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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Duffels, by Edward Eggleston
+
+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: Duffels
+
+Author: Edward Eggleston
+
+Release Date: May 31, 2008 [EBook #25661]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DUFFELS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
+produced from scanned images of public domain material
+from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+DUFFELS
+
+
+
+By
+
+EDWARD EGGLESTON
+
+AUTHOR OF
+THE FAITH DOCTOR, THE HOOSIER SCHOOLMASTER, ROXY, ETC.
+
+
+
+NEW YORK
+D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
+1893
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1893,
+BY EDWARD EGGLESTON.
+
+_All rights reserved._
+
+ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED
+AT THE APPLETON PRESS, U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+The once famous Mrs. Anne Grant--known in literature as Mrs. Grant of
+Laggan--spent part of her childhood in our New York Albany, then a town
+almost wholly given to traffic with the aborigines. To her we owe a
+description of the setting out of the young American-Dutch trader to
+ascend the Mohawk in a canoe, by laborious paddling and toilsome
+carrying round rifts and falls, in order to penetrate to the dangerous
+region of the tribes beyond the Six Nations. The outfit of this young
+"bushloper," as such a man was called in the still earlier Dutch
+period, consisted mainly of a sort of cloth suited to Indian wants. But
+there were added minor articles of use and fancy to please the youth or
+captivate the imagination of the women in the tribes. Combs, pocket
+mirrors, hatchets, knives, jew's-harps, pigments for painting the face
+blue, yellow, and vermilion, and other such things, were stored away in
+the canoe, to be spread out as temptations before the eyes of some
+group of savages rich in a winter's catch of furs. The cloths sold by
+the traders were called duffels, probably from the place of their
+origin, the town of Duffel, in the Low Countries. By degrees the word
+was, I suppose, transferred to the whole stock, and a trader's duffels
+included all the miscellany he carried with him. The romantic young
+bushloper, eager to accumulate money enough to marry the maiden he had
+selected, disappeared long ago from the water courses of northern New
+York. In his place an equally interesting figure--the Adirondack
+guide--navigates single-handed the rivers and lakes of the "North
+Woods." By one of those curious cases of transference that are often
+found in etymology, the guide still carries duffels, like his
+predecessor; but not for Indian trading. The word with him covers also
+an indefinite collection of objects of manifold use--camp utensils,
+guns, fishing tackle, and whatnots. The basket that sits in his light
+boat to hold his smaller articles is called a duffel basket, as was the
+basket of sundries in the trader's canoe, I fancy. If his camp grows
+into a house frequented by sportsmen, there will be a duffel room to
+contain all manner of unclassified things.
+
+Like the trader of old New York, I here open my kit of duffels. I have
+selected from the shorter tales written by me since I began to deal in
+the fancy wares of a writer of fiction only such as seem to have
+elements of permanent interest. I find their range to be wide. They
+cover many phases of human nature; they describe life in both the
+eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries; they are of the East and of
+the West, of the North, the Middle, and the South. Group or classify
+them I can not; they are too various. Some were written long ago, in my
+younger manner, and in the tone prevailing among the story-writers of
+those days. Opinions and sentiments are inextricably interwoven with
+some of these earlier stories that do not seem to be mine to-day. But a
+man in his fifties ought to know how to be tolerant of the enthusiasms
+and beliefs of a younger man. I suspect that the sentiment I find
+somewhat foreign to me in the season of cooler pulses, and the
+situations and motives that seem rather naive now, had something to do
+with the acceptability of the stories. The popularity of these early
+tales in their day encouraged me to go on, and a little later to set up
+in more permanent and wholesale business as a novelist. To certain of
+these stories of my apprenticeship I have appended dates to explain
+allusions in the text. Other stories there are here, that are of recent
+production, and by these I am willing to be judged. The variety in
+subject, manner, date, location, makes proper to them the title I have
+chosen--a good word with a savor of human history and an odor of the
+New World about it; a word yet in living use in this region of lakes
+and mountains. I am not without hope that some of my duffels will
+please.
+
+If formal dedications were not a little old-fashioned, I should give
+myself the pleasure of writing on one of these pages the name of my
+friend Mr. Richard Watson Gilder. I have read with delight and sincere
+admiration the poems that have given him fame, but they need no praise
+of mine. The occasion of my mentioning his name here is more
+personal--it was by his solicitation that I was seduced, nearly a
+quarter of a century ago, into writing my earliest love story. I may
+say, perhaps without pushing the figure too far, that on his suggestion
+I first embarked in the light canoe of a dealer in duffels.
+
+E. E.
+
+JOSHUA'S ROCK, LAKE GEORGE, 1893.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+                                                 PAGE
+
+SISTER TABEA                                        1
+
+THE REDEMPTIONER                                   27
+
+A BASEMENT STORY                                   64
+
+THE GUNPOWDER PLOT                                 91
+
+THE STORY OF A VALENTINE                          114
+
+HULDAH, THE HELP                                  128
+
+THE NEW CASHIER                                   149
+
+PRISCILLA                                         157
+
+TALKING FOR LIFE                                  185
+
+PERIWINKLE                                        192
+
+THE CHRISTMAS CLUB                                228
+
+
+
+
+DUFFELS.
+
+SISTER TABEA.
+
+
+Two weather-beaten stone buildings at Ephrata, in Pennsylvania, remain
+as monuments on this side of the water of the great pietistic movement
+in Germany in the early part of the eighteenth century. One of these
+was called Bethany, the other Sharon. A hundred and thirty or forty
+years ago there were other buildings with these, and the softening hand
+of time had not yet touched any of them. The doorways were then, as
+now, on the ground level, the passages were just as narrow and dusky,
+the cells had the same little square windows to let in the day. But the
+stones in that day had a hue that reminded one of the quarry, the
+mortar between them was fresh, the shingles in the roof had gathered no
+moss and very little weather stain; the primeval forests were yet
+within the horizon, and there was everywhere an air of newness, of
+advancement, and of prosperity about the Dunkard Convent. One sees now
+neither monks nor nuns in these narrow hallways; monks and nuns are
+nowhere about Ephrata, except in the graveyard where all the brethren
+of Bethany, and all the sisters who once peopled Sharon, sleep together
+in the mold. But in the middle of the eighteenth century their bare
+feet shuffled upon the stairs as, clad in white hooded cloaks
+descending to the very ground, they glided in and out of the low doors,
+or assembled in the little chapel called "Zion" to attend service under
+the lead of their founder, Conrad Beissels. In the convent, where he
+reigned supreme, Beissels was known as Brother Friedsam; later he was
+reverently called Father Friedsam Gottrecht, a name that, like all
+their convent names, had plenty of mystical significance attached to
+it.
+
+But monks and nuns are men and women; and neither cloister life, nor
+capuchin hoods and cloaks, nor bare feet, nor protracted midnight
+services, can prevent heartburnings and rivalries, nor can all of these
+together put down--what is most to be dreaded in a monastery--the
+growth of affection between man and woman. What could be done to tame
+human nature into submission, to bring it to rejoice only in unearthly
+meditations, and a contented round of self-denial and psalm-singing,
+Brother Friedsam had tried on his followers with the unsparing hand of
+a religious enthusiast. He had forbidden all animal food. Not only was
+meat of evil tendency, but milk, he said, made the spirit heavy and
+narrow; butter and cheese produced similar disabilities; eggs excited
+the passions; honey made the eyes bright and the heart cheerful, but
+did not clear the voice for music. So he approved chiefly of those
+plain things that sprang direct from the earth, particularly of
+potatoes, turnips, and other roots, with a little bread soup and such
+like ghostly diet. For drink he would have nothing but what he called
+"innocent clear water," just as it flowed from the spring.
+
+But even a dish of potatoes and turnips and beets and carrots, eaten
+from wooden trenchers, without milk or butter or meat, was not
+sufficient to make the affections and passions of men and women as
+ethereal as Friedsam wished. He wedded his people in mystic marriage to
+"the Chaste Lamb," to borrow his frequent phrase. They sang
+ecstatically of a mystical city of brotherly and sisterly affection
+which they, in common with other dreamers of the time, called
+Philadelphia, and they rejoiced in a divine creature called in their
+mystical jargon _Sophia_, which I suppose meant wisdom, wisdom divorced
+from common sense. These anchorites did not eschew social enjoyment,
+but held little love feasts. The sisters now invited the brethren, and
+next the brethren entertained the sisters--with unbuttered parsnips and
+draughts of innocent clear water, no doubt.
+
+That which was most remarkable at Ephrata, and that out of which grows
+my story, was the music. Brother Friedsam, besides his cares of
+organization, finance, and administration, and his mystical theological
+speculations, was also a poet. Most of the songs sung in the little
+building called "Zion" were written by him--songs about "the lonesome
+turtledove in the wilderness," that is, the Church; songs in praise of
+the mystical marriage of virgins with the chaste Lamb; songs about the
+Philadelphian brotherhood of saints, about the divine Sophia, and about
+many other things which no man can understand, I am sure, until he has
+first purified himself from the gross humors of the flesh by a heavenly
+diet of turnips and spring water. To the brethren and sisters who
+believed their little community in the Pennsylvania woods to be "the
+Woman in the Wilderness" seen by St. John, these words represented the
+only substantial and valuable things in the wide universe; and they
+sang the songs of Conrad Beissels with as much fervor as they could
+have sung the songs of heaven itself. Beissels--the Friedsam of the
+brotherhood--was not only the poet but the composer of the choral
+songs, and a composer of rare merit. The music he wrote is preserved as
+it was copied out with great painstaking by the brethren and sisters.
+In looking over the wonderful old manuscript notebook, the first
+impression is one of delight with the quaint symbolic illuminations
+wrought by the nuns of Ephrata upon the margins. But those who know
+music declare that the melodies are lovely, and that the whole
+structure of the harmonies is masterful, and worthy of the fame they
+had in the days when monks and nuns performed them under the lead of
+Brother Friedsam himself. In the gallery of Zion house, but concealed
+from the view of the brethren, sat the sisterhood, like a company of
+saints in spotless robes. Below, the brethren, likewise in white,
+answered to the choir above in antiphonal singing of the loveliest and
+most faultless sort. Strangers journeyed from afar over rough country
+roads to hear this wonderful chorus, and were moved in the depths of
+their souls with the indescribable sweetness and loftiness of the
+music, and with the charm and expressiveness of its rendering by these
+pale-faced other-worldly singers.
+
+But their perfection of execution was attained at a cost almost too
+great. Brother Friedsam was a fanatic, and he was also an artist. He
+obliged the brethren and sisters to submit to the most rigorous
+training. In this, as in religion, he subordinated them to his ideals.
+He would fain tune their very souls to his own key; and he exacted a
+precision that was difficult of attainment by men and women of average
+fallibility and carelessness. The men singers were divided into five
+choruses of five persons each; the sisters were classified, according
+to the pitch of their voices, into three divisions, each of which sang
+or kept silent, according to the duty assigned to it in the notebook.
+At the love-feasts these choruses sat side by side at the table, so as
+to be ready to sing together with perfect precision whenever a song
+should be announced. At the singing school Brother Friedsam could not
+abide the least defect; he rated roundly the brother or sister who made
+any mistake; he scourged their lagging aspirations toward perfection.
+If it is ever necessary to account for bad temper in musicians, one
+might suggest that the water-gruel diet had impaired his temper and
+theirs; certain it is that out of the production of so much heavenly
+harmony there sprang discord. The brethren and sisters grew daily more
+and more indignant at the severity of the director, whom they
+reverenced as a religious guide, but against whom, as a musical
+conductor, they rebelled in their hearts.
+
+The sisters were the first to act in this crisis. At their knitting and
+their sewing they talked about it, in the kitchen they discussed it,
+until their hearts burned within them. Even in illuminating the
+notebook with pretty billing turtledoves, and emblematic flowers such
+as must have grown in paradise, since nothing of the sort was ever
+known in any earthly garden--even in painting these, some of the nuns
+came near to spoiling their colors and blurring their pages with tears.
+
+Only Margaretha Thome, who was known in the convent as Sister Tabea,
+shed no tears. She worked with pen and brush, and heard the others
+talk; now and then, when some severe word of Brother Friedsam's was
+repeated, she would look up with a significant flash of the eye.
+
+"The Hofcavalier doesn't talk," said Sister Thecla. This Thecla had
+given the nickname of "Hofcavalier" (_noble courtier_), to Tabea at her
+first arrival in the convent on account of her magnificent figure and
+high carriage.
+
+"You shouldn't give nicknames, Sister Thecla."
+
+The last speaker was a sister with an austere face and gray eyes which
+had no end of cold-blooded religious enthusiasm in them.
+
+"I need not give you a nickname," retorted Thecla to the last speaker;
+"Brother Friedsam did that when he called you Jael. You are just the
+kind of person to drive a tent-nail through a man's head."
+
+"If he were the enemy of the Church of God," said Jael, in a voice as
+hard as it was sincere.
+
+Then the talk drifted back to the singing school and Brother Friedsam's
+severity.
+
+"But why doesn't the Hofcavalier speak?" again persisted Thecla.
+
+"When the Hofcavalier speaks, it will be to Brother Friedsam himself,"
+answered Tabea.
+
+The temerity of this proposition took Thecla's breath, but it set the
+storm a-going more vigorously than before among the sisterhood, who,
+having found somebody ready to bell the cat, grew eager to have the cat
+belled. Only Sister Jael, who for lack of voice was not included in
+either of the three choruses of the sisterhood, stoutly defended
+Brother Friedsam, thinking, perhaps, that it was not a bad thing to
+have the conceit of the singers reduced; indeed, she was especially
+pleased that Tabea, the unsurpassed singer of the sisters' gallery,
+should have suffered rebuke.
+
+At length it was agreed that Tabea should tell Brother Friedsam that
+the sisters did not intend to go to singing school again.
+
+Then Tabea lifted up her dark head and regarded the circle of women in
+white garments about her.
+
+"You are all brave now, but when Brother Friedsam shakes his finger at
+you, you will every one of you submit as though you were a set of
+redemptioners bought with his money. When I tell Brother Friedsam that
+I shall not come to singing school, I shall stick to it. He may get his
+music performed by some one else. He will not call me a 'ninny' again."
+
+"There spoke the Hofcavalier," giggled Thecla.
+
+"Sister Tabea," said Jael, "if you go on as you are going, you will end
+by leaving the convent and breaking your vows. Mark my words."
+
+"I am going to finish this turtledove first, though," said Tabea gayly.
+
+It was finally agreed that if Tabea would speak to the director on
+behalf of the sisterhood, the sisters would resolutely stand by their
+threat, and that they would absent themselves from Brother Friedsam's
+music drills long enough to have him understand that they were not to
+be treated like children. To the surprise of all, Tabea left her work
+at once, covered up her head with the hood attached to her gown, and
+sought the lodge of Brother Friedsam, which stood between Bethany and
+Sharon.
+
+When Tabea was admitted to the cell, and stood before the revered
+Friedsam, she felt an unexpected palpitation. Nor was Beissels any more
+composed. He could never speak to this girl without some mental
+disturbance.
+
+"Brother Friedsam," she said, "I am sent by the sisters to say that
+they are very indignant at your treatment of them in the rehearsals,
+and that they are not going to attend them hereafter."
+
+Beissels's sensitive lips quivered a moment; this sudden rebellion
+surprised him, and he did not at first see how to meet it.
+
+"You suggested this course to them, I suppose?" he said after a pause.
+
+"No, Brother Friedsam, I had nothing to do with it until now. But I
+think they are right, and I hope they will keep to their word. You have
+been altogether too hard on us."
+
+The director made no reply, but wearily leaned his pale, refined face
+upon his hand and looked up at Tabea. This look of inquiry had
+something of unhappiness in it that touched the nun's heart, and she
+was half sorry that she had spoken so sharply. She fumbled for the
+wooden latch of the door presently, and went out with a sense of inward
+defeat and annoyance.
+
+"The Hofcavalier does not come back with head in the air," murmured
+Thecla. "A bad sign."
+
+"I gave the message," said Sister Tabea, "and Brother Friedsam did not
+say whether the four parts sung by the men would be sufficient or not.
+But I know very well what he will do; he will coax you all back within
+a week."
+
+"And you will leave the convent and break your vows; mark my words,"
+said Sister Jael with sharpness.
+
+"It will be after I get this page finished, I tell you," said Tabea.
+But she did not seem in haste to finish the page, for, not choosing to
+show how much she had been discomposed by Brother Friedsam's wistful
+and inquiring look, she gathered up her brush, her colors, and the
+notebook page on which she had been at work, and went up the stairs
+alongside the great chimney, shutting herself in her cell.
+
+Once there, the picture of Friedsam's face came vividly before her. She
+recalled her first meeting with him at her mother's house on the
+Wissahickon, and how her heart had gone out to the only man she had
+ever met whose character was out of the common. I do not say that she
+had consciously loved him as she listened to him, sitting there on the
+homemade stool in her mother's cabin and talking of things beyond
+comprehension. But she could have loved him, and she did worship him.
+It was the personal fascination of Brother Friedsam and her own
+vigorous hatred of the commonplace that had led her three years before
+to join the sisterhood in the Sharon house. She did not know to what
+degree a desire for Beissels's companionship had drawn her to accept
+his speculations concerning the mystical Sophia and the Philadelphian
+fellowship. But the convent had proved a disappointment. She had seen
+little of the great Brother Friedsam, and he had given her, instead of
+friendly notice and approval, only a schoolmaster's scolding now and
+then for slight faults committed in singing a new piece.
+
+As she sat there in gloomy meditation Jael's evil prediction entered
+her mind, and she amused herself with dreams of what might take place
+if she should leave the convent and go out into the world again.
+
+In putting away her papers a little note fell out.
+
+"The goose is at it again," she said.
+
+She had that day received some blank paper from the paper mill of the
+community, and Daniel Scheible had put this little love letter into the
+package of which he was the bearer. He had sent such letters before,
+and Tabea, though she had not answered them, had kept them, partly
+because she did not wish to inform those in authority of this breach of
+rule, partly because so much defiance of the law of the place gave a
+little zest to a monotonous life, and partly because she was a young
+woman, and therefore not displeased with affection, even from a youth
+in whom she had no more than a friendly interest.
+
+Scheible's parents had been Dunkards, persecuted in Europe, who had
+sought refuge from their troubles by the bad expedient of taking ship
+for Philadelphia, with an understanding that they were, according to
+custom, to be sold for a term of years to pay the fare. Among a
+multitude who died on the passage from the overcrowding and bad food
+were Daniel's father and mother, and the little lad was sold for the
+rest of his minority to pay his own fare as well as that of the dead
+members of his family. As a promising boy, he had been bought by the
+Ephrata brotherhood and bred into the fraternity. With the audacity of
+youth he had conceived a great passion for Tabea, and now that his
+apprenticeship was about to expire he amused her with surreptitious
+notes. To-day, for the first time, Tabea began to think of the
+possibility of marrying Scheible, chiefly, perhaps, from a vague desire
+to escape from the convent, which could not but be irksome to one of
+her spirit. Scheible was ambitious, and it was his plan, as she knew,
+to go to Philadelphia to make his fortune; and she and he together,
+what might they not do? Then she laughed at herself for such a day
+dream, and went out to do her share of household duties, singing
+mellifluously, as she trod barefoot through the passages, a mystic song
+of hope and renunciation:
+
+      "Welt, packe dich;
+      Ich sehne mich
+      Nur nach dem Himmel.
+    Denn droben ist Lachen und Lieben und Leben;
+    Hier unten ist Alles dem Eiteln ergeben."
+
+Which rendered may read:
+
+      "World, get you gone;
+      I strive alone
+      To attain heaven.
+    There above is laughter, life, and love;
+    Here below one must all vanity forego."
+
+But though to-day she sang of the laughter that is above, she was less
+unworldly on the morrow. Brother Friedsam, as she had foreseen, began
+to break down the rebellion about the singing school. He was too good a
+strategist to attack the strong point of the insurrection first. He
+began with good-natured Thecla, who could laugh away yesterday's
+vexations, and so one by one he conquered the opposition in detail. He
+shrank from assailing the Hofcavalier until he should have won the
+others, knowing well the obstinacy of her resolution. And when all the
+rest had yielded he still said nothing to Tabea, either because he
+deemed it of no use, or because he thought neglect might do her
+rebellious spirit good. But if this last were his plan, he had
+miscalculated the vigor of her determination.
+
+"Do you know," said the good-hearted, gossipy little Sister Persida,
+coming into Tabea's cell two or three days later, "that the sisters
+have all yielded to Brother Friedsam? He coaxed and managed them so,
+you know. Has he talked to you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"You'll have to give up when he does. Nobody can resist Brother
+Friedsam."
+
+"I can."
+
+"You always scare me so, Sister Tabea; I wouldn't dare hold up my head
+as you do."
+
+But when Persida had gone out the high head of the Hofcavalier went
+down a little. She felt that the man whom she in some sort worshiped
+had put upon her a public slight. He did not account it worth his while
+to invite her to return. She had missed her chance to refuse. Just what
+connection Brother Friedsam's slight had with Daniel Scheible's love
+letters I leave the reader to determine. But in her anger she fished
+these notes out of a basket used to hold her changes of white raiment,
+and read them all over slowly, line by line, and for the first time
+with a lively interest in their contents. They were very ingenious; and
+they very cleverly pictured to her the joys of a home of her own with a
+devoted husband. She found evidences of very amiable traits in the
+writer. But why should I trace in detail the curious but familiar
+process by which a girl endows a man with all the qualities she wishes
+him to possess?
+
+The very next day Scheible, who had been melancholy ever since he began
+to send to Tabea letters that brought no answer, was observed to be in
+a mood so gleeful that his companions in the paper mill doubted his
+sanity. The fountain of this joy was a note from Tabea stowed away in
+the pocket of his gown. She had not signed it with her convent title,
+but with the initials M. T., for her proper name, Margaretha Thome.
+There were many fluctuations in Tabea's mind and many persuasive notes
+from Scheible before the nun at length promised to forsake the convent,
+now grown bitter to her, for the joys of a home. Even then Daniel could
+not help feeling insecure in regard to a piece of good fortune so
+dazzling, and he sent note after note to urge her to have the day for
+the wedding fixed.
+
+Meantime the young man created but little sensation by leaving the
+mill, as his term of apprenticeship had expired, and he had never
+professed much attachment to the brotherhood.
+
+Sister Tabea had persistently omitted the rehearsals, and so the grand
+chorals were now given on the Sabbaths without her voice, and Jael felt
+no little exultation at this state of things. At length, after much
+wavering, Tabea made a final resolution to leave the convent, and to
+accept the love of the adventurous youth who had shown so persistent an
+affection for her.
+
+As soon as the day of the wedding was arranged by means of the
+surreptitious notes which she continued to exchange with Scheible, she
+prepared to leave Sharon and Ephrata. But nothing could be farther from
+her plans than the project proposed by her lover that she should elope
+with him at night. Tabea meant to march out with all her colors flying.
+
+First of all she went to see the sinister prophetess, Sister Jael.
+
+"I've finished that turtledove, Sister Jael, and now I am going to
+leave the sisterhood and marry Daniel Scheible."
+
+Nothing is so surprising to a prophet as the fulfillment of his most
+confident prediction. Jael looked all aghast, and her face splintered
+into the most contradictory lines in the effort to give expression to
+the most conflicting emotions.
+
+"I'm astonished at you," she said reprovingly, when she got breath.
+
+"Why, I thought you expected it," replied Tabea.
+
+"Will you break your vow?"
+
+"Yes. Why shouldn't a woman break a vow made by a girl? And so,
+good-by, Sister Jael. Can't you wish me much joy?"
+
+But Jael turned sharply away in a horror that could find no utterance.
+
+Thecla laughed, as was her wont, and wished Tabea happiness, but
+intimated that Daniel was a bold man to undertake to subdue the
+Hofcavalier. Sister Persida's woman's heart was set all a-flutter, and
+she quite forgot that she was trying to be a nun, and that she belonged
+to the solitary and forsaken turtledove in the wilderness. She
+whispered in Tabea's ear: "You'll look so nice when you're married,
+dear, and Daniel will be so pleased, and the young men will steal your
+slipper off your foot at the dinner table, and how I wish I could be
+there to see you married! But oh, Tabea! I don't see how you dare to
+face them all! I'd just run away with all my might if I were in your
+place."
