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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lippincott's Magazine  of Popular
+Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118, 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, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: July 27, 2005 [EBook #16361]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Christine D and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note: Punctuation normalized, original spelling retained.
+
+
+[Illustration: "He stepped forward with a smile." For Percival. Page 420.]
+
+
+
+LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE
+OF
+_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE_.
+
+OCTOBER, 1877.
+Vol XX--No. 118
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by J.B. LIPPINCOTT
+& CO., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHESTER AND THE DEE.
+
+TWO PAPERS.--I.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE DEE ABOVE BALA.]
+
+The history of Chester is that of a key. It was the last city that gave up
+Harold's unlucky cause and surrendered to William the Conqueror, and the
+last that fell in the no less unlucky cause of the Stuart king against the
+Parliamentarians. In much earlier times it was held by the famous Twentieth
+Legion, the _Valens Victrix_, as the key of the Roman dominion in the
+north-west of Britain, and at present it has peculiarities of position, as
+well as of architecture, which make it unique in England and a lodestone to
+Americans. Curiously planted on the border of the newest and most bustling
+manufacturing district in England, close to the coalfields of North Wales,
+the mines of Lancashire, the quays of its sea-rival Liverpool and the mills
+of grimy, wealthy Manchester, it still exercises, besides its artistic and
+historic supremacy, a _bona fide_ ecclesiastical sway over most of these
+new places. It is the first ancient city accessible to American travellers,
+many of whom have given practical tokens of their affectionate remembrance
+of it by largely subscribing to the fund for the restoration of the
+cathedral, a work that has already cost some eighty thousand pounds.
+
+[Illustration: CAER-GAI.]
+
+The neighborhood of Chester is as suggestive of antiquity and foreigners as
+the city itself. Volumes might be written about the quaint, Dutch-like
+scenery of the low rich land reclaimed from the sea; the broad, sandy
+estuary of the Dee, with the square-headed peninsula, the Wirrall, which
+divides this quiet river from the noisy Mersey; the Hoylake, Parkgate and
+Neston fisher-folk on the sandy shores, with their queer lives, monotonous
+scratching-up of mussels and cockles, a never-failing trade, their terms of
+praise--"the biggest scrat," for instance, "in all the island," being the
+form of commendation for the woman who can with her rake at the end of a
+long pole scratch up most shellfish in a given time; the low, fertile green
+pastures, the creamy cheese and the eight yearly cheese-fairs. The city
+itself is the most foreign-looking in all England, and the inhabitants have
+the good taste to be proud of this. The river Dee--Milton's "wizard
+stream"--celebrated both by English and Welsh bards, is not seen to as much
+advantage under the walls of the Roman "camp" (_castra_=Chester) as
+elsewhere, but its bridges serve to supply the want of fine scenery,
+especially the Old Bridge, which crosses the river just at its bend, and
+whose massive pointed arches took the place, when they were first built, of
+a ferry by which the city was entered at the "Ship Gate," whence now you
+look over "the Cop" or high bank on the right side of the stream, and view,
+as from a dike in Holland, the reclaimed land stretching eight miles beyond
+Chester, though the resemblance ceases at Saltney, where behind the
+iron-works tower the Welsh hills--Moel-Famman conspicuous above the
+rest--that bound the Vale of Clwyd.
+
+The Dee is more a Welsh than an English river. It rises in the bleak
+mountain-region of Merionethshire, the most intensely Welsh of all
+counties, above Bala Lake, which is commonly but incorrectly called its
+source. Thence it flows through the Vale of Llangollen, famous in poetry,
+and waters the meadows of Wynnestay, the splendid home of one of Wales's
+most national representatives, Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, and only beyond
+that does it become English by flowing round and into Cheshire. On a very
+tiny scale the Dee follows something of the course of the Rhine: three
+streamlets combine to form it; these unite at the village of Llanwchllyn,
+and the river flows on, a mere mountain-torrent, past an old farmhouse,
+Caer-gai, lying on a desolate moor at the head of Bala Lake, and through
+the lake itself, after which its scenery alternates, like the Rhine's below
+Constance, between rocky gorges and flat moist meadows dotted with hamlets,
+churches and towns. Bala--otherwise Lin-Jegid and Pimblemere ("Lake of the
+Five Parishes")--has some traditional connection with the great British
+epic, or rather with its accessories--the _Morte d'Arthur_--of which
+Tennyson has availed himself in _Enid_, mentioning that Enid's gentle
+ministrations soothed the wounded Geraint
+
+    As the south-west that blowing Bala Lake,
+    Fills all the sacred Dee.
+
+Arthur's own home, according to Spenser, was at the source of the Dee:
+Vortigern's castle was near by on the head-waters of the Conway; and "under
+the foot of Rauran's mossy base" was the dwelling of old Timon, where
+Merlin came and gave to his care the wonderful infant who was to become the
+Christian Hercules of Britain. "Rauran" is the mountain which in Welsh is
+Arran-Pon-Llin, and which with its rocky shelves overlooks the yews of
+Bala's churches and the unaccustomed shade trees which the little town
+boasts in its principal streets. The lake, quiet and hardly visited as it
+is now, has great resources which are likely to be called upon in the
+future, and a survey was made ten years ago with a view of supplying
+Liverpool, Manchester, Blackburn, Birkenhead, etc. with water whenever a
+fresh demand for it should arise. This would imply the building of a
+breakwater at the narrow outlet of the lake, the damming up of a few
+mountain passes, and the "impounding" of a tributary of the Dee below the
+lake--the Tryweryn, which has an extensive drainage-area; but these works
+are still only projected.
+
+[Illustration: BALA.]
+
+There is scarcely an English brook that has not some historical
+associations, some poetical reminiscences, some attractions beyond those of
+scenery. Wherever water, forest and meadow were combined, an abbey was
+generally planted. Bala Lake, with its fishing-rights, once belonged to the
+Cistercian abbey of Basingwerk, while the Dee just above Llangollen was the
+property of the abbey of Valle Crucis, whose beautiful ruins still stand on
+its banks. Before we reach them we pass by the country of the Welsh hero,
+Owen Glendower, from whom are descended many of the families of this
+neighborhood and others--the Vaughans, for instance; by Glendower's prison
+at Corwen, and the Parliament House at Dolgelly, where he signed a treaty
+with France, and where the beautiful oak carving of the roof would alone
+repay a visitor for his trouble in getting there. The Dee is for the most
+part wanting in striking natural features, but here and there steep rocks
+enclose its foaming waters; deep banks covered with trees break the rugged
+shore-line; a village, such as Llanderfel with a tumbledown bridge, lies
+nestled in the valley; and coracles shoot here and there over the stream.
+These primitive boats, basketwork covered with hides, or, as used now,
+canvas coated with tar, are propelled by a paddle, and are much used for
+netting salmon. Near Bangor the fishermen are so skilful that they
+generally win in the coracle-races got up periodically by enthusiastic
+revivalists of old national sports.
+
+[Illustration: REMAINS OF VALLE CRUCIS ABBEY.]
+
+Llangollen Vale has a beauty of its own, the family likeness of which to
+that of all valleys in the hearts of mountains makes it none the less
+welcome. The picturesqueness of thatched houses and a dilapidation of
+masonry which only age makes beautiful marks the difference between this
+valley and the Alpine ones with their trim, clean toy houses, or the
+Transatlantic ones with their square, solid, black log huts and huge
+well-sweeps; otherwise the fresh greenery, the purple mountain-shadows, the
+subdued sounds, no one knows whence, the sense of peace and solitude, are
+akin to every other beautiful valley-scene of mingled wildness and
+cultivation. A traveller can hardly help making comparisons, yet much
+escapes him of the peculiar charm that hangs round every place, and is too
+subtle to disclose itself to the eye of a mere passer. You must live at
+least six months in one place before its true character unfolds: the broad
+beauties you see at once, but it needs the microscope of habit to find out
+the rarest charms. Therefore it is much easier to descant on the tangible,
+striking beauty of Valle Crucis Abbey than on the aggregate loveliness of
+Llangollen Vale; and perhaps it is this lack of familiarity that leads
+novelists, poets and others to dwell so much more and with such detail on
+buildings than on natural scenery. It may not be given them to understand
+upon how much higher a plane of beauty stands a bed of ferns on a rocky
+ledge, a clump of trees even on a flat meadow, and especially a tangled
+forest-scene or a view of distant mountains in a sunset glow, or the
+surface of water undotted by a sail, than the highest effect of man-made
+beauty, be it even York Minster or the Parthenon. What man does has value
+by reason of the meaning in it, and of course man cannot but fall short of
+the perfection of his own meaning; whereas Nature is of herself perfection,
+and perfection in which there is no effort. Valle Crucis is hardly a rival
+of Fountains or Rivaulx. The Cistercians in the beginning of their
+foundation were reformers, ascetic, and essentially agriculturists. Their
+great leader, Bernard of Clairvaux, the advocate of silence and work, once
+said, "Believe me, I have learnt more from trees than ever I learnt from
+men." But decay came even into this community of farmer-monks, and the
+praise and panegyric of the abbey, as handed down to us by a Welsh poet,
+betray unconsciously things hardly to the credit of a monastic house, for
+the abbot, "the pope of the glen," he tells us, gave entertainments "like
+the leaves in summer," with "vocal and instrumental music," wine, ale and
+curious dishes of fish and fowl, "like a carnival feast," and "a thousand
+apples for dessert."
+
+[Illustration: OWEN GLENDOWER'S PRISON.]
+
+[Illustration: THE PARLIAMENT HOUSE, DOLGELLY.]
+
+The river-scenery changes below Llangollen, and gives us first a glimpse of
+a wooded, narrow valley, then of the unsightly accessories of the great
+North Wales coalfield, after which it enters upon a typically English
+phase--low undulating hills and moist, rich meadows divided by luxuriant
+hedges and dotted with single spreading trees. The hedgerow timber of
+Cheshire is beautiful, and to a great extent makes up for the want of
+tracts of wooded land. This country is not, like the Midland counties and
+the great Fen district, violently or exclusively agricultural, and these
+hedges and trees, which are gratefully kept up for the sake of the shade
+they afford to the cattle, show a very different temper among the farmers
+from that utilitarianism which marks the men of Leicester shire, Lincoln,
+Nottingham, Norfolk, or Rutland. There even great land-owners are often
+obliged to humor their tenants, and keep the unwelcome hedges trimmed so as
+not to interpose two feet of shade between them and the wheat-crop; and as
+often as possible hedges are replaced by ugly stone walls or wooden fences.
+It is only in their own grounds that landlords can afford to court
+picturesqueness, and in this part of the country the American who is said
+to have objected to hedges because they were unfit for seats whence to
+admire the landscape, might safely sit down anywhere; only, as matters are
+seldom perfectly arranged, there is very little to admire but a flat
+expanse of wheat, barley and grass. This part of Cheshire has hardly more
+diversity in its river-scenery, but the mere presence of trees and green
+arbors makes it a pleasant picture, while here and there, as at Overton
+(this is Welsh, however, and belongs to Flintshire), a church-tower comes
+in to complete the scene. Here the Dee winds about a good deal, and
+receives its beautiful, dashing tributary, the Alyn, which runs through the
+Vale of Gresford and waters the park of Trevallyn Old Hall, one of the
+loveliest of old English homes. Its pointed gables and great clustering
+stacks of chimneys, its mullioned and diamond-paned windows, its
+finely-wooded park, all realize the stranger's ideal of the antique
+manor-house. This neighborhood is studded with country-houses in all styles
+of architecture, from the characteristic national to the uncomfortable and
+cold foreign type. Houses that were meant to stand in ilex-groves under a
+purple sky and a sun of bronze look forlorn and uninviting under the gray
+sky of England and amid its trees leafless for so many months in the year:
+home associations seem impossible in a porticoed house suggestive of
+outdoor living and the relegation of chambers to the use of a mere refuge
+from the weather. For many of these places are no more than villas
+enlarged, and might be set down with advantage to themselves in the
+Regent's Park in London, the very acme of the commonplace. On the other
+hand, all the traditional associations that go with an English hall
+presuppose a national style of architecture. Even florid Tudor, even sturdy
+"Queen Anne," can stand juxtaposition with groups of horses, dogs and
+huntsmen; Christmas cheer and Christmas weather set them off all the
+better; leafless trees are no drawback; the house looks warmer, coseyer,
+more home-like, the worse the blast and rush without. A roaring fire is
+natural to the huge hall fireplace, while in a mosaic-paved "ante-room" or
+a frescoed "saloon" it looks foreign and out of place. Many an odd Welsh
+and English house has unfortunately disappeared to make room for a cold,
+unsuccessful monstrosity that reminds one of a mammoth railway-station or a
+new hotel; and when Welsh names are tacked on to these absurd dwellings the
+contrast is as painful as it is forcible. Such, for instance, is
+Bryn-y-Pys, on the Dee--a house you might guess to belong to a Liverpool
+merchant who had trusted to a common builder for a comfortable home.
+Overton Cottage, on the other side, fills in with its walks and plantations
+an abrupt bend of the river, and the view from the up-going road at its
+back is very lovely, though the scene is purely pastoral. Overton
+Churchyard is one of the "seven wonders" of North Wales: it has a very trim
+and stately appearance, not that ragged, free if melancholy,
+outspreadedness which distinguishes many country cemeteries, that
+unpremeditated luxuriance of creepers and flowers, blossoming bushes and
+grasses, that make up at least half of one's pleasant reminiscences of such
+places. How much more interesting to find an old tomb or quaint "brass"
+under the temple of a wild rosebush or in the firm clasp of an ivy-root
+than to walk up to it and read the inscription newly scraped and cleaned by
+the voluble attendant who volunteers to show you the place! The great elms
+by Overton Church and the half-timbered and thatched houses crowding up to
+its gates somewhat make up for the splendor of the coped wall and new
+monuments in the churchyard. A scene wholly old is the Erbistock Ferry,
+which one might mistake for a rope-ferry on the Mosel. The cottage looks
+like the dilapidated lodge of an old monastery, and here, at least, is no
+trimness. Two walls with a flight of steps in each enclose a grass terrace
+between them, and trees and bushes straggle to the edge of the river,
+hardly keeping clear of the swinging rope. Coracles are sometimes used for
+ferrying--also punts. Bangor is a familiar name to students of church
+history, and to those who are not, the startling tale of the massacre of
+twelve hundred British monks by the Saxon and heathen king of Northumbria,
+who conquered Chester and invaded Wales in the seventh century, is repeated
+by the local guides. At present, Bangor is interesting to anglers and to
+lovers of curiosities--to the former as a good salmon-ground, and to the
+latter for the quaint verses, which, though trivial in themselves, borrow a
+value from the date of their inscription and the "laws" to which they
+refer. They are on the wall of the lower story of the bell-tower:
+
+[Illustration: IN THE VALE OF LLANGOLLEN.]
+
+    If that to ring you would come here,
+    You must ring well with hand and ear;
+    But if you ring in spur or hat,
+    Fourpence always is due for that;
+    But if a bell you overthrow,
+    Sixpence is due before you go;
+    But if you either swear or curse,
+    Twelvepence is due; pull out your purse.
+    Our laws are old, they are not new;
+    Therefore the clerk must have his due.
+    If to our laws you do consent,
+    Then take a bell: we are content.
+
+[Illustration: LLANGOLLEN.]
+
+Farndon Bridge and Wrexham Church (the latter looks like a small cathedral
+to the unpractised eye) are the last Welsh points of attraction before the
+Dee becomes quite an English river. Malpas (_mauvais pas_ = "bad step"), on
+the English bank, is significantly so-called from its situation as a border
+town: the rector, too, might consider it not ill named, as regards the odd
+partition of the church tithes, which has been in force from time
+immemorial, and has given rise to an explanatory legend concerning a
+travelling king whom the resident curate wisely entertained in the absence
+of the rector, receiving for his guerdon a promise of an equal share in the
+income, not only for himself, but for all future curates. In the upper
+rectory (the lower is the curate's house) was born Bishop Heber in 1783,
+and in the early years of this century, before missionary meetings were as
+common as they are now, the young clergyman wrote on the spur of the
+moment, with only one word corrected, the well-known hymn, "From
+Greenland's Icy Mountains." A missionary sermon was announced for Sunday at
+Wrexham, the vicarage of Heber's father-in-law, Shirley, and the want of a
+suitable hymn was felt. He was asked on Saturday to write one, and did so,
+seated at a window of the old vicarage-house. It was printed that evening,
+and sung the next day in Wrexham Church. The original manuscript is in a
+collection at Liverpool, and the printer who set up the type when a boy was
+still living at Wrexham within the last twenty years.
+
+[Illustration: CHESTER, FROM THE ALDFORD ROAD.]
+
+The river now makes a turn, sweeping along into English ground and making
+almost a natural moat round Chester, the great Roman camp whose form and
+intersecting streets still bear the stamp of Roman regularity, and whose
+history long bore traces of the influence of Roman inflexibility mingled
+with British dash. The view of the city is fine from the Aldford road (or
+Old Ford, where a Roman pavement is sometimes visible in the bed of the
+stream), with the cathedral and St. John's towering over the peaks and
+gables that shoot up above the walls. The mention of the ford brings to
+mind a famous crossing of the river during the civil wars. It was just
+before the battle of Rowton Moor, which Charles I. watched from the tower
+that now bears his name; and Sir Marmaduke Langdale, one of his leal
+soldiers, wishing to send the king notice of his having crossed the Dee at
+Farndon Bridge and pressing on the Parliamentarians, bade Colonel Shakerley
+convey the message as speedily as possible. The latter, to avoid the long
+circuit by the bridge, galloped to the Dee, took a wooden tub used for
+slaughtering swine, employed "a batting-staff, used for batting of coarse
+linen," as an oar, put his servant in the tub, his horse swimming by him,
+and once across left the tub in charge of the man while he rode to the
+king, delivered his message and returned to cross over the same way.
+
+[Illustration: CORACLES.]
+
+Eaton and Wynnestay are the grandest of the Dee country-seats, though not
+the most interesting as to architecture. The former, like many Italian
+houses, has its park open to the public, and is an exception to the
+jealously-guarded places in most parts of England, but its avenues, rather
+formal though very magnificent, are approached by lodges. The Wrexham
+avenue leads to a farmhouse called Belgrave, and here is the
+christening-point of the new, fashionable London of society, of novelists
+and of contractors. Another like avenue leads to Pulford, where there is
+another lodge: a third leads from Grosvenor Bridge to the deer-park, and a
+fourth to the village of Aldford. The hall is an immense pile, strikingly
+like, at first glance, the Houses of Parliament, with the Victoria Tower
+(this in the hall is one hundred and seventy feet high, and built above the
+chapel), and the style is sixteenth-century French, florid and costly. The
+plan is perhaps unique in England, and comfort has been attained, though
+one would hardly believe it, such size seeming to swamp everything except
+show. The description of the house, as given by a visitor there, reads like
+that of a palace: "The hall is an octagonal room in the centre of the house
+about seventy-five feet in length and from thirty to forty broad: on each
+side, at the end farthest from the entrance, are two doors leading into
+anterooms--one the ante-drawing-room, and the other the ante-dining-room;
+each is lighted by three large windows, and is thirty-three feet in length:
+they are fine rooms in themselves, and well-proportioned. From these lead
+the drawing-room and the dining-room respectively, both exceedingly grand
+rooms, ingenious in design and shape, each with two oriel windows and
+lighted by three others and a large bay window: this suite completes the
+east side. The south is occupied by the end of the drawing-room and a vast
+library--all _en suite_. The library is lighted by four bay windows, three
+flat ones and a fine alcove, and the rest of the main building to the west
+is made up of billiard- and smoking-rooms, waiting-hall, groom-of-chambers'
+sitting- and bed-rooms, and a carpet-room, besides the necessary
+staircases. This completes the main building, and a corridor leads to the
+kitchen and cook's offices: this corridor, which passes over the upper
+part of the kitchen, branches off into two parts--one leading to an
+excellently-planned mansion for the family and the private secretary, and
+another leading to the stables, which are arranged with great skill. The
+pony stable, the carriage-horse stable, the riding horses, occupy different
+sides, and through these are arranged, just in the right places, the rooms
+for livery and saddle grooms and coachmen. The laundry, wash-house,
+gun-room and game-larder occupy another building, which, however, is easily
+approached, and the whole building, though it extends seven hundred feet in
+length, is a perfect model of compactness. Great facilities are given to
+any one who desires to see it." The mention of a "mansion for the family"
+shows how the associations of a home are lost in this wilderness of
+magnificence: indeed, I remember a remark of a person whose husband had
+three or four country-houses in England and Scotland and a house in London,
+that "she never felt at home anywhere."
+
+[Illustration: CHESTER CATHEDRAL AND CITY WALL.]
+
+The farms in this neighborhood are mostly small, the average being seventy
+acres, and some are still smaller, though when one gets down to ten, one is
+tempted to call them gardens. Grazing and dairy-work are the chief
+industries. Farther inland, beyond the manufacturing town of Stockport, is
+a house of the Leghs, an immense building, more imposing than lovely in its
+exterior, but one of the most individual and pleasant houses in its
+interior as well as in its human associations. It has been altered at
+various times, and bears traces, like a corrected map, of each new phase of
+architecture for several hundred years. The four sides form a huge
+quadrangle, entered by foreign-looking gateways, and the rooms all open
+into a wide passage that runs round three sides of the building, and is a
+museum in itself. Old and new are just enough blended to produce comfort,
+and the stately, old-English look of the drawing-room, with its dark
+panelling and tapestry, is a reproach to the pink-and-white,
+plaster-of-Paris style of too many remodelled houses. Outside there is a
+garden distinguished by a heavy old wall overrun with creepers, dividing
+two levels and making a striking object in the landscape; and beyond that,
+where the country grows bleak and begins to remind one of moors, there are
+the last survivors of a unique breed of wild cattle, which, like the
+mastiffs at the house, bear the name of the place. The name of another
+Cheshire house, formerly belonging to the Stanleys, and now to Mr.
+Gladstone, is probably familiar to American readers--Hawarden Castle. The
+present house must trust entirely to associations for its interest, having
+been built in 1809, before much taste was applied to restore old places,
+but the old castle in the park dates from the middle of the thirteenth
+century. The park is not unlike that of Arundel, but the views from the
+ruin are finer and more varied. The counties of Caernarvon, Denbigh, Flint,
+Cheshire and Lancashire are spread out around it, and the ruin itself is
+beautiful and extensive.
+
+The road from Hawarden to Boughton is exceedingly grand: we come upon one
+of the widest panoramas of the Dee and one of the most typical of English
+country scenes. A vast sweep of country unsurpassed in richness spreads
+along the river on the Cheshire side: sixty square miles of fields and
+pastures are in sight, with elms, sycamores and formal rows of Lombardy
+poplars. Wherever the trees cluster in a grove they usually mark the site
+of a country-house or a cherished ruin, like this one of old Hawarden,
+where one enormous oak tree sweeps its branches on the ground on every
+side, and forms a canopy whence you can peer out, as through the delicate
+tracery of a Gothic window, at the landscape beyond. The mouth of the Dee
+is visible from this road, whence at low water it seems reduced to a huge
+sandbank, through which the tired river trickles like a brook. The dun sky
+and yellow sands and gray sea, with the island of Hilbree, a counterpart of
+Lindisfarne both in its legend of a recluse and its continual alternation
+twice a day between the state of an island and a peninsula, make a picture
+pleasant to look back upon. Hence too come the shoals of cockles and
+mussels that go to delight Londoners. Then the open-sea fishing, the lithe
+boats that seem all sail, the wide waste of waters, with the point of Air
+and the Great Orme's Head walling it in on the receding Welsh coasts, the
+remembrance of the shipwreck a little beyond the mouth of the Dee which led
+to Milton's poem of _Lycidas_ (containing the phrase "wizard stream" which
+has become peculiar to the Dee),--all claim our notice, and it seems
+impossible that we are so few miles from Manchester and so far from the
+historic, romantic times of old.
+
+LADY BLANCHE MURPHY.
+
+[Illustration: OVERTON CHURCH.]
+
+
+
+
+FOR ANOTHER.
+
+    Sweet--sweet? My child, some sweeter word than sweet,
+      Some lovelier word than love, I want for you.
+    Who says the world is bitter, while your feet
+      Are left among the lilies and the dew?
+
+    Ah? So some other has, this night, to fold
+      Such hands as his, and drop some precious head
+    From off her breast as full of baby-gold?
+      I, for her grief, will not be comforted.
+
+S.M.B. PIATT.
+
+
+
+
+AMONG THE KABYLES.
+
+CONCLUDING PAPER.
+
+[Illustration: ROMAN SEPULCHRE AT TAKSEBT.]
+
+
+Few countries twenty-five leagues long by ten wide have such an assortment
+of climates as Grand Kabylia. From the Mediterranean on the north to the
+Djurjura range on the south, a distance of two hours' ride by rail if there
+were a railway, the ascent is equal to that from New York Bay to the summit
+of Mount Washington. The palm is at home on the shore, while snow is
+preserved through the summer in the hollows of the peaks. This epitome of
+the zones is more condensed than that so often remarked upon on the eastern
+slope of Mexico, although it does not embrace such extremes of temperature
+as those presented by Vera Cruz and the uppermost third of Orizaba. The
+country being more broken, the lower and higher levels are brought at many
+points more closely together than on the Mexican ascent. It happens thus
+that semi-tropical and semi-arctic plants come not simply into one and the
+same landscape, but into actual contact. Each hill is a miniature Orizaba,
+so far as it rises, and hundreds of abrupt hills collected in a space
+comparatively so limited so dovetail the floras of different levels as in a
+degree to cause them to coalesce and effect a certain mutual adaptation of
+habits. Good neighborhood has established itself rather more completely
+among the vegetable than with the human part of the inhabitants.
+
+What more amiable example of give-and-take than the intertwining of birch
+and orange, the thin ghostly sprays of the hyperborean caressing the
+fragrant leaf and golden globes of the sub-tropical? This, and other
+conjunctions less eloquent of contrast, may be seen on the headland of
+Zeffoun or Cape Corbelin. They stand out from a prevailing background of
+the familiar forest trees of temperate Europe and America--the ash, elm,
+beech, oak, fir and walnut. The orchards, above those of oranges and
+lemons, are of figs and olives. The cork-oak covers considerable tracts,
+but is less attended to than in Spain. A non-European aspect is imparted by
+the tufts of cactus and aloes which abound in the most arid localities.
+
+[Illustration: THE DJURJURA RANGE.]
+
+Wherever intelligent farming is met with in Northern Africa it is a safe
+assertion that the Kabyles are either on the spot or not far off. Like
+other farmers, they are conservative and adhere to old rules or fancies,
+which in some cases verge upon superstition. The practice of fertilizing
+fig trees by hanging them with fruits of the wild fig is one of those which
+it is difficult to class--whether with the visionary or the practical. Be
+that as it may, people who know nothing about figs except to eat them have
+no right to a say in the matter. Tradition and experience are in favor of
+the Kabyle. He does what has been done since Aristotle, Theophrastus and
+Pliny, all of whom insist on "caprification" as essential to a large crop
+of figs adapted to drying. He will go or send many miles to procure the
+wild fruit if it does not grow in his neighborhood, and the traffic in it
+reaches a value of some thousands of dollars annually, trains of thirty,
+fifty and sixty mule-loads passing from one tribe to another. As with other
+valuable things, this inedible fruit is food for quarrelling. The tribe
+which is rich in the _dokhar_, or wild fig, is fortunate, and especially so
+if its neighbors have none or if their crop of it fails. It is then able to
+"bull the market," and proceeds to do so with a promptness and vim that
+would turn a Wall street operator blue with envy. But it is compelled to
+take account of troubles in its path unknown at the Board. The party who is
+"short" on dokhar may be "long" on matchlocks. If so, the speculation is
+apt to come to an unhappy end. A sudden raid will capture the stock and at
+once equalize the market. To many communities figs are at once meat and
+pocket-money. To lose the harvest is not to be thought of. The aspect of
+the means of preventing such a disaster is altogether a secondary
+consideration. Dokhar at all hazards is the cry of men, women and children.
+The comparative cessation of fig-wars is one of the blessings due to French
+rule.
+
+[Illustration: ROAD ACROSS THE DJURJURA AT MOUNT TIROURDA.]
+
+What we deem the fruit of the fig is, it will be remembered, only the husk,
+the apparent seeds being the true fruit and--before ripening--the blossom.
+A small fly establishes itself in the interior of the wild fig, escaping in
+great numbers when the fruit is ripe. This happens before the ripening of
+the improved fig, and the fly is supposed to carry the wild pollen to the
+flowers of the latter. A single insect, say the Kabyles, will perfect
+ninety-nine figs, the hundredth becoming its tomb. Some varieties of figs
+do not need caprification, but they are said to be unsuitable for drying or
+shipment.
+
+The Italian practice of touching the eye of each fig, while yet on the
+tree, with a drop of olive oil seems opposed to the African plan; since the
+oil would certainly exclude the insect. And there are no better figs in the
+world than those of the Southern States of the Union, which are not
+treated in either way, and receive the least possible cultivation of any
+kind. Those States, if it be true that the difference in the yield of a
+"caprified" and non-caprified tree is that between two hundred and eighty
+and twenty-five pounds, cannot do better than borrow a leaf from the Kabyle
+book, should it only be a fig-leaf to aid in clothing the nakedness of bare
+sands and galled hillsides. The United States Department of Agriculture
+should by all means introduce the dokhar. Some of our agricultural
+machinery would be an exchange in the highest degree beneficial to the
+other side.
+
+[Illustration: THE PEAK OF TIROURDA.]
+
+Long before the French occupation the Kabyles had maintained a regulation
+which is, we believe, peculiar in Europe to France--the _ban_, or
+legally-established day for the beginning of the vintage and the harvest of
+other fruits. The cultivator may repose under his own vine and fig tree,
+but he shall not until the word is given by the proper authority put forth
+his hand to pluck its luscious boon, though perfectly mature or past
+maturity. Exceptions are made in case of invalids and distinguished guests,
+and doubtless the hale schoolboy decrees an occasional dispensation in his
+own favor. The birds share his defiance of the law, and both are abetted by
+a third group of transgressors, the monkeys.
+
+Africans of this last-named race are in some localities extremely numerous,
+and they do not restrict their foraging parties to succulent food. Grain
+is very acceptable to them, and has the advantage of keeping better than
+fruit, the art of drying which they have not yet mastered any more than the
+Bushmen or the Pi-Utes. They establish granaries in the crevices of the
+rocks; and these reserves of provision are sometimes of such magnitude as
+to make exploring expeditions on the part of the plundered Kabyles quite
+remunerative.
+
+[Illustration: DJEMA-SAHRIDJ.]
+
+These most ancient of all the devastators which have successively descended
+upon Barbary are baboons of small size. They have no tails, that ancestral
+organ having dwindled to a wart the size of a pea. This approach to the
+form of man is aided by another point of personal resemblance--long
+whiskers. That the tail should have been worn off against the rocks, or in
+climbing the fences to get at orchards and melon-patches, is easily
+conceivable. How the evolutionists account for the retention of the beard
+does not yet appear. The females carry their young as adroitly and
+carefully as do the Kabyle women, and ascend the rocks with them with much
+greater activity. A young monkey has a less neglected look than a young
+Kabyle. His ablutions cannot be less frequent. Tourists complain that all
+Kabylia does not boast a single bath-house--a privation the more striking
+to one who has to pick his way often for miles among the ruins of Roman
+aqueducts, tanks and baths, the great basin in cut stone at Djema-Sahridj,
+which gives name to the place, being a noted example of these works.
+
+[Illustration: A DISH-FACTORY.]
+
+As the vultures, dogs, negroes, Jews and jackals keep exact memoranda of
+the market-days, so the baboons are always on hand at harvest. Ranged in
+long ranks on an amphitheatre of cliffs, stroking gravely their long white
+beards like so many reverend _episcopi_ or "on-lookers" confident of their
+tithes, they calmly contemplate the toilers in the vale below. Swift was
+not more certain of his "tithe-pig and mortuary guinea." Sunset comes
+sooner below than above. The reapers are early home, and the peaks are
+still purple when the marauders pour down upon the fields, and their share
+of the work is done with a neatness unsurpassable by reiver, ritter or
+kateran. The monkey-tax thus collected is quite a calculable percentage of
+the crop, and few taxes are more regularly paid. As it goes to
+non-producers, its reduction is an object constantly kept in view. The
+wretched guns of the natives are, however, but a feeble instrument of
+reform. The chassepot may succeed after having finished the rest of its
+task, and dispose of the baboons after the settlement of the men. The
+former, though not incomparably smaller than the French conscript after a
+protracted war, will never be made to bear arms. He is therefore useless to
+modern statesmen, and needs to be got rid of.
+
+While the barn is defrauded by these little vegetarians, the barnyard is
+laid under tribute by a family of equally unauthorized flesh-eaters--the
+panthers. If this large spotted cat, known in other parts of the world as
+ounce, jaguar, leopard and chetah, has any choice of diet, it is for veal.
+But his appreciation of kid is none the less lively. Lamb, in season, comes
+well to him also. As there are many panthers, each of them of "unbounded
+stomach," and they can find little to eat in the way of wild quadrupeds,
+the destruction they must cause among domestic animals is seen to be
+serious. In the Mokuea neighborhood each village has its panther-killer, an
+enterprising man set apart for a profession which sometimes becomes
+hereditary. One of these boasts of having killed thirty-six panthers. His
+father before him had bagged seventy-five, and he hoped before pulling his
+final trigger to have done as well. This expectation was a just one, as at
+twenty-eight he had already nearly halved the paternal count. The method of
+hunting is very simple. The sportsman fixes a bleating little victim from
+the herd at the foot of a tree, and climbs with his flint gun into the
+branches. Had the North African beast the arboreal habits of the South
+African tree-leopard or the American jaguar, this proceeding would be less
+effectual with him. But he can neither climb nor reflect like his
+countryman the monkey, and is picked off like a beef. One finds it
+difficult to get up sympathy for an animal so little able to take care of
+himself, or to suppose that panthers could have furnished a particularly
+high-spiced ingredient to the enjoyments of the Roman arena. An English
+bull-dog, if less picturesque, would have been far more fruitful of
+fighting.
+
+Products edible neither to the wild beast nor the tooth of time are the
+Kabyle vases in clay. The amphorae in common use by the women for carrying
+water are generally of graceful forms, comparing well in design with many
+of the archaic vases of Greece and the Levant. The patterns vary somewhat
+with the locality, but there is a resemblance which speaks of a common
+origin and taste. Those of the Beni-Raten all come to a blunt point at the
+bottom, and will not stand unsupported. The jar is made to rest upon the
+girdle of the bearer, while she supports it upon her back by one or both of
+the handles. Among the tribes nearer the Djurjura the jar has a broader and
+hollowed bottom, fitted to rest upon the head of the woman. It must
+therefore be less elongated and more rotund to admit of her reaching the
+handles for the purpose of balancing it. These jars weigh, filled with
+water, sixty pounds. In carrying one of them a Kabyle woman, it may easily
+be supposed, is not in a condition to study lightness of step or grace of
+carriage. Yet this heavy task, to which she begins to accustom herself at
+the age of twelve, does not appear to injure her figure or health. Such a
+result is more often due to violent and exceptional strains than to
+habitual exertion even greater in extent. The muscles are not less
+susceptible of education than the mind. Whatever brings out the full power
+of either without suddenly overtasking is healthy and beneficial.
+
+It has been remarked that the most usual size of the Kabyle water-jar is as
+nearly as possible identical with the amphora kept for a standard measure
+in the Capitol at Rome. This coincidence may well be due rather to a
+correspondence in the average strength of the carriers than to a common
+system of authorized measures. In decoration the Kabyle vases approach the
+Arabic more than the Roman style. But the feeling, both in form and
+coloring, is decidedly more artistic than in the similar ware of Northern
+Europe.
+
+Very ancient influences are manifest, too, in the work of the Kabyle
+silversmiths. Their diadems, ear-drops, bracelets and anklets remind one
+of the forms unearthed at Hissarlik and in Cyprus. In outline and chasing
+the rectangular, mathematical and monumental rules at the expense of the
+flowing and floriated. A certain pre-Phidian stiffness of handling seems to
+hamper the workman, as though twenty-three hundred years had been lost for
+him.
+
+[Illustration: THE BOUDOIR AND KITCHEN.]
+
+That there should be so much of hopeful force left in the Kabyle, artisan,
+agriculturist or adventurer, is creditable to him, and suggests "an
+original glory not yet lost." He obstinately refuses to accept the sheer
+professional vagabondism of the Arab, confident, as it were, that the world
+has in reserve better use for him than that. "Day-dawn in Africa" will
+probably gild his hills sooner than the tufted swamps of Guinea or the
+slimy huts of the Nile. A class of missionaries quite different from the
+Livingstones and the Moffatts have devoted themselves to his improvement.
+They approach him in a different way, and begin on his commercial and
+industrial side, not on the spiritual. The latter does not appear to be by
+any means so accessible. Unlike the Ashantees, the Kafirs and the M'pongwe,
+he was a Christian once, and may become one again. But he is not going to
+be evangelized on the hurrah system; and that fact his new rulers, with all
+their alleged defects as reformers and colonizers, have sense enough to
+recognize. The new faith must push its way in the rear of works. Peace,
+good government, good roads, better implements and methods of labor will
+promote the enlightenment necessary to its success.
+
+Bougie, the port of Eastern Kabylia, lying under Cape Carbon, has one
+Catholic church, standing in the midst of new streets, squares and public
+constructions indicative of prosperity wrought by the French regime. It is
+still in need of easy communication with the interior, having but one
+road--one more than in the time of the Turks. Wax is the chief commodity
+traversing that line of traffic. That circumstance has, however, nothing to
+do with the name of the town. The name was there when the French came, as
+was the wax, and very little else but ruins. If the present state of
+improvement has been effected with so little aid from good roads, what
+would not a number of them accomplish? A railway running to the other end
+of the province longitudinally through its centre would have but one ridge
+to overcome, and would find a very fair business ready for it. The railway
+and vandalism, in the proverbial sense of the word, could not coexist.
+When the Vandals buy railway-tickets and ship fat oxen on fast stock-trains
+the African world will move. Nobody ever heard of chronic war between two
+adjacent railroad-stations, or of a gang of raiders dressed only in shirts
+and armed with spears and matchlocks going out on the morning mail for a
+day's shooting among their fellow-countrymen in the next county.
+
+Let us quote a sketch of the region lying a few leagues west and north-west
+of Bougie:
+
+"Near Tarourt we found thermal springs. An open park-like country,
+beautiful with trees and turf, is defaced only by charred spots where the
+cork-woods have been burned by the natives to effect clearings much less in
+extent than the space thus denuded. Ten acres of cork trees will be
+thoughtlessly burned to make one of fig-orchard. And this evil rather
+increases than lessens, prevention being difficult by reason of the want of
+good roads for reaching the delinquents.... In six hours' march we reached
+Toudja, at the foot of Mount Arbalon, in the most delicious oasis
+imaginable. The soil, threaded by clear and cool rivulets which spring in
+abundance from the rocks forming the base of the mountain, is wonderfully
+fertile. We are surrounded by more than a square league of tufted verdure,
+composed in great part of orange and lemon groves, mingled with some palms
+and immense carob trees. The houses are well built, and even show fancy in
+their designs. Vines bending with enormous clusters of grapes festoon
+themselves from tree to tree, tasselling the topmost branches with fruit
+and tendrils. It is not uncommon to see four or five large trees taken
+possession of by a single vine, its trunk as large as the body of a man.
+The grapes are mostly of a light-red color, large and sweet."
+
+[Illustration: REPOSE.]
+
+All this indicates that France did not deceive herself as to the
+capabilities of Algeria, and that her conquest of it was inspired by
+considerations more solid than the glory she has been accused of
+recognizing as an all-sufficient motive. She has made the country much
+more valuable to the commerce of the world than any other part of Barbary.
+Had she done nothing more with it than hold it prostrate and put an end to
+its existence as a den of pirates, she would by that alone have earned the
+gratitude of the nations. She has done a great deal more. European
+civilization has discovered a penetrable spot in the dense armor of
+African barbarism. It has effected a lodgment in the darkest and most
+hopeless of the continents. Should the movement fail, like so many before
+it, to extend itself, and become localized after a period of promise, the
+cause must be sought mainly in natural obstacles almost impossible to be
+overcome.
+
+To have lifted the dead, brutal weight of Ottoman tyranny from any corner
+of the broad territory it blasts is to deserve well of humanity. Still
+stronger is the case when the rescued territory is fertile, beautiful, and
+inhabited by a race worthy of a better fate than the bondage against which
+it had never ceased to struggle.
+
+France has not been guiltless of acts of severity, always attendant, in a
+greater or less degree, on violent political changes. It is not doubtful,
+nevertheless, that by repressing the endless turbulence of the tribes and
+driving out a foreign rule that knew no law but force, she has saved many
+more lives than she has taken. A genius for organization was never denied
+her. Organization was the first thing wanted in Algeria.
+
+EDWARD C. BRUCE.
+
+
+
+
+"FOR PERCIVAL."
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THORNS AND ROSES.
+
+
+It was a long, narrow and rather low room, with four windows looking out on
+a terrace. Jasmine and roses clustered round them, and flowers lifted their
+heads to the broad sills. Within, the lighted candles showed furniture that
+was perhaps a little faded and dim, though it had a slender, old-fashioned
+grace which more than made amends for any beauty it had lost. There was
+much old china, and on the walls were a few family portraits, of which
+their owner was justly proud; and in the air there lingered a faint
+fragrance of dried rose-leaves, delicate yet unconquerable. Even the full
+tide of midsummer sweetness which flowed through the open windows could not
+altogether overcome that subtle memory of summers long gone by.
+
+The master of the house, with a face like a wrinkled waxen mask, sat in his
+easy-chair reading the _Saturday Review_, and a lady very like him, only
+with a little more color and fulness, was knitting close by. The light
+shone on the old man's pale face and white hair, on the old lady's
+silver-gray dress and flashing rings: the knitting-pins clicked, working up
+the crimson wool, and the pages of the paper rustled with a pleasant
+crispness as they were turned. By the window, where the candlelight faded
+into the soft shadows, stood a young man apparently lost in thought. His
+face, which was turned a little toward the garden, was a noteworthy one
+with its straight forehead and clearly marked, level brows. His features
+were good, and his clear olive complexion gave him something of a foreign
+air. He had no beard, and his moustache was only a dark shadow on his upper
+lip, so that his mouth stood revealed as one which indicated reserve,
+though it was neither stern nor thin-lipped. Altogether, it was a pleasant
+face.
+
+A light step sauntering along the terrace, a low voice softly singing
+"Drink to Me only with Thine Eyes," roused him from his reverie. He did not
+move, but his mouth and eyes relaxed into a smile as a white figure came
+out of the dusk exactly opposite his window, and singer and song stopped
+together. "Oh, Percival! I didn't know you had come out of the
+dining-room."
+
+"Twenty minutes ago. What have you been doing?"
+
+"Wandering about the garden. What could I do on such a perfect night but
+what I have been doing all this perfect day?"
+
+She stood looking up at him as she spoke. She had an arch, beautiful
+face--the sort of face which would look well with patches and powder. Only
+it would have been a sin to powder the hair, which, though deep brown, had
+rich touches of gold, as if a happy sunbeam were imprisoned in its waves.
+Her eyes were dark, her lips were softly red: everything about Sissy
+Langton's face was delicate and fine. She lifted her hand to reach a spray
+of jasmine just above her head, and the lace sleeve above fell back from
+her pretty, slender wrist: "Give it to me. Percival! do you hear? Oh, what
+a tease you are!" For he drew it back when she would have gathered it. Mrs.
+Middleton was heard making a remark inside.
+
+"You don't deserve it," said Percival. "Here is my aunt saying that the hot
+weather makes you scandalously idle."
+
+"Scandalously idle! Aunt Harriet!" Sissy repeated it in incredulous
+amusement, and the old lady's indignant disclaimer was heard: "Percival!
+Most unusually idle, I said."
+
+"Oh! most unusually idle? I beg your pardon. But doesn't that imply a
+considerable amount of idleness to be got through by one person?"
+
+"Yes, but you helped me," said Sissy.--"Aunt Harriet, listen. He stood on
+my thimble ever so long while he was talking this afternoon. How can I work
+without a thimble?"
+
+"Impossible!" said Percival. "And I don't think I can get you another
+to-morrow: I am going out. On Thursday I shall come back and bring you one
+that won't fit. Friday you must go with me to change it. Yes, we shall
+manage three days' holiday very nicely."
+
+"Nonsense! But it _is_ your fault if I am idle."
+
+"Why, yes. Having no thimble, you are naturally unable to finish your book,
+for instance."
+
+"Oh, I sha'n't finish that: I don't like it. The heroine is so dreadfully
+strong-minded I don't believe in her. She never does anything wrong; and
+though she suffers tortures--absolute agony, you know--she always rises to
+the occasion--nasty thing!"
+
+"A wonderful woman," said Percival, idly picking sprays of jasmine as he
+spoke.
+
+Sissy's voice sank lower: "Do you think there are really any women like
+that?"
+
+"Oh yes, I suppose so."
+
+She took the flowers which he held out, and looked doubtfully into his
+face: "But--do you _like_ them, Percival?"
+
+"Make the question a little clearer," he said. "I don't like your ranting,
+pushing, unwomanly women who can talk of nothing but their rights. They are
+very terrible. But heroic women--" He stopped short. The pause was more
+eloquent than speech.
+
+"Ah!" said Sissy, "Well--a woman like Jael? or Judith?"
+
+He repeated the name "Judith." "Or Charlotte Corday?" he suggested after a
+moment.
+
+It was Sissy's turn to hesitate, and she compressed her pretty lips
+doubtfully. Being in the Old Testament, Jael must of course come out all
+right, even if one finds it difficult to like her. Judith's position, is
+less clear. Still, it is a great thing to be in the Apocrypha, and then
+living so long ago and so far away makes a difference. But Charlotte
+Corday--a young Frenchwoman, not a century dead, who murdered a man, and
+was guillotined in those horrible revolutionary times,--would Percival say
+_that_ was the type of woman he liked?
+
+"Well--Charlotte Corday, then?"
+
+"Yes, I admire her," he said slowly. "Though I would rather the heroism did
+not show itself in bloodshed. Still, she was noble: I honor her. I dare say
+the others were too, but I don't know so much about them."
+
+"What a poor little thing you must think me!" said Sissy. "I could never do
+anything heroic."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I should be frightened. I can't bear people to be angry with me. I should
+run away, or do something silly."
+
+"Then I hope you won't be tried," said Percival.
+
+She shook her pretty head: "People always talk about casting gold into the
+furnace, and it's coming out only the brighter and better. Things are not
+good for much if you would rather they were not tried."
+
+Her hand was on the window-frame as she spoke, and the young man touched a
+ring she wore: "Gold is tried in the furnace--yes, but not your pearls.
+Besides, I'm not so sure that you would fail if you were put to the test."
+
+She smiled, well pleased, yet unconvinced.
+
+"You think," he went on, "that people who did great deeds did them without
+an effort--were always ready, like a bow always strung? No, no, Sissy: they
+felt very weak sometimes. Isn't there anything in the world you think you
+could die for? Even if you say 'No' now, there may be something one of
+these days."
+
+The twilight hid the soft glow which overspread her face. "Anything in the
+world you could die for?" Anything? Anybody? Her blood flowed in a strong,
+courageous current as her heart made answer, "Yes--for one."
+
+But she did not speak, and after a moment her companion changed the
+subject. "That's a pretty ring," he said.
+
+Sissy started from her reverie: "Horace gave it me. Adieu, Mr. Percival
+Thorne: I'm going to look at my roses."
+
+"Thank you. Yes, I shall be delighted to come." And Percival jumped out.
+"Don't look at me as if I'd said something foolish. Isn't that the right
+way to answer your kind invitation?"
+
+"Invitation! What next?" demanded Sissy with pretty scorn. And the pair
+went off together along the terrace and into the fragrant dusk.
+
+A minute later it occurred to Mrs. Middleton to fear that Sissy might take
+cold, and she went to the window to look after her. But, as no one was to
+be seen, she turned away and encountered her brother, who had been watching
+them too. "Do they care for each other?" he asked abruptly.
+
+"How can I tell?" Mrs. Middleton replied. "Of course she is fond of him in
+a way, but I can't help fancying sometimes that Horace--"
+
+"Horace!" Mr. Thorne's smile was singularly bland. "Oh, indeed! Horace--a
+charming arrangement! Pray how many more times is Mr. Horace to supplant
+that poor boy?" His soft voice changed suddenly, as one might draw a sword
+from its sheath. "Horace had better not cross Percival's path, or he will
+have to deal with me. Is he not content? What next must he have?"
+
+Mrs. Middleton paused. She could have answered him. There was an obvious
+reply, but it was too crushing to be used, and Mr. Thorne braved it
+accordingly.
+
+"Better leave your grandsons alone, Godfrey," she said at last, "if you'll
+take my advice; which I don't think you ever did yet. You'll only make
+mischief. And there is Sissy to be considered. Let the child choose for
+herself."
+
+"And you think she can choose--_Horace?_"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Choose Horace rather than Percival?"
+
+"I should," said the old lady with smiling audacity. "And I would rather
+she did. Horace's position is better."
+
+Mr. Thorne uttered something akin to a grunt, which might by courtesy be
+taken for a groan: "Oh, how mercenary you women are! Well, if you marry a
+man for his money, Horace has the best of it--if he behaves himself. Yes, I
+admit that--_if he behaves himself_"'
+
+"And Horace is handsomer," said Mrs. Middleton with a smile.
+
+"Pink-and-white prettiness!" scoffed Mr. Thorne.
+
+"Nonsense!" The color mounted to the old lady's forehead, and she spoke
+sharply: "We didn't hear anything about that when he was a lad, and we were
+afraid of something amiss with his lungs: it would have been high treason
+to say a syllable against him then. And now, though I suppose he will
+always be a little delicate (you'd be sorry if you lost him, Godfrey), it's
+a shame to talk as if the boys were not to be compared. They are just of a
+height, not half an inch difference, and the one as brave and manly as the
+other. Horace is fair, and Percival is dark; and you know, as well as I do,
+that Horace is the handsomer."
+
+Mr. Thorne shifted his ground: "If I were Sissy I would choose my husband
+for qualities that are rather more than skin-deep."
+
+"By all means. And still I would choose Horace."
+
+"What is amiss with Percival?"
+
+"He is not so frank and open. I don't want to say anything against him--I
+like Percival--but I wish he were not quite so reserved."
+
+"What next?" said Mr. Thorne with a short laugh. "Why, only this morning
+you said he talked more than Horace."
+
+"Talked? Oh yes, Percival can talk, and about himself too," said Mrs.
