical. Our publicists
+were not misled by convictions of the "infinite perfectibility of
+the human mind," the motive proclaimed by Condorcet, writing in sweet
+obliviousness of the guillotine, as explaining "how much more pure,
+accurate and profound are the principles upon which the constitution
+and laws of France have been formed than those which directed the
+Americans." The lack of this equilibrium among the pure, and, as we
+may venture to term them, the untrained races, we have occasional
+opportunities of noting on our own soil when for a passing cause they
+resort to isolated action.
+
+[Illustration: THE CITY OF TOKYO, THE LARGEST STEAMSHIP BUILT IN
+AMERICA, AND FITCH'S STEAMBOAT, THE FIRST CONSTRUCTED.]
+
+A race-question of a character that cannot be supplied by
+differentiation within Caucasian limits haunts us as it has done from
+the very birth of the colonies. Like the Wild Huntsman, we have had
+the sable spectre close beside us through the whole run. But, more
+fortunate than he, we see it begin to fade. At least its outlines are
+contracting. The ratio of colored inhabitants to the aggregate,
+in 1790 19.26 per cent., or one-fifth, fell in 1860 to 14.12, or
+one-seventh, and in 1870 to 12.65, or an eighth. The next census will
+beyond doubt point more strongly in the same direction. If, whilst
+dwindling in magnitude, the dusky shape perplex us by assuming
+suddenly a novel form, we may yet be assured that it is the same in
+substance and in manageability. Its hue is whitening with the fleece
+of five millions of cotton bales. The cloud has a silver lining--a
+golden one in fact--for ours is pecuniarily a serviceable phantom to
+the extent of adding to our annual income a sum equal to eight or ten
+times the entire yearly export of the colonies. Should he lead us,
+like the Land--und--Wild--Graf, into the pit of ruin, he will have
+first bottomed it with an ample and soft cushion of lint whereon to
+fall.
+
+Extremes meet, and modern culture, like ancient anarchy, drives its
+people into cities. Such is the tendency on both sides of the ocean.
+Improvement must result from associated effort, and of that cities are
+the last expression. All the European towns are outgrowing the rural
+districts. With us the change states itself in an advance, since 1790,
+of the city population from 3.4 to 20.9 per cent. of the aggregate.
+Broadcloth has gained on homespun in the proportion of six to one,
+Giles having thus six mouths to fill where he formerly had but one.
+We shall show farther on how gallantly he meets this draft. New York,
+with its suburbs, contains more Germans than any German city save
+Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than Dublin, and more English-speaking
+inhabitants than Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol and
+Leeds together. All the colonial towns in a lump would scarce add a
+twentieth to her numbers, and her militia embraces nearly twice as
+many men as served, first and last, in the Continental army.
+
+[Illustration: THE COTTON GIN.]
+
+But the column that sums the souls does not state the complete life of
+the cities. Man has in our day a host of allies that work with him and
+at his command--slaves of iron, steel and brass wholly unknown to our
+great--grand-fathers--fed also by the farmer, through the miner as an
+intermediate. Steam-engines, to the number of 40,191, and of 1,215,711
+horse-power--all of the stationary variety, and exclusive of nearly
+half as many that traverse the country and may be classed among the
+rural population--have succeeded the websters and spinners who were
+wont to clothe all the world and his wife, and who survive only in
+the surnames of some of our statesmen and financiers. Not that they
+confine their labors to textile fabrics. Their iron fingers are in
+every pie, including that of the printer, who is answered, when he
+calls the roll of his serfs of steam, by 691 whistles. And he is
+one of the smallest of the slaveholders--a mere ten-bale man.
+India-rubber, a product known a century ago only by some little black
+lumps used by draughtsmen to erase pencil-marks, owns enough of them
+to equal 4412 horses or 22,000 No. 1 field hands. Boots and shoes not
+of the India-rubber variety employ 3212 horse-power or 15,000 steam
+Crispins, over and above their Christian fellows who stick solitary
+to the last, and who, it must be owned, produce an article more of the
+Revolutionary type and more solid and durable. As a cord-wainer Steam
+is a failure; but he works cheaply, and will continue to hammer on,
+and disseminate his commodity of brown paper throughout the temperate
+zone. Three-fourths of the population of the globe still runs unshod,
+however, and it is obvious that this crying want cannot be met by
+the old system. Steam will perforce keep pegging away till Cathay,
+Xipangu, India and all the isles awaken to the absurdity of walking on
+cotton or undressed human skin. Could one of our 299 fire-fed cobblers
+have been set to work at Valley Forge, backed by one of the 1057
+makers of woolen that are similarly nourished!
+
+But we do Mr. Watt's lusty bantling injustice in assigning him
+exclusively the tastes of a cit. He is not insensible to pastoral
+charms, and often selects a home among the hemlocks and under the
+broad-armed oaks, by bosky glen or open mead, wherever the brooklet
+brawls or dreams, for he sticks to the waterside like a beaver. Here
+he sits down, like an artist as he is, until he has got all the choice
+bits of the grove. The large and bustling family of the sawyers, both
+top and bottom, he has utterly banished from their ancient haunts.
+'There would be needed a million and a half of them to take the places
+of 11,199 steam-engines, of 314,774 horse-power, that are devastating
+our forests. An equal number is replaced by the 16,559 water-wheels,
+of 326,728 horse-power, engaged in the same field of havoc. Armed
+with the handsaw, all the Revolutionary patriots and Tories together,
+withdrawing their attention entirely from military affairs, as well as
+from all other mundane concerns, would not have turned out one-sixth
+of the quantity of lumber demanded by their descendants of a period
+that boasts itself the age of iron, and has as little as possible
+to do with wood. And if we place in the hands of the patriarchs the
+ancestral axes, and tell them to get out charcoal for three millions
+of tons of iron, to be hauled an average of a hundred miles to
+market by oxen over roads whose highest type was the corduroy, the
+imagination reels at the helplessness of the heroes.
+
+[Illustration: GRAIN ELEVATOR.]
+
+The paternal thoughtfulness of the home government employed itself in
+relieving the colonist from such exhausting drafts upon his energies.
+It sedulously prohibited his throwing himself away on the manufacture
+of iron or anything else. In 1750 it placed him under a penalty of
+�200 for erecting a rolling-mill, tilt-hammer or steel-furnace. Lest
+the governor of the colony should fail to enforce this statute
+and protect the pioneer from such a waste of time, it held that
+functionary to a personal forfeit of �500 for failing, within thirty
+days after presentment by two witnesses on oath, to abate as a
+nuisance every such mill, engine, etc. As this mulct would have made a
+serious inroad on the emoluments of the royal governors, even with the
+addition of the inaugural douceur customarily given by the provincial
+assemblies to each new incumbent--in Virginia regularly �500, doubled
+in the instance of Fauquier in 1758, when it was desired to drive
+the entering wedge of disestablishment and razee the parsons--we are
+prepared to believe that the iron business was not flourishing. Under
+a despotism tempered so very moderately by bribes, a similar blight
+fell upon all other branches of manufacture. Among these, wool, flax,
+paper, hats and leather are specified in a Parliamentary report as
+interfering with "the trade, navigation and manufactures" of
+the mother-country. An act of Parliament accordingly forbade the
+exportation of hats to foreign countries, and even from one colony to
+another.
+
+That, after such a course of repression, the country found itself
+wholly unprepared on the attainment of independence to make any
+headway in this field, is no matter of surprise. Thirty years elapsed
+before the manufacturing statistics of the Union became presentable.
+In 1810 they were reckoned at $198,613,471. This embraces every fruit
+of handicraft, from a barrel of flour and a bushel of lime to a silk
+dress. We had 122,647 spindles and 325,392 looms, made 53,908 tons of
+pig iron, and refined about one pound of sugar for each head of the
+population. In 1870, after sixty years of tossing between the
+Scylla and Charybdis of tariffs, "black" and white, the yield of our
+factories had mounted to the respectable sum of $4,232,325,442. They
+employed 2,053,996 operatives. Of these, the average wages were $377,
+against $289 in 1860 and $247 in 1850, yearly. The advance in the
+product of refined sugar may be cited as illustrative of the progress
+of the people in comfort and luxury. It reached a value of one hundred
+and nine millions, representing nearly ten times as many pounds, or
+twenty-eight pounds a head. This exemplification is but one in an
+endless list.
+
+Manufactures have come to figure respectably in our exports. They
+exceed in that list, by three or four to one, the entire exports of
+all kinds in 1790; and they equal the average aggregate of the years
+from 1815 to 1824. But the multiplication of the wants of a people
+rapidly growing in numbers and refinement will, with the comparatively
+high price of labor, scarcity of capital and distance of most of our
+ports from the markets supplied by European manufactures, for a long
+time to come make the home-supply the chief care of our artisans. They
+have, for such and other reasons, in some points lost ground of
+late. The revolution in the propulsion and construction of ships, for
+instance, has not found them prepared to take the advantage they have
+usually done of improvements. Not only do the British screw-steamers
+take undisputed possession of our trade with their own country, but
+they expel our once unrivaled craft from the harbors of other quarters
+of the globe, and threaten to monopolize the most profitable part
+of our carrying-trade with all countries. This result is more easily
+explained than the inroads made on our more ordinary foreign traffic,
+in sailing vessels, by the mercantile marine of second- and third-rate
+powers. This is eloquently told by the annual government returns and
+the daily shipping-list. While our coastwise tonnage increases, that
+employed in foreign trade remains stationary or declines. The bearing
+of this upon our naval future becomes an imperative question for
+our merchants and legislators. The United States is benevolently and
+gratuitously building up a marine for each of half a dozen European
+states which possess little or no commerce of their own, and
+multiplying the ships and sailors of our chief maritime rival. We have
+long since ceased to import locomotives, and have, within the past two
+years, almost ceased to import railroad iron. Our iron-workers obtain
+coal at nearly or quite as low prices as do those of Birkenhead or the
+Clyde. They have recently sent to sea some large screw-steamers that
+perform well. No insurmountable difficulty appears to prevent the
+launching of more until we have enough to serve at least our direct
+trade with Europe and China. That determined, it may be possible
+to ascertain whether we cannot assist Norway, Belgium and Sicily in
+carrying our cotton, wheat and tobacco to the purchasers of it.
+
+[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A POSTAL CAR.]
+
+This decline in American tonnage is, it must be added, only relative,
+whether the comparison be made with other countries or with our own
+past. The returns show a carrying capacity in our ships more than
+twentyfold that of 1789, and three times that of 1807; when, on the
+other hand, it exceeded in the ratio of fourteen to twelve that of
+1829, twenty-two years later. This interest is peculiarly subject to
+fluctuations; some of which in the past have been less explicable than
+the one it is now undergoing. Another decade may turn the tables, and
+restore the flag of the old Liverpool liners to their fleeter but less
+shapely supplanters. The steamer and the clipper are both American
+inventions. Why not their combination ours as well? The centenary of
+Rumsey's boat, not due till December 11, 1887, should not find its
+descendants lording the ocean under another flag.
+
+The monthly Falmouth packet of a century ago, sufficient till within
+the past two generations for the mail communication of the two
+continents, has grown into six or eight steamships weekly, each
+capable of carrying a pair of the old sloops in her hold, and making
+the passage westwardly in a fifth and eastwardly in a third of the
+time. Can it be but ninety years ago that the latest dates at New
+York (February 14, 1786) from London (December 7, 1785) brought as a
+leading item from Paris (November 20) the news that Philippe �galit�
+had by his father's death just come into four millions of livres a
+year, that six hundred thousand livres paid by the Crown to his father
+thereupon devolved to Monsieur (afterward Louis XVIII.), and that the
+latter had kept up the game of shuttlecock with the treasure of the
+French by "a donation of all his estates to the duke of Normandy, the
+younger son of their Majesties, preserving for himself the use and
+profits thereof during his life"? That was a short winter-passage,
+too--more speedy than the land-trip of a letter in the same journal
+"from a gentleman in the Western country to his friend in Connecticut,
+dated River Muskingum, November 5, 1785," describing a voyage down the
+Ohio from Fort Pitt and the wonders of the country much as Livingstone
+and Du Chaillu do those of Africa. The time is less now to Japan, and
+about the same to New South Wales, with both which countries we have
+postal conventions-i.e., a practically consolidated service--far
+cheaper and more convenient than that maintained on the adoption of
+the present Constitution between our own cities. Our foreign service
+with leading countries is combined, moreover, with an institution
+undreamed of in that day--the money-order system. Under this admirable
+contrivance the post-offices of the world will ere long be so many
+banks of deposit and exchange for the benefit of the masses, effecting
+transfers mutually with much greater facility, rapidity and security
+than the regular banks formerly attained.
+
+Still in its infancy, the international money-order system has already
+reached importance in the magnitude of its operations. The sums sent
+by means of it were, in 1874, $1,499,320 to Great Britain, $701,634 to
+Germany, and to the little inland republic of Switzerland $72.287.
+
+The dimensions to which this new method of financial intercourse
+between the different peoples of the globe is destined to reach may be
+inferred from the growth of the domestic money--order service. In 1874
+the number of orders issued was 4,620,633, representing $74,424,854.
+The erroneous payments having been but one in 59,677, it is plain that
+this mode of remittance must make further inroads on the old routine
+of cheque and draft, and become, among its other advantages, a
+currency regulator of no trifling value.
+
+Our post-office may almost be said to head the development of the
+century. The other lines of progress in some sense converge to it. The
+advance of intelligence, of settlement, of transit by land and water
+and of mechanical and philosophical discovery have all fostered
+the post, while its return to them has been liberal. Thus aided
+and spurred, its extension has approached the rate of geometrical
+progression. Its development resembles that from the Annelids to the
+Vertebrata, the simple canal which constitutes the internal anatomy of
+the simplest animal forms finding a counterpart in the line of mails
+vouchsafed by the British postmaster-general to the colonies in 1775
+from Falmouth to Savannah, "with as many cross-posts as he shall
+see fit." Fifteen years of independence had caused the accretion
+of wonderfully few ganglia on this primeval structure. In 1790 four
+millions of inhabitants possessed but seventy-five post-offices
+and 1875 miles of post-roads. The revenue of the department was
+$37,935--little over a thousandth of what it is at present under rates
+of postage but a fraction of the old. New York and Boston heard
+from each other three times a week in summer and twice in winter.
+Philadelphia and New York were more social and luxurious, and insisted
+on a mail every week-day but one, hurrying it through in two days each
+way, or a twentieth of the present speed. On the interior routes chaos
+ruled supreme. Newspapers and business-men combined to employ riders
+who meandered along the mud roads as it pleased Heaven.
+
+When the new government machine had smoothed down its bearings matters
+rapidly improved. In 1800 we had 903 post-offices and 20,817 miles of
+road. In 1820 these figures changed to 4500 and 92,492, and in 1870
+to 28,492 offices and 231,232 miles. Five years later 70,083 miles of
+railway, 15,788 by steamboat and 192,002 of other routes represented
+the web woven since the Falmouth and Savannah shuttle commenced its
+weary way. Of course, neither the number of offices nor extent of
+routes fully measures the change from past to present; mails having
+become more frequent over the same route, and a new style of office,
+the locomotive variety, having been added to the old. This innovation,
+of mounting postmaster and post-office with the mailbags on wheels,
+and hurling the whole through space at thirty or forty miles an hour,
+already furnishes us with gigantic statistics. In 1875 there were
+sixty-two lines of railway postal-cars covering 16,932 miles with
+40,109 miles of daily service and 901 peripatetic clerks. These
+gentlemen, under the demands of the fast mail-trains, will ere long
+swell from a regiment into a brigade, and so into a division, till
+poets and painters be called on to drop the theme of "waiting for the
+mail."
+
+The greater portion of the fifty-odd thousand employ�s of the
+department do not give it their whole time, many of the country
+postmasters being engaged in other business. But the undivided efforts
+of them all, with an auxiliary corps, would be demanded for the
+handling of eight hundred and fifty millions of letters and cards,
+and a greater bulk of other mail-matter, under the old plan of
+rates varying according to distance and number of sheets, and not
+weight--stamps unknown. The introduction of stamps, with coincident
+reduction and unification of rates, has been the chief factor in the
+extraordinary increase of correspondence within the past thirty years;
+the number of letters passing through the mails having within that
+period multiplied twenty-fold. The number transmitted in the British
+Islands, then three times greater than in the United States, is
+now but little in excess, having been in 1874 nine hundred and
+sixty--seven millions. The immense difference between the two
+countries in extent, and consequently in the average distance of
+transportation, is enough to account for the contrast between the two
+balance-sheets, our department showing a heavy annual deficit, while
+in Great Britain this is replaced by a profit. As regards post-office
+progress in the United States, the question is rather an abstract one;
+for there is not the least probability of an advance in rates. The
+discrepancy between receipts and expenses will be attacked rather
+by seeking to reduce the latter at the same time that the former
+are enhanced by natural growth and by improvement in the details of
+service and administration.
+
+[Illustration: PROF. S.F.B. MORSE, THE INVENTOR OF THE
+ELECTRO-MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH.]
+
+Difficult as it is adequately to state or to measure the extension of
+the mails within the century, it is far from telling the whole
+story of the amplitude and celerity with which the people of our day
+interchange intelligence.
+
+Only to the last third of the period under review has the electric
+telegraph been known. It is now a necessity of the public and private
+life of every civilized spot upon the globe. It traverses all lands
+and all seas. The forty miles of wire with which it started from
+Washington City have become many millions. Its length of line in the
+United States is about the same with that of the mail-routes, and a
+similar equality probably obtains in other parts of the world. We have
+nearly as much line as all Europe together, though the extent of wire
+may not be so great. It is little to say that this continent, so
+dim to the founders of the Union, has been by the invention of Morse
+compressed within whispering distance, the same advantage having been
+conferred on other countries. It is the property of mankind, and
+the comparison must be between present and past, not between any two
+countries of the present. Strictly, a comparison is not possible,
+nothing like magnetic communication having been known forty years
+ago, unless to the half imagination, half realization of one or two
+scientific experimenters. Steam and stamps wrought a difference in
+degree--the telegraph one of kind. Against eighteen hundred miles of
+wagon-road we set seventy-three thousand of railway; but two hundred
+thousand miles of telegraph are opposed by nothing, unless by
+Franklin's kite-string. Looked at along the perspective of poles, the
+old days disappear entirely--the patriots become pre-historic. Yet
+modern self-conceit is somewhat checked by the reflection that the
+career of these two great agents of intercommunication has but just
+opened; that their management even yet remains a puzzle to us; and
+that the next generation may wonder how we happened to get hold of
+implements whose use and capabilities we so poorly comprehended.
+So far as prediction can now be ventured, a force and pathway more
+economical than coal and the rail will not soon be forthcoming; nor
+is Canton apt to "interview" New York at the rate of more words in a
+minute over a single wire than she can now. Some day dynamite may be
+harnessed to the balloon, which stands, or drifts, where it did with
+Montgolfier, and we may all become long-range projectiles; but even
+this age of hurry will contentedly wait a little for that.
+
+Possibly the Post-office Department would be less of a valetudinarian,
+financially, had it confined itself to its legitimate occupation, the
+speeding of intercourse and wafting of sighs, and not yielded to the
+heavy temptation of disseminating shoes, pistols and *garden-seeds
+over three millions of square miles. Newspapers are enough to test its
+powers as a freight-agent. Where these and their literary kindred
+of books, magazines, etc. used to be estimated by the dozen and the
+ounce, the ton is becoming too small a unit.
+
+West of the Blue Ridge, or the front line of the Alleghany, so called
+in most of its length, there was not a newspaper published in
+1776. Ten years later, scarcely more than one--the _Pittsburg
+Gazette_--existed west of the mountains. The few in the seaboard
+towns kept alive the name, and little more. In 1850, '60 and '70 the
+periodicals of the Union numbered, respectively, 2526, 4051 and 5871,
+with an average circulation, at the three periods, of twenty-one
+hundred, thirty-four hundred and thirty-six hundred copies each. The
+circulation thus outgrew the numbers in the proportion of nearly
+two to one. And both are largely in excess of the increase of the
+population, that being in the twenty years but 65 percent. The number
+of daily papers (254 in 1850 and 574 in 1870) must now be equal to the
+entire number of periodicals in France outside of Paris (796 in 1875),
+with an average issue less than half that of ours. The proportion of
+readers to the population, certainly in this class of literature, thus
+appears to be rapidly growing: and the change is most striking if we
+take, for example, that group of periodicals which are most purely
+literary and most remote from the mere chronicle. The returns for
+the three periods place the monthlies at, respectively, 100, 280 and
+622--an advance of sixfold.
+
+The magazine leads us to the door of the library; and here the exhibit
+is still more marked, significant and gratifying. The census figures
+are, for many reasons, extremely confused, but in the general result
+they cannot be outrageously wrong, and they can mislead us only in
+degree as to the immense multiplication of books in both public and
+private libraries. The returns are manifestly far below the truth.
+To give them here without the explanations accompanying them in
+the census volumes would mislead; and those explanations, or a fair
+synopsis of them, would occupy too much space, and would, after all,
+leave the problem unsolved. That the supply of books has fully
+kept pace with every other means of culture is patent enough. The
+Congressional Library has risen in half the century from the shelves
+of a closet to nearly four hundred thousand volumes--an accumulation
+not surpassed in '76 by more than two libraries in Europe. It now
+demands a separate edifice of its own, fit to stand by the side of
+the fine structures which have within a generation recreated the
+architectural aspect of the Federal metropolis with the most stately
+government-offices in the world. Other public libraries, belonging to
+colleges, schools, societies and independent endowments, show similar
+progress. While none of them are equal, for reference, to some of the
+great European establishments, they are generally better adapted to
+the purposes of popular instruction. Their literary wealth is fresh
+and available, little encumbered by lumber kept merely because old or
+curious. Thus adjuncts, in some sort, of the newspaper and the common
+school, their catalogues prove, as do the bookcases of private houses,
+that the newest and deepest results of European thought and inquiry
+are eagerly sought and used by our people.
+
+[Illustration: THE SCHOOL-HOUSE OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.]
+
+Our system of public schools, long classed among the "peculiar
+institutions" of the country, is notably gaining in scope and
+efficiency, be the English and Prussians right or not in their claim
+of greater thoroughness and a higher curriculum. The different States
+have engaged in a series of competitive experiments for the common
+good, and cities and counties, in their sphere, labor to the same end.
+Schools of higher grade are being multiplied, and the examination of
+teachers, still lax enough, becomes more exact and faithful, as befits
+the drill of an army of two hundred and forty thousand charged with
+the intellectual police of eight millions of children--the number said
+by the new "National Bureau of Education" to have been enrolled in
+1875, against 7,209,938, 5,477,037 and 3,642,694 by the censuses of
+1870, '60 and '50. Little more than half this number is estimated by
+the Bureau to represent the average daily attendance, which is
+quite compatible with the attendance, for the greater part of the
+school-year, of nine-tenths of the whole number on the lists. A
+comparison of the number enrolled and the entire supposed number
+of children between six and sixteen leaves an excess of nearly two
+millions and a half outside the public schools. Of these private
+schools will account, and account well, for a large proportion.
+These are fulfilling indispensable offices, one being that of normal
+schools--a want likely to be inadequately satisfied for a long time to
+come.
+
+In one respect our public schools are beyond, though not above,
+comparison with those of the most advanced European states. An annual
+outlay of a trifle less than seventy-five millions of dollars, with
+an investment in buildings, ground, etc. of a hundred and sixty-six
+millions, implies a determination that should be rewarded with the
+most unexceptionable results. It reaches eighteen dollars yearly,
+leaving out the interest on the fixed stock, for each child in
+daily attendance. Such an expenditure, trebling, we believe, that
+of Prussia, ought to secure better teachers and a higher range
+of instruction. It must be said, however, that the duties of the
+school-boards are as honestly and economically discharged as those of
+any other public bodies; that the cost for each pupil is highest
+where common schools have been longest established and most thoroughly
+studied; and that the statistics certainly show a steady advance in
+their efficiency. That is the truest test. Any pecuniary means are
+justifiable by the end. If common schools, themselves a means to a
+higher education, mental and moral, than they can directly afford,
+take some part of the wealth we accumulate to prevent our men's
+decaying, it is well used. It helps to purchase for us progress
+more genuine than that whereof railways and cotton-factories are the
+exponents.
+
+It is thus a guarantee of a brighter century even than the one just
+closed that, in the wildest quarter of the still unkempt continent,
+the school actually precedes the pioneer. Choose his homestead where
+he may, the sixteenth section is staked out before it. From it the
+rills of knowledge soon trickle along the first furrows, as strange
+to the soil as its new products. It provides the modern settler
+in advance with an equipment, mental and material, if not moral,
+altogether superior to that of his colonial prototype, that enables
+him in a shorter time to impart a higher stamp to his surroundings. He
+attacks the prairie with a plough unimagined by his predecessor;
+cuts his wheat with a cradle--or, given a neighbor or two, a
+reaper--instead of a sickle; sends into the boundless pasture the
+nucleus of a merino flock, and returns at evening to a home rugged
+enough, in unison with its surroundings, but brightened by traits of
+culture and intelligence which must adhere to any m�nage of to-day
+and were out of reach of any of the olden time. The civilization that
+travels West now is a different thing from that which went West a
+hundred years ago.
+
+Science has done much for the farmer, though not as much as he has
+done for it and its hotbeds, the towns. In one point his shortcomings
+are notable. He has not learned how to eat his cake and have it. He
+works the virgin soil as the miner does the coal-seam. What Nature has
+placed in it he takes out, and, until forced by the pressure of
+his friends and enemies, the cities, returns no nest-egg of future
+fertility. So it is that many portions of the rural East have to
+be resettled and started afresh in the process of agricultural
+redemption. A hundred years ago England grew fifteen bushels of wheat
+to the acre. Her standard is now thirty-two. Within three-quarters of
+the century New York has fallen from twenty-five to twelve; and
+half that period, again, has brought Ohio and Indiana from thirty to
+fifteen. But this process is a natural part of the sum of American
+progress. Land was the only property of the country originally, and
+subsequently of different parts of it in succession. It was used like
+any other commodity, and worn out like leather or cloth. The original
+cuticle of the continent has disappeared for ever. The task, now is
+to induce the granulation of a new one. The restorative process may
+be complete by the time we have four hundred souls to the square
+mile, like England and Flanders. Meanwhile, the exporting of Iowa and
+California in the shape of wheat is going on at what must be esteemed
+a profitable rate; for our farmers, as a class, do not seem to be
+losing ground. Their glebes have risen in value from thirty-two
+hundred millions in 1850 to sixty-six hundred ten years later,
+and ninety-three hundred in 1870. This has been accompanied by a
+diminution of their average extent, the farm of 1870 covering a
+hundred and fifty-three acres. This is small enough, considering
+the capital necessary for stock in these days of improved and costly
+implements, when a farmer can no longer pack his entire kit in a cart.
+It matches closely the size of English holdings, where agricultural
+science is at its height. The French peasant-farmers, with their plats
+of three and four acres, are chained to the spade and hoe, and their
+steading becomes a poultry-yard--a consummation we are not yet in
+sight of, as is proved by the legions of pigs and beeves, barreled
+or bellowing, that roll in from the ancient realms of Pontiac and
+the Prophet with a smoothness and velocity unattained by the most
+luxurious coach that carried a First Congressman.
+
+Everything that makes a nation, we are told, and the nation itself,
+is the product of the soil. But the less immediate, finer and
+most delicate fruits cannot usually be garnered until the soil is
+thoroughly subdued. The mass of matter keeps the intellectual in
+abeyance. Were Europe enlarged one-half, and her population reduced
+to one-eighth what it actually is, the spectacle of culture she now
+presents would be an impossibility. It is our merit that, thus brought
+to American conditions, she would in no way compare with American
+achievement. An offset wherewith we must at the same time be debited
+is the aid we have, in so many forms, derived from her. Making every
+allowance for this, it is a clear credit in our favor that one-tenth
+of Christendom should have done so much more than a tenth of its
+effective thinking simultaneously with taming the most savage half
+of its domain. We have more than our share of laborers in the mental
+vineyard, though fewer of them are master-workmen. We utilize for
+Europe herself, and send back to her in its first available shape,
+much of what her students produce. As between thought and substance,
+the two continents interchange offices. We import the crude material
+her philosophers harvest or mine, work it up and return it, just as
+she takes the yield of our non-metaphorical fields and strata and
+restores it manufactured. Much of the social, political and industrial
+advancement of Europe within the century she may be said to owe to
+the United States. Her governmental reforms certainly and confessedly
+found here their germ. These gave birth to others of a social
+character. In this manner, as well as more directly by our commerce,
+inventions and example, we have stimulated her industry. We have
+spread before her the two oceans, and taught her to traverse them with
+a firm and masterful mien, no longer
+
+  As one who in a lonely road doth walk in fear and dread.
+
+We have created cities upon her havens, Parliaments in her capitals,
+and stronger hearts and quicker hands in her villages. No community on
+her varied surface but is the better for America. That our people and
+their labors have done it all it would be absurd to say; but the Old
+World's progress in the period under review can be but very partially
+accounted for by any internal force of its own. None of its rulers or
+peoples adventure a reform of any kind without a preliminary, if often
+only a half-conscious, glance of inquiry westward. Collectively as
+members of a European republic of nations, and internally each
+within itself, they have in this way learned, after many recalcitrant
+struggles, to recognize and respect local independence. Municipal law
+has gained new life. The commune has become an entity everywhere, and
+the nations which it informs have established the right to readjust or
+recast their constitutions without being hounded down as disturbers
+of the peace. The contribution of the American Union to such results
+would earn it honor at the hands of history were it to sink into
+nothing to-morrow. Had no such tangible fruits hitherto ripened, some
+portion of such honor would still accrue to it for having shown that a
+people may grow from a handful to an empire without hereditary rulers,
+without a privileged class, without a state Church, without a standing
+army, without tumult in the largest cities and without stagnant
+savagery in the remotest wilds.
+
+
+
+
+UP THE THAMES.
+
+CONCLUDING PAPER.
+
+[Illustration: WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM ETON.]
+
+Let our demonstration to-day be on the monarchical citadel of England,
+the core and nucleus of her kingly associations, her architectural
+_eikon basilik�_, Windsor. To reach the famous castle it will not do
+to lounge along the river. We must cut loose from the suburbs of the
+suburbs, and launch into a more extended flight. Our destination
+is nearly an hour distant by rail; and though it does not take us
+altogether out of sight of the city, it leads us among real farms and
+genuine villages, tilled and inhabited as they have been since the
+Plantagenets, instead of market-gardens and villas.
+
+We go to Paddington and try the Great Western, the parent of the broad
+gauges with no very numerous family, Erie being one of its unfortunate
+children. That six-foot infant is not up to the horizontal stature of
+its seven-foot progenitor, but has still sixteen inches too many
+to fare well in the contest with its little, active, and above all
+numerous, foes of the four-feet-eight-and-a-half-inch "persuasion."
+The English and the American giants can sympathize with each other.
+Both have drained the bitter cup that is tendered by a strong majority
+to a weak minority. Neither the American nor the British constitution,
+with their whole admirable array of checks and balances, has shielded
+them from this evil. In the battle of the gauges both have gone to
+the wall, and will stay there until they can muster strength enough to
+reel over into the ranks of their enemies.
+
+This relative debility is, at the same time, more apparent to the
+stockholders than to their customers. The superstructure and "plant"
+of the Erie has lately stood interested inspection from abroad with
+great credit, and that of the Great Western is unexceptionable. The
+vote of travelers may be safely allotted to the broad gauge. They
+have more elbow room. The carriages attain the requisite width without
+unpleasantly, not to say dangerously, overhanging the centre of
+gravity; and, other things equal, the movement is steadier. Nor is the
+financial aspect of the question apt to impress gloomily the tourist
+as he enters the Paddington station and looks around at its blaze of
+polychrome and richness of decoration generally. As the coach doors
+are slammed upon you, the guard steps into his "van," the vast
+drivers, taller than your head plus the regulation stove-pipe, slowly
+begin their whirl, and you roll majestically forth through a long
+file of liveried servants of the company, drawn up or in action on the
+platform, the sensation of patronizing a poverty-stricken corporation
+is by no means likely to harass you. You cease to realize that the
+Napoleon of engineers, Monsieur Brunel, made a disastrous mistake in
+the design of this splendid highway, and that, as some will have it,
+it was his Moscow. His error, if one there was, existed only in the
+selection of the width of track. Whatever the demerits of the design
+in that one particular, the execution is in all above praise. The road
+was his pet. Once finished, it was his delight, as with the breeder of
+a fine horse, to mount it and try its mettle. Over and again would
+he occupy the footboard between London and Bristol, and rejoice as a
+strong man in running his race at close to seventy miles an hour. He
+and Stephenson were capital types of the Gaul and Briton, striving
+side by side on the same field, as it will be good for the world that
+they should ever do.
+
+[Illustration: MORTON CHURCH.]
+
+Combats of another character--in fact, of two other characters--recur
+to our reflections as we find that we have shuffled off the coil
+of bricks and mortar and are rattling across Wormwood Scrubs. More
+fortunate than some who have been there before us, we have no call to
+alight. Calls to this ancient field of glory, whether symbolized by
+the gentlemanly pistol or the plebeian fist, have ceased to be in
+vogue. Dueling and boxing are both frowned down effectually, one by
+public opinion and the other by the police. It is only of late years
+that they finally succumbed to those twin discouragers; but it seems
+altogether improbable that the ordeal by combat in either shape
+will again come to the surface in a land where tilting-spear and
+quarter-staff were of old so rife. In France chivalry still asserts,
+in a feeble way, the privilege of winking and holding out its iron,
+and refuses to be comforted with a suit for damages.
+
+Southall, a station or two beyond, suggests sport of a less lethal
+character, being an ancient meeting-place for the queen's stag-hounds.
+John Leach may have collected here some of his studies of Cockney
+equestrianism. The sportsmen so dear to his pencil furnished him
+wealth of opportunities on their annual concourse at the cart's tail.
+The unloading of the animal, his gathering himself up for a leisurely
+canter across country, the various styles and degrees of horsemanship
+among his lumbering followers, and the business-like replacing of
+the quarry in his vehicle, to be hauled away for another day's sport,
+served as the most complete travesty imaginable of the chase. It has
+the compensation of placing a number of worthy men in the saddle at
+least once in the year and compelling them to do some rough riding.
+The English have always made it their boast that they are more at home
+on horseback than any other European nation, and they claim to have
+derived much military advantage from it. Lever's novels would lose
+many of their best situations but for this national accomplishment and
+the astounding development it reaches in his hands.
+
+[Illustration: MILTON'S PEAR TREE.]
+
+To the left lies the fine park of Osterley, once the seat of the
+greatest of London's merchant princes, Sir Thomas Gresham. An
+improvement proposed by Queen Bess, on a visit to Gresham in 1578,
+does not speak highly for her taste in design. She remarked that in
+her opinion the court in front of the house would look better split up
+by a wall. Her host dutifully acceded to the idea, and surprised Her
+Majesty next morning by pointing out the wall which he had erected
+during the night, sending to London for masons and material for the
+purpose. The conceit was a more ponderous one than that of Raleigh's
+cloak--bricks and mortar _versus_ velvet.
+
+A greater than Gresham succeeded, after the death of his widow, to the
+occupancy of Osterley--Chief-justice Coke. His compliment to Elizabeth
+on the occasion of a similar visit to the same house took the more
+available and acceptable shape of ten or twelve hundred pounds
+sterling in jewelry. She had more than a woman's weakness for finery,
+and Coke operated upon it very successfully. His gems outlasted
+Gresham's wall, which has long since disappeared with the court it
+disfigured. In place of both stands a goodly Ionic portico, through
+which one may pass to a staircase that bears a representation by
+Rubens of the apotheosis of Mr. Motley's hero, William the Silent. The
+gallery offers a collection of other old pictures. Should we, however,
+take time for even a short stop in this vicinity, it would probably be
+for the credit of saying that we walked over Hounslow Heath intact in
+purse and person. The gentlemen of the road live only in the classic
+pages of Ainsworth, Reynolds and, if we may include Sam Weller in such
+worshipful company, that bard of "the bold Tur_pin_." Another class
+of highwaymen had long before them been also attracted by the fine
+manoeuvring facilities of the heath, beginning with the army of the
+C�sars and ending with that of James II. Jonathan Wild and his merry
+men were saints to Kirke and his lambs.
+
+Hurrying on, we skirt one of Pope's outlying manors, in his time the
+seat of his friend Bathurst and the haunt of Addison, Prior, Congreve
+and Gay, and leave southward, toward the Thames, Horton, the cradle of
+Milton. A marble in its ivy-grown church is inscribed to the memory
+of his mother, _ob_. 1637. At Horton were composed, or inspired,
+_Lycidas, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus_ and others of his nominally
+minor but really sweetest and most enjoyable poems. In this retirement
+the Muse paid him her earliest visits, before he had thrown himself
+away on politics or Canaanitish mythology. Peeping in upon his
+handsome young face in its golden setting of blonde curls,
+
+  Through the sweetbrier or the vine,
+  Or the twisted eglantine,
+
+she wooed him to better work than reporting the debates of the
+archangels or calling the roll of Tophet. Had he confined himself to
+this tenderer field, the world would have been the gainer. He might
+not have "made the word Miltonic mean sublime," but we can spare a
+little of the sublime to get some more of the beautiful.
+
+To reach Milton, however, we have run off of the track badly. His Eden
+is no station on the Great Western. We shall balance this southward
+divergence with a corresponding one to the north from Slough, the last
+station ere reaching Windsor. We may give a go-by for the moment to
+the halls of kings, do homage to him who treated them similarly, and
+point, in preference, to where,
+
+         in many a mouldering heap,
+  The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
+
+They show Gray's tomb in Stoke Pogis church, and his house, West End
+Cottage, half a mile distant. The ingredients of his _Elegy_--actually
+the greatest, but in his judgment among the least, of his few
+works--exist all around. "The rugged elm," "the ivy-mantled tower,"
+and "the yew tree's shade," the most specific among the simple
+"properties" of his little spectacle, are common to so many places
+that there are several competitors for the honor of having furnished
+them. The cocks, ploughmen, herds and owls cannot, of course, at this
+late day be identified. Gray could not have done it himself. He
+drew from general memory, in his closet, and not bit by bit on
+his thumb-nail from chance-met objects as he went along. Had
+his conception and rendering of the theme been due to the direct
+impression upon his mind of its several aspects and constituents,
+he would have more thoroughly appreciated his work. He could not
+understand its popularity, any more than Campbell could that of _Ye
+Mariners of England_, which he pronounced "d----d drum-and-trumpet
+verses." Gray used to say, "with a good deal of acrimony," that the
+_Elegy_ "owed its popularity entirely to the subject, and the public
+would have received it as well had it been written entirely in prose."
+Had it been written in prose or in the inventory style of poetry, it
+would have been forgotten long ago, like so much else of that kind.
+
+[Illustration: GRAY.]
+
+Not far hence is Beaconsfield, which gave a home to Burke and a title
+to the wife of Disraeli, the nearest approach to a peerage that the
+haughty Israelite, soured by a life of struggle against peers and
+their prejudices, would deign to accept. We know it will be objected
+to this remark that Disraeli is, and has been for most of his career,
+associated with Toryism. But that was part of his game. A man of
+culture, thought and fastidious taste, he would, had he been of the
+_sangre azul_, have been the steadiest and sincerest of Conservatives.
+Privilege would have been his gospel. As it is, it has only been his
+weapon, to use in fighting for himself. "The time will come when you
+shall listen to me," were his words when he was first coughed down.
+The time has come. The most cynical of premiers, he governs England,
+and he scorns to take a place among those who ruled her before him.
+
+Extending our divergence farther west toward "Cliefden's proud alcove,
+the bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love," we find ourselves in a
+luxuriant rolling country, rural and slumberous. Cookham parish,
+which we should traverse, claims quite loudly American kinship on
+the strength of its including an estate once the property of Henry
+Washington, who is alleged, without sufficient ground, to have been
+a relative of the general. But we are within the purlieus of Windsor.
+The round tower has been looking down upon us these many miles, and we
+cannot but yield to its magnetism.
+
+[Illustration: BEACONSFIELD CHURCH.]
+
+Eton, on the north bank, opposite Windsor, and really a continuous
+town with that which nestles close to the castle walls, is on our way
+from Slough. The red-brick buildings of the school, forming a fine
+foil to the lighter-colored and more elegantly designed chapel, are on
+our left, the principal front looking over a garden toward the river
+and Windsor Home Park beyond. We become aware of a populace of boys,
+the file-closers of England's nineteenth century worthies, and her
+coming veterans of the twentieth. We may contemplatively view them in
+that light, but it has little place in their reflections. Their ruddy
+faces and somewhat cumbrous forms belong to the animal period of life
+that links together boyhood, colthood and calfhood. Education of the
+physique, consisting chiefly in the indulgence and employment of it in
+the mere demonstration of its superabundant vitality, is a large
+part of the curriculum at English schools. The playground and the
+study-room form no unequal alliance. Rigid as, in some respects, the
+discipline proper of the school may be, it does not compare with the
+severity of that maintained by the older boys over the younger ones.
+The code of the lesser, and almost independent, republic of the
+dormitory and the green is as clear in its terms as that of the
+unlimited monarchy of the school-room, and more potent in shaping the
+character. The lads train themselves for the battle of the world,
+with some help from the masters. It is a sound system on the whole, if
+based, to appearance, rather too much on the principle of the weaker
+to the wall. The tendency of the weaker inevitably is to the wall, and
+if he is to contend against it effectively, it will be by finding
+out his weakness and being made to feel it at the earliest possible
+moment.
+
+[Illustration: TOMB OF BURKE.]
+
+Not on land only, but on the river, whereinto it so gradually blends,
+does lush young England dissipate. Cricket and football order into
+violent action both pairs of extremities, while the upper pair and the
+organs of the thorax labor profitably at the oar. The Thames, in its
+three bends from Senly Hall, the Benny Havens of Eton, down to Datchet
+Mead, where Falstaff overflowed the buck-basket, belongs to the boys.
+In this space it is split into an archipelago of aits. In and out of
+the gleaming paths and avenues of silvery water that wind between them
+glide the little boats. The young Britons take to the element like
+young ducks. Many a "tall admiral" has commenced his "march over the
+mountain wave" among these water-lilies and hedges of osier.
+
+Shall we leave the boys at play, and, renewing our youth, go
+ourselves to school? Entering the great gate of the western of the two
+quadrangles, we are welcomed by a bronze statue of the founder of the
+institution, Henry VI. He endowed it in 1440. The first organization
+comprised "a provost, four clerks, ten priests, six choristers,
+twenty-five poor grammar-scholars, and twenty-five poor infirm men to
+pray for the king." The prayers of these invalids were sorely needed
+by the unhappy scion of Lancaster, but did him little good in a
+temporal sense. The provost is always rector of the parish. Laymen are
+non-eligible. Thus it happens that the list does not include two
+names which would have illuminated it more than those of any of the
+incumbents--Boyle the philosopher, "father of chemistry and brother
+of the earl of Cork," and Waller the poet. The modern establishment
+consists of a provost, vice-provost, six fellows, a master,
+under-master, assistants, seventy foundation scholars, seven lay
+clerks and ten choristers, with a cortege of "inferior officers and
+servants"--a tolerably full staff. The pay-students, as they would be
+termed in this country, numbering usually five to six hundred, do not
+live in the college precincts, but at boarding-houses in the town,
+whence their designation of oppidans, the seventy gowns-men only
+having dormitories in the college. The roll of the alumni contains
+such names as the first earl of Chatham, Harley, earl of Oxford,
+Bolingbroke, Fox, Gray, Canning, Wellington and Hallam. That is enough
+to say for Eton. The beauties of the chapel, the treasures of the
+library and the other shows of the place become trivial by the side of
+the record.
+
+[Illustration: HEDSOR AND COOKHAM CHURCHES.]
+
+Over the "fifteen-arch" bridge, which has but three or four arches, we
+pass to the town of Windsor, which crouches, on the river-side, close
+up to the embattled walls of the castle--so closely that the very
+irregular pile of buildings included in the latter cannot at first
+glance be well distinguished from the town. High over all swells the
+round tower to a height above the water of two hundred and twenty
+feet--no excessive altitude, if we deduct the eminence on which it
+stands, yet enough, in this level country, to give it a prospect of
+a score or two of miles in all directions. The Conqueror fell in love
+with the situation at first sight, and gave a stolen monastery in
+exchange for it. The home so won has provided a shelter--at times very
+imperfect, indeed--to British sovereigns for eight centuries. From
+the modest erection of William it has been steadily growing--with the
+growth of the empire, we were near saying, but its chief enlargements
+occurred before the empire entered upon the expansion of the past
+three centuries. It is more closely associated with Edward III. than
+with any other of the ancient line. He was born at Windsor, and
+almost entirely rebuilt it, William of Wykeham being superintending
+architect, with "a fee of one shilling a day whilst at Windsor, and
+two shillings when he went elsewhere on the duties of his office,"
+three shillings a week being the pay of his clerk. It becomes at once
+obvious that the margin for "rings" was but slender in those days.
+The labor question gave not the least trouble. The law of supply
+and demand was not consulted. "Three hundred and sixty workmen were
+impressed, to be employed on the building at the king's wages; some
+of whom having clandestinely left Windsor and engaged in other
+employments to greater advantage, writs were issued prohibiting all
+persons from employing them on pain of forfeiting all their goods and
+chattels." In presence of so simple and effective a definition of the
+rights of the workingman, strikes sink into nothingness. And Magna
+Charta had been signed a hundred and fifty years before! That
+document, however, in honor of which the free and enlightened Briton
+of to-day is wont to elevate his hat and his voice, was only in the
+name and on behalf of the barons. The English people derived under it
+neither name, place nor right. English liberty is only incidental, a
+foundling of untraced parentage, a _filius nullius_. True, its
+growth was indirectly fostered by aught that checked the power of the
+monarch, and the nobles builded more wisely than they knew or intended
+when they brought Lackland to book, or to parchment, at Runnymede,
+not far down the river and close to the edge of the royal park. The
+memorable plain is still a meadow, kept ever green and inviolate of
+the plough. A pleasant row it is for the Eton youngsters to this spot.
+On Magna Charta island, opposite, they may take their rest and their
+lunch, and refresh their minds as well with the memories of the place.
+The task of reform is by no means complete. There is room and call
+for further concessions in favor of the masses. These embryo statesmen
+have work blocked out for them in the future, and this is a good place
+for them to adjust to it the focus of their bright young optics.
+
+[Illustration: ETON COLLEGE AND CHAPEL.]
+
+The monarchical idea is certainly predominant in our present
+surroundings. The Thames flows from the castle and the school under
+two handsome erections named the Victoria and Albert bridges; and
+when, turning our back upon Staines, just below Runnymede, with its
+boundary-stone marking the limit of the jurisdiction of plebeian
+London's fierce democracy, and inscribed "God preserve the City of
+London, 1280," we strike west into the Great Park, we soon come plump
+on George III, a great deal larger than life. The "best farmer that
+ever brushed dew from lawn" is clad in antique costume with toga and
+buskins. Bestriding a stout horse, without stirrups and with no bridle
+to speak of, the old gentleman looks calmly into the distance while
+his steed is in the act of stepping over a perpendicular precipice.
+This preposterous effort of the glyptic art has the one merit of
+serving as a finger-board. The old king points us to his palace, three
+miles off, at the end of the famous Long Walk. He did not himself care
+to live at the castle, but liked to make his home at an obscure lodge
+in the park, the same from which, on his first attack of insanity, he
+set out in charge of two of his household on that melancholy ride
+to the retreat of Kew, more convenient in those days for medical
+attendance from London, and to which he returned a few months later
+restored for the time. Shortly after his recovery he undertook to
+throw up one of the windows of the lodge, but found it nailed down. He
+asked the cause, and was told, with inconsiderate bluntness, that
+it had been done during his illness to prevent his doing himself an
+injury. The perfect calmness and silence with which he received this
+explanation was a sufficient evidence of his recovery.
+
+[Illustration: ETON COLLEGE, FROM NORTH TERRACE, WINDSOR.]
+
+Bidding the old man a final farewell, we accept the direction of
+his brazen hand and take up the line of march, wherein all traveling
+America has preceded us, to the point wherefrom we glanced off so
+suddenly in obedience to the summons of Magna Charta. On either
+hand, as we thread the Long Walk, open glades that serve as so many
+emerald-paved courts to the monarchs of the grove, some of them older
+than the whole Norman dynasty, with Saxon summers recorded in their
+hearts. One of them, thirty-eight feet round, is called after the
+Conqueror. Among these we shall not find the most noted of Windsor
+trees. It was in the Home Park, on the farther or northern side of the
+castle, that the fairies were used to perform their
+
+    --dance of custom round about the oak
+  Of Herne the hunter.
+
+Whether the genuine oak was cut down at the close of the last century,
+or was preserved, carefully fenced in and labeled, in an utterly
+leafless and shattered state, to our generation, is a moot point.
+Certain it is that the most ardent Shakespearean must abandon the hope
+of securing for a bookmark to his _Merry Wives of Windsor_ one of the
+leaves that rustled, while "Windsor bell struck twelve," over the head
+of fat Jack. He has the satisfaction, however, of looking up at the
+identical bell-tower of the sixteenth century, and may make tryst with
+his imagination to await its midnight chime. Then he may cross the
+graceful iron bridge--modern enough, unhappily--to Datchet, and
+ascertain by actual experiment whether the temperature of the Thames
+has changed since the dumping into it of Falstaff, "hissing hot."
+
+[Illustration: STAINES CHURCH.]
+
+Back at the castle, we must "do" it, after the set fashion. Reminders
+meet us at the threshold that it is in form a real place of defence,
+contemplative of wars and rumors of wars, and not a mere dwelling by
+any means in original design. A roadway, crooked and raked by frowning
+embrasures, leads up from the peaceful town to the particularly
+inhospitable-looking twin towers of Henry VIII.'s gateway, in their
+turn commanded by the round tower on the right, in full panoply of
+artificial scarp and ditch. Sentinels in the scarlet livery that
+has flamed on so many battlefields of all the islands and continents
+assist in proving that things did not always go so easy with majesty
+as they do now. But two centuries and more have elapsed since
+there happened any justification for this frown of stone, steel and
+feathers; Rupert's futile demonstration on it in 1642 having been
+Windsor's last taste of war, its sternest office after that having
+been the safe-keeping of Charles I., who here spent his "sorrowful and
+last Christmas." Once inside the gate, visions of peace recur. The eye
+first falls on the most beautiful of all the assembled structures,
+St. George's Chapel. It, with the royal tomb house, the deanery and
+Winchester tower, occupies the left or north side of the lower or
+western ward. In the rear of the chapel of St. George are quartered in
+cozy cloisters the canons of the college of that ilk--not great guns
+in any sense, but old ecclesiastical artillery spiked after a more or
+less noisy youth and laid up in varnished black for the rest of their
+days. Watch and ward over these modern equipments is kept by Julius
+C�sar's tower, as one of the most ancient erections is of course
+called. Still farther to our left as we enter are the quarters of
+sundry other antiquated warriors, the Military Knights of Windsor.
+These are a few favored veterans, mostly decayed officers of the army
+and navy, who owe this shelter to royal favor and an endowment. The
+Ivy tower, west of the entrance, is followed in eastward succession by
+those of the gateway, Salisbury, Garter and Bell towers.
+
+[Illustration: NORMAN GATE AND ROUND TOWER, WINDSOR.]
+
+The fine exterior of St. George's is more than matched by the carving
+and blazonry of the interior. The groined roof bears the devices of
+half a dozen early kings, beginning with Edward the Confessor. Along
+the choir stretch the stalls of the sovereign and knights-companions
+of the order of the Garter, each hung with banner, mantle, sword and
+helmet. Better than these is the hammered steel tomb of Edward IV., by
+Quentin Matsys, the Flemish blacksmith. In the vaults beneath rest the
+victim of Edward, Henry VI., Henry VIII., Jane Seymour and Charles I.
+The account of the appearance of Charles' remains when his tomb was
+examined in 1813 by Sir Henry Halford, accompanied by several of the
+royal family, is worth quoting. "The complexion of the face was dark
+and discolored. The forehead and temples had lost little or nothing of
+their muscular substance. The cartilage of the nose was gone; but the
+left eye, in the moment of first exposure, was open and full,
+though it vanished almost immediately, and the pointed beard so
+characteristic of the reign of King Charles was perfect. The shape
+of the face was a long oval; many of the teeth remained; and the
+left ear, in consequence of the interposition of some unctuous matter
+between it and the cere-cloth, was found entire. The hair was thick at
+the back part of the head, and in appearance nearly black. A portion
+of it, which has since been cleaned and dried, is of a beautiful
+dark-brown color. That of the beard was a reddish-brown. On the back
+part of the head it was not more than an inch in length, and had
+probably been cut so short for the convenience of the executioner,
+or perhaps by the piety of friends after death in order to furnish
+memorials of the unhappy king. On holding up the head to determine
+the place of separation from the body, the muscles of the neck had
+evidently contracted themselves considerably, and the fourth cervical
+vertebra was found to be cut through its substance transversely,
+leaving the face of the divided portions perfectly smooth and even--an
+appearance which could have been produced only by a heavy blow
+inflicted with a very sharp instrument, and which furnished the last
+proof wanting to identify Charles I."
+
+[Illustration: HERNE'S OAK.]
+
+A highly-edifying spectacle this must have been to the prince regent
+and his brother Cumberland. The certainties of the past and the
+possibilities of the future were calculated to be highly suggestive.
+A French sovereign had but a few years before shared the fate of
+Charles, and a cloud of other kings were drifting about Europe with
+no very flattering prospect of coming soon to anchor. Napoleon was
+showing his banded foes a good double front in Germany and Spain.
+His dethronement and the restoration of the Bourbons were not as yet
+contemplated. The Spanish succession was whittled down to a girl--that
+is, by Salic law, to nothing at all. The Hanoverian was in a similar
+condition, or worse, none of the old sons of the crazy old king
+having any legitimate children. The prince regent himself was highly
+unpopular with the mass of his people; and the classes that formed
+his principal support were more so, by reason of the arrogance and
+exactions of the landed interest, the high price of grain and
+other heavy financial burdens consequent on the war, the arbitrary
+prosecutions and imprisonment of leaders of the people, and the
+irregularities of his private life.
+
+But these sinister omens proved illusory. Leigh Hunt, Wraxall and the
+rest made but ineffectual martyrs; the Bourbons straggled back into
+France and Spain, with such results as we see; George IV. weathered,
+by no merit of his own, a fresh series of storms at home; the clouds
+that lowered upon his house were made glorious summer by the advent of
+a fat little lady in 1819--the fat old lady of 1875; and we step from
+the tomb of Charles in St. George's Chapel to that where George and
+William slumber undisturbed in the tomb-house, elaborately decorated
+by Wolsey. Wolsey's fixtures were sold by the thrifty patriots of
+Cromwell's Parliament, and bought in by the republican governor of the
+castle as "old brass." George was able, too, to add another story to
+the stature of the round tower or keep that marks the middle ward
+of the castle and looks down, on the rare occasion of a sufficiently
+clear atmosphere, on prosperous and no longer disloyal London. This
+same keep has quite a list of royal prisoners; John of France and
+David II. and James I. of Scotland enjoyed a prolonged view of its
+interior; so did the young earl of Surrey, a brother-poet, a century
+removed, of James.
+
+Leaving behind us the atmosphere of shackles and dungeons, we emerge,
+through the upper ward and the additions of Queen Bess, upon the ample
+terrace, where nothing bounds us but the horizon. Together, the north,
+east and south terraces measure some two thousand feet. The first
+looks upon Eton, the lesser park of some five hundred acres which
+fills a bend of the Thames and the country beyond for many miles. The
+eastern platform, lying between the queen's private apartments and an
+exquisite private garden, is not always free to visitors. The south
+terrace presents to the eye the Great Park of thirty-eight hundred
+acres, extending six miles, with a width of from half a mile to
+two miles. The equestrian statue at the end of the Long Walk is a
+conspicuous object. The prevailing mass of rolling woods is broken by
+scattered buildings, glades and avenues, which take from it monotony
+and give it life. Near the south end is an artificial pond called
+Virginia Water, edged with causeless arches and ruins that never were
+anything but ruins, Chinese temples and idle toys of various other
+kinds, terrestrial and aquatic. The ancient trees, beeches and elms,
+of enormous size, and often projected individually, are worth studying
+near or from a distance. The elevation is not so great as to bring
+out low-lying objects much removed. We see the summits of hills, each
+having its name, as St. Leonard's, Cooper's, Highstanding, etc., and
+glimpses of the river and of some country-seats. St. Anne's Hill was
+the home of Fox; at St. Leonard's dwelt the father of his rival and
+rival of his father, and at Binfield, Pope, of whom it is so hard
+to conceive as having ever been young, "lisped in numbers, for the
+numbers came," natural descriptions, ethical reflections, _vers de
+societ�_ and all, for around him here there was food for them all. To
+descend from Pope in point of both time and romance, the view
+includes the scenes of Prince Albert's agricultural experiments. Quite
+successful many of them were. He was a thoroughly practical man--a
+circumstance which carried him by several routes across ploughed
+fields and through well-built streets, straight to the hearts of the
+English people. His memory is more warmly cherished, and impressed
+upon the stranger by more monuments, than that of any other of the
+German strain. It might have been less so had he succeeded in the
+efforts he is now known to have made soon after his marriage to attain
+a higher nominal rank. He possessed, through the alliance of Leopold
+and Stockmar and the devotion of Victoria, kingly power without the
+name and the responsibility, and with that he became content. He used
+it cautiously and well when he employed it at all. His position was a
+trying one, but he steered well through its difficulties, and died
+as generally trusted as he was at first universally watched. The
+love-match of 1840 was every way a success.
+
+[Illustration: EAST FRONT, WINDSOR CASTLE.]
+
+Another figure, more rugged and less majestic, but not less
+respectable, will be associated with Victoria in the memories, if not
+the history proper, of her reign. This is John Brown, the canny and
+impassive Scot, content, like the Rohans, to be neither prince nor
+king, and, prouder than they, satisfied honestly to discharge the
+office of a flunkey without the very smallest trace of the flunkey
+spirit. He too has lived down envy and all uncharitableness.
+Contemptuous and serene amid the hootings of the mob and the squibs
+of the newspapers, he carries, as he has done for years, Her Majesty's
+shawl and capacious India-rubbers, attends her tramps through the
+Highlands and the Home Park, engineers her special trains and looks
+after her personal comfort even to the extent of ordering her to
+wear "mair claes" in a Scotch mist. The queen has embalmed him in
+her books, and he will rank among the heroes of royal authors as his
+namesake and countryman the Cameronian, by favor of very similar moral
+qualities, does with those of more democratic proclivities.
+
+[Illustration: QUEEN ELIZABETH'S BUILDING, WINDSOR.]
+
+We cannot apply literally to the view from Windsor Thackeray's lines
+on "the castle towers of Bareacres:"
+
+  I stood upon the donjon keep and viewed the country o'er;
+  I saw the lands of Bareacres for fifty miles or more.
+
+[Illustration: EARL OF SURREY.]
+
+We scan what was once embraced in Windsor Forest, where the Norman
+laid his broad palm on a space a hundred and twenty miles round, and,
+like the lion in the fable of the hunting-party, informed his subjects
+that that was his share. The domain dwindled, as did other royal
+appurtenances. Yet in 1807 the circuit was as much as seventy-seven
+miles. In 1789 it embraced sixty thousand acres. The process of
+contraction has since been accelerated, and but little remains outside
+of the Great and Little Parks. Several villages of little note stand
+upon it. Of these Wokingham has the distinction of an ancient hostelry
+yclept the Rose; and the celebrity of the Rose is a beautiful daughter
+of the landlord of a century and a half ago. This lady missed her
+proper fame by the blunder of a merry party of poets who one evening
+encircled the mahogany of her papa. It was as "fast" a festivity as
+such names as Gay and Swift could make it. Their combined efforts
+resulted in the burlesque of _Molly Mog_. These two and some others
+contributed each a verse in honor of the fair waiter. But they mistook
+her name, and the crown fell upon the less charming brow of her
+sister, whose cognomen was depraved from Mary into Molly. Wiclif's Oak
+is pointed out as a corner of the old forest, a long way east of the
+park. Under its still spreading branches that forerunner of Luther
+is said to have preached. Messrs. Moody and Sankey should have sought
+inspiration under its shade.
+
+In the vast assemblage of the arboreal commonwealth that carpets the
+landscape the centuries are represented one with another. It is a
+leafy parliament that has never been dissolved or prorogued. One hoary
+member is coeval with the Confessor. Another sheltered William Rufus,
+tired from the chase. Under another gathered recruits bound with
+Coeur de Lion for the Holy Land. Against the bole of this was set up
+a practicing butt for the clothyard shafts that won Agincourt, and
+beneath that bivouacked the pickets of Cromwell. As we look down upon
+their topmost leaves there floats, high above our own level, "darkly
+painted on the crimson sky," a member, not so old, of another
+commonwealth quite as ancient that has flourished among their branches
+from time immemorial. There flaps the solitary heron to the evening
+tryst of his tribe. Where is the hawk? Will he not rise from some fair
+wrist among the gay troop we see cantering across yonder glade? Only
+the addition of that little gray speck circling into the blue is
+needed to round off our illusion. But it comes not. In place of it
+comes a spirt of steam from the railway viaduct, and the whistle of
+an engine. Froissart is five hundred years dead again, and we turn to
+Bradshaw.
+
+[Illustration: WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM BISHOPSGATE.]
+
+Yet we have a "view of an interior" to contemplate before facing the
+lower Thames. And first, as the day is fading, we seek the dimmest
+part. We dive into the crypt of the bell-tower, or the curfew-tower,
+that used to send far and wide to many a Saxon cottage the hateful
+warning that told of servitude. How old the base of this tower is
+nobody seems to know, nor how far back it has served as a prison.
+The oldest initials of state prisoners inscribed on its cells date
+to 1600. The walls are twelve feet thick, and must have begotten a
+pleasant feeling of perfect security in the breasts of the involuntary
+inhabitants. They did not know of a device contrived for the security
+of their jailers, which has but recently been discovered. This is a
+subterranean and subaqueous passage, alleged to lead under the river
+to Burnham Abbey, three miles off. The visitor will not be disposed to
+verify this statement or to stay long in the comparatively airy crypt.
+Damp as the British climate may be above ground, it is more so below.
+We emerge to the fine range of state apartments above, and submit to
+the rule of guide and guide-book.
+
+[Illustration: LOCK AT WINDSOR.]
+
+St. George's Hall, the Waterloo gallery, the council-chamber and the
+Vandyck room are the most attractive, all of them for the historical
+portraits they contain, and the first, besides, for its merit as an
+example of a Gothic interior and its associations with the order of
+the Garter, the knights of which society are installed in it. The
+specialty of the Waterloo room is the series of portraits of the
+leaders, civil and military, English and continental, of the last and
+successful league against Napoleon. They are nearly all by Lawrence,
+and of course admirable in their delineation of character. In that
+essential of a good portrait none of the English school have excelled
+Lawrence. We may rely upon the truth to Nature of each of the heads
+before us; for air and expression accord with what history tells us
+of the individuals, its verdict eked out and assisted by instructive
+minuti� of lineament and meaning detected, in the "off-guard" of
+private intercourse, by the eye of a great painter and a lifelong
+student of physiognomy. We glance from the rugged Blucher to the
+wily Metternich, and from the philosophic Humboldt to the semi-savage
+Platoff. The dandies George IV. and Alexander are here, but Brummel
+is left out. The gem of the collection is Pius VII., Lawrence's
+masterpiece, widely familiar by engravings. Raphael's Julius II. seems
+to have been in the artist's mind, but that work is not improved on,
+unless in so far as the critical eye of our day may delight in the
+more intricate tricks of chiaroscuro and effect to which Lawrence has
+recourse. "Brunswick's fated chieftain" will interest the votaries of
+Childe Harold. Could he have looked forward to 1870, he would perhaps
+have chosen a different side at Waterloo, as his father might at Jena,
+and elected to figure in oils at Versailles rather than at Windsor.
+Incomparably more destructive to the small German princes have been
+the Hohenzollerns than the Bonapartes.
+
+[Illustration: THE THAMES EMBANKMENT.]
+
+We forget these nineteenth-century people in the council-chamber,
+wherein reign Guido, Rembrandt, Claude, and even Da Vinci. If
+Leonardo really executed all the canvases ascribed to him in English
+collections, the common impressions of his habits of painting but
+little, and not often finishing that, do him great injustice. Martin
+Luther is here, by Holbein, and the countess of Desmond, the merry old
+lady
+
+  Who lived to the age of twice threescore and ten,
+  And died of a fall from a cherry tree then,
+
+is embalmed in the bloom of one hundred and twenty and the gloom of
+Rembrandt. The two dozen pictures in this room form nearly as odd an
+association as any like number of portraits could do. Guercino's Sibyl
+figures with a cottage interior by Teniers, and Lely's Prince Rupert
+looks down with lordly scorn on Jonah pitched into the sea by the
+combined efforts of the two Poussins. The link between Berghem's cows
+and Del Sarto's Holy Family was doubtless supplied to the minds of
+the hanging committee by recollections of the manger. Our thrifty
+Pennsylvanian, West, is assigned the vestibule. Five of his "ten-acre"
+pictures illustrate the wars of Edward III. and the Black Prince.
+The king's closet and the queen's closet are filled mostly by the
+Flemings. Vandyck's room finally finishes the list. It has, besides
+a portrait of himself and several more of the first Charles and his
+family in every pose, some such queer, or worse than queer, commoners
+as Tom Killigrew and Sir Kenelm Digby and Venetia his hopeful spouse,
+so dear to novelists of a certain school.
+
+[Illustration: ELMS NEAR THE HERONRY.]
+
+Vast sums have been expended on the renovation and improvement of the
+castle during the past half century. With Victoria it has been more
+popular as a residence than with any of her predecessors since
+the fourteenth century. What, however, with its greater practical
+proximity to London, due to railways, and what with the queen's liking
+for solitude since the death of her consort, the more secluded
+homes of Osborne and Balmoral have measurably superseded it in her
+affections. Five hundred miles of distance to the Dee preclude the
+possibility of the dumping on her, by means of excursion trains, of
+loyal cockneydom. She is as thoroughly protected from that inundation
+in the Isle of Wight, the average Londoner having a fixed horror of
+sea-sickness. The running down, by her private steamer, of a few more
+inquisitive yachts in the Solent would be a hazardous experiment, if
+temporarily effective in keeping home invaders at bay. Holding as her
+right and left bowers those two sanctuaries at the opposite ends of
+her island realm, she can play a strong hand in the way of personal
+independence, and cease to feel that hers is a monarchy limited by the
+rights of the masses. It is well for the country that she should be
+left as far as possible to consult her own comfort, ease and health
+at least as freely as the humblest of her subjects. The continuance
+of her life is certainly a political desideratum. It largely aids in
+maintaining a wholesome balance between conservatism and reform. So
+long as she lives there will be no masculine will to exaggerate the
+former or obstruct the latter, as notably happened under George
+III. and William IV. Her personal bearing is also in her favor. Her
+popularity, temporarily obscured a few years ago, is becoming as great
+as ever. It has never been weakened by any misstep in politics, and so
+long as that can be said will be exposed to no serious danger.
+
+We are far from being at the end of the upper Thames. Oxford, were
+there no other namable place, is beyond us. But we have explored
+the denser portion--the nucleus of the nebula of historic stars that
+stretches into the western sky as seen from the metropolis. We lay
+aside our little lorgnette. It has shown us as much as we can map in
+these pages, and that we have endeavored to do with at least the merit
+of accuracy.
+
+EDWARD C. BRUCE.
+
+
+
+
+THE POET'S PEN.
+
+      I am an idle reed;
+  I rustle in the whispering air;
+      I bear my stalk and seed
+  Through spring-time's glow and summer's glare.
+
+      And in the fiercer strife
+  Which winter brings to me amain,
+      Sapless, I waste my life,
+  And, murmuring at my fate, complain.
+
+      I am a worthless reed;
+  No golden top have I for crown,
+      No flower for beauty's meed,
+  No wreath for poet's high renown.
+
+      Hollow and gaunt, my wand
+  Shrill whistles, bending in the gale;
+      Leafless and sad I stand,
+  And, still neglected, still bewail.
+
+      O foolish reed! to wail!
+  A poet came, with downcast eyes,
+      And, wandering through the dale,
+  Saw thee and claimed thee for his prize.
+
+      He plucked thee from the mire;
+  He pruned and made of thee a pen,
+      And wrote in words of fire
+  His flaming song to listening men;
+
+      Till thou, so lowly bred,
+  Now wedded to a nobler state,
+      Utt'rest such p�ans overhead
+  That angels listen at their gate.
+
+  F.A. HILLARD.
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES OF INDIA.
+
+II.
+
+
+I had now learned to place myself unreservedly in the hands of Bhima
+Gandharva. When, therefore, on regaining the station at Khandallah, he
+said, "The route by which I intend to show you India will immediately
+take us quite away from this part of it; first, however, let us go and
+see Poona, the old Mahratta capital, which lies but a little more than
+thirty miles farther to the south-eastward by rail,"--I accepted the
+proposition as a matter of course, and we were soon steaming down the
+eastern declivity of the Gh�ts. As we moved smoothly down into the
+treeless plains which surround Poona I could not resist a certain
+feeling of depression.
+
+"Yes," said Bhima Gandharva when I mentioned it to him, "I understand
+exactly what you mean. On reaching an unbroken expanse of level
+country, after leaving the tops of mountains, I always feel as if my
+soul had come bump against a solid wall of rock in the dark. I seem
+to hear a dull _thud_ of discouragement somewhere back in my soul, as
+when a man's body falls dead on the earth. Nothing, indeed, could
+more heighten such a sensation than the contrast between this and
+the Bombay side of the Gh�ts. There we had the undulating waters,
+the lovely harbor with its wooded and hilly islands, the ascending
+terraces of the Gh�ts: everything was energetic, the whole invitation
+of Nature was toward air, light, freedom, heaven. But here one spot
+is like another spot; this level ground is just the same level ground
+there was a mile back; this corn stands like that corn; there is an
+oppressive sense of bread-and-butter about; one somehow finds one's
+self thinking of ventilation and economics. It is the sausage-grinding
+school of poetry--of which modern art, by the way, presents several
+examples--as compared with that general school represented by the
+geniuses who arise and fly their own flight and sing at a great
+distance above the heads of men and of wheat."
+
+Having arrived and refreshed ourselves at our hotel, whose proprietor
+was, as usual, a Parsee, we sallied forth for a stroll about Poona. On
+one side of us lay the English quarter, consisting of the houses and
+gardens of the officers and government employ�s, and of the two or
+three hundred other Englishmen residing here. On the other was the
+town, extending itself along the banks of the little river Moota.
+We dreamed ourselves along in the lovely weather through such of
+the seven quarters of the town as happened to strike the fancy of my
+companion. Occasionally we were compelled to turn out of our way
+for the sacred cattle, which, in the enjoyment of their divine
+prerogatives, would remain serenely lying across our path; but
+we respected the antiquity, if not the reasonableness, of their
+privileges, and murmured not.
+
+Each of the seven quarters of Poona is named after a day of the week.
+As we strolled from Monday to Tuesday, or passed with bold anachronism
+from Saturday back to Wednesday, I could not help observing how
+these interweavings and reversals of time appeared to take an actual
+embodiment in the scenes through which we slowly moved, particularly
+in respect of the houses and the costumes which went to make up
+our general view. From the modern-built European houses to the
+medi�val-looking buildings of the Bhoodwar quarter, with their massive
+walls and loop-holes and crenellations, was a matter of four or five
+centuries back in a mere turn of the eye; and from these latter to
+the Hindu temples here and there, which, whether or not of actual age,
+always carry one straight into antiquity, was a further retrogression
+to the obscure depths of time. So, too, one's glance would often sweep
+in a twinkling from a European clothed in garments of the latest mode
+to a Hindu whose sole covering was his _dhotee_, or clout about the
+loins, taking in between these two extremes a number of distinct
+stages in the process of evolution through which our clothes have
+gone. In the evening we visited the _Sangam_, where the small streams
+of the Moola and the Moota come together. It is filled with cenotaphs,
+but, so far from being a place of weeping, the pleasant air was full
+of laughter and of gay conversation from the Hindus, who delight to
+repair here for the purpose of enjoying the cool breath of the evening
+as well as the pleasures of social intercourse.
+
+[Illustration: HINDU TEMPLES NEAR POONA.]
+
+But I did not care to linger in Poona. The atmosphere always had to me
+a certain tang of the assassinations, the intrigues, the treacheries
+which marked the reign of that singular line of usurping ministers
+whose capital was here. In the days when the Peishwas were in the
+height of their glory Poona was a city of a hundred and fifty thousand
+inhabitants, and great traffic was here carried on in jewelry and
+such luxuries among the Mahratta nobles. The Mahrattas once, indeed,
+possessed the whole of India practically; and their name is composed
+of _Mahu_, a word meaning "great," and often to be met with in the
+designations of this land, where so many things really _are_ great,
+and _Rachtra_, "kingdom," the propriety of the appellation seeming to
+be justified by the bravery and military character of the people. They
+have been called the Cossacks of India from these qualities combined
+with their horsemanship. But the dynasty of the usurping ministers had
+its origin in iniquity; and the corruption of its birth quickly broke
+out again under the stimulus of excess and luxury, until it culminated
+in the destruction of the Mahratta empire in 1818. So, when we had
+seen the palace of the Peishwa, from one of whose balconies the young
+Peishwa Mahadeo committed suicide by leaping to the earth in the
+year 1797 through shame at having been reproved by his minister
+Nana Farnavese in presence of his court, and when we had visited the
+Hira-B�gh, or Garden of Diamonds, the summer retreat of the Peishwas,
+with its elegant pavilion, its balconies jutting into the masses of
+foliage, its cool tank of water, reposing under the protection of the
+temple-studded Hill of Pararati, we took train again for Bombay.
+
+The Great Indian Peninsula Railway's main line leads out of Bombay
+over the Gh�ts to Jabalp�r, six hundred miles; thence a railway of
+some two hundred and twenty miles runs to Allahabad, connecting them
+with the great line, known as the East Indian Railway, which extends
+for more than a thousand miles north-westward from Calcutta _vi�_
+Patna, Benares, Allahabad, Cawnpore, Lucknow, Agra and Delhi. Our
+journey, as marked out by Bhima Gandharva, was to be from Bombay
+to Jabalp�r by rail; thence by some slow and easy conveyance across
+country to Bhopal, and from Bhopal northward through Jhansi to Delhi
+and the northern country, thence returning by rail to Calcutta.
+
+As one ascends the Western Gh�ts shortly after leaving Bombay one has
+continual occasion to remark the extraordinary resources of modern
+railway engineering. Perhaps the mechanical skill of our time has not
+achieved any more brilliant illustrations of itself than here occur.
+For many miles one is literally going up a flight of steps by rail.
+The word Gh�t indeed means the steps leading up from pools or rivers,
+whose frequent occurrence in India attests the need of easy access
+to water, arising from the important part which it plays both in the
+civil and religious economies of the Hindu. The Gh�ts are so called
+from their terraced ledges, rising one above another from the shores
+of the ocean like the stairs leading up from a pool. In achieving the
+ascent of these gigantic stairs all the expedients of road-makers have
+been resorted to: the zigzag, the trestle, the tunnel, the curve, have
+been pushed to their utmost applications; for five continuous miles
+on the Thull Gh�t Incline there is a grade of one in thirty-seven,
+involving many trying curves, and on nineteen miles of the Bhore Gh�t
+Incline there are thirty tunnels.
+
+That which gives tone and character to a general view of the interior
+of a railway-car in traveling is, from the nature of things, the
+head-covering of the occupants, for it is this which mostly meets the
+eye; and no one who has traveled in the United States, for example,
+can have failed to observe the striking difference between the aspect
+of a car in the South, where the felt slouch prevails, and of one
+in the North, where the silk hat is more affected. But cars full
+of turbans! There were turbans of silk, of muslin, of woolen; white
+turbans, red, green and yellow turbans; turbans with knots, turbans
+with ends hanging; neat turbans, baggy turbans, preternatural turbans,
+and that curious spotted silk inexpressible mitre which the Parsee
+wears.
+
+[Illustration: G�NDS.]
+
+Bhima Gandharva was good enough to explain to me the turban; and
+really, when within bounds, it is not so nonsensical a headdress as
+one is apt at first to imagine. It is a strip of cloth from nine to
+twelve inches wide, and from fifteen to twenty-five yards long. They
+are known, however, of larger dimensions, reaching to a yard in width
+and sixty yards in length. The most common color is white; next,
+perhaps, red, and next yellow; though green, blue, purple and black
+are worn, as are also buff, shot colors and gray, these latter being
+usually of silk; but this does not exhaust the varieties, for there
+are many turbans made of cotton cloth printed in various devices to
+suit the fancies of the wearers.
+
+"The _puttee-dar_ (_pugri_, or turban)," continued my companion, "is
+a neat compact turban, in general use by Hindus and Mohammedans; the
+_joore-dar_ is like the _puttee-dar_, except that it has the addition
+of a knot on the crown; the _khirkee-dar_ is the full-dress turban of
+gentlemen attached to native courts; the _nustalik_ is a small turban
+which fits closely to the head, and is worn for full dress at the
+Mohammedan _durbars_ or royal receptions; the _mundeel_ is the
+military turban, with stripes of gold and ends; the _s�thi_ is
+like the _nustalik_, and is worn by bankers; the _shumla_ is
+a shawl-turban; and I fear you do not care to know the other
+varieties--the _morassa_, the _umamu_, the _dustar_, the--"
+
+"Thank you," I said: "life is short, my dear Bhima, and I shall know
+nothing but turbans if this goes on, which will be inconvenient,
+particularly when I return to my home and my neighbor Smith asks me
+that ghastly question, 'What do I think of India?'"
+
+"It is a more 'ghastly' question as to India than as to any other
+country in the world," said the Hindu. "Some years ago, when Mr.
+Dilke was traveling in this country, a witty officer of one of the
+hill-stations remarked to him that _all general observations about
+India were absurd_. This is quite true. How could it be otherwise?
+Only consider, for example, the languages of India--the Assamese, with
+its two branches of the Deccan-g�l and the Uttar-g�l; the Bengalee;
+the Maithilee, Tirhutiya or Tirabhucti, spoken between the Coosy and
+the Gunduck; the Orissan, of the regions around Cuttack; the Nepalese;
+the Kosalese, about Almora; the Dogusee, between Almora and Cashmere;
+the Cashmiran; the Panjabee; the Mooltanee, or Vuchee, on the middle
+Indus; the two dialects of Sindh�, or Tatto, on the lower Indus; the
+Cutch�, on the west coast of the peninsula; the Guserat�, spoken
+on the islands of Salsette and Bombay and the opposite coast of the
+Coucan, as well as by the Parsees in the cities, where it is corrupted
+with many words of other languages through the influence of commercial
+relations; the Coucan�, from Bombay to Goa and along the parallel
+Gh�ts where it is called Ballagate; the Bikaneer�, the Marvar�, the
+Jeypor�, the Udayapor�, of Rajpootana; the Vraja-bhasha (the cow-pen
+language) of the Doab, between the Ganges and the Jumna, which is
+probably the parent of Hindi (or Oord�); the Maloo�, of the tableland
+of Malwa; the Bundelakhand�, of the Bundelkhand; the Mogadh�, of
+Behar; the Maharachtr�, of the country south of the Vindhyas; the--"
+
+"It gives me pain to interrupt you, Bhima Gandharva," I said
+(fervently hoping that this portion of my remark might escape the
+attention of the recording angel); "but I think we are at Jabalp�r."
+
+_Apropos_ of Jubbulpoor, it is well enough to remark that by the rules
+of Indian orthography which are now to be considered authentic, the
+letter "a" without an accent has a sound equivalent to short "u," and
+a vowel with an acute accent has what is usually called its long
+sound in English. Accordingly, the word written "Jabalp�r" should
+be pronounced as if retaining the "u" and the "oo" with which it was
+formerly written, "Jubbulpoor". The termination _p�r_, so common in
+the designation of Indian places, is equivalent to that of _ville_
+in English, and means the same. The other common termination, _abad_,
+means "dwelling" or "residence": e.g., Ahmedabad, the residence of
+Ahmed. Jabalp�r is but about a mile from the right bank of the Nerbad�
+(_Nerbudda_) River; and as I wished to see the famous Marble Rocks
+of that stream, which are found a short distance from Jabalp�r, my
+companion and I here left the railway, intending to see a little of
+the valley of the Nerbad�, and then to strike across the Vindhyas,
+along the valley of the Tonsa, to Bhopal, making our journey by such
+slow, irregular and easy stages as should be compatible with that
+serene and philosophic disposition into which the Hindu's beautiful
+gravity had by this time quite converted my American tendencies toward
+rushing through life at the killing pace.
+
+[Illustration: CENOTAPHS IN THE VALLEY OF THE TONSA.]
+
+It was a little past midday when we made our first journey along the
+river between the Marble Rocks. Although the weather was as nearly
+perfect as weather could be, the mornings being deliciously cool and
+bracing and the nights cold enough to produce often a thin layer of
+ice over a pan of water left exposed till daybreak, yet the midday sun
+was warm enough, especially after a walk, to make one long for leaves
+and shade and the like. It would be difficult, therefore, to convey
+the sensations with which we reclined at our ease in a flat-bottomed
+punt while an attendant poled us up toward the "Fall of Smoke," where
+the Nerbad� leaps out eagerly toward the low lands he is to fertilize,
+like a young poet anxious to begin his work of grace in the world. On
+each side of us rose walls of marble a hundred feet in height, whose
+pure white was here and there striped with dark green or black: all
+the colors which met the eye--the marmoreal whites, the bluish grays
+of the recesses among the ledges, the green and black seams, the
+limpid blue of the stream--were grateful, calm-toned, refreshing; we
+inhaled the coolness as if it had been a mild aroma out of a distant
+flower. This pleasant fragrance, which seemed to come up out of
+all things, was presently intensified by a sort of spiritual
+counterpart--a gentle breath that blew upon us from the mysterious
+regions of death; for on a _gh�t_ we saw a small company of Hindus
+just launching the body of a pious relative into the waters of
+Mother Nerbad� in all that freedom from grief, and even pleasant
+contemplation, with which this singular people regard the transition
+from present to future existence. These corpses, however, which are
+thus committed to the wave, do not always chime so happily in with the
+reveries of boating-parties on the Nerbad�. The Marble Rocks are often
+resorted to by pic-nic parties in the moonlit evenings; and one can
+easily fancy that to have a dusky dead body float against one's boat
+and sway slowly round alongside in the midst of a gay jest or of a
+light song of serenade, as is said to have happened not unfrequently
+here, is not an occurrence likely to heighten the spirits of revelers.
+Occasionally, also, the black, ugly double snout of the _magar_ (or
+Nerbad� crocodile) may pop up from the surface, which may here serve
+as a warning to the young lady who trails her hand in the water--and
+I have yet to be in a boating-party where the young lady did not trail
+her hand in the water--that on the Nerbad� it is perhaps as well to
+resign an absent-minded hand to the young officer who sits by her in
+the boat lest Magar should snap it off.
+
+Leaving the Nerbad� we now struck off northward toward the Tonsa,
+intending to pass round by way of Dumoh, Sangor, Bhilsa and Sanchi
+to Bhopal. We might have pursued a route somewhat more direct by
+following directly down the valley of the Nerbad� to Hoshangabad,
+and thence straight across to Bhopal, but my companion preferred
+the circuitous route indicated, as embracing a greater variety of
+interesting objects. He had procured for our conveyance a vehicle
+which was in all respects suitable to the placidity of his temper; and
+I make bold to confess that, American as I am--born on the railroad,
+so to speak--I have never enjoyed traveling as I did in this novel
+carriage. It was what is called a _chapaya_. It consisted of a body
+nearly ten feet in length by more than five in breadth, and was
+canopied by a top supported upon sculptured pillars of wood.
+The wheels were massive and low. There were no springs; but this
+deficiency was atoned for by the thick cushionment of the rear portion
+of the vehicle, which allowed us to lie at full length in luxurious
+ease as we rolled along. Four white bullocks, with humps and horns
+running nearly straight back on the prolongation of the forehead line,
+drew us along in a very stately manner at the rate of something like a
+mile and a half an hour.
+
+We were now in the G�ndwana, in some particulars one of the most
+interesting portions of the country. Here are the Highlands of Central
+India; here rise the Nerbad� and the Tapti--which flow to the westward
+in a generally parallel direction, and empty into the Gulf of Cambaye,
+the one at Broode and the other at Surat--as well as the S�n, the
+Keyn (or Cane) and the Tonsa, which flow northward into the Jumna. The
+valley of the Keyn and that of the Tonsa here run across the Vindhyas,
+which are known to the eastward of this as the Kyrmores, and afford
+communication between Northern and Southern India. It is along the
+depression of the latter stream that the railway has been built from
+Jabalp�r to Allahabad.
+
+The eight hundred thousand G�nds of the G�ndwana are supposed to be
+members of the great autochthonal family of ancient India. These hills
+of the G�ndwana country appear to have been considered by the incoming
+Aryans for a long time as a sort of uncanny land, whose savage
+recesses were filled with demons and snakes: indeed, in the epics of
+the M�h�bh�r�ta and R�m�yana this evil character is attributed to that
+portion of India lying south of the Vindhyas. The forest of Spenser's
+Fairy Queen, in which wandering knights meet with manifold beasts and
+maleficent giants, and do valorous battles against them in the rescue
+of damsels and the like--such seem to have been the G�ndwana woods to
+the ancient Hindu imagination. It was not distressed damsels,
+however, whom they figured as being assisted by the arms of the errant
+protectors, but religious devotees, who dwelt in the seclusion of the
+forest, and who were protected from the pranks and machinations of the
+savage denizens by opportune heroes of the northern race. It appears,
+however, that the native demons of the G�ndwana had fascinating
+daughters; for presently we find the rajahs from the north coming
+down and marrying them; and finally, in the fourteenth and fifteenth
+centuries, the keen urgency of the conquering Mohammedans sends great
+numbers of Rajp�ts down into the G�ndwana, and a considerable mixture
+of the two bloods takes place. With this incursion of Hindu peoples
+come also the Hindu gods and tenets; and Mahadeo, the "great god,"
+whose home had been the Kailas of the Himalayas, now finds himself
+domesticated in the mountains of Central India. In the Mahadeo
+mountain is still a shrine of Siva, which is much visited by pilgrims
+and worshipers.
+
+[Illustration: THE GAUR, OR INDIAN BISON.]
+
+The G�nd--he who lives back in the hills, far off from the
+neighborhood of the extensive planting districts, which have attracted
+many of those living near them to become at least half-civilized
+laborers in harvest-time--is a primitive being enough.
+
+"Only look," said Bhima Gandharva, "at that hut if you desire to see
+what is perhaps one of the most primitive houses since ever the banyan
+tree gave to man (as is fabled) the idea of sheltering himself from
+the elements artificially." It was simply made of stakes driven into
+the ground, between which were wattled branches. This structure was
+thatched with grass, and plastered with mud.
+
+The G�nd, like the American Indian, has his little patch of grain,
+which he cultivates, however, in a fashion wholly his own. His sole
+instrument of agriculture seems to be the axe. Selecting a piece of
+ground which presents a growth of small and easily-cut saplings--and
+perhaps, by the way, thus destroying in a few hours a whole cargo
+of teak trees worth more than all the crops of his agricultural
+lifetime--he hews down the growth, and in the dry season sets fire to
+the fallen timber. The result is a bed of ashes over a space of two or
+three acres. His soil is now ready. If the patch thus prepared happens
+to be level, he simply flings out a few handfuls of grain, coarse
+rice, k�tki (ponicum) or k�don (paspalum), and the thing is done. The
+rest is in the hands of the god who sends the rains. If the patch be
+on a declivity, he places the grain at the upper part, where it will
+be washed down by the rains over the balance of the field. Next year
+he will burn some more wood--the first burning will have left many
+charred stumps and trunks, which he supplements with a little wood
+dragged from other parts of the forest--on the same spot, and so
+the next year, by which time it will become necessary to begin a new
+clearing, or _dhya_. The _dhya_ thus abandoned does not renew the
+original growth which clothed it, like the pinelands of the Southern
+United States, which, if allowed to run waste after having been
+cleared and cultivated, clothe themselves either with oaks or with a
+wholly different species of pine from the original growth. The waste
+_dhya_, which may have perhaps nourished a splendid growth of teak,
+becomes now only a dense jungle.
+
+The G�nd also raises pumpkins and beans; and this vegetable diet
+he supplements with game ensnared in the _dhyas_, to which peafowl,
+partridges, hares and the like resort. Many of the villages, however,
+have a professional huntsman, who will display the most incredible
+patience in waiting with his matchlock for the game to appear.
+
+Besides these articles of diet, the aborigines of the G�ndwana have
+their mhowa tree, which stands them in much the same multifarious
+stead as the palm does to its beneficiaries. The flowers of the mhowa
+fall and are eaten, or are dried and pressed, being much like raisins:
+they also produce a wine by fermentation and the strong liquor of the
+hill-people by distillation. Of the seed cakes are made, and an oil is
+expressed from them which is an article of commerce.
+
+In addition, the poor G�nd appears to have a periodical godsend
+resulting from a singular habit of one of the great Indian plants.
+The bamboo is said to undergo a general seeding every thirty years: at
+this period, although, in the mean time, many individual bamboos may
+have passed through the process of reproduction, it is said that the
+whole bamboo growth of a section will simultaneously drop its leaves
+and put forth large panicles of flowers, after which come great
+quantities of seeds much like rice. These are gathered for food by
+the inhabitants with all the greater diligence in consequence of a
+tradition--which, however, does not seem to be at all supported by
+facts--that the general seeding of the bamboo portends a failure of
+the regular crops. The liberal forests of the G�ndwana furnish still
+other edibles to their denizens. The ebony plums, the wild mango,
+the seeds of the s�l tree, the beans of the giant banhinia creeper, a
+species of arrowroot, and a wild yam, are here found and eaten.
+
+[Illustration: BANJARIS.]
+
+It is not long since the G�nds had arrived at a melancholy condition
+under the baleful influences of the kulars, or liquor-dealers, who
+resided among them and created an extraordinary demand for their
+intoxicating wares by paying for service and for produce in liquor.
+The kulars have, however, been thrown into the background by wise
+efforts toward their suppression, and matters have improved for the
+poor autoch-thones.
+
+We spent our first night in our chapaya, my companion having so
+arranged matters that we were quite independent of the bungaloos which
+the Englishmen have erected at suitable distances along the great
+roads for the convenience of travelers. The night was clear; betwixt
+the corner pillars which upheld our canopy a thousand friendly
+salutations from the stars streamed in upon us; the tranquil
+countenance of my friend seemed, as he lay beside me, like the face of
+the Past purified of old errors and calm with great wisdom got through
+great tribulation, insomuch that betwixt the Hindu and the stars I
+felt myself to be at once in communication with antiquity and with
+eternity.
+
+Thus we pursued our ambulatory meditations through the G�ndwana. If
+we had been sportsmen, we should have found full as varied a field for
+the bagging of game as for that more spiritual hunt after new ideas
+and sensations in which we were engaged. Gray quail, gray partridges,
+painted partridges (_Francolinus pictus_), snipe and many varieties
+of water-fowl, the sambor, the black antelope, the Indian gazelle or
+ravine deer, the gaur or Indian bison, chewing the cud in the midday
+shade or drinking from a clear stream, troops of _nilga�_ springing
+out from the long grass and dwarf growth of pol�s and jujube trees
+which covered the sites of abandoned villages and fields,--all
+these revealed themselves to us in the most tempting situations. But
+although I had been an ardent devotee of the double-barrel, the large
+and manly tenderness which Bhima Gandharva invariably displayed toward
+all animals, whether wild or tame, had wrought marvels upon me, and
+I had grown fairly ashamed--nay, horrified--at the idea that anything
+which a generous and brave man could call _sport_ should consist
+wholly in the most keen and savage cruelties inflicted upon creatures
+whom we fight at the most unknightly odds, we armed, they unarmed.
+While I knew that our pleasures are by the divine order mostly
+distillations from pain, I could not now help recognizing at the same
+time that this circumstance was part of an enormous plan which the
+slaughter of innocent creatures in the way of "sport" did in nowise
+help to carry out.
+
+The truth is, although I had been for some days wavering upon the
+brink of these conclusions in a quiet way, I found the old keen ardor
+of the sportsman still burning too strongly, and I had started out
+with a breech-loader, intent upon doing much of the G�ndwana route gun
+in hand. It was not long before a thoughtless shot operated to
+bring my growing convictions sharply face to face with my decreasing
+practice, and thus to quite frown the latter out of existence. It
+happened in this wise: One day, not far from sunset, I was walking
+idly along behind the chapaya, in which Bhima Gandharva was dreamily
+reclining, when suddenly a pair of great _s�ras_ cranes rose from the
+low banks of a small stream and sailed directly across the road. Quick
+as thought--indeed, quicker than thought; for if I _had_ thought, I
+would not have done it--I fired, and brought down one of the monstrous
+birds. As I started to approach it, Bhima Gandharva said, in a tone
+just a trifle graver than usual, "Stop! wait a moment," and at the
+same time halted the chapaya. The mate of the bird I had shot, seeing
+him fall, alighted on the same spot, then flew up, then returned,
+flew up again, returned again, with an exhibition of sad and lingering
+affection of which I had not dreamed, and which penetrated me beyond
+expression; so I stood half stolid outwardly and wholly ashamed
+and grieved inwardly. "The s�ras," said my friend, "is the type of
+conjugal affection among the Hindus. The birds nearly always go
+in pairs; and when one is killed, the other invariably makes those
+demonstrations of tenderness which you have just seen."
+
+As we journeyed along in the dusk came notes from another pair of
+feathered lovers, "chukwa, chukwi," "chukwa, chukwi," in a sort of
+mournful alternation. They were the branning ducks, he on one side,
+she on the other side of the stream, as is their habit, whence they
+are fabled to be a pair of lovers who must yearn unavailingly through
+the long nights from opposite banks of the river.
+
+That night, when Bhima Gandharva was asleep, I gently arose, took my
+double-barrel--thou dear Manton! how often has not Jonesville admired
+thee returning from the field at late evening slanting at a jaunty
+angle high above my bagful of snipe or of quail as the case might
+be!--yes, I took this love of a gun, together with the cartridges,
+accoutrements and all other rights, members and appurtenances
+thereunto belonging or in any wise appertaining, and slid the whole
+lot softly into a deep green pool of the very stream from which had
+flown my s�ras.
+
+The taste of gypsy life which I was now enjoying contributed to add
+a sort of personal element to that general interest which hangs about
+the curious Banjaris, whom we met constantly, with their families
+and their bullocks, along our road. _Banjara_ is literally
+"forest-wanderer." The women were especially notable for their tall
+stature, shapely figures and erect carriage; which circumstances are
+all the more wonderful from the life of hardship which they lead,
+attending as they do at once to the foraging of the cattle, the
+culinary preparations for the men and the cares of the children. From
+the profusion of ornaments which they wore, one may imagine, however,
+that they were well cared for by their lords in return for their
+affectionate labors; and the general bearing of the tall Banjara who
+bore a long two-handed sword gave evidence of a certain inward sense
+of protection over his belongings which probably found vent in many an
+affectionate gift of rings and bracelets to his graceful partner. It
+must be confessed that the gypsying of these Eastern Bohemians is not
+so free a life as is popularly supposed. The _naik_ or sovereign of
+each _tanda_, or camp, seems to be possessed of absolute power, and in
+this connection the long two-handed sword suggested much less gentle
+reflections. The Banjara, however, though a nomad, is a serviceable
+one, for he is engaged in trade. With his bullocks he is the carrier
+of Central India, and is to be met with all over that section,
+bringing salt and other commodities and returning with interior
+produce.
+
+
+
+
+FRA ALOYSIUS
+
+  Fra Aloysius, vexed with skeptic fears,
+    Nigh crazed with thought to all the saints did pray
+    For faith in those mysterious words that say,
+  "One day is with the Lord a thousand years,
+    A thousand years with Him are as a day."
+
+  An erudite and holy monk was he,
+    And yet his brethren trembled lest his brain
+    Should lose its poise, so long he dwelt in vain
+  On that perplexing verse to find its key,
+    And strove to make its hidden meaning plain.
+
+  Racked by a sleepless night, one fresh spring morn
+    Forth from the cloister Aloysius strolled.
+    The wood was dewy-bright, clear beams of gold
+  Illumined it, and to his heart was borne
+    A sense of freedom, peace and joy untold.
+
+  Beside a laughing brook he sat to rest,
+    Above whose wave did long-haired willows weep;
+    Midmost the dense green forest, still and deep,
+  Lulled by the trickling waters and possessed
+    By tranquil thoughts, the friar fell asleep.
+
+  And, overworn, he slept the livelong day,
+    Nor waked until the twilight shadows fell,
+    That flung a brown night o'er that leafy dell.
+  Then up he rose refreshed and went his way,
+    And, half ashamed, he heard the vesper-bell.
+
+  Back to the convent fared he; at the gate
+    A stranger gave him entrance, but he passed
+    Into the chapel with meek eyes downcast,
+  In truant guise returning home thus late,
+    And toward his wonted seat made seemly haste.
+
+  Too late! a stranger filled it. Looking round,
+    Amazed, he could discern no face he knew.
+    The abbot's self had changed; his wonder grew,
+  When, after the familiar chant, he found
+    These crazy monks held him for crazy too.
+
+  They gathered round with curious, eager eyes.
+   "What cloister's this?" he asked. They named its name:
+    The one he left that morning was the same.
+  His name he gave; with many a wild surmise
+    They guessed who he might be and whence he came.
+
+  He asked them where the abbot was at last,
+    From whom he parted but the night before.
+   "He hath been dead three hundred years and more!"
+  They answered with a single voice, aghast.
+    Then spake a friar versed in monkish lore:
+
+  "Brethren, a miracle! This man I know:
+   'Tis Aloysius, who, as I have read,
+    Beset with doubts, forth from this convent fled,
+  And vanished, some three hundred years ago,
+    And all the world hath counted him as dead."
+
+  Then Aloysius felt the blessed tears
+    Fulfill his eyes, whence dropped the scales away.
+    Kneeling, he cried, "Oh, brethren, let us pray.
+  One day is with the Lord a thousand years,
+    A thousand years with Him are as a day."
+
+EMMA LAZARUS.
+
+
+
+
+A FEW HOURS IN BOHEMIA.
+
+
+The beauty of this country is that no turbulent sea confines its
+borders, nor are martello-towers needed to guard its coast: no jealous
+neighbor threatens its frontier, no army oppresses its citizens, and
+no king can usurp its throne. Its locality is hard to define: like the
+Fata Morgana, it is here to-day and gone to-morrow, for its territory
+is the mind of men, and in extent it is as boundless as thought.
+Natives of every clime are enrolled among its freemen, and all lands
+contain its representatives, but it is in the picturesque streets of
+the older continental cities of Europe, where rambling lodgings and
+cheap apartments are many, that the invisible mother-country founds
+her colonies. I will tell you how I went and what I saw there.
+
+Afra was a cosmopolite, and consequently knew Bohemia, its byways and
+thoroughfares. If any one could fill the office of guide thereto,
+Afra could, and when one evening she rushed into my room saying, "Come
+along if you want to go to Bohemia," I did not hesitate a moment, but
+made ready for the journey, with the simple precaution of putting on
+my bonnet and shawl.
+
+"A cab?" I asked as we moved from the door.
+
+"Who ever heard of entering Bohemia in a cab?" laughed Afra dryly.
+"People have been known to drive _out_ in their own carriages, but
+they always make their first appearance there on foot, or at best in
+an omnibus."
+
+"As you please," I replied, trying to keep pace with her rapid step,
+which showed constant practice.
+
+"I wonder you did not propose a balloon," she continued pettishly.
+"The gods don't give everything to one person: now, they give us
+brains, and they give other people--money."
+
+"If you would understand, I--"
+
+"No, you wouldn't. I sha'n't ride in cabs until I can pay for them
+myself; meanwhile, I have gros sous enough in my pocket for an omnibus
+fare, and if you have the same we will stop here." At this she entered
+a bureau, and as I followed I saw her get some tickets from a man who
+sat behind a small counter, and then composedly sit down on a bench
+while she said, "We shall have some time to wait for our luxury:" then
+showing me the tickets, "Twelve and thirteen: it is a full night, and
+all these people ahead of us."
+
+"Is it a lottery?" I asked ignorantly.
+
+"Very much of a lottery," Afra replied grimly--"like all the ways of
+Bohemia, remarkably uncertain. You get a ticket for something in the
+giving of the Muses, and you wait until your number is called. The
+worst of it is, the most unlikely people are called before you, and
+some get disgusted and leave: there goes one out at the door at this
+moment. Well, he may be better or he may be worse off than those who
+finally win: who knows if any race is worth the running? Still, if you
+have courage to hold on, I believe there is no doubt that every one
+ultimately gets something." Seeing my perplexity, she twisted the
+round tickets between her fingers and added, "Do not be alarmed: these
+are only good for a seat in the first empty 'bus that comes up. The
+conductor will call out the numbers in rotation, and if ours is among
+them we shall go. It is frightful that you have never ridden in a 'bus
+before. I wonder where we should get ideas if we shut ourselves up in
+cabs and never walked or were hungry or tired, and thought only of our
+own comfort from morning till night? You don't know what you miss, you
+poor deluded, unfortunate rich people. I will tell you of something
+I saw the other evening; and, as it is worthy of a name, it shall be
+called 'The Romance of an Omnibus.' Listen! isn't that our numbers I
+heard? Yes: come quick or we shall lose our chance."
+
+"Well," said I when we had successfully threaded the crowd and were
+seated--"the romance."
+
+"You have no idea of the fitness of things. My story is pathetic: it
+will look badly to see you drowned in tears--people will stare."
+
+"I promise not to cry."
+
+"Oh, if you are one of those stolid, unemotional beings who are never
+moved, I sha'n't waste my tale upon you. Wait until to-morrow: we
+will get Monsieur C---- to recount, and you shall hear something worth
+listening to. He is a regular troubadour--has the same artless vanity
+they were known to possess, their charming simplicity, their
+gestures, and their power of investing everything with romance. One is
+transported to the Middle Ages while he speaks: no book written on the
+subject could so fully give you the flavor of the times. He recalls
+Froissart. If you are not affected by C----'s stories, you had better
+pretend to be. But that, I am sure, will not be necessary: a great
+tragedian was lost when he became a great painter."
+
+"Might I ask how and when and where I am to meet this wonderful man?"
+
+"At the garden-party."
+
+"In what way am I to get there?"
+
+"By strategy. There is a little reunion to-night of what may be called
+female Bohemians. They are going to settle the preliminaries of this
+party, and if you happen to be present they will invite you; not that
+they particularly care for your company, but because, as I said, you
+happen to be there. Only don't get yourself into a mess by tramping on
+any one's toes."
+
+"Have they corns?"
+
+"Yes, on every inch of surface: they are dreadfully thin-skinned. But
+they hate sham even more than a hard knock, and are quicker than
+a police-officer in detecting it; so be careful not to talk about
+anything you are ignorant of."
+
+"Give me a few rules, and I promise to conduct myself properly."
+
+"Well, don't be snobbish and patronize them, and don't look shocked
+at any strange opinions you hear, nor act as if you were at an animal
+show and were wondering what would happen next. Be sure not to assent
+when you see they wish to argue, and don't argue when they expect
+acquiescence. If any of them speak in broken English, and you can't
+for the life of you understand, don't ask them to repeat, but answer
+immediately, for you can imagine when one has taken pains to learn a
+foreign language one likes it to be appreciated, and don't--But here
+we are. In short, make yourself at home, as if you had been there all
+your life."
+
+"Afra," I said, laying my hand on her arm as she took to her swift
+pace again, "perhaps I had better go home: I am afraid I can't--I
+think--that is--"
+
+"Nonsense! as if you could not get on after all those hints! Anyway,
+you cannot return alone, and I am unable to go with you. Make up your
+mind to blunder, and do it. There was an amateur visited the studio
+about three months ago: her absurdities have lasted us for laughing
+material ever since. As she is getting rather stale, you can take her
+place. This is the house: come in."
+
+With this doubtful prospect in view I followed my peremptory guide
+from the narrow street into what appeared to be a spacious court, but
+as the only light it received was from a blinking candle in the window
+of the conciergerie, I could not determine. After exchanging some
+cabalistic sentences with a toothless old woman, the proprietor of the
+candle, Afra turned to the right, and walking a few steps came to a
+door opening on a stairway, which we mounted. I can think of nothing
+black enough for comparison with the darkness surrounding us. At last
+a faint glimmer showed an old lamp standing in a corner of a hall bare
+and carpetless. A series of doors flanked the place, looking to my
+unaccustomed eyes all alike, but Afra without a moment's hesitation
+went to one of them and knocked. It was opened by a lady, who smiled
+and said, "Enter. You are just in time: school is over and the model
+about going."
+
+I found myself in a high-ceiled room, at one end of which was
+suspended a row of perhaps a dozen lamps. Here, at least, there was-no
+lack of light: it required some moments to accustom our eyes to the
+sudden contrast. The yellow blaze was directed by reflectors into the
+space immediately beneath the lamps, which left the rest of the room
+pleasantly tempered. Some easels, a few chairs and screens, plaster
+casts on shelves, sketches in all stages of progress on the wall,
+a tea-kettle singing over a bright fire in a stove, and a curtain
+enclosing a corner used as a bedroom, completed the list of furniture.
+It was a night-school for lady artists. The class had finished for the
+evening, and a number of the students were moving about or seated near
+the fire, talking in an unlimited number of languages.
+
+I was given several random introductions, and did my best to follow
+Afra's directions; but there was an indescribable quaintness about the
+appearance and manners of my new acquaintance that made it difficult
+not to stare. I found, however, that little notice was taken of me,
+as a lively discussion was being carried on over a study of an arm and
+hand which one of them was holding up for inspection.
+
+"It is a style I should call the lantern," said she. "The redness of
+the flesh can only be accounted for on the supposition that a light is
+shining through it."
+
+"I should call it raw beef," remarked another.
+
+"It is a shame, mademoiselle!" began the model in an injured tone.
+She had been tying on her bonnet before a bit of looking-glass she
+had taken from her pocket. "Does my arm look like that?" Here she
+indignantly drew up her sleeve and held out that dimpled member,
+meanwhile gazing wrathfully at the sketch. "It ought not to be
+allowed. The silver tones of my flesh are entirely lost; and see how
+you have caricatured the elegance of my beautiful hand. Will not some
+one help mademoiselle to put it right before my reputation is ruined?"
+
+"Jeanne, a model is not a critic," said the author of the drawing,
+coming forward and grasping the canvas with no gentle hand.--"Ladies,
+if you wish to find fault, turn to your own studies. That proportion
+is frightful"--she pointed to different sketches as she spoke--"that
+ear is too large; and, madame, if you take a crust of paint like yours
+for freedom of touch, I pity you."
+
+This dispute was by no means the last during the evening. Opinions
+seemed to be plentiful in Bohemia, each individual being furnished
+with a set of her own on every subject broached; and as no diffidence
+was shown in putting them forth, the company quarreled with great
+good-nature and evident enjoyment. A pot of tea was then brewed by the
+owner of the studio, who had been English before she became Bohemian,
+and the beverage was handed round in tea-cups which, like the opinions
+of the guests, differed widely from each other. In the silence that
+attended this diversion Afra took the floor and said, "How about the
+garden-party to the country? Who is going?"
+
+Several spoke, and one asked, "Shall we take lunch with us?"
+
+"No, something will be provided for us there."
+
+"So much the better. When are we to meet, and where?"
+
+"Twelve o'clock, midday, at ----."
+
+"What messieurs are going?"
+
+"Quite a number--a tenor from the Grand Opera, and the leader of the
+orchestra, who is a magnificent violinist; that new Spanish painter
+who plays the guitar divinely; a poet--that is, he has written some
+pretty songs--besides plenty more."
+
+"That promises well."
+
+"You will bring your friend?" and the speaker nodded her head toward
+me.
+
+"I shall be delighted: I am so curious to see those eccentric--" Here
+a warning glance from Afra stopped me.
+
+But the lady only laughed and said, "You will see eccentricity enough
+to-morrow, if that is what you want. People who devote their minds to
+great objects have no time to think of little things. You had better
+see that Afra has on her bonnet or she will go without one."
+
+"Nonsense!" replied Afra.--"Miss," this to the owner of the studio,
+who was so called in honor of her English birth, "are you ever
+troubled by the ghost of that young painter who hung himself up
+there?"
+
+"Those who have occasion to commit suicide are not likely to come
+back: they have had enough of this world," said the Englishwoman.
+
+"Did some one really die here?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, really;" and Afra mimicked my tone of horror. "You know, a
+Bohemian is at home anywhere, so a change of country don't affect him
+much. If we find a place disagreeable, we travel."
+
+"Was he insane?"
+
+"Not more than the rest of us, but _you_ can't understand the feeling
+that would induce a man to do such a thing. This young fellow painted
+a picture: he put his mind, his soul, himself, into it, and sent it to
+the Exhibition. It was rejected--that is, he was rejected--and he came
+here and died. They found him suspended from that beam where the lamps
+hang now."
+
+"I thought your Bohemia was so gay?"
+
+"So it is, but the brightest light makes the deepest shadows."
+
+The conversation went on. These ladies discussed politics, literature,
+art and society with absolute confidence. One of the topics was Alfred
+de Musset. The Englishwoman was praising the English Alfred, when
+a pale-faced girl, who up to this moment had been intently reading,
+oblivious of all about her, closed her book with a snap (it was a
+much-worn edition of one of the classics, bought for a few sous on the
+quay) and broke out with--"Your Tennyson is childish. His King Arthur
+puts me in mind of our Louis Philippe and his umbrella. Did you know
+Louis carried an umbrella with him when he was obliged to fly from
+Paris? One would have looked well held over Arthur's dragon helmet
+that disagreeable night he left the queen to go and fight his nephew.
+But perhaps Guinevere had lent it to Launcelot, and even the best
+friends, alas! do not return umbrellas. Your poet writes in white
+kid gloves, and thinks in them too. Imagine the magnificent rush and
+struggle of those ancient days, the ecstasy of battle, the intensity
+of life, and then read your Tennyson's milk-and-water tales, with
+their modern English-m�nage feelings. Arthur would have been much more
+likely to give his wife a beating, as did the hero of the _Nibelungen
+Lied_, than that high-flown lecture; and it would have done the
+Guinevere of that time more good."
+
+"And what is your Alfred, Anita?"
+
+"He is divine."
+
+"After the heathen pattern. He dipped his pen in mire."
+
+"What is mire?--water and earth. What are we?--water and earth. Mire
+is humanity, and holds in itself not only the roots of the tree,
+but the germ of the flower. A poet who is too delicate to plant
+his thought in earth must be content to give it but the life of a
+parasite: it can have no separate existence of its own."
+
+"But one need not be bad to be great."
+
+"Nor need one be good to be great," returned Anita sarcastically.
+"Alfred de Musset was a peculiar type of a peculiar time. He did not
+imagine: he felt, he lived, he was himself, and was original, like a
+new variety of flower or a new species of insect. Tennyson has gleaned
+from everybody's fields: our Alfred gathered only from his own. The
+one is made, the other is born."
+
+"Come away," said Afra impatiently: "no one can speak while Anita
+is on her hobby. Besides, I must get home early to trim a bonnet for
+to-morrow;" and without more leavetaking than a "Good-evening," which
+included every one, we found ourselves in the street.
+
+"Who is Anita?" I asked.
+
+"She is nobody just now: what she will be remains to be seen. Her
+family wish her to be an artist: she wishes to adopt the stage as a
+profession, and is studying for it _sub rosa_. Did you ever see a more
+tragic face?"
+
+"Poor thing!" I involuntarily exclaimed.
+
+"Don't pity her," said Afra, more seriously than she had yet spoken.
+"The best gift that can be bestowed upon a mortal is a strong natural
+inclination for any particular life and the opportunity of following
+it. The man or woman who has that can use the wheel of Fate for a
+spinning-wheel."
+
+The next morning at the appointed time I met Afra at the station.
+"How do I look?" she asked, standing up for my inspection as soon as I
+appeared in sight, at the same time regarding as much of her dress as
+it was possible for her to see. But before I could reply the satisfied
+expression of her face changed: an unpleasant discovery had been
+made. "I have shoes on that are not mates," she exclaimed--"cloth and
+leather: that looks rather queer, doesn't it? Do you think it will be
+noticed? I could not decide which pair to wear, and put on one of each
+to see the effect: afterward I forgot them. Now, I suppose that would
+be thought eccentric, though any one might make the same mistake. It
+shows I have two pairs of shoes," she added more cheerfully, "and they
+are both black. How is my bonnet?"
+
+The bonnet was black velvet, and we were in midsummer. The material,
+however, was skillfully draped with a veil, and a profusion of pink
+flowers gave it a seasonable air. A crimson bow was also tied at
+her neck; she complacently remarked that "pink and crimson harmonize
+beautifully;" and others of the party arriving at that moment, I was
+saved the trouble of making a polite answer.
+
+The ride through ripening grain-fields and moss-thatched hamlets
+need not be described; suffice it to say, it was France and June. An
+omnibus was waiting at the station where we dismounted: it carried us
+near, but not to, our destination. After leaving it we walked through
+the streets of a low-roofed village, then followed a path bordered
+with wild mignonette and apple trees that wound up the side of a hill
+covered with vineyards. A couple of chattering magpies ran before
+us, an invisible cuckoo was heard between snatches of Italian melody
+warbled by the tenor _sotto voce_ and the little company overflowed
+with gayety.
+
+The house we arrived at looked as if it might be a castle in the air
+materialized--pointed windows hidden in ivy, through which you saw
+the chintz-covered walls of the interior; turrets on the roof and
+a stair-tower; odd nooks for pigeons and cattle; the color a
+weather-toned red, met by gray roofs, green trees and blue sky. We
+passed through it to the quaint garden: rows of dwarf pears bordered
+its paths, and trellises and walls supported nectarines and vines,
+with sunshine and shadow caressing the half-ripe fruit.
+
+The shady spaces were occupied by guests who had arrived before us,
+and we saw with pleasure that ceremony had not been invited to attend.
+The host's kindly manner was sufficient to put the company at once
+at ease. We wandered at will from group to group, listening or
+conversing: introductions were sometimes given, but more often not.
+
+At one table some ladies and gentlemen were playing the artistic game
+of "five points." A more difficult pastime was never invented. The
+materials necessary are simply a piece of paper and a pencil: it is
+their use that is extraordinary. A person puts five dots on the paper
+in whatever position fancy may dictate: on this slight foundation
+another is expected to design a figure, the puzzle being to include
+all the marks given. One that I saw had four of the dots placed
+unusually close together, and the fifth in a distant corner:
+this latter, in the opinion of the lookers-on, would surely prove
+refractory. After some moments of consideration, with pencil suspended
+and eye attentive, the artist commenced drawing. In ten minutes the
+sketch was finished. It was an angel: her upturned head took in the
+highest of the group of dots; one hand hanging by her side the next;
+a knee the third; and the flowing hem of her robe the fourth; but the
+fifth in the corner--what could reach it? With a touch of the pencil
+the angel's other hand appeared flinging up a censer attached to
+a long chain, which struck the solitary dot like a shot amid
+acclamations. To show that he did not consider the feat a _tour de
+force_, the artist turned the paper, and taking the same marks drew
+a devil in an entirely different attitude, the difficult point being
+reached by his pitchfork. This gave rise to a learned discussion as
+to whether the devil's emblematic pitchfork was not a descendant of
+Neptune's trident, which I did not stay to hear, as Afra whispered she
+wanted to present me to Monsieur C----, and I was taken to a gentleman
+of no great height, but of such wondrous width that Nature must have
+formed him in a most generous mood.
+
+"You are American?" said this wide man to me as I was introduced, and
+without waiting for a reply went on: "I like your country-people:
+they admire frankly. Show them a picture, they exclaim, 'Beautiful!
+magnificent! lovely! exquisite! name your price;' and they buy it.
+Here the public look and look. 'Not bad,' they say, 'but the color is
+from Veronese, and that attitude is surely Raphael's. What a mine that
+man's genius has been to ambitious but less gifted artists!' and so
+they go on. I wish they would let the dead rest in peace. Are you
+acquainted with Mr. B---- of New York?"
+
+I was obliged to say "No."
+
+"I wish to send a message to him," he continued grandly: "tell him
+that I paint now for him alone."
+
+"You are court-painter to Mr. B----," I remarked laughingly.
+
+"Don't speak of courts," he exclaimed pettishly. "I was to have
+painted the baptism of the prince imperial for the state: it gave me
+no end of annoyance, and in the end was never finished."
+
+"I understood that you insisted on painting the little prince nude,
+after the Rubens manner, and that was one ground of objection to the
+design," said Afra.
+
+"The baby would have had on plenty of clothes: one of his dresses was
+sent from the Tuileries for Monsieur C---- to paint, and I sewed a
+rosette on it myself." This from the painter's wife.
+
+"A countryman of yours sat for the head of a young priest at the
+ceremony. He had a fine countenance: he was studying art with me
+at the time, and has since been professor of drawing at your Naval
+Academy. Teaching is a sad trade--Pegasus dragging the plough."
+
+"At least, your other great picture brought you nothing but praise."
+
+"The public have since repented of being so good to me. Then, they
+could not say enough in my favor: now, if a person asks what I am
+doing, every one repeats like a parrot, 'C---- doesn't paint, C----
+doesn't paint.' I have heard it so often that I begin to believe
+it myself, and when I am asked join the general cry, 'C---- doesn't
+paint.'"
+
+I laughed, thinking this a joke, but I soon found that though
+C---- might be cynical, sarcastic or bitter, though he might excite
+unintentional laughter by his remarks, he was too sensitive a man to
+take any but a serious view of life. The imperfections of the world
+excited his disgust, his anger, never his mirth.
+
+"Ah but, monsieur," said Afra, "you should be satisfied, and leave
+some little honor for the rest of us to gather. The stories one hears
+of your youth are like fairy-tales."
+
+"And they are true," replied the artist with evident enjoyment. "In
+those days I was pointed out to people when I walked the street;
+which, by the way, gave rise to an odd incident. A gentleman thought
+he had seen me in a crowd, but he had taken an older and taller man
+for the great painter. He believed big pictures were painted by big
+men, and I had not then my present circumference. This gentleman sent
+me an invitation to dine with him. On the day appointed I arrived at
+the house, and was met at the door by my host, a look of surprise and
+annoyance on his face which he tried to conceal by a low bow, at the
+same time asking politely, 'How is your father?'--'Very well, thank
+you,' I returned, although I could not understand why my father's
+health should be a matter of interest to him.--'You have come to
+tell me of some catastrophe which prevents his attendance here
+to-day?'--'Not at all: I have come to dine with you, according to this
+invitation.' Here I pulled out the card, which I happened to have in
+my pocket.--'Are you the person here addressed?' he said, staring at
+me.--'I am'.--'I beg your pardon, there is a mistake: I meant it for
+your father, the painter of the "D�cadence des Romains."'--'I am the
+painter of the "D�cadence," but I am not my father.'--'You ought to
+be an older man.'--'I should have been, monsieur, had I been born
+sooner.'--At that moment a friend, overhearing the conversation and
+divining the cause, came and explained to my wonder-struck host that I
+was really the artist in question. With many apologies I was led into
+a hall adorned with floral arches in my honor, next to a beautiful
+salon, likewise decorated, and finally we reached the dining-room,
+which was arranged to represent my picture. Columns wreathed with
+flowers supported the roof; flowers festooned the white table-linen
+and adorned the antique vessels that covered it; couches of different
+colored silk were laid after the Roman fashion for the guests to
+recline upon; and lovely women dressed in costly Roman costumes, their
+heads crowned with flowers, were placed in the attitudes that you
+will see on my celebrated canvas. Was it not a graceful tribute to my
+genius?"
+
+"If a Frenchman wants to pay a compliment, he never uses one that has
+done duty before, but invents something new," said Afra emphatically.
+
+"What are you painting now, monsieur?" I asked.
+
+"A series of pictures called 'Pierrot the Clown.' He succeeds in
+tricking the world in every station of life. I am just finishing his
+deathbed. All his friends are weeping about him: the doctor feels
+his pulse and gives some learned name to the disease--doctors know so
+much--while hidden everywhere around the room are empty bottles. The
+drunken clown plays with even death for a mask."
+
+"I thought he painted such romantic pictures," said I to Afra as we
+turned from the master.
+
+"So he does: there is one in his studio now. A girl clad in gray and
+shadow--open-air shade which in his hands is so clear and luminous.
+She walks along a garden-path, her head bent down, dreaming as she
+goes, and unconsciously nearing a half-open gateway, through which the
+sunshine is streaming. Above the rustic gate two doves are billing and
+cooing. You feel sure the girl is about to pass through this typical,
+sunshiny, invitingly half-open door; and--what is beyond?"
+
+Just then we were called to lunch, a plentiful but not luxurious
+repast. There was no lack of lively repartees and anecdotes, and
+we had speeches and songs afterward. I wonder if I ever heard "'Tis
+better to laugh than be sighing" given with more zest than on that
+day? One could easily imagine that it was such an occasion as this
+that had inspired it.
+
+Lunch being over, Monsieur C---- was asked to relate one of his own
+stories. I cannot give it entire, but the plot was this: A pilgrim,
+whom he called poor Jacques, hearing much of heaven, set out to find
+his way to the blessed abode, with only a little dog to accompany him
+on the journey. As he went he met many of his contemporaries, who
+had made what a walker would style but poor time. The allusions to
+well-known peculiarities in the various people and their occupation in
+the other life caused much amusement. For instance, Ingres the painter
+was seated by the roadside playing Rossini's music on the violin, on
+which instrument he was a great proficient. But he was known to detest
+the Italian's music before he started heavenward: his taste must then
+have grown _en route_. (Critics might object to this supposition.)
+However, Jacques was anxious to push on, and spent little time
+listening. But he was a good-hearted man, and, though he would
+not delay for his own amusement, he could not refuse to stop when
+fellow-pilgrims asked him for assistance. Little children were
+continually straying from the path, and without Jacques and his little
+dog would inevitably have been lost. Feeble old people were standing
+looking with despair at some obstacle that without Jacques's friendly
+arm they would have found it impossible to pass. Young men who never
+looked where they were walking were continually calling on him for a
+hand to help them out of the ditch where they had fallen; and young
+girls--well, one would have supposed they had never been given feet
+of their own to walk with, from the trouble they were to poor Jacques.
+The worst of it was, that when all these good people were well over
+their troubles they called Jacques a simpleton for his pains, and
+refused to have any intercourse with him, giving him the worst side of
+the road and laughing at his old-fashioned staff and scrip, and even
+at his little dog, to which they gave many a sly kick. Nor was it
+any wonder, for there were many in the company robed in silk, wearing
+precious stones and with well-filled wallets by their sides. Jacques
+was but human, and often he wished he had never set out for heaven at
+all in such company; but even in their bitterest moods neither
+Jacques nor the little dog could ever hear a cry of distress without
+forgetting all unkindness and rushing at once to the rescue.
+
+These labors exhausted Jacques's strength: the little dog, too, was
+worn to a shadow, and so timid from ill-treatment that it was only
+when some great occasion called out his mettle that you saw what a
+noble little dog-heart he had. He did his best to comfort his master,
+but when Jacques's sandals were worn out and his cloak in rags, and
+when he looked forward and saw nothing yet of the holy city in view,
+though he still tried to go forward, Nature gave way: he sank to the
+ground, and the little dog licked his hands in vain to awaken him.
+
+There is a band of angels who each night descend the holy mount
+whereon is built the city, in search of such pilgrims as have failed
+through fatigue to reach the gate. They are clothed in robes woven of
+good deeds, which never lose their lustre, for they are renewed every
+day. It was this company which found Jacques in his swoon by the
+roadside. One gently touched his tired body, and more than the vigor
+of youth leapt through his veins. Another whispered "Come," and he
+rose and walked with them. As he moved on with eyes abashed, thinking
+of the rents in his garments and regretting their poverty, he noticed
+that they too were changed, and were as bright as those of his
+companions. "Who has done this?" he said, venturing to address the
+one that walked at his right hand. "You wore them always," he answered
+with an angelic smile, "but it is this light which shows their
+beauty;" and he pointed to that which streamed from the celestial
+walls.
+
+There was much applause. I saw Afra wipe a tear from her eye; only, a
+thin-faced individual who sat near me whispered that it was too long.
+The delicacy and pathos of expression and language it is impossible
+to give, and, though old in form, the story was skillfully new in
+incident; nor must I forget that the little dog slipped through the
+eternal gate with his master. Some one asked the troubadour why he
+did not write it out. He shook his head and threw up his hands as
+he replied, "I wrote one book and gave it to a literary man for
+correction. You should have seen the manuscript when he sent it home:
+not a page but was scarred and cut. He called that 'style.' Now, what
+did I want with style? I wanted to write as I talked."
+
+"Certainly," said one. "What did you do?"
+
+"I quickly put Monsieur le R�dacteur's style out of my book; then
+I published it. George Sand promised to write the preface, but some
+busybody told her that I was attacking the whole world, so she would
+have nothing to do with it. She was misled: I blamed nothing in my
+book but what deserved censure."
+
+Having heard this excellent representation of the ancient minstrel,
+we were shortly given a touch of the modern usurper of the name. A
+gentleman was present who in the many turns of Fortune's wheel had
+once found himself a follower of the burnt-cork persuasion. He gave us
+a negro melody with a lively accompaniment on the guitar. A melancholy
+Spanish song followed. The company again dispersed into congenial
+groups, and in the long twilight you heard the murmur of voices broken
+by occasional snatches of melody or the nightingale's song.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And what do you think of Bohemia?" asked Afra as we returned that
+night.
+
+"It is different from what I expected. They are refined, and, though
+frank, never rude. I think--"
+
+Afra laughed: "You had unconsciously thought them a set of sharpers;
+but there is a great difference between living by your brains and
+living by your wits. My dear, you have broken bread with giants
+to-day: such men live in another world that they may rule this one."
+
+ITA ANIOL PROKOP.
+
+
+
+
+PROFESSOR AND TEACHER.
+
+
+The two words that recur most frequently perhaps in the discussion of
+matters of education are "teacher" and "professor;" yet there are
+no two that are used so carelessly and loosely. It seems as if the
+thought that they may not be synonymous seldom, if ever, occurs to
+those using them. If one of our writers or speakers upon education
+were suddenly called upon to state exactly what he meant by a
+"professor" in distinction from a "teacher," he would be at a loss for
+an answer. He might reply, after some hesitation, "Why, a teacher is
+a man who teaches at a school or an academy, and a professor is a man
+who teaches at a college." If he were pressed still more closely, and
+asked to give the precise difference between a "school or an academy"
+and a "college," it is safe to assume that he would find himself
+nonplussed. There are colleges in the country, some large and others
+small, some old and others young, some good and others poor; but aside
+from the fact that they provide a curriculum of four years and teach
+a certain amount of Latin, Greek and mathematics, they do not possess
+features enough in common to enable us to define with exactness "a
+college." It is not in the power of language to devise a formula so
+elastic as to embrace Harvard, Brown, Princeton, Trinity, Cornell
+and Michigan University, without at the same time ignoring the
+characteristic features of one or the other. Even if we admit that
+there is a vague ideal unity underlying the so-called college system,
+by virtue of which it is a system and not a mere aggregate, we shall
+not make much progress in our search after the proper definition
+of the term "professor." The utmost that can be said of our college
+system, as a system, is that it stands on a somewhat higher plane than
+the schools, that it is supposed to finish a young man's education,
+and consequently that the men whom it employs for such a purpose--its
+professors--are, or at least ought to be, abler men than the teachers
+proper. The difference, then, between professor and teacher is one of
+degree, and not of kind. Both teach, and both teach in great part the
+same subjects and in substantially the same way; that is, by means
+of textbook and recitation. Herein lies the explanation of the
+disposition evinced by some of our best schools to call their teachers
+"professors." An institution like Phillips Exeter or Andover can
+scarcely be said to assume more than it is entitled to in putting
+itself on an equality with Hobart College or Racine.
+
+On turning to Germany, we observe no such laxity in the use of the
+term "professor." He, and he only, is professor who "professes" to
+have made himself eminent in his special branch, and whose claims have
+been allowed officially by a university or by the government. He is
+not even a teacher in the English or American sense. He is a scholar
+and investigator who has produced results worthy of distinction, and
+it is upon the strength of those results, and not because of his real
+or supposed ability to impart knowledge and stimulate industry among
+students, that he receives his call to a university chair.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: The circumstance that some of the gymnasium-teachers in
+Germany have the title of "professor" does not affect the above view.
+The title has been expressly conferred upon them by the government as
+a mark of special distinction, either for long services or for unusual
+scholarship--in most cases for the latter. Where schools of the
+highest order are so numerous as they are in Germany, it is not
+surprising that they should count among their teachers men of profound
+scholarship. The official recognition paid to such men is only an
+additional proof of the care with which the title is used. It is given
+to the teacher, not so much because he is a good teacher, as because
+he has done something over and above school-room work.]
+
+The words of one who is himself a leading professor in one of the
+most renowned universities are so explicit upon this point that they
+deserve to be translated and carefully studied. Heinrich von Sybel, in
+his academic address delivered at Bonn in 1868, says: "The excellence
+of our universities is to be found in the fact that they are not
+mere institutions where instruction is given, but are workshops
+of science[2]--that their vital principle is unceasing scientific
+productivity. Hence it is that the state assembles the best men of
+all Germany as professors at its universities, so that the phenomenon,
+common enough in England and France, of a distinguished savant without
+a university chair is with us a very unusual exception. Hence it is
+that in appointing to such a chair the first and last demand is for
+published evidences of such activity. As for the so-called ability to
+teach _(Lehrtalent im formellen Sinne),_ we are satisfied if it is not
+utterly and notoriously wanting. The question upon which everything
+turns is, Has the candidate given evidence of his capacity for
+original investigation and production? Whoever has this capacity
+is sufficiently qualified, according to our German notions, for
+fulfilling the essential function of university instruction."
+
+[Footnote 2: _Science_ is used here in the broad German sense to
+denote any study, whether in the direction of natural phenomena,
+history or philosophy, which is pursued systematically and with a view
+to eliciting truth.]
+
+In other words, a German professor is a man who has devoted himself
+to special and original research--to "science" as Von Sybel uses the
+term--and whose discoveries and works give strength and increase of
+dignity to the university with which he is connected. He is
+appointed upon his merits as a discoverer or an author. The further
+consideration--namely, whether he is what we Americans style a "good
+teacher"--was not so much as an afterthought in the minds of those who
+gave him his call. The explanation of this disregard of the personal
+element in the professorial character is obvious. The professor is not
+called upon to teach. It does not constitute any part of his vocation
+to spur up the sluggish, to keep the idle busy, to give each student
+enough to do, and make first principles perfectly clear to all. So far
+from coming down to the level of the students, the professor expects
+that the students will make every possible exertion to rise to his
+level, while he himself can scarcely be said to lend a helping hand.
+To the sentimentalist, then, he might appear a very selfish mortal.
+But by going beneath the surface of the relation between professor and
+student, and examining into its essence, we shall find that it is an
+eminently healthful relation, because it is based upon the recognition
+of mutual rights and duties. The professor, as a man of science, has a
+right to the free direction of his talents. The student has the right
+to develop what there is in him without supervision or interference.
+He is to make a man of himself by seeking diligently after the truth
+in a manly, independent spirit. All that the professor can do for him
+is to point out the road to the truth.
+
+This view of the functions of a professor may appear obscure and
+exaggerated to one who has not studied at a German university. But it
+gives the clew to the entire German system of university education,
+and accounts in great part for the high standard of scholarship. Only
+in part, for the innate proneness of the German mind to research must
+be credited with some share in the result. It is safe to say that
+Germany, under any system, would be a land of erudition.
+
+However pleasant it might be to go into the details of the
+professional position and character in Germany, it will be more
+profitable, and certainly more practical, to compare this fundamental
+German idea, as already given, with the salient features of
+professional life in America. The American professor, then, is a
+teacher. Unless he is the fortunate occupant of an exceptionally
+favored chair, his chief, and even his sole, function in the college
+body is to teach, in the strictest sense of the term. He has to
+prescribe textbooks, assign and hear lessons, grade recitations, mark
+examination-papers, submit carefully prepared term and annual reports
+to the faculty. When the question of conditioning or dismissing a
+student on the ground of defective scholarship comes up for decision,
+his opinion must be given and weighed in connection with that of
+others, in order that the faculty may strike a fair general average.
+The number of hours that he is compelled, by the college curriculum,
+to pass per week in the recitation-room is seldom less than fifteen,
+and may be as high as twenty. The classes themselves are ill-sorted
+and often troublesome, and are usually unwieldy by reason of their
+size. The professor's mind must be continually on the watch to prevent
+disorder and enforce attention. Besides, as every one knows full well
+who has tried it, there is nothing so exhausting as to supply "brains"
+to those who either have not received their portion from Nature or
+else have squandered it for a mess of pottage. Every professor-teacher
+can bear witness to the truism that one hour in the recitation-room
+is fully equal, in its drain upon the vital energy, to two passed in
+private study or authorship. The sense of responsibility, we might
+say, is omnipresent. It does not cease with the recitation: it follows
+him to his study, and haunts him with the recollection of absurd
+blunders made by young men who should have done better--the
+dispiriting reflection that despite his best efforts the stupid and
+indifferent will not learn. If to this normal wear and tear and these
+every-day annoyances we add the participation in what is
+pleasingly styled enforcement of discipline--that is, protracted
+faculty-meetings, interviews with anxious or irate parents,
+exhortations to the vicious to mend their ways--we shall probably come
+to the conclusion that the professor's burden is anything but light.
+We all have heavy burdens. But while admitting the universality of the
+adage, we are nevertheless at liberty to ascertain if we cannot make
+the burden of a particular man or class easier to bear by fitting it
+to the back.
+
+Editors, essayists, college presidents and reformers assure us that
+we are on the verge of a change, and perhaps a great change, in our
+system of higher education. They dilate upon the indisputable fact
+that most of our older colleges have made rapid strides within
+the past ten years, augmenting their endowments, erecting handsome
+buildings, establishing new departments of study and increasing the
+number of students. Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Amherst, Princeton,
+Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, were never so well off, in
+point of money and men, as they are at this day. The inference is, of
+course, if so much has been done in ten years, what may we not expect
+by the end of the century? The University of Virginia holds its own,
+notwithstanding the desolation wrought by the late civil war, and Ann
+Arbor and Cornell have shot up with extraordinary vigor. There can be
+no doubt that our institutions of learning are full of robust life.
+And it is no less certain that this growth of resources is due to
+private enterprise. Our colleges have grown because graduates, and
+even non-graduates, have taken an interest in them, and endowed them
+with a munificence which seems incredible to a Frenchman or a German.
+But in studying the aspect of higher education it behooves us not to
+lose sight of the fundamental principle that education is something
+spiritual in its nature, and that it cannot be gauged by buildings,
+by endowments, by the trappings of wealth--in short, by anything
+material. Endowments and buildings are only the means; unless the
+end to which these means are subservient be clearly perceived and
+persistently followed, the means themselves may prove a hindrance
+rather than a help. Of this Oxford is a notable proof.
+
+Have, then, the end and aim, the method and agencies, of college
+instruction changed essentially within the past fifteen years, or are
+they likely to change essentially within the coming twenty-five? In
+the year 1770 the greatest genius of Germany entered the walls of the
+old university-town of Strasburg, there to complete his education. He
+has bequeathed to us a faithful record of his studies, his amusements,
+his daily life. Connecting this Strasburg experience with the previous
+experience at Leipsic, we know what it meant in the eighteenth century
+to be a German student. We know that the professors in those days were
+pedagogues in the Anglo-American sense, and that university-life stood
+little if at all higher than our own present college-life. But when
+Goethe died, in 1832, the universities of Germany had reached their
+prime. Since then they have made no gain. It may be doubted if the
+professors, on the whole, rank quite so high to-day for originality
+and vigor of research as did their predecessors forty years ago.
+Wherein lies the secret, then, of this wonderful change wrought in
+the brief span of two generations, between 1770 and 1830, and amid
+the dire confusion of the great Revolution and the Napoleonic era? The
+change was twofold. It consisted, first, in allowing to the professor
+the free play of his individuality; second, in providing him with a
+properly trained body of students. From the practical recognition
+of these two principles, which have nothing to do with wealth and
+buildings, proceed the power and glory of the German universities.
+Viewed from the English, or even the American point, some of these
+universities might be pronounced poor, not to say starvelings. The
+buildings are old and out of repair, the professors are scantily paid,
+the students are needy, there is a general atmosphere of want and
+discomfort. But the work they do is noble, and its nobility consists
+in its freedom, its heartiness, its strict devotion to truth.
+
+We are not concerned in this place with the study of the growth of the
+German school system that prepares the German student. We have to do
+with the professor. Although the gymnasium and the university are
+not to be dissevered in actual practice, the one being the necessary
+prelude to the other, still we can discuss either one of them
+separately with a view to ascertaining its salient features.
+
+The German university allows to the professor the free play of his
+individuality. By this is meant that each professor has his specialty,
+which he teaches as a specialty and after his own fashion. He has been
+appointed because of his specialty, and to the end that he may teach
+it. His salary is paid to him, not so much for what he does as for
+what he is. It is in a measure the reward for having made for himself
+a name. His standing in the university is based, not so much upon the
+number of students that he may attract to his lectures as upon the
+quality of scholarship that he exhibits and his general repute in
+the world of letters. He has the satisfaction of feeling that his
+researches, even the most abstruse, can be brought to bear directly
+upon his official intercourse with his students. A discovery that he
+makes is usually communicated to them in the first instance, before it
+finds its way into print. The neglect to take account of this element
+of originality in the lectures of a German professor has led to an
+unfair estimate of the lecture-system. Americans and English are apt
+to regard it as merely the oral inculcation of established truths.
+Were that the case, we might be right in questioning its superiority
+over our method of teaching by textbook. But it is not the case.
+The lecture is the vehicle for conveying the latest discoveries made
+either by the professor himself or gleaned by him from the labors of
+his colleagues. So far from merely repeating established truths,
+it rather promulgates truths in process of establishment. German
+university lectures, taken all in all, represent the most advanced
+stage of thought. The instances are not infrequent where a professor
+refrains from publishing his lectures, lest he should lose his
+hearers, who are attracted to him by reports of his originality and
+thoroughness.
+
+The evident tendency of such a system is to encourage productivity
+and the highest degree of accuracy. A man who has to teach only one
+subject, and teach it to such students only as are ready and anxious
+to receive it, can afford to take the time for being thorough. The
+tendency of the American system, on the other hand, is to beget a
+spirit of routine and to check productivity. The professor falls
+into a way of contenting himself with meeting the requirements of the
+college curriculum. The effects of this curriculum upon the professors
+are deeper and farther-reaching than is usually perceived. It is
+in accordance with facts to call American professors, as a class,
+unproductive. But it would be unjust and inconsiderate to ascribe this
+want of productivity to the disposition called laziness. Laziness is
+not a national fault of Americans. On the contrary, we are pushing,
+active, restless: we yearn, Alexander-like, for something new to
+overcome. Our professors are of the same stock as our business-men,
+our lawyers, our doctors, our politicians. But the spirit of progress,
+if we choose to call it by that name, has been repressed in them. The
+spirit of emulation, of aggressive competition, which marks our trade,
+our banking, our manufacturing interests, our railroads, and even our
+professions, stops at the threshold of our colleges. There is rivalry,
+true, between Harvard and Yale, for instance. If the former erects a
+handsome dormitory, the latter must have one larger and finer. If the
+former establishes a new professorship, the latter must do likewise.
+The colleges compete among themselves. But we see no signs of
+competition among the professors of a college, or between the
+professors of different colleges--competition, be it observed, in the
+sense that the individual professor regards his attainments and views
+as a proper subject for comparison with the attainments and views of
+another professor in the same branch. Once established in his chair,
+his individuality is merged in the general character of the college.
+His time, his knowledge and his energy are subordinated to the
+curriculum. He can teach only so much as may be fitted into his share
+of the time and may be suited to the capacities of a mixed audience.
+It matters little whether the curriculum be good or bad, whether it
+take in a wide or a narrow range of subjects, whether it be behind
+or up to the times: so long as it is a real curriculum it tends to
+prevent the full assertion of his individual excellence. He may study
+for himself, but he cannot teach more than the regulations permit.
+However advanced he may be in his specialty, however sincere and
+earnest his wish to impart the choicest fruits of his research, he
+must admit to himself that there is a point beyond which he is unable
+to carry his students. They are borne off to something else; they have
+no more time for him; they slip from his hold, perhaps at the very
+moment when he flatters himself that he has acquired some formative
+influence over them.
+
+If this view of the necessary effect of a curriculum is correct,
+it will enable us to set a more accurate value upon the so-called
+improvements that have been introduced of late years in our colleges.
+These improvements, stripped of the �clat with which they are
+invested, will be found to amount to little more than expansions
+and slight modifications of a system which remains unaltered in
+its fundamental features. New studies have been introduced, such as
+physics, chemistry, geology, the share of attention assigned to
+modern languages has been increased, a higher standard of admission is
+enforced, and the salaries of professors have been raised. But in
+all this there is no radical change of the method of instruction. The
+establishment of a chair of physics, for instance, can scarcely be
+said to enable the professor of Greek to exhibit his attainments
+more fully. The professor of Latin does not perceive that his pupils,
+because they are now instructed in physical geography, can be carried
+by him to a more advanced stage of Latin scholarship. In fact, so far
+as the older studies are concerned, those which made up the curriculum
+thirty years ago, they seem to be slightly the worse for the recent
+improvements. The college course of 1840 or 1850 was a comparatively
+simple thing. It covered only a few studies, and those of a
+general nature; it taught more thoroughly and with less pretence to
+universality; in short, it did its work more after the fashion of a
+good school. At the present day the curriculum embraces a much wider
+range of subjects--we need only recall to our minds the introduction
+of general history, chemistry, physiology and the modern
+languages--but the time has not been lengthened by a single year. The
+student's time is more broken up than before: the direct influence
+exerted by the professor is less. Our recognition of these and kindred
+facts, however, should be something more than a vain regret for the
+good old past. All these changes are concessions made to the spirit
+of the age. Our generation demands--and very rightfully, too--that the
+sphere of knowledge be enlarged, that the sciences of Nature receive
+sufficient attention. To attempt to undo what has been done, to
+restore the curriculum to the antiquated cadre of Latin and Greek,
+trigonometry, mental science and rhetoric, would be a reaction as
+senseless as hopeless.
+
+Let us be just to ourselves and just to our colleges. We, the public,
+clamored for new studies, and the colleges had to meet the demand,
+because, by force of circumstances, they were the only places where
+the changes could be effected. But in our praisworthy desire for
+progress we have not considered sufficiently whether the colleges were
+in truth the proper places for innovation; whether we were bringing
+in our innovations in the right way and at the right time; whether
+we were in a fair way of making our colleges what we seek to make
+them--namely, centres of learning. To discuss all these points would
+be equivalent to discussing the question of education in all its
+phases, from the primary school to the university. For the present
+we must limit ourselves to understanding and appreciating fairly the
+position of our professors.
+
+That position is not only a trying, but a discouraging one. The
+greater part of the professor's time is spent--from the point of
+view of pure science we might almost say wasted--in teaching the same
+things over and over again. After a few years' practice his round of
+hours becomes mechanical. Familiarity with the textbooks and with the
+uniformly-recurring blunders of each successive class begets a feeling
+of weariness that is not remote from aversion and contempt. So far
+as his prescribed official duties are concerned, he feels that he has
+nothing more to learn. There being, then, no stimulus from without, he
+is open to one of two temptations--either to rest on his past labors,
+or, which is far more likely, to keep on studying for himself, but
+to keep the results to himself. It is not only more soothing to our
+pride, it is juster to our professors, to regard them thus as men who
+have hid their lights under a bushel, and also to confess that we, our
+institutions and ways of thinking, have made the bushel for them
+and held it down over their heads. It is not every man who has the
+persistency and stamina of Professor Whitney, for instance, who can
+toil for years with beginning classes in French and German, never
+losing sight of his real aim, never neglecting an opportunity of
+bringing it forward, until at last he achieves the success he has
+especially desired, and is acknowledged to be one of the foremost
+comparative philologists and Sanskrit scholars in the world. Where a
+Professor Whitney may succeed in spite of untoward circumstances, a
+dozen will probably fail because of circumstances. We naturally look
+to our colleges for the evidences of learning, of enlightenment and
+culture. We think of the capital invested in them, of the part they
+play in moulding the character of our young men, and we deem it a
+matter of course that they should be continually producing something
+original and independent. But when we compare them with the German
+universities--and the comparison is forced upon us whenever one of our
+graduates goes abroad to complete his studies or whenever we look into
+a recent German publication--we are forced to exclaim, "What are our
+colleges about? Are they incompetent, or asleep?" Neither one nor
+the other. Most of our professors do the best they can. But they are
+fettered by routine: they are not stimulated and sustained by
+the consciousness that their private studies may be made directly
+available in the classroom. They lead two lives, as it were--one
+as professor, the other as thinker and reader--and there is not the
+proper action and reaction between the two.
+
+The remedy is as easy to propose as it would be difficult to apply.
+We have only to convert our colleges into universities, our college
+instructors into professors after the German model. Let us relegate
+all teaching, so called, to the schools, and let us give our
+professors permission to expand into veritable scholars discoursing to
+young men of kindred spirit. Any one can see at a glance that from
+the wish to the accomplishment is a long way. Upon some of us the
+consciousness is beginning to dawn that perhaps we have not even taken
+the first decisive step. The best that can be said of our colleges is
+that they are in a state of transition. We have increased the number
+of studies, as well as the number of colleges; we have established
+schools of law and schools of science, sometimes independent of,
+sometimes co-ordinate with or subordinate to, the college. We have
+also established post-graduate courses, in the hope of inducing our
+young men to complete their studies at home. Yet every year we see a
+larger number going abroad. In those days of golden memory, both for
+Germany and for America, when Longfellow was gliding down the
+Rhine with Freiligrath, and Bancroft and Bismarck were comrades at
+G�ttingen, an American in Germany was something of a rarity. In most
+instances he was a man of wealth and high social standing, who
+looked upon his semester or two as a romantic episode. But now every
+outward-bound steamer carries with it one or more who, emerging from
+obscurity and poverty, have saved up a few hundred dollars and are
+bent upon plain, hard, practical business. "We go," they can be
+imagined as saying, "because we can get in Germany what we cannot get
+at home. Your schools of science and your post-graduate courses may be
+well enough in their way, but they do not give us what we are after,
+and we cannot afford to wait until they may be able to give it. Some
+of the professors are first-rate men--perhaps just as good as any
+we may meet in Germany--but what does their learning, their science,
+avail us, so long as they are obliged to withhold from us the best
+that they know? They trained themselves in Germany, and if we are ever
+to rival them we must do the same."
+
+It is not pleasant to listen to such reasonings, much less to see them
+carried into effect. But the defect which they bring to light will not
+be cured by closing our eyes to it and trusting to time, the sovereign
+healer. Time is a negative factor: it only enables the forces of
+Nature to do their positive work. But schools and colleges are not the
+product of the elemental forces of Nature: they are distinctively
+the work of man as a free agent. If we are free to shape any of our
+institutions to suit our needs, we are certainly free to shape our
+educational institutions. By having a definite result in view, and
+willing its attainment, we may succeed; but if we fail either in
+clearness of vision or persistency of will, we cannot expect the
+result to come of itself. The present university system of Germany,
+which might seem to a careless observer the natural outgrowth
+of German life, is the result of hard thinking and strenuous,
+well-directed effort. We should not commit much of an exaggeration
+were we to call it the deliberate creation of Frederick the Great, Von
+Zedlitz and Wolf, who dragged with them Prussia, and the other
+German states in her wake. They and their associates and followers,
+Schleiermacher and William von Humboldt, clear-headed, iron-willed
+men, perceived what was needed, and bent all their energies to the
+task. They emancipated the schools from the control of the clergy,
+and established the principle that teaching is a distinct vocation,
+requiring special training, over which the state has supervision;
+furthermore, that the state should pronounce who is fit and who is
+not fit for university education, thereby abolishing
+entrance-examinations, and putting an end to the ignoble practice on
+the part of the universities of lowering the standard for the purpose
+of increasing the number of students. They abolished the last vestiges
+of the scholastic system by raising the faculty of philosophy from its
+position as a quasi-preparatory course to the others, and placing it
+on a footing of perfect equality with law, theology and medicine.[3]
+They removed all restrictions from the _Lehrfreiheit_, or professional
+freedom of instruction, while at the same time they preserved the
+right of the state to control indirectly the quality of university
+instruction by means of state-examinations for pastors, teachers,
+lawyers, physicians and officeholders. Ever since then the university
+system of Germany has rested upon a secure and lasting basis.
+
+[Footnote 3: The subordination of the philosophical faculty as a sort
+of preparatory course to the others remained in force in Austria until
+1850. It is not surprising, then, that Austria should have compared
+so unfavorably with Germany in philology, history, philosophy and
+literary criticism until within our own times.]
+
+Is the course pursued by Prussia to be regarded as a mere incident in
+history, or may it serve as an example and model for us? Prussia is a
+monarchy, clothed with some constitutional forms but at bottom a
+state where the personal will of the sovereign has always made,
+and continues to make, itself felt in the final instance. We are
+a republic, or rather a cluster of republics under an imperfectly
+centralized national government. It is evident that the agencies and
+mode of reform with us must differ from those that have been employed
+in Prussia and in the rest of Germany. But it does not follow that
+the reform itself is impossible. What has elsewhere sprung from the
+autocratic will of a single man and his cabinet may be effected here
+through that other force, equally great and perhaps more pervasive,
+to which we give the vague name of "popular opinion." We know that
+popular opinion in our country is irresistible. It makes everything
+bend to it. It broke up the Tweed Ring, seemingly impregnable, in a
+single campaign. But this popular opinion is not a natural product: it
+is the work of a few men who devote themselves to awakening the sense
+of right and wrong and guiding the understanding of their fellows.
+But for popular leaders like Mr. O'Conor and Governor Tilden, the
+late Tweed Ring might be in power at this day. Education is not
+so different from politics but that we can regard it as subject to
+similar laws of cause and effect. Our present common-school system is
+an off-spring of popular opinion, as that opinion was created and led
+to action by a few men. And whether our common schools are to stand
+or fall is again becoming a question of the day, and will be decided
+according as popular opinion may be swayed by a few zealous friends or
+enemies. Our colleges, it may be said, do not occupy the same
+relation to the state that our schools do. They are nearly all private
+corporations, enjoying vested rights which the state is powerless to
+touch. Undoubtedly true, but it is no less true that what cannot be
+done directly may be done indirectly. The state need not make so much
+as the attempt to lay hands upon college property or to interfere with
+college studies. It has only to say, "I, the state, exact such and
+such qualifications of all who seek to practice law or medicine within
+my limits or to become my officeholders. I establish my own free
+colleges and schools of law and medicine, and I proceed to tax
+all others at their full valuation." There is not a college in the
+country, not even Harvard, that could compete upon such terms. The
+state need not even express its sovereign will so precisely. It
+can content itself with establishing a university of its own, and
+facilitating the direct influence of this university over the public
+and private schools. We see the operations of such a system very
+plainly in Michigan. Not only does the university at Ann Arbor
+overshadow completely the private colleges, but the "union schools,"
+administered under its auspices, are--to borrow the expression of one
+of its graduates--"killing" the private schools. We may rest assured
+that whatever the people of a State or of the United States is
+earnestly bent upon having, will come.
+
+Whether all our States are to act as Michigan has done--whether we are
+indeed ripe for thorough change--whether a change is to be effected
+by direct State action or indirectly by the mere pressure of public
+sentiment--whether we have real need of a body of professors and a set
+of universities such as Germany possesses--whether we are to make
+our higher as well as our primary education non-sectarian,--are all
+questions which may rest in abeyance for a long time to come. It is
+also possible that one or the other of them may, in legal phraseology,
+be sprung upon us at any time. Not to be taken unawares, we have
+to bear steadily in mind several fixed principles and to disabuse
+ourselves of one misconception.
+
+The misconception is this: that what Germany accomplished in the
+eighteenth century we cannot accomplish in the nineteenth, because
+circumstances are so very different, chiefly because Germany is an old
+country and we are a young country. The circumstances are not so very
+different, and the difference, however great it may be estimated, is
+in our favor. We are a union of thirty or forty States: in the Germany
+of the eighteenth century there were three hundred. Ever since the
+adoption of our Federal Constitution we have enjoyed common rights of
+citizenship, common laws of commerce, common legal protection. Will
+it be necessary to remind the student of history that the Germans have
+acquired these blessings only within our own day? We are a nation of
+forty millions, rich and prosperous, free to develop our resources.