+
+And so each one took the startling intelligence according to her
+character, and soon all work was suspended, and every inmate of Sharon
+was gathered in unwonted excitement in the halls and the common room.
+
+When Tabea passed out of the low-barred door of Sharon she met the
+radiant face of Scheible, who had tied his two saddle horses a little
+way off.
+
+"Come quickly, Tabea," he said with impatience.
+
+"No, Daniel; it won't do to be rude. I must tell Brother Friedsam
+good-by."
+
+"No, don't," said Daniel, turning pale with terror. "If you go in to
+see the director you will never come with me."
+
+"Why won't I?" laughed the defiant girl.
+
+"He's a wizard, and has charms that he gets out of his great books.
+Don't go in there; you'll never get away."
+
+Daniel held to the Pennsylvania Dutch superstitions, but Tabea only
+laughed, and said, "I am not afraid of wizards." She looked the
+Hofcavalier more than ever as she left the trembling fellow and went up
+to the door of Brother Friedsam's lodge.
+
+"She isn't afraid of the _devil_," muttered Scheible.
+
+Tabea knocked at the door.
+
+"Come in and welcome, whoever thou art," said the director within.
+
+But when she had lifted the latch and pushed back the door, squeaking
+on its wooden hinges, Tabea found that Friedsam was engaged in some
+business with the prior of the convent, the learned Dr. Peter Miller,
+known at Ephrata as Brother Jabez. Friedsam did not at first look up.
+The delay embarrassed her; she had time to see, with painful clearness,
+all the little articles in the slenderly furnished room. She noticed
+that the billet of wood which lay for a pillow, according to the
+Ephrata custom, on a bare bench used for a bed, was worn upon one side
+with long use; she saw how the bell rope by means of which Friedsam
+called the brethren and sisters to prayers at any hour in the night,
+hung dangling near the bench, so that the bell might be pulled on a
+sudden inspiration even while the director was rising from his wooden
+couch; she noted the big books; and then a great reverence for his
+piety and learning fell upon her, and a homesick regret; and Scheible
+and the wedding frolic did not seem so attractive after all.
+Nevertheless she held up her head like a defiant Hofcavalier.
+
+After a time Brother Jabez, with a kind greeting, passed her, and the
+director, looking up, said very gently:
+
+"I wish you a very good day, Sister Tabea."
+
+"I am no longer Sister Tabea, but Margaretha Thome. I have said adieu
+to all in Sharon, and now I come to say good-by to Brother Friedsam. I
+am going to lay aside these garments and marry Daniel Scheible."
+
+She held out her hand, but Friedsam was too much stunned to see it.
+
+"You have broken your vow! You have denied the Lord!"
+
+There was no severity in his despondent rebuke; it had the vibration of
+an involuntary cry of surprise and pain.
+
+Tabea was not prepared for this. Severity she could have defied; but
+this cry of a prophet awakened her own conscience, and she trembled as
+if she had been in the light of a clear-seeing divine judgment.
+
+"You can speak so, Brother Friedsam, for you have no human weaknesses.
+I am not suited to a convent; I never can be happy here. I am not
+submissive. I want to be necessary to somebody. Nobody cares for me
+here. You do not mind whether I sing in the chorals or not, and you
+will be better pleased to have me away, _and I am going_." Then,
+finding that the director remained silent, she said, with emotion:
+"Brother Friedsam, I have a great reverence for you, but I wish you
+knew something of the infirmities of a heart that wants to love and to
+be loved by somebody, and then maybe you would not think so very hardly
+of Tabea after she has gone."
+
+There was a tone of beseeching in these last words which Tabea had not
+been wont to use.
+
+The director looked more numb now than ever. Tabea's words had given
+him a rude blow, and he could not at once recover. His lips moved
+without speaking, and his face assumed a look betokening inward
+suffering.
+
+"Great God of wisdom, must I then tell her?" said Friedsam when he got
+breath. He stood up and gazed out of the square window in indecision.
+
+"Tabea," he said presently, turning full upon her and looking into her
+now pale face upturned to the light, "I thought my secret would die in
+my breast, but you wring it from me. You say that I have no
+infirmities--no desire for companionship like other men or women. It is
+the voice of Sophia, the wisdom of the Almighty, that bids me humble
+myself before you this day."
+
+Here he paused in visible but suppressed emotion. "These things," he
+said, pointing to his wooden couch, "these hardships of the body, these
+self-denials of my vocation, give me no trouble. I have one great
+soul-affliction, and that is what you reproach me for lacking, namely,
+the longing to love and to be loved. And that trial you laid upon me
+the first time I saw your face and heard your words in your mother's
+house on the Wissahickon. O Tabea, you are not like the rest! you are
+not like the rest! Even when you go wrong, it is not like the rest. It
+is the vision of the life I might have led with such a woman as you
+that troubles my dreams in the night-time, when, across the impassable
+gulf of my irrevocable vow, I have stretched out my hands in entreaty
+to you."
+
+This declaration changed instantly the color of Tabea's thoughts of
+life. Daniel Scheible and his little love scrawls seemed to her lofty
+spirit as nothing now that she saw herself in the light thrown upon her
+by the love of the great master whose spirit had evoked Ephrata, and
+whose genius uttered itself in angelic harmonies. She loathed the
+little life that now opened before her. There seemed nothing in heaven
+or earth so desirable as to possess the esteem of Friedsam. But she
+stood silent and condemned.
+
+"I have had one comfort," proceeded Brother Friedsam after a while.
+"When I have perceived your strength of character, when I have heard
+your exquisite voice uttering the melodies with which I am inspired, I
+have thought my work was sweeter because Tabea shared it, and I have
+hoped that you would yet more and more share it as years and discipline
+should ripen your spirit."
+
+The director felt faint; he sat down and looked dejectedly into the
+corner of the room farthest away from where Tabea stood. He roused
+himself in a few moments, and turned about again, to find Tabea
+kneeling on the flagstones before him.
+
+"I have denied the Lord!" she moaned, for her judgment had now come
+completely round to Friedsam's standpoint. His condemnation seemed
+bitterer than death. "Brother Friedsam, I have denied the Lord!"
+
+Friedsam regarded the kneeling figure for a moment, and then he reached
+out his hands, solemnly placing them on her head with a motherly
+tenderness, while a tremor went through his frame.
+
+"Thou, dear child, shalt do thy first work over again," he said. "Thou
+shalt take a new vow, and when thou art converted then shalt thou, like
+Peter, strengthen the others." And, withdrawing his hands, he said: "I
+will pray for you, Tabea, every night of my life when I hear the cock
+crow."
+
+Tabea rose up slowly and went out at the door, walking no longer like a
+Hofcavalier, but like one in a trance. Dimly she saw the sisters
+standing without the door of Sharon; there was Thecla, with half-amused
+face, and there was Persida, curious as ever; there were Sister
+Petronella and Sister Blandina and others, and behind all the straight,
+tall form of austere Jael. Without turning to the right or to the left,
+Tabea directed her steps to the group at the door of Sharon.
+
+"No! no! come, dear Tabea!" It was the voice of Daniel Scheible, whose
+existence she had almost forgotten.
+
+"Poor Daniel!" she said, pausing and looking at him with pity.
+
+"Don't say '_Poor_ Daniel,' but _come_."
+
+"Poor boy!" said Tabea.
+
+"_You are bewitched!_" he cried, seizing her and drawing her away. "I
+knew Friedsam would put a charm on you."
+
+She absently allowed him to lead her a few steps; then, with another
+look full of tender pity and regret at his agitated face, she
+extricated herself from his embrace and walked rapidly to the door.
+Quickening her steps to escape his pursuing grasp, she pushed through
+the group of sisters and fled along the hallway and up the stairs,
+closing the door of her cell and fastening down the latch.
+
+Scheible, sure that she was under some evil spell, rushed after her,
+shook himself loose from the grip of Sister Jael, who sought to stop
+him, and reached the door of Tabea's cell. But all his knocking brought
+not one word of answer, and after a while Brother Jabez came in and led
+the poor fellow out, to the great grief of Sister Persida, who in her
+heart thought it a pity to spoil a wedding.
+
+The sisters who came to call Tabea to supper that evening also failed
+to elicit any response. Late in the night, when she had become calm,
+Tabea heard the crowing of a cock, and her heart was deeply touched at
+the thought that Friedsam, the revered Friedsam, now more than ever the
+beloved of her soul, was at that moment going to prayer for the
+disciple who had broken her vow. She rose from her bench and fell on
+her knees; and if she mistook the mingled feelings of penitence and
+human passion for pure devotion, she made the commonest mistake of
+enthusiastic spirits.
+
+But she was not left long to doubt that Friedsam had remembered her; by
+the time that the cock had crowed the second time the sound of the
+monastery bell, the rope of which hung just by Friedsam's bedside,
+broke abruptly into the deathlike stillness, calling the monks and nuns
+of Ephrata to a solemn night service. Tabea felt sure that Friedsam had
+called the meeting at this moment by way of assuring her of his
+remembrance.
+
+Daniel Scheible, who had wandered back to the neighborhood in the
+aimlessness of disappointment, heard the monastery bell waking all the
+reverberations of the forest, and saw light after light twinkle from
+the little square windows of Bethany and Sharon; then he saw the monks
+and nuns come out of Bethany and Sharon, each carrying a small paper
+lantern as they hastened to Zion. The bell ceased, and Zion, which
+before had been wrapped in night, shone with light from every window,
+and there rose upon the silence the voices of the choruses chanting an
+antiphonal song; and disconsolate Scheible cursed Friedsam and Ephrata,
+and went off into outer darkness.
+
+When the first strophe had been sung below, and the sweet-voiced
+sisters caught up the antistrophe, Brother Friedsam, sitting in the
+midst, listened with painful attention, vainly trying to detect the
+sound of Tabea's voice. But when the second strophe had been sung, and
+the sisters began their second response, a thrill of excitement went
+through all as the long-silent voice of Sister Tabea rose above the
+rest with even more than its old fervor and expression.
+
+And the next Saturday--for the seventh day was the Ephrata
+Sabbath--Tabea took a new, solemn, and irrevocable vow; and from that
+time until the day of her death she was called Sister Anastasia--the
+name signifying that she had been re-established. What source of
+consolation Anastasia had the rest never divined. How should they guess
+that alongside her religious fervor a human love grew ethereally like
+an air plant?
+
+    NOTE.--Much of this little story is fact. I have supplied details,
+    dialogue, and passion. For the facts which constitute the
+    groundwork I am chiefly indebted to Dr. Oswald W. Seidensticker's
+    very valuable monograph entitled "Ephrata, eine amerikanische
+    Klostergeschichte." The reader will find a briefer account of the
+    monastery from the same learned and able writer in _The Century_
+    magazine for December, 1881.
+
+
+
+
+THE REDEMPTIONER.
+
+A STORY IN THREE SCENES.
+
+PROLOGUE.
+
+
+The stories we write are most of them love stories; but in the lives of
+men there are also many stories that are not love stories: some, truly,
+that are hate stories. The main incident of the one I am about to tell
+I found floating down from the eighteenth century on the stream of
+Maryland tradition. It serves to present some of our forefathers, not
+as they seem in patriotic orations and reverent family traditions, but
+as they appear to a student of the writings and prints of their own
+age.
+
+
+SCENE I.
+
+The time was a warm autumn day in the year 1751. The place was a
+plantation on the Maryland shore of the Potomac. A planter of about
+thirty years of age, clad in buckskin shortclothes, sat smoking his
+pipe, after his noonday meal, in the wide entry that ran through his
+double log house from the south side to the north, the house being of
+the sort called alliteratively "two pens and a passage." The planter's
+wife sat over against him, on the other side of the passage, carding
+home-grown cotton wool with hand cards. He had placed his shuck-bottom
+chair so as to see down the long reach to the eastward, where the
+widening Potomac spread itself between low-lying banks, with never a
+brown hill to break the low horizon line. Every now and again he took
+his cob pipe from his mouth, and scanned the distant water wistfully.
+
+"I know what you're looking for, Mr. Browne," said his wife, as she
+reversed her hand cards and rubbed the carded cotton between the smooth
+backs of the two implements to make it into a roll for spinning.
+"You're looking to see the Nancy Jane come sailing into the river one
+of these days."
+
+"That's just what I'm looking after," he answered.
+
+"Why should you care?" she said. "You don't expect her to fetch you a
+new bonnet and a hoop skirt seven feet wide." She laughed merrily at
+her own speech, which, after all, was but a trifling exaggeration of
+the width of a hoop skirt in that time.
+
+Sanford Browne did not laugh, but took his pipe from his mouth, and
+stood up a moment, straining his sight once more against the distant
+horizon, where the green-blue water of the wide estuary melted into the
+blue-green of the sky with hardly a line of demarcation. Then he sat
+down and took a dry tobacco leaf lying on a stool beside him and
+crushed it to powder by first chafing it between his open hands and
+then grinding it in the palm of his left hand, rubbing it with the
+thumb of his right in a mortar-and-pestle fashion.
+
+"I've a good deal more reason to look for the Nancy Jane than you have,
+Judy. I wrote my factor, you know, to find some trace of my father and
+mother, or of my sister Susan, if it took the half of my tobacco crop.
+I hope he'll find them this time." Saying this, he filled his cob pipe
+with the powdered tobacco, and then rose and walked into the large
+western room of the house, which served for kitchen and dining-room. It
+was also the weaving-room, and the great heavy-beamed loom stood in the
+corner. At the farther end was the vast, smoke-blackened stone
+fireplace, with two large rude andirons and a swinging crane. A skillet
+and a gridiron stood against the jamb on one side, a hoe for baking hoe
+cakes and a little wrought-iron trivet were in order on the other. The
+breakfast fire had burned out; only the great backlog, hoary with gray
+ashes, lay slumbering at the back of the fireplace. The planter poked
+the drift of ashes between the andirons with a green oak stick until he
+saw a live coal shining red in the gray about it. This he rolled out
+upon the hearth, and then took it between thumb and finger and
+deposited it within the bowl of his pipe by a deft motion, which gave
+it no time to burn him.
+
+Having got his pipe a-going, he strolled back into the wide passage and
+scanned the horizon once more. Judith Browne did not like to see her
+husband in this mood. She knew well how vain every exercise of her
+wifely arts of diversion would prove when he once fell into this train
+of black thoughts; but she could not refrain from essaying the hopeless
+task by holding up her apron of homespun cloth full of cotton rolls,
+pretty in their whiteness and roundness and softness, meantime
+coquettishly turning her still girlish head on one side, and saying:
+"Now, Mr. Browne, why don't you praise my cotton? Did you ever see
+better carding than that?"
+
+The young planter took a roll of the cotton in his hands, holding it
+gingerly, and essaying absentmindedly to yield to his wife's mood. Just
+at that moment Sanford Browne the younger, a boy about eight years of
+age, came round the corner of the house and stood in front of his
+father, with his feet wide apart, feeling among the miscellanies in the
+bottom of his pocket for a periwinkle shell.
+
+"How would you like to have him spirited away by a crimp, Judy?"
+demanded the husband, replacing the cotton and pointing to the lad.
+
+"I should just die, dear," said Judy Browne in a low voice.
+
+"That's what happened to my mother, I suppose," said Browne. "I hope
+she died; it would be too bad to think that she had to live all these
+twenty-two years imagining all sorts of things about her lost little
+boy. I remember her, Judy, the day I saw her last. I went out of a side
+street into Fleet Street, and then I grew curious and went on out
+through Temple Bar into the road they call the Strand. I did not know
+how far I had gone from the city until I heard the great bell of St.
+Martin's in the Fields chiming at five o'clock. I turned toward the
+city again, but stopped along the way to look at the noblemen's houses.
+Somehow, at last I got into Lincoln's Inn Fields and could not tell
+which way to go. Just then a sea captain came up to me, and, pretending
+to know me, told me he would fetch me to my father. I went with him,
+and he got me into a boat and so down to his ship below the bridge. The
+ship was already taking aboard a lot of kids and freewillers out of the
+cook houses, where some of them had been shut up for weeks. I cried and
+begged for my father, but the captain only kicked and cuffed me. It was
+a long and wretched voyage, as I have told you often. I was brought
+here and sold to work with negroes and convicts. I don't so much mind
+the beatings I got, or the hard living, but to think of all my mother
+has suffered, and that I shall never see her or my father again! If I
+ever lay eyes on that Captain Lewis, he will go to the devil before he
+has time to say any prayers."
+
+"I'd like to shoot him," said the boy, in sympathy with his father's
+mood. "I'll kill him when I get big enough, pappy." And he went off to
+seek the bow and arrow given him by an Indian who lingered in the
+region once occupied by his tribe.
+
+"Never mind," said the wife, stroking her husband's arm, "you are
+getting rich now, and your hard times are over."
+
+"Yes, but everybody will always remember that I was a bought
+redemptioner, and your folks will hardly ever forgive you for marrying
+me."
+
+"Oh, yes, they will some day. If you keep on as lucky as you are, I
+shall live in a bigger house than any of them, and drive to church
+behind six horses. That'll make a great difference. If the Nancy Jane
+fetches me a London bonnet and a wide, wide petticoat such as the
+Princess Augusta wears, so that I can brush against the pews on both
+sides with my silk frock when I go down the aisle, my folks will
+already begin to think that Sanford Browne is somebody," and she made
+little motions of vanity as she fancied her entrance into Duck Creek
+parish church on the Sunday after the arrival of the tobacco ship,
+arrayed in imitation of the Princess of Wales, the news of whose recent
+widowhood had not yet reached Judy Browne.
+
+"There comes the Nancy Jane now," called the boy from the dooryard,
+pointing to a sloop on the other side of the wide estuary, bowling in
+with topsail and jib furled, and her rusty mainsail bellying under
+pressure of a wind dead aft.
+
+"That's not the Nancy Jane," said the father; "only a sloop. But I
+don't know whose. Oh, yes; it must be that Yankee peddler back again.
+There's his codfish ensign at his masthead. He's making for the other
+side now, but he'll come over here to sell his rum and kickshaws before
+he goes out."
+
+"Hello, Mr. Browne!" It was a voice coming from the river in front of
+the house. The owner of the voice was concealed by some bushes at the
+margin of the water.
+
+"Hello!" answered Browne to the invisible caller. "Is that you, Mr.
+Wickford?"
+
+"I've got some letters for you, Mr. Browne," came back from the water.
+"The Nancy Jane ran in on the east wind this morning before daylight,
+and anchored in the little oyster bay below Manley's. She brings news
+that the Prince of Wales died last Spring. I happened to come past
+there this morning, and I brought some things Captain Jackson had for
+you. I reckon there's something pretty here for Mrs. Browne, too. Send
+one of your boys down."
+
+"I'll come myself," said Browne, going down the bank, followed eagerly
+by the little Sanford, who had also his interest in the arrival of the
+parcels from London. There came after them presently a lithe young
+negro boy of fifteen, not yet two years out of Africa. He was clad in
+nothing but his native blackness, which was deemed sufficient for a
+half-grown negro in that day. Mrs. Browne had sent black Jocko after
+the others with orders to bring up her things "without waiting for the
+gentlemen to get done talking."
+
+But the gentlemen did not talk very long. The neighbor was desirous of
+getting on to have the first telling of the news about the death of
+Prince Frederick, and Mr. Browne was impatient to open the packet from
+his factor.
+
+"Good-by, Mr. Wickford. Come down and see us some time, and bring all
+your family," he called as the neighbor's canoe shot away in answer to
+the lusty paddle strokes of his men.
+
+"I reckon we'll come, sir," answered the receding neighbor. "My wife'll
+want to see what Mrs. Browne got from London. Tell Mrs. Browne we're
+afraid she'll be too fine to know her neighbors when she puts on her
+new bonnet."
+
+The last words of this neighborly chaff were shouted over a wide sheet
+of water, and Sanford Browne, halfway up the bank, made no reply, but
+went back to his chair in the passage and opened his packet. Kid that
+he had been, Browne had contrived to learn to read and write from a
+convict bought for a schoolmaster by the planter to whom Browne had
+been sold. This lettered rogue took pity on the kidnaped child, and
+gave him lessons on nights and Sunday, because he was well born and not
+willing to sink to the condition of the servants about him.
+
+Browne found his factor's letter occupied at the outset with an account
+of the tobacco market and congratulations on the high price obtained
+for the last year's crop. Then the factor proceeded to give a bill of
+sales, and then a list of things purchased for Browne and his family,
+with the price set down for the hoop skirt and the new bonnet and the
+silk frock, as well as for a cocked hat and dress periwig necessary to
+Sanford Browne's increasing dignity, and some things for the little
+Sanford. Browne studied each successive page of the letter in hope of
+finding a word on the subject in which he was most deeply interested,
+stopping reluctantly now and then to look up when his wife would break
+in with:
+
+"Mr. Browne! Mr. Browne! won't you just look this way a minute? Isn't
+this fine?"
+
+"Yes, Judy; it surely is," he would say absently, keeping his thumb on
+the place in the factor's letter, and resuming his reading as soon as
+possible, without having any definite idea of what Mrs. Judith had been
+showing him.
+
+On the very last page he found these words:
+
+    "I have made most diligent searche for your family as you required
+    butt I have not discovered muche that will be to your satisfaction.
+    I send you, Sir, a coppie of certain things sette down in the
+    Parish Register of St. Clement Danes, wch I thoughte most like to
+    be of interest to you. Bye these you will discover that Walter
+    Sanford Browne was born the 27 daye of the moneth of Febuarie
+    1721--wch will no doubt give you exacte knowledge of your owne age.
+    The father and mother of Walter Sanford Browne bore the names
+    Walter and Susan respectively wch is a fact that will not be
+    indifferent to you I suppose. I finde that Walter Browne aforesd,
+    who is sette down a scrivener, was married at this same church of
+    St. Clements on the 22 daye of Marche in the year 1720 to Anne
+    Sanford of the same parish. Theire daughter Susan was borne in
+    Aprill 1725, as you will see by this transcripte made by the clarke
+    of the parish. The clarke cannot discover any further mencion of
+    this familie nor of the name of Sanford in this register downe to
+    this present time, from wch he deems it is to be inferred that sd.
+    Walter Browne long since removed out of that parish, in particular
+    as the present wardens and sidesmen of the parish afresd do not
+    know any man of that name now residente there. It is a probabilitie
+    that yr. father has removed to one of the plantations. I have made
+    public advertisement in the Gazettes for your father or any neare
+    kinsman but w'out any successe whatsoever."
+
+There followed a memorandum of pounds, shillings, and pence paid to the
+"clarke" of the parish of St. Clement Danes, of money paid for
+advertisements in the gazettes, and of expenses incurred in further
+searches made by a solicitor. That was all--the end of hope to Sanford
+Browne. He went into the sitting-room and put the factor's letter into
+a little clothespress that stood beside the chimney, and then strode
+out into the air, giving no heed to Judith, who had gone up the stairs
+at the side of the passage, and come down again wearing a hideous
+pannier petticoat under her new frock. She guessed her husband's
+disappointment, and, though she longed for a word of admiration, or at
+least of wondering attention, for her square-rigged petticoat, she
+thought best to be content with the excited prattle of her maid, a
+young bond-servant bought off the Nancy Jane the year before.
+
+"Here, Jocko," said Browne, standing in front of his house and calling
+to the Adamite negro lad, "you go and call Bob, and get the sloop
+ready. I'm going down to the ship."
+
+"Get sloop, massa?" said the negro, speaking English with difficulty.
+"Massa say sloop?"
+
+Sanford Browne looked at the black figure inquiringly. It was not often
+that poor, cringing Jocko ventured to question him. "Yes, sloop," he
+said with an emphasis born of his irritating disappointment.
+
+"Much great big wind blow--blow right up river. Tack, tack, all day,"
+muttered the black boy timidly.
+
+"You're right," said the planter, who had not observed that the strong
+wind would be dead ahead all the way to the anchorage. "Tell Bob to put
+the canoe in the water." And then to himself: "The negro is no fool."
+
+"Bob, Bob, massa him want can-noo go see great big ship mighty quick."
+
+"Come, Sanford; you may go too," said the planter to his son. "We'll
+carry the fowling piece: there'll be ducks on the water."