+Middleton with a smile. "But he can keep his secrets all the time. I don't
+want to say anything against him: I like him very much--"
+
+"No doubt," said Mr. Thorne.
+
+"But I don't feel quite sure that I know him. He isn't like Horace. You
+know Horace's friends--"
+
+"Trust me for that."
+
+"But what do you know of Percival's? I heard him tell Sissy he would be out
+to-morrow. Will you ever know where he went?"
+
+"I sha'n't ask him."
+
+"No," she retorted, "you dare not! Isn't it a rule that no one is ever to
+question Percival?"
+
+"And while I'm master here it shall be obeyed. It's the least I can do. The
+boy shall come and go, speak or hold his tongue, as he pleases. No one
+shall cross him--Horace least of all--while I'm master here, Harriet; but
+that won't be very long."
+
+"I don't want you to think any harm of Percival's silence," she answered
+gently. "I don't for one moment suppose he has any secrets to be ashamed
+of. I myself like people to be open, that is all."
+
+"If I wanted to know anything Percival would tell me," said Mr. Thorne.
+
+Mrs. Middleton's charity was great. She hid the smile she could not
+repress. "Well," she said, "perhaps I am not fair to Percival, but,
+Godfrey, you are not quite just to Horace."
+
+He turned upon her: "Unjust to Horace? _I?_"
+
+She knew what he meant. He had shown Horace signal favor, far above his
+cousin, yet what she had said was true. Perhaps some of the injustice had
+been in this very favor. "Here are our truants!" she exclaimed. She and her
+brother had not talked so confidentially for years, but the moment her eyes
+fell on Sissy her thoughts went back to the point at which Mr. Thorne had
+disturbed them: "My dearest Sissy, I am so afraid you will catch cold."
+
+"It can't be done to-night," said Percival. "Won't you come and try?" But
+the old lady shook her head.
+
+"All right, auntie! we won't stop out," said Sissy; and a moment later she
+made her appearance in the drawing-room with her hands full of roses, which
+she tossed carelessly on the table. Mr. Thorne had picked up his paper, and
+stood turning the pages and pretending to read, but she pushed it aside to
+put a rosebud in his coat.
+
+"Roses are more fit for you young people than for an old fellow like me,"
+he said, "Why don't you give one to Percival?"
+
+She looked over her shoulder at young Thorne. "Do you want one?" she said.
+
+He smiled, with a slight movement of his head and his dark eyes fixed on
+hers.
+
+"Then, why didn't you pick one when we were out? Now, weren't you foolish?
+Well, never mind. What color?"
+
+"Choose for him," said Mr. Thorne.
+
+Sissy hesitated, looking from Percival's face to a bud of deepest crimson.
+Then, throwing it down, "No, you shall have yellow," she exclaimed: "Laura
+Falconer's complexion is something like yours, and she always wears yellow.
+As soon as one yellow dress is worn out she gets another."
+
+"She is a most remarkable young woman if she waits till the first one is
+worn out," said Percival.
+
+"Am I to put your rose in or not?" Sissy demanded.
+
+He stepped forward with a smile, and looked darkly handsome as he stood
+there with Sissy putting the yellow rose in his coat and glancing archly up
+at him.
+
+Mr. Thorne from behind his _Saturday Review_ watched the girl who might,
+perhaps, hold his favorite's future in her hands. "Does he care for her?"
+he wondered. If he did, the old man felt that he would gladly have knelt to
+entreat her, "Be good to my poor Percival." But did Percival want her to be
+good to him? Godfrey Thorne was altogether in the dark about his grandson's
+wishes in the matter. He tried hard not to think that he was in the dark
+about every wish or hope of Percival's, and he looked up eagerly when the
+latter said something about going out the next day. He remembered which
+horse Percival liked, he assented to everything, but he watched him all the
+time with a wistful curiosity. He did not really care where Percival went,
+but he would have given much for such a word about his plans as would have
+proved to Harriet, and to himself too, that his boy _did_ confide in him
+sometimes. It was not to be, however. Young Thorne had taken up the local
+paper and the subject dropped. Mr. Thorne may have guessed later, but he
+never knew where his roan horse went the next day.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+"THOSE EYES OF YOURS."
+
+
+Not five miles away that same evening a conversation was going on which
+would have interested Mrs. Middleton.
+
+The scene was an up-stairs room in a pleasant house near the county town.
+Mrs. Blake, a woman of seven or eight and forty, handsome and well
+preserved, but of a high-colored type, leant back in an easy-chair lazily
+unfastening her bracelets, by way of signifying that she had begun to
+prepare for the night. Her two daughters were with her. Addie, the elder,
+was at the looking-glass brushing her hair and half enveloped in its silky
+blackness. She was a tall, graceful girl, a refined likeness of her mother.
+On the rug lay Lottie, three years younger, hardly more than a growing
+girl, long-limbed, slight, a little abrupt and angular by her sister's
+side, her features not quite so regular, her face paler in its cloud of
+dark hair. Yet there was a look of determination and power which was
+wanting in Addie; and at times, when Lottie was roused, her eyes had a dark
+splendor which made her sister's beauty seem comparatively commonplace and
+tame.
+
+Stretched at full length, she propped her chin on her hands and looked up
+at her mother. "I don't suppose you care," she said, in a clear, almost
+boyish voice.
+
+"Not much," Mrs. Blake replied with, a smile. "Especially as I rather doubt
+it."
+
+Addie paused, brush in hand: "I really think you've made a mistake,
+Lottie."
+
+"Do you really? I haven't, though," said that young lady decidedly.
+
+"It can't be--surely," Addie hesitated, with a little shadow on her face.
+
+"Of course no. Is it likely?" said Mrs. Blake, as if the discussion were
+closed.
+
+"I tell you," said Lottie stubbornly, "Godfrey Hammond told me that
+Percival's father was the eldest son."
+
+"But it is Horace who has always lived at Brackenhill. Percival only goes
+on a visit now and then. Every one knows," said Addie, in almost an injured
+tone, "that Horace is the heir."
+
+Lottie raised her head a little and eyed her sister intently, with
+amusement, wonder, and a little scorn in her glance. Addie, blissfully
+unconscious, went on brushing her hair, still with that look of anxious
+perplexity.
+
+"This is how it was," Lottie exclaimed suddenly. "Percival was just gone,
+and you were talking to Horace. Up comes Godfrey Hammond, sits down by me,
+and says some rubbish about consoling me. I think I laughed. Then he looked
+at me out of his little, light eyes, and said that you and I seemed to get
+on well with his young friends. So I said, 'Oh yes--middling.'"
+
+"Upon my word," smiled Mrs. Blake, "you appear to have distinguished
+yourself in the conversation."
+
+"Didn't I?" said Lottie, untroubled and unabashed: "I know it struck me so
+at the time. Then he said something--I forget how he put it--about our
+being just the right number and pairing off charmingly. So I said, 'Oh, of
+course the elder ones went together: that was only right.'"
+
+"And what did he say?"
+
+"Oh, he pinched his lips together and smiled, and said, 'Don't you know
+that Percival is the elder?'"
+
+"But, Lottie, that proves nothing as to his father."
+
+"Who supposed it did? I said 'Fiddlededee! I didn't mean that: I supposed
+they were much about the same age, or if Percy were a month or two older it
+made no difference. I meant that Horace was the eldest son's son, so of
+course he was A 1.'"
+
+"Well?" said Addie.
+
+"Well, then he looked twice as pleased with himself as he did before, and
+said, 'I don't think Horace told you that. It so happens that Percival is
+not only the elder by a month or two, as you say, but he is the son of the
+eldest son.' Then I said 'Oh!' and mamma called me for something, and I
+went."
+
+Mrs. Blake and Addie exchanged glances.
+
+"Now, could I have made a mistake?" demanded Lottie.
+
+"It seems plain enough, certainly," her mother allowed.
+
+"Then, could Godfrey Hammond have made a mistake? Hasn't he known the
+Thornes all their lives? and didn't he say once that he was named Godfrey
+after their old grandfather?"
+
+Mrs. Blake assented.
+
+"Then," said the girl, relapsing into her recumbent position, "perhaps
+you'll believe me another time."
+
+"Perhaps," said Mrs. Blake: "we'll see when the other time comes. If it is
+as you say, it is curious." She rose as she spoke and went to the farther
+end of the room. As she stood by an open drawer putting away the ornaments
+which she had taken off, the candlelight revealed a shadow of perplexity
+on her face which increased the likeness between herself and Addie.
+Apparently, Lottie was right as to her facts. The estate was not entailed,
+then, and despotic power seemed to be rather capriciously exercised by the
+head of the house. If Horace should displease his grandfather--if, for
+instance, he chose a wife of whom old Mr. Thorne did not approve--would his
+position be very secure? Mrs. Blake was uneasy, and felt that it was very
+wrong of people to play tricks with the succession to an estate like
+Brackenhill.
+
+Meanwhile, Lottie watched her sister, who was thoughtfully drawing her
+fingers through her long hair. "Addie," she said, after a pause, "what will
+you do if Horace isn't the heir after all?"
+
+"What a silly question! I shan't do anything: there's nothing for me to
+do."
+
+"But shall you mind very much? You are very fond of Horace, aren't you?"
+
+"Fond of him!" Addie repeated. "He is very pleasant to talk to, if you mean
+that."
+
+"Oh, you can't deceive me so! I believe that you are in love with him,"
+said Lottie solemnly.
+
+The color rushed to Addie's face when her vaguely tender sentiments,
+indefinite as Horace's attentions, were described in this startling
+fashion. "Indeed, I'm nothing of the kind," she said hurriedly. "Pray don't
+talk such utter nonsense, Lottie. If you have nothing more sensible to say,
+you had better hold your tongue."
+
+"But why are you ashamed of it?" Lottie persisted: "I wouldn't be." She had
+an unsuspected secret herself, but she would have owned it proudly enough
+had she been challenged.
+
+"I'm not ashamed," said Addie; "and you know nothing about being in love,
+so you had better not talk about it."
+
+"Oh yes, I do!" was the reply, uttered with Lottie's calm simplicity of
+manner: "I know how to tell whether you are in love or not, Addie. What
+would you do if a girl were to win Horace Thorne away from you?"
+
+Pride and a sense of propriety dictated Addie's answer and gave sharpness
+to her voice: "I should say she was perfectly welcome to him."
+
+Lottie considered for a moment: "Yes, I suppose one might _say_ so to her,
+but what would you do? Wouldn't you want to kill her? And wouldn't you die
+of a broken heart?"
+
+Addie was horrified: "I don't want to kill anybody, and I'm not going to
+die for Mr. Horace Thorne. Please don't say such things, Lottie: people
+never do. You forget he is only an acquaintance."
+
+"No; I don't think you are in love with him, certainly." Lottie pronounced
+this decision with the air of one who has solved a difficult problem.
+
+"What are you talking about?" Mrs. Blake inquired, coming back, and
+glancing from Addie's flushed and troubled face to Lottie's thoughtful
+eyes.
+
+"I was asking Addie if she didn't want Horace to be the heir. I know you
+do, mamma--oh, just for his own sake, because you think he's the nicest,
+don't you? I heard you tell him one day "--here Lottie looked up with a
+candid gaze and audaciously imitated Mrs. Blake's manner--"that though we
+knew his cousin _first_, he--Horace, you know--seemed to drop _so_
+naturally into _all_ our ways that it was quite _delightful_ to feel that
+we needn't stand on _any_ ceremony with him."
+
+"Good gracious, Lottie! what do you mean by listening to every word I say?"
+
+"I didn't listen--I heard," said Lottie. "I always do hear when you say
+your words as if they had little dashes under them."
+
+"Well, Horace Thorne _is_ easier to get on with than his cousin," said Mrs.
+Blake, taking no notice of Lottie's mimicry.
+
+"There, I said so: mamma would like it to be Horace. Nobody asks what I
+should like--nobody thinks about me and Percival."
+
+"Oh, indeed! I wasn't aware," said Mrs. Blake. "When is that to come off? I
+dare say you will look very well in orange-blossoms and a pinafore!"
+
+"Oh, you think I'm too young, do you? But a little while ago you were
+always saying that I was grown up, and oughtn't to want any more childish
+games. What was I to do?"
+
+"Upon my word!" exclaimed Mrs. Blake. "I'll buy you a doll for a birthday
+present, to keep you out of mischief."
+
+"Too late," said Lottie from the rug. She burst into sudden laughter, loud
+but not unmelodious. "What rubbish we are talking! Seventeen to-morrow, and
+Addie is nearly twenty; and sometimes I think I must be a hundred!"
+
+"Well, you are talking nonsense now," Mrs. Blake exclaimed. "Why, you baby!
+only last November you would go into that wet meadow by the rectory to play
+trap-and-ball with Robin and Jack. And such a fuss as there was if one
+wanted to make you the least tidy and respectable!"
+
+"Was that last November?" Lottie stared thoughtfully into space. "Queer
+that last November should be so many years ago, isn't it? Poor little Cock
+Robin! I met him in the lane the day before he went away. They will keep
+him in jackets, and he hates them so! I laughed at him, and told him to be
+a good little boy and mind his book. He didn't seem to like it, somehow."
+
+"I dare say he didn't," said Addie, who had been silently recovering
+herself: "there's no mistake about it when you laugh at any one."
+
+"There shall be no mistake about anything I do," Lottie asserted. "I'm
+going to bed now." She sprang to her feet and stood looking at her sister:
+"What jolly hair you've got, Addie!"
+
+"Yours is just as thick, or thicker," said Addie.
+
+"Each individual hair is a good deal thicker, if you mean that.
+'Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horse-hairs!' That's what Percy quoted to
+me one day when I was grumbling, and I said I wasn't sure he wasn't rude.
+Addie, are Horace and Percival fond of each other?"
+
+"How can I tell? I suppose so."
+
+"I have my doubts," said Lottie sagely. "Why should they be? There must be
+something queer, you know, or why doesn't that stupid old man at
+Brackenhill treat Percival as the eldest? Well, good-night." And Lottie
+went off, half saying, half singing, "Who killed Cock Robin? I, said the
+Sparrow--with my bow and arrow." And with a triumphant outburst of "_I_
+killed Cock Robin!" she banged the door after her.
+
+There was a pause. Then Addie said, "Seventeen to-morrow! Mamma, Lottie
+really is grown-up now."
+
+"Is she?" Mrs. Blake replied doubtfully. "Time she should be, I'm sure."
+
+Lottie had been a sore trial to her mother. Addie was pretty as a child,
+tolerably presentable even at her most awkward age, glided gradually into
+girlhood and beauty, and finally "came out" completely to Mrs. Blake's
+satisfaction. But Lottie at fifteen or sixteen was her despair--"Exactly
+like a great unruly boy," she lamented. She dashed through her lessons
+fairly well, but the moment she was released she was unendurable. She
+whistled, she sang at the top of her voice, and plunged about the house in
+her thick boots, till she could be off to join the two boys at the rectory,
+her dear friends and comrades. Robin Wingfield, the elder, was her junior
+by rather more than a year; and this advantage, especially as she was tall
+and strong for her age, enabled her fully to hold her own with them. Nor
+could Mrs. Blake hinder this friendship, as she would gladly have done, for
+her husband was on Lottie's side.
+
+"Let the girl alone," he said. "Too big for this sort of thing? Rubbish!
+The milliner's bills will come in quite soon enough. And what's amiss with
+Robin and Jack? Good boys as boys go, and she's another; and if they like
+to scramble over hedges and ditches together, let them. For Heaven's sake,
+Caroline, don't attempt to keep her at home: she'll certainly drive me
+crazy if you do. No one ever banged doors as Lottie does: she ought to
+patent the process. Slams them with a crash which jars the whole house, and
+yet manages not to latch them, and the moment she is gone they are swinging
+backward and forward till I'm almost out of my senses. Here she comes down
+stairs, like a thunderbolt.--Lottie, my dear girl, I'm sure it's going to
+be fine: better run out and look up those Wingfield boys, I think."
+
+So the trio spent long half-holidays rambling in the fields; and on these
+occasions Lottie might be met, an immense distance from home, in the
+shabbiest clothes and wearing a red cap of Robin's tossed carelessly on her
+dark hair. Percival once encountered them on one of these expeditions.
+Lottie's beauty was still pale and unripe, like those sheathed buds which
+will come suddenly to their glory of blossom, not like rosebuds which have
+a loveliness of their own; but the young man was struck by the boyish
+mixture of shyness and bluntness with which she greeted him, and attracted
+by the great eyes which gazed at him from under Robin's shabby cap. When he
+and Horace went to the Blakes' he amused himself idly enough with the
+school-girl, while his cousin flirted with Addie. He laughed one day when
+Mrs. Blake was unusually troubled about Lottie's apparel, and said
+something about "a sweet neglect." But the soul of Lottie's mamma was not
+to be comforted with scraps of poetry. How could it be, when she had just
+arraigned her daughter on the charge of having her pockets bulging
+hideously, and had discovered that those receptacles overflowed with a
+miscellaneous assortment of odds and ends, the accumulations of weeks,
+tending to show that Lottie and Cock Robin, as she called him, had all
+things in common? How could it be, when Lottie was always outgrowing her
+garments in the most ungainly manner, so that her sleeves seemed to retreat
+in horror from her wrists and from her long hands, tanned by sun and wind,
+seamed with bramble-scratches and smeared with school-room ink? Once Lottie
+came home with an unmistakable black eye, for which Robin's cricket-ball
+was accountable. Then, indeed, Mrs. Blake felt that her cup of bitterness
+was full to overflowing, though Lottie did assure her, "You should have
+seen Jack's eye last April: his was much more swollen, and all sorts of
+colors, than mine." It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that Jack
+must have been, to say the least of it, unpleasant to look at. Percival
+happened to come to the house just then, and was tranquilly amused at the
+good lady's despair. It was before the Blakes knew much of Horace, and she
+had not yet discovered that Percival's cousin was so much more friendly
+than Percival himself; so she made the latter her confidant. He recommended
+a raw beefsteak with a gravity worthy of a Spanish grandee. He was not
+allowed to see Lottie, who was kept in seclusion as being half culprit,
+half invalid, and wholly unpresentable; but as he was going away the
+servant gave him a little note in Lottie's boyish scrawl:
+
+     "DEAR PERCIVAL: Mamma was cross with Robin and sent him away
+     do tell him I'm all right, and he is not to mind he will be
+     sure to be about somewhere It is very stupid being shut up
+     here Addie says she can't go running about giving messages
+     to boys and Papa said if he saw him he should certainly
+     punch his head so please tell him he is not to bother
+     himself about me I shall soon be all right."
+
+Percival went away, smiling a little at his letter and at Lottie herself.
+Just as he reached the first of the fields which were the short cut from
+the house, he spied Robin lurking on the other side of the hedge, with Jack
+at his heels. He halted, and called "Robin! Robin Wingfield! I want to
+speak to you."
+
+The boy hesitated: "There's a gate farther on."
+
+Coming to the gate, Percival rested his arms on it and looked at Robin. The
+boy was not big for his age, but there was a good deal of cleverness in his
+upturned freckled face. "I've a message for you," said the young man.
+
+"From her?" Robin indicated the Blakes' house with a jerk of his head.
+
+"Yes. She asked me to tell you that she is all right, though, of course,
+she can't come out at present. She made sure I should find you somewhere
+about."
+
+Robin nodded: "I did try to hear how she was, but that old dragon--"
+
+"Meaning my friend Mrs. Blake?" said young Thorne. "Ah! Hardly civil
+perhaps, but forcible."
+
+"Well--Mrs. Blake, then--caught me in the shrubbery and pitched into me.
+Said I ought to be ashamed of myself. Supposed I should be satisfied when
+I'd broken Lottie's neck. Told me I'd better not show my face there again."
+
+"Well," said Percival, "you couldn't expect Mrs. Blake to be particularly
+delighted with your afternoon's work. And, Wingfield, though I was
+especially to tell you that you were not to vex yourself about it, you
+really ought to be more careful. Knocking a young lady's eye half out--"
+
+"Young lady!" in a tone of intense scorn. "Lottie isn't a _young lady_."
+
+"Oh! isn't she?" said Percival.
+
+"I should think not, indeed!" And Robin eyed the big young man who was
+laughing at him as if he meditated wiping out the insult to Lottie then and
+there. But even with Jack, his sturdy satellite, to help, it was not to be
+thought of. "She's a brick!" said Cock Robin, half to himself.
+
+"No doubt," said Percival. "But, as I was saying, it isn't exactly the way
+to treat her.--At least--I don't know: upon my word, I don't know," he
+soliloquized. "Judging by most women's novels, from _Jane Eyre_ downward,
+the taste for muscular bullies prevails. Robin may be the coming hero--who
+knows?--and courtship commencing with a black eye the future
+fashion.--Well, Robin, any answer?"
+
+"Tell her I hope she'll soon be all right. Shall you see her?"
+
+"I can see that she gets any message you want to send."
+
+Robin groped among his treasures: "Look here: I brought away her knife that
+afternoon. She lent it me. She'd better have it--it's got four blades--she
+may want it, perhaps."
+
+Percival dropped the formidable instrument carelessly into his pocket: "She
+shall have it. And, Robin, you'd better not be hanging about here: Lottie
+says so. You'll only vex Mrs. Blake."
+
+"All right!" said the boy, and went off, with Jack after him.
+
+Percival, who was staying in the neighborhood, went straight home, tied up
+a parcel of books he thought might amuse Lottie in her imprisonment, and
+wrote a note to go with them. He was whistling softly to himself as he
+wrote, and, if the truth be told, had a fair vision floating before his
+eyes--a girl of whom Lottie had reminded him by sheer force of contrast.
+Still, he liked Lottie in her way. He was young enough to enjoy the easy
+sense of patronage and superiority which made the words flow so pleasantly
+from his pen. Never had Lottie seemed to him so utterly a child as
+immediately after his talk with her boy-friend.
+
+"Here are some books," said the hurrying pen, "which I think you will like
+if your eye is not so bad as to prevent your reading. Robin was keeping his
+disconsolate watch close by, as you foretold, and asked anxiously after
+you, so I gave him your message and dismissed him. He especially charged me
+to send you the enclosed--knife I believe he called it: it looks to me like
+a whole armory of deadly weapons--which he seemed to think would be a
+comfort to you in your affliction. I sincerely hope it may prove so. I was
+very civil to him, remembering that I was your ambassador; but if he isn't
+a little less rough with you in future, I shall be tempted to adopt Mr.
+Blake's plan if I happen to meet your friend again. You really mustn't let
+him damage those eyes of yours in this reckless fashion. Mrs. Blake was
+nearly heartbroken this morning."
+
+He sent his parcel off, and speedily ceased to think of it. And Lottie
+herself might have done the same, not caring much for his books, but for
+four little words--"those eyes of yours." Had Percival written "your eyes,"
+it would have meant nothing, but "those eyes of yours" implied notice--nay,
+admiration. Again and again she looked at the thick paper, with the crest
+at the top and the vigorous lines of writing below; and again and again the
+four words, "those eyes of yours," seemed to spring into ever-clearer
+prominence. She hid the letter away with a sudden comprehension of the
+roughness of her pencil scrawl which it answered, and began to take pride
+in her looks when they least deserved it. Only a day or two before she had
+envied Robin the possession of sight a little keener than her own, but now
+she smiled to think that Percival Thorne would never have regretted injury
+to "those eyes of yours" had she owned Robin's light-gray orbs.
+
+Her transformation had begun. The knife was still a treasure, but she was
+ashamed of her delight in it. She breathed on the shining blades and rubbed
+them to brightness again, but she did it stealthily, with a glance over her
+shoulder first. She went rambling with Robin and Jack, but not when she
+knew that Percival Thorne was in the neighborhood. She was very sure of his
+absence on the November day to which her mother had alluded, when she had
+insisted on playing trap-and-ball in the rectory meadows. Mrs. Blake did
+not realize it, but it was almost the last day of Lottie's old life. At
+Christmas-time they were asked to stay for a few days at a friend's house.
+There was to be a dance, and the hostess, being Lottie's godmother,
+pointedly included her in the invitation; so Mrs. Blake and Addie did what
+they could to improve their black sheep's appearance.
+
+Lottie, dressed for the eventful evening, was left alone for a moment
+before the three went down. She felt shy, dispirited and sullen. Her
+ball-dress encumbered and constrained her. "I hate it all," she said to
+herself, beating impatiently with her foot upon the ground. Something
+moving caught her eye: it was her reflection in a mirror. She paused and
+gazed in wonder. Was this slender girl, arrayed in a cloud of
+semi-transparent white, really herself--the Lottie who only a few days
+before had raced Robin Wingfield home across the fields, had been the first
+over the gap and through the ditch into the rectory meadow, and had rushed
+away with the November rain-drops driving in her face? She gazed on: the
+transformation had its charms, after all. But the shadow came back: "It's
+no use. Addie's prettier than I ever shall be: I must be second all my
+life. Second! If I can't be A 1, I'd as soon be Z 1000! I won't go about
+to be a foil to her. I'd ten times rather race with Robin; and I will too!
+They sha'n't coop me up and make a young lady of me!"
+
+She caught the flash of her indignant glance in the glass and paused.
+
+"_Those eyes of yours!_"
+
+_Must_ she be second all her life? Had she not a power and witchery of her
+own? Might she not even distance Addie in the race? "I've more brains than
+she has," mused Lottie.
+
+Her heart was beating fast as they came down stairs. They had only arrived
+by a late train, which gave them just time to dress; and Mrs. Blake had
+rather exceeded the allowance, so that most of the guests had arrived and
+the first quadrille was nearly ended as they came in. Lottie followed her
+mother and Addie as they glided through the crowd, and when they paused she
+stood shy and fierce, casting lowering glances around.
+
+She heard their hostess say to some one, "Do let me find you a partner."
+
+A well-known voice replied, "Not this time, thank you: I'm going to try to
+find one for myself;" and Percival stood before her, looking, to her
+girlish fancy, more of a hero than ever in the evening-dress which became
+him well. The perfectly-fitting gloves, the flower in his coat, a dozen
+little things which she could not define, made her feel uncouth and
+anxious, fascinated and frightened, all at once. Had he greeted her in the
+patronizing way in which he had talked to her of old, she would have been
+deeply wounded, but he asked her for the next dance more ceremoniously, she
+knew, than Horace would have asked Addie. Still, she trembled as they moved
+off. They had scarcely met since her note to him. Suppose he alluded to it,
+asked after her black eye, and inquired whether she had derived any benefit
+from the beefsteak? Nothing more natural, and yet if he did Lottie felt
+that she should _hate_ him. "I know I should do something dreadful," she
+thought--"scratch his face, and then burst out crying, most likely. Oh,
+what would become of me? I should be ruined for life! I should have to
+shut myself up, never see any one again, and emigrate with Robin directly
+he was old enough."
+
+Percival did not know his danger, but he escaped it. The fatal thoughts
+were in his mind while Lottie was planning her disgrace and exile, but he
+merely remarked that he liked the first waltz, and should they start at
+once or wait a moment till a couple or two dropped out?
+
+"I don't know whether I _can_ waltz," said Lottie doubtfully.
+
+"Weren't you over tortured with dancing-lessons?"
+
+"Oh yes. But I've never tried at a party. Suppose we go bumping up against
+everybody, like that fat man and the little lady in pink--the two who are
+just stopping?"
+
+"I assure you," said Percival gravely, "that I do not dance at all like
+that fat man. And if you dance like the lady in pink, I shall be more
+surprised than I have words to say. Now?"
+
+They were off. Percival knew that he waltzed well, and had an idea that
+Lottie would prove a good partner. Nor was he mistaken. She had been fairly
+taught, much against her will, had a good ear for time, and, thanks to many
+a race with Robin Wingfield, her energy was almost terrible. They spun
+swiftly and silently round, unwearied while other couples dropped out of
+the ranks to rest and talk. Percival was well pleased. It is true that he
+had memories of waltzes with Sissy Langton of more utter harmony, of
+sweeter grace, of delight more perfect, though far more fleeting. But
+Lottie, with her steady swiftness and her strong young life, had a charm of
+her own which he was not slow to recognize. She would hardly have thanked
+him for accurately classifying it, for as she danced she felt that she had
+discovered a new joy. Her old life slipped from her like a husk. Friendship
+with Cock Robin was an evident absurdity. It is true she was angry with
+herself that, after fighting so passionately for freedom, she should
+voluntarily bend her proud neck beneath the yoke. She foresaw that her
+mother and Addie would triumph; she felt that her bondage to Mrs. Grundy
+would often be irksome; but here was the first instalment of her wages in
+this long waltz with Percival. She fancied that the secret of her pleasure
+lay in the two words--"with Percival." In her ignorance she thought that
+she was tasting the honeyed fire of love, when in truth it was the
+sweetness of conscious success. Before the last notes of that enchanted
+music died away she had cast her girlish devotion, "half in a rapture and
+half in a rage," at her partner's feet, while he stood beside her calm and
+self-possessed. He would have been astounded, and perhaps almost disgusted,
+had he known what was passing through her mind.
+
+Love at sixteen is generally only a desire to be in love, and seeks not so
+much a fit as a possible object. Probably Lottie's passion offered as many
+assurances of domestic bliss as could be desired at her age.
+
+Percival was dark, foreign-looking and handsome: he had an interesting air
+of reserve, and no apparent need to practise small economies. His clothes
+fitted him extremely well, and at times he had a way of standing proudly
+aloof which was worthy of any hero of romance. No settled occupation would
+interfere with picnics and balls; and, to crown all, had he not said to
+her, "Those eyes of yours"? Were not these ample foundations for the
+happiness of thirty or forty years of marriage?
+
+Percival, meanwhile, wanted to be kind to the childish, half-tamed Lottie,
+who had attracted his notice in the fields and trusted him with her
+generous message to Robin Wingfield. The girl fancied herself immensely
+improved by her white dress, but had Thorne been a painter he would have
+sketched her as a pale vision of Liberty, with loosely-knotted hair and
+dark eyes glowing under Robin's red cap. He was able coolly to determine
+the precise nature of his pleasure in her society, but he knew that it was
+a pleasure. And Lottie, when she fell asleep that night, clasped a card
+which was rendered priceless by the frequent recurrence of his initials.
+
+Her passion transformed her. Her vehement spirit remained, but everything
+else was changed. Her old dreams and longings were cast out by the new. She
+laughed with Mrs. Blake and Addie, but under the laughter she hid her love,
+and cherished it in fierce and solitary silence. Yet even to herself the
+transformation seemed so wonderful that she could hardly believe in it, and
+acted the rough girl now and then with the idea that otherwise they _must_
+think her a consummate actress morning, noon and night. For some months no
+great event marked the record of her unsuspected passion. It might,
+perhaps, have run its course, and died out harmlessly in due time, but for
+an unlucky afternoon, about a week before her birthday, when Percival
+uttered some thoughtless words which woke a tempest of doubt and fear in
+Lottie's heart. She did not question his love, but she caught a glimpse of
+his pride, and felt as if a gulf had opened between her and her dream of
+happiness.
+
+Percival was calling at the house on the eventful day which was destined to
+influence Lottie's fate and his own. He was in a happy mood, well pleased
+with things in general, and, after his own fashion, inclined to be
+talkative. When visitors arrived and Addie exclaimed, "Mrs. Pickering and
+that boy of hers--oh bother!" she spoke the feelings of the whole party;
+and Percival from his place by the window looked across at Lottie and
+shrugged his shoulders expressively. Had there been time he would have
+tried to escape into the garden with his girl friend; but as that was
+impossible, he resigned himself to his fate and listened while Mrs.
+Pickering poured forth her rapture concerning her son's prospects to Mrs.
+Blake. An uncle who was the head of a great London firm had offered the
+young man a situation, with an implied promise of a share in the business
+later. "Such a subject for congratulation!" the good lady exclaimed,
+beaming on her son, who sat silently turning his hat in his hands and
+looking very pink. "Such an opening for William! Better than having a
+fortune left him, I call it, for it is such a thing to have an occupation.
+Every young man should be brought up to something, in my opinion."
+
+Mrs. Blake, with a half glance at Addie and a thought of Horace, suggested
+that heirs to landed estates--
+
+"Well, yes." Mrs. Pickering agreed with her. Country gentlemen often found
+so much to do in looking after their tenants and making improvements that
+she would not say anything about them. But young men with small incomes and
+no profession--she should be sorry if a son of hers--
+
+"Like me, for instance," said Percival, looking up. "I've a small income
+and no profession."
+
+Mrs. Pickering, somewhat confused, hastened to explain that she meant
+nothing personal.
+
+"Of course not," he said: "I know that. I only mentioned it because I think
+an illustration stamps a thing on people's memories."
+
+"But, Percival," Mrs. Blake interposed, "I must say that in this I agree
+with Mrs. Pickering. I do think it would be better if you had something to
+do--I do indeed." She looked at him with an air of affectionate severity.
+"I speak as your friend, you know." (Percival bowed his gratitude.) "I
+really think young people are happier when they have a settled occupation."
+
+"I dare say that is true, as a rule," he said.
+
+"But you don't think you would be?" questioned Lottie.
+
+He turned to her with a smile: "Well, I doubt it. Of course I don't know
+how happy I might be if I had been brought up to a profession." He glanced
+through the open window at the warm loveliness of June. "At this moment,
+for instance, I might have been writing a sermon or cutting off a man's
+leg. But, somehow, I am very well satisfied as I am."
+
+"Oh, if you mean to make fun of it--" Mrs. Blake began.
+
+"But I don't," Percival said quickly. "I may laugh, but I'm in earnest too.
+I have plenty to eat and drink; I can pay my tailor and still have a little
+money in my pocket; I am my own master. Sometimes I ride--another man's
+horse: if not I walk, and am just as well content. I don't smoke--I don't
+bet--I have no expensive tastes. What could money do for me that I should
+spend the best years of my life in slaving for it?"
+
+"That may be all very well for the present," said Mrs. Blake.
+
+"Why not for the future too? Oh, I have my dream for the future too."
+
+"And, pray, may one ask what it is?" said Mrs. Pickering, looking down on
+him from the height of William's prosperity.
+
+"Certainly," he said. "Some day I shall leave England and travel leisurely
+about the Continent. I shall have a sky over my head compared with which
+this blue is misty and pale. I shall gain new ideas. I shall get grapes and
+figs and melons very cheap. There will be a little too much garlic in my
+daily life--even such a destiny as mine must have its drawbacks--but think
+of the wonderful scenery I shall see and the queer, beautiful
+out-of-the-way holes and corners I shall discover! And in years to come I
+shall rejoice, without envy, to hear that Mr. Blake has bought a large
+estate and gains prizes for fat cattle, while my friend here has been
+knighted on the occasion of some city demonstration."
+
+Young Pickering, who had been listening open-mouthed to the other's fluent
+and tranquil speech, reddened at the allusion to himself and dropped his
+hat.
+
+"At that rate you must never marry," said Mrs. Blake.
+
+Percival thoughtfully stroked his lip: "You think I should not find a wife
+to share my enjoyment of a small income?"
+
+"Marry a girl with lots of money, Mr. Thorne," said the future Sir William,
+feeling it incumbent on him to take part in the conversation.
+
+"Not I." Percival's glance made the lad's hot face yet hotter. "That's the
+last thing I will do. If a man means to work, he may marry whom he will.
+But if he has made up his mind to be idle, he is a contemptible cur if he
+will let his wife keep him in his idleness." He spoke very quietly in his
+soft voice, and leaned back in his chair.
+
+"Well, then, you must never fall in love with an heiress," said Mrs.
+Blake.
+
+"Or you must work and win her," Lottie suggested almost in a whisper.
+
+He smiled, but slightly shook his head with a look which she fancied meant
+"Too late." Mrs. Pickering began to tell the latest Fordborough scandal,
+and the talk drifted into another channel.
+
+Lottie had listened as she always listened when Percival spoke, but she had
+not attached any peculiar meaning to his words. But an hour or so later,
+when he was gone and she was loitering in the garden just outside the
+window, Addie, who was within, made some remark in a laughing tone. Lottie
+did not catch the words, but Mrs. Blake's reply was distinct and not to be
+mistaken: "William Pickering, indeed! No: with your looks and your
+expectations you girls ought to marry really well." Lottie stood aghast.
+They would have money, then? She had never thought about money. She would
+be an heiress? And Percival would never marry an heiress--he could not: had
+he not said so? How gladly would she have given him every farthing she
+possessed! And was her fortune to be a barrier between them for ever? Every
+syllable that he had spoken was made clear by this revelation, and rose up
+before her eyes as a terrible word of doom. But she was not one to be
+easily dismayed, and her first cry was, "What shall I do?" Lottie's
+thoughts turned always to action, not to endurance, and she was resolved to
+break down the barrier, let the cost be what it might. Her talk with
+Godfrey Hammond gave a new interest to her romance and new strength to her
+determination. Since her hero was disinherited and poor, and she, though
+rich, would be poor in all she cared to have if she were parted from him,
+might she not tell him so when she saw him on her birthday? She thought it
+would be easier to speak on the one day when in girlish fashion she would
+be queen. She would not think of her own pride, because his pride was dear
+to her. She could not tell what she would say or do: she only knew that her
+birthday should decide her fate. And her heart was beating fast in hope
+and fear the night before when she banged the door after her and went off
+to bed, sublimely ready to renounce the world for Percival.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES--ALFRED THORNE'S IS TOLD BY THE WRITER.
+
+
+Mr. Thorne of Brackenhill was a miserable man, who went through the world
+with a morbidly sensitive spot in his nature. A touch on it was torture,
+and unfortunately the circumstances of his daily life continually chafed
+it.
+
+It was only a common form of selfishness carried to excess. "I don't want
+much," he would have said--truly enough, for Godfrey Thorne had never been
+grasping--"but let it be my own." He could not enjoy anything unless he
+knew that he might waste it if he liked. The highest good, fettered by any
+condition, was in his eyes no good at all. Brackenhill was dear to him
+because he could leave it to whom he would. He was seventy-six, and had
+spent his life in improving his estate, but he prized nothing about it so
+much as his right to give the result of his life's work to the first beggar
+he might chance to meet. It would have made him still happier if he could
+have had the power of destroying Brackenhill utterly, of wiping it off the
+face of the earth, in case he could not find an heir who pleased him, for
+it troubled him to think that some man _must_ have the land after him,
+whether he wished it or not.
+
+Godfrey Hammond had declared that no one could conceive the exquisite
+torments Mr. Thorne would endure if he owned an estate with a magnificent
+ruin on it, some unique and priceless relic of bygone days. "He should be
+able to see it from his window," said Hammond, "and it should be his, as
+far as law could make it, while he should be continually conscious that in
+the eyes of all cultivated men he was merely its guardian. People should
+write to the newspapers asserting boldly that the public had a right of
+free access to it, and old gentlemen with antiquarian tastes should find a
+little gap in a fence, and pen indignant appeals to the editor demanding to
+be immediately informed whether a monument of national, nay, of world-wide
+interest, ought not, for the sake of the public, to be more carefully
+protected from injury. Local archaeological societies should come and read
+papers in it. Clergymen, wishing to combine a little instruction with the
+pleasures of a school-feast, should arrive with van-loads of cheering boys
+and girls, a troop of ardent teachers, many calico flags and a brass band.
+Artists, keen-eyed and picturesque, each with his good-humored air of
+possessing the place so much more truly than any mere country gentleman
+ever could, should come to gaze and sketch. Meanwhile, Thorne should remark
+about twice a week that of course he could pull the whole thing down if he
+liked; to which every one should smile assent, recognizing an evident but
+utterly unimportant fact. And then," said Hammond solemnly, "when all the
+archaeologists were eating and drinking, enjoying their own theories and
+picking holes in their neighbors' discoveries, the bolt should fall in the
+shape of an announcement that Mr. Thorne had sold the stones as building
+materials, and that the workmen had already removed the most ancient and
+interesting part. After which he would go slowly to his grave, dying of his
+triumph and a broken heart."
+
+It was all quite true, though Godfrey Hammond might have added that all the
+execrations of the antiquarians would hardly have added to the burden of
+shame and remorse of which Mr. Thorne would have felt the weight before the
+last cart carried away its load from the trampled sward; that he would have
+regretted his decision every hour of his life; and if by a miracle he could
+have found himself once more with the fatal deed undone, he would have
+rejoiced for a moment, suffered his old torment for a little while, and
+then proceeded to do it again.
+
+For a great part of Mr. Thorne's life the boast of his power over
+Brackenhill had been on his lips more frequently than the twice a week of
+which Hammond talked. Of late years it had not been so. He had used his
+power to assure himself that he possessed it, and gradually awoke to the
+consciousness that he had lost it by thus using it.
+
+He had had three sons--Maurice, a fine, high-spirited young fellow; Alfred,
+good-looking and good-tempered, but indolent; James, a slim, sickly lad,
+who inherited from his mother a fatal tendency to decline. She died while
+he was a baby, and he was petted from that time forward. Godfrey Thorne was
+well satisfied with Maurice, but was always at war with his second son, who
+would not take orders and hold the family living. They argued the matter
+till it was too late for Alfred to go into the army, the only career for
+which he had expressed any desire; and then Mr. Thorne found himself face
+to face with a gentle and lazy resistance which threatened to be a match
+for his own hard obstinacy. Alfred didn't mind being a farmer. But his
+father was troubled about the necessary capital, and doubted his son's
+success: "You will go on after a fashion for a few years, and then all the
+money will have slipped through your fingers. You know nothing of
+farming."--"That's true," said Alfred.--"And you are much too lazy to
+learn."--"That's very likely," said the young man. So Mr. Thorne looked
+about him for some more eligible opening for his troublesome son; and
+Alfred meanwhile, with his handsome face and honest smile, was busy making
+love to Sarah Percival, the rector's daughter.
+
+The little idyl was the talk of the villagers before it came to the
+squire's ears. When he questioned Alfred the young man confessed it readily
+enough. He loved Miss Percival, and she didn't mind waiting. Mr. Thorne was
+not altogether displeased, for, though his intercourse with the rector was
+rather stormy and uncertain, they happened to be on tolerable terms just
+then. Sarah was an only child, and would have a little money at Mr.
+Percival's death, and Alfred was much more submissive and anxious to please
+his father under these altered circumstances. The young people were not to
+consider themselves engaged, Miss Percival being only eighteen and Alfred
+one-and-twenty. But if they were of the same mind later, when the latter
+should be in a position to marry, it was understood that neither his father
+nor Mr. Percival would oppose it.
+
+Unluckily, a parochial question arose near Christmas-time, and the squire
+and the clergyman took different views of it. Mr. Thorne went about the
+house with brows like a thunder-cloud, and never opened his lips to Alfred
+except to abuse the rector. "You'll have to choose between old Percival and
+me one of these days," he said more than once. "You'd better be making up
+your mind: it will save time." Alfred was silent. When the strife was at
+its height Maurice was drowned while skating.
+
+The poor fellow was hardly in his grave before the storm burst on Alfred's
+head. If Mr. Thorne had barely tolerated the idea of his son's marriage
+before, he found it utterly intolerable now; and the decree went forth that
+this boyish folly about Miss Percival must be forgotten. "I can do as I
+like with Brackenhill," said Mr. Thorne: "remember that." Alfred did
+remember it. He had heard it often enough, and his father's angry eyes gave
+it an added emphasis. "I can make an eldest son of James if I like, and I
+will if you defy me." But nothing could shake Alfred. He had given his word
+to Miss Percival, and they loved each other, and he meant to keep to it.
+"You don't believe me," his father thundered: "you think I may talk, but
+that I sha'n't do it. Take care!" There was no trace of any conflict on
+Alfred's face: he looked a little dull and heavy under the bitter storm,
+but that was all. "I can't help it, sir," he said, tracing the pattern of
+the carpet with the toe of his boot as he stood: "you will do as you
+please, I suppose."--"I suppose I shall," said Mr. Thorne.
+
+So Alfred was disinherited. "As well for this as anything else," he said:
+"we couldn't have got on long." He had an allowance from his father, who
+declined to take any further interest in his plans. He went abroad for a
+couple of years--a test which Mr. Percival imposed upon him that nothing
+might be done in haste--and came back, faithful as he went, to ask for the
+consent which could no longer be denied. Mr. Percival had been presented to
+a living at some distance from Brackenhill, and, as there was a good deal
+of glebe-land attached to it, Alfred was able to try his hand at farming.
+He did so, with a little loss if no gain, and they made one household at
+the rectory.
+
+He never seemed to regret Brackenhill. Sarah--dark, ardent, intense, a
+strange contrast to his own fair, handsome face and placid
+indolence--absorbed all his love. Her eager nature could not rouse him to
+battle with the world, but it woke a passionate devotion in his heart: they
+were everything to each other, and were content. When their boy was born
+the rector would have named him Godfrey: at any rate, he urged them to call
+him by one of the old family names which had been borne by bygone
+generations of Thornes. But the young husband was resolved that the child
+should be Percival, and Percival only. "Why prejudice his grandfather
+against him for a mere name?" the rector persisted. But Alfred shook his
+head. "Percival means all the happiness of my life," he said. So the child
+received his name, and the fact was announced to Mr. Thorne in a letter
+brief and to the point like a challenge.
+
+Communications with Brackenhill were few and far between. From the local
+papers Alfred heard of the rejoicings when James came of age, quickly
+followed by the announcement that he had gone abroad for the winter. Then
+he was at home again, and going to marry Miss Harriet Benham; whereat
+Alfred smiled a little. "The governor must have put his pride in his
+pocket: old Benham made his money out of composite candles, then retired,
+and has gas all over the house for fear they should be mentioned. Harry, as
+we used to call her, is the youngest of them--she must be eight or nine and
+twenty; fine girl, hunts--tried it on with poor Maurice ages ago. I should
+think she was about half as big again as Jim. Well, yes, perhaps I am
+exaggerating a little. How charmed my father must be!--only, of course,
+anything to please Jim, and it's a fine thing to have him married and
+settled."
+
+Alfred read his father's feelings correctly enough, but Mr. Thorne was
+almost repaid for all he had endured when, in his turn, he was able to
+write and announce the birth of a boy for whom the bells had been set
+ringing as the heir of Brackenhill. Jim, with his sick fancies and
+querulous conceit, Mrs. James Thorne, with her coarsely-colored splendor
+and imperious ways, faded into the background now that Horace's little star
+had risen.
+
+The rest may be briefly told. Horace had a little sister who died, and he
+himself could hardly remember his father. His time was divided between his
+mother's house at Brighton and Brackenhill. He grew slim and tall and
+handsome--a Thorne, and not a Benham, as his grandfather did not fail to
+note. He was delicate. "But he will outgrow that," said Mrs. Middleton, and
+loved him the better for the care she had to take of him. It was
+principally for his sake that she was there. She was a widow and had no
+children of her own, but when, at her brother's request, she came to
+Brackenhill to make more of a home for the school-boy, she brought with her
+a tiny girl, little Sissy Langton, a great-niece of her husband's.
+
+Meanwhile, the other boy grew up in his quiet home, but death came there as
+well as to Brackenhill, and seemed to take the mainspring of the household
+in taking Sarah Thorne. Her father pined for her, and had no pleasure in
+life except in her child. Even when the old man was growing feeble, and it
+was manifest to all but the boy that he would not long be parted from his
+daughter, it was a sombre but not an unhappy home for the child. Something
+in the shadow which overhung it, in his grandfather's weakness and his
+father's silence, made him grave and reserved, but he always felt that he
+was loved. No playful home-name was ever bestowed on the little lad, but
+it did not matter, for when spoken by Alfred Thorne no name could be so
+tender as Percival.
+
+The rector's death when the boy was fifteen broke up the only real home he
+was destined to know, for Alfred was unable to settle down in any place for
+any length of time. While his wife and her father were alive their
+influence over him was supreme: he was like the needle drawn aside by a
+powerful attraction. But now that they were gone his thoughts oscillated a
+while, and then reverted to Brackenhill. For himself he was content--he had
+made his choice long ago--but little by little the idea grew up in his mind
+that Percival was wronged, for he, at least, was guiltless. He secretly
+regretted the defiant fashion in which his boy had been christened, and
+made a feeble attempt to prove that, after all, Percy was an old family
+name. He succeeded in establishing that a "P. Thorne" had once existed, who
+of course might have been Percy, as he might have been Peter or Paul; and
+he tried to call his son Percy in memory of this doubtful namesake. But the
+three syllables were as dear to the boy as the white flag to a Bourbon.
+They identified him with the mother he dimly remembered, and proclaimed to
+all the world (that is, to his grandfather) that for her sake he counted
+Brackenhill well lost. He triumphed, and his father was proud to be
+defeated. To this day he invariably writes himself "Percival Thorne."
+
+Alfred, however, had his way on a more important point, and educated his
+son for no profession, because the head of the house needed none. Percival
+acquiesced willingly enough, without a thought of the implied protest. He
+was indolent, and had little or no ambition. Since daily bread--and,
+luckily, rather more than daily bread, for he was no ascetic--was secured
+to him, since books were many and the world was wide, he asked nothing
+better than to study them. He grew up grave, dreamy and somewhat solitary
+in his ways. He seemed to have inherited something of the rector's
+self-possessed and rather formal courtesy, and at twenty he looked older
+than his age, though his face was as smooth as a girl's.
+
+He was not twenty-one, when his father died suddenly of fever. When the
+news reached Brackenhill the old squire was singularly affected by it. He
+had been accustomed to contrast Alfred's vigorous prime with his own
+advanced age, Percival's unbroken health with Horace's ailing boyhood, and
+to think mournfully of the probability that the old manor-house must go to
+a stranger unless he could humble himself to the son who had defied him.
+But, old as he was, he had outlived his son, and he was dismayed at his
+isolation. A whole generation was dead and gone, and the two lads, who were
+all that remained of the Thornes of Brackenhill, stood far away, as though
+he stretched his trembling hands to them across their fathers' graves. He
+expressly requested that Percival should come and see him, and the young
+man presented himself in his deep mourning. Sissy, just sixteen, looked
+upon him as a sombre hero of romance, and within two days of his coming
+Mrs. Middleton announced that her brother was "perfectly infatuated about
+that boy."
+
+The evening of his arrival he stood with his grandfather on the terrace
+looking at the wide prospect which lay at their feet--ample fields and
+meadows, and the silvery flash of water through the willows. Then he
+turned, folded his arms and coolly surveyed Brackenhill itself from end to
+end. Mr. Thorne watched him, expecting some word, but when none came, and
+Percival's eyes wandered upward to the soft evening sky, where a glimmering
+star hung like a lamp above the old gray manor-house, he said, with some
+amusement, "Well, and what is your opinion?"
+
+Percival came down to earth with the greatest promptitude: "It's a
+beautiful place. I'm glad to see it. I like looking over old houses."
+
+"Like looking over old houses? As if it were merely a show! Isn't
+Brackenhill more to you than any other old house?" demanded Mr. Thorne.