+The Germany of 1775 could count barely twenty millions, its soil was
+poorly tilled, its mineral wealth undeveloped, manufactures in an
+embryonic state, trade fettered in a thousand ways, the peasantry
+brutally ignorant and servile, the national character--to all
+appearance--ruined by cruel religious wars, the sense of national
+unity blunted by the recollections of a hundred petty feuds reaching
+back to the gloom of the Middle Ages, the national taste dominated by
+poor French models to an extent that now seems incredible, learning
+either dry pedantry or shallow cox-combry. We are indeed a young
+country, but we are young in hope; Germany was old, but it was old in
+weakness, in poverty, in despondency. Whoever doubts our ability to do
+as much as Germany did one hundred years ago, fails to profit by the
+teachings of history--overlooks the fact that Germany in 1840 was
+only where she had been in 1618. That we should take Germany for our
+standard of comparison, rather than England or France, is a postulate
+which has one circumstance unmistakably in its favor. Although we are
+connected with England by common descent, institutions and language,
+although the politics and philosophy of France have exerted
+considerable influence over our own, we do not observe our young
+men going in numbers to England and France to receive their final
+training. Their instinct leads them to Germany. For one American
+graduate of Oxford or Cambridge or of the French _�coles_, it would
+be easy to count ten doctors of G�ttingen or Heidelberg. Our young
+men are not attracted to the German universities by such factitious
+considerations as cheapness of living or the acquisition of the
+language, but by sympathy with German methods and academic liberty.
+
+Some of the most important fixed principles have been already touched
+upon, but only one can be developed in this place. It is, that if
+we are to establish a system of higher education, we must begin by
+recognizing freely and fully the distinction between teacher and
+professor. We must perceive the importance of having two sets of
+men--the one to teach, the other to investigate; the one engaged in
+training boys to learn, the other in showing young men how to think.
+When and how this distinction is to be established, in what special
+form it is to be embodied, is a secondary matter. The chief thing is
+to admit that it is essential and feasible. The young man who returns
+after a three years' absence in Germany, exhibiting with dignified
+pride his well-earned doctor's diploma, looks of course upon the
+institution that conferred it as the _ne plus ultra_. But riper
+experience, contact with the sharp corners of American prejudices
+and peculiarities, renewed familiarity with our social, political,
+commercial and literary life, will gradually convince him that a
+German university is not a thing to be plucked up by the roots and
+transplanted bodily to American soil. We have rather to take our
+native stock as we find it, and engraft upon it a slip from the
+German. One trial may fail, another may succeed. Our first efforts
+will be like those of a man groping about in the dark. More than
+one department in a German university will be of little avail in an
+American, and conversely we shall have to create some that do not
+exist elsewhere. For instance, in view of the great power exerted by
+the newspaper press, it might be desirable to have a course of study
+for those who think of taking up journalism as a profession. In such
+a course, political economy, constitutional and international law,
+English and American history, and the modern languages and literatures
+should constitute a full and serious discipline. It is not probable
+that the study of philology will ever attract the same attention here
+that it does abroad. Our needs lie in the direction of the natural
+sciences rather than in the direction of history and linguistics. But
+we should be derelict to our duty were we to sacrifice these sciences
+of the spirit, as the Germans call them, to the sciences of Nature.
+A culture without them would be the bleakest and most repulsive
+materialism.
+
+The practical recognition of the difference between teacher and
+professor would be a decided step. By the side of it those which
+we have already taken would appear insignificant. The addition of
+chemistry, geology, or physiology to the previous curriculum does
+not change its character, so long as the professors of those branches
+instruct after the fashion of the professors of Latin and Greek. The
+advantage that the men of natural science have over their colleagues
+is one which the nature of the subject brings with it. In order to
+teach at all, they must come in close personal contact with their
+pupils, and to escape falling behind in their department, where
+new theories succeed one another with such rapid bounds, they must
+continue a certain amount at least of original research. Supplementing
+the present curriculum by post-graduate courses will hardly suffice.
+Such courses are open to serious objections. If conducted by the
+regular professors, they impose additional burdens upon men who have
+already more than enough. If conducted by special professors, they
+will tend to raise those professors at the expense of the regular
+faculty. A lecturer to graduates must necessarily appear, in the eyes
+of the undergraduate, superior to the man who hears recitations and
+prepares term-reports. Besides, young men who have passed four years
+at one college need "a change of air:" they will develop more rapidly
+if brought into contact with new ideas and new instructors. Every
+institution has an atmosphere of its own, which ceases after a time to
+act upon the student as a stimulant.
+
+There is one additional point that should not be overlooked. A careful
+discrimination between the functions of the professor and those of the
+teacher would benefit both classes of men. Such has been the effect in
+Germany. The gymnasium-teacher has a high sense of the dignity of
+his vocation and a keen sense of its responsibilities, because he
+perceives that he must bring his labors to a well-rounded conclusion.
+He knows that the university does not supplement the gymnasium--that
+the university professors do not undertake to make good his
+shortcomings. The gymnasial course is a completed phase of training.
+It aims at giving the pupil all the general knowledge that he requires
+previous to his professional studies. What is lost or overlooked in
+the gymnasium cannot be acquired at the university. Hence the peculiar
+conscientiousness of the German teacher, his almost painful anxiety to
+make sure that his pupils master every subject, his unwillingness to
+let them go before they are "ripe." With us the change from school
+to college is not an abrupt transition, like that from gymnasium to
+university. The college course, certainly during the two lower years
+at least, is a continuation of the school course: the same or
+similar subjects are taught, and taught in the same way. Hence the
+school-teacher is tempted to regulate his efforts according to the
+college standard of admission. If he can only "get his men into
+college," as the saying is, he thinks that he is doing enough. To say
+this of all schools and all teachers would be flagrant injustice.
+Not a few of our older schools compare favorably with the best German
+gymnasiums, and in the large cities we find schools of even recent
+origin that endeavor faithfully to give a well-rounded discipline. But
+it remains nevertheless true that our schools, taken as a whole, give
+no more than the colleges require, and that only too many of them
+give less, trusting to the colleges to be lenient and eke out the
+deficiency. Moreover, when we read in the daily papers advertisements
+like the following, "Mr. Smith, a graduate of Harvard (or Yale or some
+other college, as the case may be), prepares young men for college,"
+what inference are we to draw? Simply, that Mr. Smith, having gone
+through Harvard or Yale, knows exactly what is required there, and
+will undertake to "coach" any young man for admission in two or three
+years. Such coaching, if the young man is dull or backward, will
+consist in cramming him with required studies, to the neglect of
+everything not required. Teaching is not easy work. In many respects
+it is more difficult to be a good teacher than to be an original
+investigator. Whatever operates to strengthen and elevate the
+teacher's position, therefore, must be a gain. The highest
+incentive would be the consciousness that his school is not a mere
+stepping-stone to another school of larger growth, but the place where
+he must in truth prepare the youthful mind for independent study.
+
+JAMES MORGAN HART.
+
+
+
+
+CONTRASTED MOODS.
+
+            WANT.
+
+  Where is the power I fancied mine?
+    Can I have emptied my soul of thought?
+  In yesterday's fullness lay no sign
+    That to-day would be a time of drought.
+  What if thought fail me for evermore?
+    The world that awaits a well-filled plan
+  Must, railing, cry at my long-closed door,
+    "He cannot finish what he began."
+
+            PLENTY.
+
+  Thought dashes on thought within my soul:
+    Time will not serve for the bounding-line.
+  I think it would fail to mete the whole
+    If old Methuselah's years were mine.
+  Like the famous spring that is sometimes dry,
+    Then flows with a river's whelming might,
+  The current of thought now runs so high
+    It covers the earthy bed from sight.
+
+CHARLOTTE F. BATES.
+
+
+
+
+THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS.
+
+BY MRS. E. LYNN LINTON, AUTHOR OF "PATRICIA KEMBALL."
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+CHANGES.
+
+
+Four years had come and gone since Mr. Dundas had laid his second
+wife in the grave beside his first, and the county had discussed
+the immorality of taking cherry-water as a calmant. For it was to
+an overdose of this that the verdict at the coroner's inquest had
+assigned the cause of poor madame's awful and sudden death; though why
+the medicine should have been found so loaded with prussic acid as
+to have caused instant death on this special night, when it had been
+taken so often before with impunity, was a mystery to which there was
+no solution. Not a trace of poison was to be found anywhere in the
+house, and no evidence was forthcoming to show how it might have been
+bought or where procured. Alick Corfield, who understood it all,
+was not called as a witness, and he told no one what he knew. On the
+contrary, he burdened his soul with the, to him, unpardonable crime
+of falsehood that he might shield Leam from detection; for when his
+father, missing the sixty-minim bottle of hydrocyanic acid, asked him
+what had become of it, Alick answered, with that wonderful coolness
+of virtue descending to sin for the protection of the beloved which is
+sometimes seen in the ingenuous, "I broke it by accident, father, and
+forgot to tell you."
+
+As the boy had never been known to tell a falsehood in his life, he
+reaped the reward of good repute, and his father, saying quietly,
+"That was a bad job, my boy," laid the matter aside as a _caput
+mortuum_ of no value.
+
+To be sure, he thought more than once that it was an odd coincidence,
+but he could see no connection between the two circumstances
+of madame's sudden death and Alick's fracture of that bottle of
+hydrocyanic acid; and even if there should be any, he preferred not
+to trace it. So the inquest was a mere show so far as getting at the
+truth was concerned, and madame died and was buried in the mystery in
+which she had lived.
+
+Meantime, Leam had been sent to school, whence she was expected
+to return a little more like other English girls than she had been
+hitherto, and Mr. Dundas shut up Ford House--he went back to the
+original name after madame's death--and left England to shake off in
+travel the deadly despair that had fallen like a sickness on him and
+taken all the flavor out of his life. He had never cared to search out
+the real history of that fair beloved woman. Enough had come to his
+knowledge, in the bills which had poured in from several Sherrington
+tradesmen on the announcement of her marriage and then of her death,
+to convince him that he had been duped in facts if not in feeling. For
+among these bills was one from the local geologist for "a beginner's
+cabinet of specimens," delivered just about the time when he,
+Sebastian, had spent so many pleasant hours in arranging the fragments
+which madame said represented both her knowledge and her lost
+happiness; also one from the fancy repository, which sold everything,
+for sundry water-color drawings and illuminated texts, a Table of
+the Ten Commandments illustrated, and the like, which sufficiently
+explained all on this side, and settled for ever the dead woman's
+claims to the artistic and scientific merit with which Mr. Dundas and
+the rector had credited her.
+
+Also, certain ugly letters from a person of the name of Lowes, in
+London, put him on the track, had he cared to follow it up, of a
+deception even worse than that of pretended art or mock science. These
+letters, written in the same handwriting as that wherein Julius de
+Montfort, her brother-in-law, the present marquis, had told her of
+the defalcations of the family solicitor and trustee, called Virginie,
+Madame la Marquise de Montfort, plain Susan bluntly, and reminded her
+of the screw that would be turned if the writer was not satisfied;
+and were letters that demanded money, always money, as the price of
+continued silence.
+
+But Sebastian had loved his second wife too well to seek to know the
+truth, if that truth would be to her discredit. He preferred to
+be deceived; and he had what he preferred. He stifled all doubts,
+darkened all chinks by which the obtrusive light might penetrate, kept
+his love if not his faith unshaken, caring only to remember her as
+beautiful, seductive, soothing, and mourning her as deeply, doubtful
+as she had proved herself to be, as he had loved her fondly when he
+believed her honest. It was a curious mental condition for a man to
+cherish, but it satisfied him, and his regret was not robbed of its
+pathos by knowledge.
+
+Now that the four years were completed, the widower had to return to
+his desolate home and make the best he could of the fragments of peace
+and happiness left to him. Leam was nineteen: it was time for her to
+be taken from school and given the protection of her father's house.
+It went against the man's heart to have her, but he was compelled, if
+he wished to stand well with his friends, and he hoped that the girl
+would be found improved from these years of discipline and training,
+and be rational and like other people. Wherefore he came home one
+dry dull day in October, and the neighborhood welcomed him, if not as
+their prodigal returned, yet as their lunatic restored to his right
+mind.
+
+During these four years a few changes had taken place at North Aston.
+Carry Fairbairn had married--not Frank Harrowby: he had found a rich
+wife, not in the least to his personal taste, but greatly to his
+profit; and Carry, after having cried a good deal for a month, had
+consoled herself with a young clergyman from the North, whom she loved
+quite as much as if she had never fancied Frank at all, and spoilt in
+the first months by such submission as caused her to repent for all
+the years of her life after.
+
+The things of the rectory were much in their old state. Little Fina,
+madame's child, was there under Mrs. Birkett's motherly care; but
+as the child was nearly six years old now, the good creature's
+instinctive love for infants was wearing out, and she was often heard
+to say how much she wished she could have kept Fina always a baby,
+and, sighing, how difficult she was to manage! She was an exceedingly
+pretty little girl, with fair skin, fair hair and dark eyes--willful
+of course, and spoilt of course; the only one in the house who took
+her in hand to correct being Adelaide. And as she took her in hand too
+smartly, Mrs. Birkett generally interfered, and the servants combined
+to screen her; the result being that the little one was mistress of
+the situation, after the manner of willful children, and made every
+one more or less anxious and uncomfortable as her return for their
+care.
+
+Alick Corfield was the rector's curate. On the whole, this was the
+most important of all the North Aston events which had taken place
+during the last four years. Soon after madame's death and Leam's
+transfer from home to school Alick had a strange and sudden illness.
+No one knew what to make of it, nor how it came, nor what it was, but
+the doctor called it cerebral fever, and when the families got hold
+of the word they were content. Cerebral fever does as well as anything
+else for an illness of which no one knows and no one seeks to know the
+cause, and to the origin of which the patient himself gives no clew.
+It was a peg, and a peg was all that was wanted.
+
+On his recovery he announced his intention of going to Oxford to read
+for holy orders. His mother was piteously distressed, as might be
+expected. She feared all sorts of evil for her boy, from damp sheets
+and unmended linen to over-study, wine-parties and bold-faced minxes
+weaving subtle webs of fascination. But for the first time in his life
+Alick stood out against her insistance, and his will conquered hers.
+The sequel of the struggle was, that he went to Oxford, took his
+degree, read for orders, passed, and that Mr. Birkett gave him his
+title as his curate.
+
+It could hardly be said that the relations were entirely harmonious
+between the military-minded rector, who held to the righteousness of
+helotry and the value of ignorance in the class beneath him, and the
+young curate burning with zeal and oppressed with the desire to put
+all the crooked things of life straight. The one pooh-poohed the
+enthusiasm of the other, derided his belief in humanity and assured
+him of failure: the other felt as if he had been taken behind the
+scenes and shown the blue fire of which the awful lightning of his
+youth was made. Mr. Birkett could not quite forbid the greater
+faith, the more loving endeavor which the young man threw into his
+ministrations, but he was the Sadducee who scoffed and made the
+work heavy and uphill throughout. He gave a grudging assent to the
+Bible-classes, the Wednesday evening services at the Sunday-school,
+the lectures on great men on the first Monday in the month, which
+Alick proposed and established. He thought it all weariness to the
+flesh and a waste of time and energy; but the traditions of his order
+were strong, if he himself did not share them, and he had to give way
+in the end. He consoled himself with the reflection that the boy would
+find out his mistake before long, and that then he would know who had
+been right throughout.
+
+But even zeal and hope and diligence in his work could not lighten the
+persistent sadness which was Alick's chief characteristic now. Gaunt
+and silent, with the eyes of a man whose inner self is absent and
+whose thoughts are not with his company, he looked as if he had passed
+through the fire, and had not passed through unscathed. No one knew
+what had happened to him, and, though many made conjectures, none came
+near the truth. Meanwhile, he seemed as if he lived only to work, and,
+the clearer-sighted might have added, to wait.
+
+For a further local change, Lionnet was tenanted again by a strange
+and solitary man, who never went to church and did not visit in
+the neighborhood. He was in consequence believed to be a forger, an
+escaped convict in hiding, or, by the more charitable, a maniac as yet
+not dangerous. North Aston held him in deeper horror than it had held
+even Pepita, and his true personality exercised its wits more keenly
+than had even the true personality of madame. In point of fact, he was
+a quiet, inoffensive, amiable man, who gave his mind to Sanskrit for
+work and to entomology for play, and did not trouble himself about his
+own portrait as drawn in the local vernacular. Nevertheless, for all
+his reserved habits and quiet ways, he had learnt the whole history of
+the place and people before he had been at Lionnet a month.
+
+At the Hill things remained unchanged for the ladies, save for the
+additional burden of years and the pleasant news that Edgar was
+expected home daily. Adelaide, now twenty-four, took the news as a
+personal grace, and blossomed into smiles and glad humor of which only
+Josephine understood the source. But Josephine held her tongue, and
+received the confidence of her young friend with discretion. As she
+had never dispossessed her own old idol, she could feel for Adelaide,
+and she was not disposed to look on her patient determination with
+displeasure. The constancy of the two, however, was very different in
+essential meaning. With Josephine it was the constancy that is born of
+an affectionate disposition and the absence of rival Lotharios: with
+Adelaide it was the result of calculation and decision. The one would
+have worshiped Sebastian as she worshiped him now had he been ruined,
+a cripple, a criminal even: the other would have shut out Edgar
+inexorably from her very dreams had not his personality included
+the Hill. With the one it was self-abasement--with the other
+self-consideration; but it came to the same thing in the end, and the
+men profited equally.
+
+All these changes Sebastian Dundas found to have taken place when he
+returned to North Aston with gray hair instead of brown, his smooth,
+fair skin tanned and roughened, and his weak, finely-cut, effeminate
+mouth hidden by a moustache of a reddish tint, mingled with white.
+Still, he was Sebastian; and after the first shock of his altered
+appearance had been got over, Josephine carried her incense in the old
+way, and found her worship as dear and as tantalizing as ever.
+
+Lastly, as the crowning change of all, Leam came home from school;
+no longer the arrogant, embittered child, looking at life through the
+false medium of pride and ignorance, saying rude things and doing odd
+ones with the most perfect unconsciousness; but well-bred, graceful,
+sufficiently instructed not to make patent mistakes, and more
+beautiful by far than she had even promised to be. Her very eyes were
+lovelier, lovely as they had always been: they had more variety of
+expression, were more dewy and tender, and, if less tragic, were more
+spiritual. That hard, dry, burning passion which had devoured her of
+old time seemed to have gone, as also her savage Spanish pride. She
+had rounded and softened in body too, as in mind. Her skin was fairer;
+her lips were not so firmly closed, so rigid in line, so constricted
+in motion; her brows were more flexible and not so often knit
+together; and her slight, lithe figure was perfect in line and
+movement. Still, she had enough of her former manner of being for
+identity. Grave, quiet, laconic, direct, she was but a modification
+of the former Leam as they had known her--Leam, Pepita's daughter,
+and with blood in her veins that was not the ordinary blood of the
+ordinary British miss.
+
+Her father's artistic perceptions were gratified as he met her at the
+station and Leam turned her cheek to him voluntarily with tears in her
+eyes. Turning her cheek was apparently her idea of kissing; but if not
+too intense an expression of affection, it was at least an improvement
+on the old hard repulsion, and Sebastian accepted it as the concession
+it was meant to be. Indeed, they met somewhat as foes reconciled, or
+rather seeking to be reconciled, and Mr. Dundas did not wish to keep
+open old sores. Her cheek, turned to him somewhere about the ear,
+represented to his mind a peace-offering: her eyes full of tears were
+as a confession of past sins and a promise of amendment. Not that he
+understood why she was so much more effusive than of old, but if it
+augured a happier life together, he was glad.
+
+As they drove up to the door of the old home, crowded with memories
+and associations, a shudder passed over the girl: she grasped her
+father's hand in her own almost convulsively, and he heard her say
+below her breath, "Poor papa!"
+
+He wondered why she pitied him. The place must surely be full of
+memories of her mother for her: why did she say "Poor papa!" to him?
+He did not see what she saw--that peaceful September evening, and the
+bottle of cherry-water on the table, with the little phial of thirty
+deaths in her hand; and now the contents emptied into the harmless
+draught; and now madame pale and dead. The whole scene transacted
+itself vividly before her, and she shuddered at her memories and her
+past self, as always with a kind of vague wonder how she could have
+been so wicked, and where did she get the force, the courage, for such
+a cruel crime?
+
+For all these four years at school the shadow of that dreadful deed
+had been ever in the background of her life; and as time went on, and
+she came to a better understanding of morality, it grew clear to her
+as a crime. Its consciousness of guilt had broken down her pride, and
+thus had made her more malleable, more humble. She could no longer
+harden herself in her belief that she was superior to every one else.
+Those girls, her companions--they had not had an Andalusian mother,
+truly; they did not pray to the saints, and the Holy Virgin took no
+care of them; they were Protestants and English, frogs and pigs; but
+they had not committed murder. If she should stand up in the middle
+of the room and tell them what she had done, which of them would touch
+her hand again? which of them speak to her? English and Protestants as
+they were, how far superior in their innocence to her, an Andalusian
+Catholic, in her guilt! But no one lives with remorse. It comes and
+goes gustily, fitfully; but the things of the present are stronger
+than the things of the past, else the man with a shameful secret in
+his life would go mad.
+
+One of these gusty storms broke over Leam as she passed through the
+gates of the old home, and for the moment she felt as if she must
+confess the truth to her father and tell him what evil thing she had
+done. Yet it passed, as other such storms had passed: the things of
+the present took their natural place of prominence, and those of the
+past sank again into the background, shadows that never faded quite
+away, but that were not actualities pressing against her.
+
+The news of Leam's home-coming created quite a pleasurable excitement
+in the neighborhood, and the families flocked to Ford House to
+welcome her among them as one of themselves, all anxious to see if
+the Ethiopian of North Aston had shed her skin, if the leopardess had
+changed her spots. They were divided among themselves as to whether
+she had or had not. Some said she was charming, and like any one else,
+but others shook their heads, and, like experts in brain disease,
+professed to see traces of the old lunacy, and to be doubtful as to
+her cure. At the worst, however, here she was--one of themselves whom
+they must receive; and common sense dictated that they should make the
+best of her, and hope all things till they proved some.
+
+There was one among them whom Leam longed yet dreaded to meet. This
+was Alick Corfield. She wondered what he knew, or rather what he
+suspected, and she was anxious to have her ordeal over. But,
+though Mrs. Corfield came, and was just the same as ever, bustling,
+inquisitive, dogmatic, before ten minutes were over having put the
+girl through her scholastic facings and got from her the whole of her
+curriculum, yet Alick did not appear. He waited until after Sunday,
+when he should see her first in church, and so nerve himself as it
+were behind the barrier of his sacred office; but after Sunday had
+passed and he had seen her in her old place, he called, and found her
+alone.
+
+When they met, and she looked into his face and laid her hand in his,
+she knew all. He shared her secret, and knew what she had done. It was
+not that he was either distant or familiar, cold or disrespectful,
+or anything but glad and reverent; nevertheless, he knew. He was no
+longer the boy adorer, her slave, her dog: he was her friend, and
+he wished to make her feel that she was safe with him--known, in his
+power, but safe.
+
+"You are changed," he said awkwardly.
+
+He thought of her as Leam, heard her always called Leam, but he dared
+not use the familiar name, and yet she was not "Miss Dundas" to him.
+
+"It is four years since you saw me," she said with a grave smile. "It
+was time to change."
+
+"But you are your old self too," he returned eagerly. He would have
+no disloyalty done to the queen of his boyish dreams: what worm soever
+was at its root, his royal pomegranate flower should be always set
+fair in the sun where he might be.
+
+"You seem much changed too," she said after a short pause--"graver and
+older. Is that because you are a clergyman?"
+
+Alick turned his eyes away from the girl's face, and looked mournfully
+out onto the autumn woods. "Partly," he said.
+
+"And the other part?" asked Leam, pressing to know the worst.
+
+"And the other part?" He looked at her, and his wan face grew paler.
+"Well, never mind the other part. There are things which sometimes
+come into a man's life and wither it for ever, as a fire passing over
+a green tree, but we do not speak of them."
+
+"To no one?"
+
+"To no one."
+
+Leam sighed. No proclamation could have made the thing clearer between
+them. Henceforth she was in Alick's power: let him be faithful,
+chivalrous, loyal, devoted, what you will, she was no longer her own
+unshared property. He knew what she was, and in so far was her master.
+
+Poor Alick! This was not the light in which he held his fatal secret.
+True, he knew what she had done, and that his young queen, his ideal,
+was a murderess, who, if the truth were made public, would be degraded
+below the level of the poorest wretch that had kept an honest name;
+but he felt himself more accursed than she, in that he had been the
+means whereby she had gotten both her knowledge and the power to use
+it. He was the doomed if innocent, as of old tragic times--the sinless
+Cain guilty of murder, but guiltless in intent. It was for this, as
+much as for the love and poetry of the boyish days, that he felt he
+owed himself to Leam--that his life was hers, and all his energies
+were to be devoted for her good. It was for this that he had prayed
+with such intensity of earnestness it seemed to him sometimes as if
+his soul had left his body, and had gone up to the Most High to pluck
+by force of passionate entreaty the pardon he besought: "Pardon her, O
+Lord! Turn her heart, enlighten her understanding, convince her of her
+sin; but pardon her, pardon her, dear Lord! And with her, pardon me."
+
+The man's whole life was spent in this one wild, fervid prayer. All
+that he did was tinged with the sentiment of winning grace for her and
+pardon for both. In his own mind they stood hand in hand together;
+and if he was the intercessor, they were both to benefit, and neither
+would be saved without the other. And he believed in the value of his
+prayers and in the objective reality of their influence.
+
+For the final changes in the ordering of home and society at North
+Aston, the week after Leam returned Edgar Harrowby came from India,
+and took up his position as the owner of the Hill estate; and the
+child Fina was brought to Ford House, and formally invested with
+her new name and condition as Miss Fina Dundas, Sebastian's younger
+daughter. Mindful of the past, Mr. Dundas expected to have a stormy
+scene with Leam when he told her his intentions respecting poor
+madame's child; but Leam answered quietly, "Very well, papa," and
+greeted Fina when she arrived benevolently, if not effusively. She was
+not one of those born mothers who love babies from their early nursery
+days, but she was kind to the child in her grave way, and seemed
+anxious to do well by her.
+
+The ladies all bestowed on her their nursery recipes and systems
+in rich abundance--especially Mrs. Birkett, who, though glad to be
+relieved from the hourly task of watching and contending, was still
+immensely interested in the little creature, and gave daily counsel
+and superintendence. So that on the whole Leam was not left unaided
+with her charge. On the contrary, she ran great risk of being
+bewildered by her multiplicity of counselors, and of entering in
+consequence on that zigzag course which covers much ground and makes
+but little progress.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+EDGAR HARROWBY.
+
+
+Thirty-two years of age; tall, handsome, well set-up, and every inch
+a soldier; manly in bearing, but also with that grace of gesture and
+softness of speech which goes by the name of polished manner; a
+bold sportsman, ignorant of physical fear, to whom England was the
+culmination of the universe, and such men as he--gentlemen, officers,
+squires--the culmination of humanity; a man who loved women as
+creatures, but despised them as intelligences; who respected socially
+the ladies of his own class, and demanded that they should be without
+stain, as befits the wives and mothers and sisters of gentlemen, but
+who thought women of a meaner grade fair game for the roving fowler; a
+conservative, holding to elemental differences whence arise the value
+of races, the dignity of family and the righteousness of caste; an
+hereditary landowner, regarding landed property as a sacred possession
+meant only for the few and not to be suffered to lapse into low-born
+hands; a gentleman, incapable of falsehood, treachery, meanness,
+social dishonor, but not incapable of injustice, tyranny, selfishness,
+even cruelty, if such came in his way as the privilege of his
+rank,--this was Edgar Harrowby as the world saw and his friends knew
+him, and as North Aston had henceforth to know him.
+
+His return caused immense local excitement and great rejoicing. It
+seemed to set the social barometer at "fair," and to promise a spell
+of animation such as North Aston had been long wanting. And indeed
+personally for himself it was time that Major Harrowby was at home and
+at the head of his own affairs. Matters had been going rather badly on
+the estate without him, and the need of a strong hand to keep agents
+straight and tenants up to the mark had been making itself somewhat
+disastrously felt during the last three or four years. Wherefore
+he had sold out, broken all his ties in India handsomely, as he had
+broken them in London handsomely once before, when, mad with jealousy,
+he had fled like a thief in the night, burned his boats behind him,
+and, as he thought, obliterated every trace by which that loved and
+graceless woman could discover his real name or family holding; and
+now had come home prepared to do his duty to society and himself. That
+is, prepared to marry a nice girl of his own kind, keep the estate
+well in hand, and set an example of respectability and orthodoxy,
+family prayers and bold riding, according to the ideal of the English
+country gentleman.
+
+But, above all, he must marry. And the wife provided for him by the
+eternal fitness of things was Adelaide Birkett. Who else could be
+found to suit the part so perfectly? She was well-born, well-mannered;
+though not coarsely robust, yet healthy in the sense of purity
+of blood; and she was decidedly pretty. So far to the good of the
+Harrowby stock in the future. Neither was she too young, though by
+reason of her quiet country life her twenty-four years did not count
+more to her in wear and tear of feeling and the doubtful moulding of
+experience than if she had lived through one London season. She was a
+girl of acknowledged good sense, calm, equable, holding herself in the
+strictest leash of ladylike reserve, and governing all her emotions
+without trouble, patent or unconfessed. Hers was a character which
+would never floreate into irregular beauties to give her friends
+anxiety and crowd her life with embarrassing consequences. She
+despised sentiment and ridiculed enthusiasm, thought skepticism both
+wicked and disreputable, but at the same time fanaticism was silly,
+and not nearly so respectable as that quiet, easy-going religion which
+does nothing of which society would disapprove, but does not break its
+heart in trying to found the kingdom of God on earth.
+
+All her relations with life and society would be blameless, orthodox,
+ladylike and thoroughly English. As a wife she would preach submission
+in public and practice domination and the moral repression belonging
+to the superior being in private. As a mother she would take care
+to have experienced nurses and well-bred governesses, who would look
+after the children properly, when she would wash her hands of further
+trouble and responsibility, save to teach them good manners at
+luncheon and self-control in their evening visit to the drawing-room
+for the "children's half hour" before dinner. As the mistress of an
+establishment she would be strict, demanding perfect purity in the
+morals of her servants, not suffering waste, nor followers, nor
+kitchen amusements that she knew of, nor kitchen individuality anyhow.
+Her servants would be her serfs, and she would assume to have bought
+them by food and wages in soul as well as body, in mind as well as
+muscle. She would give broken meat in moderation to the deserving
+poor, but she would let those who are not deserving do the best they
+could with want at home and inclemency abroad; and she would have
+called it fostering vice had she fed the husbandless mother when
+hungry or clothed the drunkard's children when naked. She would never
+be talked about for extremes or eccentricities of any kind; and the
+world would be forced to mention her with respect when it mentioned
+her at all, having indeed no desire to do otherwise. For she was of
+the kind dear to the heart of England--one of those who are called the
+salt of the earth, and who are assumed to keep society safe and
+pure. She was incredulous of science, contemptuous of superstition,
+impatient of new ideas--appreciating art, but holding artists as
+inferior creatures, like actors, acrobats and newspaper writers. She
+was loyal to the queen and royal family, the nobility and Established
+Church, bracketing republicans with atheists, and both with unpunished
+felons; as also classing immorality, the facts of physiology and the
+details of disease in a group together, as things horrible and not to
+be spoken of before ladies. She was not slow to believe evil of her
+neighbors, maintaining, indeed, that to be spoken of at all was proof
+sufficient of undesirable conduct; but she would never investigate a
+charge, preferring rather to accept it in its vile integrity than to
+soil her hands by attempting to unweave its dirty threads; hence she
+would be pitiless, repellent, but she would never make herself the
+focus of gossip. She was a human being if you will, a Christian in
+creed and name assuredly; but beyond and above all things she was
+a well-mannered, well-conducted English lady, a person of spotless
+morals and exquisite propriety, in the presence of whom humanity must
+not be human, truth truthful, nor Nature natural.
+
+This was the wife for Edgar Harrowby as a country gentleman--the
+woman whom Mrs. Harrowby would have chosen out of thousands to be her
+daughter-in-law, whom his sisters would like, who would do credit to
+his name and position; and whom he himself would find as good for his
+purpose as any within the four seas.
+
+For when Edgar married he would marry on social and rational grounds:
+he would not commit the mistake of fancying that he need love the
+woman as he had loved some others. He would marry her, whoever
+she might be, because she would be of a good family and reasonable
+character, fairly handsome, unexceptionable in conduct, not tainted
+with hereditary disease nor disgraced by ragged relatives, having
+nothing to do with vice or poverty in the remotest link of her
+connections--a woman fit to be the keeper of his house, the bearer
+of his name, the mother of his children. But for love, passion,
+enthusiasm, sentiment--Edgar thought all such emotional impedimenta
+as these not only superfluous, but oftentimes disastrous in the grave
+campaign of matrimony.
+
+It was for this marriage that Adelaide had saved herself. She believed
+that any woman can marry any man if she only wills to do so; and from
+the day when she was seventeen, and they had had a picnic at Dunaston,
+she had made up her mind to marry Edgar Harrowby. When he came home
+for good, unmarried and unengaged, she knew that she should succeed;
+and Edgar knew it too. He knew it so well after he had been at home
+about a week that if anything could have turned him against the wife
+carved out for him by circumstance and fitness, it would have been the
+almost fatal character of that fitness, as if Fortune had not left him
+a choice in the matter.
+
+"And what do you think of Adelaide?" asked Mrs. Harrowby one day when
+her son said that he had been to the rectory. "You have seen her twice
+now: what is your impression of her?'"
+
+"She is prettier than ever--improved, I should say, all through," was
+his answer.
+
+Mrs. Harrowby smiled. "She is a girl I like," she said. "She is so
+sensible and has such nice feeling about things."
+
+"Yes," answered Edgar, "she is thoroughly well-bred."
+
+"We have seen a great deal of her of late years," Mrs. Harrowby
+continued, angling dexterously. "She and the girls are fast friends,
+especially she and Josephine, though there is certainly some slight
+difference of age between them. But Adelaide prefers their society
+to that of any one about the neighborhood. And I think that of itself
+shows such good taste and nice feeling."
+
+"So it does," said Edgar with dutiful assent, not exactly seeing for
+himself what constituted Adelaide's good taste and nice feeling in
+this preference for his dull and doleful sisters over the brighter
+companionship of the Fairbairns, say, or any other of the local
+nymphs. To him those elderly maiden sisters of his were rather bores
+than otherwise, but he was not displeased that Adelaide Birkett
+thought differently. If it "ever came to anything," it would be better
+that they satisfied her than that she should find them uncongenial.
+
+"She is coming up to dinner this evening," Mrs. Harrowby went on to
+say; and Edgar smiled, pulled his moustaches and looked half puzzled
+if wholly pleased.
+
+"She is a pretty girl," he said with the imbecility of a man who ought
+to speak and who has nothing to say, also who has something that he
+does not wish to say.
+
+"She is better than pretty--she is good," returned Mrs. Harrowby;
+and Edgar, not caring to discuss Adelaide on closer ground with his
+mother, strolled away into his private room, where he sat before the
+fire smoking, meditating on his life in the past and his prospects
+in the future, and wondering how he would like it when he had finally
+abjured the freedom of bachelorhood and had taken up with matrimony
+and squiredom for the remainder of his natural life.
+
+Punctually at seven Adelaide Birkett appeared. This, too, was one
+of her minor virtues: she was exact. Mind, person, habits, all were
+regulated with the nicest method, and she knew as little of hurry as
+of delay, and as little of both as of passion.
+
+"You are such a dear, good punctual girl!" said Josephine
+affectionately--Josephine, whose virtues had a few more, loose ends
+and knots untied than had her friend's.
+
+"It is so vulgar to be unpunctual," said Adelaide with her calm
+good-breeding. "It seems to me only another form of uncleanliness and
+disorder."
+
+"And Edgar is so punctual too!" cried Josephine by way of commentary.
+
+Adelaide smiled, not broadly, not hilariously, only to the exact shade
+demanded by conversational sympathy. "Then we shall agree in this,"
+she said quietly.
+
+"Oh I am sure you will agree, and in more than this," Josephine
+returned, almost with enthusiasm.
+
+Had she not been the willing nurse of this affair from the
+beginning?--if not the open confidante, yet secretly holding the key
+to her younger friend's mind and actions? and was she not, like all
+the kindly disappointed, intensely sympathetic with love-matters,
+whether wise or foolish, hopeful or hopeless?
+
+"Who is it that you are sure will agree with Miss Adelaide, if any one
+indeed could be found to disagree with her?" asked Edgar, standing in
+the doorway.
+
+Josephine laughed with the silliness of a weak woman "caught." She
+looked at Adelaide slyly. Adelaide turned her quiet face, unflushed,
+unruffled, and neither laughed sillily nor looked slyly.
+
+"She was praising me for punctuality; and then she said that you were
+punctual too," she explained cheerfully.
+
+"We learn that in the army," said Edgar.
+
+"But I have had to learn it without the army," she answered.
+
+"Which shows that you have by the grace of nature what I have attained
+only by discipline and art," said Edgar gallantly.
+
+Adelaide smiled. She did not disdain the compliment. On the contrary,
+she wished to impress it on Edgar that she accepted his praises
+because they were her due. She knew that the world takes us if not
+quite at our own valuation, yet as being the character we assume to
+be. It all depends on our choice of a mask and to what ideal self we
+dress. If we are clever and dress in keeping, without showing chinks
+or discrepancies, no one will find out that it is only a mask; and
+those of us are most successful in gaining the good-will of our
+fellows who understand this principle the most clearly and act on it
+the most consistently.
+
+The evening was a pleasant one for Adelaide, being an earnest of the
+future for which, if she had not worked hard, she had controlled much.
+Edgar sang solos to her accompaniment, and put in his rich baritone to
+her pure if feeble soprano; he played chess with her for an hour, and
+praised her play, as it deserved: naturally, not thinking it necessary
+to make love to his sisters, he paid her almost exclusive attention,
+and looked the admiration he felt. She really was a very pretty young
+woman, and she had unexceptionable manners; and having cut himself
+adrift from his ties and handsomely released himself from his
+obligations, he was not disposed to take much trouble in looking far
+afield for a wife when here was one ready-made to his hand. Still,
+he was not so rash as to commit himself too soon. Fine play is never
+precipitate; and even the most lordly lover, if an English gentleman,
+thinks it seemly to pretend to woo the woman whom he means to take,
+and who he knows will yield.
+
+And on her side Adelaide was too well-bred for the one part, and too
+wise for the other, to clutch prematurely at the prize she had willed
+should be hers. Her actions must be like her gestures, graceful,
+rhythmic, rather slow than hurried, and bearing the stamp of purpose
+and deliberation. When Edgar should make his offer, as she knew he
+would, she would ask for time to reflect and make up her mind. This
+would be doing the thing properly and with due regard to her own
+dignity; for no husband of hers should ever have cause to think that
+she held her marriage with him as a thing so undeniably advantageous
+there was no doubt of her acceptance from the first. Every woman must
+make herself difficult, thought Adelaide, if she wishes to be prized,
+even the woman who for seven years has fixed her eyes steadily on one
+point, and has determined that she will finally capture a certain man
+and land him as her lifelong possession.
+
+Thus the evening passed, with a subtle undercurrent of concealed
+resolves flowing beneath its surface admiration that gave it a
+peculiar charm to the two people principally concerned--the one
+feeling that she had advanced her game by an important move; the
+other, that the eternal fitness of things 'was making itself more
+and-more evident, and that it was manifest to all his senses
+whom Providence had destined for his wife, and for what ultimate
+matrimonial end he had been shaped and spared.
+
+A book of photographs was on the table.
+
+"Are you here?" asked Edgar, lowering his bright blue eyes on
+Adelaide as she sat on a small chair at Mrs. Harrowby's feet, carrying
+daughterly incense to that withered shrine.
+
+"Yes, I think so," she answered.
+
+He turned the pages carefully--passing over his sisters in wide
+crinolines and spoon bonnets; his mother, photographed from an old
+picture, in a low dress and long dropping bands of hair, like a
+mouflon's ears, about her face; Fred and himself, both as boys in
+Scotch suits, set stiffly against the table like dolls--with gradual
+improvement in art and style, till he came to a page where Adelaide's
+fair vignetted head of large size was placed side by side with
+another, also vignetted and also large.
+
+"Ah! there you are; and what a capital likeness!" cried Edgar, with
+the joyous look and accent of one meeting an old friend, giving that
+gauge of interest which we all unconsciously give when we first see
+the photograph of a well-known face. He looked at the portrait long
+and critically. "Only not so pretty," he added gallantly. "Those
+fellows cannot catch the spirit: they give only the outside forms, and
+not always these correctly. Here is a striking face," he continued,
+pointing to Adelaide's companion-picture--a girl with masses of dark
+hair, dark eyes, large, mournful, heavily fringed with long lashes,
+and a grave, sad face, that seemed listening rather than looking. "Who
+is she? She looks foreign."
+
+Adelaide glanced at the page, as if she did not know it by heart.
+"That? Oh! that is only Leam Dundas," she said with the faintest,
+finest flavor of scorn in her voice.
+
+"Leam Dundas?" repeated Edgar--"the daughter of that awful woman?"
+
+"Yes, and nearly as odd as the mother," answered Adelaide, still in
+the same cold manner and with the same accent of superior scorn.
+
+"At least she used to be, you mean, dear, but she is more like other
+people now," said kindly Josephine, more just than politic.
+
+Adelaide looked at her calmly, indifferently. "Yes, I suppose she is
+rather less savage than of old," was her reply, "but I do not see much
+of her,"
+
+"I do not remember to have ever seen her: she must have been a mere
+child when I was here last," said Edgar.
+
+"She is nineteen now, I think," said Mrs. Harrowby.
+
+"Not more?" repeated Adelaide. "I imagined she was one-and-twenty at
+the least. She looks so very much older than even this--five or six
+and twenty, full; dark people age so quickly."
+
+"She seems to be superbly handsome," Edgar said, still looking at the
+portrait.
+
+"For those who like that swarthy kind of beauty. For myself, I do not:
+it always reminds me of negroes and Lascars."
+
+Adelaide leaned forward, and made pretence to examine Leam's portrait
+with critical independence of judgment. She spoke as if this was the
+first time she had seen it, and her words the thought of the moment
+resulting.
+
+"There is no negroid taint here," Edgar answered gravely. "It is the
+face of a sibyl, of a tragedian."
+
+"Do you think so? It is fine in outline certainly, but too monotonous
+to please me, and too lugubrious; and the funny part of it is,
+there is nothing in her. She looks like a sibyl, but she is the most
+profoundly stupid person you can imagine."
+
+"Not now, Addy: she has wakened up a good deal," again interposed
+Josephine with her love of justice and want of tact.
+
+"But do you not see the mother in her, Josephine? I do, painfully; and
+the mother was such a horror! Leam is just like her. She will grow her
+exact counterpart"
+
+"A bad model enough," said Edgar; "but this face is not bad. It has
+more in it than poor old Pepita's. How fat she was!"
+
+"So will Leam be when she is as old," said Adelaide quietly. "And do
+you think these dark people ever look clean? I don't,"
+
+"That is a drawback certainly," laughed Edgar, running through the
+remainder of the book.
+
+But he turned back again to the page which held Leam and Adelaide side
+by side, and he spoke of the latter while he looked at the former. The
+face of Leam Dundas, mournful, passionate, concentrated as it was,
+had struck his imagination--struck it as none other had done since the
+time when he had met that grand and graceful woman wandering, lost in
+a fog, in St. James's Park, and had protected from possible annoyance
+till he had landed her in St. John's Wood. He was glad that Leam
+Dundas lived in North Aston, and that he should see her without
+trouble or overt action; and as he handed Adelaide into her carriage
+he noticed for the first time that her blue eyes were not quite even,
+that her flaxen hair had not quite enough color, and that her face, if
+pure and fair, was slightly insipid.
+
+"Poor, dear Adelaide!" he said when he returned to the drawing-room,
+"how nice she is! but how tart she was about this Leam Dundas of
+yours! Looks like jealousy; and very likely is. All you women are so
+horribly jealous."
+
+"Not all of us," said Maria hastily.
+
+"And I do not think that Adelaide is," said Josephine. "She has no
+cause; for though Leam is certainly very lovely, and seems to have
+improved immensely for being at school, still she and Addy do not come
+into collision any way, and I do not see why she should be jealous."
+
+"Perhaps Edgar admired her photograph too much," said Fanny, who
+was the stupid one of the three, but on occasions made the shrewdest
+remarks.
+
+Edgar laughed, not displeasedly. "That would be paying me too high a
+compliment," he said.
+
+Whereat his three sisters echoed "Compliment!" in various tones of
+deprecation, and Josephine added a meaning little laugh for her own
+share, for which Edgar gave her a kiss, and said in a bantering kind
+of voice, "Now, Joseph! mind what you are about!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+ON THE MOOR.
+
+
+It was a gray and gusty day in November, with heavy masses of
+low-lying clouds rolling tumultuously overhead, and a general look
+of damp and decay about the fields and banks--one of those melancholy
+days of the late autumn which make one long for the more varied
+circumstances of confessed winter, when the deep blue shadows in the
+crisp snow suggest the glory of southern skies, and the sparkle of the
+sun on the delicate tracery of the frosted branches has a mimicry of
+life, such as we imagine strange elves and fairies might create.
+
+There was no point of color in the landscape save the brown foliage of
+the shivering beech trees, a few coarse splashes of yellow weeds, and
+here and there a trail of dying crimson leaves threading the barren
+hedgerows. Everything was "sombre, lifeless, mournful", and even Edgar
+Harrowby, though by no means sentimentally impressionable to outward
+conditions, felt, as he rode through the deserted lanes and looked
+abroad over the stagnant country, that life on the off-hunt days was
+but a slow-kind of thing at North Aston, and that any incident which
+should break the dead monotony of the scene would be welcome.
+
+He had been thinking a great deal of Adelaide for the last four or
+five days, since she had dined at the Hill, and making up his mind to
+take the final plunge before long. He was not in love with her, but
+she suited, as has been said; and that was as good as love to
+Edgar, who had now to take up his squiredom and country gentleman's
+respectability, after having had his share of a young man's "fling" in
+rather larger proportion than falls to the lot of most. All the same,
+he wished that her face had more expression and that her eyes were
+perfectly straight; and he wanted to see Leam Dundas.
+
+He had made a long round to-day, and was turning now homeward, when,
+as he had almost crossed the moor, athwart which his road led, he saw
+standing on a little hillock, away from the main track, the slight
+figure of a woman sharply defined against the sky. She was alone,
+doing nothing, not seeming to be looking at anything--just standing
+there on the hillock, facing the north-west, as if for pleasure in the
+rough freshness of the breeze.
+
+The wind blew back her dress, and showed her girlish form, supple,
+flexible, graceful, fashioned like some nymph of olden time. From her
+small feet, arched and narrow, gripping the ground like feet of steel,
+to the slender throat on which her head was set with so much grace
+of line, yet with no sense of over-weighting in its tender curves, an
+expression of nervous energy underlying her fragile litheness of form,
+a look of strength--not muscular nor the strength of bulk or weight,
+but the strength of fibre, will, tenacity--seemed to mark her out as
+something different from the herd.
+
+Edgar scarcely gave this vague impression words in his own mind, but
+he was conscious of a new revelation of womanhood, and he scented an
+adventure in this solitary figure facing the north-west wind on the
+lonely moor.
+
+Her very dress, too, had a character of its own in harmony with the
+rest--black all through, save for the scarlet feather in her hat,
+which burnt like a flame against the gray background of the sky;
+and her whole attitude had something of defiance in its profound
+stillness, while standing so boldly against the strong blasts that
+swept across the heights, which caught his imagination, at that
+moment ready to be inflamed. All things depend on times and moods, and
+Edgar's mood at this moment of first seeing Leam Dundas was favorable
+for the reception of new impressions.
+
+For, of course, it was Leam--Leam, who, since her return from school,
+alone and without companionship, was feverish often, and often
+impelled to escape into the open country from something that oppressed
+her down in the valley too painfully to be borne. She had never been
+a confidential nor an expansive schoolfellow; not even an affectionate
+one as girls count affection, seeing that she neither kissed nor
+cried, nor quarreled nor made up--neither stood as a model of
+fidelity nor changed her girl-lovers in anticipation of future
+inconstancies--writing a love-letter to Ada to-day and a copy of
+verses to Ethel to-morrow--but had kept with all the same quiet
+gravity and gentle reticence which seemed to watch rather than share,
+and to be more careful not to offend than solicitous to win.
+
+All the same, she missed her former comrades now that she had lost
+them; but most of all she missed the wholesome occupation and mental
+employment of her studies. Left as she was to herself, thoughts and
+memories were gathering up from the background where they had lain
+dormant if extant all these years, and through her solitude were
+getting a vitality which made her stand still in a kind of breathless
+agony, wondering where they would lead her and in what they would end.
+At times such a burning sense of sin would flash over her that she
+felt as if she must confess that hideous fact of her girlish past. It
+seemed so shameful that she should be living there among the rest, a
+criminal with the innocent, and not tell them what she was. Then the
+instinct of self-preservation would carry it over her conscience, and
+she would press back her thoughts and go out, as to-day, to cool her
+feverish blood, and grow calm to bear and strong to hold the heavy
+burden which she had fashioned by her own mad deed and laid for life
+on her own hands.
+
+If only the ladies had not insisted so strongly on mamma's personality
+in heaven! if only they had not lighted up her imagination, her
+loyalty, by this tremendous torch of faith and love! How bitterly she
+regretted the childish fanaticism which had made her imagine herself
+the providence of that beloved memory, the avenger of those shadowy
+wrongs! Oh, if she could undo the past and call madame back to life!
+She would kiss her now, and even call her mamma if it would please her
+and papa. So she stood on the hillock facing the north-west, thinking
+these things and regretting in vain.
+
+As Edgar came riding by his large black hound dashed off to Leam and
+barked furiously, all four paws planted on the ground as if preparing
+for a spring. The beast had probably no malice, and might have meant
+it merely as his method of saying, "Who are you?" but he looked
+formidable, and Leam started back and cried, "Down, dog! go away!" in
+a voice half angry and half afraid.
+
+Then Edgar saw the face, and knew who she was. He rode across the
+turf, calling off his dog, and came up to her. It was an opportunity,
+and Edgar Harrowby was a man who knew how to take advantage of
+opportunities. It was in his creed to thank Providence for favorable
+chances by making the most of them, and this was a chance of which it
+would be manifestly ungrateful not to make the most. It was far more
+picturesque to meet her for the first time, as now, on the wild moor
+on a gusty gray November day, than in the gloomy old drawing-room at
+the Hill. It gave a flavor of romance and the forbidden which was not
+without its value in the beginning of an acquaintance with such a face
+as Leam's. Nevertheless, in spite of the romance that hung about the
+circumstance, his first words were common-place enough. "I hope my dog
+has not alarmed you?" he said, lifting his hat.
+
+Leam looked at him with those wonderful eyes of hers, that seemed
+somehow to look through him. She, standing on her hillock, was
+slightly higher than Edgar sitting on his horse; and her head was bent
+as she looked down on him, giving her attitude and gesture something
+of a dignified assumption of superiority, more like the Leam of the
+past than of the present. "No, I was not alarmed," she said. "But I
+do not like to be barked at," she added, an echo of the old childish
+sense of injury from circumstance that was so quaint and pretty in her
+half-complaining voice.
+
+"I suppose not: how should you?" answered Edgar with sympathetic
+energy. "Rover is a good-old fellow, but he has the troublesome trick
+of giving tongue unnecessarily. He would not have hurt you, but I
+should be very sorry to think he had frightened you. To heel, sir!"
+angrily.
+
+"No, he did not frighten me." repeated Leam.
+
+Never loquacious, there was something about this man's face and
+manner, his masterful spirit underneath his courteous bearing, his
+look of masculine power and domination, his admiring eyes that fixed
+themselves on her so unflinchingly--not with insolence, but as if he
+had the prescriptive right of manhood to look at her, only a woman, as
+he chose, he commanding and she obeying--that quelled and silenced
+her even beyond her wont. He was the first gentleman of noteworthy
+appearance who had ever spoken to her--not counting Alick, nor
+the masters who had taught her at school, nor Mr. Birkett, nor Mr.
+Fairbairn, as gentlemen of noteworthy appearance--and the first of all
+things has a special influence over young minds.
+
+"You are brave to walk so far alone: you ought to have a dog like
+Rover to protect you," Edgar said, still looking at her with those
+unflinching eyes, which oppressed her even when she did not see them.
+
+"I am not brave, and I do not care for dogs. Besides, I do not often
+walk so far as this; but I felt the valley stifling to-day," answered
+Leam, in her matter-of-fact, categorical way.
+
+"All the same, you ought to have protection," Edgar said
+authoritatively, and Leam did not reply.
+
+She only looked at him earnestly, wondering against what she should
+be protected, having abandoned by this time her belief in banditti and
+wild beasts.
+
+If his eyes oppressed her, hers half embarrassed him. There was such
+a strange mixture of intensity and innocence in them, he scarcely knew
+how to meet them.
+
+"It is absurd to pretend that we do not know each other," then said
+Edgar after a short pause, smiling; and his smile was very sweet and
+pleasant. "You are Miss Dundas--I am Edgar Harrowby."
+
+"Yes, I know," Leam answered.
+
+"How is that?" he asked, "_I_ knew _you_ from your photograph--once
+seen not to be forgotten again," gallantly--"but how should you know
+me?"
+
+Leam raised her eyes from the ground where she had cast them. Those
+slow full looks, intense, tragic, fixed, had a startling effect of
+which she was wholly unconscious. Edgar felt his own grow dark and
+tender as he met hers. If the soul and mind within only answered to
+the mask without, what queen or goddess could surpass this half-breed
+Spanish girl, this country-born, unnoted, but glorious Leam Dundas? he
+thought.
+
+"And I knew you from yours," she answered.
+
+"An honor beyond my deserts," said Edgar.
+
+Not that he thought the notice of a girl, even with such a face
+as this, beyond his deserts. Indeed, if a queen or a goddess had
+condescended to him, it would not have been a grace beyond his merits;
+but it sounded pretty to say so, and served to make talk as well as
+anything else. And to make talk was the main business on hand at this
+present moment.
+
+"Why an honor?" asked Leam, ignorant of the elements of flirting.
+
+Edgar smiled again, and this time his smile without words troubled
+her. It seemed the assertion of superior intelligence, contemptuous,
+if half pitiful of her ignorance. Once so serenely convinced of her
+superiority, Leam was now as suspicious of her shortcomings, and was
+soon abashed.
+
+Edgar did not see that he had troubled her. Masterful and masculine
+to an eminent degree, the timid doubts and fears of a young girl were
+things he could not recognize. He had no point in his own nature with
+which they came in contact, so that he should sympathize with them.
+He knew the whole fence and foil of coquetry, the signs of silent
+flattery, the sweet language of womanly self-conscious love, whether
+wooing or being won; but the fluttering misgivings of youth and
+absolute inexperience were dark to him. All of which he felt conscious
+was that here was something deliciously fresh and original, and that
+Leam was more beautiful to look at than Adelaide, and a great deal
+more interesting to talk to.
+
+"If you will allow me, now that I have had the pleasure of meeting
+you, I will see you safe for at least part of your way home," he said,
+passing by her na�ve query "Why an honor?" as a thing to be answered
+only by that smile of superior wisdom.
+
+Flinging himself from his horse, he took the bridle in his hand and
+turned toward home, looking to the girl to accompany him. Leam felt
+that she could not refuse his escort offered as so much a matter of
+course. Why should she? It was very pleasant to have some one to walk
+with--some one not her father, with whom she still felt shy, if not
+now absolutely estranged; nor yet Alick, in whose pale face she was
+always reading the past, and who, though he was so good and kind
+and tender, was her master and held her in his hand. This handsome,
+courteous gentleman was different from either, and she liked his
+society and superior ways. And as he began now to talk to her of
+things not trenching on nor admitting of flirtation--chiefly of the
+places he had visited, India, Egypt, Italy, Spain--she was not so much
+abashed by his unflinching looks and masterful manner.
+
+When he entered on Spain and his recollections of what he had seen
+there, the girl's heart throbbed, and her pale face grew whiter still
+with the passionate thrill that stirred her. The old blood was in her
+veins yet, and, though modified, and in some sense transformed, she
+was still Pepita's daughter and the child of Andalusia. And here was
+truth; not like that poor wretched madame's talk, which even she had
+found out to be false and only making believe to know what she did not
+know. Spain was the name of power with Learn, as it had been with her
+mother, and she lifted her face, white with its passionate desires,
+listening as if entranced to all that Edgar said.
+
+It was a good opening, and the handsome soldier-squire congratulated
+himself on his lucky hit and serviceable memory. Presently he touched
+on Andalusia, and Leam, who hitherto had been listening without
+comment, now broke in eagerly. "That is my own country!" she cried.
+"Mamma came from Andalusia, beautiful Andalusia! Ah! how I should like
+to go there!"
+
+"Perhaps you will some day," Edgar answered a little significantly.
+
+Had she been more instructed in the kind of thing he meant, she would
+have seen that he wished to convey the idea of a love-journey made
+with him.
+
+She shook her head and her eyes grew moist and dewy. "Not now," she
+said mournfully. "Poor mamma has gone, and there is no one now to take
+me."
+
+"I will make up a party some day, and you shall be one of us," said
+Edgar.
+
+She brightened all over. "Ah! that would be delightful!" she cried,
+taking him seriously. "When do you think we shall go?"
+
+"I will talk about it," Edgar answered, though smiling again--Leam
+wished he would not smile so often--a little aghast at her
+literalness, and saying to himself in warning that he must be careful
+of what he said to Leam Dundas. It was evident that she did not
+understand either badinage or a joke. But her very earnestness pleased
+him for all its oddity. It was so unlike the superficiality and
+levity of the modern girl--that hateful Girl of the Period, in whose
+existence he believed, and of whose influence he stood in almost
+superstitious awe. He liked that grave, intense way of hers, which was
+neither puritanical nor stolid, but, on the contrary, full of unspoken
+passion, rich in latent concentrated power.
+
+"They are very beautiful, are they not?" Leam asked suddenly.
+
+"What? who?" was Edgar's answer.
+
+"The Andalusian women, and the men," returned Leam.
+
+"The men are fine-looking fellows enough," answered Edgar
+carelessly--"a little too brutal for my taste, but well-grown men for
+all that. But I have seen prettier women out of Spain than in it."
+
+"Mamma used to say they were so beautiful--the most beautiful of
+all the women in the world; and the best." Leam said this with a
+disappointed air and her old injured accent.
+
+Edgar laughed softly. "The prettiest Andalusian woman I have ever
+seen has an English father," he answered, with a sudden flush on his
+handsome face as he bent it a little nearer to hers.
+
+"How odd!" said Leam. "An English father? That is like me."
+
+Edgar looked at her, to read how much of this was real ingenuousness,
+how much affected simplicity. He saw only a candid inquiring face with
+a faint shade of surprise in its quiet earnestness, unquestionably not
+affected.
+
+"Just so," he answered. "Exactly like you."
+
+His voice and manner made Leam blush uncomfortably. She was conscious
+of something disturbing, without knowing what it was. She first looked
+up into his face with the same expression of inquiry as before, then
+down to the earth perplexedly, when suddenly the truth came upon her;
+he meant herself--she was the prettiest Andalusian he had ever seen.
+
+She was intensely humiliated at her discovery. Not one of those girls
+who study every feature, every gesture, every point, till there is
+not a square inch of their personality of which they are not painfully
+conscious, Leam had never taken herself into artistic consideration
+at all. She had been proud of her Spanish blood, of her mantilla, her
+high comb and her fan; but of herself as a woman among women she knew
+nothing, nor whether she was plain or pretty. Indeed, had she had to
+say offhand which, she would have answered plain. The revelation which
+comes sooner or later to all women of the charms they possess had not
+yet come to her; and Edgar's words, making the first puncture in
+her ignorance, pained her more by the shock which they gave her
+self-consciousness than they pleased her by their flattery.
+
+She said no more, but walked by his side with her head held very high
+and slightly turned away. She was sorry that he had offended her. They
+had been getting on together so well until he had said this foolish
+thing, and now they were like friends who had quarreled. She was quite
+sorry that he had been so foolish as to offend her, but she must not
+forgive him--at least not just yet. It was very wrong of him to tell
+her that she was prettier than the true children of the soil; and she
+resented the slight to Spain and to her mother, as well as the wrong
+done to herself, by his saying that which was not true. So she walked
+with her little head held high, and Edgar could get nothing more out
+of her. When Leam was offended coaxings to make her forget were of no
+avail. She had to wear through an impression by herself, and it was
+useless to try for a premature pardon.
+
+Edgar saw that he had overshot the mark, and that his best policy now
+was absence; wherefore, after a few moments' silence, he remounted his
+horse, looking penitent, handsome, full of admiration and downcast.
+
+"I hope we shall soon see you at the Hill, Miss Dundas," he said,
+holding her hand in his for his farewell a little longer than was
+quite necessary for good breeding or even cordiality.
+
+"I very seldom go to the Hill," answered Leam, looking past his head.
+
+"But you will come, and soon?" fervently.
+
+"Perhaps: I do not know," answered Leam, still looking past his head,
+and embarrassed to a most uncomfortable extent.
+
+"Thank you," he said, as if he had been thanking her for the grace of
+his life; and with a long look, lifting his hat again, he rode off,
+just escaping by a few hundred yards the danger of being met walking
+with Leam by his sisters and Adelaide Birkett. They were all driving
+together in the phaeton, and the sisters were making much of their
+young friend.
+
+At that moment Edgar preferred to be met alone and not walking with
+Leam. He did not stop the carriage--simply nodded to them all with
+familiar kindness, as a group of relatives not demanding extra
+courtesy, flinging a few words behind him as he rode on smiling. Nor
+did the ladies in their turn stop for Leam, whom they met soon after
+walking slowly along the road; but Josephine said, as they passed, how
+pretty Learn looked to-day, and how much softer her face was than it
+used to be; and Maria, even Maria, agreed with kindly Joseph, and
+was quite eulogistic on the object of her old disdain. Adelaide sat
+silent, and did not join in their encomiums.
+
+It would have been a nice point to ascertain if the Misses Harrowby
+would have praised the girl's beauty as they did had they known
+that she had grown soft and dewy-eyed by talking of Spain with their
+brother Edgar, though she had hardened a little afterward when he told
+her that she was the prettiest Andalusian he had ever seen.
+
+During the dinner at the Hill, where Adelaide was one of the family
+party, Edgar mentioned casually how that he had met Miss Dundas on the
+moor, and had had to speak to her because of Rover's misbehavior.
+
+"Yes? and what do you think of her?" asked Mrs. Harrowby with a sharp
+glance.
+
+"I scarcely know: I have hardly seen her as yet," he answered.
+
+"Did she say or do anything very extraordinary to-day?" asked
+Adelaide with such an air of contemptuous curiosity as seemed to him
+insufferably insolent.
+
+"No, nothing. Is she in the habit of saying or doing extraordinary
+things?" he answered back, arching his eyebrows and speaking in a
+well-affected tone of sincere inquiry.
+
+"At times she is more like a maniac than a sane person," said
+Adelaide, breaking her bread with deliberation. "What can you expect
+from such a parentage and education as hers?"
+
+Edgar looked down and smiled satirically. "Poor Pepita's sins lie
+heavy on your mind," he answered.
+
+"Yes, I believe in race," was her reply.
+
+"Mother," then said Edgar after a short silence, "why do you not have
+Miss Dundas to dine here with Adelaide? It would be more amusing
+to her, for it must be dull"--turning to their guest and speaking
+amiably, considerately--"I am afraid very dull--to be so often quite
+alone with us."
+
+He did not add what he thought, that it was almost indelicate in her
+to be here so often. He was out of humor with her to-day.
+
+"She is such an uncertain girl we never know how she may be. I had her
+to stay here once, and I do not want to repeat the experiment," was
+Mrs. Harrowby's answer.
+
+"But, mamma, that was before she went to school, when she was quite a
+child. She is so much improved now," pleaded Josephine.
+
+"Good little soul!" said Edgar under his breath.--"Wine, Joseph?"
+aloud, as his recognition of her good offices.
+
+"And I like coming alone best, thanks," said Adelaide with unruffled
+calmness. "Leam has never been my friend; indeed, I do not like her,
+and you all," to the sisters, with a gracious smile and prettily,
+"have always been my favorite companions."
+
+"Still, she is very lonely, and it would be kind. Besides, she is good
+to look at," said Edgar.
+
+"Do you think so?" said Mrs. Harrowby with crisp lips and
+ill-concealed displeasure.
+
+"Do I think so, mother? I should have no eyes else. She is superb. I
+have never seen such a face. She is the most beautiful creature I have
+ever known of any nation."
+
+Adelaide's delicate pink cheeks turned pale, and then they flushed a
+brilliant rose as she laid down her spoon and left her jelly untasted.
+
+There were no trials of skill at chess, no duets, no solos, this
+evening. After dinner Edgar went to his own room and sat there
+smoking. He felt revolted at the idea of spending two or three hours
+with what he irreverently called "a lot of dull women," and preferred
+his own thoughts to their talk. He sauntered into the drawing-room
+about ten minutes before Adelaide had to leave, apologizing for his
+absence on the man's easy plea of "business," saying he was sorry to
+have missed her charming society, and he hoped they should see her
+there soon again, and so on--all in the proper voice and manner,
+but with a certain ring of insincerity in the tones which Adelaide
+detected, if the others did not. But she accepted his excuses with the
+most admirable tact, smiling to the sisters as she said, "Oh, we
+have been very happy, Josephine, have we not? though," with a nice
+admission of Edgar's claims, not too broadly stated nor too warmly
+allowed, "of course it would have been very pleasant if you could have
+come in too."
+
+"It has been my loss," said Edgar.
+
+She smiled "Yes" by eyes, lips and turn of her graceful head. In
+speech she answered, "Of that, of course, you are the best judge for
+yourself; but none of us here feel as some girls do, lost without
+gentlemen to amuse them. We can get on very well by ourselves. Cannot
+we, Joseph?"
+
+And Josephine said gallantly, "Yes," but her heart was more rueful
+than her voice, and she thought that some gentlemen were very
+nice, and that Sebastian Dundas especially made the dull time pass
+pleasantly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+THE CHILD FINA.
+
+
+Nothing surprised the North Astonians more than what it was the
+fashion to call "the admirable manner in which Leam behaved to
+the child Fina." If the world which praised her had known all the
+compelling circumstances, would it have called her admirable then? Yet
+beyond those natural promptings of remorse which forced her to do
+the best she could for the child whom her fatal crime had rendered
+motherless, Leam did honestly behave well, if this means doing irksome
+things without complaint and sacrificing self to a sense of right. And
+this was all the more praiseworthy in that sympathy of nature between
+these two young creatures there was none, and the girl's maternal
+instinct was not of that universal kind which makes all children
+pleasant, whatever they may be. Hence, she did nobly when she did her
+duty with the uncompromising exactness characteristic of her; but then
+it was only duty, it was not love.
+
+How should it be love? Her tenacity and reserve were ill matched with
+Fina's native inconstancy of purpose and childish incontinence of
+speech; her pride of race resented her father's adoption of a stranger
+into the penetralia of the family; and to share the name she had
+inherited from her mother with the daughter of that mother's rival
+seemed to her a wrong done to both the living and the dead. Naturally
+taciturn, unjoyful, and ever oppressed by that brooding consciousness
+of guilt hanging like a cloud over her memory, formless, vague, but
+never lifting, Fina's changeful temper and tumultuous vivacity were
+intensely wearisome to her. Nevertheless, she was forbearing if not
+loving, and the people said rightly when they said she was admirable.
+
+Her grave patience with the little one did more to open her father's
+heart to her than did even her own wonderful beauty, which gratified
+his paternal pride of authorship, or than her efforts after docility
+to himself--efforts that would have been creditable to any one, and
+that with her were heroic. For Mr. Dundas, being of those clinging,
+clasping natures which must love some one, had taken poor madame's
+child into his affections in the wholesale manner so emphatically his
+own, now in these first days of his new paternity seeming to live only
+for the little Fina, and never happy but when he had her with him. It
+was the first time that he felt he had had a child of his own; and he
+gave her the love which would have been Leam's had Pepita been less
+of a savage than she was, and more discreet in the matter of
+doll-dressing.
+
+The little round, fair-haired creature, with her picturesque
+Gainsborough head and rose-red lips, pretty, pleasant, facile, easily
+amused if easily made cross, divertible from her purpose if she was
+but coaxed and caressed, and if the substitute offered was to her
+liking--without tenacity, fluid, floating on the surface of things and
+born of their froth; loving only those who ministered to her pleasure
+and were in sight; forgetting yesterday's joys as though they had
+never been, and her dearest the moment they were absent--a child
+deliciously caressing because sensual by temperament and instinctively
+diplomatic, with no latent greatness to be developed as time went on
+and the flower set into the fruit. Epitomizing the characteristics of
+the class of which her mother had been a typical example, she was the
+pleasantest thing of his life to a man who cared mainly to be amused,
+and who liked with a woman's liking to be loved.
+
+The strong love of children inherent in him, which had never been
+satisfied till now, seemed now to have gathered tenfold strength, and
+the love of the man, who had never cared for his own, for this his
+little daughter by adoption was almost a passion. If Leam could have
+been jealous where she did not love, she would have been jealous of
+her father and Fina. But she was not. On the contrary, it seemed to
+soften some of the bitterness of her self-reproach, and she was glad
+that madame's motherless child was not deserted, but had found a
+substitute for the protection which she had taken from her; for Leam,
+criminal, was not ignoble.
+
+A few days after the meeting on the moor between Learn and Edgar, Mr.
+Dundas drove to the Hill, carrying Fina with him. Leam had a fit of
+shyness and refused to go: thus Sebastian had the child to himself,
+and was not sorry to be without his elder and less congenial daughter.
+He owned to himself that she was good, very good indeed, and a great
+deal better than he ever expected she would be; yet for all that, with
+her more than Oriental gravity and reserve, and that look of tragedy
+haunting her face, she was not an amusing companion, and the little
+one was.
+
+Mr. Dundas had begun to take up his old habits again with the
+Harrowbys. He found the patient constancy of his friend Josephine not
+a disagreeable salve for a wounded heart and broken life; albeit poor
+dear Joseph was getting stout and matronly, and took off the keen edge
+of courtship by a willingness too manifest for wisdom. Sebastian liked
+to be loved, but he did not like to be bored by being made overmuch
+love to. The things are different, and most men resent the latter, how
+much soever they desire the former.
+
+Edgar was in the drawing-room when Mr. Dundas was announced. He was
+booted and spurred, waiting his horse to be brought round. "What a
+pretty little girl!" he said after a time. True to his type, he was
+fond of children and animals, and children and animals liked him.
+"Come and speak to me," he continued, holding out his hand to
+Fina.--"Whose child is she?" vaguely to the company in general.
+
+"Mine," said Mr. Dundas emphatically--"my youngest daughter, Fina
+Dundas."
+
+Edgar knew what he meant. He had often heard the story from his
+sisters, and since his return home he had had Adelaide Birkett's
+comments thereon. He looked then with even more interest on the
+pretty little creature in dark-blue velvet and swansdown, careless,
+unconscious, happy, as the child of a mystery and a tragedy in one.
+
+"Ah!" he said sympathetically. "Come to me, little one," again,
+coaxingly.
+
+Fina, with her finger in her mouth, went up to him half shyly, half
+boldly, and wholly prettily. She let him take her on his knee and kiss
+her without remonstrance. She was of the kind to like being taken on
+knees and kissed--especially by gentlemen who were strong and matronly
+women who were soft--and she soon made friends. Not many minutes
+elapsed before, kneeling upon his knees, she was stroking his tawny
+beard and plaiting it in threes, pulling his long moustache, playing
+with his watch-guard, and laughing in his face with the pretty
+audacity of six.
+
+"What a dear little puss!" cried Edgar, caressing her. "Very like
+you, Joseph, I should think, when you were her age, judging by your
+picture. Is she not, mother?"
+
+"They say so, but I do not see it," answered Mrs. Harrowby primly.
+
+She did not like to hear about this resemblance. There was something
+in it that annoyed her intensely, she scarcely knew why, and the more
+so because it was true.
+
+"Poor madame used to say so: she saw it from the first, when Fina was
+quite a little baby," said Josephine in a low voice.
+
+She was kneeling by her brother's side caressing Fina. She always made
+love to the little girl: it was one of her methods of making love to
+the father.
+
+"Is she like her mother?" asked Edgar in the same low tones, looking
+at the child critically.
+
+"A little," answered Josephine--"not much. It is odd, is it not, that
+she should be more like me?"
+
+Just then Fina laid her fresh sweet lips against Edgar's, and he
+kissed her with a strange thrill of tenderness.
+
+"Why, Edgar, I never saw you take so to a child before," cried Mrs.
+Harrowby, not quite pleasantly; and on Sebastian adding with his
+nervous little laugh, which meant the thing it assumed only to play
+at, "I declare I shall be quite jealous, Edgar, if you make love to
+my little girl like this." Edgar, who had the Englishman's dislike
+to observation, save when he offered himself for personal admiration,
+laughed too and put Fina away.
+
+But the child had taken a fancy to him, and could scarcely be induced
+to leave him. She clung to his hand still, and went reluctantly when
+her stepfather called her. It was a very little matter, but men being
+weak in certain directions, it delighted Edgar and annoyed Sebastian
+beyond measure.
+
+"I hope your elder daughter is well," then said Edgar, emphasizing the
+adjective, the vision of Leam as he first saw her, breasting the wind,
+filling his eyes with a strange light.
+
+"Leam? Quite well, thanks. But how do you know anything about her?"
+was Sebastian's reply.
+
+"I met her yesterday on the moor, and Rover introduced us," answered
+Edgar laughing.
+
+"How close she is!" said her father fretfully. "She never told me a
+word about it."
+
+"Perhaps she thought the incident too trifling," suggested Edgar, a
+little chagrined.
+
+"Oh no, not at all! In a place like North Aston the least thing counts
+as an adventure; and meeting for the first time one of the neighbors
+is not an incident to be forgotten as if it were of no more value than
+meeting a flock of sheep."
+
+Mr. Dundas spoke peevishly. To a man who liked to be amused and who
+lived on crumbs this reserved companionship was disappointing and
+tiresome.
+
+"Leam is at home making music," said Fina disdainfully. She had caught
+the displeased accent of her adopted father, and echoed it.
+
+"Does she make much music?" asked Edgar with his hand under her chin,
+turning up her face.
+
+The child shrugged her little shoulders. "She makes a noise," she
+said; and those who heard her laughed.
+
+"That is not a very polite way of putting it," said Edgar a little
+gravely.
+
+"No," said Josephine.
+
+"You should speak nicely of your sister, my little one," put in
+Sebastian.
+
+Fina looked up into his face reproachfully. "You called it a noise
+yourself, papa," she said, pouting. "You made her leave off yesterday
+as soon as you came in, because you said she made your head ache with
+her noise, and set your teeth--something, I don't know what."
+
+"Did I, dear?" he repeated carelessly. "Well, we need not discuss the
+subject. I dare say it amuses her to make music, as you call it, and
+so we need say no more about it."
+
+"But you did say it was a noise," persisted Fina, climbing on to his
+knees and putting her arms round his neck. "And I think it a noise
+too."
+
+"Poor Leam's music cannot be very first-rate," remarked Maria, who
+was a proficient and played almost as well as a "professional." "Four
+years ago she did not know her notes, and four years' practice cannot
+be expected to make a perfect pianiste."
+
+"But a person may play very sweetly and yet not be what you call
+perfect," said Edgar.
+
+"Do you think so?" Maria answered with a frosty smile. "I do not." Of
+what use to have toiled for thirty years early and late at scales
+and thorough-bass if a stupid girl like Leam could be allowed to play
+sweetly after four years' desultory practice? "Adelaide Birkett, if
+you will, plays well," she added; "but Leam, poor child! how should
+she?"
+
+"I hope I shall have an opportunity of judging for myself," said
+Edgar with his company manner.--"When will you come and dine here,
+Dundas?--to-morrow? You and your elder daughter: we shall be very glad
+to see you."
+
+He looked to his mother. Mrs. Harrowby had drawn her lips tight, and
+wore an injured air doing its best to be resigned. This was
+Edgar's first essay in domestic mastership, and it pained her, not
+unnaturally.
+
+"Thanks," said Sebastian. "Willingly, if--" looking to Mrs. Harrowby.
+
+"I have no engagement, and Edgar is master now," said that lady.
+
+"And mind that Leam comes too," said Josephine, sharing her favorite
+brother's action by design.
+
+"And me," cried Fina.
+
+Whereat they all laughed, which made Fina cry, to be consoled only by
+some sweetmeats which Josephine found in her work-basket.
+
+It was agreed, then, that the next day Leam and her father should dine
+at the Hill.
+
+"Only ourselves," Edgar said, wanting the excuse of her "being the
+only lady" to devote himself to Leam. It was strange that he should
+be so anxious to see her nearer, and in company with his sisters and
+mother; for after all, why should he? What was she to him, either near
+or afar off, alone or in the inner circle of his family?
+
+But when the next day came Mr. Dundas appeared alone. Leam had been
+taken with a fit of shyness, pride--who shall say?--and refused to
+accept her share of the invitation. Her father made the stereotyped
+excuse of "headache;" but headaches occur too opportunely to be
+always real, and Leam's to-night was set down to the fancy side of
+the account, and not believed in by the hearers any more than by the
+bearer.
+
+Edgar raged against her in his heart, and decided that she was not
+worth a second thought, while the ladies said in an undertone from
+each to each, "How rude!" Maria adding, "How like Leam!" the chain
+of condemnation receiving no break till it came to Josephine, whose
+patient soul refrained from wrath, and gave as her link, "Poor Leam!
+perhaps she is shy or has really a headache."
+
+In spite of his decision that she was not worth a second thought,
+the impression which Leam had made on Edgar deepened with his
+disappointment, and he became restless and unpleasant in his temper,
+casting about for means whereby he might see her again. He cast
+about in vain. This fit of shyness, pride, reluctance--who knows
+what?--continued with Leam for many days after this. If she went out
+at all, she went where she knew she should not be met; and if Edgar
+called at Ford House, she was not to be found. She mainly devoted
+herself to Fina and some books lent her by Alick, and kept the house
+with strange persistency. Perhaps this was because the weather was
+bad, for Leam, who could bear wind and frost and noonday sun, could
+not bear wet. When it rained she shut herself up in her own room, and
+pitied herself for the ungenial skies as she had pitied herself for
+some other things before now.
+
+Sitting thus reading one miserably dark, cold, misty day, the child
+Fina came in to her with her lessons, which she repeated well. They
+were very small and insignificant little lessons, for Leam had a
+fellow-feeling for the troubles of ignorance, and laid but a light
+hand on the frothy mind inside that curly head. When they were
+finished the little one said coaxingly, "Now play with me, Leam! You
+never play with me."
+
+"What can I do, Fina?" poor Leam replied.
+
+She had never learnt to play when she was a child: she had never built
+towers and towns, made railway trains and coaches with the sofa and
+chairs, played at giants through the dark passages and screamed when
+she was caught. She had only sat still when mamma was asleep, or when
+she was awake played on the zambomba, or listened to her when she told
+her of the things of Spain, and made up stories with her dolls that
+were less edifying than those of Mother Bunch. She could scarcely,
+however, unpack that old box full of waxen puppets, with the one
+dressed in scarlet and black, with fishbone horns and a worsted tail,
+and a queer clumped kind of foot made of folds of leather, cleft in
+the middle, that used to go by the name of "El se�or papa." What could
+she do?
+
+"Shall I tell you a story?" she then said in a mild fit of
+desperation, for story-telling was as little in her way as anything
+else.
+
+"Yes, yes, tell me a story!" Fina clapped her chubby hands together
+and climbed up into Leam's lap.
+
+"What shall it be about--bears or tigers, or what?" asked Leam
+dutifully.
+
+"Tell me about mamma, my own mamma, not Aunty Birkett," said Fina.
+
+Leam shuddered from head to foot. This was the first time the little
+girl had mentioned her mother's name to her. Indeed, she did not know
+that she had ever heard of her at all--ever known that she had had
+a mother; but the servants had talked, and the child's curiosity was
+aroused. The dead mother is as much a matter of wondering inquiry
+as the angels and the stars; and Fina's imagination was beginning to
+bestir itself on the mysteries of childish life.
+
+"I have nothing to tell you about her," said Leam, controlling
+herself, though she still shivered.
+
+"Yes, you have--everything," insisted Fina. "Was mamma pretty?"
+playing with a corner of her sister's ribbon.
+
+"People said so," answered Leam.
+
+"As pretty as Cousin Addy?" she asked.
+
+"About," said Leam, who thought neither supreme.
+
+"Prettier than you?"
+
+"I don't know: how can I tell?" she answered a little impatiently.
+
+The mother's blood that ran in her, the mother's mould in which she
+had been formed, forbade her to put herself below madame in anything;
+but, as she was neither vain nor conscious, she found Fina's question
+difficult to answer.
+
+"Oh," cried Fina, in a tone of disappointment, "then she could not
+have been very pretty."
+
+"I dare say she was, but I do not know," returned Leam.
+
+"And she died?" continued Fina, yawning in a childishly indifferent
+manner.
+
+"Yes, she died."
+
+"Why? Who killed her? Did papa?" asked Fina.
+
+Leam's face was very white: "No, not papa."
+
+"Did God?"
+
+"I cannot tell you, Fina," said Leam, to whom falsehoods were
+abhorrent and the truth impossible.
+
+"Did you?" persisted Fina with childish obstinacy.
+
+"Now go," said Leam, putting her off her lap and rising from her chair
+in strange disorder. "You are troublesome and ask too many questions."
+
+Fina began to cry loudly, and Mr. Dundas, from his library below,
+heard her. He came up stairs with his fussy, restless kindness, and
+opened the door of the room where his two daughters, of nature and by
+adoption, were.
+
+"Heyday! what's all this about?" he cried. "What's the matter, my
+little Fina? what are you crying for? Tut, tut! you should not cry
+like this, darling; and, Leam," severely, "you should really keep the
+child better amused and happy. She is as good as gold with me: with
+you there is always something wrong."
+
+Fina ran into his arms sobbing. "Leam is cross," she said. "She will
+not tell me who killed mamma."
+
+The man's ruddy face, reddened and roughened with travel, grew white
+and pitiful. "God took her away, my darling," he said with a sob.
+"She was too good for me, and He took her to live with the angels in
+heaven,"
+
+"And Leam's mamma? Is she in heaven too with the angels?" asked Fina,
+opening her eyes wide through their tears,
+
+"I hope so," Sebastian answered in an altered voice.
+
+Leam covered her face in her hands; then lifting it up, she said
+imploringly, "Papa, do not talk to her of mamma. It is sacrilege."
+
+"I agree with you, Leam," said Mr, Dundas in a steady voice. "We meet
+at the same point, but perhaps by different methods."
+
+[TO BE CONTINUED.]
+
+
+
+
+LETTERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA
+
+BY LADY BARKER.
+
+
+    CAPE TOWN, October 16, 1875.
+
+    Safe, safe at last, after twenty-four days of nothing but sea
+    and sky, of white-crested waves--which made no secret of their
+    intention of coming on board whenever they could or of tossing
+    the good ship Edinburgh Castle hither and thither like a
+    child's plaything--and of more deceitful sluggish rolling
+    billows, looking tolerably calm to the unseafaring eye, but
+    containing a vast amount of heaving power beneath their slow,
+    undulating water-hills and valleys. Sometimes sky and sea
+    have been steeped in dazzling haze of golden glare, sometimes
+    brightened to blue of a sapphire depth. Again, a sudden change
+    of wind has driven up serried clouds from the south and east,
+    and all has been gray and cold and restful to eyes wearied
+    with radiance and glitter of sun and sparkling water.
+
+    Never has there been such exceptional weather, although the
+    weather of my acquaintance invariably _is_ exceptional. No
+    sooner had the outlines of Madeira melted and blended into
+    the soft darkness of a summer night than we appeared to sail
+    straight into tropic heat and a sluggish vapor, brooding on
+    the water like steam from a giant geyser. This simmering,
+    oily, exhausting temperature carried us close to the line.
+    "What is before us," we asked each other languidly, "if it be
+    hotter than this? How can mortal man, woman, still less child,
+    endure existence?" Vain alarms! Yet another shift of the
+    light wind, another degree passed, and we are all shivering in
+    winter wraps. The line was crossed in greatcoats and shawls,
+    and the only people whose complexion did not resemble a
+    purple plum were those lucky ones who had strength of mind
+    and steadiness of body to lurch up and down the deck all
+    day enjoying a strange method of movement which they called
+    walking.
+
+    The exceptional weather pursued us right into the very
+    dock. Table Mountain ought to be seen--and very often is
+    seen--seventy miles away. I am told it looks a fine bold bluff
+    at that distance, Yesterday we had blown off our last pound of
+    steam and were safe under its lee before we could tell
+    there was a mountain there at all, still less an almost
+    perpendicular cliff more than three thousand feet high. Robben
+    Island looked like a dun-colored hillock as we shot past it
+    within a short distance, and a more forlorn and discouraging
+    islet I don't think I have ever beheld. When I expressed
+    something of this impression to a cheery fellow-voyager, he
+    could only urge in its defence that there were a great many
+    rabbits on it. If he had thrown the lighthouse into the
+    bargain, I think he would have summed up all its attractive
+    features. Unless Langalibalele is of a singularly
+    unimpressionable nature, he must have found his sojourn on
+    it somewhat monotonous, but he always says he was very
+    comfortable there.
+
+    And now for the land. We are close alongside of a wharf,
+    and still a capital and faithful copy of a Scotch mist wraps
+    houses, trees and sloping uplands in a fibry fantastic veil,
+    and the cold drizzle seems to curdle the spirits and energies
+    of the few listless Malays and half-caste boys and men who are
+    lounging about. Here come hansom cabs rattling up one after
+    the other, all with black drivers in gay and fantastic head
+    and shoulder gear; but their hearts seem precisely as
+    the hearts of their London brethren, and they single out
+    new-comers at a glance, and shout offers to drive them a
+    hundred yards or so for exorbitant sums, or yell laudatory
+    recommendations of sundry hotels. You must bear in mind that
+    in a colony every pot-house is a hotel, and generally rejoices
+    in a name much too imposing to fit across its frontage. These
+    hansoms are all painted white with the name of some ship in
+    bright letters on the side, and are a great deal cleaner,
+    roomier and more comfortable than their London "forbears." The
+    horses are small and shabby, but rattle along at a good pace;
+    and soon each cab has its load of happy home-comers and swings
+    rapidly away to make room for fresh arrivals hurrying up for
+    fares. Hospitable suggestions come pouring in, and it is as
+    though it were altogether a new experience when one steps
+    cautiously on the land, half expecting it to dip away
+    playfully from under one's feet. A little boy puts my thoughts
+    into words when he exclaims, "How steady the ground is!"
+    and becomes a still more faithful interpreter of a wave-worn
+    voyager's sensations when, a couple of hours later, he demands
+    permission to get _out_ of his delicious little white bed
+    that he may have the pleasure of getting _into_ it again. The
+    evening is cold and raw and the new picture is all blurred and
+    soft and indistinct, and nothing seems plain except the
+    kindly grace of our welcome and the
+    never-before-sufficiently-appreciated delights of space and
+    silence.
+
+    OCTOBER 17.
+
+    How pleasant is the process familiarly known as "looking
+    about one," particularly when performed under exceptionally
+    favorable circumstances! A long and happy day commenced with a
+    stroll through the botanic gardens, parallel with which runs,
+    on one side, a splendid oak avenue just now in all the
+    vivid freshness of its young spring leaves. The gardens are
+    beautifully kept, and are valuable as affording a sort of
+    experimental nursery in which new plants and trees can be
+    brought up on trial and their adaptability to the soil and
+    climate ascertained. For instance, the first thing that caught
+    my eye was the gigantic trunk of an Australian blue-gum tree,
+    which had attained to a girth and height not often seen in its
+    own land. The flora of the Cape Colony is exceptionally varied
+    and beautiful, but one peculiarity incidentally alluded to by
+    my charming guide struck me as very noticeable. It is that
+    in this dry climate and porous soil all the efforts of
+    uncultivated nature are devoted to the _stems_ of the
+    vegetation: on their sap-retaining power depends the life of
+    the plant, so blossom and leaf, though exquisitely indicated,
+    are fragile and incomplete compared to the solidity and
+    bulbous appearance of the stalk. Everything is sacrificed to
+    the practical principle of keeping life together, and it is
+    not until these stout-stemmed plants are cultivated and
+    duly sheltered and watered, and can grow, as it were, with
+    confidence, that they are able to do justice to the inherent
+    beauty of penciled petal and veined leaf. Then the stem
+    contracts to ordinary dimensions, and leaf and blossom expand
+    into things which may well be a joy to the botanist's eye.
+    A thousand times during that shady saunter did I envy my
+    companions their scientific acquaintance with the beautiful
+    green things of earth, and that intimate knowledge of a
+    subject which enhances one's appreciation of its charms as
+    much as bringing a lamp into a darkened picture-gallery. There
+    are the treasures of form and color, but from ignorant eyes
+    more than half their charms and wonders are held back.
+
+    A few steps beyond the garden stand the library and natural
+    history museum. The former is truly a credit to the Colony.
+    Spacious, handsome, rich in literary treasures, It would
+    bear comparison with similar institutions in far older and
+    wealthier places. But I have often noticed in colonies how
+    much importance is attached to the possession of a good public
+    library, and how fond, as a rule, colonists are of books. In
+    a new settlement other shops may be ill supplied, but there
+    is always a good bookseller's, and all books are to be bought
+    there at pretty nearly the same prices as in England. Here
+    each volume costs precisely the same as it would in London,
+    and it would puzzle ever so greedy a reader to name a book
+    which would not be instantly handed to him.
+
+    The museum is well worth a visit of many more hours than we
+    could afford minutes, and, as might be expected, contains
+    numerous specimens of the _Bok_ family, whose tapering horns
+    and slender legs are to be seen at every turn of one's head.
+    Models are there also of the largest diamonds, and especially
+    well copied is the famous "Star of South Africa," a
+    magnificent brilliant of purest water, sold here originally
+    for something like twelve thousand pounds, and resold for
+    double that sum three or four years back. In these few hours I
+    perceive, or think I perceive, a certain soreness, if one
+    may use the word, on the part of the Cape Colonists about the
+    unappreciativeness of the English public toward their produce
+    and possessions. For Instance, an enormous quantity of wine is
+    annually exported, which reaches London by a devious route and
+    fetches a high price, as it is fairly entitled to do from its
+    excellence. If that same wine were sent direct to a London
+    merchant and boldly sold as Cape wine, it is said that the
+    profit on it would be a very different affair. The same
+    prejudice exists against Cape diamonds. Of course, as in other
+    things, a large proportion of inferior stones are forced into
+    the market and serve to give the diamonds that bad name which
+    we all know is so fatal to a dog. But it is only necessary to
+    pretend that a really fine Cape diamond has come from Brazil
+    to ensure its fetching a handsome price, and in that way even
+    jewelers themselves have been known to buy and give a good
+    round sum, too, for stones they would otherwise have looked
+    upon with suspicion. Already I have seen a straw-colored
+    diamond from "Du Zoit's pan" in the diamond-fields cut in
+    Amsterdam and set in London, which could hold its own for
+    purity, radiance and color against any other stone of the same
+    rare tint, without fear or favor; but of course such gems are
+    not common, and fairly good diamonds cost as much here as in
+    any other part of the world.
+
+    The light morning mists from that dampness of yesterday have
+    rolled gradually away as the beautiful sunshine dried the
+    atmosphere, and by midday the table-cloth, as the colonists
+    affectionately call the white, fleece-like vapor which so
+    often rests on their pet mountain, has been folded up and laid
+    aside in Cloudland for future use. I don't know what picture
+    other people may have made to their own minds of the shape and
+    size of Table Mountain, but it was quite a surprise and the
+    least little bit in the world of a disappointment to me to
+    find that it cuts the sky (and what a beautiful sky it is!)
+    with a perfectly straight and level line. A gentle, undulating
+    foreground broken into ravines, where patches of green _velts_
+    or fields, clumps of trees and early settlers' houses nestle
+    cosily down, guides the eye half-way up the mountain. There
+    the rounder forms abruptly cease, and great granite cliffs
+    rise, bare and straight, up to the level line stretching ever
+    so far along. "It is so characteristic," and "You grow to be
+    so fond of that mountain," are observations I have heard made
+    in reply to the carping criticisms of travelers, and already
+    I begin to understand the meaning of the phrases. But you
+    need to see the mountain from various points of view and under
+    different influences of sun and cloud before you can take in
+    its striking and peculiar charms.
+
+    On each side of the straight line which is emphatically Table
+    Mountain, but actually forming part of it, is a bold headland
+    of the shape one is usually accustomed to in mountains. The
+    "Devil's Peak" is uncompromising enough for any one's taste,
+    whilst the "Lion's Head" charms the eye by its bluff form
+    and deep purple fissures. These grand promontories are not,
+    however, half so beloved by Cape Colonists as their own Table
+    Mountain, and it is curious and amusing to notice how the
+    influence of this odd straight ridge, ever before their eyes,
+    has unconsciously guided and influenced their architectural
+    tastes. All the roofs of the houses are straight--straight
+    as the mountain; a gable is almost unknown, and even the few
+    steeples are dwarfed to an imperceptible departure from the
+    prevailing straight line. The very trees which shade the
+    Parade-ground and border the road in places have their tops
+    blown absolutely straight and flat, as though giant shears
+    had trimmed them; but I must confess, in spite of a
+    natural anxiety to carry out my theory, that the violent
+    "sou'-easters" are the "straighteners" in their case.
+
+    Cape Town is so straggling that it is difficult to form any
+    idea of its real size, but the low houses are neat and the
+    streets are well kept and look quaint and lively enough to my
+    new eyes this morning. There are plenty of people moving about
+    with a sociable, business-like air; lots of different shades
+    of black and brown Malays, with pointed hats on the men's
+    heads: the women encircle their dusky, smiling faces with a
+    gay cotton handkerchief and throw another of a still brighter
+    hue over their shoulders. When you add to this that they
+    wear a full, flowing, stiffly-starched cotton gown of a third
+    bright color, you can perhaps form some idea of how they
+    enliven the streets. Swarms of children everywhere, romping
+    and laughing and showing their white teeth in broadest
+    of grins. The white children strike me at once as looking
+    marvelously well--such chubby cheeks, such sturdy fat
+    legs--and all, black or white, with that amazing air of
+    independence peculiar to baby-colonists. Nobody seems to mind
+    them and nothing seems to harm them. Here are half a dozen
+    tiny boys shouting and laughing at one side of the road, and
+    half a dozen baby-girls at the other (they all seem to play
+    separately): they are all driving each other, for "horses" is
+    the one game here. By the side of a pond sit two toddles of
+    about three years old, in one garment apiece and pointed hats:
+    they are very busy with string and a pin; but who is taking
+    care of them and why don't they tumble in? They are as fat as
+    ortolans and grin at us in the most friendly fashion.
+
+    We must remember that this chances to be the very best moment
+    of the whole year in which to see the Cape and the dwellers
+    thereat. The cold weather has left its bright roses on the
+    children's cheeks, and the winter rains exceptionally having
+    this year made every blade of grass and leaf of tree to laugh
+    and sing in freshest green. After the dry, windy summer I am
+    assured there is hardly a leaf and never a blade of grass to
+    be seen in Cape Town, and only a little straggling verdure
+    under the shelter of the mountain. The great want of this
+    place is water. No river, scarcely a brook, refreshes one's
+    eye for many and many a league inward. The necessary water for
+    the use of the town is brought down by pipes from the numerous
+    springs which trickle out of the granite cliffs of Table
+    Mountain, but there is never a sufficiency to spare for
+    watering roads or grassplots. This scarcity is a double loss
+    to residents and visitors, for one misses it both for use and
+    beauty.
+
+    Everybody who comes here rides or drives round the "Kloof."
+    That may be; but what I maintain is that very few do it so
+    delightfully as I did this sunny afternoon with a companion
+    who knew and loved every turn of the romantic road, who could
+    tell me the name of every bush or flower, of every distant
+    stretch of hills, and helped me to make a map in my head of
+    the stretching landscape and curving bay. Ah! how delicious it
+    was, the winding, climbing road, at whose every angle a fresh
+    fair landscape fell away from beneath our feet or a shining
+    stretch of sea, whose transparent green and purple shadows
+    broke in a fringe of feathery spray at the foot of bold, rocky
+    cliffs, or crept up to a smooth expanse of silver sand in a
+    soft curling line of foam! "Kloof" means simply cleft, and is
+    the pass between the Table Mountain and the Lion's Head, The
+    road first rises, rises, rises, until one seems half-way up
+    the great mountain, and the little straight--roofed white
+    houses, the green velts or fields and the parallel lines of
+    the vineyards have sunk below one's feet far, far away. The
+    mountain gains in grandeur as one approaches it, for the
+    undulating spurs which run from it down to the sea-shore take
+    away from the height looking upward. But when these are left
+    beneath, the perpendicular Walls of granite, rising sheer
+    and straight up to the bold sky-line, and the rugged, massive
+    strength of the buttress-like cliffs, begin to gain something
+    of their true value to the stranger's eye. The most beautiful
+    part of the road, however, to my taste, is the descent, when
+    the shining expanse of Camp's Bay lies shimmering in the warm
+    afternoon haze with a thousand lights and shadows from cloud
+    and cliff touching and passing over the crisp water-surface.
+    By many a steep zigzag we round the Lion's Head, and drop once
+    more on a level road running parallel to the sea-shore, and so
+    home in the balmy and yet bracing twilight. The midday sun is
+    hot and scorching even at this time of year, but it is always
+    cool in the shade, and no sooner do the afternoon shadows grow
+    to any length than the air freshens into sharpness, and by
+    sundown one is glad of a good warm shawl.
+
+
+    OCTOBER 18.
+
+    Another bright, ideal day, and the morning passed in a
+    delicious flower-filled room looking over old books and
+    records and listening to odd, quaint little scraps from the
+    old Dutch records. But directly after luncheon (and how hungry
+    we all are, and how delicious everything tastes on shore!) the
+    open break with four capital horses comes to the door, and we
+    start for a long, lovely drive. Half a mile or so takes us
+    out on a flat red road with Table Mountain rising straight up
+    before it, but on the left stretches away a most enchanting
+    panorama. It is all so soft in coloring and tone, distinct and
+    yet not hard, and exquisitely beautiful!
+
+    The Blue-Berg range of mountains stretch beyond the great bay,
+    which, unless a "sou'-easter" is tearing over it, lies glowing
+    in tranquil richness. This afternoon it is colored like an
+    Italian lake. Here are lines of chrysoprase, green-fringed,
+    white with little waves, and beyond lie dark, translucent,
+    purple depths, which change with every passing cloud. Beyond
+    these amethystic shoals again stretches the deep blue water,
+    and again beyond, and bluer still, rise the five ranges
+    of "Hottentots' Holland," which encircle and complete the
+    landscape, bringing the eye round again to the nearer cliffs
+    of the Devil's Peak. When the Dutch came here some two hundred
+    years ago, they seized upon this part of the coast and called
+    it Holland, driving the Hottentots beyond the neighboring
+    range and telling them that was to be their Holland--a name it
+    keeps to this day. Their consciences must have troubled them
+    after this arbitrary division of the soil, for up the highest
+    accessible spurs of their own mountain they took the
+    trouble to build several queer little square houses called
+    "block-houses," from which they could keep a sharp look-out
+    for foes coming over the hills from Hottentots' Holland.
+    The foes never came, however, and the roofs and walls of
+    the block-houses have gradually tumbled in, and the
+    gun-carriages--for they managed to drag heavy ordnance up the
+    steep hill-side--have rotted away, whilst the old-fashioned
+    cannon lie, grim and rusty, amid a tangled profusion of wild
+    geranium, heath and lilies, I scrambled up to one of the
+    nearest block-houses, and found the date on the dismounted gun
+    to be more than a hundred years old. The view was beautiful
+    and the air fresh and fragrant with scent of flowers.
+
+    But to return to our drive. I could gaze and gaze for ever at
+    this lovely panorama, but am told this is the ugliest part of
+    the road. The road itself is certainly not pretty just here,
+    and is cloudy with a fine red dust, but this view of sea and
+    distant hills is enchanting. Soon we get under the lee of
+    the great mountain, and then its sheltering arms show their
+    protective power; for splendid oak avenues begin to border the
+    road all the way, and miniature forests of straight-stemmed
+    pines and shimmering belts of the ghostly silver tree run up
+    all the mountain-clefts. Stem and leaf of the silver tree are
+    all of purest white; and when one gets a gleam of sunlight
+    on a distant patch of these trees, the effect is quite
+    indescribable, contrasting, as they do, with green of field
+    and vineyard. The vines all about here and towards Constantia,
+    thirteen miles off, are dwarf-plants, and only grow to the
+    height of gooseberry-bushes. It is a particular species, which
+    is found to answer best as requiring less labor to train and
+    cultivate, and is less likely to be blown out of the ground
+    by the violent "sou'-easters" which come sweeping over the
+    mountain. These gales are evidently the greatest annoyance
+    which Cape Colonists have to endure; and although everybody
+    kindly suggests that I _ought_ to see one, just to understand
+    what it is like, I am profoundly thankful that I only know it
+    from their description and my own distinct recollection of the
+    New Zealand "nor'-westers." Those were hot winds, scorching
+    and curling up everything, whereas this is rather a cold
+    breeze, although it blows chiefly in summer. It whirls along
+    clouds of dust from the red clay roads and fields which
+    penetrates and clings to everything in the most extraordinary
+    manner. All along the road the stems and lower branches of the
+    trees are dyed a deep brick-dust color, and I hear moving and
+    pathetic stories of how it ruins clothes, not only utterly
+    spoiling black silk dresses, but staining white petticoats and
+    children's frocks and pinafores with a border of color exactly
+    like the ruddle with which sheep are branded. Especially is
+    it the terror of sailors, rendering the navigation along the
+    coast dangerous and difficult; for it blends land and water
+    into one indistinct whirl of vaporous cloud, confusing and
+    blurring everything until one cannot distinguish shore from
+    sea.
+
+    The vineyards of Constantia originally took their pretty name
+    from the fair daughter of one of the early Dutch governors,
+    but now it has grown into a generic word, and you see
+    "Cloete's Constantia," "Von Reybeck Constantia," written upon
+    great stone gateways leading by long avenues into the various
+    vine-growing plantations. It was to the former of these
+    constantias, which was also the farthest off, that we were
+    bound that pleasant summer afternoon, and from the time we got
+    out of the carriage until the moment we re-entered it--all
+    too soon, but it is a long drive back in the short cold
+    twilight--I felt as though I had stepped through a magic
+    portal into the scene of one of Washington Irving's
+    stories. It was all so simple and homely, so quaint and so
+    inexpressibly picturesque. The house had stood there for a
+    couple of hundred years, and looks as though it might last for
+    ever, with its air of cool, leisurely repose and comfort and
+    strength.
+
+    In the flagged hall stands a huge stalactite some ten feet
+    high, brought a hundred years ago from caves far away in the
+    distant ranges. It is shaped something like a Malay's hat,
+    only the peak tapers to a point about eight feet high. The
+    drawing-room--though it seems a profanation to call that
+    venerable stately room by so flippant and modern a name--is
+    large, ceiled with great beams of cedar, and lighted by lofty
+    windows, which must contain many scores of small panes of
+    glass. There were treasures of rarest old china and delfware,
+    and curious old carved stands for fragile dishes. A wealth of
+    swinging-baskets of flowers and ferns and bright girl-faces
+    lighted up the solemn, shady old room, in which we must not
+    linger, for there is much to see outside. First to the cellar,
+    as it is called, though it is far from being under ground,
+    and is, in fact, a spacious stone building with an
+    elaborately-carved pediment. Here are rows and rows of giant
+    casks, stretching on either hand into avenues in the black
+    distance, but these are mere children in the nursery, compared
+    to those we are going to see. First we must pause in a middle
+    room full of quaintest odds and ends--crossbows, long whips of
+    hippopotamus hide, strange rusty old swords and firearms--to
+    look at a map of South Africa drawn somewhere about 1640. It
+    hangs on the wall and is hardly to be touched, for the paint
+    and varnish crack and peel off at a breath. It is a marvel of
+    accurate geographical knowledge, and is far better filled
+    in than the maps of yesterday. All poor Livingstone's great
+    geographical discoveries are marked on it as being--perhaps
+    only from description--known or guessed at all that long time
+    ago. It was found impossible to photograph it on account of
+    the dark shade which age has laid over the original yellow
+    varnish, but a careful tracing has been made and, I believe,
+    sent home to the Geographical Society. It is in the long
+    corridor beyond this that the "stuck-vats" live--puncheons
+    which hold easily some thousand gallons or so, and are of a
+    solemn rotundity calculated to strike awe into the beholder's
+    heart. Here is white constantia, red constantia, young
+    constantia, middle-aged constantia, and constantia so old as
+    to be a liqueur almost beyond price. When it has been kept
+    all these years, the sweetness by which it is distinguished
+    becomes so absorbed and blended as to be hardly perceptible.
+
+    Presently one of the party throws a door suddenly open, and,
+    behold, we are standing right over a wild wooded glen with a
+    streamlet running through it, and black washerwomen beating
+    heaps of white clothes on the strips of shingle. Turtle-doves
+    are cooing, and one might almost fancy one was back again on
+    the wild Scotch west coast, until some one else says calmly,
+    "Look at the ostriches!" Here they come, with a sort of
+    dancing step, twisting their long necks and snake-like heads
+    from side to side in search of a tempting pebble or trifle of
+    hardware. Their wings are slightly raised, and the long fringe
+    of white feathers rustles softly as they trot easily and
+    gracefully past us. They are young male birds, and in a few
+    months more their plumage, which now resembles that of a
+    turkey-cock, will be jet black, except the wing-feathers. A
+    few drops of rain are falling, so we hurry back to where the
+    carriage is standing under some splendid oak trees, swallow a
+    sort of stirrup-cup of delicious hot tea, and so home again as
+    fast as we can go.
+
+
+    OCTOBER 19.
+
+    It is decided that I must take a drive in a Cape cart; so
+    directly after breakfast a smart workman-like-looking vehicle,
+    drawn by a pair of well-bred iron-gray cobs, dashes up under
+    the portico. There are capital horses here, but they fetch
+    a good price, and such a pair as these would easily find
+    purchasers at one hundred and fifty pounds. The cart itself
+    is very trim and smart, with a framework sort of head, which
+    falls back at pleasure, and it holds four people easily. It
+    is a capital vehicle, light and strong and uncommonly
+    comfortable, but I am warned not to imagine that all Cape
+    carts are as easy as this one. Away we go at a fine pace
+    through the delicious sparkling morning sunshine and crisp
+    air, soon turning off the red high-road into a sandy, marshy
+    flat with a sort of brackish back-water standing in pools here
+    and there. We are going to call on Langalibalele, and his
+    son, Malambuli, who are located at Uitvlugt on the Cape
+    downs, about four miles from the town. It is a sort of
+    farm-residence; and considering that the chief has hitherto
+    lived in a reed hut, he is not badly off, for he has plenty
+    of room out of doors as well as a good house over his head. We
+    bump over some strange and rough bits of sandy road and climb
+    up and down steep banks in a manner seldom done on wheels.
+    There is a wealth of lovely flowers blooming around, but I
+    can't help fixing my eyes on the pole of the cart, which is
+    sometimes sticking straight up in the air, its silver hook
+    shining merrily in the sun, or else it has disappeared
+    altogether, and I can only see the horses' haunches. That
+    is when we are going _down_ hill, and I think it is a more
+    terrible sensation than when we are playfully scrambling up
+    some sandy hillock as a cat might.
+
+    Here is the location at last, thank Heaven! and there is
+    Langalibalele sitting in the verandah stoep (pronounced
+    "stoup") on his haunches on a brick. He looks as comfortable
+    as if he were in an arm-chair, but it must be a difficult
+    thing to do if you think seriously of it. The etiquette seems
+    to be to take no notice of him as we pass into the parlor,
+    where we present our pass and the people in authority satisfy
+    themselves that we are quite in rule. Then the old chief walks
+    quietly in, takes off his soft felt hat and sits himself
+    down in a Windsor arm-chair with grave deliberation. He is
+    uncommonly ugly; but when one remembers that he is nearly
+    seventy years of age, it is astonishing to see how young
+    he looks. Langalibalele is not a true Kafir at all: he is a
+    Fingor, a half-caste tribe contemptuously christened by the
+    Kafirs "dogs." His wool grows in distinct and separate clumps
+    like hassocks of grass all over his head. He is a large and
+    powerful man and looks the picture of sleek contentment, as
+    well he may. Only one of his sons, a good-natured, fine
+    young man, black as ebony, is with him, and the chief's one
+    expressed grievance is that none of his wives will come to
+    him. In vain he sends commands and entreaties to these dusky
+    ladies to come and share his solitude. They return for answer
+    that "they are working for somebody else;" for, alas! the only
+    reason their presence is desired is that they may cultivate
+    some of the large extent of ground placed at the old chief's
+    disposal. Neither he nor his stalwart son would dream for
+    a moment of touching spade or hoe; but if the ladies of the
+    family could only be made to see their duty, an honest penny
+    might easily be turned by oats or rye. I gave him a large
+    packet of sugar-plums, which he seized with childish delight
+    and hid away exactly like the big monkeys at the Zoo.
+
+    By way of a joke, Malambuli pretended to want to take them
+    away, and the chattering and laughing which followed was
+    almost deafening. But by and by a gentleman of the party
+    presented a big parcel of the best tobacco, and the chuckling
+    old chief made over at once all my sweetmeats "jintly" to
+    his son, and proceeded to hide away his new treasure. He
+    was dressed exactly like a dissenting minister, and declared
+    through the interpreter he was perfectly comfortable. The
+    impression here seems to be that he is a restless, intriguing
+    and mischief-making old man, who may consider himself as
+    having come out of the hornets' nest he tried to stir up
+    uncommonly well.
+
+    We don't want to bump up and down the sandy plain again, so
+    a lively conversation goes on in Dutch about the road between
+    one of my gentlemen and somebody who looks like a "stuck-vat"
+    upon short legs. The dialogue is fluent and lively, beginning
+    with "Ja, ja!" and ending with "All right!" but it leads to
+    our hitting off the right track exactly, and coming out at a
+    lovely little cottage-villa under the mountain, where we rest
+    and lunch and then stroll about up the hill spurs, through
+    myrtle hedges and shady oak avenues. Then, before the
+    afternoon shadows grow too long, we drive off to "Groote
+    Schuur," the ancient granary of the first settlers, which is
+    now turned into a roomy, comfortable country-house, perfect
+    as a summer residence, and securely sheltered from the
+    "sou'-easters." We approach it through a double avenue of tall
+    Italian pines, and after a little while go out once more for
+    a ramble up some quaint old brick steps, and so through a
+    beautiful glen all fringed and feathered with fresh young
+    fronds of maiden-hair ferns, and masses of hydrangea bushes,
+    which must be beautiful as a poet's dream when they are
+    covered with their great bunches of pale blue blossom. That
+    will not be until Christmas-tide, and, alas! I shall not be
+    here to see, for already my three halcyon days of grace are
+    ended and over, and this very evening we must steam away
+    from a great deal yet unvisited of what is interesting
+    and picturesque, and from friends who three days ago were
+    strangers, but who have made every moment since we landed
+    stand out as a bright and pleasant landmark on life's highway.
+
+
+
+
+ON SANKOTA HEAD.
+
+
+"Yay, Jim, there ain't no doubt but Sairy Macy's a mighty nice gal,
+but, thee sees, what I'm a-contendin' fur is that she's tew nice fur
+thee--that is, not tew nice egzackly, but a leetle tew fine-feathered.
+No, not that egzackly, nuther; but she's a leetle tew fine in the
+feelin's, an' I don't b'lieve that in the long run thee an' she'll
+sort well tugether. Shell git eout o' conceit with thy ways--thee
+_ain't_ the pootiest-mannered feller a gal ever see--an' thee'll git
+eout o' conceit with hern. Thee'll think she's a-gittin' stuck up, an'
+she'll think thee's a-gittin'low-minded. Neow, Jim, my 'dvice is
+good; an' ef thee'll take it, an' not go on with this thing no furder,
+thee'll both be glad on it arterwa'ds. 'Spesh'ly 's she ain't very
+rugged, an' sickly gals had oughter hev rich husbands."
+
+"But, father, Sairy an' me loves o' 'nother."
+
+"Oh, wal, then it's tew late ter say nothin'," said the old man with
+a mingled sigh and smile as, raising his basket of quahaugs to his
+shoulder, he walked off, pressing his bare feet into the yielding sand
+with the firm but clumsy tread of vigorous old age. The rough hat
+of plaited straw was pushed back from a brow that with a cultivated
+nature would have been considered as evidence of considerable
+intellectual power, but, as it was, only showed the probable truth
+of the opinion of his neighbors, that "Stephen Starbuck was a shrewd,
+common-sense ole feller."
+
+Jim was of a little finer grade than his father, having inherited some
+of the traits of his gentle mother, but the young Hercules could by no
+means have been mistaken for an Apollo; neither did his somewhat heavy
+features bear the expression of unselfish loyalty which would have
+given better promise than any mere refinement of features or manner
+for the future happiness of Sarah Macy. But she found nothing wanting
+in her lover as she stood on the cliff-head gazing down upon him.
+Sarah knew that the man she loved was not considered her equal, but
+because she loved him she believed him capable of becoming all that
+she or others could desire. There is in the world no faith so absolute
+as that of a woman in the possibilities of the man she loves. Had
+Sarah read of Sir Galahad--but this was in 1779, and the fame of the
+search for the Holy Grail had not reached the popular ear--she would
+have said to herself, "My Jim is just so pure and holy." Had "her Jim"
+been a Royalist during the English Revolution, Prince Rupert's laurels
+would not have been unshared. Had Jim been a Puritan--though the
+little Quaker maiden did not love Puritans over well, and did not
+fancy her Jim as fighting on that side--England's Protector would
+not have borne the name of Cromwell. Or if Jim were not one of the
+peace-loving Friends, and would enlist in the present struggle for
+liberty, the fame of Commodore James Starbuck should soon eclipse that
+of Paul Jones.
+
+Not for the world would Sarah have given voice to the heretical
+desire, but in her inmost heart was even now a wish that her dear Jim
+held religious opinions that would not interfere with his showing
+to the country how talented, noble and valiant he was; while the
+fair-haired, sunburnt, indolent young Hercules idly gazing out to sea
+was fired with no higher ambition for himself than to be able soon
+to erect on the Head another small house like that of his father, to
+which he might bring "the sweet little girl who loved him, so much."
+For Sarah had committed the common mistake of loving women, and had
+let Jim see how dear he was to her. So now, instead of dwelling on his
+love for her and scheming how he might be worthy of her heart, he was
+fully satisfied with himself, and inclined to grumble at Fortune for
+not at once bestowing the trifle he asked at her hands.
+
+"Jim, how long's thee goin' ter stan' there? If the water _is_ pretty,
+thee can see it any day, so 't ain't worth while to look at it all day
+ter a time."
+
+As, the sweet tones floated down the cliff Jim turned lazily to smile
+up at the speaker, and, raising his heavy basket of quahaugs, came
+leisurely up the steep sand-path, which seemed to shrink from his
+weight at every step: "Wal', Sairy, I wa'n't a-thinkin' much o' the
+water: I was a-thinkin' o' thee, an' o' what fayther said a little
+spell ago."
+
+"What was that, Jim?" Sarah's tone was a little anxious, for she knew
+that there was a jealousy among some of the islanders of the facts
+that her father had brought with him a few heavy articles of "real
+mahogany furnitur," and that her stepmother had always been able to
+hire others to do her spinning and weaving, and even to "help her at
+odd spells with the heft o' the housework."
+
+"Oh, nothin'," replied Jim, passing his free arm carelessly round the
+girl's waist--"othin', undly th' old story 'beout heow we'd best not
+merry, 'cause by'm-by thee'll git ter feelin' better nor me."
+
+"But thee don't believe him, Jim? Thee knows better. Thee knows,"
+adding this with the sweet and sincere but often sadly mistaken
+humility of love--"thee knows thou art better than me. Thou art so
+grand and so noble! If folks only knew thee better they would wonder
+at thee fur puttin' up wi' me. I wish I could make thee a better wife.
+But, Jim, if I ain't very strong, I'm pretty good at contrivin', an'
+I don't believe but what I can manage so's to git along a'most as well
+as them that's tougher."
+
+"Git along? O' course thee'll git along," answered Jim patronizingly.
+"I telled mother th'other day that I didn't cafe ef thee wa'n't 's
+strong as Mary Allen: thee was a good deal smarter, an' I'd be willin'
+tu resk but what I'd hev as little waitin' on ter dew fur thee 's fur
+her. Besides"--and here a gleam of real if shallow affection sprang
+from Jim's eyes as he looked down at the loving creature by his
+side--"besides, I'd _like_ to take care o' thee, Sairy--I would
+indeed."
+
+It is said that the sky has no color of its own--that the deep blue
+we think so beautiful is only owing to the atmosphere through which we
+view it. To Sarah this very slight expression of her lover's care
+for her bore more weight than the most passionate protestations of
+affection could have done to a colder nature, for it was colored by
+the glowing tints of her own warm love; and when the two parted that
+day she carried with her a sweet, satisfying sense of being beloved by
+the "best man on the earth" even as she loved him; while he whistled
+cheerily over his net-mending, thinking "what a sweet little thing it
+was!" "how pretty its eyes were!" and "how kitten-like its ways!" and
+only checked his whistling once in a while to wonder whether the day
+would ever really come when "Sairy would feel herself better than
+him," and to think it also a little hard that old Thomas Macy was "so
+sot agin' the match" that he would give his daughter no portion but an
+outfit of clothes and household linen. "He might jest's well's not,"
+reasoned Jim to himself, "give us a little lift: I guess he would if
+Sairy's own mother was alive; but them step-mothers never wants to
+give nothin' ter the fust wives' childern." In which opinion Jim did
+the second Mrs. Macy much injustice, for it was owing solely to her
+influence that Sarah's father had consented to provide his daughter
+with even a new dress in which to be married to "that big, lazy boy
+o'old Steve Starbuck's."
+
+Meantime, sad, gentle old Mrs. Starbuck had been turning over
+many things in her mind. She felt her son's defects; she knew that
+warm-hearted, imaginative Sarah Macy would be doing a foolish thing to
+marry Jim--as foolish a thing as in her inmost heart she felt, rather
+than acknowledged, that she herself had done when she married Jim's
+father. But the mother-heart longed that her son should grow to be
+what she desired (and what poor Sarah thought he already was), and she
+hoped much from the elevating influence of so good a wife.
+
+So, as she sat knitting, while Jim and his father sat, hats on heads
+and pipes in mouths, mending their nets, old Mrs. Starbuck had "made a
+plan." "Father," said, she at last, "I've be'n thinkin'--"
+
+"Yay," replied the old man gruffly but not unkindly--"yay, I 'spect
+so. Thee's pooty nigh allus a-thinkin' o' suthin. What is it neow?
+Eout with it!"
+
+"I've be'n thinkin' that Jim's all the child we've got--"
+
+"Wal, yay. Hain't had no other--not's I knows on. What o' that?"
+
+"Well, I was a-thinkin' that, that bein' so, an' Jim an' Sairy
+thinkin' so much o' 'nother, it wa'n't o' no use fur them ter keep
+waitin' along year eout an' year in fur a chance tu keep house by
+'emselves. They'd best git married right off an' come an' live along
+o' us."
+
+"W'y, ole woman!"
+
+"W'y, mother!"
+
+"Yay; I hear both on ye," said the gentle old mother with a half
+smile. "I s'posed likely ye'd think strange on't at fust; but ye
+h'ain't no need ter, fur it's a sens'ble thing ter dew, an' yell see't
+so when ye've thought on't a spell: see if ye don't."
+
+So well was the proposal liked that very soon the simple ceremony of
+the Friends made James and Sarah husband and wife; and for a while all
+seemed happiness in the humble cottage on the cliff--cottage so humble
+that it scarcely deserved even that lowly name.
+
+Sarah Macy's father owned one of the largest dwellings on Nantucket--a
+two-story "double house" with two rooms on each side of a broad hall
+running through the house from front to rear. On one side of this hall
+was the "best bedroom," ghostly with tightly-closed white shutters
+and long white dimity curtains to the "four-poster" and shining white
+sanded floor, and the "best-room," terrible in its grandeur of cold
+white walls, straight hard sofa, "spider-legged" table, grenadier-like
+chairs and striped woolen carpet underlaid with straw. In the rear, on
+the other side of the hall, was the kitchen with its big brick oven,
+its yawning fireplace overhung with corpulent iron pots or shining
+copper kettles depending from numerous gallows-like cranes; with its
+glittering copper, brass and pewter utensils arrayed on snowy-shelves;
+with its spotless tables, Its freshly-sanded floor and its
+heavily-beamed, whitewashed ceiling, from which hung many a bunch of
+savory herbs or string of red pepper-pods or bunch of seed-corn, or
+perhaps even a round-backed ham, to get a little browner in the smoke
+that would sometimes pour out from the half-ignited mass of peat. In
+front of the kitchen was the "living-room," in one corner of which
+stood a carved high-post bedstead--glory of the Macys and envy of
+their neighbors--with its curtains of big figured chintz, brown
+sunflowers sprawling over a white ground, drawn aside in the daytime
+to display the marvelous patchwork of the quilt beneath. Fuel was
+scarce even then on the sandy isle; and economy compelled Mr. and
+Mrs. Macy to make use of this living-room as a bedchamber also, since
+Thomas Macy confessed to "bein rather tender," and to liking a warm
+room to sleep In, though his neighbors often insinuated that he was
+killing himself by the Indulgence. And indeed the heat must have been
+stifling when we consider the size of the fireplace, nine feet wide by
+four deep, with a yawning throat, through which the rain poured freely
+down on stormy nights, putting out the best arranged mass of coals,
+ashes and peat, and, in spite of the little gutter purposely made
+round the broad brick hearth, sometimes overflowing and drenching
+a portion of the neat rag carpet, in which, with true Quaker
+consistency, no gay-colored fragment had been allowed a place.
+
+In striking contrast to all this magnificence was the lowly home to
+which James Starbuck brought his happy bride. This little house was
+"double" also--that Is, it was entered in the centre by a small square
+passage just big enough for the outer door to swing in. On one side
+of this entry was a tiny parlor, as dismal as rag carpet, fireless
+hearth, dingy paper and dark-green paper shades to the small windows
+could make it. On the other side of the entry was the tiny and cold
+bedroom of the senior Starbucks. In the centre of the house rose a
+massive chimney, big enough to retain all the heat from a dozen fires.
+Across the rear of parlor, chimney and bedroom ran the long, low
+sunshiny kitchen. At one end of this certain ladder-like stairs
+conducted to the loft, which had served Jim for a "roosting-place"
+ever since he had grown big enough to be trusted o' nights so far
+away from his mother. On Sarah's advent into the family the
+dismal "best-room" was made habitable by the addition of a
+"four-poster"--which Mrs. Starbuck senior regretted was only of
+cherry-wood and not carved--and by sundry little feminine contrivances
+of Sarah's own.
+
+I said that for a time all seemed to go on happily in this humble
+home. And the seeming would have been reality had Jim possessed the
+faith in his wife which she had in him. True, he loved and believed in
+her after his fashion, and his mother was a strong ally on his wife's
+side; but Jim had one fatal weakness of character. He resented the
+slightest look that was anything but simple admiration on the part of
+his wife. A strong nature is not afraid of censure, but a weak one,
+pleading sensitiveness, is easily roused to small retaliations,
+repaying what is good in intention with what is evil. Jim, as his
+father had truly told him, was "not the pootiest-mannered feller a gal
+ever see," and in the daily home-life this became apparent to Sarah
+as it had never been in all the years they had been near neighbors.
+Naturally, she wished her husband to be pleasing to her father, and at
+last ventured to hint, as delicately as she could, at various little
+points in which improvements might be made. At first Jim did not seem
+very restless under such reproofs, given, as they were, with many
+a loving kiss and winsome look; but as months went on his wife's
+caresses were more carelessly received, and her hinted corrections
+with more of resentment. One evening stately old Thomas Macy had
+"happened in," and Jim had greatly grieved his wife by his curt,
+uncivil manner to her father. After he had gone Sarah spoke in a low
+tone and kindly as always, but with more spirit than she had ever
+before manifested or felt, of her husband's disrespectful ways to the
+aged.
+
+For a moment after his wife had ceased, Jim sat with his hat
+pulled closely over his eyes, fiercely biting into the apple he was
+eating--biting and throwing the bits into the glowing mass of peat on
+the hearth. Then he sprang to his feet, exclaiming, "I see! It's all
+come true, what ev'rybody said. Thee thinks thee an' thy folks is
+better'n me an' my folks, an' keeps all the time a-naggin' on me. I
+wish I'd merried Mary Allen! I won't stan' no more o' this talk. If I
+ain't to be maaster o' my own house I won't stay in't." (The house was
+his father's, but angry men never think of such trifles.) And waxing
+pitiful of himself, he continued in a broken and injured tone, "The
+bed o' the sea's the bes' place fur a man whose own wife's got tew big
+feelin' ter put up wi' his ways."
+
+With this dignified burst of eloquence the angry fellow flung himself
+out of the house, letting in at the door as he went a dash of cold,
+sleety rain and a gust of wind that put out the flickering tallow dip
+that was enabling Sarah to take the last stitches in the tiny
+white slip that now fell from her fingers. Too sorely wounded for
+resentment, too fond of her husband to wish even his parents to see
+him in the light in which he was now revealed to her, Sarah silently
+stooped to recover her work, and as she did so her hand was met under
+the table by a sympathizing pressure from that of her mother-in-law.
+This was too much, and, laying her head in the elder woman's lap,
+poor Sarah wept without restraint; while the mother sorrowfully and
+tenderly stroked her soft brown tresses. The father, quietly puffing
+at his pipe, seemed to take no notice, only now and then glancing with
+kindly eye covertly from under his hat-brim at the two grieving women.
+
+Silently, but for the roaring of the wind and surf and fitful dashing
+of the rain, the hours passed on till the high clock in the kitchen
+corner sharply struck eleven. This was a late hour for those times,
+and a faint fear began to come upon them all. Could it be that Jim had
+really meant what he said? "Had he--" And the two women looked blankly
+at each other. Not a word had been uttered, but each felt the other's
+dread.
+
+The father rose and said with a well-affected yawn, "Guess likely
+Jim's went deown ter Uncle Will'amses, an' they thought as 't's so
+stormy he'd bes' not come back. So guess I'll jest go eout ter the
+shed and git some more peat, fur ter keep the fire."
+
+Thus leaving the mother and wife partially reassured, the old
+father slipped out and down the track, cut deeply in the sand by the
+one-horse carts, to "Uncle Will'amses," as fast as the storm would
+permit. But no Jim had been seen there; and still more anxiously the
+stout old man fought his way back against winds that seemed strong"
+enough to blow him like a feather over the cliff's edge, and against
+the spray which shot up from the beach below, smitten by the sounding
+surf, clear over the high top of Sankota Head.
+
+Reaching his door during a brief lull in the wind, he heard faintly
+but distinctly the booming of guns fired by a ship in distress. "It
+mus' be some vessil on the shoals, an' mos' likely Jim's heard her an'
+got some o' th' other boys, an' 's went off in 's boat ter help her.
+Poor soul!" With this comforting reflection the father cheered the
+watchers inside, who had grown fearfully anxious, as the clock had
+long ago struck for midnight.
+
+"We mus' build a fire on the Head ter light 'em," said the old man.
+"There hed oughter be a light'us here, but 's there ain't none, we
+mus' dew the bes' we kin,"
+
+So saying, he harnessed the horse--almost as old as himself--and with
+the aid of the two women loaded the sled with dry wood and started
+with it to the cliff, while the mother and daughter followed behind as
+best they might, struggling to keep alive without being set on fire
+by the coals in the iron pot which they carried between them. It was
+a weary half mile, wind, spray and rain all contending against the
+feeble folk who had come out to help back to land and home the brave
+fellows who had gone to succor the distressed. They made all the more
+sure that this was the case, because Jim's new boat, the pride and joy
+of his life, was not to be found at the spot where he had only that
+day drawn, it high above the reach of even such a storm as this, ready
+for building over it on the morrow its winter house of pine-boughs and
+turf.
+
+At last a fire was kindled; and leaving the women to watch it, old
+Stephen took several weary trips back to the cottage after fuel,
+making serious inroads upon a stock at the best not too large to meet
+the demands of the coming winter. The flame, fanned by the blast even
+more than dashed by the spray and rain, sprang upward, casting its
+ruddy lances of light backward over the sandy downs, destitute even
+then of tree or shrub to break the force of the gale, and forward over
+the frothing white tops and deep, black troughs of waves that seemed
+to the excited eyes of the watching women like so many separate fiends
+leaping upward and stretching out white hands to clutch helpless
+victims and hurry them to the hell beneath. And all the while the
+surf thundered at the foot of the trembling cliff. No form could be
+discovered through the darkness beyond the near neighborhood of the
+shore; and but for the flash of the gun, which was seen continually,
+though its sound was but seldom heard above the surf and the wind, the
+watchers would have thought there was no ship near.
+
+By and by the rain ceased, but there was no moon, and impenetrable
+wind-clouds still hid the stars. Out through the blackness of the
+night the flame-light quivered in long, bright streams over the
+endless lines of ever-advancing waves, but revealed to the watchers
+no ship, no boat, no tokens even of wreck, only the ceaseless reaching
+upward of the beckoning white hands; and the wind bore no sound, save
+at intervals the dull distant boom of the cannon. But ever the solemn
+surf thundered on the beach below, and the sand-cliff trembled and
+crumbled beneath its resounding blows.
+
+The old man, who, with a seaman's owl-like eyesight, kneeled intently
+gazing out through the darkness in the direction of the flash,
+suddenly exclaimed, "I don't un'erstan' it! That air ship hadn't
+oughter be in 'stress off where she is. She ain't on no shoal, nor
+nothin'. She's jest a-lyin' tew. An' I don't see no signs o' no boats
+nuther; an's fur's I kin see, them folks is a firin' off that air gun
+jest fur the musicalness on't. Blast 'em! Come, gals: we mought as
+well be walkin' along hum as ter stop a-yawpin' here in the wind an'
+spray, a-burnin' up the winter's kindlin' fur folks 'at's a-foolin' on
+us. 'Spesh'ly as I think she's a Britisher. Blast her!"
+
+The old Quaker was not accustomed to use strong language of any sort,
+but evidently the human nature in him was so powerful in this instance
+that he could not help indulging in the most emphatic admissible
+invective.
+
+But the mother and wife were not so easily satisfied. In their eyes
+the strange ship and all on board her were not of as much consequence
+as the unworthy missing Jim, whose fate they associated with it.
+Jim's boat, they said, was gone. No one could have taken her but Jim
+himself. He would never have put out on such a night as this save to
+go to the help of the distressed ship; and if he was on the water, the
+light burning on Sankota Head would guide him safely back. So, in the
+midst of spray and wind, the three kneeled on the cliff and kept the
+blaze alight till the rising dawn made it useless, when, to the dismay
+of the watchers, the ship hoisted sail and bore away. She showed no
+colors, but the old islander, once a whaler, declared that she was a
+British man-o'-war.
+
+But where was Jim? The unanswering surf still boomed at the foot of
+the cliff, though the height of the waves was rapidly diminishing, and
+the water was gradually assuming the peculiarly bland expression that
+often comes after a storm, reminding one of the cat that has "eaten
+the canary," but there was no sign of incoming boat or men.
+
+Chilled to the bone with the wind and cold sea-spray of the November
+night, and to the heart with sorrow and disappointment, the three
+returned to the lonely house. Running to meet them came Mary Allen,
+breathlessly crying, "Where's Eben and Jim?"
+
+Poor Sarah could not answer, but the brave old mother, a veteran in
+sorrows, replied with trembling lips, "We don't know anythin' o' thy
+brother, Mary; an' Jim hain't b'en hum sence las' night. His boat's
+gone, an' we thought he might ha' went out to help the ship that was
+a-firin' all night. But she's sailed off this mornin' all right; an'
+father, he says she was a Britisher an' undly a-firin' ter fool us
+folks. So I don't know nothin' about it," uttering the last words in a
+drearily hopeless tone that gave them exceeding pathos.
+
+For a moment Mary stood in dismay; then she cried wildly, "Oh, they're
+drowned, they're drowned! Jim come deown ter eour heouse las' night
+a-sayin' he'd heard the firin' o' a ship in 'stress, an' askin' Eb
+ter go with him an' help him git his boat eout, an' telled me ter run
+along deown to Zack Tumnaydoo's An' ax Zack an' Ellery ter go with
+'em. An' I did, an' that's the las' anybody's seen o' any one on 'em.
+Oh dear! oh dear!" And wringing her hands, the sobbing girl ran back
+as quickly as she had come to impart to her mother and sisters the
+full extent of her evil tidings.
+
+The cold, sad, desolate weeks and months that now rolled slowly on
+are to this day remembered on Nantucket as those of the "hard winter."
+Provisions were scarce, fuel was difficult to obtain, the harbor
+was frozen over, so that few fish could be taken there, and all
+communication with "the main" was cut off by British cruisers. In
+January the cherished old horse was killed because there was no longer
+hay to feed him, and even oats were "too precious to be fed to dumb
+beasts." In February the stalwart old Stephen lay grimly down to die,
+saying pityingly, "It's time, gals: I can't dew ye no more good by
+stayin'; an' I'm so tired."
+
+The day succeeding the silent funeral, where two women had dropped the
+few tears that were left them to shed, good old Thomas Macy came and
+took his daughter and her mother to his own home. And in windy, still
+frozen March the wail of a tiny baby was heard in the house.
+
+Under all the trouble the two brave women made no moan. Silently
+clinging together, never losing sight of each other for more than a
+few moments at a time, they yet said nothing of their greatest grief,
+that Jim should have disappeared with such unworthy words on his lips
+and thoughts in his heart, until, a few days after the baby's birth,
+Sarah said to her mother, "I know he's not dead. If he'd ha' died,
+he'd ha' come back and told me he was sorry. Fur I dew think he'd be
+sorry. Don't thee, mother?" And the mother nodded assent and smiled
+through her tears.
+
+But, in truth, they had a more substantial reason than poor Sarah's
+wistful fancy for thinking that Jim was living. When the ice broke up,
+his boat was found in a little cove, where it had floated right-side
+up, without any serious injury except the carrying away of the sails.
+Of course this discovery roused new hopes in the homes of the missing
+men. It did not "stand to reason" that four big strong, temperate
+young fellows, brought up to the hardy, amphibious island-life, had
+all fallen overboard, any more than it "stood to sense" that the boat
+had upset and then righted of itself. Besides, "none of the boy's
+corpuses had ever floated up." So the Tucketers took courage and
+felt sure that, whatever had become of the missing men, they were not
+drowned.
+
+But still the slow months came and went, till the summer and autumn
+and another winter had passed by; and patient old Rachel Starbuck grew
+daily a little quieter and a little grayer; and the brave young wife
+grew a little stronger to bear, but not a whit less loving or prone to
+suffer, and stately old Thomas Macy grew daily more gentle and pitying
+in his ways as he looked long at the winsome face of the happy, wee
+grandchild, that throve and crowed and tried to utter sweet little
+hesitating words as gayly as if the world had never a sin, a sorrow or
+a weakness in it.
+
+One day Sarah and her mother had carried the baby down to the small
+cottage at the back of the cliff, whither they went to attend to
+some little household matter; for, although they did not mention the
+subject, even to themselves, they still kept all there in readiness
+against Jim's coming home. Here, in the soft May sunshine, the
+red-frocked baby was sitting on the green turf step, playing with
+some "daffies," first of the season, which Sarah had plucked from the
+little garden in the rear. The mother and daughter were in the house,
+when both were alarmed by a scream from the usually merry child. A man
+had it closely clasped in his arms, kissing it and calling it between
+half-choked sobs his "own pretty, pretty baby." The man was thin,
+pock-marked, bald, and clad in a ragged uniform of a British sailor,
+but to the faithful, longing eyes of mother and wife there was no
+mistaking their Jim.
+
+It was long ere the story could be told, but at last they learned that
+on that sad November night Jim and his companions had gone out to the
+relief of the signaling ship. She was, as old Stephen had conjectured,
+a British man-o'-war. Being short of hands, and having on board as
+pilot a renegade native of the island, who knew where a ship could
+"lay-to" in safety, she had taken advantage of the storm to attract
+strong men within the range of her guns, then to command them to
+surrender, and thus to impress them into "His Majesty's service" as
+"able seamen."
+
+For a long time Jim had managed to keep alive his resentful feelings
+toward his wife, accusing of being the source of all his misfortunes
+the poor little woman who was loving and longing so sincerely for him.
+But when illness came he could hold out no longer. "I made up my mind
+then," said he, "that if ever I got hum agin, I'd go deown on my knees
+an' ax pardin' o' my Sairy."
+
+But she had never been angry, and was now only too thankful that Jim
+and his friends had escaped safely.
+
+"Ah!" said Jim in telling his adventures, "we hed a clus run on 't,
+Sairy, but thee'd better believe that air British navy's a fust-rate
+place fur larnin' a feller ter know when he's well off. An' Sairy,
+when I longed so fur thee an' mother, an' thought o' what a wretch I
+was to speak so ter the dearest little woman in the world, I c'u'd see
+that I hadn't knowed when I was well off."
+
+Jim's was not an unselfish kind of repentance, but it was the best it
+was in his nature to offer, and Sarah had long ago learned that her
+Jim was not the saint and hero she had once dreamed, but only a weak
+and common-place man; and she asked for nothing higher from him. To
+his best she had a right, and with that she was content, smiling on
+her husband with eyes full of a love as tender and true as when in the
+old days she had gazed down upon her lover from the cliff-head, while
+the mother laid her hand softly on his scanty hair, and said solemnly,
+"May God keep thee thus, my son!" adding, after a moment's pause,
+"But I wish thy fayther was here to see." And a tender silence for
+the memory of the rough but kindly-natured old man fell over them all;
+while the baby, reconciled to the stranger, poked her little fingers
+in the marks on his face, and cried because she could not get them
+off.
+
+ETHEL C. GALE.
+
+
+
+
+AT THE OLD PLANTATION.
+
+TWO PAPERS.--II.
+
+
+The eastern sky is just beginning to assume that strange neutral tint
+which tells of the approaching dawn when we open the heavy hall door
+and step out into the crisp, frosty air. No moonlight hunting for me,
+with the cold, deceitful light making phantom pools of every white
+sand-patch in the road, and ghostly logs and boulders of every
+wavering shadow. You are always gathering up your reins for leaps
+over imaginary fence-panels, which your horse goes through like a
+nightmare, and always unprepared for the real ones, which he clears
+when you are least expecting it. If the cry bears down on you, and you
+rein up for a view, the fox is sure to dodge by invisibly under cover
+of some dark little bay, and you get home too late for a morning nap
+and too early for the breakfast, which you have been longing after for
+the last two hours. Then, too, your horse has lost his night's rest,
+and will be jaded for two days in consequence. No: the time to throw
+the dogs off for a fox-hunt is that weird hour which the negroes
+significantly call "gray-day:" it is the surest time to strike a
+trail, and by the time Reynard begins to dodge and double there will
+be plenty of light to ride by and to get a good view. If the fox gets
+away or the cover is drawn without a find, you are always sure of
+having your spirits raised by the cheerful sunrise: by the time you
+get home, tired and spattered, the ladies are down stairs ready to
+make pretty exclamations over the brush or to chaff you pleasantly
+for your want of success; and then there is just time to get your hair
+brushed and your clothes changed before the mingled aromas of fried
+sausage and old Java put the keen edge on your already whetted
+appetite.
+
+A ride across country after a rattling pack of English hounds on
+a thoroughbred hunter with a field of red-coated squires is an
+experience which few hunters on this side of the water have ever
+enjoyed, but with the incidents of which every reader of English
+novels is familiar. The chase of the red fox in Maryland or Virginia
+has some features in common with the British national sport, but that
+of the gray fox in the more southern States differs materially from
+both. The latter animal is smaller and possessed of less speed and
+endurance than his more northern brother, but he is far more common
+and quite as cunning. He makes shorter runs, but over very different
+ground, always keeping in the woods and dodging about like a rabbit,
+so that a different style of horse and a different method of riding
+are required for his capture. There is no risk of breaking your neck
+over a five-barred gate or a stone wall, but you may be hung in a
+grapevine, or knocked out of the saddle by a low limb, or have your
+knee scraped against a tree-trunk. It is true you may catch your fox
+in twenty minutes, and three hours is an extraordinary run, but then
+you may catch four or five between daylight and ten o'clock of an
+autumn morning.
+
+The horses stretch their necks toward the stables and whinny as they
+think of the bundles of untasted fodder: the dogs require no notes
+of the horn to rouse them, for they know the signs and are already
+capering about in eager merriment, throwing their heads into the air
+occasionally to utter a long and musical bay. This wakes up the
+curs about the negro-yard, and their barking stirs up the geese, the
+combined chorus rousing all the cocks in the various poultry-houses,
+so that we ride off amid a hub-bub of howling, cackling, neighing and
+crowing which would awaken the Seven Sleepers. We are first at the
+meet, and the old woods ring with the mellow, winding notes of
+our horns--no twanging brass reeds in the mouth-pieces, but honest
+cow-horn bugles, which none but a true hunter can blow. The hounds
+grow wild at the cheering sound, and howl through every note of the
+canine gamut; the echoes catch the strain and fling it from brake to
+bay; the dying cadence strengthens into an answering blast, and the
+party is soon increased to half a dozen bold riders and twenty eager
+dogs. Venus, the beautiful "flag-star of heaven," is just toning her
+brilliancy into harmony with the pale light which creeps slowly up
+from the eastern horizon, and some wakeful crow in the pine-thicket
+gives an answering caw to the goblin laugh of the barred owl in the
+cypress, as we leap our horses into a field of sedge and cheer on the
+dogs to their work. For half an hour we ride in silence save the
+words of encouragement to the hounds, which are snuffing about
+unsuccessfully and whipping the hoar-frost with their tails from the
+dry yellow stems of the grass. Now and then some eager young dog opens
+on the trail of a rabbit which has started from its form, but the
+crack of a whip restrains him, and the other hounds pay no attention
+to him. Suddenly a sharp, quick yelp comes from the farthest corner of
+the field, and the older dogs stop instantly and raise their heads
+to listen. Hark to old Blucher! There he is again, and the whole pack
+give tongue and dash off to the call which never deceives them. We
+catch a glimpse of the old fellow's white throat as he trots about in
+a zigzag course, poking his tan muzzle into every clump of tall grass
+and giving tongue occasionally as he sniffs the cold trail. Presently
+a long, quavering cry comes from old Firefly; again and again Blucher
+opens more and more eagerly; another and another dog takes it up, and
+the trot quickens into a lope. The trail grows warmer as they follow
+the line of fence, and just as we settle ourselves in the saddle for
+a run it all stops and the dogs are at fault. But Blucher is hard to
+puzzle and knows every trick of his cunning game. Running a few panels
+down the fence, he rears up on it and snuffs the top rail, and then,
+with a yell of triumph, dashes over it into the woods, with the whole
+pack in full cry at his heels. A ringing cheer announces that the
+fox has "jumped," and the field scatters in pursuit. Two only, the
+subscriber being one, follow the dogs with a flying leap. Some dash
+off in search of a low panel, others to head off the cry through the
+distant gate, while others stop to pull the rails and make a gap.
+For ten minutes we keep well behind the hounds, with a tight rein and
+heads bent to avoid the hanging oak limbs. But the fox has turned and
+plunged into a brake which no horse can go through, and we draw up
+and listen to decide where we can head him off with the greatest
+certainty; then turn in different directions and spur through the
+young black-jacks. Ah! there he goes, with dragging brush and open
+mouth, and the pack, running close enough together to be covered by
+a table-cloth, not sixty yards behind him. I am in at the death this
+time, for he cannot run a hundred yards farther, and the brush is
+mine, for there's no one else in sight. With a savage burst the dogs
+dash after him into the thicket and then--dead silence, not a yelp,
+as they scatter and run backward and forward, nosing under every dead
+leaf and up the trunk of every tree. The fault is complete, and the
+young dogs give it up and lie down panting, while the older hounds try
+every expedient to puzzle out the trail and take up the scent again.
+He certainly has not treed, there is neither earth nor hollow to hide
+him, and yet the scent has gone! And it never came back. If any reader
+can tell what became of that fox, he is a wiser man than I. Certain
+it is that we never heard of him again; and for aught I know to the
+contrary, he may have been that identical Japanese animal which turns
+into tea-kettles and vanishes in puffs of smoke. It does not take
+long, however, to make another find, and we go home after a three
+hours' chase with two fine brushes and appetites which would ruin any
+hotel-keeper in a week.
+
+After breakfast a walk to the cotton-houses would be in order, for the
+successful planter is he who trusts nothing to the overseer which can
+have his personal supervision, and he must excuse himself to such of
+his guests as prefer a cigar by the library fire to an hour spent in
+observing the details of plantation work. In the days of which I write
+horse-power was preferred to steam, and negro-power to both; and few
+planters of the fine black-seed cotton could be convinced that any
+"power-gin" could be invented which would not injure the long, silky
+"staple" or fibre of the lint. The old-time "foot-gins" were used
+exclusively, and the gin-house was a place of curious interest to all
+visitors. In one end of the long room was the huge pile of seed-cotton
+which was to pass through the rollers as the first step toward
+its preparation for the market. How simply does a sudden stroke of
+inventive genius solve a problem which wise men have regarded as
+insoluble! Not much more than a century ago a commission of practical
+English _savans_ discouraged the cultivation of a textile fabric
+which "might be useful but for the impossibility of clearing it of the
+seeds!" But the foot-gin appeared on the scene, and indigo went down
+before cotton. Ranged along the walls of the room are some twenty
+rough wooden frames, looking like a compromise between a straw-cutter
+and a sewing-machine, each furnished with two strong rollers operated
+by a treadle and acting precisely like those of a clothes-wringer.
+Behind each of these machines stands a man or woman with one
+ever-moving foot upon the treadle-board, feeding the seed-cotton from
+a large bag to the greedy rollers, which seize it and pass the lint
+in fleecy rolls into another bag prepared for it, while the seed, like
+shirt-buttons touched by the afore-mentioned wringer, rolls off from
+the hither side to form a pile upon the floor. Thence it will be
+carted to the seed-house to be rotted into manure for the next crop,
+there being no better fertilizer for cotton than a compost of which
+it forms the base. A portion of it, however, will be reserved to
+be boiled with cow-peas and fed to the milch-cattle, no food being
+superior to its rich, oily kernel in milk-producing qualities. The
+negro mothers use it largely in decoction as a substitute for cocoa,
+and the white mothers under similar circumstances having it parched
+and ground like coffee, when it makes an exceedingly palatable and
+nutritious beverage. The "green-seed" or short-staple variety is far
+inferior to the black for this purpose, and produces white, sticky,
+cottony-looking butter; indeed, most dairywomen insist that "you
+can pick the lint out of it." The ginned cotton is carried to the
+platforms, where it is "specked" by the women--leaves, dirt and other
+impurities being picked out by hand--and spread out to dry and bleach
+in the sun; thence we follow it to the "moting-room," where it is
+thoroughly and finally overhauled, every minute particle of dirt or
+other foreign matter and every flock of stained and discolored cotton
+being picked out. This room is always in the second story, and at one
+end of it a circular hole is cut in the floor; through this hole hangs
+the bag of strong, close gunny-cloth, very different from the coarse
+covering which suffices for the lower grades of "short-staple,"
+supported by a stout iron hoop larger by some inches than the hole
+in the floor, and to which the end of the bag is securely sewed. The
+cotton is thrown into this bag and packed with an iron rammer by a man
+who stands in it, his weight assisting in the packing, each bag being
+made to contain upward of four hundred pounds.
+
+Everything seeming to go on as it ought and all the necessary orders
+and directions being given, we walk out to take a look at the poultry.
+There are fowls in abundance and superabundance, but our kind host
+is most proud of his flock of three hundred white turkeys; and a
+beautiful sight they are, scattered over the grassy lawn. Ranging, as
+these fine birds will, over a mile or two of woods abounding in their
+wild brethren, convenient mistakes were often made by the pineland
+gunners, whose rifles were always ready to pick off a stray gobbler
+without waiting to know whether he was wild or tame, and so the old
+gentleman introduced the white stock to prevent the possibility of
+such errors. For a similar reason no ducks were raised except those
+which wear top-knots. It is no unusual thing for wild gobblers and
+mallards to come up with the tame stock to the poultry-yard, and
+the bronze feathers and shy habits of many of the young turkeys show
+evidence of their free parentage.
+
+It is just impossible for a city man to remain indoors in the country
+with the broad fields, the shady woods, the bright blue sky and
+the merry pipe of birds calling him out to active exercise and
+unaccustomed sport. He is sure to think himself a sportsman, even if
+uncertain whether the shot or powder should first enter the gun;
+and if an old hand at the trigger, his uneasiness while in the house
+becomes almost painful. Every article of hunting-gear is
+overhauled again and again; boots are greased, shot-pouches filled,
+powder-charges remeasured, guns cleaned and ramrods oiled; and I
+once had a fine Manton--as sweet a piece as ever came to the
+shoulder--almost ruined by an eager friend, who, after going through
+all this during a stormy morning, insisted on taking off the locks
+and triggers, just to while away the time. The introduction of the
+breech-loader most happily obviates all this, since such lagging hours
+may now be occupied in charging and crimping cartridges. But there is
+nothing to detain us longer to-day: the "Bob Whites" are waiting for
+us among the pea-vines, and the snipe among the tussocky grass of the
+old rice-field. Di and Sancho have caught sight of the guns, and are
+capering about in the wildest excitement, for it is a long time since
+they have seen anything more "gamey" than a city pigeon. Birding over
+good dogs is the very poetry of field-sports. The silken-haired setter
+and the lithe pointer are as far the superiors of the half-savage
+hound as the Coldstream Guards are of the Comanches. The hound has no
+affection and but little intelligence, and the qualities which make
+him valuable are purely those of instinct. The long, hungry cry with
+which he follows the deer and the sharp, angry yelp which he utters
+when chasing the fox tell plainly that the motives which prompt him
+thus to use his delicate nose and unwearying powers of endurance are
+precisely those which carry the Indian to the hunt or on the war-path.
+He hunts for any master who will cheer him on, has no tactics but to
+stick to the trail and give tongue as long as the scent will lie, and
+must be whipped off the game when caught to prevent his devouring
+it on the spot. The setter, on the other hand, is intelligent,
+affectionate and faithful. If properly trained and reared, he loves
+his master and will hunt for no one else, learns to understand human
+language to an astonishing degree and exhibits reasoning powers of no
+mean order. He hunts purely for sport, understands the habits of his
+game, and regulates his tactics accordingly, and delivers the birds
+uninjured to his master, sometimes controlling his appetite and
+carrying the game long distances for this purpose. I have frequently
+discovered that my dogs, brought up in the house, understood words
+which had never been taught them. My old favorite Di always answers
+the dinner-bell and stands near my chair for odd scraps. Being
+somewhat annoyed one day by her eagerness, I said playfully, "Go to
+the kitchen and tell Annie to feed you." She at once rushed off and
+scratched the kitchen door until the girl opened it, and then stood by
+the tray of scraps looking at her and wagging her tail. Wanting one of
+my little sons one evening, I said, "Di, go find the boys!" She rushed
+off, looking and smelling about their usual haunts, but returned
+unsuccessful. I scolded and sent her a second and third time, with the
+same result: a few minutes after she came quietly behind me with the
+_hat_ of my youngest boy in her mouth: she had taken it from a table
+in the passage, and her wagging tail said plainly, "Will this answer?
+It's the best I can do." The same dog will creep carefully upon
+partridges, and stand as if cut in marble lest they should fly, but
+will chase turkeys at full speed, giving tongue like a hound, and then
+lie still for hours while they are called up and shot, nor will she
+ever confound the different habits of the two birds or the different
+methods of hunting them.
+
+Such are the highly-bred and intelligent animals which are eagerly
+waiting for us to-day--Di, with her white coat, soft as wavy silk, her
+chestnut ears and one spot on the back alone marring its snowy purity;
+Sancho, jet black, with "featherings" like a King Charles spaniel.