+
+
+SCENE II.
+
+The time is the same day, and the place the deck of the Nancy Jane, at
+anchor. The captain is giving orders to the cook: "I want a good bowl
+of bumbo set here on deck against the planters come aboard." Then
+turning to the mate: "Have the decks squeegeed clean, an' everything
+shipshape. Put the rogues in as good garb as you can. You'll find a few
+wigs in a box in my cabin. But these on the likeliest, and make 'em say
+they're mechanics, or merchants' clerks, and housemaids. Tell 'em if
+they don't put out a good foot and get off our hands soon we'll tie 'em
+up and make 'em understand that it's better to lie to a planter than to
+stick on shipboard too long. Make the women clean themselves up and
+look tidy like ancient housemaids, and don't allow any nonsense. Tell
+'em if they swear or quarrel while the planters are aboard they'll get
+a cat-o'-nine-tails well laid on. We've got to make 'em more afraid of
+the ship than they are of the plantations."
+
+The convicts were in the course of an hour or two ranged up against the
+bulwarks forward, and they were with much effort sufficiently
+browbeaten to bring them into some kind of order.
+
+"They're a sorry lot of Newgate birds," said the captain to the mate.
+"I'm afraid we'll have a time of it before we change 'em off for
+merchantable tobacco. Here, you Cappy," he said to one of the older
+convicts. "Look here! Don't you tell anybody to-day that you're a
+seaman. They'll swear you are a pirate, and that you'll be off with one
+of their country sloops, and go a-blackbearding it down the coast.
+You're to be a schoolmaster to-day."
+
+"I can't read much, and I can't hardly write a word," said the man, a
+burly fellow of about sixty, whose heavy jaws and low brows would look
+brutal in spite of the brand-new periwig put on him that very morning
+to make him salable.
+
+"That don't matter," said the captain. "You're schoolmaster enough for
+a tobacco country. You can navigate a ship by the sun and compass, and
+that's education enough. If you go and let it out that you're a sailor,
+I'll--well, you've been a captain or mate, and you know devilish well
+what I'll do with you. I'll serve you as you have served many a poor
+devil in your time."
+
+Then, catching sound of a quarrel between two of the women, the captain
+called the mate, and said: "Give both of the wenches a touch off with
+your rope's end. Don't black their eyes or hit 'em about the face, but
+let 'em just taste the knot once over the shoulders to keep 'em
+peaceable. Be in haste, or they'll scratch one another's eyes."
+
+The mate proceeded to salute the two women with a sharp blow apiece of
+the knotted rope, and thus changed their rising fury into sullenness.
+
+Planters came and went during the forenoon, and cross-questioned the
+convicts, threatening to make it hard for them if they did not tell the
+truth. The visitors drank the captain's bumbo, but the convicts were
+slow of sale. Some of the planters announced their intention not to buy
+any more convicts, meaning for the future to purchase only freewillers,
+or bond servants voluntarily selling themselves, and some had made up
+their minds not to buy any more Christian servants at all, but to stock
+their places with blacks.
+
+It was mid-afternoon when Sanford Browne arrived in his dugout,
+propelled against a head wind and heavy seas by Bob, the white
+redemptioner, and Jocko, the negro boy. The planter himself sat astern
+steering, with little Sanford crouched between his knees. Leaving the
+two servants in the canoe, the planter and his son went aboard the
+ship, while the convicts crowded against the guard rail to get a look
+at the naked figure of Jocko, his black skin being a novel sight to
+their English eyes.
+
+There was recognition between the captain of the Nancy Jane, who had
+sailed to the Potomac for many years, and Sanford Browne. While the two
+stood in conversation by the bowl of strong rum punch, little Sanford
+strolled about the deck, shyly scrutinizing the faces of the convicts
+and being scrutinized by them. The women tried to talk with him, but
+their rather battered countenances frightened the boy, and he slipped
+away. At last he planted himself before old Cappy, whose bronzed face
+under a new powdered wig produced a curious effect.
+
+"Where did you come from?" demanded the child, with awakened curiosity.
+
+The would-be schoolmaster started at this question, gazed a moment at
+the child, and said, "God!" between his teeth.
+
+"Lawr! 'e's one uv yer scholars, Cappy," said one of the women, in
+derision. "Ye'll be a-l'arnin' 'im lots uv words 'e ain't never 'eerd
+uv afore. Yer givin' the young un a prime lesson in swearin' to begin."
+
+But Cappy made no reply. He only looked more eagerly at the child, and
+wiped his brow with his sleeve, disarranging his periwig in doing so.
+Then, changing the form of his exclamation but not its meaning, he
+muttered, "The devil!"
+
+"W'atever's the matter?" said the woman. "You're fetching in God an'
+the devil both. Is the young un one uv yer long-lost brothers, Cappy?"
+
+"What's your name?" demanded Cappy of the boy, without heeding the
+woman's gabble.
+
+"Sanford Browne."
+
+The perspiration stood in beads on the man's forehead, and the veins
+were visibly distended. "Looks like as if he hadn't got any bigger in
+more'n twenty years," he soliloquized. Then he said to the boy in an
+eager whisper, for his voice was dry and husky, "What's yer pappy's
+name, lad?"
+
+"He's Sanford Browne, too. That's him a-talking to Captain Jackson at
+t'other end of the ship. He was stole when he was a little boy by a
+mean old captain, and brought over here and sold, just like you folks,"
+and the lad made the remark general by looking around him. "He's got
+rich now, and he's got more'n a thousand acres of land," said the
+little Sanford, boastfully, thinking perhaps that his father's success
+might encourage the woe-begone set before him. "But I reckon that mean
+old captain'll ketch it if pappy ever sets eyes on to him," he added.
+
+"Lawr! now w'atever's the matter uv you, Cappy?" put in the woman
+again. "A body'd think you must 'a' been that very cap'n yer own self."
+
+The man turned fiercely upon the garrulous woman and seized her throat
+with his left hand, while he threatened her with a clenched fist and
+growled like a wild beast. "Another word of that, Poll, and I'll knock
+the life out of you."
+
+Poll gave a little shriek, which brought the mate on the scene with his
+threatening rope's end, and restored Cappy to a sort of self-control,
+though with a strange eagerness of terror his eyes followed the
+frightened lad as he retreated toward his father.
+
+The planter, after discussing with Captain Jackson the death of the
+Prince of Wales in the preceding March, was explaining to the captain
+that he did not mean to buy any more white servants. The blacks were
+better, and were good property, while the black children added to a
+planter's estate. White servants gave you trouble, and in four or seven
+years at most their time expired, and you had to break in new ones. But
+still, if he could pick up a fellow that would know how to sail his
+sloop in a pinch, he might buy.
+
+"There's one, now," said Captain Jackson; "that chap leaning on the
+capstan; he's been a captain, I believe."
+
+"How'd they come to convict a captain?" demanded the planter, laughing.
+"We planters have always thought that all captains were allowed to
+steal a little."
+
+"They mustn't steal from their owners," said Captain Jackson
+good-naturedly. "Passengers and shippers we do clip a little when we
+can, but that old fool must have tried to get something out of the
+owners of the ship. He's too old to run away now, or cut up any more
+deviltry. Go and talk with him."
+
+"What's his bob-wig for?"
+
+"Oh, that's some of my mate's nonsense. He thought planters wouldn't
+want to buy a seaman, so he rigged the old captain up like a
+schoolmaster, and told him to say that he had always taught arithmetic.
+He'll tell you he's a schoolmaster, according to the mate's commands;
+but he isn't. He's been a ship's captain, I believe, and he helped me
+take observations on the voyage, and he seemed to know the river when
+he got in last night."
+
+There ensued some talk as to how many hogsheads of tobacco the convict
+was worth, and then Browne went forward to inspect the man and question
+him.
+
+"What's your name?" said the planter.
+
+"James Palmer," said Cappy, with his head down.
+
+"Lawr!" muttered Polly under her breath.
+
+"What's your business?"
+
+"Schoolmaster."
+
+"Come, don't lie to me," said Browne. "You are a sailor, or a captain
+maybe."
+
+This set the old fellow to trembling visibly, and Polly again said
+"Lawr!" loud enough for him to hear it and give her one fierce glance
+that quieted her.
+
+"Who said I was a sailor, sir?"
+
+"Captain Jackson."
+
+"That's because you want a sailor," stammered the convict. "Mighty
+little I ever knew about a ship till I got aboard this thing. Captain
+would 'a' told you I was a carpenter or a preacher if he thought that
+was what you wanted."
+
+The man spoke gaspingly, and a dim sense of having known him began to
+make its way into the mind of the planter. He was going to ask him
+where he had taught school, but all at once a rush of memories crowded
+his mind, and a strange suspicion came to him. He stood silent and
+staring at the convict half a minute. Then he walked round him,
+examining him from this side and that.
+
+"Let me see your left hand, you villain!" he muttered, approaching the
+man.
+
+The convict had kept his left hand shoved down under his belt. He shook
+now as with an ague, and made no motion.
+
+"Out with it!" cried the planter.
+
+Slowly the old man drew out his hand, showing that one joint of the
+little finger was gone.
+
+"You liar!" said the planter, at the same time pulling the bob-wig from
+the convict's head, and flinging it on the deck. "Your name is not
+James Palmer, but Jim Lewis, Captain Jim Lewis of the Red Rose--'Black
+Jim,' as everybody called you behind your back!"
+
+Here Poll broke out again with "Lawr!" while Sanford Browne paused,
+fairly choked with emotion. Then he began again in a low voice:
+
+"You thought I wouldn't know you. I've been watching out for you these
+ten years, to send you to hell with my own hands! You robbed my poor
+mother of her boy." The wretch cowered beneath the planter's gaze, and
+essayed to deny his identity, but his voice died in his throat. Browne
+at length turned on his heel, and strode rapidly toward the captain.
+
+"I'll take him at the price you fixed," he called out as he advanced.
+
+The captain wondered what gold mine Browne had discovered in Cappy to
+make him so eager to accept the first price named. He for his part was
+equally eager to be rid of a convict whom he regarded as rather a
+dangerous man, so he said promptly, "He belongs to you," and shook
+hands according to the custom in "closing a bargain."
+
+A moment later Black Jim Lewis, having regained his wits, rushed up to
+the captain entreating hoarsely not to be sold to Browne. "Now, don't
+let him have me, Captain Jackson; for God's sake, don't, now! He's my
+enemy. He'll beat me and starve me to death. I'm one of your own kind;
+I'm a sea captain, and it's a shame for you, a sea captain too, to sell
+me to a man that hates me and only wants to make me miserable. I'm
+ruinated anyhow, and you ought to take some pity on me."
+
+This plea for a freemasonry among sea captains had influence with the
+captain of the Nancy Jane. But he said, "W'y, Jim Lewis, I've sold to
+you the best master in the province of Maryland. You don't know when
+you're well off. Mr. Browne feeds his people well, and he never beats
+'em bad, like the rest."
+
+"I tell you, he'll flay me alive, that man will! You'd better shoot me
+dead and put me out of misery."
+
+While the wretch was making this appeal, Browne was silently engaged
+in emptying the priming of his flintlock fowling piece, picking open
+the tube, and then filling the pan with fresh powder from the horn at
+his side. When he had closed the pan, he struck the stock of the gun
+one or two blows to shake the powder well down into place, that the gun
+might not miss fire. Then turning to the captain, he said, "A bargain
+is a bargain."
+
+Then to the convict he said: "Black Jim Lewis, you belong to me. Get
+into that boat, or it'll be worse for you," and he slowly raised the
+snaphance with his thumb on the hammer.
+
+Lewis had aged visibly in ten minutes. With trembling steps he walked
+to the ship's side, and clambered over the bulwarks into the dugout.
+The boy followed, and then the master took his seat in the stern, with
+his flintlock fowling piece within reach.
+
+"My dead body'll float down here past the Nancy Jane," said Jim Lewis
+to the captain; "and I'll ha'nt your ship forever--see if I don't!" He
+half rose and waved his hand threateningly as he said this in a hoarse,
+sepulchral voice.
+
+"Mr. Browne," interposed the captain of the Nancy Jane, as the lifted
+canoe paddles were ready to dip into the water, "don't be too hard on
+the old captain. You see how old and shaken he is. You'll show
+moderation, now, won't you?"
+
+"I'll care for him," answered Browne unbendingly. "Away with the canoe!
+Good-by, captain. My tobacco will be ready for you."
+
+And Poll, the convict, as she leaned over the rail and watched the
+fast-receding canoe pitching up and down on the seas, said, "Lawr!"
+
+
+SCENE III.
+
+The time is the late afternoon of the same day, and the place is again
+Sanford Browne's plantation.
+
+Judith Browne, having exhausted her experiments on the frock, the
+bonnet, and the hoop petticoat bought for her in London and sent like
+the proverbial pig in a poke, had taken to watching the Yankee peddling
+sloop, which, having lain for an hour at Patterson's on the Virginia
+shore, was now heading for the Browne place. It was pretty to see the
+sloop heel over under a beam wind and shoot steadily forward, while the
+waves dashed fair against her weather side and splashed the water from
+time to time to the top of her free board. It was a pleasant sight to
+mark her approach by the gradual increase in her size and the growing
+distinctness with which the details of her rigging could be made out.
+At length, when her bow appeared to Judith Browne to be driving so
+straight on the bank that nothing could prevent the vessel's going
+ashore Captain Perkins called to his only man, standing at the helm,
+"Hard down!" and the sloop swung her nose into the waves, and
+gracefully rounded head into the wind just in time to lie close under
+the bank, rocking fore and aft like a duck. As soon as she had swung
+into the wind enough for her sail to flap, the captain called to the
+boy who was the third member of the crew to let go the halyards; and as
+the sail ran rattling down, the captain heaved the anchor at the bow
+with his own hands. Then a plank was run out, a line made fast forward,
+and Perkins climbed the bank and greeted Mrs. Browne. His manner
+combined strangely the heartiness of the seaman with the sinuous
+deference of the peddler. His speech was that which one hears only in
+the most up-country New England regions and among London small
+shopkeepers. The uttering of his vowel sounds taper end first greatly
+amused his customers in the Chesapeake regions, while their abrupt
+clipping of both vowels and liquids was equally curious to Perkins, who
+regarded all people outside of New England as natives to be treated
+with condescending kindness alike for Christian and for business
+reasons, and as people who were even liable to surprise him by the
+possession of some rudimentary virtues in spite of their unlucky
+outlandishness.
+
+"Glad to see yeh again, Mis' Braown," he said when he reached the top
+of the bank. "Where's Mr. Braown?"
+
+"He's gone down to the Nancy Jane. Won't you come in, Captain Perkins?
+Come in and sit down a while."
+
+"Wal, yes. And how's your little gal?" Seeing a dubious look on Mrs.
+Browne's face, he said: "Or is it a boy, now? I call at so many houses
+I git confused. Fine child, I remember."
+
+"The lad's gone off with his father," said Judith, giving Perkins a
+seat in the passage.
+
+After more preliminary talk the peddler got to his main point, that he
+had lots of nice notions and things this year cheaper'n they could be
+had in London. All the folks agreed that his things were "cheaper,
+considerin' quality, Mis' Braown, than you could git 'em in London."
+
+Judith knew by experience that his things were neither very good nor
+very cheap, but her only chance in life to know anything of the
+delights of shopping lay in the coming of peddling sloops. One might
+order a frock, a bonnet, or a petticoat from London, but one must wait
+nearly a year till the tobacco ship returned to get what had been sent
+for. It was better to be cheated a little in order to get the pleasure
+of making up her mind and then changing it, of fancying herself
+possessor now of this and now of that, and finally getting what she
+liked best after having had the usufruct of the whole stock. She was
+soon examining the goods that Perkins's boy had brought up to
+her--fancy things for herself and young Sanford, and coarse cloth for
+her servants. She concluded nothing about staple trading till her
+husband should return; for prices were to be fixed on the corn and
+bacon which must be paid in exchange. But there were articles that she
+craved, and of which she preferred not to speak to her husband, for a
+while at least, and these she paid for from her little hoard of pieces
+of eight, or Spanish dollars. The change she made in fractions of these
+coins--actual quarters of dollars cut like pieces of pie. These were
+tested in Perkins's little money scales. Less than a quarter of a
+dollar was usually disregarded in the South; and as for Perkins, he
+never seemed to have any fractional silver to give back in change, but
+always proposed some little article that he would put in at cost just
+to fill up to the value of a piece of eight.
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+Paddling with the wind, Sanford Browne's cedar canoe made good speed,
+and as the sun was setting and the wind falling it glided past the
+Yankee sloop into shoal water farther up, where its inmates
+disembarked, and beached their craft.
+
+Sanford Browne walked rapidly up the bank, followed by his son, the
+servants, and the old convict. He approached Perkins and greeted him,
+but in a manner not cordial and hardly courteous. He looked at Judith
+so severely that she fancied him offended with her. She reflected
+quickly that he could not have known anything of her surreptitious
+trading with the peddler. Uriah Perkins concluded that a storm was
+brewing between husband and wife, and found it necessary to return to
+the sloop to make her fast astern, against the turn of the tide and the
+veering of the wind.
+
+When Perkins had disappeared, Sanford Browne pointed to the convict and
+said slowly and with fierceness:
+
+"Judy, that's the man. That's Black Jim Lewis, that stole me away from
+home and sold me for a redemptioner. Jocko, go fetch the manacles."
+
+Judith stood speechless. It was a guiding maxim with her that women
+should not meddle with men's business, and it was an article of faith
+that whatever her husband did was right. She sympathized with his
+resentment against the man who had kidnaped him. But the sight of the
+terror-stricken face of the cowardly brute smote her woman's heart with
+pity as the manacles were put on the convict's wrists.
+
+"See that he doesn't get away," said Browne to Bob.
+
+"He can't pound his corn with them things," said Bob, pointing to the
+handcuffs. "Shall I get him some meal?"
+
+"Not to-night," said Browne. "He didn't give me a crust to eat the
+first night I was on ship. Turn about's fair play, Captain Lewis. Take
+him to the quarters."
+
+When the convict found himself manacled, his terror increased. He
+pulled away from Bob and approached Browne.
+
+"Let me speak a word, master," he began tremulously. "I'm all broke up
+and ruinated, anyhow. I know the devil must 'a' been in me the day I
+took you away. I've thought of it many a time, and I've said, 'Jim
+Lewis, something dreadful'll come to you for stealin' a good little boy
+that way.'" Here he paused. Then he resumed in a still more broken
+voice: "When I was put on to a transport to come to this country I
+remembered you, and I says, 'That's what's come of it.' Soon as I saw
+that little fellow, the very picture of you the day when I coaxed you
+away, I says to myself, 'O my God, I'm done fer now! I'm ruinated for a
+fact; I might as well be in hell as in Maryland.' But, master, if
+you'll only have just a little pity on an old man that's all broke up
+and ruinated, I'll--I'll--be a good servant to you. I promise you,
+afore Almighty God. Don't you go and be too hard on a poor ruinated old
+man. I'm old--seems to me I'm ten year older than I wuz afore I saw you
+this mornin'. I know you hate me. You've got strong reasons to hate me.
+I hate myself, and I keep sayin' to myself, says I, 'Jim Lewis, what an
+old devil you are!' But please, master, if you won't be too hard on me,
+I think I'll be better. I can't live long nohow. But----"
+
+"There, that'll do," said Browne.
+
+"Please, Mr. Browne," interposed Judy.
+
+"Lewis, do you remember when you woolded a sailor's head?" demanded the
+planter.
+
+"I don't know, master. I have done lots of things a little hard.
+Sailors are a hard lot."
+
+"If you'd had pity on that poor sailor when he begged for mercy, I'd
+have pity on you to-night But I cried over that sailor that you
+wouldn't have mercy on, and now I can't pity you a bit. You've made
+your own bed. Your turn has come."
+
+Saying this, Sanford Browne went into the house, while the old sea
+captain followed Bob in a half-palsied way round the south end of the
+house toward the servants' quarters, muttering, "Well, now, Jim Lewis,
+you're done fer."
+
+"Mr. Browne, what are you going to do with that old man?" asked Judy,
+with more energy than she usually showed in speaking to her husband.
+
+"I don't know, Judy. Something awful, I reckon." Browne could not make
+up his mind to any distinct act of cruelty beyond sending the convict
+supperless to bed.
+
+"I don't like you to be so hard on an old man. I know he's bad--as bad
+as can be, but that's no reason why you should be bad."
+
+"I wouldn't be bad, Judy. Just think how he sold me, like Joseph, away
+from my family!"
+
+"But Joseph wasn't really very unkind to his brothers, Mr. Browne; and
+you won't be too hard on the poor old wretch, now will you?"
+
+"Judy, I mean to make him suffer. When I think of my mother, and all
+she must have suffered, I haven't a drop of pity in me. He's got to
+suffer for his crimes now. That's what he was thrown into my hands for,
+I reckon, Judy."
+
+"Then you won't be the man you have been. Time and again you've bought
+some poor kid from a hard master like old Hoak, to save him from
+suffering. Now you'll get to be hard and hateful like old Hoak
+yourself."
+
+"Judy, remember my mother."
+
+"Do you think your mother, if she is alive, would like to think of your
+standing over that old wretch while he was whipped and whipped and
+washed with salt water, maybe? If your mother has lived, she has been
+kept alive just by thinking what a good boy you were; and she says to
+herself, 'My Sanford wouldn't hurt anything. If he was run off to the
+plantations, he has grown to be the best man in all the country.' Do
+you think she'd like to have you turn a kind of public whipper or
+hangman for her sake?"
+
+Browne looked at his wife in surprise. Her eyes flashed as she spoke,
+and the little womanly body, whose highest flight had seemed to end in
+a London frock and petticoat, had suddenly become something much more
+than he had fancied possible to her. She had taken the first place, and
+he felt himself overshadowed. He looked up at her with a sort of
+reverence, but he held stubbornly to a purpose that had been ossifying
+for twenty years.
+
+"That's all well enough for a woman, Judy. But you know that any other
+man would do just what I am going to do, under the same circumstances.
+I don't like to do what you don't want me to do, but I sha'n't let old
+Lewis off. I reckon he'll find my hand hard on him as long as he holds
+out. Any other man would do just the same, Judy."
+
+Judith Browne stood still and looked at her husband in silence. Then
+she spoke in a repressed voice:
+
+"Sanford Browne, what do you talk to me that way for? Any other man
+might worry this old wretch out of his life, but you won't do it. What
+did I marry you for? Why did I leave my father's house to take you, a
+poor redemptioner just out of your time? It was because you weren't
+like other men. I knew you were kind and good-hearted when other men
+were cruel and unfeeling. From that day to this you have never made me
+sorry that I left home and turned my father against me. But if you do
+this thing you have in mind to a poor old wretch that can't help
+himself, then you won't be Sanford Browne any more. You'll have that
+old man's blood on your hands, and Judy will never get over being sorry
+that she left her friends to go with you." The woman's voice had broken
+as she spoke these last words, and now she broke down completely, and
+sobbed a little.
+
+"What shall I do, Judy?" said her husband softly. "God knows, if I keep
+him in sight I shall kill him some day."
+
+"Sell him. Sell him right off. There's Captain Perkins coming up the
+bank now."
+
+"You sell him, Judy. Perkins has things you want. I give Lewis to you.
+Make any trade you please." Then, as his wife moved away, he followed
+her, and said in a smothered voice: "Sell him quick, Judy. Don't stand
+on the price. Get him out of sight before I kill him."
+
+Judith went out to meet the peddling captain, who was now strolling
+toward the house in hope of an invitation to supper, knowing that Mrs.
+Browne's biscuit and fried chicken were better than the salt pork and
+hoecake cooked by the boy on the sloop. The wind had fallen, and the
+water view was growing dim in the gloaming. Judith explained to the
+peddler that the convict her husband had bought proved to be an old
+enemy of his. She stammered a little in her endeavor not to betray the
+real reasons for selling him, and Perkins, who was proud of his own
+penetration, inferred that Browne was afraid of his life if he should
+keep the new servant. He saw in this an unexpected chance for profit.