+
+"Oh, well, perhaps," Percival allowed: "I have heard my father talk of it
+of course."
+
+"Come, come! You are not such an outsider as all that," said his
+grandfather.
+
+The young man smiled a little, but did not speak.
+
+"You don't forget you are a Thorne, I hope?" the other went on. "There are
+none too many of us."
+
+"No," said Percival. "I like the old house, and I can assure you, sir, that
+I am proud of both my names."
+
+"Well, well! very good names. But shouldn't you call a man a lucky fellow
+if he owned a place like this?"
+
+"My opinion wouldn't be half as well worth having as yours," was the reply.
+"What do you call yourself, sir?"
+
+"Do you think I own this place?" Mr. Thorne inquired.
+
+"Why, yes--I always supposed so. Don't you?"
+
+"No, I don't!" The answer was almost a snarl. "I'm bailiff, overlooker,
+anything you like to call it. My master is at Oxford, at Christ Church. He
+won't read, and he can't row, so he is devoting his time to learning how to
+get rid of the money I am to save up for him. _I_ own Brackenhill?" He
+faced abruptly round. "All that timber is mine, they say; and if I cut down
+a stick your aunt Middleton is at me: 'Think of Horace.' The place was
+mortgaged when I came into it. I pinched and saved--I freed it--for Horace.
+Why shouldn't I mortgage it again if I please--raise money and live royally
+till my time comes, eh? They'd all be at me, dinning 'Horace! Horace!' and
+my duty to those who come after me, into my ears. Look at the drawing-room
+furniture!"
+
+"The prettiest old room I ever saw," said Percival.
+
+"Ah! you're right there. But my sister doesn't think so. It's shabby, she
+would tell you. But does she ask me to furnish it for her? No, no, it isn't
+worth while: mine is such a short lease. When Horace marries and comes into
+his inheritance, of course it must be done up. It would be a pity to waste
+money about it now, especially as there's a bit of land lies between two
+farms of mine, and if I don't go spending a lot in follies, I can buy it.
+Think of that! I can buy it--_for Horace!_"
+
+Percival was guarded in his replies to this and similar outbursts; and Mrs.
+Middleton, seeing that he showed no disposition to toady his grandfather or
+to depreciate Horace, told Godfrey Hammond that, though her brother was so
+absurd about him, she thought he seemed a good sort of young man, after
+all. "Time will show," was the answer. Now, this was depressing, for
+Godfrey had established a reputation for great sagacity.
+
+[TO BE CONTINUED.]
+
+
+
+
+ABBEYS AND CASTLES.
+
+
+It is a frequent reflection with the stranger in England that the beauty
+and interest of the country are private property, and that to get access to
+them a key is always needed. The key may be large or it may be small, but
+it must be something that will turn a lock. Of the things that charm an
+American observer in the land of parks and castles, I can think of very few
+that do not come under this definition of private property. When I have
+mentioned the hedgerows and the churches I have almost exhausted the list.
+You can enjoy a hedgerow from the public road, and I suppose that even if
+you are a Dissenter you may enjoy a Norman abbey from the street. If,
+therefore, one talks of anything beautiful in England, the presumption will
+be that it is private; and indeed such is my admiration of this delightful
+country that I feel inclined to say that if one talks of anything private,
+the presumption will be that it is beautiful. Here is something of a
+dilemma. If the observer permits himself to commemorate charming
+impressions, he is in danger of giving to the world the fruits of
+friendship and hospitality. If, on the other hand, he withholds his
+impression, he lets something admirable slip away without having marked its
+passage, without having done it proper honor. He ends by mingling
+discretion with enthusiasm, and he says to himself that it is not treating
+a country ill to talk of its treasures when the mention of each connotes,
+as the metaphysicians say, an act of private courtesy.
+
+The impressions I have in mind in writing these lines were gathered in a
+part of England of which I had not before had even a traveller's glimpse;
+but as to which, after a day or two, I found myself quite ready to agree
+with a friend who lived there, and who knew and loved it well, when he said
+very frankly, "I _do_ believe it is the loveliest corner of the world!"
+This was not a dictum to quarrel about, and while I was in the neighborhood
+I was quite of his mind. I felt that it would not take a great deal to make
+me care for it very much as he cared for it: I had a glimpse of the
+peculiar tenderness with which such a country may be loved. It is a capital
+example of the great characteristic of English scenery--of what I should
+call density of feature. There are no waste details; everything in the
+landscape is something particular--has a history, has played a part, has a
+value to the imagination. It is a country of hills and blue undulations,
+and, though none of the hills are high, all of them are
+interesting--interesting as such things are interesting in an old, small
+country, by a kind of exquisite modulation, something suggesting that
+outline and coloring have been retouched and refined, as it were, by the
+hand of Time. Independently of its castles and abbeys, the definite relics
+of the ages, such a landscape seems historic. It has human relations, and
+it is intimately conscious of them. That little speech about the
+loveliness of his county, or of his own part of his county, was made to me
+by my companion as we walked up the grassy slope of a hill, or "edge," as
+it is called there, from the crests of which we seemed in an instant to
+look away over half of England. Certainly I should have grown fond of such
+a view as that. The "edge" plunged down suddenly, as if the corresponding
+slope on the other side had been excavated, and one might follow the long
+ridge for the space of an afternoon's walk with this vast, charming
+prospect before one's eyes. Looking across an English county into the next
+but one is a very pretty entertainment, the county seeming by no means so
+small as might be supposed. How can a county seem small in which, from such
+a vantage-point as the one I speak of, you see, as a darker patch across
+the lighter green, the twelve thousand acres of Lord So-and-So's woods?
+Beyond these are blue undulations of varying tone, and then another
+bosky-looking spot, which you learn to be about the same amount of manorial
+umbrage belonging to Lord Some-One-Else. And to right and left of these, in
+shaded stretches, lie other estates of equal consequence. It was therefore
+not the smallness but the vastness of the country that struck me, and I was
+not at all in the mood of a certain American who once, in my hearing, burst
+out laughing at an English answer to my inquiry as to whether my
+interlocutor often saw Mr. B----. "Oh no," the answer had been, "we never
+see him: he lives away off in the West." It was the western part of his
+county our friend meant, and my American humorist found matter for infinite
+jest in his meaning. "I should as soon think," he declared, "of saying my
+western hand and my eastern."
+
+I do not think, even, that my disposition to form a sentimental attachment
+for this delightful region--for its hillside prospect of old red farmhouses
+lighting up the dark-green bottoms, of gables and chimney-tops of great
+houses peeping above miles of woodland, and, in the vague places of the
+horizon, of far-away towns and sites that one had always heard of--was
+conditioned upon having "property" in the neighborhood, so that the little
+girls in the town should suddenly drop courtesies to me in the street;
+though that too would certainly have been pleasant. At the same time,
+having a little property would without doubt have made the sentiment
+stronger. People who wander about the world without money have their
+dreams--dreams of what they would buy if their pockets were lined. These
+dreams are very apt to have relation to a good estate in any neighborhood
+in which the wanderer happens to find himself. For myself, I have never
+been in a country so unattractive that it did not seem a peculiar felicity
+to be able to purchase the most considerable house it contained. In New
+England and other portions of the United States I have coveted the large
+mansion with Greek columns and a pediment of white-painted timber: in Italy
+I should have made proposals for the yellow-walled villa with statues on
+the roof. In England I have rarely gone so far as to fancy myself in treaty
+for the best house, but, short of this, I have never failed to feel that
+ideal comfort for the time would be to call one's self owner of what is
+denominated here a "good" place. Is it that English country life seems to
+possess such irresistible charms? I have not always thought so: I have
+sometimes suspected that it is dull; I have remembered that there is a
+whole literature devoted to exposing it (that of the English novel "of
+manners"), and that its recorded occupations and conversations occasionally
+strike one as lacking a certain desirable salt. But, for all that, when, in
+the region to which I allude, my companion spoke of this and that place
+being likely sooner or later to come to the hammer, it seemed as if nothing
+could be more delightful than to see the hammer fall upon an offer made by
+one's self. And this in spite of the fact that the owners of the places in
+question would part with them because they could no longer afford to keep
+them up. I found it interesting to learn, in so far as was possible, what
+sort of income was implied by the possession of country-seats such as are
+not in America a concomitant of even the largest fortunes; and if in these
+interrogations I sometimes heard of a very long rent-roll, on the other
+hand I was frequently surprised at the slenderness of the resources
+attributed to people living in the depths of an oak-studded park. Then,
+certainly, English country life seemed to me the most advantageous thing in
+the world: on these terms one would gladly put up with a little dulness.
+When I reflected that there were thousands of people dwelling in brownstone
+houses in numbered streets in New York who were at as great a cost to make
+a reputable appearance in those harsh conditions as some of the occupants
+of the grassy estates of which I had a glimpse, the privileges of the
+latter class appeared delightfully cheap.
+
+There was one place in particular of which I said to myself that if I had
+the money to buy it, I would simply walk up to the owner and pour the sum
+in sovereigns into his hat. I saw this place, unfortunately, to small
+advantage: I saw it in the rain. But I am rather glad that fine weather did
+not meddle with the affair, for I think that in this case the irritation of
+envy would have been really too acute. It was a rainy Sunday, and the rain
+was serious. I had been in the house all day, for the weather can best be
+described by my saying that it had been deemed an exoneration from
+church-going. But in the afternoon, the prospective interval between lunch
+and tea assuming formidable proportions, my host took me out to walk, and
+in the course of our walk he led me into a park which he described as "the
+paradise of a small English country gentleman." Well it might be: I have
+never seen such a collection of oaks. They were of high antiquity and
+magnificent girth and stature: they were strewn over the grassy levels in
+extraordinary profusion, and scattered upon and down the slopes in a
+fashion than which I have seen nothing more charming since I last looked at
+the chestnut trees on the banks of the Lake of Como. It appears that the
+place was not very vast, but I was unable to perceive its limits. Shortly
+before we turned into the park the rain had renewed itself, so that we were
+awkwardly wet and muddy; but, being near the house, my companion proposed
+to leave his card in a neighborly way. The house was most agreeable: it
+stood on a kind of terrace in the midst of a lawn and garden, and the
+terrace looked down on one of the handsomest rivers in England, and across
+to those blue undulations of which I have already spoken. On the terrace
+also was a piece of ornamental water, and there was a small iron paling to
+divide the lawn from the park. All this I beheld in the rain. My companion
+gave his card to the butler, with the observation that we were too much
+bespattered to come in; and we turned away to complete our circuit. As we
+turned away I became acutely conscious of what I should have been tempted
+to call the cruelty of this proceeding. My imagination gauged the whole
+position. It was a Sunday afternoon, and it was raining. The house was
+charming, the terrace delightful, the oaks magnificent, the view most
+interesting. But the whole thing was--not to repeat the epithet "dull," of
+which just now I made too gross a use--the whole thing was quiet. In the
+house was a drawing-room, and in the drawing-room was--by which I meant
+_must be_--a lady, a charming English lady. There was, it seemed to me, no
+fatuity in believing that on this rainy Sunday afternoon it would not
+please her to be told that two gentlemen had walked across the country to
+her door only to go through the ceremony of leaving a card. Therefore,
+when, before we had gone many yards, I heard the butler hurrying after us,
+I felt how just my sentiment of the situation had been. Of course we went
+back, and I carried my muddy shoes into the drawing-room--just the
+drawing-room I had imagined--where I found--I will not say just the lady I
+had imagined, but--a lady even more charming. Indeed, there were two
+ladies, one of whom was staying in the house. In whatever company you find
+yourself in England, you may always be sure that some one present is
+"staying." I seldom hear this participle now-a-days without remembering an
+observation made to me in France by a lady who had seen much of English
+manners: "Ah, that dreadful word _staying!_ I think we are so happy in
+France not to be able to translate it--not to have any word that answers to
+it." The large windows of the drawing-room I speak of looked away over the
+river to the blurred and blotted hills, where the rain was drizzling and
+drifting. It was very quiet: there was an air of leisure. If one wanted to
+do something here, there was evidently plenty of time--and indeed of every
+other appliance--to do it. The two ladies talked about "town:" that is what
+people talk about in the country. If I were disposed I might represent them
+as talking about it with a certain air of yearning. At all events, I asked
+myself how it was possible that one should live in this charming place and
+trouble one's head about what was going on in London in July. Then we had
+excellent tea.
+
+I have narrated this trifling incident because there seemed to be some
+connection between it and what I was going to say about the stranger's
+sense of country life being the normal, natural, typical life of the
+English. In America, however comfortably people may live in the country,
+there is always, relatively speaking, an air of picnicking about their
+establishments. Their habitations, their arrangements, their appointments,
+are more or less provisional. They dine at different hours from their city
+hours; they wear different clothing; they spend all their time out of
+doors. The English, on the other hand, live according to the same system in
+Devonshire and in Mayfair--with the difference, perhaps, that in
+Devonshire, where they have people "staying" with them, the system is
+rather more rigidly applied. The picnicking, if picnicking there is to be,
+is done in town. They keep their best things in the country--their best
+books, their best furniture, their best pictures--and their footing in
+London is as provisional as ours is at our "summer retreats." The English
+smile a good deal--or rather would smile a good deal if they had more
+observation of it--at the fashion in which we American burghers stow
+ourselves away for July and August in white wooden boarding-houses beside
+dusty, ill-made roads. But it is fair to say that these improvised homes
+are not immeasurably more barbaric than the human _entassement_ that takes
+place in London "apartments" during the months of May and June. Whoever has
+had unhappy occasion to look for lodgings at this period, and to explore
+the mysteries of the little black houses in the West End which have a
+neatly-printed card suspended in the door-light, will admit that from the
+obligation to rough it our more luxurious kinsmen are not altogether
+exempt. We rough it, certainly, more than they do, but we rough it in the
+country, where Nature herself is rough, and they rough it in the heart of
+the largest and most splendid of cities. In England, in the country, Nature
+as well as civilization is smooth, and it seems perfectly consistent, even
+at midsummer, to dress for dinner; albeit that when so costumed you cannot
+conveniently lie on the grass. But in England you do not particularly
+expect to lie on the grass, especially in the evening. The aspect of the
+usual English country-houses sufficiently indicates the absence of that
+informal culture of the open air into which the American _villeggiatura_
+generally resolves itself; and one reason why I mentioned just now the
+excellent dwelling which I visited in the rain was that, as I approached
+it, it struck me as so good an example of all that, for American rural
+purposes, a house should not be. It was indeed built of stone, or of brick
+stuccoed over; which, as they say in England, is a "great pull." But except
+that it was detached and gabled, it belonged quite to the class of city
+houses. Its walls were straight and bare, and its windows, though wide,
+were short. It might have been deposited in Belgravia without in the least
+seeming out of place: it conformed to the rigid London model. It had no
+external galleries, no breezy piazzas, no long windows opening upon them,
+no doors disposed for propagating draughts. But, indeed, I have never seen
+an English house furnished with what we call a piazza; and I must add that
+I have rarely known an English summer day on which it would have been
+convenient to sit in a propagated draught.
+
+It seems, however, grossly unthankful to say that English country-houses
+lack anything when one has received delightful impressions of what they
+possess. What is a draughty doorway to an old Norman portal, massively
+arched and quaintly sculptured, across whose hollow threshold the eye of
+fancy may see the ghosts of monks and the shadows of abbots pass
+noiselessly to and fro? What is a paltry piazza to a beautiful ambulatory
+of the thirteenth century--a long stone gallery or cloister repeated in two
+stories, with the interstices of its carven lattice now glazed, but with
+its long, low, narrow, charming vista still perfect and picturesque--with
+its flags worn away by monkish sandals, and with huge round-arched doorways
+opening from its inner side into great rooms roofed like cathedrals? What
+are the longest French windows, with the most patented latches, to narrow
+casements of almost defensive aspect set in embrasures three feet deep and
+ornamented with little grotesque mediaeval faces? To see one of these small
+monkish masks grinning at you while you dress and undress, or while you
+look up in the intervals of inspiration from your letter-writing, is a
+simple detail in the entertainment of living in an ancient priory. This
+entertainment is inexhaustible, for every step you take in such a house
+confronts you in one way or another with the remote past. You feast upon
+picturesqueness, you inhale history. Adjoining the house is a beautiful
+ruin, part of the walls and windows and bases of the piers of the
+magnificent church administered by your predecessor the abbot. These relics
+are very desultory, but they are still abundant, and they testify to the
+great scale and the stately beauty of the abbey. You may lie upon the grass
+at the base of an ivied fragment, measure the girth of the great stumps of
+the central columns, half smothered in soft creepers, and think how strange
+it is that in this quiet hollow, in the midst of lonely hills, so exquisite
+and elaborate a work of art should have arisen. It is but an hour's walk to
+another great ruin, which has held together more completely. There the
+central tower stands erect to half its altitude, and the round arches and
+massive pillars of the nave make a perfect vista on the unencumbered turf.
+You get an impression that when Catholic England was in her prime great
+abbeys were as thick as milestones. By native amateurs, even now, the
+region is called "wild," though to American eyes it seems thoroughly
+suburban in its smoothness and finish. There is a noiseless little railway
+running through the valley, and there is an ancient little town at the
+abbey gates--a town, indeed, with no great din of vehicles, but with goodly
+brick houses, with a dozen "publics," with tidy, whitewashed cottages, and
+with little girls, as I have said, bobbing courtesies in the street. But
+even now, if one had wound one's way into the valley by the railroad, it
+would be rather a surprise to find a small ornamental cathedral in a spot
+on the whole so natural and pastoral. How impressive then must the
+beautiful church have been in the days of its prosperity, when the pilgrim
+came down to it from the grassy hillside and its bells made the stillness
+sensible! The abbey was in those days a great affair: as my companion said,
+it sprawled all over the place. As you walk away from it you think you have
+got to the end of its traces, but you encounter them still in the shape of
+a rugged outhouse grand with an Early-English arch, or an ancient well
+hidden in a kind of sculptured cavern. It is noticeable that even if you
+are a traveller from a land where there are no Early-English--and indeed
+few Late-English--arches, and where the well-covers are, at their hoariest,
+of fresh-looking shingles, you grow used with little delay to all this
+antiquity. Anything very old seems extremely natural: there is nothing we
+accept so implicitly as the past. It is not too much to say that after
+spending twenty-four hours in a house that is six hundred years old, you
+seem yourself to have lived in it for six hundred years. You seem yourself
+to have hollowed the flags with your tread and to have polished the oak
+with your touch. You walk along the little stone gallery where the monks
+used to pace, looking out of the Gothic window-places at their beautiful
+church, and you pause at the big round, rugged doorway that admits you to
+what is now the drawing-room. The massive step by which you ascend to the
+threshold is a trifle crooked, as it should be: the lintels are cracked and
+worn by the myriad-fingered years. This strikes your casual glance. You
+look up and down the miniature cloister before you pass in: it seems
+wonderfully old and queer. Then you turn into the drawing-room, where you
+find modern conversation and late publications and the prospect of dinner.
+The new life and the old have melted together: there is no dividing-line.
+In the drawing-room wall is a queer funnel-shaped hole, with the broad end
+inward, like a small casemate. You ask a lady what it is, but she doesn't
+know. It is something of the monks: it is a mere detail. After dinner you
+are told that there is of course a ghost--a gray friar who is seen in the
+dusky hours at the end of passages. Sometimes the servants see him, and
+afterward go surreptitiously to sleep in the town. Then, when you take your
+chamber-candle and go wandering bedward by a short cut through empty rooms,
+you are conscious of a peculiar sensation which you hardly know whether to
+interpret as a desire to see the gray friar or as an apprehension that you
+will see him.
+
+A friend of mine, an American, who knew this country, had told me not to
+fail, while I was in the neighborhood, to go to S----. "Edward I. and
+Elizabeth," he said, "are still hanging about there." Thus admonished, I
+made a point of going to S----, and I saw quite what my friend meant.
+Edward I. and Elizabeth, indeed, are still to be met almost anywhere in the
+county: as regards domestic architecture, few parts of England are still
+more vividly Old English. I have rarely had, for a couple of hours, the
+sensation of dropping back personally into the past in a higher degree than
+while I lay on the grass beside the well in the little sunny court of this
+small castle, and idly appreciated the still definite details of mediaeval
+life. The place is a capital example of what the French call a small
+_gentilhommiere_ of the thirteenth century. It has a good deep moat, now
+filled with wild verdure, and a curious gatehouse of a much later
+period--the period when the defensive attitude had been wellnigh abandoned.
+This gatehouse, which is not in the least in the style of the habitation,
+but gabled and heavily timbered, with quaint cross-beams protruding from
+surfaces of coarse white stucco, is a very picturesque anomaly in regard to
+the little gray fortress on the other side of the court. I call this a
+fortress, but it is a fortress which might easily have been taken, and it
+must have assumed its present shape at a time when people had ceased to
+peer through narrow slits at possible besiegers. There are slits in the
+outer walls for such peering, but they are noticeably broad and not
+particularly oblique, and might easily have been applied to the uses of a
+peaceful parley. This is part of the charm of the place: human life there
+must have lost an earlier grimness: it was lived in by people who were
+beginning to feel comfortable. They must have lived very much together:
+that is one of the most obvious reflections in the court of a mediaeval
+dwelling. The court was not always grassy and empty, as it is now, with
+only a couple of gentlemen in search of impressions lying at their length,
+one of whom has taken a wine-flask out of his pocket and has colored the
+clear water drawn for them out of the well in a couple of tumblers by a
+decent, rosy, smiling, talking old woman, who has come bustling out of the
+gatehouse, and who has a large, dropsical, innocent husband standing about
+on crutches in the sun and making no sign when you ask after his health.
+This poor man has reached that ultimate depth of human simplicity at which
+even a chance to talk about one's ailments is not appreciated. But the
+civil old woman talks for every one, even for an artist who has come out of
+one of the rooms, where I see him afterward reproducing its mouldering
+quaintness. The rooms are all unoccupied and in a state of extreme decay,
+though the castle is, as yet, far from being a ruin. From one of the
+windows I see a young lady sitting under a tree across a meadow, with her
+knees up, dipping something into her mouth. It is a camel's hair
+paint-brush: the young lady is sketching. These are the only besiegers to
+which the place is exposed now, and they can do no great harm, as I doubt
+whether the young lady's aim is very good. We wandered about the empty
+interior, thinking it a pity things should be falling so to pieces. There
+is a beautiful great hall--great, that is, for a small castle (it would be
+extremely handsome in a modern house)--with tall, ecclesiastical-looking
+windows, and a long staircase at one end climbing against the wall into a
+spacious bedroom. You may still apprehend very well the main lines of that
+simpler life; and it must be said that, simpler though it was, it was
+apparently by no means destitute of many of our own conveniences. The
+chamber at the top of the staircase ascending from the hall is charming
+still, with its irregular shape, its low-browed ceiling, its cupboards in
+the walls, and its deep bay window formed of a series of small lattices.
+You can fancy people stepping out from it upon the platform of the
+staircase, whose rugged wooden logs, by way of steps, and solid,
+deeply-guttered hand-rail, still remain. They looked down into the hall,
+where, I take it, there was always a certain congregation of retainers,
+much lounging and waiting and passing to and fro, with a door open into the
+court. The court, as I said just now, was not the grassy, aesthetic spot
+which you may find it at present of a summer's day: there were beasts
+tethered in it, and hustling men-at-arms, and the earth was trampled into
+puddles. But my lord or my lady, looking down from the chamber-door, could
+pick out the man wanted and bawl down an order, with a threat to fling
+something at his head if it were not instantly performed. The sight of the
+groups on the floor beneath, the calling up and down, the oaken tables
+spread, and the brazier in the middle,--all this seemed present again; and
+it was not difficult to pursue the historic vision through the rest of the
+building--through the portion which connected the great hall with the tower
+(here the confederate of the sketching young lady without had set up the
+peaceful three-legged engine of his craft); through the dusky, roughly
+circular rooms of the tower itself, and up the corkscrew staircase of the
+same to that most charming part of every old castle, where visions must
+leap away off the battlements to elude you--the sunny, breezy platform at
+the tower-top, the place where the castle-standard hung and the vigilant
+inmates surveyed the approaches. Here, always, you really overtake the
+impression of the place--here, in the sunny stillness, it seems to pause,
+panting a little, and give itself up.
+
+It was not only at Stokesay--I have written the name at last, and I will
+not efface it--that I lingered a while on the quiet platform of the keep to
+enjoy the complete impression so overtaken. I spent such another half hour
+at Ludlow, which is a much grander and more famous monument. Ludlow,
+however, is a ruin--the most impressive and magnificent of ruins. The
+charming old town and the admirable castle form a capital object of
+pilgrimage. Ludlow is an excellent example of a small English provincial
+town that has not been soiled and disfigured by industry: I remember there
+no tall chimneys and smoke-streamers, with their attendant purlieus and
+slums. The little city is perched upon a hill near which the goodly Severn
+wanders, and it has a noticeable air of civic dignity. Its streets are wide
+and clean, empty and a little grass-grown, and bordered with spacious,
+soberly-ornamental brick houses, which look as if there had been more going
+on in them in the first decade of the century than there is in the present,
+but which can still, nevertheless, hold up their heads and keep their
+window-panes clear, their knockers brilliant and their doorsteps whitened.
+The place looks as if seventy years ago it had been the centre of a large
+provincial society, and as if that society had been very "good of its
+kind." It must have transported itself to Ludlow for the season--in
+rumbling coaches and heavyish curricles--and there entertained itself in
+decent emulation of that metropolis which a choice of railway-lines had not
+as yet placed within its immediate reach. It had balls at the
+assembly-rooms; it had Mrs. Siddons to play; it had Catalani to sing. Miss
+Austin's and Miss Edgeworth's heroines might perfectly well have had their
+first love-affair there: a journey to Ludlow would certainly have been a
+great event to Fanny Price or Anne Eliot, to Helen or Belinda. It is a
+place on which a provincial "gentry" has left a sensible stamp. I have
+seldom seen so good a collection of houses of the period between the elder
+picturesqueness and the modern baldness. Such places, such houses, such
+relics and intimations, always carry me back to the near antiquity of that
+pre-Victorian England which it is still easy for a stranger to picture with
+a certain vividness, thanks to the partial survival of many of its
+characteristics. It is still easy for a stranger who has stayed a while in
+England to form an idea of the tone, the habits, the aspect of English
+social life before its classic insularity had begun to wane, as all
+observers agree that it did, about thirty years ago. It is true that the
+mental operation in this matter reduces itself to fancying some of the
+things which form what Mr. Matthew Arnold would call the peculiar "notes"
+of England infinitely exaggerated--the rigidly aristocratic constitution of
+society, for instance; the unaesthetic temper of the people; the private
+character of most kinds of comfort and entertainment. Let an old gentleman
+of conservative tastes, who can remember the century's youth, talk to you
+at a club _temporis acti_--tell you wherein it is that from his own point
+of view London, as a residence for a gentleman, has done nothing but fall
+off for the last forty years. You will listen, of course, with an air of
+decent sympathy, but privately you will be saying to yourself how
+difficult a place of sojourn London must have been in those days for a
+stranger--how little cosmopolitan, how bound, in a thousand ways, with
+narrowness of custom. What is true of the metropolis at that time is of
+course doubly true of the provinces; and a genteel little city like the one
+I am speaking of must have been a kind of focus of insular propriety. Even
+then, however, the irritated alien would have had the magnificent ruins of
+the castle to dream himself back into good-humor in. They would effectually
+have transported him beyond all waning or waxing Philistinisms.
+
+Ludlow Castle is an example of a great feudal fortress, as the little
+castellated manor I spoke of a while since is an example of a small one.
+The great courtyard at Ludlow is as large as the central square of a city,
+but now it is all vacant and grassy, and the day I was there a lonely old
+horse was tethered and browsing in the middle of it. The place is in
+extreme dilapidation, but here and there some of its more striking features
+have held well together, and you may get a very sufficient notion of the
+immense scale upon which things were ordered in the day of its strength. It
+must have been garrisoned with a small army, and the vast _enceinte_ must
+have enclosed a stalwart little world. Such an impression of thickness and
+duskiness as one still gets from fragments of partition and chamber--such a
+sense of being well behind something, well out of the daylight and its
+dangers--of the comfort of the time having been security, and security
+incarceration! There are prisons within the prison--horrible unlighted
+caverns of dismal depth, with holes in the roof through which Heaven knows
+what odious refreshment was tossed down to the poor groping _detenu_. There
+is nothing, surely, that paints one side of the Middle Ages more vividly
+than this fact that fine people lived in the same house with their
+prisoners, and kept the key in their pocket. Fancy the young ladies of the
+family working tapestry in their "bower" with the knowledge that at the
+bottom of the corkscrew staircase one of their papa's enemies was sitting
+month after month in mouldy midnight! But Ludlow Castle has brighter
+associations than these, the chief of which I should have mentioned at the
+outset. It was for a long period the official residence of the
+governors--the "lords presidents" they were called--of the Marches of
+Wales, and it was in the days of its presidential splendor that Milton's
+_Comus_ was acted in the great hall. Wandering about in shady corners of
+the ruin, it is the echo of that enchanting verse that we should try to
+catch, and not the faint groans of some encaverned malefactor. Other verse
+was also produced at Ludlow--verse, however, of a less sonorous quality. A
+portion of Samuel Butler's _Hudibras_ was composed there. Let me add that
+the traveller who spends a morning at Ludlow will naturally have come
+thither from Shrewsbury, of which place I have left myself no space to
+speak, though it is worth, and well worth, an allusion. Shrewsbury is a
+museum of beautiful old gabled, cross-timbered house-fronts.
+
+H. JAMES, JR.
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE LIZAY.
+
+
+Alston was a Virginia slave--a tall, well-built half-breed, in whom the
+white blood dominated the black. When about thirty-seven years of age he
+was sold to a Mississippi plantation, in the north-western part of the
+State and on the river. The farm was managed by an overseer, the
+master--Horton by name--being a practising physician in Memphis, Tenn.
+Alston had been on the plantation a few weeks when, toward the last of
+September, the cotton-picking season opened. The year had been, for the
+river-plantations, exceptionally favorable for cotton-growing. On the
+Horton place especially "the stand" had been pronounced perfect, there
+being scarcely a gap, scarcely a stalk missing from the mile-long rows of
+the broad fields. Then, the rainfall had not been so profuse as to develop
+foliage at the bolls' expense, as was too frequently the case on the river.
+Yet it had been plenteous enough to keep off the "rust," from which the
+dryer upland plantations were now suffering. Neither the "boll-worm" nor
+the dreaded "army-worm" had molested the river-fields; so the tall
+pyramidal plants were thickly set with "squares" and green egg-shaped
+bolls, smooth and shining as with varnish. On a single stalk might be seen
+all stages of development--from the ripe, brown boll, parted starlike, with
+the long white fleece depending, to the bean-sized embryo from which the
+crimson flower had but just fallen. Indeed, among the wide-open bolls there
+was an occasional flower, cream-hued or crimson according to its age, for
+the cotton-bloom at opening resembles in color the magnolia-blossom, but
+this changes quickly to a deep crimson.
+
+There was, then, the promise, almost the certainty, of a heavy crop on the
+Horton place. It was in view of this that the owner completed an
+arrangement, for months under consideration, in which he increased his
+working plantation-force by thirteen hands, of whom one was Alston. It was,
+too, in view of this promised heavy crop that the overseer, Mr. Buck,
+harangued the slaves at the opening of the picking-season. The burden of
+his harangue was, that no flagging would be tolerated in cotton-gathering
+during the season. The figures of the past year were on record, showing
+what each hand did each day. There was to be no falling behind these
+figures: indeed, they must be beaten, for the heavier bolling made the
+picking easier. Any one falling behind was to be cowhided. As for the new
+hands, they ought to lead the field, for they were all young, stout
+fellows.
+
+As has been said, Alston was tall, strong, well-made. Working in tobacco,
+to whose culture he had been used, he could hold his hand with the best:
+how would it be in this new business of cotton-picking? He had a strong
+element of cheerful fidelity in his nature. The first day he worked
+steadily and as rapidly as he was able at the unfamiliar employment. When
+night came he reckoned he had done well. With a complacent feeling he stood
+waiting his turn as the great baskets, one after another, were swung on the
+steelyard and the weights announced. He found himself pitying some of the
+pickers as light weights were called, wondering if they had fallen behind
+last year's figures. When his basket was brought forward, it was by Big
+Sam, who with one hand swung it lightly to the scales; yet Alston's thought
+was, "How strong Big Sam is!" and never, "How light the basket!"
+
+The weight was announced: Alston was almost stunned. He had strained every
+nerve, yet here he was behind the children-pickers, behind the gray old
+women stiff with rheumatism and broken with childbearing and with doing
+men's work.
+
+"Sixty-three pounds!" the overseer said with a threatening tone. "Min' yer
+git a heap higher'n that ter-morrer, yer yaller raskel! Ef yer can't pick
+cotton, yer'll be sol' down in Louzany to a sugar-plantation, whar' niggers
+don't git nothin' ter eat 'cept cotton-seeds an' a few dreggy lasses."
+
+Next to being sent to "the bad place" itself, the most terrible fate, to
+the negro's imagination, was to be sold to a sugar-planter.
+
+"Here's Big Sam," the overseer continued, "nigh unto three hunderd; an'
+Little Lizay two hunderd an' fawty-seven.--That's the bigges' figger yer's
+ever struck yit, Lizay: shows what yer kin do. Min' yer come up ter it
+ter-morrer an' ev'ry other day."
+
+"Days gits shawter 'bout Chrismus-time," Little Lizay ventured to suggest,
+"an' it gits col', an' my fingers ain't limber."
+
+"Don't give me none yer jaw. Reckon I knows 'nuff ter make 'lowances fer
+col' an' shawt days an' scatterin' bolls an' sich like."
+
+The next day, Alston, humiliated by his failure and by the brutal reprimand
+he had received, went to the cotton-field before any of the other
+hands--indeed, before it was fairly light. There he worked if ever a man
+did work. When the other negroes came on the field there were laughing,
+talking, singing, nodding and occasional napping in the shade of the
+cotton-stalks. But Alston took no part in any of these. He had no interest
+for anything apart from his work. At this all his faculties were engaged.
+His lithe body was seen swaying from side to side about the widespreading
+branches; he stood on tiptoe to reach the topmost bolls; he got on his
+knees to work the base-limbs, pressing down and away the long grass with
+his broad feet, tearing and holding back even with his teeth hindering
+tendrils of the passion-flower and morning-glory and other creepers which
+had escaped the devastating hoe when the crop was "laid by," and had made
+good their hold on occasional stalks. Persistently he worked in this intent
+way all through the hot day, every muscle in action. He lingered at the
+work till after the last of the other pickers had with great baskets poised
+on head joined the long, weird procession, showing white in the dusk, that
+went winding through field and lane to the ginhouse. On he worked till the
+crescent moon came up and he could hardly discern fleece from leaf. At
+last, fearing that the basket-weighing might be ended before he could reach
+the ginhouse, a half mile distant, he emptied his pick-sack, belted at his
+waist, into the tall barrel-like basket, tramped the cotton with a few
+movements of his bare feet, and then kneeling got the basket to his
+shoulder: he was not used to the balancing on head which seemed natural as
+breathing to the old hands. With long strides he hurried to the ginhouse.
+He was not a minute too early. Almost the last basket had been weighed,
+emptied and stacked when he climbed the ladder-like steps to the scaffold
+where the cotton was sunned preparatory to its ginning. When he had pushed
+his way through the crowd of negroes hanging about the door of the
+ginhouse-loft he heard the overseer call, "Whar's that yaller whelp,
+Als'on?"
+
+"Here, sah," Alston answered, hurrying forward to put his basket on the
+steelyard.
+
+"Give me any mo' yer jaw an' I'll lay yer out with the butt-en' er this
+whip," said Mr. Buck. Alston was wondering what he had said that was
+disrespectful, when the man added, "Won't have none yer sahrin' uv me. I's
+yer moster, an' that's what yer's got ter call me, I let yer know."
+
+Alston's blood was up, but the slaves were used to self-repression. All
+that was endurable in their lives depended on patience and submission.
+
+"Beg poddon, moster," Alston said with well-assumed meekness. "In Ol'
+Virginny we use ter say moster to jist our sho'-'nuff owners; but," he
+added quickly, by way of mollifying the overseer, who could not fail to be
+stung by the covert jeer, "it's a heap better ter say moster ter all the
+white folks, white trash an' all: then yer's sho' ter be right."
+
+At this speech there was in Mr. Buck's rear much grinning and eye-rolling.
+
+But Mr. Buck was engaged with Alston's basket, which was now on the scales.
+"Sixty-seven poun's," the overseer called.
+
+The slave's heart sank: only four pounds' gain after all his toil early and
+late! He was bitterly disappointed. He believed the overseer lied. Then his
+heart burned. Couldn't he leave his basket unemptied, and weigh it himself
+when the others were gone? No: the order of routine was peremptory. The
+baskets must be emptied and stacked on the scaffold outside the
+cotton-loft, so that there would be no chance the next morning for the
+negroes to take away cotton in their baskets to the fields. And what if he
+could reweigh his cotton, and prove Mr. Buck a liar? He would not dare
+breathe the discovery.
+
+So Alston emptied out the cotton he had worked so hard to gather, listening
+moodily to the overseer's harsh threats: "Yer reckon I's goin' to stan'
+sich figgers? Sixty-seven poun's! fou' poun's 'head uv yistiddy. Yer ought
+ter be fawty ahead. I won't look at nothin' under a hunderd. Ef yer don't
+get it ter-morrer I'll tie yer up, sho's yer bawn, yer great merlatto dog!
+Yer's 'hin' the poo'es' gal in the fiel'."
+
+"I never pick no cotton 'fo' yistiddy, an' its tolerbul unhandy. Rickon I
+kin do better when I gits my han' in. I use ter could wuck fus'-rate in
+tobaccy."
+
+"Tobaccy won't save yer. We hain't got no use for niggers ef they can't
+come up ter the scratch on cotton. I's made a big crop, an' I ain't goin'
+ter let it rot in the fiel'. Yer ought ter pick three hunderd ev'ry day. I
+know'd a nigger onct, a heap littler than Little Lizay, that picked five
+hunderd ev'ry lick; an' I hearn tell uv a feller that went up ter seven
+hunderd. I ain't goin' ter take no mo' sixties from yer: a good hunderd or
+the cowhide. That's the talk!"
+
+"I'll pick all I kin," said Alston: "I wuckt haud's I could ter-day."
+
+"Ef yer don't hush yer lyin' mouth I'll cut yer heart out."
+
+Alston went from the gin-loft, his blood tingling. On the sunning-scaffold
+he encountered Little Lizay. She had been listening--had heard all that had
+passed between the two men. She went down the scaffold-steps, and Alston
+came soon after. She waited for him, and they walked to the "quarter"
+together. "It's mighty haud, ain't it?" she said.
+
+"I believe he tol' a lie 'bout my baskit. Anyhow, I wuckt haud's I could
+ter-day. I can't pick no hunderd poun's uv the flimpsy stuff. He'll have
+ter cowhide me: I don't kere."
+
+But Alston did care keenly--not so much for the pain; he could bear worse
+misery than the brutal arm could inflict, though the rawhide cut like a
+dull knife; but it was the shame, the disgrace, of the thing. He was a
+stranger on the place--only a few weeks there--and to be tied up and
+flogged in the midst of strange, unsympathizing negroes! it was such
+degradation to his manhood. Since he was a child he had not been struck. He
+had been rather a favorite with his master in Virginia, but this master had
+died in debt, leaving numerous heirs, and in the changes incident to a
+partition of the estate Alston was sold.
+
+Perceiving that he had Little Lizay's sympathy, Alston went on talking,
+telling her that he could stand a lashing coming from his own master, but
+that an overseer was only white trash, who never did "own a nigger," and
+never would be able to. If he had to be flogged, he wanted it to be by a
+gentleman.
+
+"Never min'," said Little Lizay. "Maybe yer'll git mo' ter-morrer. When
+yer's pickin' yer mus' quit stoppin' ter pick out the leaves an' trash. I
+lets ev'rything go in that happens, green bolls an' all: they weighs
+heavy."
+
+The following day, Alston, as before, went to the cotton-field early, but
+he found that Little Lizay had the start of him. She had already emptied
+her sack into her pick-basket. "The cotton we get now'll weigh heavy," she
+said: "it's got dew on it."
+
+"That's so," Alston assented, "but yer mus'n't talk ter me, Lizay. I's got
+ter put all my min' ter my wuck: I can't foad ter talk."
+
+"I can't nuther," said Lizay. "Wish I didn't pick so much cotton the fus'
+day: I's got ter keep on trottin' ter two hunderd an' fawty-seven."
+
+She selected two rows beside Alston's. She wore a coarse dress of uncolored
+homespun cotton, of the plainest and scantiest make, low in the neck, short
+in the sleeves and skirt. Her feet and head were bare. A sack of like
+material with her dress was tied about the waist, apron-like. This was to
+receive immediately the pickings from the hand. When filled it was emptied
+in a pick-basket, holding with a little packing fifty or sixty pounds. This
+small basket was kept in the picker's vicinity, being moved forward
+whenever the sack was taken back for emptying. Besides this go-between
+pick-basket, there was at that end of the row nearest the ginhouse an
+immense basket, nearly as tall as a barrel, and of greater circumference,
+with a capacity for three hundred pounds.
+
+Alston's pick-basket stood beside Little Lizay's, and between his row and
+hers. She was carrying two rows to his one, and he perceived, without
+looking and with a vague envy, that Lizay emptied three sacks at least to
+his one. Yet she did not seem to be working half as hard as he was. With
+light, graceful movements, now right, now left, she plucked the white tufts
+and the candelabra-like pendants stretched by the wind and the expanding
+lint till the dark seed could be discerned in clusters.
+
+It was near nine o'clock when Alston emptied his first sack, some fifteen
+pounds, in the pick-basket, which Little Lizay had brought forward with her
+own. Soon after she went back to empty her sack. The baskets stood
+hazardously near Alston for Lizay's game, but with her back turned to him
+and the luxuriant cotton-stalks between she reckoned she might venture.
+One-third of her sack she threw into Alston's basket--about five pounds.
+And thus the poor soul did during the day, giving a third of her gatherings
+to Alston. She would have given him more--the half, the whole, everything
+she owned--for she regarded him with a feeling that would have been called
+love in a fairer woman.
+
+Alston had been in Virginia something of a house-servant, doing occasional
+duty as coachman when the regular official was ill or was wanted elsewhere.
+He was also a good table-waiter, and had served in the dining-room when
+there were guests. So it came that though properly a field-hand, yet in
+manner and speech he showed to advantage beside the slaves who were
+exclusively field-hands. Little Lizay too occupied a halfway place between
+these and the better-spoken, gentler-mannered house-servants. In the
+winters, after Christmas, which usually terminated the picking-season,
+Lizay was called to the place of head assistant of the plantation
+seamstress. Indeed, she did little field-service except in times of special
+pressure and during the quarter of cotton-picking. She was so
+nimble-fingered and swift that she could not be spared from the field in
+picking-season, especially if, as was the case this year, there was a heavy
+crop. And occasionally in the winter, when there was unusual company at the
+Hortons' in the city, Little Lizay was sent for and had the advantage of a
+season in town. She felt her superiority to the average plantation-negro,
+and had not married, though not unsolicited. When, therefore, Alston came
+she at once recognized in him a companion, and she was not long in making
+over her favor to the distinguished-looking stranger. He was, as she, a
+half-breed, and Lizay liked her own color. Had Alston courted her favor,
+she might have yielded it less readily, but he did not take easily to his
+new companions. Some called him proud: others reckoned he had left a
+sweetheart, a wife perhaps, in Virginia. Little Lizay's evident preference
+laid her open to the rude jokes and sneers of the other negroes--in
+particular Big Sam, who was her suitor, and Edny Ann, who was fond of
+Alston. But Edny Ann did not care for Alston as Little Lizay did--could
+not, indeed. She was incapable of the devotion that Lizay felt. She would
+not have left her sleep and gone to the dew-wet field before daybreak for
+the sake of helping Alston: she would not have taken the risk of falling
+behind in her picking, and thus incurring a flogging, by dividing her
+gatherings with him. And if she had helped him at all, it would not have
+been delicately, as Lizay's help had been given. Edny Ann would have wanted
+Alston to know that she had helped him: Little Lizay wished to hide it from
+him, both because she feared he would decline her help, and because she
+wanted to spare him the humiliation.
+
+When night came not only Alston lingered, picking by moonlight, but Little
+Lizay; and this gave rise to much laughing among the other pickers, and to
+many coarse jokes. But to one who knew her secret it would have seemed
+piteous--the girl's anxious face as the weighing proceeded, drawing on and
+on to Alston's basket and hers at the very end of the line. Would he have
+a hundred? would she fall behind? Would he be saved the flogging? would she
+have to suffer in his stead? She dreaded a flogging at the hands of that
+brutal overseer, and all her womanliness shrunk from the degradation of
+being stripped and flogged in Alston's presence, or even of having him know
+that she was to be cowhided. She bethought her of making an appeal to the
+overseer. She knew she had some power with him, for he had been enamored,
+in his brutish way, of her physical charms--her neat figure, her glossy,
+waving hair, and the small, shapely hand and foot.
+
+Just before the weighing had reached Alston's basket and hers she stepped
+beside the overseer. "Please, Mos' Buck," she said in a low tone, "ef I
+falls 'hin' myse'f, an' don't git up to them fus' figgers, an' has to git
+cowhided--please, sah, don't let the black folks an' Als'on know 'bout it."
+
+Mr. Buck took a hint from this request. He perceived that Lizay was
+interested in Alston, as he had already guessed from the jokes of the
+negroes, and that she was specially desirous to conceal her shame from the
+man to whom she had given her favor. Mr. Buck resented it that Lizay should
+rebuff him and encourage Alston; so he hoped that for this once, at any
+rate, she would fall behind: he had thought of a capital plan of revenging
+himself on her.
+
+The next moment after her whispered appeal Lizay saw with intense interest
+Alston's basket brought forward for weighing. She glanced at him. His eyes
+were wide open, staring with eagerness, his head advanced, his whole
+attitude one of absorbed anxiety. By the position of the weight or pea on
+the steelyard she knew that it was put somewhere near the sixty notch. Up
+flew the end of the yard, and up flew Lizay's heart with it: out went the
+pea some ten teeth, yet up again went the impatient steel. Click! click!
+click! rattled the weight. Out and out another ten notches, then another
+and another--one hundred, one hundred and one, one hundred and two, one
+hundred and three--yet the yard still protested, still called for more.
+Out one tooth farther, and the steel lay along the horizon. Everybody
+listened.
+
+"One hunderd an' fou'," Mr. Buck announced. "Thar' now, yer lazy dog! I
+know'd yer wasn't half wuckin'. Now see ter it yer come ter taw arter this:
+hunderd an' fou's yer notch."
+
+It was a moment of supreme relief to Alston. He drew a long breath, and
+returned some smiles of congratulation from the negroes. Then he sighed: he
+felt hopeless of repeating the weight day after day. He had hardly stopped
+to breathe from day-dawn till moon-rise: he would not always have the
+friendly moonlight to help him. But now Little Lizay's basket was swinging.
+He listened to hear its weight with interest, but how unlike this was to
+the absorbed anxiety which she had felt for him!
+
+"Two hunderd an' 'leven--thutty-six poun's behin'!" said Mr. Buck, smacking
+his lips as over some good thing. Now he should have vent for his spite
+against the girl. "Thutty-six lashes on yer bar' back by yer sweet'art."
+Mr. Buck said this with a dreadful snicker in Little Lizay's face.
+
+The word ran like wildfire from mouth to mouth that Little Lizay, the
+famous picker, had fallen behind, and was to be flogged--by the overseer,
+some said--by Big Sam, others declared. But Edny Ann reckoned the cowhiding
+was to be done by Alston.
+
+"An' her dersarves it, kase her's a big fool," said Edny Ann, "hangin'
+roun' him, an' patchin' his cloze like her wus morred ter 'im--an' washin'
+his shut an' britches ev'ry Saddy night."
+
+All the hands were required to stop after the weighing and witness the
+floggings, as a warning to themselves and an enhancement of punishment to
+the convicts. There was but little shrinking from the sight. Human nature
+is everywhere much the same: cruel spectacles brutalize, whether in Spain
+or on a negro-plantation. But to-night there was a new sensation: the
+slaves were on the _qui vive_ to see Little Lizay flogged, and to find out
+whose hand was to wield the whip.
+
+"Now hurry up yere, yer lazy raskels! an' git yer floggin'," Mr. Buck said
+when the weighing was over.
+
+From right and left and front and rear negroes came forward and stood, a
+motley group, before the one white man. It was a weird spectacle that did
+not seem to belong to our earth. Black faces, heads above heads, crowded at
+the doorway--some solemn and sympathetic, others grinning in anticipation
+of the show. Negroes were perched on the gin and in the corners of the loft
+where the cotton was heaped. Others lay at full length close to the field
+of action. In every direction the dusky figures dotted the cotton lying on
+every hand about the little cleared space where the flogging and weighing
+were done. In a close bunch stood the shrinking, cowering convicts, some
+with heads white as the cotton all about them. Mr. Buck, the most
+picturesque figure of the whole, was laying off his coat and baring his
+arm, standing under the solitary lamp depending from the rafters, whose
+faint light served to give to all the scene an indefinite supernatural
+aspect.
+
+"Now, come out yere," said Mr. Buck, moving from under the grease-lamp and
+calling for volunteers.
+
+One by one the negroes came forward and bared themselves to the
+waist--children, strong men and old women. And then there was shrieking and
+wailing, begging and praying: it was like a leaf out of hell.
+
+Little Lizay was among the first of the condemned to present herself, for
+she felt an intolerable suspense as to what awaited her. The vague terror
+in her face was discerned by the dim light.
+
+As she stepped forward Mr. Buck called out, "Als'on!"
+
+"Yes, moster," Alston answered.
+
+"What yer sneakin' in that thar' corner fer? Come up yere, you--" but his
+vile sentence shall not be finished here.
+
+Alston came forward with a statuesque face.
+
+"Take this rawhide," was the order he received.
+
+He put out his hand, and then, suddenly realizing the requisition that was
+to be made on him, realizing that he was to flog Little Lizay, his
+confidante and sympathizing friend, his hand dropped cold and limp.
+
+"Yerdar' ter dis'bey me?" Mr. Buck bellowed. "I'll brain yer: I'll--"
+
+"I didn't go ter do it, moster," Alston said, reaching for the whip. "I'll
+whip her tell yer tells me ter stop."
+
+"He didn't go ter do it, Mos' Buck," pleaded Little Lizay, frightened for
+Alston. "He'll whip me ef yer'll give 'im the whip.--I's ready, Als'on."