+They are over the fence already, and tearing about the field so
+recklessly in the exuberance of their joy that they must certainly
+startle any game which may be there. The timid little field-buntings
+glide away on silent wing through the grass; the meadow-larks rise
+with gentle flappings and sail off with that easy flight so tempting
+to very young wing-shots; now and then a flock of doves whistle off
+too far for a certain shot, and clouds of crow-blackbirds rise with
+hoarse chirps and seek less public feeding-grounds; a rabbit dashes
+off from a brier-patch and both dogs rush pell-mell at his heels, but
+a single note from the whistle brings them to a sudden halt and makes
+them look thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Off they go again, as
+wild as deer; but suddenly Di's whole action changes: crouching to the
+ground and beating her sides rapidly with her tail, she runs hither
+and thither, snuffing eagerly in the grass. Now Sancho comes up and
+catches the cold trail, for a covey has certainly been in that place
+to-day. Most probably they rose from the spot, frightened by the swoop
+of a hawk, and made for the nearest cover, for the dogs can do nothing
+with the scent. But that little whiff of the exciting effluvia has
+brought them down to their work, and a beautiful sight it is as they
+quarter the ground with quickly-beating tails and noses high in the
+air, crossing and recrossing the wind in zigzag lines and concentric
+circles, hunting the ground so closely that no trail, however cold,
+can escape their keen sense of smell. A wave of the hand to Sancho,
+and the sagacious fellow is off toward the far corner of the field,
+when suddenly Di stops in mid-career with a jerk that must try every
+sinew in her frame. The birds are right under her nose, and she dares
+not move a muscle, but stands as if changed into stone, her eyes
+starting with excitement, her nostrils expanded, her feathery stern
+quivering stiffly out behind and every line of her figure standing out
+like whipcord. "Toho!" The black dog catches the sound and turns his
+head: he sees her rigid form, and backs her where he stands as firmly
+as if he too had the scent. There is no hurry, for the dogs are true
+as steel and will stand there as long as the frightened birds lie,
+while the latter, obedient to the instinct of sudden terror, will
+cower where they are for an hour, with their heads drawn back, their
+mottled breasts pressed to the earth and their legs gathered under
+them, ready to spring into the air. We cock our guns, agree to shoot
+respectively at the birds which go right or left or straight before
+us, and then advance to flush the covey ourselves. The staunch dog
+never winces as we pass her: two paces, three, a sudden rush and whirr
+as of many wings, five sharp reports in quick succession and four
+birds down! Another, wild with fright, rises straight up for twenty
+feet and darts off behind us, but his beautiful head droops as the
+crack of my last barrel resounds on the air and a cloud of feathers
+floats downward. The shot has struck him in the line of flight, and he
+goes to the ground with a bounce, some thirty yards away, as if hurled
+there by a vigorous arm. The well-trained dogs come to the "Down!
+charge!" while we reload our guns, and then seek the dead birds and
+bring them carefully in to us.
+
+Leaving the broken covey to be worked up on our return, we push on to
+another part of the large pea-field, where, perched upon the topmost
+limb of a tall dead pine, we see a red-tailed hawk engaged in quiet
+observation. There is no surer sign of birds, but it takes close
+hunting to find them, for they dare not move about while their savage
+enemy is on the watch. As we approach the hawk stretches out his neck,
+jerks his wings two or three times and oscillates his ungainly body,
+and then, with a loud scream of angry disappointment, he is off. The
+tree stands in a little piece of sedge, not far from a dense growth of
+pine-saplings, and we know that the moment the hawk left his perch the
+birds started for the cover, and our only chance for shooting is to
+head them off and turn them. The dogs have struck the running trail,
+and their action is totally different from what it was with the first
+covey. Crouching flat to the ground, they glide after the startled
+birds with a snake-like movement, now stopping, now running swiftly
+in. Suddenly Di leaves the trail and dashes off at full speed to the
+right. Making a wide circuit, she skirts the pines, and, turning short
+round, comes to a firm stand in the very face of the retreating covey,
+while Sancho lies prone with his nose between his paws. It is an
+old trick of hers thus to "huddle" running birds, and we follow her
+example, come up behind her, and get six with four barrels as the
+birds rise in a bunch.
+
+But if the reader follows us too closely, he will have all the fatigue
+of a long tramp without the compensation of healthful excitement
+and full game-pockets. Thirty-five fine birds in a pile on the
+pantry-table offer a capital _raison d'�tre_ for weary feet and soiled
+fingers when we reach home just in time for the supper-bell. There
+have been some arrivals while we were gone, for Christmas is near at
+hand, and the old house is filling up with guests. To-morrow the "St.
+John's Hunting-Club" has its monthly deer-hunt and dinner at Black
+Oak, and we need a good night's rest to prepare us for an experience
+the omission of which would render imperfect any truthful reminiscence
+of life at the old plantation.
+
+During the months spent at the plantation there is little social
+visiting among the gentlemen, and, except on Sundays and occasions
+of public meetings, the various local clubs offer their only
+opportunities for seeing each other, Another object--at least, under
+the old _r�gime_--was to bring together those who occupied somewhat
+different social positions. Formerly the clubs were strictly
+exclusive, and, indeed, this feature was never lost, but in every
+community there would be some _novi homines_, clever men many of them,
+whom the old gentry were quite willing to recognize, though a marked
+difference in culture prevented family visiting. These could be
+admitted to membership, and at the club-house could be met on equal
+terms. The hunting feature was always preserved, though few of the
+older members ever joined in the sport. Under the rules there was a
+place, a day and an hour for the weekly meet; and I remember when it
+was a safe thing to be at "the White Bridge" on the Santee Canal any
+Saturday morning at nine o'clock. Somebody was sure to be there with
+dogs and driver, prepared for a "wallet-hunt"--i.e., an all-day hunt
+with wallets at the crupper well filled with hunter's cheer. Once a
+month the club met for dinner, each member "finding" in turn, and
+on that day a single drive, or at most two, was all that could be
+enjoyed. The club-house was a plain frame building in the woods, with
+a huge fireplace at each end, heavy stationary pine table extending
+the length of the room, and broad soft-pine benches. The dishes,
+wines, liquors and cigars were all specified in the rules, the
+finder being allowed two extra dishes at will, and supplying all the
+crockery, cutlery and glass. The kitchen was a rough shed close to the
+cool and shaded spring of pure, clear water. Being myself but a guest,
+I have not the privilege of extending an invitation to the reader;
+so, by his leave, we will drop the present tense and I will assume the
+part of _raconteur_. How vividly do the scenes of that day come back
+through the highways of memory, crowded as they are with experiences
+of more than twenty varied years! As I rode up to the bridge on that
+bright December morning I found a party which promised rare sport.
+There was Kit Gillam with his crooked nose, and Tom Clifton with his
+deadly Manton and fine cry of dogs, and cheery Jack Parker, who hunted
+only for the good company, and whose gun was as likely as not to be
+unloaded when the deer came out to him. Two drives were decided on
+which might be relied on for shooting, and yet were small enough to
+give ample time for reaching the club-house before dinner.
+
+As we rode toward our stands I thought it a good chance to settle
+a point which had long excited my curiosity. "Kit," said I, "I have
+often wondered how your nose got out of plumb. What caused it?"
+
+"When I was a little bit of a boy I fell down and stepped on it."
+
+This very satisfactory explanation brought us to our ground, and
+we were soon at our respective stands and listening eagerly for the
+trail-notes of the old hounds. The deer have regular runs, from which
+they rarely deviate, and which do not vary in the course of years.
+These are guarded by the standers while the game is driven down
+from the opposite direction. A large drive may have a dozen of these
+stands, by one of which the deer will almost certainly pass, but which
+one nobody knows. Quiet is absolutely necessary and a cigar is fatal
+to sport, but concealment is useless, as these animals see imperfectly
+in daylight.
+
+I had not to wait long before I caught the distant cheering and
+hand-clapping of the drivers as they encouraged the dogs to hunt.
+In the quiet of the sombre woods every sound was distinctly audible.
+Suddenly three or four quick, sharp yelps brought my gun to the
+"ready," and the hammers clicked as a burst of music followed. But
+above the clamor of the hounds came the crack of the driver's whip,
+and his voice, mellowed by distance, was heard in angry tones: "Come
+back yah, you good-for-nuttin', wutless lee' rabbit-dog, you! I sway
+maussa ha' for shoot da' puppy 'fore he spile ebery dog in de pack!"
+
+Soon, however, came another open, deep and musical, and there was no
+mistaking old Drummer's trail-note: then Killbuck joined in, and then
+the cry became general. For a while the broken, quavering tongue tells
+that the dogs are only trailing and the deer is still cowering in his
+bed, or perhaps has sneaked out of the drive at the first sound of the
+horn. Hark! what a burst! They had "started" within two hundred yards
+of me. The next moment there was a rustle of leaves, and a yearling
+doe dashed by. I am not a dead shot, and have nothing to say about
+that first barrel, but the second sent her down and over with a roll
+that almost broke her neck. The dogs were stopped and the deer
+thrown over the pommel of one of the boys, and we rode on to try the
+Brunswick swamp. The boy had assured us that "One pow'ful big buck bin
+in day (there) las' night. I see all he track gwine in, an' I nebber
+see none come out."
+
+We were soon strung along the narrow dam across which the game was to
+be forced by the drivers, who had to make their way through an ugly
+bog among cypress "knees" and dense brier-patches. Jack Parker stood
+next to me, fidgeting about uneasily, because it was against rules to
+talk on stand. Jack's prominent feature was his nose, and he had
+an incorrigible trick of blowing it "out loud" whenever there was a
+particular reason for keeping perfectly quiet. The dogs had begun
+to open, and their loose, scattering trail-notes indicated turkeys.
+Looking directly before me, I saw seven noble gobblers stepping
+cautiously toward my stand. Their glossy breasts glittered with
+coppery lustre in the straggling sunbeams as, with drooping wings and
+expanded tails, they advanced, looking fearfully about and uttering
+their low alarm-notes, "Quit! quit! quit!" Three more steps will make
+a certain shot, and--out rang Jack's nasal clarion, loud and clear as
+the _morte_ at a fox-chase. I looked round in horror, and there
+stood my hunter complacently eying me and flourishing his white silk
+handkerchief, while his gun leaned against a tree ten paces distant:
+"Expect I'd better go back to my stand, eh? Are those dogs barking at
+a deer?"
+
+I jumped to my feet for a snap-shot at the old gobbler which flew over
+me, making a clear miss. Bang! bang! went two more guns; a woodcock
+whistled up from the bog and two swamp-rabbits dashed into the
+brier. The dogs came out, shaking the water from their coats, and the
+spattered drivers rode through the creek. There was not a feather to
+show, and of course everybody was "down" on Jack, but with an air of
+deep injury he put it off on me with the question, "Why didn't you
+tell me the turkeys were coming? How can a fellow help having a cold?"
+
+We reached the club-house just in time to take our seats as dinner was
+served, and were in capital condition to enjoy the rich mutton, the
+fat turkey, the juicy home-cured ham and the rare old madeira which
+graced the board. This last was a specialty with the gentlemen of
+those days, and probably no cellars in the world could boast choicer
+vintage than the "Newton & Gordon" and "Old Leacock" which cheered the
+table of that "hunting-club." There were stronger liquors, too, though
+these were chiefly used as appetizers before dinner. The moderate use
+of brandy was universal, but the drunkenness which blots these days of
+prohibitory laws was comparatively rare. Few ever left the club-house
+"disguised" by liquor except the young men, who then, as now and
+always, would occasionally indulge in a "frolic." With the clearing of
+the board came the regular and volunteer toasts, and then an hour of
+"crop-talk" and "horse-talk" and hunting-stories over the wine and
+cigars. With the departure of the older members came the inevitable
+quarter-race, with its accompaniment of riding feats which would have
+done credit to a Don Cossack. The equestrian performance was commenced
+by Kit Gillam (who now dismounts and leads over every little
+ditch) forcing his active chestnut up the wooden steps and into
+the club-room, and rearing him on the dining-table. Then came a
+leaping-match over a ten-railed fence, resulting in the barking of
+some shins and the demolition of sundry panels of rail. Joe Keating,
+the wildest rider I ever knew, had emptied his tumbler too often, and
+insisted on running his horse home through the woods. An hour after
+he was overtaken trudging along the road, perfectly sober, with the
+saddle on his shoulders and the bridle over his arm.
+
+"Why, Joe, where's your horse?"
+
+"Dead!" was the laconic reply.
+
+Sure enough. He had run full against a huge pine, and the horse had
+gone down with a broken skull. He never tried it again.
+
+Christmas Eve has come at last, and the old plantation is in all its
+glory. Carriage after carriage has deposited its freight of blooming
+girls and merry-eyed children at the broad, open hall-door. There is
+not a vacant stall in the stables, nor an unoccupied bedroom among all
+the seventeen of the spacious mansion. The broad dinner-table is
+set diagonally in the long dining-room, and to-morrow, at least, the
+guests will have to take two turns at filling its twenty seats, while
+the children go through the same manoeuvre in the pantry. Where they
+will all sleep to-night is a mystery which none can unravel save the
+busy, hospitable "lady of the manor;" but it makes little
+difference, for there will be little sleeping done. The day passes
+in riding-parties and rowing-parties and similar amusements, as
+each freely follows the bent of his inclination. "Brass," the negro
+fiddler, has been summoned, and "Newport" comes with his stirrup and
+steel for the "triangle" accompaniment, and the merry feet of the
+dancers are soon keeping time to the homely but inspiriting music. The
+"German" and the "Boston" have not usurped the places of the old-time
+cotillon, quadrille and Virginia reel, and the dance is often varied
+by romping games of "Blindman's Buff," "Move-House" and "Stage-Coach,"
+in which old and young unite with equal zest.
+
+But this is not the limit of the fun. From time immemorial Christmas
+Eve has been licensed for the performance of all sorts of tricks,
+and demure little faces are flitting about convulsed by the effort to
+conceal the merry sense of mischief. The stockings are duly hung for
+Saint Nicholas, and the holly, with its glossy leaves and scarlet
+berries, stands ready to be planted in the parlor, to bloom to-morrow
+into all kinds of rich flowers and gift-fruit. At nine o'clock the
+work of arranging the Christmas tree begins. The ladies retire, and
+after a quiet smoke by the roaring hall-fire the gentlemen follow
+suit. To bed, but not to sleep. Jack Parker is the first man ready,
+and bounces into the best bed to secure the softest place; but the
+bars have been skillfully removed, and he is the centre of a rather
+mixed pile on the floor. I feel another, to be sure that all is right,
+and slip cozily between the sheets, but some graceless little wretch
+has placed a walking-cane "athwart-ships," which nearly breaks my
+back. None escape. Some find their sheets strewed with chaff or
+cockle-burs, some find no sheets at all. At midnight a fearful roar
+comes from the girls' room, followed by pretty shrieks and terrible
+confusion; but it is only the old Cochin rooster, which was slyly shut
+up in the empty chimney-place before they retired, indulging in his
+first crow.
+
+Daylight puts an end to all sleep, for the boys are on the piazza
+ready to welcome Christmas with innumerable packages of fire-crackers.
+We rise to find our pantaloons sewed up, our boots stuffed with wet
+cotton, our tooth-brushes dusted with quinine and our _caf� noir_
+sweetened with salt. These practical jokes are all taken in good
+part and made to contribute to the jollity of the season. At
+the breakfast-table lumps of cracked marble serve admirably for
+loaf-sugar, except that the hottest coffee will not dissolve them, and
+boiled eggs tempt the appetite only to disappoint with their sawdust
+filling. Then all assemble on the piazza to witness the merriment
+of the crowd of negroes who have assembled to claim little gifts of
+tobacco and sugar and to receive the annual glass of whisky which a
+time-honored custom bestows. The liquor is served in a wine-glass, and
+swallowed eagerly by men, women and boys from ten years old upward.
+Then they disperse to get their portion of the Christmas beef which
+has been slaughtered for their special benefit, and we prepare for
+service at the parish church, which stands among the shadows of the
+old forest oaks an easy walk from the house. There the solemn services
+temper and soften, but do not check or lessen, the joy and good-will
+which so well become the season, and which find their appropriate
+manifestation in all kinds of innocent amusement. The religious and
+the social observances of the day react each upon the other, and
+harmonize most admirably in the impressions which they produce. The
+interchange of gifts and tokens around the Christmas tree follows
+most appropriately, and the Christmas feast is marked by profuse
+hospitality and keen enjoyment unmarred by riot or excess.
+
+Ah, well! there are piles of dusty memories in the old cockloft still
+untouched, but I shall rummage no more to-night. The scenes which have
+floated past me with the wreathing smoke of my cigar are green and
+fragrant to me with a freshness which time can never blight, but they
+never can harden into reality again for any mortal experience. They
+have gone into the irretrievable past with a state of things which
+some may regret and others rejoice in, and well will it be if the new
+_r�gime_ shall supply their places with other pictures which twenty
+years hence it may be no less pleasant to remember.
+
+ROBERT WILSON.
+
+
+
+
+OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
+
+A GERMAN AGRICULTURAL FAIR.
+
+
+From the 27th to the 30th of September all Stuttgart flocks to
+Cannstatt for the _Volksfest_; and this year every good W�rtemberger
+was bound to feel an additional interest in the f�te on account of
+the opening ceremony, the inauguration of a statue to the late king,
+Wilhelm I.--and "well beloved," one is tempted to add from the way
+in which his people still speak of him. "The old king" and "this one"
+they say with an inflection of voice anything but flattering to
+the latter. Our landlady assures us that let the weather look as
+threatening as it would, the sun always contrived to burst out when in
+former times the late king rode into the arena to give the prizes; and
+she is evidently by no means certain it will not pour all three days
+of the fair this year. However, to judge from the skies, "this one" is
+not so bad as he might be: the sun shines propitious on him too, and
+consequently on us as we set forth to see what we can see. The second
+is the great day, as the prizes are then distributed; but already on
+Monday the booths and shows were on the field, and Cannstatt was gay
+with banners and wreaths and garlands of green. The carpenters were
+still hard at work hammering at seats for us to occupy next day,
+but the wonderful triumphal arch stood quite completed and worthy of
+sincere admiration. No one knows who has not seen it worked into an
+architectural design how beautiful a string of onions can be, how
+gorgeous a row of vegetable-marrows, how delicate a cluster of
+turnips. It sounds puerile, but it was lovely nevertheless. Imagine a
+temple-like construction all composed of odorous pine, with an arched
+portal on either hand, and then every line and curve, every niche and
+pillar and balustrade, defined with glowing fruit. It was looped in
+festoons and hung in tassels of red and white and gold: the arms of
+W�rtemberg even were traced in yellow corn, while above it all rose
+a graceful column, a mosaic from base to summit of every fruit that
+autumn can bring to perfection.
+
+That was the great show: after that, mammoth cucumbers and carrots or
+rows of agricultural implements did not detain us long. The next best
+thing was to see the booths and the crowd on the outskirts of the
+exhibition. There the circus was in full blast, and triumphant,
+brazen-throated opposition to all smaller attractions that had
+ventured into that neighborhood. The performing dogs in red petticoats
+were reduced to making an appearance before their tent to entice
+spectators, and Harlequin and Columbine had to shout themselves hoarse
+inviting people to come in and split with laughter for sixpence. Those
+who did not aspire to a seat under painted canvas gathered round a
+melancholy bear dancing a _pas seul_ on the grass with heartbroken
+gravity. Then came the _Sch�tzhallen_, where the marksmen stationed
+themselves three feet from the target and cracked away at it with no
+other visible effect than that produced on a monkey doing its tricks
+close by: at every shot the poor little creature stopped fiddling and
+looked over its shoulder with a distressed air of "If I'm not hit this
+time!" Hand-organs, penny trumpets and rattles quite drowned the voice
+of a street-songstress with a large assortment of vocal music before
+her, from which she was giving the public a selection. Whether the
+songs had any reference to the pictures that formed her background we
+did not discover, but, at all events, the latter were tragic in the
+extreme. "The twenty-four-year-old murderer of his mother and six
+brothers and sisters" was there portrayed in a neat suit of black,
+with a hatchet in his hand and a very irresolute expression of
+countenance, while the various members of his family, seen through
+the open bedroom doors, awaited their fate in peaceful slumber. The
+booths, with toys, gingerbread, sausages, cheese and light literature
+tastefully intermingled, went on and on like the restaurants that
+lined each side of the long avenue. Around primitive tables family
+parties clinked foaming glasses and hailed with demonstrative
+hospitality any stray cousin who chanced that way. In one of the last
+of these improvised _Trinkhallen_ we came upon a young man and maiden
+who had the place quite to themselves. Her brown parasol kept the
+sun off them both, and it was of no sort of consequence that they had
+nothing more interesting than the back of a shed to look at. Future
+prospects were the only ones they cared for: the present had no need
+of anything but a faint beeriness, conducive to day-dreaming.
+
+As we get into the carriage again our coachman says we must see the
+new statue. Accordingly, we drive through the town and halt before it
+in the square. It is very fine, glowing like gold from the mint.
+The king sits his charger well, and gazes majestically at nothing in
+particular: still, one must be a little critical, and we imagine the
+horse's tail is not quite right. But then is not the whisk of a tail
+in bronze almost impossible to conceive of? If the artist suffers no
+severer censure than that, he will probably call himself a happy
+man. The inscription on the pedestal of the statue reads, "From his
+grateful people." High and low have contributed to it, and gladly.
+"That was a man!" says our driver. He was a soldier under him, and
+knows. And in fact the old king seems to have been always doing
+something for the country, so that the gratitude is not without a
+cause. The inhabitants of Cannstatt have special reason to remember
+him kindly: he himself was grateful to them and showed it. In the
+troublous times of 1848 he was sadly in need of money: Ludwigsburg
+(another satellite of Stuttgart) refused it, while Cannstatt came
+up to the mark handsomely. The royal creditor never forgot that. He
+instituted the _Volksfest_ as a sort of memorial, and Cannstatt is
+proud and prosperous, while Ludwigsburg is like a city of the dead.
+So the coachman affirms; and once conversation is opened between us it
+flows without intermission. His head is over his shoulder all the way
+as we roll back to the city under the beautiful trees of the palace
+grounds. "If the old king had been living, W�rtemberg would never have
+joined in the last war: he would have told Prussia to fight it out by
+herself." Apropos of the war, we ask what he thinks of Bismarck.
+He evidently thinks a great deal of him, though not perhaps in the
+generally accepted sense of that expression. He states as a fact that
+there _are_ limits, leaving it to us to understand that the chancellor
+of the empire has overstepped them. He declares further that a
+Prussian, and especially a Berliner, is always to him an obnoxious
+member of society through his insisting on knowing everything (except
+his own place) better than anybody else. "Now, there was the Prussian
+general before this last one," he continues, changing from politics
+to court-gossip (naturally, since 1870, military matters in W�rtemberg
+flourish under Prussian auspices): "the first ball he went to at the
+palace he asked the queen to dance! _Our_ queen!! And then he took his
+whole family, and they sat in chairs that never were meant for them,
+so that the king had to say to him next day, "Mr. General, first come
+I, and then my ministers, and then this one, and then that one, and
+_then_ you." He went back to Berlin soon after. It is pleasanter to
+sit one's self down where one doesn't belong than to be set down
+by somebody else." Our driver chuckles, and then bursts out afresh,
+"Asking the _queen_ to dance!" He certainly has perfect faith in his
+own stories.
+
+We saw the successor of that presumptuous military man next day
+among the greater and lesser lights that revolve around the throne of
+W�rtemberg. We ourselves were stationary, crowded into the foremost of
+the tiers of seats that rose surrounding the immense enclosure, and
+in the best place for observation, close by the royal pavilion.
+The hills, bright in the sun and velvet in shadow, made a natural
+amphitheatre beyond, a little church with its pretty tower looked
+picturesquely down from a neighboring height, and the whole place
+was gay with flags and branches, glittering uniforms and gorgeous
+liveries. We were to see the _hohe Herrschaften_ come in at the
+farthest entrance and drive around directly before our seats. As the
+trumpets flourish and the first magnificence sweeps by we hear all
+about us, "The princess Vera," and "No, the duchess of Uhra," and "Is
+it?" "Isn't it?" "Which is it?" till we finally settle down to the
+serene conclusion that it is either one or the other. There is no
+mistaking the queen, however, with the outriders, six superb black
+horses and postilions in scarlet and gold. The Majesty herself looks
+pale and resigned, bending to the right and left in answer to the
+bows and _hochs._ Our neighbors "the Weimars" come in full force. A
+superfluous prince of that family appears to have drifted to these
+regions, and makes our street aristocratic for us. Young Weimar looks
+uncommonly well in his hussar uniform, and the old prince and his wife
+and daughter are resplendent. We met them later that same day in town,
+but they had taken off their best clothes, and truth compels us sadly
+to admit that we should hardly have known them.
+
+In the course of time, after various false alarms on our part, the
+band confidently strikes up "God Save the King!" and there is a
+flashing and prancing in the distance that creates a great stir. The
+citizen guard, a stately body of burghers, rides out with the king on
+this day of all the year, and comes caracoling by in fine style, he in
+the midst bowing and smiling. And now, after the _Herrschaften--hohe_
+and _h�chste_--come the animals. First, horses haughtily stepping,
+and then splendid bulls with wreaths on their horns and garlands round
+their--waists shall we say?--are led before the king, standing at the
+foot of the steps and handing the prizes to the farmers, who present
+themselves, ducking and scraping. It seems a shame to tie up the
+creatures' legs so, and put rings through their noses: some have
+even a cloth bound over their heads; and if all these precautionary
+measures are necessary, it ought to be a relief when the procession of
+mild cows begins, They look out amiably from under the floral crowns
+that have slipped low on their brows, or turn with half-conscious
+pride to the handsome little calves that trot beside them. The sheep,
+seeking to attract too early the notice of royalty, dash out in a
+flock, and are driven back with jeering and hooting, as they deserve
+to be. Then the pigs stagger by: their garlands are excessively
+unbecoming. Such of the family of swine as are too young to stagger
+are wheeled in handcarts in the rear; and so the ceremonies are
+closed, except for a couple of races which take place immediately, and
+with no great �clat. The burgher races these are called, while on the
+third and last day are the officers' races. The rain prevented our
+attending them, and we consoled ourselves, hearing it intimated by
+those who had been at Ascot and Longchamps that we had not lost a
+great deal.
+
+G.H.P.
+
+
+
+
+A PAIR OF WHEELS AND AN OLD PARASOL.
+
+
+The threads from which the tissue of history is being woven are ever
+in unceasing and rapid motion in the hands of the Fates. But these
+deities for the most part love to work unseen, like the bees. It is
+only when the spinning is going on with exceptional rapidity and
+vigor that the movements of the threads and the characteristics of the
+operation can be observed on the surface of social life, Such is
+the case in these days at Rome, and it is not necessary to watch the
+actions of governments or listen to the discussions of legislative
+chambers in order to assure one's self of the fact. One cannot walk
+the streets without having the phenomena which are the outward and
+visible signs of it thrust in a thousand ways on the observation
+of our senses. The other day I read a whole chapter of contemporary
+history compressed into the appearance of a pair of wheels engaged in
+their ordinary daily duty in the streets. It was in that central and
+crowded part of the city which is between the church of the Ges� and
+the Farnese palace, a labyrinth of tortuous streets and lanes,
+not often visited by foreigners unless when bent on some special
+expedition of sight-seeing. There are no sidewalks for foot-passengers
+in these streets. They are narrow, very tortuous and very crowded.
+Foot-passengers and vehicles of all sorts find their way along as best
+they may in one confused mass. It was there I saw the historic pair
+of wheels in question. They were attached to the barrow of a
+coster-monger, who was retailing a stock of onions, carrots and
+"cavolo Romano" which he had just purchased at the neighboring market
+of the "Campo de' Fiori." His wares, I fear, had been selected from
+the refuse of the market, and he and his barrow were in a state of
+dilapidated shabbiness that matched his stock in trade. But not so the
+wheels on which his barrow was supported. They were wheels of the most
+gorgeous description. The spokes and the circumference were painted
+of the most brilliant scarlet, and the entire nave was gilded so as
+to have the appearance of a solid mass of gold. It is impossible to
+imagine anything more _bizarre_ than the effect of these magnificent
+wheels doing the work of carrying such an equipage. Nevertheless,
+the apparition seemed to attract very little attention in the crowded
+street. The grand scarlet and gilded wheels flamed along among the
+crowd of shabby men and shabby vehicles with their load of onions and
+cabbages, and scarcely anybody turned his head to stare at them. I
+suppose the denizens of the district were used to the apparition of
+them. To me they looked as if they had been the originals from
+which Guido Reni painted those of the car in which he has placed the
+celebrated Aurora of his world-famous fresco. They were solidly and
+heavily built wheels--very barbarous an English carriage-builder would
+have considered them in their heavy and clumsy magnificence--but they
+were very gorgeous. What could be the meaning of their appearance in
+public under such circumstances? I was walking with an Italian friend
+at the time, who saw my state of amazement at so strange a phenomenon,
+and explained it all by a single remark.
+
+"Yes," said he, "there go a pair of His Eminence's wheels. They are
+sharing the fortunes of their late master in a manner that is at once
+dramatic and historical."
+
+The wheels from a cardinal's carriage! Of course they were. How was
+it possible that such wheels should be mistaken for any other in the
+world? A few years ago, when pope and cardinals had not yet suffered
+the horrible eclipse which has overtaken them, one of the most notable
+features of the Roman streets and suburban roads used to consist
+of the carriages of the members of the Sacred College taking their
+diurnal drive. It was not etiquette for a cardinal to walk in the
+streets, or indeed anywhere else, without his carriage following him.
+There was no mistaking these barbarously gorgeous vehicles. They were
+all exactly like each other, and unlike any other carriages to be
+seen in the nineteenth century--heavy, clumsy, coarsely built and
+gorgeously painted of the most flaming scarlet, and largely gilded.
+They were drawn by long-tailed black horses covered with heavy harness
+richly plated with silver, or something that looked like it, and
+driven by a coachman whose livery, always as shabby as magnificent,
+was as heavily laden with huge masses of worsted lace of the kind that
+used to be placed on carriage-linings some five-and-twenty years ago.
+Two similarly bedizened footmen always stood on the monkey-board
+at the rear, who descended and walked behind His Eminence and
+his chaplain when the cardinal left his carriage to get his
+constitutional. Ichabod! Ichabod! The glory has departed! Such
+cavalcades are no longer to be seen crawling along the Via Appia,
+or following His Eminence on a fine and sunny afternoon about four
+o'clock as he walks on the footpath between the Porta Pia and the
+Basilica of St. Agnes in search of an appetite for his dinner. The
+world will never see such carriages and such servants any more. _Fuit
+Ilium!_ I thought of the old lines on the "high--mettled racer," and
+of "imperial C�sar, dead and turned to clay, stopping a hole to keep
+the wind away." To see such splendor reduced to the service of such
+vile uses! Yes, as my Italian friend said, "There go the cardinal's
+wheels," and it is impossible not to feel sure that the phenomenon
+is symbolical of the way the cardinal is going himself. When an
+institution, a dignity, a social arrangement of any sort, has grown
+to be purely ornamental, has become so splendid that its splendor has
+come to be the essence of it, it will no longer be able to exist shorn
+of its splendor, however much it may in its origin have been adapted
+for use rather than for show. The wheels were heavy, cumbrous and
+ill put together; they were not well adapted for the costermonger's
+purpose, and will probably fall to pieces before long. Their fate is
+a type of that of their once master. That ornamental individual, shorn
+of his ornamental character, is useless. His _raison d'�tre_ is gone
+as entirely as Othello's occupation was. And it will probably not be
+long before the fate of the cardinal's wheels overtakes the cardinal
+himself.
+
+The second little bit of street incident which recently occurred to me
+was in itself less striking, but seemed to me to symbolize changes of
+yet higher moment and wider significance. This time what I saw was in
+the Ghetto. Many of my readers probably know what the Ghetto at Rome
+is, but untraveled stayers-at-home may very excusably never have heard
+of it. The Ghetto is the Jews' quarter in Rome--the district in which
+they were for many generations compelled to reside and to be locked
+in by night, and where from habit the greater part, especially of the
+poorer members of the Jewish community, still live. As will be easily
+believed, it is the worst and most wretched quarter of the city--the
+lowest physically as well as morally--and inundated with tolerable
+certainty every year by the rising of the Tiber. The dilapidated and
+filthy streets of the other parts of old papal Rome used to look
+clean and spruce by comparison with the lurid and darksome dens of
+the Ghetto. There are Ghettos in London--streets where the children of
+Israel congregate, not in obedience to any law old or new, but drawn
+together by mutual attraction and similarity of occupation. And the
+occupations there are very much of the same nature as those pursued
+in the Ghetto of Rome--the buying and selling of old clothes and
+second-hand property of all sorts, the preparation and distribution of
+fried fish, and here and there a little usury. But the _genius loci_
+here impresses on the trade in discarded odds and ends a peculiar
+character of its own. A much larger number of old pictures figure
+among the hoards of useless "property" than would be the case
+elsewhere. The constant decay of noble and once wealthy families
+furnishes to the second-hand market a much more abundant supply of
+the remains of articles that were once rich and rare in their day--old
+damask hangings torn from walls that have witnessed the princely
+revelry of many a generation; rich brocades and stuffs that have made
+part of the moving pageant in the same saloons; lace of the finest
+and rarest from the vestments of deceased prelates, whose heirs, as
+regards such property, have probably been their serving-men; purple
+and scarlet articles from the wardrobes of cardinals and princes of
+the Church; and odds and ends of various sorts widely different in
+kind from aught that could be found in similar repositories in other
+cities. And another specialty of the Roman Ghetto is that it is not
+altogether easy to obtain a sight of the miscellaneous treasures of
+this rag-fair. Partly because the low-lying and narrow lanes of the
+Ghetto are too murky and filthy to permit of the advantageous exposure
+of the merchandise in question; partly, probably, from an habitual
+consciousness on the part of the dealers that the details of their
+traffic in all its particulars are not of a nature to be safely
+submitted to the public eye; partly from that secretiveness which is
+the natural result of living for many generations from father to son
+under the tyranny of an alien race, whose bitterly hostile prejudices
+were but little restrained by law or justice; and partly also, no
+doubt, from the genuine Roman laziness, which in its perfection is
+capable of overriding even Jewish keenness of trade,--the Jew brokers
+of the Ghetto are often unwilling to show their hidden stores to the
+first comer. Some amount of diplomacy and some show of the probability
+of effecting an advantageous deal must be had recourse to in order to
+attain the purpose of the explorer.
+
+On the recent occasion to which I have referred these difficulties had
+been overcome, and I had made my way into the interior of one of
+the dens I have described in the company of a lady friend who is a
+confirmed and irreclaimable lace-hunter, and who in pursuit of her
+game would have confronted worse obstacles than any that we had
+to encounter. For, in truth, the exterior appearance and the
+entrance-chambers are the worst part of the Ghetto dwellings. One is
+curiously reminded of the old medi�val stories of Jewish dwellings,
+where the utmost squalor and poverty of exterior was a mere blind for
+an interior gorgeous with every manifestation of wealth and luxury. I
+will not say that much of the latter is to be found in the dwellings
+of the Ghetto, but a degree of comfortable decency and indications
+of the possession of capital may be met with which the exterior
+appearances would not have led one to anticipate. Well, we had reached
+the third floor of one of these sinister-looking abodes, conducted by
+a fat old Jewess with a pair of huge black eyes, a large smooth face
+as yellow as a guinea, and a vast development of bust clad in dirty
+white wrappers of some sort. A door on the landing-place jealously
+locked with two huge keys admitted us into a suite of three good-sized
+rooms crammed from floor to ceiling with a collection of articles more
+heterogeneous than can easily be conceived--far more so than can be
+described.
+
+Those who have ever accompanied a lady lace-hunter when she has struck
+a promising trail know that the business in hand is likely to be a
+somewhat long one. My companion on the present occasion very soon
+convinced the Jewess that she knew quite as much about the matter as
+she, the dealer, did. But I presume that some of the old yellow stores
+produced were "the real thing;" for my friend and the old Jewess soon
+became immersed in an eager and, as it seemed to me interminable,
+discussion as to qualities, condition and values. Meantime, I had to
+amuse myself as best I might by looking at the multifarious objects.
+I must content myself with mentioning one article, the appearance
+of which in such a place struck me as strange and not a little
+significant. It was simply an old parasol, very much faded and a
+little tattered, but not such a parasol as your fair hands ever
+carried, my dear madam, nor such as the once equally fair hands of any
+generation of your ancestors ever carried. The article in question was
+more like the shelter which we see represented in Chinese paintings as
+carried over the heads of persons of high rank among the Celestials.
+It was very large, not much curved into the shape of a dome when
+expanded, very clumsily and coarsely put together, but of gorgeous
+magnificence of material. It was made of a very thick and rich damask
+silk, additionally ornamented by embroidery in gold and silver thread,
+and the handle and points of the supports were richly gilt. In a word,
+I perceived at once, not being a novice in such matters, that the
+article before me was one of the canopies used for holding over the
+"Host" when the holy sacrament is carried by the priest through the
+streets to a dying person. It needs but a moment's reflection on the
+Roman Catholic theory of the sacrament of the "Last Supper" to be
+aware of the extremely sacred nature of the uses to which this parasol
+had been put, and of the associations connected with it. Nevertheless,
+I found this bit of sacred church property in the hands of a Jew
+broker, exposed to sale for a few francs to the first comer, heretic,
+scoffer or infidel, that might take a fancy to buy it. This would
+hardly have been the case when the pope was absolute master of Rome
+and of all in it. The thing could not have happened save by the
+dishonesty and cynical disbelief of some priest, and indeed probably
+of more than one. And, upon the whole, it struck me as a second
+curious indication of the somewhat breakneck speed with which the
+threads of history are spinning themselves in these days and in these
+latitudes.
+
+T.A.T.
+
+
+
+
+MEDICAL EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+
+A great deal of discussion has recently taken place on the subject of
+medical education in the United States. To a foreigner, or to one not
+acquainted with the influences that have led to and have kept up this
+discussion, it might seem to be the result of a spontaneous outburst
+of popular feeling, earnestly demanding much-needed progress. Really,
+however, the very reverse is the case; and the revolutionists are
+those whose _kind_ and _sympathetic_ interest in the welfare of the
+community is prompted solely by selfish considerations. The changes
+urged by these self-condemning philanthropists are not demanded by the
+medical profession nor by the public; neither have they been, nor will
+they be, sustained by both or by either. This assertion is clearly
+proved by the experience of the University of Pennsylvania, In 1846
+the American Medical Association recommended to all medical colleges
+certain changes and improvements in their courses of instruction.
+In consequence of this recommendation the University of Pennsylvania
+extended its session to six months: not a _single medical college in
+the country followed_ its progressive lead, and after continuing the
+experiment for six years at great pecuniary loss, it was reluctantly
+obliged to retrace its steps, and to return to the old standard as to
+length of session. During the period of this advance the classes of
+the University fell off greatly, and the classes of other medical
+schools correspondingly increased. Even medical men sent their sons
+to other medical schools, to save the time and money necessary for the
+longer course. Indeed, medical men, as a rule, have sought to evade
+the restrictions as to length of time of study, etc. more than any
+other class; and the statement, that the "student usually dates his
+medical studies from the time he buys his first _Chemistry_" applies
+more frequently to the sons of _physicians_ than to any others. Hence,
+I declare that these proposed changes are not demanded by the medical
+profession nor by the public.
+
+The writer of a recent article in _Lippincott's Magazine_ (Dr. H.C.
+Wood) on "Medical Education in the United States" seems to have
+been so lost in admiration at the methods of instruction followed in
+European medical colleges as to be utterly blind to the good in the
+system of medical education as it exists in this country--a system the
+_necessary_ result of our political, social, financial and territorial
+conditions; a system which, though in the abstract may not be the
+best, is certainly, judging from its results, the best _possible_
+under our peculiar circumstances. This much abused system of
+medical education (only greatly improved in its extent and
+thoroughness--improvements developed by the constant advances in
+knowledge) is the same system which has produced the great medical
+men of the United States during the past seventy-five years--medical
+practitioners whose success has been surpassed by none in Europe;
+surgeons whose skill has been, and is, world-wide in reputation;
+authors whose works are standard authorities everywhere. It is the
+same system of medical instruction--I quote verbatim (italics mine)
+from this article that holds it up to scorn--which "accomplished such
+_splendid results_ during the late rebellion." The writer says: "The
+great resources of the medical profession were proved during the
+civil war, when there was created in a few months a service which
+for magnitude and efficiency has rarely if ever been equaled. Indeed,
+military medicine was raised by it to a point _never reached before
+that time in Europe_ and the results achieved have, in many points,
+_worked a revolution in science_." After this frank declaration of the
+inestimable value and glorious results of American medical education,
+the writer draws the _logical_(?) sequence that it (American medical
+education) is responsible for a case of most heartrending malpractice,
+which he relates, compared to which the Japanese hari-kari were
+merciful mildness, and approaching more nearly the tortures by
+crucifixion as administered by this same _kind-hearted_ people. With
+about as much reason and justice might he conclude that the _American
+system_ of Sunday-school education is lamentably inferior to that of
+Great Britain, _because_(!) Jesse Pomeroy was a possibility in that
+most respectable town of Boston.
+
+Dr. Wood alludes to the ignorance of the American medical student,
+and makes a statement "not founded on the authority of official
+publication," in which he endeavors to show that from "six to ten
+per cent." of American medical students have an ignorance of vulgar
+fractions and rudimentary astronomy that would exclude them from an
+ordinary infant-school. Every one familiar with the students attending
+our first-class American medical colleges knows perfectly well that
+in origin and in culture they compare favorably with the young men
+engaged in the study of law and divinity, or with those entering upon
+mercantile or manufacturing pursuits. True, there are some imperfectly
+educated, but certainly not "six or ten per cent." destitute of
+that knowledge taught even in _American_ infant-schools, and without
+knowing, and without the statement "being founded on the authority of
+any official publication," I _infer_ that in _Europe_, owing to their
+"better methods," similar knowledge is communicated to the average
+European child many months _before its birth_.
+
+Next follows a comment on the poverty of the American medical student.
+Dr. Wood says: "Even worse than this, however, is the fact that the
+summer between the winter courses is often not spent in study, but
+in idleness, or, not rarely, in acquiring in the school-room or
+harvest-field the pecuniary means of spending the subsequent winter in
+the city." Alas! this _is_ too true. Providence seems to have ordained
+that our young _American_ doctors are not always reared in the lap of
+luxury and wealth as the fittest preparation for the trials, hardships
+and self-denials of their future lives. It is also true that some
+_other_ young American professional men have been compelled "in the
+school-room or harvest-field" to acquire the means to prosecute their
+professional studies. Daniel Webster, the son of a New England farmer,
+taught school at Fryeburg, Maine, "upon a salary of about one dollar
+per diem." "His salary was all saved ... as a fund for his _own
+professional_ education and to help his brother through college."
+"During his residence at Fryeburg, Mr. Webster borrowed (he was too
+poor to buy) Blackstone's _Commentaries_." Mr. Webster's great rival,
+Henry Clay, also was compelled to resort to the "school-room and
+harvest-field to obtain the pecuniary means," etc. etc. etc. The son
+of the poor widow with seven children "applied himself to the labor of
+the field with alacrity and diligence;" "and there yet live those who
+remember to have seen him oftentimes riding his sorry horse, with a
+rope bridle, no saddle, and a bag of grain." "By the familiar name
+of the Mill-boy of the Slashes do these men ... perpetuate the
+remembrance of his lowly yet dutiful and unrepining employments."
+American biography is so filled with similar instances, showing how
+the great characters of her great men acquired their development and
+strength in the stern gymnasium of poverty, even in "the school-room
+and harvest-field," that I could fill volumes with the glowing
+records. The youngest American school-boy recognizes Abraham Lincoln
+and Henry Wilson in this _American_ galaxy. Whose heart has not been
+stirred by the life-story of the great Hugh Miller, the stonecutter's
+pick earning for him humble means, thereby enabling him to acquire
+that learning which made his name a household word even in America.
+Truth, then, as I have remarked, obliges me to admit that we have in
+our medical colleges some young men who labor "in harvest-fields and
+school-rooms" in order that they may honorably pay their way, rather
+than eat the bread or accept the gratuities of pauperism.
+
+Last March there graduated at the medical department of the University
+of Pennsylvania one of these self-supporting young men. He was the son
+of a missionary clergyman: the father was poor in pocket, but the son
+was not poor in spirit. During the interval between his winter courses
+of lectures, rather than be a burden to his father, rather than accept
+gratuitous instruction from the school, he went into the coal regions
+of Pennsylvania and worked in a coal-mine, as a common miner, to
+procure funds to enable him to complete his professional studies;
+and, _strange_ as it may seem, this young miner passed an excellent
+examination, and received the unanimous vote of the medical faculty
+for his degree. I mention this case, but every year there are several
+similar; and we always find that the school-teachers and miners are by
+no means at the foot of the graduating class.
+
+Concerning clinical teaching, we have the following statement:
+"The clinical teaching in an American hospital is comprised in the
+following routine: Once or twice a week, from one to five hundred men
+being congregated in an amphitheatre, the professor lectures upon a
+case brought into the arena, perhaps operates, and when the hour has
+expired the class is dismissed. Evidently, under such circumstances
+there cannot be the training of the senses, the acquiring of a
+knowledge of the hourly play of symptoms of disease and of familiarity
+with the proper handling of the sick and wounded, which is of such
+vital importance, and which can be the outcome only of daily contact
+with patients." What can the writer of this sentence mean? Certainly,
+no one knows better than he does that such _is not_ the practice in
+the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, in Bellevue and in
+many other large hospitals, where clinics and dispensary services
+are held for _several hours daily_ throughout the year, and where the
+student has furnished him abundant opportunities four "acquiring a
+knowledge of the ... symptoms of disease, ... of handling the sick and
+wounded," etc. etc. That the American medical student profits by these
+opportunities, and learns his clinic lessons well, is proved by the
+unexpected and evidently unintended testimony which occurs toward the
+close of the article, where Dr. Wood says, "The great resources of the
+medical profession in America were proved during the civil war, when
+there was created in a _few months_ a service which for _magnitude_
+and _efficiency_ has _rarefy if ever been equaled_. Indeed, military
+medicine was raised by it to a point _never reached before_ that time
+_in Europe_, and the results achieved have in many points worked a
+_revolution in science_." The italics in this quotation are mine, as
+they also are in those which follow.
+
+But (says the article under review) "the largest proportion of our
+prominent physicians have educated themselves after graduation." As
+if this were an extraordinary or unusual circumstance! Certainly,
+they have; and so have all prominent men in all professions and all
+pursuits of life, in every age and every country, not even excepting
+the much-lauded men of Great Britain and the continent of Europe. What
+young lawyer is entrusted with an important cause immediately after
+admission to the Bar? And as the young doctor (according to the
+aforesaid showing) "gains his first practical knowledge while serving
+as a hospital resident, under the supervision of experienced men,"
+so the young lawyer, _even in Great Britain_, must gain _his_ first
+practical knowledge by constant attention at the courts, and by
+diligently following the proceedings of his preceptor's and other
+offices. Even the young clergyman, whose business it is to save
+_souls_, has to do very much as the young doctor does, and, like him,
+is often "thrown at once on his own resources, gaining his experience
+without supervision, and at the _expense_ of the _poorer classes_,
+who _naturally_ fall to his charge, and whose ignorance precludes them
+from an even approximately correct estimate of" his fitness. "It is
+one of the saddest features of our system that the famed skill of our
+best" _(clergymen)_ "should so often be acquired at such a cost."
+
+What can be more unphilosophical and illogical than to compare the
+young doctor, or any other young professional man, to a new piece of
+machinery, fresh from the manufactory, complete and perfect in all
+its parts? And yet something like this is _attempted_ in the article
+before us. Even as Minerva sprang from the brain of Jove the complete
+and perfect goddess of learning, so would our Utopian writer have
+the young doctors to come from the brains of their medical professors
+complete and perfect; only, if his idea be correct, their medical
+professors have so little brains that the annual graduating medical
+classes of the United States would be immediately reduced from
+the frightful army of three thousand "legalized murderers" to the
+comparatively small and easily counted number of _one graduate_ (of
+course, springing from one head). No; the young doctor, at graduation,
+cannot be compared to a new, complete and perfect machine fresh from
+the manufactory; rather, let him be compared to the young marsupial
+creature at birth, extremely rudimentary, whose natural, and hence
+fittest, place is the parental pouch, but which in due time becomes
+the vigorous and well-developed specimen. I suppose, if I compare
+the young doctor to the young marsupial, I should also say that _his_
+protecting parental pouch, in which he acquires growth and vigor, is
+the hospital where he goes after graduation, or the practice which he
+sees under his preceptor's supervision.
+
+The article continues: "The remarks which follow do not apply to
+the medical department of Harvard College or to _one or two other
+schools_" (the italics are mine); and farther on it continues: "In
+other words, Harvard has copied the European plan of medical teaching
+in some of its essential features, and as a consequence its medical
+diploma is the _only one_ issued by _any prominent medical American_
+college which is a _guarantee_ that its possessor has been well
+educated in the science and practice of medicine." Where can we
+find meekness and modesty like this?--modesty as becoming as it
+is unexpected and surprising, seeing that the writer fills _two_
+professorships in the University of Pennsylvania, Does he hang his
+head so low in his--I was about to say _singular_--self-abasement
+(but, considering, the _two_ professorships, I suppose I should say
+_doubled_ self-abasement) that he cannot see? or are his eyes so
+blinded by the effulgence of "Harvard" and "European" plans that he
+fails to recognize and appreciate the immense advantages offered by
+his own home institutions? I do not propose to make any invidious
+remarks concerning Harvard, but I maintain that an _honest_ and _just_
+comparison of the schools, of their requirements, of the character of
+their teachings and the facilities they furnish their students, _must_
+show that modesty alone prevented Professor "H.C. Wood, Jr., M.D.,"
+also excepting from his sweeping denunciations the two great schools
+of Philadelphia, though I only speak for and defend the medical
+department of the University of Pennsylvania from an attack unjust,
+uncalled-for and untrue.
+
+R.A.F. PENROSE.
+
+
+The party opposed to any reforms in medical education has, of course,
+a right to be heard, and Dr. Penrose is well entitled to represent it
+both by his position and by the evident heartiness with which he is
+prepared to defend the existing system at every point. In impugning
+the motives of those who have attacked it he lays himself open to an
+obvious retort; but it is sufficient to remark that the contest is
+not of a nature to call for or justify the use of personalities, which
+could serve only to divert attention from the real issues.
+
+The arguments put forward by Dr. Penrose may be summarized as follows:
+1st, that the proposed changes are not demanded either by the public
+or by the profession; 2d, that the present system is the best possible
+in a nation constituted like ours; 3d, that the preparatory education
+of our medical students is equal to that of law or divinity students,
+or of young men entering upon mercantile or manufacturing pursuits;
+4th, that in certain cases obstacles in the way of a regular and
+thorough training have been overcome and success achieved in spite of
+them; and 5th, that it is unavoidable and proper that medical men, as
+well as members of other professions, should educate themselves after
+graduation.
+
+It will be observed that none of these arguments except the last,
+which is based on a mere verbal ambiguity, touches the two subjects
+discussed in Dr. Wood's article--namely, the _need_ of reform and the
+_methods_ by which, if practicable, it is to be effected. Dr. Penrose
+does not venture to assert that the existing system is perfect, or
+to deny that the suggested changes are in the nature of improvements.
+What he wishes us to believe is that the system, whatever its defects,
+is as good a one as Americans have a right to demand, and that it is
+so closely interwoven with our political and social institutions as to
+admit of no separate handling. Similar arguments are frequently urged
+against the desire to raise the standard and widen the avenues of the
+"higher education." We are thus taught to regard ourselves as a poor
+and struggling nation with no claim to the possession of intellectual
+luxuries, or as having bound ourselves to forego any aspirations to an
+equality with other nations in respect of culture when we secured the
+advantages of popular government and its social concomitants. It would
+seem, however, to be a sounder, as it is certainly a more gratifying
+belief, that precisely because we have attained these advantages
+it will be easier for us to appropriate all the benefits which
+civilization has to offer--possible for us to make more rapid strides
+than have been made by other nations, impeded by a diversity of
+interests and conflicts between the government and the people. No
+doubt the comparative youthfulness of the nation will account for
+our backward condition in certain respects; but surely it is time to
+abandon this and every similar plea as an argument against any attempt
+at progress.
+
+We have not space, and for the reasons indicated we see no necessity,
+to discuss Dr. Penrose's positions in detail. It will be sufficient
+to notice generally what seems to us their inherent weakness. His
+assertion that no changes are _now_ demanded by the public or the
+profession is, he thinks, "clearly proved" by the fact that thirty
+years ago some that were introduced in the University of Pennsylvania
+at the suggestion of the American Medical Association ended in
+failure. But what this experience really proves is, that the defects
+of the system were even then admitted, while the remedies are still to
+be applied. At Harvard this has been done; and the question for other
+medical schools is whether they are to follow the example or to
+be deterred by a bugbear--whether, for example, the University of
+Pennsylvania, after raising her scientific and art departments to
+a higher level, shall be content to let her medical school remain
+stationary. It is the opinion of intelligent physicians who are not
+parties to this controversy that the experiment which failed in 1846
+would succeed now. The new plan adopted at Harvard, which exacts
+three years of study, and embraces lectures, recitations, clinical
+conferences and written examinations of the most stringent character,
+has, we are informed, attracted a class of very superior men. Compared
+with the effort made here in 1846, this change may be described as a
+revolution, and it has proved a success.
+
+We are at a loss to understand what Dr. Penrose wishes to prove by his
+citation of cases in which eminence has been reached--chiefly, it
+is to be noticed, in politics or the law--by persons who have
+had insufficient opportunities for study. If the disadvantage was
+imaginary, where was the merit of overcoming it? If it was real, as
+most people would admit, what is the objection to insisting on it as
+such? In the great majority of cases it is _not_ overcome, and the
+result is, that the country is overstocked with men engaged in the
+practice of professions for which they are inadequately qualified. As
+to the skill that is gained by practice, the ripe knowledge that may
+result from experience, this cannot without a confusion of terms
+be described as "education." It will in general be most surely and
+rapidly acquired by those who have received the best training, and
+the great object of our higher educational institutions should be
+to provide such training--not, by maintaining a low standard, to
+facilitate the efforts of those who, from whatever cause, would find
+it difficult to meet the demands of a higher one. Such persons may
+have a claim to encouragement and assistance in their endeavors to
+reach the mark; but they have no right to expect that the distance
+shall be regulated to suit their convenience.
+
+Dr. Wood's admissions in regard to the excellence of the army medical
+service during the war are seized upon with natural exultation by his
+opponent, who draws from them a legitimate inference in favor of the
+general status of medical skill and knowledge throughout the country.
+If Dr. Wood really intended to say--what his language, we confess,
+would seem to imply--that the service attained its high state of
+efficiency in a few months, we do not well see how he is to resist the
+conclusion thus pressed upon him. But we conceive the truth to be that
+either his phraseology or his recollection of the facts was at fault.
+It is well known that at the beginning of the war it was impossible to
+find competent surgeons in anything like the number that was
+needed, and that the examining boards were consequently forced to be
+ridiculously lenient. We know of an able surgeon who after a battle
+found that he had not a single assistant in his corps who could be
+trusted to perform an operation. This state of matters was the direct
+result of the imperfect education given in the schools. Not one man in
+ten who leaves them has ever been practically exercised in operations
+on the cadaver, and the proportion was still smaller before the war.
+It is easy therefore to understand, while it would be painful to
+recall, the circumstances under which the great bulk of our army
+surgeons acquired the requisite proficiency. The ultimate success
+of our medical service, like the final triumph of our armies, was
+preceded by many woeful blunders and mishaps, and, like that, was due
+in great measure to a lavish outlay which would scarcely have been
+possible in any European war, and to the general devotion and united
+efforts which drew out all the resources of the country, of whatever
+kind, and directed them to the furtherance of a single aim.
+
+
+
+
+OUR EARLY NEWSPAPERS.
+
+
+In looking over the contents of the old newspapers of this country, of
+which there was a considerable number as early as the year 1730, one
+is specially struck by the number of advertisements of slave sales and
+of runaway slaves, apprentices and servants. The following are common
+examples:
+
+"To be sold, a very likely Negro woman about 30 years of Age, has been
+in this city about 10. She is a fine Cook, has been brought up to all
+sorts of House Work, and speaks very good English. She has had the
+small Pox, and has now a Young Child. Enquire further concerning
+her and the Conditions of Sale of Mary Kippen, or the Printer
+hereof."--_New York Weekly Journal_, May 9, 1735.
+
+"Just arrived from _Great Britain_, and are to be Sold on board the
+Ship Alice and Elizabeth, Capt. _Paine_ Commander several likely
+_Welch_ and _English_ Servant Men, most of them Tradesmen. Whoever
+inclines to purchase any of them may agree with said Commander, or Mr.
+_Thomas Noble_, Merchant, at Mr. Hazard's, in New York; where also
+is to be Sold several Negro Girls and a Negro Boy, and likewise good
+_Cheshire_ Cheese."--_New York Gazette_, Sept. 11, 1732.
+
+Here is a notice from the same paper, date 1735, which shows very
+clearly the position of the apprentice one hundred and forty years
+ago:
+
+"Run away on the 5th. Instant from John Bell of the city of New York
+Carpenter, an Apprentice Boy named James Harding, aged about 19 years,
+being a tall well-set Lad of a Fresh Complexion, he wears a Wig, he
+is spley-footed and shuffles with his feet as he Walks, has a Copper
+coloured Kersey Coat with large flat white Mettle Buttons, a grey
+Duroy Coat lined with Silk, it is pretty much faded by wearing, a
+broad blue striped Waistcoat and Breeches and a pair of blue striped
+Tickin Breeches, in warm weather he often bleeds at the nose."
+Then follows the offer of forty shillings to any one who will give
+information whereby his master, John Bell, can regain possession of
+the runaway.
+
+That the women of that time were strong-minded, or at least that they
+were disposed to assist in the reformation of bad husbands, is shown
+by the following from the same journal, date December 31, 1733. The
+subject, or victim, was one William Drinkwater, living near New York,
+who had proved quarrelsome with his neighbors and abusive to his wife:
+"The good Women of the Place took the Matter into Consideration and
+laid hold of an Opportunity, to get him tied to a Cart, and there with
+Rods belaboured him on his Back, till, in striveing to get away, he
+pulled one of his Arms out of Joint, and then they unti'd him. Mr.
+_Drinkwater_ Complained to Sundrie Magistrates of this useage, but all
+he got by it was to be Laughed at; Whereupon he removed to New Milford
+where we hear he proves a good Neighhour and a loving Husband. _A
+Remarkable Reformation ariseing from the Justice of the good Women._"
+
+Another advertisement indicates a toilet article now out of fashion:
+
+"To be Sold by _Peter Lynch_, near Mr. _Rutgers_ Brewhouse, very good
+Orange Butter, it is excellent for Gentlewomen to comb up their Hair
+with, it also cures Children's sore Heads."
+
+The next sounds quite as odd:
+
+"_James Munden_ Partner with _Thomas Butwell_ from London, Maketh
+Gentlewomens Stays and Childrens Coats in the Newest Fashion, that
+Crooked Women and Children will appear strait," Same paper, date
+February, 1735.
+
+It is a curious fact that the deaths at that time, both in the New
+York and New England papers, were announced not by the names of the
+deceased, but by the churches to which they belonged. For example:
+"Buried in the city last week, _viz._, Church of England 26, Dutch 24,
+Lutheran 2, French 1, Presbyterians 3. The number of Blacks we
+refer till Next Week."--_New England Weekly Journal_, Nov. 1, 1731.
+Sometimes the number is recorded as four or five, or even less:
+therefore the record must be very imperfect, and there seems to have
+been no notice taken of those who were not buried from any church.
+
+M.H.
+
+
+
+
+LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
+
+
+    Dante and his Circle; with the Italian Poets preceding him.
+    Edited and translated in the original Metres by Dante Gabriel
+    Rossetti. Revised and rearranged edition, Boston: Roberts
+    Bros.
+
+Dante is so great a figure in Italian literature that he hides from
+sight the host of minor poets who preceded him, and throws his own
+contemporaries so into the shade that we are apt to think that Italian
+poetry began with him, and that its second exponent is Petrarch. Such
+a view is to be regretted, not only because it overlooks much that
+is in itself valuable, but because it attributes to a period of
+slow development a phenomenal character. There were many poets worth
+listening to before the great Florentine wrote the _New Life_ or the
+_Divine Comedy_, and many whom he listened to and praised, although
+his prophetic foresight told him that he would one day bear their
+glory from them.
+
+It was to make us acquainted with these forgotten singers that Mr.
+Rossetti wrote some years ago his charming book. _The Early Italian
+Poets_, which, after being long out of print, he now presents to us in
+a revised and rearranged edition. The author's wish is not merely to
+give us a glimpse of the quaint conceits of a school that continued in
+Italy the waning influence of the Troubadours, but to open to us the
+intimate social life of the literary men of that period as reflected
+in their vague Platonic rhapsodies, their friendly letters, their
+jests and quarrels, their joy and sadness. Interwoven with all this
+are stately _canzoni_, and dainty sonnets full of quaint conceits,
+like that wherein Jacopo da Lentino (1250) sings _Of his Lady in
+Heaven_:
+
+  I have it in my heart to serve God so
+  That into Paradise I shall repair--
+  The holy place through the which everywhere
+  I have heard say that joy and solace flow.
+  Without my lady I were loath to go--
+  She who has the bright face and the bright hair--
+  Because if she were absent, I being there,
+  My pleasure would be less than naught, I know.
+  Look you, I say not this to such intent
+  As that I there would deal in any sin:
+  I only would behold her gracious mien,
+  And beautiful soft eyes, and lovely face,
+  That so it should be my complete content
+  To see my lady joyful in her place.
+
+We seem, in turning over these pages, to see the brilliant,
+ever-changing current of Italian thirteenth and fourteenth century
+life--from Palermo, where Frederick II. held an almost Oriental
+court, to the communes of Central Italy, the best type of which is
+the merchant-city of the Arno, whose sons in those days could fight as
+well as wield the yardstick, and sing in strains that have rarely
+been equaled. In the first division of the work the great poet and his
+friends are brought vividly before us from the time when, a sensitive
+child, his eyes first beheld Beatrice and his new life began, to the
+painful hours of bereavement and exile. The poet, it is known, made
+a curious sonnet out of a dream he had after his first meeting with
+Beatrice, and, in accordance with the fashion of the day, sent it to
+various well-known poets, asking them to interpret his vision. The
+answers are all given here; and among those whose attention was thus
+attracted to the precocious youth was one whom he calls his "first
+friend," Guido Cavalcanti--after Dante one of the most interesting
+literary personages of the day. Rash and chivalrous, we can follow him
+in his poems from the time he made his pilgrimage to the shrine of St.
+James, and fell in love on the way with Mandetta of Toulouse, to the
+turbulent days of Florentine party strife, when he rides down Messer
+Corso Donati, "the baron," and wounds him with his javelin, and then
+goes into exile at Sarzana, where he sings his dying song and sends
+it to his lady, "who," he says, "of her noble grace shall show thee
+courtesy." All the poets were not as constant as their own lines
+would have us believe. Dante reproaches the famous Cino da Pistoja
+for fickleness, and the latter confesses the charge, and declares he
+cannot get "free from Love's pitiless aim." Guido Cavalcanti rebukes
+Dante himself for his way of life after the death of Beatrice; and
+this valuable sonnet should be read in connection with the beautiful
+passage in the _Purgatory_ (xxx. 55-75) where Beatrice herself
+upbraids the tearful poet.
+
+In the second part, comprising _Poets chiefly before Dante_, we have
+specimens of the Sicilian school--a _canzone_ by the great Frederick,
+and a sonnet by his luckless son Enzo, who died in prison at Bologna
+after a confinement of nearly twenty-three years. Of more importance
+are the poems of Guido Guinicelli, of which the philosophical one
+entitled "Of the Gentle Heart" was a nine days' wonder, but which,
+even in Rossetti's elegant version, seems cold and formal. The
+most natural and pleasing pieces among much that is artificial and
+conventional are a ballad and two "catches" by Sacchetti, who died
+just after 1400, and properly does not belong to Dante's circle.
+Mr. Rossetti's readers will, however, be grateful to him for his
+delightful versions of the two catches, one "On a Fine Day," the other
+"On a Wet Day," giving the experiences of a band of young girls who
+have gone to spend the afternoon in the fields and are overtaken by a
+shower.
+
+Poems like these, unfortunately, are rare. The range is a limited
+one--Platonic love in its conventional form, or the still more
+conventional form of chivalric love, imported bodily from the
+Troubadours. Scattered here and there are some noble poems; as, for
+instance, the one attributed to Fazio degli Uberti on his lady's
+portrait, which begins--
+
+  I look at the crisp golden-threaded hair,
+  Whereof, to thrall my heart, Love twists a net;
+  Using at times a string of pearls for bait,
+  And sometimes with a single rose therein.
+
+Mr. Rossetti has performed his task in a way to deserve the warmest
+praise. The difficulties he has overcome are very great, consisting
+not merely of intricate rhyme and assonance, which he has faithfully
+reproduced, but a text often corrupt and meaning often obscure.
+He says himself in his preface that "The life-blood of rhythmical
+translation is this commandment--that a good poem shall not be turned
+into a bad one;" and this commandment, as far as we can see, he has
+not broken in a single case, while in some instances, we are bold
+enough to say, the translation is better than the original.
+
+    History of the Army of the Cumberland, its Organization,
+    Campaigns and Battles. Written at the request of Maj.-Gen.
+    George H. Thomas, chiefly from his private military journal
+    and other official documents furnished by him. By Thomas B.
+    Van Horne, U.S. Army. Illustrated with campaign and
+    battle maps compiled by Edward Ruger, late Superintendent
+    Topographical Engineer Office, Head quarters Department of the
+    Cumberland. 2 vols. and atlas. Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co.
+
+It was natural that General Thomas should make choice of some one to
+whom he could entrust the task of writing his military history. For
+that purpose he chose Mr. T.B. Van Home, a chaplain in the regular
+army, and the work, which was begun in 1865 and finished in 1872, was
+subject to Thomas's own examination. The result is now, after this
+long delay, presented to the public in a shape that does great credit
+to the publishers, whose imprint is almost synonymous with good
+workmanship. Of the literary skill, or want of it, on the part of the
+author not much need be said: he is evidently zealous in his anxiety
+to do honor to the memory of General Thomas, and to do justice to all
+who served with him; but he is sadly lacking in the art of suitably
+clothing his ideas with fitting words, and much of his elaborate
+composition is badly wasted in trying to find extravagant language
+for the recital of important events. In some cases, where the official
+reports printed at the close of each chapter recite in simple words
+the actual occurrences, the text of the book is overlaid with unusual
+words and involved sentences, in which the statement of the same facts
+is lost in a cloud of phraseology of a very curious and original kind.
+"Primal success," "the expression of a stride," "the belligerence of
+the two armies," "philosophy of the victory," "palpable co-operation,"
+"the expression of an insurrection,"--these are some of the odd
+inventions of the author; and for instances of passages just as odd,
+but too long for citation, we refer to the description of the battle
+of Shiloh--a weak imitation of Kinglake's worst style--where we
+are told that "change is the prophecy of unexpected conditions."
+Fortunately, the second volume is much less marred by such faults, and
+the great event of Thomas's career, the battle of Nashville, is told
+with clearness and in full detail.
+
+Although Thomas is the hero of the book from the time when he took
+command at Camp Dick Robinson in August of 1861, it was not till
+October, 1863, which brings us to page 394 of the first volume, that
+he succeeded to the command of the Army of the Cumberland, after
+Rosecrans, who had followed Buell and Sherman and Anderson. Under the
+other generals Thomas had served with marked ability and fidelity, and
+his dealing with them is fairly reflected by the author of this work,
+for he rarely criticises either of Thomas's commanding officers--for
+the most part merely records the operations of the army, and puts in
+most prominence Thomas's own services, just as his military journal no
+doubt supplied the material. Of all that long and dreary marching and
+countermarching through Kentucky and Tennessee the account is full and
+clear, and we find Buell and Halleck saying that they know nothing of
+any plan of campaign in the very midst of their operations. At last
+with Halleck, and still more with Grant in authority, there were
+movements ordered that had some relation to each other and a general
+plan of operations, and then the overwhelming strength of the North
+began to turn the scale. Thomas was called on by Rosecrans, as he had
+been by Buell, for advice, but he was obliged to act independently
+too; and then, as at Stone River, he showed an energy and a capacity
+that ought to have secured his earlier promotion. At Chickamauga he
+was actually left in command by Rosecrans, and while the latter
+was looking for new help elsewhere, Thomas at the front saved the
+shattered army and led it safely back to Chattanooga, where it
+underwent its famous long siege. The measures for its relief were
+planned by Rosecrans, approved by Grant, and executed by Thomas, with
+large assistance from "Baldy" Smith, whose skill as an engineer was
+fully attested then. When Thomas did at last succeed to the command
+of the Army of the Cumberland, he showed his superiority to his
+predecessors by marked improvement in his method of securing supplies,
+in his use of cavalry, and in the increased efficiency of his
+infantry. When Johnston, thanks to Davis's unwise interference with
+the Confederate armies, gave way to Hood, the latter almost at once
+gave token of his inferior skill by being defeated by the Army of the
+Cumberland--by less than half of it, in fact--in an attack intended to
+destroy three armies of more than five times the number of the Union
+force actually engaged. Thomas was in command at this battle of
+Peach-tree Creek, one of the sharpest and most significant actions
+of the campaign, though no official report is found at the end of
+the chapter in which it is described. The events that led up to the
+victory of Nashville are always worth the telling, and the account
+given in this work may be looked upon as in some respects Thomas's own
+version of them. A brief chapter by Colonel Merrill of the Engineers
+gives a very good description of three of the leading features of the
+work done by that corps in the Army of the Cumberland. To cross great
+rivers there was need of pontoon-bridges; to protect the long lines
+of railroads it was necessary to provide block-houses; to go through
+a country that was often a trackless forest, and always badly provided
+with real high-roads, it was all-important to have maps, and to
+reproduce them rapidly and plentifully. Colonel Merrill's chapter
+is pithy, pointed and to the purpose, showing how well our technical
+troops did their share of work, and how large and important that share
+was in securing the general result. The maps are also well done, and
+therefore useful in enabling a reader to follow out the details of the
+narrative.
+
+
+
+
+_BOOKS RECEIVED._
+
+
+Dissertations and Discussions; Political, Philosophical and
+Historical. By John Stuart Mill. Vol. V. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
+
+From Everglade to Canon with the Second Dragoons, 1836-75, Compiled by
+Theo. F. Rodenbough. New York: D. Van Nostrand.
+
+Grand'ther Baldwin's Thanksgiving, with other Ballads and Poems. By
+Horatio Alger, Jr. Boston: Loring.
+
+Shakespeare Hermeneutics; or, The Still Lion. By C.M. Ingleby, M.A.,
+LL.D. London: Tr�bner & Co.
+
+Minutes of the Ohio State Arch�ological Convention. Columbus: Printed
+for the Society by Paul & Thrall.
+
+Strength of Beams under Transverse Loads. By Prof. W. Allan. New York:
+D. Van Nostrand.
+
+The Illustrated Catholic Family Almanac for 1876. New York: Catholic
+Publication Society.
+
+Report of the Commissioner of Education for 1874. Washington:
+Government Printing-office.
+
+Our Poetical Favorites. Second Series. By Aschel C. Kendrick. New
+York: Sheldon &Co.
+
+Camp-Life in Florida. By Charles Hallock. New York: Forest and Stream
+Publishing Co.
+
+Lectures on Art. Second Series. By H. Taine. New York: Henry Holt &
+Co.
+
+Pretty Miss Bellew. By Theo. Gift. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
+
+Drawn from. Life. By Charles Dickens. New York: E.J. Hale & Son.
+
+The Conquest of Europe: A Poem of the Future. By Confucius.
+
+Cartoons. By Margaret J. Preston. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Lippincott's Magazine of Popular
+Literature and Science, by Various
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 13154-8.txt or 13154-8.zip *****
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+    <title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Lippincott's Magazine of
+    Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII, No. 98, February,
+    1876.</title>
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature
+and Science, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science
+       February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98.
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: August 10, 2004 [EBook #13154]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Sandra Brown and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <div class="trans-note">
+        Transcriber's Note: The Table of Contents and the list of
+        illustrations were added by the transcriber.
+    </div>
+    <hr class="full" />
+
+    <h1>LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE</h1>
+
+    <h3>OF</h3>
+
+    <h2><i>POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.</i></h2>
+    <hr class="short" />
+
+    <h4>February, 1876.</h4>
+
+    <h4>Vol. XVII.</h4>
+    <hr class="short" />
+
+    <h3>TABLE OF CONTENTS</h3>
+
+    <div class="toc">
+        <p><a href="#illustrations">ILLUSTRATIONS</a></p>
+
+        <p>THE CENTURY--ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.</p>
+
+        <p class="i4">II.--AMERICAN PROGRESS.
+        <a href="#page137">137</a></p>
+
+        <p>UP THE THAMES.</p>
+
+        <p class="i4">CONCLUDING PAPER, by EDWARD C. BRUCE.
+        <a href="#page154">154</a></p>
+
+        <p>THE POET'S PEN, by F.A. HILLARD.
+        <a href="#page171">171</a></p>
+
+        <p>SKETCHES OF INDIA.</p>
+
+        <p class="i4">II. <a href="#page172">172</a></p>
+
+        <p>FRA ALOYSIUS, by EMMA
+        LAZARUS.<a href="#page183">183</a></p>
+
+        <p>A FEW HOURS IN BOHEMIA. <a href="#page185">185</a></p>
+
+        <p>PROFESSOR AND TEACHER, by JAMES MORGAN
+        HART.<a href="#page193">193</a></p>
+
+        <p>CONTRASTED MOODS, by CHARLOTTE F. BATES.
+        <a href="#page203">203</a></p>
+
+        <p>THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS.</p>
+
+        <p class="i4">by MRS. E. LYNN LINTON, AUTHOR OF "PATRICIA
+        KEMBALL."</p>
+
+        <p class="i4">CHAPTER XXI.
+        &mdash;CHANGES.<a href="#page204">204</a></p>
+
+        <p class="i4">CHAPTER XXII. &mdash;EDGAR HARROWBY.
+        <a href="#page209">209</a></p>
+
+        <p class="i4">CHAPTER XXIII. &mdash;ON THE
+        MOOR.<a href="#page215">215</a></p>
+
+        <p class="i4">CHAPTER XXIV. &mdash;THE CHILD
+        FINA.<a href="#page221">221</a></p>
+
+        <p>LETTERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA, by LADY
+        BARKER.<a href="#page226">226</a></p>
+
+        <p>ON SANKOTA HEAD, by ETHEL C. GALE.
+        <a href="#page234">234</a></p>
+
+        <p>AT THE OLD PLANTATION.</p>
+
+        <p class="i4">TWO PAPERS.&mdash;II., by ROBERT WILSON.
+        <a href="#page241">241</a></p>
+
+        <p>OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.</p>
+
+        <p class="i4">A GERMAN AGRICULTURAL FAIR.
+        <a href="#page250">250</a></p>
+
+        <p class="i4">A PAIR OF WHEELS AND AN OLD PARASOL.
+        <a href="#page252">252</a></p>
+
+        <p class="i4">MEDICAL EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES, by
+        R.A.F. PENROSE.<a href="#page256">256</a></p>
+
+        <p class="i4">OUR EARLY NEWSPAPERS.
+        <a href="#page260">260</a></p>
+
+        <p>LITERATURE OF THE DAY. <a href="#page262">262</a></p>
+
+        <p class="i4"><i>Books Received.</i>
+        <a href="#page264">264</a></p>
+    </div>
+    <br />
+    <hr />
+    <br />
+    <a name="illustrations"
+          id="illustrations"></a>
+
+    <h4>ILLUSTRATIONS</h4>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig137">POST-OFFICE
+    DEPARTMENT BUILDING AT WASHINGTON.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig139-1">THE CAPITOL AT
+    WASHINGTON AND CARPENTERS' HALL, WHERE THE FIRST COLONIAL
+    CONGRESS MET.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig141-1">HOE'S NEW
+    PERFECTING PRINTING-PRESS, PRINTING 12,000 DOUBLE MPRESSIONS
+    PER HOUR, AND THE OLD EPHRATA PRESS.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig143-1">THE CITY OF TOKYO,
+    THE LARGEST STEAMSHIP BUILT IN AMERICA, AND FITCH'S STEAMBOAT,
+    THE FIRST CONSTRUCTED.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig144">THE COTTON
+    GIN.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig145">GRAIN
+    ELEVATOR.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig147">INTERIOR OF A POSTAL
+    CAR.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig149">PROF. S.F.B. MORSE,
+    THE INVENTOR OF THE ELECTRO-MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig151-1">THE SCHOOL-HOUSE
+    OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig154">WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM
+    ETON.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig155">MORTON
+    CHURCH.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig156">MILTON'S PEAR
+    TREE.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig157">GRAY.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig158-1">BEACONSFIELD
+    CHURCH.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig158-2">TOMB OF
+    BURKE.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig159">HEDSOR AND COOKHAM
+    CHURCHES.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig160">ETON COLLEGE AND
+    CHAPEL.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig161">ETON COLLEGE, FROM
+    NORTH TERRACE, WINDSOR.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig162">STAINES
+    CHURCH.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig163">NORMAN GATE AND
+    ROUND TOWER, WINDSOR.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig164">HERNE'S OAK.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig165">EAST FRONT, WINDSOR
+    CASTLE.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig166-1">QUEEN ELIZABETH'S
+    BUILDING, WINDSOR.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig166-2">EARL OF
+    SURREY.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig167">WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM
+    BISHOPSGATE.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig168">LOCK AT
+    WINDSOR.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig169">THE THAMES
+    EMBANKMENT.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig170">ELMS NEAR THE
+    HERONRY.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig173">HINDU TEMPLES NEAR
+    POONA.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig175">G�NDS.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig177">CENOTAPHS IN THE
+    VALLEY OF THE TONSA.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig179">THE GAUR, OR INDIAN
+    BISON.</a></p>
+
+    <p class="illustrations"><a href="#fig181">BANJARIS.</a></p>
+    <hr />
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page137"
+       id="page137"></a>[pg 137]</span>
+
+    <h2>THE CENTURY&mdash;ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.</h2>
+
+    <h3>II.&mdash;AMERICAN PROGRESS.</h3>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/137.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig137"
+             id="fig137"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/137.jpg"
+             alt="POST-OFFICE DEPARTMENT BUILDING AT WASHINGTON." />
+             </a>POST-OFFICE DEPARTMENT BUILDING AT WASHINGTON.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>From showing the world's right to the epoch of '76, and
+    sketching the progress of the century in its wider aspect, a
+    natural transition is to the part played in illustrating the
+    period by the people from whose political birth it dates, and
+    who have made the task of honoring it their own. They have
+    reached their first resting-place, and pardonably enjoy the
+    opportunity of looking back at the road they have traversed.
+    They pause to contemplate its gloomy beginning, the perilous
+    precipices along which it wound, and the sudden quagmires that
+    often interrupted it, all now softened by distance and by the
+    consciousness of success. Opening with a forest-path, it has
+    broadened and brightened into a highway of nations.</p>
+
+    <p>So numerous and various were the
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page138"
+       id="page138"></a>[pg 138]</span> influences, formative and
+       impellent, which combined to bring the colonies up to the
+       precise ripening-point of their independence, as to make it
+       difficult to assign each its proper force. In the concentric
+       mass, however, they stand out sharp and clear, and the
+       conjoint effect seems preordained. That the event should
+       have come when it did, and not before or after, is as
+       obvious as any of history's predictions after the fact.
+       Looking through the glasses of to-day, we find it hard to
+       realize that the Continental Congress renewed its
+       expressions of loyalty to the king three weeks after the
+       battle of Bunker Hill, so distinct before us rises the
+       completed and symmetrical edifice of separation ready for
+       its capstone, from its foundations growing steadily through
+       the past.</p>
+
+    <p>Thirteen years&mdash;one for each State&mdash;were occupied
+    in the topping-off. The Seven Years' War, that created the new
+    central power of modern Europe, had a great deal to do with
+    creating the new American power. It taught the colonies their
+    strength, gave them several thousand native soldiers, and sent
+    them from over the water the material, some of it completely
+    wrought, for more in the German immigration consequent upon it.
+    Out of it grew the obnoxious enactments that brought on the
+    end. So closely simultaneous were these with the king's
+    proclamation of October 7, 1763, prohibiting all his subjects
+    "from making any purchases or settlements whatever, or taking
+    possession of any of the lands, beyond the sources of any of
+    the rivers which fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the west or
+    north-west," as to support the suspicion that the British
+    ministry had a premonitory sense of the coming struggle, and
+    meant to prepare for it by checking the expansion of the
+    colonies. The pressure applied to front and rear was part of
+    one and the same movement; and is incompatible with the
+    accepted view that neither cabinet nor Parliament anticipated,
+    in the first instance, any American opposition to the Stamp Act
+    and the system of legislation to which it was the opening
+    wedge. The England of that day proposed to rule America after
+    much the same fashion with Ireland, the Alleghanies presenting
+    themselves very conveniently for an Indian Pale. This line of
+    policy was in harmony with the ideas then predominant in
+    England, and was fully understood by the colonists. They could
+    not possibly have been blind to it, in view of the continuous
+    and repeated claims of absolute legislative supremacy formally
+    put forth, from the bill to that effect passed coincidently
+    with the repeal of the Stamp Act down to the alterations made
+    in the Massachusetts charter in 1774; the latter proceeding
+    being in close harmony, both in time and motive, with the
+    extension of the province of Quebec to the Ohio&mdash;one of
+    the very rare evidences of sagacity and foresight discernible
+    in the course of the ministry; for, while it did not avail to
+    dam the westward flood, it certainly contributed, with other
+    concessions made at the same time to the Canadians, to save the
+    St. Lawrence to the Crown.</p>
+
+    <p>As apropos to this point, we transcribe from the original
+    manuscript, written in the round, clear, unhesitating but
+    steady hand characteristic of all Washington's letters, the
+    following to James Wood of Winchester, afterward governor of
+    Virginia, but then little more than a stripling:</p>
+
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>"MOUNT VERNON, Feb'y 20th, 1774.</p>
+
+        <p>"DEAR SIR: I have to thank you, for your obliging acc't
+        of your trip down the Mississippi, contained in a Letter of
+        the 18th of Octob'r from Winchester&mdash;the other Letter,
+        therein refer'd to, I have never yet receiv'd, nor did this
+        come to hand till some time in November, as I was returning
+        from Williamsburg.</p>
+
+        <p>"The contradictory acc'ts given of the Lands upon the
+        Mississippi are really astonishing&mdash;some speak of the
+        Country as a terrestrial Paradise, whilst others represent
+        it as scarce fit for anything but Slaves and Brutes. I am
+        well satisfied, however, from your description of it, that
+        I have no cause to regret my disappointment:&mdash;The
+        acc't of Lord Hillsborough's sentiments of the Proclamation
+        of 1763, I can view in no other light than as one, among
+        many other proofs, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page139"
+           id="page139"></a>[pg 139]</span> of his Lordship's
+           malignant disposition towards us poor Americans, formed
+           equally in malice, absurdity, and error; as it would
+           have puzzled this noble Peer, I am persuaded, to have
+           assigned any plausible reason in support of this
+           opinion.</p>
+
+        <p>"As I do not know but I may shortly see you in
+        Frederick, and assuredly shall before the Assembly, I shall
+        add no more than that, it will always give me pleasure to
+        see you at this place whenever it is convenient to you, and
+        that with compliments to your good Mother I remain, D'r
+        Sir, Y'r most Obed't H'ble Serv't,</p>
+
+        <p>"G'o WASHINGTON."</p>
+    </blockquote>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/139-1.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig139-1"
+             id="fig139-1"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/139-1.jpg"
+             alt="THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON." />
+        </a>THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON AND CARPENTERS' HALL, WHERE
+        THE FIRST COLONIAL CONGRESS MET.
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="figleft"
+         style="width:50%;">
+        <a href="images/139-2.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig139-2"
+             id="fig139-2"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/139-2.jpg"
+             alt="CARPENTERS' HALL." /></a>
+    </div>
+
+    <p>This private note, discussing casually and curtly the great
+    river of the West, and the minister who endeavored to make it a
+    <i>flumen clausum</i> to the colonists, nearly equidistant in
+    date between the Boston Tea-party and the meeting of the
+    Assembly which called the first Continental Congress, has some
+    public interest. The West always possessed a peculiar
+    attraction for Washington. He explored it personally and
+    through others, and lost no occasion of procuring detailed
+    information in regard to its capabilities. He acquired large
+    bodies of land along the Ohio at different points, from its
+    affluents at the foot of the Alleghany to the Great Kanawha and
+    below. Now we see him gazing farther, over the yet unreddened
+    battle-grounds of Boone and Lewis, to the magnificent province
+    France and Spain were carefully holding in joint trusteeship
+    for the infant state he was to nurse. The representative in the
+    provincial legislature of a frontier county stretching from the
+    Potomac to the Ohio, we may fancy him inspired, as he looked
+    around from his post on the vertebral range of the continent,
+    with "something of prophetic strain." If so, he was not long to
+    have leisure for indulging it. Within eighteen months his
+    life's work was to summon him eastward to the sea-shore. The
+    Dark and Bloody Ground must wait. For its tillage other guess
+    implements than the plough were
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page140"
+       id="page140"></a>[pg 140]</span> preparing&mdash;the same
+       that beckoned him to Cambridge and the new century.</p>
+
+    <p>The slender driblet of population which at this juncture
+    flowed toward the Lower Mississippi was due to the anxiety of
+    Spain to get a home-supply of wheat, hemp and such-like
+    indispensables of temperate extraction for her broad tropical
+    empire. A newspaper of August 20, 1773 gives news from New York
+    of the arrival at that port of "the sloop Mississippi, Capt.
+    Goodrich, with the Connecticut Military Adventurers from the
+    Mississippi, but last from Pensacola, the 16th inst." They had
+    "laid out twenty-three townships at the Natchez," where lands
+    were in process of rapid occupation, the arrivals numbering
+    "above four hundred families within six weeks, down the Ohio
+    from Virginia and the Carolinas." The Connecticut men doubtless
+    came back prepared, a little later, to vindicate their martial
+    cognomen; and to aid them in that they were met by
+    Transatlantic recruits in unusual force. The same journal
+    mentions the arrival at Philadelphia of 1050 passengers in two
+    ships from Londonderry; this valuable infusion of Scotch-Irish
+    brawn, moral, mental and muscular, being farther supplemented
+    by three hundred passengers and servants in the ship Walworth
+    from the same port for South Carolina. The cash value to the
+    country of immigrants was ascertainable by a much less
+    circuitous computation then than now; many of them being
+    indentured for a term of years at an annual rate that left a
+    very fair sum for interest and sinking fund on the one thousand
+    dollars it is the practice of our political economist of to-day
+    to clap on each head that files into Castle Garden. The German
+    came with the Celt in almost equal force&mdash;enough to more
+    than balance their countrymen under Donop, Riedesel and
+    Knyphausen. The attention drawn to the colonies by the
+    ministerial aggressions thus contributed to strengthen them for
+    the contest.</p>
+
+    <p>But with all these accessions in the nick of time, two
+    millions and a quarter of whites was a meagre outfit for
+    stocking a virgin farm of fifteen hundred miles square, to say
+    nothing of its future police and external defence against the
+    wolves of the deep. It barely equaled the original population,
+    between the two oceans, of nomadic Indians, who were, by
+    general consent, too few to be counted or treated as owners of
+    the land. It fell far short of the numbers that had
+    constituted, two centuries earlier, the European republic from
+    which our federation borrowed its name. The task, too, of the
+    occidental United States was double. Instead of being condensed
+    into a small, wealthy and defensible territory, they had at
+    once to win their independence from a maritime power stronger
+    than Spain, and to redeem from utter crudeness and turn into
+    food, clothing and the then recognized appliances of civilized
+    life the wilderness thus secured. The result could not vary nor
+    be doubted; but that the struggle, in war and in peace, must be
+    slow and wearing, was quite as certain. It is dreary to look
+    back upon its commencement now, and upon the earlier decades of
+    its progress; and we cannot wonder that those who had it to
+    look forward to half shrank from it. Among them there may have
+    been a handful who could scan the unshaped wilderness as the
+    sculptor does his block, and body forth in imagination the
+    glory hidden within. That which these may have faintly imagined
+    stands before us palpable if not yet perfected, the amorphous
+    veil of the shapely figure hewn away, and the long toil of
+    drill and chisel only in too much danger of being
+    forgotten.</p>
+
+    <p>Population, the most convenient gauge of national strength
+    and progress, is far from being a universally reliable one. We
+    shall find sometimes as wide a difference between two given
+    millions as between two given individuals. Either may grow
+    without doing much else. They may direct their energies to
+    different fields. Compared with the United States, France and
+    Germany, for example, have advanced but little in population.
+    They have, however, done wonders for themselves and the world
+    by activities which we have, in comparison, neglected. The old
+    city of London gains in wealth as it loses in inhabitants.
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page141"
+       id="page141"></a>[pg 141]</span></p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/141-1.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig141-1"
+             id="fig141-1"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/141-1.jpg"
+             alt="HOE'S NEW PERFECTING PRINTING-PRESS." />
+        </a><br />HOE'S NEW PERFECTING PRINTING-PRESS, PRINTING 12,000
+        DOUBLE IMPRESSIONS PER HOUR, AND THE OLD EPHRATA PRESS.
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="figleft"
+         style="width:40%;">
+        <a href="images/141-2.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig141-2"
+             id="fig141-2"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/141-2.jpg"
+             alt="THE OLD EPHRATA PRESS." /></a>
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Yet success in the multiplication of souls within their own
+    borders&mdash;depopulate as they may elsewhere&mdash;is eagerly
+    coveted and regularly measured by all the nations. Since 1790,
+    when we set them the example, they have one by one adopted the
+    rule of numbering heads every five, six or ten years,
+    recognizing latterly as well, more and more, the importance of
+    numbering other things, until men, women and children have come
+    to be embedded in a medley of steam-engines, pigs, newspapers,
+    schools, churches and bolts of calico. For twenty centuries
+    this taking of stock by governments had been an obsolete
+    practice, until revived by the framers of the American
+    Constitution and made a vital part of that instrument. The
+    right of the most&mdash;and not of the richest, the best, the
+    bravest, the cleverest, or the oldest in blood&mdash;to rule
+    being formally recognized and set down on paper, it became
+    necessary to ascertain at stated intervals who were the most.
+    The lords of the soil, instead of being inducted into power on
+    the death of their parents with great pother of ointment, Te
+    Deum, heraldry, drum and trumpet, were chosen every ten years
+    by a corps of humble knights of the pencil and schedule.</p>
+
+    <p>To these disposers of empire, the enhancement and
+    complication of whose toil has been a labor of love with each
+    decennial Congress, we owe the knowledge that eighty years, out
+    of the hundred, brought the people of the Union up from a tally
+    of 3,929,214 in 1790 to 38,558,371 in 1870, and that down to
+    the beginning of the last decade the rate of increment adhered
+    closely to 35 per cent. On that basis of growth the latest
+    return falls nearly four millions short. One of the causes of
+    this is "too obvious" (and too disagreeable) "to mention;" but
+    it is inadequate. The sharp demarcation of the western frontier
+    by the grasshopper and the hygrometer is another, which will
+    continue to operate until, by irrigation, tree-planting or some
+    other device, a new climate can be manufactured for the Plains.
+    The teeming West, that of old needed only to be tickled with a
+    hoe to laugh with a harvest, has disappeared. At least what is
+    left of it has lost the power of suction that was wont to reach
+    across the ocean, pull Ballys and Dorfs up by the roots and
+    transplant them bodily to the Muskingum and the Des Moines. A
+    third cause, operating more especially within the current
+    decade, is attributable to another mode in which that
+    attractive power has been exerted&mdash;the absorption from the
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page142"
+       id="page142"></a>[pg 142]</span> European purse for the
+       construction of railways of seven or eight times as much as
+       the thirty-five millions in specie it took to fight through
+       the Revolutionary war. For a while, Hans came with his
+       thalers, but they outfooted him&mdash;"fast and faster"
+       behind came "unmerciful disaster," and he was fain to turn
+       his back on the land of promise and promises. Similar
+       set-backs, however, are interspersed through our previous
+       history, and the influence of the last one may be
+       over-rated.</p>
+
+    <p>In truth, the Old World's fund of humanity is not
+    sufficiently ample to keep up the pace; and the rate of natural
+    increase is no longer what it was when the country was all new,
+    and cornfield and nursery vied in fecundity. That the former
+    source of augmentation is gaining in proportion upon the latter
+    is apparent from the last three returns. The ratio of
+    foreign-born inhabitants to the aggregate in 1850 was 9.68 per
+    cent. in 1860, 13.16, and in 1870, 14.44. In the last-named
+    year, moreover, 10,892,015, or 28 per cent. of the entire
+    population, white and black, are credited with foreign
+    parentage on one or both sides. Excluding the colored element,
+    ranked as all native, this proportion rises to 32 per cent.</p>
+
+    <p>Judged by the test of language, three-fifths of those who
+    are of foreign birth disappear from the roll of foreigners,
+    3,119,705 out of 5,567,229 having come from the British Isles
+    and British America. Germany, including Bohemia, Holland and
+    Switzerland, sums up 1,883,285; Scandinavia, 241,685; and
+    France and Belgium, 128,955. The Celtic influx from Ireland,
+    and the Teutonic and Norse together, form two currents of
+    almost identical volume. Compared with either, the contribution
+    of the Latin or the Romance races sinks into
+    insignificance&mdash;an insignificance, however, that shows
+    itself chiefly in numbers, the traces of their character and
+    influence being, relatively to their numerical strength,
+    marked. The immigrants from Northern and Southern Europe have a
+    disposition, in choosing their new homes, to follow latitude,
+    or rather the isotherms; the North-men skirting the Canadian
+    frontier and grouping themselves on the coldest side of Lake
+    Michigan, while the Italians, Spaniards and French drift toward
+    the Gulf States. The Irish and Germans are more cosmopolitan,
+    each in a like degree. They disperse with less regard to
+    climate or surroundings, and are more rapidly and imperceptibly
+    absorbed and blended, thus promoting rather than marring the
+    homogeneity of the American people. The Germans are, however,
+    more prone to colonizing than the Irish&mdash;a circumstance
+    due in great measure to their differing in language from the
+    mass of their new neighbors. This cause of isolation is
+    gradually losing its weight, the recognition of the German
+    tongue by State legislatures, municipalities, etc. being less
+    common than formerly, notwithstanding the immense immigratior
+    so calculated to extend it.</p>
+
+    <p>While assimilation has been growing more complete, and a
+    fixed resultant becoming more discernible, the ingredients of
+    this ethnic medley do not seem to have materially varied in
+    their proportions since the beginning of the century. They
+    present a tolerably close parallel to the like process in
+    Northern France, where Celt and Teuton combined in nearly equal
+    numbers, with, as in our case, a limited local infusion of the
+    Norse. The result cannot, however, be identical, the French
+    lacking our Anglo-Saxon substratum, with its valuable
+    traditions and habitudes of political thought. The balance
+    between impulse and conservatism has never been, in this
+    country, long or seriously disturbed, and is probably as sound
+    now as a hundred years ago. In the discussions of the twenty
+    years which embrace our Revolutionary period we find abundance
+    of theory, but they were never carried by abstractions out of
+    sight of the practical. Our publicists were not misled by
+    convictions of the "infinite perfectibility of the human mind,"
+    the motive proclaimed by Condorcet, writing in sweet
+    obliviousness of the guillotine, as explaining "how much more
+    pure, accurate and profound are the principles upon which the
+    constitution and laws of France have been formed than those
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page10"
+       id="page10"></a>[pg 10]</span> which directed the
+       Americans." The lack of this equilibrium among the pure,
+       and, as we may venture to term them, the untrained races, we
+       have occasional opportunities of noting on our own soil when
+       for a passing cause they resort to isolated action.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/143-1.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig143-1"
+             id="fig143-1"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/143-1.jpg"
+             alt="THE CITY OF TOKYO." />
+        </a>THE CITY OF TOKYO, THE LARGEST STEAMSHIP BUILT IN
+        AMERICA, AND FITCH'S STEAMBOAT, THE FIRST CONSTRUCTED.
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="figleft"
+         style="width:40%;">
+        <a href="images/143-2.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig143-2"
+             id="fig143-2"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/143-2.jpg"
+             alt="FITCH'S STEAMBOAT." /></a>
+    </div>
+
+    <p>A race-question of a character that cannot be supplied by
+    differentiation within Caucasian limits haunts us as it has
+    done from the very birth of the colonies. Like the Wild
+    Huntsman, we have had the sable spectre close beside us through
+    the whole run. But, more fortunate than he, we see it begin to
+    fade. At least its outlines are contracting. The ratio of
+    colored inhabitants to the aggregate, in 1790 19.26 per cent.,
+    or one-fifth, fell in 1860 to 14.12, or one-seventh, and in
+    1870 to 12.65, or an eighth. The next census will beyond doubt
+    point more strongly in the same direction. If, whilst dwindling
+    in magnitude, the dusky shape perplex us by assuming suddenly a
+    novel form, we may yet be assured that it is the same in
+    substance and in manageability. Its hue is whitening with the
+    fleece of five millions of cotton bales. The cloud has a silver
+    lining&mdash;a golden one in fact&mdash;for ours is pecuniarily
+    a serviceable phantom to the extent of adding to our annual
+    income a sum equal to eight or ten times the entire yearly
+    export of the colonies. Should he lead us, like the
+    Land&mdash;und&mdash;Wild&mdash;Graf, into the pit of ruin, he
+    will have first bottomed it with an ample and soft cushion of
+    lint whereon to fall.</p>
+
+    <p>Extremes meet, and modern culture, like ancient anarchy,
+    drives its people into cities. Such is the tendency on both
+    sides of the ocean. Improvement must result from associated
+    effort, and of that cities are the last expression. All the
+    European towns are outgrowing the rural districts. With us the
+    change states itself in an advance, since 1790, of the city
+    population from 3.4 to 20.9 per cent. of the aggregate.
+    Broadcloth has gained on homespun in the proportion of six to
+    one, Giles having thus six mouths to fill where he formerly had
+    but one. We shall show farther on how gallantly he meets this
+    draft. New York, with its suburbs, contains more Germans than
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page144"
+       id="page144"></a>[pg 144]</span> any German city save Vienna
+       and Berlin, more Irish than Dublin, and more
+       English-speaking inhabitants than Liverpool, Birmingham,
+       Manchester, Bristol and Leeds together. All the colonial
+       towns in a lump would scarce add a twentieth to her numbers,
+       and her militia embraces nearly twice as many men as served,
+       first and last, in the Continental army.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/144.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig144"
+             id="fig144"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/144.jpg"
+             alt="THE COTTON GIN." /></a>THE COTTON GIN.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>But the column that sums the souls does not state the
+    complete life of the cities. Man has in our day a host of
+    allies that work with him and at his command&mdash; slaves of
+    iron, steel and brass wholly unknown to our
+    great&mdash;grand-fathers&mdash; fed also by the farmer,
+    through the miner as an intermediate. Steam-engines, to the
+    number of 40,191, and of 1,215,711 horse-power&mdash;all of the
+    stationary variety, and exclusive of nearly half as many that
+    traverse the country and may be classed among the rural
+    population&mdash;have succeeded the websters and spinners who
+    were wont to clothe all the world and his wife, and who survive
+    only in the surnames of some of our statesmen and financiers.
+    Not that they confine their labors to textile fabrics. Their
+    iron fingers are in every pie, including that of the printer,
+    who is answered, when he calls the roll of his serfs of steam,
+    by 691 whistles. And he is one of the smallest of the
+    slaveholders&mdash;a mere ten-bale man. India-rubber, a product
+    known a century ago only by some little black lumps used by
+    draughtsmen to erase pencil-marks, owns enough of them to equal
+    4412 horses or 22,000 No. 1 field hands. Boots and shoes not of
+    the India-rubber variety employ 3212 horse-power or 15,000
+    steam Crispins, over and above their Christian fellows who
+    stick solitary to the last, and who, it must be owned, produce
+    an article more of the Revolutionary type and more solid and
+    durable. As a cord-wainer Steam is a failure; but he works
+    cheaply, and will continue to hammer on, and disseminate his
+    commodity of brown paper throughout the temperate zone.
+    Three-fourths of the population of the globe still runs unshod,
+    however, and it is obvious that this crying want cannot be met
+    by the old system. Steam will perforce keep pegging away till
+    Cathay, Xipangu, India and all the isles awaken to the
+    absurdity of walking on cotton or undressed human skin. Could
+    one of our 299 fire-fed cobblers have been set to work at
+    Valley Forge, backed by one of the 1057 makers of woolen that
+    are similarly nourished!</p>
+
+    <p>But we do Mr. Watt's lusty bantling
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page145"
+       id="page145"></a>[pg 145]</span> injustice in assigning him
+       exclusively the tastes of a cit. He is not insensible to
+       pastoral charms, and often selects a home among the hemlocks
+       and under the broad-armed oaks, by bosky glen or open mead,
+       wherever the brooklet brawls or dreams, for he sticks to the
+       waterside like a beaver. Here he sits down, like an artist
+       as he is, until he has got all the choice bits of the grove.
+       The large and bustling family of the sawyers, both top and
+       bottom, he has utterly banished from their ancient haunts.
+       'There would be needed a million and a half of them to take
+       the places of 11,199 steam-engines, of 314,774 horse-power,
+       that are devastating our forests. An equal number is
+       replaced by the 16,559 water-wheels, of 326,728 horse-power,
+       engaged in the same field of havoc. Armed with the handsaw,
+       all the Revolutionary patriots and Tories together,
+       withdrawing their attention entirely from military affairs,
+       as well as from all other mundane concerns, would not have
+       turned out one-sixth of the quantity of lumber demanded by
+       their descendants of a period that boasts itself the age of
+       iron, and has as little as possible to do with wood. And if
+       we place in the hands of the patriarchs the ancestral axes,
+       and tell them to get out charcoal for three millions of tons
+       of iron, to be hauled an average of a hundred miles to
+       market by oxen over roads whose highest type was the
+       corduroy, the imagination reels at the helplessness of the
+       heroes.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/145.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig145"
+             id="fig145"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/145.jpg"
+             alt="GRAIN ELEVATOR." /></a>GRAIN ELEVATOR.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>The paternal thoughtfulness of the home government employed
+    itself in relieving the colonist from such exhausting drafts
+    upon his energies. It sedulously prohibited his throwing
+    himself away on the manufacture of iron or anything else. In
+    1750 it placed him under a penalty of �200 for erecting a
+    rolling-mill, tilt-hammer or steel-furnace. Lest the governor
+    of the colony should fail to enforce this statute and protect
+    the pioneer from such a waste of time, it held that functionary
+    to a personal forfeit of �500 for failing, within thirty days
+    after presentment by two witnesses on oath, to abate as a
+    nuisance every such mill, engine, etc. As this mulct would have
+    made a serious inroad on the emoluments of the royal governors,
+    even with the addition of the inaugural douceur customarily
+    given by the provincial assemblies to each new
+    incumbent&mdash;in Virginia regularly �500, doubled in the
+    instance of Fauquier in <span class="pagenum"><a name="page146"
+       id="page146"></a>[pg 146]</span> 1758, when it was desired
+       to drive the entering wedge of disestablishment and razee
+       the parsons&mdash;we are prepared to believe that the iron
+       business was not flourishing. Under a despotism tempered so
+       very moderately by bribes, a similar blight fell upon all
+       other branches of manufacture. Among these, wool, flax,
+       paper, hats and leather are specified in a Parliamentary
+       report as interfering with "the trade, navigation and
+       manufactures" of the mother-country. An act of Parliament
+       accordingly forbade the exportation of hats to foreign
+       countries, and even from one colony to another.</p>
+
+    <p>That, after such a course of repression, the country found
+    itself wholly unprepared on the attainment of independence to
+    make any headway in this field, is no matter of surprise.
+    Thirty years elapsed before the manufacturing statistics of the
+    Union became presentable. In 1810 they were reckoned at
+    $198,613,471. This embraces every fruit of handicraft, from a
+    barrel of flour and a bushel of lime to a silk dress. We had
+    122,647 spindles and 325,392 looms, made 53,908 tons of pig
+    iron, and refined about one pound of sugar for each head of the
+    population. In 1870, after sixty years of tossing between the
+    Scylla and Charybdis of tariffs, "black" and white, the yield
+    of our factories had mounted to the respectable sum of
+    $4,232,325,442. They employed 2,053,996 operatives. Of these,
+    the average wages were $377, against $289 in 1860 and $247 in
+    1850, yearly. The advance in the product of refined sugar may
+    be cited as illustrative of the progress of the people in
+    comfort and luxury. It reached a value of one hundred and nine
+    millions, representing nearly ten times as many pounds, or
+    twenty-eight pounds a head. This exemplification is but one in
+    an endless list.</p>
+
+    <p>Manufactures have come to figure respectably in our exports.
+    They exceed in that list, by three or four to one, the entire
+    exports of all kinds in 1790; and they equal the average
+    aggregate of the years from 1815 to 1824. But the
+    multiplication of the wants of a people rapidly growing in
+    numbers and refinement will, with the comparatively high price
+    of labor, scarcity of capital and distance of most of our ports
+    from the markets supplied by European manufactures, for a long
+    time to come make the home-supply the chief care of our
+    artisans. They have, for such and other reasons, in some points
+    lost ground of late. The revolution in the propulsion and
+    construction of ships, for instance, has not found them
+    prepared to take the advantage they have usually done of
+    improvements. Not only do the British screw-steamers take
+    undisputed possession of our trade with their own country, but
+    they expel our once unrivaled craft from the harbors of other
+    quarters of the globe, and threaten to monopolize the most
+    profitable part of our carrying-trade with all countries. This
+    result is more easily explained than the inroads made on our
+    more ordinary foreign traffic, in sailing vessels, by the
+    mercantile marine of second- and third-rate powers. This is
+    eloquently told by the annual government returns and the daily
+    shipping-list. While our coastwise tonnage increases, that
+    employed in foreign trade remains stationary or declines. The
+    bearing of this upon our naval future becomes an imperative
+    question for our merchants and legislators. The United States
+    is benevolently and gratuitously building up a marine for each
+    of half a dozen European states which possess little or no
+    commerce of their own, and multiplying the ships and sailors of
+    our chief maritime rival. We have long since ceased to import
+    locomotives, and have, within the past two years, almost ceased
+    to import railroad iron. Our iron-workers obtain coal at nearly
+    or quite as low prices as do those of Birkenhead or the Clyde.
+    They have recently sent to sea some large screw-steamers that
+    perform well. No insurmountable difficulty appears to prevent
+    the launching of more until we have enough to serve at least
+    our direct trade with Europe and China. That determined, it may
+    be possible to ascertain whether we cannot assist Norway,
+    Belgium and Sicily in carrying our cotton, wheat and tobacco to
+    the purchasers of
+    it.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page147"
+       id="page147"></a>[pg 147]</span>
+
+    <div class="figright"
+         style="width:70%;">
+        <a href="images/147.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig147"
+             id="fig147"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/147.jpg"
+             alt="INTERIOR OF A POSTAL CAR." /></a>INTERIOR OF A
+             POSTAL CAR.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>This decline in American tonnage is, it must be added, only
+    relative, whether the comparison be made with other countries
+    or with our own past. The returns show a carrying capacity in
+    our ships more than twentyfold that of 1789, and three times
+    that of 1807; when, on the other hand, it exceeded in the ratio
+    of fourteen to twelve that of 1829, twenty-two years later.
+    This interest is peculiarly subject to fluctuations; some of
+    which in the past have been less explicable than the one it is
+    now undergoing. Another decade may turn the tables, and restore
+    the flag of the old Liverpool liners to their fleeter but less
+    shapely supplanters. The steamer and the clipper are both
+    American inventions. Why not their combination ours as well?
+    The centenary of Rumsey's boat, not due till December 11, 1887,
+    should not find its descendants lording the ocean under another
+    flag.</p>
+
+    <p>The monthly Falmouth packet of a century ago, sufficient
+    till within the past two generations for the mail communication
+    of the two continents, has grown into six or eight steamships
+    weekly, each capable of carrying a pair of the old sloops in
+    her hold, and making the passage westwardly in a fifth and
+    eastwardly in a third of the time. Can it be but ninety years
+    ago that the latest dates at New York (February 14, 1786) from
+    London (December 7, 1785) brought as a leading item from Paris
+    (November 20) the news that Philippe �galit� had by his
+    father's death just come into four millions of livres a year,
+    that six hundred thousand livres paid by the Crown to his
+    father thereupon devolved to Monsieur (afterward Louis XVIII.),
+    and that the latter had kept up the game of shuttlecock with
+    the treasure of the French by "a donation of all his estates to
+    the duke of Normandy, the younger son of their Majesties,
+    preserving for himself the use and profits thereof during his
+    life"? That was a short winter-passage, too&mdash;more speedy
+    than the land-trip of a letter in the same journal "from a
+    gentleman in the Western country to his friend in Connecticut,
+    dated River Muskingum, November 5, 1785," describing a voyage
+    down the Ohio from Fort Pitt and the wonders of the country
+    much as Livingstone and Du Chaillu do those of Africa. The time
+    is less now to Japan, and about the same to New South Wales,
+    with both which countries we have postal conventions-i.e., a
+    practically consolidated service&mdash;far cheaper and more
+    convenient than that maintained on the adoption of
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page148"
+       id="page148"></a>[pg 148]</span> the present Constitution
+       between our own cities. Our foreign service with leading
+       countries is combined, moreover, with an institution
+       undreamed of in that day&mdash;the money-order system. Under
+       this admirable contrivance the post-offices of the world
+       will ere long be so many banks of deposit and exchange for
+       the benefit of the masses, effecting transfers mutually with
+       much greater facility, rapidity and security than the
+       regular banks formerly attained.</p>
+
+    <p>Still in its infancy, the international money-order system
+    has already reached importance in the magnitude of its
+    operations. The sums sent by means of it were, in 1874,
+    $1,499,320 to Great Britain, $701,634 to Germany, and to the
+    little inland republic of Switzerland $72.287.</p>
+
+    <p>The dimensions to which this new method of financial
+    intercourse between the different peoples of the globe is
+    destined to reach may be inferred from the growth of the
+    domestic money&mdash;order service. In 1874 the number of
+    orders issued was 4,620,633, representing $74,424,854. The
+    erroneous payments having been but one in 59,677, it is plain
+    that this mode of remittance must make further inroads on the
+    old routine of cheque and draft, and become, among its other
+    advantages, a currency regulator of no trifling value.</p>
+
+    <p>Our post-office may almost be said to head the development
+    of the century. The other lines of progress in some sense
+    converge to it. The advance of intelligence, of settlement, of
+    transit by land and water and of mechanical and philosophical
+    discovery have all fostered the post, while its return to them
+    has been liberal. Thus aided and spurred, its extension has
+    approached the rate of geometrical progression. Its development
+    resembles that from the Annelids to the Vertebrata, the simple
+    canal which constitutes the internal anatomy of the simplest
+    animal forms finding a counterpart in the line of mails
+    vouchsafed by the British postmaster-general to the colonies in
+    1775 from Falmouth to Savannah, "with as many cross-posts as he
+    shall see fit." Fifteen years of independence had caused the
+    accretion of wonderfully few ganglia on this primeval
+    structure. In 1790 four millions of inhabitants possessed but
+    seventy-five post-offices and 1875 miles of post-roads. The
+    revenue of the department was $37,935&mdash;little over a
+    thousandth of what it is at present under rates of postage but
+    a fraction of the old. New York and Boston heard from each
+    other three times a week in summer and twice in winter.
+    Philadelphia and New York were more social and luxurious, and
+    insisted on a mail every week-day but one, hurrying it through
+    in two days each way, or a twentieth of the present speed. On
+    the interior routes chaos ruled supreme. Newspapers and
+    business-men combined to employ riders who meandered along the
+    mud roads as it pleased Heaven.</p>
+
+    <p>When the new government machine had smoothed down its
+    bearings matters rapidly improved. In 1800 we had 903
+    post-offices and 20,817 miles of road. In 1820 these figures
+    changed to 4500 and 92,492, and in 1870 to 28,492 offices and
+    231,232 miles. Five years later 70,083 miles of railway, 15,788
+    by steamboat and 192,002 of other routes represented the web
+    woven since the Falmouth and Savannah shuttle commenced its
+    weary way. Of course, neither the number of offices nor extent
+    of routes fully measures the change from past to present; mails
+    having become more frequent over the same route, and a new
+    style of office, the locomotive variety, having been added to
+    the old. This innovation, of mounting postmaster and
+    post-office with the mailbags on wheels, and hurling the whole
+    through space at thirty or forty miles an hour, already
+    furnishes us with gigantic statistics. In 1875 there were
+    sixty-two lines of railway postal-cars covering 16,932 miles
+    with 40,109 miles of daily service and 901 peripatetic clerks.
+    These gentlemen, under the demands of the fast mail-trains,
+    will ere long swell from a regiment into a brigade, and so into
+    a division, till poets and painters be called on to drop the
+    theme of "waiting for the mail."</p>
+
+    <p>The greater portion of the fifty-odd thousand employ�s of
+    the department do <span class="pagenum"><a name="page149"
+       id="page149"></a>[pg 149]</span> not give it their whole
+       time, many of the country postmasters being engaged in other
+       business. But the undivided efforts of them all, with an
+       auxiliary corps, would be demanded for the handling of eight
+       hundred and fifty millions of letters and cards, and a
+       greater bulk of other mail-matter, under the old plan of
+       rates varying according to distance and number of sheets,
+       and not weight&mdash;stamps unknown. The introduction of
+       stamps, with coincident reduction and unification of rates,
+       has been the chief factor in the extraordinary increase of
+       correspondence within the past thirty years; the number of
+       letters passing through the mails having within that period
+       multiplied twenty-fold. The number transmitted in the
+       British Islands, then three times greater than in the United
+       States, is now but little in excess, having been in 1874
+       nine hundred and sixty&mdash;seven millions. The immense
+       difference between the two countries in extent, and
+       consequently in the average distance of transportation, is
+       enough to account for the contrast between the two
+       balance-sheets, our department showing a heavy annual
+       deficit, while in Great Britain this is replaced by a
+       profit. As regards post-office progress in the United
+       States, the question is rather an abstract one; for there is
+       not the least probability of an advance in rates. The
+       discrepancy between receipts and expenses will be attacked
+       rather by seeking to reduce the latter at the same time that
+       the former are enhanced by natural growth and by improvement
+       in the details of service and administration.</p>
+
+    <div class="figright"
+         style="width:65%;">
+        <a href="images/149.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig149"
+             id="fig149"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/149.jpg"
+             alt="PROF. S.F.B. MORSE, THE INVENTOR OF THE ELECTRO-MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH." />
+        </a>PROF. S.F.B. MORSE, THE INVENTOR OF THE
+        ELECTRO-MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Difficult as it is adequately to state or to measure the
+    extension of the mails within the century, it is far from
+    telling the whole story of the amplitude and celerity with
+    which the people of our day interchange intelligence.</p>
+
+    <p>Only to the last third of the period under review has the
+    electric telegraph been known. It is now a necessity of the
+    public and private life of every civilized spot upon the globe.
+    It traverses all lands and all seas. The forty miles of wire
+    with which it started from Washington City have become many
+    millions. Its length of line in the United States is about the
+    same with that of the mail-routes, and a similar equality
+    probably obtains in other parts of the world. We have nearly as
+    much line as all Europe together, though the extent of wire may
+    not be so great. It is little to say that this continent, so
+    dim to the founders of the Union, has been by the invention of
+    Morse compressed within whispering distance, the same advantage
+    having been conferred on other countries. It is the property of
+    mankind, and the comparison must be between present and past,
+    not between any two countries of the present. Strictly, a
+    comparison is not possible, nothing like magnetic communication
+    having been known forty years ago, unless to the half
+    imagination, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page150"
+       id="page150"></a>[pg 150]</span> half realization of one or
+       two scientific experimenters. Steam and stamps wrought a
+       difference in degree&mdash;the telegraph one of kind.
+       Against eighteen hundred miles of wagon-road we set
+       seventy-three thousand of railway; but two hundred thousand
+       miles of telegraph are opposed by nothing, unless by
+       Franklin's kite-string. Looked at along the perspective of
+       poles, the old days disappear entirely&mdash;the patriots
+       become pre-historic. Yet modern self-conceit is somewhat
+       checked by the reflection that the career of these two great
+       agents of intercommunication has but just opened; that their
+       management even yet remains a puzzle to us; and that the
+       next generation may wonder how we happened to get hold of
+       implements whose use and capabilities we so poorly
+       comprehended. So far as prediction can now be ventured, a
+       force and pathway more economical than coal and the rail
+       will not soon be forthcoming; nor is Canton apt to
+       "interview" New York at the rate of more words in a minute
+       over a single wire than she can now. Some day dynamite may
+       be harnessed to the balloon, which stands, or drifts, where
+       it did with Montgolfier, and we may all become long-range
+       projectiles; but even this age of hurry will contentedly
+       wait a little for that.</p>
+
+    <p>Possibly the Post-office Department would be less of a
+    valetudinarian, financially, had it confined itself to its
+    legitimate occupation, the speeding of intercourse and wafting
+    of sighs, and not yielded to the heavy temptation of
+    disseminating shoes, pistols and *garden-seeds over three
+    millions of square miles. Newspapers are enough to test its
+    powers as a freight-agent. Where these and their literary
+    kindred of books, magazines, etc. used to be estimated by the
+    dozen and the ounce, the ton is becoming too small a unit.</p>
+
+    <p>West of the Blue Ridge, or the front line of the Alleghany,
+    so called in most of its length, there was not a newspaper
+    published in 1776. Ten years later, scarcely more than
+    one&mdash;the <i>Pittsburg Gazette</i>&mdash;existed west of
+    the mountains. The few in the seaboard towns kept alive the
+    name, and little more. In 1850, '60 and '70 the periodicals of
+    the Union numbered, respectively, 2526, 4051 and 5871, with an
+    average circulation, at the three periods, of twenty-one
+    hundred, thirty-four hundred and thirty-six hundred copies
+    each. The circulation thus outgrew the numbers in the
+    proportion of nearly two to one. And both are largely in excess
+    of the increase of the population, that being in the twenty
+    years but 65 percent. The number of daily papers (254 in 1850
+    and 574 in 1870) must now be equal to the entire number of
+    periodicals in France outside of Paris (796 in 1875), with an
+    average issue less than half that of ours. The proportion of
+    readers to the population, certainly in this class of
+    literature, thus appears to be rapidly growing: and the change
+    is most striking if we take, for example, that group of
+    periodicals which are most purely literary and most remote from
+    the mere chronicle. The returns for the three periods place the
+    monthlies at, respectively, 100, 280 and 622&mdash;an advance
+    of sixfold.</p>
+
+    <p>The magazine leads us to the door of the library; and here
+    the exhibit is still more marked, significant and gratifying.
+    The census figures are, for many reasons, extremely confused,
+    but in the general result they cannot be outrageously wrong,
+    and they can mislead us only in degree as to the immense
+    multiplication of books in both public and private libraries.
+    The returns are manifestly far below the truth. To give them
+    here without the explanations accompanying them in the census
+    volumes would mislead; and those explanations, or a fair
+    synopsis of them, would occupy too much space, and would, after
+    all, leave the problem unsolved. That the supply of books has
+    fully kept pace with every other means of culture is patent
+    enough. The Congressional Library has risen in half the century
+    from the shelves of a closet to nearly four hundred thousand
+    volumes&mdash;an accumulation not surpassed in '76 by more than
+    two libraries in Europe. It now demands a separate edifice of
+    its own, fit to stand by the side of the fine structures which
+    have within a generation recreated the architectural aspect of
+    the Federal metropolis with the most stately
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page151"
+       id="page151"></a>[pg 151]</span> government-offices in the
+       world. Other public libraries, belonging to colleges,
+       schools, societies and independent endowments, show similar
+       progress. While none of them are equal, for reference, to
+       some of the great European establishments, they are
+       generally better adapted to the purposes of popular
+       instruction. Their literary wealth is fresh and available,
+       little encumbered by lumber kept merely because old or
+       curious. Thus adjuncts, in some sort, of the newspaper and
+       the common school, their catalogues prove, as do the
+       bookcases of private houses, that the newest and deepest
+       results of European thought and inquiry are eagerly sought
+       and used by our people.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/151-1.jpg"
+             name="fig151-1"
+             id="fig151-1"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/151-1.jpg"
+             alt="THE SCHOOL-HOUSE OF THE PRESENT." />
+             </a>THE SCHOOL-HOUSE OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="figleft"
+         style="width:40%;">
+        <a href="images/151-2.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig151-2"
+             id="fig151-2"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/151-2.jpg"
+             alt="THE SCHOOL-HOUSE OF THE PAST." /></a>
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Our system of public schools, long classed among the
+    "peculiar institutions" of the country, is notably gaining in
+    scope and efficiency, be the English and Prussians right or not
+    in their claim of greater thoroughness and a higher curriculum.
+    The different States have engaged in a series of competitive
+    experiments for the common good, and cities and counties, in
+    their sphere, labor to the same end. Schools of higher grade
+    are being multiplied, and the examination of teachers, still
+    lax enough, becomes more exact and faithful, as befits the
+    drill of an army of two hundred and forty thousand charged with
+    the intellectual police of eight millions of children&mdash;the
+    number said by the new "National Bureau of Education" to have
+    been enrolled in 1875, against 7,209,938, 5,477,037 and
+    3,642,694 by the censuses of 1870, '60 and '50. Little more
+    than half this number is estimated by the Bureau to represent
+    the average daily attendance, which is quite compatible with
+    the attendance, for the greater part of the school-year, of
+    nine-tenths of the whole number on the lists. A comparison of
+    the number enrolled and the entire supposed number of children
+    between six and sixteen leaves an excess of nearly two millions
+    and a half outside the public schools. Of these private schools
+    will account, and account well, for a large proportion. These
+    are fulfilling indispensable offices, one being that of normal
+    schools&mdash;a want likely to be inadequately satisfied for a
+    long time to come.</p>
+
+    <p>In one respect our public schools are beyond, though not
+    above, comparison with those of the most advanced European
+    states. An annual outlay of a trifle less than seventy-five
+    millions of dollars, with an investment in buildings, ground,
+    etc. of a hundred and sixty-six millions, implies a
+    determination that should be rewarded with the most
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page152"
+       id="page152"></a>[pg 152]</span> unexceptionable results. It
+       reaches eighteen dollars yearly, leaving out the interest on
+       the fixed stock, for each child in daily attendance. Such an
+       expenditure, trebling, we believe, that of Prussia, ought to
+       secure better teachers and a higher range of instruction. It
+       must be said, however, that the duties of the school-boards
+       are as honestly and economically discharged as those of any
+       other public bodies; that the cost for each pupil is highest
+       where common schools have been longest established and most
+       thoroughly studied; and that the statistics certainly show a
+       steady advance in their efficiency. That is the truest test.
+       Any pecuniary means are justifiable by the end. If common
+       schools, themselves a means to a higher education, mental
+       and moral, than they can directly afford, take some part of
+       the wealth we accumulate to prevent our men's decaying, it
+       is well used. It helps to purchase for us progress more
+       genuine than that whereof railways and cotton-factories are
+       the exponents.</p>
+
+    <p>It is thus a guarantee of a brighter century even than the
+    one just closed that, in the wildest quarter of the still
+    unkempt continent, the school actually precedes the pioneer.
+    Choose his homestead where he may, the sixteenth section is
+    staked out before it. From it the rills of knowledge soon
+    trickle along the first furrows, as strange to the soil as its
+    new products. It provides the modern settler in advance with an
+    equipment, mental and material, if not moral, altogether
+    superior to that of his colonial prototype, that enables him in
+    a shorter time to impart a higher stamp to his surroundings. He
+    attacks the prairie with a plough unimagined by his
+    predecessor; cuts his wheat with a cradle&mdash;or, given a
+    neighbor or two, a reaper&mdash;instead of a sickle; sends into
+    the boundless pasture the nucleus of a merino flock, and
+    returns at evening to a home rugged enough, in unison with its
+    surroundings, but brightened by traits of culture and
+    intelligence which must adhere to any m�nage of to-day and were
+    out of reach of any of the olden time. The civilization that
+    travels West now is a different thing from that which went West
+    a hundred years ago.</p>
+
+    <p>Science has done much for the farmer, though not as much as
+    he has done for it and its hotbeds, the towns. In one point his
+    shortcomings are notable. He has not learned how to eat his
+    cake and have it. He works the virgin soil as the miner does
+    the coal-seam. What Nature has placed in it he takes out, and,
+    until forced by the pressure of his friends and enemies, the
+    cities, returns no nest-egg of future fertility. So it is that
+    many portions of the rural East have to be resettled and
+    started afresh in the process of agricultural redemption. A
+    hundred years ago England grew fifteen bushels of wheat to the
+    acre. Her standard is now thirty-two. Within three-quarters of
+    the century New York has fallen from twenty-five to twelve; and
+    half that period, again, has brought Ohio and Indiana from
+    thirty to fifteen. But this process is a natural part of the
+    sum of American progress. Land was the only property of the
+    country originally, and subsequently of different parts of it
+    in succession. It was used like any other commodity, and worn
+    out like leather or cloth. The original cuticle of the
+    continent has disappeared for ever. The task, now is to induce
+    the granulation of a new one. The restorative process may be
+    complete by the time we have four hundred souls to the square
+    mile, like England and Flanders. Meanwhile, the exporting of
+    Iowa and California in the shape of wheat is going on at what
+    must be esteemed a profitable rate; for our farmers, as a
+    class, do not seem to be losing ground. Their glebes have risen
+    in value from thirty-two hundred millions in 1850 to sixty-six
+    hundred ten years later, and ninety-three hundred in 1870. This
+    has been accompanied by a diminution of their average extent,
+    the farm of 1870 covering a hundred and fifty-three acres. This
+    is small enough, considering the capital necessary for stock in
+    these days of improved and costly implements, when a farmer can
+    no longer pack his entire kit in a cart. It matches closely the
+    size of English holdings, where agricultural science is at its
+    height. The <span class="pagenum"><a name="page153"
+       id="page153"></a>[pg 153]</span> French peasant-farmers,
+       with their plats of three and four acres, are chained to the
+       spade and hoe, and their steading becomes a
+       poultry-yard&mdash;a consummation we are not yet in sight
+       of, as is proved by the legions of pigs and beeves, barreled
+       or bellowing, that roll in from the ancient realms of
+       Pontiac and the Prophet with a smoothness and velocity
+       unattained by the most luxurious coach that carried a First
+       Congressman.</p>
+
+    <p>Everything that makes a nation, we are told, and the nation
+    itself, is the product of the soil. But the less immediate,
+    finer and most delicate fruits cannot usually be garnered until
+    the soil is thoroughly subdued. The mass of matter keeps the
+    intellectual in abeyance. Were Europe enlarged one-half, and
+    her population reduced to one-eighth what it actually is, the
+    spectacle of culture she now presents would be an
+    impossibility. It is our merit that, thus brought to American
+    conditions, she would in no way compare with American
+    achievement. An offset wherewith we must at the same time be
+    debited is the aid we have, in so many forms, derived from her.
+    Making every allowance for this, it is a clear credit in our
+    favor that one-tenth of Christendom should have done so much
+    more than a tenth of its effective thinking simultaneously with
+    taming the most savage half of its domain. We have more than
+    our share of laborers in the mental vineyard, though fewer of
+    them are master-workmen. We utilize for Europe herself, and
+    send back to her in its first available shape, much of what her
+    students produce. As between thought and substance, the two
+    continents interchange offices. We import the crude material
+    her philosophers harvest or mine, work it up and return it,
+    just as she takes the yield of our non-metaphorical fields and
+    strata and restores it manufactured. Much of the social,
+    political and industrial advancement of Europe within the
+    century she may be said to owe to the United States. Her
+    governmental reforms certainly and confessedly found here their
+    germ. These gave birth to others of a social character. In this
+    manner, as well as more directly by our commerce, inventions
+    and example, we have stimulated her industry. We have spread
+    before her the two oceans, and taught her to traverse them with
+    a firm and masterful mien, no longer</p>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>As one who in a lonely road doth walk in fear and
+            dread.</p>
+        </div>
+    </div>
+
+    <p>We have created cities upon her havens, Parliaments in her
+    capitals, and stronger hearts and quicker hands in her
+    villages. No community on her varied surface but is the better
+    for America. That our people and their labors have done it all
+    it would be absurd to say; but the Old World's progress in the
+    period under review can be but very partially accounted for by
+    any internal force of its own. None of its rulers or peoples
+    adventure a reform of any kind without a preliminary, if often
+    only a half-conscious, glance of inquiry westward. Collectively
+    as members of a European republic of nations, and internally
+    each within itself, they have in this way learned, after many
+    recalcitrant struggles, to recognize and respect local
+    independence. Municipal law has gained new life. The commune
+    has become an entity everywhere, and the nations which it
+    informs have established the right to readjust or recast their
+    constitutions without being hounded down as disturbers of the
+    peace. The contribution of the American Union to such results
+    would earn it honor at the hands of history were it to sink
+    into nothing to-morrow. Had no such tangible fruits hitherto
+    ripened, some portion of such honor would still accrue to it
+    for having shown that a people may grow from a handful to an
+    empire without hereditary rulers, without a privileged class,
+    without a state Church, without a standing army, without tumult
+    in the largest cities and without stagnant savagery in the
+    remotest wilds.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page154"
+       id="page154"></a>[pg 154]</span>
+
+    <h2>UP THE THAMES.</h2>
+
+    <h3>CONCLUDING PAPER.</h3>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/154.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig154"
+             id="fig154"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/154.jpg"
+             alt="WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM ETON." /></a>WINDSOR CASTLE,
+             FROM ETON.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Let our demonstration to-day be on the monarchical citadel
+    of England, the core and nucleus of her kingly associations,
+    her architectural <i>eikon basilik�</i>, Windsor. To reach the
+    famous castle it will not do to lounge along the river. We must
+    cut loose from the suburbs of the suburbs, and launch into a
+    more extended flight. Our destination is nearly an hour distant
+    by rail; and though it does not take us altogether out of sight
+    of the city, it leads us among real farms and genuine villages,
+    tilled and inhabited as they have been since the Plantagenets,
+    instead of market-gardens and villas.</p>
+
+    <p>We go to Paddington and try the Great Western, the parent of
+    the broad gauges with no very numerous family, Erie being one
+    of its unfortunate children. That six-foot infant is not up to
+    the horizontal stature of its seven-foot progenitor, but has
+    still sixteen inches too many to fare well in the contest with
+    its little, active, and above all numerous, foes of the
+    four-feet-eight-and-a-half-inch "persuasion." The English and
+    the American giants can sympathize with each other. Both have
+    drained the bitter cup that is tendered by a strong majority to
+    a weak minority. Neither the American nor the British
+    constitution, with their whole admirable array of checks and
+    balances, has shielded them from this evil. In the battle of
+    the gauges both have gone to the wall, and will stay there
+    until they can muster strength enough to reel over into the
+    ranks of their enemies.</p>
+
+    <p>This relative debility is, at the same time, more apparent
+    to the stockholders than to their customers. The superstructure
+    and "plant" of the Erie has lately stood interested inspection
+    from abroad with great credit, and that of the Great Western is
+    unexceptionable. The vote of travelers may be safely allotted
+    to the broad gauge. They have more elbow room. The carriages
+    attain the requisite width without unpleasantly, not to say
+    dangerously, overhanging the centre of gravity; and, other
+    things equal, the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page155"
+       id="page155"></a>[pg 155]</span> movement is steadier. Nor
+       is the financial aspect of the question apt to impress
+       gloomily the tourist as he enters the Paddington station and
+       looks around at its blaze of polychrome and richness of
+       decoration generally. As the coach doors are slammed upon
+       you, the guard steps into his "van," the vast drivers,
+       taller than your head plus the regulation stove-pipe, slowly
+       begin their whirl, and you roll majestically forth through a
+       long file of liveried servants of the company, drawn up or
+       in action on the platform, the sensation of patronizing a
+       poverty-stricken corporation is by no means likely to harass
+       you. You cease to realize that the Napoleon of engineers,
+       Monsieur Brunel, made a disastrous mistake in the design of
+       this splendid highway, and that, as some will have it, it
+       was his Moscow. His error, if one there was, existed only in
+       the selection of the width of track. Whatever the demerits
+       of the design in that one particular, the execution is in
+       all above praise. The road was his pet. Once finished, it
+       was his delight, as with the breeder of a fine horse, to
+       mount it and try its mettle. Over and again would he occupy
+       the footboard between London and Bristol, and rejoice as a
+       strong man in running his race at close to seventy miles an
+       hour. He and Stephenson were capital types of the Gaul and
+       Briton, striving side by side on the same field, as it will
+       be good for the world that they should ever do.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/155.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig155"
+             id="fig155"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/155.jpg"
+             alt="MORTON CHURCH." /></a>MORTON CHURCH.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Combats of another character&mdash;in fact, of two other
+    characters&mdash;recur to our reflections as we find that we
+    have shuffled off the coil of bricks and mortar and are
+    rattling across Wormwood Scrubs. More fortunate than some who
+    have been there before us, we have no call to alight. Calls to
+    this ancient field of glory, whether symbolized by the
+    gentlemanly pistol or the plebeian fist, have ceased to be in
+    vogue. Dueling and boxing are both frowned down effectually,
+    one by public opinion and the other by the police. It is only
+    of late years that they finally succumbed to those twin
+    discouragers; but it seems altogether improbable that the
+    ordeal by combat in either shape will again come to the surface
+    in a land where tilting-spear and quarter-staff were of old so
+    rife. In France chivalry still asserts, in a feeble way, the
+    privilege of winking and holding out its iron, and refuses to
+    be comforted with a suit for damages.</p>
+
+    <p>Southall, a station or two beyond, suggests sport of a less
+    lethal character, being an ancient meeting-place for the
+    queen's stag-hounds. John Leach may have collected here some of
+    his studies of Cockney equestrianism. The sportsmen so dear to
+    his pencil furnished him wealth of opportunities on their
+    annual concourse at the cart's tail. The unloading of the
+    animal, his gathering himself up for a leisurely canter across
+    country, the various styles and degrees of horsemanship among
+    his lumbering followers, and the business-like replacing
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page156"
+       id="page156"></a>[pg 156]</span> of the quarry in his
+       vehicle, to be hauled away for another day's sport, served
+       as the most complete travesty imaginable of the chase. It
+       has the compensation of placing a number of worthy men in
+       the saddle at least once in the year and compelling them to
+       do some rough riding. The English have always made it their
+       boast that they are more at home on horseback than any other
+       European nation, and they claim to have derived much
+       military advantage from it. Lever's novels would lose many
+       of their best situations but for this national
+       accomplishment and the astounding development it reaches in
+       his hands.</p>
+
+    <div class="figleft"
+         style="width:50%;">
+        <a href="images/156.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig156"
+             id="fig156"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/156.jpg"
+             alt="MILTON'S PEAR TREE." /></a>MILTON'S PEAR TREE.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>To the left lies the fine park of Osterley, once the seat of
+    the greatest of London's merchant princes, Sir Thomas Gresham.
+    An improvement proposed by Queen Bess, on a visit to Gresham in
+    1578, does not speak highly for her taste in design. She
+    remarked that in her opinion the court in front of the house
+    would look better split up by a wall. Her host dutifully
+    acceded to the idea, and surprised Her Majesty next morning by
+    pointing out the wall which he had erected during the night,
+    sending to London for masons and material for the purpose. The
+    conceit was a more ponderous one than that of Raleigh's
+    cloak&mdash;bricks and mortar <i>versus</i> velvet.</p>
+
+    <p>A greater than Gresham succeeded, after the death of his
+    widow, to the occupancy of Osterley&mdash;Chief-justice Coke.
+    His compliment to Elizabeth on the occasion of a similar visit
+    to the same house took the more available and acceptable shape
+    of ten or twelve hundred pounds sterling in jewelry. She had
+    more than a woman's weakness for finery, and Coke operated upon
+    it very successfully. His gems outlasted Gresham's wall, which
+    has long since disappeared with the court it disfigured. In
+    place of both stands a goodly Ionic portico, through which one
+    may pass to a staircase that bears a representation by Rubens
+    of the apotheosis of Mr. Motley's hero, William the Silent. The
+    gallery offers a collection of other old pictures. Should we,
+    however, take time for even a short stop in this vicinity, it
+    would probably be for the credit of saying that we walked over
+    Hounslow Heath intact in purse and person. The gentlemen of the
+    road live only in the classic pages of Ainsworth, Reynolds and,
+    if we may include Sam Weller in such worshipful company, that
+    bard of "the bold Tur<i>pin</i>." Another class of highwaymen
+    had long before them been also attracted by the fine
+    manoeuvring facilities of the heath, beginning with the army of
+    the C�sars and ending with that of James II. Jonathan Wild and
+    his merry men were saints to Kirke and his lambs.</p>
+
+    <p>Hurrying on, we skirt one of Pope's outlying manors, in his
+    time the seat of his friend Bathurst and the haunt of Addison,
+    Prior, Congreve and Gay, and leave southward, toward the
+    Thames, Horton, the cradle of Milton. A marble in its ivy-grown
+    church is inscribed to the memory of his mother, <i>ob</i>.
+    1637. At Horton were composed, or inspired, <i>Lycidas,
+    L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus</i> and others of his nominally
+    minor but really sweetest and most enjoyable poems. In this
+    retirement the Muse paid him her earliest visits, before he had
+    thrown himself away on politics or Canaanitish mythology.
+    Peeping in upon his handsome young face in its golden setting
+    of blonde curls,</p>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>Through the sweetbrier or the vine,</p>
+
+            <p>Or the twisted eglantine,</p>
+        </div>
+    </div><span class="pagenum"><a name="page157"
+       id="page157"></a>[pg 157]</span>
+
+    <p>she wooed him to better work than reporting the debates of
+    the archangels or calling the roll of Tophet. Had he confined
+    himself to this tenderer field, the world would have been the
+    gainer. He might not have "made the word Miltonic mean
+    sublime," but we can spare a little of the sublime to get some
+    more of the beautiful.</p>
+
+    <p>To reach Milton, however, we have run off of the track
+    badly. His Eden is no station on the Great Western. We shall
+    balance this southward divergence with a corresponding one to
+    the north from Slough, the last station ere reaching Windsor.
+    We may give a go-by for the moment to the halls of kings, do
+    homage to him who treated them similarly, and point, in
+    preference, to where,</p>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i6">in many a mouldering heap,</p>
+
+            <p>The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.</p>
+        </div>
+    </div>
+
+    <p>They show Gray's tomb in Stoke Pogis church, and his house,
+    West End Cottage, half a mile distant. The ingredients of his
+    <i>Elegy</i>&mdash;actually the greatest, but in his judgment
+    among the least, of his few works&mdash;exist all around. "The
+    rugged elm," "the ivy-mantled tower," and "the yew tree's
+    shade," the most specific among the simple "properties" of his
+    little spectacle, are common to so many places that there are
+    several competitors for the honor of having furnished them. The
+    cocks, ploughmen, herds and owls cannot, of course, at this
+    late day be identified. Gray could not have done it himself. He
+    drew from general memory, in his closet, and not bit by bit on
+    his thumb-nail from chance-met objects as he went along. Had
+    his conception and rendering of the theme been due to the
+    direct impression upon his mind of its several aspects and
+    constituents, he would have more thoroughly appreciated his
+    work. He could not understand its popularity, any more than
+    Campbell could that of <i>Ye Mariners of England</i>, which he
+    pronounced "d&mdash;&mdash;d drum-and-trumpet verses." Gray
+    used to say, "with a good deal of acrimony," that the
+    <i>Elegy</i> "owed its popularity entirely to the subject, and
+    the public would have received it as well had it been written
+    entirely in prose." Had it been written in prose or in the
+    inventory style of poetry, it would have been forgotten long
+    ago, like so much else of that kind.</p>
+
+    <div class="figright"
+         style="width:35%;">
+        <a href="images/157.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig157"
+             id="fig157"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/157.jpg"
+             alt="GRAY." /></a>GRAY.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Not far hence is Beaconsfield, which gave a home to Burke
+    and a title to the wife of Disraeli, the nearest approach to a
+    peerage that the haughty Israelite, soured by a life of
+    struggle against peers and their prejudices, would deign to
+    accept. We know it will be objected to this remark that
+    Disraeli is, and has been for most of his career, associated
+    with Toryism. But that was part of his game. A man of culture,
+    thought and fastidious taste, he would, had he been of the
+    <i>sangre azul</i>, have been the steadiest and sincerest of
+    Conservatives. Privilege would have been his gospel. As it is,
+    it has only been his weapon, to use in fighting for himself.
+    "The time will come when you shall listen to me," were his
+    words when he was first coughed down. The time has come. The
+    most cynical of premiers, he governs England, and he scorns to
+    take a place among those who ruled her before him.</p>
+
+    <p>Extending our divergence farther west toward "Cliefden's
+    proud alcove, the bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love," we find
+    ourselves in a luxuriant rolling country, rural and slumberous.
+    Cookham parish, which we should traverse, claims quite loudly
+    American kinship on the strength of its including an estate
+    once the property of Henry Washington, who is alleged, without
+    sufficient ground, to have been a relative of the general. But
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page158"
+       id="page158"></a>[pg 158]</span> we are within the purlieus
+       of Windsor. The round tower has been looking down upon us
+       these many miles, and we cannot but yield to its
+       magnetism.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:90%;">
+        <a href="images/158-1.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig158-1"
+             id="fig158-1"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/158-1.jpg"
+             alt="BEACONSFIELD CHURCH." /></a>BEACONSFIELD CHURCH.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Eton, on the north bank, opposite Windsor, and really a
+    continuous town with that which nestles close to the castle
+    walls, is on our way from Slough. The red-brick buildings of
+    the school, forming a fine foil to the lighter-colored and more
+    elegantly designed chapel, are on our left, the principal front
+    looking over a garden toward the river and Windsor Home Park
+    beyond. We become aware of a populace of boys, the file-closers
+    of England's nineteenth century worthies, and her coming
+    veterans of the twentieth. We may contemplatively view them in
+    that light, but it has little place in their reflections. Their
+    ruddy faces and somewhat cumbrous forms belong to the animal
+    period of life that links together boyhood, colthood and
+    calfhood. Education of the physique, consisting chiefly in the
+    indulgence and employment of it in the mere demonstration of
+    its superabundant vitality, is a large part of the curriculum
+    at English schools. The playground and the study-room form no
+    unequal alliance. Rigid as, in some respects, the discipline
+    proper of the school may be, it does not compare with the
+    severity of that maintained by the older boys over the younger
+    ones. The code of the lesser, and almost independent, republic
+    of the dormitory and the green is as clear in its terms as that
+    of the unlimited monarchy of the school-room, and more potent
+    in shaping the character. The lads train themselves for the
+    battle of the world, with some help from the masters. It is a
+    sound system on the whole, if based, to appearance, rather too
+    much on the principle of the weaker to the wall. The tendency
+    of the weaker inevitably is to the wall, and if he is to
+    contend against it effectively, it will be by finding out his
+    weakness and being made to feel it at the earliest possible
+    moment.</p>
+
+    <div class="figleft"
+         style="width:35%;">
+        <a href="images/158-2.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig158-2"
+             id="fig158-2"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/158-2.jpg"
+             alt="TOMB OF BURKE." /></a>TOMB OF BURKE.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Not on land only, but on the river, whereinto it so
+    gradually blends, does lush young England dissipate. Cricket
+    and football order into violent action
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page159"
+       id="page159"></a>[pg 159]</span> both pairs of extremities,
+       while the upper pair and the organs of the thorax labor
+       profitably at the oar. The Thames, in its three bends from
+       Senly Hall, the Benny Havens of Eton, down to Datchet Mead,
+       where Falstaff overflowed the buck-basket, belongs to the
+       boys. In this space it is split into an archipelago of aits.
+       In and out of the gleaming paths and avenues of silvery
+       water that wind between them glide the little boats. The
+       young Britons take to the element like young ducks. Many a
+       "tall admiral" has commenced his "march over the mountain
+       wave" among these water-lilies and hedges of osier.</p>
+
+    <p>Shall we leave the boys at play, and, renewing our youth, go
+    ourselves to school? Entering the great gate of the western of
+    the two quadrangles, we are welcomed by a bronze statue of the
+    founder of the institution, Henry VI. He endowed it in 1440.
+    The first organization comprised "a provost, four clerks, ten
+    priests, six choristers, twenty-five poor grammar-scholars, and
+    twenty-five poor infirm men to pray for the king." The prayers
+    of these invalids were sorely needed by the unhappy scion of
+    Lancaster, but did him little good in a temporal sense. The
+    provost is always rector of the parish. Laymen are
+    non-eligible. Thus it happens that the list does not include
+    two names which would have illuminated it more than those of
+    any of the incumbents&mdash;Boyle the philosopher, "father of
+    chemistry and brother of the earl of Cork," and Waller the
+    poet. The modern establishment consists of a provost,
+    vice-provost, six fellows, a master, under-master, assistants,
+    seventy foundation scholars, seven lay clerks and ten
+    choristers, with a cortege of "inferior officers and
+    servants"&mdash;a tolerably full staff. The pay-students, as
+    they would be termed in this country, numbering usually five to
+    six hundred, do not live in the college precincts, but at
+    boarding-houses in the town, whence their designation of
+    oppidans, the seventy gowns-men only having dormitories in the
+    college. The roll of the alumni contains such names as the
+    first earl of Chatham, Harley, earl of Oxford, Bolingbroke,
+    Fox, Gray, Canning, Wellington and Hallam. That is enough to
+    say for Eton. The beauties of the chapel, the treasures of the
+    library and the other shows of the place become trivial by the
+    side of the record.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/159.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig159"
+             id="fig159"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/159.jpg"
+             alt="HEDSOR AND COOKHAM CHURCHES." /></a>HEDSOR AND
+             COOKHAM CHURCHES.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Over the "fifteen-arch" bridge, which has but three or four
+    arches, we pass to the town of Windsor, which crouches, on the
+    river-side, close up to the embattled walls of the
+    castle&mdash;so closely that the very irregular pile of
+    buildings included in the latter cannot at first glance be well
+    distinguished from the town. High
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page160"
+       id="page160"></a>[pg 160]</span> over all swells the round
+       tower to a height above the water of two hundred and twenty
+       feet&mdash;no excessive altitude, if we deduct the eminence
+       on which it stands, yet enough, in this level country, to
+       give it a prospect of a score or two of miles in all
+       directions. The Conqueror fell in love with the situation at
+       first sight, and gave a stolen monastery in exchange for it.
+       The home so won has provided a shelter&mdash;at times very
+       imperfect, indeed&mdash;to British sovereigns for eight
+       centuries. From the modest erection of William it has been
+       steadily growing&mdash;with the growth of the empire, we
+       were near saying, but its chief enlargements occurred before
+       the empire entered upon the expansion of the past three
+       centuries. It is more closely associated with Edward III.
+       than with any other of the ancient line. He was born at
+       Windsor, and almost entirely rebuilt it, William of Wykeham
+       being superintending architect, with "a fee of one shilling
+       a day whilst at Windsor, and two shillings when he went
+       elsewhere on the duties of his office," three shillings a
+       week being the pay of his clerk. It becomes at once obvious
+       that the margin for "rings" was but slender in those days.
+       The labor question gave not the least trouble. The law of
+       supply and demand was not consulted. "Three hundred and
+       sixty workmen were impressed, to be employed on the building
+       at the king's wages; some of whom having clandestinely left
+       Windsor and engaged in other employments to greater
+       advantage, writs were issued prohibiting all persons from
+       employing them on pain of forfeiting all their goods and
+       chattels." In presence of so simple and effective a
+       definition of the rights of the workingman, strikes sink
+       into nothingness. And Magna Charta had been signed a hundred
+       and fifty years before! That document, however, in honor of
+       which the free and enlightened Briton of to-day is wont to
+       elevate his hat and his voice, was only in the name and on
+       behalf of the barons. The English people derived under it
+       neither name, place nor right. English liberty is only
+       incidental, a foundling of untraced parentage, a <i>filius
+       nullius</i>. True, its growth was indirectly fostered by
+       aught that checked the power of the monarch, and the nobles
+       builded more wisely than they knew or intended when they
+       brought Lackland to book, or to parchment, at Runnymede, not
+       far down the river and close to the edge of the royal park.
+       The memorable plain is still a meadow, kept ever green and
+       inviolate of the plough. A pleasant row it is for the Eton
+       youngsters to this spot. On Magna Charta island, opposite,
+       they may take their rest
+       <span class="pagenum"><a name="page161"
+       id="page161"></a>[pg 161]</span> and their lunch, and
+       refresh their minds as well with the memories of the place.
+       The task of reform is by no means complete. There is room
+       and call for further concessions in favor of the masses.
+       These embryo statesmen have work blocked out for them in the
+       future, and this is a good place for them to adjust to it
+       the focus of their bright young optics.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/160.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig160"
+             id="fig160"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/160.jpg"
+             alt="ETON COLLEGE AND CHAPEL." /></a>ETON COLLEGE AND
+             CHAPEL.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>The monarchical idea is certainly predominant in our present
+    surroundings. The Thames flows from the castle and the school
+    under two handsome erections named the Victoria and Albert
+    bridges; and when, turning our back upon Staines, just below
+    Runnymede, with its boundary-stone marking the limit of the
+    jurisdiction of plebeian London's fierce democracy, and
+    inscribed "God preserve the City of London, 1280," we strike
+    west into the Great Park, we soon come plump on George III, a
+    great deal larger than life. The "best farmer that ever brushed
+    dew from lawn" is clad in antique costume with toga and
+    buskins. Bestriding a stout horse, without stirrups and with no
+    bridle to speak of, the old gentleman looks calmly into the
+    distance while his steed is in the act of stepping over a
+    perpendicular precipice. This preposterous effort of the
+    glyptic art has the one merit of serving as a finger-board. The
+    old king points us to his palace, three miles off, at the end
+    of the famous Long Walk. He did not himself care to live at the
+    castle, but liked to make his home at an obscure lodge in the
+    park, the same from which, on his first attack of insanity, he
+    set out in charge of two of his household on that melancholy
+    ride to the retreat of Kew, more convenient in those days for
+    medical attendance from London, and to which he returned a few
+    months later restored for the time. Shortly after his recovery
+    he undertook to throw up one of the windows of the lodge, but
+    found it nailed down. He asked the cause, and was told, with
+    inconsiderate bluntness, that it had been done during his
+    illness to prevent his doing himself an injury. The perfect
+    calmness and silence with which he received this explanation
+    was a sufficient evidence of his recovery.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/161.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig161"
+             id="fig161"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/161.jpg"
+             alt="ETON COLLEGE, FROM NORTH TERRACE, WINDSOR." />
+             </a>ETON COLLEGE, FROM NORTH TERRACE, WINDSOR.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Bidding the old man a final farewell, we accept the
+    direction of his brazen hand and take up the line of march,
+    wherein all traveling America has preceded us, to the point
+    wherefrom we glanced off so suddenly in obedience to the
+    summons of Magna Charta. On either hand, as we thread the Long
+    Walk, open glades that serve as so many emerald-paved courts to
+    the monarchs of the grove, some of them older than the whole
+    Norman dynasty, with <span class="pagenum"><a name="page162"
+       id="page162"></a>[pg 162]</span> Saxon summers recorded in
+       their hearts. One of them, thirty-eight feet round, is
+       called after the Conqueror. Among these we shall not find
+       the most noted of Windsor trees. It was in the Home Park, on
+       the farther or northern side of the castle, that the fairies
+       were used to perform their</p>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i2">&mdash;dance of custom round about the
+            oak</p>
+
+            <p>Of Herne the hunter.</p>
+        </div>
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Whether the genuine oak was cut down at the close of the
+    last century, or was preserved, carefully fenced in and
+    labeled, in an utterly leafless and shattered state, to our
+    generation, is a moot point. Certain it is that the most ardent
+    Shakespearean must abandon the hope of securing for a bookmark
+    to his <i>Merry Wives of Windsor</i> one of the leaves that
+    rustled, while "Windsor bell struck twelve," over the head of
+    fat Jack. He has the satisfaction, however, of looking up at
+    the identical bell-tower of the sixteenth century, and may make
+    tryst with his imagination to await its midnight chime. Then he
+    may cross the graceful iron bridge&mdash;modern enough,
+    unhappily&mdash;to Datchet, and ascertain by actual experiment
+    whether the temperature of the Thames has changed since the
+    dumping into it of Falstaff, "hissing hot."</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/162.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig162"
+             id="fig162"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/162.jpg"
+             alt="STAINES CHURCH." /></a>STAINES CHURCH.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Back at the castle, we must "do" it, after the set fashion.
+    Reminders meet us at the threshold that it is in form a real
+    place of defence, contemplative of wars and rumors of wars, and
+    not a mere dwelling by any means in original design. A roadway,
+    crooked and raked by frowning embrasures, leads up from the
+    peaceful town to the particularly inhospitable-looking twin
+    towers of Henry VIII.'s gateway, in their turn commanded by the
+    round tower on the right, in full panoply of artificial scarp
+    and ditch. Sentinels in the scarlet livery that has flamed on
+    so many battlefields of all the islands and continents assist
+    in proving that things did not always go so easy with majesty
+    as they do now. But two centuries and more have elapsed since
+    there happened any justification for this frown of stone, steel
+    and feathers; Rupert's futile demonstration on it in 1642
+    having been Windsor's last taste of war, its sternest office
+    after that having been the safe-keeping of Charles I., who here
+    spent his "sorrowful and last Christmas." Once inside the gate,
+    visions of peace <span class="pagenum"><a name="page163"
+       id="page163"></a>[pg 163]</span> recur. The eye first falls
+       on the most beautiful of all the assembled structures, St.