+When Mrs. Browne offered to sell him if Perkins would take him to the
+eastern shore or some other place away off, he said that servants wuz a
+thing he didn't deal in--a leetle dangerous at sea where the crew wuz
+so small as his. Hard to sell an old fellow; the planters wanted young
+men. But he wanted to accommodate, you know, an' seein' as how Mis'
+Braown had been a good customer, he would do what he could. He would
+have to make a run over to the eastern shore perticular to sell this
+man. Folks on the eastern shore didn't buy much. Hadn't sold 'em a hat,
+for instance. They all wore white cotton caps, men an' women; an' they
+made the caps themselves out of cotton of their own raisin'. But, as he
+wuz a-sayin', Mis' Braown had been a good customer, an' he wanted to
+accommodate. But he'd have to put the price low enough so as he
+wouldn't be poorer by the trade. Thus he faced about on his disjunctive
+conjunction, now this way, now that, until he had time to consider what
+was the very lowest figure he could offer as a basis for his higgling.
+He couldn't offer much, but he would give a price which he named in
+pieces of eight, stipulating that he should pay it in goods. He saw in
+this a chance for elastic profits in both directions.
+
+Judith hardly gave a thought to the price he named; but as soon as she
+perceived that he had disentangled himself from his higgling preamble
+so far as to offer a definite sum, she accepted it.
+
+This lack of hesitation on her part disconcerted the peddler, who had a
+feeling that a bargain made without preliminary chaffering had not been
+properly solemnized. He was suspicious now that he was the victim of
+some design.
+
+"That is to say, Mis' Braown, I only dew this to accommodate ole
+friends. It ain't preudent to make such a trade in the dark. I'll dew
+it if I find the man sound in wind and limb, and all satisfactory, when
+I come to look him over."
+
+"Of course that's what I mean," said Judith. "Now come in and take
+supper with us, captain," she continued, her voice still in a quiver
+with recent emotions.
+
+"Well, I don't keer if I dew, jest fer to bind the bargain, you knaow.
+I told the boy I'd be back, but I reckon they won't wait long. Ship
+folks don't wait much on nobody."
+
+Judith turned toward the house, followed by the peddler. Sanford Browne
+was still sitting in the entry just as Judith had left him, surprised
+and in a sense paralyzed by the sudden and effective opposition which
+his wife had offered to the gratification of his only grudge.
+
+"Mr. Browne!" called Judith, almost hysterically, her tense nerves
+suddenly shaken again. "What's that? Something's happened down at the
+quarters."
+
+Looking through the wide passage into the dim twilight beyond, she
+could see running figures like shadows approaching the house. Sanford
+Browne rose at his wife's summons in time to meet the convict Lewis,
+still manacled, as he rushed into the passage at the back of the house
+and dashed out again at the front. Browne attempted to arrest his
+flight, crying out, as he made an effort to seize him, "Stop, you old
+villain, or I'll kill you!" But the momentum of the flying figure
+rendered Browne's grasp ineffectual, and in a moment he was out of
+doors, just as Bob and Jocko and the other servants entered the passage
+in a pell-mell pursuit.
+
+As the running man emerged from the darkness of the passage, Perkins,
+thinking his profit in jeopardy, threw himself athwart his path, and
+cried: "Here! Where be you a-goin' so fast with them things on your
+wrist?"
+
+"To hell and damnation!" yelled Lewis, striking the peddler fair in the
+breast with both manacled hands, and sending him rolling on the ground.
+
+The convict did not pause a moment in his flight, but, with the whole
+pack in full cry after him, dashed onward to the bank and down it.
+Before any of his pursuers could lay hands on him he was aboard the
+sloop.
+
+"Ketch him! Ketch him!" cried Captain Perkins, once more on his feet,
+and giving orders from the top of the bank.
+
+The cabin boy had just emerged from the cabin to call the man to
+supper. He and the sailor tried hard to seize the fleeing man, but
+Captain Lewis swerved to one side and ran round the gunwale of the
+sloop with both men after him. When he reached the stern he leaped
+beyond their reach, and plunged head first into the water, sinking out
+of sight where the fast-ebbing tide was now gurgling round the rudder.
+
+In vain the boy and the sailorman looked with all their might at the
+place where he had gone down; in vain they poked a long pole into the
+water after him; in vain did Bob and Jocko paddle in the canoe all over
+the place where Black Jim Lewis had sunk.
+
+Perkins took the precaution, before descending the bank, to say:
+"You'll remember, Mis' Braown, that I only bought him on conditions,
+and stipple-lated I wuz to be satisfied when I come to look him over.
+'Tain't no loss of mine." This caveat duly lodged, he descended to the
+deck of his sloop, where he found the cabin boy shaking as with an
+ague.
+
+"What be you a-trimblin' abaout, naow? Got a fever 'n' agur a'ready? Y'
+ain't afeard of a dead man, be yeh, Elkanah?"
+
+"I don't noways like the idear," said Elkanah, "of sleepin' aboard, an'
+him dead thar by his own will, a-layin' closte up to the sloop."
+
+"He ain't nowher's nigh the sloop," responded Perkins. "This ebb-tide's
+got him in tow, an' he'll be down layin' ag'in' the Nancy Jane afore
+mornin'. That's the ship he'll ha'nt, bein' kind uv used to her."
+
+Browne had remained standing at the top of the bank, without saying a
+single word. He turned at last, and started slowly toward the house.
+Judith, forgetting her invitation to the peddler, went after her
+husband and took his hand.
+
+"I'm so glad he's dead," said she. "I know the cruel man deserved his
+fate. He'll be off your mind, now, dear; and nobody can say you did
+it."
+
+
+
+
+A BASEMENT STORY.
+
+
+I.
+
+It was one of those obscure days found only on the banks of
+Newfoundland. There was no sun, and yet no visible cloud; there was
+nothing, indeed, to test the vision by; there was no apparent fog, but
+sight was soon lost in a hazy indefiniteness. Near objects stood out
+with a distinctness almost startling. The swells ran high without
+sufficient provocation from the present wind, and attention was
+absorbed by the tremendous pitching of the steamer's bow, the wide arc
+described by the mainmast against no background at all, and by the
+smoky and bellying mainsail, kept spread to hold the vessel to some
+sort of steadiness in the waves. There was no storm, nor any dread of a
+storm, and the few passengers who were not seasick in stateroom bunks
+below, or stretched in numb passivity on the sofas in the music saloon,
+were watching the rough sea with a cheerful excitement. In the total
+absence of sky and the entire abolition of horizon the eye rejoiced,
+like Noah's dove, to find some place of rest; and the mainsail, smoky
+like the air, but cutting the smoky air with a sharp plane, was such a
+resting place for the vision. This sail and the reeky smokestack
+beyond, and the great near billows that emerged from time to time out
+of the gray obscurity--these seemed to save the universe from chaos. On
+such a day the imagination is released from bounds, individuality is
+lost, and space becomes absolute--the soul touches the poles of the
+infinite and the unconditioned.
+
+I do not pretend that such emotions filled the breasts of all the
+twenty passengers on deck that day. One man was a little seasick, and
+after every great rushing plunge of the steamer from a billow summit
+into a sea valley he vented his irritation by wishing that he had there
+some of the poets that--here he paused and gasped as the ship balanced
+itself on another crest preparatory to another shoot down the flank of
+a swell, while the screw, thrown clean out of the water, rattled wildly
+in the unresisting air and made the ship quiver in every timber--some
+of those poets, he resumed with bitterer indignation, that sing about
+the loveliness of the briny deep and the deep blue--but here an errant
+swell hit the vessel a tremendous blow on the broadside, making her
+roll heavily to starboard, and bringing up through the skylights sounds
+of breaking goblets thrown from the sideboards in the saloon below,
+while the passenger who hated marine poetry was capsized from his
+steamer chair and landed sprawling on the deck. A small group of young
+people on the forward part of the upper deck were passing the day in
+watching the swells and forecasting the effect of each upon the
+steamer, rejoicing in the rush upward followed by the sudden falling
+downward, much as children enjoy the flying far aloft in a swing or on
+a teetering see-saw, to be frightened by the descent. Some of the young
+ladies had books open in their laps, but the pretense that they had
+come on deck to read was a self-deluding hypocrisy. They had left their
+elderly relatives safely ensconced in staterooms below, and had worked
+their way up to the deck with much care and climbing and with many
+lurches and much grievous staggering, not for the purpose of reading,
+but to enjoy the society of other young women, and of such young men as
+could sit on deck. When did a young lady ever read on an ocean steamer,
+the one place where the numerical odds are reversed and there are
+always found two gallant young men to attend each young girl? This
+merry half dozen, reclining in steamer chairs and muffled in shawls,
+breathed the salt air and enjoyed the chaos into which the world had
+fallen. On this deck, where usually there was a throng, they felt
+themselves in some sense survivors of a world that had dropped away
+from them, and they enjoyed their social solitude, spiced with apparent
+peril that was not peril.
+
+The enthusiastic Miss Sylvia Thorne, who was one of this party, was
+very much interested in the billows, and in the attentions of a student
+who sat opposite her. From time to time she remarked also on some of
+the steerage passengers on the deck below; particularly was she
+interested in a young girl who sat watching the threatening swells
+emerge from the mist. Miss Sylvia spoke to the young lady alongside of
+her about that interesting young girl in the steerage, but her
+companion said she had so much trouble with the Irish at home that she
+could not bear an Irish girl even at sea. Her mother, she went on to
+say, had hired a girl who had proved most ungrateful, she had--but here
+a scream from all the party told that a sea of more than usual
+magnitude was running up against the port side. A minute later and all
+were trying to keep their seats while the ship reeled away to starboard
+with vast momentum, and settled swiftly again into the trough of the
+sea.
+
+Miss Thorne now wondered that the sail, which did not flap as she had
+observed sails generally do, in poems, did not tear into shreds as she
+had always known sails to do in novels when there was a rough sea. But
+the blue-eyed student, having come from a fresh-water college, and
+being now on a homeward voyage, knew all about it, and tried to explain
+the difference between a sea like this and a storm or a squall. He
+would have become hopelessly confused in a few minutes more had not a
+lucky wave threatened to capsize his chair and so divert the
+conversation from the sail to himself. And just as Sylvia was about to
+change back to the sail again for the sake of relieving his
+embarrassment, her hat strings, not having been so well secured as the
+sail, gave way, and her hat went skimming down to the main deck below,
+lodged a minute, and then took another flight forward. It would soon
+have been riding the great waves on its own account, a mark for curious
+sea gulls and hungry sharks to inspect, had not the Irish girl that
+Sylvia had so much admired sprung to her feet and seized it as it swept
+past, making a handsome "catch on the fly." A sudden revulsion of the
+vessel caused her to stagger and almost to fall, but she held on to the
+hat as though life depended on it. The party on the upper deck cheered
+her, but their voices could hardly have reached her in the midst of the
+confused sounds of the sea and the wind.
+
+The student, Mr. Walter Kirk, a large, bright, blond fellow, jumped to
+his feet and was about to throw himself over the rail. It was a chance
+to do something for Miss Thorne; he felt impelled to recover her
+seventy-five-cent hat with all the abandon of a lover flinging himself
+into the sea to rescue his lady-love. But a sudden sense of the
+ludicrousness of wasting so much eagerness on a hat and a sudden lurch
+of the ship checked him. He made a gesture to the girl who held the
+hat, and then ran aft to descend for it. The Irish girl, with the curly
+hair blown back from her fair face, started to meet Mr. Kirk, but
+paused abruptly before a little inscription which said that steerage
+passengers were not allowed aft. Then turning suddenly, she mounted a
+coil of rope, and held the hat up to Miss Thorne.
+
+"There's your hat, miss," she said.
+
+"Thank you," said Sylvia.
+
+"Sure you're welcome, miss," she said, not with a broad accent, but
+with a subdued trace of Irish in the inflection and idiom.
+
+When the gallant Walter Kirk came round to where the girl, just
+dismounted from the cordage, stood, he was puzzled to see her without
+the hat.
+
+"Where is it?" he asked.
+
+"The young lady's got it her own self," she replied.
+
+Kirk felt foolish. Had his chum come down over the rail for it? He
+would do something to distinguish himself. He fumbled in his pockets
+for a coin to give the girl, but found nothing smaller than a half
+sovereign, and with that he could ill afford to part. The girl had
+meanwhile turned away, and Kirk had nothing left but to go back to the
+upper deck.
+
+The enthusiastic Sylvia spoke in praise of the Irish girl for her
+agility and politeness, but the young lady alongside, who did not like
+the Irish, told her that what the girl wanted was a shilling or two.
+Servants in Europe were always beggars, and the Irish people
+especially. But she wouldn't give the girl a quarter if it were her
+hat. What was the use of making people so mean-spirited?
+
+"I'd like to give her something, if I thought it wouldn't hurt her
+feelings," said Sylvia, at which the other laughed immoderately.
+
+"Hurt her feelings! Did you ever see an Irish girl whose feelings were
+hurt by a present of money? I never did, though I don't often try the
+experiment, that's so."
+
+"I was going to offer her something myself, but she walked away while I
+was trying to find some change," said Kirk.
+
+The matter of a gratuity to the girl weighed on Sylvia Thorne's mind.
+She had a sense of a debt in owing her a gratuity, if one may so speak.
+The next day being calm and fine, and finding her company not very
+attractive, for young Kirk was engaged with some gentlemen in a stupid
+game of shuffleboard, she went forward to the part of the deck on which
+the steerage passengers were allowed to sun themselves, and found the
+Irish girl holding a baby. "You saved my hat yesterday," she said with
+embarrassment.
+
+"Sure that's not much now, miss. I'd like to do somethin' for you every
+day if I could. It isn't every lady that's _such_ a lady," said the
+girl, with genuine admiration of the delicate features and kindly
+manner of young Sylvia Thorne.
+
+"Does that baby belong to some friend of yours?" asked the young lady.
+
+"No, miss; I've not got any friends aboard. Its mother's seasick, and
+I'm givin' her a little rest an' holdin' the baby out here. The air of
+that steerage isn't fit for a baby, now, you may say."
+
+Should she give her any money? What was it about the girl that made her
+afraid to offer a customary trifle?
+
+"Where did you live in Ireland?" inquired Sylvia.
+
+"At Drogheda, miss, till I went to work in the linen mills."
+
+"Oh! you worked in the linen mills."
+
+"Yes, miss. My father died, and my mother was poor, and girls must work
+for their living. But my father wanted me to get a good bit of readin'
+and writin' so as I might do better; but he died, miss, and I couldn't
+leave my mother without help."
+
+"You were the only child?"
+
+"I've got a sister, but somehow she didn't care to go out to work, and
+so I had to go out to service; and I heard that more was paid in
+Ameriky, where I've got an aunt, an' I had enough to take me out, an' I
+thought maybe I'd get my mother out there some day, or I'd get money
+enough to make her comfortable, anyways."
+
+"What kind of work will you do in New York? I don't believe we've got
+any linen mills. I think we get Irish linen table-cloths, and so on."
+
+"Oh, I'm going out to service. I can't do heavy work, but I can do
+chambermaid's work."
+
+All this time Sylvia was turning a quarter over in her pocket. It was
+the only American coin she had carried with her through Europe, and she
+now took it out slowly, and said:
+
+"You'll accept a little something for your kindness in saving my hat."
+
+"I'm much obliged, miss, but I'd rather not I'd rather have your kind
+words than any money. It's very lonesome I've been since I left
+Drogheda."
+
+She put the quarter back into her pocket with something like shame;
+then she fumbled her rings in a strange embarrassment. She had made a
+mess of it, she thought. At the same time she was glad the girl had so
+much pride.
+
+"What is your name?" she asked.
+
+"Margaret Byrne."
+
+"You must let me help you in some way," said Miss Thorne at last.
+
+"I wonder what kind of people they are in New York, now," said
+Margaret, looking at Sylvia wistfully. "It seems dreadful to go so far
+away and not know in whose house you'll be livin'."
+
+Sylvia looked steadily at the girl, and then went away, promising to
+see her again. She smiled at Walter Kirk, who had finished his game of
+shuffleboard and was looking all up and down the deck for Miss Thorne.
+She did not stop to talk with him, however, but pushed on to where her
+mother and father were sitting not far from the taffrail.
+
+"Mamma, I've been out in the steerage."
+
+"You'll be in the maintop next, I don't doubt," said her father,
+laughing.
+
+"I've been talking to the Irish girl that caught my hat yesterday."
+
+"You shouldn't talk to steerage people," said Mrs. Thorne. "They might
+have the smallpox, or they might not be proper people."
+
+"I suppose cabin passengers might have the smallpox too," said Mr.
+Thorne, who liked to tease either wife or daughter.
+
+"I offered the Irish girl a quarter, and she wouldn't have it."
+
+"You're too free with your money," said her mother in a tone of
+complaint that was habitual.
+
+"The girl wouldn't impose on you, Sylvia," said Mr. Thorne. "She's
+honest. She knew that your hat wasn't worth so much. Now, if you had
+said fifteen cents----"
+
+"O papa, be still," and she put her hand over his mouth. "I want to
+propose something."
+
+"Going to adopt the Irish----" But here Sylvia's hand again arrested Mr.
+Thorne's speech.
+
+"No, I'm not going to adopt her, but I want mamma to take her for
+upstairs girl when we get home."
+
+Mr. Thorne made another effort to push away Sylvia's hand so as to say
+something, but the romping girl smothered his speech into a gurgle.
+
+"I couldn't think of it. She's got no references and no character."
+
+"Maybe she has got her character in her pocket, you don't know," broke
+out the father. "That's where some girls carry their character till
+it's worn out."
+
+"I'll give her a character," said Sylvia. "She is a lady, if she is a
+servant."
+
+"That's just what I don't want, Sylvia," said Mrs. Thorne, with a
+plaintive inflection, "a ladylike servant."
+
+"Oh, well, we must try her. How's the girl to get a character if nobody
+tries her? And she's real splendid, I think, going off to get money to
+help her mother. And I'm sure she's had some great sorrow or
+disappointment, you know. She's got such a wistful look in her face,
+and when I spoke about Drogheda she said----"
+
+"There you are again!" exclaimed the father. "You'll have a heroine to
+make your bed every morning. But you'd better keep your drawers locked
+for all that."
+
+"Now, I think that's mean!" and the young girl tried to look stern. But
+the severity vanished when Mr. Kirk, of the senior class in Highland
+College, came up to inform Miss Thorne that the young people were about
+getting up a conundrum party. Miss Sylvia accepted the invitation to
+join in that diluted recreation, saying, as she departed, "Let's try
+her anyway."
+
+"If she wants her I suppose I shall have to take her, but I wish she
+had more sense than to go to the steerage for a servant."
+
+"She could hardly find one in the cabin," ventured Mr. Thorne.
+
+So it happened that, on arrival in New York, Margaret Byrne was
+installed as second girl at the Thornes'. For in an American home the
+authority is often equitably divided--the mother has the name of ruling
+the household which the daughter actually governs.
+
+
+II.
+
+How much has the setting to do with a romance? The old tales had
+castles environed with savage forests and supplied with caves and
+underground galleries leading to where it was necessary to go in the
+novelist's emergency. In our realistic times we like to lay our scenes
+on a ground of Axminster with environments of lace curtains, pianos,
+and oil paintings. How, then, shall I make you understand the real
+human loves and sorrows that often have play in a girl's heart, where
+there are no better stage fittings than stationary washtubs and kitchen
+ranges?
+
+Sylvia Thorne was sure that the pretty maid from Drogheda, whose
+melancholy showed itself through the veil of her perfect health, had
+suffered a disappointment. She watched her as she went silently about
+her work of sweeping and bedmaking, and she knew by a sort of
+divination that here was a real heroine, a sufferer or a doer of
+something.
+
+Mrs. Thorne pronounced the new maid good, but "awfully solemn." But
+when Maggie Byrne met the eyes of Sylvia looking curiously and kindly
+at her sad face, there broke through her seriousness a smile so bright
+and sunny that Sylvia was sure she had been mistaken, and that there
+had been no disappointment in the girl's life.
+
+Maggie shocked Mrs. Thorne by buying a shrine from an image vender and
+hanging it against the wall in the kitchen. The mistress of the house,
+being very scrupulous of other people's superstitions, and being one of
+the stanchest of Protestants, doubted whether she ought to allow an
+idolatrous image to remain on the wall. She had read the Old Testament
+a good deal, and she meditated whether she ought not, like Jehu, the
+son of Nimshi, to break the image in pieces. But Mr. Thorne, when the
+matter was referred to him, said that a faithful Catholic ought to do
+better than an unfaithful one, and that so long as Margaret did not
+steal the jewelry she oughtn't to be disturbed at her prayers, which it
+was known she was accustomed to say every night, with her head bowed on
+the ironing table, before the image of Mary and her son.
+
+"How can the Catholics pray to images and say the second commandment,
+I'd like to know?" said Mrs. Thorne, one morning, with some asperity.
+
+"By a process like that by which we Protestants read the Sermon on the
+Mount, and then go on reviling our enemies and laying up treasures on
+earth," said her husband.
+
+"My dear, you never will listen to reason; you know that the Sermon on
+the Mount is not to be taken literally."
+
+"And how about the second commandment?"
+
+"You'd defend the scribes and Pharisees, I do believe, just for the
+sake of an argument."
+
+"Oh, no! there are plenty of them alive yet; let them defend
+themselves, if they want to," said the ungallant husband, with a wicked
+twinkle in his eye.
+
+As for Sylvia, she was all the more convinced, as time went on, that
+the girl "had had a disappointment." On the evenings when the cook was
+out Sylvia would find her way into the kitchen for a talk with Maggie.
+The quaint old stories of Ireland and the enthusiastic description of
+Irish scenes that found their way into Margaret Byrne's talk delighted
+Sylvia's fancy. But the conversations always ended by some allusion to
+the ship and the hat, and to the large-shouldered blond young man that
+came down after the hat; and Sylvia confided to Maggie that he had
+asked permission to call to see her the next summer, when he should
+come East after his graduation. Margaret had no other company, and she
+regularly looked for Sylvia on the evenings when she was alone,
+brightening the kitchen for the occasion so much as to convince the
+"down-stairs girl" that sly Maggie was accustomed to receive a beau in
+her absence.
+
+One evening Miss Thorne found Maggie in tears.
+
+"I've a mind to tell you all about it," said the girl, in answer to the
+inquiries of Sylvia, at the same time pushing her hair back off her
+face and leaning her head on her hands while she rested her elbows on
+the table.
+
+"Maybe it will do you good to tell me," answered Sylvia, concealing her
+eager curiosity behind her desire to serve Margaret.
+
+"Well, you see, miss, my sister Dora is purty."
+
+"So are you, Maggie."
+
+"No, but Dora is a young thing, and kind of helpless, like a baby. I
+was the oldest, and that Dora was my baby, like. Well, Andy Doyle and
+me were always friends. I wish I hadn't never seen him. But he seemed
+to be the nicest fellow in the world. There was never anything said
+between him an' me, only--well--but I can't tell ye--you're so
+young--you don't know about such things."
+
+"Yes, I do. You loved him, didn't you?"
+
+"You see, miss, he was always so good. Dora, she hadn't no end of b'ys
+that liked her. But anything that I had she always wanted, you may say,
+and I always 'umored her in a way. She was young and a kind of a baby,
+an' she is that purty, Miss Sylvy. Well, one of us had to go out to
+work in the mill, an' my mother, she said that Dora must go, because
+Dora wasn't any good about the house to speak of. She never knew how to
+do anything right. But Dora cried, and said she couldn't work in the
+mill, and so I went down to Larne to work in the mill, and Dora
+promised to look after the house. Now, at the time I went away Dora was
+all took up with Billy Caughey, and we thought sure as could be it was
+a match. But what does that girl do but desave Billy, and catch Andy. I
+don't think, miss, that he ever half loved her, but then I don't know
+what she made him believe; and then, ye know, nobody ever could refuse
+Dora anything, with her little beggin', winnin' ways. She just dazed
+him and got him engaged to her; and I don't believe he was ever
+entirely happy with her. But what could I do, miss? I couldn't try to
+coax him back--now could I? She was such a baby of a thing that she
+would cry if Andy only talked to me a minute after I come home. And I
+didn't want to take him away from her. That was when the mill at Larne
+had shut up. And so I hadn't no heart to do anything more there; it
+seemed like I was dead; and I knowed that if I stayed there would be
+trouble, for I could see that Andy looked at me strange, like there was
+somethin' he didn't quite understand, ye may say; but I was mad, and I
+didn't want to take away Dora's beau, nor to have anything to do with a
+lad that could change his mind so easy. And so I come away, thinkin'
+maybe I'd get some heart again on this side of the sea, and that I
+could soon send for me old mother to come."