+
+She crossed her arms over her bare bosom and shook her long hair forward:
+then dropped her face low and stood with her back partly turned to Alston,
+who now had the whip.
+
+"Fire away!" said the overseer.
+
+Alston was not a refined gentleman, whose youth had been hedged from the
+coarse and degrading, whose good instincts had been cherished, whose
+faculties had been harmoniously trained. He was not a hero: he was not
+prepared to espouse to the death Little Lizay's cause--to risk everything
+for the shrinking, helpless woman and for his own manhood--to die rather
+than strike her. He was only a slave, used from his cradle to the low and
+cruel and brutalizing. But he had the making of a man in him: his nature
+was one that could never become utterly base. But there was no help, no
+hope, for either of them in anything he could do. He might knock Mr. Buck
+senseless, sure of the sympathy of every slave on the plantation. There
+would be a brief triumph, but he and Little Lizay would have to pay for it:
+bloodhounds, scourgings, chains, cruelty that never slept and could never
+be placated, were sure as fate. Resistance was inevitable disaster.
+
+Alston did not need to stand there undetermined while he went over this: it
+was familiar ground. Over and over again he had settled it: it was madness
+for the slave to oppose himself to the dominant white man.
+
+So, after his first unreasoning recoil, his mind was decided to adminster
+the flogging. Would it not be a mercy to Little Lizay for him to do this
+rather than that other hand, energized by hate, revenge and cruelty?
+
+He raised his arm, with his heart beating hot and his manhood shrinking: he
+struck Little Lizay's bare shoulders. She had nerved herself, but the blow,
+after all, surprised her and made her start; and she had not quite
+recovered herself when the second blow fell, so that she winced again; but
+after that she stood like a statue.
+
+"Harder!" cried Mr. Buck after the first few lashes. "None yer tomfool'ry
+'bout me. She ain't no baby. Harder! I tell yer. Yer ain't draw'd no blood
+nary time. Ef yer don't min' me I'll knock yer down. Yer whips like yer wus
+'feard yer'd hurt 'er. Yer ac' like yer never whipped no nigger sence yer
+wus bawn. Yer's got ter tiptoe ter it, an' fling yer arm back at a better
+lick 'an that. Look yere: ef yer don't lick her harder I'll make Big Sam
+lick yer till yer see sights."
+
+At length the wretched work was ended, and the negroes made their way along
+the moonlighted lanes to their cabins. These were single rooms, built of
+unhewn logs, chinked and daubed with yellow mud. They had puncheon floors
+and chimneys built of sticks and clay. Of clay also were the all-important
+jambs, which served as depositories of perhaps every household article
+pertaining to the cabin except the bedding and the stools. There might have
+been found the household knife and spoon, the two or three family tin cups,
+the skillet, the pothooks, sundry gourd vessels, the wooden tray in which
+the "cawn" bread was mixed--pipe, tobacco and banjo.
+
+On the Horton place the negroes cooked their own suppers after the day's
+work was over. So for an hour every evening "the quarter" had an animated
+aspect, for the cabins, standing five yards apart, faced each other in two
+long lines. In each was a glowing fire, on which logs and pine-knots and
+cypress-splints were laid with unsparing hand, for there was no limit to
+the fuel. These fires furnished the lights: candles and lamps were unknown
+at "the quarter."
+
+Of course the windowless cabins, with these roaring fires, were stifling
+in September; so the negroes sat in the doorways chatting and singing while
+the bacon was frying and the corn dough roasting in the ashes or the
+hoecake baking on the griddle. An occasional woman patched or washed some
+garment by the firelight, while others brought water in piggins from the
+spring at the foot of the hill on whose brow "the quarter" was located.
+
+As Alston sat outside his door on a block, eating his supper by the light
+of the high-mounting flames of his cabin-fire, Little Lizay came out and
+sat on her doorsill. Her cabin stood opposite his. He recognized her, and
+when he had finished his supper he went over to her.
+
+"I didn't want ter strike yer, Lizay," he said. "Do you feel haud agin me
+fer it?"
+
+"No," Lizay answered: "he made yer do it. Yer couldn't he'p it. I reckon
+yer'll have ter whip me agin ter-morrer night. I mos' knows my baskit won't
+weigh no two hunderd an' fawty-seven poun's. 'Tain't fa'r ter 'spec' that
+much from me: it's a heap more'n tother gals gits, an' mos' all uv um is
+heap bigger'n me. I's small pertatoes." She laughed a little at her jest.
+
+"Yer's some punkins," said Alston, returning the joke. "I'd give a heap ef
+I could pick cotton like yer."
+
+"Yer's improved a heap," said Little Lizay. "Ef yer keeps on improvin',
+mayby yer'll git so yer kin he'p me arter 'while."
+
+"Mayby so," Alston answered.
+
+"But yer wouldn't he'p me, I reckon. Reckon yer'd he'p Edny Ann: yer likes
+her better'n me."
+
+"No, I don't."
+
+"Reckon yer likes somebody in Virginny more'n yer likes anybody on this
+plantation."
+
+"I's better 'quainted back thar'," said Alston apologetically.
+
+"But thar' ain't no use hankerin' arter them yer's lef 'hin' yer: reckon
+yer won't never see um no mo'. Heap better git sati'fied yere. It's a long
+way back thar', ain't it?"
+
+"A mighty long way," said Alston; and then he was silent, his thoughts
+going back and back over the long way.
+
+Lizay recalled him: "Was yer sorry yer had ter whip me?"
+
+"I was mighty sorry, Little Lizay," he replied with a strong tone of
+tenderness that made her heart beat faster. "I would er knocked that white
+nigger down, but it wouldn't er he'ped nothin'. Things would er jus' been
+wusser."
+
+"Yes," Lizay assented, "nothin' won't he'p us: ain't no use in nothin'."
+
+"Reckon I'll go in an' go ter sleep," said Alston: "got ter git up early in
+the mawnin'."
+
+He _was_ up early the next morning, he and Little Lizay being again in the
+cotton-field before dawn. All through the day there was, as before,
+persistent devotion to the picking; then the holding on after dusk for one
+more pound; the same result at night--the man up to the required figure,
+the woman behind, this time forty-one pounds behind. Again she received a
+cowhiding at Alston's hands.
+
+"What yer mean by this yere foolin'?" Mr. Buck demanded in a rage of Little
+Lizay. "Yer reckon I's gwine ter stan' this yere? Two hunderd an'
+fawty-seven 'gin two hunderd an' six! It's all laziness an' mulishness.
+I'll git yer outen that thar' notch, else I'll kill yer. Look yere:
+ter-morrer, ef yer don't come ter taw, I'll give yer twict es many licks es
+the poun's yer falls behin'."
+
+Did this threat frighten Little Lizay out of her devotion?
+
+"Two hunderd is 'nuff fer a little gal like yer," Alston said the next
+morning. "Save my life, I can't pick no more'n a hunderd an' a few poun's
+mo'. I wouldn't stan' ter be flogged ef I'd done my shar'."
+
+"Got ter stan' it--can't he'p myse'f."
+
+"I'd go ter town an' tell Mos' Hawton. I's tolerbul sho' he wouldn't 'low
+yer ter git twict es many licks, nohow. Mos' Hawton's tolerbul good ter his
+black folks, ain't he?"
+
+"Yes, tolerbul--to the house-sarvants he's got in town; but he jist goes
+'long mindin' his business thar', an' don't pay no 'tention sca'cely ter
+his plantation. He don't want us ter come 'plainin' ter him. He's mighty
+busy--gits a heap er practice, makes a heap er money. He went down the
+river onct, more'n a hunderd miles, ter cut somethin' off a man--I fawgits
+what 'twas--an' the man paid him hunderds an' hunderds an' hunderds--I
+fawgits how much 'twas."
+
+Here Little Lizay found that Alston was no longer listening, but was
+absorbed with the cotton-picking.
+
+That day, to save the pickers' time, their bacon and corn pones were
+brought out to the field by wagon in wooden trays and buckets. There were
+three cotton-baskets filled with corn dodgers. Alston and Little Lizay sat
+not far apart while eating their dinners.
+
+"I reckon I's gittin' 'long tolerbul well ter-day," he said. "Dun know for
+sar-tin, but looks like the pickin' wus heap handier than at fus'. Look
+yere, Lizay: ef I know'd I'd git more'n a hunderd I'd he'p yer 'long: I'd
+give yer the balance. Couldn't stave off all the floggin', but I might save
+yer some licks."
+
+"Take kere yer ownse'f, Als'on. I don't min' the las' few licks: they don't
+never hut bad es the fus' ones." This was Little Lizay's answer, given with
+glowing cheek and eyes looking down. To her own heart she said, "I likes
+him better'n he likes me. Reckon he can't git over mou'nin' fer somebody in
+Virginny." She wondered if he had left a wife back there: she would test
+him. "Reckon yer'll hear from yer wife any mo', Als'on?" she said.
+
+"Yes, reckon I will. She said she'd write me a letter. She didn't b'long
+ter my ol' moster: she b'longed ter Squire Minor. I tuck a wife off'en our
+plantation. She's goin' ter ax her moster ter sell her an' the childun to
+Mos' Hawton, and I's waitin' ter fin' out ef he'll sell 'um. I ain't goin'
+ter cou't no other gal tell I fin's out."
+
+"Yer hopes he'll sell her, don't yer?" Little Lizay asked with an anxious
+heart.
+
+"She wus a mighty good wife," said Alston, without committing himself by a
+categorical answer. "Would seem like Ol' Virginny ter have her an' the
+childun, but they's better off thar'. They couldn't pick cotton, I reckon.
+Her moster an' mistiss thinks a heap uv her: she's one the cooks. I don't
+reckon they kin spaw her."
+
+"Don't yer, sho' 'nuff?"
+
+"No, I don't reckon they kin, 'cause one Mis' Minor's cooks is gittin' ol'
+an' can't see good--Aunt Juno. She wucks up flies an' sich into the cawn
+bread. They wants ter put my wife into her place, but they can't git shet
+with Aunt Juno: she's jis' boun' she'll do the white folks' cookin'. She
+says thar' ain't no use in bein' free ef she can't do what she pleases:
+they set her free Chrismus 'fo' las'. But law, Lizay! we mus' hurry up an'
+get ter pickin'."
+
+That night Lizay had gained on her basket of the preceding day by five and
+a half pounds, and Alston had fallen behind his by four. But as he was
+still over a hundred he escaped a flogging. Mr. Buck, being unable to
+reckon exactly the number of lashes to which Little Lizay was entitled,
+gave the rawhide the benefit of any doubt and ordered Alston to administer
+seventy-five lashes.
+
+The next day nothing noticeable occurred in the lives of these two slaves,
+except that Alston's basket fell yet behind: Mr. Buck acknowledged it was a
+"hunderd, but a mighty tight squeeze," while Little Lizay's had gained
+three pounds on the last weight.
+
+"Yer saved six lashes ter-day, Little Lizay," Alston said. He was evidently
+glad for her, and her hungry heart was glad that he cared.
+
+"An' yer didn't haudly git clear," she replied, adding to herself that
+to-morrow she must be more generous with her help to Alston.
+
+But on the morrow something occurred which dismayed the girl. She had
+shaken her sack over Alston's basket, designing to empty a third of its
+contents there, and then the remainder in her "pick." But the cotton was
+closely packed in the sack, and almost the whole of it tumbled in a compact
+mass into Alston's basket. He would not need so much help as this to ensure
+him, so she proceeded to transfer a portion of the heap to her basket.
+Suddenly she started as though shot. Some one was calling to her and making
+a terrible accusation. The some one was Edny Ann: "Yer's stealin' thar': I
+see'd yer do it--see'd yer takin' cotton outen Als'on's baskit. Ain't yer
+shame, yer yaller good-fer-nuffin'? I's gwine ter tell." This was the
+terrible accusation.
+
+"Yer dun know nothin' 'tall 'bout it," said Little Lizay. "It's my cotton.
+I emptied it in Als'on's baskit when I didn't go ter do it. I ain't tuck a
+sol'tary lock er Als'on's cotton; an' I wouldn't, nuther, ter save my
+life."
+
+"Reckon yer kin fool me?" demanded the triumphant Edny Ann. Then she called
+Alston with the _O_ which Southerners inevitably prefix: "O Als'on! O
+Als'on! come yere! quick!"
+
+"Don't, please don't, tell him," Little Lizay pleaded. "I'll give yer my
+new cal'ker dress ef yer won't tell nobody."
+
+But Edny Ann went on calling: "O Als'on! O Als'on! come yere!"
+
+Little Lizay pleaded in a frantic way for silence as she saw Alston coming
+with long strides up between the cotton-rows toward them.
+
+"I wants yer ter ten' ter Lizay," said Edny Ann. "Her's been stealin' yer
+cotton: see'd 'er do it--see'd 'er take a heap er cotton outen yer baskit
+an' ram it into hern. Did so!"
+
+Then you should have seen the man's face. Had it been white you could not
+have discerned any plainer the surprise, the disappointment, the grief.
+Lizay saw with an indefinable thrill the sadness in his eyes, heard the
+grief in his voice.
+
+"I didn't reckon yer'd do sich a thing, Lizay," he said. "I know it's
+mighty haud on yer, gittin' cowhided ev'ry night, but stealin' ain't goin'
+ter he'p it, Lizay."
+
+"I never stole yer cotton, Als'on," Little Lizay said with a certain
+dignity, but with an unsteady voice.
+
+"I see'd yer do it," Edny Ann interrupted.
+
+"I emptied my sack in yer baskit when I didn't go ter do it," Little Lizay
+continued. "It wus my own cotton I wus takin' out yer baskit."
+
+"Ef yer deny it, Lizay, yer'll make it wusser." Then Alston went up close
+to her, so that Edny Ann might not hear, and said something in a low tone.
+
+Lizay gave him a swift look of surprise: then her lip began to quiver; the
+quick tears came to her eyes; she put both hands to her face and cried
+hard, so that she could not have found voice if she had wished to tell
+Alston her story. He went back to his row, and left her there crying beside
+the pick-baskets. He returned almost immediately, shouldered his basket,
+and went away from her to another part of the field, leaving his row
+unfinished. He wondered how much cotton Lizay had taken from his basket--if
+its weight would be brought down below a hundred; and meditated what he
+should do in case he was called up to be flogged by the brutal overseer.
+Should he stand and take the lashing, trusting to Heaven to make it up to
+him some day? or should he knock the overseer senseless and make a strike
+for freedom? Where was freedom? Which was the way to the free North? In
+Virginia he would have known in what direction to set his face for Ohio,
+but here everything was new and strange.
+
+However, he had no occasion for a desperate movement that night. His basket
+weighed one hundred and seven, while Little Lizay's had fallen lower than
+ever before. Alston thought it was because she had missed her chance of
+transferring the usual quantity of cotton from his basket.
+
+The striking of Lizay had never seemed so abhorrent to him as on this
+night, now that there was estrangement between them. She was already
+humiliated in his sight, and to raise his hand against her was like
+striking a fallen foe. She would think that he was no longer sorry--that he
+was glad to repay the wrong she had done him.
+
+In the mean time, Edny Ann had told the story of the theft to one and
+another, and Lizay found at night the "quarter" humming with it. Taunts and
+jeers met her on every hand. Stealing from white folks the negroes regarded
+as a very trifling matter, since they, the slaves, had earned everything
+there was: but to steal from "a po' nigger" was the meanest thing in their
+decalogue.
+
+"Stealin' from her beau!" sneered one negro, commenting on Little Lizay's
+offence.
+
+"An' her sweet'art!" said another.
+
+"An' her 'tendin' like her lubbed 'im!"
+
+"An' Als'on can't pick cotton fas', nohow, kase he ain't use ter
+cotton--neber see'd none till he come yere--an' her know'd he'd git a
+cowhidin'. It's meaner'n boneset tea," said Edny Ann.
+
+"A heap meaner," assented Cat. "Sich puffawmance's wusser'n stealin' acawns
+frum a blin' hog."
+
+Over and over Little Lizay said, "I never stole Als'on's cotton;" and then
+she would make her explanation, as she had made it to Edny Ann and Alston.
+Often she was tempted to tell the whole story of how she had been all along
+helping Alston at her own cost, but many motives restrained her. She
+dreaded the jeers and jests to which the story would subject her, and
+everything was to be feared from Mr. Buck's retaliation should he learn
+that he had been tricked. Besides, she wished, if possible, to go on
+helping Alston. She doubted, too, if he would receive it well that she had
+been helping him. Might he not gravely resent it that through her action
+such a pitiable part in the drama had been forced on him? Then there was
+something sweet to Little Lizay in suffering all alone for Alston--in
+having this secret unshared: she respected herself more that she did not
+risk everything to vindicate herself, for this she could do: the steelyard
+to-morrow would demonstrate the truth of her story.
+
+But the morrow came, and she went out to the field, her story untold, a
+marked woman. Yet she was not comfortless. The something that Alston had
+told her the previous day was making her heart sing. This is what he told
+her: "While yer wus stealin' from me, Lizay, I wus he'pin' yer. I put a
+ha'f er sack in yer baskit ter-day, an' a ha'f er sack yistiddy--kase I
+liked yer, Lizay."
+
+She took her rows beside Alston's as usual, determined to watch for a
+chance to help him. But when he moved away from her and took another row,
+Lizay knew that the time had come. She couldn't stand it to have him strain
+and tug and bend to his work as no other hand in the field did, only to be
+disappointed at night. She could never bear it that he should be flogged
+after all she had done to save him from the shame. She could never live
+through it--the cowhiding of her hero by the detested overseer. Yes, the
+time had come: she must tell Alston.
+
+She went over to where he had begun a new row. "Yer don't b'lieve the tale
+I tole yistiddy, Als'on: yer's feared I'll steal yer cotton ter-day," she
+said.
+
+"I don't wish no talk 'bout it, Lizay," Alston said. His tone was half sad,
+half peremptory.
+
+"Yer mustn't feel haud agin me ef I tells you somethin', Als'on. Yer's been
+puttin' cotton in my baskit unbeknownst ter save me some lashes, an' yer
+throw'd it up ter me yistiddy. Now, look yere, Als'on: I's been he'pin' yer
+all this week, ever since Mr. Buck said yer got ter git a hunderd. Ev'ry
+day I's he'ped yer git up ter a hunderd."
+
+Alston had stopped picking, both his hands full of cotton, and stood
+staring in a bewildered way at the girl. "Lizay, is this a fac'?" he said
+at length.
+
+"'Tis so, Als'on; an' ef yer don't lemme he'p yer now yer'll fall 'hin' an'
+have ter git flogged."
+
+"An' ef yer he'p me, yer'll fall shawt an' have ter git flogged. Oh, Lizay,
+thar' never was nobody afo' would er done this yer fer me," Alston said,
+feeling that he would like to kiss the poor shoulders that had been
+scourged for him. Great tears gathered in his eyes, and he thought without
+speaking the thought, "My wife in Virginny wouldn't er done it."
+
+"So yer mus' lemme he'p yer ter-day," said Little Lizay.
+
+"I'll die fus'," he said in a savage tone.
+
+"Oh, yer'll git a whippin', Als'on, sho's yer bawn."
+
+"No: I won't take a floggin' from that brute."
+
+"Oh, Als'on, yer jis' got ter: yer can't he'p the miserbulness. No use
+runnin' 'way: they'd ketch yer an' bring yer back. Thar's nigger-hunters
+an' blood-houn's all roun' this yer naberhood. Yer couldn't git 'way ter
+save yer life."
+
+"Look yere, Lizay," Alston said with sudden inspiration: "le's go tell
+Mos' Hawton all 'bout it. Ef he's a genulman he'll 'ten' ter us. They won't
+miss us till night, an' 'fo' that time we'll be in Memphis. Yer knows the
+way, don't yer?"
+
+"Yes," Lizay said; "an' I reckon that's the bes' thing we kin do--go tell
+moster an' mistis. But, law! I ought er go pull off this yere ole homespun
+dress an' put on my new cal'ker."
+
+"I reckon we ain't got no time ter dress up," said Alston. "We mus' start
+quick: come 'long. Le's hide our baskits fus' whar' the cotton-stalks is
+thick."
+
+This they did, and then started off at a brisk pace, their flight concealed
+by the tall cotton-plants. They reached Memphis about eleven o'clock, and
+found Dr. Horton at home, having just finished his lunch. They were
+admitted at once to the dining-room, where the doctor sat picking his
+teeth. He had never seen Alston, as the new negroes had been bought by an
+agent.
+
+"Sarvant, moster!" Alston said humbly, but with dignity.
+
+"Howdy, moster?" was Little Lizay's more familiar salutation.
+
+"I's Als'on, one yer new boys from Ol' Virginny."
+
+"You're a likely-lookin' fellow," said the doctor, who was given to
+dropping final consonants in his speech. "I reckon I'll hear a good report
+of you from Mr. Buck. You look like you could stan' up to work like a
+soldier. But what's brought you and Little Lizay to the city? Anything gone
+wrong?"
+
+"Yes, moster," said Alston--"mighty wrong. Look yere, Mos' Hawton: when I
+come on yer plantation I made up my min' ter sarve yer faithful--ter wuck
+fer yer haud's I could--ter strike ev'ry lick I could fer yer. When I hoed
+cawn an' pulled fodder I went 'head er all the han's on yer plantation. But
+when I went ter pick cotton I wusn't use ter it. I wuckt haud's I could,
+'fo' day an' arter dark. Mos' Hawton, I couldn't pick a poun' more'n I pick
+ter save my life. But I wus 'hin' all t'other han's. Then Mos' Buck wus
+goin' ter flog me ef I didn't git a hunderd: then Little Lizay, her he'ped
+me unbeknownst: ev'ry day she puts cotton in my baskit ter fetch it ter a
+hunderd, an' that made her fall 'hin' las' year's pickin'; then ev'ry night
+she was stripped an' cowhided; but she kep' on he'pin' me, an' kep' on
+gettin' whipped. I dun know what she dun it fer: 'min's me uv the Laud on
+the cross."
+
+Dr. Horton knew what she did it for. His knightliness was touched to the
+quick. The story made him wish as never before to be a better master than
+he had ever been to his poor people. He asked many questions, and drew
+forth all the facts, Lizay telling how Alston was helping her while she was
+helping him. Dr. Horton saw that here was a romance in slave-life--that the
+man and woman were in love with each other.
+
+"Well, if you can't pick cotton," he said to Alston, "what can you do?"
+
+"Mos' anything else, moster. I kin do ev'rything 'bout cawn; I kin split
+rails; I kin plough; I kin drive carriage."
+
+"Could you run a cotton-gin?"
+
+"Reckon so, moster: the black folks says it's tolerbul easy."
+
+"Well, now, look here: you and Lizay get some dinner, an' then do you take
+a back-trot for the plantation. I'll sen' Buck a note: no, he can't more'n
+half read writin'. Well, do you tell him, Alston, to put you to ginnin'
+cotton: Little Sam mus' work with you a few days till you get the hang of
+the thing; an' then I want you to show that plantation what 'tis to serve
+master faithfully. You see, I believe in you, my man."
+
+"Thanky, moster. I'll wuck fer yer haud's I kin. Please God, I'll sarve yer
+faithful."
+
+"Of cou'se, Lizay, you'll go back to pickin' cotton, an' don't let me hear
+any mo' of you' nonsense--helpin' a strappin' fellow twice you' size. An'
+tell Buck I won't have him whippin' any my negroes ev'ry night in the week.
+Confound it! a mule couldn't stan' it. If I've got a negro that needs
+floggin' ev'ry night, I'll sell him or give 'im away, or turn 'im out to
+grass to shif' for himself. I'll be out there soon, an' 'ten' to things. If
+anybody needs a floggin', tell Buck to send 'im to me. Tell the folks to
+work like clever Christians, an' they shall have a fus'-rate Christmas--a
+heap of Christmas-gifts."
+
+"Yes, moster."
+
+"Do you an' Lizay want to get married right away, or wait till Christmas?"
+
+Alston and Little Lizay looked at each other, smiling in an embarrassed
+way.
+
+"But, moster," said Alston, "I's got a wife an' fou' childun in Ol'
+Virginny, an' I promused I'd wait an' wouldn't git morred ag'in tell she'd
+write ter me ef her moster'd sell her; an' I was goin' ter ax yer ter buy
+'er."
+
+"You needn't pester yourself about that. I got a letter for you the other
+day from her," the doctor said, fumbling in his pockets.
+
+"Yer did, sah?" Alston said with interest.
+
+"Yes: here it is. Can you read? or shall I read it to you?"
+
+"Ef yer please, moster."
+
+Then Dr. Horton read:
+
+"MY DEAR B'LOVED HUSBUN': Miss Marthy Jane takes my pen in han' ter let yer
+know I's well, an' our childun's well, an' all the black folks is tolerbul
+well 'cept Juno: her's got the polsy tolerbul bad. All the white folks
+'bout yere is will 'cept mistis: her's got the dumps. All the childun say,
+Howdy? the black folks all says, Howdy? an' Pete says, Howdy? an' Andy
+says, Howdy? an' Viny says, Howdy? an' Cinthy says, Howdy? an' Tony Tucker
+says, Howdy? and Brudder Thomas Jeff'son Hollan' says, Howdy? Last time I
+see'd Benj'man Franklins Bedfud, he says, ''Member, an' don't fawgit, the
+fus' time yer writes, ter tell Als'on, Howdy?'
+
+"Yer 'fectionate wife, CHLOE."
+
+"P.S. Mistis says her can't spaw me, so 'tain't no use waitin' no longer
+fer me. 'Sides, I got 'gaged ter git morred: I wus morred Sundy 'fo' las'
+at quat'ly meetin'. Brudder Mad'son Mason puffawmed the solemn cer'mony,
+an' preached a beautiful discou'se. Me an' my secon' husbun' gits 'long
+fus'-rate. I fawgot ter tell yer who I got morred to. I got morred to
+Thomas Jeff'son Hollan'."
+
+"So you're a free man," said Dr. Horton, folding the letter and handing it
+to Alston. "You an' Little Lizay can get married to-day, right now, if you
+wish to. Uncle Moses can marry you: he's a member of the Church in good an'
+regular standin': I don't know but he's an exhorter, or class-leader, or
+somethin'. What do you say? Shall I call him in an' have him tie you
+together?"
+
+"Thanky, moster, ef Little Lizay's willin'.--Is yer, Lizay?"
+
+"I reckon so," said Lizay, her heart beating in gladness. But she
+nevertheless glanced down at her coarse field-dress and thought with
+longing of the new calico in her cabin.
+
+So Uncle Moses was called in, and Mrs. Horton and all the children and
+servants.
+
+"Uncle Moses," said Dr. Horton, "did you ever marry anybody?"
+
+"To be sho', Mos' Hawton. I's morred--Lemme see how many wives has I morred
+sence I fus' commenced?"
+
+"Oh, I don't mean that;" and Dr. Horton proceeded to explain what he did
+mean.
+
+"No," said Moses. "I never done any that business, but reckon I could: I's
+done things a heap hauder."
+
+"Well, let me see you try your han' on this couple."
+
+"Well," said Uncle Moses, "git me a book: got ter have a Bible, or
+hymn-book, or cat'chism, or somethin'."
+
+The doctor gravely handed over a pocket edition of _Don Quixote_, which
+happened to lie in his reach.
+
+Uncle Moses took it for a copy of the _Methodist Discipline_, and made
+pretence of seeking for the marriage ceremony. At length he appeared
+satisfied that he had the right page, and stood up facing the couple.
+
+"Jine boff yer right han's," he solemnly commanded. Then, with his eyes on
+the book, he repeated the marriage service, with some remarkable
+emendations. "An' ef yer solemnly promus," he said in conclusion, "ter lub
+an' 'bey one 'nuther tell death pawts yer, please de Laud yer lib so long,
+I pernounces boff yer all man an' wife."
+
+Then the mistress looked about and got together a basket of household
+articles for the new couple. Bearing this between them, Alston and Little
+Lizay went back to the plantation and to their unfinished rows of cotton,
+happy, poor souls! pathetic as it seems.
+
+SARAH WINTER KELLOGG.
+
+
+
+
+THE BASS OF THE POTOMAC.
+
+
+Some twenty-five years ago Mr. William Shriver, a primitive pisciculturist,
+took from the Youghiogheny River eleven black bass, and conveyed them in
+the tank of the tender of a locomotive to Cumberland, in the coal-region of
+Western Maryland. There he deposited them in the Potomac, with the
+injunction which forms the heraldic motto of the State of
+Maryland--_Crescite et multiplicamini_. The first part of this excellent
+precept they obeyed by proceeding to devour all the aboriginal fish in the
+river, and waxing extremely hearty upon the liberal diet. The second they
+performed with a diligence so commendable that the name of them in the
+river became as legion, and the original possessors of the waters were
+steadily extirpated or took despairingly to small rivulets, and led ever
+after a life of undeserved ignominy and obscurity. There were bass in the
+river from the Falls of the Potomac, near Georgetown, to a point as near
+its source as any self-respecting fish could approach without detriment to
+the buttons on his vest by reason of the shallowness of the water. They
+were in all its tributaries, and in fact monopolized its waters completely.
+Had the supply of small fish for food held out, it is impossible to say to
+what extent they would have increased. They might in their numerical
+enormity have rivalled the condition of that famous river, the Wabash,
+which in a certain season of excessive dryness became so low that a local
+journal of established veracity described the fish as having to stand upon
+their heads to breathe, and while in that constrained attitude being pulled
+by the inhabitants like radishes in a garden.
+
+It has been contended by some ichthyologists that the black bass does not
+eat its own kind, but the spectacle which I recently beheld of a
+four-pounder, defunct and floating on the water, with the tail and half the
+body of a ten-ounce bass sticking out of his distended mouth, affords but
+inadequate confirmation of their views. I sat upon the bass in question,
+and rendered a verdict of "choked to death, and served him right." He had
+swallowed the younger fish, who, for aught he knew to the contrary, or
+cared, might have been his own son; and his confidence in his capacity
+being ably supported by his appetite, he undertook a contract to which he
+was unequal in the matter of expansion. He couldn't disgorge, being in the
+predicament of the boa-constrictor who swallows a hen head first, and finds
+her go against the grain when he would fain reconsider the subject. The
+head of the inside fish was partially digested, but that process had
+imparted no gratification to either party, and both were defunct, mutually
+immolated upon the altar of gluttony. It is not an uncommon thing to find
+them dead in that condition, for their appetites are ravenous, and lead
+them into indiscretions more or less serious in their consequences.
+
+There can be no doubt of their having regarded as a delicate attention the
+action some few years since of the Maryland Fish Commissioner in placing
+several thousand young California salmon in the river. Those salmon have
+never been seen or heard of since; but, although the bass for some time had
+a guilty look about them, it is hardly fair to let them remain under so
+grievous an imputation as is implied in the whole responsibility for the
+fate of the California emigrants. The fact is, that at Georgetown the
+Potomac River makes a very abrupt change in its grade, and the Great Falls,
+as they are called, are both picturesque and arduous of passage. The
+salmon, being of luxurious habit, betakes him each year to the seaside, and
+at the end of the season returns in a connubial frame of mind to the spot
+endeared to him by his early associations. It is quite possible that these
+particular salmon when on their way to the purlieus of marine fashion were
+somewhat discouraged at the jar and shock incident to their transit over
+the Falls. They may have concluded that the locality was unpropitious for
+the return trip, and then, consulting with salmon whose lines had been cast
+in more pleasant places, they may have ascended rivers of more conspicuous
+natural attractions and more agreeable to fish of cultivated habits.
+
+The habits of the black bass may be described as generally bad. It is a
+fish devoid of any of the cardinal virtues. It is ever engaged in
+internecine war, and will any day forego a square meal for the sake of a
+fight. It gorges itself like a python, and when hooked is as game as a
+salmon, and quite as vigorous in proportion to size. In the Potomac it has
+been known to weigh as much as six pounds, but bass of that weight are very
+rare, from three to four pounds being the average of what are known as good
+fish. These afford excellent sport, and are taken with a variety of bait.
+The habitues of the river commonly employ live minnow, chub, catfish,
+suckers, sunfish--in fact, any fish under six inches in length. The bass
+has also a well-marked predilection for small frogs, or indeed for frogs of
+any dimensions. It sometimes rises well at a gaudy, substantial fly or a
+deft simulation of a healthy Kansas grasshopper; but fishermen have noticed
+that the largest fish despise flies, much as a person of a full roast-beef
+habit may be supposed to turn up his nose at a small mutton-chop. In other
+rivers they take the fly quite freely, but in the Potomac they have had
+that branch of their education greatly neglected. In the matter of
+vitality they are simply extraordinary: they cling to life with a tenacity
+that very few fish exhibit. In the spring or fall, when the water and the
+air are at a comparatively low temperature, a bass will live for eight or
+ten hours without water. The writer has brought fifty fish, weighing on an
+average two and three-quarter pounds, from Point of Rocks to Baltimore, a
+distance of seventy-two miles, and after they had been in the air six hours
+has placed them in a tub of water and found two-thirds of the number
+immediately "kick" and plunge with an amount of energy and ability that
+threw the water in all directions. These fish had been caught at various
+times during the day, and as each was taken from the hook a stout leather
+strap was forced through the floor of its mouth beneath its tongue, and the
+bunch of fish so secured allowed to trail overboard in the stream. They
+were thus dragged all day against a powerful current, but never showed any
+symptoms of "drowning." In the evening they were strung upon a stout piece
+of clothes-line, and after lying for some time on the railway platform were
+transferred to the floor of the baggage-car, and so transported to the
+city. It is quite evident that we do not live in the fear of Mr. Bergh. But
+what is one to do? The fish is not to be discouraged except by the
+exhibition of great and brutal violence. In fact, bass will not be induced
+to decently decease by any civilized process short of a powerful shock from
+a voltaic pile administered in the region of their _medulla oblongata_. Of
+course, one cannot be expected to carry about a voltaic pile and go hunting
+for the medullary recesses of a savage and turbulent fish. On the other
+hand, one may batter the protoplasm out of a refractory subject by the aid
+of a small rock, but it won't improve the fish's looks or cooking
+qualities. It may seem like high treason to mention, moreover, at a safe
+distance from Mr. Bergh, that euthanasia in animals designed for the table
+does not always improve their quality, and in fact that the linked misery
+long drawn out of a protracted dissolution imparts a certain tenderness and
+flavor to the flesh that it would not otherwise possess. Should that
+excellent and most estimable gentleman regard this statement with a
+sceptical eye, let it be here stated that the bass should be recently
+killed, split, crimped and broiled to a delicate brown, with a little good
+butter and a sprinkling of pepper, salt and chopped parsley. Should he
+pursue the subject upon this basis, he will not be the first gentleman who
+has surrendered his convictions and compounded a culinary felony upon
+favorable terms.
+
+Below Harper's Ferry there is one of the most picturesque reaches of the
+Potomac River. From the rugged heights that frown upon that historic and
+lovely spot, where the Shenandoah strikes away through the pass that leads
+to the broad and beautiful Valley of Virginia, and where John Brown's
+memory struggles through battered ruins and the invading smoke of the
+unhallowed locomotive, the river chafes from side to side of the stern
+defile that hems it in and curbs its restless waters. Great walls of dark
+rocks, crested by serried ranks of solemn pines, stand guard above its
+fitful, surging flood, and against the dark blue calm and misty depth of
+its gorge the pale smoke rises in a quiet column above the mills and houses
+that nestle by the river's bed. Huge boulders stem the current, and the
+rocks stand out in shelves and rugged ridges, around which the stream
+whirls swiftly and sweeps off into broad dark pools in whose green,
+mysterious depths there should be noble fish. Below, the river widens and
+has long placid reaches, but for the most part its banks are precipitous,
+and the deep water runs along the trunks and bares the roots of great trees
+whose branches stretch far out over its surface. Occasionally, the
+mountains recede and form a vast amphitheatre, clad in primeval forest, and
+there are islands on which vegetation runs riot in its unbridled luxury,
+and weaves festoons of gay creepers to conceal the gaunt skeletons of the
+endless piles of dead drift-wood. All is in the most glorious green--a very
+extravagance of fresh and brilliant color--relieved with the bright
+purples and tender leafing of the flowering shrubs and vines that
+intertwine among its heavy jungle. Upon the broad, flat rocks one may see
+dozens of stolid "sliders," or mud-turtles, some of great size, basking in
+the sun like so many boarders at a country hotel. They crowd upon the rocks
+as thickly as they can, and blink there all day long unless disturbed by
+the approach of a boat, when they dive clumsily but quickly. Occasionally,
+one sees an otter, with seal-like head above the surface of the water,
+swimming swiftly from haunt to haunt in pursuit of the bass; and small
+coteries of summer ducks fly swiftly from sedge to sedge.
+
+The acoustic properties of the river would make an architect die with envy.
+The light breeze bears one's conversation audibly for half a mile; one
+hears the splash of a fish that jumps a thousand yards away; and the grim
+cliffs at the foot of which the canal winds in and out take up the
+profanity of the towpath and hurl it back and forth across the river as if
+it was great fun and all propriety. The stalwart exhortations and clean-cut
+phraseology of the mule-drivers and the notes of the bugles go ringing over
+to Virginia's shore, and fill the air with cadences so sweet and musical
+that they sound like the pleasant laughter of good-humored Nature, instead
+of the well-punctuated and diligent ribaldry of the most profane class of
+humanity in existence. It is perfectly startling and frightful to hear an
+objurgation of the most utterly purposeless and ingeniously vile
+description transmitted half a mile with painful distinctness, and then
+seized by a virtuous and reproachful echo and indignantly repelled in
+disjointed fragments.
+
+"Y'ill take care, sorr, an' sit fair in the middle of the shkiff," said Mr.
+McGrath as I got into his frail craft at five o'clock in the morning on the
+bank of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal near Point of Rocks. "It's
+onconvanient to be outside of the boat whin we're going through them locks.
+There were a gintleman done that last year, an' he come near lavin' a lot
+of orphans behind him."
+
+"How was that, McGrath?" said I.
+
+"Begorra! the divil a child had he," he replied.
+
+"But do you mean that he was drowned?" I asked.
+
+"Faith, an' he was that, sorr--complately."
+
+I promised Mr. McGrath that I would observe his instructions carefully, and
+that gentleman, after placing the rods, live-bait bucket, luncheon-basket
+and other articles on board, took his seat in the bow, and we proceeded. We
+had two boats for my companion and myself, and an experienced man in each.
+Mr. McGrath had fallen to my lot, and my companion had a darkey named Pete.
+We were to go up the canal some four miles, and then, launching the boats
+into the river, were to fish slowly down with the current. We had a horse
+and tow-rope, and a small boy, mounted on the animal, started off at a
+smart trot. It was quite exhilarating, and the boats dashed along merrily
+at a capital rate. A gray mist hung low on the river, and thin wraiths of
+it rose off the water of the canal and crept up the mountain-side,
+shrouding the black pines and hiding the summit from view. Beyond, the tops
+of the hills on the Virginia shore were beginning to blush as they caught
+the first rays of sunrise, and the fish-hawk's puny scream echoed from the
+islands in the stream. It was a lovely morning, and promised a day, as Mr.
+McGrath observed, on which some elegant fish should die. After a few delays
+at locks, in which canal-boats took precedence of us, we reached our point
+of transshipment, hauled the boats out on the bank, and our horse drew them
+sleigh-fashion across field and down to and out into the water.
+
+I had a light split bamboo rod, a good silk line and a fair assortment of
+flies. Mr. McGrath had a common bamboo cane, a battered old reel, and the
+value of his outfit might be generously estimated at half a dollar. In his
+live-bait bucket were about a hundred fish, varying in length from two to
+six inches. He did not prepare to fish himself, but was watching me with
+the deepest attention. He held the boat across the stream toward the
+opposite shore, and by the time we dropped down on a large flat rock I was
+ready. I got out, and there being a pleasant air stirring, I made my casts
+with a great deal of ease and comfort. There was a deep hole below the
+rocks, bordered on both sides by a swift ripple--as pretty a spot as ever a
+fly was thrown over. I sped them over it in all directions, casting fifty
+and sixty feet of line, and admiring the soft flutter with which they
+dropped on the edge of the ripple or the open water. Mr. McGrath was
+surveying the operation critically, nodding his head in approval from side
+to side, and uttering short ejaculations of the most flattering nature. I
+kept whipping the stream assiduously, so satisfied with my work and the
+style of it as to feel confident that no well-regulated fish could resist
+it. But there was no appearance of a rise: not a sign appeared on the water
+to show even the approach of a speculative fish. I was about to note the
+fact to Mr. McGrath when that gentleman remarked, "Begorra! but it's
+illigant sport it'd be if the bass 'ud only bite at them things!"
+
+"Bite at them?" said I, turning round: "of course they'll bite at them."
+
+"Sorra bit will they, sorr. It's just wondherin' they are if them things up
+above is good to ate, but they're too lazy to step up an' inquire. Augh, be
+me sowl! but it's the thruth I tell you. Now, if it was a dacent throut
+that were there, he'd be afther acceptin' yer invite in a minit; but them
+bass--begorra! they're not amaynable to the fly at all."
+
+Now, if there is anything that I have been brought up to despise, it is
+fishing with "bait." Fly-fishing I have learned to regard as the only
+legitimate method of taking any fish that any sportsman ought to fish for,
+and fishing with a worm and a cork I always looked upon as equal to
+shooting a partridge on the ground in May. I did not believe Mr. McGrath,
+and I told him, as I resumed my graceful occupation, that I didn't think
+there were any fish there to catch. The idea of their rejecting flies
+served up as mine were was too preposterous.
+
+"Well," said he, "ye may be right, sorr: there may be none there at all;
+but I'll thry them wid a bait, anyhow."
+
+In another minute Mr. McGrath was slashing about right and left a bait
+which to my disordered vision looked as big as a Yarmouth bloater. He threw
+it in every direction with great vigor and precision, and, as I could not
+help noticing, with very little splashing. I turned away with emotion, and
+continued my fly-fishing. Presently I heard an exclamation from Mr.
+McGrath, quickly succeeded by an ominous whirring of his reel.
+
+"Luk at the vagabone, sorr! luk at him now! Run, ye divil ye! run!" he
+cried as he facilitated the departure of the line, which was going out at a
+famous rate. "Bedad! he's a fine mikroptheros! Whisht! he's stopped.--Take
+that, ye spalpeen ye!"
+
+As he said this he gave his rod a strong jerk, that brought the line up
+with a "zip" out of the water in a long ridge, and the old bamboo cane bent
+until it cracked. At the same moment, about a hundred and fifty feet away,
+a splendid fish leaped high and clear out of the water with the line
+dangling from his mouth. Mr. McGrath had struck him fairly, and away he
+went across stream as hard as he could tear.
+
+"Take the rod, sorr, while I get the landing-net. Kape a tight line on him,
+sorr: niver let him deludher ye. It's an illigant mikroptheros he is,
+sure!"
+
+He returned from the boat in a moment with the landing-net, but absolutely
+refused to take back his rod: "Sorra bit, sorr: bring him in. It's great
+fun ye'll have wid the vagabone in that current! No, sorr: bring him in
+yerself, sorr: ye'll niver lay it at my door that the first fish hooked
+wasn't brought in."
+
+I didn't need any instructions, and as the fish ran for a rock some
+distance off, I brought him up sharply, and he jumped again as wickedly as
+he could full three feet out of the water, and came straight toward us with
+a rush. It was no use trying, I couldn't reel up quick enough, and he was
+under the eddy at our feet before I had one-third of the line in.
+Fortunately, he was securely hooked, and there was no drop out from the
+slacking of the line. He was in about twelve feet of water, and as I
+brought the line taut on him again he went off down stream as fast as ever.
+I had the current full against him this time, and I brought him steadily up
+through it, and held him well in hand. I swept him around in front of Mr.
+McGrath's landing-net, but he shied off so quickly that I thought he would
+break the line. Away down he went as stiffly and stubbornly as possible,
+and there he lodged, rubbing his nose against a rock and trying to get rid
+of the hook. Half a dozen times I dislodged him and brought him up, but he
+was so wild and strong I did not dare to force him in. At last he made a
+dash for the ripple, and I gave him a quick turn, and as he struck out of
+it Mr. McGrath had his landing-net under him in a twinkling, and he was out
+kicking on the rock. He weighed four pounds six ounces, and furnished
+conclusive evidence that a bass of that weight can give a great deal of
+very agreeable trouble before he will consent to leave his element.
+
+"What was it," said I, "that you called him when you struck him just now?"
+
+"What did I call him, sorr? A mikroptheros, sorr."
+
+"And for Goodness' sake, McGrath, what is a mikroptheros?"
+
+"Begorra! that's what it is," said Mr. McGrath, throwing the bass overboard
+to swim at the end of its leathern thong.
+
+"Well!" said I in amazement. "I never heard such a name as that for a fish
+in all my life!--a mikroptheros!"
+
+"Divil a more or less!" said Mr. McGrath decidedly. "The Fish Commissioner
+wor up here last week, an' sez he to me, sez he, 'It's a mikroptheros, so
+it is.'--'What's that?' sez I.--'That!' sez he; and he slaps him into an
+illigant glass bottle of sperrits, as I thought he was goin' to say to me,
+'McGrath, have ye a mouth on ye?' an' I as dhry as if I'd et red herrin's
+for a week. 'Yis,' sez he to me, 'that's the right name of him;' and wid
+that he writes it on a tag, and he sends it off, this side up wid care, to
+the musayum. Sure I copied it: be me sowl, an' if ye doubt me word, here
+it is."
+
+Mr. McGrath handed me a piece of paper torn off the margin of a newspaper,
+on which he had written legibly enough, "_Micropteros Floridanus_" I read
+it as gravely as I could, smiled feebly at my own ignorance, and returned
+it to him, saying, "Upon my word, McGrath, you are perfectly right. What a
+blessing it is to have had a classical education!"
+
+"Sorra lie in it," said he proudly as he replaced the slip in the crown of
+his hat; "an' it's meself that's glad of it."
+
+I can but throw myself upon the mercy of every respectable disciple of the
+art before whom this confession may come when I say that during this
+conversation I was employed in taking off my flies and in substituting
+therefor a strong bass-hook and a cork, after the effective fashion of Mr.
+McGrath. When this never-to-be-sufficiently-despised device was ready I
+took from the bucket a small and unhappy sunfish, immolated him upon my
+hook by passing it through his upper and lower lips, and cast him out upon
+the stream. The red top of the cork spun merrily down the current and out
+among the oily ripples of the deep water below, but Mr. McGrath could beat
+me completely in handling his. I noticed that I threw my fish so that it
+struck hard upon the water, "knocking the sowl out of it," as he said,
+while he threw his hither and thither with the greatest ease, always taking
+care to do it with the least possible amount of violence, and keeping it
+alive as long as possible. However, it was not long before my cork
+disappeared with a peculiar style of departure abundantly indicative of the
+cause, to which I replied by a vigorous "strike." My cork came up promptly,
+and with it my hook, bare. The sunfish had found a grave within the natural
+enemy of his species, and I had missed my fish.
+
+"Divvle a wondher!" said Mr. McGrath in reply to a remark to that
+effect--"being, sorr, that ye're not familiar wid their ways. Ye see, sorr,
+he comes up an' he nips that fish be the tail, an' away wid him to a
+convanient spot for to turn him an' swallow him head first, by rason of his
+sthickles an' fins all p'intin' the other way. Whin he takes it, sorr, jist
+let him run away wid it as far as he likes, but the minit he turns to
+swallow it, an' says to himself, 'What an illigant breakfast this is, to be
+sure!' that minit slap the hook into his jaw, an' hould on to him for dear
+life."
+
+These excellent instructions I obeyed with no little difficulty. My cork
+came up in the back water under the rock on which I stood, and there,
+almost at my very feet, it disappeared. I could not believe that a bass had
+taken it, but all doubt on the subject was dispelled by the shrill whir of
+my reel as the fine silk line spun out at a tremendous rate. The fish had
+darted across the current, and only stopped after he had taken out over two
+hundred feet of line.
+
+"Now, sorr, jist make a remark to him," whispered Mr. McGrath; and I struck
+as hard as I could. "Illigant, begorra!" said he as the fish, maddened and
+frightened, leaped out of the water. "Look at him looking for a dentist,
+bedad!"
+
+It was peculiarly delightful to feel that fish pull--to get a firm hand on
+him, and have him charge off with an impetuosity that involved more line or
+broken tackle--to feel that vigorous, oscillating pull of his, and to note
+the ease and strength with which he swam against the powerful current or
+dashed across the boiling eddy below.
+
+It did not last long, however: he soon spent himself, and Mr. McGrath
+received him with a graceful swoop of his landing-net and secured him. Four
+more soon followed, all large fish--two to the credit of Mr. McGrath and
+two to myself. When caught they are of a dark olive-green on the back and
+sides, the fins quite black at the ends, and the under side white. They
+change color rapidly, and as their vitality decreases become paler and
+paler, turning when dead to a very light olive-green. The mouth in general
+form resembles that of the salmon family, but the size is much larger in
+proportion to the weight of the fish, and the arrangement of the teeth is
+different. With its great strength and its "game" qualities it is not
+surprising that it should afford a good deal of what is known as "sport."
+
+An attribute of man which is equivalent to a strong natural instinct is his
+disposition to "do murder." This may account for his love of "sport," or it
+may only be an hereditary trait derived from the period when he had not yet
+concerned himself with agriculture, but slew wild beasts and used his
+implements of stone to crack their bones and get the marrow out. The
+instinct to slay birds, beasts and fishes is certainly strong within us,
+whatever be its remote origin, and it is very little affected by what we
+are pleased to call our civilization. Indeed, it is hardly to be believed
+that one of the primitive lords of creation, stalking about in the
+condition of gorgeous irresponsibility incident to the Stone Period, would
+have lowered himself to the level of the kid-gloved example of the present
+stage of evolution who fishes in Maine. It cannot be supposed that the
+pre-historic gentleman would have disgraced himself by catching fish he
+could not use. He never caught ten times as many of the _Salmo fontinalis_
+as he and all his friends could eat, and then threw the rest away to rot.
+This kind of thing has prevailed to a great extent, but natural causes have
+nearly brought it to an end. The wholesale slaughter of the fish has
+reduced their numbers, and a surfeit of indecent sport can no longer be
+indulged in. Such fishermen should be confined by law to a large aquarium,
+in which the fish they most affected could be taught to undergo catching
+and re-catching until the gentlemen had had enough. The fish might grow to
+like it eventually, and submit as a purely business matter to being caught
+regularly for a daily consideration in chopped liver and real flies. But
+how our ancestor, just alluded to, would despise the sport of this
+progressive age! With his primitive but natural acceptation of Nature's law
+of supply and demand, what would he think of the gentlemen who killed fish
+to rot in the sun or drove a few thousand buffaloes over a precipice--all
+for sport? It is probably the propensity to "do murder" which accounts for
+these things, for "sport," within decent and proper limits, is a good
+thing, and has been favored by the best of men in all ages--fishing
+particularly, because it predisposes to pleasant contemplation, to equity
+of criticism in the consideration of most matters of life, and to no little
+self-benignancy. No one knew this better (although Shakespeare himself was
+a poacher) than Christopher North, and where more fitly could the brightest
+pages of the _Noctes Ambrosianae_ have been conceived or inspired than when
+their author was, rod in hand, on the banks of a brawling Highland
+trout-stream?