+       George's Chapel. It, with the royal tomb house, the deanery
+       and Winchester tower, occupies the left or north side of the
+       lower or western ward. In the rear of the chapel of St.
+       George are quartered in cozy cloisters the canons of the
+       college of that ilk&mdash;not great guns in any sense, but
+       old ecclesiastical artillery spiked after a more or less
+       noisy youth and laid up in varnished black for the rest of
+       their days. Watch and ward over these modern equipments is
+       kept by Julius C�sar's tower, as one of the most ancient
+       erections is of course called. Still farther to our left as
+       we enter are the quarters of sundry other antiquated
+       warriors, the Military Knights of Windsor. These are a few
+       favored veterans, mostly decayed officers of the army and
+       navy, who owe this shelter to royal favor and an endowment.
+       The Ivy tower, west of the entrance, is followed in eastward
+       succession by those of the gateway, Salisbury, Garter and
+       Bell towers.</p>
+
+    <div class="figright"
+         style="width:70%;">
+        <a href="images/163.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig163"
+             id="fig163"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/163.jpg"
+             alt="NORMAN GATE AND ROUND TOWER, WINDSOR." />
+             </a>NORMAN GATE AND ROUND TOWER, WINDSOR.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>The fine exterior of St. George's is more than matched by
+    the carving and blazonry of the interior. The groined roof
+    bears the devices of half a dozen early kings, beginning with
+    Edward the Confessor. Along the choir stretch the stalls of the
+    sovereign and knights-companions of the order of the Garter,
+    each hung with banner, mantle, sword and helmet. Better than
+    these is the hammered steel tomb of Edward IV., by Quentin
+    Matsys, the Flemish blacksmith. In the vaults beneath rest the
+    victim of Edward, Henry VI., Henry VIII., Jane Seymour and
+    Charles I. The account of the appearance of Charles' remains
+    when his tomb was examined in 1813 by Sir Henry Halford,
+    accompanied by several of the royal family, is worth quoting.
+    "The complexion of the face was dark and discolored. The
+    forehead and temples had lost little or nothing of their
+    muscular substance. The cartilage of the nose was gone; but the
+    left eye, in the moment of first exposure, was open and full,
+    though it vanished almost immediately, and the pointed beard so
+    characteristic of the reign of King Charles was perfect. The
+    shape of the face was a long oval; many of the teeth remained;
+    and the left ear, in consequence of the interposition of some
+    unctuous matter between it and the cere-cloth, was found
+    entire. The hair was thick at the back part of the head, and in
+    appearance nearly black. A portion of it, which has since been
+    cleaned and dried, is of a beautiful dark-brown color. That of
+    the beard was a reddish-brown. On the back part of the head it
+    was not more than an inch in length, and had probably been cut
+    so short for the convenience of the executioner, or perhaps by
+    the piety of friends after death in order to furnish memorials
+    of the unhappy king. On holding up the head to determine the
+    place of separation from the body, the muscles of the neck had
+    evidently contracted themselves considerably, and the fourth
+    cervical vertebra <span class="pagenum"><a name="page164"
+       id="page164"></a>[pg 164]</span> was found to be cut through
+       its substance transversely, leaving the face of the divided
+       portions perfectly smooth and even&mdash;an appearance which
+       could have been produced only by a heavy blow inflicted with
+       a very sharp instrument, and which furnished the last proof
+       wanting to identify Charles I."</p>
+
+    <div class="figleft"
+         style="width:60%;">
+        <a href="images/164.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig164"
+             id="fig164"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/164.jpg"
+             alt="HERNE'S OAK." /></a>HERNE'S OAK.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>A highly-edifying spectacle this must have been to the
+    prince regent and his brother Cumberland. The certainties of
+    the past and the possibilities of the future were calculated to
+    be highly suggestive. A French sovereign had but a few years
+    before shared the fate of Charles, and a cloud of other kings
+    were drifting about Europe with no very flattering prospect of
+    coming soon to anchor. Napoleon was showing his banded foes a
+    good double front in Germany and Spain. His dethronement and
+    the restoration of the Bourbons were not as yet contemplated.
+    The Spanish succession was whittled down to a girl&mdash;that
+    is, by Salic law, to nothing at all. The Hanoverian was in a
+    similar condition, or worse, none of the old sons of the crazy
+    old king having any legitimate children. The prince regent
+    himself was highly unpopular with the mass of his people; and
+    the classes that formed his principal support were more so, by
+    reason of the arrogance and exactions of the landed interest,
+    the high price of grain and other heavy financial burdens
+    consequent on the war, the arbitrary prosecutions and
+    imprisonment of leaders of the people, and the irregularities
+    of his private life.</p>
+
+    <p>But these sinister omens proved illusory. Leigh Hunt,
+    Wraxall and the rest made but ineffectual martyrs; the Bourbons
+    straggled back into France and Spain, with such results as we
+    see; George IV. weathered, by no merit of his own, a fresh
+    series of storms at home; the clouds that lowered upon his
+    house were made glorious summer by the advent of a fat little
+    lady in 1819&mdash;the fat old lady of 1875; and we step from
+    the tomb of Charles in St. George's Chapel to that where George
+    and William slumber undisturbed in the tomb-house, elaborately
+    decorated by Wolsey. Wolsey's fixtures were sold by the thrifty
+    patriots of Cromwell's Parliament, and bought in by the
+    republican governor of the castle as "old brass." George was
+    able, too, to add another story to the stature of the round
+    tower or keep that marks the middle ward of the castle and
+    looks down, on the rare occasion of a sufficiently clear
+    atmosphere, on prosperous and no longer disloyal London. This
+    same keep has quite a list of royal prisoners; John of France
+    and David II. and James I. of Scotland enjoyed a prolonged view
+    of its interior; so did the young earl of Surrey, a
+    brother-poet, a century removed, of James.</p>
+
+    <p>Leaving behind us the atmosphere of shackles and dungeons,
+    we emerge, through the upper ward and the additions of Queen
+    Bess, upon the ample terrace, where nothing bounds us but the
+    horizon. Together, the north, east and south terraces measure
+    some two thousand feet. The first looks upon Eton, the lesser
+    park of some five hundred acres which fills a bend of the
+    Thames <span class="pagenum"><a name="page165"
+       id="page165"></a>[pg 165]</span> and the country beyond for
+       many miles. The eastern platform, lying between the queen's
+       private apartments and an exquisite private garden, is not
+       always free to visitors. The south terrace presents to the
+       eye the Great Park of thirty-eight hundred acres, extending
+       six miles, with a width of from half a mile to two miles.
+       The equestrian statue at the end of the Long Walk is a
+       conspicuous object. The prevailing mass of rolling woods is
+       broken by scattered buildings, glades and avenues, which
+       take from it monotony and give it life. Near the south end
+       is an artificial pond called Virginia Water, edged with
+       causeless arches and ruins that never were anything but
+       ruins, Chinese temples and idle toys of various other kinds,
+       terrestrial and aquatic. The ancient trees, beeches and
+       elms, of enormous size, and often projected individually,
+       are worth studying near or from a distance. The elevation is
+       not so great as to bring out low-lying objects much removed.
+       We see the summits of hills, each having its name, as St.
+       Leonard's, Cooper's, Highstanding, etc., and glimpses of the
+       river and of some country-seats. St. Anne's Hill was the
+       home of Fox; at St. Leonard's dwelt the father of his rival
+       and rival of his father, and at Binfield, Pope, of whom it
+       is so hard to conceive as having ever been young, "lisped in
+       numbers, for the numbers came," natural descriptions,
+       ethical reflections, <i>vers de societ�</i> and all, for
+       around him here there was food for them all. To descend from
+       Pope in point of both time and romance, the view includes
+       the scenes of Prince Albert's agricultural experiments.
+       Quite successful many of them were. He was a thoroughly
+       practical man&mdash;a circumstance which carried him by
+       several routes across ploughed fields and through well-built
+       streets, straight to the hearts of the English people. His
+       memory is more warmly cherished, and impressed upon the
+       stranger by more monuments, than that of any other of the
+       German strain. It might have been less so had he succeeded
+       in the efforts he is now known to have made soon after his
+       marriage to attain a higher nominal rank. He possessed,
+       through the alliance of Leopold and Stockmar and the
+       devotion of Victoria, kingly power without the name and the
+       responsibility, and with that he became content. He used it
+       cautiously and well when he employed it at all. His position
+       was a trying one, but he steered well through its
+       difficulties, and died as generally trusted as he was at
+       first universally watched. The love-match of 1840 was every
+       way a success.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/165.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig165"
+             id="fig165"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/165.jpg"
+             alt="EAST FRONT, WINDSOR CASTLE." /></a>EAST FRONT,
+             WINDSOR CASTLE.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Another figure, more rugged and less majestic, but not less
+    respectable, will be associated with Victoria in the memories,
+    if not the history proper, of her reign. This is John Brown,
+    the canny and impassive Scot, content, like the Rohans, to be
+    neither prince nor king, and, prouder
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page166"
+       id="page166"></a>[pg 166]</span> than they, satisfied
+       honestly to discharge the office of a flunkey without the
+       very smallest trace of the flunkey spirit. He too has lived
+       down envy and all uncharitableness. Contemptuous and serene
+       amid the hootings of the mob and the squibs of the
+       newspapers, he carries, as he has done for years, Her
+       Majesty's shawl and capacious India-rubbers, attends her
+       tramps through the Highlands and the Home Park, engineers
+       her special trains and looks after her personal comfort even
+       to the extent of ordering her to wear "mair claes" in a
+       Scotch mist. The queen has embalmed him in her books, and he
+       will rank among the heroes of royal authors as his namesake
+       and countryman the Cameronian, by favor of very similar
+       moral qualities, does with those of more democratic
+       proclivities.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:90%;">
+        <a href="images/166-1.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig166-1"
+             id="fig166-1"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/166-1.jpg"
+             alt="QUEEN ELIZABETH'S BUILDING, WINDSOR." /></a>QUEEN
+             ELIZABETH'S BUILDING, WINDSOR.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>We cannot apply literally to the view from Windsor
+    Thackeray's lines on "the castle towers of Bareacres:"</p>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>I stood upon the donjon keep and viewed the country
+            o'er;</p>
+
+            <p>I saw the lands of Bareacres for fifty miles or
+            more.</p>
+        </div>
+    </div>
+
+    <div class="figleft"
+         style="width:40%;">
+        <a href="images/166-2.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig166-2"
+             id="fig166-2"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/166-2.jpg"
+             alt="EARL OF SURREY." /></a>EARL OF SURREY.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>We scan what was once embraced in Windsor Forest, where the
+    Norman laid his broad palm on a space a hundred and twenty
+    miles round, and, like the lion in the fable of the
+    hunting-party, informed his subjects that that was his share.
+    The domain dwindled, as did other royal appurtenances. Yet in
+    1807 the circuit was as much as seventy-seven miles. In 1789 it
+    embraced sixty thousand acres. The process of contraction has
+    since been accelerated, and but little remains outside of the
+    Great and Little Parks. Several villages of little note stand
+    upon it. Of these Wokingham has the distinction of an ancient
+    hostelry yclept the Rose; and the celebrity of the
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page167"
+       id="page167"></a>[pg 167]</span> Rose is a beautiful
+       daughter of the landlord of a century and a half ago. This
+       lady missed her proper fame by the blunder of a merry party
+       of poets who one evening encircled the mahogany of her papa.
+       It was as "fast" a festivity as such names as Gay and Swift
+       could make it. Their combined efforts resulted in the
+       burlesque of <i>Molly Mog</i>. These two and some others
+       contributed each a verse in honor of the fair waiter. But
+       they mistook her name, and the crown fell upon the less
+       charming brow of her sister, whose cognomen was depraved
+       from Mary into Molly. Wiclif's Oak is pointed out as a
+       corner of the old forest, a long way east of the park. Under
+       its still spreading branches that forerunner of Luther is
+       said to have preached. Messrs. Moody and Sankey should have
+       sought inspiration under its shade.</p>
+
+    <p>In the vast assemblage of the arboreal commonwealth that
+    carpets the landscape the centuries are represented one with
+    another. It is a leafy parliament that has never been dissolved
+    or prorogued. One hoary member is coeval with the Confessor.
+    Another sheltered William Rufus, tired from the chase. Under
+    another gathered recruits bound with Coeur de Lion for the Holy
+    Land. Against the bole of this was set up a practicing butt for
+    the clothyard shafts that won Agincourt, and beneath that
+    bivouacked the pickets of Cromwell. As we look down upon their
+    topmost leaves there floats, high above our own level, "darkly
+    painted on the crimson sky," a member, not so old, of another
+    commonwealth quite as ancient that has flourished among their
+    branches from time immemorial. There flaps the solitary heron
+    to the evening tryst of his tribe. Where is the hawk? Will he
+    not rise from some fair wrist among the gay troop we see
+    cantering across yonder glade? Only the addition of that little
+    gray speck circling into the blue is needed to round off our
+    illusion. But it comes not. In place of it comes a spirt of
+    steam from the railway viaduct, and the whistle of an engine.
+    Froissart is five hundred years dead again, and we turn to
+    Bradshaw.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/167.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig167"
+             id="fig167"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/167.jpg"
+             alt="WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM BISHOPSGATE." /></a>WINDSOR
+             CASTLE, FROM BISHOPSGATE.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Yet we have a "view of an interior" to contemplate before
+    facing the lower Thames. And first, as the day is fading,
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page168"
+       id="page168"></a>[pg 168]</span> we seek the dimmest part.
+       We dive into the crypt of the bell-tower, or the
+       curfew-tower, that used to send far and wide to many a Saxon
+       cottage the hateful warning that told of servitude. How old
+       the base of this tower is nobody seems to know, nor how far
+       back it has served as a prison. The oldest initials of state
+       prisoners inscribed on its cells date to 1600. The walls are
+       twelve feet thick, and must have begotten a pleasant feeling
+       of perfect security in the breasts of the involuntary
+       inhabitants. They did not know of a device contrived for the
+       security of their jailers, which has but recently been
+       discovered. This is a subterranean and subaqueous passage,
+       alleged to lead under the river to Burnham Abbey, three
+       miles off. The visitor will not be disposed to verify this
+       statement or to stay long in the comparatively airy crypt.
+       Damp as the British climate may be above ground, it is more
+       so below. We emerge to the fine range of state apartments
+       above, and submit to the rule of guide and guide-book.</p>
+
+    <div class="figleft"
+         style="width:70%;">
+        <a href="images/168.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig168"
+             id="fig168"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/168.jpg"
+             alt="LOCK AT WINDSOR." /></a>LOCK AT WINDSOR.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>St. George's Hall, the Waterloo gallery, the council-chamber
+    and the Vandyck room are the most attractive, all of them for
+    the historical portraits they contain, and the first, besides,
+    for its merit as an example of a Gothic interior and its
+    associations with the order of the Garter, the knights of which
+    society are installed in it. The specialty of the Waterloo room
+    is the series of portraits of the leaders, civil and military,
+    English and continental, of the last and successful league
+    against Napoleon. They are nearly all by Lawrence, and of
+    course admirable in their delineation of character. In that
+    essential of a good portrait none of the English school have
+    excelled Lawrence. We may rely upon the truth to Nature of each
+    of the heads before us; for air and expression accord with what
+    history tells us of the individuals, its verdict eked out and
+    assisted by instructive minuti� of lineament and meaning
+    detected, in the "off-guard" of private intercourse, by the eye
+    of a great painter and a lifelong student of physiognomy. We
+    glance from the rugged Blucher to the wily Metternich, and from
+    the philosophic Humboldt to the semi-savage Platoff. The
+    dandies George IV. and Alexander are here, but Brummel is left
+    out. The gem of the collection is Pius VII., Lawrence's
+    masterpiece, widely familiar by engravings. Raphael's Julius
+    II. seems <span class="pagenum"><a name="page169"
+       id="page169"></a>[pg 169]</span> to have been in the
+       artist's mind, but that work is not improved on, unless in
+       so far as the critical eye of our day may delight in the
+       more intricate tricks of chiaroscuro and effect to which
+       Lawrence has recourse. "Brunswick's fated chieftain" will
+       interest the votaries of Childe Harold. Could he have looked
+       forward to 1870, he would perhaps have chosen a different
+       side at Waterloo, as his father might at Jena, and elected
+       to figure in oils at Versailles rather than at Windsor.
+       Incomparably more destructive to the small German princes
+       have been the Hohenzollerns than the Bonapartes.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/169.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig169"
+             id="fig169"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/169.jpg"
+             alt="THE THAMES EMBANKMENT." /></a>THE THAMES
+             EMBANKMENT.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>We forget these nineteenth-century people in the
+    council-chamber, wherein
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page170"
+       id="page170"></a>[pg 170]</span> reign Guido, Rembrandt,
+       Claude, and even Da Vinci. If Leonardo really executed all
+       the canvases ascribed to him in English collections, the
+       common impressions of his habits of painting but little, and
+       not often finishing that, do him great injustice. Martin
+       Luther is here, by Holbein, and the countess of Desmond, the
+       merry old lady</p>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>Who lived to the age of twice threescore and
+            ten,</p>
+
+            <p>And died of a fall from a cherry tree then,</p>
+        </div>
+    </div>
+
+    <p>is embalmed in the bloom of one hundred and twenty and the
+    gloom of Rembrandt. The two dozen pictures in this room form
+    nearly as odd an association as any like number of portraits
+    could do. Guercino's Sibyl figures with a cottage interior by
+    Teniers, and Lely's Prince Rupert looks down with lordly scorn
+    on Jonah pitched into the sea by the combined efforts of the
+    two Poussins. The link between Berghem's cows and Del Sarto's
+    Holy Family was doubtless supplied to the minds of the hanging
+    committee by recollections of the manger. Our thrifty
+    Pennsylvanian, West, is assigned the vestibule. Five of his
+    "ten-acre" pictures illustrate the wars of Edward III. and the
+    Black Prince. The king's closet and the queen's closet are
+    filled mostly by the Flemings. Vandyck's room finally finishes
+    the list. It has, besides a portrait of himself and several
+    more of the first Charles and his family in every pose, some
+    such queer, or worse than queer, commoners as Tom Killigrew and
+    Sir Kenelm Digby and Venetia his hopeful spouse, so dear to
+    novelists of a certain school.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:90%;">
+        <a href="images/170.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig170"
+             id="fig170"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/170.jpg"
+             alt="ELMS NEAR THE HERONRY." /></a>ELMS NEAR THE
+             HERONRY.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Vast sums have been expended on the renovation and
+    improvement of the castle during the past half century. With
+    Victoria it has been more popular as a residence than with any
+    of her predecessors since the fourteenth century. What,
+    however, with its greater practical proximity to London, due to
+    railways, and what with the queen's liking for solitude since
+    the death of her consort, the more secluded homes of Osborne
+    and Balmoral have measurably superseded it in her affections.
+    Five hundred miles of distance to the Dee preclude the
+    possibility of the dumping on her, by means of excursion
+    trains, of loyal cockneydom. She is as thoroughly protected
+    from that inundation in the Isle of Wight, the average Londoner
+    having a fixed horror of sea-sickness. The running down, by her
+    private steamer, of a few more inquisitive yachts in the Solent
+    would be a hazardous experiment, if temporarily effective in
+    keeping home invaders at bay. Holding as her right and left
+    bowers those two sanctuaries at the opposite ends of her island
+    realm, she can play a strong hand in the way of personal
+    independence, and cease to feel that hers is a monarchy limited
+    by the rights of the masses. It is well for the country that
+    she should be left as far as possible to consult her own
+    comfort, ease and health at least as freely as
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page171"
+       id="page171"></a>[pg 171]</span> the humblest of her
+       subjects. The continuance of her life is certainly a
+       political desideratum. It largely aids in maintaining a
+       wholesome balance between conservatism and reform. So long
+       as she lives there will be no masculine will to exaggerate
+       the former or obstruct the latter, as notably happened under
+       George III. and William IV. Her personal bearing is also in
+       her favor. Her popularity, temporarily obscured a few years
+       ago, is becoming as great as ever. It has never been
+       weakened by any misstep in politics, and so long as that can
+       be said will be exposed to no serious danger.</p>
+
+    <p>We are far from being at the end of the upper Thames.
+    Oxford, were there no other namable place, is beyond us. But we
+    have explored the denser portion&mdash;the nucleus of the
+    nebula of historic stars that stretches into the western sky as
+    seen from the metropolis. We lay aside our little lorgnette. It
+    has shown us as much as we can map in these pages, and that we
+    have endeavored to do with at least the merit of accuracy.</p>
+
+    <p class="author">EDWARD C. BRUCE.</p>
+
+    <h2>THE POET'S PEN.</h2>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i4">I am an idle reed;</p>
+
+            <p>I rustle in the whispering air;</p>
+
+            <p class="i4">I bear my stalk and seed</p>
+
+            <p>Through spring-time's glow and summer's glare.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i4">And in the fiercer strife</p>
+
+            <p>Which winter brings to me amain,</p>
+
+            <p class="i4">Sapless, I waste my life,</p>
+
+            <p>And, murmuring at my fate, complain.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i4">I am a worthless reed;</p>
+
+            <p>No golden top have I for crown,</p>
+
+            <p class="i4">No flower for beauty's meed,</p>
+
+            <p>No wreath for poet's high renown.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i4">Hollow and gaunt, my wand</p>
+
+            <p>Shrill whistles, bending in the gale;</p>
+
+            <p class="i4">Leafless and sad I stand,</p>
+
+            <p>And, still neglected, still bewail.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i4">O foolish reed! to wail!</p>
+
+            <p>A poet came, with downcast eyes,</p>
+
+            <p class="i4">And, wandering through the dale,</p>
+
+            <p>Saw thee and claimed thee for his prize.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i4">He plucked thee from the mire;</p>
+
+            <p>He pruned and made of thee a pen,</p>
+
+            <p class="i4">And wrote in words of fire</p>
+
+            <p>His flaming song to listening men;</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i4">Till thou, so lowly bred,</p>
+
+            <p>Now wedded to a nobler state,</p>
+
+            <p class="i4">Utt'rest such p�ans overhead</p>
+
+            <p>That angels listen at their gate.</p>
+        </div>
+    </div>
+
+    <p class="author">F.A.
+    HILLARD.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page172"
+       id="page172"></a>[pg 172]</span>
+
+    <h2>SKETCHES OF INDIA.</h2>
+
+    <h3>II.</h3>
+
+    <p>I had now learned to place myself unreservedly in the hands
+    of Bhima Gandharva. When, therefore, on regaining the station
+    at Khandallah, he said, "The route by which I intend to show
+    you India will immediately take us quite away from this part of
+    it; first, however, let us go and see Poona, the old Mahratta
+    capital, which lies but a little more than thirty miles farther
+    to the south-eastward by rail,"&mdash;I accepted the
+    proposition as a matter of course, and we were soon steaming
+    down the eastern declivity of the Gh�ts. As we moved smoothly
+    down into the treeless plains which surround Poona I could not
+    resist a certain feeling of depression.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes," said Bhima Gandharva when I mentioned it to him, "I
+    understand exactly what you mean. On reaching an unbroken
+    expanse of level country, after leaving the tops of mountains,
+    I always feel as if my soul had come bump against a solid wall
+    of rock in the dark. I seem to hear a dull <i>thud</i> of
+    discouragement somewhere back in my soul, as when a man's body
+    falls dead on the earth. Nothing, indeed, could more heighten
+    such a sensation than the contrast between this and the Bombay
+    side of the Gh�ts. There we had the undulating waters, the
+    lovely harbor with its wooded and hilly islands, the ascending
+    terraces of the Gh�ts: everything was energetic, the whole
+    invitation of Nature was toward air, light, freedom, heaven.
+    But here one spot is like another spot; this level ground is
+    just the same level ground there was a mile back; this corn
+    stands like that corn; there is an oppressive sense of
+    bread-and-butter about; one somehow finds one's self thinking
+    of ventilation and economics. It is the sausage-grinding school
+    of poetry&mdash;of which modern art, by the way, presents
+    several examples&mdash;as compared with that general school
+    represented by the geniuses who arise and fly their own flight
+    and sing at a great distance above the heads of men and of
+    wheat."</p>
+
+    <p>Having arrived and refreshed ourselves at our hotel, whose
+    proprietor was, as usual, a Parsee, we sallied forth for a
+    stroll about Poona. On one side of us lay the English quarter,
+    consisting of the houses and gardens of the officers and
+    government employ�s, and of the two or three hundred other
+    Englishmen residing here. On the other was the town, extending
+    itself along the banks of the little river Moota. We dreamed
+    ourselves along in the lovely weather through such of the seven
+    quarters of the town as happened to strike the fancy of my
+    companion. Occasionally we were compelled to turn out of our
+    way for the sacred cattle, which, in the enjoyment of their
+    divine prerogatives, would remain serenely lying across our
+    path; but we respected the antiquity, if not the
+    reasonableness, of their privileges, and murmured not.</p>
+
+    <p>Each of the seven quarters of Poona is named after a day of
+    the week. As we strolled from Monday to Tuesday, or passed with
+    bold anachronism from Saturday back to Wednesday, I could not
+    help observing how these interweavings and reversals of time
+    appeared to take an actual embodiment in the scenes through
+    which we slowly moved, particularly in respect of the houses
+    and the costumes which went to make up our general view. From
+    the modern-built European houses to the medi�val-looking
+    buildings of the Bhoodwar quarter, with their massive walls and
+    loop-holes and crenellations, was a matter of four or five
+    centuries back in a mere turn of the eye; and from these latter
+    to the Hindu temples here and there, which, whether or not of
+    actual age, always carry one straight into antiquity, was a
+    further retrogression to the obscure depths of time. So, too,
+    one's glance would often sweep in a twinkling from a European
+    clothed in <span class="pagenum"><a name="page173"
+       id="page173"></a>[pg 173]</span> garments of the latest mode
+       to a Hindu whose sole covering was his <i>dhotee</i>, or
+       clout about the loins, taking in between these two extremes
+       a number of distinct stages in the process of evolution
+       through which our clothes have gone. In the evening we
+       visited the <i>Sangam</i>, where the small streams of the
+       Moola and the Moota come together. It is filled with
+       cenotaphs, but, so far from being a place of weeping, the
+       pleasant air was full of laughter and of gay conversation
+       from <span class="pagenum"><a name="page174"
+       id="page174"></a>[pg 174]</span> the Hindus, who delight to
+       repair here for the purpose of enjoying the cool breath of
+       the evening as well as the pleasures of social
+       intercourse.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/173.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig173"
+             id="fig173"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/173.jpg"
+             alt="HINDU TEMPLES NEAR POONA." /></a>HINDU TEMPLES
+             NEAR POONA.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>But I did not care to linger in Poona. The atmosphere always
+    had to me a certain tang of the assassinations, the intrigues,
+    the treacheries which marked the reign of that singular line of
+    usurping ministers whose capital was here. In the days when the
+    Peishwas were in the height of their glory Poona was a city of
+    a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, and great traffic was
+    here carried on in jewelry and such luxuries among the Mahratta
+    nobles. The Mahrattas once, indeed, possessed the whole of
+    India practically; and their name is composed of <i>Mahu</i>, a
+    word meaning "great," and often to be met with in the
+    designations of this land, where so many things really
+    <i>are</i> great, and <i>Rachtra</i>, "kingdom," the propriety
+    of the appellation seeming to be justified by the bravery and
+    military character of the people. They have been called the
+    Cossacks of India from these qualities combined with their
+    horsemanship. But the dynasty of the usurping ministers had its
+    origin in iniquity; and the corruption of its birth quickly
+    broke out again under the stimulus of excess and luxury, until
+    it culminated in the destruction of the Mahratta empire in
+    1818. So, when we had seen the palace of the Peishwa, from one
+    of whose balconies the young Peishwa Mahadeo committed suicide
+    by leaping to the earth in the year 1797 through shame at
+    having been reproved by his minister Nana Farnavese in presence
+    of his court, and when we had visited the Hira-B�gh, or Garden
+    of Diamonds, the summer retreat of the Peishwas, with its
+    elegant pavilion, its balconies jutting into the masses of
+    foliage, its cool tank of water, reposing under the protection
+    of the temple-studded Hill of Pararati, we took train again for
+    Bombay.</p>
+
+    <p>The Great Indian Peninsula Railway's main line leads out of
+    Bombay over the Gh�ts to Jabalp�r, six hundred miles; thence a
+    railway of some two hundred and twenty miles runs to Allahabad,
+    connecting them with the great line, known as the East Indian
+    Railway, which extends for more than a thousand miles
+    north-westward from Calcutta <i>vi�</i> Patna, Benares,
+    Allahabad, Cawnpore, Lucknow, Agra and Delhi. Our journey, as
+    marked out by Bhima Gandharva, was to be from Bombay to
+    Jabalp�r by rail; thence by some slow and easy conveyance
+    across country to Bhopal, and from Bhopal northward through
+    Jhansi to Delhi and the northern country, thence returning by
+    rail to Calcutta.</p>
+
+    <p>As one ascends the Western Gh�ts shortly after leaving
+    Bombay one has continual occasion to remark the extraordinary
+    resources of modern railway engineering. Perhaps the mechanical
+    skill of our time has not achieved any more brilliant
+    illustrations of itself than here occur. For many miles one is
+    literally going up a flight of steps by rail. The word Gh�t
+    indeed means the steps leading up from pools or rivers, whose
+    frequent occurrence in India attests the need of easy access to
+    water, arising from the important part which it plays both in
+    the civil and religious economies of the Hindu. The Gh�ts are
+    so called from their terraced ledges, rising one above another
+    from the shores of the ocean like the stairs leading up from a
+    pool. In achieving the ascent of these gigantic stairs all the
+    expedients of road-makers have been resorted to: the zigzag,
+    the trestle, the tunnel, the curve, have been pushed to their
+    utmost applications; for five continuous miles on the Thull
+    Gh�t Incline there is a grade of one in thirty-seven, involving
+    many trying curves, and on nineteen miles of the Bhore Gh�t
+    Incline there are thirty tunnels.</p>
+
+    <p>That which gives tone and character to a general view of the
+    interior of a railway-car in traveling is, from the nature of
+    things, the head-covering of the occupants, for it is this
+    which mostly meets the eye; and no one who has traveled in the
+    United States, for example, can have failed to observe the
+    striking difference between the aspect of a car in the South,
+    where the felt slouch prevails, and of one in the North, where
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page175"
+       id="page175"></a>[pg 175]</span> the silk hat is more
+       affected. But cars full of turbans! There were turbans of
+       silk, of muslin, of woolen; white turbans, red, green and
+       yellow turbans; turbans with knots, turbans with ends
+       hanging; neat turbans, baggy turbans, preternatural turbans,
+       and that curious spotted silk inexpressible mitre which the
+       Parsee wears.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/175.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig175"
+             id="fig175"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/175.jpg"
+             alt="G�NDS." /></a>G�NDS.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Bhima Gandharva was good enough
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page176"
+       id="page176"></a>[pg 176]</span> to explain to me the
+       turban; and really, when within bounds, it is not so
+       nonsensical a headdress as one is apt at first to imagine.
+       It is a strip of cloth from nine to twelve inches wide, and
+       from fifteen to twenty-five yards long. They are known,
+       however, of larger dimensions, reaching to a yard in width
+       and sixty yards in length. The most common color is white;
+       next, perhaps, red, and next yellow; though green, blue,
+       purple and black are worn, as are also buff, shot colors and
+       gray, these latter being usually of silk; but this does not
+       exhaust the varieties, for there are many turbans made of
+       cotton cloth printed in various devices to suit the fancies
+       of the wearers.</p>
+
+    <p>"The <i>puttee-dar</i> (<i>pugri</i>, or turban)," continued
+    my companion, "is a neat compact turban, in general use by
+    Hindus and Mohammedans; the <i>joore-dar</i> is like the
+    <i>puttee-dar</i>, except that it has the addition of a knot on
+    the crown; the <i>khirkee-dar</i> is the full-dress turban of
+    gentlemen attached to native courts; the <i>nustalik</i> is a
+    small turban which fits closely to the head, and is worn for
+    full dress at the Mohammedan <i>durbars</i> or royal
+    receptions; the <i>mundeel</i> is the military turban, with
+    stripes of gold and ends; the <i>s�thi</i> is like the
+    <i>nustalik</i>, and is worn by bankers; the <i>shumla</i> is a
+    shawl-turban; and I fear you do not care to know the other
+    varieties&mdash;the <i>morassa</i>, the <i>umamu</i>, the
+    <i>dustar</i>, the&mdash;"</p>
+
+    <p>"Thank you," I said: "life is short, my dear Bhima, and I
+    shall know nothing but turbans if this goes on, which will be
+    inconvenient, particularly when I return to my home and my
+    neighbor Smith asks me that ghastly question, 'What do I think
+    of India?'"</p>
+
+    <p>"It is a more 'ghastly' question as to India than as to any
+    other country in the world," said the Hindu. "Some years ago,
+    when Mr. Dilke was traveling in this country, a witty officer
+    of one of the hill-stations remarked to him that <i>all general
+    observations about India were absurd</i>. This is quite true.
+    How could it be otherwise? Only consider, for example, the
+    languages of India&mdash;the Assamese, with its two branches of
+    the Deccan-g�l and the Uttar-g�l; the Bengalee; the Maithilee,
+    Tirhutiya or Tirabhucti, spoken between the Coosy and the
+    Gunduck; the Orissan, of the regions around Cuttack; the
+    Nepalese; the Kosalese, about Almora; the Dogusee, between
+    Almora and Cashmere; the Cashmiran; the Panjabee; the
+    Mooltanee, or Vuchee, on the middle Indus; the two dialects of
+    Sindh�, or Tatto, on the lower Indus; the Cutch�, on the west
+    coast of the peninsula; the Guserat�, spoken on the islands of
+    Salsette and Bombay and the opposite coast of the Coucan, as
+    well as by the Parsees in the cities, where it is corrupted
+    with many words of other languages through the influence of
+    commercial relations; the Coucan�, from Bombay to Goa and along
+    the parallel Gh�ts where it is called Ballagate; the Bikaneer�,
+    the Marvar�, the Jeypor�, the Udayapor�, of Rajpootana; the
+    Vraja-bhasha (the cow-pen language) of the Doab, between the
+    Ganges and the Jumna, which is probably the parent of Hindi (or
+    Oord�); the Maloo�, of the tableland of Malwa; the
+    Bundelakhand�, of the Bundelkhand; the Mogadh�, of Behar; the
+    Maharachtr�, of the country south of the Vindhyas;
+    the&mdash;"</p>
+
+    <p>"It gives me pain to interrupt you, Bhima Gandharva," I said
+    (fervently hoping that this portion of my remark might escape
+    the attention of the recording angel); "but I think we are at
+    Jabalp�r."</p>
+
+    <p><i>Apropos</i> of Jubbulpoor, it is well enough to remark
+    that by the rules of Indian orthography which are now to be
+    considered authentic, the letter "a" without an accent has a
+    sound equivalent to short "u," and a vowel with an acute accent
+    has what is usually called its long sound in English.
+    Accordingly, the word written "Jabalp�r" should be pronounced
+    as if retaining the "u" and the "oo" with which it was formerly
+    written, "Jubbulpoor". The termination <i>p�r</i>, so common in
+    the designation of Indian places, is equivalent to that of
+    <i>ville</i> in English, and means the same. The other common
+    termination, <i>abad</i>, means "dwelling" or "residence":
+    <i>e.g.</i>, Ahmedabad, the residence of Ahmed. Jabalp�r is but
+    about a mile from the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page177"
+       id="page177"></a>[pg 177]</span> right bank of the Nerbad�
+       (<i>Nerbudda</i>) River; and as I wished to see the famous
+       Marble Rocks of that stream, which are found a short
+       distance from Jabalp�r, my companion and I here left the
+       railway, intending to see a little of the valley of the
+       Nerbad�, and then to strike across the Vindhyas, along the
+       valley of the Tonsa, to Bhopal, making our journey by such
+       slow, irregular and easy stages as should be compatible with
+       that serene and philosophic disposition into which the
+       Hindu's beautiful gravity had by this time quite converted
+       my American tendencies toward rushing through life at the
+       killing pace.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/177.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig177"
+             id="fig177"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/177.jpg"
+             alt="CENOTAPHS IN THE VALLEY OF THE TONSA." />
+             </a>CENOTAPHS IN THE VALLEY OF THE TONSA.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>It was a little past midday when we made our first journey
+    along the river between the Marble Rocks. Although the weather
+    was as nearly perfect as weather could be, the mornings being
+    deliciously cool and bracing and the nights cold enough to
+    produce often a thin layer of ice over a pan of water left
+    exposed till daybreak, yet the midday sun was warm enough,
+    especially after a walk, to make one long for leaves and shade
+    and the like. It would be difficult, therefore, to convey the
+    sensations with which we reclined at our ease in a
+    flat-bottomed punt while an attendant poled us up toward the
+    "Fall of Smoke," where the Nerbad� leaps out eagerly toward the
+    low lands he is to fertilize, like a young poet anxious to
+    begin his work of grace in the world. On each side of us rose
+    walls of marble a hundred feet in height, whose pure white was
+    here and there striped with dark green or black: all the colors
+    which met the eye&mdash;the marmoreal whites, the bluish grays
+    of the recesses among the ledges, the green and black seams,
+    the limpid blue of the stream&mdash;were grateful, calm-toned,
+    refreshing; we inhaled the coolness as if it had been a mild
+    aroma out of a distant flower. This pleasant fragrance, which
+    seemed to come up out of all things, was presently intensified
+    by a sort of spiritual counterpart&mdash;a gentle breath that
+    blew upon us from the mysterious regions of death; for on a
+    <i>gh�t</i> we saw a small company of Hindus just launching the
+    body of a pious relative into the waters of Mother
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page178"
+       id="page178"></a>[pg 178]</span> Nerbad� in all that freedom
+       from grief, and even pleasant contemplation, with which this
+       singular people regard the transition from present to future
+       existence. These corpses, however, which are thus committed
+       to the wave, do not always chime so happily in with the
+       reveries of boating-parties on the Nerbad�. The Marble Rocks
+       are often resorted to by pic-nic parties in the moonlit
+       evenings; and one can easily fancy that to have a dusky dead
+       body float against one's boat and sway slowly round
+       alongside in the midst of a gay jest or of a light song of
+       serenade, as is said to have happened not unfrequently here,
+       is not an occurrence likely to heighten the spirits of
+       revelers. Occasionally, also, the black, ugly double snout
+       of the <i>magar</i> (or Nerbad� crocodile) may pop up from
+       the surface, which may here serve as a warning to the young
+       lady who trails her hand in the water&mdash;and I have yet
+       to be in a boating-party where the young lady did not trail
+       her hand in the water&mdash;that on the Nerbad� it is
+       perhaps as well to resign an absent-minded hand to the young
+       officer who sits by her in the boat lest Magar should snap
+       it off.</p>
+
+    <p>Leaving the Nerbad� we now struck off northward toward the
+    Tonsa, intending to pass round by way of Dumoh, Sangor, Bhilsa
+    and Sanchi to Bhopal. We might have pursued a route somewhat
+    more direct by following directly down the valley of the
+    Nerbad� to Hoshangabad, and thence straight across to Bhopal,
+    but my companion preferred the circuitous route indicated, as
+    embracing a greater variety of interesting objects. He had
+    procured for our conveyance a vehicle which was in all respects
+    suitable to the placidity of his temper; and I make bold to
+    confess that, American as I am&mdash;born on the railroad, so
+    to speak&mdash;I have never enjoyed traveling as I did in this
+    novel carriage. It was what is called a <i>chapaya</i>. It
+    consisted of a body nearly ten feet in length by more than five
+    in breadth, and was canopied by a top supported upon sculptured
+    pillars of wood. The wheels were massive and low. There were no
+    springs; but this deficiency was atoned for by the thick
+    cushionment of the rear portion of the vehicle, which allowed
+    us to lie at full length in luxurious ease as we rolled along.
+    Four white bullocks, with humps and horns running nearly
+    straight back on the prolongation of the forehead line, drew us
+    along in a very stately manner at the rate of something like a
+    mile and a half an hour.</p>
+
+    <p>We were now in the G�ndwana, in some particulars one of the
+    most interesting portions of the country. Here are the
+    Highlands of Central India; here rise the Nerbad� and the
+    Tapti&mdash;which flow to the westward in a generally parallel
+    direction, and empty into the Gulf of Cambaye, the one at
+    Broode and the other at Surat&mdash;as well as the S�n, the
+    Keyn (or Cane) and the Tonsa, which flow northward into the
+    Jumna. The valley of the Keyn and that of the Tonsa here run
+    across the Vindhyas, which are known to the eastward of this as
+    the Kyrmores, and afford communication between Northern and
+    Southern India. It is along the depression of the latter stream
+    that the railway has been built from Jabalp�r to Allahabad.</p>
+
+    <p>The eight hundred thousand G�nds of the G�ndwana are
+    supposed to be members of the great autochthonal family of
+    ancient India. These hills of the G�ndwana country appear to
+    have been considered by the incoming Aryans for a long time as
+    a sort of uncanny land, whose savage recesses were filled with
+    demons and snakes: indeed, in the epics of the M�h�bh�r�ta and
+    R�m�yana this evil character is attributed to that portion of
+    India lying south of the Vindhyas. The forest of Spenser's
+    Fairy Queen, in which wandering knights meet with manifold
+    beasts and maleficent giants, and do valorous battles against
+    them in the rescue of damsels and the like&mdash;such seem to
+    have been the G�ndwana woods to the ancient Hindu imagination.
+    It was not distressed damsels, however, whom they figured as
+    being assisted by the arms of the errant protectors, but
+    religious devotees, who dwelt in the seclusion of the forest,
+    and who were protected from the pranks and machinations of the
+    savage denizens by opportune heroes
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page179"
+       id="page179"></a>[pg 179]</span> of the northern race. It
+       appears, however, that the native demons of the G�ndwana had
+       fascinating daughters; for presently we find the rajahs from
+       the north coming down and marrying them; and finally, in the
+       fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the keen urgency of the
+       conquering Mohammedans sends great numbers of Rajp�ts down
+       into the G�ndwana, and a considerable mixture of the
+       <span class="pagenum"><a name="page180"
+       id="page180"></a>[pg 180]</span> two bloods takes place.
+       With this incursion of Hindu peoples come also the Hindu
+       gods and tenets; and Mahadeo, the "great god," whose home
+       had been the Kailas of the Himalayas, now finds himself
+       domesticated in the mountains of Central India. In the
+       Mahadeo mountain is still a shrine of Siva, which is much
+       visited by pilgrims and worshipers.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/179.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig179"
+             id="fig179"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/179.jpg"
+             alt="THE GAUR, OR INDIAN BISON." /></a>THE GAUR, OR
+             INDIAN BISON.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>The G�nd&mdash;he who lives back in the hills, far off from
+    the neighborhood of the extensive planting districts, which
+    have attracted many of those living near them to become at
+    least half-civilized laborers in harvest-time&mdash;is a
+    primitive being enough.</p>
+
+    <p>"Only look," said Bhima Gandharva, "at that hut if you
+    desire to see what is perhaps one of the most primitive houses
+    since ever the banyan tree gave to man (as is fabled) the idea
+    of sheltering himself from the elements artificially." It was
+    simply made of stakes driven into the ground, between which
+    were wattled branches. This structure was thatched with grass,
+    and plastered with mud.</p>
+
+    <p>The G�nd, like the American Indian, has his little patch of
+    grain, which he cultivates, however, in a fashion wholly his
+    own. His sole instrument of agriculture seems to be the axe.
+    Selecting a piece of ground which presents a growth of small
+    and easily-cut saplings&mdash;and perhaps, by the way, thus
+    destroying in a few hours a whole cargo of teak trees worth
+    more than all the crops of his agricultural lifetime&mdash;he
+    hews down the growth, and in the dry season sets fire to the
+    fallen timber. The result is a bed of ashes over a space of two
+    or three acres. His soil is now ready. If the patch thus
+    prepared happens to be level, he simply flings out a few
+    handfuls of grain, coarse rice, k�tki (ponicum) or k�don
+    (paspalum), and the thing is done. The rest is in the hands of
+    the god who sends the rains. If the patch be on a declivity, he
+    places the grain at the upper part, where it will be washed
+    down by the rains over the balance of the field. Next year he
+    will burn some more wood&mdash;the first burning will have left
+    many charred stumps and trunks, which he supplements with a
+    little wood dragged from other parts of the forest&mdash;on the
+    same spot, and so the next year, by which time it will become
+    necessary to begin a new clearing, or <i>dhya</i>. The
+    <i>dhya</i> thus abandoned does not renew the original growth
+    which clothed it, like the pinelands of the Southern United
+    States, which, if allowed to run waste after having been
+    cleared and cultivated, clothe themselves either with oaks or
+    with a wholly different species of pine from the original
+    growth. The waste <i>dhya</i>, which may have perhaps nourished
+    a splendid growth of teak, becomes now only a dense jungle.</p>
+
+    <p>The G�nd also raises pumpkins and beans; and this vegetable
+    diet he supplements with game ensnared in the <i>dhyas</i>, to
+    which peafowl, partridges, hares and the like resort. Many of
+    the villages, however, have a professional huntsman, who will
+    display the most incredible patience in waiting with his
+    matchlock for the game to appear.</p>
+
+    <p>Besides these articles of diet, the aborigines of the
+    G�ndwana have their mhowa tree, which stands them in much the
+    same multifarious stead as the palm does to its beneficiaries.
+    The flowers of the mhowa fall and are eaten, or are dried and
+    pressed, being much like raisins: they also produce a wine by
+    fermentation and the strong liquor of the hill-people by
+    distillation. Of the seed cakes are made, and an oil is
+    expressed from them which is an article of commerce.</p>
+
+    <p>In addition, the poor G�nd appears to have a periodical
+    godsend resulting from a singular habit of one of the great
+    Indian plants. The bamboo is said to undergo a general seeding
+    every thirty years: at this period, although, in the mean time,
+    many individual bamboos may have passed through the process of
+    reproduction, it is said that the whole bamboo growth of a
+    section will simultaneously drop its leaves and put forth large
+    panicles of flowers, after which come great quantities of seeds
+    much like rice. These are gathered for food by the inhabitants
+    with all the greater diligence in consequence of a
+    tradition&mdash;which, however, does not seem to be at all
+    supported by facts&mdash;that the general seeding of the
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page181"
+       id="page181"></a>[pg 181]</span> bamboo portends a failure
+       of the regular crops. The liberal forests of the G�ndwana
+       furnish still other edibles to their denizens. The ebony
+       plums, the wild mango, the seeds of the s�l tree, the beans
+       of the giant banhinia creeper, a species of arrowroot, and a
+       wild yam, are here found and eaten.</p>
+
+    <div class="figcenter"
+         style="width:100%;">
+        <a href="images/181.jpg"
+             target="blank"
+             name="fig181"
+             id="fig181"><img width="100%"
+             src="images/181.jpg"
+             alt="BANJARIS." /></a>BANJARIS.
+    </div>
+
+    <p>It is not long since the G�nds had arrived at a melancholy
+    condition under the baleful influences of the kulars, or
+    liquor-dealers, who resided among them and created an
+    extraordinary demand for their intoxicating wares by paying for
+    service and for produce in liquor. The kulars have, however,
+    been thrown <span class="pagenum"><a name="page182"
+       id="page182"></a>[pg 182]</span> into the background by wise
+       efforts toward their suppression, and matters have improved
+       for the poor autoch-thones.</p>
+
+    <p>We spent our first night in our chapaya, my companion having
+    so arranged matters that we were quite independent of the
+    bungaloos which the Englishmen have erected at suitable
+    distances along the great roads for the convenience of
+    travelers. The night was clear; betwixt the corner pillars
+    which upheld our canopy a thousand friendly salutations from
+    the stars streamed in upon us; the tranquil countenance of my
+    friend seemed, as he lay beside me, like the face of the Past
+    purified of old errors and calm with great wisdom got through
+    great tribulation, insomuch that betwixt the Hindu and the
+    stars I felt myself to be at once in communication with
+    antiquity and with eternity.</p>
+
+    <p>Thus we pursued our ambulatory meditations through the
+    G�ndwana. If we had been sportsmen, we should have found full
+    as varied a field for the bagging of game as for that more
+    spiritual hunt after new ideas and sensations in which we were
+    engaged. Gray quail, gray partridges, painted partridges
+    (<i>Francolinus pictus</i>), snipe and many varieties of
+    water-fowl, the sambor, the black antelope, the Indian gazelle
+    or ravine deer, the gaur or Indian bison, chewing the cud in
+    the midday shade or drinking from a clear stream, troops of
+    <i>nilga�</i> springing out from the long grass and dwarf
+    growth of pol�s and jujube trees which covered the sites of
+    abandoned villages and fields,&mdash;all these revealed
+    themselves to us in the most tempting situations. But although
+    I had been an ardent devotee of the double-barrel, the large
+    and manly tenderness which Bhima Gandharva invariably displayed
+    toward all animals, whether wild or tame, had wrought marvels
+    upon me, and I had grown fairly ashamed&mdash;nay,
+    horrified&mdash;at the idea that anything which a generous and
+    brave man could call <i>sport</i> should consist wholly in the
+    most keen and savage cruelties inflicted upon creatures whom we
+    fight at the most unknightly odds, we armed, they unarmed.
+    While I knew that our pleasures are by the divine order mostly
+    distillations from pain, I could not now help recognizing at
+    the same time that this circumstance was part of an enormous
+    plan which the slaughter of innocent creatures in the way of
+    "sport" did in nowise help to carry out.</p>
+
+    <p>The truth is, although I had been for some days wavering
+    upon the brink of these conclusions in a quiet way, I found the
+    old keen ardor of the sportsman still burning too strongly, and
+    I had started out with a breech-loader, intent upon doing much
+    of the G�ndwana route gun in hand. It was not long before a
+    thoughtless shot operated to bring my growing convictions
+    sharply face to face with my decreasing practice, and thus to
+    quite frown the latter out of existence. It happened in this
+    wise: One day, not far from sunset, I was walking idly along
+    behind the chapaya, in which Bhima Gandharva was dreamily
+    reclining, when suddenly a pair of great <i>s�ras</i> cranes
+    rose from the low banks of a small stream and sailed directly
+    across the road. Quick as thought&mdash;indeed, quicker than
+    thought; for if I <i>had</i> thought, I would not have done
+    it&mdash;I fired, and brought down one of the monstrous birds.
+    As I started to approach it, Bhima Gandharva said, in a tone
+    just a trifle graver than usual, "Stop! wait a moment," and at
+    the same time halted the chapaya. The mate of the bird I had
+    shot, seeing him fall, alighted on the same spot, then flew up,
+    then returned, flew up again, returned again, with an
+    exhibition of sad and lingering affection of which I had not
+    dreamed, and which penetrated me beyond expression; so I stood
+    half stolid outwardly and wholly ashamed and grieved inwardly.
+    "The s�ras," said my friend, "is the type of conjugal affection
+    among the Hindus. The birds nearly always go in pairs; and when
+    one is killed, the other invariably makes those demonstrations
+    of tenderness which you have just seen."</p>
+
+    <p>As we journeyed along in the dusk came notes from another
+    pair of feathered lovers, "chukwa, chukwi," "chukwa, chukwi,"
+    in a sort of mournful <span class="pagenum"><a name="page183"
+       id="page183"></a>[pg 183]</span> alternation. They were the
+       branning ducks, he on one side, she on the other side of the
+       stream, as is their habit, whence they are fabled to be a
+       pair of lovers who must yearn unavailingly through the long
+       nights from opposite banks of the river.</p>
+
+    <p>That night, when Bhima Gandharva was asleep, I gently arose,
+    took my double-barrel&mdash;thou dear Manton! how often has not
+    Jonesville admired thee returning from the field at late
+    evening slanting at a jaunty angle high above my bagful of
+    snipe or of quail as the case might be!&mdash;yes, I took this
+    love of a gun, together with the cartridges, accoutrements and
+    all other rights, members and appurtenances thereunto belonging
+    or in any wise appertaining, and slid the whole lot softly into
+    a deep green pool of the very stream from which had flown my
+    s�ras.</p>
+
+    <p>The taste of gypsy life which I was now enjoying contributed
+    to add a sort of personal element to that general interest
+    which hangs about the curious Banjaris, whom we met constantly,
+    with their families and their bullocks, along our road.
+    <i>Banjara</i> is literally "forest-wanderer." The women were
+    especially notable for their tall stature, shapely figures and
+    erect carriage; which circumstances are all the more wonderful
+    from the life of hardship which they lead, attending as they do
+    at once to the foraging of the cattle, the culinary
+    preparations for the men and the cares of the children. From
+    the profusion of ornaments which they wore, one may imagine,
+    however, that they were well cared for by their lords in return
+    for their affectionate labors; and the general bearing of the
+    tall Banjara who bore a long two-handed sword gave evidence of
+    a certain inward sense of protection over his belongings which
+    probably found vent in many an affectionate gift of rings and
+    bracelets to his graceful partner. It must be confessed that
+    the gypsying of these Eastern Bohemians is not so free a life
+    as is popularly supposed. The <i>naik</i> or sovereign of each
+    <i>tanda</i>, or camp, seems to be possessed of absolute power,
+    and in this connection the long two-handed sword suggested much
+    less gentle reflections. The Banjara, however, though a nomad,
+    is a serviceable one, for he is engaged in trade. With his
+    bullocks he is the carrier of Central India, and is to be met
+    with all over that section, bringing salt and other commodities
+    and returning with interior produce.</p>
+
+    <h2>FRA ALOYSIUS</h2>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>Fra Aloysius, vexed with skeptic fears,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Nigh crazed with thought to all the
+            saints did pray</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">For faith in those mysterious words that
+            say,</p>
+
+            <p>"One day is with the Lord a thousand years,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">A thousand years with Him are as a
+            day."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>An erudite and holy monk was he,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">And yet his brethren trembled lest his
+            brain</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Should lose its poise, so long he dwelt
+            in vain</p>
+
+            <p>On that perplexing verse to find its key,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">And strove to make its hidden meaning
+            plain.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page184"
+               id="page184"></a>[pg 184]</span>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>Racked by a sleepless night, one fresh spring
+            morn</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Forth from the cloister Aloysius
+            strolled.</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">The wood was dewy-bright, clear beams of
+            gold</p>
+
+            <p>Illumined it, and to his heart was borne</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">A sense of freedom, peace and joy
+            untold.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>Beside a laughing brook he sat to rest,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Above whose wave did long-haired willows
+            weep;</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Midmost the dense green forest, still and
+            deep,</p>
+
+            <p>Lulled by the trickling waters and possessed</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">By tranquil thoughts, the friar fell
+            asleep.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>And, overworn, he slept the livelong day,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Nor waked until the twilight shadows
+            fell,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">That flung a brown night o'er that leafy
+            dell.</p>
+
+            <p>Then up he rose refreshed and went his way,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">And, half ashamed, he heard the
+            vesper-bell.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>Back to the convent fared he; at the gate</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">A stranger gave him entrance, but he
+            passed</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Into the chapel with meek eyes
+            downcast,</p>
+
+            <p>In truant guise returning home thus late,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">And toward his wonted seat made seemly
+            haste.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>Too late! a stranger filled it. Looking round,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Amazed, he could discern no face he
+            knew.</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">The abbot's self had changed; his wonder
+            grew,</p>
+
+            <p>When, after the familiar chant, he found</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">These crazy monks held him for crazy
+            too.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>They gathered round with curious, eager eyes.</p>
+
+            <p>"What cloister's this?" he asked. They named its
+            name:</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">The one he left that morning was the
+            same.</p>
+
+            <p>His name he gave; with many a wild surmise</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">They guessed who he might be and whence
+            he came.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>He asked them where the abbot was at last,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">From whom he parted but the night
+            before.</p>
+
+            <p>"He hath been dead three hundred years and
+            more!"</p>
+
+            <p>They answered with a single voice, aghast.</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Then spake a friar versed in monkish
+            lore:</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>"Brethren, a miracle! This man I know:</p>
+
+            <p>'Tis Aloysius, who, as I have read,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Beset with doubts, forth from this
+            convent fled,</p>
+
+            <p>And vanished, some three hundred years ago,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">And all the world hath counted him as
+            dead."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>Then Aloysius felt the blessed tears</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Fulfill his eyes, whence dropped the
+            scales away.</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Kneeling, he cried, "Oh, brethren, let us
+            pray.</p>
+
+            <p>One day is with the Lord a thousand years,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">A thousand years with Him are as a
+            day."</p>
+        </div>
+    </div>
+
+    <p class="author">EMMA
+    LAZARUS.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page185"
+       id="page185"></a>[pg 185]</span>
+
+    <h2>A FEW HOURS IN BOHEMIA.</h2>
+
+    <p>The beauty of this country is that no turbulent sea confines
+    its borders, nor are martello-towers needed to guard its coast:
+    no jealous neighbor threatens its frontier, no army oppresses
+    its citizens, and no king can usurp its throne. Its locality is
+    hard to define: like the Fata Morgana, it is here to-day and
+    gone to-morrow, for its territory is the mind of men, and in
+    extent it is as boundless as thought. Natives of every clime
+    are enrolled among its freemen, and all lands contain its
+    representatives, but it is in the picturesque streets of the
+    older continental cities of Europe, where rambling lodgings and
+    cheap apartments are many, that the invisible mother-country
+    founds her colonies. I will tell you how I went and what I saw
+    there.</p>
+
+    <p>Afra was a cosmopolite, and consequently knew Bohemia, its
+    byways and thoroughfares. If any one could fill the office of
+    guide thereto, Afra could, and when one evening she rushed into
+    my room saying, "Come along if you want to go to Bohemia," I
+    did not hesitate a moment, but made ready for the journey, with
+    the simple precaution of putting on my bonnet and shawl.</p>
+
+    <p>"A cab?" I asked as we moved from the door.</p>
+
+    <p>"Who ever heard of entering Bohemia in a cab?" laughed Afra
+    dryly. "People have been known to drive <i>out</i> in their own
+    carriages, but they always make their first appearance there on
+    foot, or at best in an omnibus."</p>
+
+    <p>"As you please," I replied, trying to keep pace with her
+    rapid step, which showed constant practice.</p>
+
+    <p>"I wonder you did not propose a balloon," she continued
+    pettishly. "The gods don't give everything to one person: now,
+    they give us brains, and they give other
+    people&mdash;money."</p>
+
+    <p>"If you would understand, I&mdash;"</p>
+
+    <p>"No, you wouldn't. I sha'n't ride in cabs until I can pay
+    for them myself; meanwhile, I have gros sous enough in my
+    pocket for an omnibus fare, and if you have the same we will
+    stop here." At this she entered a bureau, and as I followed I
+    saw her get some tickets from a man who sat behind a small
+    counter, and then composedly sit down on a bench while she
+    said, "We shall have some time to wait for our luxury:" then
+    showing me the tickets, "Twelve and thirteen: it is a full
+    night, and all these people ahead of us."</p>
+
+    <p>"Is it a lottery?" I asked ignorantly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Very much of a lottery," Afra replied grimly&mdash;"like
+    all the ways of Bohemia, remarkably uncertain. You get a ticket
+    for something in the giving of the Muses, and you wait until
+    your number is called. The worst of it is, the most unlikely
+    people are called before you, and some get disgusted and leave:
+    there goes one out at the door at this moment. Well, he may be
+    better or he may be worse off than those who finally win: who
+    knows if any race is worth the running? Still, if you have
+    courage to hold on, I believe there is no doubt that every one
+    ultimately gets something." Seeing my perplexity, she twisted
+    the round tickets between her fingers and added, "Do not be
+    alarmed: these are only good for a seat in the first empty 'bus
+    that comes up. The conductor will call out the numbers in
+    rotation, and if ours is among them we shall go. It is
+    frightful that you have never ridden in a 'bus before. I wonder
+    where we should get ideas if we shut ourselves up in cabs and
+    never walked or were hungry or tired, and thought only of our
+    own comfort from morning till night? You don't know what you
+    miss, you poor deluded, unfortunate rich people. I will tell
+    you of something I saw the other evening; and, as it is worthy
+    of a name, it shall be called 'The Romance of an Omnibus.'
+    Listen! isn't that our numbers I heard? Yes: come quick or we
+    shall lose our chance."</p>
+
+    <p>"Well," said I when we had successfully
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page186"
+       id="page186"></a>[pg 186]</span> threaded the crowd and were
+       seated&mdash;"the romance."</p>
+
+    <p>"You have no idea of the fitness of things. My story is
+    pathetic: it will look badly to see you drowned in
+    tears&mdash;people will stare."</p>
+
+    <p>"I promise not to cry."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, if you are one of those stolid, unemotional beings who
+    are never moved, I sha'n't waste my tale upon you. Wait until
+    to-morrow: we will get Monsieur C&mdash;&mdash; to recount, and
+    you shall hear something worth listening to. He is a regular
+    troubadour&mdash;has the same artless vanity they were known to
+    possess, their charming simplicity, their gestures, and their
+    power of investing everything with romance. One is transported
+    to the Middle Ages while he speaks: no book written on the
+    subject could so fully give you the flavor of the times. He
+    recalls Froissart. If you are not affected by C&mdash;&mdash;'s
+    stories, you had better pretend to be. But that, I am sure,
+    will not be necessary: a great tragedian was lost when he
+    became a great painter."</p>
+
+    <p>"Might I ask how and when and where I am to meet this
+    wonderful man?"</p>
+
+    <p>"At the garden-party."</p>
+
+    <p>"In what way am I to get there?"</p>
+
+    <p>"By strategy. There is a little reunion to-night of what may
+    be called female Bohemians. They are going to settle the
+    preliminaries of this party, and if you happen to be present
+    they will invite you; not that they particularly care for your
+    company, but because, as I said, you happen to be there. Only
+    don't get yourself into a mess by tramping on any one's
+    toes."</p>
+
+    <p>"Have they corns?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, on every inch of surface: they are dreadfully
+    thin-skinned. But they hate sham even more than a hard knock,
+    and are quicker than a police-officer in detecting it; so be
+    careful not to talk about anything you are ignorant of."</p>
+
+    <p>"Give me a few rules, and I promise to conduct myself
+    properly."</p>
+
+    <p>"Well, don't be snobbish and patronize them, and don't look
+    shocked at any strange opinions you hear, nor act as if you
+    were at an animal show and were wondering what would happen
+    next. Be sure not to assent when you see they wish to argue,
+    and don't argue when they expect acquiescence. If any of them
+    speak in broken English, and you can't for the life of you
+    understand, don't ask them to repeat, but answer immediately,
+    for you can imagine when one has taken pains to learn a foreign
+    language one likes it to be appreciated, and don't&mdash;But
+    here we are. In short, make yourself at home, as if you had
+    been there all your life."</p>
+
+    <p>"Afra," I said, laying my hand on her arm as she took to her
+    swift pace again, "perhaps I had better go home: I am afraid I
+    can't&mdash;I think&mdash;that is&mdash;"</p>
+
+    <p>"Nonsense! as if you could not get on after all those hints!
+    Anyway, you cannot return alone, and I am unable to go with
+    you. Make up your mind to blunder, and do it. There was an
+    amateur visited the studio about three months ago: her
+    absurdities have lasted us for laughing material ever since. As
+    she is getting rather stale, you can take her place. This is
+    the house: come in."</p>
+
+    <p>With this doubtful prospect in view I followed my peremptory
+    guide from the narrow street into what appeared to be a
+    spacious court, but as the only light it received was from a
+    blinking candle in the window of the conciergerie, I could not
+    determine. After exchanging some cabalistic sentences with a
+    toothless old woman, the proprietor of the candle, Afra turned
+    to the right, and walking a few steps came to a door opening on
+    a stairway, which we mounted. I can think of nothing black
+    enough for comparison with the darkness surrounding us. At last
+    a faint glimmer showed an old lamp standing in a corner of a
+    hall bare and carpetless. A series of doors flanked the place,
+    looking to my unaccustomed eyes all alike, but Afra without a
+    moment's hesitation went to one of them and knocked. It was
+    opened by a lady, who smiled and said, "Enter. You are just in
+    time: school is over and the model about going."</p>
+
+    <p>I found myself in a high-ceiled room, at one end of which
+    was suspended a row of perhaps a dozen lamps. Here, at least,
+    there was-no lack of light: it
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page187"
+       id="page187"></a>[pg 187]</span> required some moments to
+       accustom our eyes to the sudden contrast. The yellow blaze
+       was directed by reflectors into the space immediately
+       beneath the lamps, which left the rest of the room
+       pleasantly tempered. Some easels, a few chairs and screens,
+       plaster casts on shelves, sketches in all stages of progress
+       on the wall, a tea-kettle singing over a bright fire in a
+       stove, and a curtain enclosing a corner used as a bedroom,
+       completed the list of furniture. It was a night-school for
+       lady artists. The class had finished for the evening, and a
+       number of the students were moving about or seated near the
+       fire, talking in an unlimited number of languages.</p>
+
+    <p>I was given several random introductions, and did my best to
+    follow Afra's directions; but there was an indescribable
+    quaintness about the appearance and manners of my new
+    acquaintance that made it difficult not to stare. I found,
+    however, that little notice was taken of me, as a lively
+    discussion was being carried on over a study of an arm and hand
+    which one of them was holding up for inspection.</p>
+
+    <p>"It is a style I should call the lantern," said she. "The
+    redness of the flesh can only be accounted for on the
+    supposition that a light is shining through it."</p>
+
+    <p>"I should call it raw beef," remarked another.</p>
+
+    <p>"It is a shame, mademoiselle!" began the model in an injured
+    tone. She had been tying on her bonnet before a bit of
+    looking-glass she had taken from her pocket. "Does my arm look
+    like that?" Here she indignantly drew up her sleeve and held
+    out that dimpled member, meanwhile gazing wrathfully at the
+    sketch. "It ought not to be allowed. The silver tones of my
+    flesh are entirely lost; and see how you have caricatured the
+    elegance of my beautiful hand. Will not some one help
+    mademoiselle to put it right before my reputation is
+    ruined?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Jeanne, a model is not a critic," said the author of the
+    drawing, coming forward and grasping the canvas with no gentle
+    hand.&mdash;"Ladies, if you wish to find fault, turn to your
+    own studies. That proportion is frightful"&mdash;she pointed to
+    different sketches as she spoke&mdash;"that ear is too large;
+    and, madame, if you take a crust of paint like yours for
+    freedom of touch, I pity you."</p>
+
+    <p>This dispute was by no means the last during the evening.
+    Opinions seemed to be plentiful in Bohemia, each individual
+    being furnished with a set of her own on every subject
+    broached; and as no diffidence was shown in putting them forth,
+    the company quarreled with great good-nature and evident
+    enjoyment. A pot of tea was then brewed by the owner of the
+    studio, who had been English before she became Bohemian, and
+    the beverage was handed round in tea-cups which, like the
+    opinions of the guests, differed widely from each other. In the
+    silence that attended this diversion Afra took the floor and
+    said, "How about the garden-party to the country? Who is
+    going?"</p>
+
+    <p>Several spoke, and one asked, "Shall we take lunch with
+    us?"</p>
+
+    <p>"No, something will be provided for us there."</p>
+
+    <p>"So much the better. When are we to meet, and where?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Twelve o'clock, midday, at &mdash;&mdash;."</p>
+
+    <p>"What messieurs are going?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Quite a number&mdash;a tenor from the Grand Opera, and the
+    leader of the orchestra, who is a magnificent violinist; that
+    new Spanish painter who plays the guitar divinely; a
+    poet&mdash;that is, he has written some pretty
+    songs&mdash;besides plenty more."</p>
+
+    <p>"That promises well."</p>
+
+    <p>"You will bring your friend?" and the speaker nodded her
+    head toward me.</p>
+
+    <p>"I shall be delighted: I am so curious to see those
+    eccentric&mdash;" Here a warning glance from Afra stopped
+    me.</p>
+
+    <p>But the lady only laughed and said, "You will see
+    eccentricity enough to-morrow, if that is what you want. People
+    who devote their minds to great objects have no time to think
+    of little things. You had better see that Afra has on her
+    bonnet or she will go without one."</p>
+
+    <p>"Nonsense!" replied Afra.&mdash;"Miss," this to the owner of
+    the studio, who was so called in honor of her English birth,
+    "are you ever troubled by the ghost of
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page188"
+       id="page188"></a>[pg 188]</span> that young painter who hung
+       himself up there?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Those who have occasion to commit suicide are not likely to
+    come back: they have had enough of this world," said the
+    Englishwoman.</p>
+
+    <p>"Did some one really die here?" I asked.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, really;" and Afra mimicked my tone of horror. "You
+    know, a Bohemian is at home anywhere, so a change of country
+    don't affect him much. If we find a place disagreeable, we
+    travel."</p>
+
+    <p>"Was he insane?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Not more than the rest of us, but <i>you</i> can't
+    understand the feeling that would induce a man to do such a
+    thing. This young fellow painted a picture: he put his mind,
+    his soul, himself, into it, and sent it to the Exhibition. It
+    was rejected&mdash;that is, he was rejected&mdash;and he came
+    here and died. They found him suspended from that beam where
+    the lamps hang now."</p>
+
+    <p>"I thought your Bohemia was so gay?"</p>
+
+    <p>"So it is, but the brightest light makes the deepest
+    shadows."</p>
+
+    <p>The conversation went on. These ladies discussed politics,
+    literature, art and society with absolute confidence. One of
+    the topics was Alfred de Musset. The Englishwoman was praising
+    the English Alfred, when a pale-faced girl, who up to this
+    moment had been intently reading, oblivious of all about her,
+    closed her book with a snap (it was a much-worn edition of one
+    of the classics, bought for a few sous on the quay) and broke
+    out with&mdash;"Your Tennyson is childish. His King Arthur puts
+    me in mind of our Louis Philippe and his umbrella. Did you know
+    Louis carried an umbrella with him when he was obliged to fly
+    from Paris? One would have looked well held over Arthur's
+    dragon helmet that disagreeable night he left the queen to go
+    and fight his nephew. But perhaps Guinevere had lent it to
+    Launcelot, and even the best friends, alas! do not return
+    umbrellas. Your poet writes in white kid gloves, and thinks in
+    them too. Imagine the magnificent rush and struggle of those
+    ancient days, the ecstasy of battle, the intensity of life, and
+    then read your Tennyson's milk-and-water tales, with their
+    modern English-m�nage feelings. Arthur would have been much
+    more likely to give his wife a beating, as did the hero of the
+    <i>Nibelungen Lied</i>, than that high-flown lecture; and it
+    would have done the Guinevere of that time more good."</p>
+
+    <p>"And what is your Alfred, Anita?"</p>
+
+    <p>"He is divine."</p>
+
+    <p>"After the heathen pattern. He dipped his pen in mire."</p>
+
+    <p>"What is mire?&mdash;water and earth. What are
+    we?&mdash;water and earth. Mire is humanity, and holds in
+    itself not only the roots of the tree, but the germ of the
+    flower. A poet who is too delicate to plant his thought in
+    earth must be content to give it but the life of a parasite: it
+    can have no separate existence of its own."</p>
+
+    <p>"But one need not be bad to be great."</p>
+
+    <p>"Nor need one be good to be great," returned Anita
+    sarcastically. "Alfred de Musset was a peculiar type of a
+    peculiar time. He did not imagine: he felt, he lived, he was
+    himself, and was original, like a new variety of flower or a
+    new species of insect. Tennyson has gleaned from everybody's
+    fields: our Alfred gathered only from his own. The one is made,
+    the other is born."</p>
+
+    <p>"Come away," said Afra impatiently: "no one can speak while
+    Anita is on her hobby. Besides, I must get home early to trim a
+    bonnet for to-morrow;" and without more leavetaking than a
+    "Good-evening," which included every one, we found ourselves in
+    the street.</p>
+
+    <p>"Who is Anita?" I asked.</p>
+
+    <p>"She is nobody just now: what she will be remains to be
+    seen. Her family wish her to be an artist: she wishes to adopt
+    the stage as a profession, and is studying for it <i>sub
+    rosa</i>. Did you ever see a more tragic face?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Poor thing!" I involuntarily exclaimed.</p>
+
+    <p>"Don't pity her," said Afra, more seriously than she had yet
+    spoken. "The best gift that can be bestowed upon a mortal is a
+    strong natural inclination for any particular life and the
+    opportunity of following it. The man or woman who has
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page189"
+       id="page189"></a>[pg 189]</span> that can use the wheel of
+       Fate for a spinning-wheel."</p>
+
+    <p>The next morning at the appointed time I met Afra at the
+    station. "How do I look?" she asked, standing up for my
+    inspection as soon as I appeared in sight, at the same time
+    regarding as much of her dress as it was possible for her to
+    see. But before I could reply the satisfied expression of her
+    face changed: an unpleasant discovery had been made. "I have
+    shoes on that are not mates," she exclaimed&mdash;"cloth and
+    leather: that looks rather queer, doesn't it? Do you think it
+    will be noticed? I could not decide which pair to wear, and put
+    on one of each to see the effect: afterward I forgot them. Now,
+    I suppose that would be thought eccentric, though any one might
+    make the same mistake. It shows I have two pairs of shoes," she
+    added more cheerfully, "and they are both black. How is my
+    bonnet?"</p>
+
+    <p>The bonnet was black velvet, and we were in midsummer. The
+    material, however, was skillfully draped with a veil, and a
+    profusion of pink flowers gave it a seasonable air. A crimson
+    bow was also tied at her neck; she complacently remarked that
+    "pink and crimson harmonize beautifully;" and others of the
+    party arriving at that moment, I was saved the trouble of
+    making a polite answer.</p>
+
+    <p>The ride through ripening grain-fields and moss-thatched
+    hamlets need not be described; suffice it to say, it was France
+    and June. An omnibus was waiting at the station where we
+    dismounted: it carried us near, but not to, our destination.
+    After leaving it we walked through the streets of a low-roofed
+    village, then followed a path bordered with wild mignonette and
+    apple trees that wound up the side of a hill covered with
+    vineyards. A couple of chattering magpies ran before us, an
+    invisible cuckoo was heard between snatches of Italian melody
+    warbled by the tenor <i>sotto voce</i> and the little company
+    overflowed with gayety.</p>
+
+    <p>The house we arrived at looked as if it might be a castle in
+    the air materialized&mdash;pointed windows hidden in ivy,
+    through which you saw the chintz-covered walls of the interior;
+    turrets on the roof and a stair-tower; odd nooks for pigeons
+    and cattle; the color a weather-toned red, met by gray roofs,
+    green trees and blue sky. We passed through it to the quaint
+    garden: rows of dwarf pears bordered its paths, and trellises
+    and walls supported nectarines and vines, with sunshine and
+    shadow caressing the half-ripe fruit.</p>
+
+    <p>The shady spaces were occupied by guests who had arrived
+    before us, and we saw with pleasure that ceremony had not been
+    invited to attend. The host's kindly manner was sufficient to
+    put the company at once at ease. We wandered at will from group
+    to group, listening or conversing: introductions were sometimes
+    given, but more often not.</p>
+
+    <p>At one table some ladies and gentlemen were playing the
+    artistic game of "five points." A more difficult pastime was
+    never invented. The materials necessary are simply a piece of
+    paper and a pencil: it is their use that is extraordinary. A
+    person puts five dots on the paper in whatever position fancy
+    may dictate: on this slight foundation another is expected to
+    design a figure, the puzzle being to include all the marks
+    given. One that I saw had four of the dots placed unusually
+    close together, and the fifth in a distant corner: this latter,
+    in the opinion of the lookers-on, would surely prove
+    refractory. After some moments of consideration, with pencil
+    suspended and eye attentive, the artist commenced drawing. In
+    ten minutes the sketch was finished. It was an angel: her
+    upturned head took in the highest of the group of dots; one
+    hand hanging by her side the next; a knee the third; and the
+    flowing hem of her robe the fourth; but the fifth in the
+    corner&mdash;what could reach it? With a touch of the pencil
+    the angel's other hand appeared flinging up a censer attached
+    to a long chain, which struck the solitary dot like a shot amid
+    acclamations. To show that he did not consider the feat a
+    <i>tour de force</i>, the artist turned the paper, and taking
+    the same marks drew a devil in an entirely different attitude,
+    the difficult point being reached by his pitchfork.
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page190"
+       id="page190"></a>[pg 190]</span> This gave rise to a learned
+       discussion as to whether the devil's emblematic pitchfork
+       was not a descendant of Neptune's trident, which I did not
+       stay to hear, as Afra whispered she wanted to present me to
+       Monsieur C&mdash;&mdash;, and I was taken to a gentleman of
+       no great height, but of such wondrous width that Nature must
+       have formed him in a most generous mood.</p>
+
+    <p>"You are American?" said this wide man to me as I was
+    introduced, and without waiting for a reply went on: "I like
+    your country-people: they admire frankly. Show them a picture,
+    they exclaim, 'Beautiful! magnificent! lovely! exquisite! name
+    your price;' and they buy it. Here the public look and look.
+    'Not bad,' they say, 'but the color is from Veronese, and that
+    attitude is surely Raphael's. What a mine that man's genius has
+    been to ambitious but less gifted artists!' and so they go on.
+    I wish they would let the dead rest in peace. Are you
+    acquainted with Mr. B&mdash;&mdash; of New York?"</p>
+
+    <p>I was obliged to say "No."</p>
+
+    <p>"I wish to send a message to him," he continued grandly:
+    "tell him that I paint now for him alone."</p>
+
+    <p>"You are court-painter to Mr. B&mdash;&mdash;," I remarked
+    laughingly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Don't speak of courts," he exclaimed pettishly. "I was to
+    have painted the baptism of the prince imperial for the state:
+    it gave me no end of annoyance, and in the end was never
+    finished."</p>
+
+    <p>"I understood that you insisted on painting the little
+    prince nude, after the Rubens manner, and that was one ground
+    of objection to the design," said Afra.</p>
+
+    <p>"The baby would have had on plenty of clothes: one of his
+    dresses was sent from the Tuileries for Monsieur
+    C&mdash;&mdash; to paint, and I sewed a rosette on it myself."
+    This from the painter's wife.</p>
+
+    <p>"A countryman of yours sat for the head of a young priest at
+    the ceremony. He had a fine countenance: he was studying art
+    with me at the time, and has since been professor of drawing at
+    your Naval Academy. Teaching is a sad trade&mdash;Pegasus
+    dragging the plough."</p>
+
+    <p>"At least, your other great picture brought you nothing but
+    praise."</p>
+
+    <p>"The public have since repented of being so good to me.
+    Then, they could not say enough in my favor: now, if a person
+    asks what I am doing, every one repeats like a parrot,
+    'C&mdash;&mdash; doesn't paint, C&mdash;&mdash; doesn't paint.'
+    I have heard it so often that I begin to believe it myself, and
+    when I am asked join the general cry, 'C&mdash;&mdash; doesn't
+    paint.'"</p>
+
+    <p>I laughed, thinking this a joke, but I soon found that
+    though C&mdash;&mdash; might be cynical, sarcastic or bitter,
+    though he might excite unintentional laughter by his remarks,
+    he was too sensitive a man to take any but a serious view of
+    life. The imperfections of the world excited his disgust, his
+    anger, never his mirth.</p>
+
+    <p>"Ah but, monsieur," said Afra, "you should be satisfied, and
+    leave some little honor for the rest of us to gather. The
+    stories one hears of your youth are like fairy-tales."</p>
+
+    <p>"And they are true," replied the artist with evident
+    enjoyment. "In those days I was pointed out to people when I
+    walked the street; which, by the way, gave rise to an odd
+    incident. A gentleman thought he had seen me in a crowd, but he
+    had taken an older and taller man for the great painter. He
+    believed big pictures were painted by big men, and I had not
+    then my present circumference. This gentleman sent me an
+    invitation to dine with him. On the day appointed I arrived at
+    the house, and was met at the door by my host, a look of
+    surprise and annoyance on his face which he tried to conceal by
+    a low bow, at the same time asking politely, 'How is your
+    father?'&mdash;'Very well, thank you,' I returned, although I
+    could not understand why my father's health should be a matter
+    of interest to him.&mdash;'You have come to tell me of some
+    catastrophe which prevents his attendance here
+    to-day?'&mdash;'Not at all: I have come to dine with you,
+    according to this invitation.' Here I pulled out the card,
+    which I happened to have in my pocket.&mdash;'Are you the
+    person here addressed?' he said, staring at me.&mdash;'I
+    am'.&mdash;'I beg your pardon, there is a mistake: I meant it
+    for your father, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page191"
+       id="page191"></a>[pg 191]</span> the painter of the
+       "D�cadence des Romains."'&mdash;'I am the painter of the
+       "D�cadence," but I am not my father.'&mdash;'You ought to be
+       an older man.'&mdash;'I should have been, monsieur, had I
+       been born sooner.'&mdash;At that moment a friend,
+       overhearing the conversation and divining the cause, came
+       and explained to my wonder-struck host that I was really the
+       artist in question. With many apologies I was led into a
+       hall adorned with floral arches in my honor, next to a
+       beautiful salon, likewise decorated, and finally we reached
+       the dining-room, which was arranged to represent my picture.
+       Columns wreathed with flowers supported the roof; flowers
+       festooned the white table-linen and adorned the antique
+       vessels that covered it; couches of different colored silk
+       were laid after the Roman fashion for the guests to recline
+       upon; and lovely women dressed in costly Roman costumes,
+       their heads crowned with flowers, were placed in the
+       attitudes that you will see on my celebrated canvas. Was it
+       not a graceful tribute to my genius?"</p>
+
+    <p>"If a Frenchman wants to pay a compliment, he never uses one
+    that has done duty before, but invents something new," said
+    Afra emphatically.</p>
+
+    <p>"What are you painting now, monsieur?" I asked.</p>
+
+    <p>"A series of pictures called 'Pierrot the Clown.' He
+    succeeds in tricking the world in every station of life. I am
+    just finishing his deathbed. All his friends are weeping about
+    him: the doctor feels his pulse and gives some learned name to
+    the disease&mdash;doctors know so much&mdash;while hidden
+    everywhere around the room are empty bottles. The drunken clown
+    plays with even death for a mask."</p>
+
+    <p>"I thought he painted such romantic pictures," said I to
+    Afra as we turned from the master.</p>
+
+    <p>"So he does: there is one in his studio now. A girl clad in
+    gray and shadow&mdash;open-air shade which in his hands is so
+    clear and luminous. She walks along a garden-path, her head
+    bent down, dreaming as she goes, and unconsciously nearing a
+    half-open gateway, through which the sunshine is streaming.
+    Above the rustic gate two doves are billing and cooing. You
+    feel sure the girl is about to pass through this typical,
+    sunshiny, invitingly half-open door; and&mdash;what is
+    beyond?"</p>
+
+    <p>Just then we were called to lunch, a plentiful but not
+    luxurious repast. There was no lack of lively repartees and
+    anecdotes, and we had speeches and songs afterward. I wonder if
+    I ever heard "'Tis better to laugh than be sighing" given with
+    more zest than on that day? One could easily imagine that it
+    was such an occasion as this that had inspired it.</p>
+
+    <p>Lunch being over, Monsieur C&mdash;&mdash; was asked to
+    relate one of his own stories. I cannot give it entire, but the
+    plot was this: A pilgrim, whom he called poor Jacques, hearing
+    much of heaven, set out to find his way to the blessed abode,
+    with only a little dog to accompany him on the journey. As he
+    went he met many of his contemporaries, who had made what a
+    walker would style but poor time. The allusions to well-known
+    peculiarities in the various people and their occupation in the
+    other life caused much amusement. For instance, Ingres the
+    painter was seated by the roadside playing Rossini's music on
+    the violin, on which instrument he was a great proficient. But
+    he was known to detest the Italian's music before he started
+    heavenward: his taste must then have grown <i>en route</i>.
+    (Critics might object to this supposition.) However, Jacques
+    was anxious to push on, and spent little time listening. But he
+    was a good-hearted man, and, though he would not delay for his
+    own amusement, he could not refuse to stop when fellow-pilgrims
+    asked him for assistance. Little children were continually
+    straying from the path, and without Jacques and his little dog
+    would inevitably have been lost. Feeble old people were
+    standing looking with despair at some obstacle that without
+    Jacques's friendly arm they would have found it impossible to
+    pass. Young men who never looked where they were walking were
+    continually calling on him for a hand to help them out of the
+    ditch where they had fallen; and young girls&mdash;well, one
+    would have supposed they had never been given feet of their own
+    to walk with, from the trouble they were to poor Jacques. The
+    worst of it was, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page192"
+       id="page192"></a>[pg 192]</span> that when all these good
+       people were well over their troubles they called Jacques a
+       simpleton for his pains, and refused to have any intercourse
+       with him, giving him the worst side of the road and laughing
+       at his old-fashioned staff and scrip, and even at his little
+       dog, to which they gave many a sly kick. Nor was it any
+       wonder, for there were many in the company robed in silk,
+       wearing precious stones and with well-filled wallets by
+       their sides. Jacques was but human, and often he wished he
+       had never set out for heaven at all in such company; but
+       even in their bitterest moods neither Jacques nor the little
+       dog could ever hear a cry of distress without forgetting all
+       unkindness and rushing at once to the rescue.</p>
+
+    <p>These labors exhausted Jacques's strength: the little dog,
+    too, was worn to a shadow, and so timid from ill-treatment that
+    it was only when some great occasion called out his mettle that
+    you saw what a noble little dog-heart he had. He did his best
+    to comfort his master, but when Jacques's sandals were worn out
+    and his cloak in rags, and when he looked forward and saw
+    nothing yet of the holy city in view, though he still tried to
+    go forward, Nature gave way: he sank to the ground, and the
+    little dog licked his hands in vain to awaken him.</p>
+
+    <p>There is a band of angels who each night descend the holy
+    mount whereon is built the city, in search of such pilgrims as
+    have failed through fatigue to reach the gate. They are clothed
+    in robes woven of good deeds, which never lose their lustre,
+    for they are renewed every day. It was this company which found
+    Jacques in his swoon by the roadside. One gently touched his
+    tired body, and more than the vigor of youth leapt through his
+    veins. Another whispered "Come," and he rose and walked with
+    them. As he moved on with eyes abashed, thinking of the rents
+    in his garments and regretting their poverty, he noticed that
+    they too were changed, and were as bright as those of his
+    companions. "Who has done this?" he said, venturing to address
+    the one that walked at his right hand. "You wore them always,"
+    he answered with an angelic smile, "but it is this light which
+    shows their beauty;" and he pointed to that which streamed from
+    the celestial walls.</p>
+
+    <p>There was much applause. I saw Afra wipe a tear from her
+    eye; only, a thin-faced individual who sat near me whispered
+    that it was too long. The delicacy and pathos of expression and
+    language it is impossible to give, and, though old in form, the
+    story was skillfully new in incident; nor must I forget that
+    the little dog slipped through the eternal gate with his
+    master. Some one asked the troubadour why he did not write it
+    out. He shook his head and threw up his hands as he replied, "I
+    wrote one book and gave it to a literary man for correction.
+    You should have seen the manuscript when he sent it home: not a
+    page but was scarred and cut. He called that 'style.' Now, what
+    did I want with style? I wanted to write as I talked."</p>
+
+    <p>"Certainly," said one. "What did you do?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I quickly put Monsieur le R�dacteur's style out of my book;
+    then I published it. George Sand promised to write the preface,
+    but some busybody told her that I was attacking the whole
+    world, so she would have nothing to do with it. She was misled:
+    I blamed nothing in my book but what deserved censure."</p>
+
+    <p>Having heard this excellent representation of the ancient
+    minstrel, we were shortly given a touch of the modern usurper
+    of the name. A gentleman was present who in the many turns of
+    Fortune's wheel had once found himself a follower of the
+    burnt-cork persuasion. He gave us a negro melody with a lively
+    accompaniment on the guitar. A melancholy Spanish song
+    followed. The company again dispersed into congenial groups,
+    and in the long twilight you heard the murmur of voices broken
+    by occasional snatches of melody or the nightingale's song.</p>
+    <hr />
+
+    <p>"And what do you think of Bohemia?" asked Afra as we
+    returned that night.</p>
+
+    <p>"It is different from what I expected. They are refined,
+    and, though frank, never rude. I
+    think&mdash;"</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page193"
+       id="page193"></a>[pg 193]</span>
+
+    <p>Afra laughed: "You had unconsciously thought them a set of
+    sharpers; but there is a great difference between living by
+    your brains and living by your wits. My dear, you have broken
+    bread with giants to-day: such men live in another world that
+    they may rule this one."</p>
+
+    <p class="author">ITA ANIOL PROKOP.</p>
+
+    <h2>PROFESSOR AND TEACHER.</h2>
+
+    <p>The two words that recur most frequently perhaps in the
+    discussion of matters of education are "teacher" and
+    "professor;" yet there are no two that are used so carelessly
+    and loosely. It seems as if the thought that they may not be
+    synonymous seldom, if ever, occurs to those using them. If one
+    of our writers or speakers upon education were suddenly called
+    upon to state exactly what he meant by a "professor" in
+    distinction from a "teacher," he would be at a loss for an
+    answer. He might reply, after some hesitation, "Why, a teacher
+    is a man who teaches at a school or an academy, and a professor
+    is a man who teaches at a college." If he were pressed still
+    more closely, and asked to give the precise difference between
+    a "school or an academy" and a "college," it is safe to assume
+    that he would find himself nonplussed. There are colleges in
+    the country, some large and others small, some old and others
+    young, some good and others poor; but aside from the fact that
+    they provide a curriculum of four years and teach a certain
+    amount of Latin, Greek and mathematics, they do not possess
+    features enough in common to enable us to define with exactness
+    "a college." It is not in the power of language to devise a
+    formula so elastic as to embrace Harvard, Brown, Princeton,
+    Trinity, Cornell and Michigan University, without at the same
+    time ignoring the characteristic features of one or the other.
+    Even if we admit that there is a vague ideal unity underlying
+    the so-called college system, by virtue of which it is a system
+    and not a mere aggregate, we shall not make much progress in
+    our search after the proper definition of the term "professor."
+    The utmost that can be said of our college system, as a system,
+    is that it stands on a somewhat higher plane than the schools,
+    that it is supposed to finish a young man's education, and
+    consequently that the men whom it employs for such a
+    purpose&mdash;its professors&mdash;are, or at least ought to
+    be, abler men than the teachers proper. The difference, then,
+    between professor and teacher is one of degree, and not of
+    kind. Both teach, and both teach in great part the same
+    subjects and in substantially the same way; that is, by means
+    of textbook and recitation. Herein lies the explanation of the
+    disposition evinced by some of our best schools to call their
+    teachers "professors." An institution like Phillips Exeter or
+    Andover can scarcely be said to assume more than it is entitled
+    to in putting itself on an equality with Hobart College or
+    Racine.</p>
+
+    <p>On turning to Germany, we observe no such laxity in the use
+    of the term "professor." He, and he only, is professor who
+    "professes" to have made himself eminent in his special branch,
+    and whose claims have been allowed officially by a university
+    or by the government. He is not even a teacher in the English
+    or American sense. He is a scholar and investigator who has
+    produced results worthy of distinction, and it is upon the
+    strength of those results, and not because of his real or
+    supposed ability to impart knowledge and stimulate industry
+    among students, that he receives his call to a university
+    chair.<a id="footnotetag1" target="blank" name="footnotetag1"></a>
+    <a href="#footnote1"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page194"
+       id="page194"></a>[pg 194]</span>
+
+    <p>The words of one who is himself a leading professor in one
+    of the most renowned universities are so explicit upon this
+    point that they deserve to be translated and carefully studied.
+    Heinrich von Sybel, in his academic address delivered at Bonn
+    in 1868, says: "The excellence of our universities is to be
+    found in the fact that they are not mere institutions where
+    instruction is given, but are workshops of
+    science<a id="footnotetag2"
+       target="blank"
+       name="footnotetag2"></a><a href="#footnote2"><sup>2</sup></a>&mdash;that
+       their vital principle is unceasing scientific productivity.
+       Hence it is that the state assembles the best men of all
+       Germany as professors at its universities, so that the
+       phenomenon, common enough in England and France, of a
+       distinguished savant without a university chair is with us a
+       very unusual exception. Hence it is that in appointing to
+       such a chair the first and last demand is for published
+       evidences of such activity. As for the so-called ability to
+       teach <i>(Lehrtalent im formellen Sinne),</i> we are
+       satisfied if it is not utterly and notoriously wanting. The
+       question upon which everything turns is, Has the candidate
+       given evidence of his capacity for original investigation
+       and production? Whoever has this capacity is sufficiently
+       qualified, according to our German notions, for fulfilling
+       the essential function of university instruction."</p>
+
+    <p>In other words, a German professor is a man who has devoted
+    himself to special and original research&mdash;to "science" as
+    Von Sybel uses the term&mdash;and whose discoveries and works
+    give strength and increase of dignity to the university with
+    which he is connected. He is appointed upon his merits as a
+    discoverer or an author. The further
+    consideration&mdash;namely, whether he is what we Americans
+    style a "good teacher"&mdash;was not so much as an afterthought
+    in the minds of those who gave him his call. The explanation of
+    this disregard of the personal element in the professorial
+    character is obvious. The professor is not called upon to
+    teach. It does not constitute any part of his vocation to spur
+    up the sluggish, to keep the idle busy, to give each student
+    enough to do, and make first principles perfectly clear to all.
+    So far from coming down to the level of the students, the
+    professor expects that the students will make every possible
+    exertion to rise to his level, while he himself can scarcely be
+    said to lend a helping hand. To the sentimentalist, then, he
+    might appear a very selfish mortal. But by going beneath the
+    surface of the relation between professor and student, and
+    examining into its essence, we shall find that it is an
+    eminently healthful relation, because it is based upon the
+    recognition of mutual rights and duties. The professor, as a
+    man of science, has a right to the free direction of his
+    talents. The student has the right to develop what there is in
+    him without supervision or interference. He is to make a man of
+    himself by seeking diligently after the truth in a manly,
+    independent spirit. All that the professor can do for him is to
+    point out the road to the truth.</p>
+
+    <p>This view of the functions of a professor may appear obscure
+    and exaggerated to one who has not studied at a German
+    university. But it gives the clew to the entire German system
+    of university education, and accounts in great part for the
+    high standard of scholarship. Only in part, for the innate
+    proneness of the German mind to research must be credited with
+    some share in the result. It is safe to say that Germany, under
+    any system, would be a land of erudition.</p>
+
+    <p>However pleasant it might be to go into the details of the
+    professional position and character in Germany, it will be more
+    profitable, and certainly more practical, to compare this
+    fundamental German idea, as already given, with the salient
+    features of professional life in America. The American
+    professor, then, is a teacher. Unless he is the fortunate
+    occupant of an exceptionally favored chair, his chief, and even
+    his sole, function <span class="pagenum"><a name="page195"
+       id="page195"></a>[pg 195]</span> in the college body is to
+       teach, in the strictest sense of the term. He has to
+       prescribe textbooks, assign and hear lessons, grade
+       recitations, mark examination-papers, submit carefully
+       prepared term and annual reports to the faculty. When the
+       question of conditioning or dismissing a student on the
+       ground of defective scholarship comes up for decision, his
+       opinion must be given and weighed in connection with that of
+       others, in order that the faculty may strike a fair general
+       average. The number of hours that he is compelled, by the
+       college curriculum, to pass per week in the recitation-room
+       is seldom less than fifteen, and may be as high as twenty.
+       The classes themselves are ill-sorted and often troublesome,
+       and are usually unwieldy by reason of their size. The
+       professor's mind must be continually on the watch to prevent
+       disorder and enforce attention. Besides, as every one knows
+       full well who has tried it, there is nothing so exhausting
+       as to supply "brains" to those who either have not received
+       their portion from Nature or else have squandered it for a
+       mess of pottage. Every professor-teacher can bear witness to
+       the truism that one hour in the recitation-room is fully
+       equal, in its drain upon the vital energy, to two passed in
+       private study or authorship. The sense of responsibility, we
+       might say, is omnipresent. It does not cease with the
+       recitation: it follows him to his study, and haunts him with
+       the recollection of absurd blunders made by young men who
+       should have done better&mdash;the dispiriting reflection
+       that despite his best efforts the stupid and indifferent
+       will not learn. If to this normal wear and tear and these
+       every-day annoyances we add the participation in what is
+       pleasingly styled enforcement of discipline&mdash;that is,
+       protracted faculty-meetings, interviews with anxious or
+       irate parents, exhortations to the vicious to mend their
+       ways&mdash;we shall probably come to the conclusion that the
+       professor's burden is anything but light. We all have heavy
+       burdens. But while admitting the universality of the adage,
+       we are nevertheless at liberty to ascertain if we cannot
+       make the burden of a particular man or class easier to bear
+       by fitting it to the back.</p>
+
+    <p>Editors, essayists, college presidents and reformers assure
+    us that we are on the verge of a change, and perhaps a great
+    change, in our system of higher education. They dilate upon the
+    indisputable fact that most of our older colleges have made
+    rapid strides within the past ten years, augmenting their
+    endowments, erecting handsome buildings, establishing new
+    departments of study and increasing the number of students.
+    Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Amherst, Princeton, Columbia, the
+    University of Pennsylvania, were never so well off, in point of
+    money and men, as they are at this day. The inference is, of
+    course, if so much has been done in ten years, what may we not
+    expect by the end of the century? The University of Virginia
+    holds its own, notwithstanding the desolation wrought by the
+    late civil war, and Ann Arbor and Cornell have shot up with
+    extraordinary vigor. There can be no doubt that our
+    institutions of learning are full of robust life. And it is no
+    less certain that this growth of resources is due to private
+    enterprise. Our colleges have grown because graduates, and even
+    non-graduates, have taken an interest in them, and endowed them
+    with a munificence which seems incredible to a Frenchman or a
+    German. But in studying the aspect of higher education it
+    behooves us not to lose sight of the fundamental principle that
+    education is something spiritual in its nature, and that it
+    cannot be gauged by buildings, by endowments, by the trappings
+    of wealth&mdash;in short, by anything material. Endowments and
+    buildings are only the means; unless the end to which these
+    means are subservient be clearly perceived and persistently
+    followed, the means themselves may prove a hindrance rather
+    than a help. Of this Oxford is a notable proof.</p>
+
+    <p>Have, then, the end and aim, the method and agencies, of
+    college instruction changed essentially within the past fifteen
+    years, or are they likely to change essentially within the
+    coming twenty-five? In the year 1770 the greatest genius of
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page196"
+       id="page196"></a>[pg 196]</span> Germany entered the walls
+       of the old university-town of Strasburg, there to complete
+       his education. He has bequeathed to us a faithful record of
+       his studies, his amusements, his daily life. Connecting this
+       Strasburg experience with the previous experience at
+       Leipsic, we know what it meant in the eighteenth century to
+       be a German student. We know that the professors in those
+       days were pedagogues in the Anglo-American sense, and that
+       university-life stood little if at all higher than our own
+       present college-life. But when Goethe died, in 1832, the
+       universities of Germany had reached their prime. Since then
+       they have made no gain. It may be doubted if the professors,
+       on the whole, rank quite so high to-day for originality and
+       vigor of research as did their predecessors forty years ago.
+       Wherein lies the secret, then, of this wonderful change
+       wrought in the brief span of two generations, between 1770
+       and 1830, and amid the dire confusion of the great
+       Revolution and the Napoleonic era? The change was twofold.
+       It consisted, first, in allowing to the professor the free
+       play of his individuality; second, in providing him with a
+       properly trained body of students. From the practical
+       recognition of these two principles, which have nothing to
+       do with wealth and buildings, proceed the power and glory of
+       the German universities. Viewed from the English, or even
+       the American point, some of these universities might be
+       pronounced poor, not to say starvelings. The buildings are
+       old and out of repair, the professors are scantily paid, the
+       students are needy, there is a general atmosphere of want
+       and discomfort. But the work they do is noble, and its
+       nobility consists in its freedom, its heartiness, its strict
+       devotion to truth.</p>
+
+    <p>We are not concerned in this place with the study of the
+    growth of the German school system that prepares the German
+    student. We have to do with the professor. Although the
+    gymnasium and the university are not to be dissevered in actual
+    practice, the one being the necessary prelude to the other,
+    still we can discuss either one of them separately with a view
+    to ascertaining its salient features.</p>
+
+    <p>The German university allows to the professor the free play
+    of his individuality. By this is meant that each professor has
+    his specialty, which he teaches as a specialty and after his
+    own fashion. He has been appointed because of his specialty,
+    and to the end that he may teach it. His salary is paid to him,
+    not so much for what he does as for what he is. It is in a
+    measure the reward for having made for himself a name. His
+    standing in the university is based, not so much upon the
+    number of students that he may attract to his lectures as upon
+    the quality of scholarship that he exhibits and his general
+    repute in the world of letters. He has the satisfaction of
+    feeling that his researches, even the most abstruse, can be
+    brought to bear directly upon his official intercourse with his
+    students. A discovery that he makes is usually communicated to
+    them in the first instance, before it finds its way into print.
+    The neglect to take account of this element of originality in
+    the lectures of a German professor has led to an unfair
+    estimate of the lecture-system. Americans and English are apt
+    to regard it as merely the oral inculcation of established
+    truths. Were that the case, we might be right in questioning
+    its superiority over our method of teaching by textbook. But it
+    is not the case. The lecture is the vehicle for conveying the
+    latest discoveries made either by the professor himself or
+    gleaned by him from the labors of his colleagues. So far from
+    merely repeating established truths, it rather promulgates
+    truths in process of establishment. German university lectures,
+    taken all in all, represent the most advanced stage of thought.
+    The instances are not infrequent where a professor refrains
+    from publishing his lectures, lest he should lose his hearers,
+    who are attracted to him by reports of his originality and
+    thoroughness.</p>
+
+    <p>The evident tendency of such a system is to encourage
+    productivity and the highest degree of accuracy. A man who has
+    to teach only one subject, and teach it to such students only
+    as are ready and <span class="pagenum"><a name="page197"
+       id="page197"></a>[pg 197]</span> anxious to receive it, can
+       afford to take the time for being thorough. The tendency of
+       the American system, on the other hand, is to beget a spirit
+       of routine and to check productivity. The professor falls
+       into a way of contenting himself with meeting the
+       requirements of the college curriculum. The effects of this
+       curriculum upon the professors are deeper and
+       farther-reaching than is usually perceived. It is in
+       accordance with facts to call American professors, as a
+       class, unproductive. But it would be unjust and
+       inconsiderate to ascribe this want of productivity to the
+       disposition called laziness. Laziness is not a national
+       fault of Americans. On the contrary, we are pushing, active,
+       restless: we yearn, Alexander-like, for something new to
+       overcome. Our professors are of the same stock as our
+       business-men, our lawyers, our doctors, our politicians. But
+       the spirit of progress, if we choose to call it by that
+       name, has been repressed in them. The spirit of emulation,
+       of aggressive competition, which marks our trade, our
+       banking, our manufacturing interests, our railroads, and
+       even our professions, stops at the threshold of our
+       colleges. There is rivalry, true, between Harvard and Yale,
+       for instance. If the former erects a handsome dormitory, the
+       latter must have one larger and finer. If the former
+       establishes a new professorship, the latter must do
+       likewise. The colleges compete among themselves. But we see
+       no signs of competition among the professors of a college,
+       or between the professors of different
+       colleges&mdash;competition, be it observed, in the sense
+       that the individual professor regards his attainments and
+       views as a proper subject for comparison with the
+       attainments and views of another professor in the same
+       branch. Once established in his chair, his individuality is
+       merged in the general character of the college. His time,
+       his knowledge and his energy are subordinated to the
+       curriculum. He can teach only so much as may be fitted into
+       his share of the time and may be suited to the capacities of
+       a mixed audience. It matters little whether the curriculum
+       be good or bad, whether it take in a wide or a narrow range
+       of subjects, whether it be behind or up to the times: so
+       long as it is a real curriculum it tends to prevent the full
+       assertion of his individual excellence. He may study for
+       himself, but he cannot teach more than the regulations
+       permit. However advanced he may be in his specialty, however
+       sincere and earnest his wish to impart the choicest fruits
+       of his research, he must admit to himself that there is a
+       point beyond which he is unable to carry his students. They
+       are borne off to something else; they have no more time for
+       him; they slip from his hold, perhaps at the very moment
+       when he flatters himself that he has acquired some formative
+       influence over them.</p>
+
+    <p>If this view of the necessary effect of a curriculum is
+    correct, it will enable us to set a more accurate value upon
+    the so-called improvements that have been introduced of late
+    years in our colleges. These improvements, stripped of the
+    �clat with which they are invested, will be found to amount to
+    little more than expansions and slight modifications of a
+    system which remains unaltered in its fundamental features. New
+    studies have been introduced, such as physics, chemistry,
+    geology, the share of attention assigned to modern languages
+    has been increased, a higher standard of admission is enforced,
+    and the salaries of professors have been raised. But in all
+    this there is no radical change of the method of instruction.
+    The establishment of a chair of physics, for instance, can
+    scarcely be said to enable the professor of Greek to exhibit
+    his attainments more fully. The professor of Latin does not
+    perceive that his pupils, because they are now instructed in
+    physical geography, can be carried by him to a more advanced
+    stage of Latin scholarship. In fact, so far as the older
+    studies are concerned, those which made up the curriculum
+    thirty years ago, they seem to be slightly the worse for the
+    recent improvements. The college course of 1840 or 1850 was a
+    comparatively simple thing. It covered only a few studies, and
+    those of a general nature; it taught more thoroughly and with
+    less pretence to universality; in short, it did its work
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page198"
+       id="page198"></a>[pg 198]</span> more after the fashion of a
+       good school. At the present day the curriculum embraces a
+       much wider range of subjects&mdash;we need only recall to
+       our minds the introduction of general history, chemistry,
+       physiology and the modern languages&mdash;but the time has
+       not been lengthened by a single year. The student's time is
+       more broken up than before: the direct influence exerted by
+       the professor is less. Our recognition of these and kindred
+       facts, however, should be something more than a vain regret
+       for the good old past. All these changes are concessions
+       made to the spirit of the age. Our generation
+       demands&mdash;and very rightfully, too&mdash;that the sphere
+       of knowledge be enlarged, that the sciences of Nature
+       receive sufficient attention. To attempt to undo what has
+       been done, to restore the curriculum to the antiquated cadre
+       of Latin and Greek, trigonometry, mental science and
+       rhetoric, would be a reaction as senseless as hopeless.</p>
+
+    <p>Let us be just to ourselves and just to our colleges. We,
+    the public, clamored for new studies, and the colleges had to
+    meet the demand, because, by force of circumstances, they were
+    the only places where the changes could be effected. But in our
+    praisworthy desire for progress we have not considered
+    sufficiently whether the colleges were in truth the proper
+    places for innovation; whether we were bringing in our
+    innovations in the right way and at the right time; whether we
+    were in a fair way of making our colleges what we seek to make
+    them&mdash;namely, centres of learning. To discuss all these
+    points would be equivalent to discussing the question of
+    education in all its phases, from the primary school to the
+    university. For the present we must limit ourselves to
+    understanding and appreciating fairly the position of our
+    professors.</p>
+
+    <p>That position is not only a trying, but a discouraging one.
+    The greater part of the professor's time is spent&mdash;from
+    the point of view of pure science we might almost say
+    wasted&mdash;in teaching the same things over and over again.
+    After a few years' practice his round of hours becomes
+    mechanical. Familiarity with the textbooks and with the
+    uniformly-recurring blunders of each successive class begets a
+    feeling of weariness that is not remote from aversion and
+    contempt. So far as his prescribed official duties are
+    concerned, he feels that he has nothing more to learn. There
+    being, then, no stimulus from without, he is open to one of two
+    temptations&mdash;either to rest on his past labors, or, which
+    is far more likely, to keep on studying for himself, but to
+    keep the results to himself. It is not only more soothing to
+    our pride, it is juster to our professors, to regard them thus
+    as men who have hid their lights under a bushel, and also to
+    confess that we, our institutions and ways of thinking, have
+    made the bushel for them and held it down over their heads. It
+    is not every man who has the persistency and stamina of
+    Professor Whitney, for instance, who can toil for years with
+    beginning classes in French and German, never losing sight of
+    his real aim, never neglecting an opportunity of bringing it
+    forward, until at last he achieves the success he has
+    especially desired, and is acknowledged to be one of the
+    foremost comparative philologists and Sanskrit scholars in the
+    world. Where a Professor Whitney may succeed in spite of
+    untoward circumstances, a dozen will probably fail because of
+    circumstances. We naturally look to our colleges for the
+    evidences of learning, of enlightenment and culture. We think
+    of the capital invested in them, of the part they play in
+    moulding the character of our young men, and we deem it a
+    matter of course that they should be continually producing
+    something original and independent. But when we compare them
+    with the German universities&mdash;and the comparison is forced
+    upon us whenever one of our graduates goes abroad to complete
+    his studies or whenever we look into a recent German
+    publication&mdash;we are forced to exclaim, "What are our
+    colleges about? Are they incompetent, or asleep?" Neither one
+    nor the other. Most of our professors do the best they can. But
+    they are fettered by routine: they are not stimulated and
+    sustained by the consciousness that their private studies may
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page199"
+       id="page199"></a>[pg 199]</span> be made directly available
+       in the classroom. They lead two lives, as it were&mdash;one
+       as professor, the other as thinker and reader&mdash;and
+       there is not the proper action and reaction between the
+       two.</p>
+
+    <p>The remedy is as easy to propose as it would be difficult to
+    apply. We have only to convert our colleges into universities,
+    our college instructors into professors after the German model.
+    Let us relegate all teaching, so called, to the schools, and
+    let us give our professors permission to expand into veritable
+    scholars discoursing to young men of kindred spirit. Any one
+    can see at a glance that from the wish to the accomplishment is
+    a long way. Upon some of us the consciousness is beginning to
+    dawn that perhaps we have not even taken the first decisive
+    step. The best that can be said of our colleges is that they
+    are in a state of transition. We have increased the number of
+    studies, as well as the number of colleges; we have established
+    schools of law and schools of science, sometimes independent
+    of, sometimes co-ordinate with or subordinate to, the college.
+    We have also established post-graduate courses, in the hope of
+    inducing our young men to complete their studies at home. Yet
+    every year we see a larger number going abroad. In those days
+    of golden memory, both for Germany and for America, when
+    Longfellow was gliding down the Rhine with Freiligrath, and
+    Bancroft and Bismarck were comrades at G�ttingen, an American
+    in Germany was something of a rarity. In most instances he was
+    a man of wealth and high social standing, who looked upon his
+    semester or two as a romantic episode. But now every
+    outward-bound steamer carries with it one or more who, emerging
+    from obscurity and poverty, have saved up a few hundred dollars
+    and are bent upon plain, hard, practical business. "We go,"
+    they can be imagined as saying, "because we can get in Germany
+    what we cannot get at home. Your schools of science and your
+    post-graduate courses may be well enough in their way, but they
+    do not give us what we are after, and we cannot afford to wait
+    until they may be able to give it. Some of the professors are
+    first-rate men&mdash;perhaps just as good as any we may meet in
+    Germany&mdash;but what does their learning, their science,
+    avail us, so long as they are obliged to withhold from us the
+    best that they know? They trained themselves in Germany, and if
+    we are ever to rival them we must do the same."</p>
+
+    <p>It is not pleasant to listen to such reasonings, much less
+    to see them carried into effect. But the defect which they
+    bring to light will not be cured by closing our eyes to it and
+    trusting to time, the sovereign healer. Time is a negative
+    factor: it only enables the forces of Nature to do their
+    positive work. But schools and colleges are not the product of
+    the elemental forces of Nature: they are distinctively the work
+    of man as a free agent. If we are free to shape any of our
+    institutions to suit our needs, we are certainly free to shape
+    our educational institutions. By having a definite result in
+    view, and willing its attainment, we may succeed; but if we
+    fail either in clearness of vision or persistency of will, we
+    cannot expect the result to come of itself. The present
+    university system of Germany, which might seem to a careless
+    observer the natural outgrowth of German life, is the result of
+    hard thinking and strenuous, well-directed effort. We should
+    not commit much of an exaggeration were we to call it the
+    deliberate creation of Frederick the Great, Von Zedlitz and
+    Wolf, who dragged with them Prussia, and the other German
+    states in her wake. They and their associates and followers,
+    Schleiermacher and William von Humboldt, clear-headed,
+    iron-willed men, perceived what was needed, and bent all their
+    energies to the task. They emancipated the schools from the
+    control of the clergy, and established the principle that
+    teaching is a distinct vocation, requiring special training,
+    over which the state has supervision; furthermore, that the
+    state should pronounce who is fit and who is not fit for
+    university education, thereby abolishing entrance-examinations,
+    and putting an end to the ignoble practice on the part of the
+    universities of lowering the standard for the purpose of
+    increasing the number of
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page200"
+       id="page200"></a>[pg 200]</span> students. They abolished
+       the last vestiges of the scholastic system by raising the
+       faculty of philosophy from its position as a
+       quasi-preparatory course to the others, and placing it on a
+       footing of perfect equality with law, theology and
+       medicine.<a id="footnotetag3"
+       target="blank"
+       name="footnotetag3"></a><a href="#footnote3"><sup>3</sup></a>
+       They removed all restrictions from the <i>Lehrfreiheit</i>,
+       or professional freedom of instruction, while at the same
+       time they preserved the right of the state to control
+       indirectly the quality of university instruction by means of
+       state-examinations for pastors, teachers, lawyers,
+       physicians and officeholders. Ever since then the university
+       system of Germany has rested upon a secure and lasting
+       basis.</p>
+
+    <p>Is the course pursued by Prussia to be regarded as a mere
+    incident in history, or may it serve as an example and model
+    for us? Prussia is a monarchy, clothed with some constitutional
+    forms but at bottom a state where the personal will of the
+    sovereign has always made, and continues to make, itself felt
+    in the final instance. We are a republic, or rather a cluster
+    of republics under an imperfectly centralized national
+    government. It is evident that the agencies and mode of reform
+    with us must differ from those that have been employed in
+    Prussia and in the rest of Germany. But it does not follow that
+    the reform itself is impossible. What has elsewhere sprung from
+    the autocratic will of a single man and his cabinet may be
+    effected here through that other force, equally great and
+    perhaps more pervasive, to which we give the vague name of
+    "popular opinion." We know that popular opinion in our country
+    is irresistible. It makes everything bend to it. It broke up
+    the Tweed Ring, seemingly impregnable, in a single campaign.
+    But this popular opinion is not a natural product: it is the
+    work of a few men who devote themselves to awakening the sense
+    of right and wrong and guiding the understanding of their
+    fellows. But for popular leaders like Mr. O'Conor and Governor
+    Tilden, the late Tweed Ring might be in power at this day.
+    Education is not so different from politics but that we can
+    regard it as subject to similar laws of cause and effect. Our
+    present common-school system is an off-spring of popular
+    opinion, as that opinion was created and led to action by a few
+    men. And whether our common schools are to stand or fall is
+    again becoming a question of the day, and will be decided
+    according as popular opinion may be swayed by a few zealous
+    friends or enemies. Our colleges, it may be said, do not occupy
+    the same relation to the state that our schools do. They are
+    nearly all private corporations, enjoying vested rights which
+    the state is powerless to touch. Undoubtedly true, but it is no
+    less true that what cannot be done directly may be done
+    indirectly. The state need not make so much as the attempt to
+    lay hands upon college property or to interfere with college
+    studies. It has only to say, "I, the state, exact such and such
+    qualifications of all who seek to practice law or medicine
+    within my limits or to become my officeholders. I establish my
+    own free colleges and schools of law and medicine, and I
+    proceed to tax all others at their full valuation." There is
+    not a college in the country, not even Harvard, that could
+    compete upon such terms. The state need not even express its
+    sovereign will so precisely. It can content itself with
+    establishing a university of its own, and facilitating the
+    direct influence of this university over the public and private
+    schools. We see the operations of such a system very plainly in
+    Michigan. Not only does the university at Ann Arbor overshadow
+    completely the private colleges, but the "union schools,"
+    administered under its auspices, are&mdash;to borrow the
+    expression of one of its graduates&mdash;"killing" the private
+    schools. We may rest assured that whatever the people of a
+    State or of the United States is earnestly bent upon having,
+    will come.</p>
+
+    <p>Whether all our States are to act as Michigan has
+    done&mdash;whether we are indeed ripe for thorough
+    change&mdash;whether a change is to be effected by direct State
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page201"
+       id="page201"></a>[pg 201]</span> action or indirectly by the
+       mere pressure of public sentiment&mdash;whether we have real
+       need of a body of professors and a set of universities such
+       as Germany possesses&mdash;whether we are to make our higher
+       as well as our primary education non-sectarian,&mdash;are
+       all questions which may rest in abeyance for a long time to
+       come. It is also possible that one or the other of them may,
+       in legal phraseology, be sprung upon us at any time. Not to
+       be taken unawares, we have to bear steadily in mind several
+       fixed principles and to disabuse ourselves of one
+       misconception.</p>
+
+    <p>The misconception is this: that what Germany accomplished in
+    the eighteenth century we cannot accomplish in the nineteenth,
+    because circumstances are so very different, chiefly because
+    Germany is an old country and we are a young country. The
+    circumstances are not so very different, and the difference,
+    however great it may be estimated, is in our favor. We are a
+    union of thirty or forty States: in the Germany of the
+    eighteenth century there were three hundred. Ever since the
+    adoption of our Federal Constitution we have enjoyed common
+    rights of citizenship, common laws of commerce, common legal
+    protection. Will it be necessary to remind the student of
+    history that the Germans have acquired these blessings only
+    within our own day? We are a nation of forty millions, rich and
+    prosperous, free to develop our resources. The Germany of 1775
+    could count barely twenty millions, its soil was poorly tilled,
+    its mineral wealth undeveloped, manufactures in an embryonic
+    state, trade fettered in a thousand ways, the peasantry
+    brutally ignorant and servile, the national character&mdash;to
+    all appearance&mdash;ruined by cruel religious wars, the sense
+    of national unity blunted by the recollections of a hundred
+    petty feuds reaching back to the gloom of the Middle Ages, the
+    national taste dominated by poor French models to an extent
+    that now seems incredible, learning either dry pedantry or
+    shallow cox-combry. We are indeed a young country, but we are
+    young in hope; Germany was old, but it was old in weakness, in
+    poverty, in despondency. Whoever doubts our ability to do as
+    much as Germany did one hundred years ago, fails to profit by
+    the teachings of history&mdash;overlooks the fact that Germany
+    in 1840 was only where she had been in 1618. That we should
+    take Germany for our standard of comparison, rather than
+    England or France, is a postulate which has one circumstance
+    unmistakably in its favor. Although we are connected with
+    England by common descent, institutions and language, although
+    the politics and philosophy of France have exerted considerable
+    influence over our own, we do not observe our young men going
+    in numbers to England and France to receive their final
+    training. Their instinct leads them to Germany. For one
+    American graduate of Oxford or Cambridge or of the French
+    <i>�coles</i>, it would be easy to count ten doctors of
+    G�ttingen or Heidelberg. Our young men are not attracted to the
+    German universities by such factitious considerations as
+    cheapness of living or the acquisition of the language, but by
+    sympathy with German methods and academic liberty.</p>
+
+    <p>Some of the most important fixed principles have been
+    already touched upon, but only one can be developed in this
+    place. It is, that if we are to establish a system of higher
+    education, we must begin by recognizing freely and fully the
+    distinction between teacher and professor. We must perceive the
+    importance of having two sets of men&mdash;the one to teach,
+    the other to investigate; the one engaged in training boys to
+    learn, the other in showing young men how to think. When and
+    how this distinction is to be established, in what special form
+    it is to be embodied, is a secondary matter. The chief thing is
+    to admit that it is essential and feasible. The young man who
+    returns after a three years' absence in Germany, exhibiting
+    with dignified pride his well-earned doctor's diploma, looks of
+    course upon the institution that conferred it as the <i>ne plus
+    ultra</i>. But riper experience, contact with the sharp corners
+    of American prejudices and peculiarities, renewed familiarity
+    with our social, political, commercial and
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page202"
+       id="page202"></a>[pg 202]</span> literary life, will
+       gradually convince him that a German university is not a
+       thing to be plucked up by the roots and transplanted bodily
+       to American soil. We have rather to take our native stock as
+       we find it, and engraft upon it a slip from the German. One
+       trial may fail, another may succeed. Our first efforts will
+       be like those of a man groping about in the dark. More than
+       one department in a German university will be of little
+       avail in an American, and conversely we shall have to create
+       some that do not exist elsewhere. For instance, in view of
+       the great power exerted by the newspaper press, it might be
+       desirable to have a course of study for those who think of
+       taking up journalism as a profession. In such a course,
+       political economy, constitutional and international law,
+       English and American history, and the modern languages and
+       literatures should constitute a full and serious discipline.
+       It is not probable that the study of philology will ever
+       attract the same attention here that it does abroad. Our
+       needs lie in the direction of the natural sciences rather
+       than in the direction of history and linguistics. But we
+       should be derelict to our duty were we to sacrifice these
+       sciences of the spirit, as the Germans call them, to the
+       sciences of Nature. A culture without them would be the
+       bleakest and most repulsive materialism.</p>
+
+    <p>The practical recognition of the difference between teacher
+    and professor would be a decided step. By the side of it those
+    which we have already taken would appear insignificant. The
+    addition of chemistry, geology, or physiology to the previous
+    curriculum does not change its character, so long as the
+    professors of those branches instruct after the fashion of the
+    professors of Latin and Greek. The advantage that the men of
+    natural science have over their colleagues is one which the
+    nature of the subject brings with it. In order to teach at all,
+    they must come in close personal contact with their pupils, and
+    to escape falling behind in their department, where new
+    theories succeed one another with such rapid bounds, they must
+    continue a certain amount at least of original research.
+    Supplementing the present curriculum by post-graduate courses
+    will hardly suffice. Such courses are open to serious
+    objections. If conducted by the regular professors, they impose
+    additional burdens upon men who have already more than enough.
+    If conducted by special professors, they will tend to raise
+    those professors at the expense of the regular faculty. A
+    lecturer to graduates must necessarily appear, in the eyes of
+    the undergraduate, superior to the man who hears recitations
+    and prepares term-reports. Besides, young men who have passed
+    four years at one college need "a change of air:" they will
+    develop more rapidly if brought into contact with new ideas and
+    new instructors. Every institution has an atmosphere of its
+    own, which ceases after a time to act upon the student as a
+    stimulant.</p>
+
+    <p>There is one additional point that should not be overlooked.
+    A careful discrimination between the functions of the professor
+    and those of the teacher would benefit both classes of men.
+    Such has been the effect in Germany. The gymnasium-teacher has
+    a high sense of the dignity of his vocation and a keen sense of
+    its responsibilities, because he perceives that he must bring
+    his labors to a well-rounded conclusion. He knows that the
+    university does not supplement the gymnasium&mdash;that the
+    university professors do not undertake to make good his
+    shortcomings. The gymnasial course is a completed phase of
+    training. It aims at giving the pupil all the general knowledge
+    that he requires previous to his professional studies. What is
+    lost or overlooked in the gymnasium cannot be acquired at the
+    university. Hence the peculiar conscientiousness of the German
+    teacher, his almost painful anxiety to make sure that his
+    pupils master every subject, his unwillingness to let them go
+    before they are "ripe." With us the change from school to
+    college is not an abrupt transition, like that from gymnasium
+    to university. The college course, certainly during the two
+    lower years at least, is a continuation of the school course:
+    the same or similar subjects are
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page203"
+       id="page203"></a>[pg 203]</span> taught, and taught in the
+       same way. Hence the school-teacher is tempted to regulate
+       his efforts according to the college standard of admission.
+       If he can only "get his men into college," as the saying is,
+       he thinks that he is doing enough. To say this of all
+       schools and all teachers would be flagrant injustice. Not a
+       few of our older schools compare favorably with the best
+       German gymnasiums, and in the large cities we find schools
+       of even recent origin that endeavor faithfully to give a
+       well-rounded discipline. But it remains nevertheless true
+       that our schools, taken as a whole, give no more than the
+       colleges require, and that only too many of them give less,
+       trusting to the colleges to be lenient and eke out the
+       deficiency. Moreover, when we read in the daily papers
+       advertisements like the following, "Mr. Smith, a graduate of
+       Harvard (or Yale or some other college, as the case may be),
+       prepares young men for college," what inference are we to
+       draw? Simply, that Mr. Smith, having gone through Harvard or
+       Yale, knows exactly what is required there, and will
+       undertake to "coach" any young man for admission in two or
+       three years. Such coaching, if the young man is dull or
+       backward, will consist in cramming him with required
+       studies, to the neglect of everything not required. Teaching
+       is not easy work. In many respects it is more difficult to
+       be a good teacher than to be an original investigator.
+       Whatever operates to strengthen and elevate the teacher's
+       position, therefore, must be a gain. The highest incentive
+       would be the consciousness that his school is not a mere
+       stepping-stone to another school of larger growth, but the
+       place where he must in truth prepare the youthful mind for
+       independent study.</p>
+
+    <p class="author">JAMES MORGAN HART.</p>
+
+    <h2>CONTRASTED MOODS.</h2>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i10">WANT.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>Where is the power I fancied mine?</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Can I have emptied my soul of
+            thought?</p>
+
+            <p>In yesterday's fullness lay no sign</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">That to-day would be a time of
+            drought.</p>
+
+            <p>What if thought fail me for evermore?</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">The world that awaits a well-filled
+            plan</p>
+
+            <p>Must, railing, cry at my long-closed door,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">"He cannot finish what he began."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p class="i10">PLENTY.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>Thought dashes on thought within my soul:</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Time will not serve for the
+            bounding-line.</p>
+
+            <p>I think it would fail to mete the whole</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">If old Methuselah's years were mine.</p>
+
+            <p>Like the famous spring that is sometimes dry,</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">Then flows with a river's whelming
+            might,</p>
+
+            <p>The current of thought now runs so high</p>
+
+            <p class="i2">It covers the earthy bed from sight.</p>
+        </div>
+    </div>
+
+    <p class="author">CHARLOTTE F.
+    BATES.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page204"
+       id="page204"></a>[pg 204]</span>
+
+    <h2>THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS.</h2>
+
+    <h3>BY MRS. E. LYNN LINTON, AUTHOR OF "PATRICIA KEMBALL."</h3>
+
+    <h3>CHAPTER XXI.</h3>
+
+    <h3>CHANGES.</h3>
+
+    <p>Four years had come and gone since Mr. Dundas had laid his
+    second wife in the grave beside his first, and the county had
+    discussed the immorality of taking cherry-water as a calmant.
+    For it was to an overdose of this that the verdict at the
+    coroner's inquest had assigned the cause of poor madame's awful
+    and sudden death; though why the medicine should have been
+    found so loaded with prussic acid as to have caused instant
+    death on this special night, when it had been taken so often
+    before with impunity, was a mystery to which there was no
+    solution. Not a trace of poison was to be found anywhere in the
+    house, and no evidence was forthcoming to show how it might
+    have been bought or where procured. Alick Corfield, who
+    understood it all, was not called as a witness, and he told no
+    one what he knew. On the contrary, he burdened his soul with
+    the, to him, unpardonable crime of falsehood that he might
+    shield Leam from detection; for when his father, missing the
+    sixty-minim bottle of hydrocyanic acid, asked him what had
+    become of it, Alick answered, with that wonderful coolness of
+    virtue descending to sin for the protection of the beloved
+    which is sometimes seen in the ingenuous, "I broke it by
+    accident, father, and forgot to tell you."</p>
+
+    <p>As the boy had never been known to tell a falsehood in his
+    life, he reaped the reward of good repute, and his father,
+    saying quietly, "That was a bad job, my boy," laid the matter
+    aside as a <i>caput mortuum</i> of no value.</p>
+
+    <p>To be sure, he thought more than once that it was an odd
+    coincidence, but he could see no connection between the two
+    circumstances of madame's sudden death and Alick's fracture of
+    that bottle of hydrocyanic acid; and even if there should be
+    any, he preferred not to trace it. So the inquest was a mere
+    show so far as getting at the truth was concerned, and madame
+    died and was buried in the mystery in which she had lived.</p>
+
+    <p>Meantime, Leam had been sent to school, whence she was
+    expected to return a little more like other English girls than
+    she had been hitherto, and Mr. Dundas shut up Ford
+    House&mdash;he went back to the original name after madame's
+    death&mdash;and left England to shake off in travel the deadly
+    despair that had fallen like a sickness on him and taken all
+    the flavor out of his life. He had never cared to search out
+    the real history of that fair beloved woman. Enough had come to
+    his knowledge, in the bills which had poured in from several
+    Sherrington tradesmen on the announcement of her marriage and
+    then of her death, to convince him that he had been duped in
+    facts if not in feeling. For among these bills was one from the
+    local geologist for "a beginner's cabinet of specimens,"
+    delivered just about the time when he, Sebastian, had spent so
+    many pleasant hours in arranging the fragments which madame
+    said represented both her knowledge and her lost happiness;
+    also one from the fancy repository, which sold everything, for
+    sundry water-color drawings and illuminated texts, a Table of
+    the Ten Commandments illustrated, and the like, which
+    sufficiently explained all on this side, and settled for ever
+    the dead woman's claims to the artistic and scientific merit
+    with which Mr. Dundas and the rector had credited her.</p>
+
+    <p>Also, certain ugly letters from a person of the name of
+    Lowes, in London, put him on the track, had he cared to follow
+    it up, of a deception even worse than that of pretended art or
+    mock science. These letters, written in the same handwriting as
+    that wherein Julius de Montfort, her brother-in-law, the
+    present <span class="pagenum"><a name="page205"
+       id="page205"></a>[pg 205]</span> marquis, had told her of
+       the defalcations of the family solicitor and trustee, called
+       Virginie, Madame la Marquise de Montfort, plain Susan
+       bluntly, and reminded her of the screw that would be turned
+       if the writer was not satisfied; and were letters that
+       demanded money, always money, as the price of continued
+       silence.</p>
+
+    <p>But Sebastian had loved his second wife too well to seek to
+    know the truth, if that truth would be to her discredit. He
+    preferred to be deceived; and he had what he preferred. He
+    stifled all doubts, darkened all chinks by which the obtrusive
+    light might penetrate, kept his love if not his faith unshaken,
+    caring only to remember her as beautiful, seductive, soothing,
+    and mourning her as deeply, doubtful as she had proved herself
+    to be, as he had loved her fondly when he believed her honest.
+    It was a curious mental condition for a man to cherish, but it
+    satisfied him, and his regret was not robbed of its pathos by
+    knowledge.</p>
+
+    <p>Now that the four years were completed, the widower had to
+    return to his desolate home and make the best he could of the
+    fragments of peace and happiness left to him. Leam was
+    nineteen: it was time for her to be taken from school and given
+    the protection of her father's house. It went against the man's
+    heart to have her, but he was compelled, if he wished to stand
+    well with his friends, and he hoped that the girl would be
+    found improved from these years of discipline and training, and
+    be rational and like other people. Wherefore he came home one
+    dry dull day in October, and the neighborhood welcomed him, if
+    not as their prodigal returned, yet as their lunatic restored
+    to his right mind.</p>
+
+    <p>During these four years a few changes had taken place at
+    North Aston. Carry Fairbairn had married&mdash;not Frank
+    Harrowby: he had found a rich wife, not in the least to his
+    personal taste, but greatly to his profit; and Carry, after
+    having cried a good deal for a month, had consoled herself with
+    a young clergyman from the North, whom she loved quite as much
+    as if she had never fancied Frank at all, and spoilt in the
+    first months by such submission as caused her to repent for all
+    the years of her life after.</p>
+
+    <p>The things of the rectory were much in their old state.
+    Little Fina, madame's child, was there under Mrs. Birkett's
+    motherly care; but as the child was nearly six years old now,
+    the good creature's instinctive love for infants was wearing
+    out, and she was often heard to say how much she wished she
+    could have kept Fina always a baby, and, sighing, how difficult
+    she was to manage! She was an exceedingly pretty little girl,
+    with fair skin, fair hair and dark eyes&mdash;willful of
+    course, and spoilt of course; the only one in the house who
+    took her in hand to correct being Adelaide. And as she took her
+    in hand too smartly, Mrs. Birkett generally interfered, and the
+    servants combined to screen her; the result being that the
+    little one was mistress of the situation, after the manner of
+    willful children, and made every one more or less anxious and
+    uncomfortable as her return for their care.</p>
+
+    <p>Alick Corfield was the rector's curate. On the whole, this
+    was the most important of all the North Aston events which had
+    taken place during the last four years. Soon after madame's
+    death and Leam's transfer from home to school Alick had a
+    strange and sudden illness. No one knew what to make of it, nor
+    how it came, nor what it was, but the doctor called it cerebral
+    fever, and when the families got hold of the word they were
+    content. Cerebral fever does as well as anything else for an
+    illness of which no one knows and no one seeks to know the
+    cause, and to the origin of which the patient himself gives no
+    clew. It was a peg, and a peg was all that was wanted.</p>
+
+    <p>On his recovery he announced his intention of going to
+    Oxford to read for holy orders. His mother was piteously
+    distressed, as might be expected. She feared all sorts of evil
+    for her boy, from damp sheets and unmended linen to over-study,
+    wine-parties and bold-faced minxes weaving subtle webs of
+    fascination. But for the first time in his life Alick stood out
+    against her insistance, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page206"
+       id="page206"></a>[pg 206]</span> and his will conquered
+       hers. The sequel of the struggle was, that he went to
+       Oxford, took his degree, read for orders, passed, and that
+       Mr. Birkett gave him his title as his curate.</p>
+
+    <p>It could hardly be said that the relations were entirely
+    harmonious between the military-minded rector, who held to the
+    righteousness of helotry and the value of ignorance in the
+    class beneath him, and the young curate burning with zeal and
+    oppressed with the desire to put all the crooked things of life
+    straight. The one pooh-poohed the enthusiasm of the other,
+    derided his belief in humanity and assured him of failure: the
+    other felt as if he had been taken behind the scenes and shown
+    the blue fire of which the awful lightning of his youth was
+    made. Mr. Birkett could not quite forbid the greater faith, the
+    more loving endeavor which the young man threw into his
+    ministrations, but he was the Sadducee who scoffed and made the
+    work heavy and uphill throughout. He gave a grudging assent to
+    the Bible-classes, the Wednesday evening services at the
+    Sunday-school, the lectures on great men on the first Monday in
+    the month, which Alick proposed and established. He thought it
+    all weariness to the flesh and a waste of time and energy; but
+    the traditions of his order were strong, if he himself did not
+    share them, and he had to give way in the end. He consoled
+    himself with the reflection that the boy would find out his
+    mistake before long, and that then he would know who had been
+    right throughout.</p>
+
+    <p>But even zeal and hope and diligence in his work could not
+    lighten the persistent sadness which was Alick's chief
+    characteristic now. Gaunt and silent, with the eyes of a man
+    whose inner self is absent and whose thoughts are not with his
+    company, he looked as if he had passed through the fire, and
+    had not passed through unscathed. No one knew what had happened
+    to him, and, though many made conjectures, none came near the
+    truth. Meanwhile, he seemed as if he lived only to work, and,
+    the clearer-sighted might have added, to wait.</p>
+
+    <p>For a further local change, Lionnet was tenanted again by a
+    strange and solitary man, who never went to church and did not
+    visit in the neighborhood. He was in consequence believed to be
+    a forger, an escaped convict in hiding, or, by the more
+    charitable, a maniac as yet not dangerous. North Aston held him
+    in deeper horror than it had held even Pepita, and his true
+    personality exercised its wits more keenly than had even the
+    true personality of madame. In point of fact, he was a quiet,
+    inoffensive, amiable man, who gave his mind to Sanskrit for
+    work and to entomology for play, and did not trouble himself
+    about his own portrait as drawn in the local vernacular.
+    Nevertheless, for all his reserved habits and quiet ways, he
+    had learnt the whole history of the place and people before he
+    had been at Lionnet a month.</p>
+
+    <p>At the Hill things remained unchanged for the ladies, save
+    for the additional burden of years and the pleasant news that
+    Edgar was expected home daily. Adelaide, now twenty-four, took
+    the news as a personal grace, and blossomed into smiles and
+    glad humor of which only Josephine understood the source. But
+    Josephine held her tongue, and received the confidence of her
+    young friend with discretion. As she had never dispossessed her
+    own old idol, she could feel for Adelaide, and she was not
+    disposed to look on her patient determination with displeasure.
+    The constancy of the two, however, was very different in
+    essential meaning. With Josephine it was the constancy that is
+    born of an affectionate disposition and the absence of rival
+    Lotharios: with Adelaide it was the result of calculation and
+    decision. The one would have worshiped Sebastian as she
+    worshiped him now had he been ruined, a cripple, a criminal
+    even: the other would have shut out Edgar inexorably from her
+    very dreams had not his personality included the Hill. With the
+    one it was self-abasement&mdash;with the other
+    self-consideration; but it came to the same thing in the end,
+    and the men profited equally.</p>
+
+    <p>All these changes Sebastian Dundas found to have taken place
+    when he <span class="pagenum"><a name="page207"
+       id="page207"></a>[pg 207]</span> returned to North Aston
+       with gray hair instead of brown, his smooth, fair skin
+       tanned and roughened, and his weak, finely-cut, effeminate
+       mouth hidden by a moustache of a reddish tint, mingled with
+       white. Still, he was Sebastian; and after the first shock of
+       his altered appearance had been got over, Josephine carried
+       her incense in the old way, and found her worship as dear
+       and as tantalizing as ever.</p>
+
+    <p>Lastly, as the crowning change of all, Leam came home from
+    school; no longer the arrogant, embittered child, looking at
+    life through the false medium of pride and ignorance, saying
+    rude things and doing odd ones with the most perfect
+    unconsciousness; but well-bred, graceful, sufficiently
+    instructed not to make patent mistakes, and more beautiful by
+    far than she had even promised to be. Her very eyes were
+    lovelier, lovely as they had always been: they had more variety
+    of expression, were more dewy and tender, and, if less tragic,
+    were more spiritual. That hard, dry, burning passion which had
+    devoured her of old time seemed to have gone, as also her
+    savage Spanish pride. She had rounded and softened in body too,
+    as in mind. Her skin was fairer; her lips were not so firmly
+    closed, so rigid in line, so constricted in motion; her brows
+    were more flexible and not so often knit together; and her
+    slight, lithe figure was perfect in line and movement. Still,
+    she had enough of her former manner of being for identity.
+    Grave, quiet, laconic, direct, she was but a modification of
+    the former Leam as they had known her&mdash;Leam, Pepita's
+    daughter, and with blood in her veins that was not the ordinary
+    blood of the ordinary British miss.</p>
+
+    <p>Her father's artistic perceptions were gratified as he met
+    her at the station and Leam turned her cheek to him voluntarily
+    with tears in her eyes. Turning her cheek was apparently her
+    idea of kissing; but if not too intense an expression of
+    affection, it was at least an improvement on the old hard
+    repulsion, and Sebastian accepted it as the concession it was
+    meant to be. Indeed, they met somewhat as foes reconciled, or
+    rather seeking to be reconciled, and Mr. Dundas did not wish to
+    keep open old sores. Her cheek, turned to him somewhere about
+    the ear, represented to his mind a peace-offering: her eyes
+    full of tears were as a confession of past sins and a promise
+    of amendment. Not that he understood why she was so much more
+    effusive than of old, but if it augured a happier life
+    together, he was glad.</p>
+
+    <p>As they drove up to the door of the old home, crowded with
+    memories and associations, a shudder passed over the girl: she
+    grasped her father's hand in her own almost convulsively, and
+    he heard her say below her breath, "Poor papa!"</p>
+
+    <p>He wondered why she pitied him. The place must surely be
+    full of memories of her mother for her: why did she say "Poor
+    papa!" to him? He did not see what she saw&mdash;that peaceful
+    September evening, and the bottle of cherry-water on the table,
+    with the little phial of thirty deaths in her hand; and now the
+    contents emptied into the harmless draught; and now madame pale
+    and dead. The whole scene transacted itself vividly before her,
+    and she shuddered at her memories and her past self, as always
+    with a kind of vague wonder how she could have been so wicked,
+    and where did she get the force, the courage, for such a cruel
+    crime?</p>
+
+    <p>For all these four years at school the shadow of that
+    dreadful deed had been ever in the background of her life; and
+    as time went on, and she came to a better understanding of
+    morality, it grew clear to her as a crime. Its consciousness of
+    guilt had broken down her pride, and thus had made her more
+    malleable, more humble. She could no longer harden herself in
+    her belief that she was superior to every one else. Those
+    girls, her companions&mdash;they had not had an Andalusian
+    mother, truly; they did not pray to the saints, and the Holy
+    Virgin took no care of them; they were Protestants and English,
+    frogs and pigs; but they had not committed murder. If she
+    should stand up in the middle of the room and tell them what
+    she had done, which of them would touch her hand
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page208"
+       id="page208"></a>[pg 208]</span> again? which of them speak
+       to her? English and Protestants as they were, how far
+       superior in their innocence to her, an Andalusian Catholic,
+       in her guilt! But no one lives with remorse. It comes and
+       goes gustily, fitfully; but the things of the present are
+       stronger than the things of the past, else the man with a
+       shameful secret in his life would go mad.</p>
+
+    <p>One of these gusty storms broke over Leam as she passed
+    through the gates of the old home, and for the moment she felt
+    as if she must confess the truth to her father and tell him
+    what evil thing she had done. Yet it passed, as other such
+    storms had passed: the things of the present took their natural
+    place of prominence, and those of the past sank again into the
+    background, shadows that never faded quite away, but that were
+    not actualities pressing against her.</p>
+
+    <p>The news of Leam's home-coming created quite a pleasurable
+    excitement in the neighborhood, and the families flocked to
+    Ford House to welcome her among them as one of themselves, all
+    anxious to see if the Ethiopian of North Aston had shed her
+    skin, if the leopardess had changed her spots. They were
+    divided among themselves as to whether she had or had not. Some
+    said she was charming, and like any one else, but others shook
+    their heads, and, like experts in brain disease, professed to
+    see traces of the old lunacy, and to be doubtful as to her
+    cure. At the worst, however, here she was&mdash;one of
+    themselves whom they must receive; and common sense dictated
+    that they should make the best of her, and hope all things till
+    they proved some.</p>
+
+    <p>There was one among them whom Leam longed yet dreaded to
+    meet. This was Alick Corfield. She wondered what he knew, or
+    rather what he suspected, and she was anxious to have her
+    ordeal over. But, though Mrs. Corfield came, and was just the
+    same as ever, bustling, inquisitive, dogmatic, before ten
+    minutes were over having put the girl through her scholastic
+    facings and got from her the whole of her curriculum, yet Alick
+    did not appear. He waited until after Sunday, when he should
+    see her first in church, and so nerve himself as it were behind
+    the barrier of his sacred office; but after Sunday had passed
+    and he had seen her in her old place, he called, and found her
+    alone.</p>
+
+    <p>When they met, and she looked into his face and laid her
+    hand in his, she knew all. He shared her secret, and knew what
+    she had done. It was not that he was either distant or
+    familiar, cold or disrespectful, or anything but glad and
+    reverent; nevertheless, he knew. He was no longer the boy
+    adorer, her slave, her dog: he was her friend, and he wished to
+    make her feel that she was safe with him&mdash;known, in his
+    power, but safe.</p>
+
+    <p>"You are changed," he said awkwardly.</p>
+
+    <p>He thought of her as Leam, heard her always called Leam, but
+    he dared not use the familiar name, and yet she was not "Miss
+    Dundas" to him.</p>
+
+    <p>"It is four years since you saw me," she said with a grave
+    smile. "It was time to change."</p>
+
+    <p>"But you are your old self too," he returned eagerly. He
+    would have no disloyalty done to the queen of his boyish
+    dreams: what worm soever was at its root, his royal pomegranate
+    flower should be always set fair in the sun where he might
+    be.</p>
+
+    <p>"You seem much changed too," she said after a short
+    pause&mdash;"graver and older. Is that because you are a
+    clergyman?"</p>
+
+    <p>Alick turned his eyes away from the girl's face, and looked
+    mournfully out onto the autumn woods. "Partly," he said.</p>
+
+    <p>"And the other part?" asked Leam, pressing to know the
+    worst.</p>
+
+    <p>"And the other part?" He looked at her, and his wan face
+    grew paler. "Well, never mind the other part. There are things
+    which sometimes come into a man's life and wither it for ever,
+    as a fire passing over a green tree, but we do not speak of
+    them."</p>
+
+    <p>"To no one?"</p>
+
+    <p>"To no one."</p>
+
+    <p>Leam sighed. No proclamation could have made the thing
+    clearer between <span class="pagenum"><a name="page209"
+       id="page209"></a>[pg 209]</span> them. Henceforth she was in
+       Alick's power: let him be faithful, chivalrous, loyal,
+       devoted, what you will, she was no longer her own unshared
+       property. He knew what she was, and in so far was her
+       master.</p>
+
+    <p>Poor Alick! This was not the light in which he held his
+    fatal secret. True, he knew what she had done, and that his
+    young queen, his ideal, was a murderess, who, if the truth were
+    made public, would be degraded below the level of the poorest
+    wretch that had kept an honest name; but he felt himself more
+    accursed than she, in that he had been the means whereby she
+    had gotten both her knowledge and the power to use it. He was
+    the doomed if innocent, as of old tragic times&mdash;the
+    sinless Cain guilty of murder, but guiltless in intent. It was
+    for this, as much as for the love and poetry of the boyish
+    days, that he felt he owed himself to Leam&mdash;that his life
+    was hers, and all his energies were to be devoted for her good.
+    It was for this that he had prayed with such intensity of
+    earnestness it seemed to him sometimes as if his soul had left
+    his body, and had gone up to the Most High to pluck by force of
+    passionate entreaty the pardon he besought: "Pardon her, O
+    Lord! Turn her heart, enlighten her understanding, convince her
+    of her sin; but pardon her, pardon her, dear Lord! And with
+    her, pardon me."</p>
+
+    <p>The man's whole life was spent in this one wild, fervid
+    prayer. All that he did was tinged with the sentiment of
+    winning grace for her and pardon for both. In his own mind they
+    stood hand in hand together; and if he was the intercessor,
+    they were both to benefit, and neither would be saved without
+    the other. And he believed in the value of his prayers and in
+    the objective reality of their influence.</p>
+
+    <p>For the final changes in the ordering of home and society at
+    North Aston, the week after Leam returned Edgar Harrowby came
+    from India, and took up his position as the owner of the Hill
+    estate; and the child Fina was brought to Ford House, and
+    formally invested with her new name and condition as Miss Fina
+    Dundas, Sebastian's younger daughter. Mindful of the past, Mr.
+    Dundas expected to have a stormy scene with Leam when he told
+    her his intentions respecting poor madame's child; but Leam
+    answered quietly, "Very well, papa," and greeted Fina when she
+    arrived benevolently, if not effusively. She was not one of
+    those born mothers who love babies from their early nursery
+    days, but she was kind to the child in her grave way, and
+    seemed anxious to do well by her.</p>
+
+    <p>The ladies all bestowed on her their nursery recipes and
+    systems in rich abundance&mdash;especially Mrs. Birkett, who,
+    though glad to be relieved from the hourly task of watching and
+    contending, was still immensely interested in the little
+    creature, and gave daily counsel and superintendence. So that
+    on the whole Leam was not left unaided with her charge. On the
+    contrary, she ran great risk of being bewildered by her
+    multiplicity of counselors, and of entering in consequence on
+    that zigzag course which covers much ground and makes but
+    little progress.</p>
+
+    <h3>CHAPTER XXII.</h3>
+
+    <h3>EDGAR HARROWBY.</h3>
+
+    <p>Thirty-two years of age; tall, handsome, well set-up, and
+    every inch a soldier; manly in bearing, but also with that
+    grace of gesture and softness of speech which goes by the name
+    of polished manner; a bold sportsman, ignorant of physical
+    fear, to whom England was the culmination of the universe, and
+    such men as he&mdash;gentlemen, officers, squires&mdash;the
+    culmination of humanity; a man who loved women as creatures,
+    but despised them as intelligences; who respected socially the
+    ladies of his own class, and demanded that they should be
+    without stain, as befits the wives and mothers and sisters of
+    gentlemen, but who thought women of a meaner grade fair game
+    for the roving fowler; a conservative, holding to elemental
+    differences whence arise the value of races, the dignity of
+    family and the righteousness of caste; an
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page210"
+       id="page210"></a>[pg 210]</span> hereditary landowner,
+       regarding landed property as a sacred possession meant only
+       for the few and not to be suffered to lapse into low-born
+       hands; a gentleman, incapable of falsehood, treachery,
+       meanness, social dishonor, but not incapable of injustice,
+       tyranny, selfishness, even cruelty, if such came in his way
+       as the privilege of his rank,&mdash;this was Edgar Harrowby
+       as the world saw and his friends knew him, and as North
+       Aston had henceforth to know him.</p>
+
+    <p>His return caused immense local excitement and great
+    rejoicing. It seemed to set the social barometer at "fair," and
+    to promise a spell of animation such as North Aston had been
+    long wanting. And indeed personally for himself it was time
+    that Major Harrowby was at home and at the head of his own
+    affairs. Matters had been going rather badly on the estate
+    without him, and the need of a strong hand to keep agents
+    straight and tenants up to the mark had been making itself
+    somewhat disastrously felt during the last three or four years.
+    Wherefore he had sold out, broken all his ties in India
+    handsomely, as he had broken them in London handsomely once
+    before, when, mad with jealousy, he had fled like a thief in
+    the night, burned his boats behind him, and, as he thought,
+    obliterated every trace by which that loved and graceless woman
+    could discover his real name or family holding; and now had
+    come home prepared to do his duty to society and himself. That
+    is, prepared to marry a nice girl of his own kind, keep the
+    estate well in hand, and set an example of respectability and
+    orthodoxy, family prayers and bold riding, according to the
+    ideal of the English country gentleman.</p>
+
+    <p>But, above all, he must marry. And the wife provided for him
+    by the eternal fitness of things was Adelaide Birkett. Who else
+    could be found to suit the part so perfectly? She was
+    well-born, well-mannered; though not coarsely robust, yet
+    healthy in the sense of purity of blood; and she was decidedly
+    pretty. So far to the good of the Harrowby stock in the future.
+    Neither was she too young, though by reason of her quiet
+    country life her twenty-four years did not count more to her in
+    wear and tear of feeling and the doubtful moulding of
+    experience than if she had lived through one London season. She
+    was a girl of acknowledged good sense, calm, equable, holding
+    herself in the strictest leash of ladylike reserve, and
+    governing all her emotions without trouble, patent or
+    unconfessed. Hers was a character which would never floreate
+    into irregular beauties to give her friends anxiety and crowd
+    her life with embarrassing consequences. She despised sentiment
+    and ridiculed enthusiasm, thought skepticism both wicked and
+    disreputable, but at the same time fanaticism was silly, and
+    not nearly so respectable as that quiet, easy-going religion
+    which does nothing of which society would disapprove, but does
+    not break its heart in trying to found the kingdom of God on
+    earth.</p>
+
+    <p>All her relations with life and society would be blameless,
+    orthodox, ladylike and thoroughly English. As a wife she would
+    preach submission in public and practice domination and the
+    moral repression belonging to the superior being in private. As
+    a mother she would take care to have experienced nurses and
+    well-bred governesses, who would look after the children
+    properly, when she would wash her hands of further trouble and
+    responsibility, save to teach them good manners at luncheon and
+    self-control in their evening visit to the drawing-room for the
+    "children's half hour" before dinner. As the mistress of an
+    establishment she would be strict, demanding perfect purity in
+    the morals of her servants, not suffering waste, nor followers,
+    nor kitchen amusements that she knew of, nor kitchen
+    individuality anyhow. Her servants would be her serfs, and she
+    would assume to have bought them by food and wages in soul as
+    well as body, in mind as well as muscle. She would give broken
+    meat in moderation to the deserving poor, but she would let
+    those who are not deserving do the best they could with want at
+    home and inclemency abroad; and she would have called it
+    fostering vice had she fed the husbandless mother when hungry
+    or clothed the drunkard's
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page211"
+       id="page211"></a>[pg 211]</span> children when naked. She
+       would never be talked about for extremes or eccentricities
+       of any kind; and the world would be forced to mention her
+       with respect when it mentioned her at all, having indeed no
+       desire to do otherwise. For she was of the kind dear to the
+       heart of England&mdash;one of those who are called the salt
+       of the earth, and who are assumed to keep society safe and
+       pure. She was incredulous of science, contemptuous of
+       superstition, impatient of new ideas&mdash;appreciating art,
+       but holding artists as inferior creatures, like actors,
+       acrobats and newspaper writers. She was loyal to the queen
+       and royal family, the nobility and Established Church,
+       bracketing republicans with atheists, and both with
+       unpunished felons; as also classing immorality, the facts of
+       physiology and the details of disease in a group together,
+       as things horrible and not to be spoken of before ladies.