+
+Here she leaned her head on the table and cried.
+
+"Now, there," she said after a while, "to-day I got a letter from Dora;
+there it is!" and she pushed it to the middle of the table as though it
+stung her. "She says that Andy is comin' over here to make money enough
+to bring her over after a while, sure. It kind o' makes my heart jump
+up, miss, to think of seein' anybody from Drogheda, and more'n all to
+see Andy again, that always played with me, and---- But I despise him
+too, miss, fer bein' so changeable. But then, Dora she makes fools out
+of all of them with her purty face and her coaxin' ways, miss. She
+can't help it, maybe."
+
+"Well, you needn't see Andy if you don't want to," said Sylvia.
+
+"Oh! but I do want to," and Margaret laughed through her tears at her
+own inconsistency. "Besides, Dora wants me to help him get a place, and
+I must do that; and then, sure, miss, do you think I'd let him know
+that I cared a farthin' fer him? Not a bit of it!" and Maggie pushed
+back her hair and held herself up proudly.
+
+The next morning, as Margaret laid the morning paper on Mr. Thorne's
+table in the library, she ventured to ask if he knew of a place for a
+friend of hers that was coming from Ireland the next week. That
+gentleman had caught the infection of Sylvia's enthusiasm for the Irish
+girl, and by the blush on her cheek when she made the request he was
+sure that his penetration had divined the girl's secret. So he made
+some inquiries about Andy, and, finding that he was "handy with tools,"
+the merchant thought he could give him a place in his packing
+department.
+
+It happened, therefore, that Sylvia rarely spent any more evenings in
+the kitchen. Instead of that, her little sister used to frequent it,
+for Andy was very ingenious in making chairs, tables, and other
+furniture for doll houses, and little Sophy thought him the nicest man
+in the world. Maggie was very cool and repellent to him, with little
+spells of relenting. Sometimes Andy felt himself so much snubbed that
+he would leave after a five minutes' call, in which event Maggie Byrne
+was sure to relax a little at the door, and Sylvia or Sophy was almost
+certain to find her in tears afterward.
+
+Andy could not, perhaps, have defined his feelings toward Margaret. He
+could not resist the attraction of the kitchen, for was not Maggie his
+old playmate and the sister of Dora? Sure, there was no harm at all in
+a fellow's goin' to see, just once a week, the sister of his
+swateheart, when the ocean kept him from seein' his swateheart herself.
+But if Andy had been a man accustomed to analyze his feelings he might
+have inquired how it came that he liked his swateheart's sister better
+even than his swateheart herself.
+
+One evening he had a letter from Dora, and he thought to cheer Margaret
+with good news from home. But she would not be cheered.
+
+"Now what's the matter, Mag?" Andy said coaxingly. "Don't that fellow
+in Larne write to ye?"
+
+"What fellow in Larne?" demanded Margaret with asperity.
+
+"Why, him that used to be so swate when ye was a-workin' in the mill."
+
+"Who told you that?"
+
+"Oh, now, you needn't try to kape it from me! Don't you think I knew
+all about it? Do you think Dora wouldn't tell me, honey? Don't I know
+you was engaged to him before you left the mill at Larne? Has he gone
+an' desaved you now, Maggie? If he has, I don't wonder you're cross."
+
+"Andy, that isn't true. I never had any b'y at Larne, at all."
+
+"Now, what's the use denying it? That's always the way with you girls
+about such things."
+
+"Andy Doyle, do you go out of this kitchen, and don't you never come
+back. I never desaved you in my life, and I won't have nobody say that
+I did."
+
+A conflict of feeling had made Margaret irritable, and Andy was the
+most convenient object of wrath in the absence of Dora. Andy started
+slowly out through the hall; there he turned about, and said:
+
+"Hold a bit, my poor Mag. Let me git me thoughts together. It's me's
+been desaved. If it hadn't 'a' been fer that fellow down at Larne there
+wouldn't never 'a' been anything betwixt me and Dora. And now----"
+
+"Don't you say no more, Andy. Dora's a child, and she wanted you. Don't
+ye give her up. If you give her up, and she, poor child, on the other
+sides of the water, I'll never respict ye--d'ye hear that, now, Andy?
+Only the last letter she wrote she said she'd break her heart if I let
+you fall in love with anybody else. The men's all fools now, anyhow,
+Andy, and some of them is bad, but don't you go and desave that child,
+that's a-breakin' her heart afther you. And don't ye believe as I ever
+keered a straw for ye, for I don't keer fer you, nor no other man
+a-livin'."
+
+Andy stood still for some moments, trying in a dumb way to think what
+to do or say; then he helplessly opened the door and went out.
+
+
+III.
+
+The next Thursday evening Andy did not come, and Margaret felt sorry,
+she could not tell why. But Sylvia came down into the lower hall,
+peered through the glass of the kitchen door, and, finding the maid
+sitting alone by the range, entered as of old. And to her Maggie Byrne,
+sore pressed for sympathy, told of her last talk with the comely young
+man.
+
+"You see, miss, it would be too mean for me to take Dora's b'y away
+from her, fer he's the finest-lookin' and altogether the nicest young
+man anywhere about Drogheda; and Dora, she's always used to havin' the
+best of everything, and she always took anything that was mine,
+thinkin' she'd a right to it, and, bein' a weak and purty young thing,
+I s'pose she had, now, miss."
+
+"I think she's mean, Maggie, and you're foolish if you don't take your
+own lover back again."
+
+"And she on the other sides of the say, miss? And my own little sister
+that I packed around in me arms? She's full of tricks, but then she's
+purty, and she's always been used to havin' my things. At any rate,
+'tain't meself as'll be takin' away what's hers, and she's trusted him
+to me, and she's away on the other sides of the water. At least not if
+I can help it, miss. And I pray fer help all the time. Besides, do you
+think I'd have Andy Doyle afther what's happened, even if Dora was out
+of the way?"
+
+"I know you would," said Sylvia.
+
+"I believe I would, miss, I'm such a fool. But then sometimes I despise
+him. If it wasn't fer me dear old mother, that maybe I'll never see
+again," and Maggie wiped her eyes with her apron, "I'd join the
+Sisters. I think maybe I have got a vocation, as they call it."
+
+It was the very next evening after this interview that Bridget Monahan,
+the downstairs girl, gave Margaret a little advice.
+
+"He's a foine young feller, now, Mag, but don't you be in no hurry to
+git married. You're afther havin' a nice face--a kind o' saint's face,
+on'y it's a thrifle too solemn to win the men. But if Andy should lave,
+ye might be afther doin' better, and ye might be afther doin' worruss
+now, Mag. But don't ye git married till ye've got enough to buy a
+brocade shawl. Ef ye don't git a brocade shawl afore you're married,
+niver a bit of a one'll ye be afther gittin' aftherwards. Girls like us
+don't git no money afther they are married, and it's best to lay by
+enough to git a shawl beforehand now, Mag. That's me own plan."
+
+A few weeks later Maggie was thrown into grief by hearing of the death
+of her mother. Of course she received sympathy from Sylvia. Andy, also
+having received a letter from Dora, ventured to call on Maggie to
+express in his sincerely simple way his sympathy for her grief, and to
+discuss with her what was now to be done for the homeless girl in the
+old country.
+
+"We must bring her over, Andy."
+
+"I know that," said the young man. "I'll draw all my money out of the
+Shamrock Savings Bank to-morry and send her a ticket. But I'll tell you
+what, Mag, after I went away from here the last time I felt sure I'd
+never marry Dora Byrne. But maybe I was wrong. Poor thing! I'm sorry
+fer her, all alone."
+
+"Sure, now, Andy, you must 'a' made a mistake," said Maggie. "It's
+myself as may've given Dora rason to think I'd got a young man down at
+Larne. I don't know as she meant to desave you. She needn't, fer you
+know I don't keer fer men, neither you nor anybody. I'm goin' into the
+Sisters, now my mother's dead. I've spoken to Sister Agnes about it."
+
+But whether it was from her lonely feeling at the death of her mother,
+or from her exultation at her victory over her feelings, or whether it
+was that her heart, trodden down by her conscience, sought revenge, she
+showed more affection for Andy this evening than ever before, following
+him to the area gate, detaining him in conversation, and bidding him
+goodnight with real emotion.
+
+The next evening Andy came again with a long face. He had a paper in
+which he showed Maggie an account of the suspension of the Shamrock
+Savings Bank, in which the money of so many Irishmen was locked up, and
+in which were all of Andy Doyle's savings, except ten dollars he had in
+his pocket.
+
+"Now, Mag, what am I goin' to do? It takes thirty-five dollars for a
+ticket. If I put my week's wages that I'll git to-morry on to this, I'm
+short half of it."
+
+"Sure, Andy, I'll let you have it all if you want it. You keep what
+you've got. She's me own sister. On'y I'll have to wait a while, for I
+don't want to fetch into the Sisters any less money than I've spoke to
+Sister Agnes about."
+
+"I'm a-goin' to pay ye back every cint of it, Mag, and God bless ye!
+But it 'most makes me hate Dora to see you so good. And I tell you,
+Maggie, the first thing when she gits here she's got to explain about
+that fellow down at Larne that she told me about."
+
+"Andy," said Maggie, "d'ye mind now what I say. I've suffered enough on
+account of Dora's takin' you away from me, but I'd rather die with a
+broken heart than to have anything to do with you if you are afther
+breakin' that poor child's heart when she comes here."
+
+"Oh, then you did keer for me a little, Maggie darlint?" exclaimed
+Andy. "I thought you said you never did keer!"
+
+Maggie was surprised. "I don't keer for you, nor any other man, and I
+never----" But here she paused. "You ought to be ashamed to be talkin'
+that way to me, and you engaged to Dora. There, now, take the money,
+Andy, and git Dora's ticket, and don't let's hear no more foolish
+talkin' that it would break the poor dear orphan's heart to hear. The
+poor baby's got nobody but you and me to look afther her, now her
+mother's gone, and it's a shame and a sin if we don't do it."
+
+
+IV.
+
+Margaret Byrne hurried her work through. The steamer that brought Dora
+had come in that day. Dora was met at Castle Garden by her aunt, and
+Margaret had got permission to go to see her in the evening. As Andy
+Doyle had to go the same way, he stopped for Maggie. All the way over
+to the aunt's house in Brooklyn he was moody and silent, the very
+opposite of a man going to meet his betrothed. Margaret was quiet, with
+the peace of one who has gained a victory. Her struggle was over. There
+was no more any danger that she should be betrayed into bearing off the
+affections of her sister's affianced lover.
+
+Maggie greeted Dora affectionately, but Dora was like one distraught.
+She held herself aloof from her sister, and still more from Andy, who,
+on his part, made a very poor show of affection.
+
+"Well," said Dora after a while, "I s'pose you two people have been
+afther makin' love to one another for six months."
+
+"You hain't got any right to say that, Dora," broke out Andy. "Maggie's
+stood up fer you in a way you didn't more'n half desarve, and it's
+partly Maggie's money that brought you here. You know well enough what
+a--a--lie, if I must say it, you told me about Mag's havin' a beau at
+Larne, and she says she didn't. You're the one that took away your
+sister's----" But here he paused.
+
+"Hush up, Andy!" broke in Margaret. "You know I never keered fer you,
+or any other man. Don't you and Dora begin to quarrel now."
+
+Andy looked sullen, and Dora scared. At length Dora took speech
+timidly.
+
+"Billy will be here in a minute."
+
+"Billy who?" asked Andy.
+
+"Billy Caughey," she answered. "He came over in the same ship with me."
+
+"Oh, I s'pose you've been sparkin' with him ag'in! You pitched him over
+to take me----"
+
+"No, I haven't been sparkin' with him, Andy; at least, not lately. He's
+my husband. We got married three months ago."
+
+"And didn't tell me?" said Andy, between pleasure and anger.
+
+"No, we wanted to come over here, and we couldn't have come if it
+hadn't been for the money you sent."
+
+"Why, Dora, how mean you treated Andy!" broke out Margaret.
+
+"I knew you'd take up for him," said Dora pitifully, "but what could I
+do, sure? You won't hurt Billy, now, will you, Andy? He's afeard of
+you."
+
+"Well," said Andy, straightening up his fine form with a smile of
+relief, "tell Billy that I wish him much j'y, and that I'll be afther
+thankin' him with all my heart the very first time I see him for the
+kindness he's afther doin' me. Good-night, Mrs. Billy Caughey, good
+luck to ye! As Mag says she don't keer fer me, I'll be after going home
+alone." This last was said bitterly as he opened the door.
+
+"O Andy! wait fer me--do!" said Margaret.
+
+"Ain't you stayin' to see Billy?" asked Dora.
+
+"Not me. It's with Andy Doyle I'm afther goin'," cried Margaret, with a
+lightness she had not known for a year.
+
+And the two went out together.
+
+The next evening Margaret told Sylvia about it, and the little
+romance-maker was in ecstasy.
+
+"So you won't enter the sisterhood, then?" she said, when Margaret had
+finished.
+
+"No, miss, I don't think I've got any vocation."
+
+
+
+
+THE GUNPOWDER PLOT.
+
+THE STORY OF A FOURTH OF JULY.
+
+
+Whenever one writes with photographic exactness of frontier life he is
+accused of inventing improbable things.
+
+"Old Davy Lindsley" lived in a queer cabin on the Pomme de Terre River.
+If you should ever ride over the new Northern Pacific when it shall be
+completed, or over that branch of it which crosses the Pomme de Terre,
+you can get out at a station which will, no doubt, be called for an old
+settler, Gager's Station; and if you would like to see some beautiful
+scenery, take a canoe and float down the Pomme de Terre River. You will
+have to make some portages, and you will have a good appetite for
+supper when you reach the old Lindsley house, ten miles from Gager's,
+but its present owner is hospitable.
+
+A queer old chap was Lindsley the last time I saw him. I remember how
+he took me all over his claim and showed me the beauties of
+Lindsleyville, as he called it. His long iron-gray hair fluttered in
+the wind, and his face seemed like a wizard's, penetrating but
+unearthly. That was long before the great tide of immigrants had begun
+to find their way into this paradise through the highway of the Sauk
+Valley. Lindsleyville was a hundred and fifty miles out of the world at
+that time. Its population numbered two--Lindsley and his daughter. The
+old man had tried to make a fortune in many ways. There was no sort of
+useless invention that he had not attempted, and you will find in the
+Patent Office models without number of beehives and cannons, steam
+cut-offs and baby jumpers, lightning churns and flying machines on
+which he had taken out patents, assured of making a fortune from each
+one. He had raised fancy chickens, figured himself rich on two swarms
+of bees, traveled with a magic lantern, written a philosophic novel,
+and started a newspaper. There was but one purpose in which he was
+fixed--which was, to guard his daughter jealously. To do this, and to
+make the experiment of building a Utopian city, he had traveled to the
+summit of this knoll on the right bank of the Pomme de Terre. There
+never was a more beautiful landscape than that which Lindsleyville
+commanded. But the town did not grow, chiefly because it was so far
+beyond the border, though the conditions in his deeds intended to
+secure the character of the city from deterioration were so many that
+nobody would have been willing to buy the lots.
+
+At the time I speak of David Lindsley had dwelt on the Pomme de Terre
+for five years. He had removed suddenly from the Connecticut village in
+which he had been living because he discovered that his daughter had,
+in spite of his watchfulness, formed an attachment for a young man who
+had the effrontery to disclose the whole thing to him by politely
+asking his consent to their marriage.
+
+"Marry my daughter!" choked the old man. "Why, Mr. Brown, you are
+crazy! I have educated her upon the combined principles of Rousseau, of
+Pestalozzi, of Froebel, and of Herbert Spencer. And you--you only
+graduated at Yale, an old fogy mediaeval institution! No, sir! not till
+I meet a philosopher whose mind has been symmetrically developed can I
+consent for my Emilia to marry."
+
+And the old man became so frantic, that, to save him from the madhouse,
+Emilia wrote a letter, at his dictation, to young Brown, peremptorily
+breaking off all relations; and he, a sensitive, romantic man, was
+heartbroken, and left the village. He only sent a farewell to his
+friends the day before he was to sail from New Bedford on a whaling
+voyage. He carried with him the impression that an unaccountable change
+of mind in Emilia had left no hope for him.
+
+To prevent a recurrence of such an untoward accident as this, and, as
+he expressed it, "to bring his daughter's mind into intimate relations
+with nature," the fanatical philosopher established the town of
+Lindsleyville, determined that no family in which there was a young man
+should settle on his town plot, unless, indeed, the young man should
+prove to be the paragon he was looking for.
+
+Emilia's motherless life had not been a cheerful one, subjected to the
+ever-changing whims of a visionary father, with whom one of her
+practical cast of mind could have no point of sympathy. And since she
+came to Lindsleyville it was harder than ever, for there was no
+neighbor nearer than Gager's, ten miles away, and there was not a woman
+within fifty miles. There is no place so lonesome as a prairie; the
+horizon is so wide, and the earth is so empty!
+
+Lindsley had spent all his own money long ago, and it was only the
+small annuity of his daughter, inherited from her mother's family, the
+capital of which was tied up to keep it out of his reach, that
+prevented them from starving. Emilia was starving indeed, not in body,
+but in soul. Cut off from human sympathy, she used to sit at the gable
+window of the cabin and look out over the boundless meadow until it
+seemed to her that she would lose her reason. The wild geese screaming
+to one another overhead, the bald eagles building in the solitary elm
+that grew by the river, the flocks of great white pelicans that were
+fishing on the beach of Swan Lake, three miles away, were all objects
+of envy to the lonesome heart of the girl; for they had companions of
+their kind--they were husbands and wives, and parents and children,
+while she--here she checked her thoughts, lest she should be disloyal
+to her father. To her disordered fancy the universe seemed to be a
+wheel. The sun and the stars came up and went down over the monotonous
+sea of grass with frightful regularity, and she could not tell whether
+there was a God or not. When she thought of God at all, it was as a
+relentless giant turning the crank that kept the sky going round. The
+universe was an awful machine. The prayers her mother taught her in
+infancy died upon her lips, and instead of praying to God she cried out
+to her mother. Un-protestant as the sentiment is, I can not forbear
+saying that this talking to the dead is one of the most natural things
+in the world. To Emilia the dimly remembered love of her mother was all
+of tenderness there was in the universe, the only revelation of God
+that had come to her, except the other love, which was to her a
+paradise lost. For the great hard fate that turned the prairie universe
+round with a crank motion had also--so it seemed to her--snatched away
+from her the object of her love. This disordered, faithless state was
+all the fruit she tasted of the peculiar education so much vaunted by
+her father. She had eaten the husks he gave her and was hungry.
+
+I said she had no company. An old daguerreotype of her mother and a
+carefully hidden photograph (marked on the back, in a rather immature
+hand, "E. Brown") seemed to answer with looks of love and sympathy when
+she wetted them with her tears. They were her rosary and her crucifix;
+they were the gifts of a beclouded life, through which God shone in
+dimly upon her.
+
+This poor girl looked and longed so for the company of human kind that
+she counted those red-letter days on which a half-breed voyageur
+traveled over the trail in front of the house, and even a party of
+begging and beggarly Sioux, hungry for all they could get to eat,
+offering importunately to sell "hompoes" (moccasins) to her father,
+were not wholly unwelcome. But the days of all days were those on which
+Edwards, the tall, long-haired American trapper, fished in the Pomme de
+Terre in sight of the Lindsley cabin. On such occasions the old man
+Lindsley would leave his work and stay about the house, and watch
+jealously and uneasily every movement of the trapper. On one or two
+occasions when that picturesque individual, wearing a wolf-skin cap,
+with the wolf's tail hanging down between his shoulders, presented
+himself at the door of the cabin to crave some little courtesy,
+Lindsley closed the front door and brought out the article asked for
+from the back, like a mediaeval chieftain guarding his castle. But all
+the time that poor Emilia could hear the voice of the tall trapper her
+heart beat two beats for one. For was it not a human voice speaking her
+own language? And the days on which he was visible were accounted as
+the gates of paradise, and the moments in which he spoke in her hearing
+were as paradise itself.
+
+This churlish, inhospitable manner made Lindsley many enemies in a land
+in which one can not afford to have enemies. Every half-breed hunter
+took the old man's suspicious manner as a personal affront. "He thinks
+we are horse thieves," they said scornfully. And Jacques Bourdon, the
+half-breed who had "filed on" the claim alongside Lindsley's, and even
+claimed unjustly a "forty" of Lindsley's town plot, had no difficulty
+in securing the sympathy of the settlers and nomads, who looked on
+Lindsley as a monster quite capable of anything. He was even reported
+to have beaten his daughter, and to have confined her in the wilderness
+that he might keep her out of an immense fortune which she had
+inherited. So Lindsley grew every day in disfavor in a region where
+unpopularity in its mildest form is sure to take a most unpleasant way
+of making itself known. Emilia knew enough to understand this danger,
+and she was shaken with a nameless fear whenever she heard the sharp
+words that passed between her father and Bourdon, the half-breed. The
+resentment of the latter reached its climax when the decision of the
+land office was rendered in favor of Mr. Lindsley. From that hour the
+revenge of this man, whose hot French was mixed with relentless Indian
+blood, hung over the head of the old man, who still read and wrote, and
+invented and theorized, in utter ignorance of any peril except the
+danger that some man, not a fool, should marry his daughter.
+
+The Fourth of July was celebrated at Gager's. People came from fifty
+miles round. Patriotism? No! but love of human fellowship. The
+celebrated Pierre Bottineau and the other Canadians and half-breeds
+were there, mellowed with drink, singing the sensual and almost lewd
+French rowing songs their fathers had sung on the St. Lawrence. "Whisky
+Jim," the retired stage driver, and Hans Brinkerhoff and the other
+German settlers, with two or three Yankees, completed the slender
+crowd, which comprised almost the entire population of six skeleton
+counties. And the ever-popular Edwards was among them, his grave face
+and flowing ringlets rising above them all. A man so ready to serve
+anybody as he was idolized among frontiermen, whose gratitude is almost
+equal to their revenge. Captain Oscar, the popular politician, who wore
+his hair long and swore and drank, just to keep in with his widely
+scattered constituents, whom he represented in the Minnesota Senate
+each winter (and who usually cast half a dozen votes each for him),
+made a buncombe speech, and then Edwards, who wouldn't drink, but who
+knew how to tell strange stories, kept them laughing for half an hour.
+Edwards was a type of man not so uncommon on the frontier as those
+imagine who think the trapper always a half-horse, half-alligator
+creature, such as they read of in the Beadle novels. I knew one trapper
+who was a student of numismatics, another who devoted his spare time to
+astronomy, and several traders and trappers who were men of
+considerable culture, though they are generally men who are a little
+morbid or eccentric in their mental structure. All Edwards's natural
+abilities, which were sufficient to have earned him distinction had he
+been "in civilization," were concentrated on the pursuits of his wild
+life, and such a man always surpasses the coarser and duller Indian or
+half-breed in his own field.
+
+After a game of ball, and other sports imitated from the Indians, the
+_bois brules_[1] began to be too much softened with whisky to keep up
+athletic exercises, and something in their manner led Edwards to
+suspect that there were other amusements on the programme into the
+secret of which he had not been admitted.
+
+      [1] _Bois brules_, "burnt wood," is the title the half-breeds
+      apply to themselves, in allusion to their complexion.
+
+By adroit management he contrived to overhear part of a conversation in
+which "_poudre a canon_" was mixed up with the name of Linds_lee_. He
+inferred that the blowing up of Lindsley's house was to finish the
+celebration of the national holiday. Treating Bourdon to an extra glass
+of whisky, and seasoning it with some well-timed denunciations of "the
+old monster," he gathered that the plan was to plant a keg of powder
+under the chimney on the north side of the cabin and blow it to pieces,
+just to scare the monster out, or kill him and his daughter, it did not
+matter which. Edwards praised the plan. He said that if it were not
+that he had to go to Pelican Lake that very night he would go along and
+help blow up the old rascal.