+
+The fish had ceased to bite where we were, and at Mr. McGrath's suggestion
+we dropped down the stream to where my friend and his darkey were. His
+experience with the flies had been similar to mine, but he had too much
+regard for his fine fly-rod, he said, to use it for "slinging round a bait
+as big as a herring." He had taken it to pieces and put it away. He was
+sitting with his elbows on his knees and a brier-root pipe in his mouth,
+content in every feature, a perfect picture of Placidity on a Boulder.
+
+"Given up fishing?" I asked.
+
+"Not much," he replied: "I've caught nine beauties. Pete does all the work,
+and I catch the fish."
+
+Sure enough, he had Pete, who was one of the best fishermen on the river,
+fishing away as hard as he could. Whenever Pete hooked a fish my friend
+would lay down his pipe and play the fish into the landing-net. "It's
+beastly sport," he said: "if I wasn't so confoundedly lazy I couldn't stand
+it at all.--Hello, Pete! got him?"
+
+"Yes, sah--got him shuah;" and Pete handed him the rod as the line spun
+out. We watched the short struggle, and started down stream, leaving him to
+his laziness just as he was settling back in the boat for a nap and telling
+Pete not to wake him up unless the next was a big one.
+
+By noon we had thirty-two fish--a very fair and satisfactory experience. We
+were about to change our position when we were detained by a tremendous
+shouting from the other boat, about half a mile above us.
+
+"What's the matter with them, McGrath?" said I.
+
+"Bedad, sorr! I think it must be that bucket there in the bow," he replied,
+pointing to the article, which contained our luncheon.
+
+I was quite satisfied that it was, and there being a cool spring about
+forty feet above us on the bank on the Virginia side, we disembarked. In
+the excitement of fishing I had not thought of luncheon, but now I found I
+had a startling appetite. So had my friend and his assiduous darkey when
+they came in and reported twenty fish.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I know we ought to have a good many more, but Pete is so
+lazy. It was all I could possibly do to catch those myself."
+
+With a flat rock for a table, the grass to sit upon, and the bubbling music
+of the little stream that flowed from the spring as an accompaniment, the
+ham and bread and butter, the pickles and the hard-boiled eggs, and even
+the pie with its mysterious leather crust and its doubtful inside of dried
+peaches, tasted wonderfully well. We did not venture out upon the river
+again until three o'clock, our worthy guides agreeing that the fish do not
+bite well between noon and that hour, and both of us being disposed to rest
+a little. My friend stretched himself on the thick grass, and when his pipe
+was exhausted went fast asleep, and snored with great precision and power
+to a mild sternutatory accompaniment by Mr. McGrath and Pete. I employed
+myself in bringing up my largest bass from the boat to sit for his picture
+in a little basin in the rock under the spring. After he had floundered
+himself into a comparatively rational and quiet condition, much after the
+fashion of a gentleman reluctant to have his portrait taken under the
+auspices of the police, I succeeded in committing him to paper. He was a
+handsome fish, and eminently deserving of the distinction thus conferred
+upon him.
+
+Sleeping in the grass on a summer afternoon is a bucolic luxury I never
+fully appreciated. When I stirred up my friend he was red, perspirational
+and full of lively entomological suspicions. He slapped the legs of his
+pantaloons vigorously in spots, moved his arms uneasily, took off his
+shirt-collar and implored me to look down his back.
+
+"There's nothing there," I reported. "I know how it is myself: a fellow
+always feels that way when he goes to sleep in the grass."
+
+"Any woodticks here?" he asked.
+
+"Begorra! plenty," said Mr. McGrath, sitting up. "They et a child," he
+added with perfect seriousness of manner, "down here below last summer."
+McGrath's eyes twinkled when my friend began to talk of peeling off and
+jumping into the river after a general search. He was finally reassured,
+and we started out. We had even better sport than in the morning, and
+accumulated a splendid string of fish each. On the way down we passed two
+boats in which were some gentlemen, evidently foreigners, engaged in
+throwing flies with apparently the same results that we had attained in the
+morning.
+
+"Do you know who those people are?" I asked McGrath.
+
+"I dunno, sorr," said he, "but I think they are from one of the legations
+at Washington. They come up for a day's fishin' all along of the illigant
+fishin' a party from the same place had one day last week I suppose;" and
+he smiled.
+
+"How was that, McGrath?"
+
+"It wor last week, sorr; and I wor up the river be meself, an' I had thirty
+illigant fish thrailin' undher the boat comin' down. It wor just where they
+are I seen two boats full of gintlemen, an' I dhropped alongside. They wor
+swells, sure. They had patint rods, an' patint reels, an' patint flies, an'
+patint boots, an' patint coats, an' patint hats, an' the divil knows what.
+Bedad! they wor so fine that sez I to meself, sez I, 'Bedad! if I wor a
+bass I'd say, "Gintlemen, don't go to no throuble on my account: I'll git
+into the boat this minit."'--'Been fishin', me man?' sez one of them to me.
+'Sorra much, yer honor,' sez I.--'It's very strange, you know,' sez he,
+'that they don't bite at all to-day. You haven't caught any, have
+you?'--'Well, sorr,' sez I, 'I did dhrop on a few little ones as I come
+down.'--'Oh, did you, really?' sez another one, puttin' a glass in his eye
+and standin' up excited like. 'Why, my good man,' sez he, 'be good enough
+to 'old them up, you know. We'd like so much to see them!'--Wid that, sorr,
+I up wid the sthring as high as I could lift it, an' it weighin' nigh onto
+a hundred pound. Well, they were that wild they didn't know what to make of
+it. One of them sez, sez he, 'The beggar's been a hauling of a net, he
+has.'--'Divvle a bit more than yerself,' sez I. 'There's me impliments,
+an', what's more, if ye wor to stay here till next week the sorra fish can
+ye ketch, because, bedad! ye dunno how.' Wid that they put their heads
+together, and swore it ud disgrace them to go home to Washington without a
+fish, you know; an' how much would I take for the lot? Sez I, 'I have
+twenty-five more down here in a creel in the river: that's fifty-five,' sez
+I. 'Ye can have the lot for twinty dollars.'--'It's a go,' sez he; an' ever
+since that there's letters comin' up from Washington askin' if the wather
+is in good ordher, and what is the accommodations? Bedad! I'm wondherin' if
+them as we passed wouldn't be likin' a dozen or two on the same terms?"
+
+Nothing finishes up a day's bass-fishing better than a good hot supper of
+broiled bass, country sausage, fried ham and eggs, and coffee. The cooking
+can generally be managed, and the appetite is guaranteed. _Experto crede_.
+
+W. MACKAY LAFFAN.
+
+
+
+
+THE CHRYSALIS OF A BOOKWORM.
+
+    I read, O friend, no pages of old lore,
+      Which I loved well, and yet the winged days,
+      That softly passed as wind through green spring ways
+    And left a perfume, swift fly as of yore,
+    Though in clear Plato's stream I look no more,
+      Neither with Moschus sing Sicilian lays.
+      Nor with bold Dante wander in amaze,
+    Nor see our Will the Golden Age restore.
+    I read a book to which old books are new,
+      And new books old. A living book is mine--
+        In age, two years: in it I read no lies--
+    In it to myriad truths I find the clew--
+      A tender, little child; but I divine
+        Thoughts high as Dante's in its clear blue eyes.
+
+MAURICE F. EGAN.
+
+
+
+
+A LAW UNTO HERSELF.
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+Miss Fleming arrived that evening while Jane was on the water. She was in
+the habit of coming out to the Hemlock Farm for a day's holiday, and went
+directly to her own room as though she were at home. When she stepped
+presently out on the porch, where the gentlemen had gone to smoke, a soft
+black silk showing every line of her supple figure, glimpses of the rounded
+arms revealed with every movement of the loose sleeves, one or two thick
+green leaves in her light hair--ugly, quiet, friendly--they all felt more
+at home than they had done before. There was a pitcher of punch by the
+captain's elbow: she tasted it, threw in a dash of liquor, poured him out a
+glass and sat down beside him, and he felt that a gap was comfortably
+filled.
+
+"You have turned your back on Philadelphia, they tell me, Miss Fleming,"
+complained Judge Rhodes. "New York sucks in all the young blood of the
+country--the talent and energy."
+
+"Oh, I came simply to sell my wares. New York is my market, but
+Philadelphia will always be home to me," in her peculiar pathetic voice. "I
+left good friends there," with one of her bewildering glances straight into
+the judge's beady eyes, at which his flabby face was suffused with heat.
+
+"You do not forget your friends, that's certain," he said, lowering his
+voice. "That was a delicate compliment, sending my portrait back to the
+Exhibition. I felt it very much, I assure you."
+
+Cornelia bowed silently. Neither she nor the judge said anything about the
+round-numbered cheque which he had sent her for it. In the moonlight they
+preferred to let the affair stand on a sentimental basis.
+
+Mr. Van Ness meanwhile eyed Miss Fleming's pose and rounded figure with a
+watery gleam of complacency.
+
+"An exceptional woman," was his verdict. He turned the conversation to art,
+and asked innumerable questions with a profound humility. Cornelia replied
+eagerly, until the fact crept out from the judge that there was not an
+aesthetic dogma nor a gallery in the world with which he was not familiar.
+Then to pottery, in which field his modesty was as profound, until the
+judge pushed him, as it were, to a corner, when he acknowledged himself the
+possessor of a few "nice bits."
+
+"I have some old Etruscan pieces which I should like you to see, Miss
+Fleming," with his mild, deprecating cough, "and a bit of Capo di Monte,
+and the only real specimen of Henri Deux in the country."
+
+"I must see them," emphatically. "Where are your cabinets?"
+
+"Oh, nowhere," with a shrug. "My poor little specimens have never been
+unpacked since I returned to this country. They are boxed up in a friend's
+cellar."
+
+"God bless me, Cornelia!" cried the captain in a muffled tone, "how could
+Mr. Van Ness spend his time koo-tooing to cracked pots? He has, as I may
+say, the future of Pennsylvania in his hand. When I think what he is doing
+for the friendless children--thousands of'em--" The punch had heated the
+captain's zeal to the point where words failed him.
+
+After that the friendless children swept lighter subjects out of sight. Mr.
+Van Ness, whose humility in this light rose to saintly heights, had all the
+statistics of the Bureaux of Charity at his tongue's end. He had studied
+the Dangerous Classes in every obscure corner of the world. He could give
+you the _status quo_ of any given tribe in India just as easily as the
+time-table on the new railway in Egypt. No wonder that he could tell you in
+a breath the percentage of orphans, deserted minors, children of vicious
+parents, in his own State, and the amount _per capita_ required to civilize
+and Christianize them. As he talked of this matter his eyes became
+suffused with tears. The great Home for these helpless wards of the State
+he described at length, from its situation on a high table-land of the
+Alleghanies and the dimensions of the immense buildings down to the
+employments of the children and the capacity of the laundry--a perfect
+Arcadia with all the modern improvements, where Crime was to be transformed
+wholesale into Virtue.
+
+"Where is this institution?" asked Miss Fleming. "It is strange I never
+heard of it."
+
+"Oh, it is not built as yet: we have not raised the funds," Mr. Van Ness
+replied with a smothered sigh.
+
+The judge patted one foot and looked at him compassionately. It was a
+devilishly queer ambition to be the savior of those dirty little wretches
+in the back alleys. But if a man had given himself up, body and soul, to
+such a pursuit, it was hard measure that he must be thwarted in it.
+
+Miss Fleming also bent soft sympathetic eyes on her new friend. The Home
+was not built, eh? Not a brick laid? She wondered whether that box with the
+priceless treasures existed in his friend's cellar or in his brain: she
+wondered whether he had not seen those pictures of the old masters in
+photographs, or whether he had travelled in Japan and the obscure corners
+of the earth in the flesh or in books. There was more than the wonted
+necessity upon her to establish sympathetic relations with this new man:
+she had never seen a finer presence: the beard and brow quite lifted his
+masculinity into aesthetic regions; she caught glimpses, too, of an
+unfamiliar mongrel species of intellect with which she would relish
+Platonic relations. Yet with this glow upon her she regarded the reformer's
+noble face and benignant blond beard doubtfully, thinking how she used to
+stick pins in brilliant bubbles when she was a child, and nothing would be
+left but a patch of dirty water.
+
+"Jane is out on the river, as usual?" she asked presently.
+
+"Yes," said her father: "Mr. Neckart is with her. Neither of them will ever
+stay under a roof if they can help it. They ought to have a dash of Indian
+blood in their veins to account for such vagabondizing."
+
+"Is Bruce Neckart here?" with a change in her tone which made the captain
+look up at her involuntarily.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I thought he was in Washington: I did not expect to meet him."
+
+The judge puffed uneasily at his cigar. He was a family man, with a stout
+wife and married son. He did not meet Miss Fleming once a year, but he felt
+a vague jealousy of Neckart.
+
+"By the way, you must be old acquaintances?" he said abruptly. "Both from
+Delaware? Kent county?"
+
+"Oh yes," with a shrill womanish laugh, very different from her usual sweet
+boyish ha! ha! "Many's the day we rowed on the bay or dredged for oysters
+together, dirty and ragged and happy. There is not very much difference in
+our ages," seeing his look of surprise. "I look younger than I am, and
+Bruce has grown old fast. At least, so I hear. I have not seen him for
+years."
+
+She was silent after that, and preoccupied as her admirers had never seen
+her, and presently, hearing Jane's and Neckart's steps on the path, she
+rose hastily and bade them good-night. They each shook hands with her, that
+being one of the sacred rites in the Platonic friendships so much in vogue
+now-a-days among clever men and women. Mr. Van Ness offered his hand last,
+and Cornelia smiled cordially as she took it. But it was clammy and soft.
+She rubbed her fingers with a shudder of disgust as she hurried up to her
+own room. There she walked straight to her glass and turned up the lamp
+beside it, looking long and fixedly at her face. She knew with exactness
+the extent of its ugliness and its power.
+
+"It is too late now even if it ever could have been," she said quietly, and
+put out the light. Then she went to the window. Mr. Neckart had left Jane
+inside, and, not joining the other men, turned back to the garden. She saw
+the bulky dark figure as it passed under her window.
+
+She stretched out her hands as if for a caress, with the palms pressed
+close. "Oh, Bruce!" she said under her breath. "Bruce!"
+
+After he had passed out of sight she stood thinking over all the men who
+had made a comrade of her since she saw him last--how they had handled her
+fingers and looked into her eyes; how her every thought and fancy had grown
+common and unclean through much usage; how she had dragged out whatever
+maidenly feeling she had in the old times, and made capital of it to bring
+these companions to her who were neither lovers nor friends.
+
+"When I could not have the food which I wanted. I took the husks which the
+swine did eat," she said, leaving the window, with a short laugh. "Well, I
+could not die of starvation."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+When Jane woke the next morning a bluebird was singing outside of the
+window: she tried to mimic him before she was out of bed, and sang scraps
+of songs to herself as she dressed. The captain heard her in his room
+below, but pretended to be asleep when she came down as usual to lay out
+his clothes, for, although she insisted that her father should have Dave as
+a valet, she left him but little to do.
+
+Watching her from under the covers, the captain saw that she had left off
+the black snood and tied her hair with a band of rose-colored ribbon. Her
+lips were ruddy and her eyes alight: once or twice she laughed to herself.
+
+"What high day or holiday is it, Jane?"
+
+"Oh, every day is a high day now!" running to kiss him. "I was just
+thinking how comfortable money is, and how glad I am that we have it,"
+glancing about delighted at his luxurious toilet appointments before the
+low wood-fire. Then she spread out his dressing-gown and velvet
+smoking-cap, and eyed with her head on one side the fine shirt and its
+costly studs.
+
+"Do you remember the rag-carpet in your room which we thought such a
+triumph? and the old tin shaving-cup? Now, my lord, look out upon your
+estate!" opening the window. "Your musicians have come to waken you, and
+your servitors stand without," as Buff tapped at the door with hot water.
+
+"He is as comfortable as a baby wrapped in lamb's wool," she thought as she
+ran down the stairs. "And this air is so pure and the sun so bright! Oh, he
+must grow strong here! Anybody would be cured here--anybody!"
+
+The captain followed her to the barnyard. It was one of her inexorable
+prescriptions for him that he should drink a glass of warm milk-punch
+before breakfast, and smell the cow's breath during the operation. She was
+milking the white cow herself, while the pseudo sempstress, Nichols, waited
+with the goblet, and the bandy-legged shoemaker, Twiss, stood on guard,
+eyeing Brindle's horns suspiciously.
+
+"Now the glass! These are the strippings. Oh you'll soon learn, Betty!
+You'll make butter as well as you used to make dresses badly."
+
+The little widow and Twiss laughed, as they always did at Jane's weak
+jokes, and took the punch to the captain. She was the finest wit of her day
+in their eyes. The hostler's boy ran down from the stable to speak to her.
+She thought he had as innocent a face as she had ever seen. No doubt he
+would have gone to perdition if Neckart had not rescued him. She stopped to
+talk to him with beaming eyes, and meeting Betty's toddling baby took it up
+and tossed it in the air, and then walked on, carrying the soft little
+thing in her arms. The farm was like the Happy Valley this morning! God was
+so good to her! She could warm and comfort all these people. Then she
+turned into the woods and sat down on a fallen log. It was the place where
+they had stopped to rest yesterday, Neckart lying at her feet. There was
+the imprint still in the dead moss where his arm had lain. She looked
+guiltily about, and then laid her hand in the broken moss with a quick
+passionate touch. The baby caught her chin in its fingers. She hugged it to
+her breast, and kissed it again and again. From the hemlock overhead a
+tanager suddenly flashed up into the air with a shrill peal of song. Jane
+looked up, her face and throat dyed crimson. Did he know? She glanced down
+at the grass, at the friendly trees all alive with rustling and chirping.
+The sky overhead was so deep and warm a blue to-day. It seemed as if they
+all knew that he loved her.
+
+The captain found Mr. Neckart standing on the stoop listening to some sound
+that came up from the woods.
+
+"It is Jane singing," he said. "You would not hear her once in a year.
+Hereditary gift! In the old Swedish annals we read of the remarkable voices
+of the Svens."
+
+"I never heard her sing before." Yet he had known at once that it was she.
+It was the most joyous of songs, but there was a foreboding pathos in the
+voice which moved him as no other sound had ever done.
+
+"You are not going before breakfast?" cried the captain.
+
+"Yes, and I shall not be able to come again for a long time. Say to Miss
+Swendon--But no. I will go and bid her good-bye."
+
+He met her as she was crossing the plank thrown across the brook, and they
+stopped by the little hand-rail, not looking directly at each other: "I
+came to bid you good-morning."
+
+"Do you take the early train, then?"
+
+"Yes." He did not mean to tell her that he would not come again. The more
+ordinary their parting the sooner she would forget it and him. He had
+thought the matter out during the night, and being a man who was apt to
+under-rate himself, was convinced that the feeling which she had betrayed
+was but that transient flush of preference which any very young and
+innocent girl is apt to give to the first man of whom she makes a
+companion.
+
+"There is nothing in me likely to win enduring love from her. A more
+intellectual woman, indeed--" He had gone over the argument again and
+again. When he was out of sight her fancy would soon turn to this new
+lover, so much better suited to her in every respect. For himself--But he
+had no right, to think of himself. He struck that thought down fiercely
+again as they stood together on the bridge. No more right than he would
+have, were he dead, to drag down this young creature into his grave.
+
+He patted the child on the head as it clung to her dress, and talked of the
+chance of more rain with perfect correctness and civility; and when Jane
+managed to raise her eyes to his face she found it grave and preoccupied,
+as it usually was over the morning papers. He saw Van Ness coming smiling
+to meet her.
+
+"It is time for me to go," he said, his eyes passing slowly over her: then
+with a hasty bow, not touching her hand, he struck through the woods to the
+station, thinking as he went how she was standing then on the bridge in the
+sunshine, with the man whom she would marry beside her. She looked after
+him, her eyes full of still, deep content. He loved her. She had forgotten
+everything else.
+
+"A perfect morning, Miss Swendon," said Mr. Van Ness, stroking his
+magnificent golden beard. "You see just this deep azure sky above the
+Sandwich Islands. Now, I remember watching such a dawn on Mauna Loa. Ah-h,
+_you_ would have appreciated that. Our friend has gone, eh? Most active,
+energetic man! I heard him tell your father he should not return soon
+again."
+
+"Not return?" stopping in her slow walk.
+
+"No. It really must be impossible for an editor to spare time often for
+visits to even such an Arcadia as this. No stock market or political news
+in Arcadia, eh?" with a benevolent gurgle of a laugh. "Business! business!
+Miss Swendon. Ah, how it engrosses the majority of men!" shaking his head
+ponderously.
+
+She said nothing. It was as if she had been suddenly wakened out of a dream
+in the crowd of a dusty market-place. He had gone back to the world, to his
+real business and his real trouble. She, with her love and her intended
+cure for him, was a silly fool wandering in a fantastic Arcadia.
+
+Miss Fleming was walking up and down on the porch as they came up, more
+carefully dressed than usual. The captain had just told her that Neckart
+had gone.
+
+"Ah? I'm very sorry," carelessly. "I should have been glad to see him
+again. Though no doubt he has forgotten me."
+
+She went forward to meet Jane with a smile, but a withered gray look under
+her eyes. "I have been making a tour of your principality," she said as
+they went in to breakfast. "I see you have brought out a colony of
+Philadelphia paupers. Twiss, and Betty, and the rest."
+
+"They were not paupers," said Jane, taking her place behind the urn. "Did
+you see into what a great boy Top has grown? And Peter?" It gave her a warm
+glow at heart to remember these people just now. At least, there her care
+had not been fantastic or thrown away.
+
+"I hardly expected you to take up the role of guardian angel. It requires
+study, after all, to play it successfully," pursued Cornelia with an
+amiable smile, cutting her butter viciously.--"Very young girls are apt to
+be impetuous in their charities, and damage more than they help," turning
+to the judge. "These poor people, for instance. Betty had her kinsfolk
+about her in Philadelphia, her church and her gossips. She complained
+bitterly to me this morning that she 'had no company here but the cows:
+Miss Swendon might as well have whisked her off into a haythen desart.'"
+
+"She complained to you!" cried the captain. "Why, the trouble and money
+which Jane has given to that woman and her family! They were starving, I
+assure you!"
+
+Jane listened at first with her usual quiet good-humor. Miss Fleming's
+waspish temper generally amused her, as it would have done a man (if he was
+not her husband). But she began to grow anxious.
+
+"You really think Betty is not contented here?" her hand a little unsteady
+as she poured the cream into the cups.
+
+"Contented? She seems miserable enough. Home is home, you know, if it is
+only a cellar and starvation. But perhaps"--with a shrug--"that class of
+Irish are never happy without a grievance. Now, Twiss, it appears to me,
+has just ground for complaint.--A shoemaker," turning to the judge a face
+beaming with fun, "whom this young lady has transported and set down in
+charge of gardens and hot-houses. He does not know a hoe from a mower, and
+he is too old to learn. He had a good trade: now he has nothing."
+
+"But he could not live by his trade," cried Jane.
+
+"Well, cobbling is looking up now. In any case, you have pauperized him."
+
+"That's bad--bad! Now, in Virginia we used to feed everybody who came
+along!" said the judge, shaking his head. "But I've learned wisdom in the
+cities. Every bit of bread given to a beggar degrades human nature and rots
+society to the core."
+
+"But suppose he is starving?" urged the captain. "The Good Samaritan wasn't
+afraid of pauperizing that poor devil on the road."
+
+"Let him starve. He will have preserved his self-respect. The Good
+Samaritan knew nothing of political economy, sir."
+
+Jane left her breakfast untasted. She understood nothing about political
+economy, but she saw that she had done irreparable injury to these people
+whom she had tried to serve--God knew with what anxiety and tenderness of
+heart. In one case, at least, there had been no mistake.
+
+"Did you see Phil?" she said, turning with brightening countenance to Miss
+Fleming. "We intend to have Phil educated. He is such a keen-witted little
+fellow."
+
+Miss Fleming laughed outright now: "Mr. Neckart's protege? Yes, I saw him.
+He has been stealing tobacco and money from Dave, it appears, ever since he
+came, and was found out this morning. There was a horrible row in the
+stable as I passed."
+
+"Of course he stole!" said the judge triumphantly. "I tell you, the more
+efforts you make to reform the dangerous classes the more hardened you will
+grow. It's hopeless--hopeless!"
+
+Her other listeners each promptly presented their theory. Like all
+intelligent Americans, they were provided with theories on every social
+problem, and were ready to hang it on an individual stable-boy or any other
+nail of a fact which might offer. Jane alone sat silent. She did not hear
+when her father spoke to her once or twice.
+
+"You are disappointed," Mr. Van Ness's soft soothing voice murmured in her
+ear. "I know how these baffled efforts chill the heart. I will explain to
+you the machinery which I propose to bring to bear on these classes."
+
+"I don't know anything about machinery or classes. Twiss and Betty were
+friends of mine, and I tried to help them, and have failed."
+
+Miss Fleming, who was watching her furtively, saw her dull eyes raised
+presently and rest on the captain, who with a red face and bursts of
+laughter was telling one of his interminable stories.
+
+"This girl," Cornelia said to herself, "has everything which I have
+not--beauty, wealth, Bruce Neckart's love. Yet she looks at that weak old
+man as if he were all that was left her in the world." She had put Jane
+before on the general basis of antipathy which she had to everything in the
+world that was not masculine, but the feeling had kindled since last night
+into active dislike.
+
+When breakfast was over and their guests had gone to their rooms to make
+ready to meet the train, Jane decoyed the captain away to Bruno's kennel,
+where he was tied during Mr. Van Ness's stay. Once out of sight she retied
+his cravat, arranged his white hair to her liking, stroked his sunken
+cheeks. Here was something actual and real. She knew now that she had never
+had anything that was truly her own but the kind foolish face looking down
+on her. She never would have anything more. Only an hour ago life had
+opened for her wide and fair as the dawn: now it had narrowed to this old
+hand in hers, to his breath, that came and went--O God, how feebly!
+
+"You are looking stronger to-day, father. You are gaining every day. Oh
+that is quite certain! Very soon we shall have you as well and strong as
+you were at forty."
+
+What if she had not had money this last year? He never could have lived
+through it. God had been kind to her--kind! She pressed his hand to her
+breast with a quick glance out to the bright sky. The Captain saw her chin
+quivering. His own thoughts ran partly in the same line as hers.
+
+"Oh, I'm gaining, no doubt of it. Though I never could have pulled through
+this year if we had had to live in the old way. God bless Will Laidley for
+leaving the money as he did!"
+
+"It was not his to leave otherwise!" she cried indignantly.
+
+"Tut, tut, Jane! Of course it was his. By every law. He could have flung it
+away where he chose; and he had a perfect right to do it."
+
+It was not God who had been kind to her, then: it was only that she had
+stolen the money?
+
+"Come, Jenny: we must go back to the house."
+
+"In a moment, father. Go on: I will follow you."
+
+She walked up and down the tan-bark path for a while. She was sure of
+nothing. Wherever she had done what seemed to her right and natural, she
+was barred and checked by the world's laws and experience. She had brought
+these starving wretches out of a hell upon earth into this paradise, and
+even they laughed at her want of wisdom: the very money which was her own
+in the sight of God, and which had lengthened her father's life, ought to
+be given back to-day to the poor, its rightful owners. If there was any
+other cause for her to fight blindly against the narrow matter-of-fact
+routine which ruled her life, she did not name it even to herself.
+
+Looking toward the house, she saw her father escorting their guests to the
+gate, where the carriage waited, David resplendent on the box. The captain
+walked with a feeble kind of swagger: his voice came back to her in weak
+gusts of laughter. She laid her hand on a tree, glancing about her with a
+firm sense of possession. "The property is mine," she said, "and I'll keep
+it as long as he lives, if all the paupers in the United States were
+starving at the gates!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+Mr. Van Ness returned to the Hemlock Farm at stated periods during the
+summer. He had, to be plain, sat down before Jane's heart to besiege it
+with the same ponderous benign calm with which he ate an egg or talked of
+death. There was a bronze image of Buddha in the hall at the Farm, the gaze
+of the god fixed with ineffable content, as it had been for ages, on his
+own stomach.
+
+Jane went up to it one day after an hour's talk with Mr. Van Ness. "This
+creature maddens me," she said. "I always want to break it into pieces to
+see it alter."
+
+Little Mr. Waring, who had come with Van Ness, hurried up as a connoisseur
+in bronzes, adjusting his eye-glasses. "Why, it is faultless, Miss
+Swendon!" he cried.
+
+"That is precisely what makes it intolerable."
+
+Much of Jane's large, easy good-humor was gone by this time. She had grown
+thin, was eager, restless, uncertain of what she ought or ought not to do,
+even in trifles.
+
+Mr. Waring and Judge Rhodes were both at the Farm now. They ran over to New
+York every week or two. Phil Waring was not a marrying man, but it was part
+of his duty as a leader in society to be intimate with every important
+heiress or beauty in the two cities. Out of sincere compassion to Jane's
+stupendous ignorance he would sit for hours stroking his moustache, his
+elbows on his knees, his feet on a rung of the chair, dribbling information
+as to the nice effects in the Water-Color Exhibition, or miraculous "finds"
+of Spode or Wedgwood in old junk-shops, or the most authentic information
+as to why the Palfreys had no cards to Mrs. Livingstone's kettledrums,
+while Jane listened with a quizzical gleam in her eyes, as she did to the
+little bantam hen outside cackling and strutting over its new egg.
+
+"We must have you in society this winter," he urged. "It is a duty you owe
+in your position. You have no choice about it."
+
+"You are right, Mr. Waring," called the captain from the corner where he
+sat with Judge Rhodes. "The child must have friends in her own class." He
+dropped his voice again: "The truth is, Rhodes, she has no ties like other
+girls. Her dog and two or three old women and some children--that is all
+she knows of life. It's enough while she has me. But I shall not be here
+long, now. Not many months."
+
+The eyes of the two men met.
+
+"Does she know?" asked the judge after a while.
+
+"No." The captain's gaunt features worked: he trotted his foot to some
+tune, looking down from the window and whistling under his breath. "It was
+for this I sent for you," he added presently. "If I could only see her
+settled, married, before I go! She is no more fit to be left alone in the
+world than Bruno."
+
+The judge shook his head in gloomy assent. His own opinion was that Jane
+would follow her own instincts in a dog-like fashion if her father was out
+of the way, and God only knew where they would lead her! He had brought his
+own girls, Rose and Netty, with him to visit her, in order that she might
+have a domestic feminine influence upon her. They found, accidentally, that
+she did not know a word of any catechism, and, terrified, loaned her
+religious novels to convert her: she took them graciously, but never cut
+the leaves. There were to them even more heathenish indications in her
+hoopless straight skirts: the good little creatures zealously cut and
+trimmed a dress for her from the very last patterns. She put it on, and
+straightway went through bog and brake with Bruno for mushrooms, coming
+back with it in tatters. They chattered in their thin falsetto voices the
+last Culpepper gossip into her patient ear--the story of Rosey's balls at
+Old Point, and Netty's lovers, all of whom were "splendid matches until
+impohverished by the war." She listened to their chirping with amused eyes,
+tapping them, when they were through, approvingly on the head as though
+they were clever canaries. The girls told their father that they "feared
+her principles leaned toward infidelity, and that it was never safe to be
+intimate with these original women," and had gone home the next day, not
+waiting for the judge. They washed their hands of her, and gloved them
+again, but he still felt responsible for her. After he left the captain he
+went to her, fatherly interest radiant in every feature: "Mr. Waring is
+right, Jane. It is high time that you were taking your part in society.
+Your father wishes it."
+
+"I will do whatever he wishes," quietly.--"You did not know us when we
+lived in the old house in Southwark, Mr. Waring. We invented our patents
+then. Sometimes we could afford to go to the gallery at the theatre when
+the play was good. Father and the newsboys would lead the clapping. And we
+went once a year in our patched shoes a-fishing for a holiday. Those were
+good times."
+
+"Perfect child of Nature!" telegraphed Mr. Waring uneasily to the judge.
+"How Mrs. Wilde will rejoice in you, Miss Swendon! Nature is her specialty.
+She is coming to call this morning.--Miss Swendon," turning anxiously to
+the judge, "can have no better sponsor in society than Mrs. Wilde. She only
+can give the accolade to all aspirants. No amount of money will force an
+entrance at her doors. There must be blood--blood. 'Swendon?' she said when
+I spoke to her about this call. 'The Swedish Svens? I remember. Queen
+Christina's gallant lieutenant was her great-grandfather. Good stock. None
+better. The girl must belong to our circle.' So, now it is all settled!"
+rubbing his hands and smiling.
+
+"Jane is careless," said the captain eagerly. "People of the best fashion
+have called, and she has not even left cards. Her dress too--Now a Paris
+gown, fringes and--"
+
+The three men looked at her at that with a sudden imbecile despair, at
+which she laughed and went out.
+
+The captain found her presently down by the boat in which she had heard
+Neckart's story. She bailed it out and cleaned it carefully every day, but
+she had never gone on the river in it since that night.
+
+"Father," stepping ashore, "what have I done that I must be turned into
+another woman?"
+
+"Now, Jenny, making models and crabbing were well enough for you as a
+child. But, as Waring justly observes, the society to which you belong is
+inexorable in its rules for a woman."
+
+She flung out her arms impatiently, and then clasped them above her head.
+It seemed as if a thousand fine clammy webs were being spun about her.
+
+"If you had any especial talent, as Waring says--if you were artistic or
+musical, or concerned in some asylum-work--you could take your own path,
+independent of society. But--" looking down at her anxiously.
+
+"I understand. I don't know what I was made for."
+
+It was the first time in her life that she had been driven in to consider
+herself. She stood grave and intent, saying nothing for some time. Every
+other woman had some definite aim. The whole world was marching by, keeping
+step to a neat, orderly little tune. They made calls, they gave alms, they
+dressed, all of the same fashion.
+
+"Why not be like other people?" her father was saying, making a burden to
+her thought.
+
+"I don't know why," drearily.
+
+"What would you have, Jenny?" taking her hand in his.
+
+"Father, I never loved but one or two people in the world. You and Bruno
+and--not many others. I can do nothing outside of them."
+
+"Nonsense! You cannot be a law to yourself, child. God knows I want to see
+you happy!" his voice breaking. "But," straightening his eye-glasses,
+"Waring says, very justly, you are out of the groove which all other girls
+are in." He stopped inquiringly, but she did not answer. She was a
+strongly-built woman in mind and body, and just then she felt her strength.
+The blood rushed in a swift current through her veins. Why should she be
+hampered with these thousand meaningless, sham duties? She was fit for but
+one purpose--to serve two men whom she loved. Her father was ill, and he
+pushed her from him into Society; and Bruce Neckart was alone, and with a
+worse fate than death creeping on him, and he--
+
+"Why does not Mr. Neckart come to us?" she asked abruptly. "It is months
+since I have seen him."
+
+"His health is failing. There is some trouble of the brain threatened. I
+hear that he is going to give up the paper, and is settling up his business
+to go to Europe." Her question startled him: he watched her with a new keen
+suspicion.
+
+"If this must come on him, why should he not come here to bear it? I can
+nurse you both. Surely, that is as good work as returning calls or learning
+to dress in Parisian style," with a short laugh.
+
+The captain's face gathered intelligence as he listened. He knew her secret
+now. For a moment he felt a wrench of pity for her. But love, with the
+captain, had been a sentimental fever ending in a cold ague: he had
+experienced light heats and chills of it many a time since. This wild fancy
+of the girl's would speedily burn itself out if judiciously damped. He
+would at once take the matter in hand.
+
+"Neckart," he said deliberately, eying her to gauge the effect of his
+words, "is a man of sense and knowledge of the world. He knows his
+condition, and in the little time left to him he attends to his business
+and important political affairs, instead of nursing a romantic friendship
+which cannot serve him, and would only compromise you."
+
+"Compromise me? I don't understand you, father."
+
+"A woman could not render such service as you offer except to her betrothed
+lover or husband."
+
+"Why, he would understand."
+
+"But Society, child--"
+
+"Oh, Society!" with a laugh. "But you do not remember!" clasping her hands
+on his shoulder. "If this thing comes upon him--he has looked forward to it
+all his life--he has nobody. He is quite alone."
+
+"At least," impatiently, "you will not be involved. I did not understand
+before why Bruce had deserted us lately. I see now that he has acted very
+properly. It was not his fault nor yours--this flirtation--preference--or
+whatever you may choose to call it. But Bruce knows the world, and knows
+just how long-lived such fancies are, and he intends that it shall be no
+hinderance to your marriage--making an excellent match."
+
+"I marry? Make an excellent match?"
+
+"Yes. Certainly. What else should you do? Don't look in that way, my
+darling. It frightens me. I'm not strong. It is not death that is coming to
+you, but a good husband. You need not turn so white."
+
+"And Mr. Neckart planned this for _me?_"
+
+"N-no. I can't say 'planned,' to be accurate. But he agreed in our plan.
+Why, Bruce has common sense. He knows it is the way of the world that a
+woman should marry, and he will be much happier to know that you are the
+wife of a good man--good and good-looking too. Much more presentable than
+Bruce, poor fellow!"
+
+The captain watched her closely as he gave this home-thrust. How a woman
+could turn from that magnificent, devout reformer to any lean, irascible
+politician! Her foot was on the edge of the little skiff. She pushed it
+into the water. While he sat in the boat there that night, with the
+moonlight white about them, while he told her that he loved her, he had
+been planning this good match for her! There was no such thing as love,
+then, in the world? Or truth? But there was Society and common sense and
+the inexorable rules of propriety. Bruce Neckart represented to her
+Strength itself, and he submitted to these rules cheerfully. He was happy
+to think of her as the wife of a good, presentable man!
+
+When she had thought of him as going alone with his terrible burden away
+from her into the wilderness, true to her until the last breath of reason
+was gone, there had been a thrill of delight in the intolerable pain. But
+planning, like finical little Waring, that she should fall snugly into a
+fashionable set, Parisian gowns, a suitable marriage!
+
+Jane had not the womanish faculty of thinning every fact or thought that
+came to her into tears or talk. Neckart had gone out of her life. She
+accepted the fact at once, without argument. What the loss imported to her
+would assuredly be known only to her own narrow, one-sided mind, and the
+God who had given it to her.
+
+"Shall we go to the house, father? Can't you laugh again, and look like
+yourself? Why, I will give myself up, body and soul, to Society or
+Philanthropy--anything you choose--rather than see you so shaken." She hung
+on his arm as they went up the path, talking incessantly, and laughing
+more, as even the captain felt, than the jokes would warrant. The moment
+was favorable for introducing the subject he had at heart.
+
+"The last train brought out a dozen men to consult Mr. Van Ness," he
+began--"deputations from church and charitable organizations. 'Pon my soul,
+I don't know what Christianity in this country would do without that man!"
+
+"It would wear a very different face," absently.
+
+"I went with Rhodes to a great revival-meeting in town one night lately,
+and Van Ness, of course, was called up on the platform. Rhodes thought he
+looked like one of the apostles in modern dress; and all the ladies near me
+said that his face beamed with heavenly light. It would have made anybody
+devout to look at him. Are you listening?" glancing at her abstracted face.
+"You certainly think him remarkably handsome? As to his nose, now?"
+
+"I don't suppose anybody could find fault with his nose," smiling.
+
+"Nor with his manner?"
+
+"Nor with his manner."
+
+"And yet you are not friends, eh?" holding his breath for her answer.
+
+"No," carelessly. "Mr. Van Ness and I could not be friends."
+
+"Why? why?"
+
+"How could I tell?" with a shrug, and looking at Bruno, who was fighting a
+cat just then without cause.
+
+The captain looked and sighed. It was of no use, he thought, to try to
+account for the prejudices or likings of any of the lower animals.
+
+Mr. Waring met them at the moment in an anxious flutter: "Mrs. Wilde is
+here. She is coming down the path."
+
+Mrs. Wilde was a small, plump old lady with a sober, tranquil face framed
+in soft puffs of white hair; her dress never rustled or brought itself into
+any notice; her language never fell uneasily out of its quiet gait; when
+she spoke to you, you felt that something genuine and happy dominated you
+for the moment.
+
+"I followed Mr. Waring here," holding out her hand. "One makes acquaintance
+so much more quickly out of doors. I must begin ours by asking for your
+arm, Miss Swendon. I am fat and scant o' breath, and apt to forget it."
+
+Jane drew the puffy hand eagerly through her arm. She would have liked to
+say outright how welcome the motherly presence and the honest voice were to
+her just then.
+
+Mrs. Wilde dismissed the captain and Mr. Waring, and the two women sat down
+in the arbor, and at once were at ease and at home with each other. Bruno
+came up, eyed and smelled the new-comer, and snuggled down on her skirts to
+go to sleep.
+
+"He vouches for me," she said nodding. "You must take me at his valuation."
+
+"He makes no mistakes."
+
+"Nor do you, I suspect. That reminds me, Miss Swendon. I brought a friend
+with me, and now that I have seen you I mean to bespeak your good-will for
+her. She needs just such healthy influence as yours would be."
+
+"Is she ill?"
+
+"Only in mind. One of those morbid women who must make a drama out of their
+lives, and prefer to make it a tragedy. A Madame Trebizoff, an
+English-woman who married a Russian prince. She is a widow now, with large
+means--came to New York a few months ago, and has had much court paid to
+her. But her nature makes her always a very lonely woman." She spoke
+hastily as the trailing of heavy skirts approached on the grass. "Here she
+is, poor thing! Be good to her," she whispered before presenting her in
+form. Madame Trebizoff was draped in black, with a good deal of lace about
+her head and an artificial yellow rose at her throat. Jane went up to her
+with outstretched hand, but when the sallow face turned full on her she
+stopped short, looked at it a moment, and then bowed without a word.
+
+"It is the materialized spirit!" But she did not speak, for in a moment she
+remembered that she had once taken the bread from the wretched woman's
+mouth. She would not do it again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+Mr. Van Ness came beaming down through the lilacs to the arbor, and was
+received with much reverence by Mrs. Wilde. She was a devout woman, and
+Pliny Van Ness's name was in all the churches. They all sauntered back to
+luncheon presently, Mrs. Wilde and Jane going before, while Mr. Van Ness
+and the Russian princess walked more slowly through the woods, the
+foreigner talking with animation and many gestures of American trees, while
+the reformer listened benignly, ineffable calm in his smiling eyes.
+
+"You followed me here purposely, Charlotte?" he said gently as she dilated
+eloquently on our autumnal foliage.
+
+"No. I did not know that you were in New York. But I meant to call upon you
+soon. I have had no money from you since last August."
+
+"Somebody, apparently, has filled my place as your banker," his placid eye
+sweeping over the costly dress and be-diamonded fingers.
+
+"What is that to you?" with a sudden shrill passion. "Once you would have
+cared, Pliny. But that was years ago."
+
+"Yes. Many years ago," buttoning his glove carefully. "A Russian princess,
+eh?" after a short pause. "You are playing higher than ordinary, Charlotte.
+You'll find it dangerous. I should advise you to keep to begging letters or
+the role of medium or literary tramp."
+
+"One class is as ready to be humbugged as the other. Who knows that better
+than you?"
+
+"In the religious and charitable work to which I have given up my life,"
+deliberately measuring his words, "there are few impostors to be met. We
+usually detect fraud, with God's help, and do not suffer from it,
+therefore."
+
+She stopped short, looking at him with blank amazement. Then walked on with
+a shrug: "Absolutely! He expects me to believe in him! He believes in
+himself! Can imposture go further than that?"
+
+Mrs. Wilde, in the distance, caught sight of the two figures as they passed
+through a belt of sunlight, and smiled contentedly.
+
+"I am so glad to bring poor madame under direct religious influence! Mr.
+Van Ness is speaking to her with great earnestness, I perceive."
+
+The Princess Trebizoff scanned the great reformer as they walked,
+appraising him, from the measured solemn step to his calm humility of eye.
+She would have relished a passionate scene with him. After terrapin and
+champagne, there was nothing she relished so much as emotion and tears. But
+they had played up to each other so often! The tragedy in their relation
+had grown terribly stale! You could not, she felt, make Hamlet's inky cloak
+out of dyed cotton. But he would serve as audience.
+
+"I'm growing very tired of good society," talking rapidly as usual. "Now,
+you always enjoyed a dead level, Pliny."
+
+"Yes. There's no Bohemian blood in my veins. I was designed for
+respectability."
+
+"So? I mean Ted shall be respectable," with sudden earnestness. "He is in a
+Presbyterian college. I should be glad if he'd go into the ministry. Yes, I
+should. Provided he had a call from God. I'll have no sham professions
+from Ted," her black eyes sparkling. "You did not ask for the boy. In your
+weighty affairs doubtless you forgot there was such a human being."
+
+"No, indeed. In what institution have you placed Thaddeus?"
+
+"No matter. He's out of your influence, thank God! He never heard your
+name. But as for me, I think I'll drop this princess business soon,"
+meditatively. "I began down town," with a fresh burst of vivacity. "On the
+boarding-house keepers. Last December."
+
+"You are Madame Varens! Is it possible?" turning to look at her. "The
+papers were filled with your exploits last winter."
+
+"Precisely!" She had a joyous girlish laugh, infectious enough to draw a
+smile from Van Ness.
+
+"You are really very clever, Charlotte," admiringly.
+
+"I made a tour in the West just before that," excitedly, patting her hands
+together. "Agent for Orphans' Homes in the Gulf States. I wrote a letter of
+introduction from one or two bishops to the clergymen in their dioceses:
+that started me, and the clergy and press passed me through. What a mill of
+tea-drinkings and church-gossip I went through! But it was better fun than
+this."
+
+Looking up, she happened to catch the cold, furtive glance with which he
+had listened, and kept her eye fixed on him curiously.
+
+"Do you hate me so much as _that?_" she said with a long breath. "Well,"
+frankly, "it must be intolerable to carry such a millstone about your neck
+as I am to you. You know I could pull you down any minute I chose," tossing
+her head and laughing maliciously. "No matter how high you had climbed. I
+often wonder, Pliny, why you do not rid yourself of me. It could be easily
+done."
+
+The usually suave tone was harsh and hoarse as he began to speak. He
+coughed, and carefully modulated his voice before he said politely, "Yes.
+But it would involve exposure unless carefully managed. That is certain
+damnation. There is a chance of safety for the present in trusting to you.
+You were always good-natured, Charlotte. And," turning his watery eye full
+on her, "you loved me once."
+
+"Possibly," coolly. "But last year's loves are as tedious reading as last
+year's newspapers. Better trust my good-nature. You show your shrewdness in
+that. I don't interfere with people. The world uses me very well. It's a
+hogshead that gives the best of wine--if you know how to tap it."
+
+"You've tapped it with a will. You go through life perpetually drunk," he
+thought as she ran lightly before him up the steps. He habitually made such
+complacent moral reflections upon his companions to himself, and took
+spiritual comfort in them.
+
+The hall was wide and sunny, made homelike by low seats and growing plants:
+it was occupied by half a dozen committee-men, who were waiting impatiently
+to see Mr. Van Ness. The princess seated herself, attentive, her head on
+one side like some bright-eyed tropical bird.
+
+Van Ness, without even a glance toward her, took up his business of
+Christian financier. "Do not go, I beg," as the captain opened the inner
+door for Rhodes and the ladies to retire. "Our affairs are conducted in the
+eyes of the public. Sound integrity has no secrets to keep. That is our
+pride.--Ah, gentlemen?"
+
+The captain was glad to stay. Surely, Jane would be impressed with the vast
+influence of this good man. Van Ness did not look at her once. But he saw
+nobody but her, and spoke directly to her ear.
+
+Asylums, workingmen's homes, hospitals, in all of which he was a director,
+were brought up and dismissed with a few hopeful, earnest words. The vast
+system of organized charities through which the kindly wealthy class touch
+the poor beneath them was opened. Mrs. Wilde, a manager in many of them,
+joined in the discussion.
+
+"What a useless creature I am!" thought Jane. "But the money," doggedly,
+"is mine, and I choose to give it to father if the whole world go hungry."
+She turned, however, from one representative of these asylums to the other
+with a baited look. Was it this one or that whom she had robbed?
+
+"Now, as to Temperance City--_our_ city?" demanded a puffy little man
+importantly. "You are the fountain-head of information there. We look to
+you, Mr. Van Ness."
+
+"You shall have the annual report next week.--Temperance City," turning to
+Rhodes, his balmy gaze aimed straight over her head, "is a scheme to
+protect people of small means in the churches, especially women, from
+wrecking their little all in unwise investments. It is a town on the line
+of the Pacific Railroad. Lots are only sold to colonists who are
+tee-totallers and members of some church. The stock is owned largely by the
+same class."
+
+"Oh, almost altogether!" cried the little man enthusiastically. "Mr. Van
+Ness's name, as you will understand, gives it authority among all religious
+people. We distribute prospectuses at camp-meetings and at all sectarian
+seaside resorts. Shares go off this summer like hot cakes. There's nothing
+like religion, sir, to back up business enterprise. There's Stokes, for
+instance. His shoes are sold from New Jersey to Oregon on the strength of
+the hymns he has written."
+
+"Yes," said the judge solemnly. "We used to keep religion too much in the
+chimney-corner--spoke of it with bated breath. But it's in trade now, sir.
+We hear every day of our Christian shoe-makers and railway kings and
+statesmen. The world moves!"
+
+"Moves? Oh there's no lever like religion!" gasped the little man. "No
+advertisement to equal it. And a good man ought to succeed! Are the
+swindlers to take all the fat of the land? Does not the good Book say, 'To
+the laborers belong the spoils'?"
+
+"But this is so charming to me!" cried the princess. "We foreigners have so
+few opportunities of looking into the workings of your politics and trade!"
+
+Van Ness bowed respectfully.
+
+"And the State Home for destitute children?" asked a raw-boned
+Scotch-Irishman. "We're interested in that here in New York. We've
+subscribed largely, as you're aware, Mr. Van Ness. May I ask when you wull
+begin the buildin'?"
+
+"In the spring, I trust. If enough funds are collected."
+
+"And hoo air the funds invested in the mean while?"