+       She was not slow to believe evil of her neighbors,
+       maintaining, indeed, that to be spoken of at all was proof
+       sufficient of undesirable conduct; but she would never
+       investigate a charge, preferring rather to accept it in its
+       vile integrity than to soil her hands by attempting to
+       unweave its dirty threads; hence she would be pitiless,
+       repellent, but she would never make herself the focus of
+       gossip. She was a human being if you will, a Christian in
+       creed and name assuredly; but beyond and above all things
+       she was a well-mannered, well-conducted English lady, a
+       person of spotless morals and exquisite propriety, in the
+       presence of whom humanity must not be human, truth truthful,
+       nor Nature natural.</p>
+
+    <p>This was the wife for Edgar Harrowby as a country
+    gentleman&mdash;the woman whom Mrs. Harrowby would have chosen
+    out of thousands to be her daughter-in-law, whom his sisters
+    would like, who would do credit to his name and position; and
+    whom he himself would find as good for his purpose as any
+    within the four seas.</p>
+
+    <p>For when Edgar married he would marry on social and rational
+    grounds: he would not commit the mistake of fancying that he
+    need love the woman as he had loved some others. He would marry
+    her, whoever she might be, because she would be of a good
+    family and reasonable character, fairly handsome,
+    unexceptionable in conduct, not tainted with hereditary disease
+    nor disgraced by ragged relatives, having nothing to do with
+    vice or poverty in the remotest link of her connections&mdash;a
+    woman fit to be the keeper of his house, the bearer of his
+    name, the mother of his children. But for love, passion,
+    enthusiasm, sentiment&mdash;Edgar thought all such emotional
+    impedimenta as these not only superfluous, but oftentimes
+    disastrous in the grave campaign of matrimony.</p>
+
+    <p>It was for this marriage that Adelaide had saved herself.
+    She believed that any woman can marry any man if she only wills
+    to do so; and from the day when she was seventeen, and they had
+    had a picnic at Dunaston, she had made up her mind to marry
+    Edgar Harrowby. When he came home for good, unmarried and
+    unengaged, she knew that she should succeed; and Edgar knew it
+    too. He knew it so well after he had been at home about a week
+    that if anything could have turned him against the wife carved
+    out for him by circumstance and fitness, it would have been the
+    almost fatal character of that fitness, as if Fortune had not
+    left him a choice in the matter.</p>
+
+    <p>"And what do you think of Adelaide?" asked Mrs. Harrowby one
+    day when her son said that he had been to the rectory. "You
+    have seen her twice now: what is your impression of her?'"</p>
+
+    <p>"She is prettier than ever&mdash;improved, I should say, all
+    through," was his answer.</p>
+
+    <p>Mrs. Harrowby smiled. "She is a girl I like," she said. "She
+    is so sensible and has such nice feeling about things."</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes," answered Edgar, "she is thoroughly well-bred."</p>
+
+    <p>"We have seen a great deal of her of late years," Mrs.
+    Harrowby continued, angling dexterously. "She and the girls are
+    fast friends, especially she and Josephine, though there is
+    certainly some slight difference of age between them. But
+    Adelaide prefers their society to that of any one about the
+    neighborhood. And <span class="pagenum"><a name="page212"
+       id="page212"></a>[pg 212]</span> I think that of itself
+       shows such good taste and nice feeling."</p>
+
+    <p>"So it does," said Edgar with dutiful assent, not exactly
+    seeing for himself what constituted Adelaide's good taste and
+    nice feeling in this preference for his dull and doleful
+    sisters over the brighter companionship of the Fairbairns, say,
+    or any other of the local nymphs. To him those elderly maiden
+    sisters of his were rather bores than otherwise, but he was not
+    displeased that Adelaide Birkett thought differently. If it
+    "ever came to anything," it would be better that they satisfied
+    her than that she should find them uncongenial.</p>
+
+    <p>"She is coming up to dinner this evening," Mrs. Harrowby
+    went on to say; and Edgar smiled, pulled his moustaches and
+    looked half puzzled if wholly pleased.</p>
+
+    <p>"She is a pretty girl," he said with the imbecility of a man
+    who ought to speak and who has nothing to say, also who has
+    something that he does not wish to say.</p>
+
+    <p>"She is better than pretty&mdash;she is good," returned Mrs.
+    Harrowby; and Edgar, not caring to discuss Adelaide on closer
+    ground with his mother, strolled away into his private room,
+    where he sat before the fire smoking, meditating on his life in
+    the past and his prospects in the future, and wondering how he
+    would like it when he had finally abjured the freedom of
+    bachelorhood and had taken up with matrimony and squiredom for
+    the remainder of his natural life.</p>
+
+    <p>Punctually at seven Adelaide Birkett appeared. This, too,
+    was one of her minor virtues: she was exact. Mind, person,
+    habits, all were regulated with the nicest method, and she knew
+    as little of hurry as of delay, and as little of both as of
+    passion.</p>
+
+    <p>"You are such a dear, good punctual girl!" said Josephine
+    affectionately&mdash;Josephine, whose virtues had a few more,
+    loose ends and knots untied than had her friend's.</p>
+
+    <p>"It is so vulgar to be unpunctual," said Adelaide with her
+    calm good-breeding. "It seems to me only another form of
+    uncleanliness and disorder."</p>
+
+    <p>"And Edgar is so punctual too!" cried Josephine by way of
+    commentary.</p>
+
+    <p>Adelaide smiled, not broadly, not hilariously, only to the
+    exact shade demanded by conversational sympathy. "Then we shall
+    agree in this," she said quietly.</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh I am sure you will agree, and in more than this,"
+    Josephine returned, almost with enthusiasm.</p>
+
+    <p>Had she not been the willing nurse of this affair from the
+    beginning?&mdash;if not the open confidante, yet secretly
+    holding the key to her younger friend's mind and actions? and
+    was she not, like all the kindly disappointed, intensely
+    sympathetic with love-matters, whether wise or foolish, hopeful
+    or hopeless?</p>
+
+    <p>"Who is it that you are sure will agree with Miss Adelaide,
+    if any one indeed could be found to disagree with her?" asked
+    Edgar, standing in the doorway.</p>
+
+    <p>Josephine laughed with the silliness of a weak woman
+    "caught." She looked at Adelaide slyly. Adelaide turned her
+    quiet face, unflushed, unruffled, and neither laughed sillily
+    nor looked slyly.</p>
+
+    <p>"She was praising me for punctuality; and then she said that
+    you were punctual too," she explained cheerfully.</p>
+
+    <p>"We learn that in the army," said Edgar.</p>
+
+    <p>"But I have had to learn it without the army," she
+    answered.</p>
+
+    <p>"Which shows that you have by the grace of nature what I
+    have attained only by discipline and art," said Edgar
+    gallantly.</p>
+
+    <p>Adelaide smiled. She did not disdain the compliment. On the
+    contrary, she wished to impress it on Edgar that she accepted
+    his praises because they were her due. She knew that the world
+    takes us if not quite at our own valuation, yet as being the
+    character we assume to be. It all depends on our choice of a
+    mask and to what ideal self we dress. If we are clever and
+    dress in keeping, without showing chinks or discrepancies, no
+    one will find out that it is only a mask; and those of us are
+    most successful in gaining the good-will of our fellows who
+    understand this principle the most clearly and act on it the
+    most consistently.</p>
+
+    <p>The evening was a pleasant one for Adelaide, being an
+    earnest of the future <span class="pagenum"><a name="page213"
+       id="page213"></a>[pg 213]</span> for which, if she had not
+       worked hard, she had controlled much. Edgar sang solos to
+       her accompaniment, and put in his rich baritone to her pure
+       if feeble soprano; he played chess with her for an hour, and
+       praised her play, as it deserved: naturally, not thinking it
+       necessary to make love to his sisters, he paid her almost
+       exclusive attention, and looked the admiration he felt. She
+       really was a very pretty young woman, and she had
+       unexceptionable manners; and having cut himself adrift from
+       his ties and handsomely released himself from his
+       obligations, he was not disposed to take much trouble in
+       looking far afield for a wife when here was one ready-made
+       to his hand. Still, he was not so rash as to commit himself
+       too soon. Fine play is never precipitate; and even the most
+       lordly lover, if an English gentleman, thinks it seemly to
+       pretend to woo the woman whom he means to take, and who he
+       knows will yield.</p>
+
+    <p>And on her side Adelaide was too well-bred for the one part,
+    and too wise for the other, to clutch prematurely at the prize
+    she had willed should be hers. Her actions must be like her
+    gestures, graceful, rhythmic, rather slow than hurried, and
+    bearing the stamp of purpose and deliberation. When Edgar
+    should make his offer, as she knew he would, she would ask for
+    time to reflect and make up her mind. This would be doing the
+    thing properly and with due regard to her own dignity; for no
+    husband of hers should ever have cause to think that she held
+    her marriage with him as a thing so undeniably advantageous
+    there was no doubt of her acceptance from the first. Every
+    woman must make herself difficult, thought Adelaide, if she
+    wishes to be prized, even the woman who for seven years has
+    fixed her eyes steadily on one point, and has determined that
+    she will finally capture a certain man and land him as her
+    lifelong possession.</p>
+
+    <p>Thus the evening passed, with a subtle undercurrent of
+    concealed resolves flowing beneath its surface admiration that
+    gave it a peculiar charm to the two people principally
+    concerned&mdash;the one feeling that she had advanced her game
+    by an important move; the other, that the eternal fitness of
+    things 'was making itself more and-more evident, and that it
+    was manifest to all his senses whom Providence had destined for
+    his wife, and for what ultimate matrimonial end he had been
+    shaped and spared.</p>
+
+    <p>A book of photographs was on the table.</p>
+
+    <p>"Are you here?" asked Edgar, lowering his bright blue eyes
+    on Adelaide as she sat on a small chair at Mrs. Harrowby's
+    feet, carrying daughterly incense to that withered shrine.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, I think so," she answered.</p>
+
+    <p>He turned the pages carefully&mdash;passing over his sisters
+    in wide crinolines and spoon bonnets; his mother, photographed
+    from an old picture, in a low dress and long dropping bands of
+    hair, like a mouflon's ears, about her face; Fred and himself,
+    both as boys in Scotch suits, set stiffly against the table
+    like dolls&mdash;with gradual improvement in art and style,
+    till he came to a page where Adelaide's fair vignetted head of
+    large size was placed side by side with another, also vignetted
+    and also large.</p>
+
+    <p>"Ah! there you are; and what a capital likeness!" cried
+    Edgar, with the joyous look and accent of one meeting an old
+    friend, giving that gauge of interest which we all
+    unconsciously give when we first see the photograph of a
+    well-known face. He looked at the portrait long and critically.
+    "Only not so pretty," he added gallantly. "Those fellows cannot
+    catch the spirit: they give only the outside forms, and not
+    always these correctly. Here is a striking face," he continued,
+    pointing to Adelaide's companion-picture&mdash;a girl with
+    masses of dark hair, dark eyes, large, mournful, heavily
+    fringed with long lashes, and a grave, sad face, that seemed
+    listening rather than looking. "Who is she? She looks
+    foreign."</p>
+
+    <p>Adelaide glanced at the page, as if she did not know it by
+    heart. "That? Oh! that is only Leam Dundas," she said with the
+    faintest, finest flavor of scorn in her voice.</p>
+
+    <p>"Leam Dundas?" repeated Edgar&mdash;"the daughter of that
+    awful woman?"</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page214"
+       id="page214"></a>[pg 214]</span>
+
+    <p>"Yes, and nearly as odd as the mother," answered Adelaide,
+    still in the same cold manner and with the same accent of
+    superior scorn.</p>
+
+    <p>"At least she used to be, you mean, dear, but she is more
+    like other people now," said kindly Josephine, more just than
+    politic.</p>
+
+    <p>Adelaide looked at her calmly, indifferently. "Yes, I
+    suppose she is rather less savage than of old," was her reply,
+    "but I do not see much of her,"</p>
+
+    <p>"I do not remember to have ever seen her: she must have been
+    a mere child when I was here last," said Edgar.</p>
+
+    <p>"She is nineteen now, I think," said Mrs. Harrowby.</p>
+
+    <p>"Not more?" repeated Adelaide. "I imagined she was
+    one-and-twenty at the least. She looks so very much older than
+    even this&mdash;five or six and twenty, full; dark people age
+    so quickly."</p>
+
+    <p>"She seems to be superbly handsome," Edgar said, still
+    looking at the portrait.</p>
+
+    <p>"For those who like that swarthy kind of beauty. For myself,
+    I do not: it always reminds me of negroes and Lascars."</p>
+
+    <p>Adelaide leaned forward, and made pretence to examine Leam's
+    portrait with critical independence of judgment. She spoke as
+    if this was the first time she had seen it, and her words the
+    thought of the moment resulting.</p>
+
+    <p>"There is no negroid taint here," Edgar answered gravely.
+    "It is the face of a sibyl, of a tragedian."</p>
+
+    <p>"Do you think so? It is fine in outline certainly, but too
+    monotonous to please me, and too lugubrious; and the funny part
+    of it is, there is nothing in her. She looks like a sibyl, but
+    she is the most profoundly stupid person you can imagine."</p>
+
+    <p>"Not now, Addy: she has wakened up a good deal," again
+    interposed Josephine with her love of justice and want of
+    tact.</p>
+
+    <p>"But do you not see the mother in her, Josephine? I do,
+    painfully; and the mother was such a horror! Leam is just like
+    her. She will grow her exact counterpart"</p>
+
+    <p>"A bad model enough," said Edgar; "but this face is not bad.
+    It has more in it than poor old Pepita's. How fat she was!"</p>
+
+    <p>"So will Leam be when she is as old," said Adelaide quietly.
+    "And do you think these dark people ever look clean? I
+    don't,"</p>
+
+    <p>"That is a drawback certainly," laughed Edgar, running
+    through the remainder of the book.</p>
+
+    <p>But he turned back again to the page which held Leam and
+    Adelaide side by side, and he spoke of the latter while he
+    looked at the former. The face of Leam Dundas, mournful,
+    passionate, concentrated as it was, had struck his
+    imagination&mdash;struck it as none other had done since the
+    time when he had met that grand and graceful woman wandering,
+    lost in a fog, in St. James's Park, and had protected from
+    possible annoyance till he had landed her in St. John's Wood.
+    He was glad that Leam Dundas lived in North Aston, and that he
+    should see her without trouble or overt action; and as he
+    handed Adelaide into her carriage he noticed for the first time
+    that her blue eyes were not quite even, that her flaxen hair
+    had not quite enough color, and that her face, if pure and
+    fair, was slightly insipid.</p>
+
+    <p>"Poor, dear Adelaide!" he said when he returned to the
+    drawing-room, "how nice she is! but how tart she was about this
+    Leam Dundas of yours! Looks like jealousy; and very likely is.
+    All you women are so horribly jealous."</p>
+
+    <p>"Not all of us," said Maria hastily.</p>
+
+    <p>"And I do not think that Adelaide is," said Josephine. "She
+    has no cause; for though Leam is certainly very lovely, and
+    seems to have improved immensely for being at school, still she
+    and Addy do not come into collision any way, and I do not see
+    why she should be jealous."</p>
+
+    <p>"Perhaps Edgar admired her photograph too much," said Fanny,
+    who was the stupid one of the three, but on occasions made the
+    shrewdest remarks.</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar laughed, not displeasedly. "That would be paying me
+    too high a compliment," he said.</p>
+
+    <p>Whereat his three sisters echoed "Compliment!" in various
+    tones of deprecation, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page215"
+       id="page215"></a>[pg 215]</span> and Josephine added a
+       meaning little laugh for her own share, for which Edgar gave
+       her a kiss, and said in a bantering kind of voice, "Now,
+       Joseph! mind what you are about!"</p>
+
+    <h3>CHAPTER XXIII.</h3>
+
+    <h3>ON THE MOOR.</h3>
+
+    <p>It was a gray and gusty day in November, with heavy masses
+    of low-lying clouds rolling tumultuously overhead, and a
+    general look of damp and decay about the fields and
+    banks&mdash;one of those melancholy days of the late autumn
+    which make one long for the more varied circumstances of
+    confessed winter, when the deep blue shadows in the crisp snow
+    suggest the glory of southern skies, and the sparkle of the sun
+    on the delicate tracery of the frosted branches has a mimicry
+    of life, such as we imagine strange elves and fairies might
+    create.</p>
+
+    <p>There was no point of color in the landscape save the brown
+    foliage of the shivering beech trees, a few coarse splashes of
+    yellow weeds, and here and there a trail of dying crimson
+    leaves threading the barren hedgerows. Everything was "sombre,
+    lifeless, mournful", and even Edgar Harrowby, though by no
+    means sentimentally impressionable to outward conditions, felt,
+    as he rode through the deserted lanes and looked abroad over
+    the stagnant country, that life on the off-hunt days was but a
+    slow-kind of thing at North Aston, and that any incident which
+    should break the dead monotony of the scene would be
+    welcome.</p>
+
+    <p>He had been thinking a great deal of Adelaide for the last
+    four or five days, since she had dined at the Hill, and making
+    up his mind to take the final plunge before long. He was not in
+    love with her, but she suited, as has been said; and that was
+    as good as love to Edgar, who had now to take up his squiredom
+    and country gentleman's respectability, after having had his
+    share of a young man's "fling" in rather larger proportion than
+    falls to the lot of most. All the same, he wished that her face
+    had more expression and that her eyes were perfectly straight;
+    and he wanted to see Leam Dundas.</p>
+
+    <p>He had made a long round to-day, and was turning now
+    homeward, when, as he had almost crossed the moor, athwart
+    which his road led, he saw standing on a little hillock, away
+    from the main track, the slight figure of a woman sharply
+    defined against the sky. She was alone, doing nothing, not
+    seeming to be looking at anything&mdash;just standing there on
+    the hillock, facing the north-west, as if for pleasure in the
+    rough freshness of the breeze.</p>
+
+    <p>The wind blew back her dress, and showed her girlish form,
+    supple, flexible, graceful, fashioned like some nymph of olden
+    time. From her small feet, arched and narrow, gripping the
+    ground like feet of steel, to the slender throat on which her
+    head was set with so much grace of line, yet with no sense of
+    over-weighting in its tender curves, an expression of nervous
+    energy underlying her fragile litheness of form, a look of
+    strength&mdash;not muscular nor the strength of bulk or weight,
+    but the strength of fibre, will, tenacity&mdash;seemed to mark
+    her out as something different from the herd.</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar scarcely gave this vague impression words in his own
+    mind, but he was conscious of a new revelation of womanhood,
+    and he scented an adventure in this solitary figure facing the
+    north-west wind on the lonely moor.</p>
+
+    <p>Her very dress, too, had a character of its own in harmony
+    with the rest&mdash;black all through, save for the scarlet
+    feather in her hat, which burnt like a flame against the gray
+    background of the sky; and her whole attitude had something of
+    defiance in its profound stillness, while standing so boldly
+    against the strong blasts that swept across the heights, which
+    caught his imagination, at that moment ready to be inflamed.
+    All things depend on times and moods, and Edgar's mood at this
+    moment of first seeing Leam Dundas was favorable for the
+    reception of new impressions.</p>
+
+    <p>For, of course, it was Leam&mdash;Leam, who, since her
+    return from school, alone and without companionship, was
+    feverish <span class="pagenum"><a name="page216"
+       id="page216"></a>[pg 216]</span> often, and often impelled
+       to escape into the open country from something that
+       oppressed her down in the valley too painfully to be borne.
+       She had never been a confidential nor an expansive
+       schoolfellow; not even an affectionate one as girls count
+       affection, seeing that she neither kissed nor cried, nor
+       quarreled nor made up&mdash;neither stood as a model of
+       fidelity nor changed her girl-lovers in anticipation of
+       future inconstancies&mdash;writing a love-letter to Ada
+       to-day and a copy of verses to Ethel to-morrow&mdash;but had
+       kept with all the same quiet gravity and gentle reticence
+       which seemed to watch rather than share, and to be more
+       careful not to offend than solicitous to win.</p>
+
+    <p>All the same, she missed her former comrades now that she
+    had lost them; but most of all she missed the wholesome
+    occupation and mental employment of her studies. Left as she
+    was to herself, thoughts and memories were gathering up from
+    the background where they had lain dormant if extant all these
+    years, and through her solitude were getting a vitality which
+    made her stand still in a kind of breathless agony, wondering
+    where they would lead her and in what they would end. At times
+    such a burning sense of sin would flash over her that she felt
+    as if she must confess that hideous fact of her girlish past.
+    It seemed so shameful that she should be living there among the
+    rest, a criminal with the innocent, and not tell them what she
+    was. Then the instinct of self-preservation would carry it over
+    her conscience, and she would press back her thoughts and go
+    out, as to-day, to cool her feverish blood, and grow calm to
+    bear and strong to hold the heavy burden which she had
+    fashioned by her own mad deed and laid for life on her own
+    hands.</p>
+
+    <p>If only the ladies had not insisted so strongly on mamma's
+    personality in heaven! if only they had not lighted up her
+    imagination, her loyalty, by this tremendous torch of faith and
+    love! How bitterly she regretted the childish fanaticism which
+    had made her imagine herself the providence of that beloved
+    memory, the avenger of those shadowy wrongs! Oh, if she could
+    undo the past and call madame back to life! She would kiss her
+    now, and even call her mamma if it would please her and papa.
+    So she stood on the hillock facing the north-west, thinking
+    these things and regretting in vain.</p>
+
+    <p>As Edgar came riding by his large black hound dashed off to
+    Leam and barked furiously, all four paws planted on the ground
+    as if preparing for a spring. The beast had probably no malice,
+    and might have meant it merely as his method of saying, "Who
+    are you?" but he looked formidable, and Leam started back and
+    cried, "Down, dog! go away!" in a voice half angry and half
+    afraid.</p>
+
+    <p>Then Edgar saw the face, and knew who she was. He rode
+    across the turf, calling off his dog, and came up to her. It
+    was an opportunity, and Edgar Harrowby was a man who knew how
+    to take advantage of opportunities. It was in his creed to
+    thank Providence for favorable chances by making the most of
+    them, and this was a chance of which it would be manifestly
+    ungrateful not to make the most. It was far more picturesque to
+    meet her for the first time, as now, on the wild moor on a
+    gusty gray November day, than in the gloomy old drawing-room at
+    the Hill. It gave a flavor of romance and the forbidden which
+    was not without its value in the beginning of an acquaintance
+    with such a face as Leam's. Nevertheless, in spite of the
+    romance that hung about the circumstance, his first words were
+    common-place enough. "I hope my dog has not alarmed you?" he
+    said, lifting his hat.</p>
+
+    <p>Leam looked at him with those wonderful eyes of hers, that
+    seemed somehow to look through him. She, standing on her
+    hillock, was slightly higher than Edgar sitting on his horse;
+    and her head was bent as she looked down on him, giving her
+    attitude and gesture something of a dignified assumption of
+    superiority, more like the Leam of the past than of the
+    present. "No, I was not alarmed," she said. "But I do not like
+    to be barked at," she added, an echo of the old childish sense
+    of injury from <span class="pagenum"><a name="page217"
+       id="page217"></a>[pg 217]</span> circumstance that was so
+       quaint and pretty in her half-complaining voice.</p>
+
+    <p>"I suppose not: how should you?" answered Edgar with
+    sympathetic energy. "Rover is a good-old fellow, but he has the
+    troublesome trick of giving tongue unnecessarily. He would not
+    have hurt you, but I should be very sorry to think he had
+    frightened you. To heel, sir!" angrily.</p>
+
+    <p>"No, he did not frighten me." repeated Leam.</p>
+
+    <p>Never loquacious, there was something about this man's face
+    and manner, his masterful spirit underneath his courteous
+    bearing, his look of masculine power and domination, his
+    admiring eyes that fixed themselves on her so
+    unflinchingly&mdash;not with insolence, but as if he had the
+    prescriptive right of manhood to look at her, only a woman, as
+    he chose, he commanding and she obeying&mdash;that quelled and
+    silenced her even beyond her wont. He was the first gentleman
+    of noteworthy appearance who had ever spoken to her&mdash;not
+    counting Alick, nor the masters who had taught her at school,
+    nor Mr. Birkett, nor Mr. Fairbairn, as gentlemen of noteworthy
+    appearance&mdash;and the first of all things has a special
+    influence over young minds.</p>
+
+    <p>"You are brave to walk so far alone: you ought to have a dog
+    like Rover to protect you," Edgar said, still looking at her
+    with those unflinching eyes, which oppressed her even when she
+    did not see them.</p>
+
+    <p>"I am not brave, and I do not care for dogs. Besides, I do
+    not often walk so far as this; but I felt the valley stifling
+    to-day," answered Leam, in her matter-of-fact, categorical
+    way.</p>
+
+    <p>"All the same, you ought to have protection," Edgar said
+    authoritatively, and Leam did not reply.</p>
+
+    <p>She only looked at him earnestly, wondering against what she
+    should be protected, having abandoned by this time her belief
+    in banditti and wild beasts.</p>
+
+    <p>If his eyes oppressed her, hers half embarrassed him. There
+    was such a strange mixture of intensity and innocence in them,
+    he scarcely knew how to meet them.</p>
+
+    <p>"It is absurd to pretend that we do not know each other,"
+    then said Edgar after a short pause, smiling; and his smile was
+    very sweet and pleasant. "You are Miss Dundas&mdash;I am Edgar
+    Harrowby."</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, I know," Leam answered.</p>
+
+    <p>"How is that?" he asked, "<i>I</i> knew <i>you</i> from your
+    photograph&mdash;once seen not to be forgotten again,"
+    gallantly&mdash;"but how should you know me?"</p>
+
+    <p>Leam raised her eyes from the ground where she had cast
+    them. Those slow full looks, intense, tragic, fixed, had a
+    startling effect of which she was wholly unconscious. Edgar
+    felt his own grow dark and tender as he met hers. If the soul
+    and mind within only answered to the mask without, what queen
+    or goddess could surpass this half-breed Spanish girl, this
+    country-born, unnoted, but glorious Leam Dundas? he
+    thought.</p>
+
+    <p>"And I knew you from yours," she answered.</p>
+
+    <p>"An honor beyond my deserts," said Edgar.</p>
+
+    <p>Not that he thought the notice of a girl, even with such a
+    face as this, beyond his deserts. Indeed, if a queen or a
+    goddess had condescended to him, it would not have been a grace
+    beyond his merits; but it sounded pretty to say so, and served
+    to make talk as well as anything else. And to make talk was the
+    main business on hand at this present moment.</p>
+
+    <p>"Why an honor?" asked Leam, ignorant of the elements of
+    flirting.</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar smiled again, and this time his smile without words
+    troubled her. It seemed the assertion of superior intelligence,
+    contemptuous, if half pitiful of her ignorance. Once so
+    serenely convinced of her superiority, Leam was now as
+    suspicious of her shortcomings, and was soon abashed.</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar did not see that he had troubled her. Masterful and
+    masculine to an eminent degree, the timid doubts and fears of a
+    young girl were things he could not recognize. He had no point
+    in his own nature with which they came in contact, so that he
+    should sympathize with them. He knew the whole fence and foil
+    of <span class="pagenum"><a name="page218"
+       id="page218"></a>[pg 218]</span> coquetry, the signs of
+       silent flattery, the sweet language of womanly
+       self-conscious love, whether wooing or being won; but the
+       fluttering misgivings of youth and absolute inexperience
+       were dark to him. All of which he felt conscious was that
+       here was something deliciously fresh and original, and that
+       Leam was more beautiful to look at than Adelaide, and a
+       great deal more interesting to talk to.</p>
+
+    <p>"If you will allow me, now that I have had the pleasure of
+    meeting you, I will see you safe for at least part of your way
+    home," he said, passing by her na�ve query "Why an honor?" as a
+    thing to be answered only by that smile of superior wisdom.</p>
+
+    <p>Flinging himself from his horse, he took the bridle in his
+    hand and turned toward home, looking to the girl to accompany
+    him. Leam felt that she could not refuse his escort offered as
+    so much a matter of course. Why should she? It was very
+    pleasant to have some one to walk with&mdash;some one not her
+    father, with whom she still felt shy, if not now absolutely
+    estranged; nor yet Alick, in whose pale face she was always
+    reading the past, and who, though he was so good and kind and
+    tender, was her master and held her in his hand. This handsome,
+    courteous gentleman was different from either, and she liked
+    his society and superior ways. And as he began now to talk to
+    her of things not trenching on nor admitting of
+    flirtation&mdash;chiefly of the places he had visited, India,
+    Egypt, Italy, Spain&mdash;she was not so much abashed by his
+    unflinching looks and masterful manner.</p>
+
+    <p>When he entered on Spain and his recollections of what he
+    had seen there, the girl's heart throbbed, and her pale face
+    grew whiter still with the passionate thrill that stirred her.
+    The old blood was in her veins yet, and, though modified, and
+    in some sense transformed, she was still Pepita's daughter and
+    the child of Andalusia. And here was truth; not like that poor
+    wretched madame's talk, which even she had found out to be
+    false and only making believe to know what she did not know.
+    Spain was the name of power with Learn, as it had been with her
+    mother, and she lifted her face, white with its passionate
+    desires, listening as if entranced to all that Edgar said.</p>
+
+    <p>It was a good opening, and the handsome soldier-squire
+    congratulated himself on his lucky hit and serviceable memory.
+    Presently he touched on Andalusia, and Leam, who hitherto had
+    been listening without comment, now broke in eagerly. "That is
+    my own country!" she cried. "Mamma came from Andalusia,
+    beautiful Andalusia! Ah! how I should like to go there!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Perhaps you will some day," Edgar answered a little
+    significantly.</p>
+
+    <p>Had she been more instructed in the kind of thing he meant,
+    she would have seen that he wished to convey the idea of a
+    love-journey made with him.</p>
+
+    <p>She shook her head and her eyes grew moist and dewy. "Not
+    now," she said mournfully. "Poor mamma has gone, and there is
+    no one now to take me."</p>
+
+    <p>"I will make up a party some day, and you shall be one of
+    us," said Edgar.</p>
+
+    <p>She brightened all over. "Ah! that would be delightful!" she
+    cried, taking him seriously. "When do you think we shall
+    go?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I will talk about it," Edgar answered, though smiling
+    again&mdash;Leam wished he would not smile so often&mdash;a
+    little aghast at her literalness, and saying to himself in
+    warning that he must be careful of what he said to Leam Dundas.
+    It was evident that she did not understand either badinage or a
+    joke. But her very earnestness pleased him for all its oddity.
+    It was so unlike the superficiality and levity of the modern
+    girl&mdash;that hateful Girl of the Period, in whose existence
+    he believed, and of whose influence he stood in almost
+    superstitious awe. He liked that grave, intense way of hers,
+    which was neither puritanical nor stolid, but, on the contrary,
+    full of unspoken passion, rich in latent concentrated
+    power.</p>
+
+    <p>"They are very beautiful, are they not?" Leam asked
+    suddenly.</p>
+
+    <p>"What? who?" was Edgar's answer.</p>
+
+    <p>"The Andalusian women, and the men," returned Leam.</p>
+
+    <p>"The men are fine-looking fellows
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page219"
+       id="page219"></a>[pg 219]</span> enough," answered Edgar
+       carelessly&mdash;"a little too brutal for my taste, but
+       well-grown men for all that. But I have seen prettier women
+       out of Spain than in it."</p>
+
+    <p>"Mamma used to say they were so beautiful&mdash;the most
+    beautiful of all the women in the world; and the best." Leam
+    said this with a disappointed air and her old injured
+    accent.</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar laughed softly. "The prettiest Andalusian woman I have
+    ever seen has an English father," he answered, with a sudden
+    flush on his handsome face as he bent it a little nearer to
+    hers.</p>
+
+    <p>"How odd!" said Leam. "An English father? That is like
+    me."</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar looked at her, to read how much of this was real
+    ingenuousness, how much affected simplicity. He saw only a
+    candid inquiring face with a faint shade of surprise in its
+    quiet earnestness, unquestionably not affected.</p>
+
+    <p>"Just so," he answered. "Exactly like you."</p>
+
+    <p>His voice and manner made Leam blush uncomfortably. She was
+    conscious of something disturbing, without knowing what it was.
+    She first looked up into his face with the same expression of
+    inquiry as before, then down to the earth perplexedly, when
+    suddenly the truth came upon her; he meant herself&mdash;she
+    was the prettiest Andalusian he had ever seen.</p>
+
+    <p>She was intensely humiliated at her discovery. Not one of
+    those girls who study every feature, every gesture, every
+    point, till there is not a square inch of their personality of
+    which they are not painfully conscious, Leam had never taken
+    herself into artistic consideration at all. She had been proud
+    of her Spanish blood, of her mantilla, her high comb and her
+    fan; but of herself as a woman among women she knew nothing,
+    nor whether she was plain or pretty. Indeed, had she had to say
+    offhand which, she would have answered plain. The revelation
+    which comes sooner or later to all women of the charms they
+    possess had not yet come to her; and Edgar's words, making the
+    first puncture in her ignorance, pained her more by the shock
+    which they gave her self-consciousness than they pleased her by
+    their flattery.</p>
+
+    <p>She said no more, but walked by his side with her head held
+    very high and slightly turned away. She was sorry that he had
+    offended her. They had been getting on together so well until
+    he had said this foolish thing, and now they were like friends
+    who had quarreled. She was quite sorry that he had been so
+    foolish as to offend her, but she must not forgive him&mdash;at
+    least not just yet. It was very wrong of him to tell her that
+    she was prettier than the true children of the soil; and she
+    resented the slight to Spain and to her mother, as well as the
+    wrong done to herself, by his saying that which was not true.
+    So she walked with her little head held high, and Edgar could
+    get nothing more out of her. When Leam was offended coaxings to
+    make her forget were of no avail. She had to wear through an
+    impression by herself, and it was useless to try for a
+    premature pardon.</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar saw that he had overshot the mark, and that his best
+    policy now was absence; wherefore, after a few moments'
+    silence, he remounted his horse, looking penitent, handsome,
+    full of admiration and downcast.</p>
+
+    <p>"I hope we shall soon see you at the Hill, Miss Dundas," he
+    said, holding her hand in his for his farewell a little longer
+    than was quite necessary for good breeding or even
+    cordiality.</p>
+
+    <p>"I very seldom go to the Hill," answered Leam, looking past
+    his head.</p>
+
+    <p>"But you will come, and soon?" fervently.</p>
+
+    <p>"Perhaps: I do not know," answered Leam, still looking past
+    his head, and embarrassed to a most uncomfortable extent.</p>
+
+    <p>"Thank you," he said, as if he had been thanking her for the
+    grace of his life; and with a long look, lifting his hat again,
+    he rode off, just escaping by a few hundred yards the danger of
+    being met walking with Leam by his sisters and Adelaide
+    Birkett. They were all driving together in the phaeton, and the
+    sisters were making much of their young friend.</p>
+
+    <p>At that moment Edgar preferred to be met alone and not
+    walking with Leam. He did not stop the carriage&mdash;simply
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page220"
+       id="page220"></a>[pg 220]</span> nodded to them all with
+       familiar kindness, as a group of relatives not demanding
+       extra courtesy, flinging a few words behind him as he rode
+       on smiling. Nor did the ladies in their turn stop for Leam,
+       whom they met soon after walking slowly along the road; but
+       Josephine said, as they passed, how pretty Learn looked
+       to-day, and how much softer her face was than it used to be;
+       and Maria, even Maria, agreed with kindly Joseph, and was
+       quite eulogistic on the object of her old disdain. Adelaide
+       sat silent, and did not join in their encomiums.</p>
+
+    <p>It would have been a nice point to ascertain if the Misses
+    Harrowby would have praised the girl's beauty as they did had
+    they known that she had grown soft and dewy-eyed by talking of
+    Spain with their brother Edgar, though she had hardened a
+    little afterward when he told her that she was the prettiest
+    Andalusian he had ever seen.</p>
+
+    <p>During the dinner at the Hill, where Adelaide was one of the
+    family party, Edgar mentioned casually how that he had met Miss
+    Dundas on the moor, and had had to speak to her because of
+    Rover's misbehavior.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes? and what do you think of her?" asked Mrs. Harrowby
+    with a sharp glance.</p>
+
+    <p>"I scarcely know: I have hardly seen her as yet," he
+    answered.</p>
+
+    <p>"Did she say or do anything very extraordinary to-day?"
+    asked Adelaide with such an air of contemptuous curiosity as
+    seemed to him insufferably insolent.</p>
+
+    <p>"No, nothing. Is she in the habit of saying or doing
+    extraordinary things?" he answered back, arching his eyebrows
+    and speaking in a well-affected tone of sincere inquiry.</p>
+
+    <p>"At times she is more like a maniac than a sane person,"
+    said Adelaide, breaking her bread with deliberation. "What can
+    you expect from such a parentage and education as hers?"</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar looked down and smiled satirically. "Poor Pepita's
+    sins lie heavy on your mind," he answered.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, I believe in race," was her reply.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mother," then said Edgar after a short silence, "why do you
+    not have Miss Dundas to dine here with Adelaide? It would be
+    more amusing to her, for it must be dull"&mdash;turning to
+    their guest and speaking amiably, considerately&mdash;"I am
+    afraid very dull&mdash;to be so often quite alone with us."</p>
+
+    <p>He did not add what he thought, that it was almost
+    indelicate in her to be here so often. He was out of humor with
+    her to-day.</p>
+
+    <p>"She is such an uncertain girl we never know how she may be.
+    I had her to stay here once, and I do not want to repeat the
+    experiment," was Mrs. Harrowby's answer.</p>
+
+    <p>"But, mamma, that was before she went to school, when she
+    was quite a child. She is so much improved now," pleaded
+    Josephine.</p>
+
+    <p>"Good little soul!" said Edgar under his
+    breath.&mdash;"Wine, Joseph?" aloud, as his recognition of her
+    good offices.</p>
+
+    <p>"And I like coming alone best, thanks," said Adelaide with
+    unruffled calmness. "Leam has never been my friend; indeed, I
+    do not like her, and you all," to the sisters, with a gracious
+    smile and prettily, "have always been my favorite
+    companions."</p>
+
+    <p>"Still, she is very lonely, and it would be kind. Besides,
+    she is good to look at," said Edgar.</p>
+
+    <p>"Do you think so?" said Mrs. Harrowby with crisp lips and
+    ill-concealed displeasure.</p>
+
+    <p>"Do I think so, mother? I should have no eyes else. She is
+    superb. I have never seen such a face. She is the most
+    beautiful creature I have ever known of any nation."</p>
+
+    <p>Adelaide's delicate pink cheeks turned pale, and then they
+    flushed a brilliant rose as she laid down her spoon and left
+    her jelly untasted.</p>
+
+    <p>There were no trials of skill at chess, no duets, no solos,
+    this evening. After dinner Edgar went to his own room and sat
+    there smoking. He felt revolted at the idea of spending two or
+    three hours with what he irreverently called "a lot of dull
+    women," and preferred his own thoughts to their talk. He
+    sauntered into the drawing-room about ten minutes before
+    Adelaide had to leave, apologizing for his absence on the man's
+    easy plea <span class="pagenum"><a name="page221"
+       id="page221"></a>[pg 221]</span> of "business," saying he
+       was sorry to have missed her charming society, and he hoped
+       they should see her there soon again, and so on&mdash;all in
+       the proper voice and manner, but with a certain ring of
+       insincerity in the tones which Adelaide detected, if the
+       others did not. But she accepted his excuses with the most
+       admirable tact, smiling to the sisters as she said, "Oh, we
+       have been very happy, Josephine, have we not? though," with
+       a nice admission of Edgar's claims, not too broadly stated
+       nor too warmly allowed, "of course it would have been very
+       pleasant if you could have come in too."</p>
+
+    <p>"It has been my loss," said Edgar.</p>
+
+    <p>She smiled "Yes" by eyes, lips and turn of her graceful
+    head. In speech she answered, "Of that, of course, you are the
+    best judge for yourself; but none of us here feel as some girls
+    do, lost without gentlemen to amuse them. We can get on very
+    well by ourselves. Cannot we, Joseph?"</p>
+
+    <p>And Josephine said gallantly, "Yes," but her heart was more
+    rueful than her voice, and she thought that some gentlemen were
+    very nice, and that Sebastian Dundas especially made the dull
+    time pass pleasantly.</p>
+
+    <h3>CHAPTER XXIV.</h3>
+
+    <h3>THE CHILD FINA.</h3>
+
+    <p>Nothing surprised the North Astonians more than what it was
+    the fashion to call "the admirable manner in which Leam behaved
+    to the child Fina." If the world which praised her had known
+    all the compelling circumstances, would it have called her
+    admirable then? Yet beyond those natural promptings of remorse
+    which forced her to do the best she could for the child whom
+    her fatal crime had rendered motherless, Leam did honestly
+    behave well, if this means doing irksome things without
+    complaint and sacrificing self to a sense of right. And this
+    was all the more praiseworthy in that sympathy of nature
+    between these two young creatures there was none, and the
+    girl's maternal instinct was not of that universal kind which
+    makes all children pleasant, whatever they may be. Hence, she
+    did nobly when she did her duty with the uncompromising
+    exactness characteristic of her; but then it was only duty, it
+    was not love.</p>
+
+    <p>How should it be love? Her tenacity and reserve were ill
+    matched with Fina's native inconstancy of purpose and childish
+    incontinence of speech; her pride of race resented her father's
+    adoption of a stranger into the penetralia of the family; and
+    to share the name she had inherited from her mother with the
+    daughter of that mother's rival seemed to her a wrong done to
+    both the living and the dead. Naturally taciturn, unjoyful, and
+    ever oppressed by that brooding consciousness of guilt hanging
+    like a cloud over her memory, formless, vague, but never
+    lifting, Fina's changeful temper and tumultuous vivacity were
+    intensely wearisome to her. Nevertheless, she was forbearing if
+    not loving, and the people said rightly when they said she was
+    admirable.</p>
+
+    <p>Her grave patience with the little one did more to open her
+    father's heart to her than did even her own wonderful beauty,
+    which gratified his paternal pride of authorship, or than her
+    efforts after docility to himself&mdash;efforts that would have
+    been creditable to any one, and that with her were heroic. For
+    Mr. Dundas, being of those clinging, clasping natures which
+    must love some one, had taken poor madame's child into his
+    affections in the wholesale manner so emphatically his own, now
+    in these first days of his new paternity seeming to live only
+    for the little Fina, and never happy but when he had her with
+    him. It was the first time that he felt he had had a child of
+    his own; and he gave her the love which would have been Leam's
+    had Pepita been less of a savage than she was, and more
+    discreet in the matter of doll-dressing.</p>
+
+    <p>The little round, fair-haired creature, with her picturesque
+    Gainsborough head and rose-red lips, pretty, pleasant, facile,
+    easily amused if easily made cross, divertible from her purpose
+    if she was but coaxed and caressed, and if the substitute
+    offered was to her liking&mdash;without
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page222"
+       id="page222"></a>[pg 222]</span> tenacity, fluid, floating
+       on the surface of things and born of their froth; loving
+       only those who ministered to her pleasure and were in sight;
+       forgetting yesterday's joys as though they had never been,
+       and her dearest the moment they were absent&mdash;a child
+       deliciously caressing because sensual by temperament and
+       instinctively diplomatic, with no latent greatness to be
+       developed as time went on and the flower set into the fruit.
+       Epitomizing the characteristics of the class of which her
+       mother had been a typical example, she was the pleasantest
+       thing of his life to a man who cared mainly to be amused,
+       and who liked with a woman's liking to be loved.</p>
+
+    <p>The strong love of children inherent in him, which had never
+    been satisfied till now, seemed now to have gathered tenfold
+    strength, and the love of the man, who had never cared for his
+    own, for this his little daughter by adoption was almost a
+    passion. If Leam could have been jealous where she did not
+    love, she would have been jealous of her father and Fina. But
+    she was not. On the contrary, it seemed to soften some of the
+    bitterness of her self-reproach, and she was glad that madame's
+    motherless child was not deserted, but had found a substitute
+    for the protection which she had taken from her; for Leam,
+    criminal, was not ignoble.</p>
+
+    <p>A few days after the meeting on the moor between Learn and
+    Edgar, Mr. Dundas drove to the Hill, carrying Fina with him.
+    Leam had a fit of shyness and refused to go: thus Sebastian had
+    the child to himself, and was not sorry to be without his elder
+    and less congenial daughter. He owned to himself that she was
+    good, very good indeed, and a great deal better than he ever
+    expected she would be; yet for all that, with her more than
+    Oriental gravity and reserve, and that look of tragedy haunting
+    her face, she was not an amusing companion, and the little one
+    was.</p>
+
+    <p>Mr. Dundas had begun to take up his old habits again with
+    the Harrowbys. He found the patient constancy of his friend
+    Josephine not a disagreeable salve for a wounded heart and
+    broken life; albeit poor dear Joseph was getting stout and
+    matronly, and took off the keen edge of courtship by a
+    willingness too manifest for wisdom. Sebastian liked to be
+    loved, but he did not like to be bored by being made overmuch
+    love to. The things are different, and most men resent the
+    latter, how much soever they desire the former.</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar was in the drawing-room when Mr. Dundas was announced.
+    He was booted and spurred, waiting his horse to be brought
+    round. "What a pretty little girl!" he said after a time. True
+    to his type, he was fond of children and animals, and children
+    and animals liked him. "Come and speak to me," he continued,
+    holding out his hand to Fina.&mdash;"Whose child is she?"
+    vaguely to the company in general.</p>
+
+    <p>"Mine," said Mr. Dundas emphatically&mdash;"my youngest
+    daughter, Fina Dundas."</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar knew what he meant. He had often heard the story from
+    his sisters, and since his return home he had had Adelaide
+    Birkett's comments thereon. He looked then with even more
+    interest on the pretty little creature in dark-blue velvet and
+    swansdown, careless, unconscious, happy, as the child of a
+    mystery and a tragedy in one.</p>
+
+    <p>"Ah!" he said sympathetically. "Come to me, little one,"
+    again, coaxingly.</p>
+
+    <p>Fina, with her finger in her mouth, went up to him half
+    shyly, half boldly, and wholly prettily. She let him take her
+    on his knee and kiss her without remonstrance. She was of the
+    kind to like being taken on knees and kissed&mdash;especially
+    by gentlemen who were strong and matronly women who were
+    soft&mdash;and she soon made friends. Not many minutes elapsed
+    before, kneeling upon his knees, she was stroking his tawny
+    beard and plaiting it in threes, pulling his long moustache,
+    playing with his watch-guard, and laughing in his face with the
+    pretty audacity of six.</p>
+
+    <p>"What a dear little puss!" cried Edgar, caressing her. "Very
+    like you, Joseph, I should think, when you were her age,
+    judging by your picture. Is she not,
+    mother?"</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page223"
+       id="page223"></a>[pg 223]</span>
+
+    <p>"They say so, but I do not see it," answered Mrs. Harrowby
+    primly.</p>
+
+    <p>She did not like to hear about this resemblance. There was
+    something in it that annoyed her intensely, she scarcely knew
+    why, and the more so because it was true.</p>
+
+    <p>"Poor madame used to say so: she saw it from the first, when
+    Fina was quite a little baby," said Josephine in a low
+    voice.</p>
+
+    <p>She was kneeling by her brother's side caressing Fina. She
+    always made love to the little girl: it was one of her methods
+    of making love to the father.</p>
+
+    <p>"Is she like her mother?" asked Edgar in the same low tones,
+    looking at the child critically.</p>
+
+    <p>"A little," answered Josephine&mdash;"not much. It is odd,
+    is it not, that she should be more like me?"</p>
+
+    <p>Just then Fina laid her fresh sweet lips against Edgar's,
+    and he kissed her with a strange thrill of tenderness.</p>
+
+    <p>"Why, Edgar, I never saw you take so to a child before,"
+    cried Mrs. Harrowby, not quite pleasantly; and on Sebastian
+    adding with his nervous little laugh, which meant the thing it
+    assumed only to play at, "I declare I shall be quite jealous,
+    Edgar, if you make love to my little girl like this." Edgar,
+    who had the Englishman's dislike to observation, save when he
+    offered himself for personal admiration, laughed too and put
+    Fina away.</p>
+
+    <p>But the child had taken a fancy to him, and could scarcely
+    be induced to leave him. She clung to his hand still, and went
+    reluctantly when her stepfather called her. It was a very
+    little matter, but men being weak in certain directions, it
+    delighted Edgar and annoyed Sebastian beyond measure.</p>
+
+    <p>"I hope your elder daughter is well," then said Edgar,
+    emphasizing the adjective, the vision of Leam as he first saw
+    her, breasting the wind, filling his eyes with a strange
+    light.</p>
+
+    <p>"Leam? Quite well, thanks. But how do you know anything
+    about her?" was Sebastian's reply.</p>
+
+    <p>"I met her yesterday on the moor, and Rover introduced us,"
+    answered Edgar laughing.</p>
+
+    <p>"How close she is!" said her father fretfully. "She never
+    told me a word about it."</p>
+
+    <p>"Perhaps she thought the incident too trifling," suggested
+    Edgar, a little chagrined.</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh no, not at all! In a place like North Aston the least
+    thing counts as an adventure; and meeting for the first time
+    one of the neighbors is not an incident to be forgotten as if
+    it were of no more value than meeting a flock of sheep."</p>
+
+    <p>Mr. Dundas spoke peevishly. To a man who liked to be amused
+    and who lived on crumbs this reserved companionship was
+    disappointing and tiresome.</p>
+
+    <p>"Leam is at home making music," said Fina disdainfully. She
+    had caught the displeased accent of her adopted father, and
+    echoed it.</p>
+
+    <p>"Does she make much music?" asked Edgar with his hand under
+    her chin, turning up her face.</p>
+
+    <p>The child shrugged her little shoulders. "She makes a
+    noise," she said; and those who heard her laughed.</p>
+
+    <p>"That is not a very polite way of putting it," said Edgar a
+    little gravely.</p>
+
+    <p>"No," said Josephine.</p>
+
+    <p>"You should speak nicely of your sister, my little one," put
+    in Sebastian.</p>
+
+    <p>Fina looked up into his face reproachfully. "You called it a
+    noise yourself, papa," she said, pouting. "You made her leave
+    off yesterday as soon as you came in, because you said she made
+    your head ache with her noise, and set your
+    teeth&mdash;something, I don't know what."</p>
+
+    <p>"Did I, dear?" he repeated carelessly. "Well, we need not
+    discuss the subject. I dare say it amuses her to make music, as
+    you call it, and so we need say no more about it."</p>
+
+    <p>"But you did say it was a noise," persisted Fina, climbing
+    on to his knees and putting her arms round his neck. "And I
+    think it a noise too."</p>
+
+    <p>"Poor Leam's music cannot be very first-rate," remarked
+    Maria, who was a proficient and played almost as well as a
+    "professional." "Four years ago she did not know her notes, and
+    four years' <span class="pagenum"><a name="page224"
+       id="page224"></a>[pg 224]</span> practice cannot be expected
+       to make a perfect pianiste."</p>
+
+    <p>"But a person may play very sweetly and yet not be what you
+    call perfect," said Edgar.</p>
+
+    <p>"Do you think so?" Maria answered with a frosty smile. "I do
+    not." Of what use to have toiled for thirty years early and
+    late at scales and thorough-bass if a stupid girl like Leam
+    could be allowed to play sweetly after four years' desultory
+    practice? "Adelaide Birkett, if you will, plays well," she
+    added; "but Leam, poor child! how should she?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I hope I shall have an opportunity of judging for myself,"
+    said Edgar with his company manner.&mdash;"When will you come
+    and dine here, Dundas?&mdash;to-morrow? You and your elder
+    daughter: we shall be very glad to see you."</p>
+
+    <p>He looked to his mother. Mrs. Harrowby had drawn her lips
+    tight, and wore an injured air doing its best to be resigned.
+    This was Edgar's first essay in domestic mastership, and it
+    pained her, not unnaturally.</p>
+
+    <p>"Thanks," said Sebastian. "Willingly, if&mdash;" looking to
+    Mrs. Harrowby.</p>
+
+    <p>"I have no engagement, and Edgar is master now," said that
+    lady.</p>
+
+    <p>"And mind that Leam comes too," said Josephine, sharing her
+    favorite brother's action by design.</p>
+
+    <p>"And me," cried Fina.</p>
+
+    <p>Whereat they all laughed, which made Fina cry, to be
+    consoled only by some sweetmeats which Josephine found in her
+    work-basket.</p>
+
+    <p>It was agreed, then, that the next day Leam and her father
+    should dine at the Hill.</p>
+
+    <p>"Only ourselves," Edgar said, wanting the excuse of her
+    "being the only lady" to devote himself to Leam. It was strange
+    that he should be so anxious to see her nearer, and in company
+    with his sisters and mother; for after all, why should he? What
+    was she to him, either near or afar off, alone or in the inner
+    circle of his family?</p>
+
+    <p>But when the next day came Mr. Dundas appeared alone. Leam
+    had been taken with a fit of shyness, pride&mdash;who shall
+    say?&mdash;and refused to accept her share of the invitation.
+    Her father made the stereotyped excuse of "headache;" but
+    headaches occur too opportunely to be always real, and Leam's
+    to-night was set down to the fancy side of the account, and not
+    believed in by the hearers any more than by the bearer.</p>
+
+    <p>Edgar raged against her in his heart, and decided that she
+    was not worth a second thought, while the ladies said in an
+    undertone from each to each, "How rude!" Maria adding, "How
+    like Leam!" the chain of condemnation receiving no break till
+    it came to Josephine, whose patient soul refrained from wrath,
+    and gave as her link, "Poor Leam! perhaps she is shy or has
+    really a headache."</p>
+
+    <p>In spite of his decision that she was not worth a second
+    thought, the impression which Leam had made on Edgar deepened
+    with his disappointment, and he became restless and unpleasant
+    in his temper, casting about for means whereby he might see her
+    again. He cast about in vain. This fit of shyness, pride,
+    reluctance&mdash;who knows what?&mdash;continued with Leam for
+    many days after this. If she went out at all, she went where
+    she knew she should not be met; and if Edgar called at Ford
+    House, she was not to be found. She mainly devoted herself to
+    Fina and some books lent her by Alick, and kept the house with
+    strange persistency. Perhaps this was because the weather was
+    bad, for Leam, who could bear wind and frost and noonday sun,
+    could not bear wet. When it rained she shut herself up in her
+    own room, and pitied herself for the ungenial skies as she had
+    pitied herself for some other things before now.</p>
+
+    <p>Sitting thus reading one miserably dark, cold, misty day,
+    the child Fina came in to her with her lessons, which she
+    repeated well. They were very small and insignificant little
+    lessons, for Leam had a fellow-feeling for the troubles of
+    ignorance, and laid but a light hand on the frothy mind inside
+    that curly head. When they were finished the little one said
+    coaxingly, "Now play with me, Leam! You never play with
+    me."</p>
+
+    <p>"What can I do, Fina?" poor Leam
+    replied.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page225"
+       id="page225"></a>[pg 225]</span>
+
+    <p>She had never learnt to play when she was a child: she had
+    never built towers and towns, made railway trains and coaches
+    with the sofa and chairs, played at giants through the dark
+    passages and screamed when she was caught. She had only sat
+    still when mamma was asleep, or when she was awake played on
+    the zambomba, or listened to her when she told her of the
+    things of Spain, and made up stories with her dolls that were
+    less edifying than those of Mother Bunch. She could scarcely,
+    however, unpack that old box full of waxen puppets, with the
+    one dressed in scarlet and black, with fishbone horns and a
+    worsted tail, and a queer clumped kind of foot made of folds of
+    leather, cleft in the middle, that used to go by the name of
+    "El se�or papa." What could she do?</p>
+
+    <p>"Shall I tell you a story?" she then said in a mild fit of
+    desperation, for story-telling was as little in her way as
+    anything else.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, yes, tell me a story!" Fina clapped her chubby hands
+    together and climbed up into Leam's lap.</p>
+
+    <p>"What shall it be about&mdash;bears or tigers, or what?"
+    asked Leam dutifully.</p>
+
+    <p>"Tell me about mamma, my own mamma, not Aunty Birkett," said
+    Fina.</p>
+
+    <p>Leam shuddered from head to foot. This was the first time
+    the little girl had mentioned her mother's name to her. Indeed,
+    she did not know that she had ever heard of her at
+    all&mdash;ever known that she had had a mother; but the
+    servants had talked, and the child's curiosity was aroused. The
+    dead mother is as much a matter of wondering inquiry as the
+    angels and the stars; and Fina's imagination was beginning to
+    bestir itself on the mysteries of childish life.</p>
+
+    <p>"I have nothing to tell you about her," said Leam,
+    controlling herself, though she still shivered.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, you have&mdash;everything," insisted Fina. "Was mamma
+    pretty?" playing with a corner of her sister's ribbon.</p>
+
+    <p>"People said so," answered Leam.</p>
+
+    <p>"As pretty as Cousin Addy?" she asked.</p>
+
+    <p>"About," said Leam, who thought neither supreme.</p>
+
+    <p>"Prettier than you?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I don't know: how can I tell?" she answered a little
+    impatiently.</p>
+
+    <p>The mother's blood that ran in her, the mother's mould in
+    which she had been formed, forbade her to put herself below
+    madame in anything; but, as she was neither vain nor conscious,
+    she found Fina's question difficult to answer.</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh," cried Fina, in a tone of disappointment, "then she
+    could not have been very pretty."</p>
+
+    <p>"I dare say she was, but I do not know," returned Leam.</p>
+
+    <p>"And she died?" continued Fina, yawning in a childishly
+    indifferent manner.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes, she died."</p>
+
+    <p>"Why? Who killed her? Did papa?" asked Fina.</p>
+
+    <p>Leam's face was very white: "No, not papa."</p>
+
+    <p>"Did God?"</p>
+
+    <p>"I cannot tell you, Fina," said Leam, to whom falsehoods
+    were abhorrent and the truth impossible.</p>
+
+    <p>"Did you?" persisted Fina with childish obstinacy.</p>
+
+    <p>"Now go," said Leam, putting her off her lap and rising from
+    her chair in strange disorder. "You are troublesome and ask too
+    many questions."</p>
+
+    <p>Fina began to cry loudly, and Mr. Dundas, from his library
+    below, heard her. He came up stairs with his fussy, restless
+    kindness, and opened the door of the room where his two
+    daughters, of nature and by adoption, were.</p>
+
+    <p>"Heyday! what's all this about?" he cried. "What's the
+    matter, my little Fina? what are you crying for? Tut, tut! you
+    should not cry like this, darling; and, Leam," severely, "you
+    should really keep the child better amused and happy. She is as
+    good as gold with me: with you there is always something
+    wrong."</p>
+
+    <p>Fina ran into his arms sobbing. "Leam is cross," she said.
+    "She will not tell me who killed mamma."</p>
+
+    <p>The man's ruddy face, reddened and roughened with travel,
+    grew white and pitiful. "God took her away, my darling," he
+    said with a sob. "She was too
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page226"
+       id="page226"></a>[pg 226]</span> good for me, and He took
+       her to live with the angels in heaven,"</p>
+
+    <p>"And Leam's mamma? Is she in heaven too with the angels?"
+    asked Fina, opening her eyes wide through their tears,</p>
+
+    <p>"I hope so," Sebastian answered in an altered voice.</p>
+
+    <p>Leam covered her face in her hands; then lifting it up, she
+    said imploringly, "Papa, do not talk to her of mamma. It is
+    sacrilege."</p>
+
+    <p>"I agree with you, Leam," said Mr, Dundas in a steady voice.
+    "We meet at the same point, but perhaps by different
+    methods."</p>
+
+    <p class="center">[TO BE CONTINUED.]</p>
+
+    <h2>LETTERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA</h2>
+
+    <h3>BY LADY BARKER.</h3>
+
+    <blockquote>
+        <p class="author">CAPE TOWN, October 16, 1875.</p>
+
+        <p>Safe, safe at last, after twenty-four days of nothing
+        but sea and sky, of white-crested waves&mdash;which made no
+        secret of their intention of coming on board whenever they
+        could or of tossing the good ship Edinburgh Castle hither
+        and thither like a child's plaything&mdash;and of more
+        deceitful sluggish rolling billows, looking tolerably calm
+        to the unseafaring eye, but containing a vast amount of
+        heaving power beneath their slow, undulating water-hills
+        and valleys. Sometimes sky and sea have been steeped in
+        dazzling haze of golden glare, sometimes brightened to blue
+        of a sapphire depth. Again, a sudden change of wind has
+        driven up serried clouds from the south and east, and all
+        has been gray and cold and restful to eyes wearied with
+        radiance and glitter of sun and sparkling water.</p>
+
+        <p>Never has there been such exceptional weather, although
+        the weather of my acquaintance invariably <i>is</i>
+        exceptional. No sooner had the outlines of Madeira melted
+        and blended into the soft darkness of a summer night than
+        we appeared to sail straight into tropic heat and a
+        sluggish vapor, brooding on the water like steam from a
+        giant geyser. This simmering, oily, exhausting temperature
+        carried us close to the line. "What is before us," we asked
+        each other languidly, "if it be hotter than this? How can
+        mortal man, woman, still less child, endure existence?"
+        Vain alarms! Yet another shift of the light wind, another
+        degree passed, and we are all shivering in winter wraps.
+        The line was crossed in greatcoats and shawls, and the only
+        people whose complexion did not resemble a purple plum were
+        those lucky ones who had strength of mind and steadiness of
+        body to lurch up and down the deck all day enjoying a
+        strange method of movement which they called walking.</p>
+
+        <p>The exceptional weather pursued us right into the very
+        dock. Table Mountain ought to be seen&mdash;and very often
+        is seen&mdash;seventy miles away. I am told it looks a fine
+        bold bluff at that distance, Yesterday we had blown off our
+        last pound of steam and were safe under its lee before we
+        could tell there was a mountain there at all, still less an
+        almost perpendicular cliff more than three thousand feet
+        high. Robben Island looked like a dun-colored hillock as we
+        shot past it within a short distance, and a more forlorn
+        and discouraging islet I don't think I have ever beheld.
+        When I expressed something of this impression to a cheery
+        fellow-voyager, he could only urge in its defence that
+        there were a great many rabbits on it. If he had thrown the
+        lighthouse into the bargain, I think he would have summed
+        up all its attractive features. Unless Langalibalele is of
+        a singularly unimpressionable nature, he must have found
+        his sojourn on it somewhat monotonous, but he always says
+        he was very comfortable
+        there.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page227"
+           id="page227"></a>[pg 227]</span>
+
+        <p>And now for the land. We are close alongside of a wharf,
+        and still a capital and faithful copy of a Scotch mist
+        wraps houses, trees and sloping uplands in a fibry
+        fantastic veil, and the cold drizzle seems to curdle the
+        spirits and energies of the few listless Malays and
+        half-caste boys and men who are lounging about. Here come
+        hansom cabs rattling up one after the other, all with black
+        drivers in gay and fantastic head and shoulder gear; but
+        their hearts seem precisely as the hearts of their London
+        brethren, and they single out new-comers at a glance, and
+        shout offers to drive them a hundred yards or so for
+        exorbitant sums, or yell laudatory recommendations of
+        sundry hotels. You must bear in mind that in a colony every
+        pot-house is a hotel, and generally rejoices in a name much
+        too imposing to fit across its frontage. These hansoms are
+        all painted white with the name of some ship in bright
+        letters on the side, and are a great deal cleaner, roomier
+        and more comfortable than their London "forbears." The
+        horses are small and shabby, but rattle along at a good
+        pace; and soon each cab has its load of happy home-comers
+        and swings rapidly away to make room for fresh arrivals
+        hurrying up for fares. Hospitable suggestions come pouring
+        in, and it is as though it were altogether a new experience
+        when one steps cautiously on the land, half expecting it to
+        dip away playfully from under one's feet. A little boy puts
+        my thoughts into words when he exclaims, "How steady the
+        ground is!" and becomes a still more faithful interpreter
+        of a wave-worn voyager's sensations when, a couple of hours
+        later, he demands permission to get <i>out</i> of his
+        delicious little white bed that he may have the pleasure of
+        getting <i>into</i> it again. The evening is cold and raw
+        and the new picture is all blurred and soft and indistinct,
+        and nothing seems plain except the kindly grace of our
+        welcome and the never-before-sufficiently-appreciated
+        delights of space and silence.</p>
+
+        <p class="author">OCTOBER 17.</p>
+
+        <p>How pleasant is the process familiarly known as "looking
+        about one," particularly when performed under exceptionally
+        favorable circumstances! A long and happy day commenced
+        with a stroll through the botanic gardens, parallel with
+        which runs, on one side, a splendid oak avenue just now in
+        all the vivid freshness of its young spring leaves. The
+        gardens are beautifully kept, and are valuable as affording
+        a sort of experimental nursery in which new plants and
+        trees can be brought up on trial and their adaptability to
+        the soil and climate ascertained. For instance, the first
+        thing that caught my eye was the gigantic trunk of an
+        Australian blue-gum tree, which had attained to a girth and
+        height not often seen in its own land. The flora of the
+        Cape Colony is exceptionally varied and beautiful, but one
+        peculiarity incidentally alluded to by my charming guide
+        struck me as very noticeable. It is that in this dry
+        climate and porous soil all the efforts of uncultivated
+        nature are devoted to the <i>stems</i> of the vegetation:
+        on their sap-retaining power depends the life of the plant,
+        so blossom and leaf, though exquisitely indicated, are
+        fragile and incomplete compared to the solidity and bulbous
+        appearance of the stalk. Everything is sacrificed to the
+        practical principle of keeping life together, and it is not
+        until these stout-stemmed plants are cultivated and duly
+        sheltered and watered, and can grow, as it were, with
+        confidence, that they are able to do justice to the
+        inherent beauty of penciled petal and veined leaf. Then the
+        stem contracts to ordinary dimensions, and leaf and blossom
+        expand into things which may well be a joy to the
+        botanist's eye. A thousand times during that shady saunter
+        did I envy my companions their scientific acquaintance with
+        the beautiful green things of earth, and that intimate
+        knowledge of a subject which enhances one's appreciation of
+        its charms as much as bringing a lamp into a darkened
+        picture-gallery. There are the treasures of form and color,
+        but from ignorant eyes more than half their charms and
+        wonders are held back.</p>
+
+        <p>A few steps beyond the garden stand the library and
+        natural history museum. The former is truly a credit to the
+        Colony. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page228"
+           id="page228"></a>[pg 228]</span> Spacious, handsome,
+           rich in literary treasures, It would bear comparison
+           with similar institutions in far older and wealthier
+           places. But I have often noticed in colonies how much
+           importance is attached to the possession of a good
+           public library, and how fond, as a rule, colonists are
+           of books. In a new settlement other shops may be ill
+           supplied, but there is always a good bookseller's, and
+           all books are to be bought there at pretty nearly the
+           same prices as in England. Here each volume costs
+           precisely the same as it would in London, and it would
+           puzzle ever so greedy a reader to name a book which
+           would not be instantly handed to him.</p>
+
+        <p>The museum is well worth a visit of many more hours than
+        we could afford minutes, and, as might be expected,
+        contains numerous specimens of the <i>Bok</i> family, whose
+        tapering horns and slender legs are to be seen at every
+        turn of one's head. Models are there also of the largest
+        diamonds, and especially well copied is the famous "Star of
+        South Africa," a magnificent brilliant of purest water,
+        sold here originally for something like twelve thousand
+        pounds, and resold for double that sum three or four years
+        back. In these few hours I perceive, or think I perceive, a
+        certain soreness, if one may use the word, on the part of
+        the Cape Colonists about the unappreciativeness of the
+        English public toward their produce and possessions. For
+        Instance, an enormous quantity of wine is annually
+        exported, which reaches London by a devious route and
+        fetches a high price, as it is fairly entitled to do from
+        its excellence. If that same wine were sent direct to a
+        London merchant and boldly sold as Cape wine, it is said
+        that the profit on it would be a very different affair. The
+        same prejudice exists against Cape diamonds. Of course, as
+        in other things, a large proportion of inferior stones are
+        forced into the market and serve to give the diamonds that
+        bad name which we all know is so fatal to a dog. But it is
+        only necessary to pretend that a really fine Cape diamond
+        has come from Brazil to ensure its fetching a handsome
+        price, and in that way even jewelers themselves have been
+        known to buy and give a good round sum, too, for stones
+        they would otherwise have looked upon with suspicion.
+        Already I have seen a straw-colored diamond from "Du Zoit's
+        pan" in the diamond-fields cut in Amsterdam and set in
+        London, which could hold its own for purity, radiance and
+        color against any other stone of the same rare tint,
+        without fear or favor; but of course such gems are not
+        common, and fairly good diamonds cost as much here as in
+        any other part of the world.</p>
+
+        <p>The light morning mists from that dampness of yesterday
+        have rolled gradually away as the beautiful sunshine dried
+        the atmosphere, and by midday the table-cloth, as the
+        colonists affectionately call the white, fleece-like vapor
+        which so often rests on their pet mountain, has been folded
+        up and laid aside in Cloudland for future use. I don't know
+        what picture other people may have made to their own minds
+        of the shape and size of Table Mountain, but it was quite a
+        surprise and the least little bit in the world of a
+        disappointment to me to find that it cuts the sky (and what
+        a beautiful sky it is!) with a perfectly straight and level
+        line. A gentle, undulating foreground broken into ravines,
+        where patches of green <i>velts</i> or fields, clumps of
+        trees and early settlers' houses nestle cosily down, guides
+        the eye half-way up the mountain. There the rounder forms
+        abruptly cease, and great granite cliffs rise, bare and
+        straight, up to the level line stretching ever so far
+        along. "It is so characteristic," and "You grow to be so
+        fond of that mountain," are observations I have heard made
+        in reply to the carping criticisms of travelers, and
+        already I begin to understand the meaning of the phrases.
+        But you need to see the mountain from various points of
+        view and under different influences of sun and cloud before
+        you can take in its striking and peculiar charms.</p>
+
+        <p>On each side of the straight line which is emphatically
+        Table Mountain, but actually forming part of it, is a bold
+        headland of the shape one is usually accustomed to in
+        mountains. The "Devil's Peak" is uncompromising enough for
+        <span class="pagenum"><a name="page229"
+           id="page229"></a>[pg 229]</span> any one's taste, whilst
+           the "Lion's Head" charms the eye by its bluff form and
+           deep purple fissures. These grand promontories are not,
+           however, half so beloved by Cape Colonists as their own
+           Table Mountain, and it is curious and amusing to notice
+           how the influence of this odd straight ridge, ever
+           before their eyes, has unconsciously guided and
+           influenced their architectural tastes. All the roofs of
+           the houses are straight&mdash;straight as the mountain;
+           a gable is almost unknown, and even the few steeples are
+           dwarfed to an imperceptible departure from the
+           prevailing straight line. The very trees which shade the
+           Parade-ground and border the road in places have their
+           tops blown absolutely straight and flat, as though giant
+           shears had trimmed them; but I must confess, in spite of
+           a natural anxiety to carry out my theory, that the
+           violent "sou'-easters" are the "straighteners" in their
+           case.</p>
+
+        <p>Cape Town is so straggling that it is difficult to form
+        any idea of its real size, but the low houses are neat and
+        the streets are well kept and look quaint and lively enough
+        to my new eyes this morning. There are plenty of people
+        moving about with a sociable, business-like air; lots of
+        different shades of black and brown Malays, with pointed
+        hats on the men's heads: the women encircle their dusky,
+        smiling faces with a gay cotton handkerchief and throw
+        another of a still brighter hue over their shoulders. When
+        you add to this that they wear a full, flowing,
+        stiffly-starched cotton gown of a third bright color, you
+        can perhaps form some idea of how they enliven the streets.
+        Swarms of children everywhere, romping and laughing and
+        showing their white teeth in broadest of grins. The white
+        children strike me at once as looking marvelously
+        well&mdash;such chubby cheeks, such sturdy fat
+        legs&mdash;and all, black or white, with that amazing air
+        of independence peculiar to baby-colonists. Nobody seems to
+        mind them and nothing seems to harm them. Here are half a
+        dozen tiny boys shouting and laughing at one side of the
+        road, and half a dozen baby-girls at the other (they all
+        seem to play separately): they are all driving each other,
+        for "horses" is the one game here. By the side of a pond
+        sit two toddles of about three years old, in one garment
+        apiece and pointed hats: they are very busy with string and
+        a pin; but who is taking care of them and why don't they
+        tumble in? They are as fat as ortolans and grin at us in
+        the most friendly fashion.</p>
+
+        <p>We must remember that this chances to be the very best
+        moment of the whole year in which to see the Cape and the
+        dwellers thereat. The cold weather has left its bright
+        roses on the children's cheeks, and the winter rains
+        exceptionally having this year made every blade of grass
+        and leaf of tree to laugh and sing in freshest green. After
+        the dry, windy summer I am assured there is hardly a leaf
+        and never a blade of grass to be seen in Cape Town, and
+        only a little straggling verdure under the shelter of the
+        mountain. The great want of this place is water. No river,
+        scarcely a brook, refreshes one's eye for many and many a
+        league inward. The necessary water for the use of the town
+        is brought down by pipes from the numerous springs which
+        trickle out of the granite cliffs of Table Mountain, but
+        there is never a sufficiency to spare for watering roads or
+        grassplots. This scarcity is a double loss to residents and
+        visitors, for one misses it both for use and beauty.</p>
+
+        <p>Everybody who comes here rides or drives round the
+        "Kloof." That may be; but what I maintain is that very few
+        do it so delightfully as I did this sunny afternoon with a
+        companion who knew and loved every turn of the romantic
+        road, who could tell me the name of every bush or flower,
+        of every distant stretch of hills, and helped me to make a
+        map in my head of the stretching landscape and curving bay.
+        Ah! how delicious it was, the winding, climbing road, at
+        whose every angle a fresh fair landscape fell away from
+        beneath our feet or a shining stretch of sea, whose
+        transparent green and purple shadows broke in a fringe of
+        feathery spray at the foot of bold, rocky cliffs, or crept
+        up to a smooth expanse of silver sand in a soft curling
+        line of foam! "Kloof" means simply cleft, and
+        <span class="pagenum"><a name="page230"
+           id="page230"></a>[pg 230]</span> is the pass between the
+           Table Mountain and the Lion's Head, The road first
+           rises, rises, rises, until one seems half-way up the
+           great mountain, and the little straight&mdash;roofed
+           white houses, the green velts or fields and the parallel
+           lines of the vineyards have sunk below one's feet far,
+           far away. The mountain gains in grandeur as one
+           approaches it, for the undulating spurs which run from
+           it down to the sea-shore take away from the height
+           looking upward. But when these are left beneath, the
+           perpendicular Walls of granite, rising sheer and
+           straight up to the bold sky-line, and the rugged,
+           massive strength of the buttress-like cliffs, begin to
+           gain something of their true value to the stranger's
+           eye. The most beautiful part of the road, however, to my
+           taste, is the descent, when the shining expanse of
+           Camp's Bay lies shimmering in the warm afternoon haze
+           with a thousand lights and shadows from cloud and cliff
+           touching and passing over the crisp water-surface. By
+           many a steep zigzag we round the Lion's Head, and drop
+           once more on a level road running parallel to the
+           sea-shore, and so home in the balmy and yet bracing
+           twilight. The midday sun is hot and scorching even at
+           this time of year, but it is always cool in the shade,
+           and no sooner do the afternoon shadows grow to any
+           length than the air freshens into sharpness, and by
+           sundown one is glad of a good warm shawl.</p>
+
+        <p class="author">OCTOBER 18.</p>
+
+        <p>Another bright, ideal day, and the morning passed in a
+        delicious flower-filled room looking over old books and
+        records and listening to odd, quaint little scraps from the
+        old Dutch records. But directly after luncheon (and how
+        hungry we all are, and how delicious everything tastes on
+        shore!) the open break with four capital horses comes to
+        the door, and we start for a long, lovely drive. Half a
+        mile or so takes us out on a flat red road with Table
+        Mountain rising straight up before it, but on the left
+        stretches away a most enchanting panorama. It is all so
+        soft in coloring and tone, distinct and yet not hard, and
+        exquisitely beautiful!</p>
+
+        <p>The Blue-Berg range of mountains stretch beyond the
+        great bay, which, unless a "sou'-easter" is tearing over
+        it, lies glowing in tranquil richness. This afternoon it is
+        colored like an Italian lake. Here are lines of
+        chrysoprase, green-fringed, white with little waves, and
+        beyond lie dark, translucent, purple depths, which change
+        with every passing cloud. Beyond these amethystic shoals
+        again stretches the deep blue water, and again beyond, and
+        bluer still, rise the five ranges of "Hottentots' Holland,"
+        which encircle and complete the landscape, bringing the eye
+        round again to the nearer cliffs of the Devil's Peak. When
+        the Dutch came here some two hundred years ago, they seized
+        upon this part of the coast and called it Holland, driving
+        the Hottentots beyond the neighboring range and telling
+        them that was to be their Holland&mdash;a name it keeps to
+        this day. Their consciences must have troubled them after
+        this arbitrary division of the soil, for up the highest
+        accessible spurs of their own mountain they took the
+        trouble to build several queer little square houses called
+        "block-houses," from which they could keep a sharp look-out
+        for foes coming over the hills from Hottentots' Holland.
+        The foes never came, however, and the roofs and walls of
+        the block-houses have gradually tumbled in, and the
+        gun-carriages&mdash;for they managed to drag heavy ordnance
+        up the steep hill-side&mdash;have rotted away, whilst the
+        old-fashioned cannon lie, grim and rusty, amid a tangled
+        profusion of wild geranium, heath and lilies, I scrambled
+        up to one of the nearest block-houses, and found the date
+        on the dismounted gun to be more than a hundred years old.
+        The view was beautiful and the air fresh and fragrant with
+        scent of flowers.</p>
+
+        <p>But to return to our drive. I could gaze and gaze for
+        ever at this lovely panorama, but am told this is the
+        ugliest part of the road. The road itself is certainly not
+        pretty just here, and is cloudy with a fine red dust, but
+        this view of sea and distant hills is enchanting. Soon we
+        get under the lee of the great mountain, and then its
+        sheltering arms show their protective power; for splendid
+        oak <span class="pagenum"><a name="page231"
+           id="page231"></a>[pg 231]</span> avenues begin to border
+           the road all the way, and miniature forests of
+           straight-stemmed pines and shimmering belts of the
+           ghostly silver tree run up all the mountain-clefts. Stem
+           and leaf of the silver tree are all of purest white; and
+           when one gets a gleam of sunlight on a distant patch of
+           these trees, the effect is quite indescribable,
+           contrasting, as they do, with green of field and
+           vineyard. The vines all about here and towards
+           Constantia, thirteen miles off, are dwarf-plants, and
+           only grow to the height of gooseberry-bushes. It is a
+           particular species, which is found to answer best as
+           requiring less labor to train and cultivate, and is less
+           likely to be blown out of the ground by the violent
+           "sou'-easters" which come sweeping over the mountain.
+           These gales are evidently the greatest annoyance which
+           Cape Colonists have to endure; and although everybody
+           kindly suggests that I <i>ought</i> to see one, just to
+           understand what it is like, I am profoundly thankful
+           that I only know it from their description and my own
+           distinct recollection of the New Zealand "nor'-westers."
+           Those were hot winds, scorching and curling up
+           everything, whereas this is rather a cold breeze,
+           although it blows chiefly in summer. It whirls along
+           clouds of dust from the red clay roads and fields which
+           penetrates and clings to everything in the most
+           extraordinary manner. All along the road the stems and
+           lower branches of the trees are dyed a deep brick-dust
+           color, and I hear moving and pathetic stories of how it
+           ruins clothes, not only utterly spoiling black silk
+           dresses, but staining white petticoats and children's
+           frocks and pinafores with a border of color exactly like
+           the ruddle with which sheep are branded. Especially is
+           it the terror of sailors, rendering the navigation along
+           the coast dangerous and difficult; for it blends land
+           and water into one indistinct whirl of vaporous cloud,
+           confusing and blurring everything until one cannot
+           distinguish shore from sea.</p>
+
+        <p>The vineyards of Constantia originally took their pretty
+        name from the fair daughter of one of the early Dutch
+        governors, but now it has grown into a generic word, and
+        you see "Cloete's Constantia," "Von Reybeck Constantia,"
+        written upon great stone gateways leading by long avenues
+        into the various vine-growing plantations. It was to the
+        former of these constantias, which was also the farthest
+        off, that we were bound that pleasant summer afternoon, and
+        from the time we got out of the carriage until the moment
+        we re-entered it&mdash;all too soon, but it is a long drive
+        back in the short cold twilight&mdash;I felt as though I
+        had stepped through a magic portal into the scene of one of
+        Washington Irving's stories. It was all so simple and
+        homely, so quaint and so inexpressibly picturesque. The
+        house had stood there for a couple of hundred years, and
+        looks as though it might last for ever, with its air of
+        cool, leisurely repose and comfort and strength.</p>
+
+        <p>In the flagged hall stands a huge stalactite some ten
+        feet high, brought a hundred years ago from caves far away
+        in the distant ranges. It is shaped something like a
+        Malay's hat, only the peak tapers to a point about eight
+        feet high. The drawing-room&mdash;though it seems a
+        profanation to call that venerable stately room by so
+        flippant and modern a name&mdash;is large, ceiled with
+        great beams of cedar, and lighted by lofty windows, which
+        must contain many scores of small panes of glass. There
+        were treasures of rarest old china and delfware, and
+        curious old carved stands for fragile dishes. A wealth of
+        swinging-baskets of flowers and ferns and bright girl-faces
+        lighted up the solemn, shady old room, in which we must not
+        linger, for there is much to see outside. First to the
+        cellar, as it is called, though it is far from being under
+        ground, and is, in fact, a spacious stone building with an
+        elaborately-carved pediment. Here are rows and rows of
+        giant casks, stretching on either hand into avenues in the
+        black distance, but these are mere children in the nursery,
+        compared to those we are going to see. First we must pause
+        in a middle room full of quaintest odds and
+        ends&mdash;crossbows, long whips of hippopotamus hide,
+        strange rusty old swords and firearms&mdash;to look at a
+        map of South Africa drawn somewhere
+        <span class="pagenum"><a name="page232"
+           id="page232"></a>[pg 232]</span> about 1640. It hangs on
+           the wall and is hardly to be touched, for the paint and
+           varnish crack and peel off at a breath. It is a marvel
+           of accurate geographical knowledge, and is far better
+           filled in than the maps of yesterday. All poor
+           Livingstone's great geographical discoveries are marked
+           on it as being&mdash;perhaps only from
+           description&mdash;known or guessed at all that long time
+           ago. It was found impossible to photograph it on account
+           of the dark shade which age has laid over the original
+           yellow varnish, but a careful tracing has been made and,
+           I believe, sent home to the Geographical Society. It is
+           in the long corridor beyond this that the "stuck-vats"
+           live&mdash;puncheons which hold easily some thousand
+           gallons or so, and are of a solemn rotundity calculated
+           to strike awe into the beholder's heart. Here is white
+           constantia, red constantia, young constantia,
+           middle-aged constantia, and constantia so old as to be a
+           liqueur almost beyond price. When it has been kept all
+           these years, the sweetness by which it is distinguished
+           becomes so absorbed and blended as to be hardly
+           perceptible.</p>
+
+        <p>Presently one of the party throws a door suddenly open,
+        and, behold, we are standing right over a wild wooded glen
+        with a streamlet running through it, and black washerwomen
+        beating heaps of white clothes on the strips of shingle.
+        Turtle-doves are cooing, and one might almost fancy one was
+        back again on the wild Scotch west coast, until some one
+        else says calmly, "Look at the ostriches!" Here they come,
+        with a sort of dancing step, twisting their long necks and
+        snake-like heads from side to side in search of a tempting
+        pebble or trifle of hardware. Their wings are slightly
+        raised, and the long fringe of white feathers rustles
+        softly as they trot easily and gracefully past us. They are
+        young male birds, and in a few months more their plumage,
+        which now resembles that of a turkey-cock, will be jet
+        black, except the wing-feathers. A few drops of rain are
+        falling, so we hurry back to where the carriage is standing
+        under some splendid oak trees, swallow a sort of
+        stirrup-cup of delicious hot tea, and so home again as fast
+        as we can go.</p>
+
+        <p class="author">OCTOBER 19.</p>
+
+        <p>It is decided that I must take a drive in a Cape cart;
+        so directly after breakfast a smart workman-like-looking
+        vehicle, drawn by a pair of well-bred iron-gray cobs,
+        dashes up under the portico. There are capital horses here,
+        but they fetch a good price, and such a pair as these would
+        easily find purchasers at one hundred and fifty pounds. The
+        cart itself is very trim and smart, with a framework sort
+        of head, which falls back at pleasure, and it holds four
+        people easily. It is a capital vehicle, light and strong
+        and uncommonly comfortable, but I am warned not to imagine
+        that all Cape carts are as easy as this one. Away we go at
+        a fine pace through the delicious sparkling morning
+        sunshine and crisp air, soon turning off the red high-road
+        into a sandy, marshy flat with a sort of brackish
+        back-water standing in pools here and there. We are going
+        to call on Langalibalele, and his son, Malambuli, who are
+        located at Uitvlugt on the Cape downs, about four miles
+        from the town. It is a sort of farm-residence; and
+        considering that the chief has hitherto lived in a reed
+        hut, he is not badly off, for he has plenty of room out of
+        doors as well as a good house over his head. We bump over
+        some strange and rough bits of sandy road and climb up and
+        down steep banks in a manner seldom done on wheels. There
+        is a wealth of lovely flowers blooming around, but I can't
+        help fixing my eyes on the pole of the cart, which is
+        sometimes sticking straight up in the air, its silver hook
+        shining merrily in the sun, or else it has disappeared
+        altogether, and I can only see the horses' haunches. That
+        is when we are going <i>down</i> hill, and I think it is a
+        more terrible sensation than when we are playfully
+        scrambling up some sandy hillock as a cat might.</p>
+
+        <p>Here is the location at last, thank Heaven! and there is
+        Langalibalele sitting in the verandah stoep (pronounced
+        "stoup") on his haunches on a brick. He looks as
+        comfortable as if he were in an arm-chair, but it must be a
+        difficult thing to do if you think seriously of it. The
+        etiquette seems to be to take
+        <span class="pagenum"><a name="page233"
+           id="page233"></a>[pg 233]</span> no notice of him as we
+           pass into the parlor, where we present our pass and the
+           people in authority satisfy themselves that we are quite
+           in rule. Then the old chief walks quietly in, takes off
+           his soft felt hat and sits himself down in a Windsor
+           arm-chair with grave deliberation. He is uncommonly
+           ugly; but when one remembers that he is nearly seventy
+           years of age, it is astonishing to see how young he
+           looks. Langalibalele is not a true Kafir at all: he is a
+           Fingor, a half-caste tribe contemptuously christened by
+           the Kafirs "dogs." His wool grows in distinct and
+           separate clumps like hassocks of grass all over his
+           head. He is a large and powerful man and looks the
+           picture of sleek contentment, as well he may. Only one
+           of his sons, a good-natured, fine young man, black as
+           ebony, is with him, and the chief's one expressed
+           grievance is that none of his wives will come to him. In
+           vain he sends commands and entreaties to these dusky
+           ladies to come and share his solitude. They return for
+           answer that "they are working for somebody else;" for,
+           alas! the only reason their presence is desired is that
+           they may cultivate some of the large extent of ground
+           placed at the old chief's disposal. Neither he nor his
+           stalwart son would dream for a moment of touching spade
+           or hoe; but if the ladies of the family could only be
+           made to see their duty, an honest penny might easily be
+           turned by oats or rye. I gave him a large packet of
+           sugar-plums, which he seized with childish delight and
+           hid away exactly like the big monkeys at the Zoo.</p>
+
+        <p>By way of a joke, Malambuli pretended to want to take
+        them away, and the chattering and laughing which followed
+        was almost deafening. But by and by a gentleman of the
+        party presented a big parcel of the best tobacco, and the
+        chuckling old chief made over at once all my sweetmeats
+        "jintly" to his son, and proceeded to hide away his new
+        treasure. He was dressed exactly like a dissenting
+        minister, and declared through the interpreter he was
+        perfectly comfortable. The impression here seems to be that
+        he is a restless, intriguing and mischief-making old man,
+        who may consider himself as having come out of the hornets'
+        nest he tried to stir up uncommonly well.</p>
+
+        <p>We don't want to bump up and down the sandy plain again,
+        so a lively conversation goes on in Dutch about the road
+        between one of my gentlemen and somebody who looks like a
+        "stuck-vat" upon short legs. The dialogue is fluent and
+        lively, beginning with "Ja, ja!" and ending with "All
+        right!" but it leads to our hitting off the right track
+        exactly, and coming out at a lovely little cottage-villa
+        under the mountain, where we rest and lunch and then stroll
+        about up the hill spurs, through myrtle hedges and shady
+        oak avenues. Then, before the afternoon shadows grow too
+        long, we drive off to "Groote Schuur," the ancient granary
+        of the first settlers, which is now turned into a roomy,
+        comfortable country-house, perfect as a summer residence,
+        and securely sheltered from the "sou'-easters." We approach
+        it through a double avenue of tall Italian pines, and after
+        a little while go out once more for a ramble up some quaint
+        old brick steps, and so through a beautiful glen all
+        fringed and feathered with fresh young fronds of
+        maiden-hair ferns, and masses of hydrangea bushes, which
+        must be beautiful as a poet's dream when they are covered
+        with their great bunches of pale blue blossom. That will
+        not be until Christmas-tide, and, alas! I shall not be here
+        to see, for already my three halcyon days of grace are
+        ended and over, and this very evening we must steam away
+        from a great deal yet unvisited of what is interesting and
+        picturesque, and from friends who three days ago were
+        strangers, but who have made every moment since we landed
+        stand out as a bright and pleasant landmark on life's
+        highway.</p>
+    </blockquote><span class="pagenum"><a name="page234"
+       id="page234"></a>[pg 234]</span>
+
+    <h2>ON SANKOTA HEAD.</h2>
+
+    <p>"Yay, Jim, there ain't no doubt but Sairy Macy's a mighty
+    nice gal, but, thee sees, what I'm a-contendin' fur is that
+    she's tew nice fur thee&mdash;that is, not tew nice egzackly,
+    but a leetle tew fine-feathered. No, not that egzackly, nuther;
+    but she's a leetle tew fine in the feelin's, an' I don't
+    b'lieve that in the long run thee an' she'll sort well
+    tugether. Shell git eout o' conceit with thy ways&mdash;thee
+    <i>ain't</i> the pootiest-mannered feller a gal ever
+    see&mdash;an' thee'll git eout o' conceit with hern. Thee'll
+    think she's a-gittin' stuck up, an' she'll think thee's
+    a-gittin'low-minded. Neow, Jim, my 'dvice is good; an' ef
+    thee'll take it, an' not go on with this thing no furder,
+    thee'll both be glad on it arterwa'ds. 'Spesh'ly 's she ain't
+    very rugged, an' sickly gals had oughter hev rich
+    husbands."</p>
+
+    <p>"But, father, Sairy an' me loves o' 'nother."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, wal, then it's tew late ter say nothin'," said the old
+    man with a mingled sigh and smile as, raising his basket of
+    quahaugs to his shoulder, he walked off, pressing his bare feet
+    into the yielding sand with the firm but clumsy tread of
+    vigorous old age. The rough hat of plaited straw was pushed
+    back from a brow that with a cultivated nature would have been
+    considered as evidence of considerable intellectual power, but,
+    as it was, only showed the probable truth of the opinion of his
+    neighbors, that "Stephen Starbuck was a shrewd, common-sense
+    ole feller."</p>
+
+    <p>Jim was of a little finer grade than his father, having
+    inherited some of the traits of his gentle mother, but the
+    young Hercules could by no means have been mistaken for an
+    Apollo; neither did his somewhat heavy features bear the
+    expression of unselfish loyalty which would have given better
+    promise than any mere refinement of features or manner for the
+    future happiness of Sarah Macy. But she found nothing wanting
+    in her lover as she stood on the cliff-head gazing down upon
+    him. Sarah knew that the man she loved was not considered her
+    equal, but because she loved him she believed him capable of
+    becoming all that she or others could desire. There is in the
+    world no faith so absolute as that of a woman in the
+    possibilities of the man she loves. Had Sarah read of Sir
+    Galahad&mdash;but this was in 1779, and the fame of the search
+    for the Holy Grail had not reached the popular ear&mdash;she
+    would have said to herself, "My Jim is just so pure and holy."
+    Had "her Jim" been a Royalist during the English Revolution,
+    Prince Rupert's laurels would not have been unshared. Had Jim
+    been a Puritan&mdash;though the little Quaker maiden did not
+    love Puritans over well, and did not fancy her Jim as fighting
+    on that side&mdash;England's Protector would not have borne the
+    name of Cromwell. Or if Jim were not one of the peace-loving
+    Friends, and would enlist in the present struggle for liberty,
+    the fame of Commodore James Starbuck should soon eclipse that
+    of Paul Jones.</p>
+
+    <p>Not for the world would Sarah have given voice to the
+    heretical desire, but in her inmost heart was even now a wish
+    that her dear Jim held religious opinions that would not
+    interfere with his showing to the country how talented, noble
+    and valiant he was; while the fair-haired, sunburnt, indolent
+    young Hercules idly gazing out to sea was fired with no higher
+    ambition for himself than to be able soon to erect on the Head
+    another small house like that of his father, to which he might
+    bring "the sweet little girl who loved him, so much." For Sarah
+    had committed the common mistake of loving women, and had let
+    Jim see how dear he was to her. So now, instead of dwelling on
+    his love for her and scheming how he might be worthy of her
+    heart, he was fully satisfied with himself, and inclined to
+    grumble at Fortune for not at once bestowing the trifle he
+    asked at her hands.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page235"
+       id="page235"></a>[pg 235]</span>
+
+    <p>"Jim, how long's thee goin' ter stan' there? If the water
+    <i>is</i> pretty, thee can see it any day, so 't ain't worth
+    while to look at it all day ter a time."</p>
+
+    <p>As, the sweet tones floated down the cliff Jim turned lazily
+    to smile up at the speaker, and, raising his heavy basket of
+    quahaugs, came leisurely up the steep sand-path, which seemed
+    to shrink from his weight at every step: "Wal', Sairy, I wa'n't
+    a-thinkin' much o' the water: I was a-thinkin' o' thee, an' o'
+    what fayther said a little spell ago."</p>
+
+    <p>"What was that, Jim?" Sarah's tone was a little anxious, for
+    she knew that there was a jealousy among some of the islanders
+    of the facts that her father had brought with him a few heavy
+    articles of "real mahogany furnitur," and that her stepmother
+    had always been able to hire others to do her spinning and
+    weaving, and even to "help her at odd spells with the heft o'
+    the housework."</p>
+
+    <p>"Oh, nothin'," replied Jim, passing his free arm carelessly
+    round the girl's waist&mdash;"othin', undly th' old story
+    'beout heow we'd best not merry, 'cause by'm-by thee'll git ter
+    feelin' better nor me."</p>
+
+    <p>"But thee don't believe him, Jim? Thee knows better. Thee
+    knows," adding this with the sweet and sincere but often sadly
+    mistaken humility of love&mdash;"thee knows thou art better
+    than me. Thou art so grand and so noble! If folks only knew
+    thee better they would wonder at thee fur puttin' up wi' me. I
+    wish I could make thee a better wife. But, Jim, if I ain't very
+    strong, I'm pretty good at contrivin', an' I don't believe but
+    what I can manage so's to git along a'most as well as them
+    that's tougher."</p>
+
+    <p>"Git along? O' course thee'll git along," answered Jim
+    patronizingly. "I telled mother th'other day that I didn't cafe
+    ef thee wa'n't 's strong as Mary Allen: thee was a good deal
+    smarter, an' I'd be willin' tu resk but what I'd hev as little
+    waitin' on ter dew fur thee 's fur her. Besides"&mdash;and here
+    a gleam of real if shallow affection sprang from Jim's eyes as
+    he looked down at the loving creature by his
+    side&mdash;"besides, I'd <i>like</i> to take care o' thee,
+    Sairy&mdash;I would indeed."</p>
+
+    <p>It is said that the sky has no color of its own&mdash;that
+    the deep blue we think so beautiful is only owing to the
+    atmosphere through which we view it. To Sarah this very slight
+    expression of her lover's care for her bore more weight than
+    the most passionate protestations of affection could have done
+    to a colder nature, for it was colored by the glowing tints of
+    her own warm love; and when the two parted that day she carried
+    with her a sweet, satisfying sense of being beloved by the
+    "best man on the earth" even as she loved him; while he
+    whistled cheerily over his net-mending, thinking "what a sweet
+    little thing it was!" "how pretty its eyes were!" and "how
+    kitten-like its ways!" and only checked his whistling once in a
+    while to wonder whether the day would ever really come when
+    "Sairy would feel herself better than him," and to think it
+    also a little hard that old Thomas Macy was "so sot agin' the
+    match" that he would give his daughter no portion but an outfit
+    of clothes and household linen. "He might jest's well's not,"
+    reasoned Jim to himself, "give us a little lift: I guess he
+    would if Sairy's own mother was alive; but them step-mothers
+    never wants to give nothin' ter the fust wives' childern." In
+    which opinion Jim did the second Mrs. Macy much injustice, for
+    it was owing solely to her influence that Sarah's father had
+    consented to provide his daughter with even a new dress in
+    which to be married to "that big, lazy boy o'old Steve
+    Starbuck's."</p>
+
+    <p>Meantime, sad, gentle old Mrs. Starbuck had been turning
+    over many things in her mind. She felt her son's defects; she
+    knew that warm-hearted, imaginative Sarah Macy would be doing a
+    foolish thing to marry Jim&mdash;as foolish a thing as in her
+    inmost heart she felt, rather than acknowledged, that she
+    herself had done when she married Jim's father. But the
+    mother-heart longed that her son should grow to be what she
+    desired (and what poor Sarah thought he already was), and she
+    hoped much from the elevating influence of so good a wife.</p>
+
+    <p>So, as she sat knitting, while Jim and his father sat, hats
+    on heads and pipes <span class="pagenum"><a name="page236"
+       id="page236"></a>[pg 236]</span> in mouths, mending their
+       nets, old Mrs. Starbuck had "made a plan." "Father," said,
+       she at last, "I've be'n thinkin'&mdash;"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yay," replied the old man gruffly but not
+    unkindly&mdash;"yay, I 'spect so. Thee's pooty nigh allus
+    a-thinkin' o' suthin. What is it neow? Eout with it!"</p>
+
+    <p>"I've be'n thinkin' that Jim's all the child we've
+    got&mdash;"</p>
+
+    <p>"Wal, yay. Hain't had no other&mdash;not's I knows on. What
+    o' that?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Well, I was a-thinkin' that, that bein' so, an' Jim an'
+    Sairy thinkin' so much o' 'nother, it wa'n't o' no use fur them
+    ter keep waitin' along year eout an' year in fur a chance tu
+    keep house by 'emselves. They'd best git married right off an'
+    come an' live along o' us."</p>
+
+    <p>"W'y, ole woman!"</p>
+
+    <p>"W'y, mother!"</p>
+
+    <p>"Yay; I hear both on ye," said the gentle old mother with a
+    half smile. "I s'posed likely ye'd think strange on't at fust;
+    but ye h'ain't no need ter, fur it's a sens'ble thing ter dew,
+    an' yell see't so when ye've thought on't a spell: see if ye
+    don't."</p>
+
+    <p>So well was the proposal liked that very soon the simple
+    ceremony of the Friends made James and Sarah husband and wife;
+    and for a while all seemed happiness in the humble cottage on
+    the cliff&mdash;cottage so humble that it scarcely deserved
+    even that lowly name.</p>
+
+    <p>Sarah Macy's father owned one of the largest dwellings on
+    Nantucket&mdash;a two-story "double house" with two rooms on
+    each side of a broad hall running through the house from front
+    to rear. On one side of this hall was the "best bedroom,"
+    ghostly with tightly-closed white shutters and long white
+    dimity curtains to the "four-poster" and shining white sanded
+    floor, and the "best-room," terrible in its grandeur of cold
+    white walls, straight hard sofa, "spider-legged" table,
+    grenadier-like chairs and striped woolen carpet underlaid with
+    straw. In the rear, on the other side of the hall, was the
+    kitchen with its big brick oven, its yawning fireplace overhung
+    with corpulent iron pots or shining copper kettles depending
+    from numerous gallows-like cranes; with its glittering copper,
+    brass and pewter utensils arrayed on snowy-shelves; with its
+    spotless tables, Its freshly-sanded floor and its
+    heavily-beamed, whitewashed ceiling, from which hung many a
+    bunch of savory herbs or string of red pepper-pods or bunch of
+    seed-corn, or perhaps even a round-backed ham, to get a little
+    browner in the smoke that would sometimes pour out from the
+    half-ignited mass of peat. In front of the kitchen was the
+    "living-room," in one corner of which stood a carved high-post
+    bedstead&mdash;glory of the Macys and envy of their
+    neighbors&mdash;with its curtains of big figured chintz, brown
+    sunflowers sprawling over a white ground, drawn aside in the
+    daytime to display the marvelous patchwork of the quilt
+    beneath. Fuel was scarce even then on the sandy isle; and
+    economy compelled Mr. and Mrs. Macy to make use of this
+    living-room as a bedchamber also, since Thomas Macy confessed
+    to "bein rather tender," and to liking a warm room to sleep In,
+    though his neighbors often insinuated that he was killing
+    himself by the Indulgence. And indeed the heat must have been
+    stifling when we consider the size of the fireplace, nine feet
+    wide by four deep, with a yawning throat, through which the
+    rain poured freely down on stormy nights, putting out the best
+    arranged mass of coals, ashes and peat, and, in spite of the
+    little gutter purposely made round the broad brick hearth,
+    sometimes overflowing and drenching a portion of the neat rag
+    carpet, in which, with true Quaker consistency, no gay-colored
+    fragment had been allowed a place.</p>
+
+    <p>In striking contrast to all this magnificence was the lowly
+    home to which James Starbuck brought his happy bride. This
+    little house was "double" also&mdash;that Is, it was entered in
+    the centre by a small square passage just big enough for the
+    outer door to swing in. On one side of this entry was a tiny
+    parlor, as dismal as rag carpet, fireless hearth, dingy paper
+    and dark-green paper shades to the small windows could make it.
+    On the other side of the entry was the tiny and cold bedroom of
+    the senior Starbucks. In the centre of the house rose a massive
+    chimney, big enough to retain all the
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page237"
+       id="page237"></a>[pg 237]</span> heat from a dozen fires.
+       Across the rear of parlor, chimney and bedroom ran the long,
+       low sunshiny kitchen. At one end of this certain ladder-like
+       stairs conducted to the loft, which had served Jim for a
+       "roosting-place" ever since he had grown big enough to be
+       trusted o' nights so far away from his mother. On Sarah's
+       advent into the family the dismal "best-room" was made
+       habitable by the addition of a "four-poster"&mdash;which
+       Mrs. Starbuck senior regretted was only of cherry-wood and
+       not carved&mdash;and by sundry little feminine contrivances
+       of Sarah's own.</p>
+
+    <p>I said that for a time all seemed to go on happily in this
+    humble home. And the seeming would have been reality had Jim
+    possessed the faith in his wife which she had in him. True, he
+    loved and believed in her after his fashion, and his mother was
+    a strong ally on his wife's side; but Jim had one fatal
+    weakness of character. He resented the slightest look that was
+    anything but simple admiration on the part of his wife. A
+    strong nature is not afraid of censure, but a weak one,
+    pleading sensitiveness, is easily roused to small retaliations,
+    repaying what is good in intention with what is evil. Jim, as
+    his father had truly told him, was "not the pootiest-mannered
+    feller a gal ever see," and in the daily home-life this became
+    apparent to Sarah as it had never been in all the years they
+    had been near neighbors. Naturally, she wished her husband to
+    be pleasing to her father, and at last ventured to hint, as
+    delicately as she could, at various little points in which
+    improvements might be made. At first Jim did not seem very
+    restless under such reproofs, given, as they were, with many a
+    loving kiss and winsome look; but as months went on his wife's
+    caresses were more carelessly received, and her hinted
+    corrections with more of resentment. One evening stately old
+    Thomas Macy had "happened in," and Jim had greatly grieved his
+    wife by his curt, uncivil manner to her father. After he had
+    gone Sarah spoke in a low tone and kindly as always, but with
+    more spirit than she had ever before manifested or felt, of her
+    husband's disrespectful ways to the aged.</p>
+
+    <p>For a moment after his wife had ceased, Jim sat with his hat
+    pulled closely over his eyes, fiercely biting into the apple he
+    was eating&mdash;biting and throwing the bits into the glowing
+    mass of peat on the hearth. Then he sprang to his feet,
+    exclaiming, "I see! It's all come true, what ev'rybody said.
+    Thee thinks thee an' thy folks is better'n me an' my folks, an'
+    keeps all the time a-naggin' on me. I wish I'd merried Mary
+    Allen! I won't stan' no more o' this talk. If I ain't to be
+    maaster o' my own house I won't stay in't." (The house was his
+    father's, but angry men never think of such trifles.) And
+    waxing pitiful of himself, he continued in a broken and injured
+    tone, "The bed o' the sea's the bes' place fur a man whose own
+    wife's got tew big feelin' ter put up wi' his ways."</p>
+
+    <p>With this dignified burst of eloquence the angry fellow
+    flung himself out of the house, letting in at the door as he
+    went a dash of cold, sleety rain and a gust of wind that put
+    out the flickering tallow dip that was enabling Sarah to take
+    the last stitches in the tiny white slip that now fell from her
+    fingers. Too sorely wounded for resentment, too fond of her
+    husband to wish even his parents to see him in the light in
+    which he was now revealed to her, Sarah silently stooped to
+    recover her work, and as she did so her hand was met under the
+    table by a sympathizing pressure from that of her
+    mother-in-law. This was too much, and, laying her head in the
+    elder woman's lap, poor Sarah wept without restraint; while the
+    mother sorrowfully and tenderly stroked her soft brown tresses.
+    The father, quietly puffing at his pipe, seemed to take no
+    notice, only now and then glancing with kindly eye covertly
+    from under his hat-brim at the two grieving women.</p>
+
+    <p>Silently, but for the roaring of the wind and surf and
+    fitful dashing of the rain, the hours passed on till the high
+    clock in the kitchen corner sharply struck eleven. This was a
+    late hour for those times, and a faint fear began to come upon
+    them all. Could it be that Jim had really meant what he said?
+    "Had he&mdash;" And the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page238"
+       id="page238"></a>[pg 238]</span> two women looked blankly at
+       each other. Not a word had been uttered, but each felt the
+       other's dread.</p>
+
+    <p>The father rose and said with a well-affected yawn, "Guess
+    likely Jim's went deown ter Uncle Will'amses, an' they thought
+    as 't's so stormy he'd bes' not come back. So guess I'll jest
+    go eout ter the shed and git some more peat, fur ter keep the
+    fire."</p>
+
+    <p>Thus leaving the mother and wife partially reassured, the
+    old father slipped out and down the track, cut deeply in the
+    sand by the one-horse carts, to "Uncle Will'amses," as fast as
+    the storm would permit. But no Jim had been seen there; and
+    still more anxiously the stout old man fought his way back
+    against winds that seemed strong" enough to blow him like a
+    feather over the cliff's edge, and against the spray which shot
+    up from the beach below, smitten by the sounding surf, clear
+    over the high top of Sankota Head.</p>
+
+    <p>Reaching his door during a brief lull in the wind, he heard
+    faintly but distinctly the booming of guns fired by a ship in
+    distress. "It mus' be some vessil on the shoals, an' mos'
+    likely Jim's heard her an' got some o' th' other boys, an' 's
+    went off in 's boat ter help her. Poor soul!" With this
+    comforting reflection the father cheered the watchers inside,
+    who had grown fearfully anxious, as the clock had long ago
+    struck for midnight.</p>
+
+    <p>"We mus' build a fire on the Head ter light 'em," said the
+    old man. "There hed oughter be a light'us here, but 's there
+    ain't none, we mus' dew the bes' we kin,"</p>
+
+    <p>So saying, he harnessed the horse&mdash;almost as old as
+    himself&mdash;and with the aid of the two women loaded the sled
+    with dry wood and started with it to the cliff, while the
+    mother and daughter followed behind as best they might,
+    struggling to keep alive without being set on fire by the coals
+    in the iron pot which they carried between them. It was a weary
+    half mile, wind, spray and rain all contending against the
+    feeble folk who had come out to help back to land and home the
+    brave fellows who had gone to succor the distressed. They made
+    all the more sure that this was the case, because Jim's new
+    boat, the pride and joy of his life, was not to be found at the
+    spot where he had only that day drawn, it high above the reach
+    of even such a storm as this, ready for building over it on the
+    morrow its winter house of pine-boughs and turf.</p>
+
+    <p>At last a fire was kindled; and leaving the women to watch
+    it, old Stephen took several weary trips back to the cottage
+    after fuel, making serious inroads upon a stock at the best not
+    too large to meet the demands of the coming winter. The flame,
+    fanned by the blast even more than dashed by the spray and
+    rain, sprang upward, casting its ruddy lances of light backward
+    over the sandy downs, destitute even then of tree or shrub to
+    break the force of the gale, and forward over the frothing
+    white tops and deep, black troughs of waves that seemed to the
+    excited eyes of the watching women like so many separate fiends
+    leaping upward and stretching out white hands to clutch
+    helpless victims and hurry them to the hell beneath. And all
+    the while the surf thundered at the foot of the trembling
+    cliff. No form could be discovered through the darkness beyond
+    the near neighborhood of the shore; and but for the flash of
+    the gun, which was seen continually, though its sound was but
+    seldom heard above the surf and the wind, the watchers would
+    have thought there was no ship near.</p>
+
+    <p>By and by the rain ceased, but there was no moon, and
+    impenetrable wind-clouds still hid the stars. Out through the
+    blackness of the night the flame-light quivered in long, bright
+    streams over the endless lines of ever-advancing waves, but
+    revealed to the watchers no ship, no boat, no tokens even of
+    wreck, only the ceaseless reaching upward of the beckoning
+    white hands; and the wind bore no sound, save at intervals the
+    dull distant boom of the cannon. But ever the solemn surf
+    thundered on the beach below, and the sand-cliff trembled and
+    crumbled beneath its resounding blows.</p>
+
+    <p>The old man, who, with a seaman's owl-like eyesight, kneeled
+    intently gazing out through the darkness in the
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page239"
+       id="page239"></a>[pg 239]</span> direction of the flash,
+       suddenly exclaimed, "I don't un'erstan' it! That air ship
+       hadn't oughter be in 'stress off where she is. She ain't on
+       no shoal, nor nothin'. She's jest a-lyin' tew. An' I don't
+       see no signs o' no boats nuther; an's fur's I kin see, them
+       folks is a firin' off that air gun jest fur the musicalness
+       on't. Blast 'em! Come, gals: we mought as well be walkin'
+       along hum as ter stop a-yawpin' here in the wind an' spray,
+       a-burnin' up the winter's kindlin' fur folks 'at's a-foolin'
+       on us. 'Spesh'ly as I think she's a Britisher. Blast
+       her!"</p>
+
+    <p>The old Quaker was not accustomed to use strong language of
+    any sort, but evidently the human nature in him was so powerful
+    in this instance that he could not help indulging in the most
+    emphatic admissible invective.</p>
+
+    <p>But the mother and wife were not so easily satisfied. In
+    their eyes the strange ship and all on board her were not of as
+    much consequence as the unworthy missing Jim, whose fate they
+    associated with it. Jim's boat, they said, was gone. No one
+    could have taken her but Jim himself. He would never have put
+    out on such a night as this save to go to the help of the
+    distressed ship; and if he was on the water, the light burning
+    on Sankota Head would guide him safely back. So, in the midst
+    of spray and wind, the three kneeled on the cliff and kept the
+    blaze alight till the rising dawn made it useless, when, to the
+    dismay of the watchers, the ship hoisted sail and bore away.
+    She showed no colors, but the old islander, once a whaler,
+    declared that she was a British man-o'-war.</p>
+
+    <p>But where was Jim? The unanswering surf still boomed at the
+    foot of the cliff, though the height of the waves was rapidly
+    diminishing, and the water was gradually assuming the
+    peculiarly bland expression that often comes after a storm,
+    reminding one of the cat that has "eaten the canary," but there
+    was no sign of incoming boat or men.</p>
+
+    <p>Chilled to the bone with the wind and cold sea-spray of the
+    November night, and to the heart with sorrow and
+    disappointment, the three returned to the lonely house. Running
+    to meet them came Mary Allen, breathlessly crying, "Where's
+    Eben and Jim?"</p>
+
+    <p>Poor Sarah could not answer, but the brave old mother, a
+    veteran in sorrows, replied with trembling lips, "We don't know
+    anythin' o' thy brother, Mary; an' Jim hain't b'en hum sence
+    las' night. His boat's gone, an' we thought he might ha' went
+    out to help the ship that was a-firin' all night. But she's
+    sailed off this mornin' all right; an' father, he says she was
+    a Britisher an' undly a-firin' ter fool us folks. So I don't
+    know nothin' about it," uttering the last words in a drearily
+    hopeless tone that gave them exceeding pathos.</p>
+
+    <p>For a moment Mary stood in dismay; then she cried wildly,
+    "Oh, they're drowned, they're drowned! Jim come deown ter eour
+    heouse las' night a-sayin' he'd heard the firin' o' a ship in
+    'stress, an' askin' Eb ter go with him an' help him git his
+    boat eout, an' telled me ter run along deown to Zack
+    Tumnaydoo's An' ax Zack an' Ellery ter go with 'em. An' I did,
+    an' that's the las' anybody's seen o' any one on 'em. Oh dear!
+    oh dear!" And wringing her hands, the sobbing girl ran back as
+    quickly as she had come to impart to her mother and sisters the
+    full extent of her evil tidings.</p>
+
+    <p>The cold, sad, desolate weeks and months that now rolled
+    slowly on are to this day remembered on Nantucket as those of
+    the "hard winter." Provisions were scarce, fuel was difficult
+    to obtain, the harbor was frozen over, so that few fish could
+    be taken there, and all communication with "the main" was cut
+    off by British cruisers. In January the cherished old horse was
+    killed because there was no longer hay to feed him, and even
+    oats were "too precious to be fed to dumb beasts." In February
+    the stalwart old Stephen lay grimly down to die, saying
+    pityingly, "It's time, gals: I can't dew ye no more good by
+    stayin'; an' I'm so tired."</p>
+
+    <p>The day succeeding the silent funeral, where two women had
+    dropped the few tears that were left them to shed, good old
+    Thomas Macy came and took his daughter and her mother to his
+    own home. And in windy, still frozen March
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page240"
+       id="page240"></a>[pg 240]</span> the wail of a tiny baby was
+       heard in the house.</p>
+
+    <p>Under all the trouble the two brave women made no moan.
+    Silently clinging together, never losing sight of each other
+    for more than a few moments at a time, they yet said nothing of
+    their greatest grief, that Jim should have disappeared with
+    such unworthy words on his lips and thoughts in his heart,
+    until, a few days after the baby's birth, Sarah said to her
+    mother, "I know he's not dead. If he'd ha' died, he'd ha' come
+    back and told me he was sorry. Fur I dew think he'd be sorry.
+    Don't thee, mother?" And the mother nodded assent and smiled
+    through her tears.</p>
+
+    <p>But, in truth, they had a more substantial reason than poor
+    Sarah's wistful fancy for thinking that Jim was living. When
+    the ice broke up, his boat was found in a little cove, where it
+    had floated right-side up, without any serious injury except
+    the carrying away of the sails. Of course this discovery roused
+    new hopes in the homes of the missing men. It did not "stand to
+    reason" that four big strong, temperate young fellows, brought
+    up to the hardy, amphibious island-life, had all fallen
+    overboard, any more than it "stood to sense" that the boat had
+    upset and then righted of itself. Besides, "none of the boy's
+    corpuses had ever floated up." So the Tucketers took courage
+    and felt sure that, whatever had become of the missing men,
+    they were not drowned.</p>
+
+    <p>But still the slow months came and went, till the summer and
+    autumn and another winter had passed by; and patient old Rachel
+    Starbuck grew daily a little quieter and a little grayer; and
+    the brave young wife grew a little stronger to bear, but not a
+    whit less loving or prone to suffer, and stately old Thomas
+    Macy grew daily more gentle and pitying in his ways as he
+    looked long at the winsome face of the happy, wee grandchild,
+    that throve and crowed and tried to utter sweet little
+    hesitating words as gayly as if the world had never a sin, a
+    sorrow or a weakness in it.</p>
+
+    <p>One day Sarah and her mother had carried the baby down to
+    the small cottage at the back of the cliff, whither they went
+    to attend to some little household matter; for, although they
+    did not mention the subject, even to themselves, they still
+    kept all there in readiness against Jim's coming home. Here, in
+    the soft May sunshine, the red-frocked baby was sitting on the
+    green turf step, playing with some "daffies," first of the
+    season, which Sarah had plucked from the little garden in the
+    rear. The mother and daughter were in the house, when both were
+    alarmed by a scream from the usually merry child. A man had it
+    closely clasped in his arms, kissing it and calling it between
+    half-choked sobs his "own pretty, pretty baby." The man was
+    thin, pock-marked, bald, and clad in a ragged uniform of a
+    British sailor, but to the faithful, longing eyes of mother and
+    wife there was no mistaking their Jim.</p>
+
+    <p>It was long ere the story could be told, but at last they
+    learned that on that sad November night Jim and his companions
+    had gone out to the relief of the signaling ship. She was, as
+    old Stephen had conjectured, a British man-o'-war. Being short
+    of hands, and having on board as pilot a renegade native of the
+    island, who knew where a ship could "lay-to" in safety, she had
+    taken advantage of the storm to attract strong men within the
+    range of her guns, then to command them to surrender, and thus
+    to impress them into "His Majesty's service" as "able
+    seamen."</p>
+
+    <p>For a long time Jim had managed to keep alive his resentful
+    feelings toward his wife, accusing of being the source of all
+    his misfortunes the poor little woman who was loving and
+    longing so sincerely for him. But when illness came he could
+    hold out no longer. "I made up my mind then," said he, "that if
+    ever I got hum agin, I'd go deown on my knees an' ax pardin' o'
+    my Sairy."</p>
+
+    <p>But she had never been angry, and was now only too thankful
+    that Jim and his friends had escaped safely.</p>
+
+    <p>"Ah!" said Jim in telling his adventures, "we hed a clus run
+    on 't, Sairy, but thee'd better believe that air British navy's
+    a fust-rate place fur larnin' a feller ter know when he's well
+    off. An' <span class="pagenum"><a name="page241"
+       id="page241"></a>[pg 241]</span> Sairy, when I longed so fur
+       thee an' mother, an' thought o' what a wretch I was to speak
+       so ter the dearest little woman in the world, I c'u'd see
+       that I hadn't knowed when I was well off."</p>
+
+    <p>Jim's was not an unselfish kind of repentance, but it was
+    the best it was in his nature to offer, and Sarah had long ago
+    learned that her Jim was not the saint and hero she had once
+    dreamed, but only a weak and common-place man; and she asked
+    for nothing higher from him. To his best she had a right, and
+    with that she was content, smiling on her husband with eyes
+    full of a love as tender and true as when in the old days she
+    had gazed down upon her lover from the cliff-head, while the
+    mother laid her hand softly on his scanty hair, and said
+    solemnly, "May God keep thee thus, my son!" adding, after a
+    moment's pause, "But I wish thy fayther was here to see." And a
+    tender silence for the memory of the rough but kindly-natured
+    old man fell over them all; while the baby, reconciled to the
+    stranger, poked her little fingers in the marks on his face,
+    and cried because she could not get them off.</p>
+
+    <p class="author">ETHEL C. GALE.</p>
+
+    <h2>AT THE OLD PLANTATION.</h2>
+
+    <h3>TWO PAPERS.&mdash;II.</h3>
+
+    <p>The eastern sky is just beginning to assume that strange
+    neutral tint which tells of the approaching dawn when we open
+    the heavy hall door and step out into the crisp, frosty air. No
+    moonlight hunting for me, with the cold, deceitful light making
+    phantom pools of every white sand-patch in the road, and
+    ghostly logs and boulders of every wavering shadow. You are
+    always gathering up your reins for leaps over imaginary
+    fence-panels, which your horse goes through like a nightmare,
+    and always unprepared for the real ones, which he clears when
+    you are least expecting it. If the cry bears down on you, and
+    you rein up for a view, the fox is sure to dodge by invisibly
+    under cover of some dark little bay, and you get home too late
+    for a morning nap and too early for the breakfast, which you
+    have been longing after for the last two hours. Then, too, your
+    horse has lost his night's rest, and will be jaded for two days
+    in consequence. No: the time to throw the dogs off for a
+    fox-hunt is that weird hour which the negroes significantly
+    call "gray-day:" it is the surest time to strike a trail, and
+    by the time Reynard begins to dodge and double there will be
+    plenty of light to ride by and to get a good view. If the fox
+    gets away or the cover is drawn without a find, you are always
+    sure of having your spirits raised by the cheerful sunrise: by
+    the time you get home, tired and spattered, the ladies are down
+    stairs ready to make pretty exclamations over the brush or to
+    chaff you pleasantly for your want of success; and then there
+    is just time to get your hair brushed and your clothes changed
+    before the mingled aromas of fried sausage and old Java put the
+    keen edge on your already whetted appetite.</p>
+
+    <p>A ride across country after a rattling pack of English
+    hounds on a thoroughbred hunter with a field of red-coated
+    squires is an experience which few hunters on this side of the
+    water have ever enjoyed, but with the incidents of which every
+    reader of English novels is familiar. The chase of the red fox
+    in Maryland or Virginia has some features in common with the
+    British national sport, but that of the gray fox in the more
+    southern States differs materially from both. The latter animal
+    is smaller and possessed of less speed and endurance than his
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page242"
+       id="page242"></a>[pg 242]</span> more northern brother, but
+       he is far more common and quite as cunning. He makes shorter
+       runs, but over very different ground, always keeping in the
+       woods and dodging about like a rabbit, so that a different
+       style of horse and a different method of riding are required
+       for his capture. There is no risk of breaking your neck over
+       a five-barred gate or a stone wall, but you may be hung in a
+       grapevine, or knocked out of the saddle by a low limb, or
+       have your knee scraped against a tree-trunk. It is true you
+       may catch your fox in twenty minutes, and three hours is an
+       extraordinary run, but then you may catch four or five
+       between daylight and ten o'clock of an autumn morning.</p>
+
+    <p>The horses stretch their necks toward the stables and whinny
+    as they think of the bundles of untasted fodder: the dogs
+    require no notes of the horn to rouse them, for they know the
+    signs and are already capering about in eager merriment,
+    throwing their heads into the air occasionally to utter a long
+    and musical bay. This wakes up the curs about the negro-yard,
+    and their barking stirs up the geese, the combined chorus
+    rousing all the cocks in the various poultry-houses, so that we
+    ride off amid a hub-bub of howling, cackling, neighing and
+    crowing which would awaken the Seven Sleepers. We are first at
+    the meet, and the old woods ring with the mellow, winding notes
+    of our horns&mdash;no twanging brass reeds in the mouth-pieces,
+    but honest cow-horn bugles, which none but a true hunter can
+    blow. The hounds grow wild at the cheering sound, and howl
+    through every note of the canine gamut; the echoes catch the
+    strain and fling it from brake to bay; the dying cadence
+    strengthens into an answering blast, and the party is soon
+    increased to half a dozen bold riders and twenty eager dogs.
+    Venus, the beautiful "flag-star of heaven," is just toning her
+    brilliancy into harmony with the pale light which creeps slowly
+    up from the eastern horizon, and some wakeful crow in the
+    pine-thicket gives an answering caw to the goblin laugh of the
+    barred owl in the cypress, as we leap our horses into a field
+    of sedge and cheer on the dogs to their work. For half an hour
+    we ride in silence save the words of encouragement to the
+    hounds, which are snuffing about unsuccessfully and whipping
+    the hoar-frost with their tails from the dry yellow stems of
+    the grass. Now and then some eager young dog opens on the trail
+    of a rabbit which has started from its form, but the crack of a
+    whip restrains him, and the other hounds pay no attention to
+    him. Suddenly a sharp, quick yelp comes from the farthest
+    corner of the field, and the older dogs stop instantly and
+    raise their heads to listen. Hark to old Blucher! There he is
+    again, and the whole pack give tongue and dash off to the call
+    which never deceives them. We catch a glimpse of the old
+    fellow's white throat as he trots about in a zigzag course,
+    poking his tan muzzle into every clump of tall grass and giving
+    tongue occasionally as he sniffs the cold trail. Presently a
+    long, quavering cry comes from old Firefly; again and again
+    Blucher opens more and more eagerly; another and another dog
+    takes it up, and the trot quickens into a lope. The trail grows
+    warmer as they follow the line of fence, and just as we settle
+    ourselves in the saddle for a run it all stops and the dogs are
+    at fault. But Blucher is hard to puzzle and knows every trick
+    of his cunning game. Running a few panels down the fence, he
+    rears up on it and snuffs the top rail, and then, with a yell
+    of triumph, dashes over it into the woods, with the whole pack
+    in full cry at his heels. A ringing cheer announces that the
+    fox has "jumped," and the field scatters in pursuit. Two only,
+    the subscriber being one, follow the dogs with a flying leap.
+    Some dash off in search of a low panel, others to head off the
+    cry through the distant gate, while others stop to pull the
+    rails and make a gap. For ten minutes we keep well behind the
+    hounds, with a tight rein and heads bent to avoid the hanging
+    oak limbs. But the fox has turned and plunged into a brake
+    which no horse can go through, and we draw up and listen to
+    decide where we can head him off with the greatest certainty;
+    then turn in different directions and spur
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page243"
+       id="page243"></a>[pg 243]</span> through the young
+       black-jacks. Ah! there he goes, with dragging brush and open
+       mouth, and the pack, running close enough together to be
+       covered by a table-cloth, not sixty yards behind him. I am
+       in at the death this time, for he cannot run a hundred yards
+       farther, and the brush is mine, for there's no one else in
+       sight. With a savage burst the dogs dash after him into the
+       thicket and then&mdash;dead silence, not a yelp, as they
+       scatter and run backward and forward, nosing under every
+       dead leaf and up the trunk of every tree. The fault is
+       complete, and the young dogs give it up and lie down
+       panting, while the older hounds try every expedient to
+       puzzle out the trail and take up the scent again. He
+       certainly has not treed, there is neither earth nor hollow
+       to hide him, and yet the scent has gone! And it never came
+       back. If any reader can tell what became of that fox, he is
+       a wiser man than I. Certain it is that we never heard of him
+       again; and for aught I know to the contrary, he may have
+       been that identical Japanese animal which turns into
+       tea-kettles and vanishes in puffs of smoke. It does not take
+       long, however, to make another find, and we go home after a
+       three hours' chase with two fine brushes and appetites which
+       would ruin any hotel-keeper in a week.</p>
+
+    <p>After breakfast a walk to the cotton-houses would be in
+    order, for the successful planter is he who trusts nothing to
+    the overseer which can have his personal supervision, and he
+    must excuse himself to such of his guests as prefer a cigar by
+    the library fire to an hour spent in observing the details of
+    plantation work. In the days of which I write horse-power was
+    preferred to steam, and negro-power to both; and few planters
+    of the fine black-seed cotton could be convinced that any
+    "power-gin" could be invented which would not injure the long,
+    silky "staple" or fibre of the lint. The old-time "foot-gins"
+    were used exclusively, and the gin-house was a place of curious
+    interest to all visitors. In one end of the long room was the
+    huge pile of seed-cotton which was to pass through the rollers
+    as the first step toward its preparation for the market. How
+    simply does a sudden stroke of inventive genius solve a problem
+    which wise men have regarded as insoluble! Not much more than a
+    century ago a commission of practical English <i>savans</i>
+    discouraged the cultivation of a textile fabric which "might be
+    useful but for the impossibility of clearing it of the seeds!"
+    But the foot-gin appeared on the scene, and indigo went down
+    before cotton. Ranged along the walls of the room are some
+    twenty rough wooden frames, looking like a compromise between a
+    straw-cutter and a sewing-machine, each furnished with two
+    strong rollers operated by a treadle and acting precisely like
+    those of a clothes-wringer. Behind each of these machines
+    stands a man or woman with one ever-moving foot upon the
+    treadle-board, feeding the seed-cotton from a large bag to the
+    greedy rollers, which seize it and pass the lint in fleecy
+    rolls into another bag prepared for it, while the seed, like
+    shirt-buttons touched by the afore-mentioned wringer, rolls off
+    from the hither side to form a pile upon the floor. Thence it
+    will be carted to the seed-house to be rotted into manure for
+    the next crop, there being no better fertilizer for cotton than
+    a compost of which it forms the base. A portion of it, however,
+    will be reserved to be boiled with cow-peas and fed to the
+    milch-cattle, no food being superior to its rich, oily kernel
+    in milk-producing qualities. The negro mothers use it largely
+    in decoction as a substitute for cocoa, and the white mothers
+    under similar circumstances having it parched and ground like
+    coffee, when it makes an exceedingly palatable and nutritious
+    beverage. The "green-seed" or short-staple variety is far
+    inferior to the black for this purpose, and produces white,
+    sticky, cottony-looking butter; indeed, most dairywomen insist
+    that "you can pick the lint out of it." The ginned cotton is
+    carried to the platforms, where it is "specked" by the
+    women&mdash;leaves, dirt and other impurities being picked out
+    by hand&mdash;and spread out to dry and bleach in the sun;
+    thence we follow it to the "moting-room," where it is
+    thoroughly and finally overhauled, every minute particle of
+    dirt or other <span class="pagenum"><a name="page244"
+       id="page244"></a>[pg 244]</span> foreign matter and every
+       flock of stained and discolored cotton being picked out.
+       This room is always in the second story, and at one end of
+       it a circular hole is cut in the floor; through this hole
+       hangs the bag of strong, close gunny-cloth, very different
+       from the coarse covering which suffices for the lower grades
+       of "short-staple," supported by a stout iron hoop larger by
+       some inches than the hole in the floor, and to which the end
+       of the bag is securely sewed. The cotton is thrown into this
+       bag and packed with an iron rammer by a man who stands in
+       it, his weight assisting in the packing, each bag being made
+       to contain upward of four hundred pounds.</p>
+
+    <p>Everything seeming to go on as it ought and all the
+    necessary orders and directions being given, we walk out to
+    take a look at the poultry. There are fowls in abundance and
+    superabundance, but our kind host is most proud of his flock of
+    three hundred white turkeys; and a beautiful sight they are,
+    scattered over the grassy lawn. Ranging, as these fine birds
+    will, over a mile or two of woods abounding in their wild
+    brethren, convenient mistakes were often made by the pineland
+    gunners, whose rifles were always ready to pick off a stray
+    gobbler without waiting to know whether he was wild or tame,
+    and so the old gentleman introduced the white stock to prevent
+    the possibility of such errors. For a similar reason no ducks
+    were raised except those which wear top-knots. It is no unusual
+    thing for wild gobblers and mallards to come up with the tame
+    stock to the poultry-yard, and the bronze feathers and shy
+    habits of many of the young turkeys show evidence of their free
+    parentage.</p>
+
+    <p>It is just impossible for a city man to remain indoors in
+    the country with the broad fields, the shady woods, the bright
+    blue sky and the merry pipe of birds calling him out to active
+    exercise and unaccustomed sport. He is sure to think himself a
+    sportsman, even if uncertain whether the shot or powder should
+    first enter the gun; and if an old hand at the trigger, his
+    uneasiness while in the house becomes almost painful. Every
+    article of hunting-gear is overhauled again and again; boots
+    are greased, shot-pouches filled, powder-charges remeasured,
+    guns cleaned and ramrods oiled; and I once had a fine
+    Manton&mdash;as sweet a piece as ever came to the
+    shoulder&mdash;almost ruined by an eager friend, who, after
+    going through all this during a stormy morning, insisted on
+    taking off the locks and triggers, just to while away the time.
+    The introduction of the breech-loader most happily obviates all
+    this, since such lagging hours may now be occupied in charging
+    and crimping cartridges. But there is nothing to detain us
+    longer to-day: the "Bob Whites" are waiting for us among the
+    pea-vines, and the snipe among the tussocky grass of the old
+    rice-field. Di and Sancho have caught sight of the guns, and
+    are capering about in the wildest excitement, for it is a long
+    time since they have seen anything more "gamey" than a city
+    pigeon. Birding over good dogs is the very poetry of
+    field-sports. The silken-haired setter and the lithe pointer
+    are as far the superiors of the half-savage hound as the
+    Coldstream Guards are of the Comanches. The hound has no
+    affection and but little intelligence, and the qualities which
+    make him valuable are purely those of instinct. The long,
+    hungry cry with which he follows the deer and the sharp, angry
+    yelp which he utters when chasing the fox tell plainly that the
+    motives which prompt him thus to use his delicate nose and
+    unwearying powers of endurance are precisely those which carry
+    the Indian to the hunt or on the war-path. He hunts for any
+    master who will cheer him on, has no tactics but to stick to
+    the trail and give tongue as long as the scent will lie, and
+    must be whipped off the game when caught to prevent his
+    devouring it on the spot. The setter, on the other hand, is
+    intelligent, affectionate and faithful. If properly trained and
+    reared, he loves his master and will hunt for no one else,
+    learns to understand human language to an astonishing degree
+    and exhibits reasoning powers of no mean order. He hunts purely
+    for sport, understands the habits of his game, and regulates
+    his tactics accordingly, and delivers the birds
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page245"
+       id="page245"></a>[pg 245]</span> uninjured to his master,
+       sometimes controlling his appetite and carrying the game
+       long distances for this purpose. I have frequently
+       discovered that my dogs, brought up in the house, understood
+       words which had never been taught them. My old favorite Di
+       always answers the dinner-bell and stands near my chair for
+       odd scraps. Being somewhat annoyed one day by her eagerness,
+       I said playfully, "Go to the kitchen and tell Annie to feed
+       you." She at once rushed off and scratched the kitchen door
+       until the girl opened it, and then stood by the tray of
+       scraps looking at her and wagging her tail. Wanting one of
+       my little sons one evening, I said, "Di, go find the boys!"
+       She rushed off, looking and smelling about their usual
+       haunts, but returned unsuccessful. I scolded and sent her a
+       second and third time, with the same result: a few minutes
+       after she came quietly behind me with the <i>hat</i> of my
+       youngest boy in her mouth: she had taken it from a table in
+       the passage, and her wagging tail said plainly, "Will this
+       answer? It's the best I can do." The same dog will creep
+       carefully upon partridges, and stand as if cut in marble
+       lest they should fly, but will chase turkeys at full speed,
+       giving tongue like a hound, and then lie still for hours
+       while they are called up and shot, nor will she ever
+       confound the different habits of the two birds or the
+       different methods of hunting them.</p>
+
+    <p>Such are the highly-bred and intelligent animals which are
+    eagerly waiting for us to-day&mdash;Di, with her white coat,
+    soft as wavy silk, her chestnut ears and one spot on the back
+    alone marring its snowy purity; Sancho, jet black, with
+    "featherings" like a King Charles spaniel. They are over the
+    fence already, and tearing about the field so recklessly in the
+    exuberance of their joy that they must certainly startle any
+    game which may be there. The timid little field-buntings glide
+    away on silent wing through the grass; the meadow-larks rise
+    with gentle flappings and sail off with that easy flight so
+    tempting to very young wing-shots; now and then a flock of
+    doves whistle off too far for a certain shot, and clouds of
+    crow-blackbirds rise with hoarse chirps and seek less public
+    feeding-grounds; a rabbit dashes off from a brier-patch and
+    both dogs rush pell-mell at his heels, but a single note from
+    the whistle brings them to a sudden halt and makes them look
+    thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Off they go again, as wild as
+    deer; but suddenly Di's whole action changes: crouching to the
+    ground and beating her sides rapidly with her tail, she runs
+    hither and thither, snuffing eagerly in the grass. Now Sancho
+    comes up and catches the cold trail, for a covey has certainly
+    been in that place to-day. Most probably they rose from the
+    spot, frightened by the swoop of a hawk, and made for the
+    nearest cover, for the dogs can do nothing with the scent. But
+    that little whiff of the exciting effluvia has brought them
+    down to their work, and a beautiful sight it is as they quarter
+    the ground with quickly-beating tails and noses high in the
+    air, crossing and recrossing the wind in zigzag lines and
+    concentric circles, hunting the ground so closely that no
+    trail, however cold, can escape their keen sense of smell. A
+    wave of the hand to Sancho, and the sagacious fellow is off
+    toward the far corner of the field, when suddenly Di stops in
+    mid-career with a jerk that must try every sinew in her frame.
+    The birds are right under her nose, and she dares not move a
+    muscle, but stands as if changed into stone, her eyes starting
+    with excitement, her nostrils expanded, her feathery stern
+    quivering stiffly out behind and every line of her figure
+    standing out like whipcord. "Toho!" The black dog catches the
+    sound and turns his head: he sees her rigid form, and backs her
+    where he stands as firmly as if he too had the scent. There is
+    no hurry, for the dogs are true as steel and will stand there
+    as long as the frightened birds lie, while the latter, obedient
+    to the instinct of sudden terror, will cower where they are for
+    an hour, with their heads drawn back, their mottled breasts
+    pressed to the earth and their legs gathered under them, ready
+    to spring into the air. We cock our guns, agree to shoot
+    respectively at the birds which go right or left or straight
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page246"
+       id="page246"></a>[pg 246]</span> before us, and then advance
+       to flush the covey ourselves. The staunch dog never winces
+       as we pass her: two paces, three, a sudden rush and whirr as
+       of many wings, five sharp reports in quick succession and
+       four birds down! Another, wild with fright, rises straight
+       up for twenty feet and darts off behind us, but his
+       beautiful head droops as the crack of my last barrel
+       resounds on the air and a cloud of feathers floats downward.
+       The shot has struck him in the line of flight, and he goes
+       to the ground with a bounce, some thirty yards away, as if
+       hurled there by a vigorous arm. The well-trained dogs come
+       to the "Down! charge!" while we reload our guns, and then
+       seek the dead birds and bring them carefully in to us.</p>
+
+    <p>Leaving the broken covey to be worked up on our return, we
+    push on to another part of the large pea-field, where, perched
+    upon the topmost limb of a tall dead pine, we see a red-tailed
+    hawk engaged in quiet observation. There is no surer sign of
+    birds, but it takes close hunting to find them, for they dare
+    not move about while their savage enemy is on the watch. As we
+    approach the hawk stretches out his neck, jerks his wings two
+    or three times and oscillates his ungainly body, and then, with
+    a loud scream of angry disappointment, he is off. The tree
+    stands in a little piece of sedge, not far from a dense growth
+    of pine-saplings, and we know that the moment the hawk left his
+    perch the birds started for the cover, and our only chance for
+    shooting is to head them off and turn them. The dogs have
+    struck the running trail, and their action is totally different
+    from what it was with the first covey. Crouching flat to the
+    ground, they glide after the startled birds with a snake-like
+    movement, now stopping, now running swiftly in. Suddenly Di
+    leaves the trail and dashes off at full speed to the right.
+    Making a wide circuit, she skirts the pines, and, turning short
+    round, comes to a firm stand in the very face of the retreating
+    covey, while Sancho lies prone with his nose between his paws.
+    It is an old trick of hers thus to "huddle" running birds, and
+    we follow her example, come up behind her, and get six with
+    four barrels as the birds rise in a bunch.</p>
+
+    <p>But if the reader follows us too closely, he will have all
+    the fatigue of a long tramp without the compensation of
+    healthful excitement and full game-pockets. Thirty-five fine
+    birds in a pile on the pantry-table offer a capital <i>raison
+    d'�tre</i> for weary feet and soiled fingers when we reach home
+    just in time for the supper-bell. There have been some arrivals
+    while we were gone, for Christmas is near at hand, and the old
+    house is filling up with guests. To-morrow the "St. John's
+    Hunting-Club" has its monthly deer-hunt and dinner at Black
+    Oak, and we need a good night's rest to prepare us for an
+    experience the omission of which would render imperfect any
+    truthful reminiscence of life at the old plantation.</p>
+
+    <p>During the months spent at the plantation there is little
+    social visiting among the gentlemen, and, except on Sundays and
+    occasions of public meetings, the various local clubs offer
+    their only opportunities for seeing each other, Another
+    object&mdash;at least, under the old <i>r�gime</i>&mdash;was to
+    bring together those who occupied somewhat different social
+    positions. Formerly the clubs were strictly exclusive, and,
+    indeed, this feature was never lost, but in every community
+    there would be some <i>novi homines</i>, clever men many of
+    them, whom the old gentry were quite willing to recognize,
+    though a marked difference in culture prevented family
+    visiting. These could be admitted to membership, and at the
+    club-house could be met on equal terms. The hunting feature was
+    always preserved, though few of the older members ever joined
+    in the sport. Under the rules there was a place, a day and an
+    hour for the weekly meet; and I remember when it was a safe
+    thing to be at "the White Bridge" on the Santee Canal any
+    Saturday morning at nine o'clock. Somebody was sure to be there
+    with dogs and driver, prepared for a "wallet-hunt"&mdash;i.e.,
+    an all-day hunt with wallets at the crupper well filled with
+    hunter's cheer. Once a month the club met for dinner, each
+    member "finding" in turn, and on that day a single drive, or at
+    most two, was all that could be enjoyed. The club-house was a
+    plain frame building in the woods, with
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page247"
+       id="page247"></a>[pg 247]</span> a huge fireplace at each
+       end, heavy stationary pine table extending the length of the
+       room, and broad soft-pine benches. The dishes, wines,
+       liquors and cigars were all specified in the rules, the
+       finder being allowed two extra dishes at will, and supplying
+       all the crockery, cutlery and glass. The kitchen was a rough
+       shed close to the cool and shaded spring of pure, clear
+       water. Being myself but a guest, I have not the privilege of
+       extending an invitation to the reader; so, by his leave, we
+       will drop the present tense and I will assume the part of
+       <i>raconteur</i>. How vividly do the scenes of that day come
+       back through the highways of memory, crowded as they are
+       with experiences of more than twenty varied years! As I rode
+       up to the bridge on that bright December morning I found a
+       party which promised rare sport. There was Kit Gillam with
+       his crooked nose, and Tom Clifton with his deadly Manton and
+       fine cry of dogs, and cheery Jack Parker, who hunted only
+       for the good company, and whose gun was as likely as not to
+       be unloaded when the deer came out to him. Two drives were
+       decided on which might be relied on for shooting, and yet
+       were small enough to give ample time for reaching the
+       club-house before dinner.</p>
+
+    <p>As we rode toward our stands I thought it a good chance to
+    settle a point which had long excited my curiosity. "Kit," said
+    I, "I have often wondered how your nose got out of plumb. What
+    caused it?"</p>
+
+    <p>"When I was a little bit of a boy I fell down and stepped on
+    it."</p>
+
+    <p>This very satisfactory explanation brought us to our ground,
+    and we were soon at our respective stands and listening eagerly
+    for the trail-notes of the old hounds. The deer have regular
+    runs, from which they rarely deviate, and which do not vary in
+    the course of years. These are guarded by the standers while
+    the game is driven down from the opposite direction. A large
+    drive may have a dozen of these stands, by one of which the
+    deer will almost certainly pass, but which one nobody knows.
+    Quiet is absolutely necessary and a cigar is fatal to sport,
+    but concealment is useless, as these animals see imperfectly in
+    daylight.</p>
+
+    <p>I had not to wait long before I caught the distant cheering
+    and hand-clapping of the drivers as they encouraged the dogs to
+    hunt. In the quiet of the sombre woods every sound was
+    distinctly audible. Suddenly three or four quick, sharp yelps
+    brought my gun to the "ready," and the hammers clicked as a
+    burst of music followed. But above the clamor of the hounds
+    came the crack of the driver's whip, and his voice, mellowed by
+    distance, was heard in angry tones: "Come back yah, you
+    good-for-nuttin', wutless lee' rabbit-dog, you! I sway maussa
+    ha' for shoot da' puppy 'fore he spile ebery dog in de
+    pack!"</p>
+
+    <p>Soon, however, came another open, deep and musical, and
+    there was no mistaking old Drummer's trail-note: then Killbuck
+    joined in, and then the cry became general. For a while the
+    broken, quavering tongue tells that the dogs are only trailing
+    and the deer is still cowering in his bed, or perhaps has
+    sneaked out of the drive at the first sound of the horn. Hark!
+    what a burst! They had "started" within two hundred yards of
+    me. The next moment there was a rustle of leaves, and a
+    yearling doe dashed by. I am not a dead shot, and have nothing
+    to say about that first barrel, but the second sent her down
+    and over with a roll that almost broke her neck. The dogs were
+    stopped and the deer thrown over the pommel of one of the boys,
+    and we rode on to try the Brunswick swamp. The boy had assured
+    us that "One pow'ful big buck bin in day (there) las' night. I
+    see all he track gwine in, an' I nebber see none come out."</p>
+
+    <p>We were soon strung along the narrow dam across which the
+    game was to be forced by the drivers, who had to make their way
+    through an ugly bog among cypress "knees" and dense
+    brier-patches. Jack Parker stood next to me, fidgeting about
+    uneasily, because it was against rules to talk on stand. Jack's
+    prominent feature was his nose, and he had an incorrigible
+    trick of blowing it "out loud" whenever there was a particular
+    reason for keeping perfectly quiet. The dogs had begun to open,
+    and their loose, scattering trail-notes indicated
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page248"
+       id="page248"></a>[pg 248]</span> turkeys. Looking directly
+       before me, I saw seven noble gobblers stepping cautiously
+       toward my stand. Their glossy breasts glittered with coppery
+       lustre in the straggling sunbeams as, with drooping wings
+       and expanded tails, they advanced, looking fearfully about
+       and uttering their low alarm-notes, "Quit! quit! quit!"
+       Three more steps will make a certain shot, and&mdash;out
+       rang Jack's nasal clarion, loud and clear as the
+       <i>morte</i> at a fox-chase. I looked round in horror, and
+       there stood my hunter complacently eying me and flourishing
+       his white silk handkerchief, while his gun leaned against a
+       tree ten paces distant: "Expect I'd better go back to my
+       stand, eh? Are those dogs barking at a deer?"</p>
+
+    <p>I jumped to my feet for a snap-shot at the old gobbler which
+    flew over me, making a clear miss. Bang! bang! went two more
+    guns; a woodcock whistled up from the bog and two swamp-rabbits
+    dashed into the brier. The dogs came out, shaking the water
+    from their coats, and the spattered drivers rode through the
+    creek. There was not a feather to show, and of course everybody
+    was "down" on Jack, but with an air of deep injury he put it
+    off on me with the question, "Why didn't you tell me the
+    turkeys were coming? How can a fellow help having a cold?"</p>
+
+    <p>We reached the club-house just in time to take our seats as
+    dinner was served, and were in capital condition to enjoy the
+    rich mutton, the fat turkey, the juicy home-cured ham and the
+    rare old madeira which graced the board. This last was a
+    specialty with the gentlemen of those days, and probably no
+    cellars in the world could boast choicer vintage than the
+    "Newton &amp; Gordon" and "Old Leacock" which cheered the table
+    of that "hunting-club." There were stronger liquors, too,
+    though these were chiefly used as appetizers before dinner. The
+    moderate use of brandy was universal, but the drunkenness which
+    blots these days of prohibitory laws was comparatively rare.
+    Few ever left the club-house "disguised" by liquor except the
+    young men, who then, as now and always, would occasionally
+    indulge in a "frolic." With the clearing of the board came the
+    regular and volunteer toasts, and then an hour of "crop-talk"
+    and "horse-talk" and hunting-stories over the wine and cigars.
+    With the departure of the older members came the inevitable
+    quarter-race, with its accompaniment of riding feats which
+    would have done credit to a Don Cossack. The equestrian
+    performance was commenced by Kit Gillam (who now dismounts and
+    leads over every little ditch) forcing his active chestnut up
+    the wooden steps and into the club-room, and rearing him on the
+    dining-table. Then came a leaping-match over a ten-railed
+    fence, resulting in the barking of some shins and the
+    demolition of sundry panels of rail. Joe Keating, the wildest
+    rider I ever knew, had emptied his tumbler too often, and
+    insisted on running his horse home through the woods. An hour
+    after he was overtaken trudging along the road, perfectly
+    sober, with the saddle on his shoulders and the bridle over his
+    arm.</p>
+
+    <p>"Why, Joe, where's your horse?"</p>
+
+    <p>"Dead!" was the laconic reply.</p>
+
+    <p>Sure enough. He had run full against a huge pine, and the
+    horse had gone down with a broken skull. He never tried it
+    again.</p>
+
+    <p>Christmas Eve has come at last, and the old plantation is in
+    all its glory. Carriage after carriage has deposited its
+    freight of blooming girls and merry-eyed children at the broad,
+    open hall-door. There is not a vacant stall in the stables, nor
+    an unoccupied bedroom among all the seventeen of the spacious
+    mansion. The broad dinner-table is set diagonally in the long
+    dining-room, and to-morrow, at least, the guests will have to
+    take two turns at filling its twenty seats, while the children
+    go through the same manoeuvre in the pantry. Where they will
+    all sleep to-night is a mystery which none can unravel save the
+    busy, hospitable "lady of the manor;" but it makes little
+    difference, for there will be little sleeping done. The day
+    passes in riding-parties and rowing-parties and similar
+    amusements, as each freely follows the bent of his inclination.
+    "Brass," the negro fiddler, has been summoned, and "Newport"
+    comes with his <span class="pagenum"><a name="page249"
+       id="page249"></a>[pg 249]</span> stirrup and steel for the
+       "triangle" accompaniment, and the merry feet of the dancers
+       are soon keeping time to the homely but inspiriting music.
+       The "German" and the "Boston" have not usurped the places of
+       the old-time cotillon, quadrille and Virginia reel, and the
+       dance is often varied by romping games of "Blindman's Buff,"
+       "Move-House" and "Stage-Coach," in which old and young unite
+       with equal zest.</p>
+
+    <p>But this is not the limit of the fun. From time immemorial
+    Christmas Eve has been licensed for the performance of all
+    sorts of tricks, and demure little faces are flitting about
+    convulsed by the effort to conceal the merry sense of mischief.
+    The stockings are duly hung for Saint Nicholas, and the holly,
+    with its glossy leaves and scarlet berries, stands ready to be
+    planted in the parlor, to bloom to-morrow into all kinds of
+    rich flowers and gift-fruit. At nine o'clock the work of
+    arranging the Christmas tree begins. The ladies retire, and
+    after a quiet smoke by the roaring hall-fire the gentlemen
+    follow suit. To bed, but not to sleep. Jack Parker is the first
+    man ready, and bounces into the best bed to secure the softest
+    place; but the bars have been skillfully removed, and he is the
+    centre of a rather mixed pile on the floor. I feel another, to
+    be sure that all is right, and slip cozily between the sheets,
+    but some graceless little wretch has placed a walking-cane
+    "athwart-ships," which nearly breaks my back. None escape. Some
+    find their sheets strewed with chaff or cockle-burs, some find
+    no sheets at all. At midnight a fearful roar comes from the
+    girls' room, followed by pretty shrieks and terrible confusion;
+    but it is only the old Cochin rooster, which was slyly shut up
+    in the empty chimney-place before they retired, indulging in
+    his first crow.</p>
+
+    <p>Daylight puts an end to all sleep, for the boys are on the
+    piazza ready to welcome Christmas with innumerable packages of
+    fire-crackers. We rise to find our pantaloons sewed up, our
+    boots stuffed with wet cotton, our tooth-brushes dusted with
+    quinine and our <i>caf� noir</i> sweetened with salt. These
+    practical jokes are all taken in good part and made to
+    contribute to the jollity of the season. At the breakfast-table
+    lumps of cracked marble serve admirably for loaf-sugar, except
+    that the hottest coffee will not dissolve them, and boiled eggs
+    tempt the appetite only to disappoint with their sawdust
+    filling. Then all assemble on the piazza to witness the
+    merriment of the crowd of negroes who have assembled to claim
+    little gifts of tobacco and sugar and to receive the annual
+    glass of whisky which a time-honored custom bestows. The liquor
+    is served in a wine-glass, and swallowed eagerly by men, women
+    and boys from ten years old upward. Then they disperse to get
+    their portion of the Christmas beef which has been slaughtered
+    for their special benefit, and we prepare for service at the
+    parish church, which stands among the shadows of the old forest
+    oaks an easy walk from the house. There the solemn services
+    temper and soften, but do not check or lessen, the joy and
+    good-will which so well become the season, and which find their
+    appropriate manifestation in all kinds of innocent amusement.
+    The religious and the social observances of the day react each
+    upon the other, and harmonize most admirably in the impressions
+    which they produce. The interchange of gifts and tokens around
+    the Christmas tree follows most appropriately, and the
+    Christmas feast is marked by profuse hospitality and keen
+    enjoyment unmarred by riot or excess.</p>
+
+    <p>Ah, well! there are piles of dusty memories in the old
+    cockloft still untouched, but I shall rummage no more to-night.