+
+Soon after this he shook hands all around and wished them _bon voyage_
+in their trip to Lindsleyville. He winked his eyes knowingly, playing
+the hypocrite handsomely. Oscar and Bottineau left in different
+directions, the Germans had gone home drunk, and only "Whisky Jim"
+joined the half-breeds in their trip. They took possession of an
+immigrant team that was in Gager's stable, and just after sunset
+started on their patriotic errand. They were going to celebrate the
+Fourth by blowing up the tyrant.
+
+Meantime Edwards had taken long strides, but his moccasin-clad feet
+were not carrying him in the direction of Pelican Lake. Half the time
+walking as only "the long trapper" could walk, half the time in a
+swinging trot, he made the best possible speed toward Lindsleyville. He
+had the start of the half-breeds, but how much he could not tell; and
+there was no time to be lost. At the summit of every knoll he looked
+back to see if they were coming, crouching in the grass lest they
+should discover him.
+
+Lindsley received him as suspiciously as ever, and positively refused
+to believe his story. But by using his telescope Edwards soon convinced
+him that the party were just leaving Gager's. The dusk of the evening
+was coming on, and Lindsley's fright was great as he realized his
+daughter's peril.
+
+"I will fight them to the death," he said, getting down his revolver,
+with an air that would have done honor to Don Quixote.
+
+"If you fight them and whip them, they will waylay you and kill you.
+But there are ten of them, and if you fight them you will be killed,
+and this lady will be without a protector. If you run away, the house
+will be destroyed, and you will be killed whenever you are found. But
+what have you here--a magic lantern?"
+
+The old gentleman had, before Edwards's arrival, taken down the
+instrument to introduce some improvement which he had just invented.
+When Edwards stumbled over it and called it a magic lantern he looked
+at him scornfully.
+
+"A magic lantern!" he cried. "No, sir; that is a dissolving view,
+oxy-calcium, panto-sciostereoscopticon."
+
+"With this we must save you and your daughter from the half-breeds,"
+said the trapper, a little impatient at this ill-timed manifestation of
+pedantry. "Get ready for action immediately."
+
+"I have no oxygen gas."
+
+"Make it at once," said Edwards. He picked up some papers marked
+"chlor. potass." and "black oxide."
+
+"Here is your material," he said.
+
+"Do _you_ understand chemistry?" asked Lindsley. But the trapper did
+not answer. He got out the retort, and in five minutes the oxygen was
+bubbling furiously through the wash bottle into the India-rubber
+receiver. Edwards stood at the window scanning the road toward Gager's
+with his telescope until it grew dark, which in that latitude was at
+about ten o'clock. Then the magic lantern was removed to the little
+grass-roofed stable, in which dwelt a solitary pony, and by Edwards's
+direction the focus was carefully set so that it would throw a picture
+against the house. Edwards selected two pictures and adjusted them for
+use in the two tubes.
+
+The half-breeds were not in haste, and in all the long hour of suspense
+Emilia, hidden in the barn with her father and young Edwards, was
+positively happy. For here was human companionship, and a hungry soul
+will gladly risk death if by that means companionship can be purchased.
+It did not matter either that conversation was out of the question. It
+is presence, and not talk, that makes companionship.
+
+But hark! the _bois brules_ are on the bank of the river below. Emilia's
+heart grew still as she heard them swear. Their _sacr-r-r-r-re_ rolled
+like the rattle of a rattlesnake. They were coming up the hill,
+quarreling drunkenly about the powder. Now they were between the house
+and the stable, getting ready to dig a hole for the "_poudre a canon_"
+
+"I'll give them fireworks!" said Edwards in a whisper.
+
+A picture of Thorwaldsen's bas-relief of "Morning" having been
+previously placed in the instrument, Edwards now removed the cap, and
+the beautiful flying female figure, with the infant in her arms, shone
+out upon the side of the house with marvelous vividness.
+
+"By thunder!" said Whisky Jim, steadying himself, while every hair
+stood on end.
+
+"_Mon Dieu!_" cried the _bois brules_, who had never seen a picture in
+their lives except in the cathedral of St. Boniface, at Fort Garry.
+"_Mon Dieu! La Sainte Vierge!_" And they fell on their knees before
+this apparition of the Blessed Virgin, and crossed themselves and
+prayed lustily.
+
+But "Whisky Jim" straightened himself up, and hiccoughed, and stammered
+"By thunder!" and added some words which, being Saxon, I will not
+print.
+
+"The devil!" cried Jim, a minute later, starting down the hill at full
+speed, for, by Edwards's direction, the light had been shifted to the
+other tube in such a way as to dissolve the "Morning" into a hideous
+picture of the conventional horned and hoofed devil. The picture was
+originally meant to be comic, but it now set Jim to running for dear
+life.
+
+"_Oui, c'est le diable! le diable! le diable!_" cried the frantic _bois
+brules_, breaking off their invocations to the Virgin most abruptly,
+and fleeing pellmell down the hill after Jim, falling over one another
+as they ran. Quick as a flash Edwards threw about him a sheet which he
+had ready, and pursued the fleeing Frenchmen. Jim had already seized
+the reins, and, on the plan of "the devil take the hindmost," was
+driving at a pace that would have done him credit in the Central Park,
+up the trail toward Gager's, leaving the half-breeds to get on as best
+they could. Bourdon stumbled and fell, and Edwards lavished some blows
+upon him that must have satisfied the _bois brule_ that ghosts have a
+most solid corporeal existence.
+
+Then Edwards returned and captured the keg of powder. He assured the
+Lindsleys that the superstitious half-breeds would never again venture
+within five miles of a house that was guarded by the Holy Virgin and
+the devil in partnership. And they never did. Even the Indians were
+afraid to approach the place, pronouncing it "Wakan," or supernaturally
+inhabited. They regarded Lindsley as a "medicine-man" of great power.
+
+But what a night that was! For Edwards stayed two hours, and made the
+acquaintance of Lindsley and his daughter. And how he talked, while
+Emilia thought she had never known how heaven felt before; and the old
+man forgot his inventions, and did not broach more than twenty of his
+theories in the two hours. He was so much interested in the tall
+trapper that he forgot the rest. Edwards ate a supper set out by the
+hands of Emilia, and left at three o'clock. He was at Pelican Lake next
+morning, and no man suspected his share in the affair except Gager, who
+had sense enough to say nothing. And Emilia lay down and dreamed of
+angels about the house. One was like Thorwaldsen's "Morning," and the
+other wore long hair and beard, and was very tall.
+
+This abortive attempt to make a skyrocket out of Lindsley's cabin
+wrought only good to Emilia at first. The father was now wholly in love
+with the trapper. He praised him at all hours.
+
+"He is a philosopher, my daughter. He understands chemistry. He lives
+in the arcana of nature and reads her secrets. No foolish study of the
+heathen classics; no training after mediaeval fashion in one of our
+colleges, which are anachronisms, has perverted his taste. Here is the
+Emile worthy of my Emilia," he would say, much to the daughter's
+annoyance.
+
+But when Edwards came the hours were golden. Hanging his wolf-skin cap
+behind the door, and shaking back his long locks as he took his seat,
+he would entrance father and daughter alike with his talk of adventure.
+From the time of his first visit new life came to the heart of Emilia;
+and Mr. Lindsley, whose every whim the trapper humored, was as much
+fascinated as his daughter. But now commenced a fierce battle in the
+heart of Emilia. Edwards loved her. By all the speech that his eyes
+were capable of, he told her so. And by all the beating of her own
+heart she knew that she loved the brown-faced, long-haired trapper in
+return. But what about the fair-eyed student, who for very love and
+disappointment had gone to the arctic seas? He was not at hand to plead
+his cause, and for this very reason her conscience pleaded it for him.
+When her soul had fed on the words of the trapper as upon manna in the
+wilderness, she took up the old photograph and the eyes reproached her.
+She shed bitter tears of penitence upon it for her disloyalty to the
+storm-tossed sailor, but rejoiced again when she saw the tall figure of
+the trapper coming down the trail. A desolate and lonely heart can not
+live forever on the memory of a dead love. And have ye not read what
+David did when he was an hungered? Do not, therefore, reproach a
+starving soul for partaking of this feast in the desert.
+
+And so Emilia tried to believe that Brown was long since dead--poor
+fellow! She shed tears over an imaginary grave in Labrador with a great
+sense of comfort. She tried to think that he had long since married and
+forgotten her, and she endeavored to nurse some feeble pangs of
+jealousy toward an imaginary wife.
+
+Now it was very improper, doubtless, in Brown to come to life just at
+this moment. One lover too many is as destructive to the happiness of a
+conscientious girl as one too few. If Emilia had been trained in
+society, her joy at having two lovers would have had no alloy save her
+grief that there were not four of them. But it was one of the
+misfortunes of her solitary and peculiar education that she had
+conscience and maidenly modesty. Wherefore it was a source of bitter
+distress and embarrassment to her that, at the end of a long letter
+from a neighbor who had taken a notion after years of silence to write
+her all the gossip of the old village, she found these words: "Your old
+friend Brown did not jump into the sea at grief for his rejection,
+after all. He has written to somebody here that he is coming home. I
+believe he said that he loved you all the same as ever."
+
+The greatest grief of Emilia was that she should have been so wicked as
+to be grieved. Had she not prayed all these years, when she could pray
+at all, for the safety of the young student? Had she not prayed against
+storms and icebergs? And now that he was coming, her heart smote her as
+if he were a ghost of some one whom she had murdered! Whether she loved
+him, or Edwards, or anybody, indeed she could not tell. But she would
+do penance for her crime. And so, when next she heard the quiet voice
+of "the long trapper" asking for her, she refused to see him, though
+the refusal all but killed her.
+
+Poor Edwards! How he paced the shore of Swan Lake all that night! For
+when love comes into the soul of a solitary man it has all the force
+that all the thousand interests of life have to one in the busy world.
+How terrible were the temptations that sometimes assailed the religious
+eremites we can never guess.
+
+Sunset of the next day found Edwards in the Red River Valley, far on
+his way toward Fort Garry, bent on spending the rest of his life as a
+"free trader" in British America. As for Emilia, she was now in total
+darkness. The sun had set, and the moon had not appeared. Brown might
+be dead, or she might not love him, or he might never find her. And she
+had thrown away her paradise, and there was only blackness left.
+
+Edwards had already come within a few miles of Georgetown, where he was
+to take passage in that strangest of all the craft that ever frightened
+away the elk, the little seven-by-nine steamer Anson Northrup, when, as
+he was striding desperately along the trail, he was suddenly checked by
+a thought. He stood five minutes in indecision, then turned and began
+to walk rapidly in the opposite direction. At Breckinridge he found a
+stage, and getting out at Gager's he went down the trail toward
+Lindsley's.
+
+Now Davy Lindsley had been in a terrible state of ferment. When he had
+found the philosopher, "the uncontaminated child of Nature, the
+self-educated combination of civilized and savage man," his daughter
+had perversely refused him, and the old man had taken the
+disappointment so to heart that he was in a state bordering on frenzy.
+
+"Misfortune always pursues me!" he began, when he met Edwards under the
+hill. "Fifty times I have been near achieving some great result, and my
+ill luck has spoiled it all. You see me a broken-hearted man. To have
+allied my family with a child of Nature like yourself would have given
+me the greatest joy. But--how shall I express my grief?" And here the
+old man struck a pathetically tragic attitude and drew out his
+handkerchief, weeping with a profound self-pity.
+
+"Mr. Lindsley, do you know why Miss Lindsley has become so suddenly
+displeased with me?" asked the trapper, trembling.
+
+"Miss Lindsley, sir, is perverse. It is the one evil trait that my
+enlightened system of education, drawn from Rousseau, Pestalozzi,
+Froebel, and Herbert Spencer, and combined by my own genius--it is the
+one evil trait that my system has failed to eradicate. She is perverse.
+I fear, sir, she is yet worshiping the image of a misguided youth who,
+filled and puffed up with the useless learning of the schools, ventured
+to address her. I am the most unfortunate of men."
+
+"Mr. Lindsley, can I see your daughter alone?"
+
+The old man thought he could. But she was very perverse. In truth, that
+very morning Emilia had, in a sublime spirit of self-immolation, vowed
+that she would love none but the long-lost lover, and that if Brown
+never came back she would die heroically devoted to him, and thus she
+had sacrificed to her conscience and it was appeased. But right atop
+this vow came the request of Edwards for an interview. Was ever a girl
+so beset? Could she trust herself? On thinking it over she was afraid
+not; so that it was only by much persuasion that she was prevailed on
+to grant the request.
+
+While Edwards talked she could but listen, frightened all the time at
+the faintness of her solemn resolution, which had seemed so irrevocable
+when she made it. He frankly demanded the reason for her change of
+conduct toward him. And she, like an honest and simple-hearted girl,
+told the other love story with a trembling voice, while Edwards
+listened with eyes downcast.
+
+"This was five years ago?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"And the young man's name?"
+
+"Was Edward Brown."
+
+"Curious! I think," he said slowly, pausing as if to get breath and
+keep his self-control, "I think, if my hair were cut off short and
+parted on one side as Edward Brown wore his, instead of in the middle,
+and if my whiskers were shaven off, and if the tan of five years'
+exposure were gone from my face, and if I were five years younger, and
+two inches shorter, I think----" He paused here and looked at her.
+
+"Please say the rest quickly," she said in a faint whisper. For the
+setting sun was streaming in at the west window upon the face of the
+trapper. His hair was thrown back, and he was looking into her eyes
+with a look she had never seen before. But he dropped his head upon his
+hand now and looked at the floor.
+
+"It might be," he spoke musingly, "it might be that Edward Brown failed
+to reach his ship in time at New Bedford, and changed his mind and came
+here, and that after Emilia came he watched this house day and night
+till his heart came nigh to bursting. But I was going to say," he said,
+rousing himself, "that in case the years and the tan and the hair could
+be taken off, and this trapper coat changed into one of finer cut and
+material, and the name reversed, that Browne Edwards, the trapper,
+would be nearer of kin than a twin brother to Edward Brown, the
+broken-hearted student."
+
+What Emilia did just here I do not know, and if I did I should not tell
+you. To faint would have been the proper thing. But, poor girl! her
+education had been neglected, and I think she did not faint. When the
+old philosopher came in he was charmed with the situation, and that
+evening, when they two walked together on the bank of the Pomme de
+Terre, Emilia pointed to the stars, and said: "Do you know that in all
+these years God has seemed to me a cruel monster turning a crank? And
+to-night every star seems to be an eye through which God is looking at
+me, as my mother used to. I feel as though God were loving me. See, the
+stars are laughing in my face! Now I love Him as I did my mother. And
+to-night I am going to read that curious story about Christ at the
+wedding."
+
+For God, who is love, loves to find his way to a human heart through
+love. And Edwards, who had been in bitterness and rebellion during the
+years of his exile, listened now to the voice of love as to that of an
+angel whom God had sent out of heaven to bring him back home again.
+
+Mr. Lindsley is an invalid now. Lindsleyville belongs to Browne Edwards
+and his wife. And old Davy has made a will on twenty quires of legal
+cap, bequeathing to his son-in-law all his right, title, and interest
+in certain and sundry patents on churns, cannons, beehives, magic
+lanterns, flying machines, etc., together with some extraordinary
+secret discoveries. The old gentleman is slowly dying in the full
+conviction that he is bequeathing the foundation of an immense fortune
+to his son-in-law, and more wisdom to the world than has been
+contributed to its stock by all that have gone before. And he often
+reminds Emilia that she has to thank him for getting so good a husband.
+If it hadn't been for him she might have married that sickly student.
+
+_1871_.
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF A VALENTINE.
+
+
+When my friend Capt. Terrible, U.S.N., dines at my plain table, I am
+a little abashed. I know that he has been accustomed always to a
+variety of wines and sauces, to a cigarette after each course, and to
+cookery that would kill an undeveloped American. So, when the captain
+turns the castor round three times before selecting his condiment, and
+when his eyes seem to be seeking for Worcestershire sauce and Burgundy
+wine, I feel the poverty of the best feast I can furnish him. I am
+afraid veteran magazine readers will feel thus about the odd little
+story I have to tell. For I have observed of late that even the short
+stories are highly seasoned; and I can not bear to disappoint readers.
+So, let me just honestly write over the gateway to this story a
+warning. I have no Cayenne pepper. No Worcestershire sauce. No cognac.
+No cigarettes. No murders. No suicides. No broken hearts. No lovers'
+quarrels. No angry father. No pistols and coffee. No arsenic. No
+laudanum. No shrewd detectives. No trial for murder. No "heartless
+coquette." No "deep-dyed villain with a curling mustache." Now if,
+after this warning, you have the courage to go on, I am not
+responsible.
+
+Hubert said I might print it if I would disguise the names. It came out
+quite incidentally. We were discussing the woman question. I am a
+"woman's righter." Hubert--the Rev. Hubert Lee, I should say, pastor of
+the "First Church," and, indeed, the only church in Allenville--is not,
+though I flatter myself I have made some impression on him. But the
+discussion took place in Hubert's own house, and wishing to give a
+pleasant turn at the end, I suppose, he told me how, a year and a half
+before, he had "used up" one woman's-rights man, who was no other than
+old Dr. Hood, the physician that has had charge of the physical health
+of Hubert and myself from the beginning. Unlike most of his profession,
+the doctor has always been a radical, and even the wealth that has come
+in upon him of late years has left him quite as much of a radical, at
+least in theory, as ever. Indeed, the old doctor is not very
+inconsistent in practice, for he has educated his only daughter,
+Cornelia, to his own profession, and I believe she took her M.D. with
+honors, though she has lately spoiled her prospects by marrying. But
+socially he has become a little aristocratic, seeking an exclusive
+association with his wealthy neighbors. And this does not look very
+well in one who, when he was poor, was particularly bitter on "a
+purse-proud aristocracy." I suppose Hubert felt this. Certainly I did,
+and therefore I enjoyed the conversation that he repeated to me all the
+more.
+
+It seems that my friend Hubert had been away at the seminary for three
+years, and that having at last conquered in his great battle against
+poverty, and having gained an education in spite of difficulties, and
+having supplied a city church acceptably for some months during the
+absence of the pastor in Europe, he came back to our native village to
+rest on his laurels a few weeks, and to decide which of three rather
+impecunious calls he would accept. When just about to leave he took it
+into his head, for some reason, to "drop in" on old Doctor Hood. It was
+nine o'clock in the morning, and the doctor's partner was making
+morning calls, while the old gentleman sat in his office to attend to
+any that might seek his services. This particular morning happened to
+be an unfortunate one, for there were no ague-shaken patients to be
+seen, and there was not even a case of minor surgery to relieve the
+tediousness of the morning office hour. Perhaps it was for this reason,
+perhaps it was for the sake of old acquaintance, that he gave Hubert a
+most cordial reception, and launched at once into a sea of vivacious
+talk. Cornelia, who was in the office, excused herself on the ground
+that she was cramming for her final examination, and seated herself at
+a window with her book.
+
+"I am afraid I take your time, doctor," said Hubert.
+
+"Oh, no, I am giving up practice to my partner, Dr. Beck, and shall
+give it all to him in a year or two."
+
+"To him and Miss Cornelia?" queried Hubert, laughing. For it was
+currently reported that the young doctor and Cornelia were to form a
+partnership in other than professional affairs.
+
+Either because he wished to attract her attention, or for some other
+reason, Hubert soon managed to turn the conversation to the subject of
+woman's rights, and the old doctor and the young parson were soon
+hurling at each other all the staple and now somewhat stale arguments
+about woman's fitness and woman's unfitness for many things. At last,
+perhaps because he was a little cornered, Hubert said:
+
+"Now, doctor, there was a queer thing happened to a student in my class
+in the seminary. I don't suppose, doctor, that you are much interested
+in a love story, but I would just like to tell you this one, because I
+think you dare not apply your principles to it in every part. Theories
+often fail when practically applied, you know."
+
+"Go on, Hu, go on; I'd like to hear the story. And as for my
+principles, they'll bear applying anywhere!" and the old doctor rubbed
+his hands together confidently.
+
+"This friend of mine, Henry Gilbert," said Hu, "was, like myself, poor.
+A long time ago, when he was a boy, the son of a poor widow, the lot on
+which he lived joined at the back the lot on which lived a Mr. Morton,
+at that time a thriving merchant, now the principal capitalist in that
+part of the country. As there was a back gate between the lots, my
+friend was the constant playmate from earliest childhood of Jennie
+Morton. He built her playhouses out of old boards, he molded clay
+bricks for her use, and carved tiny toys out of pine blocks for her
+amusement. As he grew larger, and as Jennie's father grew richer and
+came to live in greater style, Henry grew more shy. But by all the
+unspoken language of the eyes the two never failed to make their
+unchanging regard known to each other.
+
+"Henry went to college early. At vacation time the two met. But the
+growing difference in their social position could not but be felt.
+Jennie's friends were of a different race from his own. Her parents
+never thought of inviting him to their entertainments. And if they had,
+a rusty coat and a lack of money to spend on kid gloves would have
+effectually kept him away. He was proud. This apparent neglect stung
+him. It is true that Jennie Morton was all the more kind. But his quick
+and foolish pride made him fancy that he detected pity in her kindness.
+And yet all this only made him determined to place himself in a
+position in which he could ask her hand as her equal. But you do not
+understand, doctor, as I do, how irresistible is this conviction of
+duty in regard to the ministry. Under that pressure my friend settled
+it that he must preach. And now there was before him a good ten years
+of poverty at least. What should he do about it?
+
+"In his extremity he took advice of a favorite theological professor.
+The professor advised him not to seek the hand of a rich girl. She
+would not be suited to the trials of a minister's life. But finding
+that Henry was firm in his opinion that this sound general principle
+did not in the least apply to this particular case, the professor
+proceeded to touch the tenderest chord in the young man's heart. He
+told him that it would be ungenerous, and in some sense dishonorable,
+for him to take a woman delicately brought up into the poverty and
+trial incident to a minister's life. If you understood, sir, how morbid
+his sense of honor is, you would not wonder at the impression this
+suggestion made upon him. To give up the ministry was in his mind to be
+a traitor to duty and to God. To win her, if he could, was to treat
+ungenerously her whose happiness was dearer to him a thousand times
+than his own."
+
+"I hope he did not give her up," said the doctor.
+
+"Yes, he gave her up, in a double spirit of mediaeval self-sacrifice.
+Looking toward the ministry, he surrendered his love as some of the old
+monks sacrificed love, ambition, and all other things to conscience.
+Looking at her happiness, he sacrificed his hopes in a more than
+knightly devotion to her welfare. The knights sometimes gave their
+lives. He gave more.
+
+"For three years he did not trust himself to return to his home. But,
+having graduated and settled himself for nine months over a church,
+there was no reason why he shouldn't go to see his mother again; and
+once in the village, the sight of the old schoolhouse and the old
+church revived a thousand memories that he had been endeavoring to
+banish. The garden walks, and especially the apple trees, that are the
+most unchangeable of landmarks, revived the old passion with
+undiminished power. He paced his room at night. He looked out at the
+new house of his rich neighbor. He chafed under the restraint of his
+vow not to think again of Jennie Morton. It was the old story of the
+monk who thinks the world subdued, but who finds it all at once about
+to assume the mastery of him. I do not know how the struggle might have
+ended, but it was all at once stopped from without.
+
+"There reached him a rumor that Jennie was already the betrothed wife
+of a Colonel Pearson, who was her father's partner in business. And,
+indeed, Colonel Pearson went in and out at Mr. Morton's gate every
+evening, and the father was known to favor his suit.
+
+"Jennie was not engaged to him, however. Three times she had refused
+him. The fourth time, in deference to her father's wishes, she had
+consented to 'think about it' for a week. In truth, Henry had been at
+home ten days and had not called upon her, and all the hope she had
+cherished in that direction, and all the weary waiting, seemed in vain.
+When the colonel's week was nearly out she heard that Henry was to
+leave in two days. In a sort of desperation she determined to accept
+Colonel Pearson without waiting for the time appointed for her answer.
+But that gentleman spoiled it all by his own overconfidence.