+
+"Oh, in corner-lots in Temperance City."
+
+The committee-men had hurried away to catch the next train: lunch was over,
+and Mr. Van Ness stood apart on the lawn under the drooping branches of a
+willow, when the princess tripped lightly out to him.
+
+"You have an object in coming here? You had an object in bringing those men
+to-day and opening out your affairs. What is it?"
+
+He regarded her composedly for a moment without answering: "You always
+erred, Charlotte, in ascribing your own skill in intrigue to me. It was a
+flattering mistake. What I am to others I am to myself."
+
+She laughed, a merry, hearty laugh: "Yes, Pliny, because you are not
+satisfied with cheating the world and the God that made you into the belief
+that you are a Christian, but you parade in your godliness before yourself.
+There is not a spot within you sound enough for your real soul to lodge in.
+It is all like that," setting her foot viciously on a fallen apple. "Rotten
+to the core!"
+
+A shadow of disgust passed over his handsome face. Van Ness had a
+fastidious taste. Her melodramatic poses had been familiar to him for
+years: they always had annoyed and bored him.
+
+"What is it that brings you here? A woman?"
+
+He hesitated a moment: "Yes."
+
+"This yellow-haired girl? You mean to marry her?"
+
+"I may marry her," cautiously.
+
+Their eyes met. "I did not think you would push me so far," she said
+thoughtfully.
+
+"It is to your interest not to interfere. You are mad, Charlotte. But you
+never lose sight of the dirty dollar in your madness."
+
+"That is for Ted's sake," quietly. "I dislike that girl. She's so damnably
+clean! She's of the sort that would walk straight on and trample me under
+foot like a slug if she knew what I was. I owe her an old grudge, too. But
+that's nothing," laughing good-humoredly. "It was the most ridiculous
+scene! But it lost me a year's income. She nearly recognized me to-day. On
+the whole, I'll not interfere. Marry her. She deserves just such a
+punishment. By the way, there is my card. You can send the back payments
+that are due, to-morrow."
+
+Van Ness received the card and command with a smile and bow, meant for the
+bystanders: "Of course, Charlotte, you understand that these payments must
+soon stop. I shall rid myself of any legal claims you have upon me before
+marrying another woman."
+
+"Oh, I've no doubt you'll walk strictly according to law! You will not run
+the risk of a lawsuit, much less prosecution, even for Miss Swendon. You
+will have no trouble in gaining your freedom from me," shrilly.
+
+"None whatever," stripping the leaves from a willow wand. She left him
+without a word, going to the house.
+
+Mrs. Wilde had just summoned her carriage. "Where is the princess?" looking
+lazily around.
+
+"Is Madame Trebizoff a guest in your house?" asked Jane suddenly.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I will call her. I have something to say to her."
+
+She went to meet her with the grave motherly firmness with which she would
+have gone to give a scolding to black Buff or a lazy chambermaid. The
+princess, crossing the grass, slender, dark, sparkling, had no doubt of her
+own smouldering passionate hate against her. It was the proper thing for
+Hagar to hate Sarah. Life was thin and insipid without great remorses,
+revenges, loves. The poor little creature was always aiming at them, and
+falling short. She was wondering now why Jane wore no jewelry. "Not an
+earring! Not a hoop on her finger! If I had her money!" glancing down at
+the blaze of rubies on her breast.
+
+They met under a clump of lilacs.
+
+"Stop one moment," said Jane, looking down at her not unkindly. "You must
+not let this go too far, you know."
+
+"What do you mean?" The princess fixed her eye upon her, with a somewhat
+snaky light in it. Indeed, when she assumed that attitude toward Van Ness
+or any other man she could frighten and hold him at bay as if she had been
+a cobra about to strike. But the lithe dark body, the vivid color, the
+beady eye only reminded Jane oddly of a darting little lizard, and tempted
+her to laugh.
+
+"No. You really must keep within bounds. Because I have my eye upon you. I
+can't let you cheat that good soul, who brought you here, to her damage."
+
+The princess gasped and whitened as though a cold calm hand was laid on her
+miserable sham of a body.
+
+"Do you know who I am?" stiffening herself into her idea of regal bearing.
+
+"Not exactly. It does not matter in the least, either. I took your means of
+earning a living from you once, you told me, and I don't wish to do it
+again. I will not interfere as long as you hurt nobody."
+
+The princess stared at her and burst into an hysteric laugh: "I believe, in
+my soul, you mean just what you say! You are the shrewdest or stupidest
+woman I ever saw! Do you sympathize with me? Do you feel for me?"
+tragically, "or are you trying to worm my secret from me?"
+
+"Neither one nor the other," coolly. "I know your secret. You are no spirit
+and no princess. I shall pity you perhaps when you go to some honest work.
+Why," with sudden interest, "I can find steady work for you at once. A
+staymaker in the village told me the other day--"
+
+"_I_ make stays!"
+
+They both laughed. Jane's chief thought probably was how bony and sickly
+this poor woman was: her own solid white limbs seemed selfish to her for
+the instant. She took the twitching, ringed fingers in her hand.
+
+"Play out your own play," she said good-humoredly. "You will not hurt
+anybody very seriously, I fancy."
+
+They walked in silence to the house.
+
+The princess bent forward in the carriage-window as they drove away to look
+back at her. "I wish my son knew such women as that!" she cried.
+
+"Son?" said the startled Mrs. Wilde. "You have not spoken before to me of
+your son, madame."
+
+"I have always kept him under tutors--at Leipsic."
+
+She leaned back as they drove through the sunshine, her filmy handkerchief
+to her painted eyes, seeing nothing but an ugly, honest-faced boy hard at
+work in a bare Presbyterian chapel. He would never know nor guess the life
+of shame which his mother led! Her tears were real now.
+
+She even had wild, visionary thoughts of a confession, of staymaking, of so
+many dollars a week regularly. But she remembered the time when some fussy,
+good women had put her in charge of a fashionable Kindergarten. There was a
+fat salary! The house was luxurious: the teachers did the work. But one
+night she had broken the finical apparatus to pieces, left a heap of
+bonbons for the children, scrawled a verse of good-bye with chalk on the
+blackboard, and taken to the road again without a penny.
+
+REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.
+
+[TO BE CONTINUED.]
+
+
+
+
+ALFRED DE MUSSET.
+
+
+It is twenty years since the death of Alfred de Musset, a poet whose
+popularity and influence, both in his own country and out of it, can be
+compared only to Byron's. Not that the Frenchman is known in England as the
+Englishman is known in France, but the latter country may be called the
+open side of the Channel, and in establishing a comparison between the
+relative fame and familiarity of foreign names and ideas there and on the
+isolated side, it is proportion rather than quantity which must be kept in
+view. While Byron is out of fashion in his own country, the rage for
+Musset, which for a long time made him appear not so much the favorite
+modern poet of France as the only one, has subsided into a steady
+admiration and affection, a permanent preference. New editions of his
+works, both cheaper and more costly, are being constantly issued, portraits
+of him are multiplied, his pieces are regularly performed at the Theatre
+Francais, his verses are on every one's lips, his tomb is heaped with
+flowers on All Souls' Day. Until after his death it would have been easy to
+count those who knew even his name in this country and England: as usual in
+such matters, we preceded the English in our acquaintance with him. The
+freedom with which Owen Meredith and Mr. Swinburne helped themselves from
+his poems proves how unfamiliar the general public was with him ten years
+ago, but his distinction is now so well recognized in that island, so
+remote from external impressions, that some knowledge of his life and
+writings formed part of the French course last year in the higher local
+examinations of Cambridge University.
+
+Alfred de Musset belongs to the class of poets whose inner history excites
+most curiosity, because his readers feel that there lies the spring of his
+power, the secret of his charm, as well as the key to the riddles and
+inconsistencies which his writings present: they are so imbued with the
+essence of a common humanity that the heart that beats, the tears which
+start, the blood which courses through them, keep time with our own. The
+desire to penetrate still further into the intimacy to which they admit us
+is quite distinct from the vulgar inquisitiveness which pursues celebrity,
+or merely notoriety, into privacy. His biography has lately been published
+by one who recognizes the true nature of this curiosity: Paul de Musset has
+reserved the right of telling his brother's story, regarding it, he says,
+"not only as a duty I owe to the man I loved best, and whose most intimate
+and confidential friend I was, but as a necessary complement to the perfect
+understanding of his works, for his work was himself."
+
+The way in which this task has been performed is not entirely satisfactory,
+and many passionate admirers of the poet, the order of readers to whom it
+is dedicated, will feel disappointment and a regretful sense of its failing
+to fulfil what it undertook, increased by the conviction that, having been
+undertaken by the hand best fitted for it by natural propriety, it cannot
+be done again. The book bears the relation to what one desired and expected
+that a bare diary does to the journal, or memoranda to the lecture. It is a
+collection of notes on the life of Alfred de Musset, rather than a full
+memoir. This inadequacy arises principally from the biographer himself.
+Paul de Musset, the poet's elder and only brother, is a man of taste and
+cultivation, a judge of art, literature, music and the drama, a person of
+charming manners and conversation, dignified, kindly, courteous, easy: he
+was until middle age a busy, working man, whose leisure moments were
+occupied with writings that have found little favor, except the _Femmes de
+la Regence_ and the pretty child's story of _M. le Vent et Mme. la Pluie_,
+which latter has been translated. He was the devoted, unselfish friend and
+mentor of Alfred, to whose juniority and genius he extended an indulgence
+of which he needed no share for himself: in fact, he was the elder brother
+of the Prodigal in everything but want of generosity. A more amiable
+portrait cannot be imagined than the one to be drawn of him from the
+history of his intercourse with his brother and from Alfred's own letters
+and verses to him. This, however, was not the person to give us such an
+account and analysis of the life and character of Alfred de Musset as the
+subject called for: he has neither the necessary impartiality nor ability.
+He is now seventy years old, and although, like his brother, he has the
+gift of appearing a decade less than his age, he is forced to remember that
+the time must come when he will no longer be here to defend his brother's
+memory, which has suffered more than one cruel attack. Having once had to
+silence calumny under cover of fiction, he naturally wished to put his name
+beyond the reach of being further traduced. Whatever the shortcomings of
+the performance, it could not fail to be interesting. It is written in an
+easy, well-bred style, like the author's way of talking--not without a
+sense of humor, with touching pride in his brother's endowments, and
+tenderness toward faults which he does not deny. In place of comprehensive
+views and sound judgment of Alfred de Musset's genius and career, we have
+the knowledge of absolute intimacy and sympathy, candor, a hoard of
+reminiscences and details which could be gained from no other source, and,
+more than all, that certainty as to events and motives which can exist only
+where there has been a lifelong daily association without disguise or
+distrust.
+
+The family of Musset is old and gentle, and was adorned in early centuries
+by soldiers of mark and statesmen of good counsel--the sort of lineage
+which should bequeath high and honorable ideas, an inheritance of which
+neither Paul nor Alfred de Musset nor their immediate forbears were
+unworthy. A disposition to letters and poetry appears among their ancestry
+on both sides, beginning in the twelfth century with Colin de Musset, a
+sort of troubadour, a friend of Thibaut, count of Champagne, while the
+poet's paternal grandmother bore the name of Du Bellay, so illustrious in
+the annals of French literature. Alfred de Musset's parents were remarkable
+for goodness of heart and high principle: both possessed an ideality which
+showed itself with them in elevation of moral sentiments, and which passed
+into the imaginative qualities of their sons. From remoter relatives on
+both sides came a legacy of wit, promptness and point in retort, gayety
+and good spirits. Alfred de Musset was born on the 11th of December, 1810,
+in the old quarter of Paris, on the left bank of the Seine. The stories of
+his childhood--which are pretty, like all true stories about children--show
+a sensitive, affectionate, vivacious, impetuous, perverse nature,
+precocious observation and intelligence. He was one of those beautiful,
+captivating children whom nobody can forbear to spoil, and who, with the
+innocent cunning of their age, reckon on the effect of their own charms. He
+was not four years old when he first fell in love, as such mere babies,
+both girls and boys, occasionally do: these infantine passions exhibit most
+of the phenomena of maturer ones, and show how intense and absorbing a
+passion may be which belongs exclusively to the region of sentiment and
+imagination. Alfred de Musset's first love was his cousin, a young girl
+nearly grown up when he first saw her: he left his playthings to listen to
+her account of a journey she had made from Belgium, then the seat of war,
+and from that day, whenever she came to the house, insisted on her telling
+him stories, which she did with the patience and invention of Scheherazade.
+At last he asked her to marry him, and, as she did not refuse, considered
+her his betrothed wife. After some time she returned to her home in Liege:
+there were tears on both sides--on his genuine and excessive grief. "Do not
+forget me," said Clelia.--"Forget you! Don't you know that your name is cut
+upon my heart with a pen-knife?" He set himself to learn to read and write
+with incredible application, that he might be able to correspond with his
+beloved. His attachment did not abate with absence, so that when Clelia
+really married, the whole family thought it necessary to keep it a secret
+from her little lover, and he remained in ignorance of it for years,
+although he betrayed extraordinary suspicion and misgiving on the subject.
+He was a schoolboy of eight or nine before he learned the truth, and was at
+first extremely agitated: he asked tremblingly if Clelia had been making
+fun of him, and being assured that she had not, but that they had not
+allowed her to wait for him, and that she loved him like an elder sister,
+he grew calm and said, "I will be satisfied with that." The cousins seldom
+met in after-life, but preserved a tender affection for each other, which
+served to avert a lawsuit and rupture that threatened to grow out of a
+business disagreement between the two branches of the family. In 1852,
+Clelia came to Paris to be present at Alfred's reception by the French
+Academy. He had great confidence in her taste and judgment, and the last
+time they met he said to her, "If there should ever be a handsome edition
+of my works, I will have a copy bound for you in white vellum with a gold
+band, as an emblem of our friendship."
+
+His first literary passion was the _Arabian Nights_, which filled the
+imagination of both brothers with magical lamps, wishing-carpets and secret
+caverns for nearly a twelvemonth, during which they were incessantly trying
+to carry out their fancies by constructing enchanted towers and palaces
+with the furniture of their apartment. The Eastern stories were superseded
+by tales of chivalry: Paul lit upon the _Four Sons of Aymon_ in his
+grandfather's library, and a new world opened before him in which he
+hastened to lose himself, taking his younger brother by the hand. The
+children devoured _Jerusalem Delivered_, _Orlando Furioso_, _Amadis de
+Gaule_, and all the poems, tales and traditions of knighthood on which they
+could lay hands. Their games now were of nothing but tilts and jousts,
+single combats, adventures and deeds of arms: the paladins were their
+imaginary playfellows. A little comrade, who charged with an extraordinary
+rush in the excitement of the tournament, generally represented Roland:
+Alfred, being the youngest and smallest of the three, was allowed to bear
+the enchanted lance, the first touch of which unseated the boldest rider
+and bravest champion--a pretty device of the elder brother's, in which one
+hardly knows whether to be most charmed with the poetic fancy or the
+protecting affection which it displayed. The delightful infatuation lasted
+for several years, undergoing some gradual modifications. Until he was
+nine, Alfred had been chiefly taught at home by a tutor, but at that age he
+was sent to school, where the first term dispelled his belief in the
+marvellous. His brother was by this time at boarding-school, and they met
+only on Sunday, when they renewed their knightly sports, but with
+diminished ardor. One day Alfred asked Paul seriously what he thought of
+magic, and Paul confessed his scepticism. The loss of this dear delusion
+was a painful shock to Alfred, as it is to many children. Who cannot
+remember the change which came over the world when he first learned that
+Krisskinkle _alias_ Santa Claus did not fill the Christmas stocking--that
+the fairies had not made the greener ring in the grass, where he had firmly
+believed he might have seen them dancing in the moonlight if he could only
+have sat up late enough? The Musset children fell back upon the mysterious
+machinery of old romance--trap-doors, secret staircases, etc.--and began
+tapping and sounding the walls for private passages and hidden doorways;
+but in vain. It was at this stage of the fever that _Don Quixote_ was given
+to them; and it is a singular illustration both of the genius of the book
+and the intelligence of the little readers that it put their giants, dwarfs
+and knights to flight. During the following summer they passed a few weeks
+at the manor-house of Cogners with an uncle, the marquis de Musset, the
+head of the family: to their great joy, the room assigned them had
+underneath the great canopied bedstead a trap leading into a small chamber
+built in the thickness of the floor between the two stories of the old
+feudal building. Alfred could not sleep for excitement, and wakened his
+brother at daybreak to help him explore: they found the secret chamber full
+of dust and cobwebs, and returned to their own room with the sense that
+their dreams had been realized a little too late. On looking about them
+they saw that the tapestry on their walls represented scenes from _Don
+Quixote:_ they burst out laughing, and the days of chivalry were over.
+
+Alfred de Musset was nine years old, as we have said, when he began to
+attend the College Henri IV. (now Corneille), on entering which he took his
+place in the sixth form, among boys for the most part of twelve or upward.
+He was sent to school on the first day with a deep scalloped collar and his
+long light curls falling upon his shoulders, and being greeted with jeers
+and yells by his schoolmates, went home in tears, and the curls were cut
+off forthwith. He was an ambitious rather than an assiduous scholar, and
+kept his place on the bench of honor by his facility in learning more than
+by his industry; but it was a source of keen mortification to him if he
+fell behindhand. His talents soon attracted the attention of the masters
+and the envy of the pupils, the latter of whom were irritated and
+humiliated by seeing the little curly-pate, the youngest of them all,
+always at the head of the class. The laziest and dullest formed a league
+against him: every day, when school broke up, he was assaulted with a
+brutality equal to that of an English public school, but which certainly
+would not have been roused against him there by the same cause. He had to
+run amuck through the courtyard to the gate, where a servant was waiting
+for him, often reaching it with torn clothes and a bloody face. This
+persecution was stopped by his old playfellow, Orlando Furioso, who was two
+years his senior: he threw himself into the crowd one day and dealt his
+redoubtable blows with so much energy that he scattered the bullies once
+for all. Among their schoolmates was the promising duke of Orleans, who was
+then duc de Chartres, his father, afterward King Louis Philippe, bearing at
+that time the former title. He took a strong fancy to Alfred de Musset,
+which he showed by writing him a profusion of notes during recitation, most
+of them invitations to dinner at Neuilly, where he occasionally went with
+other school-fellows of the young prince. For a time after leaving school
+De Chartres--as he was called by his young friends--kept up a lively
+correspondence with Alfred, and when their boyish intimacy naturally
+expired the recollection of it remained fresh and lively in the prince's
+mind, as was afterward proved.
+
+De Musset left college at the age of sixteen, having taken a prize in
+philosophy for a Latin metaphysical essay. His disposition to inquire and
+speculate had already manifested itself by uneasy questions in the classes
+of logic and moral philosophy; and although few will agree with his brother
+that his writings show unusual aptitude and profound knowledge in these
+sciences, or that, as he says, "the thinker was always on a level with the
+poet," nobody can deny the constant questioning of the Sphinx, the eager,
+restless pursuit of truth, which pervades his pages. He pushed his search
+through a long course of reading,--Descartes, Spinoza, Cabanis, Maine de
+Biran--only to fall back upon an innate faith in God which never forsook
+him, although it was strangely disconnected with his mode of life.
+
+I have lingered over the early years of Alfred de Musset because the
+childhood of a poet is the mirror wherein the image of his future is seen,
+and because there is something peculiarly touching in this season of
+innocence and unconsciousness of self in the history of men whose after
+lives have been torn to pieces by the storms of vicissitude and passion. So
+far, he had not begun to rhyme--an unusual case, as boys who can make two
+lines jingle, whether they be poets or not, generally scribble plentifully
+before leaving school. At the age of fourteen he wrote some verses to his
+mother on her birthday, but it is fair to suppose that they gave no hint of
+talent, as they have not been preserved: it was only from his temperament
+that his destiny might be guessed. The impressions of his infancy were
+singularly vivid and deep, and acted directly upon his imagination: they
+are reflected in his works in pictures and descriptions full of grace or
+power. The ardent Bonapartism of his family, particularly of his mother,
+whom he loved and revered, took form from his recollections in the
+magnificent opening of the _Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle,_ which has
+the double character of a prose poem and a kindling oration, while by the
+volume and sonorous beauty of the phrase it reminds one of a grand musical
+composition. When he was between seven and eight years old his family
+passed the summer at an old country-place to which belonged a farm, and he
+and his brother found inexhaustible amusement among the tenants and their
+occupations. He never saw it again, but it is reproduced with perfect
+fidelity in the tale of _Margot_. The chivalric mania left, as Paul de
+Musset observes, a love of the romantic and fantastic, a tendency to look
+upon life as a novel, an enjoyment of what was unexpected and unlikely, a
+disposition to trust to chance and the course of events. The motto of the
+Mussets was a condensed expression of the gallant love-making, Launcelot
+side of knightly existence--_Courtoisie, Bonne Aventure aux Preux_
+("Courtesy, Good Luck to the Paladin;" or, to translate the latter clause
+more freely, yet more faithfully to the spirit of the original, "None but
+the Brave Deserve the Fair"). It came from two estates--_Courtoisie_, which
+passed out of the family in the last century, and _Bonne Aventure_, a
+property on the Loire, which was not part of Alfred's patrimony. The
+fairies who endowed him at his christening with so many gifts and graces
+must have meant to complete his outfit when they presented him with such a
+device, which might have been invented for him at nineteen. On leaving
+college he continued his education by studying languages, drawing, and
+music to please himself, and attempting several professions to satisfy the
+reasonable expectations of his father. He found law dry, medicine
+disgusting, and, discouraged by these failures, he fell into low spirits,
+to which he was always prone even at the height of his youthful
+joyousness--declared to his brother that he was and ever should be good for
+nothing, that he never should be able to practise a profession, and never
+could resign himself to being _any particular kind of man._ His talent for
+drawing led him to work in a painter's studio and in the galleries of the
+Louvre with some success, and for a time he was in high spirits at the
+idea of having found his calling, and pursued it while attending lectures
+and classes on other subjects. This uncertainty lasted a couple of years,
+during which he began to venture a little into society, of which, like most
+lively, versatile young people, he was extravagantly fond. His Muse was
+still dormant, but his love for poetry was strongly developed; a volume of
+Andre Chenier was always in his pocket, and he delighted to read it under
+the trees in the avenues of the Bois on his daily walk out of Paris to the
+suburb of Auteuil, where his family lived at that time. Under this
+influence he wrote a poem, which he afterward destroyed, excepting a few
+good descriptive lines which he introduced into one of later date.
+Meanwhile, he had been presented to the once famous Cenacle, the nucleus of
+the romantic school, then in the pride and flush of youth and rapidly
+increasing popularity; its head-quarters were at the house of Victor Hugo
+_facile princeps ordinis_ even among its chiefs. There he met Alfred de
+Vigny, Merimee, Sainte-Beuve and others, whose talents differed essentially
+in kind and degree, but who were temporarily drawn together by similarity
+of literary principles and tastes. Their meetings were entirely taken up
+with intellectual discussions, or the reading of a new production, or in
+walks which have been commemorated by Merimee and Sainte-Beuve, when they
+carried their romanticism to the towers of Notre Dame to see the sun set or
+the moon rise over Paris.
+
+Stimulated by this companionship, Alfred de Musset began to compose. His
+first attempt at publication was anonymous, a ballad called "A Dream,"
+which, through the good offices of a friend, was accepted by _Le
+Provincial,_ a tri-weekly newspaper of Dijon: it did not pass unnoticed,
+but excited a controversy in print between the two editors, to the extreme
+delight of the young poet, who always fondly cherished the number of the
+paper in which it appeared. At length, one morning he woke up Sainte-Beuve
+with the laughing declaration that he too was a poet, and in support of
+his assertion recited some of his verses to that keenly attentive and
+appreciative ear. Sainte-Beuve at once announced that there was "a boy full
+of genius among them," and as long as he lived, whatever Paul de Musset's
+fraternal sensitiveness may find to complain of, he never retracted or
+qualified that first judgment. The _Contes d'Italie et d'Espagne_ followed
+fast, and were recited to an enthusiastic audience, who were the more
+lenient to the exaggerations and affectations of which, as in most youthful
+poetry, there were plenty, since these bore the stamp of their own mint.
+
+Alfred de Musset's first steps in life were made at the same time with his
+first essays in poetry. He was so handsome, high-spirited and gay that
+women did not wait to hear that he was a genius to smile upon him. His
+brother, who is tall, calls him of medium height, five feet four inches
+(about five feet nine, English measure), slender, well-made and of good
+carriage: his eyes were blue and full of fire; his nose was aquiline, like
+the portraits of Vandyke; his profile was slightly equine in type: the
+chief beauty of his face was his forehead, round which clustered the
+many-shaded masses of his fair hair, which never turned gray: the
+countenance was mobile, animated and sensitive; the predominating
+expression was pride. Paul relates without reserve how one married woman
+encouraged his brother and trifled with him, using his devotion to screen a
+real intrigue which she was carrying on, and that another, who was lying in
+wait for him, undertook his consolation. One morning Alfred made his
+appearance in spurs, with his hat very much on one side and a huge bunch of
+hair on the other, by which signs his brother understood that his vanity
+was satisfied. He was just eighteen. That a man of respectable life and
+notions like Paul de Musset should take these adventures as a matter of
+course makes it difficult for an American to find the point of view whence
+to judge a society so abominably corrupt. Thus at the age of a college-boy
+in this country he was started on the career which was destined to lead to
+so much unhappiness, and in the end to his destruction. Dissipation of
+every sort followed, debts, from which he was never free, and the habit of
+drinking, which proved fatal at last. To the advice and warnings of his
+brother he only replied that he wished to know everything by experience,
+not by hearsay--that he felt within him two men, one an actor, the other a
+spectator, and if the former did a foolish thing the latter profited by it.
+On this pernicious reasoning he pursued for three years a dissolute mode of
+life, which, thanks to the remarkable strength and elasticity of his
+constitution, did not prevent his carrying on his studies and going with
+great zest into society, where he became more and more welcome, besides
+writing occasionally. He translated De Quincey's _Confessions of an English
+Opium-Eater_, introducing some reveries of his own, but the work attracted
+no attention. During this period his father, naturally anxious about his
+son's unprofitable courses, one morning informed him that he had obtained a
+clerkship for him in an office connected with the military commissariat.
+Alfred did not venture to demur, but the confinement and routine of an
+office were intolerable, and he resolved to conquer his liberty by every
+effort of which he was capable. He offered his manuscripts for publication
+to M. Canel, the devoted editor of the romantic party: they fell short by
+five hundred lines of the number of pages requisite for a volume of the
+usual octavo bulk. He obtained a holiday, which he spent with a favorite
+uncle who lived in the provinces, and came back in three weeks with the
+poem of "Mardoche." He persuaded his father to give a literary party, to
+which his friends of the Cenacle were invited, and repeated his latest
+compositions to them, including "Mardoche." Here we have another example of
+manners startling to our notions: the keynote of these verses was rank
+libertinism, yet in his mother's drawing-room and apparently in the
+presence of his father, a dignified, reputable man, venerated by his
+children, this young rake declaimed stanzas more licentious than any in
+Byron's _Don Juan_. But it caused no scandal: the friends were rapturous,
+and predicted the infallible success of the poems, in which they were
+justified by the event. "Rarely," says Paul de Musset, "has so small a
+quantity of paper made so much noise." There was an uproar among the
+newspapers, some applauding with all their might, others denouncing the
+exaggeration of the romantic tendency: the romanticists themselves were
+disconcerted to find the "Ballade a la Lune," which they had taken as a
+good joke, turned into a joke against themselves. At all events, the young
+man was launched, and his vocation was thenceforth decided. In reading
+these first productions of Alfred de Musset's without the prejudice or
+partiality of faction, it cannot be denied that if not sufficient in
+themselves to ensure his immortality, they contain lines of finished beauty
+as perfect as the author ever produced--ample guarantee of what might be
+expected from the development of his genius.
+
+He now began to be tired of sowing wild oats, and became less irregular in
+his mode of life. A lively, pretty little comedy called _Une Nuit
+Venitienne_, which he wrote at the request of the director of the Odeon,
+for some inexplicable cause fell flat, which, besides turning him aside
+from writing for the stage during a number of years, discouraged him
+altogether for some time. Before he entirely recovered from the check he
+lost his father, who died suddenly of cholera in 1832. The shock left him
+sobered and calm, anxious to fulfil his duties toward his mother and young
+sister, whose means, it was feared, would be greatly diminished by the loss
+of M. de Musset's salary. Alfred resolved to publish another volume of
+poetry, and, if this did not succeed to a degree to warrant his considering
+literature a means of support, to get a commission in the army. He set
+himself industriously to work, and inspiration soon rewarded the effort: in
+six months his second volume appeared, comprising "Le Saule," "Voeux
+Steriles," "La Coupe et les Levres," "A quoi revent les jeunes filles,"
+"Namouna," and several shorter pieces. Among those enumerated there are
+splendid passages, second in beauty and force to but a few of his later
+poems, the sublime "Nuits," "Souvenir," and the incomparable opening of
+"Rolla." Again he convoked the friends who three years before had greeted
+the _Contes d'Espagne_ with acclamation, but, to the unutterable surprise
+and disappointment of both brothers, there was not a word of sympathy or
+applause: Merimee alone expressed his approbation, and assured the young
+poet that he had made immense progress. Perhaps the others took in bad part
+their former disciple's recantation of romanticism, which he makes in the
+dedication of "La Coupe et les Levres" after the following formula:
+
+    For my part, I hate those snivellers in boats,
+      Those lovers of waterfalls, moonshine and lakes,
+    That breed without name, which with journals and notes,
+      Tears and verses, floods every step that it takes:
+    Nature no doubt but gives back what you lend her;
+    After all, it may be that they do comprehend her,
+    But them I do certainly not comprehend.
+
+The chill of this introduction was not carried off by the public reception
+of the _Spectacle dans un Fauteuil_ (as the new collection was entitled),
+which remained almost unnoticed for some weeks, until Sainte-Beuve in the
+_Revue des Deux Mondes_ of January 15, 1833, published a review of this and
+the earlier poems, indicating their beauty and originality, the promise of
+the one and progress of the other, with his infallible discernment and
+discrimination. A few critics followed his lead, others differed, and
+discussions began again which could not but spread the young man's fame.
+The _Revue des Deux Mondes_ was now open to him, and henceforth, with a few
+exceptions, whatever he wrote appeared in that periodical. He made his
+entry with the drama of _Andrea del Sarto_, which is rife with tense and
+tragic situations and deeply-moving scenes. The affairs of the family
+turned out much better than had been expected, but Alfred de Musset
+continued to work with application and ardor. His fine critical faculty
+kept his vagaries within bounds: he knew better than anybody "how much good
+sense it requires to do without common sense"--a dictum of his own. Like
+every true artist, he took his subjects wherever he found them: the
+dripping raindrops and tolling of the convent-bell suggested one of
+Chopin's most enchanting _Preludes;_ the accidental attitudes of women and
+children in the street have given painters and sculptors their finest
+groups; so a bunch of fresh roses which De Musset's mother put upon his
+table one morning during his days of extravagant dissipation, saying, "All
+this for fourpence," gave him a happy idea for unravelling the perplexity
+of Valentin in _Les Deux Maitresses;_ and his unconscious exclamation, "Si
+je vous le disais pourtant que je vous aime," which caused a passer-by in
+the street to laugh at him, furnished the opening of the _Stances a Ninon_,
+like Dante's
+
+    Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore.
+
+These fortunate dispositions were interrupted by a meeting which affected
+his character and genius more than any other event in his life. It is
+curious that Madame Sand and De Musset originally avoided making each
+other's acquaintance. She fancied that she should not like him, and he,
+although greatly struck by the genius of her first novel, _Indiana_,
+disliked her overloaded style of writing, and struck out in pencil a
+quantity of superfluous adjectives and other parts of speech in a copy
+which unluckily fell into her hands. Their first encounter was followed by
+a sudden, almost instantaneous, mutual passion--on his part the first and
+strongest if not the only one, of his life. The first season of this
+intimacy was like a long summer holiday. "It seemed," writes the
+biographer, "as if a partnership in which existence was so gay, to which
+each brought such contributions of talent, wit, grace, youth, and
+good-humor, could never be dissolved. It seemed as if such happy people
+should find nothing better to do than remain in a home which they had made
+so attractive for themselves and their friends.... I never saw such a happy
+company, nor one which cared so little about the rest of the world.
+Conversation never flagged: they passed their time in talking, drawing, and
+making music. A childish glee reigned supreme. They invented all sorts of
+amusements, not because they were bored, but because they were overflowing
+with spirits." But Paris became too narrow for them, and they fled--first
+to Fontainebleau, then to Italy. Musset's mother was deeply opposed to the
+latter project, foreseeing misfortune with the prescience of affection, and
+he promised not to go without her consent, although his heart was set upon
+it. The most incredible story in the biography is that Madame Sand actually
+surprised Madame de Musset into an interview, and, by appeals, eloquence,
+persuasion and vows, obtained her sorrowful acquiescence.
+
+The lamentable story of that Italian journey has been told too often and by
+too many people to need repetition here. No doubt Paul de Musset has told
+it as fairly as could be expected from his brother's side: probably the
+circumstances occurred much as he sets them down. But he could not make due
+allowance for the effect which Alfred's dissolute habits had produced upon
+his character: he was but twenty-three, and had run the round of vice; he
+had already depicted the moral result of such courses in his terrible
+allegory of "La Coupe et les Levres:" the idea recurs throughout his works,
+conspicuously in the _Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle_, which is Madame
+Sand's best apology. But if his excesses had destroyed his ingenuousness,
+she destroyed his faith in human nature, and on her will ever rest the
+brand he set in the burning words of the "Nuit d'Octobre."
+
+He returned to Paris shattered in mind and body, and shut himself up in his
+room for months, unable to endure contact with the outer world, or even
+that of the loving home circle which environed him with anxious tenderness.
+He could not read or write: a favorite piece of music from his young
+sister's piano, a game of chess with his mother in the evening, were his
+only recreations--his only excitement the letters which still came from
+Venice, for which he looked with a sick longing, at which one cannot wonder
+on reading them and remembering what a companionship it was that he had
+lost. Urged by his brother and his friend M. Buloz, the director of the
+_Revue des Deux Mondes_, to try the efficacy of work, he completed his play
+of _On ne badine pas avec l'Amour_, already sketched, in which, of all his
+dramatic writings, the cry of the heart is most thrilling. Aided by this
+effort, he made a journey to Baden in September, five months after his
+miserable return to Paris. The change of air and scene restored him, and
+his votive offering for the success of his pilgrimage was the charming poem
+called "Une Bonne Fortune." Although he had determined not to see Madame
+Sand again, their connection was renewed, in spite of himself, when she
+came back from Italy: it lasted for a short period, full of angry and
+melancholy scenes, quarrels and reconciliations. Then he broke loose for
+ever, and went back to the world and his work.
+
+This episode, of which I have briefly given the outline, was the principal
+event of Alfred de Musset's life, the one which marked and colored it most
+deeply, which brought his genius to perfection by a cruel and fiery
+torture, and left a lasting imprint upon his writings. Although he never
+produced anything finer than certain passages of "Rolla," which was
+published in 1833, yet previous to that--or more accurately to 1835, when
+he began to write again--he had composed no long poem of equal merit
+throughout, none in which the flight was sustained from first to last. The
+magnificent series of the "Nights" of May, December, August and October,
+the "Letter to Lamartine," "Stanzas on the Death of Malibran," "Hope in
+God," and a number of others of not less melody and vigor, but less exalted
+and serious in tone; several plays, among them _Lorenzaccio_, which missed
+only by a very little being a fine tragedy; the greater part of his prose
+tales and criticisms, including _Le Fils de Titien_, the most charming of
+his stories, and the _Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle_, which shows as
+much genius as any of his poems,--belong to the period from 1835 to 1840,
+his apogee. Of the last work, notwithstanding its unmistakable personal
+revelations--which, if they do not tell the author's story, at least
+reflect his state of mind--Paul de Musset says, what everybody who has read
+his brother's writings carefully will feel to be true, that neither in the
+hero nor any other single personage must we look for Alfred's entire
+individuality. In the complexity of his character and emotions, and the
+contradictions which they united, are to be found the eidolon of every
+young man in his collection, even "the two heroes of _Les Caprices de
+Marianne_, Octave and Coelio," says Paul, "although they are the antipodes
+of one another." Neither is it as easy as it would seem on the surface to
+trace the thread of any one incident of his life through his writings.
+Although containing some irreconcilable passages, the four "Nights"
+appeared to have been born of the same impulse and to exact the same
+dedication: it is undeniably a shock to have their inconsistencies
+explained by hearing that while the "Nuits de Mai," "d'Aout" and
+"d'Octobre" refer to his passion for Madame Sand, the "Nuit de Decembre"
+and "Lettre a Lamartine," which naturally belong to this series, were
+dictated by another attachment and another disappointment. I will not stop
+to moralize upon this: the story of De Musset's life is really only the
+story of his loves. His brother says that he was always in love with
+somebody: it was a necessity of his nature and his genius. Before he was
+twenty-seven, six different love-affairs are enumerated, without taking
+into account numerous affairs of gallantry; nor was the sixth the last. The
+"Nuit d'Octobre" was written two years and a half after his return from
+Italy, and its terrible malediction is the outbreak of the rankling memory
+of his wrong and suffering. It was psychologically in order that while his
+love (which does not die in an hour, like trust and respect) survived, it
+should surround its object with lingering tenderness, but that as it slowly
+expired indignation, scorn and the sense of injury should increase: this is
+their final utterance, followed by pardon, a vow of forgetfulness and
+farewell, but not a final farewell. That was spoken years afterward, in
+1841, when, once again seeing by chance the forest of Fontainebleau, and
+about the same time casually encountering Madame Sand, he poured forth his
+"Souvenir," a poem of matchless sweetness and beauty, vibrating with
+feeling and most musical in expression--an exquisite combination of lyric
+and elegy. In this he calls her
+
+    Ma seule amie a jamais la plus chere.
+
+Ten years after this, in one of the last strains of his unstrung harp, a
+fragment called "Souvenir des Alpes," the sad chord is touched once more:
+up to the end it answered faintly to certain notes. Long after their
+rupture and separation he said that he would have given ten years of his
+life to marry her had she been free; and it is deplorable that the most
+fervent and lasting affection of which he was capable should have been
+thrown back upon him in such sort.
+
+Of marriage there were several schemes at different times: they fell
+through because he was averse to them himself, except one to which he much
+inclined, the young lady being pretty, intelligent, charming and the
+daughter of an old friend; but on the first advances it turned out that she
+was engaged to another man. His biographer regrets this deeply, convinced
+that such an alliance would have been his brother's salvation; but even if
+he could have been more constant to his wife than to his mistresses, the
+habit of intemperance was too confirmed to admit much hope of domestic
+happiness. The same may be opined in regard to the vague hopes which were
+destroyed by the death of the young duke of Orleans. When Louis Philippe
+came to the throne, De Musset made no attempt to approach the royal family
+on the pretext of the old school-friendship: it was the duke himself who
+renewed it in 1836 on accidentally seeing some unpublished verses of the
+poet's on the king's escape from an attempt at assassination. Louis
+Philippe himself did not like the sonnet, considering the use of the poetic
+_thou_ too familiar a form of address: he did not know who was the author;
+and when Alfred was presented to him at a court-ball took him for a cousin
+who was inspector of the royal forests at Joinville, and continued to greet
+him, under this mistake, with a few gracious words two or three times a
+year during the rest of his reign, while the poet's name was on the lips
+and in the heart of every one else. The duke's favor and friendliness ended
+only with his sad and sudden death.
+
+Paul de Musset tells us that the years 1837 and 1838 were the happiest in
+his brother's life. The love-trouble which had wrung from him the "Nuit de
+Decembre" was a disappointment, but not a deception, and the parting had
+caused equal sorrow on both sides, but no bitterness. After no long
+interval appeared "a very young and very pretty person whom he met
+frequently in society, of an enthusiastic, passionate nature, independent
+in her position, and who bought the poet's books." An acquaintance, a
+friendship, a correspondence, a serious passion followed, and became a
+relation which lasted two years "without quarrel, storm, coolness or
+subject of umbrage or jealousy--two years of love without a cloud, of true
+happiness." Why did it not last for ever? The biographer does not give the
+answer. It is hinted in a letter to Alfred's friend, the duchesse de
+Castries, dated September, 1840, in his _OEuvres posthumes_: "I have told
+you how about a year ago an absurd passion, totally useless and somewhat
+ridiculous, made me break with all my habits. I forsook all my
+surroundings, my friends of both sexes, the current in which I was living,
+and one of the prettiest women in Paris. I did not succeed in my foolish
+dream, you must understand; and now I find myself cured, it is true, but
+high and dry like a fish in a grain-field." This is probably the clue, and
+the foolish dream was for a woman to whom his brother refers as having
+repelled Alfred's homage with harshness, and having called forth from him
+some short and extremely bitter verses beginning "Oui, femme," and another
+called "Adieu!" in which there prevails a tone of quiet but deep feeling.
+This is a sad story: he apparently united the volatility and vagrancy of
+fancy, the inconstancy of light shallow natures, with the ardor and
+intensity of passion and the capacity for suffering which belong to strong
+and steadfast ones. There was a childlike quality in his disposition, which
+showed itself in a sort of simplicity and spontaneousness in the midst of a
+corrupt existence, and still more in the uncontrollable, absorbing violence
+of his emotions: they swept over him, momentarily devastating his present
+and blotting out the horizon, but unlike the tempests of childhood their
+ravages did not disappear when the clouds dispersed and the torrents
+subsided. The life of debauchery which had preceded his journey to Italy
+was replaced, for some years, by a less excessive degree of dissipation,
+during which he lived with a fast set, who, however, were men of talent and
+accomplishments, the foremost among them being Prince Belgiojoso. The
+influence of the two fortunate years, 1837-38, not only the happiest but
+the most fertile of his short career, seems to have weakened these
+associations and led him into calmer paths. He had formed several
+friendships with women of a sort which both parties may regard with pride,
+in particular with the Princess Belgiojoso, one of the most striking and
+original figures of our monotonous time, and Madame Maxime Jaubert, a
+clever, attractive young woman with a delightful house, whom he called his
+_Marraine_ because she had given him a nickname. These women, and
+others--but these two above the rest--were sincerely and loyally attached
+to him with a disinterested regard which did not spare advice, nor even
+rebuke, or relax under his loss of health and brilliancy or neglect of
+their kindness, which nevertheless he felt and valued. His purest source of
+pleasure was in the talent of others, which gave him a generous and
+sympathetic enjoyment. The appearance of Pauline Garcia--now Madame
+Viardot--and Rachel, who came out almost simultaneously at the age of
+seventeen, added delight to the two happy years. He has left notices of the
+first performances of these artistes, the former in opera, the latter on
+the stage (for he was musical himself and a _connoisseur_) which are
+excellent criticisms, and have even more interest than when they appeared,
+now that the career of one has long been closed and that of the other long
+completed. His relations with Rachel lasted for many years, interrupted by
+the gusts and blasts which the contact of two such natures inevitably
+begets. She constantly urged him to write a play for her, and in the year
+after her _debut_ he wrote a fragment of a drama on the story of
+Fredegonde, which she learned by heart and occasionally recited in private;
+but there were endless delays and difficulties on both sides, and the rest
+was not written. After various episodes and passages between them, De
+Musset was dining with her one evening when she had become a great lady and
+queen of the theatre, and her other guests were all rich men of fashion.
+One of them admired an extremely beautiful and costly ring which she wore.
+It was first passed round the table from hand to hand, and then she said
+they might bid for it. One immediately offered five hundred francs, another
+fifteen, and the ring went up at once to three thousand: "And you, my poet,
+why do not you bid? What will you give?" "I will give you my heart," he
+replied. "The ring is yours," cried Rachel, taking it off and throwing it
+into his plate. After dinner De Musset tried to restore it to her, but she
+refused to take it back: he urged and insisted, when she, suddenly falling
+on her knee with that sovereign charm of seduction for which she was as
+renowned as for her tragic power, entreated him to keep it as a pledge for
+the piece he was to write for her. The poet took the ring, and went home
+excited and wrought up to the resolve that nothing should interfere with
+the completion of his task. But it was the old story again--whims and
+postponements on Rachel's part, possibly temper and pique on his--until six
+months afterward, at the end of an angry conversation, he silently replaced
+the ring on her hand, and she did not resist. Four years later the compact
+was renewed, and although by this time De Musset had to all intents and
+purposes ceased to write, he struck off the first act of a play called
+_Faustina_, the scene of which was laid in Venice in the fourteenth
+century; but he put off finishing it, and finally let it drop altogether.
+
+In December, 1840, Alfred de Musset was thirty years old, and on his
+birthday he had one of those reckonings with himself, which the most
+deliberately careless and volatile men cannot escape. At twenty-one he had
+held a similar settlement: he was then uncertain of his genius,
+dissatisfied with his way of life and with the use he made of his time: the
+result was his adoption of a more serious line of study and conduct, which
+had led him, in spite of interruptions and aberrations, to the brilliant
+display of his beautiful and splendid talents, the full exercise of his
+wonderful powers. Now another review of his past and survey of his future
+left him in a mood of discontent and depression. He felt that he could not
+always go on being a boy. The year behind him had been almost sterile, and
+marked by the loss of many of what he called his illusions. He had been
+implored and urged to write by his friends and editors, had made and broken
+promises without number to the latter, and had become involved in money
+difficulties to a degree which kept him in constant anxiety and torment.
+Yet he steadily rejected all his brother's affectionate advice and
+importunities to shake off the deepening lethargy. He would not write
+poetry because the Muse did not come of her free will, and he would never
+do her violence. He had forsworn prose, because he said everybody wrote
+that, and many so ill that he would not swell the number of magazine
+story-writers, who, he foresaw, were to lower the standard of fiction and
+style. In short, he always had an excuse for doing nothing, and although he
+hated above all things to leave Paris, and seldom accepted the invitations
+of his friends in the country, he now repeatedly rushed out of town to
+escape the visits of editors, who had become no better than duns in his
+eyes. When at home he shut himself in his room for days together in so
+gloomy a frame of mind that even his brother did not venture to break in
+upon him: he even made a furtive attempt at suicide one night when his
+despondency reached its lowest depth; it was foiled by the accident of
+Paul's having unloaded the pistols and locked up the powder and balls some
+time before. He grew morbidly irritable, and resented Paul's remonstrances,
+which, we may be sure, were made with all the tact and consideration of
+natural delicacy and unselfish affection, generally by laughing at the poor
+poet, which was the most effectual way of restoring his courage and
+good-humor. One morning he emerged from his seclusion, and with vindictive
+desperation threw before his brother a quantity of manuscripts, saying,
+"You _would_ have prose: there it is for you." It was the introduction to a
+sort of romance called _Le Poete dechu_, a wretched story of a young man of
+many gifts who finds himself under the necessity of writing for the support
+of his orphan sisters, and it described with harrowing eloquence the vain
+efforts of his exhausted brain. The extracts in the biography are painfully
+affecting and powerful, but the work was never finished or published. Such
+a state of things could not go on indefinitely, and De Musset fell
+dangerously ill of congestion of the lungs, brought on by reckless
+imprudence when already far from well: the attack was accompanied by so
+much fever and delirium that it was at first mistaken for brain fever. This
+illness redoubled the tenderness and devotion of his family and friends:
+his Marraine and Princess Belgiojoso took turns by his bedside, magnetizing
+the unruly patient into quiescence; but the person who exercised the
+greatest influence over him was a poor Sister of Charity, Soeur Marcelline,
+who was engaged to assist in nursing him. The untiring care,
+self-abnegation, angelic sweetness and serenity of this humble woman gained
+the attachment of the whole family, and established an ascendency over
+Alfred's impressionable imagination. She did not confine her office to her
+patient's physical welfare, but strove earnestly to minister to him
+spiritually. His long convalescence "was like a second birth. He did not
+seem more than seventeen: he had the joyousness of a child, the fancies of
+a page, like Cherubino in the _Marriage of Figaro_. All the difficulties
+and subjects of despair which preceded his malady had vanished in a
+rose-colored distance. He passed his days in reading interminable
+books--_Clarissa Harlowe_, which he already knew, the _Memorial of St.
+Helena_, and all the memoirs relating to the Empire. In the evening we all
+gathered about his writing-table to draw and chat, while Soeur Marcelline
+sat by knitting in bright worsteds. Auguste Barre, our neighbor, came to
+work at an album of caricatures in the style of Toeppfer's, and we all
+amused ourselves with the comic illustrations: Alfred and Barre had the
+pencil, the rest of us composed a text as absurd as the drawings. Who will
+give us back those delicious evenings of laughter, jest and chat, when
+without stirring from home or depending on anything from without our whole
+household was so happy?" Alas! they were not of long duration. By and by
+Sister Marcelline went away, leaving her patient a pen on which she had
+embroidered, "Remember your promises." He was afflicted by her departure,
+and wrote some lines to her, who, as he said, did not know what poetry
+meant, but he could never be induced to show them, although he repeated
+them to Paul and their friend Alfred Tattet, who between them contrived to
+note down the four following verses:
+
+    Poor girl! thou art no longer fair.
+    By watching Death with patient care
+      Thou pale as he art grown:
+    By tending upon human pain
+    Thy hand is worn as coarse in grain
+      As horny Labor's own.
+
+    But weariness and courage meek
+    Illuminate thy pallid cheek
+      Beside the dying bed:
+    To the poor suffering mortal's clutch
+    Thy hard hand hath a gentle touch,
+      With tears and warm blood fed.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Tread to the end thy lonely road,
+    All for thy task and toward thy God,
+      Thy footsteps day by day.
+    That evil must exist, we prate,
+    And wisely leave it to its fate,
+      And pass another way;
+
+    But thy pure conscience owns it not,
+    Though ceaseless warfare is thy lot
+    Against disease and woe;
+    No ills for thee have power to sting,
+    Nor to thy lip a murmur bring,
+      Save those that others know.
+
+De Musset held in peculiar sacredness and reverence whatever was connected
+with this good woman and his feeling for her: seventeen years after this
+illness the embroidered pen and a piece of her knitting were buried with
+him by almost his last request.
+
+Seventeen years! a large bit of any one's life--more than a third of Alfred
+de Musset's own term--yet there is hardly anything to say about it. The
+"Souvenir," which was written about six months after his recovery, is the
+last poem in which all his strength, beauty and pathos find expression: he
+never wrote again in this vein: it was the last echo of his youth. He
+composed less and less frequently, and though what he wrote was redolent of
+sentiment, wit, grace and elegance, and some of the short occasional verses
+have a consummate charm of finish, the soul seems gone out of his poetry.