+    The scenes which have floated past me with the wreathing smoke
+    of my cigar are green and fragrant to me with a freshness which
+    time can never blight, but they never can harden into reality
+    again for any mortal experience. They have gone into the
+    irretrievable past with a state of things which some may regret
+    and others rejoice in, and well will it be if the new
+    <i>r�gime</i> shall supply their places with other pictures
+    which twenty years hence it may be no less pleasant to
+    remember.</p>
+
+    <p class="author">ROBERT
+    WILSON.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page250"
+       id="page250"></a>[pg 250]</span>
+
+    <h2>OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.</h2>
+
+    <h4>A GERMAN AGRICULTURAL FAIR.</h4>
+
+    <p>From the 27th to the 30th of September all Stuttgart flocks
+    to Cannstatt for the <i>Volksfest</i>; and this year every good
+    W�rtemberger was bound to feel an additional interest in the
+    f�te on account of the opening ceremony, the inauguration of a
+    statue to the late king, Wilhelm I.&mdash;and "well beloved,"
+    one is tempted to add from the way in which his people still
+    speak of him. "The old king" and "this one" they say with an
+    inflection of voice anything but flattering to the latter. Our
+    landlady assures us that let the weather look as threatening as
+    it would, the sun always contrived to burst out when in former
+    times the late king rode into the arena to give the prizes; and
+    she is evidently by no means certain it will not pour all three
+    days of the fair this year. However, to judge from the skies,
+    "this one" is not so bad as he might be: the sun shines
+    propitious on him too, and consequently on us as we set forth
+    to see what we can see. The second is the great day, as the
+    prizes are then distributed; but already on Monday the booths
+    and shows were on the field, and Cannstatt was gay with banners
+    and wreaths and garlands of green. The carpenters were still
+    hard at work hammering at seats for us to occupy next day, but
+    the wonderful triumphal arch stood quite completed and worthy
+    of sincere admiration. No one knows who has not seen it worked
+    into an architectural design how beautiful a string of onions
+    can be, how gorgeous a row of vegetable-marrows, how delicate a
+    cluster of turnips. It sounds puerile, but it was lovely
+    nevertheless. Imagine a temple-like construction all composed
+    of odorous pine, with an arched portal on either hand, and then
+    every line and curve, every niche and pillar and balustrade,
+    defined with glowing fruit. It was looped in festoons and hung
+    in tassels of red and white and gold: the arms of
+    W�uuml;rtemberg even were traced in yellow corn, while above it
+    all rose a graceful column, a mosaic from base to summit of
+    every fruit that autumn can bring to perfection.</p>
+
+    <p>That was the great show: after that, mammoth cucumbers and
+    carrots or rows of agricultural implements did not detain us
+    long. The next best thing was to see the booths and the crowd
+    on the outskirts of the exhibition. There the circus was in
+    full blast, and triumphant, brazen-throated opposition to all
+    smaller attractions that had ventured into that neighborhood.
+    The performing dogs in red petticoats were reduced to making an
+    appearance before their tent to entice spectators, and
+    Harlequin and Columbine had to shout themselves hoarse inviting
+    people to come in and split with laughter for sixpence. Those
+    who did not aspire to a seat under painted canvas gathered
+    round a melancholy bear dancing a <i>pas seul</i> on the grass
+    with heartbroken gravity. Then came the <i>Sch�tzhallen</i>,
+    where the marksmen stationed themselves three feet from the
+    target and cracked away at it with no other visible effect than
+    that produced on a monkey doing its tricks close by: at every
+    shot the poor little creature stopped fiddling and looked over
+    its shoulder with a distressed air of "If I'm not hit this
+    time!" Hand-organs, penny trumpets and rattles quite drowned
+    the voice of a street-songstress with a large assortment of
+    vocal music before her, from which she was giving the public a
+    selection. Whether the songs had any reference to the pictures
+    that formed her background we did not discover, but, at all
+    events, the latter were tragic in the extreme. "The
+    twenty-four-year-old murderer of his mother and six brothers
+    and sisters" was there portrayed in a neat suit of black, with
+    a hatchet in his hand and a very irresolute expression of
+    countenance, while the various members of his family, seen
+    through the open bedroom doors, awaited their fate in peaceful
+    slumber. The booths, with toys, gingerbread,
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page251"
+       id="page251"></a>[pg 251]</span> sausages, cheese and light
+       literature tastefully intermingled, went on and on like the
+       restaurants that lined each side of the long avenue. Around
+       primitive tables family parties clinked foaming glasses and
+       hailed with demonstrative hospitality any stray cousin who
+       chanced that way. In one of the last of these improvised
+       <i>Trinkhallen</i> we came upon a young man and maiden who
+       had the place quite to themselves. Her brown parasol kept
+       the sun off them both, and it was of no sort of consequence
+       that they had nothing more interesting than the back of a
+       shed to look at. Future prospects were the only ones they
+       cared for: the present had no need of anything but a faint
+       beeriness, conducive to day-dreaming.</p>
+
+    <p>As we get into the carriage again our coachman says we must
+    see the new statue. Accordingly, we drive through the town and
+    halt before it in the square. It is very fine, glowing like
+    gold from the mint. The king sits his charger well, and gazes
+    majestically at nothing in particular: still, one must be a
+    little critical, and we imagine the horse's tail is not quite
+    right. But then is not the whisk of a tail in bronze almost
+    impossible to conceive of? If the artist suffers no severer
+    censure than that, he will probably call himself a happy man.
+    The inscription on the pedestal of the statue reads, "From his
+    grateful people." High and low have contributed to it, and
+    gladly. "That was a man!" says our driver. He was a soldier
+    under him, and knows. And in fact the old king seems to have
+    been always doing something for the country, so that the
+    gratitude is not without a cause. The inhabitants of Cannstatt
+    have special reason to remember him kindly: he himself was
+    grateful to them and showed it. In the troublous times of 1848
+    he was sadly in need of money: Ludwigsburg (another satellite
+    of Stuttgart) refused it, while Cannstatt came up to the mark
+    handsomely. The royal creditor never forgot that. He instituted
+    the <i>Volksfest</i> as a sort of memorial, and Cannstatt is
+    proud and prosperous, while Ludwigsburg is like a city of the
+    dead. So the coachman affirms; and once conversation is opened
+    between us it flows without intermission. His head is over his
+    shoulder all the way as we roll back to the city under the
+    beautiful trees of the palace grounds. "If the old king had
+    been living, W�rtemberg would never have joined in the last
+    war: he would have told Prussia to fight it out by herself."
+    Apropos of the war, we ask what he thinks of Bismarck. He
+    evidently thinks a great deal of him, though not perhaps in the
+    generally accepted sense of that expression. He states as a
+    fact that there <i>are</i> limits, leaving it to us to
+    understand that the chancellor of the empire has overstepped
+    them. He declares further that a Prussian, and especially a
+    Berliner, is always to him an obnoxious member of society
+    through his insisting on knowing everything (except his own
+    place) better than anybody else. "Now, there was the Prussian
+    general before this last one," he continues, changing from
+    politics to court-gossip (naturally, since 1870, military
+    matters in W�rtemberg flourish under Prussian auspices): "the
+    first ball he went to at the palace he asked the queen to
+    dance! <i>Our</i> queen!! And then he took his whole family,
+    and they sat in chairs that never were meant for them, so that
+    the king had to say to him next day, "Mr. General, first come
+    I, and then my ministers, and then this one, and then that one,
+    and <i>then</i> you." He went back to Berlin soon after. It is
+    pleasanter to sit one's self down where one doesn't belong than
+    to be set down by somebody else." Our driver chuckles, and then
+    bursts out afresh, "Asking the <i>queen</i> to dance!" He
+    certainly has perfect faith in his own stories.</p>
+
+    <p>We saw the successor of that presumptuous military man next
+    day among the greater and lesser lights that revolve around the
+    throne of W�rtemberg. We ourselves were stationary, crowded
+    into the foremost of the tiers of seats that rose surrounding
+    the immense enclosure, and in the best place for observation,
+    close by the royal pavilion. The hills, bright in the sun and
+    velvet in shadow, made a natural amphitheatre beyond, a little
+    church with its pretty tower looked picturesquely down from a
+    neighboring <span class="pagenum"><a name="page252"
+       id="page252"></a>[pg 252]</span> height, and the whole place
+       was gay with flags and branches, glittering uniforms and
+       gorgeous liveries. We were to see the <i>hohe
+       Herrschaften</i> come in at the farthest entrance and drive
+       around directly before our seats. As the trumpets flourish
+       and the first magnificence sweeps by we hear all about us,
+       "The princess Vera," and "No, the duchess of Uhra," and "Is
+       it?" "Isn't it?" "Which is it?" till we finally settle down
+       to the serene conclusion that it is either one or the other.
+       There is no mistaking the queen, however, with the
+       outriders, six superb black horses and postilions in scarlet
+       and gold. The Majesty herself looks pale and resigned,
+       bending to the right and left in answer to the bows and
+       <i>hochs.</i> Our neighbors "the Weimars" come in full
+       force. A superfluous prince of that family appears to have
+       drifted to these regions, and makes our street aristocratic
+       for us. Young Weimar looks uncommonly well in his hussar
+       uniform, and the old prince and his wife and daughter are
+       resplendent. We met them later that same day in town, but
+       they had taken off their best clothes, and truth compels us
+       sadly to admit that we should hardly have known them.</p>
+
+    <p>In the course of time, after various false alarms on our
+    part, the band confidently strikes up "God Save the King!" and
+    there is a flashing and prancing in the distance that creates a
+    great stir. The citizen guard, a stately body of burghers,
+    rides out with the king on this day of all the year, and comes
+    caracoling by in fine style, he in the midst bowing and
+    smiling. And now, after the <i>Herrschaften&mdash;hohe</i> and
+    <i>h�chste</i>&mdash;come the animals. First, horses haughtily
+    stepping, and then splendid bulls with wreaths on their horns
+    and garlands round their&mdash;waists shall we say?&mdash;are
+    led before the king, standing at the foot of the steps and
+    handing the prizes to the farmers, who present themselves,
+    ducking and scraping. It seems a shame to tie up the creatures'
+    legs so, and put rings through their noses: some have even a
+    cloth bound over their heads; and if all these precautionary
+    measures are necessary, it ought to be a relief when the
+    procession of mild cows begins, They look out amiably from
+    under the floral crowns that have slipped low on their brows,
+    or turn with half-conscious pride to the handsome little calves
+    that trot beside them. The sheep, seeking to attract too early
+    the notice of royalty, dash out in a flock, and are driven back
+    with jeering and hooting, as they deserve to be. Then the pigs
+    stagger by: their garlands are excessively unbecoming. Such of
+    the family of swine as are too young to stagger are wheeled in
+    handcarts in the rear; and so the ceremonies are closed, except
+    for a couple of races which take place immediately, and with no
+    great �clat. The burgher races these are called, while on the
+    third and last day are the officers' races. The rain prevented
+    our attending them, and we consoled ourselves, hearing it
+    intimated by those who had been at Ascot and Longchamps that we
+    had not lost a great deal.</p>
+
+    <p class="author">G.H.P.</p>
+
+    <h4>A PAIR OF WHEELS AND AN OLD PARASOL.</h4>
+
+    <p>The threads from which the tissue of history is being woven
+    are ever in unceasing and rapid motion in the hands of the
+    Fates. But these deities for the most part love to work unseen,
+    like the bees. It is only when the spinning is going on with
+    exceptional rapidity and vigor that the movements of the
+    threads and the characteristics of the operation can be
+    observed on the surface of social life, Such is the case in
+    these days at Rome, and it is not necessary to watch the
+    actions of governments or listen to the discussions of
+    legislative chambers in order to assure one's self of the fact.
+    One cannot walk the streets without having the phenomena which
+    are the outward and visible signs of it thrust in a thousand
+    ways on the observation of our senses. The other day I read a
+    whole chapter of contemporary history compressed into the
+    appearance of a pair of wheels engaged in their ordinary daily
+    duty in the streets. It was in that central and crowded part of
+    the city which is between the church of the Ges� and the
+    Farnese palace, a labyrinth of tortuous
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page253"
+       id="page253"></a>[pg 253]</span> streets and lanes, not
+       often visited by foreigners unless when bent on some special
+       expedition of sight-seeing. There are no sidewalks for
+       foot-passengers in these streets. They are narrow, very
+       tortuous and very crowded. Foot-passengers and vehicles of
+       all sorts find their way along as best they may in one
+       confused mass. It was there I saw the historic pair of
+       wheels in question. They were attached to the barrow of a
+       coster-monger, who was retailing a stock of onions, carrots
+       and "cavolo Romano" which he had just purchased at the
+       neighboring market of the "Campo de' Fiori." His wares, I
+       fear, had been selected from the refuse of the market, and
+       he and his barrow were in a state of dilapidated shabbiness
+       that matched his stock in trade. But not so the wheels on
+       which his barrow was supported. They were wheels of the most
+       gorgeous description. The spokes and the circumference were
+       painted of the most brilliant scarlet, and the entire nave
+       was gilded so as to have the appearance of a solid mass of
+       gold. It is impossible to imagine anything more
+       <i>bizarre</i> than the effect of these magnificent wheels
+       doing the work of carrying such an equipage. Nevertheless,
+       the apparition seemed to attract very little attention in
+       the crowded street. The grand scarlet and gilded wheels
+       flamed along among the crowd of shabby men and shabby
+       vehicles with their load of onions and cabbages, and
+       scarcely anybody turned his head to stare at them. I suppose
+       the denizens of the district were used to the apparition of
+       them. To me they looked as if they had been the originals
+       from which Guido Reni painted those of the car in which he
+       has placed the celebrated Aurora of his world-famous fresco.
+       They were solidly and heavily built wheels&mdash;very
+       barbarous an English carriage-builder would have considered
+       them in their heavy and clumsy magnificence&mdash;but they
+       were very gorgeous. What could be the meaning of their
+       appearance in public under such circumstances? I was walking
+       with an Italian friend at the time, who saw my state of
+       amazement at so strange a phenomenon, and explained it all
+       by a single remark.</p>
+
+    <p>"Yes," said he, "there go a pair of His Eminence's wheels.
+    They are sharing the fortunes of their late master in a manner
+    that is at once dramatic and historical."</p>
+
+    <p>The wheels from a cardinal's carriage! Of course they were.
+    How was it possible that such wheels should be mistaken for any
+    other in the world? A few years ago, when pope and cardinals
+    had not yet suffered the horrible eclipse which has overtaken
+    them, one of the most notable features of the Roman streets and
+    suburban roads used to consist of the carriages of the members
+    of the Sacred College taking their diurnal drive. It was not
+    etiquette for a cardinal to walk in the streets, or indeed
+    anywhere else, without his carriage following him. There was no
+    mistaking these barbarously gorgeous vehicles. They were all
+    exactly like each other, and unlike any other carriages to be
+    seen in the nineteenth century&mdash;heavy, clumsy, coarsely
+    built and gorgeously painted of the most flaming scarlet, and
+    largely gilded. They were drawn by long-tailed black horses
+    covered with heavy harness richly plated with silver, or
+    something that looked like it, and driven by a coachman whose
+    livery, always as shabby as magnificent, was as heavily laden
+    with huge masses of worsted lace of the kind that used to be
+    placed on carriage-linings some five-and-twenty years ago. Two
+    similarly bedizened footmen always stood on the monkey-board at
+    the rear, who descended and walked behind His Eminence and his
+    chaplain when the cardinal left his carriage to get his
+    constitutional. Ichabod! Ichabod! The glory has departed! Such
+    cavalcades are no longer to be seen crawling along the Via
+    Appia, or following His Eminence on a fine and sunny afternoon
+    about four o'clock as he walks on the footpath between the
+    Porta Pia and the Basilica of St. Agnes in search of an
+    appetite for his dinner. The world will never see such
+    carriages and such servants any more. <i>Fuit Ilium!</i> I
+    thought of the old lines on the "high&mdash;mettled racer," and
+    of "imperial C�sar, dead and turned to clay, stopping a hole to
+    keep the wind away." To see such
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page254"
+       id="page254"></a>[pg 254]</span> splendor reduced to the
+       service of such vile uses! Yes, as my Italian friend said,
+       "There go the cardinal's wheels," and it is impossible not
+       to feel sure that the phenomenon is symbolical of the way
+       the cardinal is going himself. When an institution, a
+       dignity, a social arrangement of any sort, has grown to be
+       purely ornamental, has become so splendid that its splendor
+       has come to be the essence of it, it will no longer be able
+       to exist shorn of its splendor, however much it may in its
+       origin have been adapted for use rather than for show. The
+       wheels were heavy, cumbrous and ill put together; they were
+       not well adapted for the costermonger's purpose, and will
+       probably fall to pieces before long. Their fate is a type of
+       that of their once master. That ornamental individual, shorn
+       of his ornamental character, is useless. His <i>raison
+       d'�tre</i> is gone as entirely as Othello's occupation was.
+       And it will probably not be long before the fate of the
+       cardinal's wheels overtakes the cardinal himself.</p>
+
+    <p>The second little bit of street incident which recently
+    occurred to me was in itself less striking, but seemed to me to
+    symbolize changes of yet higher moment and wider significance.
+    This time what I saw was in the Ghetto. Many of my readers
+    probably know what the Ghetto at Rome is, but untraveled
+    stayers-at-home may very excusably never have heard of it. The
+    Ghetto is the Jews' quarter in Rome&mdash;the district in which
+    they were for many generations compelled to reside and to be
+    locked in by night, and where from habit the greater part,
+    especially of the poorer members of the Jewish community, still
+    live. As will be easily believed, it is the worst and most
+    wretched quarter of the city&mdash;the lowest physically as
+    well as morally&mdash;and inundated with tolerable certainty
+    every year by the rising of the Tiber. The dilapidated and
+    filthy streets of the other parts of old papal Rome used to
+    look clean and spruce by comparison with the lurid and darksome
+    dens of the Ghetto. There are Ghettos in London&mdash;streets
+    where the children of Israel congregate, not in obedience to
+    any law old or new, but drawn together by mutual attraction and
+    similarity of occupation. And the occupations there are very
+    much of the same nature as those pursued in the Ghetto of
+    Rome&mdash;the buying and selling of old clothes and
+    second-hand property of all sorts, the preparation and
+    distribution of fried fish, and here and there a little usury.
+    But the <i>genius loci</i> here impresses on the trade in
+    discarded odds and ends a peculiar character of its own. A much
+    larger number of old pictures figure among the hoards of
+    useless "property" than would be the case elsewhere. The
+    constant decay of noble and once wealthy families furnishes to
+    the second-hand market a much more abundant supply of the
+    remains of articles that were once rich and rare in their
+    day&mdash;old damask hangings torn from walls that have
+    witnessed the princely revelry of many a generation; rich
+    brocades and stuffs that have made part of the moving pageant
+    in the same saloons; lace of the finest and rarest from the
+    vestments of deceased prelates, whose heirs, as regards such
+    property, have probably been their serving-men; purple and
+    scarlet articles from the wardrobes of cardinals and princes of
+    the Church; and odds and ends of various sorts widely different
+    in kind from aught that could be found in similar repositories
+    in other cities. And another specialty of the Roman Ghetto is
+    that it is not altogether easy to obtain a sight of the
+    miscellaneous treasures of this rag-fair. Partly because the
+    low-lying and narrow lanes of the Ghetto are too murky and
+    filthy to permit of the advantageous exposure of the
+    merchandise in question; partly, probably, from an habitual
+    consciousness on the part of the dealers that the details of
+    their traffic in all its particulars are not of a nature to be
+    safely submitted to the public eye; partly from that
+    secretiveness which is the natural result of living for many
+    generations from father to son under the tyranny of an alien
+    race, whose bitterly hostile prejudices were but little
+    restrained by law or justice; and partly also, no doubt, from
+    the genuine Roman laziness, which in its perfection is capable
+    of overriding even Jewish keenness of trade,&mdash;the Jew
+    brokers <span class="pagenum"><a name="page255"
+       id="page255"></a>[pg 255]</span> of the Ghetto are often
+       unwilling to show their hidden stores to the first comer.
+       Some amount of diplomacy and some show of the probability of
+       effecting an advantageous deal must be had recourse to in
+       order to attain the purpose of the explorer.</p>
+
+    <p>On the recent occasion to which I have referred these
+    difficulties had been overcome, and I had made my way into the
+    interior of one of the dens I have described in the company of
+    a lady friend who is a confirmed and irreclaimable lace-hunter,
+    and who in pursuit of her game would have confronted worse
+    obstacles than any that we had to encounter. For, in truth, the
+    exterior appearance and the entrance-chambers are the worst
+    part of the Ghetto dwellings. One is curiously reminded of the
+    old medi�val stories of Jewish dwellings, where the utmost
+    squalor and poverty of exterior was a mere blind for an
+    interior gorgeous with every manifestation of wealth and
+    luxury. I will not say that much of the latter is to be found
+    in the dwellings of the Ghetto, but a degree of comfortable
+    decency and indications of the possession of capital may be met
+    with which the exterior appearances would not have led one to
+    anticipate. Well, we had reached the third floor of one of
+    these sinister-looking abodes, conducted by a fat old Jewess
+    with a pair of huge black eyes, a large smooth face as yellow
+    as a guinea, and a vast development of bust clad in dirty white
+    wrappers of some sort. A door on the landing-place jealously
+    locked with two huge keys admitted us into a suite of three
+    good-sized rooms crammed from floor to ceiling with a
+    collection of articles more heterogeneous than can easily be
+    conceived&mdash;far more so than can be described.</p>
+
+    <p>Those who have ever accompanied a lady lace-hunter when she
+    has struck a promising trail know that the business in hand is
+    likely to be a somewhat long one. My companion on the present
+    occasion very soon convinced the Jewess that she knew quite as
+    much about the matter as she, the dealer, did. But I presume
+    that some of the old yellow stores produced were "the real
+    thing;" for my friend and the old Jewess soon became immersed
+    in an eager and, as it seemed to me interminable, discussion as
+    to qualities, condition and values. Meantime, I had to amuse
+    myself as best I might by looking at the multifarious objects.
+    I must content myself with mentioning one article, the
+    appearance of which in such a place struck me as strange and
+    not a little significant. It was simply an old parasol, very
+    much faded and a little tattered, but not such a parasol as
+    your fair hands ever carried, my dear madam, nor such as the
+    once equally fair hands of any generation of your ancestors
+    ever carried. The article in question was more like the shelter
+    which we see represented in Chinese paintings as carried over
+    the heads of persons of high rank among the Celestials. It was
+    very large, not much curved into the shape of a dome when
+    expanded, very clumsily and coarsely put together, but of
+    gorgeous magnificence of material. It was made of a very thick
+    and rich damask silk, additionally ornamented by embroidery in
+    gold and silver thread, and the handle and points of the
+    supports were richly gilt. In a word, I perceived at once, not
+    being a novice in such matters, that the article before me was
+    one of the canopies used for holding over the "Host" when the
+    holy sacrament is carried by the priest through the streets to
+    a dying person. It needs but a moment's reflection on the Roman
+    Catholic theory of the sacrament of the "Last Supper" to be
+    aware of the extremely sacred nature of the uses to which this
+    parasol had been put, and of the associations connected with
+    it. Nevertheless, I found this bit of sacred church property in
+    the hands of a Jew broker, exposed to sale for a few francs to
+    the first comer, heretic, scoffer or infidel, that might take a
+    fancy to buy it. This would hardly have been the case when the
+    pope was absolute master of Rome and of all in it. The thing
+    could not have happened save by the dishonesty and cynical
+    disbelief of some priest, and indeed probably of more than one.
+    And, upon the whole, it struck me as a second curious
+    indication of the somewhat breakneck
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page256"
+       id="page256"></a>[pg 256]</span> speed with which the
+       threads of history are spinning themselves in these days and
+       in these latitudes.</p>
+
+    <p class="author">T.A.T.</p>
+
+    <h4>MEDICAL EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES.</h4>
+
+    <p>A great deal of discussion has recently taken place on the
+    subject of medical education in the United States. To a
+    foreigner, or to one not acquainted with the influences that
+    have led to and have kept up this discussion, it might seem to
+    be the result of a spontaneous outburst of popular feeling,
+    earnestly demanding much-needed progress. Really, however, the
+    very reverse is the case; and the revolutionists are those
+    whose <i>kind</i> and <i>sympathetic</i> interest in the
+    welfare of the community is prompted solely by selfish
+    considerations. The changes urged by these self-condemning
+    philanthropists are not demanded by the medical profession nor
+    by the public; neither have they been, nor will they be,
+    sustained by both or by either. This assertion is clearly
+    proved by the experience of the University of Pennsylvania, In
+    1846 the American Medical Association recommended to all
+    medical colleges certain changes and improvements in their
+    courses of instruction. In consequence of this recommendation
+    the University of Pennsylvania extended its session to six
+    months: not a <i>single medical college in the country
+    followed</i> its progressive lead, and after continuing the
+    experiment for six years at great pecuniary loss, it was
+    reluctantly obliged to retrace its steps, and to return to the
+    old standard as to length of session. During the period of this
+    advance the classes of the University fell off greatly, and the
+    classes of other medical schools correspondingly increased.
+    Even medical men sent their sons to other medical schools, to
+    save the time and money necessary for the longer course.
+    Indeed, medical men, as a rule, have sought to evade the
+    restrictions as to length of time of study, etc. more than any
+    other class; and the statement, that the "student usually dates
+    his medical studies from the time he buys his first
+    <i>Chemistry</i>" applies more frequently to the sons of
+    <i>physicians</i> than to any others. Hence, I declare that
+    these proposed changes are not demanded by the medical
+    profession nor by the public.</p>
+
+    <p>The writer of a recent article in <i>Lippincott's
+    Magazine</i> (Dr. H.C. Wood) on "Medical Education in the
+    United States" seems to have been so lost in admiration at the
+    methods of instruction followed in European medical colleges as
+    to be utterly blind to the good in the system of medical
+    education as it exists in this country&mdash;a system the
+    <i>necessary</i> result of our political, social, financial and
+    territorial conditions; a system which, though in the abstract
+    may not be the best, is certainly, judging from its results,
+    the best <i>possible</i> under our peculiar circumstances. This
+    much abused system of medical education (only greatly improved
+    in its extent and thoroughness&mdash;improvements developed by
+    the constant advances in knowledge) is the same system which
+    has produced the great medical men of the United States during
+    the past seventy-five years&mdash;medical practitioners whose
+    success has been surpassed by none in Europe; surgeons whose
+    skill has been, and is, world-wide in reputation; authors whose
+    works are standard authorities everywhere. It is the same
+    system of medical instruction&mdash;I quote verbatim (italics
+    mine) from this article that holds it up to scorn&mdash;which
+    "accomplished such <i>splendid results</i> during the late
+    rebellion." The writer says: "The great resources of the
+    medical profession were proved during the civil war, when there
+    was created in a few months a service which for magnitude and
+    efficiency has rarely if ever been equaled. Indeed, military
+    medicine was raised by it to a point <i>never reached before
+    that time in Europe</i> and the results achieved have, in many
+    points, <i>worked a revolution in science</i>." After this
+    frank declaration of the inestimable value and glorious results
+    of American medical education, the writer draws the
+    <i>logical</i>(?) sequence that it (American medical education)
+    is responsible for a case of most heartrending malpractice,
+    which he relates, compared to which the Japanese hari-kari were
+    merciful mildness, and approaching more nearly the tortures by
+    crucifixion as administered by this same <i>kind-hearted</i>
+    people. With about as much reason and justice might he conclude
+    that the <i>American system</i> of Sunday-school education is
+    lamentably inferior to that of Great Britain, <i>because</i>(!)
+    Jesse Pomeroy was a possibility in that most respectable town
+    of Boston.</p>
+
+    <p>Dr. Wood alludes to the ignorance of the American medical
+    student, and makes a statement "not founded on the authority of
+    official publication," in which he endeavors to show that from
+    "six to ten per cent." of American medical students have an
+    ignorance of vulgar fractions and rudimentary astronomy that
+    would exclude them from an ordinary infant-school. Every one
+    familiar with the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page257"
+       id="page257"></a>[pg 257]</span> students attending our
+       first-class American medical colleges knows perfectly well
+       that in origin and in culture they compare favorably with
+       the young men engaged in the study of law and divinity, or
+       with those entering upon mercantile or manufacturing
+       pursuits. True, there are some imperfectly educated, but
+       certainly not "six or ten per cent." destitute of that
+       knowledge taught even in <i>American</i> infant-schools, and
+       without knowing, and without the statement "being founded on
+       the authority of any official publication," I <i>infer</i>
+       that in <i>Europe</i>, owing to their "better methods,"
+       similar knowledge is communicated to the average European
+       child many months <i>before its birth</i>.</p>
+
+    <p>Next follows a comment on the poverty of the American
+    medical student. Dr. Wood says: "Even worse than this, however,
+    is the fact that the summer between the winter courses is often
+    not spent in study, but in idleness, or, not rarely, in
+    acquiring in the school-room or harvest-field the pecuniary
+    means of spending the subsequent winter in the city." Alas!
+    this <i>is</i> too true. Providence seems to have ordained that
+    our young <i>American</i> doctors are not always reared in the
+    lap of luxury and wealth as the fittest preparation for the
+    trials, hardships and self-denials of their future lives. It is
+    also true that some <i>other</i> young American professional
+    men have been compelled "in the school-room or harvest-field"
+    to acquire the means to prosecute their professional studies.
+    Daniel Webster, the son of a New England farmer, taught school
+    at Fryeburg, Maine, "upon a salary of about one dollar per
+    diem." "His salary was all saved ... as a fund for his <i>own
+    professional</i> education and to help his brother through
+    college." "During his residence at Fryeburg, Mr. Webster
+    borrowed (he was too poor to buy) Blackstone's
+    <i>Commentaries</i>." Mr. Webster's great rival, Henry Clay,
+    also was compelled to resort to the "school-room and
+    harvest-field to obtain the pecuniary means," etc. etc. etc.
+    The son of the poor widow with seven children "applied himself
+    to the labor of the field with alacrity and diligence;" "and
+    there yet live those who remember to have seen him oftentimes
+    riding his sorry horse, with a rope bridle, no saddle, and a
+    bag of grain." "By the familiar name of the Mill-boy of the
+    Slashes do these men ... perpetuate the remembrance of his
+    lowly yet dutiful and unrepining employments." American
+    biography is so filled with similar instances, showing how the
+    great characters of her great men acquired their development
+    and strength in the stern gymnasium of poverty, even in "the
+    school-room and harvest-field," that I could fill volumes with
+    the glowing records. The youngest American school-boy
+    recognizes Abraham Lincoln and Henry Wilson in this
+    <i>American</i> galaxy. Whose heart has not been stirred by the
+    life-story of the great Hugh Miller, the stonecutter's pick
+    earning for him humble means, thereby enabling him to acquire
+    that learning which made his name a household word even in
+    America. Truth, then, as I have remarked, obliges me to admit
+    that we have in our medical colleges some young men who labor
+    "in harvest-fields and school-rooms" in order that they may
+    honorably pay their way, rather than eat the bread or accept
+    the gratuities of pauperism.</p>
+
+    <p>Last March there graduated at the medical department of the
+    University of Pennsylvania one of these self-supporting young
+    men. He was the son of a missionary clergyman: the father was
+    poor in pocket, but the son was not poor in spirit. During the
+    interval between his winter courses of lectures, rather than be
+    a burden to his father, rather than accept gratuitous
+    instruction from the school, he went into the coal regions of
+    Pennsylvania and worked in a coal-mine, as a common miner, to
+    procure funds to enable him to complete his professional
+    studies; and, <i>strange</i> as it may seem, this young miner
+    passed an excellent examination, and received the unanimous
+    vote of the medical faculty for his degree. I mention this
+    case, but every year there are several similar; and we always
+    find that the school-teachers and miners are by no means at the
+    foot of the graduating class.</p>
+
+    <p>Concerning clinical teaching, we have the following
+    statement: "The clinical teaching in an American hospital is
+    comprised in the following routine: Once or twice a week, from
+    one to five hundred men being congregated in an amphitheatre,
+    the professor lectures upon a case brought into the arena,
+    perhaps operates, and when the hour has expired the class is
+    dismissed. Evidently, under such circumstances there cannot be
+    the training of the senses, the acquiring of a knowledge of the
+    hourly play of symptoms of disease and of familiarity with the
+    proper handling of the sick and wounded, which is of such vital
+    importance, and which can be the outcome only of daily contact
+    with patients." What can the writer of this sentence mean?
+    Certainly, no <span class="pagenum"><a name="page258"
+       id="page258"></a>[pg 258]</span> one knows better than he
+       does that such <i>is not</i> the practice in the hospital of
+       the University of Pennsylvania, in Bellevue and in many
+       other large hospitals, where clinics and dispensary services
+       are held for <i>several hours daily</i> throughout the year,
+       and where the student has furnished him abundant
+       opportunities four "acquiring a knowledge of the ...
+       symptoms of disease, ... of handling the sick and wounded,"
+       etc. etc. That the American medical student profits by these
+       opportunities, and learns his clinic lessons well, is proved
+       by the unexpected and evidently unintended testimony which
+       occurs toward the close of the article, where Dr. Wood says,
+       "The great resources of the medical profession in America
+       were proved during the civil war, when there was created in
+       a <i>few months</i> a service which for <i>magnitude</i> and
+       <i>efficiency</i> has <i>rarefy if ever been equaled</i>.
+       Indeed, military medicine was raised by it to a point
+       <i>never reached before</i> that time <i>in Europe</i>, and
+       the results achieved have in many points worked a
+       <i>revolution in science</i>." The italics in this quotation
+       are mine, as they also are in those which follow.</p>
+
+    <p>But (says the article under review) "the largest proportion
+    of our prominent physicians have educated themselves after
+    graduation." As if this were an extraordinary or unusual
+    circumstance! Certainly, they have; and so have all prominent
+    men in all professions and all pursuits of life, in every age
+    and every country, not even excepting the much-lauded men of
+    Great Britain and the continent of Europe. What young lawyer is
+    entrusted with an important cause immediately after admission
+    to the Bar? And as the young doctor (according to the aforesaid
+    showing) "gains his first practical knowledge while serving as
+    a hospital resident, under the supervision of experienced men,"
+    so the young lawyer, <i>even in Great Britain</i>, must gain
+    <i>his</i> first practical knowledge by constant attention at
+    the courts, and by diligently following the proceedings of his
+    preceptor's and other offices. Even the young clergyman, whose
+    business it is to save <i>souls</i>, has to do very much as the
+    young doctor does, and, like him, is often "thrown at once on
+    his own resources, gaining his experience without supervision,
+    and at the <i>expense</i> of the <i>poorer classes</i>, who
+    <i>naturally</i> fall to his charge, and whose ignorance
+    precludes them from an even approximately correct estimate of"
+    his fitness. "It is one of the saddest features of our system
+    that the famed skill of our best" <i>(clergymen)</i> "should so
+    often be acquired at such a cost."</p>
+
+    <p>What can be more unphilosophical and illogical than to
+    compare the young doctor, or any other young professional man,
+    to a new piece of machinery, fresh from the manufactory,
+    complete and perfect in all its parts? And yet something like
+    this is <i>attempted</i> in the article before us. Even as
+    Minerva sprang from the brain of Jove the complete and perfect
+    goddess of learning, so would our Utopian writer have the young
+    doctors to come from the brains of their medical professors
+    complete and perfect; only, if his idea be correct, their
+    medical professors have so little brains that the annual
+    graduating medical classes of the United States would be
+    immediately reduced from the frightful army of three thousand
+    "legalized murderers" to the comparatively small and easily
+    counted number of <i>one graduate</i> (of course, springing
+    from one head). No; the young doctor, at graduation, cannot be
+    compared to a new, complete and perfect machine fresh from the
+    manufactory; rather, let him be compared to the young marsupial
+    creature at birth, extremely rudimentary, whose natural, and
+    hence fittest, place is the parental pouch, but which in due
+    time becomes the vigorous and well-developed specimen. I
+    suppose, if I compare the young doctor to the young marsupial,
+    I should also say that <i>his</i> protecting parental pouch, in
+    which he acquires growth and vigor, is the hospital where he
+    goes after graduation, or the practice which he sees under his
+    preceptor's supervision.</p>
+
+    <p>The article continues: "The remarks which follow do not
+    apply to the medical department of Harvard College or to <i>one
+    or two other schools</i>" (the italics are mine); and farther
+    on it continues: "In other words, Harvard has copied the
+    European plan of medical teaching in some of its essential
+    features, and as a consequence its medical diploma is the
+    <i>only one</i> issued by <i>any prominent medical American</i>
+    college which is a <i>guarantee</i> that its possessor has been
+    well educated in the science and practice of medicine." Where
+    can we find meekness and modesty like this?&mdash;modesty as
+    becoming as it is unexpected and surprising, seeing that the
+    writer fills <i>two</i> professorships in the University of
+    Pennsylvania, Does he hang his head so low in his&mdash;I was
+    about to say <i>singular</i>&mdash;self-abasement (but,
+    considering, the <i>two</i> professorships, I suppose I should
+    say <i>doubled</i> self-abasement) that he cannot see? or are
+    his eyes so blinded by the effulgence of
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page259"
+       id="page259"></a>[pg 259]</span> "Harvard" and "European"
+       plans that he fails to recognize and appreciate the immense
+       advantages offered by his own home institutions? I do not
+       propose to make any invidious remarks concerning Harvard,
+       but I maintain that an <i>honest</i> and <i>just</i>
+       comparison of the schools, of their requirements, of the
+       character of their teachings and the facilities they furnish
+       their students, <i>must</i> show that modesty alone
+       prevented Professor "H.C. Wood, Jr., M.D.," also excepting
+       from his sweeping denunciations the two great schools of
+       Philadelphia, though I only speak for and defend the medical
+       department of the University of Pennsylvania from an attack
+       unjust, uncalled-for and untrue.</p>
+
+    <p class="author">R.A.F. PENROSE.</p>
+    <hr />
+
+    <p>The party opposed to any reforms in medical education has,
+    of course, a right to be heard, and Dr. Penrose is well
+    entitled to represent it both by his position and by the
+    evident heartiness with which he is prepared to defend the
+    existing system at every point. In impugning the motives of
+    those who have attacked it he lays himself open to an obvious
+    retort; but it is sufficient to remark that the contest is not
+    of a nature to call for or justify the use of personalities,
+    which could serve only to divert attention from the real
+    issues.</p>
+
+    <p>The arguments put forward by Dr. Penrose may be summarized
+    as follows: 1st, that the proposed changes are not demanded
+    either by the public or by the profession; 2d, that the present
+    system is the best possible in a nation constituted like ours;
+    3d, that the preparatory education of our medical students is
+    equal to that of law or divinity students, or of young men
+    entering upon mercantile or manufacturing pursuits; 4th, that
+    in certain cases obstacles in the way of a regular and thorough
+    training have been overcome and success achieved in spite of
+    them; and 5th, that it is unavoidable and proper that medical
+    men, as well as members of other professions, should educate
+    themselves after graduation.</p>
+
+    <p>It will be observed that none of these arguments except the
+    last, which is based on a mere verbal ambiguity, touches the
+    two subjects discussed in Dr. Wood's article&mdash;namely, the
+    <i>need</i> of reform and the <i>methods</i> by which, if
+    practicable, it is to be effected. Dr. Penrose does not venture
+    to assert that the existing system is perfect, or to deny that
+    the suggested changes are in the nature of improvements. What
+    he wishes us to believe is that the system, whatever its
+    defects, is as good a one as Americans have a right to demand,
+    and that it is so closely interwoven with our political and
+    social institutions as to admit of no separate handling.
+    Similar arguments are frequently urged against the desire to
+    raise the standard and widen the avenues of the "higher
+    education." We are thus taught to regard ourselves as a poor
+    and struggling nation with no claim to the possession of
+    intellectual luxuries, or as having bound ourselves to forego
+    any aspirations to an equality with other nations in respect of
+    culture when we secured the advantages of popular government
+    and its social concomitants. It would seem, however, to be a
+    sounder, as it is certainly a more gratifying belief, that
+    precisely because we have attained these advantages it will be
+    easier for us to appropriate all the benefits which
+    civilization has to offer&mdash;possible for us to make more
+    rapid strides than have been made by other nations, impeded by
+    a diversity of interests and conflicts between the government
+    and the people. No doubt the comparative youthfulness of the
+    nation will account for our backward condition in certain
+    respects; but surely it is time to abandon this and every
+    similar plea as an argument against any attempt at
+    progress.</p>
+
+    <p>We have not space, and for the reasons indicated we see no
+    necessity, to discuss Dr. Penrose's positions in detail. It
+    will be sufficient to notice generally what seems to us their
+    inherent weakness. His assertion that no changes are <i>now</i>
+    demanded by the public or the profession is, he thinks,
+    "clearly proved" by the fact that thirty years ago some that
+    were introduced in the University of Pennsylvania at the
+    suggestion of the American Medical Association ended in
+    failure. But what this experience really proves is, that the
+    defects of the system were even then admitted, while the
+    remedies are still to be applied. At Harvard
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page260"
+       id="page260"></a>[pg 260]</span> this has been done; and the
+       question for other medical schools is whether they are to
+       follow the example or to be deterred by a
+       bugbear&mdash;whether, for example, the University of
+       Pennsylvania, after raising her scientific and art
+       departments to a higher level, shall be content to let her
+       medical school remain stationary. It is the opinion of
+       intelligent physicians who are not parties to this
+       controversy that the experiment which failed in 1846 would
+       succeed now. The new plan adopted at Harvard, which exacts
+       three years of study, and embraces lectures, recitations,
+       clinical conferences and written examinations of the most
+       stringent character, has, we are informed, attracted a class
+       of very superior men. Compared with the effort made here in
+       1846, this change may be described as a revolution, and it
+       has proved a success.</p>
+
+    <p>We are at a loss to understand what Dr. Penrose wishes to
+    prove by his citation of cases in which eminence has been
+    reached&mdash;chiefly, it is to be noticed, in politics or the
+    law&mdash;by persons who have had insufficient opportunities
+    for study. If the disadvantage was imaginary, where was the
+    merit of overcoming it? If it was real, as most people would
+    admit, what is the objection to insisting on it as such? In the
+    great majority of cases it is <i>not</i> overcome, and the
+    result is, that the country is overstocked with men engaged in
+    the practice of professions for which they are inadequately
+    qualified. As to the skill that is gained by practice, the ripe
+    knowledge that may result from experience, this cannot without
+    a confusion of terms be described as "education." It will in
+    general be most surely and rapidly acquired by those who have
+    received the best training, and the great object of our higher
+    educational institutions should be to provide such
+    training&mdash;not, by maintaining a low standard, to
+    facilitate the efforts of those who, from whatever cause, would
+    find it difficult to meet the demands of a higher one. Such
+    persons may have a claim to encouragement and assistance in
+    their endeavors to reach the mark; but they have no right to
+    expect that the distance shall be regulated to suit their
+    convenience.</p>
+
+    <p>Dr. Wood's admissions in regard to the excellence of the
+    army medical service during the war are seized upon with
+    natural exultation by his opponent, who draws from them a
+    legitimate inference in favor of the general status of medical
+    skill and knowledge throughout the country. If Dr. Wood really
+    intended to say&mdash;what his language, we confess, would seem
+    to imply&mdash;that the service attained its high state of
+    efficiency in a few months, we do not well see how he is to
+    resist the conclusion thus pressed upon him. But we conceive
+    the truth to be that either his phraseology or his recollection
+    of the facts was at fault. It is well known that at the
+    beginning of the war it was impossible to find competent
+    surgeons in anything like the number that was needed, and that
+    the examining boards were consequently forced to be
+    ridiculously lenient. We know of an able surgeon who after a
+    battle found that he had not a single assistant in his corps
+    who could be trusted to perform an operation. This state of
+    matters was the direct result of the imperfect education given
+    in the schools. Not one man in ten who leaves them has ever
+    been practically exercised in operations on the cadaver, and
+    the proportion was still smaller before the war. It is easy
+    therefore to understand, while it would be painful to recall,
+    the circumstances under which the great bulk of our army
+    surgeons acquired the requisite proficiency. The ultimate
+    success of our medical service, like the final triumph of our
+    armies, was preceded by many woeful blunders and mishaps, and,
+    like that, was due in great measure to a lavish outlay which
+    would scarcely have been possible in any European war, and to
+    the general devotion and united efforts which drew out all the
+    resources of the country, of whatever kind, and directed them
+    to the furtherance of a single aim.</p>
+
+    <h3>OUR EARLY NEWSPAPERS.</h3>
+
+    <p>In looking over the contents of the old newspapers of this
+    country, of which there was a considerable number as early as
+    the year 1730, one is specially struck by the number of
+    advertisements of slave sales and of runaway slaves,
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page261"
+       id="page261"></a>[pg 261]</span> apprentices and servants.
+       The following are common examples:</p>
+
+    <p>"To be sold, a very likely Negro woman about 30 years of
+    Age, has been in this city about 10. She is a fine Cook, has
+    been brought up to all sorts of House Work, and speaks very
+    good English. She has had the small Pox, and has now a Young
+    Child. Enquire further concerning her and the Conditions of
+    Sale of Mary Kippen, or the Printer hereof."&mdash;<i>New York
+    Weekly Journal</i>, May 9, 1735.</p>
+
+    <p>"Just arrived from <i>Great Britain</i>, and are to be Sold
+    on board the Ship Alice and Elizabeth, Capt. <i>Paine</i>
+    Commander several likely <i>Welch</i> and <i>English</i>
+    Servant Men, most of them Tradesmen. Whoever inclines to
+    purchase any of them may agree with said Commander, or Mr.
+    <i>Thomas Noble</i>, Merchant, at Mr. Hazard's, in New York;
+    where also is to be Sold several Negro Girls and a Negro Boy,
+    and likewise good <i>Cheshire</i> Cheese."&mdash;<i>New York
+    Gazette</i>, Sept. 11, 1732.</p>
+
+    <p>Here is a notice from the same paper, date 1735, which shows
+    very clearly the position of the apprentice one hundred and
+    forty years ago:</p>
+
+    <p>"Run away on the 5th. Instant from John Bell of the city of
+    New York Carpenter, an Apprentice Boy named James Harding, aged
+    about 19 years, being a tall well-set Lad of a Fresh
+    Complexion, he wears a Wig, he is spley-footed and shuffles
+    with his feet as he Walks, has a Copper coloured Kersey Coat
+    with large flat white Mettle Buttons, a grey Duroy Coat lined
+    with Silk, it is pretty much faded by wearing, a broad blue
+    striped Waistcoat and Breeches and a pair of blue striped
+    Tickin Breeches, in warm weather he often bleeds at the nose."
+    Then follows the offer of forty shillings to any one who will
+    give information whereby his master, John Bell, can regain
+    possession of the runaway.</p>
+
+    <p>That the women of that time were strong-minded, or at least
+    that they were disposed to assist in the reformation of bad
+    husbands, is shown by the following from the same journal, date
+    December 31, 1733. The subject, or victim, was one William
+    Drinkwater, living near New York, who had proved quarrelsome
+    with his neighbors and abusive to his wife: "The good Women of
+    the Place took the Matter into Consideration and laid hold of
+    an Opportunity, to get him tied to a Cart, and there with Rods
+    belaboured him on his Back, till, in striveing to get away, he
+    pulled one of his Arms out of Joint, and then they unti'd him.
+    Mr. <i>Drinkwater</i> Complained to Sundrie Magistrates of this
+    useage, but all he got by it was to be Laughed at; Whereupon he
+    removed to New Milford where we hear he proves a good Neighhour
+    and a loving Husband. <i>A Remarkable Reformation ariseing from
+    the Justice of the good Women.</i>"</p>
+
+    <p>Another advertisement indicates a toilet article now out of
+    fashion:</p>
+
+    <p>"To be Sold by <i>Peter Lynch</i>, near Mr. <i>Rutgers</i>
+    Brewhouse, very good Orange Butter, it is excellent for
+    Gentlewomen to comb up their Hair with, it also cures
+    Children's sore Heads."</p>
+
+    <p>The next sounds quite as odd:</p>
+
+    <p>"<i>James Munden</i> Partner with <i>Thomas Butwell</i> from
+    London, Maketh Gentlewomens Stays and Childrens Coats in the
+    Newest Fashion, that Crooked Women and Children will appear
+    strait," Same paper, date February, 1735.</p>
+
+    <p>It is a curious fact that the deaths at that time, both in
+    the New York and New England papers, were announced not by the
+    names of the deceased, but by the churches to which they
+    belonged. For example: "Buried in the city last week,
+    <i>viz.</i>, Church of England 26, Dutch 24, Lutheran 2, French
+    1, Presbyterians 3. The number of Blacks we refer till Next
+    Week."&mdash;<i>New England Weekly Journal</i>, Nov. 1, 1731.
+    Sometimes the number is recorded as four or five, or even less:
+    therefore the record must be very imperfect, and there seems to
+    have been no notice taken of those who were not buried from any
+    church.</p>
+
+    <p class="author">
+    M.H.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page262"
+       id="page262"></a>[pg 262]</span>
+
+    <h2>LITERATURE OF THE DAY.</h2>
+
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>Dante and his Circle; with the Italian Poets preceding
+        him. Edited and translated in the original Metres by Dante
+        Gabriel Rossetti. Revised and rearranged edition, Boston:
+        Roberts Bros.</p>
+    </blockquote>
+
+    <p>Dante is so great a figure in Italian literature that he
+    hides from sight the host of minor poets who preceded him, and
+    throws his own contemporaries so into the shade that we are apt
+    to think that Italian poetry began with him, and that its
+    second exponent is Petrarch. Such a view is to be regretted,
+    not only because it overlooks much that is in itself valuable,
+    but because it attributes to a period of slow development a
+    phenomenal character. There were many poets worth listening to
+    before the great Florentine wrote the <i>New Life</i> or the
+    <i>Divine Comedy</i>, and many whom he listened to and praised,
+    although his prophetic foresight told him that he would one day
+    bear their glory from them.</p>
+
+    <p>It was to make us acquainted with these forgotten singers
+    that Mr. Rossetti wrote some years ago his charming book.
+    <i>The Early Italian Poets</i>, which, after being long out of
+    print, he now presents to us in a revised and rearranged
+    edition. The author's wish is not merely to give us a glimpse
+    of the quaint conceits of a school that continued in Italy the
+    waning influence of the Troubadours, but to open to us the
+    intimate social life of the literary men of that period as
+    reflected in their vague Platonic rhapsodies, their friendly
+    letters, their jests and quarrels, their joy and sadness.
+    Interwoven with all this are stately <i>canzoni</i>, and dainty
+    sonnets full of quaint conceits, like that wherein Jacopo da
+    Lentino (1250) sings <i>Of his Lady in Heaven</i>:</p>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>I have it in my heart to serve God so</p>
+
+            <p>That into Paradise I shall repair&mdash;</p>
+
+            <p>The holy place through the which everywhere</p>
+
+            <p>I have heard say that joy and solace flow.</p>
+
+            <p>Without my lady I were loath to go&mdash;</p>
+
+            <p>She who has the bright face and the bright
+            hair&mdash;</p>
+
+            <p>Because if she were absent, I being there,</p>
+
+            <p>My pleasure would be less than naught, I know.</p>
+
+            <p>Look you, I say not this to such intent</p>
+
+            <p>As that I there would deal in any sin:</p>
+
+            <p>I only would behold her gracious mien,</p>
+
+            <p>And beautiful soft eyes, and lovely face,</p>
+
+            <p>That so it should be my complete content</p>
+
+            <p>To see my lady joyful in her place.</p>
+        </div>
+    </div>
+
+    <p>We seem, in turning over these pages, to see the brilliant,
+    ever-changing current of Italian thirteenth and fourteenth
+    century life&mdash;from Palermo, where Frederick II. held an
+    almost Oriental court, to the communes of Central Italy, the
+    best type of which is the merchant-city of the Arno, whose sons
+    in those days could fight as well as wield the yardstick, and
+    sing in strains that have rarely been equaled. In the first
+    division of the work the great poet and his friends are brought
+    vividly before us from the time when, a sensitive child, his
+    eyes first beheld Beatrice and his new life began, to the
+    painful hours of bereavement and exile. The poet, it is known,
+    made a curious sonnet out of a dream he had after his first
+    meeting with Beatrice, and, in accordance with the fashion of
+    the day, sent it to various well-known poets, asking them to
+    interpret his vision. The answers are all given here; and among
+    those whose attention was thus attracted to the precocious
+    youth was one whom he calls his "first friend," Guido
+    Cavalcanti&mdash;after Dante one of the most interesting
+    literary personages of the day. Rash and chivalrous, we can
+    follow him in his poems from the time he made his pilgrimage to
+    the shrine of St. James, and fell in love on the way with
+    Mandetta of Toulouse, to the turbulent days of Florentine party
+    strife, when he rides down Messer Corso Donati, "the baron,"
+    and wounds him with his javelin, and then goes into exile at
+    Sarzana, where he sings his dying song and sends it to his
+    lady, "who," he says, "of her noble grace shall show thee
+    courtesy." All the poets were not as constant as their own
+    lines would have us believe. Dante reproaches the famous Cino
+    da Pistoja for fickleness, and the latter confesses the charge,
+    and declares he cannot get "free from Love's pitiless aim."
+    Guido Cavalcanti rebukes Dante himself for his way of life
+    after the death of Beatrice; and this valuable sonnet should be
+    read in connection with the beautiful passage in the
+    <i>Purgatory</i> (xxx. 55-75) where Beatrice herself upbraids
+    the tearful poet.</p>
+
+    <p>In the second part, comprising <i>Poets chiefly before
+    Dante</i>, we have specimens of the Sicilian school&mdash;a
+    <i>canzone</i> by the great Frederick, and a sonnet by his
+    luckless son Enzo, who died in prison at Bologna after a
+    confinement <span class="pagenum"><a name="page263"
+       id="page263"></a>[pg 263]</span> of nearly twenty-three
+       years. Of more importance are the poems of Guido Guinicelli,
+       of which the philosophical one entitled "Of the Gentle
+       Heart" was a nine days' wonder, but which, even in
+       Rossetti's elegant version, seems cold and formal. The most
+       natural and pleasing pieces among much that is artificial
+       and conventional are a ballad and two "catches" by
+       Sacchetti, who died just after 1400, and properly does not
+       belong to Dante's circle. Mr. Rossetti's readers will,
+       however, be grateful to him for his delightful versions of
+       the two catches, one "On a Fine Day," the other "On a Wet
+       Day," giving the experiences of a band of young girls who
+       have gone to spend the afternoon in the fields and are
+       overtaken by a shower.</p>
+
+    <p>Poems like these, unfortunately, are rare. The range is a
+    limited one&mdash;Platonic love in its conventional form, or
+    the still more conventional form of chivalric love, imported
+    bodily from the Troubadours. Scattered here and there are some
+    noble poems; as, for instance, the one attributed to Fazio
+    degli Uberti on his lady's portrait, which begins&mdash;</p>
+
+    <div class="poem">
+        <div class="stanza">
+            <p>I look at the crisp golden-threaded hair,</p>
+
+            <p>Whereof, to thrall my heart, Love twists a net;</p>
+
+            <p>Using at times a string of pearls for bait,</p>
+
+            <p>And sometimes with a single rose therein.</p>
+        </div>
+    </div>
+
+    <p>Mr. Rossetti has performed his task in a way to deserve the
+    warmest praise. The difficulties he has overcome are very
+    great, consisting not merely of intricate rhyme and assonance,
+    which he has faithfully reproduced, but a text often corrupt
+    and meaning often obscure. He says himself in his preface that
+    "The life-blood of rhythmical translation is this
+    commandment&mdash;that a good poem shall not be turned into a
+    bad one;" and this commandment, as far as we can see, he has
+    not broken in a single case, while in some instances, we are
+    bold enough to say, the translation is better than the
+    original.</p>
+
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>History of the Army of the Cumberland, its Organization,
+        Campaigns and Battles. Written at the request of Maj.-Gen.
+        George H. Thomas, chiefly from his private military journal
+        and other official documents furnished by him. By Thomas B.
+        Van Horne, U.S. Army. Illustrated with campaign and battle
+        maps compiled by Edward Ruger, late Superintendent
+        Topographical Engineer Office, Head quarters Department of
+        the Cumberland. 2 vols. and atlas. Cincinnati: Robert
+        Clarke &amp; Co.</p>
+    </blockquote>
+
+    <p>It was natural that General Thomas should make choice of
+     some one to whom he could entrust the task of writing
+     his military history. For that purpose he chose Mr. T.B. Van
+     Home, a chaplain in the regular army, and the work, which
+     was begun in 1865 and finished in 1872, was subject to
+     Thomas's own examination. The result is now, after this long
+     delay, presented to the public in a shape that does great
+     credit to the publishers, whose imprint is almost synonymous
+     with good workmanship. Of the literary skill, or want of it,
+     on the part of the author not much need be said: he is
+     evidently zealous in his anxiety to do honor to the memory
+     of General Thomas, and to do justice to all who served with
+     him; but he is sadly lacking in the art of suitably clothing
+     his ideas with fitting words, and much of his elaborate
+     composition is badly wasted in trying to find extravagant
+     language for the recital of important events. In some cases,
+     where the official reports printed at the close of each
+     chapter recite in simple words the actual occurrences, the
+     text of the book is overlaid with unusual words and involved
+     sentences, in which the statement of the same facts is lost
+     in a cloud of phraseology of a very curious and original
+     kind. "Primal success," "the expression of a stride," "the
+     belligerence of the two armies," "philosophy of the
+     victory," "palpable co-operation," "the expression of an
+     insurrection,"&mdash;these are some of the odd inventions of
+     the author; and for instances of passages just as odd, but
+     too long for citation, we refer to the description of the
+     battle of Shiloh&mdash;a weak imitation of Kinglake's worst
+     style&mdash;where we are told that "change is the prophecy
+     of unexpected conditions." Fortunately, the second volume is
+     much less marred by such faults, and the great event of
+     Thomas's career, the battle of Nashville, is told with
+     clearness and in full detail.</p>
+
+    <p>Although Thomas is the hero of the book from the time when
+    he took command at Camp Dick Robinson in August of 1861, it was
+    not till October, 1863, which brings us to page 394 of the
+    first volume, that he succeeded to the command of the Army of
+    the Cumberland, after Rosecrans, who had followed Buell and
+    Sherman and Anderson. Under the other generals Thomas had
+    served with marked ability and fidelity, and his dealing with
+    them is fairly reflected by the author of this work, for he
+    rarely criticises either of Thomas's commanding
+    officers&mdash;for the most part merely records the operations
+    of the army, and puts in most prominence Thomas's own
+    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page264"
+       id="page264"></a>[pg 264]</span> services, just as his
+       military journal no doubt supplied the material. Of all that
+       long and dreary marching and countermarching through
+       Kentucky and Tennessee the account is full and clear, and we
+       find Buell and Halleck saying that they know nothing of any
+       plan of campaign in the very midst of their operations. At
+       last with Halleck, and still more with Grant in authority,
+       there were movements ordered that had some relation to each
+       other and a general plan of operations, and then the
+       overwhelming strength of the North began to turn the scale.
+       Thomas was called on by Rosecrans, as he had been by Buell,
+       for advice, but he was obliged to act independently too; and
+       then, as at Stone River, he showed an energy and a capacity
+       that ought to have secured his earlier promotion. At
+       Chickamauga he was actually left in command by Rosecrans,
+       and while the latter was looking for new help elsewhere,
+       Thomas at the front saved the shattered army and led it
+       safely back to Chattanooga, where it underwent its famous
+       long siege. The measures for its relief were planned by
+       Rosecrans, approved by Grant, and executed by Thomas, with
+       large assistance from "Baldy" Smith, whose skill as an
+       engineer was fully attested then. When Thomas did at last
+       succeed to the command of the Army of the Cumberland, he
+       showed his superiority to his predecessors by marked
+       improvement in his method of securing supplies, in his use
+       of cavalry, and in the increased efficiency of his infantry.
+       When Johnston, thanks to Davis's unwise interference with
+       the Confederate armies, gave way to Hood, the latter almost
+       at once gave token of his inferior skill by being defeated
+       by the Army of the Cumberland&mdash;by less than half of it,
+       in fact&mdash;in an attack intended to destroy three armies
+       of more than five times the number of the Union force
+       actually engaged. Thomas was in command at this battle of
+       Peach-tree Creek, one of the sharpest and most significant
+       actions of the campaign, though no official report is found
+       at the end of the chapter in which it is described. The
+       events that led up to the victory of Nashville are always
+       worth the telling, and the account given in this work may be
+       looked upon as in some respects Thomas's own version of
+       them. A brief chapter by Colonel Merrill of the Engineers
+       gives a very good description of three of the leading
+       features of the work done by that corps in the Army of the
+       Cumberland. To cross great rivers there was need of
+       pontoon-bridges; to protect the long lines of railroads it
+       was necessary to provide block-houses; to go through a
+       country that was often a trackless forest, and always badly
+       provided with real high-roads, it was all-important to have
+       maps, and to reproduce them rapidly and plentifully. Colonel
+       Merrill's chapter is pithy, pointed and to the purpose,
+       showing how well our technical troops did their share of
+       work, and how large and important that share was in securing
+       the general result. The maps are also well done, and
+       therefore useful in enabling a reader to follow out the
+       details of the narrative.</p>
+
+    <h5><i>Books Received.</i></h5>
+
+    <p>Dissertations and Discussions; Political, Philosophical and
+    Historical. By John Stuart Mill. Vol. V. New York: Henry Holt
+    &amp; Co.</p>
+
+    <p>From Everglade to Canon with the Second Dragoons, 1836-75,
+    Compiled by Theo. F. Rodenbough. New York: D. Van Nostrand.</p>
+
+    <p>Grand'ther Baldwin's Thanksgiving, with other Ballads and
+    Poems. By Horatio Alger, Jr. Boston: Loring.</p>
+
+    <p>Shakespeare Hermeneutics; or, The Still Lion. By C.M.
+    Ingleby, M.A., LL.D. London: Tr�bner &amp; Co.</p>
+
+    <p>Minutes of the Ohio State Arch�ological Convention.
+    Columbus: Printed for the Society by Paul &amp; Thrall.</p>
+
+    <p>Strength of Beams under Transverse Loads. By Prof. W. Allan.
+    New York: D. Van Nostrand.</p>
+
+    <p>The Illustrated Catholic Family Almanac for 1876. New York:
+    Catholic Publication Society.</p>
+
+    <p>Report of the Commissioner of Education for 1874.
+    Washington: Government Printing-office.</p>
+
+    <p>Our Poetical Favorites. Second Series. By Aschel C.
+    Kendrick. New York: Sheldon &amp;Co.</p>
+
+    <p>Camp-Life in Florida. By Charles Hallock. New York: Forest
+    and Stream Publishing Co.</p>
+
+    <p>Lectures on Art. Second Series. By H. Taine. New York: Henry
+    Holt &amp; Co.</p>
+
+    <p>Pretty Miss Bellew. By Theo. Gift. New York: Henry Holt
+    &amp; Co.</p>
+
+    <p>Drawn from. Life. By Charles Dickens. New York: E.J. Hale
+    &amp; Son.</p>
+
+    <p>The Conquest of Europe: A Poem of the Future. By
+    Confucius.</p>
+
+    <p>Cartoons. By Margaret J. Preston. Boston: Roberts
+    Brothers.</p>
+    <hr class="full" />
+
+    <blockquote class="footnote">
+        <a id="footnote1"
+                    name="footnote1"></a><b>Footnote 1:</b>
+                    <a href="#footnotetag1">(return)</a>
+
+        <p>The circumstance that some of the gymnasium-teachers in
+        Germany have the title of "professor" does not affect the
+        above view. The title has been expressly conferred upon
+        them by the government as a mark of special distinction,
+        either for long services or for unusual
+        scholarship&mdash;in most cases for the latter. Where
+        schools of the highest order are so numerous as they are in
+        Germany, it is not surprising that they should count among
+        their teachers men of profound scholarship. The official
+        recognition paid to such men is only an additional proof of
+        the care with which the title is used. It is given to the
+        teacher, not so much because he is a good teacher, as
+        because he has done something over and above school-room
+        work.</p>
+    </blockquote>
+
+    <blockquote class="footnote">
+        <a id="footnote2"
+                    target="blank"
+                    name="footnote2"></a><b>Footnote 2:</b>
+                    <a href="#footnotetag2">(return)</a>
+
+        <p><i>Science</i> is used here in the broad German sense to
+        denote any study, whether in the direction of natural
+        phenomena, history or philosophy, which is pursued
+        systematically and with a view to eliciting truth.</p>
+    </blockquote>
+
+    <blockquote class="footnote">
+        <a id="footnote3"
+                    target="blank"
+                    name="footnote3"></a><b>Footnote 3:</b>
+                    <a href="#footnotetag3">(return)</a>
+
+        <p>The subordination of the philosophical faculty as a sort
+        of preparatory course to the others remained in force in
+        Austria until 1850. It is not surprising, then, that
+        Austria should have compared so unfavorably with Germany in
+        philology, history, philosophy and literary criticism until
+        within our own times.</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <hr class="full" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Lippincott's Magazine of Popular
+Literature and Science, by Various
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+</pre>
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+</body>
+</html>
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@@ -0,0 +1,8584 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature
+and Science, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science
+       February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98.
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: August 10, 2004 [EBook #13154]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Sandra Brown and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+Note: The Table of Contents and the list of illustrations were added
+      by the transcriber.
+
+
+
+
+LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE OF POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE
+
+February, 1876.
+
+Vol. XVII, No. 98.
+
+
+
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS
+
+  THE CENTURY--ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.
+    II.--AMERICAN PROGRESS.
+
+  UP THE THAMES.
+    CONCLUDING PAPER, by EDWARD C. BRUCE.
+
+  THE POET'S PEN, by F.A. HILLARD.
+
+  SKETCHES OF INDIA.
+    II.
+
+  FRA ALOYSIUS, by EMMA LAZARUS.
+
+  A FEW HOURS IN BOHEMIA.
+
+  PROFESSOR AND TEACHER, by JAMES MORGAN HART.
+
+  CONTRASTED MOODS, by CHARLOTTE F. BATES.
+
+  THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, by MRS. E. LYNN LINTON
+    CHAPTER XXI. CHANGES.
+    CHAPTER XXII. EDGAR HARROWBY.
+    CHAPTER XXIII. ON THE MOOR.
+    CHAPTER XXIV. THE CHILD FINA.
+
+  LETTERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA, by LADY BARKER.
+
+  ON SANKOTA HEAD, by ETHEL C. GALE.
+
+  AT THE OLD PLANTATION.
+    TWO PAPERS.--II, by ROBERT WILSON.
+
+  OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
+    A GERMAN AGRICULTURAL FAIR.
+    A PAIR OF WHEELS AND AN OLD PARASOL.
+    MEDICAL EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES, by R.A.F. PENROSE.
+
+  OUR EARLY NEWSPAPERS.
+
+  LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
+    _Books Received._
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+  POST-OFFICE DEPARTMENT BUILDING AT WASHINGTON.
+  THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON AND CARPENTERS' HALL, WHERE THE FIRST
+    COLONIAL CONGRESS MET.
+  HOE'S NEW PERFECTING PRINTING-PRESS, PRINTING 12,000 DOUBLE
+    IMPRESSIONS PER HOUR, AND THE OLD EPHRATA PRESS.
+  THE CITY OF TOKYO, THE LARGEST STEAMSHIP BUILT IN AMERICA, AND
+    FITCH'S STEAMBOAT, THE FIRST CONSTRUCTED.
+  THE COTTON GIN.
+  GRAIN ELEVATOR.
+  INTERIOR OF A POSTAL CAR.
+  PROF. S.F.B. MORSE, THE INVENTOR OF THE ELECTRO-MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH.
+  THE SCHOOL-HOUSE OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.
+  WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM ETON.
+  MORTON CHURCH.
+  MILTON'S PEAR TREE.
+  GRAY.
+  BEACONSFIELD CHURCH.
+  TOMB OF BURKE.
+  HEDSOR AND COOKHAM CHURCHES.
+  ETON COLLEGE AND CHAPEL.
+  ETON COLLEGE, FROM NORTH TERRACE, WINDSOR.
+  STAINES CHURCH.
+  NORMAN GATE AND ROUND TOWER, WINDSOR.
+  HERNE'S OAK.
+  EAST FRONT, WINDSOR CASTLE.
+  QUEEN ELIZABETH'S BUILDING, WINDSOR.
+  EARL OF SURREY.
+  WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM BISHOPSGATE.
+  LOCK AT WINDSOR.
+  THE THAMES EMBANKMENT.
+  ELMS NEAR THE HERONRY.
+  HINDU TEMPLES NEAR POONA.
+  GONDS.
+  CENOTAPHS IN THE VALLEY OF THE TONSA.
+  THE GAUR, OR INDIAN BISON.
+  BANJARIS.
+
+
+
+LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE
+
+OF
+
+_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE_.
+
+FEBRUARY, 1876.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CENTURY--ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.
+
+II.--AMERICAN PROGRESS.
+
+[Illustration: POST-OFFICE DEPARTMENT BUILDING AT WASHINGTON.]
+
+From showing the world's right to the epoch of '76, and sketching the
+progress of the century in its wider aspect, a natural transition is
+to the part played in illustrating the period by the people from whose
+political birth it dates, and who have made the task of honoring it
+their own. They have reached their first resting-place, and pardonably
+enjoy the opportunity of looking back at the road they have traversed.
+They pause to contemplate its gloomy beginning, the perilous
+precipices along which it wound, and the sudden quagmires that often
+interrupted it, all now softened by distance and by the consciousness
+of success. Opening with a forest-path, it has broadened and
+brightened into a highway of nations.
+
+So numerous and various were the influences, formative and impellent,
+which combined to bring the colonies up to the precise ripening-point
+of their independence, as to make it difficult to assign each its
+proper force. In the concentric mass, however, they stand out sharp
+and clear, and the conjoint effect seems preordained. That the event
+should have come when it did, and not before or after, is as obvious
+as any of history's predictions after the fact. Looking through the
+glasses of to-day, we find it hard to realize that the Continental
+Congress renewed its expressions of loyalty to the king three weeks
+after the battle of Bunker Hill, so distinct before us rises the
+completed and symmetrical edifice of separation ready for its
+capstone, from its foundations growing steadily through the past.
+
+Thirteen years--one for each State--were occupied in the topping-off.
+The Seven Years' War, that created the new central power of modern
+Europe, had a great deal to do with creating the new American power.
+It taught the colonies their strength, gave them several thousand
+native soldiers, and sent them from over the water the material,
+some of it completely wrought, for more in the German immigration
+consequent upon it. Out of it grew the obnoxious enactments that
+brought on the end. So closely simultaneous were these with the king's
+proclamation of October 7, 1763, prohibiting all his subjects "from
+making any purchases or settlements whatever, or taking possession of
+any of the lands, beyond the sources of any of the rivers which fall
+into the Atlantic Ocean from the west or north-west," as to support
+the suspicion that the British ministry had a premonitory sense of the
+coming struggle, and meant to prepare for it by checking the expansion
+of the colonies. The pressure applied to front and rear was part of
+one and the same movement; and is incompatible with the accepted
+view that neither cabinet nor Parliament anticipated, in the first
+instance, any American opposition to the Stamp Act and the system of
+legislation to which it was the opening wedge. The England of that day
+proposed to rule America after much the same fashion with Ireland,
+the Alleghanies presenting themselves very conveniently for an
+Indian Pale. This line of policy was in harmony with the ideas then
+predominant in England, and was fully understood by the colonists.
+They could not possibly have been blind to it, in view of the
+continuous and repeated claims of absolute legislative supremacy
+formally put forth, from the bill to that effect passed coincidently
+with the repeal of the Stamp Act down to the alterations made in the
+Massachusetts charter in 1774; the latter proceeding being in close
+harmony, both in time and motive, with the extension of the province
+of Quebec to the Ohio--one of the very rare evidences of sagacity and
+foresight discernible in the course of the ministry; for, while it did
+not avail to dam the westward flood, it certainly contributed, with
+other concessions made at the same time to the Canadians, to save the
+St. Lawrence to the Crown.
+
+As apropos to this point, we transcribe from the original
+manuscript, written in the round, clear, unhesitating but steady hand
+characteristic of all Washington's letters, the following to James
+Wood of Winchester, afterward governor of Virginia, but then little
+more than a stripling:
+
+    "MOUNT VERNON, Feb'y 20th, 1774.
+
+    "DEAR SIR: I have to thank you, for your obliging acc't of
+    your trip down the Mississippi, contained in a Letter of the
+    18th of Octob'r from Winchester--the other Letter, therein
+    refer'd to, I have never yet receiv'd, nor did this come
+    to hand till some time in November, as I was returning from
+    Williamsburg.
+
+    "The contradictory acc'ts given of the Lands upon the
+    Mississippi are really astonishing--some speak of the Country
+    as a terrestrial Paradise, whilst others represent it as
+    scarce fit for anything but Slaves and Brutes. I am well
+    satisfied, however, from your description of it, that I have
+    no cause to regret my disappointment:--The acc't of Lord
+    Hillsborough's sentiments of the Proclamation of 1763, I can
+    view in no other light than as one, among many other proofs,
+    of his Lordship's malignant disposition towards us poor
+    Americans, formed equally in malice, absurdity, and error; as
+    it would have puzzled this noble Peer, I am persuaded, to have
+    assigned any plausible reason in support of this opinion.
+
+    "As I do not know but I may shortly see you in Frederick, and
+    assuredly shall before the Assembly, I shall add no more than
+    that, it will always give me pleasure to see you at this place
+    whenever it is convenient to you, and that with compliments
+    to your good Mother I remain, D'r Sir, Y'r most Obed't H'ble
+    Serv't,
+
+    "G'o WASHINGTON."
+
+[Illustration: THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON AND CARPENTERS' HALL, WHERE
+THE FIRST COLONIAL CONGRESS MET.]
+
+This private note, discussing casually and curtly the great river
+of the West, and the minister who endeavored to make it a _flumen
+clausum_ to the colonists, nearly equidistant in date between the
+Boston Tea-party and the meeting of the Assembly which called the
+first Continental Congress, has some public interest. The West
+always possessed a peculiar attraction for Washington. He explored
+it personally and through others, and lost no occasion of procuring
+detailed information in regard to its capabilities. He acquired large
+bodies of land along the Ohio at different points, from its affluents
+at the foot of the Alleghany to the Great Kanawha and below. Now we
+see him gazing farther, over the yet unreddened battle-grounds of
+Boone and Lewis, to the magnificent province France and Spain were
+carefully holding in joint trusteeship for the infant state he was to
+nurse. The representative in the provincial legislature of a frontier
+county stretching from the Potomac to the Ohio, we may fancy him
+inspired, as he looked around from his post on the vertebral range of
+the continent, with "something of prophetic strain." If so, he was
+not long to have leisure for indulging it. Within eighteen months his
+life's work was to summon him eastward to the sea-shore. The Dark and
+Bloody Ground must wait. For its tillage other guess implements than
+the plough were preparing--the same that beckoned him to Cambridge and
+the new century.
+
+The slender driblet of population which at this juncture flowed
+toward the Lower Mississippi was due to the anxiety of Spain to get a
+home-supply of wheat, hemp and such-like indispensables of temperate
+extraction for her broad tropical empire. A newspaper of August 20,
+1773 gives news from New York of the arrival at that port of "the
+sloop Mississippi, Capt. Goodrich, with the Connecticut Military
+Adventurers from the Mississippi, but last from Pensacola, the 16th
+inst." They had "laid out twenty-three townships at the Natchez,"
+where lands were in process of rapid occupation, the arrivals
+numbering "above four hundred families within six weeks, down the Ohio
+from Virginia and the Carolinas." The Connecticut men doubtless came
+back prepared, a little later, to vindicate their martial cognomen;
+and to aid them in that they were met by Transatlantic recruits in
+unusual force. The same journal mentions the arrival at Philadelphia
+of 1050 passengers in two ships from Londonderry; this valuable
+infusion of Scotch-Irish brawn, moral, mental and muscular, being
+farther supplemented by three hundred passengers and servants in the
+ship Walworth from the same port for South Carolina. The cash value to
+the country of immigrants was ascertainable by a much less circuitous
+computation then than now; many of them being indentured for a term
+of years at an annual rate that left a very fair sum for interest and
+sinking fund on the one thousand dollars it is the practice of our
+political economist of to-day to clap on each head that files
+into Castle Garden. The German came with the Celt in almost equal
+force--enough to more than balance their countrymen under Donop,
+Riedesel and Knyphausen. The attention drawn to the colonies by the
+ministerial aggressions thus contributed to strengthen them for the
+contest.
+
+But with all these accessions in the nick of time, two millions and
+a quarter of whites was a meagre outfit for stocking a virgin farm of
+fifteen hundred miles square, to say nothing of its future police and
+external defence against the wolves of the deep. It barely equaled the
+original population, between the two oceans, of nomadic Indians, who
+were, by general consent, too few to be counted or treated as owners
+of the land. It fell far short of the numbers that had constituted,
+two centuries earlier, the European republic from which our federation
+borrowed its name. The task, too, of the occidental United States
+was double. Instead of being condensed into a small, wealthy and
+defensible territory, they had at once to win their independence
+from a maritime power stronger than Spain, and to redeem from utter
+crudeness and turn into food, clothing and the then recognized
+appliances of civilized life the wilderness thus secured. The result
+could not vary nor be doubted; but that the struggle, in war and in
+peace, must be slow and wearing, was quite as certain. It is dreary to
+look back upon its commencement now, and upon the earlier decades
+of its progress; and we cannot wonder that those who had it to look
+forward to half shrank from it. Among them there may have been a
+handful who could scan the unshaped wilderness as the sculptor does
+his block, and body forth in imagination the glory hidden within. That
+which these may have faintly imagined stands before us palpable if not
+yet perfected, the amorphous veil of the shapely figure hewn away,
+and the long toil of drill and chisel only in too much danger of being
+forgotten.
+
+Population, the most convenient gauge of national strength and
+progress, is far from being a universally reliable one. We shall find
+sometimes as wide a difference between two given millions as between
+two given individuals. Either may grow without doing much else. They
+may direct their energies to different fields. Compared with the
+United States, France and Germany, for example, have advanced but
+little in population. They have, however, done wonders for themselves
+and the world by activities which we have, in comparison, neglected.
+The old city of London gains in wealth as it loses in inhabitants.
+
+[Illustration: HOE'S NEW PERFECTING PRINTING-PRESS, PRINTING 12,000
+DOUBLE IMPRESSIONS PER HOUR, AND THE OLD EPHRATA PRESS.]
+
+Yet success in the multiplication of souls within their own
+borders--depopulate as they may elsewhere--is eagerly coveted and
+regularly measured by all the nations. Since 1790, when we set them
+the example, they have one by one adopted the rule of numbering heads
+every five, six or ten years, recognizing latterly as well, more and
+more, the importance of numbering other things, until men, women and
+children have come to be embedded in a medley of steam-engines,
+pigs, newspapers, schools, churches and bolts of calico. For twenty
+centuries this taking of stock by governments had been an obsolete
+practice, until revived by the framers of the American Constitution
+and made a vital part of that instrument. The right of the most--and
+not of the richest, the best, the bravest, the cleverest, or the
+oldest in blood--to rule being formally recognized and set down on
+paper, it became necessary to ascertain at stated intervals who were
+the most. The lords of the soil, instead of being inducted into power
+on the death of their parents with great pother of ointment, Te Deum,
+heraldry, drum and trumpet, were chosen every ten years by a corps of
+humble knights of the pencil and schedule.
+
+To these disposers of empire, the enhancement and complication of
+whose toil has been a labor of love with each decennial Congress, we
+owe the knowledge that eighty years, out of the hundred, brought the
+people of the Union up from a tally of 3,929,214 in 1790 to 38,558,371
+in 1870, and that down to the beginning of the last decade the rate of
+increment adhered closely to 35 per cent. On that basis of growth the
+latest return falls nearly four millions short. One of the causes of
+this is "too obvious" (and too disagreeable) "to mention;" but it
+is inadequate. The sharp demarcation of the western frontier by the
+grasshopper and the hygrometer is another, which will continue to
+operate until, by irrigation, tree-planting or some other device, a
+new climate can be manufactured for the Plains. The teeming West, that
+of old needed only to be tickled with a hoe to laugh with a harvest,
+has disappeared. At least what is left of it has lost the power of
+suction that was wont to reach across the ocean, pull Ballys and Dorfs
+up by the roots and transplant them bodily to the Muskingum and
+the Des Moines. A third cause, operating more especially within
+the current decade, is attributable to another mode in which that
+attractive power has been exerted--the absorption from the European
+purse for the construction of railways of seven or eight times as much
+as the thirty-five millions in specie it took to fight through the
+Revolutionary war. For a while, Hans came with his thalers, but they
+outfooted him--"fast and faster" behind came "unmerciful disaster,"
+and he was fain to turn his back on the land of promise and promises.
+Similar set-backs, however, are interspersed through our previous
+history, and the influence of the last one may be over-rated.
+
+In truth, the Old World's fund of humanity is not sufficiently ample
+to keep up the pace; and the rate of natural increase is no longer
+what it was when the country was all new, and cornfield and nursery
+vied in fecundity. That the former source of augmentation is gaining
+in proportion upon the latter is apparent from the last three returns.
+The ratio of foreign-born inhabitants to the aggregate in 1850 was
+9.68 per cent. in 1860, 13.16, and in 1870, 14.44. In the last-named
+year, moreover, 10,892,015, or 28 per cent. of the entire population,
+white and black, are credited with foreign parentage on one or both
+sides. Excluding the colored element, ranked as all native, this
+proportion rises to 32 per cent.
+
+Judged by the test of language, three-fifths of those who are of
+foreign birth disappear from the roll of foreigners, 3,119,705 out
+of 5,567,229 having come from the British Isles and British America.
+Germany, including Bohemia, Holland and Switzerland, sums up
+1,883,285; Scandinavia, 241,685; and France and Belgium, 128,955. The
+Celtic influx from Ireland, and the Teutonic and Norse together, form
+two currents of almost identical volume. Compared with either,
+the contribution of the Latin or the Romance races sinks into
+insignificance--an insignificance, however, that shows itself chiefly
+in numbers, the traces of their character and influence being,
+relatively to their numerical strength, marked. The immigrants from
+Northern and Southern Europe have a disposition, in choosing their
+new homes, to follow latitude, or rather the isotherms; the North-men
+skirting the Canadian frontier and grouping themselves on the coldest
+side of Lake Michigan, while the Italians, Spaniards and French drift
+toward the Gulf States. The Irish and Germans are more cosmopolitan,
+each in a like degree. They disperse with less regard to climate or
+surroundings, and are more rapidly and imperceptibly absorbed and
+blended, thus promoting rather than marring the homogeneity of the
+American people. The Germans are, however, more prone to colonizing
+than the Irish--a circumstance due in great measure to their differing
+in language from the mass of their new neighbors. This cause of
+isolation is gradually losing its weight, the recognition of the
+German tongue by State legislatures, municipalities, etc. being less
+common than formerly, notwithstanding the immense immigratior so
+calculated to extend it.
+
+While assimilation has been growing more complete, and a fixed
+resultant becoming more discernible, the ingredients of this ethnic
+medley do not seem to have materially varied in their proportions
+since the beginning of the century. They present a tolerably close
+parallel to the like process in Northern France, where Celt and Teuton
+combined in nearly equal numbers, with, as in our case, a limited
+local infusion of the Norse. The result cannot, however, be identical,
+the French lacking our Anglo-Saxon substratum, with its valuable
+traditions and habitudes of political thought. The balance between
+impulse and conservatism has never been, in this country, long or
+seriously disturbed, and is probably as sound now as a hundred
+years ago. In the discussions of the twenty years which embrace our
+Revolutionary period we find abundance of theory, but they were never
+carried by abstractions out of sight of the practical. Our publicists
+were not misled by convictions of the "infinite perfectibility of
+the human mind," the motive proclaimed by Condorcet, writing in sweet
+obliviousness of the guillotine, as explaining "how much more pure,
+accurate and profound are the principles upon which the constitution
+and laws of France have been formed than those which directed the
+Americans." The lack of this equilibrium among the pure, and, as we
+may venture to term them, the untrained races, we have occasional
+opportunities of noting on our own soil when for a passing cause they
+resort to isolated action.
+
+[Illustration: THE CITY OF TOKYO, THE LARGEST STEAMSHIP BUILT IN
+AMERICA, AND FITCH'S STEAMBOAT, THE FIRST CONSTRUCTED.]
+
+A race-question of a character that cannot be supplied by
+differentiation within Caucasian limits haunts us as it has done from
+the very birth of the colonies. Like the Wild Huntsman, we have had
+the sable spectre close beside us through the whole run. But, more
+fortunate than he, we see it begin to fade. At least its outlines are
+contracting. The ratio of colored inhabitants to the aggregate,
+in 1790 19.26 per cent., or one-fifth, fell in 1860 to 14.12, or
+one-seventh, and in 1870 to 12.65, or an eighth. The next census will
+beyond doubt point more strongly in the same direction. If, whilst
+dwindling in magnitude, the dusky shape perplex us by assuming
+suddenly a novel form, we may yet be assured that it is the same in
+substance and in manageability. Its hue is whitening with the fleece
+of five millions of cotton bales. The cloud has a silver lining--a
+golden one in fact--for ours is pecuniarily a serviceable phantom to
+the extent of adding to our annual income a sum equal to eight or ten
+times the entire yearly export of the colonies. Should he lead us,
+like the Land--und--Wild--Graf, into the pit of ruin, he will have
+first bottomed it with an ample and soft cushion of lint whereon to
+fall.
+
+Extremes meet, and modern culture, like ancient anarchy, drives its
+people into cities. Such is the tendency on both sides of the ocean.
+Improvement must result from associated effort, and of that cities are
+the last expression. All the European towns are outgrowing the rural
+districts. With us the change states itself in an advance, since 1790,
+of the city population from 3.4 to 20.9 per cent. of the aggregate.
+Broadcloth has gained on homespun in the proportion of six to one,
+Giles having thus six mouths to fill where he formerly had but one.
+We shall show farther on how gallantly he meets this draft. New York,
+with its suburbs, contains more Germans than any German city save
+Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than Dublin, and more English-speaking
+inhabitants than Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol and
+Leeds together. All the colonial towns in a lump would scarce add a
+twentieth to her numbers, and her militia embraces nearly twice as
+many men as served, first and last, in the Continental army.
+
+[Illustration: THE COTTON GIN.]
+
+But the column that sums the souls does not state the complete life of
+the cities. Man has in our day a host of allies that work with him and
+at his command--slaves of iron, steel and brass wholly unknown to our
+great--grand-fathers--fed also by the farmer, through the miner as an
+intermediate. Steam-engines, to the number of 40,191, and of 1,215,711
+horse-power--all of the stationary variety, and exclusive of nearly
+half as many that traverse the country and may be classed among the
+rural population--have succeeded the websters and spinners who were
+wont to clothe all the world and his wife, and who survive only in
+the surnames of some of our statesmen and financiers. Not that they
+confine their labors to textile fabrics. Their iron fingers are in
+every pie, including that of the printer, who is answered, when he
+calls the roll of his serfs of steam, by 691 whistles. And he is
+one of the smallest of the slaveholders--a mere ten-bale man.
+India-rubber, a product known a century ago only by some little black
+lumps used by draughtsmen to erase pencil-marks, owns enough of them
+to equal 4412 horses or 22,000 No. 1 field hands. Boots and shoes not
+of the India-rubber variety employ 3212 horse-power or 15,000 steam
+Crispins, over and above their Christian fellows who stick solitary
+to the last, and who, it must be owned, produce an article more of the
+Revolutionary type and more solid and durable. As a cord-wainer Steam
+is a failure; but he works cheaply, and will continue to hammer on,
+and disseminate his commodity of brown paper throughout the temperate
+zone. Three-fourths of the population of the globe still runs unshod,
+however, and it is obvious that this crying want cannot be met by
+the old system. Steam will perforce keep pegging away till Cathay,
+Xipangu, India and all the isles awaken to the absurdity of walking on
+cotton or undressed human skin. Could one of our 299 fire-fed cobblers
+have been set to work at Valley Forge, backed by one of the 1057
+makers of woolen that are similarly nourished!
+
+But we do Mr. Watt's lusty bantling injustice in assigning him
+exclusively the tastes of a cit. He is not insensible to pastoral
+charms, and often selects a home among the hemlocks and under the
+broad-armed oaks, by bosky glen or open mead, wherever the brooklet
+brawls or dreams, for he sticks to the waterside like a beaver. Here
+he sits down, like an artist as he is, until he has got all the choice
+bits of the grove. The large and bustling family of the sawyers, both
+top and bottom, he has utterly banished from their ancient haunts.
+'There would be needed a million and a half of them to take the places
+of 11,199 steam-engines, of 314,774 horse-power, that are devastating
+our forests. An equal number is replaced by the 16,559 water-wheels,
+of 326,728 horse-power, engaged in the same field of havoc. Armed
+with the handsaw, all the Revolutionary patriots and Tories together,
+withdrawing their attention entirely from military affairs, as well as
+from all other mundane concerns, would not have turned out one-sixth
+of the quantity of lumber demanded by their descendants of a period
+that boasts itself the age of iron, and has as little as possible
+to do with wood. And if we place in the hands of the patriarchs the
+ancestral axes, and tell them to get out charcoal for three millions
+of tons of iron, to be hauled an average of a hundred miles to
+market by oxen over roads whose highest type was the corduroy, the
+imagination reels at the helplessness of the heroes.
+
+[Illustration: GRAIN ELEVATOR.]
+
+The paternal thoughtfulness of the home government employed itself in
+relieving the colonist from such exhausting drafts upon his energies.
+It sedulously prohibited his throwing himself away on the manufacture
+of iron or anything else. In 1750 it placed him under a penalty of
+L200 for erecting a rolling-mill, tilt-hammer or steel-furnace. Lest
+the governor of the colony should fail to enforce this statute
+and protect the pioneer from such a waste of time, it held that
+functionary to a personal forfeit of L500 for failing, within thirty
+days after presentment by two witnesses on oath, to abate as a
+nuisance every such mill, engine, etc. As this mulct would have made a
+serious inroad on the emoluments of the royal governors, even with the
+addition of the inaugural douceur customarily given by the provincial
+assemblies to each new incumbent--in Virginia regularly L500, doubled
+in the instance of Fauquier in 1758, when it was desired to drive
+the entering wedge of disestablishment and razee the parsons--we are
+prepared to believe that the iron business was not flourishing. Under
+a despotism tempered so very moderately by bribes, a similar blight
+fell upon all other branches of manufacture. Among these, wool, flax,
+paper, hats and leather are specified in a Parliamentary report as
+interfering with "the trade, navigation and manufactures" of
+the mother-country. An act of Parliament accordingly forbade the
+exportation of hats to foreign countries, and even from one colony to
+another.
+
+That, after such a course of repression, the country found itself
+wholly unprepared on the attainment of independence to make any
+headway in this field, is no matter of surprise. Thirty years elapsed
+before the manufacturing statistics of the Union became presentable.
+In 1810 they were reckoned at $198,613,471. This embraces every fruit
+of handicraft, from a barrel of flour and a bushel of lime to a silk
+dress. We had 122,647 spindles and 325,392 looms, made 53,908 tons of
+pig iron, and refined about one pound of sugar for each head of the
+population. In 1870, after sixty years of tossing between the
+Scylla and Charybdis of tariffs, "black" and white, the yield of our
+factories had mounted to the respectable sum of $4,232,325,442. They
+employed 2,053,996 operatives. Of these, the average wages were $377,
+against $289 in 1860 and $247 in 1850, yearly. The advance in the
+product of refined sugar may be cited as illustrative of the progress
+of the people in comfort and luxury. It reached a value of one hundred
+and nine millions, representing nearly ten times as many pounds, or
+twenty-eight pounds a head. This exemplification is but one in an
+endless list.
+
+Manufactures have come to figure respectably in our exports. They
+exceed in that list, by three or four to one, the entire exports of
+all kinds in 1790; and they equal the average aggregate of the years
+from 1815 to 1824. But the multiplication of the wants of a people
+rapidly growing in numbers and refinement will, with the comparatively
+high price of labor, scarcity of capital and distance of most of our
+ports from the markets supplied by European manufactures, for a long
+time to come make the home-supply the chief care of our artisans. They
+have, for such and other reasons, in some points lost ground of
+late. The revolution in the propulsion and construction of ships, for
+instance, has not found them prepared to take the advantage they have
+usually done of improvements. Not only do the British screw-steamers
+take undisputed possession of our trade with their own country, but
+they expel our once unrivaled craft from the harbors of other quarters
+of the globe, and threaten to monopolize the most profitable part
+of our carrying-trade with all countries. This result is more easily
+explained than the inroads made on our more ordinary foreign traffic,
+in sailing vessels, by the mercantile marine of second- and third-rate
+powers. This is eloquently told by the annual government returns and
+the daily shipping-list. While our coastwise tonnage increases, that
+employed in foreign trade remains stationary or declines. The bearing
+of this upon our naval future becomes an imperative question for
+our merchants and legislators. The United States is benevolently and
+gratuitously building up a marine for each of half a dozen European
+states which possess little or no commerce of their own, and
+multiplying the ships and sailors of our chief maritime rival. We have
+long since ceased to import locomotives, and have, within the past two
+years, almost ceased to import railroad iron. Our iron-workers obtain
+coal at nearly or quite as low prices as do those of Birkenhead or the
+Clyde. They have recently sent to sea some large screw-steamers that
+perform well. No insurmountable difficulty appears to prevent the
+launching of more until we have enough to serve at least our direct
+trade with Europe and China. That determined, it may be possible
+to ascertain whether we cannot assist Norway, Belgium and Sicily in
+carrying our cotton, wheat and tobacco to the purchasers of it.
+
+[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A POSTAL CAR.]
+
+This decline in American tonnage is, it must be added, only relative,
+whether the comparison be made with other countries or with our own
+past. The returns show a carrying capacity in our ships more than
+twentyfold that of 1789, and three times that of 1807; when, on the
+other hand, it exceeded in the ratio of fourteen to twelve that of
+1829, twenty-two years later. This interest is peculiarly subject to
+fluctuations; some of which in the past have been less explicable than
+the one it is now undergoing. Another decade may turn the tables, and
+restore the flag of the old Liverpool liners to their fleeter but less
+shapely supplanters. The steamer and the clipper are both American
+inventions. Why not their combination ours as well? The centenary of
+Rumsey's boat, not due till December 11, 1887, should not find its
+descendants lording the ocean under another flag.
+
+The monthly Falmouth packet of a century ago, sufficient till within
+the past two generations for the mail communication of the two
+continents, has grown into six or eight steamships weekly, each
+capable of carrying a pair of the old sloops in her hold, and making
+the passage westwardly in a fifth and eastwardly in a third of the
+time. Can it be but ninety years ago that the latest dates at New
+York (February 14, 1786) from London (December 7, 1785) brought as a
+leading item from Paris (November 20) the news that Philippe Egalite
+had by his father's death just come into four millions of livres a
+year, that six hundred thousand livres paid by the Crown to his father
+thereupon devolved to Monsieur (afterward Louis XVIII.), and that the
+latter had kept up the game of shuttlecock with the treasure of the
+French by "a donation of all his estates to the duke of Normandy, the
+younger son of their Majesties, preserving for himself the use and
+profits thereof during his life"? That was a short winter-passage,
+too--more speedy than the land-trip of a letter in the same journal
+"from a gentleman in the Western country to his friend in Connecticut,
+dated River Muskingum, November 5, 1785," describing a voyage down the
+Ohio from Fort Pitt and the wonders of the country much as Livingstone
+and Du Chaillu do those of Africa. The time is less now to Japan, and
+about the same to New South Wales, with both which countries we have
+postal conventions-i.e., a practically consolidated service--far
+cheaper and more convenient than that maintained on the adoption of
+the present Constitution between our own cities. Our foreign service
+with leading countries is combined, moreover, with an institution
+undreamed of in that day--the money-order system. Under this admirable
+contrivance the post-offices of the world will ere long be so many
+banks of deposit and exchange for the benefit of the masses, effecting
+transfers mutually with much greater facility, rapidity and security
+than the regular banks formerly attained.
+
+Still in its infancy, the international money-order system has already
+reached importance in the magnitude of its operations. The sums sent
+by means of it were, in 1874, $1,499,320 to Great Britain, $701,634 to
+Germany, and to the little inland republic of Switzerland $72.287.
+
+The dimensions to which this new method of financial intercourse
+between the different peoples of the globe is destined to reach may be
+inferred from the growth of the domestic money--order service. In 1874
+the number of orders issued was 4,620,633, representing $74,424,854.
+The erroneous payments having been but one in 59,677, it is plain that
+this mode of remittance must make further inroads on the old routine
+of cheque and draft, and become, among its other advantages, a
+currency regulator of no trifling value.
+
+Our post-office may almost be said to head the development of the
+century. The other lines of progress in some sense converge to it. The
+advance of intelligence, of settlement, of transit by land and water
+and of mechanical and philosophical discovery have all fostered
+the post, while its return to them has been liberal. Thus aided
+and spurred, its extension has approached the rate of geometrical
+progression. Its development resembles that from the Annelids to the
+Vertebrata, the simple canal which constitutes the internal anatomy of
+the simplest animal forms finding a counterpart in the line of mails
+vouchsafed by the British postmaster-general to the colonies in 1775
+from Falmouth to Savannah, "with as many cross-posts as he shall
+see fit." Fifteen years of independence had caused the accretion
+of wonderfully few ganglia on this primeval structure. In 1790 four
+millions of inhabitants possessed but seventy-five post-offices
+and 1875 miles of post-roads. The revenue of the department was
+$37,935--little over a thousandth of what it is at present under rates
+of postage but a fraction of the old. New York and Boston heard
+from each other three times a week in summer and twice in winter.
+Philadelphia and New York were more social and luxurious, and insisted
+on a mail every week-day but one, hurrying it through in two days each
+way, or a twentieth of the present speed. On the interior routes chaos
+ruled supreme. Newspapers and business-men combined to employ riders
+who meandered along the mud roads as it pleased Heaven.
+
+When the new government machine had smoothed down its bearings matters
+rapidly improved. In 1800 we had 903 post-offices and 20,817 miles of
+road. In 1820 these figures changed to 4500 and 92,492, and in 1870
+to 28,492 offices and 231,232 miles. Five years later 70,083 miles of
+railway, 15,788 by steamboat and 192,002 of other routes represented
+the web woven since the Falmouth and Savannah shuttle commenced its
+weary way. Of course, neither the number of offices nor extent of
+routes fully measures the change from past to present; mails having
+become more frequent over the same route, and a new style of office,
+the locomotive variety, having been added to the old. This innovation,
+of mounting postmaster and post-office with the mailbags on wheels,
+and hurling the whole through space at thirty or forty miles an hour,
+already furnishes us with gigantic statistics. In 1875 there were
+sixty-two lines of railway postal-cars covering 16,932 miles with
+40,109 miles of daily service and 901 peripatetic clerks. These
+gentlemen, under the demands of the fast mail-trains, will ere long
+swell from a regiment into a brigade, and so into a division, till
+poets and painters be called on to drop the theme of "waiting for the
+mail."
+
+The greater portion of the fifty-odd thousand employes of the
+department do not give it their whole time, many of the country
+postmasters being engaged in other business. But the undivided efforts
+of them all, with an auxiliary corps, would be demanded for the
+handling of eight hundred and fifty millions of letters and cards,
+and a greater bulk of other mail-matter, under the old plan of
+rates varying according to distance and number of sheets, and not
+weight--stamps unknown. The introduction of stamps, with coincident
+reduction and unification of rates, has been the chief factor in the
+extraordinary increase of correspondence within the past thirty years;
+the number of letters passing through the mails having within that
+period multiplied twenty-fold. The number transmitted in the British
+Islands, then three times greater than in the United States, is
+now but little in excess, having been in 1874 nine hundred and
+sixty--seven millions. The immense difference between the two
+countries in extent, and consequently in the average distance of
+transportation, is enough to account for the contrast between the two
+balance-sheets, our department showing a heavy annual deficit, while
+in Great Britain this is replaced by a profit. As regards post-office
+progress in the United States, the question is rather an abstract one;
+for there is not the least probability of an advance in rates. The
+discrepancy between receipts and expenses will be attacked rather
+by seeking to reduce the latter at the same time that the former
+are enhanced by natural growth and by improvement in the details of
+service and administration.
+
+[Illustration: PROF. S.F.B. MORSE, THE INVENTOR OF THE
+ELECTRO-MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH.]
+
+Difficult as it is adequately to state or to measure the extension of
+the mails within the century, it is far from telling the whole
+story of the amplitude and celerity with which the people of our day
+interchange intelligence.
+
+Only to the last third of the period under review has the electric
+telegraph been known. It is now a necessity of the public and private
+life of every civilized spot upon the globe. It traverses all lands
+and all seas. The forty miles of wire with which it started from
+Washington City have become many millions. Its length of line in the
+United States is about the same with that of the mail-routes, and a
+similar equality probably obtains in other parts of the world. We have
+nearly as much line as all Europe together, though the extent of wire
+may not be so great. It is little to say that this continent, so
+dim to the founders of the Union, has been by the invention of Morse
+compressed within whispering distance, the same advantage having been
+conferred on other countries. It is the property of mankind, and
+the comparison must be between present and past, not between any two
+countries of the present. Strictly, a comparison is not possible,
+nothing like magnetic communication having been known forty years
+ago, unless to the half imagination, half realization of one or two
+scientific experimenters. Steam and stamps wrought a difference in
+degree--the telegraph one of kind. Against eighteen hundred miles of
+wagon-road we set seventy-three thousand of railway; but two hundred
+thousand miles of telegraph are opposed by nothing, unless by
+Franklin's kite-string. Looked at along the perspective of poles, the
+old days disappear entirely--the patriots become pre-historic. Yet
+modern self-conceit is somewhat checked by the reflection that the
+career of these two great agents of intercommunication has but just
+opened; that their management even yet remains a puzzle to us; and
+that the next generation may wonder how we happened to get hold of
+implements whose use and capabilities we so poorly comprehended.
+So far as prediction can now be ventured, a force and pathway more
+economical than coal and the rail will not soon be forthcoming; nor
+is Canton apt to "interview" New York at the rate of more words in a
+minute over a single wire than she can now. Some day dynamite may be
+harnessed to the balloon, which stands, or drifts, where it did with
+Montgolfier, and we may all become long-range projectiles; but even
+this age of hurry will contentedly wait a little for that.
+
+Possibly the Post-office Department would be less of a valetudinarian,
+financially, had it confined itself to its legitimate occupation, the
+speeding of intercourse and wafting of sighs, and not yielded to the
+heavy temptation of disseminating shoes, pistols and *garden-seeds
+over three millions of square miles. Newspapers are enough to test its
+powers as a freight-agent. Where these and their literary kindred
+of books, magazines, etc. used to be estimated by the dozen and the
+ounce, the ton is becoming too small a unit.
+
+West of the Blue Ridge, or the front line of the Alleghany, so called
+in most of its length, there was not a newspaper published in
+1776. Ten years later, scarcely more than one--the _Pittsburg
+Gazette_--existed west of the mountains. The few in the seaboard
+towns kept alive the name, and little more. In 1850, '60 and '70 the
+periodicals of the Union numbered, respectively, 2526, 4051 and 5871,
+with an average circulation, at the three periods, of twenty-one
+hundred, thirty-four hundred and thirty-six hundred copies each. The
+circulation thus outgrew the numbers in the proportion of nearly
+two to one. And both are largely in excess of the increase of the
+population, that being in the twenty years but 65 percent. The number
+of daily papers (254 in 1850 and 574 in 1870) must now be equal to the
+entire number of periodicals in France outside of Paris (796 in 1875),
+with an average issue less than half that of ours. The proportion of
+readers to the population, certainly in this class of literature, thus
+appears to be rapidly growing: and the change is most striking if we
+take, for example, that group of periodicals which are most purely
+literary and most remote from the mere chronicle. The returns for
+the three periods place the monthlies at, respectively, 100, 280 and
+622--an advance of sixfold.
+
+The magazine leads us to the door of the library; and here the exhibit
+is still more marked, significant and gratifying. The census figures
+are, for many reasons, extremely confused, but in the general result
+they cannot be outrageously wrong, and they can mislead us only in
+degree as to the immense multiplication of books in both public and
+private libraries. The returns are manifestly far below the truth.
+To give them here without the explanations accompanying them in
+the census volumes would mislead; and those explanations, or a fair
+synopsis of them, would occupy too much space, and would, after all,
+leave the problem unsolved. That the supply of books has fully
+kept pace with every other means of culture is patent enough. The
+Congressional Library has risen in half the century from the shelves
+of a closet to nearly four hundred thousand volumes--an accumulation
+not surpassed in '76 by more than two libraries in Europe. It now
+demands a separate edifice of its own, fit to stand by the side of
+the fine structures which have within a generation recreated the
+architectural aspect of the Federal metropolis with the most stately
+government-offices in the world. Other public libraries, belonging to
+colleges, schools, societies and independent endowments, show similar
+progress. While none of them are equal, for reference, to some of the
+great European establishments, they are generally better adapted to
+the purposes of popular instruction. Their literary wealth is fresh
+and available, little encumbered by lumber kept merely because old or
+curious. Thus adjuncts, in some sort, of the newspaper and the common
+school, their catalogues prove, as do the bookcases of private houses,
+that the newest and deepest results of European thought and inquiry
+are eagerly sought and used by our people.
+
+[Illustration: THE SCHOOL-HOUSE OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.]
+
+Our system of public schools, long classed among the "peculiar
+institutions" of the country, is notably gaining in scope and
+efficiency, be the English and Prussians right or not in their claim
+of greater thoroughness and a higher curriculum. The different States
+have engaged in a series of competitive experiments for the common
+good, and cities and counties, in their sphere, labor to the same end.
+Schools of higher grade are being multiplied, and the examination of
+teachers, still lax enough, becomes more exact and faithful, as befits
+the drill of an army of two hundred and forty thousand charged with
+the intellectual police of eight millions of children--the number said
+by the new "National Bureau of Education" to have been enrolled in
+1875, against 7,209,938, 5,477,037 and 3,642,694 by the censuses of
+1870, '60 and '50. Little more than half this number is estimated by
+the Bureau to represent the average daily attendance, which is
+quite compatible with the attendance, for the greater part of the
+school-year, of nine-tenths of the whole number on the lists. A
+comparison of the number enrolled and the entire supposed number
+of children between six and sixteen leaves an excess of nearly two
+millions and a half outside the public schools. Of these private
+schools will account, and account well, for a large proportion.
+These are fulfilling indispensable offices, one being that of normal
+schools--a want likely to be inadequately satisfied for a long time to
+come.
+
+In one respect our public schools are beyond, though not above,
+comparison with those of the most advanced European states. An annual
+outlay of a trifle less than seventy-five millions of dollars, with
+an investment in buildings, ground, etc. of a hundred and sixty-six
+millions, implies a determination that should be rewarded with the
+most unexceptionable results. It reaches eighteen dollars yearly,
+leaving out the interest on the fixed stock, for each child in
+daily attendance. Such an expenditure, trebling, we believe, that
+of Prussia, ought to secure better teachers and a higher range
+of instruction. It must be said, however, that the duties of the
+school-boards are as honestly and economically discharged as those of
+any other public bodies; that the cost for each pupil is highest
+where common schools have been longest established and most thoroughly
+studied; and that the statistics certainly show a steady advance in
+their efficiency. That is the truest test. Any pecuniary means are
+justifiable by the end. If common schools, themselves a means to a
+higher education, mental and moral, than they can directly afford,
+take some part of the wealth we accumulate to prevent our men's
+decaying, it is well used. It helps to purchase for us progress
+more genuine than that whereof railways and cotton-factories are the
+exponents.
+
+It is thus a guarantee of a brighter century even than the one just
+closed that, in the wildest quarter of the still unkempt continent,
+the school actually precedes the pioneer. Choose his homestead where
+he may, the sixteenth section is staked out before it. From it the
+rills of knowledge soon trickle along the first furrows, as strange
+to the soil as its new products. It provides the modern settler
+in advance with an equipment, mental and material, if not moral,
+altogether superior to that of his colonial prototype, that enables
+him in a shorter time to impart a higher stamp to his surroundings. He
+attacks the prairie with a plough unimagined by his predecessor;
+cuts his wheat with a cradle--or, given a neighbor or two, a
+reaper--instead of a sickle; sends into the boundless pasture the
+nucleus of a merino flock, and returns at evening to a home rugged
+enough, in unison with its surroundings, but brightened by traits of
+culture and intelligence which must adhere to any menage of to-day
+and were out of reach of any of the olden time. The civilization that
+travels West now is a different thing from that which went West a
+hundred years ago.
+
+Science has done much for the farmer, though not as much as he has
+done for it and its hotbeds, the towns. In one point his shortcomings
+are notable. He has not learned how to eat his cake and have it. He
+works the virgin soil as the miner does the coal-seam. What Nature has
+placed in it he takes out, and, until forced by the pressure of
+his friends and enemies, the cities, returns no nest-egg of future
+fertility. So it is that many portions of the rural East have to
+be resettled and started afresh in the process of agricultural
+redemption. A hundred years ago England grew fifteen bushels of wheat
+to the acre. Her standard is now thirty-two. Within three-quarters of
+the century New York has fallen from twenty-five to twelve; and
+half that period, again, has brought Ohio and Indiana from thirty to
+fifteen. But this process is a natural part of the sum of American
+progress. Land was the only property of the country originally, and
+subsequently of different parts of it in succession. It was used like
+any other commodity, and worn out like leather or cloth. The original
+cuticle of the continent has disappeared for ever. The task, now is
+to induce the granulation of a new one. The restorative process may
+be complete by the time we have four hundred souls to the square
+mile, like England and Flanders. Meanwhile, the exporting of Iowa and
+California in the shape of wheat is going on at what must be esteemed
+a profitable rate; for our farmers, as a class, do not seem to be
+losing ground. Their glebes have risen in value from thirty-two
+hundred millions in 1850 to sixty-six hundred ten years later,
+and ninety-three hundred in 1870. This has been accompanied by a
+diminution of their average extent, the farm of 1870 covering a
+hundred and fifty-three acres. This is small enough, considering
+the capital necessary for stock in these days of improved and costly
+implements, when a farmer can no longer pack his entire kit in a cart.
+It matches closely the size of English holdings, where agricultural
+science is at its height. The French peasant-farmers, with their plats
+of three and four acres, are chained to the spade and hoe, and their
+steading becomes a poultry-yard--a consummation we are not yet in
+sight of, as is proved by the legions of pigs and beeves, barreled
+or bellowing, that roll in from the ancient realms of Pontiac and
+the Prophet with a smoothness and velocity unattained by the most
+luxurious coach that carried a First Congressman.
+
+Everything that makes a nation, we are told, and the nation itself,
+is the product of the soil. But the less immediate, finer and
+most delicate fruits cannot usually be garnered until the soil is
+thoroughly subdued. The mass of matter keeps the intellectual in
+abeyance. Were Europe enlarged one-half, and her population reduced
+to one-eighth what it actually is, the spectacle of culture she now
+presents would be an impossibility. It is our merit that, thus brought
+to American conditions, she would in no way compare with American
+achievement. An offset wherewith we must at the same time be debited
+is the aid we have, in so many forms, derived from her. Making every
+allowance for this, it is a clear credit in our favor that one-tenth
+of Christendom should have done so much more than a tenth of its
+effective thinking simultaneously with taming the most savage half
+of its domain. We have more than our share of laborers in the mental
+vineyard, though fewer of them are master-workmen. We utilize for
+Europe herself, and send back to her in its first available shape,
+much of what her students produce. As between thought and substance,
+the two continents interchange offices. We import the crude material
+her philosophers harvest or mine, work it up and return it, just as
+she takes the yield of our non-metaphorical fields and strata and
+restores it manufactured. Much of the social, political and industrial
+advancement of Europe within the century she may be said to owe to
+the United States. Her governmental reforms certainly and confessedly
+found here their germ. These gave birth to others of a social
+character. In this manner, as well as more directly by our commerce,
+inventions and example, we have stimulated her industry. We have
+spread before her the two oceans, and taught her to traverse them with
+a firm and masterful mien, no longer
+
+  As one who in a lonely road doth walk in fear and dread.
+
+We have created cities upon her havens, Parliaments in her capitals,
+and stronger hearts and quicker hands in her villages. No community on
+her varied surface but is the better for America. That our people and
+their labors have done it all it would be absurd to say; but the Old
+World's progress in the period under review can be but very partially
+accounted for by any internal force of its own. None of its rulers or
+peoples adventure a reform of any kind without a preliminary, if often
+only a half-conscious, glance of inquiry westward. Collectively as
+members of a European republic of nations, and internally each
+within itself, they have in this way learned, after many recalcitrant
+struggles, to recognize and respect local independence. Municipal law
+has gained new life. The commune has become an entity everywhere, and
+the nations which it informs have established the right to readjust or
+recast their constitutions without being hounded down as disturbers
+of the peace. The contribution of the American Union to such results
+would earn it honor at the hands of history were it to sink into
+nothing to-morrow. Had no such tangible fruits hitherto ripened, some
+portion of such honor would still accrue to it for having shown that a
+people may grow from a handful to an empire without hereditary rulers,
+without a privileged class, without a state Church, without a standing
+army, without tumult in the largest cities and without stagnant
+savagery in the remotest wilds.
+
+
+
+
+UP THE THAMES.
+
+CONCLUDING PAPER.
+
+[Illustration: WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM ETON.]
+
+Let our demonstration to-day be on the monarchical citadel of England,
+the core and nucleus of her kingly associations, her architectural
+_eikon basilike_, Windsor. To reach the famous castle it will not do
+to lounge along the river. We must cut loose from the suburbs of the
+suburbs, and launch into a more extended flight. Our destination
+is nearly an hour distant by rail; and though it does not take us
+altogether out of sight of the city, it leads us among real farms and
+genuine villages, tilled and inhabited as they have been since the
+Plantagenets, instead of market-gardens and villas.
+
+We go to Paddington and try the Great Western, the parent of the broad
+gauges with no very numerous family, Erie being one of its unfortunate
+children. That six-foot infant is not up to the horizontal stature of
+its seven-foot progenitor, but has still sixteen inches too many
+to fare well in the contest with its little, active, and above all
+numerous, foes of the four-feet-eight-and-a-half-inch "persuasion."
+The English and the American giants can sympathize with each other.
+Both have drained the bitter cup that is tendered by a strong majority
+to a weak minority. Neither the American nor the British constitution,
+with their whole admirable array of checks and balances, has shielded
+them from this evil. In the battle of the gauges both have gone to
+the wall, and will stay there until they can muster strength enough to
+reel over into the ranks of their enemies.
+
+This relative debility is, at the same time, more apparent to the
+stockholders than to their customers. The superstructure and "plant"
+of the Erie has lately stood interested inspection from abroad with
+great credit, and that of the Great Western is unexceptionable. The
+vote of travelers may be safely allotted to the broad gauge. They
+have more elbow room. The carriages attain the requisite width without
+unpleasantly, not to say dangerously, overhanging the centre of
+gravity; and, other things equal, the movement is steadier. Nor is the
+financial aspect of the question apt to impress gloomily the tourist
+as he enters the Paddington station and looks around at its blaze of
+polychrome and richness of decoration generally. As the coach doors
+are slammed upon you, the guard steps into his "van," the vast
+drivers, taller than your head plus the regulation stove-pipe, slowly
+begin their whirl, and you roll majestically forth through a long
+file of liveried servants of the company, drawn up or in action on the
+platform, the sensation of patronizing a poverty-stricken corporation
+is by no means likely to harass you. You cease to realize that the
+Napoleon of engineers, Monsieur Brunel, made a disastrous mistake in
+the design of this splendid highway, and that, as some will have it,
+it was his Moscow. His error, if one there was, existed only in the
+selection of the width of track. Whatever the demerits of the design
+in that one particular, the execution is in all above praise. The road
+was his pet. Once finished, it was his delight, as with the breeder of
+a fine horse, to mount it and try its mettle. Over and again would
+he occupy the footboard between London and Bristol, and rejoice as a
+strong man in running his race at close to seventy miles an hour. He
+and Stephenson were capital types of the Gaul and Briton, striving
+side by side on the same field, as it will be good for the world that
+they should ever do.
+
+[Illustration: MORTON CHURCH.]
+
+Combats of another character--in fact, of two other characters--recur
+to our reflections as we find that we have shuffled off the coil
+of bricks and mortar and are rattling across Wormwood Scrubs. More
+fortunate than some who have been there before us, we have no call to
+alight. Calls to this ancient field of glory, whether symbolized by
+the gentlemanly pistol or the plebeian fist, have ceased to be in
+vogue. Dueling and boxing are both frowned down effectually, one by
+public opinion and the other by the police. It is only of late years
+that they finally succumbed to those twin discouragers; but it seems
+altogether improbable that the ordeal by combat in either shape
+will again come to the surface in a land where tilting-spear and
+quarter-staff were of old so rife. In France chivalry still asserts,
+in a feeble way, the privilege of winking and holding out its iron,
+and refuses to be comforted with a suit for damages.
+
+Southall, a station or two beyond, suggests sport of a less lethal
+character, being an ancient meeting-place for the queen's stag-hounds.
+John Leach may have collected here some of his studies of Cockney
+equestrianism. The sportsmen so dear to his pencil furnished him
+wealth of opportunities on their annual concourse at the cart's tail.
+The unloading of the animal, his gathering himself up for a leisurely
+canter across country, the various styles and degrees of horsemanship
+among his lumbering followers, and the business-like replacing of
+the quarry in his vehicle, to be hauled away for another day's sport,
+served as the most complete travesty imaginable of the chase. It has
+the compensation of placing a number of worthy men in the saddle at
+least once in the year and compelling them to do some rough riding.
+The English have always made it their boast that they are more at home
+on horseback than any other European nation, and they claim to have
+derived much military advantage from it. Lever's novels would lose
+many of their best situations but for this national accomplishment and
+the astounding development it reaches in his hands.
+
+[Illustration: MILTON'S PEAR TREE.]
+
+To the left lies the fine park of Osterley, once the seat of the
+greatest of London's merchant princes, Sir Thomas Gresham. An
+improvement proposed by Queen Bess, on a visit to Gresham in 1578,
+does not speak highly for her taste in design. She remarked that in
+her opinion the court in front of the house would look better split up
+by a wall. Her host dutifully acceded to the idea, and surprised Her
+Majesty next morning by pointing out the wall which he had erected
+during the night, sending to London for masons and material for the
+purpose. The conceit was a more ponderous one than that of Raleigh's
+cloak--bricks and mortar _versus_ velvet.
+
+A greater than Gresham succeeded, after the death of his widow, to the
+occupancy of Osterley--Chief-justice Coke. His compliment to Elizabeth
+on the occasion of a similar visit to the same house took the more
+available and acceptable shape of ten or twelve hundred pounds
+sterling in jewelry. She had more than a woman's weakness for finery,
+and Coke operated upon it very successfully. His gems outlasted
+Gresham's wall, which has long since disappeared with the court it
+disfigured. In place of both stands a goodly Ionic portico, through
+which one may pass to a staircase that bears a representation by
+Rubens of the apotheosis of Mr. Motley's hero, William the Silent. The
+gallery offers a collection of other old pictures. Should we, however,
+take time for even a short stop in this vicinity, it would probably be
+for the credit of saying that we walked over Hounslow Heath intact in
+purse and person. The gentlemen of the road live only in the classic
+pages of Ainsworth, Reynolds and, if we may include Sam Weller in such
+worshipful company, that bard of "the bold Tur_pin_." Another class
+of highwaymen had long before them been also attracted by the fine
+manoeuvring facilities of the heath, beginning with the army of the
+Caesars and ending with that of James II. Jonathan Wild and his merry
+men were saints to Kirke and his lambs.
+
+Hurrying on, we skirt one of Pope's outlying manors, in his time the
+seat of his friend Bathurst and the haunt of Addison, Prior, Congreve
+and Gay, and leave southward, toward the Thames, Horton, the cradle of
+Milton. A marble in its ivy-grown church is inscribed to the memory
+of his mother, _ob_. 1637. At Horton were composed, or inspired,
+_Lycidas, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus_ and others of his nominally
+minor but really sweetest and most enjoyable poems. In this retirement
+the Muse paid him her earliest visits, before he had thrown himself
+away on politics or Canaanitish mythology. Peeping in upon his
+handsome young face in its golden setting of blonde curls,
+
+  Through the sweetbrier or the vine,
+  Or the twisted eglantine,
+
+she wooed him to better work than reporting the debates of the
+archangels or calling the roll of Tophet. Had he confined himself to
+this tenderer field, the world would have been the gainer. He might
+not have "made the word Miltonic mean sublime," but we can spare a
+little of the sublime to get some more of the beautiful.
+
+To reach Milton, however, we have run off of the track badly. His Eden
+is no station on the Great Western. We shall balance this southward
+divergence with a corresponding one to the north from Slough, the last
+station ere reaching Windsor. We may give a go-by for the moment to
+the halls of kings, do homage to him who treated them similarly, and
+point, in preference, to where,
+
+         in many a mouldering heap,
+  The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
+
+They show Gray's tomb in Stoke Pogis church, and his house, West End
+Cottage, half a mile distant. The ingredients of his _Elegy_--actually
+the greatest, but in his judgment among the least, of his few
+works--exist all around. "The rugged elm," "the ivy-mantled tower,"
+and "the yew tree's shade," the most specific among the simple
+"properties" of his little spectacle, are common to so many places
+that there are several competitors for the honor of having furnished
+them. The cocks, ploughmen, herds and owls cannot, of course, at this
+late day be identified. Gray could not have done it himself. He
+drew from general memory, in his closet, and not bit by bit on
+his thumb-nail from chance-met objects as he went along. Had
+his conception and rendering of the theme been due to the direct
+impression upon his mind of its several aspects and constituents,
+he would have more thoroughly appreciated his work. He could not
+understand its popularity, any more than Campbell could that of _Ye
+Mariners of England_, which he pronounced "d----d drum-and-trumpet
+verses." Gray used to say, "with a good deal of acrimony," that the
+_Elegy_ "owed its popularity entirely to the subject, and the public
+would have received it as well had it been written entirely in prose."
+Had it been written in prose or in the inventory style of poetry, it
+would have been forgotten long ago, like so much else of that kind.
+
+[Illustration: GRAY.]
+
+Not far hence is Beaconsfield, which gave a home to Burke and a title
+to the wife of Disraeli, the nearest approach to a peerage that the
+haughty Israelite, soured by a life of struggle against peers and
+their prejudices, would deign to accept. We know it will be objected
+to this remark that Disraeli is, and has been for most of his career,
+associated with Toryism. But that was part of his game. A man of
+culture, thought and fastidious taste, he would, had he been of the
+_sangre azul_, have been the steadiest and sincerest of Conservatives.
+Privilege would have been his gospel. As it is, it has only been his
+weapon, to use in fighting for himself. "The time will come when you
+shall listen to me," were his words when he was first coughed down.
+The time has come. The most cynical of premiers, he governs England,
+and he scorns to take a place among those who ruled her before him.
+
+Extending our divergence farther west toward "Cliefden's proud alcove,
+the bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love," we find ourselves in a
+luxuriant rolling country, rural and slumberous. Cookham parish,
+which we should traverse, claims quite loudly American kinship on
+the strength of its including an estate once the property of Henry
+Washington, who is alleged, without sufficient ground, to have been
+a relative of the general. But we are within the purlieus of Windsor.
+The round tower has been looking down upon us these many miles, and we
+cannot but yield to its magnetism.
+
+[Illustration: BEACONSFIELD CHURCH.]
+
+Eton, on the north bank, opposite Windsor, and really a continuous
+town with that which nestles close to the castle walls, is on our way
+from Slough. The red-brick buildings of the school, forming a fine
+foil to the lighter-colored and more elegantly designed chapel, are on
+our left, the principal front looking over a garden toward the river
+and Windsor Home Park beyond. We become aware of a populace of boys,
+the file-closers of England's nineteenth century worthies, and her
+coming veterans of the twentieth. We may contemplatively view them in
+that light, but it has little place in their reflections. Their ruddy
+faces and somewhat cumbrous forms belong to the animal period of life
+that links together boyhood, colthood and calfhood. Education of the
+physique, consisting chiefly in the indulgence and employment of it in
+the mere demonstration of its superabundant vitality, is a large
+part of the curriculum at English schools. The playground and the
+study-room form no unequal alliance. Rigid as, in some respects, the
+discipline proper of the school may be, it does not compare with the
+severity of that maintained by the older boys over the younger ones.
+The code of the lesser, and almost independent, republic of the
+dormitory and the green is as clear in its terms as that of the
+unlimited monarchy of the school-room, and more potent in shaping the
+character. The lads train themselves for the battle of the world,
+with some help from the masters. It is a sound system on the whole, if
+based, to appearance, rather too much on the principle of the weaker
+to the wall. The tendency of the weaker inevitably is to the wall, and
+if he is to contend against it effectively, it will be by finding
+out his weakness and being made to feel it at the earliest possible
+moment.
+
+[Illustration: TOMB OF BURKE.]
+
+Not on land only, but on the river, whereinto it so gradually blends,
+does lush young England dissipate. Cricket and football order into
+violent action both pairs of extremities, while the upper pair and the
+organs of the thorax labor profitably at the oar. The Thames, in its
+three bends from Senly Hall, the Benny Havens of Eton, down to Datchet
+Mead, where Falstaff overflowed the buck-basket, belongs to the boys.
+In this space it is split into an archipelago of aits. In and out of
+the gleaming paths and avenues of silvery water that wind between them
+glide the little boats. The young Britons take to the element like
+young ducks. Many a "tall admiral" has commenced his "march over the
+mountain wave" among these water-lilies and hedges of osier.
+
+Shall we leave the boys at play, and, renewing our youth, go
+ourselves to school? Entering the great gate of the western of the two
+quadrangles, we are welcomed by a bronze statue of the founder of the
+institution, Henry VI. He endowed it in 1440. The first organization
+comprised "a provost, four clerks, ten priests, six choristers,
+twenty-five poor grammar-scholars, and twenty-five poor infirm men to
+pray for the king." The prayers of these invalids were sorely needed
+by the unhappy scion of Lancaster, but did him little good in a
+temporal sense. The provost is always rector of the parish. Laymen are
+non-eligible. Thus it happens that the list does not include two
+names which would have illuminated it more than those of any of the
+incumbents--Boyle the philosopher, "father of chemistry and brother
+of the earl of Cork," and Waller the poet. The modern establishment
+consists of a provost, vice-provost, six fellows, a master,
+under-master, assistants, seventy foundation scholars, seven lay
+clerks and ten choristers, with a cortege of "inferior officers and
+servants"--a tolerably full staff. The pay-students, as they would be
+termed in this country, numbering usually five to six hundred, do not
+live in the college precincts, but at boarding-houses in the town,
+whence their designation of oppidans, the seventy gowns-men only
+having dormitories in the college. The roll of the alumni contains
+such names as the first earl of Chatham, Harley, earl of Oxford,
+Bolingbroke, Fox, Gray, Canning, Wellington and Hallam. That is enough
+to say for Eton. The beauties of the chapel, the treasures of the
+library and the other shows of the place become trivial by the side of
+the record.
+
+[Illustration: HEDSOR AND COOKHAM CHURCHES.]
+
+Over the "fifteen-arch" bridge, which has but three or four arches, we
+pass to the town of Windsor, which crouches, on the river-side, close
+up to the embattled walls of the castle--so closely that the very
+irregular pile of buildings included in the latter cannot at first
+glance be well distinguished from the town. High over all swells the
+round tower to a height above the water of two hundred and twenty
+feet--no excessive altitude, if we deduct the eminence on which it
+stands, yet enough, in this level country, to give it a prospect of
+a score or two of miles in all directions. The Conqueror fell in love
+with the situation at first sight, and gave a stolen monastery in
+exchange for it. The home so won has provided a shelter--at times very
+imperfect, indeed--to British sovereigns for eight centuries. From
+the modest erection of William it has been steadily growing--with the
+growth of the empire, we were near saying, but its chief enlargements
+occurred before the empire entered upon the expansion of the past
+three centuries. It is more closely associated with Edward III. than
+with any other of the ancient line. He was born at Windsor, and
+almost entirely rebuilt it, William of Wykeham being superintending
+architect, with "a fee of one shilling a day whilst at Windsor, and
+two shillings when he went elsewhere on the duties of his office,"
+three shillings a week being the pay of his clerk. It becomes at once
+obvious that the margin for "rings" was but slender in those days.
+The labor question gave not the least trouble. The law of supply
+and demand was not consulted. "Three hundred and sixty workmen were
+impressed, to be employed on the building at the king's wages; some
+of whom having clandestinely left Windsor and engaged in other
+employments to greater advantage, writs were issued prohibiting all
+persons from employing them on pain of forfeiting all their goods and
+chattels." In presence of so simple and effective a definition of the
+rights of the workingman, strikes sink into nothingness. And Magna
+Charta had been signed a hundred and fifty years before! That
+document, however, in honor of which the free and enlightened Briton
+of to-day is wont to elevate his hat and his voice, was only in the
+name and on behalf of the barons. The English people derived under it
+neither name, place nor right. English liberty is only incidental, a
+foundling of untraced parentage, a _filius nullius_. True, its
+growth was indirectly fostered by aught that checked the power of the
+monarch, and the nobles builded more wisely than they knew or intended
+when they brought Lackland to book, or to parchment, at Runnymede,
+not far down the river and close to the edge of the royal park. The
+memorable plain is still a meadow, kept ever green and inviolate of
+the plough. A pleasant row it is for the Eton youngsters to this spot.
+On Magna Charta island, opposite, they may take their rest and their
+lunch, and refresh their minds as well with the memories of the place.
+The task of reform is by no means complete. There is room and call
+for further concessions in favor of the masses. These embryo statesmen
+have work blocked out for them in the future, and this is a good place
+for them to adjust to it the focus of their bright young optics.
+
+[Illustration: ETON COLLEGE AND CHAPEL.]
+
+The monarchical idea is certainly predominant in our present
+surroundings. The Thames flows from the castle and the school under
+two handsome erections named the Victoria and Albert bridges; and
+when, turning our back upon Staines, just below Runnymede, with its
+boundary-stone marking the limit of the jurisdiction of plebeian
+London's fierce democracy, and inscribed "God preserve the City of
+London, 1280," we strike west into the Great Park, we soon come plump
+on George III, a great deal larger than life. The "best farmer that
+ever brushed dew from lawn" is clad in antique costume with toga and
+buskins. Bestriding a stout horse, without stirrups and with no bridle
+to speak of, the old gentleman looks calmly into the distance while
+his steed is in the act of stepping over a perpendicular precipice.
+This preposterous effort of the glyptic art has the one merit of
+serving as a finger-board. The old king points us to his palace, three
+miles off, at the end of the famous Long Walk. He did not himself care
+to live at the castle, but liked to make his home at an obscure lodge
+in the park, the same from which, on his first attack of insanity, he
+set out in charge of two of his household on that melancholy ride
+to the retreat of Kew, more convenient in those days for medical
+attendance from London, and to which he returned a few months later
+restored for the time. Shortly after his recovery he undertook to
+throw up one of the windows of the lodge, but found it nailed down. He
+asked the cause, and was told, with inconsiderate bluntness, that
+it had been done during his illness to prevent his doing himself an
+injury. The perfect calmness and silence with which he received this
+explanation was a sufficient evidence of his recovery.
+
+[Illustration: ETON COLLEGE, FROM NORTH TERRACE, WINDSOR.]
+
+Bidding the old man a final farewell, we accept the direction of
+his brazen hand and take up the line of march, wherein all traveling
+America has preceded us, to the point wherefrom we glanced off so
+suddenly in obedience to the summons of Magna Charta. On either
+hand, as we thread the Long Walk, open glades that serve as so many
+emerald-paved courts to the monarchs of the grove, some of them older
+than the whole Norman dynasty, with Saxon summers recorded in their
+hearts. One of them, thirty-eight feet round, is called after the
+Conqueror. Among these we shall not find the most noted of Windsor
+trees. It was in the Home Park, on the farther or northern side of the
+castle, that the fairies were used to perform their
+
+    --dance of custom round about the oak
+  Of Herne the hunter.
+
+Whether the genuine oak was cut down at the close of the last century,
+or was preserved, carefully fenced in and labeled, in an utterly
+leafless and shattered state, to our generation, is a moot point.
+Certain it is that the most ardent Shakespearean must abandon the hope
+of securing for a bookmark to his _Merry Wives of Windsor_ one of the
+leaves that rustled, while "Windsor bell struck twelve," over the head
+of fat Jack. He has the satisfaction, however, of looking up at the
+identical bell-tower of the sixteenth century, and may make tryst with
+his imagination to await its midnight chime. Then he may cross the
+graceful iron bridge--modern enough, unhappily--to Datchet, and
+ascertain by actual experiment whether the temperature of the Thames
+has changed since the dumping into it of Falstaff, "hissing hot."
+
+[Illustration: STAINES CHURCH.]
+
+Back at the castle, we must "do" it, after the set fashion. Reminders
+meet us at the threshold that it is in form a real place of defence,
+contemplative of wars and rumors of wars, and not a mere dwelling by
+any means in original design. A roadway, crooked and raked by frowning
+embrasures, leads up from the peaceful town to the particularly
+inhospitable-looking twin towers of Henry VIII.'s gateway, in their
+turn commanded by the round tower on the right, in full panoply of
+artificial scarp and ditch. Sentinels in the scarlet livery that
+has flamed on so many battlefields of all the islands and continents
+assist in proving that things did not always go so easy with majesty
+as they do now. But two centuries and more have elapsed since
+there happened any justification for this frown of stone, steel and
+feathers; Rupert's futile demonstration on it in 1642 having been
+Windsor's last taste of war, its sternest office after that having
+been the safe-keeping of Charles I., who here spent his "sorrowful and
+last Christmas." Once inside the gate, visions of peace recur. The eye
+first falls on the most beautiful of all the assembled structures,
+St. George's Chapel. It, with the royal tomb house, the deanery and
+Winchester tower, occupies the left or north side of the lower or
+western ward. In the rear of the chapel of St. George are quartered in
+cozy cloisters the canons of the college of that ilk--not great guns
+in any sense, but old ecclesiastical artillery spiked after a more or
+less noisy youth and laid up in varnished black for the rest of their
+days. Watch and ward over these modern equipments is kept by Julius
+Caesar's tower, as one of the most ancient erections is of course
+called. Still farther to our left as we enter are the quarters of
+sundry other antiquated warriors, the Military Knights of Windsor.
+These are a few favored veterans, mostly decayed officers of the army
+and navy, who owe this shelter to royal favor and an endowment. The
+Ivy tower, west of the entrance, is followed in eastward succession by
+those of the gateway, Salisbury, Garter and Bell towers.
+
+[Illustration: NORMAN GATE AND ROUND TOWER, WINDSOR.]
+
+The fine exterior of St. George's is more than matched by the carving
+and blazonry of the interior. The groined roof bears the devices of
+half a dozen early kings, beginning with Edward the Confessor. Along
+the choir stretch the stalls of the sovereign and knights-companions
+of the order of the Garter, each hung with banner, mantle, sword and
+helmet. Better than these is the hammered steel tomb of Edward IV., by
+Quentin Matsys, the Flemish blacksmith. In the vaults beneath rest the
+victim of Edward, Henry VI., Henry VIII., Jane Seymour and Charles I.
+The account of the appearance of Charles' remains when his tomb was
+examined in 1813 by Sir Henry Halford, accompanied by several of the
+royal family, is worth quoting. "The complexion of the face was dark
+and discolored. The forehead and temples had lost little or nothing of
+their muscular substance. The cartilage of the nose was gone; but the
+left eye, in the moment of first exposure, was open and full,
+though it vanished almost immediately, and the pointed beard so
+characteristic of the reign of King Charles was perfect. The shape
+of the face was a long oval; many of the teeth remained; and the
+left ear, in consequence of the interposition of some unctuous matter
+between it and the cere-cloth, was found entire. The hair was thick at
+the back part of the head, and in appearance nearly black. A portion
+of it, which has since been cleaned and dried, is of a beautiful
+dark-brown color. That of the beard was a reddish-brown. On the back
+part of the head it was not more than an inch in length, and had
+probably been cut so short for the convenience of the executioner,
+or perhaps by the piety of friends after death in order to furnish
+memorials of the unhappy king. On holding up the head to determine
+the place of separation from the body, the muscles of the neck had
+evidently contracted themselves considerably, and the fourth cervical
+vertebra was found to be cut through its substance transversely,
+leaving the face of the divided portions perfectly smooth and even--an
+appearance which could have been produced only by a heavy blow
+inflicted with a very sharp instrument, and which furnished the last
+proof wanting to identify Charles I."
+
+[Illustration: HERNE'S OAK.]
+
+A highly-edifying spectacle this must have been to the prince regent
+and his brother Cumberland. The certainties of the past and the
+possibilities of the future were calculated to be highly suggestive.
+A French sovereign had but a few years before shared the fate of
+Charles, and a cloud of other kings were drifting about Europe with
+no very flattering prospect of coming soon to anchor. Napoleon was
+showing his banded foes a good double front in Germany and Spain.
+His dethronement and the restoration of the Bourbons were not as yet
+contemplated. The Spanish succession was whittled down to a girl--that
+is, by Salic law, to nothing at all. The Hanoverian was in a similar
+condition, or worse, none of the old sons of the crazy old king
+having any legitimate children. The prince regent himself was highly
+unpopular with the mass of his people; and the classes that formed
+his principal support were more so, by reason of the arrogance and
+exactions of the landed interest, the high price of grain and
+other heavy financial burdens consequent on the war, the arbitrary
+prosecutions and imprisonment of leaders of the people, and the
+irregularities of his private life.
+
+But these sinister omens proved illusory. Leigh Hunt, Wraxall and the
+rest made but ineffectual martyrs; the Bourbons straggled back into
+France and Spain, with such results as we see; George IV. weathered,
+by no merit of his own, a fresh series of storms at home; the clouds
+that lowered upon his house were made glorious summer by the advent of
+a fat little lady in 1819--the fat old lady of 1875; and we step from
+the tomb of Charles in St. George's Chapel to that where George and
+William slumber undisturbed in the tomb-house, elaborately decorated
+by Wolsey. Wolsey's fixtures were sold by the thrifty patriots of
+Cromwell's Parliament, and bought in by the republican governor of the
+castle as "old brass." George was able, too, to add another story to
+the stature of the round tower or keep that marks the middle ward
+of the castle and looks down, on the rare occasion of a sufficiently
+clear atmosphere, on prosperous and no longer disloyal London. This
+same keep has quite a list of royal prisoners; John of France and
+David II. and James I. of Scotland enjoyed a prolonged view of its
+interior; so did the young earl of Surrey, a brother-poet, a century
+removed, of James.
+
+Leaving behind us the atmosphere of shackles and dungeons, we emerge,
+through the upper ward and the additions of Queen Bess, upon the ample
+terrace, where nothing bounds us but the horizon. Together, the north,
+east and south terraces measure some two thousand feet. The first
+looks upon Eton, the lesser park of some five hundred acres which
+fills a bend of the Thames and the country beyond for many miles. The
+eastern platform, lying between the queen's private apartments and an
+exquisite private garden, is not always free to visitors. The south
+terrace presents to the eye the Great Park of thirty-eight hundred
+acres, extending six miles, with a width of from half a mile to
+two miles. The equestrian statue at the end of the Long Walk is a
+conspicuous object. The prevailing mass of rolling woods is broken by
+scattered buildings, glades and avenues, which take from it monotony
+and give it life. Near the south end is an artificial pond called
+Virginia Water, edged with causeless arches and ruins that never were
+anything but ruins, Chinese temples and idle toys of various other
+kinds, terrestrial and aquatic. The ancient trees, beeches and elms,
+of enormous size, and often projected individually, are worth studying
+near or from a distance. The elevation is not so great as to bring
+out low-lying objects much removed. We see the summits of hills, each
+having its name, as St. Leonard's, Cooper's, Highstanding, etc., and
+glimpses of the river and of some country-seats. St. Anne's Hill was
+the home of Fox; at St. Leonard's dwelt the father of his rival and
+rival of his father, and at Binfield, Pope, of whom it is so hard
+to conceive as having ever been young, "lisped in numbers, for the
+numbers came," natural descriptions, ethical reflections, _vers de
+societe_ and all, for around him here there was food for them all. To
+descend from Pope in point of both time and romance, the view
+includes the scenes of Prince Albert's agricultural experiments. Quite
+successful many of them were. He was a thoroughly practical man--a
+circumstance which carried him by several routes across ploughed
+fields and through well-built streets, straight to the hearts of the
+English people. His memory is more warmly cherished, and impressed
+upon the stranger by more monuments, than that of any other of the
+German strain. It might have been less so had he succeeded in the
+efforts he is now known to have made soon after his marriage to attain
+a higher nominal rank. He possessed, through the alliance of Leopold
+and Stockmar and the devotion of Victoria, kingly power without the
+name and the responsibility, and with that he became content. He used
+it cautiously and well when he employed it at all. His position was a
+trying one, but he steered well through its difficulties, and died
+as generally trusted as he was at first universally watched. The
+love-match of 1840 was every way a success.
+
+[Illustration: EAST FRONT, WINDSOR CASTLE.]
+
+Another figure, more rugged and less majestic, but not less
+respectable, will be associated with Victoria in the memories, if not
+the history proper, of her reign. This is John Brown, the canny and
+impassive Scot, content, like the Rohans, to be neither prince nor
+king, and, prouder than they, satisfied honestly to discharge the
+office of a flunkey without the very smallest trace of the flunkey
+spirit. He too has lived down envy and all uncharitableness.
+Contemptuous and serene amid the hootings of the mob and the squibs
+of the newspapers, he carries, as he has done for years, Her Majesty's
+shawl and capacious India-rubbers, attends her tramps through the
+Highlands and the Home Park, engineers her special trains and looks
+after her personal comfort even to the extent of ordering her to
+wear "mair claes" in a Scotch mist. The queen has embalmed him in
+her books, and he will rank among the heroes of royal authors as his
+namesake and countryman the Cameronian, by favor of very similar moral
+qualities, does with those of more democratic proclivities.
+
+[Illustration: QUEEN ELIZABETH'S BUILDING, WINDSOR.]
+
+We cannot apply literally to the view from Windsor Thackeray's lines
+on "the castle towers of Bareacres:"
+
+  I stood upon the donjon keep and viewed the country o'er;
+  I saw the lands of Bareacres for fifty miles or more.
+
+[Illustration: EARL OF SURREY.]
+
+We scan what was once embraced in Windsor Forest, where the Norman
+laid his broad palm on a space a hundred and twenty miles round, and,
+like the lion in the fable of the hunting-party, informed his subjects
+that that was his share. The domain dwindled, as did other royal
+appurtenances. Yet in 1807 the circuit was as much as seventy-seven
+miles. In 1789 it embraced sixty thousand acres. The process of
+contraction has since been accelerated, and but little remains outside
+of the Great and Little Parks. Several villages of little note stand
+upon it. Of these Wokingham has the distinction of an ancient hostelry
+yclept the Rose; and the celebrity of the Rose is a beautiful daughter
+of the landlord of a century and a half ago. This lady missed her
+proper fame by the blunder of a merry party of poets who one evening
+encircled the mahogany of her papa. It was as "fast" a festivity as
+such names as Gay and Swift could make it. Their combined efforts
+resulted in the burlesque of _Molly Mog_. These two and some others
+contributed each a verse in honor of the fair waiter. But they mistook
+her name, and the crown fell upon the less charming brow of her
+sister, whose cognomen was depraved from Mary into Molly. Wiclif's Oak
+is pointed out as a corner of the old forest, a long way east of the
+park. Under its still spreading branches that forerunner of Luther
+is said to have preached. Messrs. Moody and Sankey should have sought
+inspiration under its shade.
+
+In the vast assemblage of the arboreal commonwealth that carpets the
+landscape the centuries are represented one with another. It is a
+leafy parliament that has never been dissolved or prorogued. One hoary
+member is coeval with the Confessor. Another sheltered William Rufus,
+tired from the chase. Under another gathered recruits bound with
+Coeur de Lion for the Holy Land. Against the bole of this was set up
+a practicing butt for the clothyard shafts that won Agincourt, and
+beneath that bivouacked the pickets of Cromwell. As we look down upon
+their topmost leaves there floats, high above our own level, "darkly
+painted on the crimson sky," a member, not so old, of another
+commonwealth quite as ancient that has flourished among their branches
+from time immemorial. There flaps the solitary heron to the evening
+tryst of his tribe. Where is the hawk? Will he not rise from some fair
+wrist among the gay troop we see cantering across yonder glade? Only
+the addition of that little gray speck circling into the blue is
+needed to round off our illusion. But it comes not. In place of it
+comes a spirt of steam from the railway viaduct, and the whistle of
+an engine. Froissart is five hundred years dead again, and we turn to
+Bradshaw.
+
+[Illustration: WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM BISHOPSGATE.]
+
+Yet we have a "view of an interior" to contemplate before facing the
+lower Thames. And first, as the day is fading, we seek the dimmest
+part. We dive into the crypt of the bell-tower, or the curfew-tower,
+that used to send far and wide to many a Saxon cottage the hateful
+warning that told of servitude. How old the base of this tower is
+nobody seems to know, nor how far back it has served as a prison.
+The oldest initials of state prisoners inscribed on its cells date
+to 1600. The walls are twelve feet thick, and must have begotten a
+pleasant feeling of perfect security in the breasts of the involuntary
+inhabitants. They did not know of a device contrived for the security
+of their jailers, which has but recently been discovered. This is a
+subterranean and subaqueous passage, alleged to lead under the river
+to Burnham Abbey, three miles off. The visitor will not be disposed to
+verify this statement or to stay long in the comparatively airy crypt.
+Damp as the British climate may be above ground, it is more so below.
+We emerge to the fine range of state apartments above, and submit to
+the rule of guide and guide-book.
+
+[Illustration: LOCK AT WINDSOR.]
+
+St. George's Hall, the Waterloo gallery, the council-chamber and the
+Vandyck room are the most attractive, all of them for the historical
+portraits they contain, and the first, besides, for its merit as an
+example of a Gothic interior and its associations with the order of
+the Garter, the knights of which society are installed in it. The
+specialty of the Waterloo room is the series of portraits of the
+leaders, civil and military, English and continental, of the last and
+successful league against Napoleon. They are nearly all by Lawrence,
+and of course admirable in their delineation of character. In that
+essential of a good portrait none of the English school have excelled
+Lawrence. We may rely upon the truth to Nature of each of the heads
+before us; for air and expression accord with what history tells us
+of the individuals, its verdict eked out and assisted by instructive
+minutiae of lineament and meaning detected, in the "off-guard" of
+private intercourse, by the eye of a great painter and a lifelong
+student of physiognomy. We glance from the rugged Blucher to the
+wily Metternich, and from the philosophic Humboldt to the semi-savage
+Platoff. The dandies George IV. and Alexander are here, but Brummel
+is left out. The gem of the collection is Pius VII., Lawrence's
+masterpiece, widely familiar by engravings. Raphael's Julius II. seems
+to have been in the artist's mind, but that work is not improved on,
+unless in so far as the critical eye of our day may delight in the
+more intricate tricks of chiaroscuro and effect to which Lawrence has
+recourse. "Brunswick's fated chieftain" will interest the votaries of
+Childe Harold. Could he have looked forward to 1870, he would perhaps
+have chosen a different side at Waterloo, as his father might at Jena,
+and elected to figure in oils at Versailles rather than at Windsor.
+Incomparably more destructive to the small German princes have been
+the Hohenzollerns than the Bonapartes.
+
+[Illustration: THE THAMES EMBANKMENT.]
+
+We forget these nineteenth-century people in the council-chamber,
+wherein reign Guido, Rembrandt, Claude, and even Da Vinci. If
+Leonardo really executed all the canvases ascribed to him in English
+collections, the common impressions of his habits of painting but
+little, and not often finishing that, do him great injustice. Martin
+Luther is here, by Holbein, and the countess of Desmond, the merry old
+lady
+
+  Who lived to the age of twice threescore and ten,
+  And died of a fall from a cherry tree then,
+
+is embalmed in the bloom of one hundred and twenty and the gloom of
+Rembrandt. The two dozen pictures in this room form nearly as odd an
+association as any like number of portraits could do. Guercino's Sibyl
+figures with a cottage interior by Teniers, and Lely's Prince Rupert
+looks down with lordly scorn on Jonah pitched into the sea by the
+combined efforts of the two Poussins. The link between Berghem's cows
+and Del Sarto's Holy Family was doubtless supplied to the minds of
+the hanging committee by recollections of the manger. Our thrifty
+Pennsylvanian, West, is assigned the vestibule. Five of his "ten-acre"
+pictures illustrate the wars of Edward III. and the Black Prince.
+The king's closet and the queen's closet are filled mostly by the
+Flemings. Vandyck's room finally finishes the list. It has, besides
+a portrait of himself and several more of the first Charles and his
+family in every pose, some such queer, or worse than queer, commoners
+as Tom Killigrew and Sir Kenelm Digby and Venetia his hopeful spouse,
+so dear to novelists of a certain school.
+
+[Illustration: ELMS NEAR THE HERONRY.]
+
+Vast sums have been expended on the renovation and improvement of the
+castle during the past half century. With Victoria it has been more
+popular as a residence than with any of her predecessors since
+the fourteenth century. What, however, with its greater practical
+proximity to London, due to railways, and what with the queen's liking
+for solitude since the death of her consort, the more secluded
+homes of Osborne and Balmoral have measurably superseded it in her
+affections. Five hundred miles of distance to the Dee preclude the
+possibility of the dumping on her, by means of excursion trains, of
+loyal cockneydom. She is as thoroughly protected from that inundation
+in the Isle of Wight, the average Londoner having a fixed horror of
+sea-sickness. The running down, by her private steamer, of a few more
+inquisitive yachts in the Solent would be a hazardous experiment, if
+temporarily effective in keeping home invaders at bay. Holding as her
+right and left bowers those two sanctuaries at the opposite ends of
+her island realm, she can play a strong hand in the way of personal
+independence, and cease to feel that hers is a monarchy limited by the
+rights of the masses. It is well for the country that she should be
+left as far as possible to consult her own comfort, ease and health
+at least as freely as the humblest of her subjects. The continuance
+of her life is certainly a political desideratum. It largely aids in
+maintaining a wholesome balance between conservatism and reform. So
+long as she lives there will be no masculine will to exaggerate the
+former or obstruct the latter, as notably happened under George
+III. and William IV. Her personal bearing is also in her favor. Her
+popularity, temporarily obscured a few years ago, is becoming as great
+as ever. It has never been weakened by any misstep in politics, and so
+long as that can be said will be exposed to no serious danger.
+
+We are far from being at the end of the upper Thames. Oxford, were
+there no other namable place, is beyond us. But we have explored
+the denser portion--the nucleus of the nebula of historic stars that
+stretches into the western sky as seen from the metropolis. We lay
+aside our little lorgnette. It has shown us as much as we can map in
+these pages, and that we have endeavored to do with at least the merit
+of accuracy.
+
+EDWARD C. BRUCE.
+
+
+
+
+THE POET'S PEN.
+
+      I am an idle reed;
+  I rustle in the whispering air;
+      I bear my stalk and seed
+  Through spring-time's glow and summer's glare.
+
+      And in the fiercer strife
+  Which winter brings to me amain,
+      Sapless, I waste my life,
+  And, murmuring at my fate, complain.
+
+      I am a worthless reed;
+  No golden top have I for crown,
+      No flower for beauty's meed,
+  No wreath for poet's high renown.
+
+      Hollow and gaunt, my wand
+  Shrill whistles, bending in the gale;
+      Leafless and sad I stand,
+  And, still neglected, still bewail.
+
+      O foolish reed! to wail!
+  A poet came, with downcast eyes,
+      And, wandering through the dale,
+  Saw thee and claimed thee for his prize.
+
+      He plucked thee from the mire;
+  He pruned and made of thee a pen,
+      And wrote in words of fire
+  His flaming song to listening men;
+
+      Till thou, so lowly bred,
+  Now wedded to a nobler state,
+      Utt'rest such paeans overhead
+  That angels listen at their gate.
+
+  F.A. HILLARD.
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES OF INDIA.
+
+II.
+
+
+I had now learned to place myself unreservedly in the hands of Bhima
+Gandharva. When, therefore, on regaining the station at Khandallah, he
+said, "The route by which I intend to show you India will immediately
+take us quite away from this part of it; first, however, let us go and
+see Poona, the old Mahratta capital, which lies but a little more than
+thirty miles farther to the south-eastward by rail,"--I accepted the
+proposition as a matter of course, and we were soon steaming down the
+eastern declivity of the Ghats. As we moved smoothly down into the
+treeless plains which surround Poona I could not resist a certain
+feeling of depression.
+
+"Yes," said Bhima Gandharva when I mentioned it to him, "I understand
+exactly what you mean. On reaching an unbroken expanse of level
+country, after leaving the tops of mountains, I always feel as if my
+soul had come bump against a solid wall of rock in the dark. I seem
+to hear a dull _thud_ of discouragement somewhere back in my soul, as
+when a man's body falls dead on the earth. Nothing, indeed, could
+more heighten such a sensation than the contrast between this and
+the Bombay side of the Ghats. There we had the undulating waters,
+the lovely harbor with its wooded and hilly islands, the ascending
+terraces of the Ghats: everything was energetic, the whole invitation
+of Nature was toward air, light, freedom, heaven. But here one spot
+is like another spot; this level ground is just the same level ground
+there was a mile back; this corn stands like that corn; there is an
+oppressive sense of bread-and-butter about; one somehow finds one's
+self thinking of ventilation and economics. It is the sausage-grinding
+school of poetry--of which modern art, by the way, presents several
+examples--as compared with that general school represented by the
+geniuses who arise and fly their own flight and sing at a great
+distance above the heads of men and of wheat."
+
+Having arrived and refreshed ourselves at our hotel, whose proprietor
+was, as usual, a Parsee, we sallied forth for a stroll about Poona. On
+one side of us lay the English quarter, consisting of the houses and
+gardens of the officers and government employes, and of the two or
+three hundred other Englishmen residing here. On the other was the
+town, extending itself along the banks of the little river Moota.