+
+"For when he called, after Jennie had determined on this course, he
+found her so full of kindness that he hardly knew how to behave with
+moderation. And so he fell to flattering her, and flattering himself at
+the same time that he knew all the ins and outs of a girl's heart, he
+complimented her on the many offers she had received.
+
+"'And I tell you what,' he proceeded, 'there are plenty of others that
+would lay their heads at your feet if they were only your equals.
+There's that young parson--Gilbert, I think they call him--that is
+visiting his mother in the unpainted and threadbare-looking little
+house that stands behind this one. I've actually seen that fellow, in
+his rusty, musty coat, stop and look after you on the street; and every
+night, when I go home, he is sitting at the window that looks over this
+way. The poor fool is in love with you. Only think of it! And I chuckle
+to myself when I see him, and say, "Don't you wish you could reach so
+high?" I declare, it's funny.'
+
+"In that one speech Colonel Pearson dashed his chances to pieces. He
+could not account for the sudden return of winter in Jennie Morton's
+manner. And all his sunshine was powerless to dispel it, or to bring
+back the least approach of spring.
+
+"Poor Jennie! You can imagine, doctor, how she paced the floor all that
+night. She began to understand something of the courage of Henry
+Gilbert's heart, and something of the manliness of his motives. All
+night long she watched the light burning in the room in the widow's
+house; and all night long she debated the matter until her head ached.
+She could reach but one conclusion: Henry was to leave the day after
+to-morrow. If any communication should ever be opened between them she
+must begin it. It was as if she had seen him drifting away from her
+forever, and must throw him a rope. I think even such a woman's-right
+man as yourself would hardly justify her, however, in taking any step
+of the kind."
+
+"I certainly should," said the doctor.
+
+"But she could not find a way--she had no rope to throw. Again the
+colonel, meaning to do anything else but that, opened the way. At the
+breakfast table the next morning she received from him a magnificent
+valentine. All at once she saw her method. It was St. Valentine's day.
+The rope was in her hand. Excusing herself from breakfast she hastened
+to her room.
+
+"To send a valentine to the faithful lover was the uppermost thought.
+But how? She dare not write her name, for, after all, she might be
+mistaken in counting on his love, or she might offend his prejudices or
+his pride by so direct an approach. She went fumbling in a drawer for
+stationery. She drew out a little pine boat that Henry had whittled for
+her many years before. He had named it 'Hope,' but the combined wisdom
+of the little boy and girl could not succeed in spelling the name
+correctly. And here was the little old boat that he had given, saying
+often afterward that it was the boat they two were going to sail in
+some day. The misspelt name had been the subject of many a laugh
+between them. Now--but I mustn't be sentimental.
+
+"It did not take Jennie long to draw an exact likeness of the little
+craft. And that there might be no mistake about it, she spelled the
+name as it was on the side of the boat:
+
+                                "'HOAP.'
+
+"There was not another word in the valentine. Sealing it up, she
+hurried out with it and dropped it in the post office. No merchant,
+sending all his fortune to sea in one frail bark, ever watched the
+departure and trembled for the result of venture as she did. Spain did
+not pray half so fervently when the invincible armada sailed. It was an
+unuttered prayer--an unutterable prayer. For heart and hope were the
+lading of the little picture boat that sailed out that day, with no
+wind but her wishes in its sails.
+
+"She sat down at her window until she saw Henry Gilbert pass the next
+street corner on his morning walk to the post office. Three minutes
+after, he went home, evidently in a great state of excitement, with her
+valentine open in his hand. After a while he went back again toward the
+post office, and returned. Had he taken a reply?
+
+"Jennie again sought the office. There were people all around, with
+those hideous things that they call comic valentines open in their
+hands. And they actually seemed to think them funny! She had a reply.
+It did not take her long to find her room and to open it. There was
+another picture of a boat, but the name on its side read 'DESPAIR.' And
+these words were added: '_Your boat is the pleasantest, but
+understanding that there was no vacant place upon it, I have been
+obliged to take passage on this._' Slowly the meaning forced itself
+upon her. Henry had fears that she whom he thought engaged was
+coqueting with him. I think, doctor, you will hardly justify her in
+proceeding further with the correspondence?"
+
+"Why not? Hasn't a woman as much right to make herself understood in
+such a matter as a man? And when the social advantages are on her side
+the burden of making the advances often falls upon her. Many women do
+it indirectly and are not censured."
+
+"Well, you know I'm conservative, doctor, but I'm glad you're
+consistent. She did send another valentine. I am afraid she strained
+this figure of speech about the boat. But when everything in the world
+depends on one metaphor, it will not do to be fastidious. Jennie drew
+again the little boat with misspelt name. And this time she added five
+words: '_The master's place is vacant._'
+
+"And quite late in the afternoon the reply was left at the door: '_I
+am an applicant for the vacant place, if you will take that of master's
+mate._'"
+
+"Good!" cried the doctor; "I always advocated giving women every
+liberty in these matters."
+
+"But I will stump you yet, doctor," said Hubert. "That evening Gough
+was to lecture in the village, and my friend went not to hear Gough but
+to see Miss Jennie Morton at a distance. Somehow in the stupefaction of
+revived hope he had not thought of going to the house to see her yet.
+He had postponed his departure and had thrown away his scruples.
+Knowing how much opposition he would have to contend with, he
+thought--if he thought at all--that he must proceed with caution. But
+some time after the lecture began he discovered the Morton family
+without Jennie! Slowly it all dawned upon him. She was at home waiting
+for him. He was near the front of the church in which the lecture was
+held, and every inch of aisle was full of people. To get out was not
+easy. But as he thought of Jennie waiting, it became a matter of life
+and death. If the house had been on fire he would not have been more
+intent on making his exit. He reached the door, he passed the happiest
+evening of his life, only to awake to sorrow, for Jennie's father is
+'dead set' against the match."
+
+"He has no right to interfere," said the doctor vehemently. "You see, I
+stand by my principles."
+
+"But if I tell the story out I am afraid you would not," said Hubert.
+
+"Why, isn't it done?"
+
+"I beg your pardon, doctor, for having used a little craft. I had much
+at stake. I have disguised this story in its details. But it is true, I
+am the hero----"
+
+The doctor looked quickly towards his daughter. Her head was bent low
+over her book. Her long hair hung about it like a curtain, shutting out
+all view of the face. The doctor walked to the other window and looked
+out. Hubert sat like a mummy. After a minute Dr. Hood spoke.
+
+"Cornelia!"
+
+She lifted a face that was aflame. Tears glistened in her eyes, and I
+doubt not there was a prayer in her heart.
+
+"You are a brave girl. I had other plans. You have a right to choose
+for yourself. God bless you both! But it's a great pity Hu is not a
+lawyer; he pleads well." So saying he put on his hat and walked out.
+
+This is the conversation that Hubert repeated to me that day sitting in
+his own little parsonage in Allenville. A minute after his wife came
+in. She had been prescribing for the minor ailments of some poor
+neighbors. She took the baby from her crib, and bent over her till that
+same long hair curtained mother and child from sight.
+
+"I think," said Hubert, "that you folks who write love stories make a
+great mistake in stopping at marriage. The honeymoon never truly begins
+until conjugal affection is enriched by this holy partnership of loving
+hearts in the life of a child. The climax of a love story is not the
+wedding. It is the baby!"
+
+"What do you call her?" I asked.
+
+"Hope," said the mother.
+
+"Hope Valentine," added the father, with a significant smile.
+
+"And you spell the Hope with an 'a,' I believe," I said.
+
+"You naughty Hu!" said Mrs. Cornelia. "You've been telling. You think
+that love story is interesting to others because _you_ enjoy it so
+much!"
+
+_1871._
+
+
+
+HULDAH, THE HELP.[2]
+
+A THANKSGIVING LOVE STORY.
+
+
+I remember a story that Judge Balcom told a few years ago on the
+afternoon of Thanksgiving Day. I do not feel sure that it will interest
+everybody as it did me. Indeed, I am afraid that it will not, and yet I
+can not help thinking that it is just the sort of a trifle that will go
+well with turkey, celery, and mince pie.
+
+      [2] This is the first story written by me, beyond a few juvenile
+      tales; and it was the first short story to appear in Scribner's
+      Monthly, the present Century Magazine. Mr. Gilder, then
+      associated with Dr. Holland in editing that newborn periodical,
+      begged me to write a short story for the second number of the
+      magazine. I told him that something Helps had written suggested
+      that a story might be devised in which the hero should marry a
+      servant. He said it couldn't be done, and I wrote this, on a
+      wager, as it were. But a "help" is not a servant. The popularity
+      of this story encouraged me to continue, but I can not now
+      account for the popularity of the story.
+
+It was in the judge's own mansion on Thirty-fourth Street that I heard
+it. It does not matter to the reader how I, a stranger, came to be one
+of that family party. Since I could not enjoy the society of my own
+family, it was an act of Christian charity that permitted me to share
+the joy of others. We had eaten dinner and had adjourned to the warm,
+bright parlor. I have noticed on such occasions that conversation is
+apt to flag after dinner. Whether it is that digestion absorbs all of
+one's vitality, or for some other reason, at least so it generally
+falls out, that people may talk ever so brilliantly at the table, but
+they will hardly keep it up for the first half-hour afterward. And so
+it happened that some of the party fell to looking at the books, and
+some to turning the leaves of the photograph album, while others were
+using the stereoscope. For my own part, I was staring at an engraving
+in a dark corner of the parlor, where I could not have made out much of
+its purpose if I had desired, but in reality I was thinking of the
+joyous company of my own kith and kin, hundreds of miles away, and
+regretting that I could not be with them.
+
+"What are you thinking about, papa?" asked Irene, the judge's second
+daughter.
+
+She was a rather haughty-looking girl of sixteen, but, as I had
+noticed, very much devoted to her parents. At this moment she was
+running her hand through her father's hair, while he was rousing
+himself from his revery to answer her question.
+
+"Thinking of the old Thanksgivings, which were so different from
+anything we have here. They were the genuine thing; these are only
+counterfeits."
+
+"Come, tell us about them, please." This time it was Annie Balcom, the
+elder girl, who spoke. And we all gathered round the judge. For I
+notice that when conversation does revive, after that period of silence
+that follows dinner, it is very attractive to the whole company, and in
+whatsoever place it breaks out there is soon a knot of interested
+listeners.
+
+"I don't just now think of any particular story of New England
+Thanksgivings that would interest you," said the judge.
+
+"Tell them about Huldah's mince pie," said Mrs. Balcom, as she looked
+up from a copy of Whittier she had been reading.
+
+I can not pretend to give the story which follows exactly in the
+judge's words, for it is three years since I heard it, but as nearly as
+I can remember it was as follows:
+
+There was a young lawyer named John Harlow practicing law here in New
+York twenty odd years ago. His father lived not very far from my
+father. John had been graduated with honors, had studied law, and had
+the good fortune to enter immediately into a partnership with his law
+preceptor, ex-Gov. Blank. So eagerly had he pursued his studies that
+for two years he had not seen his country home. I think one reason why
+he had not cared to visit it was that his mother was dead, and his only
+sister was married and living in Boston. Take the "women folks" out of
+a house, and it never seems much like home to a young man.
+
+But now, as Thanksgiving day drew near, he resolved to give himself a
+brief release from the bondage of books. He told his partner that he
+wanted to go home for a week. He said he wanted to see his father and
+the boys, and his sister, who was coming home at that time, but that he
+specially wanted to ride old Bob to the brook once more, and to milk
+Cherry again, just to see how it felt to be a farmer's boy.
+
+"John," said the old lawyer, "be sure you fix up a match with some of
+those country girls. No man is fit for anything till he is well
+married; and you are now able, with economy, to support a wife. Mind
+you get one of those country girls. These paste and powder people here
+aren't fit for a young man who wants a woman."
+
+"Governor," said the young lawyer, laying his boots gracefully up on
+top of a pile of law books, as if to encourage reflection by giving his
+head the advantage of the lower end of the inclined plane, "Governor, I
+don't know anything about city girls. I have given myself to my books.
+But I must have a wife that is literary, like myself--one that can
+understand Emerson, for instance."
+
+The old lawyer laughed. "John," he answered, "the worst mistake you can
+make is to marry a woman just like yourself in taste. You don't want to
+marry a woman's head, but her heart."
+
+John defended his theory, and the governor only remarked that he would
+be cured of that sooner or later, and the sooner the better.
+
+The next morning John had a letter from his sister. Part of it ran
+about thus:
+
+"I've concluded, old fellow, that if you don't marry you'll dry up and
+turn to parchment. I'm going to bring home with me the smartest girl I
+know. She reads Carlyle, and quotes Goethe, and understands Emerson. Of
+course she don't know what I am up to, but you must prepare to
+capitulate."
+
+John did not like Amanda's assuming to pick a wife for him, but he did
+like the prospect of meeting a clever girl, and he opened the letter
+again to make sure that he had not misunderstood. He read again,
+"understands Emerson." John was pleased. Why? I think I can divine.
+John was vain of his own abilities, and he wanted a woman that could
+appreciate him. He would have told you that he wanted congenial
+society. But congenial female society to an ambitious man whose heart
+is yet untouched is only society that, in some sense, understands his
+greatness and admires his wisdom.
+
+In the old home they were looking for the son. The family proper
+consisted of the father, good Deacon Harlow, John's two brothers, ten
+and twelve years old, and Huldah, the "help." This last was the
+daughter of a neighboring farmer who was poor and hopelessly rheumatic,
+and most of the daughter's hard earnings went to eke out the scanty
+subsistence at home. Aunt Judith, the sister of John's mother, "looked
+after" the household affairs of her brother-in-law, by coming over once
+a week and helping Huldah darn and mend and make, and by giving Huldah
+such advice as her inexperience was supposed to require. But now Deacon
+Harlow's daughter had left her husband to eat his turkey alone in
+Boston, and had brought her two children home to receive the paternal
+blessing. Not that Mrs. Amanda Holmes had the paternal blessing chiefly
+in view in her trip. She had brought with her a very dear friend, Miss
+Janet Dunton, the accomplished teacher in the Mount Parnassus Female
+Seminary. Why Miss Janet Dunton came to the country with her friend she
+could hardly have told. Not a word had Mrs. Holmes spoken to her on the
+subject of the matrimonial scheme. She would have resented any allusion
+to such a project. She would have repelled any insinuation that she had
+ever dreamed that marriage was desirable under any conceivable
+circumstances. It is a way we have of teaching girls to lie. We educate
+them to catch husbands. Every superadded accomplishment is put on with
+the distinct understanding that its sole use is to make the goods more
+marketable. We get up parties, we go to watering places, we buy
+dresses, we refurnish our houses, to help our girls to a good match.
+And then we teach them to abhor the awful wickedness of ever confessing
+the great desire that nature and education have combined to make the
+chief longing of their hearts. We train them to lie to us, their
+trainers; we train them to lie to themselves; to be false with
+everybody on this subject; to say "no" when they mean "yes"; to deny an
+engagement when they are dying to boast of it. It is one of the
+refinements of Christian civilization which we pray the Women's
+Missionary Society not to communicate to poor ignorant heathens who
+know no better than to tell the truth about these things.
+
+But, before I digressed into that line of remark, I was saying that
+Miss Janet Dunton would have resented the most remote suggestion of
+marriage. She often declared sentimentally that she was wedded to her
+books, and loved her leisure, and was determined to be an old maid. And
+all the time this sincere Christian girl was dying to confer herself
+upon some worthy man of congenial tastes; which meant, in her case,
+just what it did in John Harlow's--some one who could admire her
+attainments. But, sensitive as she was to any imputation of a desire to
+marry, she and Mrs. Holmes understood each other distinctly. There is a
+freemasonry of women, and these two had made signs. They had talked
+about in this wise:
+
+    _Mrs. Holmes._--My dear Janet, you'll find my brother a bear in
+    manners, I fear. I wish he would marry. I hope you won't break his
+    heart, for I know you wouldn't have him.
+
+    _Miss Dunton._--You know my views on that subject, my dear. I love
+    books, and shall marry nobody. Besides, your brother's great legal
+    and literary attainments would frighten such a poor little mouse as
+    I am.
+
+And in saying those words they had managed to say that John Harlow was
+an unsophisticated student, and that they would run him down between
+them.
+
+Mrs. Holmes and her friend had arrived twenty-four hours ahead of John,
+and the daughter of the house had already installed herself as
+temporary mistress by thoughtlessly upsetting, reversing, and turning
+inside out all the good Huldah's most cherished arrangements. All the
+plans for the annual festival that wise and practical Huldah had
+entertained were vetoed, without a thought that this young girl had
+been for a year and a half in actual authority in the house, and might
+have some feeling of wrong in having a guest of a week overturn her
+plans for the next month. But Mrs. Holmes was not one of the kind to
+think of that. Huldah was hired and paid, and she never dreamed that
+hired people could have any interests in their work or their home other
+than their pay and their food. But Huldah was patient, though she
+confessed that she had a feeling that she had been rudely "trampled all
+over." I suspect she had a good cry at the end of the first day. I can
+not affirm it, except from a general knowledge of women.
+
+When John drove up in the buggy that the boys had taken to the depot
+for him his first care was to shake hands with the deacon, who was glad
+to see him, but could not forbear expressing a hope that he would
+"shave that hair off his upper lip." Then John greeted his sister
+cordially, and was presented to Miss Dunton. Instead of sitting down,
+he pushed right on into the kitchen, where Huldah, in a calico frock
+and a clean white apron, was baking biscuit for tea. She had been a
+schoolmate of his, and he took her hand cordially as she stood there,
+with the bright western sun half-glorifying her head and face.
+
+"Why, Huldah, how you've grown!" was his first word of greeting. He
+meant more than he said, for, though she was not handsome, she had
+grown exceeding comely as she developed into a woman.
+
+"Undignified as ever!" said Amanda, as he returned to the sitting room.
+
+"How?" said John. He looked bewildered. What had he done that was
+undignified? And Amanda Holmes saw well enough that it would not do to
+tell him that speaking to Huldah Manners was not consistent with
+dignity. She saw that her remark had been a mistake, and she got out of
+it as best she could by turning the conversation. Several times during
+the supper John addressed his conversation to Huldah, who sat at the
+table with the family; for in the country in those days it would have
+been considered a great outrage to make a "help" wait for the second
+table. John would turn from the literary conversation to inquire of
+Huldah about his old playmates, some of whom had gone to the West, some
+of whom had died, and some of whom were settling into the same fixed
+adherence to their native rocks that had characterized their ancestors.
+
+The next day the ladies could get no good out of John Harlow. He got up
+early and milked the cow. He cut wood and carried it in for Huldah. He
+rode old Bob to the brook for water. He did everything that he had been
+accustomed to do when a boy, finding as much pleasure in forgetting
+that he was a man as he had once found in hoping to be a man. The two
+boys enjoyed his society greatly, and his father was delighted to see
+that he had retained his interest in the farm life, though the deacon
+evidently felt an unconquerable hostility to what he called "that
+scrub-brush on the upper lip." I think if John had known how strong his
+father's feeling was against this much cherished product he would have
+mowed the crop and grazed the field closely until he got back to the
+city.
+
+John was not insensible to Janet Dunton's charms. She could talk
+fluently about all the authors most in vogue, and the effect of her
+fluency was really dazzling to a man not yet cultivated enough himself
+to see how superficial her culture was; for all her learning floated on
+top. None of it had influenced her own culture. She was brim full of
+that which she had acquired, but it had not been incorporated into her
+own nature. John did not see this, and he was infatuated with the idea
+of marrying a wife of such attainments. How she would dazzle his
+friends! How the governor would like to talk to her! How she would
+shine in his parlors! How she would delight people as she gave them tea
+and talk at the same time. John was in love with her as he would have
+been in love with a new tea urn or a rare book. She was a nice thing to
+show. Other people than John have married on the strength of such a
+feeling and called it love; for John really imagined that he was in
+love. And during that week he talked and walked and rode in the sleigh
+with Miss Dunton, and had made up his mind that he would carry this
+brilliant prize to New York. But, with lawyerlike caution, he thought
+he would put off the committal as long as possible. If his heart had
+been in his attentions the caution would not have been worth much.
+Caution is a good breakwater against vanity, but it isn't worth much
+against the springtide of love, as John Harlow soon found out.
+
+For toward the end of the week he began to feel a warmer feeling for
+Miss Janet. It was not in the nature of things that John should walk
+and talk with a pleasant girl a week, and not feel something more than
+his first interested desire to marry a showy wife. His heart began to
+be touched, and he resolved to bring things to a crisis as soon as
+possible. He therefore sought an opportunity to propose. But it was
+hard to find. For though Mrs. Holmes was tolerably ingenious, she could
+not get the boys or the deacon to pay any regard to her hints. Boys are
+totally depraved on such questions anyhow, and always manage to stumble
+in where any privacy is sought. And as for the deacon, it really seemed
+as though he had some design in intruding at the critical moment.
+
+I do not think that John was seriously in love with Miss Dunton. If he
+had been he would have found some means of communicating with her. A
+thousand spies with sleepless eyes all round their heads can not keep a
+man from telling his love somehow, if he really have a love to tell.
+
+There is another fact which convinces me that John Harlow was not yet
+very deeply in love with Janet. He was fond of talking with her of
+Byron and Milton, of Lord Bacon and Emerson--i.e., as I have already
+said, he was fond of putting his own knowledge on dress parade in the
+presence of one who could appreciate the display. But whenever any
+little thing released him for the time from conversation in the sitting
+room he was given to slipping out into the old kitchen, where, sitting
+on a chair that had no back, and leaning against the chimney side, he
+delighted to talk to Huldah. She couldn't talk much of books, but she
+could talk most charmingly of everything that related to the country
+life, and she could ask John many questions about the great city. In
+fact, John found that Huldah had come into possession of only such
+facts and truths as could be reached in her narrow life, but that she
+had assimilated them and thought about them, and that it was more
+refreshing to hear her original and piquant remarks about the topics
+she was acquainted with than to listen to the tireless stream of Janet
+Dunton's ostentatious erudition. And he found more delight in telling
+the earnest and hungry-minded country girl about the great world of men
+and the great world of books than in talking to Janet, who was, in the
+matter of knowledge, a little _blasee_, if I may be allowed the
+expression. And then, to Huldah he could talk of his mother, whom he
+had often watched moving about that same kitchen. When he had spoken to
+Janet of the associations of the old place with his mother's
+countenance, she had answered with a quotation from some poet, given in
+a tone of empty sentimentality. He instinctively shrank from mentioning
+the subject to her again; but to Huldah it was so easy to talk of his
+mother's gentleness and sweetness. Huldah was not unlike her in these
+respects, and then she gave him the sort of sympathy that finds its
+utterance in a tender silence--so much more tender than any speech can
+be.
+
+He observed often during the week that Huldah was depressed. He could
+not exactly account for it, until he noticed something in his sister's
+behavior toward her that awakened his suspicion. As soon as opportunity
+offered he inquired of Huldah, affecting at the same time to know
+something about it.
+
+"I don't want to complain of your sister to you, Mr. Harlow----"
+
+"Pshaw! call me John; and as for my sister, I know her faults better
+than you do. Go on, please."
+
+"Well, it's only that she told me that Miss Dunton wasn't used to
+eating at the same table with _servants_; and when one of the boys told
+your father, he was mad, and came to me, and said, 'Huldah, you must
+eat when the rest do. If you stay away from the table on account of
+these city snobs I'll make a fuss on the spot.' So, to avoid a fuss, I
+have kept on going to the table."
+
+John was greatly vexed with this. He was a chivalrous fellow, and he
+knew how such a remark must wound a person who had never learned that
+domestic service had anything degrading in it. And the result was just
+the opposite of what his sister had hoped. John paid more attention
+than ever to Huldah Manners because she was the victim of oppression.
+
+The evening before Thanksgiving day the ladies were going to make a
+visit. It was not at all incumbent on John to go, but he was seeking an
+opportunity to carry off the brilliant Miss Dunton, who would adorn his
+parlors when he became rich and distinguished, and who would make so
+nice a headpiece for his table. And so he had determined to go with
+them, trusting to some fortunate chance for his opportunity.