+His brother mentions a number of compositions begun, but thrown aside;
+there were projects of travel never carried out; he gradually gave up the
+society of even his oldest friends: everything indicated a rapid decline of
+the active faculties. Unhappily, that of suffering seemed only to
+increase--no longer the sharp anguish of unspent force which had wrung from
+him the passionate cries and plaintive murmurs of former years, but the
+dull numbness of hopelessness. His existence was monotonous, and the few
+occurrences which varied it were of a sad or unpleasant nature. His sister
+married and left Paris, and his mother subsequently went to live with her
+in the country, thus breaking up their family circle; Paul de Musset was
+absent from France for considerable spaces of time, so that for the first
+time Alfred de Musset was compelled to live alone. Friends scattered, some
+died: the Orleans family, for whom he had a real affection, was driven from
+France; he fancied that his genius was unappreciated--a notion which,
+strangely enough, his brother shared--and although he was the last man to
+rage or mope over misapprehension, the idea certainly added to his gloom.
+Through the good graces of the duke of Orleans he had been appointed
+librarian of the Home Office, a post of which he was instantly deprived on
+the change of government; but a few years later he was unexpectedly given a
+similar one in the Department of Public Education. In 1852 he was elected
+to the French Academy, that honor so limited by the small number of
+members, so ridiculed by unsuccessful aspirants, yet without which no
+French author feels his career to be complete. His plays were being
+performed with great favor, his poems and tales were becoming more and more
+popular, his verses were set to music, his stories were illustrated: but
+all this brought no cheer or consolation to the sick spirit. He lived more
+and more alone: the Theatre Francais, a silent game of chess at his cafe,
+the deadly absinthe, were his only sources of excitement. It is a comfort
+to learn that the last ray of pleasure which penetrated his moral dungeon,
+reviving for an instant the generous glow of enthusiasm, was the appearance
+of Ristori: inspired by her, he began a poetical address which he never
+finished, nor even wrote down, but a fragment of it was preserved orally by
+one or two who heard it:
+
+    For Pauline and Rachel I sang of hope,
+      And over Malibran a tear I shed;
+    But, thanks to thee, I see the mighty scope
+            Of strength and genius wed.
+
+    Ah keep them long! The heart which breathes the prayer
+      When genius calls has ever made reply,
+    Bear smiling home to Italy the fair,
+            A flower from our sky.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    They tell me that in spite of grief and wrong,
+      And pride bent earthward by a tyrant's heel,
+    A noble race, though crushed and conquered long,
+            Has not yet learned to kneel.
+
+    Rome's godlike dwellers of a bygone age,
+      The marble, porphyry, alabaster forms,
+    Still live: at night, to speech upon the stage,
+            An ancient statue warms.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What was the cause of De Musset's unhappiness and impotence? His brother
+tries to account for them by an enumeration of the distresses and
+annoyances mentioned above, and others of the same order; but when one
+remembers how the poet's great sorrows, his father's death and the betrayal
+of his affection by the first woman he really loved, had given him his
+finest conceptions in verse and prose, it is impossible to accept so
+insufficient an explanation. Nor can we allow that De Musset sank into a
+condition of puerile impatience and senile querulousness. Judged by our
+standard, all the Latin races lack manhood, as we may possibly do by
+theirs: De Musset was only as much more sensitive than the rest of his
+countrymen as those of the poetic temperament are usually found to be in
+all countries. Nor had he seen his talent slowly expire: the spring did not
+run dry by degrees: it suddenly sank into the ground. He had made a fearful
+mistake at the outset, which he discovered too late if at all. Considering
+what life is sure to bring to every one in the way of trial and sorrow, it
+is not worth while to go in search of emotions and experience which are
+certain to find us out; nor is it in the slums of life that its meaning is
+to be sought. He had foretold his own end in the prophetic warning of his
+Muse:
+
+    Quand les dieux irrites m'oteront ton genie,
+    Si je tombe des cieux que me repondras-tu?
+
+His light was not lost in a storm-cloud nor eclipse, but in the awful
+Radnorok, the Goetterdaemmerung, when sun and stars fall from a blank heaven.
+His health and habits constantly grew worse--he had organic disease of the
+heart--but his existence dragged on until May 1st, 1857, when an acute
+attack carried him off after a few days' illness. He died in his brother's
+arms, and his last words were, "Sleep! at last I shall sleep." He had
+killed himself physically and intellectually as surely as the wages of sin
+are death.
+
+But let not this be the last word on one so beloved as a poet and a man.
+Mental qualities alone never endear their possessor to every being that
+comes into contact with him, and Alfred de Musset was idolized by people
+who could not even read. There was not a generous or amiable quality in
+which he was wanting: he had an inextinguishable ardor for genius and
+greatness in every form; he was tender-hearted to excess, could not endure
+the sight of suffering, and delighted in giving pleasure; his sympathy was
+ready and entire, his loyalty of the truest metal. "He never abused
+anybody," says his brother, "nor sacrificed an absent person for the sake
+of a good story." He loved animals and children, and they loved him in
+return.
+
+He can never cease to be the poet of the many, for he has melody,
+sentiment, passion, all that charms the popular ear and heart--a
+personality which is the expression of human nature in a language which, as
+he himself says, few speak, but all understand. He can never cease to be
+the poet of the few, because, while his poems are a very concentration and
+elixir of the most intense and profound feelings of which we are all
+capable, they give words to the more exquisite and intimate emotions
+peculiar to those of a keener and more refined susceptibility, of a more
+exalted and aerial range. Sainte-Beuve says somewhere, though not in his
+final verdict on De Musset, that his chief merit is having restored to
+French literature the wit which had been driven out of it by the
+sentimentalists. His wit is indeed delightful and irresistible, but it is
+not his magic key to souls. In other countries every generation has its own
+poet: younger ears are deaf to the music which so long charmed ours; but De
+Musset will be the poet of each new generation for a certain season--the
+sweetest of all, because, as has been well said, he is the poet of youth.
+And if doubt breathes through some of his grandest strophes, Faith finds
+her first and last profession in the lines--
+
+    Une immense esperance a traverse la terre;
+    Malgre nous vers le ciel il faut lever les yeux.
+
+SARAH B. WISTER.
+
+
+
+
+THE BEE.
+
+
+    What time I paced, at pleasant morn,
+      A deep and dewy wood,
+    I heard a mellow hunting-horn
+      Make dim report of Dian's lustihood
+    Far down a heavenly hollow.
+    Mine ear, though fain, had pain to follow:
+      _Tara!_ it twang'd, _tara-tara!_ it blew,
+      Yet wavered oft, and flew
+    Most ficklewise about, or here, or there,
+    A music now from earth and now from air.
+      But on a sudden, lo!
+      I marked a blossom shiver to and fro
+    With dainty inward storm; and there within
+    A down-drawn trump of yellow jessamine
+              A bee
+      Thrust up its sad-gold body lustily,
+    All in a honey madness hotly bound
+              On blissful burglary.
+                       A cunning sound
+    In that wing-music held me: down I lay
+    In amber shades of many a golden spray,
+    Where looping low with languid arms the Vine
+    In wreaths of ravishment did overtwine
+    Her kneeling Live-Oak, thousand-fold to plight
+    Herself unto her own true stalwart knight.
+
+    As some dim blur of distant music nears
+    The long-desiring sense, and slowly clears
+      To forms of time and apprehensive tune,
+      So, as I lay, full soon
+    Interpretation throve: the bee's fanfare,
+    Through sequent films of discourse vague as air,
+    Passed to plain words, while, fanning faint perfume,
+    The bee o'erhung a rich unrifled bloom:
+      "O Earth, fair lordly Blossom, soft a-shine
+      Upon the star-pranked universal vine,
+              Hast naught for me?
+                       To thee
+      Come I, a poet, hereward haply blown,
+      From out another worldflower lately flown.
+    Wilt ask, _What profit e'er a poet brings?_
+    He beareth starry stuff about his wings
+    To pollen thee and sting thee fertile: nay,
+    If still thou narrow thy contracted way,
+      --Worldflower, if thou refuse me--
+      --Worldflower, if thou abuse me,
+      And hoist thy stamen's spear-point high
+      To wound my wing and mar mine eye--
+    Natheless I'll drive me to thy deepest sweet,
+    Yea, richlier shall that pain the pollen beat
+    From me to thee, for oft these pollens be
+    Fine dust from wars that poets wage for thee.
+    But, O beloved Earthbloom soft a-shine
+    Upon the universal jessamine,
+          Prithee abuse me not,
+          Prithee refuse me not;
+    Yield, yield the heartsome honey love to me
+          Hid in thy nectary!"
+    And as I sank into a suaver dream
+    The pleading bee-song's burthen sole did seem,
+    "Hast ne'er a honey-drop of love for me
+          In thy huge nectary?"
+
+SIDNEY LANIER.
+
+
+
+
+"OUR JOOK."
+
+
+"Koenigin," said I, as I poked the fire, "what do you think of the people in
+the house?"
+
+On second thoughts it was not "Koenigin" that I said, for it was only that
+night that she received the title. It is of no consequence what I did call
+her, however, for from that time she was never anything but Koenigin to me.
+
+We began to "talk things over," as we had a way of doing; and very good fun
+it was and quite harmless, provided the ventilator was not open. That had
+happened once or twice, and got us into quite serious scrapes. People have
+such an utterly irrational objection to your amusing yourself in the most
+innocent way at what they consider their expense.
+
+Koenigin and I had come to the boarding-house that very day. We were by
+ourselves, for our male protectors were off "a-hunting the wild deer and
+following the roe"--or its Florida equivalent, whatever that may be--and we
+did not fancy staying at a hotel under the circumstances. Now, we had taken
+our observations, and were prepared to pronounce our opinions on our
+fellow-boarders. One after another was canvassed and dismissed. Mr. A. had
+eccentric table-manners; Miss B. wriggled and squirmed when she talked;
+Mrs. C. was much too lavish of inappropriate epithets; Mr. X.'s
+conversation, on the contrary, was quite bald and bare from the utter lack
+of those parts of speech; Miss Y. had a nice face, and Mrs. Z. a pretty
+hand.
+
+Just here Koenigin suddenly burst out laughing. "Really," she said, "we go
+about the world criticising people as if we were King Solomon and the queen
+of Sheba."
+
+"'Die Koenigin von Seba,'" said I. "That, I suppose, is you and our motto
+should be, 'Wir sind das Volk und die Weisheit stirbt mit uns.'"
+
+I was not at all sure of the accuracy of my translation, but its
+appropriateness was unquestionable.
+
+"What do you think of the Englishman, Koenigin?" I asked, giving the fire
+another poke, not from shamefacedness, but because it really needed it, for
+the evening was damp and chilly.
+
+"I like him," said Koenigin decidedly.
+
+Koenigin and I were always prepared with decided opinions, whether we knew
+anything about the subject in hand or not.
+
+"He has a fine head," Koenigin went on, "quite a ducal contour, according to
+our republican ideas of what a duke ought to be. I like the steady intense
+light of his eyes under those straight dark brows, and that little frown
+only increases the effect. Then his laugh is so frank and boyish. Yes, I
+like him very much."
+
+"He has a nice gentlemanly voice," I suggested--"rather on the
+'gobble-gobble' order, but that is the fault of his English birth."
+
+This is enough of that conversation, for, after all, neither of us is the
+heroine of this tale. It is well that this should be distinctly understood
+at the start. Somehow, "the Jook" (as we generally called him, in memory of
+Jeames Yellowplush) and I became very intimate after that, but it was never
+anything more than a sort of _camaraderie_. Koenigin knew all about it, and
+she pronounced it the most remarkable instance of a purely intellectual
+flirtation which she had ever seen; which was all quite correct, except for
+the term "flirtation," of which it never had a spice.
+
+One of the Jook's most striking peculiarities, though by no means an
+uncommon one among his countrymen, was a profound distrust of new
+acquaintances and an utter incapacity of falling into the free and easy
+ways which prevail more strongly perhaps in Florida than in any other part
+of America. There really was some excuse for him, though, for, not to put
+it too strongly, society is a little mixed in Florida, and it is hard for a
+foreigner to discriminate closely enough to avoid being drawn into
+unpleasant complications if he relaxes in the slightest degree his rules of
+reserve. Besides which, the Jook was a man of the most morbid and ultra
+refinement. "Refinement" was the word he preferred, but I should have
+called it an absurd squeamishness. He could make no allowance for personal
+or local peculiarities, and eccentricities in our neighbors which delighted
+Koenigin and me and sent us into fits of laughter excited in his mind only
+the most profound disgust. Therefore, partly in the fear of having his
+sensibilities unpleasantly jarred upon, partly from the fear of making
+objectionable acquaintances whom he might afterward be unable to shake
+off, and partly from an inherent and ineradicable shyness, he went about
+clad in a mantle of gloomy reserve, speaking to no one, looking at no
+one--"grand, gloomy and peculiar." It was currently reported that previous
+to our arrival he had never spoken to a creature in the boarding-house,
+though he had been an inmate of it for six weeks. For the rest, he was
+clever and intelligent, with frank, honest, boyish ways, which I liked,
+even though they were sometimes rather exasperating.
+
+It was not quite pleasant, for instance, to hear him speak of Americans in
+the frank and unconstrained manner which he adopted when talking to us. We
+could hardly wonder at it when we looked at the promiscuous crowd which
+formed his idea of American society. Refined and well-bred people there
+certainly were, but these were precisely the ones who never forced
+themselves upon his notice, leaving him to be struck and stunned by fast
+and hoydenish young ladies, ungrammatical and ill-bred old ones, and men of
+all shades of boorishness and swagger, such as make themselves conspicuous
+in every crowd. Unluckily, both Koenigin and I have English blood in our
+veins, and the Jook could not be convinced that we did not eagerly snatch
+at the chance thus presented of claiming the title of British subjects. It
+is quite hopeless to attempt to convince Englishmen that any American would
+not be British if he could. Pride in American citizenship is an idea
+utterly monstrous and inconceivable to them, and they can look on the
+profession of it in no other light than that of a laudable attempt at
+making the best of a bad case. Therefore, the Jook persisted in ignoring
+our protestations of patriotic ardor, and in paying us the delicate
+compliment of considering us English and expressing his views on America
+with a beautiful frankness which kept us in a frame of mind verging on
+delirium.
+
+What was to be done with such a man? Clearly, but one thing, and I sighed
+for one of our American belles who should come and see and conquer this
+impracticable Englishman. At present, things seemed quite hopeless. There
+was no one within reach who would have the slightest chance of success in
+such an undertaking. Though outsiders gave me the credit of his
+subjugation, I knew quite well that there not only was not, but never could
+be, the necessary tinge of sentimentality in our intercourse. We were much
+too free and easy for that, and we laughed and talked, rambled and boated
+together, "like two babes in the woods," as Koenigin was fond of remarking.
+
+It was in Florida that all this took place--in shabby, fascinating
+Jacksonville, where one meets everybody and does nothing in particular
+except lounge about and be happy. So the Jook and I lounged and were happy
+with a placid, unexciting sort of happiness, until the day when Kitty Grey
+descended upon us with the suddenness of a meteor, and very like one in her
+bewildering brightness.
+
+Kitty was by no means pretty, but, though women recognized this fact, the
+man who could be convinced of it remains yet to be discovered. You might
+force them to confess that Kitty's nose was flat, her eyes not well shaped,
+her teeth crooked, her mouth slightly awry, but it always came back to the
+same point: "Curious that with all these defects she should still be so
+exquisitely pretty!"
+
+Really, I did not so much wonder at it myself sometimes when I saw Kitty's
+pale cheeks flush with that delicious pink, her wide hazel eyes deepen and
+glow, her little face light up with elfish mirth, and her round, childish
+figure poise itself in some coquettish attitude. Then she had such absurd
+little hands, with short fingers and babyish dimples, such tiny feet, and
+such a wealth of crinkled dark-brown hair--such bewitching little helpless
+ways, too, a fashion of throwing herself appealingly on your compassion
+which no man on earth could resist! At bottom she was a self-reliant,
+independent little soul, but no mortal man ever found that out: Kitty was
+far too wise.
+
+Of course, as soon as I saw Kitty I thought of the Jook. Would he or
+wouldn't he? On the whole, I was rather afraid he wouldn't, for Kitty's
+laugh sometimes rang out a little too loud, and Kitty's spirits sometimes
+got the better of her and set her frisking like a kitten, and I was afraid
+the modest sense of propriety which was one of the Jook's strong points
+would not survive it. However, I concluded to risk it, but just here a
+sudden and unforeseen obstacle checked my triumphant course.
+
+"Mr. Warriner," I said sweetly (I was always horribly afraid I should call
+him Mr. Jook, but I never did), "I want to introduce you to my friend, Miss
+Grey."
+
+The Jook looked at me with his most placid smile, and replied blandly,
+"Thank you very much, but _I'd rather not_."
+
+Did any one ever hear of such a man? I understood his reasons well enough,
+though he did not take the trouble to explain them: it was only
+exclusiveness gone mad. And he prided himself upon his race and breeding,
+and considered our American men boors!
+
+After that I nearly gave up his case as hopeless, and devoted myself to
+Kitty, whom I really believe the Jook did not know by sight after having
+been for nearly a week in the same house with her.
+
+Kitty once or twice mildly insinuated her desire to know him. "He has such
+a nice face," she said plaintively, "and such lovely little curly brown
+whiskers! He is the only man in the house worth looking at, but if I happen
+to come up when he is talking to you, he instantly disappears. He must
+think me _very_ ugly."
+
+It was really very embarrassing to me, for of course I could not tell her
+that the Jook had declined the honor of an introduction. I knew, as well as
+if she had told me so, that Kitty in her secret heart accused me of a mean
+and selfish desire to keep him all to myself, but I was obliged meekly to
+endure the obloquy, undeserved as it was. Koenigin used to go into fits of
+laughter at my dilemma, and just at this period my admiration of the Jook
+went down to the lowest ebb. "He is a selfish, conceited creature!" I
+exclaimed in my wrath. "I really believe he thinks that bewitching little
+Kitty would fall in love with him forthwith if he submitted to an
+introduction. Oh, I _do_ wish he knew what we thought of him! _Why_ doesn't
+he listen outside of ventilators?"
+
+"My dear," said Koenigin, still laughing, though sympathetic, "it strikes me
+that we began by making rather a demi-god of the man, and are ending by
+stripping him of even the good qualities which he probably does possess."
+
+Well! things went on in this exasperating way for a week or so longer. Of
+course I washed my hands of the Jook, for I was too much exasperated to be
+even civil to him. Kitty was as bright and good-natured as ever, ready to
+enjoy all the little pleasures that came in her way, though now and then I
+fancied that I detected a stealthy, wistful look at the Jook's impassive
+face.
+
+It was lovely that day, but fearfully hot. The sun showered down its
+burning rays upon the white Florida sands, the sky was one arch of
+cloudless blue, and the water-oaks swung their moss-wreaths languidly over
+the deserted streets. We had been dreaming and drowsing away the morning,
+Koenigin, Kitty and I, in the jelly-fish-like state into which one naturally
+falls in Florida.
+
+Suddenly Kitty sprang to her feet. "I can't stand this any longer," she
+said: "I shall turn into an oyster if I vegetate here. Please, do you see
+any shells sprouting on my back yet?"
+
+"What do you want to do?" I asked drowsily. "You can't walk in this heat,
+and if you go on the river the sun will take the skin off your face, and
+where are you then, Miss Kitty?"
+
+"I can't help that," retorted Kitty in a tone of desperation. "I don't
+exactly know where I shall go, but I think in pursuit of some yellow
+jessamine."
+
+I sat straight up and gazed at her: "Are you mad, Kitty? Has the heat
+addled your brain already? You would have to walk at least a mile before
+you could find any; and what's the good of it, after all? It would all be
+withered before you could get home."
+
+"Can't help that," repeated Kitty: "I shall have had it, at all events.
+Any way, I'm going, and you two can finish your dreams in peace."
+
+It was useless to argue with Kitty when she was in that mood, so I
+contented myself with giving her directions for reaching the nearest copse
+where she would be likely to find the fragrant beauty.
+
+Two hours later Koenigin sat at the window gazing down the long sandy
+street. Suddenly her face changed, an expression of interest and surprise
+came into her dreamy eyes: she put up her glass, and then broke into a
+laugh. "Come and look at this," she exclaimed; and I came.
+
+What I saw was only Kitty and the Jook, but Kitty and the Jook walking side
+by side in the most amicable manner--Kitty sparkling, bewitching, helpless,
+appealing by turns or altogether as only she could be; the Jook watching
+her with an expression of amusement and delight on his handsome face. And
+both were laden with great wreaths and trails of yellow jessamine, golden
+chalices of fragrance, drooping sprays of green glistening leaves, until
+they looked like walking bowers.
+
+"How on earth--" I exclaimed, and could get no further: my feelings choked
+me.
+
+Kitty came in radiant and smiling as the morning, bearing her treasures. Of
+course we both pounced upon her: "Kitty, where did you meet the Jook? How
+did it happen? What did you do?"
+
+"Cows!" said Kitty solemnly, with grave lips and twinkling eyes.
+
+"Cows? Cows in Florida? Kitty, _what_ do you mean?"
+
+"A cow ran at me, and I was frightened and ran at Mr. Warriner. He drove
+the cow off. That's all. Then he walked home with me. Any harm in that?"
+
+"Now, Kitty, the idea! A Florida cow run at you? If you had said a pig,
+there might be some sense in it, for the pigs here do have some life about
+them; but a cow! Why, the creatures have not strength enough to stand up:
+they are all starving by inches."
+
+"Can't help that," said Kitty. "Must have thought I was good to eat, then,
+I suppose. I thought she was going to toss me, but I don't think it would
+be much more agreeable to be eaten. Mr. Warriner is my preserver, anyhow,
+and I shall treat him _'as sich_.'"
+
+Kitty looked so mischievous and so mutinous that there was evidently no use
+in trying to get anything more out of her, and after standing there a few
+minutes fingering her blossoms and smiling to herself, she danced off to
+dress for tea.
+
+"Selfish little thing, not to offer us one of those lovely sprays!" I
+exclaimed, but Koenigin laughed: "My dear, they are hallowed. Our touch
+would profane them."
+
+Koenigin always saw further than I did, and I gasped: "Koenigin! you don't
+think--"
+
+"Oh no, dear, not yet. Kitty is piqued, and wants to fascinate the Jook a
+little--just a little as yet, but she may burn her fingers before she gets
+through. Looks are contagious, and--did you see her face?"
+
+Such a brilliant little figure as slipped softly into the dining-room that
+evening, all wreathed and twisted and garlanded about with the shining
+green vines, gemmed with their golden stars. Head and throat and waist and
+round white arms were all twined with them, and blossoming sprays and knots
+of the delicately carved blossoms drooped or clung here and there amid her
+floating hair and gauzy black drapery. How did the child ever make them
+stick? How had she managed to decorate herself so elaborately in the short
+time that had elapsed since her return? But Kitty had ways of doing things
+unknown to duller mortals.
+
+Not a word had Kitty for me that evening, but for her father such clinging,
+coaxing, wheedling ways, and for the Jook such coy, sparkling,
+artfully-accidental glances, such shy turns of the little head, such dainty
+capricious airs, that it was delicious to watch her. Koenigin and I sat in a
+dark corner for the express purpose of admiring her delicate little
+manoeuvres. As for her father, good stolid man! he was well used to Kitty's
+freaks, and went on reading his newspaper in such a matter-of-fact way that
+she might as well have wheedled the Pyramid of Cheops. The Jook, however,
+was all that could be desired. The shyest of men--shy and proud as only an
+Englishman can be--he could not make up his mind to walk directly up to
+Kitty, as an American would do, as all the young Americans in the room
+would have done if Kitty had let them. But Kitty, flighty little butterfly
+as she seemed, had stores of tact and finesse in that little brain of hers,
+and the power of developing a fine reserve which had already wilted more
+than one of the young men of the house. For Kitty was none of your arrant
+and promiscuous flirts who count "all fish that come to their net." She was
+choice and dainty in her flirtations, but, possibly, none the less
+dangerous for that.
+
+The Jook hovered about the room from chair to sofa, from sofa to
+window-seat, finding himself at each remove one degree nearer to Kitty.
+
+"He is like a tame canary-bird," whispered Koenigin. "Let it alone and it
+will come up to you after a while, but speak to it and you frighten it off
+at once."
+
+And when at length he reached Kitty's side, how beautiful was the look of
+slight surprise, not _too_ strongly marked, and the half-shy pleasure in
+the eyes which she raised to him; and then the coy little gesture with
+which she swept aside her draperies and made room for him. Half the power
+of Kitty's witcheries lay in her frank, childish manner, just dashed with
+womanly reserve.
+
+Well! the Jook was thoroughly in the vortex now: there was no doubt about
+that. Kitty might laugh as loud as she pleased, and he only looked charmed.
+Kitty might frisk like a will-o'-the wisp, and he only admired her innocent
+vivacity. Even the bits of slang and the Americanisms which occasionally
+slipped from her only struck him as original and piquant. How would it all
+end? That neither Koenigin nor I could divine, for Kitty was not one to wear
+her heart upon her sleeve. It was very little that we saw of Kitty in
+these days, for she was always wandering off somewhere, boating on the
+broad placid river or lounging about "Greenleaf's" or driving--always with
+the Jook for cavalier, and, if the excursions were long, with her father to
+play propriety. When she did come into our room, she was not our own Kitty,
+with her childish airs and merry laughter. This was a brilliant and
+volatile little woman of the world, who rattled on in the most amusing
+manner about everything--except the Jook. About him her lips never opened,
+and the most distant allusion to him on our part was sufficient to send her
+fluttering off on some pressing and suddenly remembered errand. Yet this
+reserve hardly seemed like the shyness of conscious but unacknowledged
+love. On the contrary, we both fancied--Koenigin and I--that Kitty began to
+look worried, and somehow, in watching her and the Jook, we began to be
+conscious that a sort of constraint had crept into her manner toward him.
+It could be no doubt of his feelings that caused it, for no woman could
+desire a bolder or more ardent lover than he had developed into, infected,
+no doubt, by the American atmosphere. Sometimes, too, we caught shy,
+wistful glances at the Jook from Kitty's eyes, hastily averted with an
+almost guilty look if he turned toward her.
+
+"What can it mean, Koenigin?" I said. "She looks as if she wanted to confess
+some sin, and was afraid to."
+
+"Some childish peccadillo," said Koenigin. "In spite of all her
+woman-of-the-world-ishness the child has a morbidly sensitive conscience,
+and is troubled about some nonsense that nobody else would think of twice."
+
+"Can it be that she has only been flirting, and is frightened to find how
+desperately in earnest he is?"
+
+"Possibly," replied Koenigin. "But I fancy that she is too well used to that
+phase of affairs to let it worry her. Wait a while and we shall see."
+
+We couldn't make anything of it, but even the Jook became worried at last
+by Kitty's queer behavior, and I suppose he thought he had better settle
+the matter. For one evening, when I was keeping my room with a headache, I
+was awakened from a light sleep by a sound of voices on the piazza outside
+of my window. It was some time before I was sufficiently wide awake to
+realize that the speakers were Kitty and the Jook, and when I did I was in
+a dilemma. To let them know that I was there would be to overwhelm them
+both with confusion and interrupt their conversation at a most interesting
+point, for the Jook had evidently just made his declaration. It was
+impossible for me to leave the room, for I was by no means in a costume to
+make my appearance in the public halls. On the whole, I concluded that the
+best thing I could do would be to keep still and never, by word or look, to
+let either of them know of my most involuntary eavesdropping.
+
+Kitty was speaking when I heard them first, talking in a broken, hesitating
+voice, which was very queer from our bright, fluent little Kitty: "Mr.
+Warriner, you don't know what a humbug you make me feel when you talk of
+'my innocence' and 'unconsciousness' and 'lack of vanity,' and all the rest
+of it. I have been feeling more and more what a vain, deceitful,
+hypocritical little wretch I am ever since I knew you. I have been
+expecting you to find me out every day, and I almost hoped you would."
+
+"What _do_ you mean, Miss Grey?" asked the Jook in tones of utter
+amazement, as well he might.
+
+"Oh dear! how shall I tell you?" sighed poor Kitty; and I could _feel_ her
+blushes burning through her words. Then, with a sudden rush: "Can't you
+see? I feel as if I had _stolen_ your love, for it was all gained under
+false pretences. You never would have cared for me if you had known what a
+miserable hypocrite I really was. Why, that very first day I wasn't afraid
+of the cow--she didn't even look at me--but I saw you coming,
+and--and--Helen wouldn't introduce you to me--and it just struck me it
+would be a good chance, and so I rushed up to you and--Oh! what will you
+think of me?"
+
+"Think?" said the Jook: "why, I think that while ninety-nine women out of
+a hundred are hypocrites, not one in a thousand has the courage to atone
+for it by an avowal like yours. Not that it was exactly hypocrisy, either."
+
+The poor blundering Jook! Always saying the most maddening things under the
+firm conviction that it was the most delicate compliment.
+
+Kitty was too much in earnest to mind it now, though. "Do you know," she
+went on, "that from the very first day I came into the house I was
+determined to captivate you?--that every word and every look was directed
+to that end? I have been nothing but an actress all through. I have done it
+before, hundreds and hundreds of times, but I never felt the shame of it
+until now--because--because--"
+
+"Because you never loved any one before? Is that it, Kitty?" said the Jook
+tenderly.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Kitty desperately. "How can I tell? But it's all
+Helen's fault. If she had introduced you to me in a rational way, I should
+never have gone on so. But she wouldn't, and I was piqued--"
+
+"I must exonerate Miss Helen," interrupted the Jook. "She wanted to
+introduce me, and I declined. I am sure I don't know why--English reserve,
+I suppose. I had not seen you then, you know, and some of the people here
+are such a queer lot that I rather dreaded new acquaintances."
+
+"Not Helen's fault?" wailed Kitty. "Oh, this is stolen--oh, poor Helen!"
+
+Naturally, the Jook was utterly bewildered, but as for me I sprang up into
+a sitting posture, for the meaning of Kitty's behavior had just flashed
+upon me. Absolutely, the poor little goose thought that in accepting the
+Jook, as she was evidently dying to do, she would be robbing me of my
+lover. And she never guessed at my own little romance, tucked away safely
+in the most secret corner of my heart, which put any man save one quite out
+of the question for me. If I had stopped to think, I suppose I should not
+have done what I did, but in my surprise the words came out before I
+thought: "Good gracious, Kitty my dear! do take the Jook if you want him!
+_I_ don't."
+
+I could not help laughing when I realized what I had done. A little shriek
+from Kitty and a _very_ British exclamation from the Jook, a slight scuffle
+of chairs and a sense, rather than sound, of confusion, announced the
+effect of my words.
+
+I waited for their reply, but dead silence prevailed, so I was obliged to
+speak again. "You needn't be alarmed," I said, peering cautiously through
+the chinks in the blinds, for I had approached the window by this time. "I
+didn't mean to listen, but I couldn't get out of the way, and I never
+intended to let you or any one else know that I had heard your
+conversation. I'm awfully sorry that I have disturbed you, but, as I am in
+for it now, I might as well go on."
+
+There I stopped, for I didn't exactly know what to say, and I hoped that
+one of them would "give me a lead." I could just catch a glimpse of their
+faces in the moonlight. The Jook was staring straight at the window-shutter
+behind which I lurked, and the wrath and disgust expressed in his handsome
+features set me off into a silent chuckle. I was sorry for Kitty, though.
+Her face drooped as if it were weighed down by its own blushes, and the
+long lashes quivered upon the hot cheeks.
+
+"Ah, really, Miss Helen," spoke the Jook at last, "this is a most
+unexpected pleasure. Ah, really, you know, I mean--"
+
+It was not very lucid, but it was all I needed, and I replied suavely, "Oh
+yes, I understand. You never asked me, and never had the faintest idea of
+doing so. Otherwise, we should not have been such good friends. All I want
+is to enforce the fact on Kitty's mind.--And now, Kitty, my dear, if you
+are quite satisfied on this point, I will dress and go down stairs.--Don't
+disturb yourselves, pray!" for both of them showed signs of moving. "You
+can finish your conversation to much better advantage where you are, and
+this little excitement has quite cured my headache."
+
+I wonder how in the world they ever took up the dropped stitches in that
+conversation? They did it somehow, though, for when they reappeared Kitty
+was the prettiest possible picture of shy, blushing, shamefaced happiness,
+while the Jook was fairly beaming with pride and delight. It was a case of
+true love at last: there was no doubt about that--such love as few would
+have believed that a flighty little creature like Kitty was capable of
+feeling. It was wonderful to see how quickly all her little wiles and
+coquetries fell off under its influence, just as the rosy, fluttering
+leaves of the spring fall off when the fruit pushes its way. I don't
+believe it had ever struck her before that there was anything degrading in
+this playing fast and loose with men's hearts which had been her favorite
+pastime, or in beguiling them by feigning a passion of which she had never
+felt one thrill. It was not until Love the magician had touched her heart
+that the honest and loyal little Kitty that lay at the bottom of all her
+whims and follies was developed. The very sense of unworthiness which she
+felt in view of the Jook's straightforward and manly ardor was the surest
+guarantee for the perfection of her cure.
+
+A truce to moralizing. Kitty does not need it, nor the Jook either. If he
+is not proud of the bright little American bride he is to take back with
+him to the "tight little isle" of our forefathers, why, appearances are
+"deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked."
+
+HENRIETTA H. HOLDICH.
+
+
+
+
+COMMUNISM IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+
+Nowhere in the history of the world have we any example of successful
+communism. The ancient Cretan and Lacedemonian experiments, the efforts of
+the Essenes and early Christians, the modified communities of St. Anthony
+and several orders of monks, the schemes of the Anabaptists of the
+sixteenth century, together with all the experiments of modern times, have
+proved essential failures. Setting out with ideas of perfection in the
+social state, and undertaking nothing less than the entire abolition of the
+miseries of the world, the communists of all times have lived in a
+condition the least ideal that can be imagined. The usual course of
+socialistic communities has been to start out with a great flourish, to
+quarrel and divide after a few months, and then to decrease and degenerate
+until a final dispersion by general consent ended the attempt. During the
+short existence of nearly all such communities the members have lived in
+want of the ordinary comforts of life, in dispute about their respective
+rights and duties, at law with retiring members, and battling with the
+wilds and malarias of the countries in which alone anything like practical
+communism has been usually possible. The most successful (so far as any of
+these attempts can be called successful) have been those communities which
+have been founded on a religion and which have consisted entirely of
+members of one faith. But all political communism has utterly failed, and
+the name is little more than a synonym for the most egregious blunders,
+excesses and crimes of which visionary and unpractical people can be
+guilty.
+
+The United States seem ill suited for the spread of communistic ideas,
+notwithstanding they contain almost the only socialistic communities to be
+found anywhere. Though the people are free to live in common if they
+desire, and although land and every facility are offered on easy terms for
+the realization of communism--which is not the case in Europe (and which
+is, therefore, the reason why the New World is chosen for communistic
+experiments)--yet there is felt no need of communism here. There are
+neither the political nor the social inducements for it which exist in
+Europe, and all efforts to excite an enthusiasm on the subject have
+invariably failed. Almost the only agitators are foreigners, and nearly all
+the existing communities are composed of foreigners. Of these, two only are
+political, the Icarian and the Cedar Vale, while the rest are religious.
+
+The Icarian Community in Adams county, Iowa, about two miles from Corning,
+a station on the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad, is the result of
+an effort to realize the communistic theory of M. Cabet, a French writer
+and politician of some note. It is perhaps the most just and practical of
+all communistic systems; for the reader will remember that social systems
+are as numerous in France as religious systems are in this country, and
+take much the same place in the passions and bigotries of the people of
+France, where there is but one religion, as our various sects do here,
+where there are so many. The system of M. Cabet differs from the others in
+much the same manner as our religious sects differ from one another; which
+is not of much importance to the outside world, as they all contain the one
+principle of a community of goods. M. Cabet first promulgated his system in
+the shape of a romance entitled _A Voyage to Icaria_, in which he
+represented the community at work under the most favorable circumstances
+and in a high degree of prosperity. According to his system, all goods are
+to be held in common, and all the people are to have an equal voice in the
+disposal of them. Each is to contribute of labor and capital all that he
+can for the common good, and to get all that he needs from the common fund.
+"From each according to his ability--to each according to his wants," is
+the formula of principles. The practical working of the community will
+further illustrate the system.
+
+In 1848, M. Cabet, with some three thousand of his followers, sailed from
+France for New Orleans, intending to take up land in Texas or Arkansas on
+which to establish a community, having the promise that he would soon be
+followed by ten thousand more of his disciples. After spending several
+months in reconnoitring, during which half of his followers got
+discontented and left him, he settled with about fifteen hundred at Nauvoo,
+Illinois, where they bought out the property of the Mormons, who had
+recently been driven from that place. There they commenced operations,
+establishing a saw- and grist-mill, and carrying on farming and several
+branches of domestic manufacturing. In a little while they sent out a
+branch colony to Icaria, in Adams county, Iowa, where they purchased, or
+entered under the Homestead Act, four thousand acres of land. In this place
+likewise they built a mill and went to farming and carrying on the more
+simple trades. In a little while, however, a quarrel arose in the principal
+community at Nauvoo in regard to the use and abuse of power, when, after a
+rage of passion not unlike that which they had exhibited in the Revolution
+of 1848 in France, M. Cabet, with a large minority, seceded and went to St.
+Louis, where they expected to form another and more perfect community. They
+never formed this community, however, and were soon dispersed. The
+community at Nauvoo, being now harassed with debts and with lawsuits
+growing out of the withdrawal of M. Cabet and his party, repaired to their
+branch colony at Icaria, where they have been ever since. Here they had
+likewise frequent disputes and withdrawals, often giving rise to lawsuits
+and a loss of property, until in 1866, when the writer first visited them,
+they were reduced to thirty-five members. Since that time they have picked
+up a few members, mostly old companions who had left them for individual
+life, until now they have about sixty in all. They own at present about two
+thousand acres of land, of which three hundred and fifty are under
+cultivation. They have good stock, consisting of about one hundred and
+twenty head of cattle, five hundred sheep, two hundred and fifty hogs and
+thirty horses. They still have their saw- and grist-mill, now run by steam,
+but give most of their time to farming. They preserve the family relation,
+and observe the strictest rules of chastity. Each family lives in a
+separate house, but they all eat at a common table. By an economic division
+of labor one man cooks for all these persons, another bakes, another
+attends to the dairy, another makes the shoes, another the clothes; and in
+general one man manages some special work for the whole. No one has any
+money or need of any. All purchases are made from the common purse, and
+each gets what he needs. The government is a pure democracy. The officers
+are chosen once a year by universal (male) suffrage, and consist of a
+president, secretary (and treasurer), director of agriculture and director
+of industry. They have no religion, but, like most of the European
+communists, are free-thinkers. They are highly moral, however, and much
+esteemed by their neighbors. Some of them are quite learned, and all of
+them may be pronounced decidedly heroic for the terrible privations they
+have undergone in order to realize their political principles, to which
+they are as strongly and sincerely devoted as any Christian to his
+religion.
+
+Such is a sketch of the most perfect system and most successful experiment
+of political communism in the United States--not very encouraging, it will
+be confessed. The other example of political communism is the Cedar Vale
+Community in Howard county, Kansas, which needs only to be mentioned here,
+as it has as yet no history. It was commenced in 1871, and is composed of
+Russian materialists and American spiritualists. They have a community of
+goods like the Icarians, and in general their principles are the same. They
+had only about a dozen members at last accounts. Another and similar
+community was established in 1874 in Chesterfield county, Virginia, called
+the "Social Freedom Community," its principles being enunciated as a "unity
+of interest and political, religious and social freedom;" but we cannot
+discover whether it is yet in existence, as at last accounts it had only
+two full members and eight probationers. It will be seen from these
+examples that the prospects of political communism are far from promising.
+Its principal power has always been as a sentiment, and it can be dreaded
+only as an appeal to the destitute and lawless to rise in acts of violence.
+It has been powerful in France in revolutions, riots and mobs, and in this
+country in aiding the late strikers in their work of destruction.
+
+The other existing communities are founded on some religious basis, being
+efforts on the part of their founders to secure their religious rights or
+to live with those of the same faith in closer relations. And although
+their measures have been similar in many respects to those of the political
+communists, they have resorted to them not on account of any political
+principles, but because they believed them to be commanded by Scripture or
+to grow out of some peculiarity of religious faith or duty. Most of them
+have been formed after the model of the society of the apostles, who had
+their goods in common, and because of their example. None, so far as we
+know, have ever proposed to establish communities by force or to have the
+whole people embraced in them. Held together by their peculiar religious
+principles, they have been far more successful (especially when under some
+shrewd leader whom they believed to have a spiritual authority) than when
+actuated purely by reason.
+
+Perhaps the most successful of these religious communities is that of the
+"True Inspirationists," known as the Amana Community, in Iowa,
+seventy-eight miles west of Iowa City, on the Chicago, Rock Island and
+Pacific Railroad. These are all Germans, who came to this country in 1842,
+and settled at first near Buffalo, New York, on a tract of land called
+Ebenezer, from which they are sometimes known as "Ebenezers." This tract
+comprised five thousand acres of land, including what is now a part of the
+city of Buffalo. In 1855 they moved to their present locality in Iowa. They
+pretend to be under direct inspiration, receiving from God the model and
+general orders for the direction of their community. The present head,
+both spiritual and temporal, is a woman, a sort of sibyl who negotiates the
+inspirations. Their business affairs are managed by thirteen trustees,
+chosen annually by the male members, who also choose the president. They
+are very religious, though having but little outward form. There are
+fourteen hundred and fifty members, who live in seven different towns or
+villages, which are all known by the name of Amana--East Amana, West Amana,
+etc. They have their property for the most part in common. Each family has
+a house, to which food is daily distributed. The work is done by a prudent
+division of labor, as in the Icarian community. But instead of providing
+clothing and incidentals, the community makes to each person an allowance
+for this purpose--to the men of from forty to one hundred dollars a year,
+to the women from twenty-five to thirty dollars, and to the children from
+five to ten dollars. There are public stores in the community at which the
+members can get all they need besides food, and at which also strangers can
+deal. They dress very plainly, use simple food, and are quite industrious.
+They aim to keep the men and women apart as much as possible. They sit
+apart at the tables and in church, and when divine service is dismissed the
+men remain in their ranks until the women get out of church and nearly
+home. In their games and amusements they keep apart, as well as in all
+combinations whether for business or pleasure. The boys play with boys and
+the girls with girls. They marry at twenty-four. They own at present
+twenty-five thousand acres of land, a considerable part of which is under
+cultivation. They have, in round numbers, three thousand sheep, fifteen
+hundred head of cattle, two hundred horses and twenty-five hundred hogs.
+Besides farming, they carry on two woollen-mills, four saw-mills, two
+grist-mills and a tannery. They are almost entirely self-supporting in the
+arts, working up their own products and living off the result. In medicine
+they are homoeopathists.
+
+The "Rappists" or Harmony Society at Economy, Pennsylvania, is composed of
+about one hundred members, being all that remain of a colony of six hundred
+who came from Germany in 1803. They were called Separatists or
+"Come-outers" in their own country, and much persecuted on account of their
+nonconformity with the established Church. They landed in Baltimore, and
+some of them who never found their way into the community, or who
+subsequently withdrew, settled in Maryland and Pennsylvania, where they are
+still known as a religious sect. Those who remained together purchased five
+thousand acres of land north of Pittsburg, in the valley of the
+Conoquenessing. In 1814 they moved to Posey county, Indiana, in the Wabash
+Valley, where they purchased thirty thousand acres of land, and in 1824
+they moved back again to their present locality in Pennsylvania. In 1831 a
+dissension arose among them, and a division was effected by one Bernard
+Mueller--or "Count Maximilian" as he called himself--who went off with
+one-third of the members and a large share of the property, and founded a
+new community at Phillips, ten miles off, on eight hundred acres of land,
+which, however, soon disbanded on account of internal quarrels.
+
+The peculiarity of this community is that there is no intercourse between
+the sexes of any kind. In 1807 they gave up marriage. The husbands parted
+from their wives, and have henceforth lived with them only as sisters. They
+claim to have authority for this in the words of the apostle: "This I say,
+brethren, the time is short; it remaineth that both they that have wives be
+as though they had none," etc. They teach that Adam in his perfect state
+was bi-sexual and had no need of a female, being in this respect like God;
+that subsequently, when he fell, the female part (rib, etc.) was separated
+from him and made into another person, and that when they become perfect
+through their religion the bi-sexual nature of the soul is restored.
+Christ, they claim, was also of this dual nature, and therefore never
+married. They believe that the world will soon come to an end, and that it
+is their duty to help it along by having no children, and so putting an end
+to the race as well as the planet.
+
+Their property is all held in common and managed by a council of seven,
+from whom the trustees are chosen. From four to eight live in each house,
+men and women together, who regard each other as of the same sex, and are
+never watched. Each household cooks for itself, although there is a general
+bakery, from which bread is taken around to the houses as they have need.
+The members are fond of music and flowers, but they discard dancing. Though
+Germans, they have ceased to use tobacco; which loss, it is said, the men
+feel more heavily than that of the wives. They make considerable wine and
+beer, which they drink in moderation. They are said to be worth from two
+millions to three millions of dollars, and speculate in mines, oil-wells,
+saw-mills, etc., doing very little hard work, and hiring laborers from
+without to take their places in all drudgery. They are engaged principally
+in farming and the common trades, and supply nearly everything for
+themselves. They are nearly all aged, none of them being under forty except
+some adopted children. All are Germans and use the German language.
+
+The Shakers are the oldest society of communists in the United States. The
+parent society at Mount Lebanon, New York, was established in 1792, being
+the outgrowth of a religious revival in which there were violent hysterical
+manifestations or "shakes," from which they took their name. In this
+revival one Ann Lee, known among them as "Mother Ann," was prominent. This
+woman, of English birth, emigrated to Niskayuna, New York, about seven
+miles north-west of Albany, where she pretended to speak from inspiration
+and work miracles, so that the people soon came to regard her as being
+another revelation of Christ and as having his authority. Being persecuted
+by the outside world, her followers, after her death, formed a community in
+which to live and enjoy their religion alone and: undisturbed. Their
+principles may be summed up as special revelation, spiritualism, celibacy,
+oral confession, community, non-resistance, peace, the gift of healing,
+miracles, physical health and separation from the world. Like the Rappists,
+they neither marry nor have any substitute for marriage, receiving all
+their children by adoption. They live in large families or communes,
+consisting of eighty or ninety members, in one big house, men and women
+together. Each brother is assigned to a sister, who mends his clothes,
+looks after his washing, tells him when he needs a new garment, reproves
+him when not orderly, and has a spiritual oversight over him generally.
+Though living in the same house, the sexes eat, labor and work apart. They
+keep apart and in separate ranks in their worship. They do not shake hands
+with the opposite sex, and there is rarely any scandal or gossip among
+them, so far as the outside world can learn. There are two orders, known as
+the Novitiate and the Church order, the latter having intercourse only with
+their own members in a sort of monkish seclusion, while the others treat
+with the outside world. The head of a Shaker society is a "ministry,"
+consisting of from three to four persons, male and female. The society is
+divided into families, as stated above, each family having two elders, one
+male and one female. In their worship they are drawn up in ranks and go
+through various gyrations, consisting of processions and dances, during
+which they continually hold out their hands as if to receive something. The
+Shakers are industrious, hard-working, economical and cleanly. They dress
+uniformly. Their houses are all alike. They say "yea" and "nay," although
+not "thee" and "thou," and call persons by their first names. They confine
+themselves chiefly to the useful, and use no ornaments. There are at
+present eighteen societies of Shakers in the United States, scattered
+throughout seven States. They number in all two thousand four hundred and
+fifteen persons, and own one hundred thousand acres of land. Their
+industries are similar to those of the Rappists and True Inspirationists,
+and are somewhat famed for the excellence of their products. The Shakers
+are nearly all Americans, like the Oneidans, next mentioned, and unlike all
+other communistic societies in the United States.
+
+The Perfectionists of Oneida and Wallingford are perhaps the most singular
+of all communists. They were founded by John Humphrey Noyes, who organized
+a community at Putney, Vermont, in 1846. In 1848 this was consolidated with
+others at Oneida in Madison county, New York. In 1849 a branch community
+was started at Brooklyn, New York, and in 1850 one at Wallingford,
+Connecticut, all of which have since broken up or been merged in the two
+communities of Oneida and Wallingford. Their principles are perfectionism,
+communism and free love. By "perfection" they mean freedom from sin, which
+they all claim to have, or to seek as practically attainable. They claim,
+in explaining their sense of this term, that as a man who does not drink is
+free from intemperance, and one who does not swear is free from profanity,
+so one who does not sin at all is free from sin, or morally perfect. Their
+communism is like that of the Icarians, so far as property is concerned,
+this being owned equally by all for the benefit of all as they severally
+have need; which state they claim is the state of man after the
+resurrection. But they have a community not only of goods, but also of
+wives; or, rather, they have no wives at all, but all women belong to all
+men, and all men to all women; which they assert to be the state of Nature,
+and therefore the most perfect state. They call it complex marriage instead
+of simple, and it is both polygamy and polyandry at the same time. They are
+enemies of all exclusiveness or selfishness, and hold that there should be
+no exclusiveness in money or in women or children. Their idea is to be in
+the most literal sense no respecters of persons. All women and children are
+the same to all men, and _vice versa_. A man never knows his own children,
+and the mothers, instead of raising their children themselves, give them
+over to a common nursery, somewhat after the suggestion of Plato in his
+_Republic_. If any two persons are suspected of forming special
+attachments, and so of violating the principle of equal and universal love,
+or of using their sexual freedom too liberally, they are put under
+discipline. They are very religious, their religion, however, consisting
+only in keeping free from sin. They have no sermons, ceremonies, sacraments
+or religious manifestations whatever. There are no public prayers, and no
+loud prayers at all. Their method of discipline is called "criticism," and
+consists in bringing the offender into the presence of a committee of men
+and women, who each pass their criticisms on him and allow him to confess
+or criticise himself. The least sign of worldliness or evidence of
+impropriety is enough to subject one to this ordeal. They are very careful
+about whom they admit to their community, as there are numerous rakes and
+idlers who make application on the supposition that it is a harem or
+Turkish paradise. None are admitted who are not imbued with their doctrine
+of perfection, and who do not show evidences of it in their lives. In a
+business point of view, they are comparatively successful, the original
+members having contributed over one hundred thousand dollars' worth of
+property, which has not depreciated. They engage in farming, wine-raising
+and various industries, and are known in the general markets for their
+products.