+We dreamed ourselves along in the lovely weather through such of
+the seven quarters of the town as happened to strike the fancy of my
+companion. Occasionally we were compelled to turn out of our way
+for the sacred cattle, which, in the enjoyment of their divine
+prerogatives, would remain serenely lying across our path; but
+we respected the antiquity, if not the reasonableness, of their
+privileges, and murmured not.
+
+Each of the seven quarters of Poona is named after a day of the week.
+As we strolled from Monday to Tuesday, or passed with bold anachronism
+from Saturday back to Wednesday, I could not help observing how
+these interweavings and reversals of time appeared to take an actual
+embodiment in the scenes through which we slowly moved, particularly
+in respect of the houses and the costumes which went to make up
+our general view. From the modern-built European houses to the
+mediaeval-looking buildings of the Bhoodwar quarter, with their massive
+walls and loop-holes and crenellations, was a matter of four or five
+centuries back in a mere turn of the eye; and from these latter to
+the Hindu temples here and there, which, whether or not of actual age,
+always carry one straight into antiquity, was a further retrogression
+to the obscure depths of time. So, too, one's glance would often sweep
+in a twinkling from a European clothed in garments of the latest mode
+to a Hindu whose sole covering was his _dhotee_, or clout about the
+loins, taking in between these two extremes a number of distinct
+stages in the process of evolution through which our clothes have
+gone. In the evening we visited the _Sangam_, where the small streams
+of the Moola and the Moota come together. It is filled with cenotaphs,
+but, so far from being a place of weeping, the pleasant air was full
+of laughter and of gay conversation from the Hindus, who delight to
+repair here for the purpose of enjoying the cool breath of the evening
+as well as the pleasures of social intercourse.
+
+[Illustration: HINDU TEMPLES NEAR POONA.]
+
+But I did not care to linger in Poona. The atmosphere always had to me
+a certain tang of the assassinations, the intrigues, the treacheries
+which marked the reign of that singular line of usurping ministers
+whose capital was here. In the days when the Peishwas were in the
+height of their glory Poona was a city of a hundred and fifty thousand
+inhabitants, and great traffic was here carried on in jewelry and
+such luxuries among the Mahratta nobles. The Mahrattas once, indeed,
+possessed the whole of India practically; and their name is composed
+of _Mahu_, a word meaning "great," and often to be met with in the
+designations of this land, where so many things really _are_ great,
+and _Rachtra_, "kingdom," the propriety of the appellation seeming to
+be justified by the bravery and military character of the people. They
+have been called the Cossacks of India from these qualities combined
+with their horsemanship. But the dynasty of the usurping ministers had
+its origin in iniquity; and the corruption of its birth quickly broke
+out again under the stimulus of excess and luxury, until it culminated
+in the destruction of the Mahratta empire in 1818. So, when we had
+seen the palace of the Peishwa, from one of whose balconies the young
+Peishwa Mahadeo committed suicide by leaping to the earth in the
+year 1797 through shame at having been reproved by his minister
+Nana Farnavese in presence of his court, and when we had visited the
+Hira-Bagh, or Garden of Diamonds, the summer retreat of the Peishwas,
+with its elegant pavilion, its balconies jutting into the masses of
+foliage, its cool tank of water, reposing under the protection of the
+temple-studded Hill of Pararati, we took train again for Bombay.
+
+The Great Indian Peninsula Railway's main line leads out of Bombay
+over the Ghats to Jabalpur, six hundred miles; thence a railway of
+some two hundred and twenty miles runs to Allahabad, connecting them
+with the great line, known as the East Indian Railway, which extends
+for more than a thousand miles north-westward from Calcutta _via_
+Patna, Benares, Allahabad, Cawnpore, Lucknow, Agra and Delhi. Our
+journey, as marked out by Bhima Gandharva, was to be from Bombay
+to Jabalpur by rail; thence by some slow and easy conveyance across
+country to Bhopal, and from Bhopal northward through Jhansi to Delhi
+and the northern country, thence returning by rail to Calcutta.
+
+As one ascends the Western Ghats shortly after leaving Bombay one has
+continual occasion to remark the extraordinary resources of modern
+railway engineering. Perhaps the mechanical skill of our time has not
+achieved any more brilliant illustrations of itself than here occur.
+For many miles one is literally going up a flight of steps by rail.
+The word Ghat indeed means the steps leading up from pools or rivers,
+whose frequent occurrence in India attests the need of easy access
+to water, arising from the important part which it plays both in the
+civil and religious economies of the Hindu. The Ghats are so called
+from their terraced ledges, rising one above another from the shores
+of the ocean like the stairs leading up from a pool. In achieving the
+ascent of these gigantic stairs all the expedients of road-makers have
+been resorted to: the zigzag, the trestle, the tunnel, the curve, have
+been pushed to their utmost applications; for five continuous miles
+on the Thull Ghat Incline there is a grade of one in thirty-seven,
+involving many trying curves, and on nineteen miles of the Bhore Ghat
+Incline there are thirty tunnels.
+
+That which gives tone and character to a general view of the interior
+of a railway-car in traveling is, from the nature of things, the
+head-covering of the occupants, for it is this which mostly meets the
+eye; and no one who has traveled in the United States, for example,
+can have failed to observe the striking difference between the aspect
+of a car in the South, where the felt slouch prevails, and of one
+in the North, where the silk hat is more affected. But cars full
+of turbans! There were turbans of silk, of muslin, of woolen; white
+turbans, red, green and yellow turbans; turbans with knots, turbans
+with ends hanging; neat turbans, baggy turbans, preternatural turbans,
+and that curious spotted silk inexpressible mitre which the Parsee
+wears.
+
+[Illustration: GONDS.]
+
+Bhima Gandharva was good enough to explain to me the turban; and
+really, when within bounds, it is not so nonsensical a headdress as
+one is apt at first to imagine. It is a strip of cloth from nine to
+twelve inches wide, and from fifteen to twenty-five yards long. They
+are known, however, of larger dimensions, reaching to a yard in width
+and sixty yards in length. The most common color is white; next,
+perhaps, red, and next yellow; though green, blue, purple and black
+are worn, as are also buff, shot colors and gray, these latter being
+usually of silk; but this does not exhaust the varieties, for there
+are many turbans made of cotton cloth printed in various devices to
+suit the fancies of the wearers.
+
+"The _puttee-dar_ (_pugri_, or turban)," continued my companion, "is
+a neat compact turban, in general use by Hindus and Mohammedans; the
+_joore-dar_ is like the _puttee-dar_, except that it has the addition
+of a knot on the crown; the _khirkee-dar_ is the full-dress turban of
+gentlemen attached to native courts; the _nustalik_ is a small turban
+which fits closely to the head, and is worn for full dress at the
+Mohammedan _durbars_ or royal receptions; the _mundeel_ is the
+military turban, with stripes of gold and ends; the _sethi_ is
+like the _nustalik_, and is worn by bankers; the _shumla_ is
+a shawl-turban; and I fear you do not care to know the other
+varieties--the _morassa_, the _umamu_, the _dustar_, the--"
+
+"Thank you," I said: "life is short, my dear Bhima, and I shall know
+nothing but turbans if this goes on, which will be inconvenient,
+particularly when I return to my home and my neighbor Smith asks me
+that ghastly question, 'What do I think of India?'"
+
+"It is a more 'ghastly' question as to India than as to any other
+country in the world," said the Hindu. "Some years ago, when Mr.
+Dilke was traveling in this country, a witty officer of one of the
+hill-stations remarked to him that _all general observations about
+India were absurd_. This is quite true. How could it be otherwise?
+Only consider, for example, the languages of India--the Assamese, with
+its two branches of the Deccan-goel and the Uttar-goel; the Bengalee;
+the Maithilee, Tirhutiya or Tirabhucti, spoken between the Coosy and
+the Gunduck; the Orissan, of the regions around Cuttack; the Nepalese;
+the Kosalese, about Almora; the Dogusee, between Almora and Cashmere;
+the Cashmiran; the Panjabee; the Mooltanee, or Vuchee, on the middle
+Indus; the two dialects of Sindhi, or Tatto, on the lower Indus; the
+Cutche, on the west coast of the peninsula; the Guserate, spoken
+on the islands of Salsette and Bombay and the opposite coast of the
+Coucan, as well as by the Parsees in the cities, where it is corrupted
+with many words of other languages through the influence of commercial
+relations; the Coucane, from Bombay to Goa and along the parallel
+Ghats where it is called Ballagate; the Bikaneere, the Marvare, the
+Jeypore, the Udayapore, of Rajpootana; the Vraja-bhasha (the cow-pen
+language) of the Doab, between the Ganges and the Jumna, which is
+probably the parent of Hindi (or Oordu); the Malooe, of the tableland
+of Malwa; the Bundelakhande, of the Bundelkhand; the Mogadhe, of
+Behar; the Maharachtre, of the country south of the Vindhyas; the--"
+
+"It gives me pain to interrupt you, Bhima Gandharva," I said
+(fervently hoping that this portion of my remark might escape the
+attention of the recording angel); "but I think we are at Jabalpur."
+
+_Apropos_ of Jubbulpoor, it is well enough to remark that by the rules
+of Indian orthography which are now to be considered authentic, the
+letter "a" without an accent has a sound equivalent to short "u," and
+a vowel with an acute accent has what is usually called its long
+sound in English. Accordingly, the word written "Jabalpur" should
+be pronounced as if retaining the "u" and the "oo" with which it was
+formerly written, "Jubbulpoor". The termination _pur_, so common in
+the designation of Indian places, is equivalent to that of _ville_
+in English, and means the same. The other common termination, _abad_,
+means "dwelling" or "residence": e.g., Ahmedabad, the residence of
+Ahmed. Jabalpur is but about a mile from the right bank of the Nerbada
+(_Nerbudda_) River; and as I wished to see the famous Marble Rocks
+of that stream, which are found a short distance from Jabalpur, my
+companion and I here left the railway, intending to see a little of
+the valley of the Nerbada, and then to strike across the Vindhyas,
+along the valley of the Tonsa, to Bhopal, making our journey by such
+slow, irregular and easy stages as should be compatible with that
+serene and philosophic disposition into which the Hindu's beautiful
+gravity had by this time quite converted my American tendencies toward
+rushing through life at the killing pace.
+
+[Illustration: CENOTAPHS IN THE VALLEY OF THE TONSA.]
+
+It was a little past midday when we made our first journey along the
+river between the Marble Rocks. Although the weather was as nearly
+perfect as weather could be, the mornings being deliciously cool and
+bracing and the nights cold enough to produce often a thin layer of
+ice over a pan of water left exposed till daybreak, yet the midday sun
+was warm enough, especially after a walk, to make one long for leaves
+and shade and the like. It would be difficult, therefore, to convey
+the sensations with which we reclined at our ease in a flat-bottomed
+punt while an attendant poled us up toward the "Fall of Smoke," where
+the Nerbada leaps out eagerly toward the low lands he is to fertilize,
+like a young poet anxious to begin his work of grace in the world. On
+each side of us rose walls of marble a hundred feet in height, whose
+pure white was here and there striped with dark green or black: all
+the colors which met the eye--the marmoreal whites, the bluish grays
+of the recesses among the ledges, the green and black seams, the
+limpid blue of the stream--were grateful, calm-toned, refreshing; we
+inhaled the coolness as if it had been a mild aroma out of a distant
+flower. This pleasant fragrance, which seemed to come up out of
+all things, was presently intensified by a sort of spiritual
+counterpart--a gentle breath that blew upon us from the mysterious
+regions of death; for on a _ghat_ we saw a small company of Hindus
+just launching the body of a pious relative into the waters of
+Mother Nerbada in all that freedom from grief, and even pleasant
+contemplation, with which this singular people regard the transition
+from present to future existence. These corpses, however, which are
+thus committed to the wave, do not always chime so happily in with the
+reveries of boating-parties on the Nerbada. The Marble Rocks are often
+resorted to by pic-nic parties in the moonlit evenings; and one can
+easily fancy that to have a dusky dead body float against one's boat
+and sway slowly round alongside in the midst of a gay jest or of a
+light song of serenade, as is said to have happened not unfrequently
+here, is not an occurrence likely to heighten the spirits of revelers.
+Occasionally, also, the black, ugly double snout of the _magar_ (or
+Nerbada crocodile) may pop up from the surface, which may here serve
+as a warning to the young lady who trails her hand in the water--and
+I have yet to be in a boating-party where the young lady did not trail
+her hand in the water--that on the Nerbada it is perhaps as well to
+resign an absent-minded hand to the young officer who sits by her in
+the boat lest Magar should snap it off.
+
+Leaving the Nerbada we now struck off northward toward the Tonsa,
+intending to pass round by way of Dumoh, Sangor, Bhilsa and Sanchi
+to Bhopal. We might have pursued a route somewhat more direct by
+following directly down the valley of the Nerbada to Hoshangabad,
+and thence straight across to Bhopal, but my companion preferred
+the circuitous route indicated, as embracing a greater variety of
+interesting objects. He had procured for our conveyance a vehicle
+which was in all respects suitable to the placidity of his temper; and
+I make bold to confess that, American as I am--born on the railroad,
+so to speak--I have never enjoyed traveling as I did in this novel
+carriage. It was what is called a _chapaya_. It consisted of a body
+nearly ten feet in length by more than five in breadth, and was
+canopied by a top supported upon sculptured pillars of wood.
+The wheels were massive and low. There were no springs; but this
+deficiency was atoned for by the thick cushionment of the rear portion
+of the vehicle, which allowed us to lie at full length in luxurious
+ease as we rolled along. Four white bullocks, with humps and horns
+running nearly straight back on the prolongation of the forehead line,
+drew us along in a very stately manner at the rate of something like a
+mile and a half an hour.
+
+We were now in the Gondwana, in some particulars one of the most
+interesting portions of the country. Here are the Highlands of Central
+India; here rise the Nerbada and the Tapti--which flow to the westward
+in a generally parallel direction, and empty into the Gulf of Cambaye,
+the one at Broode and the other at Surat--as well as the Son, the
+Keyn (or Cane) and the Tonsa, which flow northward into the Jumna. The
+valley of the Keyn and that of the Tonsa here run across the Vindhyas,
+which are known to the eastward of this as the Kyrmores, and afford
+communication between Northern and Southern India. It is along the
+depression of the latter stream that the railway has been built from
+Jabalpur to Allahabad.
+
+The eight hundred thousand Gonds of the Gondwana are supposed to be
+members of the great autochthonal family of ancient India. These hills
+of the Gondwana country appear to have been considered by the incoming
+Aryans for a long time as a sort of uncanny land, whose savage
+recesses were filled with demons and snakes: indeed, in the epics of
+the Mahabharata and Ramayana this evil character is attributed to that
+portion of India lying south of the Vindhyas. The forest of Spenser's
+Fairy Queen, in which wandering knights meet with manifold beasts and
+maleficent giants, and do valorous battles against them in the rescue
+of damsels and the like--such seem to have been the Gondwana woods to
+the ancient Hindu imagination. It was not distressed damsels,
+however, whom they figured as being assisted by the arms of the errant
+protectors, but religious devotees, who dwelt in the seclusion of the
+forest, and who were protected from the pranks and machinations of the
+savage denizens by opportune heroes of the northern race. It appears,
+however, that the native demons of the Gondwana had fascinating
+daughters; for presently we find the rajahs from the north coming
+down and marrying them; and finally, in the fourteenth and fifteenth
+centuries, the keen urgency of the conquering Mohammedans sends great
+numbers of Rajputs down into the Gondwana, and a considerable mixture
+of the two bloods takes place. With this incursion of Hindu peoples
+come also the Hindu gods and tenets; and Mahadeo, the "great god,"
+whose home had been the Kailas of the Himalayas, now finds himself
+domesticated in the mountains of Central India. In the Mahadeo
+mountain is still a shrine of Siva, which is much visited by pilgrims
+and worshipers.
+
+[Illustration: THE GAUR, OR INDIAN BISON.]
+
+The Gond--he who lives back in the hills, far off from the
+neighborhood of the extensive planting districts, which have attracted
+many of those living near them to become at least half-civilized
+laborers in harvest-time--is a primitive being enough.
+
+"Only look," said Bhima Gandharva, "at that hut if you desire to see
+what is perhaps one of the most primitive houses since ever the banyan
+tree gave to man (as is fabled) the idea of sheltering himself from
+the elements artificially." It was simply made of stakes driven into
+the ground, between which were wattled branches. This structure was
+thatched with grass, and plastered with mud.
+
+The Gond, like the American Indian, has his little patch of grain,
+which he cultivates, however, in a fashion wholly his own. His sole
+instrument of agriculture seems to be the axe. Selecting a piece of
+ground which presents a growth of small and easily-cut saplings--and
+perhaps, by the way, thus destroying in a few hours a whole cargo
+of teak trees worth more than all the crops of his agricultural
+lifetime--he hews down the growth, and in the dry season sets fire to
+the fallen timber. The result is a bed of ashes over a space of two or
+three acres. His soil is now ready. If the patch thus prepared happens
+to be level, he simply flings out a few handfuls of grain, coarse
+rice, kutki (ponicum) or kodon (paspalum), and the thing is done. The
+rest is in the hands of the god who sends the rains. If the patch be
+on a declivity, he places the grain at the upper part, where it will
+be washed down by the rains over the balance of the field. Next year
+he will burn some more wood--the first burning will have left many
+charred stumps and trunks, which he supplements with a little wood
+dragged from other parts of the forest--on the same spot, and so
+the next year, by which time it will become necessary to begin a new
+clearing, or _dhya_. The _dhya_ thus abandoned does not renew the
+original growth which clothed it, like the pinelands of the Southern
+United States, which, if allowed to run waste after having been
+cleared and cultivated, clothe themselves either with oaks or with a
+wholly different species of pine from the original growth. The waste
+_dhya_, which may have perhaps nourished a splendid growth of teak,
+becomes now only a dense jungle.
+
+The Gond also raises pumpkins and beans; and this vegetable diet
+he supplements with game ensnared in the _dhyas_, to which peafowl,
+partridges, hares and the like resort. Many of the villages, however,
+have a professional huntsman, who will display the most incredible
+patience in waiting with his matchlock for the game to appear.
+
+Besides these articles of diet, the aborigines of the Gondwana have
+their mhowa tree, which stands them in much the same multifarious
+stead as the palm does to its beneficiaries. The flowers of the mhowa
+fall and are eaten, or are dried and pressed, being much like raisins:
+they also produce a wine by fermentation and the strong liquor of the
+hill-people by distillation. Of the seed cakes are made, and an oil is
+expressed from them which is an article of commerce.
+
+In addition, the poor Gond appears to have a periodical godsend
+resulting from a singular habit of one of the great Indian plants.
+The bamboo is said to undergo a general seeding every thirty years: at
+this period, although, in the mean time, many individual bamboos may
+have passed through the process of reproduction, it is said that the
+whole bamboo growth of a section will simultaneously drop its leaves
+and put forth large panicles of flowers, after which come great
+quantities of seeds much like rice. These are gathered for food by
+the inhabitants with all the greater diligence in consequence of a
+tradition--which, however, does not seem to be at all supported by
+facts--that the general seeding of the bamboo portends a failure of
+the regular crops. The liberal forests of the Gondwana furnish still
+other edibles to their denizens. The ebony plums, the wild mango,
+the seeds of the sal tree, the beans of the giant banhinia creeper, a
+species of arrowroot, and a wild yam, are here found and eaten.
+
+[Illustration: BANJARIS.]
+
+It is not long since the Gonds had arrived at a melancholy condition
+under the baleful influences of the kulars, or liquor-dealers, who
+resided among them and created an extraordinary demand for their
+intoxicating wares by paying for service and for produce in liquor.
+The kulars have, however, been thrown into the background by wise
+efforts toward their suppression, and matters have improved for the
+poor autoch-thones.
+
+We spent our first night in our chapaya, my companion having so
+arranged matters that we were quite independent of the bungaloos which
+the Englishmen have erected at suitable distances along the great
+roads for the convenience of travelers. The night was clear; betwixt
+the corner pillars which upheld our canopy a thousand friendly
+salutations from the stars streamed in upon us; the tranquil
+countenance of my friend seemed, as he lay beside me, like the face of
+the Past purified of old errors and calm with great wisdom got through
+great tribulation, insomuch that betwixt the Hindu and the stars I
+felt myself to be at once in communication with antiquity and with
+eternity.
+
+Thus we pursued our ambulatory meditations through the Gondwana. If
+we had been sportsmen, we should have found full as varied a field for
+the bagging of game as for that more spiritual hunt after new ideas
+and sensations in which we were engaged. Gray quail, gray partridges,
+painted partridges (_Francolinus pictus_), snipe and many varieties
+of water-fowl, the sambor, the black antelope, the Indian gazelle or
+ravine deer, the gaur or Indian bison, chewing the cud in the midday
+shade or drinking from a clear stream, troops of _nilgae_ springing
+out from the long grass and dwarf growth of polas and jujube trees
+which covered the sites of abandoned villages and fields,--all
+these revealed themselves to us in the most tempting situations. But
+although I had been an ardent devotee of the double-barrel, the large
+and manly tenderness which Bhima Gandharva invariably displayed toward
+all animals, whether wild or tame, had wrought marvels upon me, and
+I had grown fairly ashamed--nay, horrified--at the idea that anything
+which a generous and brave man could call _sport_ should consist
+wholly in the most keen and savage cruelties inflicted upon creatures
+whom we fight at the most unknightly odds, we armed, they unarmed.
+While I knew that our pleasures are by the divine order mostly
+distillations from pain, I could not now help recognizing at the same
+time that this circumstance was part of an enormous plan which the
+slaughter of innocent creatures in the way of "sport" did in nowise
+help to carry out.
+
+The truth is, although I had been for some days wavering upon the
+brink of these conclusions in a quiet way, I found the old keen ardor
+of the sportsman still burning too strongly, and I had started out
+with a breech-loader, intent upon doing much of the Gondwana route gun
+in hand. It was not long before a thoughtless shot operated to
+bring my growing convictions sharply face to face with my decreasing
+practice, and thus to quite frown the latter out of existence. It
+happened in this wise: One day, not far from sunset, I was walking
+idly along behind the chapaya, in which Bhima Gandharva was dreamily
+reclining, when suddenly a pair of great _saras_ cranes rose from the
+low banks of a small stream and sailed directly across the road. Quick
+as thought--indeed, quicker than thought; for if I _had_ thought, I
+would not have done it--I fired, and brought down one of the monstrous
+birds. As I started to approach it, Bhima Gandharva said, in a tone
+just a trifle graver than usual, "Stop! wait a moment," and at the
+same time halted the chapaya. The mate of the bird I had shot, seeing
+him fall, alighted on the same spot, then flew up, then returned,
+flew up again, returned again, with an exhibition of sad and lingering
+affection of which I had not dreamed, and which penetrated me beyond
+expression; so I stood half stolid outwardly and wholly ashamed
+and grieved inwardly. "The saras," said my friend, "is the type of
+conjugal affection among the Hindus. The birds nearly always go
+in pairs; and when one is killed, the other invariably makes those
+demonstrations of tenderness which you have just seen."
+
+As we journeyed along in the dusk came notes from another pair of
+feathered lovers, "chukwa, chukwi," "chukwa, chukwi," in a sort of
+mournful alternation. They were the branning ducks, he on one side,
+she on the other side of the stream, as is their habit, whence they
+are fabled to be a pair of lovers who must yearn unavailingly through
+the long nights from opposite banks of the river.
+
+That night, when Bhima Gandharva was asleep, I gently arose, took my
+double-barrel--thou dear Manton! how often has not Jonesville admired
+thee returning from the field at late evening slanting at a jaunty
+angle high above my bagful of snipe or of quail as the case might
+be!--yes, I took this love of a gun, together with the cartridges,
+accoutrements and all other rights, members and appurtenances
+thereunto belonging or in any wise appertaining, and slid the whole
+lot softly into a deep green pool of the very stream from which had
+flown my saras.
+
+The taste of gypsy life which I was now enjoying contributed to add
+a sort of personal element to that general interest which hangs about
+the curious Banjaris, whom we met constantly, with their families
+and their bullocks, along our road. _Banjara_ is literally
+"forest-wanderer." The women were especially notable for their tall
+stature, shapely figures and erect carriage; which circumstances are
+all the more wonderful from the life of hardship which they lead,
+attending as they do at once to the foraging of the cattle, the
+culinary preparations for the men and the cares of the children. From
+the profusion of ornaments which they wore, one may imagine, however,
+that they were well cared for by their lords in return for their
+affectionate labors; and the general bearing of the tall Banjara who
+bore a long two-handed sword gave evidence of a certain inward sense
+of protection over his belongings which probably found vent in many an
+affectionate gift of rings and bracelets to his graceful partner. It
+must be confessed that the gypsying of these Eastern Bohemians is not
+so free a life as is popularly supposed. The _naik_ or sovereign of
+each _tanda_, or camp, seems to be possessed of absolute power, and in
+this connection the long two-handed sword suggested much less gentle
+reflections. The Banjara, however, though a nomad, is a serviceable
+one, for he is engaged in trade. With his bullocks he is the carrier
+of Central India, and is to be met with all over that section,
+bringing salt and other commodities and returning with interior
+produce.
+
+
+
+
+FRA ALOYSIUS
+
+  Fra Aloysius, vexed with skeptic fears,
+    Nigh crazed with thought to all the saints did pray
+    For faith in those mysterious words that say,
+  "One day is with the Lord a thousand years,
+    A thousand years with Him are as a day."
+
+  An erudite and holy monk was he,
+    And yet his brethren trembled lest his brain
+    Should lose its poise, so long he dwelt in vain
+  On that perplexing verse to find its key,
+    And strove to make its hidden meaning plain.
+
+  Racked by a sleepless night, one fresh spring morn
+    Forth from the cloister Aloysius strolled.
+    The wood was dewy-bright, clear beams of gold
+  Illumined it, and to his heart was borne
+    A sense of freedom, peace and joy untold.
+
+  Beside a laughing brook he sat to rest,
+    Above whose wave did long-haired willows weep;
+    Midmost the dense green forest, still and deep,
+  Lulled by the trickling waters and possessed
+    By tranquil thoughts, the friar fell asleep.
+
+  And, overworn, he slept the livelong day,
+    Nor waked until the twilight shadows fell,
+    That flung a brown night o'er that leafy dell.
+  Then up he rose refreshed and went his way,
+    And, half ashamed, he heard the vesper-bell.
+
+  Back to the convent fared he; at the gate
+    A stranger gave him entrance, but he passed
+    Into the chapel with meek eyes downcast,
+  In truant guise returning home thus late,
+    And toward his wonted seat made seemly haste.
+
+  Too late! a stranger filled it. Looking round,
+    Amazed, he could discern no face he knew.
+    The abbot's self had changed; his wonder grew,
+  When, after the familiar chant, he found
+    These crazy monks held him for crazy too.
+
+  They gathered round with curious, eager eyes.
+   "What cloister's this?" he asked. They named its name:
+    The one he left that morning was the same.
+  His name he gave; with many a wild surmise
+    They guessed who he might be and whence he came.
+
+  He asked them where the abbot was at last,
+    From whom he parted but the night before.
+   "He hath been dead three hundred years and more!"
+  They answered with a single voice, aghast.
+    Then spake a friar versed in monkish lore:
+
+  "Brethren, a miracle! This man I know:
+   'Tis Aloysius, who, as I have read,
+    Beset with doubts, forth from this convent fled,
+  And vanished, some three hundred years ago,
+    And all the world hath counted him as dead."
+
+  Then Aloysius felt the blessed tears
+    Fulfill his eyes, whence dropped the scales away.
+    Kneeling, he cried, "Oh, brethren, let us pray.
+  One day is with the Lord a thousand years,
+    A thousand years with Him are as a day."
+
+EMMA LAZARUS.
+
+
+
+
+A FEW HOURS IN BOHEMIA.
+
+
+The beauty of this country is that no turbulent sea confines its
+borders, nor are martello-towers needed to guard its coast: no jealous
+neighbor threatens its frontier, no army oppresses its citizens, and
+no king can usurp its throne. Its locality is hard to define: like the
+Fata Morgana, it is here to-day and gone to-morrow, for its territory
+is the mind of men, and in extent it is as boundless as thought.
+Natives of every clime are enrolled among its freemen, and all lands
+contain its representatives, but it is in the picturesque streets of
+the older continental cities of Europe, where rambling lodgings and
+cheap apartments are many, that the invisible mother-country founds
+her colonies. I will tell you how I went and what I saw there.
+
+Afra was a cosmopolite, and consequently knew Bohemia, its byways and
+thoroughfares. If any one could fill the office of guide thereto,
+Afra could, and when one evening she rushed into my room saying, "Come
+along if you want to go to Bohemia," I did not hesitate a moment, but
+made ready for the journey, with the simple precaution of putting on
+my bonnet and shawl.
+
+"A cab?" I asked as we moved from the door.
+
+"Who ever heard of entering Bohemia in a cab?" laughed Afra dryly.
+"People have been known to drive _out_ in their own carriages, but
+they always make their first appearance there on foot, or at best in
+an omnibus."
+
+"As you please," I replied, trying to keep pace with her rapid step,
+which showed constant practice.
+
+"I wonder you did not propose a balloon," she continued pettishly.
+"The gods don't give everything to one person: now, they give us
+brains, and they give other people--money."
+
+"If you would understand, I--"
+
+"No, you wouldn't. I sha'n't ride in cabs until I can pay for them
+myself; meanwhile, I have gros sous enough in my pocket for an omnibus
+fare, and if you have the same we will stop here." At this she entered
+a bureau, and as I followed I saw her get some tickets from a man who
+sat behind a small counter, and then composedly sit down on a bench
+while she said, "We shall have some time to wait for our luxury:" then
+showing me the tickets, "Twelve and thirteen: it is a full night, and
+all these people ahead of us."
+
+"Is it a lottery?" I asked ignorantly.
+
+"Very much of a lottery," Afra replied grimly--"like all the ways of
+Bohemia, remarkably uncertain. You get a ticket for something in the
+giving of the Muses, and you wait until your number is called. The
+worst of it is, the most unlikely people are called before you, and
+some get disgusted and leave: there goes one out at the door at this
+moment. Well, he may be better or he may be worse off than those who
+finally win: who knows if any race is worth the running? Still, if you
+have courage to hold on, I believe there is no doubt that every one
+ultimately gets something." Seeing my perplexity, she twisted the
+round tickets between her fingers and added, "Do not be alarmed: these
+are only good for a seat in the first empty 'bus that comes up. The
+conductor will call out the numbers in rotation, and if ours is among
+them we shall go. It is frightful that you have never ridden in a 'bus
+before. I wonder where we should get ideas if we shut ourselves up in
+cabs and never walked or were hungry or tired, and thought only of our
+own comfort from morning till night? You don't know what you miss, you
+poor deluded, unfortunate rich people. I will tell you of something
+I saw the other evening; and, as it is worthy of a name, it shall be
+called 'The Romance of an Omnibus.' Listen! isn't that our numbers I
+heard? Yes: come quick or we shall lose our chance."
+
+"Well," said I when we had successfully threaded the crowd and were
+seated--"the romance."
+
+"You have no idea of the fitness of things. My story is pathetic: it
+will look badly to see you drowned in tears--people will stare."
+
+"I promise not to cry."
+
+"Oh, if you are one of those stolid, unemotional beings who are never
+moved, I sha'n't waste my tale upon you. Wait until to-morrow: we
+will get Monsieur C---- to recount, and you shall hear something worth
+listening to. He is a regular troubadour--has the same artless vanity
+they were known to possess, their charming simplicity, their
+gestures, and their power of investing everything with romance. One is
+transported to the Middle Ages while he speaks: no book written on the
+subject could so fully give you the flavor of the times. He recalls
+Froissart. If you are not affected by C----'s stories, you had better
+pretend to be. But that, I am sure, will not be necessary: a great
+tragedian was lost when he became a great painter."
+
+"Might I ask how and when and where I am to meet this wonderful man?"
+
+"At the garden-party."
+
+"In what way am I to get there?"
+
+"By strategy. There is a little reunion to-night of what may be called
+female Bohemians. They are going to settle the preliminaries of this
+party, and if you happen to be present they will invite you; not that
+they particularly care for your company, but because, as I said, you
+happen to be there. Only don't get yourself into a mess by tramping on
+any one's toes."
+
+"Have they corns?"
+
+"Yes, on every inch of surface: they are dreadfully thin-skinned. But
+they hate sham even more than a hard knock, and are quicker than
+a police-officer in detecting it; so be careful not to talk about
+anything you are ignorant of."
+
+"Give me a few rules, and I promise to conduct myself properly."
+
+"Well, don't be snobbish and patronize them, and don't look shocked
+at any strange opinions you hear, nor act as if you were at an animal
+show and were wondering what would happen next. Be sure not to assent
+when you see they wish to argue, and don't argue when they expect
+acquiescence. If any of them speak in broken English, and you can't
+for the life of you understand, don't ask them to repeat, but answer
+immediately, for you can imagine when one has taken pains to learn a
+foreign language one likes it to be appreciated, and don't--But here
+we are. In short, make yourself at home, as if you had been there all
+your life."
+
+"Afra," I said, laying my hand on her arm as she took to her swift
+pace again, "perhaps I had better go home: I am afraid I can't--I
+think--that is--"
+
+"Nonsense! as if you could not get on after all those hints! Anyway,
+you cannot return alone, and I am unable to go with you. Make up your
+mind to blunder, and do it. There was an amateur visited the studio
+about three months ago: her absurdities have lasted us for laughing
+material ever since. As she is getting rather stale, you can take her
+place. This is the house: come in."
+
+With this doubtful prospect in view I followed my peremptory guide
+from the narrow street into what appeared to be a spacious court, but
+as the only light it received was from a blinking candle in the window
+of the conciergerie, I could not determine. After exchanging some
+cabalistic sentences with a toothless old woman, the proprietor of the
+candle, Afra turned to the right, and walking a few steps came to a
+door opening on a stairway, which we mounted. I can think of nothing
+black enough for comparison with the darkness surrounding us. At last
+a faint glimmer showed an old lamp standing in a corner of a hall bare
+and carpetless. A series of doors flanked the place, looking to my
+unaccustomed eyes all alike, but Afra without a moment's hesitation
+went to one of them and knocked. It was opened by a lady, who smiled
+and said, "Enter. You are just in time: school is over and the model
+about going."
+
+I found myself in a high-ceiled room, at one end of which was
+suspended a row of perhaps a dozen lamps. Here, at least, there was-no
+lack of light: it required some moments to accustom our eyes to the
+sudden contrast. The yellow blaze was directed by reflectors into the
+space immediately beneath the lamps, which left the rest of the room
+pleasantly tempered. Some easels, a few chairs and screens, plaster
+casts on shelves, sketches in all stages of progress on the wall,
+a tea-kettle singing over a bright fire in a stove, and a curtain
+enclosing a corner used as a bedroom, completed the list of furniture.
+It was a night-school for lady artists. The class had finished for the
+evening, and a number of the students were moving about or seated near
+the fire, talking in an unlimited number of languages.
+
+I was given several random introductions, and did my best to follow
+Afra's directions; but there was an indescribable quaintness about the
+appearance and manners of my new acquaintance that made it difficult
+not to stare. I found, however, that little notice was taken of me,
+as a lively discussion was being carried on over a study of an arm and
+hand which one of them was holding up for inspection.
+
+"It is a style I should call the lantern," said she. "The redness of
+the flesh can only be accounted for on the supposition that a light is
+shining through it."
+
+"I should call it raw beef," remarked another.
+
+"It is a shame, mademoiselle!" began the model in an injured tone.
+She had been tying on her bonnet before a bit of looking-glass she
+had taken from her pocket. "Does my arm look like that?" Here she
+indignantly drew up her sleeve and held out that dimpled member,
+meanwhile gazing wrathfully at the sketch. "It ought not to be
+allowed. The silver tones of my flesh are entirely lost; and see how
+you have caricatured the elegance of my beautiful hand. Will not some
+one help mademoiselle to put it right before my reputation is ruined?"
+
+"Jeanne, a model is not a critic," said the author of the drawing,
+coming forward and grasping the canvas with no gentle hand.--"Ladies,
+if you wish to find fault, turn to your own studies. That proportion
+is frightful"--she pointed to different sketches as she spoke--"that
+ear is too large; and, madame, if you take a crust of paint like yours
+for freedom of touch, I pity you."
+
+This dispute was by no means the last during the evening. Opinions
+seemed to be plentiful in Bohemia, each individual being furnished
+with a set of her own on every subject broached; and as no diffidence
+was shown in putting them forth, the company quarreled with great
+good-nature and evident enjoyment. A pot of tea was then brewed by the
+owner of the studio, who had been English before she became Bohemian,
+and the beverage was handed round in tea-cups which, like the opinions
+of the guests, differed widely from each other. In the silence that
+attended this diversion Afra took the floor and said, "How about the
+garden-party to the country? Who is going?"
+
+Several spoke, and one asked, "Shall we take lunch with us?"
+
+"No, something will be provided for us there."
+
+"So much the better. When are we to meet, and where?"
+
+"Twelve o'clock, midday, at ----."
+
+"What messieurs are going?"
+
+"Quite a number--a tenor from the Grand Opera, and the leader of the
+orchestra, who is a magnificent violinist; that new Spanish painter
+who plays the guitar divinely; a poet--that is, he has written some
+pretty songs--besides plenty more."
+
+"That promises well."
+
+"You will bring your friend?" and the speaker nodded her head toward
+me.
+
+"I shall be delighted: I am so curious to see those eccentric--" Here
+a warning glance from Afra stopped me.
+
+But the lady only laughed and said, "You will see eccentricity enough
+to-morrow, if that is what you want. People who devote their minds to
+great objects have no time to think of little things. You had better
+see that Afra has on her bonnet or she will go without one."
+
+"Nonsense!" replied Afra.--"Miss," this to the owner of the studio,
+who was so called in honor of her English birth, "are you ever
+troubled by the ghost of that young painter who hung himself up
+there?"
+
+"Those who have occasion to commit suicide are not likely to come
+back: they have had enough of this world," said the Englishwoman.
+
+"Did some one really die here?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, really;" and Afra mimicked my tone of horror. "You know, a
+Bohemian is at home anywhere, so a change of country don't affect him
+much. If we find a place disagreeable, we travel."
+
+"Was he insane?"
+
+"Not more than the rest of us, but _you_ can't understand the feeling
+that would induce a man to do such a thing. This young fellow painted
+a picture: he put his mind, his soul, himself, into it, and sent it to
+the Exhibition. It was rejected--that is, he was rejected--and he came
+here and died. They found him suspended from that beam where the lamps
+hang now."
+
+"I thought your Bohemia was so gay?"
+
+"So it is, but the brightest light makes the deepest shadows."
+
+The conversation went on. These ladies discussed politics, literature,
+art and society with absolute confidence. One of the topics was Alfred
+de Musset. The Englishwoman was praising the English Alfred, when
+a pale-faced girl, who up to this moment had been intently reading,
+oblivious of all about her, closed her book with a snap (it was a
+much-worn edition of one of the classics, bought for a few sous on the
+quay) and broke out with--"Your Tennyson is childish. His King Arthur
+puts me in mind of our Louis Philippe and his umbrella. Did you know
+Louis carried an umbrella with him when he was obliged to fly from
+Paris? One would have looked well held over Arthur's dragon helmet
+that disagreeable night he left the queen to go and fight his nephew.
+But perhaps Guinevere had lent it to Launcelot, and even the best
+friends, alas! do not return umbrellas. Your poet writes in white
+kid gloves, and thinks in them too. Imagine the magnificent rush and
+struggle of those ancient days, the ecstasy of battle, the intensity
+of life, and then read your Tennyson's milk-and-water tales, with
+their modern English-menage feelings. Arthur would have been much more
+likely to give his wife a beating, as did the hero of the _Nibelungen
+Lied_, than that high-flown lecture; and it would have done the
+Guinevere of that time more good."
+
+"And what is your Alfred, Anita?"
+
+"He is divine."
+
+"After the heathen pattern. He dipped his pen in mire."
+
+"What is mire?--water and earth. What are we?--water and earth. Mire
+is humanity, and holds in itself not only the roots of the tree,
+but the germ of the flower. A poet who is too delicate to plant
+his thought in earth must be content to give it but the life of a
+parasite: it can have no separate existence of its own."
+
+"But one need not be bad to be great."
+
+"Nor need one be good to be great," returned Anita sarcastically.
+"Alfred de Musset was a peculiar type of a peculiar time. He did not
+imagine: he felt, he lived, he was himself, and was original, like a
+new variety of flower or a new species of insect. Tennyson has gleaned
+from everybody's fields: our Alfred gathered only from his own. The
+one is made, the other is born."
+
+"Come away," said Afra impatiently: "no one can speak while Anita
+is on her hobby. Besides, I must get home early to trim a bonnet for
+to-morrow;" and without more leavetaking than a "Good-evening," which
+included every one, we found ourselves in the street.
+
+"Who is Anita?" I asked.
+
+"She is nobody just now: what she will be remains to be seen. Her
+family wish her to be an artist: she wishes to adopt the stage as a
+profession, and is studying for it _sub rosa_. Did you ever see a more
+tragic face?"
+
+"Poor thing!" I involuntarily exclaimed.
+
+"Don't pity her," said Afra, more seriously than she had yet spoken.
+"The best gift that can be bestowed upon a mortal is a strong natural
+inclination for any particular life and the opportunity of following
+it. The man or woman who has that can use the wheel of Fate for a
+spinning-wheel."
+
+The next morning at the appointed time I met Afra at the station.
+"How do I look?" she asked, standing up for my inspection as soon as I
+appeared in sight, at the same time regarding as much of her dress as
+it was possible for her to see. But before I could reply the satisfied
+expression of her face changed: an unpleasant discovery had been
+made. "I have shoes on that are not mates," she exclaimed--"cloth and
+leather: that looks rather queer, doesn't it? Do you think it will be
+noticed? I could not decide which pair to wear, and put on one of each
+to see the effect: afterward I forgot them. Now, I suppose that would
+be thought eccentric, though any one might make the same mistake. It
+shows I have two pairs of shoes," she added more cheerfully, "and they
+are both black. How is my bonnet?"
+
+The bonnet was black velvet, and we were in midsummer. The material,
+however, was skillfully draped with a veil, and a profusion of pink
+flowers gave it a seasonable air. A crimson bow was also tied at
+her neck; she complacently remarked that "pink and crimson harmonize
+beautifully;" and others of the party arriving at that moment, I was
+saved the trouble of making a polite answer.
+
+The ride through ripening grain-fields and moss-thatched hamlets
+need not be described; suffice it to say, it was France and June. An
+omnibus was waiting at the station where we dismounted: it carried us
+near, but not to, our destination. After leaving it we walked through
+the streets of a low-roofed village, then followed a path bordered
+with wild mignonette and apple trees that wound up the side of a hill
+covered with vineyards. A couple of chattering magpies ran before
+us, an invisible cuckoo was heard between snatches of Italian melody
+warbled by the tenor _sotto voce_ and the little company overflowed
+with gayety.
+
+The house we arrived at looked as if it might be a castle in the air
+materialized--pointed windows hidden in ivy, through which you saw
+the chintz-covered walls of the interior; turrets on the roof and
+a stair-tower; odd nooks for pigeons and cattle; the color a
+weather-toned red, met by gray roofs, green trees and blue sky. We
+passed through it to the quaint garden: rows of dwarf pears bordered
+its paths, and trellises and walls supported nectarines and vines,
+with sunshine and shadow caressing the half-ripe fruit.
+
+The shady spaces were occupied by guests who had arrived before us,
+and we saw with pleasure that ceremony had not been invited to attend.
+The host's kindly manner was sufficient to put the company at once
+at ease. We wandered at will from group to group, listening or
+conversing: introductions were sometimes given, but more often not.
+
+At one table some ladies and gentlemen were playing the artistic game
+of "five points." A more difficult pastime was never invented. The
+materials necessary are simply a piece of paper and a pencil: it is
+their use that is extraordinary. A person puts five dots on the paper
+in whatever position fancy may dictate: on this slight foundation
+another is expected to design a figure, the puzzle being to include
+all the marks given. One that I saw had four of the dots placed
+unusually close together, and the fifth in a distant corner:
+this latter, in the opinion of the lookers-on, would surely prove
+refractory. After some moments of consideration, with pencil suspended
+and eye attentive, the artist commenced drawing. In ten minutes the
+sketch was finished. It was an angel: her upturned head took in the
+highest of the group of dots; one hand hanging by her side the next;
+a knee the third; and the flowing hem of her robe the fourth; but the
+fifth in the corner--what could reach it? With a touch of the pencil
+the angel's other hand appeared flinging up a censer attached to
+a long chain, which struck the solitary dot like a shot amid
+acclamations. To show that he did not consider the feat a _tour de
+force_, the artist turned the paper, and taking the same marks drew
+a devil in an entirely different attitude, the difficult point being
+reached by his pitchfork. This gave rise to a learned discussion as
+to whether the devil's emblematic pitchfork was not a descendant of
+Neptune's trident, which I did not stay to hear, as Afra whispered she
+wanted to present me to Monsieur C----, and I was taken to a gentleman
+of no great height, but of such wondrous width that Nature must have
+formed him in a most generous mood.
+
+"You are American?" said this wide man to me as I was introduced, and
+without waiting for a reply went on: "I like your country-people:
+they admire frankly. Show them a picture, they exclaim, 'Beautiful!
+magnificent! lovely! exquisite! name your price;' and they buy it.
+Here the public look and look. 'Not bad,' they say, 'but the color is
+from Veronese, and that attitude is surely Raphael's. What a mine that
+man's genius has been to ambitious but less gifted artists!' and so
+they go on. I wish they would let the dead rest in peace. Are you
+acquainted with Mr. B---- of New York?"
+
+I was obliged to say "No."
+
+"I wish to send a message to him," he continued grandly: "tell him
+that I paint now for him alone."
+
+"You are court-painter to Mr. B----," I remarked laughingly.
+
+"Don't speak of courts," he exclaimed pettishly. "I was to have
+painted the baptism of the prince imperial for the state: it gave me
+no end of annoyance, and in the end was never finished."
+
+"I understood that you insisted on painting the little prince nude,
+after the Rubens manner, and that was one ground of objection to the
+design," said Afra.
+
+"The baby would have had on plenty of clothes: one of his dresses was
+sent from the Tuileries for Monsieur C---- to paint, and I sewed a
+rosette on it myself." This from the painter's wife.
+
+"A countryman of yours sat for the head of a young priest at the
+ceremony. He had a fine countenance: he was studying art with me
+at the time, and has since been professor of drawing at your Naval
+Academy. Teaching is a sad trade--Pegasus dragging the plough."
+
+"At least, your other great picture brought you nothing but praise."
+
+"The public have since repented of being so good to me. Then, they
+could not say enough in my favor: now, if a person asks what I am
+doing, every one repeats like a parrot, 'C---- doesn't paint, C----
+doesn't paint.' I have heard it so often that I begin to believe
+it myself, and when I am asked join the general cry, 'C---- doesn't
+paint.'"
+
+I laughed, thinking this a joke, but I soon found that though
+C---- might be cynical, sarcastic or bitter, though he might excite
+unintentional laughter by his remarks, he was too sensitive a man to
+take any but a serious view of life. The imperfections of the world
+excited his disgust, his anger, never his mirth.
+
+"Ah but, monsieur," said Afra, "you should be satisfied, and leave
+some little honor for the rest of us to gather. The stories one hears
+of your youth are like fairy-tales."
+
+"And they are true," replied the artist with evident enjoyment. "In
+those days I was pointed out to people when I walked the street;
+which, by the way, gave rise to an odd incident. A gentleman thought
+he had seen me in a crowd, but he had taken an older and taller man
+for the great painter. He believed big pictures were painted by big
+men, and I had not then my present circumference. This gentleman sent
+me an invitation to dine with him. On the day appointed I arrived at
+the house, and was met at the door by my host, a look of surprise and
+annoyance on his face which he tried to conceal by a low bow, at the
+same time asking politely, 'How is your father?'--'Very well, thank
+you,' I returned, although I could not understand why my father's
+health should be a matter of interest to him.--'You have come to
+tell me of some catastrophe which prevents his attendance here
+to-day?'--'Not at all: I have come to dine with you, according to this
+invitation.' Here I pulled out the card, which I happened to have in
+my pocket.--'Are you the person here addressed?' he said, staring at
+me.--'I am'.--'I beg your pardon, there is a mistake: I meant it for
+your father, the painter of the "Decadence des Romains."'--'I am the
+painter of the "Decadence," but I am not my father.'--'You ought to
+be an older man.'--'I should have been, monsieur, had I been born
+sooner.'--At that moment a friend, overhearing the conversation and
+divining the cause, came and explained to my wonder-struck host that I
+was really the artist in question. With many apologies I was led into
+a hall adorned with floral arches in my honor, next to a beautiful
+salon, likewise decorated, and finally we reached the dining-room,
+which was arranged to represent my picture. Columns wreathed with
+flowers supported the roof; flowers festooned the white table-linen
+and adorned the antique vessels that covered it; couches of different
+colored silk were laid after the Roman fashion for the guests to
+recline upon; and lovely women dressed in costly Roman costumes, their
+heads crowned with flowers, were placed in the attitudes that you
+will see on my celebrated canvas. Was it not a graceful tribute to my
+genius?"
+
+"If a Frenchman wants to pay a compliment, he never uses one that has
+done duty before, but invents something new," said Afra emphatically.
+
+"What are you painting now, monsieur?" I asked.
+
+"A series of pictures called 'Pierrot the Clown.' He succeeds in
+tricking the world in every station of life. I am just finishing his
+deathbed. All his friends are weeping about him: the doctor feels
+his pulse and gives some learned name to the disease--doctors know so
+much--while hidden everywhere around the room are empty bottles. The
+drunken clown plays with even death for a mask."
+
+"I thought he painted such romantic pictures," said I to Afra as we
+turned from the master.
+
+"So he does: there is one in his studio now. A girl clad in gray and
+shadow--open-air shade which in his hands is so clear and luminous.
+She walks along a garden-path, her head bent down, dreaming as she
+goes, and unconsciously nearing a half-open gateway, through which the
+sunshine is streaming. Above the rustic gate two doves are billing and
+cooing. You feel sure the girl is about to pass through this typical,
+sunshiny, invitingly half-open door; and--what is beyond?"
+
+Just then we were called to lunch, a plentiful but not luxurious
+repast. There was no lack of lively repartees and anecdotes, and
+we had speeches and songs afterward. I wonder if I ever heard "'Tis
+better to laugh than be sighing" given with more zest than on that
+day? One could easily imagine that it was such an occasion as this
+that had inspired it.
+
+Lunch being over, Monsieur C---- was asked to relate one of his own
+stories. I cannot give it entire, but the plot was this: A pilgrim,
+whom he called poor Jacques, hearing much of heaven, set out to find
+his way to the blessed abode, with only a little dog to accompany him
+on the journey. As he went he met many of his contemporaries, who
+had made what a walker would style but poor time. The allusions to
+well-known peculiarities in the various people and their occupation in
+the other life caused much amusement. For instance, Ingres the painter
+was seated by the roadside playing Rossini's music on the violin, on
+which instrument he was a great proficient. But he was known to detest
+the Italian's music before he started heavenward: his taste must then
+have grown _en route_. (Critics might object to this supposition.)
+However, Jacques was anxious to push on, and spent little time
+listening. But he was a good-hearted man, and, though he would
+not delay for his own amusement, he could not refuse to stop when
+fellow-pilgrims asked him for assistance. Little children were
+continually straying from the path, and without Jacques and his little
+dog would inevitably have been lost. Feeble old people were standing
+looking with despair at some obstacle that without Jacques's friendly
+arm they would have found it impossible to pass. Young men who never
+looked where they were walking were continually calling on him for a
+hand to help them out of the ditch where they had fallen; and young
+girls--well, one would have supposed they had never been given feet
+of their own to walk with, from the trouble they were to poor Jacques.
+The worst of it was, that when all these good people were well over
+their troubles they called Jacques a simpleton for his pains, and
+refused to have any intercourse with him, giving him the worst side of
+the road and laughing at his old-fashioned staff and scrip, and even
+at his little dog, to which they gave many a sly kick. Nor was it
+any wonder, for there were many in the company robed in silk, wearing
+precious stones and with well-filled wallets by their sides. Jacques
+was but human, and often he wished he had never set out for heaven at
+all in such company; but even in their bitterest moods neither
+Jacques nor the little dog could ever hear a cry of distress without
+forgetting all unkindness and rushing at once to the rescue.
+
+These labors exhausted Jacques's strength: the little dog, too, was
+worn to a shadow, and so timid from ill-treatment that it was only
+when some great occasion called out his mettle that you saw what a
+noble little dog-heart he had. He did his best to comfort his master,
+but when Jacques's sandals were worn out and his cloak in rags, and
+when he looked forward and saw nothing yet of the holy city in view,
+though he still tried to go forward, Nature gave way: he sank to the
+ground, and the little dog licked his hands in vain to awaken him.
+
+There is a band of angels who each night descend the holy mount
+whereon is built the city, in search of such pilgrims as have failed
+through fatigue to reach the gate. They are clothed in robes woven of
+good deeds, which never lose their lustre, for they are renewed every
+day. It was this company which found Jacques in his swoon by the
+roadside. One gently touched his tired body, and more than the vigor
+of youth leapt through his veins. Another whispered "Come," and he
+rose and walked with them. As he moved on with eyes abashed, thinking
+of the rents in his garments and regretting their poverty, he noticed
+that they too were changed, and were as bright as those of his
+companions. "Who has done this?" he said, venturing to address the
+one that walked at his right hand. "You wore them always," he answered
+with an angelic smile, "but it is this light which shows their
+beauty;" and he pointed to that which streamed from the celestial
+walls.
+
+There was much applause. I saw Afra wipe a tear from her eye; only, a
+thin-faced individual who sat near me whispered that it was too long.
+The delicacy and pathos of expression and language it is impossible
+to give, and, though old in form, the story was skillfully new in
+incident; nor must I forget that the little dog slipped through the
+eternal gate with his master. Some one asked the troubadour why he
+did not write it out. He shook his head and threw up his hands as
+he replied, "I wrote one book and gave it to a literary man for
+correction. You should have seen the manuscript when he sent it home:
+not a page but was scarred and cut. He called that 'style.' Now, what
+did I want with style? I wanted to write as I talked."
+
+"Certainly," said one. "What did you do?"
+
+"I quickly put Monsieur le Redacteur's style out of my book; then
+I published it. George Sand promised to write the preface, but some
+busybody told her that I was attacking the whole world, so she would
+have nothing to do with it. She was misled: I blamed nothing in my
+book but what deserved censure."
+
+Having heard this excellent representation of the ancient minstrel,
+we were shortly given a touch of the modern usurper of the name. A
+gentleman was present who in the many turns of Fortune's wheel had
+once found himself a follower of the burnt-cork persuasion. He gave us
+a negro melody with a lively accompaniment on the guitar. A melancholy
+Spanish song followed. The company again dispersed into congenial
+groups, and in the long twilight you heard the murmur of voices broken
+by occasional snatches of melody or the nightingale's song.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And what do you think of Bohemia?" asked Afra as we returned that
+night.
+
+"It is different from what I expected. They are refined, and, though
+frank, never rude. I think--"
+
+Afra laughed: "You had unconsciously thought them a set of sharpers;
+but there is a great difference between living by your brains and
+living by your wits. My dear, you have broken bread with giants
+to-day: such men live in another world that they may rule this one."
+
+ITA ANIOL PROKOP.
+
+
+
+
+PROFESSOR AND TEACHER.
+
+
+The two words that recur most frequently perhaps in the discussion of
+matters of education are "teacher" and "professor;" yet there are
+no two that are used so carelessly and loosely. It seems as if the
+thought that they may not be synonymous seldom, if ever, occurs to
+those using them. If one of our writers or speakers upon education
+were suddenly called upon to state exactly what he meant by a
+"professor" in distinction from a "teacher," he would be at a loss for
+an answer. He might reply, after some hesitation, "Why, a teacher is
+a man who teaches at a school or an academy, and a professor is a man
+who teaches at a college." If he were pressed still more closely, and
+asked to give the precise difference between a "school or an academy"
+and a "college," it is safe to assume that he would find himself
+nonplussed. There are colleges in the country, some large and others
+small, some old and others young, some good and others poor; but aside
+from the fact that they provide a curriculum of four years and teach
+a certain amount of Latin, Greek and mathematics, they do not possess
+features enough in common to enable us to define with exactness "a
+college." It is not in the power of language to devise a formula so
+elastic as to embrace Harvard, Brown, Princeton, Trinity, Cornell
+and Michigan University, without at the same time ignoring the
+characteristic features of one or the other. Even if we admit that
+there is a vague ideal unity underlying the so-called college system,
+by virtue of which it is a system and not a mere aggregate, we shall
+not make much progress in our search after the proper definition
+of the term "professor." The utmost that can be said of our college
+system, as a system, is that it stands on a somewhat higher plane than
+the schools, that it is supposed to finish a young man's education,
+and consequently that the men whom it employs for such a purpose--its
+professors--are, or at least ought to be, abler men than the teachers
+proper. The difference, then, between professor and teacher is one of
+degree, and not of kind. Both teach, and both teach in great part the
+same subjects and in substantially the same way; that is, by means
+of textbook and recitation. Herein lies the explanation of the
+disposition evinced by some of our best schools to call their teachers
+"professors." An institution like Phillips Exeter or Andover can
+scarcely be said to assume more than it is entitled to in putting
+itself on an equality with Hobart College or Racine.
+
+On turning to Germany, we observe no such laxity in the use of the
+term "professor." He, and he only, is professor who "professes" to
+have made himself eminent in his special branch, and whose claims have
+been allowed officially by a university or by the government. He is
+not even a teacher in the English or American sense. He is a scholar
+and investigator who has produced results worthy of distinction, and
+it is upon the strength of those results, and not because of his real
+or supposed ability to impart knowledge and stimulate industry among
+students, that he receives his call to a university chair.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: The circumstance that some of the gymnasium-teachers in
+Germany have the title of "professor" does not affect the above view.
+The title has been expressly conferred upon them by the government as
+a mark of special distinction, either for long services or for unusual
+scholarship--in most cases for the latter. Where schools of the
+highest order are so numerous as they are in Germany, it is not
+surprising that they should count among their teachers men of profound
+scholarship. The official recognition paid to such men is only an
+additional proof of the care with which the title is used. It is given
+to the teacher, not so much because he is a good teacher, as because
+he has done something over and above school-room work.]
+
+The words of one who is himself a leading professor in one of the
+most renowned universities are so explicit upon this point that they
+deserve to be translated and carefully studied. Heinrich von Sybel, in
+his academic address delivered at Bonn in 1868, says: "The excellence
+of our universities is to be found in the fact that they are not
+mere institutions where instruction is given, but are workshops
+of science[2]--that their vital principle is unceasing scientific
+productivity. Hence it is that the state assembles the best men of
+all Germany as professors at its universities, so that the phenomenon,
+common enough in England and France, of a distinguished savant without
+a university chair is with us a very unusual exception. Hence it is
+that in appointing to such a chair the first and last demand is for
+published evidences of such activity. As for the so-called ability to
+teach _(Lehrtalent im formellen Sinne),_ we are satisfied if it is not
+utterly and notoriously wanting. The question upon which everything
+turns is, Has the candidate given evidence of his capacity for
+original investigation and production? Whoever has this capacity
+is sufficiently qualified, according to our German notions, for
+fulfilling the essential function of university instruction."
+
+[Footnote 2: _Science_ is used here in the broad German sense to
+denote any study, whether in the direction of natural phenomena,
+history or philosophy, which is pursued systematically and with a view
+to eliciting truth.]
+
+In other words, a German professor is a man who has devoted himself
+to special and original research--to "science" as Von Sybel uses the
+term--and whose discoveries and works give strength and increase of
+dignity to the university with which he is connected. He is
+appointed upon his merits as a discoverer or an author. The further
+consideration--namely, whether he is what we Americans style a "good
+teacher"--was not so much as an afterthought in the minds of those who
+gave him his call. The explanation of this disregard of the personal
+element in the professorial character is obvious. The professor is not
+called upon to teach. It does not constitute any part of his vocation
+to spur up the sluggish, to keep the idle busy, to give each student
+enough to do, and make first principles perfectly clear to all. So far
+from coming down to the level of the students, the professor expects
+that the students will make every possible exertion to rise to his
+level, while he himself can scarcely be said to lend a helping hand.
+To the sentimentalist, then, he might appear a very selfish mortal.
+But by going beneath the surface of the relation between professor and
+student, and examining into its essence, we shall find that it is an
+eminently healthful relation, because it is based upon the recognition
+of mutual rights and duties. The professor, as a man of science, has a
+right to the free direction of his talents. The student has the right
+to develop what there is in him without supervision or interference.
+He is to make a man of himself by seeking diligently after the truth
+in a manly, independent spirit. All that the professor can do for him
+is to point out the road to the truth.
+
+This view of the functions of a professor may appear obscure and
+exaggerated to one who has not studied at a German university. But it
+gives the clew to the entire German system of university education,
+and accounts in great part for the high standard of scholarship. Only
+in part, for the innate proneness of the German mind to research must
+be credited with some share in the result. It is safe to say that
+Germany, under any system, would be a land of erudition.
+
+However pleasant it might be to go into the details of the
+professional position and character in Germany, it will be more
+profitable, and certainly more practical, to compare this fundamental
+German idea, as already given, with the salient features of
+professional life in America. The American professor, then, is a
+teacher. Unless he is the fortunate occupant of an exceptionally
+favored chair, his chief, and even his sole, function in the college
+body is to teach, in the strictest sense of the term. He has to
+prescribe textbooks, assign and hear lessons, grade recitations, mark
+examination-papers, submit carefully prepared term and annual reports
+to the faculty. When the question of conditioning or dismissing a
+student on the ground of defective scholarship comes up for decision,
+his opinion must be given and weighed in connection with that of
+others, in order that the faculty may strike a fair general average.
+The number of hours that he is compelled, by the college curriculum,
+to pass per week in the recitation-room is seldom less than fifteen,
+and may be as high as twenty. The classes themselves are ill-sorted
+and often troublesome, and are usually unwieldy by reason of their
+size. The professor's mind must be continually on the watch to prevent
+disorder and enforce attention. Besides, as every one knows full well
+who has tried it, there is nothing so exhausting as to supply "brains"
+to those who either have not received their portion from Nature or
+else have squandered it for a mess of pottage. Every professor-teacher
+can bear witness to the truism that one hour in the recitation-room
+is fully equal, in its drain upon the vital energy, to two passed in
+private study or authorship. The sense of responsibility, we might
+say, is omnipresent. It does not cease with the recitation: it follows
+him to his study, and haunts him with the recollection of absurd
+blunders made by young men who should have done better--the
+dispiriting reflection that despite his best efforts the stupid and
+indifferent will not learn. If to this normal wear and tear and these
+every-day annoyances we add the participation in what is
+pleasingly styled enforcement of discipline--that is, protracted
+faculty-meetings, interviews with anxious or irate parents,
+exhortations to the vicious to mend their ways--we shall probably come
+to the conclusion that the professor's burden is anything but light.
+We all have heavy burdens. But while admitting the universality of the
+adage, we are nevertheless at liberty to ascertain if we cannot make
+the burden of a particular man or class easier to bear by fitting it
+to the back.
+
+Editors, essayists, college presidents and reformers assure us that
+we are on the verge of a change, and perhaps a great change, in our
+system of higher education. They dilate upon the indisputable fact
+that most of our older colleges have made rapid strides within
+the past ten years, augmenting their endowments, erecting handsome
+buildings, establishing new departments of study and increasing the
+number of students. Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Amherst, Princeton,
+Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, were never so well off, in
+point of money and men, as they are at this day. The inference is, of
+course, if so much has been done in ten years, what may we not expect
+by the end of the century? The University of Virginia holds its own,
+notwithstanding the desolation wrought by the late civil war, and Ann
+Arbor and Cornell have shot up with extraordinary vigor. There can be
+no doubt that our institutions of learning are full of robust life.
+And it is no less certain that this growth of resources is due to
+private enterprise. Our colleges have grown because graduates, and
+even non-graduates, have taken an interest in them, and endowed them
+with a munificence which seems incredible to a Frenchman or a German.
+But in studying the aspect of higher education it behooves us not to
+lose sight of the fundamental principle that education is something
+spiritual in its nature, and that it cannot be gauged by buildings,
+by endowments, by the trappings of wealth--in short, by anything
+material. Endowments and buildings are only the means; unless the
+end to which these means are subservient be clearly perceived and
+persistently followed, the means themselves may prove a hindrance
+rather than a help. Of this Oxford is a notable proof.
+
+Have, then, the end and aim, the method and agencies, of college
+instruction changed essentially within the past fifteen years, or are
+they likely to change essentially within the coming twenty-five? In
+the year 1770 the greatest genius of Germany entered the walls of the
+old university-town of Strasburg, there to complete his education. He
+has bequeathed to us a faithful record of his studies, his amusements,
+his daily life. Connecting this Strasburg experience with the previous
+experience at Leipsic, we know what it meant in the eighteenth century
+to be a German student. We know that the professors in those days were
+pedagogues in the Anglo-American sense, and that university-life stood
+little if at all higher than our own present college-life. But when
+Goethe died, in 1832, the universities of Germany had reached their
+prime. Since then they have made no gain. It may be doubted if the
+professors, on the whole, rank quite so high to-day for originality
+and vigor of research as did their predecessors forty years ago.
+Wherein lies the secret, then, of this wonderful change wrought in
+the brief span of two generations, between 1770 and 1830, and amid
+the dire confusion of the great Revolution and the Napoleonic era? The
+change was twofold. It consisted, first, in allowing to the professor
+the free play of his individuality; second, in providing him with a
+properly trained body of students. From the practical recognition
+of these two principles, which have nothing to do with wealth and
+buildings, proceed the power and glory of the German universities.
+Viewed from the English, or even the American point, some of these
+universities might be pronounced poor, not to say starvelings. The
+buildings are old and out of repair, the professors are scantily paid,
+the students are needy, there is a general atmosphere of want and
+discomfort. But the work they do is noble, and its nobility consists
+in its freedom, its heartiness, its strict devotion to truth.
+
+We are not concerned in this place with the study of the growth of the
+German school system that prepares the German student. We have to do
+with the professor. Although the gymnasium and the university are
+not to be dissevered in actual practice, the one being the necessary
+prelude to the other, still we can discuss either one of them
+separately with a view to ascertaining its salient features.
+
+The German university allows to the professor the free play of his
+individuality. By this is meant that each professor has his specialty,
+which he teaches as a specialty and after his own fashion. He has been
+appointed because of his specialty, and to the end that he may teach
+it. His salary is paid to him, not so much for what he does as for
+what he is. It is in a measure the reward for having made for himself
+a name. His standing in the university is based, not so much upon the
+number of students that he may attract to his lectures as upon the
+quality of scholarship that he exhibits and his general repute in
+the world of letters. He has the satisfaction of feeling that his
+researches, even the most abstruse, can be brought to bear directly
+upon his official intercourse with his students. A discovery that he
+makes is usually communicated to them in the first instance, before it
+finds its way into print. The neglect to take account of this element
+of originality in the lectures of a German professor has led to an
+unfair estimate of the lecture-system. Americans and English are apt
+to regard it as merely the oral inculcation of established truths.
+Were that the case, we might be right in questioning its superiority
+over our method of teaching by textbook. But it is not the case.
+The lecture is the vehicle for conveying the latest discoveries made
+either by the professor himself or gleaned by him from the labors of
+his colleagues. So far from merely repeating established truths,
+it rather promulgates truths in process of establishment. German
+university lectures, taken all in all, represent the most advanced
+stage of thought. The instances are not infrequent where a professor
+refrains from publishing his lectures, lest he should lose his
+hearers, who are attracted to him by reports of his originality and
+thoroughness.
+
+The evident tendency of such a system is to encourage productivity
+and the highest degree of accuracy. A man who has to teach only one
+subject, and teach it to such students only as are ready and anxious
+to receive it, can afford to take the time for being thorough. The
+tendency of the American system, on the other hand, is to beget a
+spirit of routine and to check productivity. The professor falls
+into a way of contenting himself with meeting the requirements of the
+college curriculum. The effects of this curriculum upon the professors
+are deeper and farther-reaching than is usually perceived. It is
+in accordance with facts to call American professors, as a class,
+unproductive. But it would be unjust and inconsiderate to ascribe this
+want of productivity to the disposition called laziness. Laziness is
+not a national fault of Americans. On the contrary, we are pushing,
+active, restless: we yearn, Alexander-like, for something new to
+overcome. Our professors are of the same stock as our business-men,
+our lawyers, our doctors, our politicians. But the spirit of progress,
+if we choose to call it by that name, has been repressed in them. The
+spirit of emulation, of aggressive competition, which marks our trade,
+our banking, our manufacturing interests, our railroads, and even our
+professions, stops at the threshold of our colleges. There is rivalry,
+true, between Harvard and Yale, for instance. If the former erects a
+handsome dormitory, the latter must have one larger and finer. If the
+former establishes a new professorship, the latter must do likewise.
+The colleges compete among themselves. But we see no signs of
+competition among the professors of a college, or between the
+professors of different colleges--competition, be it observed, in the
+sense that the individual professor regards his attainments and views
+as a proper subject for comparison with the attainments and views of
+another professor in the same branch. Once established in his chair,
+his individuality is merged in the general character of the college.
+His time, his knowledge and his energy are subordinated to the
+curriculum. He can teach only so much as may be fitted into his share
+of the time and may be suited to the capacities of a mixed audience.
+It matters little whether the curriculum be good or bad, whether it
+take in a wide or a narrow range of subjects, whether it be behind
+or up to the times: so long as it is a real curriculum it tends to
+prevent the full assertion of his individual excellence. He may study
+for himself, but he cannot teach more than the regulations permit.
+However advanced he may be in his specialty, however sincere and
+earnest his wish to impart the choicest fruits of his research, he
+must admit to himself that there is a point beyond which he is unable
+to carry his students. They are borne off to something else; they have
+no more time for him; they slip from his hold, perhaps at the very
+moment when he flatters himself that he has acquired some formative
+influence over them.
+
+If this view of the necessary effect of a curriculum is correct,
+it will enable us to set a more accurate value upon the so-called
+improvements that have been introduced of late years in our colleges.
+These improvements, stripped of the eclat with which they are
+invested, will be found to amount to little more than expansions
+and slight modifications of a system which remains unaltered in
+its fundamental features. New studies have been introduced, such as
+physics, chemistry, geology, the share of attention assigned to
+modern languages has been increased, a higher standard of admission is
+enforced, and the salaries of professors have been raised. But in
+all this there is no radical change of the method of instruction. The
+establishment of a chair of physics, for instance, can scarcely be
+said to enable the professor of Greek to exhibit his attainments
+more fully. The professor of Latin does not perceive that his pupils,
+because they are now instructed in physical geography, can be carried
+by him to a more advanced stage of Latin scholarship. In fact, so far
+as the older studies are concerned, those which made up the curriculum
+thirty years ago, they seem to be slightly the worse for the recent
+improvements. The college course of 1840 or 1850 was a comparatively
+simple thing. It covered only a few studies, and those of a
+general nature; it taught more thoroughly and with less pretence to
+universality; in short, it did its work more after the fashion of a
+good school. At the present day the curriculum embraces a much wider
+range of subjects--we need only recall to our minds the introduction
+of general history, chemistry, physiology and the modern
+languages--but the time has not been lengthened by a single year. The
+student's time is more broken up than before: the direct influence
+exerted by the professor is less. Our recognition of these and kindred
+facts, however, should be something more than a vain regret for the
+good old past. All these changes are concessions made to the spirit
+of the age. Our generation demands--and very rightfully, too--that the
+sphere of knowledge be enlarged, that the sciences of Nature receive
+sufficient attention. To attempt to undo what has been done, to
+restore the curriculum to the antiquated cadre of Latin and Greek,
+trigonometry, mental science and rhetoric, would be a reaction as
+senseless as hopeless.
+
+Let us be just to ourselves and just to our colleges. We, the public,
+clamored for new studies, and the colleges had to meet the demand,
+because, by force of circumstances, they were the only places where
+the changes could be effected. But in our praisworthy desire for
+progress we have not considered sufficiently whether the colleges were
+in truth the proper places for innovation; whether we were bringing
+in our innovations in the right way and at the right time; whether
+we were in a fair way of making our colleges what we seek to make
+them--namely, centres of learning. To discuss all these points would
+be equivalent to discussing the question of education in all its
+phases, from the primary school to the university. For the present
+we must limit ourselves to understanding and appreciating fairly the
+position of our professors.
+
+That position is not only a trying, but a discouraging one. The
+greater part of the professor's time is spent--from the point of
+view of pure science we might almost say wasted--in teaching the same
+things over and over again. After a few years' practice his round of
+hours becomes mechanical. Familiarity with the textbooks and with the
+uniformly-recurring blunders of each successive class begets a feeling
+of weariness that is not remote from aversion and contempt. So far
+as his prescribed official duties are concerned, he feels that he has
+nothing more to learn. There being, then, no stimulus from without, he
+is open to one of two temptations--either to rest on his past labors,
+or, which is far more likely, to keep on studying for himself, but
+to keep the results to himself. It is not only more soothing to our
+pride, it is juster to our professors, to regard them thus as men who
+have hid their lights under a bushel, and also to confess that we, our
+institutions and ways of thinking, have made the bushel for them
+and held it down over their heads. It is not every man who has the
+persistency and stamina of Professor Whitney, for instance, who can
+toil for years with beginning classes in French and German, never
+losing sight of his real aim, never neglecting an opportunity of
+bringing it forward, until at last he achieves the success he has
+especially desired, and is acknowledged to be one of the foremost
+comparative philologists and Sanskrit scholars in the world. Where a
+Professor Whitney may succeed in spite of untoward circumstances, a
+dozen will probably fail because of circumstances. We naturally look
+to our colleges for the evidences of learning, of enlightenment and
+culture. We think of the capital invested in them, of the part they
+play in moulding the character of our young men, and we deem it a
+matter of course that they should be continually producing something
+original and independent. But when we compare them with the German
+universities--and the comparison is forced upon us whenever one of our
+graduates goes abroad to complete his studies or whenever we look into
+a recent German publication--we are forced to exclaim, "What are our
+colleges about? Are they incompetent, or asleep?" Neither one nor
+the other. Most of our professors do the best they can. But they are
+fettered by routine: they are not stimulated and sustained by
+the consciousness that their private studies may be made directly
+available in the classroom. They lead two lives, as it were--one
+as professor, the other as thinker and reader--and there is not the
+proper action and reaction between the two.
+
+The remedy is as easy to propose as it would be difficult to apply.
+We have only to convert our colleges into universities, our college
+instructors into professors after the German model. Let us relegate
+all teaching, so called, to the schools, and let us give our
+professors permission to expand into veritable scholars discoursing to
+young men of kindred spirit. Any one can see at a glance that from
+the wish to the accomplishment is a long way. Upon some of us the
+consciousness is beginning to dawn that perhaps we have not even taken
+the first decisive step. The best that can be said of our colleges is
+that they are in a state of transition. We have increased the number
+of studies, as well as the number of colleges; we have established
+schools of law and schools of science, sometimes independent of,
+sometimes co-ordinate with or subordinate to, the college. We have
+also established post-graduate courses, in the hope of inducing our
+young men to complete their studies at home. Yet every year we see a
+larger number going abroad. In those days of golden memory, both for
+Germany and for America, when Longfellow was gliding down the
+Rhine with Freiligrath, and Bancroft and Bismarck were comrades at
+Goettingen, an American in Germany was something of a rarity. In most
+instances he was a man of wealth and high social standing, who
+looked upon his semester or two as a romantic episode. But now every
+outward-bound steamer carries with it one or more who, emerging from
+obscurity and poverty, have saved up a few hundred dollars and are
+bent upon plain, hard, practical business. "We go," they can be
+imagined as saying, "because we can get in Germany what we cannot get
+at home. Your schools of science and your post-graduate courses may be
+well enough in their way, but they do not give us what we are after,
+and we cannot afford to wait until they may be able to give it. Some
+of the professors are first-rate men--perhaps just as good as any
+we may meet in Germany--but what does their learning, their science,
+avail us, so long as they are obliged to withhold from us the best
+that they know? They trained themselves in Germany, and if we are ever
+to rival them we must do the same."
+
+It is not pleasant to listen to such reasonings, much less to see them
+carried into effect. But the defect which they bring to light will not
+be cured by closing our eyes to it and trusting to time, the sovereign
+healer. Time is a negative factor: it only enables the forces of
+Nature to do their positive work. But schools and colleges are not the
+product of the elemental forces of Nature: they are distinctively
+the work of man as a free agent. If we are free to shape any of our
+institutions to suit our needs, we are certainly free to shape our
+educational institutions. By having a definite result in view, and
+willing its attainment, we may succeed; but if we fail either in
+clearness of vision or persistency of will, we cannot expect the
+result to come of itself. The present university system of Germany,
+which might seem to a careless observer the natural outgrowth
+of German life, is the result of hard thinking and strenuous,
+well-directed effort. We should not commit much of an exaggeration
+were we to call it the deliberate creation of Frederick the Great, Von
+Zedlitz and Wolf, who dragged with them Prussia, and the other
+German states in her wake. They and their associates and followers,
+Schleiermacher and William von Humboldt, clear-headed, iron-willed
+men, perceived what was needed, and bent all their energies to the
+task. They emancipated the schools from the control of the clergy,
+and established the principle that teaching is a distinct vocation,
+requiring special training, over which the state has supervision;
+furthermore, that the state should pronounce who is fit and who is
+not fit for university education, thereby abolishing
+entrance-examinations, and putting an end to the ignoble practice on
+the part of the universities of lowering the standard for the purpose
+of increasing the number of students. They abolished the last vestiges
+of the scholastic system by raising the faculty of philosophy from its
+position as a quasi-preparatory course to the others, and placing it
+on a footing of perfect equality with law, theology and medicine.[3]
+They removed all restrictions from the _Lehrfreiheit_, or professional
+freedom of instruction, while at the same time they preserved the
+right of the state to control indirectly the quality of university
+instruction by means of state-examinations for pastors, teachers,
+lawyers, physicians and officeholders. Ever since then the university
+system of Germany has rested upon a secure and lasting basis.
+
+[Footnote 3: The subordination of the philosophical faculty as a sort
+of preparatory course to the others remained in force in Austria until
+1850. It is not surprising, then, that Austria should have compared
+so unfavorably with Germany in philology, history, philosophy and
+literary criticism until within our own times.]
+
+Is the course pursued by Prussia to be regarded as a mere incident in
+history, or may it serve as an example and model for us? Prussia is a
+monarchy, clothed with some constitutional forms but at bottom a
+state where the personal will of the sovereign has always made,
+and continues to make, itself felt in the final instance. We are
+a republic, or rather a cluster of republics under an imperfectly
+centralized national government. It is evident that the agencies and
+mode of reform with us must differ from those that have been employed
+in Prussia and in the rest of Germany. But it does not follow that
+the reform itself is impossible. What has elsewhere sprung from the
+autocratic will of a single man and his cabinet may be effected here
+through that other force, equally great and perhaps more pervasive,
+to which we give the vague name of "popular opinion." We know that
+popular opinion in our country is irresistible. It makes everything
+bend to it. It broke up the Tweed Ring, seemingly impregnable, in a
+single campaign. But this popular opinion is not a natural product: it
+is the work of a few men who devote themselves to awakening the sense
+of right and wrong and guiding the understanding of their fellows.
+But for popular leaders like Mr. O'Conor and Governor Tilden, the
+late Tweed Ring might be in power at this day. Education is not
+so different from politics but that we can regard it as subject to
+similar laws of cause and effect. Our present common-school system is
+an off-spring of popular opinion, as that opinion was created and led
+to action by a few men. And whether our common schools are to stand
+or fall is again becoming a question of the day, and will be decided
+according as popular opinion may be swayed by a few zealous friends or
+enemies. Our colleges, it may be said, do not occupy the same
+relation to the state that our schools do. They are nearly all private
+corporations, enjoying vested rights which the state is powerless to
+touch. Undoubtedly true, but it is no less true that what cannot be
+done directly may be done indirectly. The state need not make so much
+as the attempt to lay hands upon college property or to interfere with
+college studies. It has only to say, "I, the state, exact such and
+such qualifications of all who seek to practice law or medicine within
+my limits or to become my officeholders. I establish my own free
+colleges and schools of law and medicine, and I proceed to tax
+all others at their full valuation." There is not a college in the
+country, not even Harvard, that could compete upon such terms. The
+state need not even express its sovereign will so precisely. It
+can content itself with establishing a university of its own, and
+facilitating the direct influence of this university over the public
+and private schools. We see the operations of such a system very
+plainly in Michigan. Not only does the university at Ann Arbor
+overshadow completely the private colleges, but the "union schools,"
+administered under its auspices, are--to borrow the expression of one
+of its graduates--"killing" the private schools. We may rest assured
+that whatever the people of a State or of the United States is
+earnestly bent upon having, will come.
+
+Whether all our States are to act as Michigan has done--whether we are
+indeed ripe for thorough change--whether a change is to be effected
+by direct State action or indirectly by the mere pressure of public
+sentiment--whether we have real need of a body of professors and a set
+of universities such as Germany possesses--whether we are to make
+our higher as well as our primary education non-sectarian,--are all
+questions which may rest in abeyance for a long time to come. It is
+also possible that one or the other of them may, in legal phraseology,
+be sprung upon us at any time. Not to be taken unawares, we have
+to bear steadily in mind several fixed principles and to disabuse
+ourselves of one misconception.
+
+The misconception is this: that what Germany accomplished in the
+eighteenth century we cannot accomplish in the nineteenth, because
+circumstances are so very different, chiefly because Germany is an old
+country and we are a young country. The circumstances are not so very
+different, and the difference, however great it may be estimated, is
+in our favor. We are a union of thirty or forty States: in the Germany
+of the eighteenth century there were three hundred. Ever since the
+adoption of our Federal Constitution we have enjoyed common rights of
+citizenship, common laws of commerce, common legal protection. Will
+it be necessary to remind the student of history that the Germans have
+acquired these blessings only within our own day? We are a nation of
+forty millions, rich and prosperous, free to develop our resources.
+The Germany of 1775 could count barely twenty millions, its soil was
+poorly tilled, its mineral wealth undeveloped, manufactures in an
+embryonic state, trade fettered in a thousand ways, the peasantry
+brutally ignorant and servile, the national character--to all
+appearance--ruined by cruel religious wars, the sense of national
+unity blunted by the recollections of a hundred petty feuds reaching
+back to the gloom of the Middle Ages, the national taste dominated by
+poor French models to an extent that now seems incredible, learning
+either dry pedantry or shallow cox-combry. We are indeed a young
+country, but we are young in hope; Germany was old, but it was old in
+weakness, in poverty, in despondency. Whoever doubts our ability to do
+as much as Germany did one hundred years ago, fails to profit by the
+teachings of history--overlooks the fact that Germany in 1840 was
+only where she had been in 1618. That we should take Germany for our
+standard of comparison, rather than England or France, is a postulate
+which has one circumstance unmistakably in its favor. Although we are
+connected with England by common descent, institutions and language,
+although the politics and philosophy of France have exerted
+considerable influence over our own, we do not observe our young
+men going in numbers to England and France to receive their final
+training. Their instinct leads them to Germany. For one American
+graduate of Oxford or Cambridge or of the French _ecoles_, it would
+be easy to count ten doctors of Goettingen or Heidelberg. Our young
+men are not attracted to the German universities by such factitious
+considerations as cheapness of living or the acquisition of the
+language, but by sympathy with German methods and academic liberty.
+
+Some of the most important fixed principles have been already touched
+upon, but only one can be developed in this place. It is, that if
+we are to establish a system of higher education, we must begin by
+recognizing freely and fully the distinction between teacher and
+professor. We must perceive the importance of having two sets of
+men--the one to teach, the other to investigate; the one engaged in
+training boys to learn, the other in showing young men how to think.
+When and how this distinction is to be established, in what special
+form it is to be embodied, is a secondary matter. The chief thing is
+to admit that it is essential and feasible. The young man who returns
+after a three years' absence in Germany, exhibiting with dignified
+pride his well-earned doctor's diploma, looks of course upon the
+institution that conferred it as the _ne plus ultra_. But riper
+experience, contact with the sharp corners of American prejudices
+and peculiarities, renewed familiarity with our social, political,
+commercial and literary life, will gradually convince him that a
+German university is not a thing to be plucked up by the roots and
+transplanted bodily to American soil. We have rather to take our
+native stock as we find it, and engraft upon it a slip from the
+German. One trial may fail, another may succeed. Our first efforts
+will be like those of a man groping about in the dark. More than
+one department in a German university will be of little avail in an
+American, and conversely we shall have to create some that do not
+exist elsewhere. For instance, in view of the great power exerted by
+the newspaper press, it might be desirable to have a course of study
+for those who think of taking up journalism as a profession. In such
+a course, political economy, constitutional and international law,
+English and American history, and the modern languages and literatures
+should constitute a full and serious discipline. It is not probable
+that the study of philology will ever attract the same attention here
+that it does abroad. Our needs lie in the direction of the natural
+sciences rather than in the direction of history and linguistics. But
+we should be derelict to our duty were we to sacrifice these sciences
+of the spirit, as the Germans call them, to the sciences of Nature.
+A culture without them would be the bleakest and most repulsive
+materialism.
+
+The practical recognition of the difference between teacher and
+professor would be a decided step. By the side of it those which
+we have already taken would appear insignificant. The addition of
+chemistry, geology, or physiology to the previous curriculum does
+not change its character, so long as the professors of those branches
+instruct after the fashion of the professors of Latin and Greek. The
+advantage that the men of natural science have over their colleagues
+is one which the nature of the subject brings with it. In order to
+teach at all, they must come in close personal contact with their
+pupils, and to escape falling behind in their department, where
+new theories succeed one another with such rapid bounds, they must
+continue a certain amount at least of original research. Supplementing
+the present curriculum by post-graduate courses will hardly suffice.
+Such courses are open to serious objections. If conducted by the
+regular professors, they impose additional burdens upon men who have
+already more than enough. If conducted by special professors, they
+will tend to raise those professors at the expense of the regular
+faculty. A lecturer to graduates must necessarily appear, in the eyes
+of the undergraduate, superior to the man who hears recitations and
+prepares term-reports. Besides, young men who have passed four years
+at one college need "a change of air:" they will develop more rapidly
+if brought into contact with new ideas and new instructors. Every
+institution has an atmosphere of its own, which ceases after a time to
+act upon the student as a stimulant.
+
+There is one additional point that should not be overlooked. A careful
+discrimination between the functions of the professor and those of the
+teacher would benefit both classes of men. Such has been the effect in
+Germany. The gymnasium-teacher has a high sense of the dignity of
+his vocation and a keen sense of its responsibilities, because he
+perceives that he must bring his labors to a well-rounded conclusion.
+He knows that the university does not supplement the gymnasium--that
+the university professors do not undertake to make good his
+shortcomings. The gymnasial course is a completed phase of training.
+It aims at giving the pupil all the general knowledge that he requires
+previous to his professional studies. What is lost or overlooked in
+the gymnasium cannot be acquired at the university. Hence the peculiar
+conscientiousness of the German teacher, his almost painful anxiety to
+make sure that his pupils master every subject, his unwillingness to
+let them go before they are "ripe." With us the change from school
+to college is not an abrupt transition, like that from gymnasium to
+university. The college course, certainly during the two lower years
+at least, is a continuation of the school course: the same or
+similar subjects are taught, and taught in the same way. Hence the
+school-teacher is tempted to regulate his efforts according to the
+college standard of admission. If he can only "get his men into
+college," as the saying is, he thinks that he is doing enough. To say
+this of all schools and all teachers would be flagrant injustice.
+Not a few of our older schools compare favorably with the best German
+gymnasiums, and in the large cities we find schools of even recent
+origin that endeavor faithfully to give a well-rounded discipline. But
+it remains nevertheless true that our schools, taken as a whole, give
+no more than the colleges require, and that only too many of them
+give less, trusting to the colleges to be lenient and eke out the
+deficiency. Moreover, when we read in the daily papers advertisements
+like the following, "Mr. Smith, a graduate of Harvard (or Yale or some
+other college, as the case may be), prepares young men for college,"
+what inference are we to draw? Simply, that Mr. Smith, having gone
+through Harvard or Yale, knows exactly what is required there, and
+will undertake to "coach" any young man for admission in two or three
+years. Such coaching, if the young man is dull or backward, will
+consist in cramming him with required studies, to the neglect of
+everything not required. Teaching is not easy work. In many respects
+it is more difficult to be a good teacher than to be an original
+investigator. Whatever operates to strengthen and elevate the
+teacher's position, therefore, must be a gain. The highest
+incentive would be the consciousness that his school is not a mere
+stepping-stone to another school of larger growth, but the place where
+he must in truth prepare the youthful mind for independent study.
+
+JAMES MORGAN HART.
+
+
+
+
+CONTRASTED MOODS.
+
+            WANT.
+
+  Where is the power I fancied mine?
+    Can I have emptied my soul of thought?
+  In yesterday's fullness lay no sign
+    That to-day would be a time of drought.
+  What if thought fail me for evermore?
+    The world that awaits a well-filled plan
+  Must, railing, cry at my long-closed door,
+    "He cannot finish what he began."
+
+            PLENTY.
+
+  Thought dashes on thought within my soul:
+    Time will not serve for the bounding-line.
+  I think it would fail to mete the whole
+    If old Methuselah's years were mine.
+  Like the famous spring that is sometimes dry,
+    Then flows with a river's whelming might,
+  The current of thought now runs so high
+    It covers the earthy bed from sight.
+
+CHARLOTTE F. BATES.
+
+
+
+
+THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS.
+
+BY MRS. E. LYNN LINTON, AUTHOR OF "PATRICIA KEMBALL."
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+CHANGES.
+
+
+Four years had come and gone since Mr. Dundas had laid his second
+wife in the grave beside his first, and the county had discussed
+the immorality of taking cherry-water as a calmant. For it was to
+an overdose of this that the verdict at the coroner's inquest had
+assigned the cause of poor madame's awful and sudden death; though why
+the medicine should have been found so loaded with prussic acid as
+to have caused instant death on this special night, when it had been
+taken so often before with impunity, was a mystery to which there was
+no solution. Not a trace of poison was to be found anywhere in the
+house, and no evidence was forthcoming to show how it might have been
+bought or where procured. Alick Corfield, who understood it all,
+was not called as a witness, and he told no one what he knew. On the
+contrary, he burdened his soul with the, to him, unpardonable crime
+of falsehood that he might shield Leam from detection; for when his
+father, missing the sixty-minim bottle of hydrocyanic acid, asked him
+what had become of it, Alick answered, with that wonderful coolness
+of virtue descending to sin for the protection of the beloved which is
+sometimes seen in the ingenuous, "I broke it by accident, father, and
+forgot to tell you."
+
+As the boy had never been known to tell a falsehood in his life, he
+reaped the reward of good repute, and his father, saying quietly,
+"That was a bad job, my boy," laid the matter aside as a _caput
+mortuum_ of no value.
+
+To be sure, he thought more than once that it was an odd coincidence,
+but he could see no connection between the two circumstances
+of madame's sudden death and Alick's fracture of that bottle of
+hydrocyanic acid; and even if there should be any, he preferred not
+to trace it. So the inquest was a mere show so far as getting at the
+truth was concerned, and madame died and was buried in the mystery in
+which she had lived.
+
+Meantime, Leam had been sent to school, whence she was expected
+to return a little more like other English girls than she had been
+hitherto, and Mr. Dundas shut up Ford House--he went back to the
+original name after madame's death--and left England to shake off in
+travel the deadly despair that had fallen like a sickness on him and
+taken all the flavor out of his life. He had never cared to search out
+the real history of that fair beloved woman. Enough had come to his
+knowledge, in the bills which had poured in from several Sherrington
+tradesmen on the announcement of her marriage and then of her death,
+to convince him that he had been duped in facts if not in feeling. For
+among these bills was one from the local geologist for "a beginner's
+cabinet of specimens," delivered just about the time when he,
+Sebastian, had spent so many pleasant hours in arranging the fragments
+which madame said represented both her knowledge and her lost
+happiness; also one from the fancy repository, which sold everything,
+for sundry water-color drawings and illuminated texts, a Table of
+the Ten Commandments illustrated, and the like, which sufficiently
+explained all on this side, and settled for ever the dead woman's
+claims to the artistic and scientific merit with which Mr. Dundas and
+the rector had credited her.
+
+Also, certain ugly letters from a person of the name of Lowes, in
+London, put him on the track, had he cared to follow it up, of a
+deception even worse than that of pretended art or mock science. These
+letters, written in the same handwriting as that wherein Julius de
+Montfort, her brother-in-law, the present marquis, had told her of
+the defalcations of the family solicitor and trustee, called Virginie,
+Madame la Marquise de Montfort, plain Susan bluntly, and reminded her
+of the screw that would be turned if the writer was not satisfied;
+and were letters that demanded money, always money, as the price of
+continued silence.
+
+But Sebastian had loved his second wife too well to seek to know the
+truth, if that truth would be to her discredit. He preferred to
+be deceived; and he had what he preferred. He stifled all doubts,
+darkened all chinks by which the obtrusive light might penetrate, kept
+his love if not his faith unshaken, caring only to remember her as
+beautiful, seductive, soothing, and mourning her as deeply, doubtful
+as she had proved herself to be, as he had loved her fondly when he
+believed her honest. It was a curious mental condition for a man to
+cherish, but it satisfied him, and his regret was not robbed of its
+pathos by knowledge.
+
+Now that the four years were completed, the widower had to return to
+his desolate home and make the best he could of the fragments of peace
+and happiness left to him. Leam was nineteen: it was time for her to
+be taken from school and given the protection of her father's house.
+It went against the man's heart to have her, but he was compelled, if
+he wished to stand well with his friends, and he hoped that the girl
+would be found improved from these years of discipline and training,
+and be rational and like other people. Wherefore he came home one
+dry dull day in October, and the neighborhood welcomed him, if not as
+their prodigal returned, yet as their lunatic restored to his right
+mind.
+
+During these four years a few changes had taken place at North Aston.
+Carry Fairbairn had married--not Frank Harrowby: he had found a rich
+wife, not in the least to his personal taste, but greatly to his
+profit; and Carry, after having cried a good deal for a month, had
+consoled herself with a young clergyman from the North, whom she loved
+quite as much as if she had never fancied Frank at all, and spoilt in
+the first months by such submission as caused her to repent for all
+the years of her life after.
+
+The things of the rectory were much in their old state. Little Fina,
+madame's child, was there under Mrs. Birkett's motherly care; but
+as the child was nearly six years old now, the good creature's
+instinctive love for infants was wearing out, and she was often heard
+to say how much she wished she could have kept Fina always a baby,
+and, sighing, how difficult she was to manage! She was an exceedingly
+pretty little girl, with fair skin, fair hair and dark eyes--willful
+of course, and spoilt of course; the only one in the house who took
+her in hand to correct being Adelaide. And as she took her in hand too
+smartly, Mrs. Birkett generally interfered, and the servants combined
+to screen her; the result being that the little one was mistress of
+the situation, after the manner of willful children, and made every
+one more or less anxious and uncomfortable as her return for their
+care.
+
+Alick Corfield was the rector's curate. On the whole, this was the
+most important of all the North Aston events which had taken place
+during the last four years. Soon after madame's death and Leam's
+transfer from home to school Alick had a strange and sudden illness.
+No one knew what to make of it, nor how it came, nor what it was, but
+the doctor called it cerebral fever, and when the families got hold
+of the word they were content. Cerebral fever does as well as anything
+else for an illness of which no one knows and no one seeks to know the
+cause, and to the origin of which the patient himself gives no clew.
+It was a peg, and a peg was all that was wanted.
+
+On his recovery he announced his intention of going to Oxford to read
+for holy orders. His mother was piteously distressed, as might be
+expected. She feared all sorts of evil for her boy, from damp sheets
+and unmended linen to over-study, wine-parties and bold-faced minxes
+weaving subtle webs of fascination. But for the first time in his life
+Alick stood out against her insistance, and his will conquered hers.
+The sequel of the struggle was, that he went to Oxford, took his
+degree, read for orders, passed, and that Mr. Birkett gave him his
+title as his curate.
+
+It could hardly be said that the relations were entirely harmonious
+between the military-minded rector, who held to the righteousness of
+helotry and the value of ignorance in the class beneath him, and the
+young curate burning with zeal and oppressed with the desire to put
+all the crooked things of life straight. The one pooh-poohed the
+enthusiasm of the other, derided his belief in humanity and assured
+him of failure: the other felt as if he had been taken behind the
+scenes and shown the blue fire of which the awful lightning of his
+youth was made. Mr. Birkett could not quite forbid the greater
+faith, the more loving endeavor which the young man threw into his
+ministrations, but he was the Sadducee who scoffed and made the
+work heavy and uphill throughout. He gave a grudging assent to the
+Bible-classes, the Wednesday evening services at the Sunday-school,
+the lectures on great men on the first Monday in the month, which
+Alick proposed and established. He thought it all weariness to the
+flesh and a waste of time and energy; but the traditions of his order
+were strong, if he himself did not share them, and he had to give way
+in the end. He consoled himself with the reflection that the boy would
+find out his mistake before long, and that then he would know who had
+been right throughout.
+
+But even zeal and hope and diligence in his work could not lighten the
+persistent sadness which was Alick's chief characteristic now. Gaunt
+and silent, with the eyes of a man whose inner self is absent and
+whose thoughts are not with his company, he looked as if he had passed
+through the fire, and had not passed through unscathed. No one knew
+what had happened to him, and, though many made conjectures, none came
+near the truth. Meanwhile, he seemed as if he lived only to work, and,
+the clearer-sighted might have added, to wait.
+
+For a further local change, Lionnet was tenanted again by a strange
+and solitary man, who never went to church and did not visit in
+the neighborhood. He was in consequence believed to be a forger, an
+escaped convict in hiding, or, by the more charitable, a maniac as yet
+not dangerous. North Aston held him in deeper horror than it had held
+even Pepita, and his true personality exercised its wits more keenly
+than had even the true personality of madame. In point of fact, he was
+a quiet, inoffensive, amiable man, who gave his mind to Sanskrit for
+work and to entomology for play, and did not trouble himself about his
+own portrait as drawn in the local vernacular. Nevertheless, for all
+his reserved habits and quiet ways, he had learnt the whole history of
+the place and people before he had been at Lionnet a month.
+
+At the Hill things remained unchanged for the ladies, save for the
+additional burden of years and the pleasant news that Edgar was
+expected home daily. Adelaide, now twenty-four, took the news as a
+personal grace, and blossomed into smiles and glad humor of which only
+Josephine understood the source. But Josephine held her tongue, and
+received the confidence of her young friend with discretion. As she
+had never dispossessed her own old idol, she could feel for Adelaide,
+and she was not disposed to look on her patient determination with
+displeasure. The constancy of the two, however, was very different in
+essential meaning. With Josephine it was the constancy that is born of
+an affectionate disposition and the absence of rival Lotharios: with
+Adelaide it was the result of calculation and decision. The one would
+have worshiped Sebastian as she worshiped him now had he been ruined,
+a cripple, a criminal even: the other would have shut out Edgar
+inexorably from her very dreams had not his personality included
+the Hill. With the one it was self-abasement--with the other
+self-consideration; but it came to the same thing in the end, and the
+men profited equally.
+
+All these changes Sebastian Dundas found to have taken place when he
+returned to North Aston with gray hair instead of brown, his smooth,
+fair skin tanned and roughened, and his weak, finely-cut, effeminate
+mouth hidden by a moustache of a reddish tint, mingled with white.
+Still, he was Sebastian; and after the first shock of his altered
+appearance had been got over, Josephine carried her incense in the old
+way, and found her worship as dear and as tantalizing as ever.
+
+Lastly, as the crowning change of all, Leam came home from school;
+no longer the arrogant, embittered child, looking at life through the
+false medium of pride and ignorance, saying rude things and doing odd
+ones with the most perfect unconsciousness; but well-bred, graceful,
+sufficiently instructed not to make patent mistakes, and more
+beautiful by far than she had even promised to be. Her very eyes were
+lovelier, lovely as they had always been: they had more variety of
+expression, were more dewy and tender, and, if less tragic, were more
+spiritual. That hard, dry, burning passion which had devoured her of
+old time seemed to have gone, as also her savage Spanish pride. She
+had rounded and softened in body too, as in mind. Her skin was fairer;
+her lips were not so firmly closed, so rigid in line, so constricted
+in motion; her brows were more flexible and not so often knit
+together; and her slight, lithe figure was perfect in line and
+movement. Still, she had enough of her former manner of being for
+identity. Grave, quiet, laconic, direct, she was but a modification
+of the former Leam as they had known her--Leam, Pepita's daughter,
+and with blood in her veins that was not the ordinary blood of the
+ordinary British miss.
+
+Her father's artistic perceptions were gratified as he met her at the
+station and Leam turned her cheek to him voluntarily with tears in her
+eyes. Turning her cheek was apparently her idea of kissing; but if not
+too intense an expression of affection, it was at least an improvement
+on the old hard repulsion, and Sebastian accepted it as the concession
+it was meant to be. Indeed, they met somewhat as foes reconciled, or
+rather seeking to be reconciled, and Mr. Dundas did not wish to keep
+open old sores. Her cheek, turned to him somewhere about the ear,
+represented to his mind a peace-offering: her eyes full of tears were
+as a confession of past sins and a promise of amendment. Not that he
+understood why she was so much more effusive than of old, but if it
+augured a happier life together, he was glad.
+
+As they drove up to the door of the old home, crowded with memories
+and associations, a shudder passed over the girl: she grasped her
+father's hand in her own almost convulsively, and he heard her say
+below her breath, "Poor papa!"
+
+He wondered why she pitied him. The place must surely be full of
+memories of her mother for her: why did she say "Poor papa!" to him?
+He did not see what she saw--that peaceful September evening, and the
+bottle of cherry-water on the table, with the little phial of thirty
+deaths in her hand; and now the contents emptied into the harmless
+draught; and now madame pale and dead. The whole scene transacted
+itself vividly before her, and she shuddered at her memories and her
+past self, as always with a kind of vague wonder how she could have
+been so wicked, and where did she get the force, the courage, for such
+a cruel crime?
+
+For all these four years at school the shadow of that dreadful deed
+had been ever in the background of her life; and as time went on, and
+she came to a better understanding of morality, it grew clear to her
+as a crime. Its consciousness of guilt had broken down her pride, and
+thus had made her more malleable, more humble. She could no longer
+harden herself in her belief that she was superior to every one else.
+Those girls, her companions--they had not had an Andalusian mother,
+truly; they did not pray to the saints, and the Holy Virgin took no
+care of them; they were Protestants and English, frogs and pigs; but
+they had not committed murder. If she should stand up in the middle
+of the room and tell them what she had done, which of them would touch
+her hand again? which of them speak to her? English and Protestants as
+they were, how far superior in their innocence to her, an Andalusian
+Catholic, in her guilt! But no one lives with remorse. It comes and
+goes gustily, fitfully; but the things of the present are stronger
+than the things of the past, else the man with a shameful secret in
+his life would go mad.
+
+One of these gusty storms broke over Leam as she passed through the
+gates of the old home, and for the moment she felt as if she must
+confess the truth to her father and tell him what evil thing she had
+done. Yet it passed, as other such storms had passed: the things of
+the present took their natural place of prominence, and those of the
+past sank again into the background, shadows that never faded quite
+away, but that were not actualities pressing against her.
+
+The news of Leam's home-coming created quite a pleasurable excitement
+in the neighborhood, and the families flocked to Ford House to
+welcome her among them as one of themselves, all anxious to see if
+the Ethiopian of North Aston had shed her skin, if the leopardess had
+changed her spots. They were divided among themselves as to whether
+she had or had not. Some said she was charming, and like any one else,
+but others shook their heads, and, like experts in brain disease,
+professed to see traces of the old lunacy, and to be doubtful as to
+her cure. At the worst, however, here she was--one of themselves whom
+they must receive; and common sense dictated that they should make the
+best of her, and hope all things till they proved some.
+
+There was one among them whom Leam longed yet dreaded to meet. This
+was Alick Corfield. She wondered what he knew, or rather what he
+suspected, and she was anxious to have her ordeal over. But,
+though Mrs. Corfield came, and was just the same as ever, bustling,
+inquisitive, dogmatic, before ten minutes were over having put the
+girl through her scholastic facings and got from her the whole of her
+curriculum, yet Alick did not appear. He waited until after Sunday,
+when he should see her first in church, and so nerve himself as it
+were behind the barrier of his sacred office; but after Sunday had
+passed and he had seen her in her old place, he called, and found her
+alone.
+
+When they met, and she looked into his face and laid her hand in his,
+she knew all. He shared her secret, and knew what she had done. It was
+not that he was either distant or familiar, cold or disrespectful,
+or anything but glad and reverent; nevertheless, he knew. He was no
+longer the boy adorer, her slave, her dog: he was her friend, and
+he wished to make her feel that she was safe with him--known, in his
+power, but safe.
+
+"You are changed," he said awkwardly.
+
+He thought of her as Leam, heard her always called Leam, but he dared
+not use the familiar name, and yet she was not "Miss Dundas" to him.
+
+"It is four years since you saw me," she said with a grave smile. "It
+was time to change."
+
+"But you are your old self too," he returned eagerly. He would have
+no disloyalty done to the queen of his boyish dreams: what worm soever
+was at its root, his royal pomegranate flower should be always set
+fair in the sun where he might be.
+
+"You seem much changed too," she said after a short pause--"graver and
+older. Is that because you are a clergyman?"
+
+Alick turned his eyes away from the girl's face, and looked mournfully
+out onto the autumn woods. "Partly," he said.
+
+"And the other part?" asked Leam, pressing to know the worst.
+
+"And the other part?" He looked at her, and his wan face grew paler.
+"Well, never mind the other part. There are things which sometimes
+come into a man's life and wither it for ever, as a fire passing over
+a green tree, but we do not speak of them."
+
+"To no one?"
+
+"To no one."
+
+Leam sighed. No proclamation could have made the thing clearer between
+them. Henceforth she was in Alick's power: let him be faithful,
+chivalrous, loyal, devoted, what you will, she was no longer her own
+unshared property. He knew what she was, and in so far was her master.
+
+Poor Alick! This was not the light in which he held his fatal secret.
+True, he knew what she had done, and that his young queen, his ideal,
+was a murderess, who, if the truth were made public, would be degraded
+below the level of the poorest wretch that had kept an honest name;
+but he felt himself more accursed than she, in that he had been the
+means whereby she had gotten both her knowledge and the power to use
+it. He was the doomed if innocent, as of old tragic times--the sinless
+Cain guilty of murder, but guiltless in intent. It was for this, as
+much as for the love and poetry of the boyish days, that he felt he
+owed himself to Leam--that his life was hers, and all his energies
+were to be devoted for her good. It was for this that he had prayed
+with such intensity of earnestness it seemed to him sometimes as if
+his soul had left his body, and had gone up to the Most High to pluck
+by force of passionate entreaty the pardon he besought: "Pardon her, O
+Lord! Turn her heart, enlighten her understanding, convince her of her
+sin; but pardon her, pardon her, dear Lord! And with her, pardon me."
+
+The man's whole life was spent in this one wild, fervid prayer. All
+that he did was tinged with the sentiment of winning grace for her and
+pardon for both. In his own mind they stood hand in hand together;
+and if he was the intercessor, they were both to benefit, and neither
+would be saved without the other. And he believed in the value of his
+prayers and in the objective reality of their influence.
+
+For the final changes in the ordering of home and society at North
+Aston, the week after Leam returned Edgar Harrowby came from India,
+and took up his position as the owner of the Hill estate; and the
+child Fina was brought to Ford House, and formally invested with
+her new name and condition as Miss Fina Dundas, Sebastian's younger
+daughter. Mindful of the past, Mr. Dundas expected to have a stormy
+scene with Leam when he told her his intentions respecting poor
+madame's child; but Leam answered quietly, "Very well, papa," and
+greeted Fina when she arrived benevolently, if not effusively. She was
+not one of those born mothers who love babies from their early nursery
+days, but she was kind to the child in her grave way, and seemed
+anxious to do well by her.
+
+The ladies all bestowed on her their nursery recipes and systems
+in rich abundance--especially Mrs. Birkett, who, though glad to be
+relieved from the hourly task of watching and contending, was still
+immensely interested in the little creature, and gave daily counsel
+and superintendence. So that on the whole Leam was not left unaided
+with her charge. On the contrary, she ran great risk of being
+bewildered by her multiplicity of counselors, and of entering in
+consequence on that zigzag course which covers much ground and makes
+but little progress.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+EDGAR HARROWBY.
+
+
+Thirty-two years of age; tall, handsome, well set-up, and every inch
+a soldier; manly in bearing, but also with that grace of gesture and
+softness of speech which goes by the name of polished manner; a
+bold sportsman, ignorant of physical fear, to whom England was the
+culmination of the universe, and such men as he--gentlemen, officers,
+squires--the culmination of humanity; a man who loved women as
+creatures, but despised them as intelligences; who respected socially
+the ladies of his own class, and demanded that they should be without
+stain, as befits the wives and mothers and sisters of gentlemen, but
+who thought women of a meaner grade fair game for the roving fowler; a
+conservative, holding to elemental differences whence arise the value
+of races, the dignity of family and the righteousness of caste; an
+hereditary landowner, regarding landed property as a sacred possession
+meant only for the few and not to be suffered to lapse into low-born
+hands; a gentleman, incapable of falsehood, treachery, meanness,
+social dishonor, but not incapable of injustice, tyranny, selfishness,
+even cruelty, if such came in his way as the privilege of his
+rank,--this was Edgar Harrowby as the world saw and his friends knew
+him, and as North Aston had henceforth to know him.
+
+His return caused immense local excitement and great rejoicing. It
+seemed to set the social barometer at "fair," and to promise a spell
+of animation such as North Aston had been long wanting. And indeed
+personally for himself it was time that Major Harrowby was at home and
+at the head of his own affairs. Matters had been going rather badly on
+the estate without him, and the need of a strong hand to keep agents
+straight and tenants up to the mark had been making itself somewhat
+disastrously felt during the last three or four years. Wherefore
+he had sold out, broken all his ties in India handsomely, as he had
+broken them in London handsomely once before, when, mad with jealousy,
+he had fled like a thief in the night, burned his boats behind him,
+and, as he thought, obliterated every trace by which that loved and
+graceless woman could discover his real name or family holding; and
+now had come home prepared to do his duty to society and himself. That
+is, prepared to marry a nice girl of his own kind, keep the estate
+well in hand, and set an example of respectability and orthodoxy,
+family prayers and bold riding, according to the ideal of the English
+country gentleman.
+
+But, above all, he must marry. And the wife provided for him by the
+eternal fitness of things was Adelaide Birkett. Who else could be
+found to suit the part so perfectly? She was well-born, well-mannered;
+though not coarsely robust, yet healthy in the sense of purity
+of blood; and she was decidedly pretty. So far to the good of the
+Harrowby stock in the future. Neither was she too young, though by
+reason of her quiet country life her twenty-four years did not count
+more to her in wear and tear of feeling and the doubtful moulding of
+experience than if she had lived through one London season. She was a
+girl of acknowledged good sense, calm, equable, holding herself in the
+strictest leash of ladylike reserve, and governing all her emotions
+without trouble, patent or unconfessed. Hers was a character which
+would never floreate into irregular beauties to give her friends
+anxiety and crowd her life with embarrassing consequences. She
+despised sentiment and ridiculed enthusiasm, thought skepticism both
+wicked and disreputable, but at the same time fanaticism was silly,
+and not nearly so respectable as that quiet, easy-going religion which
+does nothing of which society would disapprove, but does not break its
+heart in trying to found the kingdom of God on earth.
+
+All her relations with life and society would be blameless, orthodox,
+ladylike and thoroughly English. As a wife she would preach submission
+in public and practice domination and the moral repression belonging
+to the superior being in private. As a mother she would take care
+to have experienced nurses and well-bred governesses, who would look
+after the children properly, when she would wash her hands of further
+trouble and responsibility, save to teach them good manners at
+luncheon and self-control in their evening visit to the drawing-room
+for the "children's half hour" before dinner. As the mistress of an
+establishment she would be strict, demanding perfect purity in the
+morals of her servants, not suffering waste, nor followers, nor
+kitchen amusements that she knew of, nor kitchen individuality anyhow.
+Her servants would be her serfs, and she would assume to have bought
+them by food and wages in soul as well as body, in mind as well as
+muscle. She would give broken meat in moderation to the deserving
+poor, but she would let those who are not deserving do the best they
+could with want at home and inclemency abroad; and she would have
+called it fostering vice had she fed the husbandless mother when
+hungry or clothed the drunkard's children when naked. She would never
+be talked about for extremes or eccentricities of any kind; and the
+world would be forced to mention her with respect when it mentioned
+her at all, having indeed no desire to do otherwise. For she was of
+the kind dear to the heart of England--one of those who are called the
+salt of the earth, and who are assumed to keep society safe and
+pure. She was incredulous of science, contemptuous of superstition,
+impatient of new ideas--appreciating art, but holding artists as
+inferior creatures, like actors, acrobats and newspaper writers. She
+was loyal to the queen and royal family, the nobility and Established
+Church, bracketing republicans with atheists, and both with unpunished
+felons; as also classing immorality, the facts of physiology and the
+details of disease in a group together, as things horrible and not to
+be spoken of before ladies. She was not slow to believe evil of her
+neighbors, maintaining, indeed, that to be spoken of at all was proof
+sufficient of undesirable conduct; but she would never investigate a
+charge, preferring rather to accept it in its vile integrity than to
+soil her hands by attempting to unweave its dirty threads; hence she
+would be pitiless, repellent, but she would never make herself the
+focus of gossip. She was a human being if you will, a Christian in
+creed and name assuredly; but beyond and above all things she was
+a well-mannered, well-conducted English lady, a person of spotless
+morals and exquisite propriety, in the presence of whom humanity must
+not be human, truth truthful, nor Nature natural.
+
+This was the wife for Edgar Harrowby as a country gentleman--the
+woman whom Mrs. Harrowby would have chosen out of thousands to be her
+daughter-in-law, whom his sisters would like, who would do credit to
+his name and position; and whom he himself would find as good for his
+purpose as any within the four seas.
+
+For when Edgar married he would marry on social and rational grounds:
+he would not commit the mistake of fancying that he need love the
+woman as he had loved some others. He would marry her, whoever
+she might be, because she would be of a good family and reasonable
+character, fairly handsome, unexceptionable in conduct, not tainted
+with hereditary disease nor disgraced by ragged relatives, having
+nothing to do with vice or poverty in the remotest link of her
+connections--a woman fit to be the keeper of his house, the bearer
+of his name, the mother of his children. But for love, passion,
+enthusiasm, sentiment--Edgar thought all such emotional impedimenta
+as these not only superfluous, but oftentimes disastrous in the grave
+campaign of matrimony.
+
+It was for this marriage that Adelaide had saved herself. She believed
+that any woman can marry any man if she only wills to do so; and from
+the day when she was seventeen, and they had had a picnic at Dunaston,
+she had made up her mind to marry Edgar Harrowby. When he came home
+for good, unmarried and unengaged, she knew that she should succeed;
+and Edgar knew it too. He knew it so well after he had been at home
+about a week that if anything could have turned him against the wife
+carved out for him by circumstance and fitness, it would have been the
+almost fatal character of that fitness, as if Fortune had not left him
+a choice in the matter.
+
+"And what do you think of Adelaide?" asked Mrs. Harrowby one day when
+her son said that he had been to the rectory. "You have seen her twice
+now: what is your impression of her?'"
+
+"She is prettier than ever--improved, I should say, all through," was
+his answer.
+
+Mrs. Harrowby smiled. "She is a girl I like," she said. "She is so
+sensible and has such nice feeling about things."
+
+"Yes," answered Edgar, "she is thoroughly well-bred."
+
+"We have seen a great deal of her of late years," Mrs. Harrowby
+continued, angling dexterously. "She and the girls are fast friends,
+especially she and Josephine, though there is certainly some slight
+difference of age between them. But Adelaide prefers their society
+to that of any one about the neighborhood. And I think that of itself
+shows such good taste and nice feeling."
+
+"So it does," said Edgar with dutiful assent, not exactly seeing for
+himself what constituted Adelaide's good taste and nice feeling in
+this preference for his dull and doleful sisters over the brighter
+companionship of the Fairbairns, say, or any other of the local
+nymphs. To him those elderly maiden sisters of his were rather bores
+than otherwise, but he was not displeased that Adelaide Birkett
+thought differently. If it "ever came to anything," it would be better
+that they satisfied her than that she should find them uncongenial.
+
+"She is coming up to dinner this evening," Mrs. Harrowby went on to
+say; and Edgar smiled, pulled his moustaches and looked half puzzled
+if wholly pleased.
+
+"She is a pretty girl," he said with the imbecility of a man who ought
+to speak and who has nothing to say, also who has something that he
+does not wish to say.
+
+"She is better than pretty--she is good," returned Mrs. Harrowby;
+and Edgar, not caring to discuss Adelaide on closer ground with his
+mother, strolled away into his private room, where he sat before the
+fire smoking, meditating on his life in the past and his prospects
+in the future, and wondering how he would like it when he had finally
+abjured the freedom of bachelorhood and had taken up with matrimony
+and squiredom for the remainder of his natural life.
+
+Punctually at seven Adelaide Birkett appeared. This, too, was one
+of her minor virtues: she was exact. Mind, person, habits, all were
+regulated with the nicest method, and she knew as little of hurry as
+of delay, and as little of both as of passion.
+
+"You are such a dear, good punctual girl!" said Josephine
+affectionately--Josephine, whose virtues had a few more, loose ends
+and knots untied than had her friend's.
+
+"It is so vulgar to be unpunctual," said Adelaide with her calm
+good-breeding. "It seems to me only another form of uncleanliness and
+disorder."
+
+"And Edgar is so punctual too!" cried Josephine by way of commentary.
+
+Adelaide smiled, not broadly, not hilariously, only to the exact shade
+demanded by conversational sympathy. "Then we shall agree in this,"
+she said quietly.
+
+"Oh I am sure you will agree, and in more than this," Josephine
+returned, almost with enthusiasm.
+
+Had she not been the willing nurse of this affair from the
+beginning?--if not the open confidante, yet secretly holding the key
+to her younger friend's mind and actions? and was she not, like all
+the kindly disappointed, intensely sympathetic with love-matters,
+whether wise or foolish, hopeful or hopeless?
+
+"Who is it that you are sure will agree with Miss Adelaide, if any one
+indeed could be found to disagree with her?" asked Edgar, standing in
+the doorway.
+
+Josephine laughed with the silliness of a weak woman "caught." She
+looked at Adelaide slyly. Adelaide turned her quiet face, unflushed,
+unruffled, and neither laughed sillily nor looked slyly.
+
+"She was praising me for punctuality; and then she said that you were
+punctual too," she explained cheerfully.
+
+"We learn that in the army," said Edgar.
+
+"But I have had to learn it without the army," she answered.
+
+"Which shows that you have by the grace of nature what I have attained
+only by discipline and art," said Edgar gallantly.
+
+Adelaide smiled. She did not disdain the compliment. On the contrary,
+she wished to impress it on Edgar that she accepted his praises
+because they were her due. She knew that the world takes us if not
+quite at our own valuation, yet as being the character we assume to
+be. It all depends on our choice of a mask and to what ideal self we
+dress. If we are clever and dress in keeping, without showing chinks
+or discrepancies, no one will find out that it is only a mask; and
+those of us are most successful in gaining the good-will of our
+fellows who understand this principle the most clearly and act on it
+the most consistently.
+
+The evening was a pleasant one for Adelaide, being an earnest of the
+future for which, if she had not worked hard, she had controlled much.
+Edgar sang solos to her accompaniment, and put in his rich baritone to
+her pure if feeble soprano; he played chess with her for an hour, and
+praised her play, as it deserved: naturally, not thinking it necessary
+to make love to his sisters, he paid her almost exclusive attention,
+and looked the admiration he felt. She really was a very pretty young
+woman, and she had unexceptionable manners; and having cut himself
+adrift from his ties and handsomely released himself from his
+obligations, he was not disposed to take much trouble in looking far
+afield for a wife when here was one ready-made to his hand. Still,
+he was not so rash as to commit himself too soon. Fine play is never
+precipitate; and even the most lordly lover, if an English gentleman,
+thinks it seemly to pretend to woo the woman whom he means to take,
+and who he knows will yield.
+
+And on her side Adelaide was too well-bred for the one part, and too
+wise for the other, to clutch prematurely at the prize she had willed
+should be hers. Her actions must be like her gestures, graceful,
+rhythmic, rather slow than hurried, and bearing the stamp of purpose
+and deliberation. When Edgar should make his offer, as she knew he
+would, she would ask for time to reflect and make up her mind. This
+would be doing the thing properly and with due regard to her own
+dignity; for no husband of hers should ever have cause to think that
+she held her marriage with him as a thing so undeniably advantageous
+there was no doubt of her acceptance from the first. Every woman must
+make herself difficult, thought Adelaide, if she wishes to be prized,
+even the woman who for seven years has fixed her eyes steadily on one
+point, and has determined that she will finally capture a certain man
+and land him as her lifelong possession.
+
+Thus the evening passed, with a subtle undercurrent of concealed
+resolves flowing beneath its surface admiration that gave it a
+peculiar charm to the two people principally concerned--the one
+feeling that she had advanced her game by an important move; the
+other, that the eternal fitness of things 'was making itself more
+and-more evident, and that it was manifest to all his senses
+whom Providence had destined for his wife, and for what ultimate
+matrimonial end he had been shaped and spared.
+
+A book of photographs was on the table.
+
+"Are you here?" asked Edgar, lowering his bright blue eyes on
+Adelaide as she sat on a small chair at Mrs. Harrowby's feet, carrying
+daughterly incense to that withered shrine.
+
+"Yes, I think so," she answered.
+
+He turned the pages carefully--passing over his sisters in wide
+crinolines and spoon bonnets; his mother, photographed from an old
+picture, in a low dress and long dropping bands of hair, like a
+mouflon's ears, about her face; Fred and himself, both as boys in
+Scotch suits, set stiffly against the table like dolls--with gradual
+improvement in art and style, till he came to a page where Adelaide's
+fair vignetted head of large size was placed side by side with
+another, also vignetted and also large.
+
+"Ah! there you are; and what a capital likeness!" cried Edgar, with
+the joyous look and accent of one meeting an old friend, giving that
+gauge of interest which we all unconsciously give when we first see
+the photograph of a well-known face. He looked at the portrait long
+and critically. "Only not so pretty," he added gallantly. "Those
+fellows cannot catch the spirit: they give only the outside forms, and
+not always these correctly. Here is a striking face," he continued,
+pointing to Adelaide's companion-picture--a girl with masses of dark
+hair, dark eyes, large, mournful, heavily fringed with long lashes,
+and a grave, sad face, that seemed listening rather than looking. "Who
+is she? She looks foreign."
+
+Adelaide glanced at the page, as if she did not know it by heart.
+"That? Oh! that is only Leam Dundas," she said with the faintest,
+finest flavor of scorn in her voice.
+
+"Leam Dundas?" repeated Edgar--"the daughter of that awful woman?"
+
+"Yes, and nearly as odd as the mother," answered Adelaide, still in
+the same cold manner and with the same accent of superior scorn.
+
+"At least she used to be, you mean, dear, but she is more like other
+people now," said kindly Josephine, more just than politic.
+
+Adelaide looked at her calmly, indifferently. "Yes, I suppose she is
+rather less savage than of old," was her reply, "but I do not see much
+of her,"
+
+"I do not remember to have ever seen her: she must have been a mere
+child when I was here last," said Edgar.
+
+"She is nineteen now, I think," said Mrs. Harrowby.
+
+"Not more?" repeated Adelaide. "I imagined she was one-and-twenty at
+the least. She looks so very much older than even this--five or six
+and twenty, full; dark people age so quickly."
+
+"She seems to be superbly handsome," Edgar said, still looking at the
+portrait.
+
+"For those who like that swarthy kind of beauty. For myself, I do not:
+it always reminds me of negroes and Lascars."
+
+Adelaide leaned forward, and made pretence to examine Leam's portrait
+with critical independence of judgment. She spoke as if this was the
+first time she had seen it, and her words the thought of the moment
+resulting.
+
+"There is no negroid taint here," Edgar answered gravely. "It is the
+face of a sibyl, of a tragedian."
+
+"Do you think so? It is fine in outline certainly, but too monotonous
+to please me, and too lugubrious; and the funny part of it is,
+there is nothing in her. She looks like a sibyl, but she is the most
+profoundly stupid person you can imagine."
+
+"Not now, Addy: she has wakened up a good deal," again interposed
+Josephine with her love of justice and want of tact.
+
+"But do you not see the mother in her, Josephine? I do, painfully; and
+the mother was such a horror! Leam is just like her. She will grow her
+exact counterpart"
+
+"A bad model enough," said Edgar; "but this face is not bad. It has
+more in it than poor old Pepita's. How fat she was!"
+
+"So will Leam be when she is as old," said Adelaide quietly. "And do
+you think these dark people ever look clean? I don't,"
+
+"That is a drawback certainly," laughed Edgar, running through the
+remainder of the book.
+
+But he turned back again to the page which held Leam and Adelaide side
+by side, and he spoke of the latter while he looked at the former. The
+face of Leam Dundas, mournful, passionate, concentrated as it was,
+had struck his imagination--struck it as none other had done since the
+time when he had met that grand and graceful woman wandering, lost in
+a fog, in St. James's Park, and had protected from possible annoyance
+till he had landed her in St. John's Wood. He was glad that Leam
+Dundas lived in North Aston, and that he should see her without
+trouble or overt action; and as he handed Adelaide into her carriage
+he noticed for the first time that her blue eyes were not quite even,
+that her flaxen hair had not quite enough color, and that her face, if
+pure and fair, was slightly insipid.
+
+"Poor, dear Adelaide!" he said when he returned to the drawing-room,
+"how nice she is! but how tart she was about this Leam Dundas of
+yours! Looks like jealousy; and very likely is. All you women are so
+horribly jealous."
+
+"Not all of us," said Maria hastily.
+
+"And I do not think that Adelaide is," said Josephine. "She has no
+cause; for though Leam is certainly very lovely, and seems to have
+improved immensely for being at school, still she and Addy do not come
+into collision any way, and I do not see why she should be jealous."
+
+"Perhaps Edgar admired her photograph too much," said Fanny, who
+was the stupid one of the three, but on occasions made the shrewdest
+remarks.
+
+Edgar laughed, not displeasedly. "That would be paying me too high a
+compliment," he said.
+
+Whereat his three sisters echoed "Compliment!" in various tones of
+deprecation, and Josephine added a meaning little laugh for her own
+share, for which Edgar gave her a kiss, and said in a bantering kind
+of voice, "Now, Joseph! mind what you are about!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+ON THE MOOR.
+
+
+It was a gray and gusty day in November, with heavy masses of
+low-lying clouds rolling tumultuously overhead, and a general look
+of damp and decay about the fields and banks--one of those melancholy
+days of the late autumn which make one long for the more varied
+circumstances of confessed winter, when the deep blue shadows in the
+crisp snow suggest the glory of southern skies, and the sparkle of the
+sun on the delicate tracery of the frosted branches has a mimicry of
+life, such as we imagine strange elves and fairies might create.
+
+There was no point of color in the landscape save the brown foliage of
+the shivering beech trees, a few coarse splashes of yellow weeds, and
+here and there a trail of dying crimson leaves threading the barren
+hedgerows. Everything was "sombre, lifeless, mournful", and even Edgar
+Harrowby, though by no means sentimentally impressionable to outward
+conditions, felt, as he rode through the deserted lanes and looked
+abroad over the stagnant country, that life on the off-hunt days was
+but a slow-kind of thing at North Aston, and that any incident which
+should break the dead monotony of the scene would be welcome.
+
+He had been thinking a great deal of Adelaide for the last four or
+five days, since she had dined at the Hill, and making up his mind to
+take the final plunge before long. He was not in love with her, but
+she suited, as has been said; and that was as good as love to
+Edgar, who had now to take up his squiredom and country gentleman's
+respectability, after having had his share of a young man's "fling" in
+rather larger proportion than falls to the lot of most. All the same,
+he wished that her face had more expression and that her eyes were
+perfectly straight; and he wanted to see Leam Dundas.
+
+He had made a long round to-day, and was turning now homeward, when,
+as he had almost crossed the moor, athwart which his road led, he saw
+standing on a little hillock, away from the main track, the slight
+figure of a woman sharply defined against the sky. She was alone,
+doing nothing, not seeming to be looking at anything--just standing
+there on the hillock, facing the north-west, as if for pleasure in the
+rough freshness of the breeze.
+
+The wind blew back her dress, and showed her girlish form, supple,
+flexible, graceful, fashioned like some nymph of olden time. From her
+small feet, arched and narrow, gripping the ground like feet of steel,
+to the slender throat on which her head was set with so much grace
+of line, yet with no sense of over-weighting in its tender curves, an
+expression of nervous energy underlying her fragile litheness of form,
+a look of strength--not muscular nor the strength of bulk or weight,
+but the strength of fibre, will, tenacity--seemed to mark her out as
+something different from the herd.
+
+Edgar scarcely gave this vague impression words in his own mind, but
+he was conscious of a new revelation of womanhood, and he scented an
+adventure in this solitary figure facing the north-west wind on the
+lonely moor.
+
+Her very dress, too, had a character of its own in harmony with the
+rest--black all through, save for the scarlet feather in her hat,
+which burnt like a flame against the gray background of the sky;
+and her whole attitude had something of defiance in its profound
+stillness, while standing so boldly against the strong blasts that
+swept across the heights, which caught his imagination, at that
+moment ready to be inflamed. All things depend on times and moods, and
+Edgar's mood at this moment of first seeing Leam Dundas was favorable
+for the reception of new impressions.
+
+For, of course, it was Leam--Leam, who, since her return from school,
+alone and without companionship, was feverish often, and often
+impelled to escape into the open country from something that oppressed
+her down in the valley too painfully to be borne. She had never been
+a confidential nor an expansive schoolfellow; not even an affectionate
+one as girls count affection, seeing that she neither kissed nor
+cried, nor quarreled nor made up--neither stood as a model of
+fidelity nor changed her girl-lovers in anticipation of future
+inconstancies--writing a love-letter to Ada to-day and a copy of
+verses to Ethel to-morrow--but had kept with all the same quiet
+gravity and gentle reticence which seemed to watch rather than share,
+and to be more careful not to offend than solicitous to win.
+
+All the same, she missed her former comrades now that she had lost
+them; but most of all she missed the wholesome occupation and mental
+employment of her studies. Left as she was to herself, thoughts and
+memories were gathering up from the background where they had lain
+dormant if extant all these years, and through her solitude were
+getting a vitality which made her stand still in a kind of breathless
+agony, wondering where they would lead her and in what they would end.
+At times such a burning sense of sin would flash over her that she
+felt as if she must confess that hideous fact of her girlish past. It
+seemed so shameful that she should be living there among the rest, a
+criminal with the innocent, and not tell them what she was. Then the
+instinct of self-preservation would carry it over her conscience, and
+she would press back her thoughts and go out, as to-day, to cool her
+feverish blood, and grow calm to bear and strong to hold the heavy
+burden which she had fashioned by her own mad deed and laid for life
+on her own hands.
+
+If only the ladies had not insisted so strongly on mamma's personality
+in heaven! if only they had not lighted up her imagination, her
+loyalty, by this tremendous torch of faith and love! How bitterly she
+regretted the childish fanaticism which had made her imagine herself
+the providence of that beloved memory, the avenger of those shadowy
+wrongs! Oh, if she could undo the past and call madame back to life!
+She would kiss her now, and even call her mamma if it would please her
+and papa. So she stood on the hillock facing the north-west, thinking
+these things and regretting in vain.
+
+As Edgar came riding by his large black hound dashed off to Leam and
+barked furiously, all four paws planted on the ground as if preparing
+for a spring. The beast had probably no malice, and might have meant
+it merely as his method of saying, "Who are you?" but he looked
+formidable, and Leam started back and cried, "Down, dog! go away!" in
+a voice half angry and half afraid.
+
+Then Edgar saw the face, and knew who she was. He rode across the
+turf, calling off his dog, and came up to her. It was an opportunity,
+and Edgar Harrowby was a man who knew how to take advantage of
+opportunities. It was in his creed to thank Providence for favorable
+chances by making the most of them, and this was a chance of which it
+would be manifestly ungrateful not to make the most. It was far more
+picturesque to meet her for the first time, as now, on the wild moor
+on a gusty gray November day, than in the gloomy old drawing-room at
+the Hill. It gave a flavor of romance and the forbidden which was not
+without its value in the beginning of an acquaintance with such a face
+as Leam's. Nevertheless, in spite of the romance that hung about the
+circumstance, his first words were common-place enough. "I hope my dog
+has not alarmed you?" he said, lifting his hat.
+
+Leam looked at him with those wonderful eyes of hers, that seemed
+somehow to look through him. She, standing on her hillock, was
+slightly higher than Edgar sitting on his horse; and her head was bent
+as she looked down on him, giving her attitude and gesture something
+of a dignified assumption of superiority, more like the Leam of the
+past than of the present. "No, I was not alarmed," she said. "But I
+do not like to be barked at," she added, an echo of the old childish
+sense of injury from circumstance that was so quaint and pretty in her
+half-complaining voice.
+
+"I suppose not: how should you?" answered Edgar with sympathetic
+energy. "Rover is a good-old fellow, but he has the troublesome trick
+of giving tongue unnecessarily. He would not have hurt you, but I
+should be very sorry to think he had frightened you. To heel, sir!"
+angrily.
+
+"No, he did not frighten me." repeated Leam.
+
+Never loquacious, there was something about this man's face and
+manner, his masterful spirit underneath his courteous bearing, his
+look of masculine power and domination, his admiring eyes that fixed
+themselves on her so unflinchingly--not with insolence, but as if he
+had the prescriptive right of manhood to look at her, only a woman, as
+he chose, he commanding and she obeying--that quelled and silenced
+her even beyond her wont. He was the first gentleman of noteworthy
+appearance who had ever spoken to her--not counting Alick, nor
+the masters who had taught her at school, nor Mr. Birkett, nor Mr.
+Fairbairn, as gentlemen of noteworthy appearance--and the first of all
+things has a special influence over young minds.
+
+"You are brave to walk so far alone: you ought to have a dog like
+Rover to protect you," Edgar said, still looking at her with those
+unflinching eyes, which oppressed her even when she did not see them.
+
+"I am not brave, and I do not care for dogs. Besides, I do not often
+walk so far as this; but I felt the valley stifling to-day," answered
+Leam, in her matter-of-fact, categorical way.
+
+"All the same, you ought to have protection," Edgar said
+authoritatively, and Leam did not reply.
+
+She only looked at him earnestly, wondering against what she should
+be protected, having abandoned by this time her belief in banditti and
+wild beasts.
+
+If his eyes oppressed her, hers half embarrassed him. There was such
+a strange mixture of intensity and innocence in them, he scarcely knew
+how to meet them.
+
+"It is absurd to pretend that we do not know each other," then said
+Edgar after a short pause, smiling; and his smile was very sweet and
+pleasant. "You are Miss Dundas--I am Edgar Harrowby."
+
+"Yes, I know," Leam answered.
+
+"How is that?" he asked, "_I_ knew _you_ from your photograph--once
+seen not to be forgotten again," gallantly--"but how should you know
+me?"
+
+Leam raised her eyes from the ground where she had cast them. Those
+slow full looks, intense, tragic, fixed, had a startling effect of
+which she was wholly unconscious. Edgar felt his own grow dark and
+tender as he met hers. If the soul and mind within only answered to
+the mask without, what queen or goddess could surpass this half-breed
+Spanish girl, this country-born, unnoted, but glorious Leam Dundas? he
+thought.
+
+"And I knew you from yours," she answered.
+
+"An honor beyond my deserts," said Edgar.
+
+Not that he thought the notice of a girl, even with such a face
+as this, beyond his deserts. Indeed, if a queen or a goddess had
+condescended to him, it would not have been a grace beyond his merits;
+but it sounded pretty to say so, and served to make talk as well as
+anything else. And to make talk was the main business on hand at this
+present moment.
+
+"Why an honor?" asked Leam, ignorant of the elements of flirting.
+
+Edgar smiled again, and this time his smile without words troubled
+her. It seemed the assertion of superior intelligence, contemptuous,
+if half pitiful of her ignorance. Once so serenely convinced of her
+superiority, Leam was now as suspicious of her shortcomings, and was
+soon abashed.
+
+Edgar did not see that he had troubled her. Masterful and masculine
+to an eminent degree, the timid doubts and fears of a young girl were
+things he could not recognize. He had no point in his own nature with
+which they came in contact, so that he should sympathize with them.
+He knew the whole fence and foil of coquetry, the signs of silent
+flattery, the sweet language of womanly self-conscious love, whether
+wooing or being won; but the fluttering misgivings of youth and
+absolute inexperience were dark to him. All of which he felt conscious
+was that here was something deliciously fresh and original, and that
+Leam was more beautiful to look at than Adelaide, and a great deal
+more interesting to talk to.
+
+"If you will allow me, now that I have had the pleasure of meeting
+you, I will see you safe for at least part of your way home," he said,
+passing by her naive query "Why an honor?" as a thing to be answered
+only by that smile of superior wisdom.
+
+Flinging himself from his horse, he took the bridle in his hand and
+turned toward home, looking to the girl to accompany him. Leam felt
+that she could not refuse his escort offered as so much a matter of
+course. Why should she? It was very pleasant to have some one to walk
+with--some one not her father, with whom she still felt shy, if not
+now absolutely estranged; nor yet Alick, in whose pale face she was
+always reading the past, and who, though he was so good and kind
+and tender, was her master and held her in his hand. This handsome,
+courteous gentleman was different from either, and she liked his
+society and superior ways. And as he began now to talk to her of
+things not trenching on nor admitting of flirtation--chiefly of the
+places he had visited, India, Egypt, Italy, Spain--she was not so much
+abashed by his unflinching looks and masterful manner.
+
+When he entered on Spain and his recollections of what he had seen
+there, the girl's heart throbbed, and her pale face grew whiter still
+with the passionate thrill that stirred her. The old blood was in her
+veins yet, and, though modified, and in some sense transformed, she
+was still Pepita's daughter and the child of Andalusia. And here was
+truth; not like that poor wretched madame's talk, which even she had
+found out to be false and only making believe to know what she did not
+know. Spain was the name of power with Learn, as it had been with her
+mother, and she lifted her face, white with its passionate desires,
+listening as if entranced to all that Edgar said.
+
+It was a good opening, and the handsome soldier-squire congratulated
+himself on his lucky hit and serviceable memory. Presently he touched
+on Andalusia, and Leam, who hitherto had been listening without
+comment, now broke in eagerly. "That is my own country!" she cried.
+"Mamma came from Andalusia, beautiful Andalusia! Ah! how I should like
+to go there!"
+
+"Perhaps you will some day," Edgar answered a little significantly.
+
+Had she been more instructed in the kind of thing he meant, she would
+have seen that he wished to convey the idea of a love-journey made
+with him.
+
+She shook her head and her eyes grew moist and dewy. "Not now," she
+said mournfully. "Poor mamma has gone, and there is no one now to take
+me."
+
+"I will make up a party some day, and you shall be one of us," said
+Edgar.
+
+She brightened all over. "Ah! that would be delightful!" she cried,
+taking him seriously. "When do you think we shall go?"
+
+"I will talk about it," Edgar answered, though smiling again--Leam
+wished he would not smile so often--a little aghast at her
+literalness, and saying to himself in warning that he must be careful
+of what he said to Leam Dundas. It was evident that she did not
+understand either badinage or a joke. But her very earnestness pleased
+him for all its oddity. It was so unlike the superficiality and
+levity of the modern girl--that hateful Girl of the Period, in whose
+existence he believed, and of whose influence he stood in almost
+superstitious awe. He liked that grave, intense way of hers, which was
+neither puritanical nor stolid, but, on the contrary, full of unspoken
+passion, rich in latent concentrated power.
+
+"They are very beautiful, are they not?" Leam asked suddenly.
+
+"What? who?" was Edgar's answer.
+
+"The Andalusian women, and the men," returned Leam.
+
+"The men are fine-looking fellows enough," answered Edgar
+carelessly--"a little too brutal for my taste, but well-grown men for
+all that. But I have seen prettier women out of Spain than in it."
+
+"Mamma used to say they were so beautiful--the most beautiful of
+all the women in the world; and the best." Leam said this with a
+disappointed air and her old injured accent.
+
+Edgar laughed softly. "The prettiest Andalusian woman I have ever
+seen has an English father," he answered, with a sudden flush on his
+handsome face as he bent it a little nearer to hers.
+
+"How odd!" said Leam. "An English father? That is like me."
+
+Edgar looked at her, to read how much of this was real ingenuousness,
+how much affected simplicity. He saw only a candid inquiring face with
+a faint shade of surprise in its quiet earnestness, unquestionably not
+affected.
+
+"Just so," he answered. "Exactly like you."
+
+His voice and manner made Leam blush uncomfortably. She was conscious
+of something disturbing, without knowing what it was. She first looked
+up into his face with the same expression of inquiry as before, then
+down to the earth perplexedly, when suddenly the truth came upon her;
+he meant herself--she was the prettiest Andalusian he had ever seen.
+
+She was intensely humiliated at her discovery. Not one of those girls
+who study every feature, every gesture, every point, till there is
+not a square inch of their personality of which they are not painfully
+conscious, Leam had never taken herself into artistic consideration
+at all. She had been proud of her Spanish blood, of her mantilla, her
+high comb and her fan; but of herself as a woman among women she knew
+nothing, nor whether she was plain or pretty. Indeed, had she had to
+say offhand which, she would have answered plain. The revelation which
+comes sooner or later to all women of the charms they possess had not
+yet come to her; and Edgar's words, making the first puncture in
+her ignorance, pained her more by the shock which they gave her
+self-consciousness than they pleased her by their flattery.
+
+She said no more, but walked by his side with her head held very high
+and slightly turned away. She was sorry that he had offended her. They
+had been getting on together so well until he had said this foolish
+thing, and now they were like friends who had quarreled. She was quite
+sorry that he had been so foolish as to offend her, but she must not
+forgive him--at least not just yet. It was very wrong of him to tell
+her that she was prettier than the true children of the soil; and she
+resented the slight to Spain and to her mother, as well as the wrong
+done to herself, by his saying that which was not true. So she walked
+with her little head held high, and Edgar could get nothing more out
+of her. When Leam was offended coaxings to make her forget were of no
+avail. She had to wear through an impression by herself, and it was
+useless to try for a premature pardon.
+
+Edgar saw that he had overshot the mark, and that his best policy now
+was absence; wherefore, after a few moments' silence, he remounted his
+horse, looking penitent, handsome, full of admiration and downcast.
+
+"I hope we shall soon see you at the Hill, Miss Dundas," he said,
+holding her hand in his for his farewell a little longer than was
+quite necessary for good breeding or even cordiality.
+
+"I very seldom go to the Hill," answered Leam, looking past his head.
+
+"But you will come, and soon?" fervently.
+
+"Perhaps: I do not know," answered Leam, still looking past his head,
+and embarrassed to a most uncomfortable extent.
+
+"Thank you," he said, as if he had been thanking her for the grace of
+his life; and with a long look, lifting his hat again, he rode off,
+just escaping by a few hundred yards the danger of being met walking
+with Leam by his sisters and Adelaide Birkett. They were all driving
+together in the phaeton, and the sisters were making much of their
+young friend.
+
+At that moment Edgar preferred to be met alone and not walking with
+Leam. He did not stop the carriage--simply nodded to them all with
+familiar kindness, as a group of relatives not demanding extra
+courtesy, flinging a few words behind him as he rode on smiling. Nor
+did the ladies in their turn stop for Leam, whom they met soon after
+walking slowly along the road; but Josephine said, as they passed, how
+pretty Learn looked to-day, and how much softer her face was than it
+used to be; and Maria, even Maria, agreed with kindly Joseph, and
+was quite eulogistic on the object of her old disdain. Adelaide sat
+silent, and did not join in their encomiums.
+
+It would have been a nice point to ascertain if the Misses Harrowby
+would have praised the girl's beauty as they did had they known
+that she had grown soft and dewy-eyed by talking of Spain with their
+brother Edgar, though she had hardened a little afterward when he told
+her that she was the prettiest Andalusian he had ever seen.
+
+During the dinner at the Hill, where Adelaide was one of the family
+party, Edgar mentioned casually how that he had met Miss Dundas on the
+moor, and had had to speak to her because of Rover's misbehavior.
+
+"Yes? and what do you think of her?" asked Mrs. Harrowby with a sharp
+glance.
+
+"I scarcely know: I have hardly seen her as yet," he answered.
+
+"Did she say or do anything very extraordinary to-day?" asked
+Adelaide with such an air of contemptuous curiosity as seemed to him
+insufferably insolent.
+
+"No, nothing. Is she in the habit of saying or doing extraordinary
+things?" he answered back, arching his eyebrows and speaking in a
+well-affected tone of sincere inquiry.
+
+"At times she is more like a maniac than a sane person," said
+Adelaide, breaking her bread with deliberation. "What can you expect
+from such a parentage and education as hers?"
+
+Edgar looked down and smiled satirically. "Poor Pepita's sins lie
+heavy on your mind," he answered.
+
+"Yes, I believe in race," was her reply.
+
+"Mother," then said Edgar after a short silence, "why do you not have
+Miss Dundas to dine here with Adelaide? It would be more amusing
+to her, for it must be dull"--turning to their guest and speaking
+amiably, considerately--"I am afraid very dull--to be so often quite
+alone with us."
+
+He did not add what he thought, that it was almost indelicate in her
+to be here so often. He was out of humor with her to-day.
+
+"She is such an uncertain girl we never know how she may be. I had her
+to stay here once, and I do not want to repeat the experiment," was
+Mrs. Harrowby's answer.
+
+"But, mamma, that was before she went to school, when she was quite a
+child. She is so much improved now," pleaded Josephine.
+
+"Good little soul!" said Edgar under his breath.--"Wine, Joseph?"
+aloud, as his recognition of her good offices.
+
+"And I like coming alone best, thanks," said Adelaide with unruffled
+calmness. "Leam has never been my friend; indeed, I do not like her,
+and you all," to the sisters, with a gracious smile and prettily,
+"have always been my favorite companions."
+
+"Still, she is very lonely, and it would be kind. Besides, she is good
+to look at," said Edgar.
+
+"Do you think so?" said Mrs. Harrowby with crisp lips and
+ill-concealed displeasure.
+
+"Do I think so, mother? I should have no eyes else. She is superb. I
+have never seen such a face. She is the most beautiful creature I have
+ever known of any nation."
+
+Adelaide's delicate pink cheeks turned pale, and then they flushed a
+brilliant rose as she laid down her spoon and left her jelly untasted.
+
+There were no trials of skill at chess, no duets, no solos, this
+evening. After dinner Edgar went to his own room and sat there
+smoking. He felt revolted at the idea of spending two or three hours
+with what he irreverently called "a lot of dull women," and preferred
+his own thoughts to their talk. He sauntered into the drawing-room
+about ten minutes before Adelaide had to leave, apologizing for his
+absence on the man's easy plea of "business," saying he was sorry to
+have missed her charming society, and he hoped they should see her
+there soon again, and so on--all in the proper voice and manner,
+but with a certain ring of insincerity in the tones which Adelaide
+detected, if the others did not. But she accepted his excuses with the
+most admirable tact, smiling to the sisters as she said, "Oh, we
+have been very happy, Josephine, have we not? though," with a nice
+admission of Edgar's claims, not too broadly stated nor too warmly
+allowed, "of course it would have been very pleasant if you could have
+come in too."
+
+"It has been my loss," said Edgar.
+
+She smiled "Yes" by eyes, lips and turn of her graceful head. In
+speech she answered, "Of that, of course, you are the best judge for
+yourself; but none of us here feel as some girls do, lost without
+gentlemen to amuse them. We can get on very well by ourselves. Cannot
+we, Joseph?"
+
+And Josephine said gallantly, "Yes," but her heart was more rueful
+than her voice, and she thought that some gentlemen were very
+nice, and that Sebastian Dundas especially made the dull time pass
+pleasantly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+THE CHILD FINA.
+
+
+Nothing surprised the North Astonians more than what it was the
+fashion to call "the admirable manner in which Leam behaved to
+the child Fina." If the world which praised her had known all the
+compelling circumstances, would it have called her admirable then? Yet
+beyond those natural promptings of remorse which forced her to do
+the best she could for the child whom her fatal crime had rendered
+motherless, Leam did honestly behave well, if this means doing irksome
+things without complaint and sacrificing self to a sense of right. And
+this was all the more praiseworthy in that sympathy of nature between
+these two young creatures there was none, and the girl's maternal
+instinct was not of that universal kind which makes all children
+pleasant, whatever they may be. Hence, she did nobly when she did her
+duty with the uncompromising exactness characteristic of her; but then
+it was only duty, it was not love.
+
+How should it be love? Her tenacity and reserve were ill matched with
+Fina's native inconstancy of purpose and childish incontinence of
+speech; her pride of race resented her father's adoption of a stranger
+into the penetralia of the family; and to share the name she had
+inherited from her mother with the daughter of that mother's rival
+seemed to her a wrong done to both the living and the dead. Naturally
+taciturn, unjoyful, and ever oppressed by that brooding consciousness
+of guilt hanging like a cloud over her memory, formless, vague, but
+never lifting, Fina's changeful temper and tumultuous vivacity were
+intensely wearisome to her. Nevertheless, she was forbearing if not
+loving, and the people said rightly when they said she was admirable.
+
+Her grave patience with the little one did more to open her father's
+heart to her than did even her own wonderful beauty, which gratified
+his paternal pride of authorship, or than her efforts after docility
+to himself--efforts that would have been creditable to any one, and
+that with her were heroic. For Mr. Dundas, being of those clinging,
+clasping natures which must love some one, had taken poor madame's
+child into his affections in the wholesale manner so emphatically his
+own, now in these first days of his new paternity seeming to live only
+for the little Fina, and never happy but when he had her with him. It
+was the first time that he felt he had had a child of his own; and he
+gave her the love which would have been Leam's had Pepita been less
+of a savage than she was, and more discreet in the matter of
+doll-dressing.
+
+The little round, fair-haired creature, with her picturesque
+Gainsborough head and rose-red lips, pretty, pleasant, facile, easily
+amused if easily made cross, divertible from her purpose if she was
+but coaxed and caressed, and if the substitute offered was to her
+liking--without tenacity, fluid, floating on the surface of things and
+born of their froth; loving only those who ministered to her pleasure
+and were in sight; forgetting yesterday's joys as though they had
+never been, and her dearest the moment they were absent--a child
+deliciously caressing because sensual by temperament and instinctively
+diplomatic, with no latent greatness to be developed as time went on
+and the flower set into the fruit. Epitomizing the characteristics of
+the class of which her mother had been a typical example, she was the
+pleasantest thing of his life to a man who cared mainly to be amused,
+and who liked with a woman's liking to be loved.
+
+The strong love of children inherent in him, which had never been
+satisfied till now, seemed now to have gathered tenfold strength, and
+the love of the man, who had never cared for his own, for this his
+little daughter by adoption was almost a passion. If Leam could have
+been jealous where she did not love, she would have been jealous of
+her father and Fina. But she was not. On the contrary, it seemed to
+soften some of the bitterness of her self-reproach, and she was glad
+that madame's motherless child was not deserted, but had found a
+substitute for the protection which she had taken from her; for Leam,
+criminal, was not ignoble.
+
+A few days after the meeting on the moor between Learn and Edgar, Mr.
+Dundas drove to the Hill, carrying Fina with him. Leam had a fit of
+shyness and refused to go: thus Sebastian had the child to himself,
+and was not sorry to be without his elder and less congenial daughter.
+He owned to himself that she was good, very good indeed, and a great
+deal better than he ever expected she would be; yet for all that, with
+her more than Oriental gravity and reserve, and that look of tragedy
+haunting her face, she was not an amusing companion, and the little
+one was.
+
+Mr. Dundas had begun to take up his old habits again with the
+Harrowbys. He found the patient constancy of his friend Josephine not
+a disagreeable salve for a wounded heart and broken life; albeit poor
+dear Joseph was getting stout and matronly, and took off the keen edge
+of courtship by a willingness too manifest for wisdom. Sebastian liked
+to be loved, but he did not like to be bored by being made overmuch
+love to. The things are different, and most men resent the latter, how
+much soever they desire the former.
+
+Edgar was in the drawing-room when Mr. Dundas was announced. He was
+booted and spurred, waiting his horse to be brought round. "What a
+pretty little girl!" he said after a time. True to his type, he was
+fond of children and animals, and children and animals liked him.
+"Come and speak to me," he continued, holding out his hand to
+Fina.--"Whose child is she?" vaguely to the company in general.
+
+"Mine," said Mr. Dundas emphatically--"my youngest daughter, Fina
+Dundas."
+
+Edgar knew what he meant. He had often heard the story from his
+sisters, and since his return home he had had Adelaide Birkett's
+comments thereon. He looked then with even more interest on the
+pretty little creature in dark-blue velvet and swansdown, careless,
+unconscious, happy, as the child of a mystery and a tragedy in one.
+
+"Ah!" he said sympathetically. "Come to me, little one," again,
+coaxingly.
+
+Fina, with her finger in her mouth, went up to him half shyly, half
+boldly, and wholly prettily. She let him take her on his knee and kiss
+her without remonstrance. She was of the kind to like being taken on
+knees and kissed--especially by gentlemen who were strong and matronly
+women who were soft--and she soon made friends. Not many minutes
+elapsed before, kneeling upon his knees, she was stroking his tawny
+beard and plaiting it in threes, pulling his long moustache, playing
+with his watch-guard, and laughing in his face with the pretty
+audacity of six.
+
+"What a dear little puss!" cried Edgar, caressing her. "Very like
+you, Joseph, I should think, when you were her age, judging by your
+picture. Is she not, mother?"
+
+"They say so, but I do not see it," answered Mrs. Harrowby primly.
+
+She did not like to hear about this resemblance. There was something
+in it that annoyed her intensely, she scarcely knew why, and the more
+so because it was true.
+
+"Poor madame used to say so: she saw it from the first, when Fina was
+quite a little baby," said Josephine in a low voice.
+
+She was kneeling by her brother's side caressing Fina. She always made
+love to the little girl: it was one of her methods of making love to
+the father.
+
+"Is she like her mother?" asked Edgar in the same low tones, looking
+at the child critically.
+
+"A little," answered Josephine--"not much. It is odd, is it not, that
+she should be more like me?"
+
+Just then Fina laid her fresh sweet lips against Edgar's, and he
+kissed her with a strange thrill of tenderness.
+
+"Why, Edgar, I never saw you take so to a child before," cried Mrs.
+Harrowby, not quite pleasantly; and on Sebastian adding with his
+nervous little laugh, which meant the thing it assumed only to play
+at, "I declare I shall be quite jealous, Edgar, if you make love to
+my little girl like this." Edgar, who had the Englishman's dislike
+to observation, save when he offered himself for personal admiration,
+laughed too and put Fina away.
+
+But the child had taken a fancy to him, and could scarcely be induced
+to leave him. She clung to his hand still, and went reluctantly when
+her stepfather called her. It was a very little matter, but men being
+weak in certain directions, it delighted Edgar and annoyed Sebastian
+beyond measure.
+
+"I hope your elder daughter is well," then said Edgar, emphasizing the
+adjective, the vision of Leam as he first saw her, breasting the wind,
+filling his eyes with a strange light.
+
+"Leam? Quite well, thanks. But how do you know anything about her?"
+was Sebastian's reply.
+
+"I met her yesterday on the moor, and Rover introduced us," answered
+Edgar laughing.
+
+"How close she is!" said her father fretfully. "She never told me a
+word about it."
+
+"Perhaps she thought the incident too trifling," suggested Edgar, a
+little chagrined.
+
+"Oh no, not at all! In a place like North Aston the least thing counts
+as an adventure; and meeting for the first time one of the neighbors
+is not an incident to be forgotten as if it were of no more value than
+meeting a flock of sheep."
+
+Mr. Dundas spoke peevishly. To a man who liked to be amused and who
+lived on crumbs this reserved companionship was disappointing and
+tiresome.
+
+"Leam is at home making music," said Fina disdainfully. She had caught
+the displeased accent of her adopted father, and echoed it.
+
+"Does she make much music?" asked Edgar with his hand under her chin,
+turning up her face.
+
+The child shrugged her little shoulders. "She makes a noise," she
+said; and those who heard her laughed.
+
+"That is not a very polite way of putting it," said Edgar a little
+gravely.
+
+"No," said Josephine.
+
+"You should speak nicely of your sister, my little one," put in
+Sebastian.
+
+Fina looked up into his face reproachfully. "You called it a noise
+yourself, papa," she said, pouting. "You made her leave off yesterday
+as soon as you came in, because you said she made your head ache with
+her noise, and set your teeth--something, I don't know what."
+
+"Did I, dear?" he repeated carelessly. "Well, we need not discuss the
+subject. I dare say it amuses her to make music, as you call it, and
+so we need say no more about it."
+
+"But you did say it was a noise," persisted Fina, climbing on to his
+knees and putting her arms round his neck. "And I think it a noise
+too."
+
+"Poor Leam's music cannot be very first-rate," remarked Maria, who
+was a proficient and played almost as well as a "professional." "Four
+years ago she did not know her notes, and four years' practice cannot
+be expected to make a perfect pianiste."
+
+"But a person may play very sweetly and yet not be what you call
+perfect," said Edgar.
+
+"Do you think so?" Maria answered with a frosty smile. "I do not." Of
+what use to have toiled for thirty years early and late at scales
+and thorough-bass if a stupid girl like Leam could be allowed to play
+sweetly after four years' desultory practice? "Adelaide Birkett, if
+you will, plays well," she added; "but Leam, poor child! how should
+she?"
+
+"I hope I shall have an opportunity of judging for myself," said
+Edgar with his company manner.--"When will you come and dine here,
+Dundas?--to-morrow? You and your elder daughter: we shall be very glad
+to see you."
+
+He looked to his mother. Mrs. Harrowby had drawn her lips tight, and
+wore an injured air doing its best to be resigned. This was
+Edgar's first essay in domestic mastership, and it pained her, not
+unnaturally.
+
+"Thanks," said Sebastian. "Willingly, if--" looking to Mrs. Harrowby.
+
+"I have no engagement, and Edgar is master now," said that lady.
+
+"And mind that Leam comes too," said Josephine, sharing her favorite
+brother's action by design.
+
+"And me," cried Fina.
+
+Whereat they all laughed, which made Fina cry, to be consoled only by
+some sweetmeats which Josephine found in her work-basket.
+
+It was agreed, then, that the next day Leam and her father should dine
+at the Hill.
+
+"Only ourselves," Edgar said, wanting the excuse of her "being the
+only lady" to devote himself to Leam. It was strange that he should
+be so anxious to see her nearer, and in company with his sisters and
+mother; for after all, why should he? What was she to him, either near
+or afar off, alone or in the inner circle of his family?
+
+But when the next day came Mr. Dundas appeared alone. Leam had been
+taken with a fit of shyness, pride--who shall say?--and refused to
+accept her share of the invitation. Her father made the stereotyped
+excuse of "headache;" but headaches occur too opportunely to be
+always real, and Leam's to-night was set down to the fancy side of
+the account, and not believed in by the hearers any more than by the
+bearer.
+
+Edgar raged against her in his heart, and decided that she was not
+worth a second thought, while the ladies said in an undertone from
+each to each, "How rude!" Maria adding, "How like Leam!" the chain
+of condemnation receiving no break till it came to Josephine, whose
+patient soul refrained from wrath, and gave as her link, "Poor Leam!
+perhaps she is shy or has really a headache."
+
+In spite of his decision that she was not worth a second thought,
+the impression which Leam had made on Edgar deepened with his
+disappointment, and he became restless and unpleasant in his temper,
+casting about for means whereby he might see her again. He cast
+about in vain. This fit of shyness, pride, reluctance--who knows
+what?--continued with Leam for many days after this. If she went out
+at all, she went where she knew she should not be met; and if Edgar
+called at Ford House, she was not to be found. She mainly devoted
+herself to Fina and some books lent her by Alick, and kept the house
+with strange persistency. Perhaps this was because the weather was
+bad, for Leam, who could bear wind and frost and noonday sun, could
+not bear wet. When it rained she shut herself up in her own room, and
+pitied herself for the ungenial skies as she had pitied herself for
+some other things before now.
+
+Sitting thus reading one miserably dark, cold, misty day, the child
+Fina came in to her with her lessons, which she repeated well. They
+were very small and insignificant little lessons, for Leam had a
+fellow-feeling for the troubles of ignorance, and laid but a light
+hand on the frothy mind inside that curly head. When they were
+finished the little one said coaxingly, "Now play with me, Leam! You
+never play with me."
+
+"What can I do, Fina?" poor Leam replied.
+
+She had never learnt to play when she was a child: she had never built
+towers and towns, made railway trains and coaches with the sofa and
+chairs, played at giants through the dark passages and screamed when
+she was caught. She had only sat still when mamma was asleep, or when
+she was awake played on the zambomba, or listened to her when she told
+her of the things of Spain, and made up stories with her dolls that
+were less edifying than those of Mother Bunch. She could scarcely,
+however, unpack that old box full of waxen puppets, with the one
+dressed in scarlet and black, with fishbone horns and a worsted tail,
+and a queer clumped kind of foot made of folds of leather, cleft in
+the middle, that used to go by the name of "El senor papa." What could
+she do?
+
+"Shall I tell you a story?" she then said in a mild fit of
+desperation, for story-telling was as little in her way as anything
+else.
+
+"Yes, yes, tell me a story!" Fina clapped her chubby hands together
+and climbed up into Leam's lap.
+
+"What shall it be about--bears or tigers, or what?" asked Leam
+dutifully.
+
+"Tell me about mamma, my own mamma, not Aunty Birkett," said Fina.
+
+Leam shuddered from head to foot. This was the first time the little
+girl had mentioned her mother's name to her. Indeed, she did not know
+that she had ever heard of her at all--ever known that she had had
+a mother; but the servants had talked, and the child's curiosity was
+aroused. The dead mother is as much a matter of wondering inquiry
+as the angels and the stars; and Fina's imagination was beginning to
+bestir itself on the mysteries of childish life.
+
+"I have nothing to tell you about her," said Leam, controlling
+herself, though she still shivered.
+
+"Yes, you have--everything," insisted Fina. "Was mamma pretty?"
+playing with a corner of her sister's ribbon.
+
+"People said so," answered Leam.
+
+"As pretty as Cousin Addy?" she asked.
+
+"About," said Leam, who thought neither supreme.
+
+"Prettier than you?"
+
+"I don't know: how can I tell?" she answered a little impatiently.
+
+The mother's blood that ran in her, the mother's mould in which she
+had been formed, forbade her to put herself below madame in anything;
+but, as she was neither vain nor conscious, she found Fina's question
+difficult to answer.
+
+"Oh," cried Fina, in a tone of disappointment, "then she could not
+have been very pretty."
+
+"I dare say she was, but I do not know," returned Leam.
+
+"And she died?" continued Fina, yawning in a childishly indifferent
+manner.
+
+"Yes, she died."
+
+"Why? Who killed her? Did papa?" asked Fina.
+
+Leam's face was very white: "No, not papa."
+
+"Did God?"
+
+"I cannot tell you, Fina," said Leam, to whom falsehoods were
+abhorrent and the truth impossible.
+
+"Did you?" persisted Fina with childish obstinacy.
+
+"Now go," said Leam, putting her off her lap and rising from her chair
+in strange disorder. "You are troublesome and ask too many questions."
+
+Fina began to cry loudly, and Mr. Dundas, from his library below,
+heard her. He came up stairs with his fussy, restless kindness, and
+opened the door of the room where his two daughters, of nature and by
+adoption, were.
+
+"Heyday! what's all this about?" he cried. "What's the matter, my
+little Fina? what are you crying for? Tut, tut! you should not cry
+like this, darling; and, Leam," severely, "you should really keep the
+child better amused and happy. She is as good as gold with me: with
+you there is always something wrong."
+
+Fina ran into his arms sobbing. "Leam is cross," she said. "She will
+not tell me who killed mamma."
+
+The man's ruddy face, reddened and roughened with travel, grew white
+and pitiful. "God took her away, my darling," he said with a sob.
+"She was too good for me, and He took her to live with the angels in
+heaven,"
+
+"And Leam's mamma? Is she in heaven too with the angels?" asked Fina,
+opening her eyes wide through their tears,
+
+"I hope so," Sebastian answered in an altered voice.
+
+Leam covered her face in her hands; then lifting it up, she said
+imploringly, "Papa, do not talk to her of mamma. It is sacrilege."
+
+"I agree with you, Leam," said Mr, Dundas in a steady voice. "We meet
+at the same point, but perhaps by different methods."
+
+[TO BE CONTINUED.]
+
+
+
+
+LETTERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA
+
+BY LADY BARKER.
+
+
+    CAPE TOWN, October 16, 1875.
+
+    Safe, safe at last, after twenty-four days of nothing but sea
+    and sky, of white-crested waves--which made no secret of their
+    intention of coming on board whenever they could or of tossing
+    the good ship Edinburgh Castle hither and thither like a
+    child's plaything--and of more deceitful sluggish rolling
+    billows, looking tolerably calm to the unseafaring eye, but
+    containing a vast amount of heaving power beneath their slow,
+    undulating water-hills and valleys. Sometimes sky and sea
+    have been steeped in dazzling haze of golden glare, sometimes
+    brightened to blue of a sapphire depth. Again, a sudden change
+    of wind has driven up serried clouds from the south and east,
+    and all has been gray and cold and restful to eyes wearied
+    with radiance and glitter of sun and sparkling water.
+
+    Never has there been such exceptional weather, although the
+    weather of my acquaintance invariably _is_ exceptional. No
+    sooner had the outlines of Madeira melted and blended into
+    the soft darkness of a summer night than we appeared to sail
+    straight into tropic heat and a sluggish vapor, brooding on
+    the water like steam from a giant geyser. This simmering,
+    oily, exhausting temperature carried us close to the line.
+    "What is before us," we asked each other languidly, "if it be
+    hotter than this? How can mortal man, woman, still less child,
+    endure existence?" Vain alarms! Yet another shift of the
+    light wind, another degree passed, and we are all shivering in
+    winter wraps. The line was crossed in greatcoats and shawls,
+    and the only people whose complexion did not resemble a
+    purple plum were those lucky ones who had strength of mind
+    and steadiness of body to lurch up and down the deck all
+    day enjoying a strange method of movement which they called
+    walking.
+
+    The exceptional weather pursued us right into the very
+    dock. Table Mountain ought to be seen--and very often is
+    seen--seventy miles away. I am told it looks a fine bold bluff
+    at that distance, Yesterday we had blown off our last pound of
+    steam and were safe under its lee before we could tell
+    there was a mountain there at all, still less an almost
+    perpendicular cliff more than three thousand feet high. Robben
+    Island looked like a dun-colored hillock as we shot past it
+    within a short distance, and a more forlorn and discouraging
+    islet I don't think I have ever beheld. When I expressed
+    something of this impression to a cheery fellow-voyager, he
+    could only urge in its defence that there were a great many
+    rabbits on it. If he had thrown the lighthouse into the
+    bargain, I think he would have summed up all its attractive
+    features. Unless Langalibalele is of a singularly
+    unimpressionable nature, he must have found his sojourn on
+    it somewhat monotonous, but he always says he was very
+    comfortable there.
+
+    And now for the land. We are close alongside of a wharf,
+    and still a capital and faithful copy of a Scotch mist wraps
+    houses, trees and sloping uplands in a fibry fantastic veil,
+    and the cold drizzle seems to curdle the spirits and energies
+    of the few listless Malays and half-caste boys and men who are
+    lounging about. Here come hansom cabs rattling up one after
+    the other, all with black drivers in gay and fantastic head
+    and shoulder gear; but their hearts seem precisely as
+    the hearts of their London brethren, and they single out
+    new-comers at a glance, and shout offers to drive them a
+    hundred yards or so for exorbitant sums, or yell laudatory
+    recommendations of sundry hotels. You must bear in mind that
+    in a colony every pot-house is a hotel, and generally rejoices
+    in a name much too imposing to fit across its frontage. These
+    hansoms are all painted white with the name of some ship in
+    bright letters on the side, and are a great deal cleaner,
+    roomier and more comfortable than their London "forbears." The
+    horses are small and shabby, but rattle along at a good pace;
+    and soon each cab has its load of happy home-comers and swings
+    rapidly away to make room for fresh arrivals hurrying up for
+    fares. Hospitable suggestions come pouring in, and it is as
+    though it were altogether a new experience when one steps
+    cautiously on the land, half expecting it to dip away
+    playfully from under one's feet. A little boy puts my thoughts
+    into words when he exclaims, "How steady the ground is!"
+    and becomes a still more faithful interpreter of a wave-worn
+    voyager's sensations when, a couple of hours later, he demands
+    permission to get _out_ of his delicious little white bed
+    that he may have the pleasure of getting _into_ it again. The
+    evening is cold and raw and the new picture is all blurred and
+    soft and indistinct, and nothing seems plain except the
+    kindly grace of our welcome and the
+    never-before-sufficiently-appreciated delights of space and
+    silence.
+
+    OCTOBER 17.
+
+    How pleasant is the process familiarly known as "looking
+    about one," particularly when performed under exceptionally
+    favorable circumstances! A long and happy day commenced with a
+    stroll through the botanic gardens, parallel with which runs,
+    on one side, a splendid oak avenue just now in all the
+    vivid freshness of its young spring leaves. The gardens are
+    beautifully kept, and are valuable as affording a sort of
+    experimental nursery in which new plants and trees can be
+    brought up on trial and their adaptability to the soil and
+    climate ascertained. For instance, the first thing that caught
+    my eye was the gigantic trunk of an Australian blue-gum tree,
+    which had attained to a girth and height not often seen in its
+    own land. The flora of the Cape Colony is exceptionally varied
+    and beautiful, but one peculiarity incidentally alluded to by
+    my charming guide struck me as very noticeable. It is that
+    in this dry climate and porous soil all the efforts of
+    uncultivated nature are devoted to the _stems_ of the
+    vegetation: on their sap-retaining power depends the life of
+    the plant, so blossom and leaf, though exquisitely indicated,
+    are fragile and incomplete compared to the solidity and
+    bulbous appearance of the stalk. Everything is sacrificed to
+    the practical principle of keeping life together, and it is
+    not until these stout-stemmed plants are cultivated and
+    duly sheltered and watered, and can grow, as it were, with
+    confidence, that they are able to do justice to the inherent
+    beauty of penciled petal and veined leaf. Then the stem
+    contracts to ordinary dimensions, and leaf and blossom expand
+    into things which may well be a joy to the botanist's eye.
+    A thousand times during that shady saunter did I envy my
+    companions their scientific acquaintance with the beautiful
+    green things of earth, and that intimate knowledge of a
+    subject which enhances one's appreciation of its charms as
+    much as bringing a lamp into a darkened picture-gallery. There
+    are the treasures of form and color, but from ignorant eyes
+    more than half their charms and wonders are held back.
+
+    A few steps beyond the garden stand the library and natural
+    history museum. The former is truly a credit to the Colony.
+    Spacious, handsome, rich in literary treasures, It would
+    bear comparison with similar institutions in far older and
+    wealthier places. But I have often noticed in colonies how
+    much importance is attached to the possession of a good public
+    library, and how fond, as a rule, colonists are of books. In
+    a new settlement other shops may be ill supplied, but there
+    is always a good bookseller's, and all books are to be bought
+    there at pretty nearly the same prices as in England. Here
+    each volume costs precisely the same as it would in London,
+    and it would puzzle ever so greedy a reader to name a book
+    which would not be instantly handed to him.
+
+    The museum is well worth a visit of many more hours than we
+    could afford minutes, and, as might be expected, contains
+    numerous specimens of the _Bok_ family, whose tapering horns
+    and slender legs are to be seen at every turn of one's head.
+    Models are there also of the largest diamonds, and especially
+    well copied is the famous "Star of South Africa," a
+    magnificent brilliant of purest water, sold here originally
+    for something like twelve thousand pounds, and resold for
+    double that sum three or four years back. In these few hours I
+    perceive, or think I perceive, a certain soreness, if one
+    may use the word, on the part of the Cape Colonists about the
+    unappreciativeness of the English public toward their produce
+    and possessions. For Instance, an enormous quantity of wine is
+    annually exported, which reaches London by a devious route and
+    fetches a high price, as it is fairly entitled to do from its
+    excellence. If that same wine were sent direct to a London
+    merchant and boldly sold as Cape wine, it is said that the
+    profit on it would be a very different affair. The same
+    prejudice exists against Cape diamonds. Of course, as in other
+    things, a large proportion of inferior stones are forced into
+    the market and serve to give the diamonds that bad name which
+    we all know is so fatal to a dog. But it is only necessary to
+    pretend that a really fine Cape diamond has come from Brazil
+    to ensure its fetching a handsome price, and in that way even
+    jewelers themselves have been known to buy and give a good
+    round sum, too, for stones they would otherwise have looked
+    upon with suspicion. Already I have seen a straw-colored
+    diamond from "Du Zoit's pan" in the diamond-fields cut in
+    Amsterdam and set in London, which could hold its own for
+    purity, radiance and color against any other stone of the same
+    rare tint, without fear or favor; but of course such gems are
+    not common, and fairly good diamonds cost as much here as in
+    any other part of the world.
+
+    The light morning mists from that dampness of yesterday have
+    rolled gradually away as the beautiful sunshine dried the
+    atmosphere, and by midday the table-cloth, as the colonists
+    affectionately call the white, fleece-like vapor which so
+    often rests on their pet mountain, has been folded up and laid
+    aside in Cloudland for future use. I don't know what picture
+    other people may have made to their own minds of the shape and
+    size of Table Mountain, but it was quite a surprise and the
+    least little bit in the world of a disappointment to me to
+    find that it cuts the sky (and what a beautiful sky it is!)
+    with a perfectly straight and level line. A gentle, undulating
+    foreground broken into ravines, where patches of green _velts_
+    or fields, clumps of trees and early settlers' houses nestle
+    cosily down, guides the eye half-way up the mountain. There
+    the rounder forms abruptly cease, and great granite cliffs
+    rise, bare and straight, up to the level line stretching ever
+    so far along. "It is so characteristic," and "You grow to be
+    so fond of that mountain," are observations I have heard made
+    in reply to the carping criticisms of travelers, and already
+    I begin to understand the meaning of the phrases. But you
+    need to see the mountain from various points of view and under
+    different influences of sun and cloud before you can take in
+    its striking and peculiar charms.
+
+    On each side of the straight line which is emphatically Table
+    Mountain, but actually forming part of it, is a bold headland
+    of the shape one is usually accustomed to in mountains. The
+    "Devil's Peak" is uncompromising enough for any one's taste,
+    whilst the "Lion's Head" charms the eye by its bluff form
+    and deep purple fissures. These grand promontories are not,
+    however, half so beloved by Cape Colonists as their own Table
+    Mountain, and it is curious and amusing to notice how the
+    influence of this odd straight ridge, ever before their eyes,
+    has unconsciously guided and influenced their architectural
+    tastes. All the roofs of the houses are straight--straight
+    as the mountain; a gable is almost unknown, and even the few
+    steeples are dwarfed to an imperceptible departure from the
+    prevailing straight line. The very trees which shade the
+    Parade-ground and border the road in places have their tops
+    blown absolutely straight and flat, as though giant shears
+    had trimmed them; but I must confess, in spite of a
+    natural anxiety to carry out my theory, that the violent
+    "sou'-easters" are the "straighteners" in their case.
+
+    Cape Town is so straggling that it is difficult to form any
+    idea of its real size, but the low houses are neat and the
+    streets are well kept and look quaint and lively enough to my
+    new eyes this morning. There are plenty of people moving about
+    with a sociable, business-like air; lots of different shades
+    of black and brown Malays, with pointed hats on the men's
+    heads: the women encircle their dusky, smiling faces with a
+    gay cotton handkerchief and throw another of a still brighter
+    hue over their shoulders. When you add to this that they
+    wear a full, flowing, stiffly-starched cotton gown of a third
+    bright color, you can perhaps form some idea of how they
+    enliven the streets. Swarms of children everywhere, romping
+    and laughing and showing their white teeth in broadest
+    of grins. The white children strike me at once as looking
+    marvelously well--such chubby cheeks, such sturdy fat
+    legs--and all, black or white, with that amazing air of
+    independence peculiar to baby-colonists. Nobody seems to mind
+    them and nothing seems to harm them. Here are half a dozen
+    tiny boys shouting and laughing at one side of the road, and
+    half a dozen baby-girls at the other (they all seem to play
+    separately): they are all driving each other, for "horses" is
+    the one game here. By the side of a pond sit two toddles of
+    about three years old, in one garment apiece and pointed hats:
+    they are very busy with string and a pin; but who is taking
+    care of them and why don't they tumble in? They are as fat as
+    ortolans and grin at us in the most friendly fashion.
+
+    We must remember that this chances to be the very best moment
+    of the whole year in which to see the Cape and the dwellers
+    thereat. The cold weather has left its bright roses on the
+    children's cheeks, and the winter rains exceptionally having
+    this year made every blade of grass and leaf of tree to laugh
+    and sing in freshest green. After the dry, windy summer I am
+    assured there is hardly a leaf and never a blade of grass to
+    be seen in Cape Town, and only a little straggling verdure
+    under the shelter of the mountain. The great want of this
+    place is water. No river, scarcely a brook, refreshes one's
+    eye for many and many a league inward. The necessary water for
+    the use of the town is brought down by pipes from the numerous
+    springs which trickle out of the granite cliffs of Table
+    Mountain, but there is never a sufficiency to spare for
+    watering roads or grassplots. This scarcity is a double loss
+    to residents and visitors, for one misses it both for use and
+    beauty.
+
+    Everybody who comes here rides or drives round the "Kloof."
+    That may be; but what I maintain is that very few do it so
+    delightfully as I did this sunny afternoon with a companion
+    who knew and loved every turn of the romantic road, who could
+    tell me the name of every bush or flower, of every distant
+    stretch of hills, and helped me to make a map in my head of
+    the stretching landscape and curving bay. Ah! how delicious it
+    was, the winding, climbing road, at whose every angle a fresh
+    fair landscape fell away from beneath our feet or a shining
+    stretch of sea, whose transparent green and purple shadows
+    broke in a fringe of feathery spray at the foot of bold, rocky
+    cliffs, or crept up to a smooth expanse of silver sand in a
+    soft curling line of foam! "Kloof" means simply cleft, and is
+    the pass between the Table Mountain and the Lion's Head, The
+    road first rises, rises, rises, until one seems half-way up
+    the great mountain, and the little straight--roofed white
+    houses, the green velts or fields and the parallel lines of
+    the vineyards have sunk below one's feet far, far away. The
+    mountain gains in grandeur as one approaches it, for the
+    undulating spurs which run from it down to the sea-shore take
+    away from the height looking upward. But when these are left
+    beneath, the perpendicular Walls of granite, rising sheer
+    and straight up to the bold sky-line, and the rugged, massive
+    strength of the buttress-like cliffs, begin to gain something
+    of their true value to the stranger's eye. The most beautiful
+    part of the road, however, to my taste, is the descent, when
+    the shining expanse of Camp's Bay lies shimmering in the warm
+    afternoon haze with a thousand lights and shadows from cloud
+    and cliff touching and passing over the crisp water-surface.
+    By many a steep zigzag we round the Lion's Head, and drop once
+    more on a level road running parallel to the sea-shore, and so
+    home in the balmy and yet bracing twilight. The midday sun is
+    hot and scorching even at this time of year, but it is always
+    cool in the shade, and no sooner do the afternoon shadows grow
+    to any length than the air freshens into sharpness, and by
+    sundown one is glad of a good warm shawl.
+
+
+    OCTOBER 18.
+
+    Another bright, ideal day, and the morning passed in a
+    delicious flower-filled room looking over old books and
+    records and listening to odd, quaint little scraps from the
+    old Dutch records. But directly after luncheon (and how hungry
+    we all are, and how delicious everything tastes on shore!) the
+    open break with four capital horses comes to the door, and we
+    start for a long, lovely drive. Half a mile or so takes us
+    out on a flat red road with Table Mountain rising straight up
+    before it, but on the left stretches away a most enchanting
+    panorama. It is all so soft in coloring and tone, distinct and
+    yet not hard, and exquisitely beautiful!
+
+    The Blue-Berg range of mountains stretch beyond the great bay,
+    which, unless a "sou'-easter" is tearing over it, lies glowing
+    in tranquil richness. This afternoon it is colored like an
+    Italian lake. Here are lines of chrysoprase, green-fringed,
+    white with little waves, and beyond lie dark, translucent,
+    purple depths, which change with every passing cloud. Beyond
+    these amethystic shoals again stretches the deep blue water,
+    and again beyond, and bluer still, rise the five ranges
+    of "Hottentots' Holland," which encircle and complete the
+    landscape, bringing the eye round again to the nearer cliffs
+    of the Devil's Peak. When the Dutch came here some two hundred
+    years ago, they seized upon this part of the coast and called
+    it Holland, driving the Hottentots beyond the neighboring
+    range and telling them that was to be their Holland--a name it
+    keeps to this day. Their consciences must have troubled them
+    after this arbitrary division of the soil, for up the highest
+    accessible spurs of their own mountain they took the
+    trouble to build several queer little square houses called
+    "block-houses," from which they could keep a sharp look-out
+    for foes coming over the hills from Hottentots' Holland.
+    The foes never came, however, and the roofs and walls of
+    the block-houses have gradually tumbled in, and the
+    gun-carriages--for they managed to drag heavy ordnance up the
+    steep hill-side--have rotted away, whilst the old-fashioned
+    cannon lie, grim and rusty, amid a tangled profusion of wild
+    geranium, heath and lilies, I scrambled up to one of the
+    nearest block-houses, and found the date on the dismounted gun
+    to be more than a hundred years old. The view was beautiful
+    and the air fresh and fragrant with scent of flowers.
+
+    But to return to our drive. I could gaze and gaze for ever at
+    this lovely panorama, but am told this is the ugliest part of
+    the road. The road itself is certainly not pretty just here,
+    and is cloudy with a fine red dust, but this view of sea and
+    distant hills is enchanting. Soon we get under the lee of
+    the great mountain, and then its sheltering arms show their
+    protective power; for splendid oak avenues begin to border the
+    road all the way, and miniature forests of straight-stemmed
+    pines and shimmering belts of the ghostly silver tree run up
+    all the mountain-clefts. Stem and leaf of the silver tree are
+    all of purest white; and when one gets a gleam of sunlight
+    on a distant patch of these trees, the effect is quite
+    indescribable, contrasting, as they do, with green of field
+    and vineyard. The vines all about here and towards Constantia,
+    thirteen miles off, are dwarf-plants, and only grow to the
+    height of gooseberry-bushes. It is a particular species, which
+    is found to answer best as requiring less labor to train and
+    cultivate, and is less likely to be blown out of the ground
+    by the violent "sou'-easters" which come sweeping over the
+    mountain. These gales are evidently the greatest annoyance
+    which Cape Colonists have to endure; and although everybody
+    kindly suggests that I _ought_ to see one, just to understand
+    what it is like, I am profoundly thankful that I only know it
+    from their description and my own distinct recollection of the
+    New Zealand "nor'-westers." Those were hot winds, scorching
+    and curling up everything, whereas this is rather a cold
+    breeze, although it blows chiefly in summer. It whirls along
+    clouds of dust from the red clay roads and fields which
+    penetrates and clings to everything in the most extraordinary
+    manner. All along the road the stems and lower branches of the
+    trees are dyed a deep brick-dust color, and I hear moving and
+    pathetic stories of how it ruins clothes, not only utterly
+    spoiling black silk dresses, but staining white petticoats and
+    children's frocks and pinafores with a border of color exactly
+    like the ruddle with which sheep are branded. Especially is
+    it the terror of sailors, rendering the navigation along the
+    coast dangerous and difficult; for it blends land and water
+    into one indistinct whirl of vaporous cloud, confusing and
+    blurring everything until one cannot distinguish shore from
+    sea.
+
+    The vineyards of Constantia originally took their pretty name
+    from the fair daughter of one of the early Dutch governors,
+    but now it has grown into a generic word, and you see
+    "Cloete's Constantia," "Von Reybeck Constantia," written upon
+    great stone gateways leading by long avenues into the various
+    vine-growing plantations. It was to the former of these
+    constantias, which was also the farthest off, that we were
+    bound that pleasant summer afternoon, and from the time we got
+    out of the carriage until the moment we re-entered it--all
+    too soon, but it is a long drive back in the short cold
+    twilight--I felt as though I had stepped through a magic
+    portal into the scene of one of Washington Irving's
+    stories. It was all so simple and homely, so quaint and so
+    inexpressibly picturesque. The house had stood there for a
+    couple of hundred years, and looks as though it might last for
+    ever, with its air of cool, leisurely repose and comfort and
+    strength.
+
+    In the flagged hall stands a huge stalactite some ten feet
+    high, brought a hundred years ago from caves far away in the
+    distant ranges. It is shaped something like a Malay's hat,
+    only the peak tapers to a point about eight feet high. The
+    drawing-room--though it seems a profanation to call that
+    venerable stately room by so flippant and modern a name--is
+    large, ceiled with great beams of cedar, and lighted by lofty
+    windows, which must contain many scores of small panes of
+    glass. There were treasures of rarest old china and delfware,
+    and curious old carved stands for fragile dishes. A wealth of
+    swinging-baskets of flowers and ferns and bright girl-faces
+    lighted up the solemn, shady old room, in which we must not
+    linger, for there is much to see outside. First to the cellar,
+    as it is called, though it is far from being under ground,
+    and is, in fact, a spacious stone building with an
+    elaborately-carved pediment. Here are rows and rows of giant
+    casks, stretching on either hand into avenues in the black
+    distance, but these are mere children in the nursery, compared
+    to those we are going to see. First we must pause in a middle
+    room full of quaintest odds and ends--crossbows, long whips of
+    hippopotamus hide, strange rusty old swords and firearms--to
+    look at a map of South Africa drawn somewhere about 1640. It
+    hangs on the wall and is hardly to be touched, for the paint
+    and varnish crack and peel off at a breath. It is a marvel of
+    accurate geographical knowledge, and is far better filled
+    in than the maps of yesterday. All poor Livingstone's great
+    geographical discoveries are marked on it as being--perhaps
+    only from description--known or guessed at all that long time
+    ago. It was found impossible to photograph it on account of
+    the dark shade which age has laid over the original yellow
+    varnish, but a careful tracing has been made and, I believe,
+    sent home to the Geographical Society. It is in the long
+    corridor beyond this that the "stuck-vats" live--puncheons
+    which hold easily some thousand gallons or so, and are of a
+    solemn rotundity calculated to strike awe into the beholder's
+    heart. Here is white constantia, red constantia, young
+    constantia, middle-aged constantia, and constantia so old as
+    to be a liqueur almost beyond price. When it has been kept
+    all these years, the sweetness by which it is distinguished
+    becomes so absorbed and blended as to be hardly perceptible.
+
+    Presently one of the party throws a door suddenly open, and,
+    behold, we are standing right over a wild wooded glen with a
+    streamlet running through it, and black washerwomen beating
+    heaps of white clothes on the strips of shingle. Turtle-doves
+    are cooing, and one might almost fancy one was back again on
+    the wild Scotch west coast, until some one else says calmly,
+    "Look at the ostriches!" Here they come, with a sort of
+    dancing step, twisting their long necks and snake-like heads
+    from side to side in search of a tempting pebble or trifle of
+    hardware. Their wings are slightly raised, and the long fringe
+    of white feathers rustles softly as they trot easily and
+    gracefully past us. They are young male birds, and in a few
+    months more their plumage, which now resembles that of a
+    turkey-cock, will be jet black, except the wing-feathers. A
+    few drops of rain are falling, so we hurry back to where the
+    carriage is standing under some splendid oak trees, swallow a
+    sort of stirrup-cup of delicious hot tea, and so home again as
+    fast as we can go.
+
+
+    OCTOBER 19.
+
+    It is decided that I must take a drive in a Cape cart; so
+    directly after breakfast a smart workman-like-looking vehicle,
+    drawn by a pair of well-bred iron-gray cobs, dashes up under
+    the portico. There are capital horses here, but they fetch
+    a good price, and such a pair as these would easily find
+    purchasers at one hundred and fifty pounds. The cart itself
+    is very trim and smart, with a framework sort of head, which
+    falls back at pleasure, and it holds four people easily. It
+    is a capital vehicle, light and strong and uncommonly
+    comfortable, but I am warned not to imagine that all Cape
+    carts are as easy as this one. Away we go at a fine pace
+    through the delicious sparkling morning sunshine and crisp
+    air, soon turning off the red high-road into a sandy, marshy
+    flat with a sort of brackish back-water standing in pools here
+    and there. We are going to call on Langalibalele, and his
+    son, Malambuli, who are located at Uitvlugt on the Cape
+    downs, about four miles from the town. It is a sort of
+    farm-residence; and considering that the chief has hitherto
+    lived in a reed hut, he is not badly off, for he has plenty
+    of room out of doors as well as a good house over his head. We
+    bump over some strange and rough bits of sandy road and climb
+    up and down steep banks in a manner seldom done on wheels.
+    There is a wealth of lovely flowers blooming around, but I
+    can't help fixing my eyes on the pole of the cart, which is
+    sometimes sticking straight up in the air, its silver hook
+    shining merrily in the sun, or else it has disappeared
+    altogether, and I can only see the horses' haunches. That
+    is when we are going _down_ hill, and I think it is a more
+    terrible sensation than when we are playfully scrambling up
+    some sandy hillock as a cat might.
+
+    Here is the location at last, thank Heaven! and there is
+    Langalibalele sitting in the verandah stoep (pronounced
+    "stoup") on his haunches on a brick. He looks as comfortable
+    as if he were in an arm-chair, but it must be a difficult
+    thing to do if you think seriously of it. The etiquette seems
+    to be to take no notice of him as we pass into the parlor,
+    where we present our pass and the people in authority satisfy
+    themselves that we are quite in rule. Then the old chief walks
+    quietly in, takes off his soft felt hat and sits himself
+    down in a Windsor arm-chair with grave deliberation. He is
+    uncommonly ugly; but when one remembers that he is nearly
+    seventy years of age, it is astonishing to see how young
+    he looks. Langalibalele is not a true Kafir at all: he is a
+    Fingor, a half-caste tribe contemptuously christened by the
+    Kafirs "dogs." His wool grows in distinct and separate clumps
+    like hassocks of grass all over his head. He is a large and
+    powerful man and looks the picture of sleek contentment, as
+    well he may. Only one of his sons, a good-natured, fine
+    young man, black as ebony, is with him, and the chief's one
+    expressed grievance is that none of his wives will come to
+    him. In vain he sends commands and entreaties to these dusky
+    ladies to come and share his solitude. They return for answer
+    that "they are working for somebody else;" for, alas! the only
+    reason their presence is desired is that they may cultivate
+    some of the large extent of ground placed at the old chief's
+    disposal. Neither he nor his stalwart son would dream for
+    a moment of touching spade or hoe; but if the ladies of the
+    family could only be made to see their duty, an honest penny
+    might easily be turned by oats or rye. I gave him a large
+    packet of sugar-plums, which he seized with childish delight
+    and hid away exactly like the big monkeys at the Zoo.
+
+    By way of a joke, Malambuli pretended to want to take them
+    away, and the chattering and laughing which followed was
+    almost deafening. But by and by a gentleman of the party
+    presented a big parcel of the best tobacco, and the chuckling
+    old chief made over at once all my sweetmeats "jintly" to
+    his son, and proceeded to hide away his new treasure. He
+    was dressed exactly like a dissenting minister, and declared
+    through the interpreter he was perfectly comfortable. The
+    impression here seems to be that he is a restless, intriguing
+    and mischief-making old man, who may consider himself as
+    having come out of the hornets' nest he tried to stir up
+    uncommonly well.
+
+    We don't want to bump up and down the sandy plain again, so
+    a lively conversation goes on in Dutch about the road between
+    one of my gentlemen and somebody who looks like a "stuck-vat"
+    upon short legs. The dialogue is fluent and lively, beginning
+    with "Ja, ja!" and ending with "All right!" but it leads to
+    our hitting off the right track exactly, and coming out at a
+    lovely little cottage-villa under the mountain, where we rest
+    and lunch and then stroll about up the hill spurs, through
+    myrtle hedges and shady oak avenues. Then, before the
+    afternoon shadows grow too long, we drive off to "Groote
+    Schuur," the ancient granary of the first settlers, which is
+    now turned into a roomy, comfortable country-house, perfect
+    as a summer residence, and securely sheltered from the
+    "sou'-easters." We approach it through a double avenue of tall
+    Italian pines, and after a little while go out once more for
+    a ramble up some quaint old brick steps, and so through a
+    beautiful glen all fringed and feathered with fresh young
+    fronds of maiden-hair ferns, and masses of hydrangea bushes,
+    which must be beautiful as a poet's dream when they are
+    covered with their great bunches of pale blue blossom. That
+    will not be until Christmas-tide, and, alas! I shall not be
+    here to see, for already my three halcyon days of grace are
+    ended and over, and this very evening we must steam away
+    from a great deal yet unvisited of what is interesting
+    and picturesque, and from friends who three days ago were
+    strangers, but who have made every moment since we landed
+    stand out as a bright and pleasant landmark on life's highway.
+
+
+
+
+ON SANKOTA HEAD.
+
+
+"Yay, Jim, there ain't no doubt but Sairy Macy's a mighty nice gal,
+but, thee sees, what I'm a-contendin' fur is that she's tew nice fur
+thee--that is, not tew nice egzackly, but a leetle tew fine-feathered.
+No, not that egzackly, nuther; but she's a leetle tew fine in the
+feelin's, an' I don't b'lieve that in the long run thee an' she'll
+sort well tugether. Shell git eout o' conceit with thy ways--thee
+_ain't_ the pootiest-mannered feller a gal ever see--an' thee'll git
+eout o' conceit with hern. Thee'll think she's a-gittin' stuck up, an'
+she'll think thee's a-gittin'low-minded. Neow, Jim, my 'dvice is
+good; an' ef thee'll take it, an' not go on with this thing no furder,
+thee'll both be glad on it arterwa'ds. 'Spesh'ly 's she ain't very
+rugged, an' sickly gals had oughter hev rich husbands."
+
+"But, father, Sairy an' me loves o' 'nother."
+
+"Oh, wal, then it's tew late ter say nothin'," said the old man with
+a mingled sigh and smile as, raising his basket of quahaugs to his
+shoulder, he walked off, pressing his bare feet into the yielding sand
+with the firm but clumsy tread of vigorous old age. The rough hat
+of plaited straw was pushed back from a brow that with a cultivated
+nature would have been considered as evidence of considerable
+intellectual power, but, as it was, only showed the probable truth
+of the opinion of his neighbors, that "Stephen Starbuck was a shrewd,
+common-sense ole feller."
+
+Jim was of a little finer grade than his father, having inherited some
+of the traits of his gentle mother, but the young Hercules could by no
+means have been mistaken for an Apollo; neither did his somewhat heavy
+features bear the expression of unselfish loyalty which would have
+given better promise than any mere refinement of features or manner
+for the future happiness of Sarah Macy. But she found nothing wanting
+in her lover as she stood on the cliff-head gazing down upon him.
+Sarah knew that the man she loved was not considered her equal, but
+because she loved him she believed him capable of becoming all that
+she or others could desire. There is in the world no faith so absolute
+as that of a woman in the possibilities of the man she loves. Had
+Sarah read of Sir Galahad--but this was in 1779, and the fame of the
+search for the Holy Grail had not reached the popular ear--she would
+have said to herself, "My Jim is just so pure and holy." Had "her Jim"
+been a Royalist during the English Revolution, Prince Rupert's laurels
+would not have been unshared. Had Jim been a Puritan--though the
+little Quaker maiden did not love Puritans over well, and did not
+fancy her Jim as fighting on that side--England's Protector would
+not have borne the name of Cromwell. Or if Jim were not one of the
+peace-loving Friends, and would enlist in the present struggle for
+liberty, the fame of Commodore James Starbuck should soon eclipse that
+of Paul Jones.
+
+Not for the world would Sarah have given voice to the heretical
+desire, but in her inmost heart was even now a wish that her dear Jim
+held religious opinions that would not interfere with his showing
+to the country how talented, noble and valiant he was; while the
+fair-haired, sunburnt, indolent young Hercules idly gazing out to sea
+was fired with no higher ambition for himself than to be able soon
+to erect on the Head another small house like that of his father, to
+which he might bring "the sweet little girl who loved him, so much."
+For Sarah had committed the common mistake of loving women, and had
+let Jim see how dear he was to her. So now, instead of dwelling on his
+love for her and scheming how he might be worthy of her heart, he was
+fully satisfied with himself, and inclined to grumble at Fortune for
+not at once bestowing the trifle he asked at her hands.
+
+"Jim, how long's thee goin' ter stan' there? If the water _is_ pretty,
+thee can see it any day, so 't ain't worth while to look at it all day
+ter a time."
+
+As, the sweet tones floated down the cliff Jim turned lazily to smile
+up at the speaker, and, raising his heavy basket of quahaugs, came
+leisurely up the steep sand-path, which seemed to shrink from his
+weight at every step: "Wal', Sairy, I wa'n't a-thinkin' much o' the
+water: I was a-thinkin' o' thee, an' o' what fayther said a little
+spell ago."
+
+"What was that, Jim?" Sarah's tone was a little anxious, for she knew
+that there was a jealousy among some of the islanders of the facts
+that her father had brought with him a few heavy articles of "real
+mahogany furnitur," and that her stepmother had always been able to
+hire others to do her spinning and weaving, and even to "help her at
+odd spells with the heft o' the housework."
+
+"Oh, nothin'," replied Jim, passing his free arm carelessly round the
+girl's waist--"othin', undly th' old story 'beout heow we'd best not
+merry, 'cause by'm-by thee'll git ter feelin' better nor me."
+
+"But thee don't believe him, Jim? Thee knows better. Thee knows,"
+adding this with the sweet and sincere but often sadly mistaken
+humility of love--"thee knows thou art better than me. Thou art so
+grand and so noble! If folks only knew thee better they would wonder
+at thee fur puttin' up wi' me. I wish I could make thee a better wife.
+But, Jim, if I ain't very strong, I'm pretty good at contrivin', an'
+I don't believe but what I can manage so's to git along a'most as well
+as them that's tougher."
+
+"Git along? O' course thee'll git along," answered Jim patronizingly.
+"I telled mother th'other day that I didn't cafe ef thee wa'n't 's
+strong as Mary Allen: thee was a good deal smarter, an' I'd be willin'
+tu resk but what I'd hev as little waitin' on ter dew fur thee 's fur
+her. Besides"--and here a gleam of real if shallow affection sprang
+from Jim's eyes as he looked down at the loving creature by his
+side--"besides, I'd _like_ to take care o' thee, Sairy--I would
+indeed."
+
+It is said that the sky has no color of its own--that the deep blue
+we think so beautiful is only owing to the atmosphere through which we
+view it. To Sarah this very slight expression of her lover's care
+for her bore more weight than the most passionate protestations of
+affection could have done to a colder nature, for it was colored by
+the glowing tints of her own warm love; and when the two parted that
+day she carried with her a sweet, satisfying sense of being beloved by
+the "best man on the earth" even as she loved him; while he whistled
+cheerily over his net-mending, thinking "what a sweet little thing it
+was!" "how pretty its eyes were!" and "how kitten-like its ways!" and
+only checked his whistling once in a while to wonder whether the day
+would ever really come when "Sairy would feel herself better than
+him," and to think it also a little hard that old Thomas Macy was "so
+sot agin' the match" that he would give his daughter no portion but an
+outfit of clothes and household linen. "He might jest's well's not,"
+reasoned Jim to himself, "give us a little lift: I guess he would if
+Sairy's own mother was alive; but them step-mothers never wants to
+give nothin' ter the fust wives' childern." In which opinion Jim did
+the second Mrs. Macy much injustice, for it was owing solely to her
+influence that Sarah's father had consented to provide his daughter
+with even a new dress in which to be married to "that big, lazy boy
+o'old Steve Starbuck's."
+
+Meantime, sad, gentle old Mrs. Starbuck had been turning over
+many things in her mind. She felt her son's defects; she knew that
+warm-hearted, imaginative Sarah Macy would be doing a foolish thing to
+marry Jim--as foolish a thing as in her inmost heart she felt, rather
+than acknowledged, that she herself had done when she married Jim's
+father. But the mother-heart longed that her son should grow to be
+what she desired (and what poor Sarah thought he already was), and she
+hoped much from the elevating influence of so good a wife.
+
+So, as she sat knitting, while Jim and his father sat, hats on heads
+and pipes in mouths, mending their nets, old Mrs. Starbuck had "made a
+plan." "Father," said, she at last, "I've be'n thinkin'--"
+
+"Yay," replied the old man gruffly but not unkindly--"yay, I 'spect
+so. Thee's pooty nigh allus a-thinkin' o' suthin. What is it neow?
+Eout with it!"
+
+"I've be'n thinkin' that Jim's all the child we've got--"
+
+"Wal, yay. Hain't had no other--not's I knows on. What o' that?"
+
+"Well, I was a-thinkin' that, that bein' so, an' Jim an' Sairy
+thinkin' so much o' 'nother, it wa'n't o' no use fur them ter keep
+waitin' along year eout an' year in fur a chance tu keep house by
+'emselves. They'd best git married right off an' come an' live along
+o' us."
+
+"W'y, ole woman!"
+
+"W'y, mother!"
+
+"Yay; I hear both on ye," said the gentle old mother with a half
+smile. "I s'posed likely ye'd think strange on't at fust; but ye
+h'ain't no need ter, fur it's a sens'ble thing ter dew, an' yell see't
+so when ye've thought on't a spell: see if ye don't."
+
+So well was the proposal liked that very soon the simple ceremony of
+the Friends made James and Sarah husband and wife; and for a while all
+seemed happiness in the humble cottage on the cliff--cottage so humble
+that it scarcely deserved even that lowly name.
+
+Sarah Macy's father owned one of the largest dwellings on Nantucket--a
+two-story "double house" with two rooms on each side of a broad hall
+running through the house from front to rear. On one side of this hall
+was the "best bedroom," ghostly with tightly-closed white shutters
+and long white dimity curtains to the "four-poster" and shining white
+sanded floor, and the "best-room," terrible in its grandeur of cold
+white walls, straight hard sofa, "spider-legged" table, grenadier-like
+chairs and striped woolen carpet underlaid with straw. In the rear, on
+the other side of the hall, was the kitchen with its big brick oven,
+its yawning fireplace overhung with corpulent iron pots or shining
+copper kettles depending from numerous gallows-like cranes; with its
+glittering copper, brass and pewter utensils arrayed on snowy-shelves;
+with its spotless tables, Its freshly-sanded floor and its
+heavily-beamed, whitewashed ceiling, from which hung many a bunch of
+savory herbs or string of red pepper-pods or bunch of seed-corn, or
+perhaps even a round-backed ham, to get a little browner in the smoke
+that would sometimes pour out from the half-ignited mass of peat. In
+front of the kitchen was the "living-room," in one corner of which
+stood a carved high-post bedstead--glory of the Macys and envy of
+their neighbors--with its curtains of big figured chintz, brown
+sunflowers sprawling over a white ground, drawn aside in the daytime
+to display the marvelous patchwork of the quilt beneath. Fuel was
+scarce even then on the sandy isle; and economy compelled Mr. and
+Mrs. Macy to make use of this living-room as a bedchamber also, since
+Thomas Macy confessed to "bein rather tender," and to liking a warm
+room to sleep In, though his neighbors often insinuated that he was
+killing himself by the Indulgence. And indeed the heat must have been
+stifling when we consider the size of the fireplace, nine feet wide by
+four deep, with a yawning throat, through which the rain poured freely
+down on stormy nights, putting out the best arranged mass of coals,
+ashes and peat, and, in spite of the little gutter purposely made
+round the broad brick hearth, sometimes overflowing and drenching
+a portion of the neat rag carpet, in which, with true Quaker
+consistency, no gay-colored fragment had been allowed a place.
+
+In striking contrast to all this magnificence was the lowly home to
+which James Starbuck brought his happy bride. This little house was
+"double" also--that Is, it was entered in the centre by a small square
+passage just big enough for the outer door to swing in. On one side
+of this entry was a tiny parlor, as dismal as rag carpet, fireless
+hearth, dingy paper and dark-green paper shades to the small windows
+could make it. On the other side of the entry was the tiny and cold
+bedroom of the senior Starbucks. In the centre of the house rose a
+massive chimney, big enough to retain all the heat from a dozen fires.
+Across the rear of parlor, chimney and bedroom ran the long, low
+sunshiny kitchen. At one end of this certain ladder-like stairs
+conducted to the loft, which had served Jim for a "roosting-place"
+ever since he had grown big enough to be trusted o' nights so far
+away from his mother. On Sarah's advent into the family the
+dismal "best-room" was made habitable by the addition of a
+"four-poster"--which Mrs. Starbuck senior regretted was only of
+cherry-wood and not carved--and by sundry little feminine contrivances
+of Sarah's own.
+
+I said that for a time all seemed to go on happily in this humble
+home. And the seeming would have been reality had Jim possessed the
+faith in his wife which she had in him. True, he loved and believed in
+her after his fashion, and his mother was a strong ally on his wife's
+side; but Jim had one fatal weakness of character. He resented the
+slightest look that was anything but simple admiration on the part of
+his wife. A strong nature is not afraid of censure, but a weak one,
+pleading sensitiveness, is easily roused to small retaliations,
+repaying what is good in intention with what is evil. Jim, as his
+father had truly told him, was "not the pootiest-mannered feller a gal
+ever see," and in the daily home-life this became apparent to Sarah
+as it had never been in all the years they had been near neighbors.
+Naturally, she wished her husband to be pleasing to her father, and at
+last ventured to hint, as delicately as she could, at various little
+points in which improvements might be made. At first Jim did not seem
+very restless under such reproofs, given, as they were, with many
+a loving kiss and winsome look; but as months went on his wife's
+caresses were more carelessly received, and her hinted corrections
+with more of resentment. One evening stately old Thomas Macy had
+"happened in," and Jim had greatly grieved his wife by his curt,
+uncivil manner to her father. After he had gone Sarah spoke in a low
+tone and kindly as always, but with more spirit than she had ever
+before manifested or felt, of her husband's disrespectful ways to the
+aged.
+
+For a moment after his wife had ceased, Jim sat with his hat
+pulled closely over his eyes, fiercely biting into the apple he was
+eating--biting and throwing the bits into the glowing mass of peat on
+the hearth. Then he sprang to his feet, exclaiming, "I see! It's all
+come true, what ev'rybody said. Thee thinks thee an' thy folks is
+better'n me an' my folks, an' keeps all the time a-naggin' on me. I
+wish I'd merried Mary Allen! I won't stan' no more o' this talk. If I
+ain't to be maaster o' my own house I won't stay in't." (The house was
+his father's, but angry men never think of such trifles.) And waxing
+pitiful of himself, he continued in a broken and injured tone, "The
+bed o' the sea's the bes' place fur a man whose own wife's got tew big
+feelin' ter put up wi' his ways."
+
+With this dignified burst of eloquence the angry fellow flung himself
+out of the house, letting in at the door as he went a dash of cold,
+sleety rain and a gust of wind that put out the flickering tallow dip
+that was enabling Sarah to take the last stitches in the tiny
+white slip that now fell from her fingers. Too sorely wounded for
+resentment, too fond of her husband to wish even his parents to see
+him in the light in which he was now revealed to her, Sarah silently
+stooped to recover her work, and as she did so her hand was met under
+the table by a sympathizing pressure from that of her mother-in-law.
+This was too much, and, laying her head in the elder woman's lap,
+poor Sarah wept without restraint; while the mother sorrowfully and
+tenderly stroked her soft brown tresses. The father, quietly puffing
+at his pipe, seemed to take no notice, only now and then glancing with
+kindly eye covertly from under his hat-brim at the two grieving women.
+
+Silently, but for the roaring of the wind and surf and fitful dashing
+of the rain, the hours passed on till the high clock in the kitchen
+corner sharply struck eleven. This was a late hour for those times,
+and a faint fear began to come upon them all. Could it be that Jim had
+really meant what he said? "Had he--" And the two women looked blankly
+at each other. Not a word had been uttered, but each felt the other's
+dread.
+
+The father rose and said with a well-affected yawn, "Guess likely
+Jim's went deown ter Uncle Will'amses, an' they thought as 't's so
+stormy he'd bes' not come back. So guess I'll jest go eout ter the
+shed and git some more peat, fur ter keep the fire."
+
+Thus leaving the mother and wife partially reassured, the old
+father slipped out and down the track, cut deeply in the sand by the
+one-horse carts, to "Uncle Will'amses," as fast as the storm would
+permit. But no Jim had been seen there; and still more anxiously the
+stout old man fought his way back against winds that seemed strong"
+enough to blow him like a feather over the cliff's edge, and against
+the spray which shot up from the beach below, smitten by the sounding
+surf, clear over the high top of Sankota Head.
+
+Reaching his door during a brief lull in the wind, he heard faintly
+but distinctly the booming of guns fired by a ship in distress. "It
+mus' be some vessil on the shoals, an' mos' likely Jim's heard her an'
+got some o' th' other boys, an' 's went off in 's boat ter help her.
+Poor soul!" With this comforting reflection the father cheered the
+watchers inside, who had grown fearfully anxious, as the clock had
+long ago struck for midnight.
+
+"We mus' build a fire on the Head ter light 'em," said the old man.
+"There hed oughter be a light'us here, but 's there ain't none, we
+mus' dew the bes' we kin,"
+
+So saying, he harnessed the horse--almost as old as himself--and with
+the aid of the two women loaded the sled with dry wood and started
+with it to the cliff, while the mother and daughter followed behind as
+best they might, struggling to keep alive without being set on fire
+by the coals in the iron pot which they carried between them. It was
+a weary half mile, wind, spray and rain all contending against the
+feeble folk who had come out to help back to land and home the brave
+fellows who had gone to succor the distressed. They made all the more
+sure that this was the case, because Jim's new boat, the pride and joy
+of his life, was not to be found at the spot where he had only that
+day drawn, it high above the reach of even such a storm as this, ready
+for building over it on the morrow its winter house of pine-boughs and
+turf.
+
+At last a fire was kindled; and leaving the women to watch it, old
+Stephen took several weary trips back to the cottage after fuel,
+making serious inroads upon a stock at the best not too large to meet
+the demands of the coming winter. The flame, fanned by the blast even
+more than dashed by the spray and rain, sprang upward, casting its
+ruddy lances of light backward over the sandy downs, destitute even
+then of tree or shrub to break the force of the gale, and forward over
+the frothing white tops and deep, black troughs of waves that seemed
+to the excited eyes of the watching women like so many separate fiends
+leaping upward and stretching out white hands to clutch helpless
+victims and hurry them to the hell beneath. And all the while the
+surf thundered at the foot of the trembling cliff. No form could be
+discovered through the darkness beyond the near neighborhood of the
+shore; and but for the flash of the gun, which was seen continually,
+though its sound was but seldom heard above the surf and the wind, the
+watchers would have thought there was no ship near.
+
+By and by the rain ceased, but there was no moon, and impenetrable
+wind-clouds still hid the stars. Out through the blackness of the
+night the flame-light quivered in long, bright streams over the
+endless lines of ever-advancing waves, but revealed to the watchers
+no ship, no boat, no tokens even of wreck, only the ceaseless reaching
+upward of the beckoning white hands; and the wind bore no sound, save
+at intervals the dull distant boom of the cannon. But ever the solemn
+surf thundered on the beach below, and the sand-cliff trembled and
+crumbled beneath its resounding blows.
+
+The old man, who, with a seaman's owl-like eyesight, kneeled intently
+gazing out through the darkness in the direction of the flash,
+suddenly exclaimed, "I don't un'erstan' it! That air ship hadn't
+oughter be in 'stress off where she is. She ain't on no shoal, nor
+nothin'. She's jest a-lyin' tew. An' I don't see no signs o' no boats
+nuther; an's fur's I kin see, them folks is a firin' off that air gun
+jest fur the musicalness on't. Blast 'em! Come, gals: we mought as
+well be walkin' along hum as ter stop a-yawpin' here in the wind an'
+spray, a-burnin' up the winter's kindlin' fur folks 'at's a-foolin' on
+us. 'Spesh'ly as I think she's a Britisher. Blast her!"
+
+The old Quaker was not accustomed to use strong language of any sort,
+but evidently the human nature in him was so powerful in this instance
+that he could not help indulging in the most emphatic admissible
+invective.
+
+But the mother and wife were not so easily satisfied. In their eyes
+the strange ship and all on board her were not of as much consequence
+as the unworthy missing Jim, whose fate they associated with it.
+Jim's boat, they said, was gone. No one could have taken her but Jim
+himself. He would never have put out on such a night as this save to
+go to the help of the distressed ship; and if he was on the water, the
+light burning on Sankota Head would guide him safely back. So, in the
+midst of spray and wind, the three kneeled on the cliff and kept the
+blaze alight till the rising dawn made it useless, when, to the dismay
+of the watchers, the ship hoisted sail and bore away. She showed no
+colors, but the old islander, once a whaler, declared that she was a
+British man-o'-war.
+
+But where was Jim? The unanswering surf still boomed at the foot of
+the cliff, though the height of the waves was rapidly diminishing, and
+the water was gradually assuming the peculiarly bland expression that
+often comes after a storm, reminding one of the cat that has "eaten
+the canary," but there was no sign of incoming boat or men.
+
+Chilled to the bone with the wind and cold sea-spray of the November
+night, and to the heart with sorrow and disappointment, the three
+returned to the lonely house. Running to meet them came Mary Allen,
+breathlessly crying, "Where's Eben and Jim?"
+
+Poor Sarah could not answer, but the brave old mother, a veteran in
+sorrows, replied with trembling lips, "We don't know anythin' o' thy
+brother, Mary; an' Jim hain't b'en hum sence las' night. His boat's
+gone, an' we thought he might ha' went out to help the ship that was
+a-firin' all night. But she's sailed off this mornin' all right; an'
+father, he says she was a Britisher an' undly a-firin' ter fool us
+folks. So I don't know nothin' about it," uttering the last words in a
+drearily hopeless tone that gave them exceeding pathos.
+
+For a moment Mary stood in dismay; then she cried wildly, "Oh, they're
+drowned, they're drowned! Jim come deown ter eour heouse las' night
+a-sayin' he'd heard the firin' o' a ship in 'stress, an' askin' Eb
+ter go with him an' help him git his boat eout, an' telled me ter run
+along deown to Zack Tumnaydoo's An' ax Zack an' Ellery ter go with
+'em. An' I did, an' that's the las' anybody's seen o' any one on 'em.
+Oh dear! oh dear!" And wringing her hands, the sobbing girl ran back
+as quickly as she had come to impart to her mother and sisters the
+full extent of her evil tidings.
+
+The cold, sad, desolate weeks and months that now rolled slowly on
+are to this day remembered on Nantucket as those of the "hard winter."
+Provisions were scarce, fuel was difficult to obtain, the harbor
+was frozen over, so that few fish could be taken there, and all
+communication with "the main" was cut off by British cruisers. In
+January the cherished old horse was killed because there was no longer
+hay to feed him, and even oats were "too precious to be fed to dumb
+beasts." In February the stalwart old Stephen lay grimly down to die,
+saying pityingly, "It's time, gals: I can't dew ye no more good by
+stayin'; an' I'm so tired."
+
+The day succeeding the silent funeral, where two women had dropped the
+few tears that were left them to shed, good old Thomas Macy came and
+took his daughter and her mother to his own home. And in windy, still
+frozen March the wail of a tiny baby was heard in the house.
+
+Under all the trouble the two brave women made no moan. Silently
+clinging together, never losing sight of each other for more than a
+few moments at a time, they yet said nothing of their greatest grief,
+that Jim should have disappeared with such unworthy words on his lips
+and thoughts in his heart, until, a few days after the baby's birth,
+Sarah said to her mother, "I know he's not dead. If he'd ha' died,
+he'd ha' come back and told me he was sorry. Fur I dew think he'd be
+sorry. Don't thee, mother?" And the mother nodded assent and smiled
+through her tears.
+
+But, in truth, they had a more substantial reason than poor Sarah's
+wistful fancy for thinking that Jim was living. When the ice broke up,
+his boat was found in a little cove, where it had floated right-side
+up, without any serious injury except the carrying away of the sails.
+Of course this discovery roused new hopes in the homes of the missing
+men. It did not "stand to reason" that four big strong, temperate
+young fellows, brought up to the hardy, amphibious island-life, had
+all fallen overboard, any more than it "stood to sense" that the boat
+had upset and then righted of itself. Besides, "none of the boy's
+corpuses had ever floated up." So the Tucketers took courage and
+felt sure that, whatever had become of the missing men, they were not
+drowned.
+
+But still the slow months came and went, till the summer and autumn
+and another winter had passed by; and patient old Rachel Starbuck grew
+daily a little quieter and a little grayer; and the brave young wife
+grew a little stronger to bear, but not a whit less loving or prone to
+suffer, and stately old Thomas Macy grew daily more gentle and pitying
+in his ways as he looked long at the winsome face of the happy, wee
+grandchild, that throve and crowed and tried to utter sweet little
+hesitating words as gayly as if the world had never a sin, a sorrow or
+a weakness in it.
+
+One day Sarah and her mother had carried the baby down to the small
+cottage at the back of the cliff, whither they went to attend to
+some little household matter; for, although they did not mention the
+subject, even to themselves, they still kept all there in readiness
+against Jim's coming home. Here, in the soft May sunshine, the
+red-frocked baby was sitting on the green turf step, playing with
+some "daffies," first of the season, which Sarah had plucked from the
+little garden in the rear. The mother and daughter were in the house,
+when both were alarmed by a scream from the usually merry child. A man
+had it closely clasped in his arms, kissing it and calling it between
+half-choked sobs his "own pretty, pretty baby." The man was thin,
+pock-marked, bald, and clad in a ragged uniform of a British sailor,
+but to the faithful, longing eyes of mother and wife there was no
+mistaking their Jim.
+
+It was long ere the story could be told, but at last they learned that
+on that sad November night Jim and his companions had gone out to the
+relief of the signaling ship. She was, as old Stephen had conjectured,
+a British man-o'-war. Being short of hands, and having on board as
+pilot a renegade native of the island, who knew where a ship could
+"lay-to" in safety, she had taken advantage of the storm to attract
+strong men within the range of her guns, then to command them to
+surrender, and thus to impress them into "His Majesty's service" as
+"able seamen."
+
+For a long time Jim had managed to keep alive his resentful feelings
+toward his wife, accusing of being the source of all his misfortunes
+the poor little woman who was loving and longing so sincerely for him.
+But when illness came he could hold out no longer. "I made up my mind
+then," said he, "that if ever I got hum agin, I'd go deown on my knees
+an' ax pardin' o' my Sairy."
+
+But she had never been angry, and was now only too thankful that Jim
+and his friends had escaped safely.
+
+"Ah!" said Jim in telling his adventures, "we hed a clus run on 't,
+Sairy, but thee'd better believe that air British navy's a fust-rate
+place fur larnin' a feller ter know when he's well off. An' Sairy,
+when I longed so fur thee an' mother, an' thought o' what a wretch I
+was to speak so ter the dearest little woman in the world, I c'u'd see
+that I hadn't knowed when I was well off."
+
+Jim's was not an unselfish kind of repentance, but it was the best it
+was in his nature to offer, and Sarah had long ago learned that her
+Jim was not the saint and hero she had once dreamed, but only a weak
+and common-place man; and she asked for nothing higher from him. To
+his best she had a right, and with that she was content, smiling on
+her husband with eyes full of a love as tender and true as when in the
+old days she had gazed down upon her lover from the cliff-head, while
+the mother laid her hand softly on his scanty hair, and said solemnly,
+"May God keep thee thus, my son!" adding, after a moment's pause,
+"But I wish thy fayther was here to see." And a tender silence for
+the memory of the rough but kindly-natured old man fell over them all;
+while the baby, reconciled to the stranger, poked her little fingers
+in the marks on his face, and cried because she could not get them
+off.
+
+ETHEL C. GALE.
+
+
+
+
+AT THE OLD PLANTATION.
+
+TWO PAPERS.--II.
+
+
+The eastern sky is just beginning to assume that strange neutral tint
+which tells of the approaching dawn when we open the heavy hall door
+and step out into the crisp, frosty air. No moonlight hunting for me,
+with the cold, deceitful light making phantom pools of every white
+sand-patch in the road, and ghostly logs and boulders of every
+wavering shadow. You are always gathering up your reins for leaps
+over imaginary fence-panels, which your horse goes through like a
+nightmare, and always unprepared for the real ones, which he clears
+when you are least expecting it. If the cry bears down on you, and you
+rein up for a view, the fox is sure to dodge by invisibly under cover
+of some dark little bay, and you get home too late for a morning nap
+and too early for the breakfast, which you have been longing after for
+the last two hours. Then, too, your horse has lost his night's rest,
+and will be jaded for two days in consequence. No: the time to throw
+the dogs off for a fox-hunt is that weird hour which the negroes
+significantly call "gray-day:" it is the surest time to strike a
+trail, and by the time Reynard begins to dodge and double there will
+be plenty of light to ride by and to get a good view. If the fox gets
+away or the cover is drawn without a find, you are always sure of
+having your spirits raised by the cheerful sunrise: by the time you
+get home, tired and spattered, the ladies are down stairs ready to
+make pretty exclamations over the brush or to chaff you pleasantly
+for your want of success; and then there is just time to get your hair
+brushed and your clothes changed before the mingled aromas of fried
+sausage and old Java put the keen edge on your already whetted
+appetite.
+
+A ride across country after a rattling pack of English hounds on
+a thoroughbred hunter with a field of red-coated squires is an
+experience which few hunters on this side of the water have ever
+enjoyed, but with the incidents of which every reader of English
+novels is familiar. The chase of the red fox in Maryland or Virginia
+has some features in common with the British national sport, but that
+of the gray fox in the more southern States differs materially from
+both. The latter animal is smaller and possessed of less speed and
+endurance than his more northern brother, but he is far more common
+and quite as cunning. He makes shorter runs, but over very different
+ground, always keeping in the woods and dodging about like a rabbit,
+so that a different style of horse and a different method of riding
+are required for his capture. There is no risk of breaking your neck
+over a five-barred gate or a stone wall, but you may be hung in a
+grapevine, or knocked out of the saddle by a low limb, or have your
+knee scraped against a tree-trunk. It is true you may catch your fox
+in twenty minutes, and three hours is an extraordinary run, but then
+you may catch four or five between daylight and ten o'clock of an
+autumn morning.
+
+The horses stretch their necks toward the stables and whinny as they
+think of the bundles of untasted fodder: the dogs require no notes
+of the horn to rouse them, for they know the signs and are already
+capering about in eager merriment, throwing their heads into the air
+occasionally to utter a long and musical bay. This wakes up the
+curs about the negro-yard, and their barking stirs up the geese, the
+combined chorus rousing all the cocks in the various poultry-houses,
+so that we ride off amid a hub-bub of howling, cackling, neighing and
+crowing which would awaken the Seven Sleepers. We are first at the
+meet, and the old woods ring with the mellow, winding notes of
+our horns--no twanging brass reeds in the mouth-pieces, but honest
+cow-horn bugles, which none but a true hunter can blow. The hounds
+grow wild at the cheering sound, and howl through every note of the
+canine gamut; the echoes catch the strain and fling it from brake to
+bay; the dying cadence strengthens into an answering blast, and the
+party is soon increased to half a dozen bold riders and twenty eager
+dogs. Venus, the beautiful "flag-star of heaven," is just toning her
+brilliancy into harmony with the pale light which creeps slowly up
+from the eastern horizon, and some wakeful crow in the pine-thicket
+gives an answering caw to the goblin laugh of the barred owl in the
+cypress, as we leap our horses into a field of sedge and cheer on the
+dogs to their work. For half an hour we ride in silence save the
+words of encouragement to the hounds, which are snuffing about
+unsuccessfully and whipping the hoar-frost with their tails from the
+dry yellow stems of the grass. Now and then some eager young dog opens
+on the trail of a rabbit which has started from its form, but the
+crack of a whip restrains him, and the other hounds pay no attention
+to him. Suddenly a sharp, quick yelp comes from the farthest corner of
+the field, and the older dogs stop instantly and raise their heads
+to listen. Hark to old Blucher! There he is again, and the whole pack
+give tongue and dash off to the call which never deceives them. We
+catch a glimpse of the old fellow's white throat as he trots about in
+a zigzag course, poking his tan muzzle into every clump of tall grass
+and giving tongue occasionally as he sniffs the cold trail. Presently
+a long, quavering cry comes from old Firefly; again and again Blucher
+opens more and more eagerly; another and another dog takes it up, and
+the trot quickens into a lope. The trail grows warmer as they follow
+the line of fence, and just as we settle ourselves in the saddle for
+a run it all stops and the dogs are at fault. But Blucher is hard to
+puzzle and knows every trick of his cunning game. Running a few panels
+down the fence, he rears up on it and snuffs the top rail, and then,
+with a yell of triumph, dashes over it into the woods, with the whole
+pack in full cry at his heels. A ringing cheer announces that the
+fox has "jumped," and the field scatters in pursuit. Two only, the
+subscriber being one, follow the dogs with a flying leap. Some dash
+off in search of a low panel, others to head off the cry through the
+distant gate, while others stop to pull the rails and make a gap.
+For ten minutes we keep well behind the hounds, with a tight rein and
+heads bent to avoid the hanging oak limbs. But the fox has turned and
+plunged into a brake which no horse can go through, and we draw up
+and listen to decide where we can head him off with the greatest
+certainty; then turn in different directions and spur through the
+young black-jacks. Ah! there he goes, with dragging brush and open
+mouth, and the pack, running close enough together to be covered by
+a table-cloth, not sixty yards behind him. I am in at the death this
+time, for he cannot run a hundred yards farther, and the brush is
+mine, for there's no one else in sight. With a savage burst the dogs
+dash after him into the thicket and then--dead silence, not a yelp,
+as they scatter and run backward and forward, nosing under every dead
+leaf and up the trunk of every tree. The fault is complete, and the
+young dogs give it up and lie down panting, while the older hounds try
+every expedient to puzzle out the trail and take up the scent again.
+He certainly has not treed, there is neither earth nor hollow to hide
+him, and yet the scent has gone! And it never came back. If any reader
+can tell what became of that fox, he is a wiser man than I. Certain
+it is that we never heard of him again; and for aught I know to the
+contrary, he may have been that identical Japanese animal which turns
+into tea-kettles and vanishes in puffs of smoke. It does not take
+long, however, to make another find, and we go home after a three
+hours' chase with two fine brushes and appetites which would ruin any
+hotel-keeper in a week.
+
+After breakfast a walk to the cotton-houses would be in order, for the
+successful planter is he who trusts nothing to the overseer which can
+have his personal supervision, and he must excuse himself to such of
+his guests as prefer a cigar by the library fire to an hour spent in
+observing the details of plantation work. In the days of which I write
+horse-power was preferred to steam, and negro-power to both; and few
+planters of the fine black-seed cotton could be convinced that any
+"power-gin" could be invented which would not injure the long, silky
+"staple" or fibre of the lint. The old-time "foot-gins" were used
+exclusively, and the gin-house was a place of curious interest to all
+visitors. In one end of the long room was the huge pile of seed-cotton
+which was to pass through the rollers as the first step toward
+its preparation for the market. How simply does a sudden stroke of
+inventive genius solve a problem which wise men have regarded as
+insoluble! Not much more than a century ago a commission of practical
+English _savans_ discouraged the cultivation of a textile fabric
+which "might be useful but for the impossibility of clearing it of the
+seeds!" But the foot-gin appeared on the scene, and indigo went down
+before cotton. Ranged along the walls of the room are some twenty
+rough wooden frames, looking like a compromise between a straw-cutter
+and a sewing-machine, each furnished with two strong rollers operated
+by a treadle and acting precisely like those of a clothes-wringer.
+Behind each of these machines stands a man or woman with one
+ever-moving foot upon the treadle-board, feeding the seed-cotton from
+a large bag to the greedy rollers, which seize it and pass the lint
+in fleecy rolls into another bag prepared for it, while the seed, like
+shirt-buttons touched by the afore-mentioned wringer, rolls off from
+the hither side to form a pile upon the floor. Thence it will be
+carted to the seed-house to be rotted into manure for the next crop,
+there being no better fertilizer for cotton than a compost of which
+it forms the base. A portion of it, however, will be reserved to
+be boiled with cow-peas and fed to the milch-cattle, no food being
+superior to its rich, oily kernel in milk-producing qualities. The
+negro mothers use it largely in decoction as a substitute for cocoa,
+and the white mothers under similar circumstances having it parched
+and ground like coffee, when it makes an exceedingly palatable and
+nutritious beverage. The "green-seed" or short-staple variety is far
+inferior to the black for this purpose, and produces white, sticky,
+cottony-looking butter; indeed, most dairywomen insist that "you
+can pick the lint out of it." The ginned cotton is carried to the
+platforms, where it is "specked" by the women--leaves, dirt and other
+impurities being picked out by hand--and spread out to dry and bleach
+in the sun; thence we follow it to the "moting-room," where it is
+thoroughly and finally overhauled, every minute particle of dirt or
+other foreign matter and every flock of stained and discolored cotton
+being picked out. This room is always in the second story, and at one
+end of it a circular hole is cut in the floor; through this hole hangs
+the bag of strong, close gunny-cloth, very different from the coarse
+covering which suffices for the lower grades of "short-staple,"
+supported by a stout iron hoop larger by some inches than the hole
+in the floor, and to which the end of the bag is securely sewed. The
+cotton is thrown into this bag and packed with an iron rammer by a man
+who stands in it, his weight assisting in the packing, each bag being
+made to contain upward of four hundred pounds.
+
+Everything seeming to go on as it ought and all the necessary orders
+and directions being given, we walk out to take a look at the poultry.
+There are fowls in abundance and superabundance, but our kind host
+is most proud of his flock of three hundred white turkeys; and a
+beautiful sight they are, scattered over the grassy lawn. Ranging, as
+these fine birds will, over a mile or two of woods abounding in their
+wild brethren, convenient mistakes were often made by the pineland
+gunners, whose rifles were always ready to pick off a stray gobbler
+without waiting to know whether he was wild or tame, and so the old
+gentleman introduced the white stock to prevent the possibility of
+such errors. For a similar reason no ducks were raised except those
+which wear top-knots. It is no unusual thing for wild gobblers and
+mallards to come up with the tame stock to the poultry-yard, and
+the bronze feathers and shy habits of many of the young turkeys show
+evidence of their free parentage.
+
+It is just impossible for a city man to remain indoors in the country
+with the broad fields, the shady woods, the bright blue sky and
+the merry pipe of birds calling him out to active exercise and
+unaccustomed sport. He is sure to think himself a sportsman, even if
+uncertain whether the shot or powder should first enter the gun;
+and if an old hand at the trigger, his uneasiness while in the house
+becomes almost painful. Every article of hunting-gear is
+overhauled again and again; boots are greased, shot-pouches filled,
+powder-charges remeasured, guns cleaned and ramrods oiled; and I
+once had a fine Manton--as sweet a piece as ever came to the
+shoulder--almost ruined by an eager friend, who, after going through
+all this during a stormy morning, insisted on taking off the locks
+and triggers, just to while away the time. The introduction of the
+breech-loader most happily obviates all this, since such lagging hours
+may now be occupied in charging and crimping cartridges. But there is
+nothing to detain us longer to-day: the "Bob Whites" are waiting for
+us among the pea-vines, and the snipe among the tussocky grass of the
+old rice-field. Di and Sancho have caught sight of the guns, and are
+capering about in the wildest excitement, for it is a long time since
+they have seen anything more "gamey" than a city pigeon. Birding over
+good dogs is the very poetry of field-sports. The silken-haired setter
+and the lithe pointer are as far the superiors of the half-savage
+hound as the Coldstream Guards are of the Comanches. The hound has no
+affection and but little intelligence, and the qualities which make
+him valuable are purely those of instinct. The long, hungry cry with
+which he follows the deer and the sharp, angry yelp which he utters
+when chasing the fox tell plainly that the motives which prompt him
+thus to use his delicate nose and unwearying powers of endurance are
+precisely those which carry the Indian to the hunt or on the war-path.
+He hunts for any master who will cheer him on, has no tactics but to
+stick to the trail and give tongue as long as the scent will lie, and
+must be whipped off the game when caught to prevent his devouring
+it on the spot. The setter, on the other hand, is intelligent,
+affectionate and faithful. If properly trained and reared, he loves
+his master and will hunt for no one else, learns to understand human
+language to an astonishing degree and exhibits reasoning powers of no
+mean order. He hunts purely for sport, understands the habits of his
+game, and regulates his tactics accordingly, and delivers the birds
+uninjured to his master, sometimes controlling his appetite and
+carrying the game long distances for this purpose. I have frequently
+discovered that my dogs, brought up in the house, understood words
+which had never been taught them. My old favorite Di always answers
+the dinner-bell and stands near my chair for odd scraps. Being
+somewhat annoyed one day by her eagerness, I said playfully, "Go to
+the kitchen and tell Annie to feed you." She at once rushed off and
+scratched the kitchen door until the girl opened it, and then stood by
+the tray of scraps looking at her and wagging her tail. Wanting one of
+my little sons one evening, I said, "Di, go find the boys!" She rushed
+off, looking and smelling about their usual haunts, but returned
+unsuccessful. I scolded and sent her a second and third time, with the
+same result: a few minutes after she came quietly behind me with the
+_hat_ of my youngest boy in her mouth: she had taken it from a table
+in the passage, and her wagging tail said plainly, "Will this answer?
+It's the best I can do." The same dog will creep carefully upon
+partridges, and stand as if cut in marble lest they should fly, but
+will chase turkeys at full speed, giving tongue like a hound, and then
+lie still for hours while they are called up and shot, nor will she
+ever confound the different habits of the two birds or the different
+methods of hunting them.
+
+Such are the highly-bred and intelligent animals which are eagerly
+waiting for us to-day--Di, with her white coat, soft as wavy silk, her
+chestnut ears and one spot on the back alone marring its snowy purity;
+Sancho, jet black, with "featherings" like a King Charles spaniel.
+They are over the fence already, and tearing about the field so
+recklessly in the exuberance of their joy that they must certainly
+startle any game which may be there. The timid little field-buntings
+glide away on silent wing through the grass; the meadow-larks rise
+with gentle flappings and sail off with that easy flight so tempting
+to very young wing-shots; now and then a flock of doves whistle off
+too far for a certain shot, and clouds of crow-blackbirds rise with
+hoarse chirps and seek less public feeding-grounds; a rabbit dashes
+off from a brier-patch and both dogs rush pell-mell at his heels, but
+a single note from the whistle brings them to a sudden halt and makes
+them look thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Off they go again, as
+wild as deer; but suddenly Di's whole action changes: crouching to the
+ground and beating her sides rapidly with her tail, she runs hither
+and thither, snuffing eagerly in the grass. Now Sancho comes up and
+catches the cold trail, for a covey has certainly been in that place
+to-day. Most probably they rose from the spot, frightened by the swoop
+of a hawk, and made for the nearest cover, for the dogs can do nothing
+with the scent. But that little whiff of the exciting effluvia has
+brought them down to their work, and a beautiful sight it is as they
+quarter the ground with quickly-beating tails and noses high in the
+air, crossing and recrossing the wind in zigzag lines and concentric
+circles, hunting the ground so closely that no trail, however cold,
+can escape their keen sense of smell. A wave of the hand to Sancho,
+and the sagacious fellow is off toward the far corner of the field,
+when suddenly Di stops in mid-career with a jerk that must try every
+sinew in her frame. The birds are right under her nose, and she dares
+not move a muscle, but stands as if changed into stone, her eyes
+starting with excitement, her nostrils expanded, her feathery stern
+quivering stiffly out behind and every line of her figure standing out
+like whipcord. "Toho!" The black dog catches the sound and turns his
+head: he sees her rigid form, and backs her where he stands as firmly
+as if he too had the scent. There is no hurry, for the dogs are true
+as steel and will stand there as long as the frightened birds lie,
+while the latter, obedient to the instinct of sudden terror, will
+cower where they are for an hour, with their heads drawn back, their
+mottled breasts pressed to the earth and their legs gathered under
+them, ready to spring into the air. We cock our guns, agree to shoot
+respectively at the birds which go right or left or straight before
+us, and then advance to flush the covey ourselves. The staunch dog
+never winces as we pass her: two paces, three, a sudden rush and whirr
+as of many wings, five sharp reports in quick succession and four
+birds down! Another, wild with fright, rises straight up for twenty
+feet and darts off behind us, but his beautiful head droops as the
+crack of my last barrel resounds on the air and a cloud of feathers
+floats downward. The shot has struck him in the line of flight, and he
+goes to the ground with a bounce, some thirty yards away, as if hurled
+there by a vigorous arm. The well-trained dogs come to the "Down!
+charge!" while we reload our guns, and then seek the dead birds and
+bring them carefully in to us.
+
+Leaving the broken covey to be worked up on our return, we push on to
+another part of the large pea-field, where, perched upon the topmost
+limb of a tall dead pine, we see a red-tailed hawk engaged in quiet
+observation. There is no surer sign of birds, but it takes close
+hunting to find them, for they dare not move about while their savage
+enemy is on the watch. As we approach the hawk stretches out his neck,
+jerks his wings two or three times and oscillates his ungainly body,
+and then, with a loud scream of angry disappointment, he is off. The
+tree stands in a little piece of sedge, not far from a dense growth of
+pine-saplings, and we know that the moment the hawk left his perch the
+birds started for the cover, and our only chance for shooting is to
+head them off and turn them. The dogs have struck the running trail,
+and their action is totally different from what it was with the first
+covey. Crouching flat to the ground, they glide after the startled
+birds with a snake-like movement, now stopping, now running swiftly
+in. Suddenly Di leaves the trail and dashes off at full speed to the
+right. Making a wide circuit, she skirts the pines, and, turning short
+round, comes to a firm stand in the very face of the retreating covey,
+while Sancho lies prone with his nose between his paws. It is an
+old trick of hers thus to "huddle" running birds, and we follow her
+example, come up behind her, and get six with four barrels as the
+birds rise in a bunch.
+
+But if the reader follows us too closely, he will have all the fatigue
+of a long tramp without the compensation of healthful excitement
+and full game-pockets. Thirty-five fine birds in a pile on the
+pantry-table offer a capital _raison d'etre_ for weary feet and soiled
+fingers when we reach home just in time for the supper-bell. There
+have been some arrivals while we were gone, for Christmas is near at
+hand, and the old house is filling up with guests. To-morrow the "St.
+John's Hunting-Club" has its monthly deer-hunt and dinner at Black
+Oak, and we need a good night's rest to prepare us for an experience
+the omission of which would render imperfect any truthful reminiscence
+of life at the old plantation.
+
+During the months spent at the plantation there is little social
+visiting among the gentlemen, and, except on Sundays and occasions
+of public meetings, the various local clubs offer their only
+opportunities for seeing each other, Another object--at least, under
+the old _regime_--was to bring together those who occupied somewhat
+different social positions. Formerly the clubs were strictly
+exclusive, and, indeed, this feature was never lost, but in every
+community there would be some _novi homines_, clever men many of them,
+whom the old gentry were quite willing to recognize, though a marked
+difference in culture prevented family visiting. These could be
+admitted to membership, and at the club-house could be met on equal
+terms. The hunting feature was always preserved, though few of the
+older members ever joined in the sport. Under the rules there was a
+place, a day and an hour for the weekly meet; and I remember when it
+was a safe thing to be at "the White Bridge" on the Santee Canal any
+Saturday morning at nine o'clock. Somebody was sure to be there with
+dogs and driver, prepared for a "wallet-hunt"--i.e., an all-day hunt
+with wallets at the crupper well filled with hunter's cheer. Once a
+month the club met for dinner, each member "finding" in turn, and
+on that day a single drive, or at most two, was all that could be
+enjoyed. The club-house was a plain frame building in the woods, with
+a huge fireplace at each end, heavy stationary pine table extending
+the length of the room, and broad soft-pine benches. The dishes,
+wines, liquors and cigars were all specified in the rules, the
+finder being allowed two extra dishes at will, and supplying all the
+crockery, cutlery and glass. The kitchen was a rough shed close to the
+cool and shaded spring of pure, clear water. Being myself but a guest,
+I have not the privilege of extending an invitation to the reader;
+so, by his leave, we will drop the present tense and I will assume the
+part of _raconteur_. How vividly do the scenes of that day come back
+through the highways of memory, crowded as they are with experiences
+of more than twenty varied years! As I rode up to the bridge on that
+bright December morning I found a party which promised rare sport.
+There was Kit Gillam with his crooked nose, and Tom Clifton with his
+deadly Manton and fine cry of dogs, and cheery Jack Parker, who hunted
+only for the good company, and whose gun was as likely as not to be
+unloaded when the deer came out to him. Two drives were decided on
+which might be relied on for shooting, and yet were small enough to
+give ample time for reaching the club-house before dinner.
+
+As we rode toward our stands I thought it a good chance to settle
+a point which had long excited my curiosity. "Kit," said I, "I have
+often wondered how your nose got out of plumb. What caused it?"
+
+"When I was a little bit of a boy I fell down and stepped on it."
+
+This very satisfactory explanation brought us to our ground, and
+we were soon at our respective stands and listening eagerly for the
+trail-notes of the old hounds. The deer have regular runs, from which
+they rarely deviate, and which do not vary in the course of years.
+These are guarded by the standers while the game is driven down
+from the opposite direction. A large drive may have a dozen of these
+stands, by one of which the deer will almost certainly pass, but which
+one nobody knows. Quiet is absolutely necessary and a cigar is fatal
+to sport, but concealment is useless, as these animals see imperfectly
+in daylight.
+
+I had not to wait long before I caught the distant cheering and
+hand-clapping of the drivers as they encouraged the dogs to hunt.
+In the quiet of the sombre woods every sound was distinctly audible.
+Suddenly three or four quick, sharp yelps brought my gun to the
+"ready," and the hammers clicked as a burst of music followed. But
+above the clamor of the hounds came the crack of the driver's whip,
+and his voice, mellowed by distance, was heard in angry tones: "Come
+back yah, you good-for-nuttin', wutless lee' rabbit-dog, you! I sway
+maussa ha' for shoot da' puppy 'fore he spile ebery dog in de pack!"
+
+Soon, however, came another open, deep and musical, and there was no
+mistaking old Drummer's trail-note: then Killbuck joined in, and then
+the cry became general. For a while the broken, quavering tongue tells
+that the dogs are only trailing and the deer is still cowering in his
+bed, or perhaps has sneaked out of the drive at the first sound of the
+horn. Hark! what a burst! They had "started" within two hundred yards
+of me. The next moment there was a rustle of leaves, and a yearling
+doe dashed by. I am not a dead shot, and have nothing to say about
+that first barrel, but the second sent her down and over with a roll
+that almost broke her neck. The dogs were stopped and the deer
+thrown over the pommel of one of the boys, and we rode on to try the
+Brunswick swamp. The boy had assured us that "One pow'ful big buck bin
+in day (there) las' night. I see all he track gwine in, an' I nebber
+see none come out."
+
+We were soon strung along the narrow dam across which the game was to
+be forced by the drivers, who had to make their way through an ugly
+bog among cypress "knees" and dense brier-patches. Jack Parker stood
+next to me, fidgeting about uneasily, because it was against rules to
+talk on stand. Jack's prominent feature was his nose, and he had
+an incorrigible trick of blowing it "out loud" whenever there was a
+particular reason for keeping perfectly quiet. The dogs had begun
+to open, and their loose, scattering trail-notes indicated turkeys.
+Looking directly before me, I saw seven noble gobblers stepping
+cautiously toward my stand. Their glossy breasts glittered with
+coppery lustre in the straggling sunbeams as, with drooping wings and
+expanded tails, they advanced, looking fearfully about and uttering
+their low alarm-notes, "Quit! quit! quit!" Three more steps will make
+a certain shot, and--out rang Jack's nasal clarion, loud and clear as
+the _morte_ at a fox-chase. I looked round in horror, and there
+stood my hunter complacently eying me and flourishing his white silk
+handkerchief, while his gun leaned against a tree ten paces distant:
+"Expect I'd better go back to my stand, eh? Are those dogs barking at
+a deer?"
+
+I jumped to my feet for a snap-shot at the old gobbler which flew over
+me, making a clear miss. Bang! bang! went two more guns; a woodcock
+whistled up from the bog and two swamp-rabbits dashed into the
+brier. The dogs came out, shaking the water from their coats, and the
+spattered drivers rode through the creek. There was not a feather to
+show, and of course everybody was "down" on Jack, but with an air of
+deep injury he put it off on me with the question, "Why didn't you
+tell me the turkeys were coming? How can a fellow help having a cold?"
+
+We reached the club-house just in time to take our seats as dinner was
+served, and were in capital condition to enjoy the rich mutton, the
+fat turkey, the juicy home-cured ham and the rare old madeira which
+graced the board. This last was a specialty with the gentlemen of
+those days, and probably no cellars in the world could boast choicer
+vintage than the "Newton & Gordon" and "Old Leacock" which cheered the
+table of that "hunting-club." There were stronger liquors, too, though
+these were chiefly used as appetizers before dinner. The moderate use
+of brandy was universal, but the drunkenness which blots these days of
+prohibitory laws was comparatively rare. Few ever left the club-house
+"disguised" by liquor except the young men, who then, as now and
+always, would occasionally indulge in a "frolic." With the clearing of
+the board came the regular and volunteer toasts, and then an hour of
+"crop-talk" and "horse-talk" and hunting-stories over the wine and
+cigars. With the departure of the older members came the inevitable
+quarter-race, with its accompaniment of riding feats which would have
+done credit to a Don Cossack. The equestrian performance was commenced
+by Kit Gillam (who now dismounts and leads over every little
+ditch) forcing his active chestnut up the wooden steps and into
+the club-room, and rearing him on the dining-table. Then came a
+leaping-match over a ten-railed fence, resulting in the barking of
+some shins and the demolition of sundry panels of rail. Joe Keating,
+the wildest rider I ever knew, had emptied his tumbler too often, and
+insisted on running his horse home through the woods. An hour after
+he was overtaken trudging along the road, perfectly sober, with the
+saddle on his shoulders and the bridle over his arm.
+
+"Why, Joe, where's your horse?"
+
+"Dead!" was the laconic reply.
+
+Sure enough. He had run full against a huge pine, and the horse had
+gone down with a broken skull. He never tried it again.
+
+Christmas Eve has come at last, and the old plantation is in all its
+glory. Carriage after carriage has deposited its freight of blooming
+girls and merry-eyed children at the broad, open hall-door. There is
+not a vacant stall in the stables, nor an unoccupied bedroom among all
+the seventeen of the spacious mansion. The broad dinner-table is
+set diagonally in the long dining-room, and to-morrow, at least, the
+guests will have to take two turns at filling its twenty seats, while
+the children go through the same manoeuvre in the pantry. Where they
+will all sleep to-night is a mystery which none can unravel save the
+busy, hospitable "lady of the manor;" but it makes little
+difference, for there will be little sleeping done. The day passes
+in riding-parties and rowing-parties and similar amusements, as
+each freely follows the bent of his inclination. "Brass," the negro
+fiddler, has been summoned, and "Newport" comes with his stirrup and
+steel for the "triangle" accompaniment, and the merry feet of the
+dancers are soon keeping time to the homely but inspiriting music. The
+"German" and the "Boston" have not usurped the places of the old-time
+cotillon, quadrille and Virginia reel, and the dance is often varied
+by romping games of "Blindman's Buff," "Move-House" and "Stage-Coach,"
+in which old and young unite with equal zest.
+
+But this is not the limit of the fun. From time immemorial Christmas
+Eve has been licensed for the performance of all sorts of tricks,
+and demure little faces are flitting about convulsed by the effort to
+conceal the merry sense of mischief. The stockings are duly hung for
+Saint Nicholas, and the holly, with its glossy leaves and scarlet
+berries, stands ready to be planted in the parlor, to bloom to-morrow
+into all kinds of rich flowers and gift-fruit. At nine o'clock the
+work of arranging the Christmas tree begins. The ladies retire, and
+after a quiet smoke by the roaring hall-fire the gentlemen follow
+suit. To bed, but not to sleep. Jack Parker is the first man ready,
+and bounces into the best bed to secure the softest place; but the
+bars have been skillfully removed, and he is the centre of a rather
+mixed pile on the floor. I feel another, to be sure that all is right,
+and slip cozily between the sheets, but some graceless little wretch
+has placed a walking-cane "athwart-ships," which nearly breaks my
+back. None escape. Some find their sheets strewed with chaff or
+cockle-burs, some find no sheets at all. At midnight a fearful roar
+comes from the girls' room, followed by pretty shrieks and terrible
+confusion; but it is only the old Cochin rooster, which was slyly shut
+up in the empty chimney-place before they retired, indulging in his
+first crow.
+
+Daylight puts an end to all sleep, for the boys are on the piazza
+ready to welcome Christmas with innumerable packages of fire-crackers.
+We rise to find our pantaloons sewed up, our boots stuffed with wet
+cotton, our tooth-brushes dusted with quinine and our _cafe noir_
+sweetened with salt. These practical jokes are all taken in good
+part and made to contribute to the jollity of the season. At
+the breakfast-table lumps of cracked marble serve admirably for
+loaf-sugar, except that the hottest coffee will not dissolve them, and
+boiled eggs tempt the appetite only to disappoint with their sawdust
+filling. Then all assemble on the piazza to witness the merriment
+of the crowd of negroes who have assembled to claim little gifts of
+tobacco and sugar and to receive the annual glass of whisky which a
+time-honored custom bestows. The liquor is served in a wine-glass, and
+swallowed eagerly by men, women and boys from ten years old upward.
+Then they disperse to get their portion of the Christmas beef which
+has been slaughtered for their special benefit, and we prepare for
+service at the parish church, which stands among the shadows of the
+old forest oaks an easy walk from the house. There the solemn services
+temper and soften, but do not check or lessen, the joy and good-will
+which so well become the season, and which find their appropriate
+manifestation in all kinds of innocent amusement. The religious and
+the social observances of the day react each upon the other, and
+harmonize most admirably in the impressions which they produce. The
+interchange of gifts and tokens around the Christmas tree follows
+most appropriately, and the Christmas feast is marked by profuse
+hospitality and keen enjoyment unmarred by riot or excess.
+
+Ah, well! there are piles of dusty memories in the old cockloft still
+untouched, but I shall rummage no more to-night. The scenes which have
+floated past me with the wreathing smoke of my cigar are green and
+fragrant to me with a freshness which time can never blight, but they
+never can harden into reality again for any mortal experience. They
+have gone into the irretrievable past with a state of things which
+some may regret and others rejoice in, and well will it be if the new
+_regime_ shall supply their places with other pictures which twenty
+years hence it may be no less pleasant to remember.
+
+ROBERT WILSON.
+
+
+
+
+OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
+
+A GERMAN AGRICULTURAL FAIR.
+
+
+From the 27th to the 30th of September all Stuttgart flocks to
+Cannstatt for the _Volksfest_; and this year every good Wuertemberger
+was bound to feel an additional interest in the fete on account of
+the opening ceremony, the inauguration of a statue to the late king,
+Wilhelm I.--and "well beloved," one is tempted to add from the way
+in which his people still speak of him. "The old king" and "this one"
+they say with an inflection of voice anything but flattering to
+the latter. Our landlady assures us that let the weather look as
+threatening as it would, the sun always contrived to burst out when in
+former times the late king rode into the arena to give the prizes; and
+she is evidently by no means certain it will not pour all three days
+of the fair this year. However, to judge from the skies, "this one" is
+not so bad as he might be: the sun shines propitious on him too, and
+consequently on us as we set forth to see what we can see. The second
+is the great day, as the prizes are then distributed; but already on
+Monday the booths and shows were on the field, and Cannstatt was gay
+with banners and wreaths and garlands of green. The carpenters were
+still hard at work hammering at seats for us to occupy next day,
+but the wonderful triumphal arch stood quite completed and worthy of
+sincere admiration. No one knows who has not seen it worked into an
+architectural design how beautiful a string of onions can be, how
+gorgeous a row of vegetable-marrows, how delicate a cluster of
+turnips. It sounds puerile, but it was lovely nevertheless. Imagine a
+temple-like construction all composed of odorous pine, with an arched
+portal on either hand, and then every line and curve, every niche and
+pillar and balustrade, defined with glowing fruit. It was looped in
+festoons and hung in tassels of red and white and gold: the arms of
+Wuertemberg even were traced in yellow corn, while above it all rose
+a graceful column, a mosaic from base to summit of every fruit that
+autumn can bring to perfection.
+
+That was the great show: after that, mammoth cucumbers and carrots or
+rows of agricultural implements did not detain us long. The next best
+thing was to see the booths and the crowd on the outskirts of the
+exhibition. There the circus was in full blast, and triumphant,
+brazen-throated opposition to all smaller attractions that had
+ventured into that neighborhood. The performing dogs in red petticoats
+were reduced to making an appearance before their tent to entice
+spectators, and Harlequin and Columbine had to shout themselves hoarse
+inviting people to come in and split with laughter for sixpence. Those
+who did not aspire to a seat under painted canvas gathered round a
+melancholy bear dancing a _pas seul_ on the grass with heartbroken
+gravity. Then came the _Schuetzhallen_, where the marksmen stationed
+themselves three feet from the target and cracked away at it with no
+other visible effect than that produced on a monkey doing its tricks
+close by: at every shot the poor little creature stopped fiddling and
+looked over its shoulder with a distressed air of "If I'm not hit this
+time!" Hand-organs, penny trumpets and rattles quite drowned the voice
+of a street-songstress with a large assortment of vocal music before
+her, from which she was giving the public a selection. Whether the
+songs had any reference to the pictures that formed her background we
+did not discover, but, at all events, the latter were tragic in the
+extreme. "The twenty-four-year-old murderer of his mother and six
+brothers and sisters" was there portrayed in a neat suit of black,
+with a hatchet in his hand and a very irresolute expression of
+countenance, while the various members of his family, seen through
+the open bedroom doors, awaited their fate in peaceful slumber. The
+booths, with toys, gingerbread, sausages, cheese and light literature
+tastefully intermingled, went on and on like the restaurants that
+lined each side of the long avenue. Around primitive tables family
+parties clinked foaming glasses and hailed with demonstrative
+hospitality any stray cousin who chanced that way. In one of the last
+of these improvised _Trinkhallen_ we came upon a young man and maiden
+who had the place quite to themselves. Her brown parasol kept the
+sun off them both, and it was of no sort of consequence that they had
+nothing more interesting than the back of a shed to look at. Future
+prospects were the only ones they cared for: the present had no need
+of anything but a faint beeriness, conducive to day-dreaming.
+
+As we get into the carriage again our coachman says we must see the
+new statue. Accordingly, we drive through the town and halt before it
+in the square. It is very fine, glowing like gold from the mint.
+The king sits his charger well, and gazes majestically at nothing in
+particular: still, one must be a little critical, and we imagine the
+horse's tail is not quite right. But then is not the whisk of a tail
+in bronze almost impossible to conceive of? If the artist suffers no
+severer censure than that, he will probably call himself a happy
+man. The inscription on the pedestal of the statue reads, "From his
+grateful people." High and low have contributed to it, and gladly.
+"That was a man!" says our driver. He was a soldier under him, and
+knows. And in fact the old king seems to have been always doing
+something for the country, so that the gratitude is not without a
+cause. The inhabitants of Cannstatt have special reason to remember
+him kindly: he himself was grateful to them and showed it. In the
+troublous times of 1848 he was sadly in need of money: Ludwigsburg
+(another satellite of Stuttgart) refused it, while Cannstatt came
+up to the mark handsomely. The royal creditor never forgot that. He
+instituted the _Volksfest_ as a sort of memorial, and Cannstatt is
+proud and prosperous, while Ludwigsburg is like a city of the dead.
+So the coachman affirms; and once conversation is opened between us it
+flows without intermission. His head is over his shoulder all the way
+as we roll back to the city under the beautiful trees of the palace
+grounds. "If the old king had been living, Wuertemberg would never have
+joined in the last war: he would have told Prussia to fight it out by
+herself." Apropos of the war, we ask what he thinks of Bismarck.
+He evidently thinks a great deal of him, though not perhaps in the
+generally accepted sense of that expression. He states as a fact that
+there _are_ limits, leaving it to us to understand that the chancellor
+of the empire has overstepped them. He declares further that a
+Prussian, and especially a Berliner, is always to him an obnoxious
+member of society through his insisting on knowing everything (except
+his own place) better than anybody else. "Now, there was the Prussian
+general before this last one," he continues, changing from politics
+to court-gossip (naturally, since 1870, military matters in Wuertemberg
+flourish under Prussian auspices): "the first ball he went to at the
+palace he asked the queen to dance! _Our_ queen!! And then he took his
+whole family, and they sat in chairs that never were meant for them,
+so that the king had to say to him next day, "Mr. General, first come
+I, and then my ministers, and then this one, and then that one, and
+_then_ you." He went back to Berlin soon after. It is pleasanter to
+sit one's self down where one doesn't belong than to be set down
+by somebody else." Our driver chuckles, and then bursts out afresh,
+"Asking the _queen_ to dance!" He certainly has perfect faith in his
+own stories.
+
+We saw the successor of that presumptuous military man next day
+among the greater and lesser lights that revolve around the throne of
+Wuertemberg. We ourselves were stationary, crowded into the foremost of
+the tiers of seats that rose surrounding the immense enclosure, and
+in the best place for observation, close by the royal pavilion.
+The hills, bright in the sun and velvet in shadow, made a natural
+amphitheatre beyond, a little church with its pretty tower looked
+picturesquely down from a neighboring height, and the whole place
+was gay with flags and branches, glittering uniforms and gorgeous
+liveries. We were to see the _hohe Herrschaften_ come in at the
+farthest entrance and drive around directly before our seats. As the
+trumpets flourish and the first magnificence sweeps by we hear all
+about us, "The princess Vera," and "No, the duchess of Uhra," and "Is
+it?" "Isn't it?" "Which is it?" till we finally settle down to the
+serene conclusion that it is either one or the other. There is no
+mistaking the queen, however, with the outriders, six superb black
+horses and postilions in scarlet and gold. The Majesty herself looks
+pale and resigned, bending to the right and left in answer to the
+bows and _hochs._ Our neighbors "the Weimars" come in full force. A
+superfluous prince of that family appears to have drifted to these
+regions, and makes our street aristocratic for us. Young Weimar looks
+uncommonly well in his hussar uniform, and the old prince and his wife
+and daughter are resplendent. We met them later that same day in town,
+but they had taken off their best clothes, and truth compels us sadly
+to admit that we should hardly have known them.
+
+In the course of time, after various false alarms on our part, the
+band confidently strikes up "God Save the King!" and there is a
+flashing and prancing in the distance that creates a great stir. The
+citizen guard, a stately body of burghers, rides out with the king on
+this day of all the year, and comes caracoling by in fine style, he in
+the midst bowing and smiling. And now, after the _Herrschaften--hohe_
+and _hoechste_--come the animals. First, horses haughtily stepping,
+and then splendid bulls with wreaths on their horns and garlands round
+their--waists shall we say?--are led before the king, standing at the
+foot of the steps and handing the prizes to the farmers, who present
+themselves, ducking and scraping. It seems a shame to tie up the
+creatures' legs so, and put rings through their noses: some have
+even a cloth bound over their heads; and if all these precautionary
+measures are necessary, it ought to be a relief when the procession of
+mild cows begins, They look out amiably from under the floral crowns
+that have slipped low on their brows, or turn with half-conscious
+pride to the handsome little calves that trot beside them. The sheep,
+seeking to attract too early the notice of royalty, dash out in a
+flock, and are driven back with jeering and hooting, as they deserve
+to be. Then the pigs stagger by: their garlands are excessively
+unbecoming. Such of the family of swine as are too young to stagger
+are wheeled in handcarts in the rear; and so the ceremonies are
+closed, except for a couple of races which take place immediately, and
+with no great eclat. The burgher races these are called, while on the
+third and last day are the officers' races. The rain prevented our
+attending them, and we consoled ourselves, hearing it intimated by
+those who had been at Ascot and Longchamps that we had not lost a
+great deal.
+
+G.H.P.
+
+
+
+
+A PAIR OF WHEELS AND AN OLD PARASOL.
+
+
+The threads from which the tissue of history is being woven are ever
+in unceasing and rapid motion in the hands of the Fates. But these
+deities for the most part love to work unseen, like the bees. It is
+only when the spinning is going on with exceptional rapidity and
+vigor that the movements of the threads and the characteristics of the
+operation can be observed on the surface of social life, Such is
+the case in these days at Rome, and it is not necessary to watch the
+actions of governments or listen to the discussions of legislative
+chambers in order to assure one's self of the fact. One cannot walk
+the streets without having the phenomena which are the outward and
+visible signs of it thrust in a thousand ways on the observation
+of our senses. The other day I read a whole chapter of contemporary
+history compressed into the appearance of a pair of wheels engaged in
+their ordinary daily duty in the streets. It was in that central and
+crowded part of the city which is between the church of the Gesu and
+the Farnese palace, a labyrinth of tortuous streets and lanes,
+not often visited by foreigners unless when bent on some special
+expedition of sight-seeing. There are no sidewalks for foot-passengers
+in these streets. They are narrow, very tortuous and very crowded.
+Foot-passengers and vehicles of all sorts find their way along as best
+they may in one confused mass. It was there I saw the historic pair
+of wheels in question. They were attached to the barrow of a
+coster-monger, who was retailing a stock of onions, carrots and
+"cavolo Romano" which he had just purchased at the neighboring market
+of the "Campo de' Fiori." His wares, I fear, had been selected from
+the refuse of the market, and he and his barrow were in a state of
+dilapidated shabbiness that matched his stock in trade. But not so the
+wheels on which his barrow was supported. They were wheels of the most
+gorgeous description. The spokes and the circumference were painted
+of the most brilliant scarlet, and the entire nave was gilded so as
+to have the appearance of a solid mass of gold. It is impossible to
+imagine anything more _bizarre_ than the effect of these magnificent
+wheels doing the work of carrying such an equipage. Nevertheless,
+the apparition seemed to attract very little attention in the crowded
+street. The grand scarlet and gilded wheels flamed along among the
+crowd of shabby men and shabby vehicles with their load of onions and
+cabbages, and scarcely anybody turned his head to stare at them. I
+suppose the denizens of the district were used to the apparition of
+them. To me they looked as if they had been the originals from
+which Guido Reni painted those of the car in which he has placed the
+celebrated Aurora of his world-famous fresco. They were solidly and
+heavily built wheels--very barbarous an English carriage-builder would
+have considered them in their heavy and clumsy magnificence--but they
+were very gorgeous. What could be the meaning of their appearance in
+public under such circumstances? I was walking with an Italian friend
+at the time, who saw my state of amazement at so strange a phenomenon,
+and explained it all by a single remark.
+
+"Yes," said he, "there go a pair of His Eminence's wheels. They are
+sharing the fortunes of their late master in a manner that is at once
+dramatic and historical."
+
+The wheels from a cardinal's carriage! Of course they were. How was
+it possible that such wheels should be mistaken for any other in the
+world? A few years ago, when pope and cardinals had not yet suffered
+the horrible eclipse which has overtaken them, one of the most notable
+features of the Roman streets and suburban roads used to consist
+of the carriages of the members of the Sacred College taking their
+diurnal drive. It was not etiquette for a cardinal to walk in the
+streets, or indeed anywhere else, without his carriage following him.
+There was no mistaking these barbarously gorgeous vehicles. They were
+all exactly like each other, and unlike any other carriages to be
+seen in the nineteenth century--heavy, clumsy, coarsely built and
+gorgeously painted of the most flaming scarlet, and largely gilded.
+They were drawn by long-tailed black horses covered with heavy harness
+richly plated with silver, or something that looked like it, and
+driven by a coachman whose livery, always as shabby as magnificent,
+was as heavily laden with huge masses of worsted lace of the kind that
+used to be placed on carriage-linings some five-and-twenty years ago.
+Two similarly bedizened footmen always stood on the monkey-board
+at the rear, who descended and walked behind His Eminence and
+his chaplain when the cardinal left his carriage to get his
+constitutional. Ichabod! Ichabod! The glory has departed! Such
+cavalcades are no longer to be seen crawling along the Via Appia,
+or following His Eminence on a fine and sunny afternoon about four
+o'clock as he walks on the footpath between the Porta Pia and the
+Basilica of St. Agnes in search of an appetite for his dinner. The
+world will never see such carriages and such servants any more. _Fuit
+Ilium!_ I thought of the old lines on the "high--mettled racer," and
+of "imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, stopping a hole to keep
+the wind away." To see such splendor reduced to the service of such
+vile uses! Yes, as my Italian friend said, "There go the cardinal's
+wheels," and it is impossible not to feel sure that the phenomenon
+is symbolical of the way the cardinal is going himself. When an
+institution, a dignity, a social arrangement of any sort, has grown
+to be purely ornamental, has become so splendid that its splendor has
+come to be the essence of it, it will no longer be able to exist shorn
+of its splendor, however much it may in its origin have been adapted
+for use rather than for show. The wheels were heavy, cumbrous and
+ill put together; they were not well adapted for the costermonger's
+purpose, and will probably fall to pieces before long. Their fate is
+a type of that of their once master. That ornamental individual, shorn
+of his ornamental character, is useless. His _raison d'etre_ is gone
+as entirely as Othello's occupation was. And it will probably not be
+long before the fate of the cardinal's wheels overtakes the cardinal
+himself.
+
+The second little bit of street incident which recently occurred to me
+was in itself less striking, but seemed to me to symbolize changes of
+yet higher moment and wider significance. This time what I saw was in
+the Ghetto. Many of my readers probably know what the Ghetto at Rome
+is, but untraveled stayers-at-home may very excusably never have heard
+of it. The Ghetto is the Jews' quarter in Rome--the district in which
+they were for many generations compelled to reside and to be locked
+in by night, and where from habit the greater part, especially of the
+poorer members of the Jewish community, still live. As will be easily
+believed, it is the worst and most wretched quarter of the city--the
+lowest physically as well as morally--and inundated with tolerable
+certainty every year by the rising of the Tiber. The dilapidated and
+filthy streets of the other parts of old papal Rome used to look
+clean and spruce by comparison with the lurid and darksome dens of
+the Ghetto. There are Ghettos in London--streets where the children of
+Israel congregate, not in obedience to any law old or new, but drawn
+together by mutual attraction and similarity of occupation. And the
+occupations there are very much of the same nature as those pursued
+in the Ghetto of Rome--the buying and selling of old clothes and
+second-hand property of all sorts, the preparation and distribution of
+fried fish, and here and there a little usury. But the _genius loci_
+here impresses on the trade in discarded odds and ends a peculiar
+character of its own. A much larger number of old pictures figure
+among the hoards of useless "property" than would be the case
+elsewhere. The constant decay of noble and once wealthy families
+furnishes to the second-hand market a much more abundant supply of
+the remains of articles that were once rich and rare in their day--old
+damask hangings torn from walls that have witnessed the princely
+revelry of many a generation; rich brocades and stuffs that have made
+part of the moving pageant in the same saloons; lace of the finest
+and rarest from the vestments of deceased prelates, whose heirs, as
+regards such property, have probably been their serving-men; purple
+and scarlet articles from the wardrobes of cardinals and princes of
+the Church; and odds and ends of various sorts widely different in
+kind from aught that could be found in similar repositories in other
+cities. And another specialty of the Roman Ghetto is that it is not
+altogether easy to obtain a sight of the miscellaneous treasures of
+this rag-fair. Partly because the low-lying and narrow lanes of the
+Ghetto are too murky and filthy to permit of the advantageous exposure
+of the merchandise in question; partly, probably, from an habitual
+consciousness on the part of the dealers that the details of their
+traffic in all its particulars are not of a nature to be safely
+submitted to the public eye; partly from that secretiveness which is
+the natural result of living for many generations from father to son
+under the tyranny of an alien race, whose bitterly hostile prejudices
+were but little restrained by law or justice; and partly also, no
+doubt, from the genuine Roman laziness, which in its perfection is
+capable of overriding even Jewish keenness of trade,--the Jew brokers
+of the Ghetto are often unwilling to show their hidden stores to the
+first comer. Some amount of diplomacy and some show of the probability
+of effecting an advantageous deal must be had recourse to in order to
+attain the purpose of the explorer.
+
+On the recent occasion to which I have referred these difficulties had
+been overcome, and I had made my way into the interior of one of
+the dens I have described in the company of a lady friend who is a
+confirmed and irreclaimable lace-hunter, and who in pursuit of her
+game would have confronted worse obstacles than any that we had
+to encounter. For, in truth, the exterior appearance and the
+entrance-chambers are the worst part of the Ghetto dwellings. One is
+curiously reminded of the old mediaeval stories of Jewish dwellings,
+where the utmost squalor and poverty of exterior was a mere blind for
+an interior gorgeous with every manifestation of wealth and luxury. I
+will not say that much of the latter is to be found in the dwellings
+of the Ghetto, but a degree of comfortable decency and indications
+of the possession of capital may be met with which the exterior
+appearances would not have led one to anticipate. Well, we had reached
+the third floor of one of these sinister-looking abodes, conducted by
+a fat old Jewess with a pair of huge black eyes, a large smooth face
+as yellow as a guinea, and a vast development of bust clad in dirty
+white wrappers of some sort. A door on the landing-place jealously
+locked with two huge keys admitted us into a suite of three good-sized
+rooms crammed from floor to ceiling with a collection of articles more
+heterogeneous than can easily be conceived--far more so than can be
+described.
+
+Those who have ever accompanied a lady lace-hunter when she has struck
+a promising trail know that the business in hand is likely to be a
+somewhat long one. My companion on the present occasion very soon
+convinced the Jewess that she knew quite as much about the matter as
+she, the dealer, did. But I presume that some of the old yellow stores
+produced were "the real thing;" for my friend and the old Jewess soon
+became immersed in an eager and, as it seemed to me interminable,
+discussion as to qualities, condition and values. Meantime, I had to
+amuse myself as best I might by looking at the multifarious objects.
+I must content myself with mentioning one article, the appearance
+of which in such a place struck me as strange and not a little
+significant. It was simply an old parasol, very much faded and a
+little tattered, but not such a parasol as your fair hands ever
+carried, my dear madam, nor such as the once equally fair hands of any
+generation of your ancestors ever carried. The article in question was
+more like the shelter which we see represented in Chinese paintings as
+carried over the heads of persons of high rank among the Celestials.
+It was very large, not much curved into the shape of a dome when
+expanded, very clumsily and coarsely put together, but of gorgeous
+magnificence of material. It was made of a very thick and rich damask
+silk, additionally ornamented by embroidery in gold and silver thread,
+and the handle and points of the supports were richly gilt. In a word,
+I perceived at once, not being a novice in such matters, that the
+article before me was one of the canopies used for holding over the
+"Host" when the holy sacrament is carried by the priest through the
+streets to a dying person. It needs but a moment's reflection on the
+Roman Catholic theory of the sacrament of the "Last Supper" to be
+aware of the extremely sacred nature of the uses to which this parasol
+had been put, and of the associations connected with it. Nevertheless,
+I found this bit of sacred church property in the hands of a Jew
+broker, exposed to sale for a few francs to the first comer, heretic,
+scoffer or infidel, that might take a fancy to buy it. This would
+hardly have been the case when the pope was absolute master of Rome
+and of all in it. The thing could not have happened save by the
+dishonesty and cynical disbelief of some priest, and indeed probably
+of more than one. And, upon the whole, it struck me as a second
+curious indication of the somewhat breakneck speed with which the
+threads of history are spinning themselves in these days and in these
+latitudes.
+
+T.A.T.
+
+
+
+
+MEDICAL EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+
+A great deal of discussion has recently taken place on the subject of
+medical education in the United States. To a foreigner, or to one not
+acquainted with the influences that have led to and have kept up this
+discussion, it might seem to be the result of a spontaneous outburst
+of popular feeling, earnestly demanding much-needed progress. Really,
+however, the very reverse is the case; and the revolutionists are
+those whose _kind_ and _sympathetic_ interest in the welfare of the
+community is prompted solely by selfish considerations. The changes
+urged by these self-condemning philanthropists are not demanded by the
+medical profession nor by the public; neither have they been, nor will
+they be, sustained by both or by either. This assertion is clearly
+proved by the experience of the University of Pennsylvania, In 1846
+the American Medical Association recommended to all medical colleges
+certain changes and improvements in their courses of instruction.
+In consequence of this recommendation the University of Pennsylvania
+extended its session to six months: not a _single medical college in
+the country followed_ its progressive lead, and after continuing the
+experiment for six years at great pecuniary loss, it was reluctantly
+obliged to retrace its steps, and to return to the old standard as to
+length of session. During the period of this advance the classes of
+the University fell off greatly, and the classes of other medical
+schools correspondingly increased. Even medical men sent their sons
+to other medical schools, to save the time and money necessary for the
+longer course. Indeed, medical men, as a rule, have sought to evade
+the restrictions as to length of time of study, etc. more than any
+other class; and the statement, that the "student usually dates his
+medical studies from the time he buys his first _Chemistry_" applies
+more frequently to the sons of _physicians_ than to any others. Hence,
+I declare that these proposed changes are not demanded by the medical
+profession nor by the public.
+
+The writer of a recent article in _Lippincott's Magazine_ (Dr. H.C.
+Wood) on "Medical Education in the United States" seems to have
+been so lost in admiration at the methods of instruction followed in
+European medical colleges as to be utterly blind to the good in the
+system of medical education as it exists in this country--a system the
+_necessary_ result of our political, social, financial and territorial
+conditions; a system which, though in the abstract may not be the
+best, is certainly, judging from its results, the best _possible_
+under our peculiar circumstances. This much abused system of
+medical education (only greatly improved in its extent and
+thoroughness--improvements developed by the constant advances in
+knowledge) is the same system which has produced the great medical
+men of the United States during the past seventy-five years--medical
+practitioners whose success has been surpassed by none in Europe;
+surgeons whose skill has been, and is, world-wide in reputation;
+authors whose works are standard authorities everywhere. It is the
+same system of medical instruction--I quote verbatim (italics mine)
+from this article that holds it up to scorn--which "accomplished such
+_splendid results_ during the late rebellion." The writer says: "The
+great resources of the medical profession were proved during the
+civil war, when there was created in a few months a service which
+for magnitude and efficiency has rarely if ever been equaled. Indeed,
+military medicine was raised by it to a point _never reached before
+that time in Europe_ and the results achieved have, in many points,
+_worked a revolution in science_." After this frank declaration of the
+inestimable value and glorious results of American medical education,
+the writer draws the _logical_(?) sequence that it (American medical
+education) is responsible for a case of most heartrending malpractice,
+which he relates, compared to which the Japanese hari-kari were
+merciful mildness, and approaching more nearly the tortures by
+crucifixion as administered by this same _kind-hearted_ people. With
+about as much reason and justice might he conclude that the _American
+system_ of Sunday-school education is lamentably inferior to that of
+Great Britain, _because_(!) Jesse Pomeroy was a possibility in that
+most respectable town of Boston.
+
+Dr. Wood alludes to the ignorance of the American medical student,
+and makes a statement "not founded on the authority of official
+publication," in which he endeavors to show that from "six to ten
+per cent." of American medical students have an ignorance of vulgar
+fractions and rudimentary astronomy that would exclude them from an
+ordinary infant-school. Every one familiar with the students attending
+our first-class American medical colleges knows perfectly well that
+in origin and in culture they compare favorably with the young men
+engaged in the study of law and divinity, or with those entering upon
+mercantile or manufacturing pursuits. True, there are some imperfectly
+educated, but certainly not "six or ten per cent." destitute of
+that knowledge taught even in _American_ infant-schools, and without
+knowing, and without the statement "being founded on the authority of
+any official publication," I _infer_ that in _Europe_, owing to their
+"better methods," similar knowledge is communicated to the average
+European child many months _before its birth_.
+
+Next follows a comment on the poverty of the American medical student.
+Dr. Wood says: "Even worse than this, however, is the fact that the
+summer between the winter courses is often not spent in study, but
+in idleness, or, not rarely, in acquiring in the school-room or
+harvest-field the pecuniary means of spending the subsequent winter in
+the city." Alas! this _is_ too true. Providence seems to have ordained
+that our young _American_ doctors are not always reared in the lap of
+luxury and wealth as the fittest preparation for the trials, hardships
+and self-denials of their future lives. It is also true that some
+_other_ young American professional men have been compelled "in the
+school-room or harvest-field" to acquire the means to prosecute their
+professional studies. Daniel Webster, the son of a New England farmer,
+taught school at Fryeburg, Maine, "upon a salary of about one dollar
+per diem." "His salary was all saved ... as a fund for his _own
+professional_ education and to help his brother through college."
+"During his residence at Fryeburg, Mr. Webster borrowed (he was too
+poor to buy) Blackstone's _Commentaries_." Mr. Webster's great rival,
+Henry Clay, also was compelled to resort to the "school-room and
+harvest-field to obtain the pecuniary means," etc. etc. etc. The son
+of the poor widow with seven children "applied himself to the labor of
+the field with alacrity and diligence;" "and there yet live those who
+remember to have seen him oftentimes riding his sorry horse, with a
+rope bridle, no saddle, and a bag of grain." "By the familiar name
+of the Mill-boy of the Slashes do these men ... perpetuate the
+remembrance of his lowly yet dutiful and unrepining employments."
+American biography is so filled with similar instances, showing how
+the great characters of her great men acquired their development and
+strength in the stern gymnasium of poverty, even in "the school-room
+and harvest-field," that I could fill volumes with the glowing
+records. The youngest American school-boy recognizes Abraham Lincoln
+and Henry Wilson in this _American_ galaxy. Whose heart has not been
+stirred by the life-story of the great Hugh Miller, the stonecutter's
+pick earning for him humble means, thereby enabling him to acquire
+that learning which made his name a household word even in America.
+Truth, then, as I have remarked, obliges me to admit that we have in
+our medical colleges some young men who labor "in harvest-fields and
+school-rooms" in order that they may honorably pay their way, rather
+than eat the bread or accept the gratuities of pauperism.
+
+Last March there graduated at the medical department of the University
+of Pennsylvania one of these self-supporting young men. He was the son
+of a missionary clergyman: the father was poor in pocket, but the son
+was not poor in spirit. During the interval between his winter courses
+of lectures, rather than be a burden to his father, rather than accept
+gratuitous instruction from the school, he went into the coal regions
+of Pennsylvania and worked in a coal-mine, as a common miner, to
+procure funds to enable him to complete his professional studies;
+and, _strange_ as it may seem, this young miner passed an excellent
+examination, and received the unanimous vote of the medical faculty
+for his degree. I mention this case, but every year there are several
+similar; and we always find that the school-teachers and miners are by
+no means at the foot of the graduating class.
+
+Concerning clinical teaching, we have the following statement:
+"The clinical teaching in an American hospital is comprised in the
+following routine: Once or twice a week, from one to five hundred men
+being congregated in an amphitheatre, the professor lectures upon a
+case brought into the arena, perhaps operates, and when the hour has
+expired the class is dismissed. Evidently, under such circumstances
+there cannot be the training of the senses, the acquiring of a
+knowledge of the hourly play of symptoms of disease and of familiarity
+with the proper handling of the sick and wounded, which is of such
+vital importance, and which can be the outcome only of daily contact
+with patients." What can the writer of this sentence mean? Certainly,
+no one knows better than he does that such _is not_ the practice in
+the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, in Bellevue and in
+many other large hospitals, where clinics and dispensary services
+are held for _several hours daily_ throughout the year, and where the
+student has furnished him abundant opportunities four "acquiring a
+knowledge of the ... symptoms of disease, ... of handling the sick and
+wounded," etc. etc. That the American medical student profits by these
+opportunities, and learns his clinic lessons well, is proved by the
+unexpected and evidently unintended testimony which occurs toward the
+close of the article, where Dr. Wood says, "The great resources of the
+medical profession in America were proved during the civil war, when
+there was created in a _few months_ a service which for _magnitude_
+and _efficiency_ has _rarefy if ever been equaled_. Indeed, military
+medicine was raised by it to a point _never reached before_ that time
+_in Europe_, and the results achieved have in many points worked a
+_revolution in science_." The italics in this quotation are mine, as
+they also are in those which follow.
+
+But (says the article under review) "the largest proportion of our
+prominent physicians have educated themselves after graduation." As
+if this were an extraordinary or unusual circumstance! Certainly,
+they have; and so have all prominent men in all professions and all
+pursuits of life, in every age and every country, not even excepting
+the much-lauded men of Great Britain and the continent of Europe. What
+young lawyer is entrusted with an important cause immediately after
+admission to the Bar? And as the young doctor (according to the
+aforesaid showing) "gains his first practical knowledge while serving
+as a hospital resident, under the supervision of experienced men,"
+so the young lawyer, _even in Great Britain_, must gain _his_ first
+practical knowledge by constant attention at the courts, and by
+diligently following the proceedings of his preceptor's and other
+offices. Even the young clergyman, whose business it is to save
+_souls_, has to do very much as the young doctor does, and, like him,
+is often "thrown at once on his own resources, gaining his experience
+without supervision, and at the _expense_ of the _poorer classes_,
+who _naturally_ fall to his charge, and whose ignorance precludes them
+from an even approximately correct estimate of" his fitness. "It is
+one of the saddest features of our system that the famed skill of our
+best" _(clergymen)_ "should so often be acquired at such a cost."
+
+What can be more unphilosophical and illogical than to compare the
+young doctor, or any other young professional man, to a new piece of
+machinery, fresh from the manufactory, complete and perfect in all
+its parts? And yet something like this is _attempted_ in the article
+before us. Even as Minerva sprang from the brain of Jove the complete
+and perfect goddess of learning, so would our Utopian writer have
+the young doctors to come from the brains of their medical professors
+complete and perfect; only, if his idea be correct, their medical
+professors have so little brains that the annual graduating medical
+classes of the United States would be immediately reduced from
+the frightful army of three thousand "legalized murderers" to the
+comparatively small and easily counted number of _one graduate_ (of
+course, springing from one head). No; the young doctor, at graduation,
+cannot be compared to a new, complete and perfect machine fresh from
+the manufactory; rather, let him be compared to the young marsupial
+creature at birth, extremely rudimentary, whose natural, and hence
+fittest, place is the parental pouch, but which in due time becomes
+the vigorous and well-developed specimen. I suppose, if I compare
+the young doctor to the young marsupial, I should also say that _his_
+protecting parental pouch, in which he acquires growth and vigor, is
+the hospital where he goes after graduation, or the practice which he
+sees under his preceptor's supervision.
+
+The article continues: "The remarks which follow do not apply to
+the medical department of Harvard College or to _one or two other
+schools_" (the italics are mine); and farther on it continues: "In
+other words, Harvard has copied the European plan of medical teaching
+in some of its essential features, and as a consequence its medical
+diploma is the _only one_ issued by _any prominent medical American_
+college which is a _guarantee_ that its possessor has been well
+educated in the science and practice of medicine." Where can we
+find meekness and modesty like this?--modesty as becoming as it
+is unexpected and surprising, seeing that the writer fills _two_
+professorships in the University of Pennsylvania, Does he hang his
+head so low in his--I was about to say _singular_--self-abasement
+(but, considering, the _two_ professorships, I suppose I should say
+_doubled_ self-abasement) that he cannot see? or are his eyes so
+blinded by the effulgence of "Harvard" and "European" plans that he
+fails to recognize and appreciate the immense advantages offered by
+his own home institutions? I do not propose to make any invidious
+remarks concerning Harvard, but I maintain that an _honest_ and _just_
+comparison of the schools, of their requirements, of the character of
+their teachings and the facilities they furnish their students, _must_
+show that modesty alone prevented Professor "H.C. Wood, Jr., M.D.,"
+also excepting from his sweeping denunciations the two great schools
+of Philadelphia, though I only speak for and defend the medical
+department of the University of Pennsylvania from an attack unjust,
+uncalled-for and untrue.
+
+R.A.F. PENROSE.
+
+
+The party opposed to any reforms in medical education has, of course,
+a right to be heard, and Dr. Penrose is well entitled to represent it
+both by his position and by the evident heartiness with which he is
+prepared to defend the existing system at every point. In impugning
+the motives of those who have attacked it he lays himself open to an
+obvious retort; but it is sufficient to remark that the contest is
+not of a nature to call for or justify the use of personalities, which
+could serve only to divert attention from the real issues.
+
+The arguments put forward by Dr. Penrose may be summarized as follows:
+1st, that the proposed changes are not demanded either by the public
+or by the profession; 2d, that the present system is the best possible
+in a nation constituted like ours; 3d, that the preparatory education
+of our medical students is equal to that of law or divinity students,
+or of young men entering upon mercantile or manufacturing pursuits;
+4th, that in certain cases obstacles in the way of a regular and
+thorough training have been overcome and success achieved in spite of
+them; and 5th, that it is unavoidable and proper that medical men, as
+well as members of other professions, should educate themselves after
+graduation.
+
+It will be observed that none of these arguments except the last,
+which is based on a mere verbal ambiguity, touches the two subjects
+discussed in Dr. Wood's article--namely, the _need_ of reform and the
+_methods_ by which, if practicable, it is to be effected. Dr. Penrose
+does not venture to assert that the existing system is perfect, or
+to deny that the suggested changes are in the nature of improvements.
+What he wishes us to believe is that the system, whatever its defects,
+is as good a one as Americans have a right to demand, and that it is
+so closely interwoven with our political and social institutions as to
+admit of no separate handling. Similar arguments are frequently urged
+against the desire to raise the standard and widen the avenues of the
+"higher education." We are thus taught to regard ourselves as a poor
+and struggling nation with no claim to the possession of intellectual
+luxuries, or as having bound ourselves to forego any aspirations to an
+equality with other nations in respect of culture when we secured the
+advantages of popular government and its social concomitants. It would
+seem, however, to be a sounder, as it is certainly a more gratifying
+belief, that precisely because we have attained these advantages
+it will be easier for us to appropriate all the benefits which
+civilization has to offer--possible for us to make more rapid strides
+than have been made by other nations, impeded by a diversity of
+interests and conflicts between the government and the people. No
+doubt the comparative youthfulness of the nation will account for
+our backward condition in certain respects; but surely it is time to
+abandon this and every similar plea as an argument against any attempt
+at progress.
+
+We have not space, and for the reasons indicated we see no necessity,
+to discuss Dr. Penrose's positions in detail. It will be sufficient
+to notice generally what seems to us their inherent weakness. His
+assertion that no changes are _now_ demanded by the public or the
+profession is, he thinks, "clearly proved" by the fact that thirty
+years ago some that were introduced in the University of Pennsylvania
+at the suggestion of the American Medical Association ended in
+failure. But what this experience really proves is, that the defects
+of the system were even then admitted, while the remedies are still to
+be applied. At Harvard this has been done; and the question for other
+medical schools is whether they are to follow the example or to
+be deterred by a bugbear--whether, for example, the University of
+Pennsylvania, after raising her scientific and art departments to
+a higher level, shall be content to let her medical school remain
+stationary. It is the opinion of intelligent physicians who are not
+parties to this controversy that the experiment which failed in 1846
+would succeed now. The new plan adopted at Harvard, which exacts
+three years of study, and embraces lectures, recitations, clinical
+conferences and written examinations of the most stringent character,
+has, we are informed, attracted a class of very superior men. Compared
+with the effort made here in 1846, this change may be described as a
+revolution, and it has proved a success.
+
+We are at a loss to understand what Dr. Penrose wishes to prove by his
+citation of cases in which eminence has been reached--chiefly, it
+is to be noticed, in politics or the law--by persons who have
+had insufficient opportunities for study. If the disadvantage was
+imaginary, where was the merit of overcoming it? If it was real, as
+most people would admit, what is the objection to insisting on it as
+such? In the great majority of cases it is _not_ overcome, and the
+result is, that the country is overstocked with men engaged in the
+practice of professions for which they are inadequately qualified. As
+to the skill that is gained by practice, the ripe knowledge that may
+result from experience, this cannot without a confusion of terms
+be described as "education." It will in general be most surely and
+rapidly acquired by those who have received the best training, and
+the great object of our higher educational institutions should be
+to provide such training--not, by maintaining a low standard, to
+facilitate the efforts of those who, from whatever cause, would find
+it difficult to meet the demands of a higher one. Such persons may
+have a claim to encouragement and assistance in their endeavors to
+reach the mark; but they have no right to expect that the distance
+shall be regulated to suit their convenience.
+
+Dr. Wood's admissions in regard to the excellence of the army medical
+service during the war are seized upon with natural exultation by his
+opponent, who draws from them a legitimate inference in favor of the
+general status of medical skill and knowledge throughout the country.
+If Dr. Wood really intended to say--what his language, we confess,
+would seem to imply--that the service attained its high state of
+efficiency in a few months, we do not well see how he is to resist the
+conclusion thus pressed upon him. But we conceive the truth to be that
+either his phraseology or his recollection of the facts was at fault.
+It is well known that at the beginning of the war it was impossible to
+find competent surgeons in anything like the number that was
+needed, and that the examining boards were consequently forced to be
+ridiculously lenient. We know of an able surgeon who after a battle
+found that he had not a single assistant in his corps who could be
+trusted to perform an operation. This state of matters was the direct
+result of the imperfect education given in the schools. Not one man in
+ten who leaves them has ever been practically exercised in operations
+on the cadaver, and the proportion was still smaller before the war.
+It is easy therefore to understand, while it would be painful to
+recall, the circumstances under which the great bulk of our army
+surgeons acquired the requisite proficiency. The ultimate success
+of our medical service, like the final triumph of our armies, was
+preceded by many woeful blunders and mishaps, and, like that, was due
+in great measure to a lavish outlay which would scarcely have been
+possible in any European war, and to the general devotion and united
+efforts which drew out all the resources of the country, of whatever
+kind, and directed them to the furtherance of a single aim.
+
+
+
+
+OUR EARLY NEWSPAPERS.
+
+
+In looking over the contents of the old newspapers of this country, of
+which there was a considerable number as early as the year 1730, one
+is specially struck by the number of advertisements of slave sales and
+of runaway slaves, apprentices and servants. The following are common
+examples:
+
+"To be sold, a very likely Negro woman about 30 years of Age, has been
+in this city about 10. She is a fine Cook, has been brought up to all
+sorts of House Work, and speaks very good English. She has had the
+small Pox, and has now a Young Child. Enquire further concerning
+her and the Conditions of Sale of Mary Kippen, or the Printer
+hereof."--_New York Weekly Journal_, May 9, 1735.
+
+"Just arrived from _Great Britain_, and are to be Sold on board the
+Ship Alice and Elizabeth, Capt. _Paine_ Commander several likely
+_Welch_ and _English_ Servant Men, most of them Tradesmen. Whoever
+inclines to purchase any of them may agree with said Commander, or Mr.
+_Thomas Noble_, Merchant, at Mr. Hazard's, in New York; where also
+is to be Sold several Negro Girls and a Negro Boy, and likewise good
+_Cheshire_ Cheese."--_New York Gazette_, Sept. 11, 1732.
+
+Here is a notice from the same paper, date 1735, which shows very
+clearly the position of the apprentice one hundred and forty years
+ago:
+
+"Run away on the 5th. Instant from John Bell of the city of New York
+Carpenter, an Apprentice Boy named James Harding, aged about 19 years,
+being a tall well-set Lad of a Fresh Complexion, he wears a Wig, he
+is spley-footed and shuffles with his feet as he Walks, has a Copper
+coloured Kersey Coat with large flat white Mettle Buttons, a grey
+Duroy Coat lined with Silk, it is pretty much faded by wearing, a
+broad blue striped Waistcoat and Breeches and a pair of blue striped
+Tickin Breeches, in warm weather he often bleeds at the nose."
+Then follows the offer of forty shillings to any one who will give
+information whereby his master, John Bell, can regain possession of
+the runaway.
+
+That the women of that time were strong-minded, or at least that they
+were disposed to assist in the reformation of bad husbands, is shown
+by the following from the same journal, date December 31, 1733. The
+subject, or victim, was one William Drinkwater, living near New York,
+who had proved quarrelsome with his neighbors and abusive to his wife:
+"The good Women of the Place took the Matter into Consideration and
+laid hold of an Opportunity, to get him tied to a Cart, and there with
+Rods belaboured him on his Back, till, in striveing to get away, he
+pulled one of his Arms out of Joint, and then they unti'd him. Mr.
+_Drinkwater_ Complained to Sundrie Magistrates of this useage, but all
+he got by it was to be Laughed at; Whereupon he removed to New Milford
+where we hear he proves a good Neighhour and a loving Husband. _A
+Remarkable Reformation ariseing from the Justice of the good Women._"
+
+Another advertisement indicates a toilet article now out of fashion:
+
+"To be Sold by _Peter Lynch_, near Mr. _Rutgers_ Brewhouse, very good
+Orange Butter, it is excellent for Gentlewomen to comb up their Hair
+with, it also cures Children's sore Heads."
+
+The next sounds quite as odd:
+
+"_James Munden_ Partner with _Thomas Butwell_ from London, Maketh
+Gentlewomens Stays and Childrens Coats in the Newest Fashion, that
+Crooked Women and Children will appear strait," Same paper, date
+February, 1735.
+
+It is a curious fact that the deaths at that time, both in the New
+York and New England papers, were announced not by the names of the
+deceased, but by the churches to which they belonged. For example:
+"Buried in the city last week, _viz._, Church of England 26, Dutch 24,
+Lutheran 2, French 1, Presbyterians 3. The number of Blacks we
+refer till Next Week."--_New England Weekly Journal_, Nov. 1, 1731.
+Sometimes the number is recorded as four or five, or even less:
+therefore the record must be very imperfect, and there seems to have
+been no notice taken of those who were not buried from any church.
+
+M.H.
+
+
+
+
+LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
+
+
+    Dante and his Circle; with the Italian Poets preceding him.
+    Edited and translated in the original Metres by Dante Gabriel
+    Rossetti. Revised and rearranged edition, Boston: Roberts
+    Bros.
+
+Dante is so great a figure in Italian literature that he hides from
+sight the host of minor poets who preceded him, and throws his own
+contemporaries so into the shade that we are apt to think that Italian
+poetry began with him, and that its second exponent is Petrarch. Such
+a view is to be regretted, not only because it overlooks much that
+is in itself valuable, but because it attributes to a period of
+slow development a phenomenal character. There were many poets worth
+listening to before the great Florentine wrote the _New Life_ or the
+_Divine Comedy_, and many whom he listened to and praised, although
+his prophetic foresight told him that he would one day bear their
+glory from them.
+
+It was to make us acquainted with these forgotten singers that Mr.
+Rossetti wrote some years ago his charming book. _The Early Italian
+Poets_, which, after being long out of print, he now presents to us in
+a revised and rearranged edition. The author's wish is not merely to
+give us a glimpse of the quaint conceits of a school that continued in
+Italy the waning influence of the Troubadours, but to open to us the
+intimate social life of the literary men of that period as reflected
+in their vague Platonic rhapsodies, their friendly letters, their
+jests and quarrels, their joy and sadness. Interwoven with all this
+are stately _canzoni_, and dainty sonnets full of quaint conceits,
+like that wherein Jacopo da Lentino (1250) sings _Of his Lady in
+Heaven_:
+
+  I have it in my heart to serve God so
+  That into Paradise I shall repair--
+  The holy place through the which everywhere
+  I have heard say that joy and solace flow.
+  Without my lady I were loath to go--
+  She who has the bright face and the bright hair--
+  Because if she were absent, I being there,
+  My pleasure would be less than naught, I know.
+  Look you, I say not this to such intent
+  As that I there would deal in any sin:
+  I only would behold her gracious mien,
+  And beautiful soft eyes, and lovely face,
+  That so it should be my complete content
+  To see my lady joyful in her place.
+
+We seem, in turning over these pages, to see the brilliant,
+ever-changing current of Italian thirteenth and fourteenth century
+life--from Palermo, where Frederick II. held an almost Oriental
+court, to the communes of Central Italy, the best type of which is
+the merchant-city of the Arno, whose sons in those days could fight as
+well as wield the yardstick, and sing in strains that have rarely
+been equaled. In the first division of the work the great poet and his
+friends are brought vividly before us from the time when, a sensitive
+child, his eyes first beheld Beatrice and his new life began, to the
+painful hours of bereavement and exile. The poet, it is known, made
+a curious sonnet out of a dream he had after his first meeting with
+Beatrice, and, in accordance with the fashion of the day, sent it to
+various well-known poets, asking them to interpret his vision. The
+answers are all given here; and among those whose attention was thus
+attracted to the precocious youth was one whom he calls his "first
+friend," Guido Cavalcanti--after Dante one of the most interesting
+literary personages of the day. Rash and chivalrous, we can follow him
+in his poems from the time he made his pilgrimage to the shrine of St.
+James, and fell in love on the way with Mandetta of Toulouse, to the
+turbulent days of Florentine party strife, when he rides down Messer
+Corso Donati, "the baron," and wounds him with his javelin, and then
+goes into exile at Sarzana, where he sings his dying song and sends
+it to his lady, "who," he says, "of her noble grace shall show thee
+courtesy." All the poets were not as constant as their own lines
+would have us believe. Dante reproaches the famous Cino da Pistoja
+for fickleness, and the latter confesses the charge, and declares he
+cannot get "free from Love's pitiless aim." Guido Cavalcanti rebukes
+Dante himself for his way of life after the death of Beatrice; and
+this valuable sonnet should be read in connection with the beautiful
+passage in the _Purgatory_ (xxx. 55-75) where Beatrice herself
+upbraids the tearful poet.
+
+In the second part, comprising _Poets chiefly before Dante_, we have
+specimens of the Sicilian school--a _canzone_ by the great Frederick,
+and a sonnet by his luckless son Enzo, who died in prison at Bologna
+after a confinement of nearly twenty-three years. Of more importance
+are the poems of Guido Guinicelli, of which the philosophical one
+entitled "Of the Gentle Heart" was a nine days' wonder, but which,
+even in Rossetti's elegant version, seems cold and formal. The
+most natural and pleasing pieces among much that is artificial and
+conventional are a ballad and two "catches" by Sacchetti, who died
+just after 1400, and properly does not belong to Dante's circle.
+Mr. Rossetti's readers will, however, be grateful to him for his
+delightful versions of the two catches, one "On a Fine Day," the other
+"On a Wet Day," giving the experiences of a band of young girls who
+have gone to spend the afternoon in the fields and are overtaken by a
+shower.
+
+Poems like these, unfortunately, are rare. The range is a limited
+one--Platonic love in its conventional form, or the still more
+conventional form of chivalric love, imported bodily from the
+Troubadours. Scattered here and there are some noble poems; as, for
+instance, the one attributed to Fazio degli Uberti on his lady's
+portrait, which begins--
+
+  I look at the crisp golden-threaded hair,
+  Whereof, to thrall my heart, Love twists a net;
+  Using at times a string of pearls for bait,
+  And sometimes with a single rose therein.
+
+Mr. Rossetti has performed his task in a way to deserve the warmest
+praise. The difficulties he has overcome are very great, consisting
+not merely of intricate rhyme and assonance, which he has faithfully
+reproduced, but a text often corrupt and meaning often obscure.
+He says himself in his preface that "The life-blood of rhythmical
+translation is this commandment--that a good poem shall not be turned
+into a bad one;" and this commandment, as far as we can see, he has
+not broken in a single case, while in some instances, we are bold
+enough to say, the translation is better than the original.
+
+    History of the Army of the Cumberland, its Organization,
+    Campaigns and Battles. Written at the request of Maj.-Gen.
+    George H. Thomas, chiefly from his private military journal
+    and other official documents furnished by him. By Thomas B.
+    Van Horne, U.S. Army. Illustrated with campaign and
+    battle maps compiled by Edward Ruger, late Superintendent
+    Topographical Engineer Office, Head quarters Department of the
+    Cumberland. 2 vols. and atlas. Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co.
+
+It was natural that General Thomas should make choice of some one to
+whom he could entrust the task of writing his military history. For
+that purpose he chose Mr. T.B. Van Home, a chaplain in the regular
+army, and the work, which was begun in 1865 and finished in 1872, was
+subject to Thomas's own examination. The result is now, after this
+long delay, presented to the public in a shape that does great credit
+to the publishers, whose imprint is almost synonymous with good
+workmanship. Of the literary skill, or want of it, on the part of the
+author not much need be said: he is evidently zealous in his anxiety
+to do honor to the memory of General Thomas, and to do justice to all
+who served with him; but he is sadly lacking in the art of suitably
+clothing his ideas with fitting words, and much of his elaborate
+composition is badly wasted in trying to find extravagant language
+for the recital of important events. In some cases, where the official
+reports printed at the close of each chapter recite in simple words
+the actual occurrences, the text of the book is overlaid with unusual
+words and involved sentences, in which the statement of the same facts
+is lost in a cloud of phraseology of a very curious and original kind.
+"Primal success," "the expression of a stride," "the belligerence of
+the two armies," "philosophy of the victory," "palpable co-operation,"
+"the expression of an insurrection,"--these are some of the odd
+inventions of the author; and for instances of passages just as odd,
+but too long for citation, we refer to the description of the battle
+of Shiloh--a weak imitation of Kinglake's worst style--where we
+are told that "change is the prophecy of unexpected conditions."
+Fortunately, the second volume is much less marred by such faults, and
+the great event of Thomas's career, the battle of Nashville, is told
+with clearness and in full detail.
+
+Although Thomas is the hero of the book from the time when he took
+command at Camp Dick Robinson in August of 1861, it was not till
+October, 1863, which brings us to page 394 of the first volume, that
+he succeeded to the command of the Army of the Cumberland, after
+Rosecrans, who had followed Buell and Sherman and Anderson. Under the
+other generals Thomas had served with marked ability and fidelity, and
+his dealing with them is fairly reflected by the author of this work,
+for he rarely criticises either of Thomas's commanding officers--for
+the most part merely records the operations of the army, and puts in
+most prominence Thomas's own services, just as his military journal no
+doubt supplied the material. Of all that long and dreary marching and
+countermarching through Kentucky and Tennessee the account is full and
+clear, and we find Buell and Halleck saying that they know nothing of
+any plan of campaign in the very midst of their operations. At last
+with Halleck, and still more with Grant in authority, there were
+movements ordered that had some relation to each other and a general
+plan of operations, and then the overwhelming strength of the North
+began to turn the scale. Thomas was called on by Rosecrans, as he had
+been by Buell, for advice, but he was obliged to act independently
+too; and then, as at Stone River, he showed an energy and a capacity
+that ought to have secured his earlier promotion. At Chickamauga he
+was actually left in command by Rosecrans, and while the latter
+was looking for new help elsewhere, Thomas at the front saved the
+shattered army and led it safely back to Chattanooga, where it
+underwent its famous long siege. The measures for its relief were
+planned by Rosecrans, approved by Grant, and executed by Thomas, with
+large assistance from "Baldy" Smith, whose skill as an engineer was
+fully attested then. When Thomas did at last succeed to the command
+of the Army of the Cumberland, he showed his superiority to his
+predecessors by marked improvement in his method of securing supplies,
+in his use of cavalry, and in the increased efficiency of his
+infantry. When Johnston, thanks to Davis's unwise interference with
+the Confederate armies, gave way to Hood, the latter almost at once
+gave token of his inferior skill by being defeated by the Army of the
+Cumberland--by less than half of it, in fact--in an attack intended to
+destroy three armies of more than five times the number of the Union
+force actually engaged. Thomas was in command at this battle of
+Peach-tree Creek, one of the sharpest and most significant actions
+of the campaign, though no official report is found at the end of
+the chapter in which it is described. The events that led up to the
+victory of Nashville are always worth the telling, and the account
+given in this work may be looked upon as in some respects Thomas's own
+version of them. A brief chapter by Colonel Merrill of the Engineers
+gives a very good description of three of the leading features of the
+work done by that corps in the Army of the Cumberland. To cross great
+rivers there was need of pontoon-bridges; to protect the long lines
+of railroads it was necessary to provide block-houses; to go through
+a country that was often a trackless forest, and always badly provided
+with real high-roads, it was all-important to have maps, and to
+reproduce them rapidly and plentifully. Colonel Merrill's chapter
+is pithy, pointed and to the purpose, showing how well our technical
+troops did their share of work, and how large and important that share
+was in securing the general result. The maps are also well done, and
+therefore useful in enabling a reader to follow out the details of the
+narrative.
+
+
+
+
+_BOOKS RECEIVED._
+
+
+Dissertations and Discussions; Political, Philosophical and
+Historical. By John Stuart Mill. Vol. V. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
+
+From Everglade to Canon with the Second Dragoons, 1836-75, Compiled by
+Theo. F. Rodenbough. New York: D. Van Nostrand.
+
+Grand'ther Baldwin's Thanksgiving, with other Ballads and Poems. By
+Horatio Alger, Jr. Boston: Loring.
+
+Shakespeare Hermeneutics; or, The Still Lion. By C.M. Ingleby, M.A.,
+LL.D. London: Truebner & Co.
+
+Minutes of the Ohio State Archaeological Convention. Columbus: Printed
+for the Society by Paul & Thrall.
+
+Strength of Beams under Transverse Loads. By Prof. W. Allan. New York:
+D. Van Nostrand.
+
+The Illustrated Catholic Family Almanac for 1876. New York: Catholic
+Publication Society.
+
+Report of the Commissioner of Education for 1874. Washington:
+Government Printing-office.
+
+Our Poetical Favorites. Second Series. By Aschel C. Kendrick. New
+York: Sheldon &Co.
+
+Camp-Life in Florida. By Charles Hallock. New York: Forest and Stream
+Publishing Co.
+
+Lectures on Art. Second Series. By H. Taine. New York: Henry Holt &
+Co.
+
+Pretty Miss Bellew. By Theo. Gift. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
+
+Drawn from. Life. By Charles Dickens. New York: E.J. Hale & Son.
+
+The Conquest of Europe: A Poem of the Future. By Confucius.
+
+Cartoons. By Margaret J. Preston. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Lippincott's Magazine of Popular
+Literature and Science, by Various
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE ***
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