+
+The Separatists at Zoar, Ohio, about halfway between Cleveland and
+Pittsburg, are a body of Germans who fled from Wuertemberg in 1817 to escape
+religious persecution. They are mystics, followers of Jacob Boehm, Gerhard,
+Terstegen, Jung Stilling and others of that class, and considerably above
+the average of communists in intellect and culture. They were aided to
+emigrate to this country by some English Quakers, with whom there is a
+resemblance in some of their tenets. They purchased fifty-six hundred acres
+of land in Ohio, but did not at first intend to form a community, having
+been driven to that resort subsequently in order to the better realization
+of their religious principles. They now own over seven thousand acres of
+land in Ohio, besides some in Iowa. They have a woollen-factory, two
+flour-mills, a saw-mill, a planing-mill, a machine-shop, a tannery and a
+dye-house; also a hotel and store for the accommodation of their neighbors.
+They are industrious, simple in their dress and food, and very economical.
+They use neither tobacco nor pork, and are homoeopathists in medicine. In
+religion they are orthodox, with the usual latitude of mystics. They have
+no ceremonies, say "thou" and "thee," take off their hats and bow to nobody
+except God, refuse to fight or go to law, and settle their disputes by
+arbitration. At first they prohibited marriage and had their women in
+common, like the Perfectionists. In 1828, however, they commenced to break
+their rules and take wives. Now they observe the marriage state. Their
+officers are elected by the whole society, the women voting as well as the
+men.
+
+The Bethel and Aurora communities--the former in Shelby county, Missouri,
+forty-eight miles from Hannibal, and the latter in Oregon, twenty-nine
+miles south of Portland, on the Oregon and California Railroad--were
+founded in 1848 by Dr. Kiel, a Prussian mystic, who practised medicine a
+while in New York and Pittsburg, and subsequently formed a religious sect
+of which these communists are members. He was subsequently joined by some
+of "Count Maximilian's" people, who had left Rapp's colony at Economy,
+which this closely resembles except as to celibacy. He first founded the
+colony in Missouri, where he took up two thousand five hundred and sixty
+acres of land, and established the usual trades needed by farmers. In 1847
+there were the inevitable quarrel and division. In 1855 he set out to
+establish a similar community on the Pacific coast. The first settlement
+was made at Shoalwater Bay, Washington Territory, which was, however,
+subsequently abandoned for the present one at Aurora. There are now about
+four hundred members at Aurora, who own eighteen thousand acres of land,
+and have the usual shops and occupations of communists mentioned above,
+carrying on a considerable trade with their neighbors. The members of both
+communities are all either Germans or Pennsylvania Dutch, and thrive by the
+industry and economy peculiar to those people. Their government is
+parental, intended to be like God's. Kiel is the temporal and spiritual
+head. Their religion consists in practical benevolence, the forms of
+worship being Lutheran. They are thought to be exceedingly wealthy, but if
+their property were divided among them there would be less than three
+thousand dollars to each family, which, though more than the property of
+most other communities would average, is but small savings for twenty
+years. They preserve the usual family relations.
+
+The Bishop Hill Community, in Henry county, Illinois, was formed by a party
+of Swedes who came to this country in 1846 under Eric Janson, who had been
+their religious leader in the Old World, where they were greatly persecuted
+on account of their peculiar religious views. They suffered great hardships
+in effecting a first settlement, some of them going off, in the interest of
+the community, to dig gold in California, and others taking to
+stock-raising and speculating. In this they were quite successful, so that
+jobs and speculations became the peculiar work of this community. They took
+various public and private contracts; among others, one to grade a large
+portion of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad and to build some of
+its bridges. In 1859 they owned ten thousand acres of good land, and had
+the finest cattle in the State. In 1859, however, the young people became
+discontented and wished to dissolve the community. They divided the
+property in 1860, when one faction continued the community with its share.
+In 1861 this party also broke up, separating into three divisions. In 1862
+these again divided the property after numerous lawsuits. A small fraction,
+I believe, still continues a community on the ruins. In this community the
+families lived separately, but ate all together. They had no president or
+single head, the business being transacted by a board of trustees. Their
+religion was their principal concern.
+
+Such are the strictly communistic societies in the United States. It will
+be seen that they are each of such very peculiar views that they are
+specially fitted by their very oddity for a life in common, and specially
+disqualified from the same cause to extend or embrace others; for while
+their community of oddity makes them, by a necessarily strong sympathy, fit
+associates to be together, it separates them by an impassable gulf from the
+appreciation and sympathy of the rest of mankind, who are interested only
+in the ordinary common-sense concerns of life.
+
+Besides these, there are several other colonies which, though not
+communistic, have grown out of an attempt to solve some of the questions
+raised by socialism. They are for the most part co-operative. The following
+are the principal: The Anaheim colony in California, thirty-six miles from
+Los Angelos, which was formed by a large number of Germans in 1857, who
+banded together and purchased a large tract of land, on which they
+successfully cultivate the vine in large quantities. The property is held
+and worked all together, but the interests are separate, and will be
+divided in due time. Vineland, New Jersey, on the railroad between
+Philadelphia and Cape May, is another. It was purchased and laid out by
+Charles K. Landis in 1861 as a private speculation, and to draw the
+overcrowded population of Philadelphia into the country, where the people
+could all have comfortable homes and support themselves by their own labor.
+Some fifty thousand acres of land were purchased, and sold at a low rate
+and on long time to actual settlers and improvers. As a result, some twelve
+thousand people have been drawn thither, who cultivate all this tract and
+work numerous industries besides. No liquors are allowed to be sold in the
+place, so that the population is exceptionally moral as well as
+industrious, and offers a model example of low rates and good government. A
+successful colony exists also at Prairie Home in Franklin county, Kansas,
+which was founded by a Frenchman, Monsieur E.V. Boissiere. It is designed
+to be an association and co-operation based on attractive industry; a large
+number of persons contributing their capital and labor under stringent
+laws, the proceeds to be divided among them whenever a majority shall so
+desire. I might mention other associations of this kind, which are, in
+fact, however, only a variety of partnership or corporation.
+
+It strikes me, however, that this is the only practical remedy for the
+evils which are aimed at by the communists, as far as they are remedial by
+social means. If a number of working people, with the capital which their
+small savings will amount to (which is always large enough for any ordinary
+business if there be any considerable number of them), can be induced to
+organize themselves under competent leaders, and work for a few years
+together as faithfully as they ordinarily do for employers, they might
+realize considerable results, and get the advantage of their own work
+instead of enriching capitalists. But the difficulty is, that this class
+have not, as a rule, learned either to manage great enterprises or to
+submit to those who are wisest among them, but break up in disorder and
+divisions when their individual preferences are crossed. The first lesson
+that a man must learn who proposes to do anything in common with others
+(and the more so if there be many of them) is to submit and forbear. With a
+little schooling our people ought, to a greater extent than at present, to
+be able to co-operate in large numbers in firms and corporations where the
+members and stockholders shall themselves do all the work and receive all
+the profits, and so avoid the two extremes of making profits for
+capitalists and paying their earnings to officers and directors.
+
+AUSTIN BIERBOWER.
+
+
+
+
+OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
+
+
+NOTES FROM MOSCOW.
+
+JUNE 1 (May 20, Russian style), 1877.
+
+This diversity in the matter of dates is unpleasantly perplexing at times.
+With every sensation of interest and pleasure I set myself about the task
+of describing, I must at once begin to reckon. Twelve days' difference!
+Yes, I have already grasped that fact, but then in which direction must the
+deduction begin?--backward or forward? Such is the question that instantly
+arises, and if we are at the fag end of one month and the beginning of
+another, the amount of reckoning involved seems somewhat inadequate to the
+occasion. The Russian clergy, it is said--those, at any rate, of the lowest
+class, designated as "white priests," many of them peasants by birth and
+marvellously illiterate--have ever been averse to any change being made in
+the calendar, in order that their seasons of fasting and feasting may not
+be disturbed.
+
+_Apropos_ of priests and priesthood. Whilst quietly at work yesterday
+morning my attention was suddenly called off, first by a hurried
+exclamation, and then the inharmonious--ah, how utterly
+discordant!--ding-donging of church-bells. "Listen!" fell upon my ear: "one
+of the secular priests belonging to St. Gregory's church died two days ago,
+and is to be buried this morning. They are still saying masses over his
+body, the church is packed, and it is a sight such as you may possibly not
+have an opportunity of again witnessing." In half an hour we were within
+the church-walls. The place was already thronged, and the air close almost
+to suffocation. Never can one forget that peculiar heat, the sort of
+indescribable vapor, that arose, and the perspiration that streamed down
+the faces of all present, each of whom, from the oldest to the youngest,
+carried a lighted candle. After many vigorous efforts, and occasional
+collisions with the flaring tapers, the wax or tallow dropping at intervals
+upon our cloaks, we found ourselves at last in the centre of the edifice,
+immediately behind a dozen or more officiating priests clad in magnificent
+robes, before whom lay their late confrere reposing in his coffin, and
+dressed, according to custom, in his ecclesiastical robes. Tall lighted
+candles draped with crape surrounded him, and the solemn chant had been
+going on around him ever since life had become extinct. The dead in Russia
+are never left alone or in the dark. Relays of singing priests take the
+places of those who are weary, and friends keep watch in an adjoining room.
+The Russian temperament inclines to the strongest manifestation of the
+inmost feelings, and the method here of mourning for the dead is
+exceptionally demonstrative. The corpse of the old priest lay surrounded by
+what was of bright colors or purest white, the coffin being of the
+last-mentioned hue. Black was utterly proscribed. The face and hands were
+half buried in a lacy texture, whilst on the brow was placed a label,
+"fillet-fashion," on which was written "The Thrice Holy," or
+_Trisagion_--"O Holy God! O Holy Mighty! O Holy Immortal! have mercy upon
+us!"
+
+Chant after chant ascended for the repose of his soul. The deacon's deep
+bass voice rose ever and anon in leading fashion, the other voices
+following suit. There was of course no instrumental music. This Russian
+singing is curiously unique--of a character wholly different from any heard
+elsewhere. It is weird in the extreme, and, if the expression be
+permissible, gypsy-like. The deacons' voices are of wonderful capability,
+the popular belief being that they are specially chosen on account of this
+peculiar power. At last there came a pause. Not only the priests' and
+deacons' voices, but those of the chanting men and boys--alike unsurpliced
+and uncassocked, lacking, therefore, much of the attraction offered by a
+service in the Western Catholic Church--had all at once ceased to be
+heard. All were now pressing forward to kiss the dead priest--his
+fellow-priests first, and then, duly in order, all his relations and
+friends. "The last kiss" it is termed--a practice, it would seem, derived
+from the heathen custom, of which we find such frequent mention. None, if
+possible, omit the performance of this duty, all seeking to obtain the
+blessing or benefit, supposed to be thereby conferred. Some, however, are
+obliged to content themselves with merely kissing the corners of the
+coffin.
+
+Many of the numerous _stichera_, as they are termed--poetically-worded
+prose effusions--made use of in the course of the service are curiously
+quaint. I quote two or three, of which I have since procured a translation:
+"Come, my brethren, let us give our last kiss, our last farewell, to our
+deceased brother. He hath now forsaken his kindred and approacheth the
+grave, no longer mindful of vanity or the cares of the world. Where are now
+his kindred and friends? Behold, we are now separated! Approach! embrace
+him who lately was one of yourselves."--"Where now is the graceful form?
+Where is youth? Where is the brightness of the eye? where the beauty of the
+complexion? Closed are the eyes, the feet bound, the hands at rest: extinct
+is the sense of hearing, and the tongue locked up in silence."
+
+The words succeeding these are supposed to emanate from the lips of the
+dead, lying mute before the eyes of all present: "Brethren, friends,
+kinsmen and acquaintance, view me here lying speechless, breathless, and
+lament. But yesterday we conversed together. Come near, all who are bound
+to me by affection, and with a last embrace pronounce the last farewell. No
+longer shall I sojourn among you, no longer bear part in your discourse.
+Pray earnestly that I be received into the Light of life."
+
+The absolution having been pronounced by the priest, a paper is placed in
+the dead man's hand--"The Prayer, Hope and Confession of a faithful
+Christian soul." This is accompanied by another prayer containing the
+written words of absolution. This custom has given rise to the belief in
+the minds of many foreigners that such missives are presented in the light
+of passports to a better world; but the idea seems to be as erroneous as it
+is absurd. Moreover, I believe that, strictly speaking, the custom is one
+of national origin, and that the Church has had nothing to do with its
+adoption.
+
+All the lighted tapers having been taken away by one of the attendants, the
+coffin with its gilded ornaments was removed slowly from its resting-place,
+and placed upon an enormous open bier or hearse, extensively mounted and
+heavily ornamented with white watered silk, purple and gilt draperies, a
+gilt crown surmounting all. The base of the ponderous vehicle was alone
+permitted to boast a fringe of deep black cloth--as if, however, for the
+sole purpose of hiding the wheels. The six horses, three abreast, were also
+enveloped in black cloth drapery touching the ground on either side. Right
+and left of the coffin itself, and mounted therefore considerably aloft,
+stood two yellow _stoicharioned_ (or robed) deacons, wearing the
+_epimanikia_ and _orarion_--the former being a portion of the priestly
+dress used for covering the arms, and signifying the thongs with which the
+hands of Christ were bound; the latter a stole worn over the left shoulder.
+The head of each deacon was adorned with long waving hair, and each carried
+a censer in his hand. They faced each other, keeping watch together over
+the dead. A procession of priests, duly robed, began to move, preceded by
+censer-bearers and singing men and boys.
+
+The point whence the procession started--Mala Greuzin, situated at the
+extreme east end of Moscow--lay several miles away from the cemetery for
+which they were all _en route;_ and this veritably ancient Asiatic city had
+to be traversed at an angle in this solemn fashion, seventy or eighty
+carriages following. From the beginning to the end of the prescribed route
+Muscovites lined the road on either side, and it is fair to add that I
+never beheld more respect shown even to royalty itself. All was quietness,
+the general expression of sympathy and respect being permitted to find vent
+only in excessive gesticulation and genuflection. Not a head remained
+covered, not a single person by whom the procession passed permitted it to
+do so without crossing himself several times from forehead to chest and
+from shoulder to shoulder.
+
+At the first church which the procession reached, the bells of which had
+begun to toll--clash rather--long before it came in sight, the entire party
+halted. A bell was rung by one of those in advance, and then all waited.
+The priests and their various acolytes clustered reverently by the hearse,
+the followers and spectators standing at a respectful distance, but
+nevertheless taking part in the service. After first incensing the hearse,
+themselves and all around, further prayers were said and chanted: then a
+signal was given and all moved on again, only, however, to again pause on
+the route, for at every church we passed--and we must have encountered at
+least thirty or forty, if not more, seeing that such sacred edifices rise
+upon one's view in Moscow at wellnigh every three or four minutes'
+space--the ceremony was repeated. No sooner had one set of bells ceased to
+sound in our ears than another took its place, and again all halted, and
+then again all marched onward. Every window as the cortege passed along was
+thrown open, and figures bent forward ever and anon, enacting their wonted
+part in the pageant. And the pageant, be it remembered, was, after all,
+only one of frequent occurrence.
+
+Only the week before I had had the privilege of watching this identical old
+priest baptize the child of one of the most ancient nobles here, the
+ceremony being performed not in a church, but at the nobleman's house. One
+godfather and one godmother are all that are required, the latter of whom
+holds the infant. On the godmother also a large share of duty devolves,
+there being certain gifts which she is bound by national custom to offer
+for acceptance on the occasion. Often, therefore, the duty of selecting a
+female sponsor becomes a somewhat invidious one. A handsome dress to the
+mother, no matter in what rank of life; a delicate lace cap to the main
+object of the occasion; a lace chemise for the same highly-honored small
+individual; and an elaborate silk pocket handkerchief to the officiating
+priest,--these, when of the best quality, and they are invariably so, mount
+up somewhat as regards price, seeing that everything is marvellously dear
+here in the matter of dress. The godfather, standing immediately in front
+of the large font brought specially for the purpose from the adjacent
+church, and at the right hand of his fellow-sponsor, simply presents a
+small golden cross, to be worn, it is supposed, ever afterward. Immediately
+behind the font, and facing the entire audience--for a large circle of
+friends had been invited to witness the ceremony--was placed the "holy
+picture" of the household, without which in Russia no homestead, whether
+belonging to rich or poor, is considered complete, and before which a
+lighted oil lamp ever stands burning--a "picture of God," as the Russian
+children are taught from their earliest years to call it. Before this the
+priests bowed on entering.
+
+The mode of baptism was immersion, after several exorcisms had been read
+and the priest had thrice blown in the infant's face, signing him, also
+thrice, on the forehead and breast. Three tall lighted candles were affixed
+to the font, and others were held by the god-parents, except when they
+marched round the font in procession three times during "the chrism," when
+the candles were laid down. The chrism consists in anointing the infant's
+forehead, breast, shoulders and middle of the back with holy oil, after
+which comes the service, when the forehead, eyes, nostrils, mouth, ears,
+breast, hands and feet are again anointed, but this time with the holy
+unction prepared once a year, on Monday in Holy Week, within the walls of
+the Kremlin, and consecrated by the metropolitan in the cathedral of the
+Annunciation on Holy Thursday. Then comes the concluding act, when the
+priest cuts off a small portion of the child's hair in four different
+places on the crown of the head, encloses it in a morsel of wax and throws
+it into the font, as a sort of first-fruits of that which has been
+consecrated.
+
+S.E.
+
+
+A DAY AT THE PARIS CONSERVATOIRE.
+
+It was ten o'clock in the morning when we drove up to the door of the
+world-famous institution, but, early as it was, an animated throng already
+filled the wide marble-paved entrance-hall--former pupils in elegant
+attire; girl aspirants for future honors, accompanied by the inevitable
+mamma with the invariable little hand-bag; young men and old; celebrated
+dramatists and well-known actors, visitors, critics, etc.--all passing to
+and fro or engaged in conversation while awaiting the hour for taking their
+seats. Passing through these, we ascend a narrow staircase that gives one
+good hopes of a martyr's death should the theatre chance to catch fire, and
+we instal ourselves in a narrow and by no means comfortable box in the
+dress-circle. The theatre of the Conservatoire, though not very large, is
+very elegantly and artistically decorated in the Pompeian style, the stage
+being set with a single "box scene," as it is technically called, which is
+never changed, as plays are never acted there. Here take place the
+far-famed concerts du Conservatoire, for which tickets are as hard to
+obtain as are invitations to the entertainments of a duchess, all the seats
+being owned by private individuals. But what we are now here to witness is
+the competition in dramatic declamation, tragic and comic. The jury occupy
+a box in the centre of the dress-circle and opposite to the stage. This
+terrifying tribunal is enough to try the nerves of the stoutest aspirant
+for dramatic honors, comprising as it does among its members such powers in
+the land as Legouve, Camilla-Doucet, Alexandre Dumas, the directors of the
+Comedie Francaise and the Odeon, and the great actors Got and Delaunay. An
+elderly gentleman comes forward on the stage and reads from a printed paper
+the name of each competitor and those of his or her assistants, and that of
+the play from which the scene that is to be represented is chosen. Each
+pupil selects a scene, and the persons who in French technical parlance are
+to "give the reply" (_i.e._ to take the other characters in the scene) are
+chosen from among the ranks of the pupil's fellow-competitors. Lots are
+drawn to decide the place that each one is to occupy on the programme, the
+first place and the last being considered the least desirable. Printed
+bills are distributed among the audience giving a list of the competitors,
+with the names of the plays from which they have chosen scenes, and
+(horrible innovation for the lady pupils!) the age of each one as well.
+
+The competition is opened by M. Levanz, a young man of thirty, who took a
+second prize last year, and who has chosen the closet-scene from _Hamlet_
+(the translation of the elder Dumas) as his _cheval de bataille_. He has a
+marked Germanic countenance, decidedly the reverse of handsome, yet mobile
+and expressive: his voice is good, his figure tall and manly. He has
+evidently seen Rossi in Hamlet, and models his conception of the character
+on that grand impersonation. Next comes M. Bregaint in a scene from
+_Andromaque:_ he is so bad, so _very_ bad, that the audience are moved to
+sudden outbursts of hilarity by his grand tragic points. He is succeeded by
+a boy of sixteen, tall and graceful, with a fine tragic face of the heroic
+Kemble mould, and great blue-gray eyes that dilate or contract beneath the
+impulses of the moment--a born actor from head to foot. He fairly thrills
+the audience in the great scene of the duke de Nemours from _Louis XI_.
+This youth, M. Guitry, is undoubtedly, if his life be spared, the coming
+tragedian of the French stage. Then we have the first one of the lady
+competitors, Mademoiselle Edet, a tall, awkward girl of eighteen, with a
+flat face and Chinese-like features, dressed up in a gown of cream-yellow
+foulard trimmed with wide fringe and made with a loose jacket, whereon the
+fringes wave wildly in the air as she flings her arms around in the tragic
+love-making of Phedre. Two or three others of moderate merit succeed, and
+then comes Mademoiselle Jullien, who gives the great scene of Roxane in
+_Bajazet_ with so much intelligence of intonation and grace of gesture that
+the audience are moved to sudden applause. She is rather too short and of
+too delicate a physique for tragedy, but her face is expressive, her eyes
+fine, and there are intellect and talent in every tone and movement. She is
+nearly twenty-nine years of age, so has not much time to waste if she is to
+make her mark in her profession. Last on the list of tragic aspirants comes
+a gentleman of thirty-one, M. Aubert, who goes through a scene from
+_Hamlet_ in a very tolerable manner. He was in the army, was doing well and
+was rising in grade when, seized by the theatrical mania, he relinquished
+his profession and turned his attention to the stage. Thus far, he has
+proved, practically speaking, a failure: he has won no prizes, and no
+manager will engage him. This is his last chance, as his age will prevent
+him, by the rules of the Conservatoire, from taking part in any future
+competition.
+
+The tragedy concours ended, a recess of an hour is proclaimed, and there is
+a rush to the refreshment-tables and a great consumption of sandwiches and
+cakes, of coffee and water (known as "mazagran") and of _vin ordinaire_.
+Under that vestibule pass and repass the literary luminaries of modern
+France. Here is Henri de Bornier, the author of _La Fille de Roland_, a
+quiet, earnest-looking gentleman, with clear luminous eyes and the smallest
+hands imaginable. Here comes Francisque Sarcey, the greatest dramatic
+critic of France and one of the most noted of her Republican journalists,
+broad-shouldered, black-eyed and stalwart-looking. Yonder stand a group of
+Academicians--Legouve, Doucet, Dumas--in earnest conversation with Edouard
+Thierry, the librarian of the Arsenal. The handsome, delicate,
+aristocratic-looking gentleman who joins the group is M. Perrin, the
+director of the Comedie Francaise, the most accomplished and intelligent
+theatrical manager in France. There is an elderly, reserved-looking
+gentleman beside him who looks like a solemn _savant_ out on a holiday. It
+takes more than one glance for us to recognize in him the most accomplished
+light comedian of our day, that embodiment of grace, vivacity, sparkling
+wit and unfading youth, who is known to the boards of the Comedie Francaise
+by the name of Delaunay. There are other minor luminaries, too numerous to
+mention.
+
+We go up stairs and resume our seats, and the competition of comedy is
+begun. Scene succeeds to scene and competitor to competitor: the day wears
+on, and flitting clouds from time to time obscure the dome, bringing out
+the glare of the footlights that have been burning all day in a singularly
+effective manner. Of the nineteen competitors, the deepest impression is
+made by M. Barral, who plays a scene from _L'Avare_ magnificently; by
+Mademoiselle Carriere, who reveals herself as a sparkling and intelligent
+soubrette; and by Mademoiselle Sisos, a genuine _comedienne_, only sixteen
+years of age and as pretty as a peach. It is six o'clock when the last
+competitor has said his say, and then the jury retire to deliberate
+respecting the awards. What a flutter there must be among the young things
+whose future destiny is now swaying in the balance, for success means
+fortune, and failure a disheartening postponement, and to the elder ones
+downright and disastrous ruin of all their hopes! Half an hour passes, and
+then, after what seems a weary period of suspense, the box-door is thrown
+open and the jury resume their seats. Ambroise Thomas, the president of the
+Conservatoire, strikes his bell and a dead silence ensues. In a full
+sonorous voice he begins: "Concours of tragedy, men's class. No
+prizes.--Usher, summon M. Guitry." The gifted boy comes forward to the
+footlights. "M. Guitry, the jury have awarded to you a _premier accessit_."
+He bows and retires amid the hearty applause of the audience. "Women's
+class.--Usher, call Mademoiselle Jullien." She comes out pale and agitated,
+the slight form quivering like a wind-swept flower in her robes of creamy
+cashmere. Is it the Odeon that awaits her--the second prize? for in her
+modesty she had only hoped for a _premier accessit._ "Mademoiselle Jullien,
+the jury have awarded to you the first prize." The first prize! Those words
+mean to her an assured career, a brilliant future, the doors of the Comedie
+Francaise flung wide open to receive her. She falters, trembles, bows
+profoundly, and goes off in a very passion of hysterical weeping. Then come
+the comedy awards. M. Barral gets a first prize, as is his just due, as
+does also Mademoiselle Carriere. "Usher, call Mademoiselle Sisos." She
+comes forward, her great brown eyes dilated with excitement, her cheeks
+burning like two red roses, a mass of faded white roses clinging amid the
+rumpled gold of her hair--a very bewitching picture of childish grace and
+beauty. "Mademoiselle Sisos, the jury have awarded to you a second prize."
+She laughs and blushes, and brings her hands together with a childlike
+gesture of delight. "Oh, merci!" she cries, and drops a courtesy, and then
+away she goes--happy little creature, thus consecrated artiste at sixteen!
+The other awards are given, the jury leave their box, and the audience
+disperse. The friends of the competitors crowd around the stage-door, and
+each of the successful ones is seized by the hand and congratulated and
+embraced, the youthful Guitry being especially surrounded. Two or three
+more years of study will land this gifted boy on the boards of the Comedie
+Francaise. The queen of the day, Mademoiselle Jullien, has stolen away
+overcome by excess of emotion, which, though joyful, is still exhausting to
+her delicate frame. Finally, everybody retires, the doors are closed, and
+the long, exciting _seance_ has come to an end at last.
+
+L.H.H.
+
+
+BRIGHAM YOUNG AND MORMONISM.
+
+Brigham Young's career is a valuable commentary on that of Mohammed, and
+will hereafter be a standard citation with explorers of the natural history
+of religions. It might be more proper to go back of Young, and adhere to
+Joe Smith as the figure-head of the Mormon dispensation. How Smith would
+have turned out had he lived, and whether he would have made as much of
+Utah as the man upon whose shoulders his mantle fell, is not easy to say;
+but his was a less robust character, the enthusiast in him too far
+obscuring the organizer and commander. The Church is the thing to look at,
+rather than its leaders, when we consider duration--the soil rather than
+the plough. Why has Mohammed's creation lasted longer and spread wider than
+that of Charlemagne or Tamerlane? And is Smith's to have the like fortune,
+or to die out like those of Muenster and Joanna Southcote?
+
+The Mormon "revelation" has been before the world more than forty years. In
+twenty-two years from his first vision Mohammed had reduced all Arabia
+under his religious and political sway. Young's dominions have not expanded
+territorially. His faith cannot be said to exist outside of Utah. His
+converts are compelled to go thither for the exercise of their religion.
+Salt Lake City is not a Mecca, the goal of a passing pilgrimage, but the
+one and only possible abiding-place of those who profess its creed. A
+system thus localized is in danger of being stifled. Especially is this the
+case when its seat is exposed to invasion by a swelling current of
+non-sympathizers or open enemies. These may be repelled or prevented from
+improving their foothold by the firmness, unity and numerical predominance
+of the invaded. So it has happened at Salt Lake. The Mormons hold all the
+serviceable soil, and it is difficult for the "Gentiles" to effect a
+lodgment. Until they do, they must occupy, even in their own eyes, somewhat
+the position of adventurers. They cannot hope to secure the respect of the
+industrious sectaries who own and till the soil, and who are taught to
+count them aliens and persecutors. Irrigation is here the only means of
+successful agriculture. It involves great outlay of capital and labor, and
+creates great fixedness of tenure. Newcomers are thus additionally
+discouraged.
+
+Thus entrenched in a well-provisioned citadel, welcoming all the new levies
+it can win, and amply able to provide for them, Mormonism bids fair to
+make a prolonged stand. To emerge from a defensive position and strike for
+unlimited sway is what it cannot, to judge by all precedents, expect. It
+will be compelled, in fact, to lighten itself of some dead weights in order
+to maintain its actual situation. Polygamy must go, and the absolute power
+of the priesthood be modified. With some such adaptations it may continue a
+reality for generations to come. And time is a great sanctifier. A creed
+that lives for one or two centuries is by so much the more likely to live
+longer. Youth is the critical period with religions, as with animals and
+plants and nations. Through that period Mormonism is passing with
+flattering success. That such a lusty juvenile will, by favor of the
+mellowing effect imposed on all creeds by early years of toil, trouble and
+experience, reach a middle age of presentable decency, is not a more
+unlikely supposition than the worthy Vermont clergyman would have
+pronounced, half a century ago, the idea that his _jeu d'esprit_ would
+become the Bible of sixty thousand industrious, well-ordered
+English-speaking people in the heart of the American continent.
+
+E.C.B.
+
+
+THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN IN INDIA.
+
+According to a report sent to our Commissioner of Education at Washington
+four years ago, there were then in India one thousand girls' schools
+supported by the government and some five hundred missionary schools
+devoted to female education. Besides these, there has sprung up during the
+last few years a new field for the women-educators in that country. This is
+the teaching of women in their homes. It is called _zenana-work._ The
+_zenana_ is the women's apartment in the house--the _harem_ of the Turks.
+Women have been sent from England and from America for this special object,
+and their labors are meeting with encouraging success. They are constantly
+gaining admission to new families, which from caste or other causes are
+opposed to sending their young women to the regular schools. Some of the
+zenana-teachers are regularly-educated physicians.
+
+For the government schools each province has a director of public
+instruction, with inspectors of divisions and subdivisions. These directors
+are "gentlemen of high qualification and well paid." It is a notable fact
+that in one of the provinces the office of director is filled by a
+Christian woman--a foreigner no doubt, though the report does not say.
+
+At Dehra, at the foot of the Himalaya Mountains, there is a high school for
+girls organized on the plan of the Mount Holyoke Seminary. Here English is
+spoken, and the pupils are carried through a course of training that may
+justly be termed _high_. One of the pupils of this school has lately been
+appointed by the government to go to England and qualify herself as a
+physician, under a contract to return and serve the government by taking
+charge of a hospital and college for training young women as midwives and
+nurses.
+
+Of course, in a country containing a population of over one hundred and
+fifty-one millions, one thousand public schools for girls, supplemented as
+these are by missionary schools of many denominations, are inadequate to
+meet the needs of the people. There is an increasing demand in all the
+provinces for schools and colleges; and the native young men especially are
+eagerly seeking the educational advantages of the colleges and
+universities, because they know that these are a sure road to preferment.
+"The government takes care to give employment to those who wish it."
+
+The difficulties in the way of female education in India are well expressed
+in a late letter from one of the most distinguished native reformers, Baboo
+Keshub Chunder Sen of Calcutta. "No words of mine," he says, "would convey
+to you an adequate idea of the great obstacles which the social and
+religious condition of the Hindoo community presents in the way of female
+education and advancement. In a country where superstition and caste
+prejudices prevail to an alarming extent, where widows are cruelly
+persecuted and prevented from remarrying, where high-caste Hindoos are
+allowed to marry as many wives as they like without undertaking the
+responsibility of protecting them, and where little girls marry at a most
+tender age and sacrifice all prospects of healthy physical and mental
+development, it will take centuries before any solid and extensive reform
+is achieved."
+
+Until recently, scarcely one woman in ten thousand learned to read or
+acquired any of the accomplishments common to women of Christian countries.
+Occasionally, women of vicious lives in cities, having leisure, became
+quite learned, and this made learning a shame for women of irreproachable
+reputation. Moreover, Hindoo husbands declared, and believed, that if you
+taught a woman to read she would be sure in time to have illicit relations
+with some one. Ignorance was innocence, the safeguard of both rank and
+chastity.
+
+The missionaries, who were the first to attempt the amelioration of the
+people, had to commence with the lowest castes or classes, those having
+nothing to lose; and even then the teachers had to pay the girls a small
+copper coin daily for attending school. Even the government schools in some
+places pay the girls for attending, but they are much more popular than the
+missionary schools, because, according to the Rev. Joseph Warren in the
+report mentioned, the parents are not afraid that their girls will become
+Christians by attending them; and he adds that the government teachers and
+books are "all positively heathen or quite destitute of all religion." In
+some parts of the country the government schools secure the attendance of
+high-caste girls by allowing them to be placed behind a curtain, and thus
+screened from the eyes of the male teacher or inspector, as all the women
+of such classes are screened from male visitors. Even the physician sees
+only a hand protruded from under a curtain, and by the touch of this, with
+a few unsatisfactory answers to his questions, he is supposed to be able to
+know what the malady is, and how to prescribe for it.
+
+M.H.
+
+
+
+
+LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
+
+
+Birds and Poets: with other Papers. By John Burroughs. New York: Hurd &
+Houghton.
+
+A duodecimo that discourses on equal terms of Emerson and the chickadee,
+and unites Carlyle and the author's cow with a cement or filling-in
+indescribable in variety and in the comminution of materials, need not be
+held to strict account in the matter of neatness or accuracy of title. The
+closing article, headed "The Flight of the Eagle," is the most remarkable
+of the collection. Who would suspect, under such a heading, an elaborate
+eulogy of Walt Whitman? The writer is obviously more at home among the
+song-birds than among the Raptores, unless he be the discoverer of some new
+species of eagle characterized by traits very unlike those of other members
+of the genus. It were to be wished that he had left out the disquisition on
+Whitman, for it is a jarring chord in his little orchestra of lyric and
+ornithologic song. He might have kept it by him till the longer growing of
+his critical beard, and then, if still a devotee at that singular shrine,
+have expanded it into a volume or two explanatory of the imagination,
+animus and metre of his favorite bard.
+
+The feathered warblers have always been popular with the featherless, who
+are indebted to them for no end of similes and suggestions. What would
+poetry be without the skylark, the nightingale, the dove and the eagle? It
+is far yet from having exhausted them. It cannot be said to have approached
+them in the right way--on the most eloquent and interesting side. It
+forgets that each species of bird stands by itself, and has its special
+life and history as truly as man. We counted thirty-nine kinds in a grove
+the centre whereof was our delightful abode for two-thirds of the past
+summer, each endowed with its separate outfit of language, ways and means
+of living, tastes and political and social notions. In each, moreover,
+individualism showed itself--if not to our apprehension as articulately,
+yet as indubitably, as among the race which considers them to have been all
+created for its amusement and advantage. It does not take long, superficial
+as is our acquaintance with their vernacular and the workings of their
+little brains, to single out particular specimens, and perceive that no two
+"birds of a feather" are exactly alike. A particular robin will rule the
+roost, and assert successfully for his mate the choice of resting-places
+above competing redbreasts. It is a particular catbird, identified, it may
+be, by a missing feather in his tail, that heads the foray on our
+strawberries and cherries. We recognize afar off either of the pair of
+"flickers," or yellow-shafted woodpeckers, which have set up their penates
+in the heart of the left-hand garden gatepost. The wren whose modest
+tabernacle occupies the top of the porch pilaster we have little difficulty
+in "spotting" when we meet her in a joint stroll along the lawn-fence. Her
+ways are not as the ways of other wrens. She has a somewhat different style
+of diving into the ivy and exploring the syringa. A new generation of doves
+has grown up since the lilacs were in bloom, and nothing is easier than to
+distinguish the old and young of the two or three separate families till
+all leave the grass and the gravel together and hie to the stubble-fields
+beyond our ken. Of the one mocking bird who made night hideous by his
+masterly imitations of the screaking of a wheel-barrow (regreased at an
+early period in self-defence) and the wheezy bark of Beppo, the
+superannuated St. Bernard, there could of course be no doubt. There was
+none of his kind to compare him with--not even a mate, for "sexual
+selection" could not possibly operate in face of so inharmonious a
+love-song. His isolation had its parallel in the one white guinea-fowl that
+haunted the shrubbery like a ghost, much more silent and placid than it
+would have been in society, and its antitype in the hennery, where
+individuality of course ran riot among the Brahmas, Dominicas and
+Hamburgs--hens that would and would not lay, that would and would not set,
+that would and would not scratch up seeds, and presented generally as great
+a variety of vagaries as of feathers. So, when we turned our back at last
+on lovely Boscobel, itself shut out, as the common phrase goes, "from the
+world" by serried ramparts of maple, elm, acacia and catalpa, we knew well
+that that enceinte of leafage enclosed many little worlds of its
+own--winged microcosms, epicycles of the grand cycle of dateless life which
+man in his humility assumes to be merely a subsidiary appendage of his own
+orbit.
+
+Birds should be studied seriously. The naturalists will tell us more about
+them, and interest us more, than the poets. Mr. Bryant makes fun of the
+bobolink, and turns into an aimless whistle the solemn oration on domestic
+matters uttered by that small but energetic American to his mate. The
+waterfowl he treats more gravely and respectfully, but he still makes it
+only a part of the landscape and the theme, without ascribing any
+intelligent purpose to its flight. The bird, proceeding steadily and calmly
+to its business, may well have confounded its versifier with his fellow the
+fowler, and looked upon him, too, as regretting only that it was out of
+gunshot. Audubon or Wilson would have noted more sensibly the floating
+figure, far above "falling dew," and the earth-bound mortal who was
+evidently afraid of rheumatics and calculating whether he could walk home
+before dark. The bird, they would have been perfectly aware, was neither
+"wandering" nor "lost," and no more in need of the special interposition of
+a protecting Providence than they or Mr. Bryant. They would infer its
+motives, its point of departure and its destination, the character of the
+friends it left behind or sought--whether it was carrying out a plan of
+the day or bound on an expedition covering half the year. Its species would
+have been plain to them at half a glance, and its scientific name would
+have replaced the vague designation of "waterfowl." Its life, habits and
+habitat winter and summer, would have unrolled before them, and the
+dogs-eared and rain-stained note-book sprung open for a new entry. The
+poet, on the other hand, got happily home without injury to his health (for
+he is still hale half a century after the fact), lit the gas, nibbed the
+quill pen of the day, and sent down to us what must be confessed a
+pleasanter memorandum than we should have had from the forest-students.
+These, brave and ardent fellows! have long been asleep beneath the birds.
+
+Mr. Burroughs is half poet, half naturalist in his way of looking at
+Nature, and steers clear of the poetic vagueness in regard to species. A
+passing description of the brown thrush as "skulking" among the bushes hits
+that bird to the life. Some remarks on page 119 would seem to be applied by
+a slip of the pen to the crow blackbird, instead of the cowbird, which has
+always enjoyed the distinction of being the only American species that
+disposes of its offspring after the fashion of the cuckoo and Jean Jacques
+Rousseau. The chapter on Emerson contains some acute remarks, but the
+warmest tribute to Emerson is the book itself, in which that writer's
+influence is everywhere patent both in style and thought. Mr. Burroughs has
+a happy facility of expression, and could well afford by this time to
+discard the Emersonian props and stand on his own merits.
+
+
+The Life of Edgar Allan Poe. By W.F. Gill. Illustrated. New York:
+Dillingham.
+
+Griswold's memoir of Poe has been actually beneficial to the reputation of
+its subject, contrary to its obvious design. It has caused a thorough
+sifting of all accessible records of the poet's short and dreary life, and
+elicited many reminiscences from men of mark who were in one way or another
+personally associated with him. We know now, more certainly than we might
+have done but for Griswold's effort to prove the opposite, that Poe was not
+expelled in disgrace from the University of Virginia, but bore himself well
+there as a student and a man; that he deliberately went to work and
+procured his being dropped from the rolls of West Point by building up with
+venial faults the requisite sum of "demerits," after having repeatedly and
+in vain sought permission to withdraw from the control of a system of
+discipline so unsuited to his temperament; that, so far from being
+intemperate, a single glass of wine sufficed to bring on something like
+insanity; that, instead of neglecting his family, he devoted himself to
+them with a very rare exclusiveness, and wore down his health by watching
+at the bedside of his sick wife; that he was as faithful to his business as
+to his domestic obligations; and that, wholly disqualified for battling
+with the world, he managed to keep his necessarily troubled life at least
+unstained. We know, moreover, that he did not appoint Griswold his
+literary executor, and that the document used by the latter as a means of
+deriving from that assumed office an opportunity of vindictive defamation
+was drawn up after the poet's death by Griswold himself. To the controversy
+thus excited we are indebted for the illumination of one or two poems
+relinquished by the critics as hopelessly, if not intentionally, obscure.
+_Ulalume_, for example, held by some to be a mere experiment on the
+jingling capacity of words and the taste of readers for grappling with
+insoluble puzzles, is pronounced by one familiar with his most intimate
+feelings at the time of its composition a sublimated but distinct reflex of
+them and of the circumstances which gave them color.
+
+Could Poe's pen have cleared itself from the morbid influences which fixed
+it in a peculiar path, we might have missed some of his finest and most
+subtle poems and some prose efforts which we could better spare. But his
+wonderful powers of analysis would have been serviceable upon a broader and
+more practical field. He had an insight into the laws of language and of
+rhythm equalled by no one else in our day. What is most mysterious in the
+forms and relations of matter had a special charm for him. None could trace
+it more acutely; and his powers, matured by more and healthier years and
+applied in their favorite direction, were quite equal to results like those
+attained by his predecessor Goethe, the savant of poets. He died a few
+years older than Burns and Byron, but more of a boy than either. The man
+Poe we never saw. The best of him was to come, and it never came. Poe had,
+however, what he is not always credited with--the sincerity and earnestness
+of maturity. He was anything but a mere propounder of riddles. Had he lived
+to our day, his office would have been to aid science, so wonderfully
+advanced in the intervening third of a century, in solving some of its own.
+And in addition to that possible work we should have been none the poorer
+in the treasures of poetry he actually gave us.
+
+
+Olivia Raleigh. By W.W. Follett Synge. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.
+
+In the few choice words of introduction to the American reprint Mrs. Annis
+Lee Wister admirably characterizes this charming novel. It is indeed like a
+"clear, pure breath of English air:" from the first page to the last it is
+redolent of the health of an "incense-breathing morn." There are no dark
+scenes here, leaving on the reader a feeling of degradation that such
+things can be--no impossible villain weaving a web of intricate or
+purposeless villainy--but all is fresh and genuine, and we close the volume
+with a sense of gratitude that such a story is possible.
+
+Even if this be not in itself a recommendation sufficient to enlist the
+interest of novel-readers, _Olivia Raleigh_ is something more: it is a work
+of art: there is in it nothing crude or hasty or ill-digested. Around the
+four or five prominent characters all the interest centres, and the
+attention is not distracted by any wearisome episodes that have nothing to
+do with the main story. The characters are admirably thought out, and
+reveal themselves more by their actions than by any microscopical analysis
+of motives. They pass before us like veritable human beings, and what they
+are we learn from what they do. The transformation of one of the characters
+from a gay, debonnair bachelor past middle age into a penurious miser of
+the Blueberry-Jones type is bold, and in less skilful hands would be a
+blemish, but Mr. Synge has amply justified it, and admirably uses it to
+cement the structure of his plot. There is no weakness in any chapter, and
+as we read so secure do we feel in the author's strength that, had he
+chosen to end the story in sorrow and not in joy, we should submit as
+though to an inflexible decree of Fate.
+
+
+Les Koumiassine. Par Henry Greville. Paris: Plon.
+
+It is always interesting to watch the course of French fiction, because
+while the novel is in all countries at the present time the favorite form
+of expression of those writers who eschew scientific work on the one side
+and stand aloof from poetry on the other, in France, which is noticeably
+the country where theories are put into practice as well as invented, all
+sorts of literary methods have their clever defenders, who furnish examples
+of what they preach. Since Balzac and George Sand died, the post of leading
+novelist has been vacant, although there has been no lack of writers of the
+second or third, and especially of still lower, rank. Octave Feuillet still
+produces occasionally a clever piece of workmanship; Cherbuliez at
+intervals writes a novel which proves how lamentable a thing is the
+possession of brilliancy alone apart from the seriousness of character, or
+of some sides of character, which must exist alongside of even high
+intellectual qualities in order that the man may make a lasting impression
+on his time. Great gifts frittered away on meaningless trifles are as
+disappointing as possible, and are the more disappointing in proportion to
+the greatness of the gifts; so that the decadence of Cherbuliez--or, if
+this is too severe, his lack of improvement after his brilliant
+beginning--is a very melancholy thing. Zola is among the younger men, the
+head of a number of enthusiasts who revel in the exact study of social
+ordure, and who threaten to destroy fiction by ridding it of what makes its
+life--imagination, that is--and substituting for it scientific fact.
+Theuriet is an amiable but by no means a powerful writer, who so far has
+contented himself with following different models without striking out any
+special path of his own.
+
+Henry Greville is a new author, who has reached by no means the highest,
+yet a very respectable, place--such as would be a source of gratification
+to most people. The name signed to her novels is the _nom-de-plume_ of a
+lady who, as is also apparent from her work, has lived long enough in
+Russia to become familiar with the people and their ways. _Les Koumiassine_
+is a story of Russian life, treating of a rich family whose name gives the
+title to the novel. The family is one of great wealth, and consists of the
+Count Koumiassine and his wife, their two children--one a boy of nine or
+ten, the other a girl half a dozen years older--and a niece of about
+seventeen. The plot concerns itself with the efforts of the countess to
+give her niece, whom she values much less than her daughter, a suitable
+husband. The poor girl is bullied and badgered after the most approved
+methods of domestic tyranny, and her high-spirited struggle against adverse
+circumstances makes the book as readable as one could wish. After all, the
+family is a microcosm, and furnishes frequent opportunity for the practice
+of good or bad qualities; and the cleverest novel-writers have chosen just
+this subject which seems so bald to the romantic writer. The contest in
+this case is a long one, and is hotly contested, and the imperiousness of
+the countess and the graceful courage of the girl are excellently well
+described. The other characters too are clearly put before the reader, so
+that those who exercise care in their choice of French novels may take up
+this one with the certainty that they will be entertained, and, what is
+rarer, innocently entertained. For in a large pile of French novels it
+would be hard to find so pretty a story so well told as is the intimacy
+between the two young girls, the cousins, who in their different ways
+circumvent Fate in the person of the countess. Their amiability and jollity
+and loyalty to each other give the book an air of attractive truthfulness
+and refinement which well replaces the priggishness generally to be found
+in innocuous French fiction. More than this, the plot is intelligently
+handled, and no person is introduced who is not carefully studied. In this
+respect of careful execution the author resembles Tourgueneff, whose friend
+and disciple she is. Like him, and like those who have been affected by his
+influence, she gives attention to the minor characters and comparatively
+insignificant incidents, so that the book makes a really lifelike
+impression. This is not a story of great passion, but it deals very
+cleverly with the less open waters of domestic strife. While what it shows
+of human nature in general is the most important thing, what is shown of
+Russian life is of great interest. The position of the countess, and the
+habit of her mind with its over-bearing self-will and ingenious
+self-approval, are studies possible, of course, anywhere, but pretty sure
+to be found especially in a land like Russia, where the habit of command
+was until recently so strongly fostered by the existence of serfdom. The
+condition of those who are exposed to this aggressive imperiousness is
+clearly illustrated in the numerous dependants who make their appearance in
+this story. But it is the countess who is the best drawn and most
+impressive personage. She is really lifelike, and yet not a commonplace
+figure.
+
+
+
+
+_Books Received_.
+
+Disease of the Mind: Notes on the Early Management, European and American
+Progress, Modern Methods, etc., in the Treatment of Insanity, with especial
+reference to the needs of Massachusetts and the United States. By Charles
+F. Folsom, M.D. Boston: A. Williams & Co.
+
+Cicero's Tusculan Disputations; also Treatises on The Nature of the Gods,
+and on The Commonwealth. Literally translated by C.D. Yonge. New York:
+Harper & Brothers.
+
+Shakespeare: The Man and the Book. Being a collection of Occasional Papers
+on the Bard and his Writings. Part I. By C.M. Ingleby, M.A. London: Truebner
+& Co.
+
+Shakespeare's Comedy of a Midsummer Night's Dream. Edited with Notes by
+William J. Rolfe, A.M. New York: Harper & Brothers.
+
+Four Irrepressibles; or, The Tribe of Benjamin: Their Summer with Aunt
+Agnes, what they Did, and what they Undid. Boston: Loring.
+
+The Magnetism of Iron Vessels, with a Short Treatise on Terrestrial
+Magnetism. By Fairman Rogers. New York: D. Van Nostrand.
+
+Virgin Soil. By Ivan Tourgueneff. From the French by T.S. Perry.
+(Leisure-Hour Series.) New York: Henry Holt & Co.
+
+Personal Appearance and the Culture of Beauty. By T.S. Sozinsky, M.D.,
+Ph.D. Philadelphia: Allen, Lane & Scott.
+
+An English Commentary on the Tragedies of Euripides. By Charles Anthon,
+LL.D. New York: Harper & Brothers.
+
+Strength of Men and Stability of Nations. By P.A. Chadbourne, D.D., LL.D.
+New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.
+
+Eighth Annual Report of the State Board of Health of Massachusetts. Boston:
+Albert J. Wright. State Printer.
+
+The Antelope and Deer of America. By John Dean Caton, LL.D. New York: Hurd
+& Houghton.
+
+G.T.T.; or, The Wonderful Adventures of a Pullman. By Edward E. Hale.
+Boston: Roberts Brothers.
+
+Until the Day Break. By Mrs. J.M.D. Bartlett ("Birch Arnold").
+Philadelphia: Porter & Coates.
+
+Other People's Children. By the author of "Helen's Babies." New York: G.P.
+Putnam's Sons.
+
+Poet and Merchant. By B. Auerbach. (Leisure-Hour Series.) New York: Henry
+Holt & Co.
+
+Mental Education. By J. Edward Cranage, M.A., Ph.D. London: Bemrose & Sons.
+
+Beautiful Edith, the Child-Woman. (Loring's Tales of the Day.) Boston:
+Loring.
+
+Aliunde; or, Love Ventures of Tom, Dick and Harry. New York: Charles P.
+Somerby.
+
+Ideals made Real: A Romance. By George L. Raymond. New York: Hurd &
+Houghton.
+
+Lola. By A. Griffiths. (Leisure-Hour Series.) New York: Henry Holt & Co.
+
+Kilmeny: A Novel. By William Black. New York: Harper & Brothers.
+
+Winstowe: A Novel. By Mrs. Leith-Adams. New York: Harper & Brothers.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Lippincott's Magazine  of Popular
+Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118, by Various
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 16361.txt or 16361.zip *****
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