+
+But, sitting in the old "best room" in the dark, while the ladies were
+getting ready, and trying to devise a way by which he might get an
+opportunity to speak with Miss Dunton alone, it occurred to him that
+she was at that time in the sitting room waiting for his sister. To
+step out to where she was, and present the case in a few words, would
+not be difficult, and it might all be settled before his sister came
+downstairs. The Fates were against him, however; for, just as he was
+about to act on his thought, he heard Amanda Holmes's abundant skirts
+sweeping down the stairway. He could not help hearing the conversation
+that followed:
+
+"You see, Janet, I got up this trip to-night to keep John from spending
+the evening in the kitchen. He hasn't a bit of dignity, and would spend
+the evening romping with the children and talking to Huldah if he took
+it into his head."
+
+"Well," said Janet, "one can overlook everything in a man of your
+brother's culture. But what a queer way your country servants have of
+pushing themselves! Wouldn't I make them know their places!"
+
+And all this was said with the kitchen door open, and with the
+intention of wounding Huldah.
+
+John's castles tumbled. The erudite wife alongside the silver tea urn
+faded out of sight rapidly. If knowledge could not give a touch of
+humane regard for the feelings of a poor girl toiling dutifully and
+self-denyingly to support her family, of what account was it?
+
+Two minutes before he was about to give his life to Janet Dunton. Now
+there was a gulf wider than the world between them. He slipped out of
+the best room by the outside door and came in through the kitchen. The
+neighbor's sleigh that was to call for them was already at the door,
+and John begged them to excuse him. He had set his heart on helping
+Huldah make mince pies, as he used to help his mother when a boy. His
+sister was in despair, but she did not say much. She told John that it
+was time he was getting over his queer freaks. And the sleigh drove
+off.
+
+For an hour afterward John romped with his sister's children and told
+stories to the boys and talked to his father. When a man has barely
+escaped going over a precipice he does not like to think too much about
+it. John did not.
+
+At last the little children went to bed. The old gentleman grew sleepy,
+and retired. The boys went into the sitting room and went to sleep, one
+on the lounge and one on the floor. Huldah was just ready to begin her
+pies. She was deeply hurt, but John succeeded in making her more
+cheerful. He rolled up his sleeves and went to rolling out the pastry.
+He thought he had never seen a sweeter picture than the young girl in
+clean dress and apron, with her sleeves rolled above her elbows. There
+was a statuesque perfection in her well-rounded arms. The heat of the
+fire had flushed her face a little, and she was laughing merrily at
+John's awkward blunders in pie-making. John was delighted, he hardly
+knew why. In fixing a pie crust his fingers touched hers, and he
+started as if he had touched a galvanic battery. He looked at Huldah,
+and saw a half-pained expression on her flushed face.
+
+For the first time it occurred to him that Huldah Manners had excited
+in him a feeling a thousand times deeper than anything he had felt
+toward Janet, who seemed to be now in another world. For the first time
+he realized that he had been more in love with Huldah than with Janet
+all the time. Why not marry her? And then he remembered what the
+governor had said about marrying a woman's heart and not her head.
+
+He put on his hat and walked out--out, out, into the darkness, the
+drizzling rain, and the slush of melting snow, fighting a fierce
+battle. All his pride and all his cowardly vanity were on one side, all
+the irresistible torrent of his love on the other. He walked away into
+the dark wood pasture, trying to cool his brow, trying to think,
+and--would you believe it?--trying to pray, for it was a great
+struggle, and in any great struggle a true soul always finds something
+very like prayer in his heart.
+
+The feeling of love may exist without attracting the attention of its
+possessor. It had never occurred to John that he could love or marry
+Huldah. Thus the passion had grown all the more powerful for not being
+observed, and now the unseen fire had at a flash appeared as an
+all-consuming one.
+
+Turning back, he stood without the window, in the shadow, and looked
+through the glass at the trim young girl at work with her pies. In the
+modest, restful face he read the story of a heart that had carried
+great burdens patiently and nobly. What a glorious picture she was of
+warmth and light, framed in darkness! To his heart at that moment all
+the light and warmth of the world centered in Huldah. All the world
+besides was loneliness and darkness and drizzle and slush. His fear of
+his sister and of his friends seemed base and cowardly. And the more he
+looked at this vision of the night, this revelation of peace and love
+and light, the more he was determined to possess it. You will call him
+precipitate. But when all a man's nobility is on one side and all his
+meanness on the other, why hesitate? Besides, John Harlow had done more
+thinking in that half hour than most men do in a month.
+
+The vision had vanished from the window, and he went in and sat down.
+She had by this time put in the last pie, and was sitting with her head
+on her hand. The candle flickered and went out, and there was only the
+weird and ruddy firelight. I can not tell you what words passed between
+John and the surprised Huldah, who had thought him already betrothed to
+Miss Dunton. I can not tell what was said in the light of that fire; I
+don't suppose Harlow could tell that story himself.
+
+Huldah asked that he should not say anything about it till his sister
+was gone. Of course John saw that she asked it for his sake. But his
+own cowardice was glad of the shelter.
+
+Next day a brother of John's, whom I forgot to mention before, came
+home from college. Mrs. Holmes's husband arrived unexpectedly. Aunt
+Judith, with her family, came over at dinner time, so that there was a
+large and merry party. Two hearts, at least, joined in the deacon's
+thanksgiving before dinner with much fervor.
+
+At the table the dinner was much admired.
+
+"Huldah," said Janet Dunton, "I like your pies. I wish I could hire you
+to go to Boston. Our cook never does so well."
+
+John saw the well-aimed shaft hidden under this compliment, and all his
+manhood rallied. As soon as he could be sure of himself he said:
+
+"You can not have Huldah; she is already engaged."
+
+"How's that?" said Aunt Judith.
+
+"Oh! I've secured her services," said John.
+
+"What?" said Mrs. Holmes, "engaged your--your--your help before you
+engaged a wife!"
+
+"Not at all," said John; "engaged my help and my wife in one. I hope
+that Huldah Manners will be Huldah Harlow by Christmas."
+
+The deacon dropped his knife and fork, and dropped his lower jaw, and
+stared. "What! How! What did you say, John?"
+
+"I say, father, that this good girl Huldah is to be my wife."
+
+"John!" gasped the old man, getting to his feet and reaching his hand
+across the table, "you've got plenty of sense if you do wear a
+mustache! God bless you, my boy; there ain't no better woman here, nor
+in New York, nor anywhere, than Huldah. God bless you both! I was
+afraid you'd take a different road, though."
+
+"Hurrah for our Huldah and our John!" said George Harlow, the college
+boy, and his brothers joined him. Even the little Holmes children
+hurrahed.
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+Here the judge stopped.
+
+"Well," said Irene, "I don't think it _was_ very nice in him to marry
+the 'help.' Do you, father?"
+
+"Indeed I _do_," said the judge, with emphasis.
+
+"Did she ever come to understand Emerson?" asked Anna, who detested the
+Concord philosopher because she could not understand him.
+
+"Indeed I don't know," said the judge; "you can ask Huldah herself."
+
+"Who? what? You don't mean that mother is Huldah?"
+
+It was a cry in concert.
+
+"Mother" was a little red in the face behind the copy of Whittier she
+was affecting to read.
+
+_1870._
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW CASHIER.
+
+
+My friend Macartney-Smith has working theories for everything. He
+illustrated one of these the other day by relating something that
+happened in the Giralda apartment house, where he lives in a suite
+overlooking Central Park. I do not remember whether he was expounding
+his notion that the apartment house has solved the question of
+co-operative housekeeping, or whether he was engaged in demonstrating
+certain propositions regarding the influence of the city on the
+country. Since I have forgotten what it was intended to prove, the
+incident has seemed more interesting. It is bad for a story to medicate
+it with a theory. However, here are the facts as Macartney-Smith
+relates them with his Q.E.D. omitted.
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+I do not know [he began] by what accident or on what recommendation the
+manager of the Giralda brought a girl from Iowa to act as clerk and
+cashier in the restaurant.
+
+The new cashier had lived in a town where there were differences in
+social standing, but no recognized distinctions, after you had left out
+the sedimentary poverty-stricken class. She not only had no notions of
+the lines of social cleavage in a great apartment-house, but she had
+never heard of chaperonage, or those other indelicacies that go along
+with the high civilization of a metropolis. I have no doubt she was the
+best scholar in the arithmetic class in the village high school, and
+ten to one she was the champion at croquet. She took life with a zest
+unknown to us New Yorkers, and let the starchiest people in the house
+know that she was glad to see them when they returned after an absence
+by going across the dining-room to shake hands with them and to inquire
+whether they had had a good time. Even the gently frigid manner of Mrs.
+Drupe could not chill her friendliness; she was accustomed to accost
+that lady in the elevator, and demand, "How is Mr. Drupe?" whenever
+that gentleman chanced to be absent. It was not possible for her to
+imagine that Mrs. Drupe could be otherwise than grateful for any
+manifestation of a friendly interest in her husband.
+
+To show any irritation was not Mrs. Drupe's way; that would have
+disturbed the stylish repose of her bearing even more than misplaced
+cordiality. She always returned the salutations of Miss Wakefield, but
+in a tone so neutral, cool, and cucumberish that she hoped the girl
+would feel rebuked and learn a little more diffidence, or at least
+learn that the Drupes did not care for her acquaintance. But the only
+result of such treatment was that Miss Wakefield would say to the clerk
+in the office: "Your Eastern people have such stiff ways that they
+make me homesick. But they don't mean any harm, I suppose."
+
+Some of the families in the Giralda rather liked the new cashier; these
+were they who had children. The little children chatted and laughed
+with her across her desk when they came down as forerunners to give the
+order for the family dinner. If it were only lunch time, when few
+people were in the restaurant, they went behind the desk and embraced
+the cashier and had a romp with her. The smallest chaps she would take
+up in her arms while she pulled out the drawers to show them her paper
+knife and trinkets; and when there were flowers, she would often break
+off one apiece for even those least amiable little plagues that in an
+apartment house are the torment of their nurses and their mammas the
+livelong day. This not only gave pleasure to the infantry, but relieved
+an aching which the poor girl had for a once cheerful home, now broken
+up by the death of her parents and the scattering abroad of brothers
+and sisters.
+
+The young men in the house thought her "a jolly girl," since she would
+chat with them over her desk as freely as she would have chatted across
+the counter with the clerks in Cedar Falls, where she came from. She
+was equally cordial with the head waiter, and with those of his staff
+who knew any more English than was indispensable to the taking of an
+order. But her frank familiarity with young gentlemen and friendly
+speech with servants were offensive to some of the ladies. They talked
+it over, and decided that Miss Wakefield was not a modest girl; that at
+least she did not know her place, and that the manager ought to dismiss
+her if he meant to maintain the tone of the house. The manager--poor
+fellow!--had to hold his own place against the rivalry of the
+treasurer, and when such complaints were made to him what could he do?
+He stood out a while for Miss Wakefield, whom he liked; but when the
+influential Mrs. Drupe wrote to him that the cashier at the desk in the
+restaurant was not a well-behaved girl, he knew that it was time to
+look out for another.
+
+If the manager had forewarned her, she could have saved money enough to
+take her back to Iowa, where she might dare to be as friendly as she
+pleased with other respectable humans without fear of reproach. But he
+was not such a fool as to let go of one cashier till he had found
+another. It was while the manager was deciding which of three other
+young women to take that Mr. Drupe was stricken with apoplexy. He had
+finished eating his luncheon, which was served in the apartment, and
+had lighted a cigar, when he fell over. There were no children, and the
+Drupes kept no servant, but depended on the housekeeper to send them a
+maid when they required one, so that Mrs. Drupe found herself alone
+with her prostrate husband. The distracted wife did not know what to
+do. She took hold of the needle of the teleseme, but the words on the
+dial were confused; she quickly moved the needle round over the whole
+twenty-four points, but none of them suited the case. She stopped it at
+ "porter," moved it to "bootblack," carried it around to "ice water,"
+and successively to "coupe," "laundress," and "messenger-boy," and then
+gave up in despair, and jerked open the door that led to the hall. Miss
+Wakefield had just come up to the next apartment to inquire after a
+little girl ill from a cold, and was returning toward the elevator when
+Mrs. Drupe's wild face was suddenly thrust forth upon her.
+
+"Won't you call a boy--somebody? My husband is dying," were the words
+that greeted Miss Wakefield at the moment of the apparition of the
+despairing face.
+
+Miss Wakefield rushed past Mrs. Drupe into the apartment, and turned
+the teleseme to the word "manager," and then pressed the button three
+times in quick succession. She knew that a call for the manager would
+suggest fire, robbery, and sudden death, and that it would wake up the
+lethargic forces in the office. Then she turned to the form of the man
+lying prostrate on the floor, seized a pillow from the lounge, and
+motioned to Mrs. Drupe to raise his head while she laid it beneath.
+
+"Who is your doctor?" she demanded.
+
+"Dr. Morris; but it's a mile away," said the distracted woman. "Won't
+you send a boy in a coupe"
+
+"I'll go myself, the boys are so slow," said the cashier. "Shall I send
+you a neighboring doctor till Dr. Morris can get here?"
+
+"Do! do!" pleaded the wife, now wildly wringing her hands.
+
+Miss Wakefield caught the elevator as it landed the manager on the
+floor, and she briefly told him what was the matter. Then she
+descended, and had the clerk order a coupe by telephone, and then
+herself sent Dr. Floyd from across the street, while she ran to the
+stable, leaped into the coupe before the horse was fairly hitched up,
+and drove for Dr. Morris.
+
+Dr. Morris found Mrs. Drupe already a widow when he arrived with the
+cashier. The latter promptly secured the addresses of Mr. Drupe's
+brother and of his business partner, again entered the coupe, and soon
+had the poor woman in the hands of her friends.
+
+The energetic girl went to her room that night exhilarated by her own
+prompt and kind-hearted action. But the evil spirit that loves to mar
+our happiness had probably arranged it that on that very evening she
+received a note from the manager notifying her that her services would
+not be required after one more week. On inquiry the next day she
+learned that some of the ladies had complained of her behavior, and she
+vainly tried to remember what she had done that was capable of
+misconstruction. She also vainly tried to imagine how she was to live,
+or by what means she was to contrive to get back to those who knew her
+too well to suspect her of any evil. She was so much perplexed by the
+desperate state of her own affairs that she even neglected to attend
+Mr. Drupe's funeral, but she hoped that Mrs. Drupe would not take it
+unkindly.
+
+It was with a heavy heart that the manager called Miss Wakefield into
+his office on the ground floor in order that he might pay her last
+week's wages. He was relieved that she seemed to accept her dismissal
+with cheerfulness.
+
+"What are you going to do?" he asked timidly.
+
+"Why, didn't you know?" she said. "I am to live with Mrs. Drupe as a
+companion, and to look out for her affairs and collect her rents. I
+used to think she didn't like me. But it will be a good lesson to those
+ladies who found fault with me for nothing when they see how much Mrs.
+Drupe thinks of me."
+
+And she went her way to her new home in Mrs. Drupe's apartment, at the
+end of the hall on the sixth floor, while the manager took from a
+pigeonhole Mrs. Drupe's letter of complaint against the former cashier,
+and read it over carefully.
+
+The thickness of the walls at the base of so lofty a building made it
+difficult for daylight to work its way through the tunnel-like windows,
+so that in this office a gas jet was necessary in the daytime. After a
+moment's reflection the manager touched Mrs. Drupe's letter of
+complaint to the flame, and it was presently reduced to everlasting
+illegibility.
+
+
+
+
+PRISCILLA.
+
+
+The trained novel readers, those who have made a business of it (if any
+such should honor this poor little story with their attention), will
+glance down the opening paragraphs for a description of the heroine's
+tresses. The opening sentences of Miss Braddon are enough to show how
+important a thing a head of hair is in the getting up of a heroine for
+the popular market. But as my heroine is not a got-up one, and as I can
+not possibly remember even the color of her hair or her eyes as I
+recall her now, I fear I shall disappoint the professionals, who never
+feel that they have a complete heroine till the "long waving tresses of
+raven darkness, reaching nearly to the ground, enveloping her as with a
+cloud," have been artistically stuck on by the author. But be it known
+that I take Priscilla from memory, and not from imagination. And the
+memory of Priscilla, the best girl in the school, the most gifted, the
+most modest, the most gentle and true, is a memory too sacred to be
+trifled with. I would not make one hair light or dark, I would not
+change the shading of the eyebrows. Priscilla is Priscilla forever, to
+all who knew her. And as I can not tell the precise color of her hair
+and eyes, I shall not invent a shade for them. I remember that she was
+on the blond side of the grand division line. But she was not blond.
+She was--Priscilla. I mean to say that since you never lived in that
+dear old-fogy Ohio River village of New Geneva, and since,
+consequently, you never knew our Priscilla, no words of mine can make
+you exactly understand her. Was she handsome? No--yes. She was
+"jimber-jawed"--that is, her lower teeth shut a little outside her
+upper. Her complexion was not faultless. Her face would not bear
+criticism. And yet there is not one of her old schoolmates that will
+not vow that she was beautiful. And indeed she was. For she was
+Priscilla. And I never can make you understand it.
+
+As Priscilla was always willing to oblige any one, it was only natural
+that Mrs. Leston should send for her to help entertain the marquis. It
+was a curious chance that threw the young Marquis d'Entremont for a
+whole summer into the society of our little village. His uncle, who was
+his guardian, a pious _abbe_, wishing to remove him from Paris to get
+him out of socialistic influences, had sent him to New Orleans,
+consigned to the care of the great banking house of Challeau, Lafort &
+Company. Not liking to take the chances of yellow fever in the summer,
+he had resolved to journey to the North, and as Challeau, Lafort &
+Company had a correspondent in Henry Leston, the young lawyer, and as
+French was abundantly spoken in our Swiss village of New Geneva, what
+more natural than that they should dispatch the marquis to our pleasant
+town of vineyards, giving him a letter of introduction to their
+attorney, who fortunately spoke some book French. He had presented the
+letter, had been invited to dinner, and Priscilla Haines, who had
+learned French in childhood, though she was not Swiss, was sent for to
+help entertain the guest.
+
+I can not but fancy that D'Entremont was surprised at meeting just such
+a girl as Priscilla in a rustic village. She was not abashed at finding
+herself face to face with a nobleman, nor did she seem at all anxious
+to attract his notice. The vanity of the marquis must have been a
+little hurt at finding a lady that did not court his attention. But
+wounded vanity soon gave place to another surprise. Even Mrs. Leston,
+who understood not one word of the conversation between her husband,
+the marquis, and Priscilla, was watching for this second surprise, and
+did not fail to read it in D'Entremont's eyes. Here was a young woman
+who had read. She could admire Corinne, which was much in vogue in
+those days among English-speaking students of French; she could oppose
+Saint Simon. The Marquis d'Entremont had resigned himself to the ennui
+of talking to Swiss farmers about their vineyards, of listening to
+Swiss grandmothers telling stories of their childhood in Neufchatel and
+Vaud. But to find in this young village school-teacher one who could
+speak, and listen while he spoke, of his favorite writers, was to him
+very strange. Not that Priscilla had read many French books, for there
+were not many within her reach. But she had read Grimm's
+Correspondence, and he who reads this has heard the echo of many of the
+great voices in French literature. And while David Haines had lived his
+daughter had wanted nothing he could get to help her to the highest
+culture.
+
+But I think what amazed the marquis most was that Priscilla showed no
+consciousness of the unusual character of her attainments. She spoke
+easily and naturally of what she knew, as if it were a matter of course
+that the teacher of a primary school should have read Corneille, and
+should be able to combat Saint Simonism. As the dinner drew to a close,
+Leston lifted his chair round to where his wife sat and interpreted the
+bright talk at the other side of the table.
+
+I suspect that Saint Simon had lost some of his hold upon the marquis
+since his arrival in a country where life was more simple and the
+manner of thought more practical. But he dated the decline of his
+socialistic opinions from his discussion with Priscilla Haines.
+
+The next Sunday morning he strolled out of the Le Vert House, breathing
+the sweet air perfumed with the blossoms of a thousand apple trees. For
+what yard is there in New Geneva that has not apple trees and
+grapevines? And every family in the village keeps a cow, and every cow
+wears a bell, and every bell is on a different key; so that the three
+things that penetrated the senses of the marquis on this Sunday morning
+were the high hills that stood sentinels on every hand about the valley
+in which New Geneva stood, the smell of the superabundant apple
+blossoms, and the _tinkle_ and _tankle_ and _tonkle_ of hundreds of
+bells on the cows grazing on the "commons," as the open lots were
+called. On this almost painfully quiet morning D'Entremont noticed the
+people going one way and another to the early Sunday schools in the
+three churches. Just as he came to the pump that stood in front of the
+"public square" he met Priscilla. At her heels were ten ragged little
+ruffians, whom she was accustomed to have come to her house every
+Sunday morning and walk with her to Sunday school.
+
+"You are then a Sister of Charity also," he said in French, bowing low
+with sincere admiration as he passed her. And then to himself the young
+marquis reflected: "We Saint Simonists theorize and build castles in
+Spain for poor people, but we do not take hold of them." He walked
+clear round the square, and then followed the steps of Priscilla into
+the little brick Methodist church which in that day had neither steeple
+nor bell nor anything churchlike about it except the two arched front
+windows. There was not even a fence to inclose it, nor an evergreen nor
+an ivy about it; only a few straggling black locusts. For the
+puritanism of New England was never so hard a puritanism as the
+Methodist puritanism of a generation ago in the West--a puritanism that
+forbade jewelry, that stripped the artificial flowers out of the
+bonnets of country girls, that expelled, and even yet expels, a country
+boy for looking with wonder at a man hanging head downward from a
+trapeze in a circus tent. No other church, not even the Quaker, ever
+laid its hand more entirely upon the whole life of its members. The
+dead hand of Wesley has been stronger than the living hand of any pope.
+
+Upon the hard, open-backed, unpainted and unvarnished oak benches,
+which seemed devised to produce discomfort, sat the Sunday-school
+classes, and upon one of these, near the door, D'Entremont sat down. He
+looked at the bare walls, at the white pulpit, at the carpetless
+floors, at the general ugliness of things, the box stove, which stood
+in the only aisle, the tin chandeliers with their half-burned candles,
+the eight-by-ten lights of glass in the windows, and he was favorably
+impressed. With a quick conscience he had often felt the frivolous
+emptiness of a worldly life, and had turned toward the religion of his
+uncle the _abbe_ only to turn away again antagonized by what seemed to
+him frivolity in the religions pomp that he saw. But here was a
+religion not only without the attractions of sensuous surrounding, but
+a religion that maintained its vitality despite a repelling plainness,
+not to say a repulsive ugliness, in its external forms. For could he
+doubt the force of a religious principle that had divested every woman
+in the little church of every ornament? Doubtless he felt the
+narrowness that could read the scriptural injunction so literally, but
+none could doubt the strength of a religious conviction that submitted
+to such self-denial. And then there was Priscilla, with all her gifts,
+sitting in the midst of her boys, gathered from that part of the
+village known as "Slabtown." Yes, there must be something genuine in
+this religious life, and its entire contrast to all that the marquis
+had known and grown weary of attracted him.
+
+As eleven o'clock drew on, the little church filled with people. The
+men sat on one side of the aisle and the women on the other. The old
+brethren and sisters, and generally those who prayed in prayer meeting
+and spoke in love feast, sat near the front, many of them on the cross
+seats near the pulpit, which were thence said by scoffers to be the
+"Amen corners." Any one other than a leader of the hosts of Israel
+would as soon have thought of taking a seat in the pulpit as on one of
+these chief seats in the synagogue. The marquis sat still and watched
+the audience gather, while one of the good brethren led the
+congregation in singing
+
+    "When I can read my title clear,"
+
+which hymn was the usual voluntary at the opening of service. Then the
+old minister said, "Let us continue the worship of God by singing the
+hymn on page 554." He "lined" the hymn--that is, he read each couplet
+before it was sung. With the coming in of hymn books and other
+newfangled things the good old custom of "lining the hymn" has
+disappeared. But on that Sunday morning the Marquis d'Entremont thought
+he had never heard anything more delightful than these simple melodies
+sung thus lustily by earnest voices. The reading of each couplet by the
+minister before it was sung seemed to him a sort of recitative. He knew
+enough of English to find that the singing was hopeful and triumphant.
+Wearied with philosophy and _blase_ with the pomp of the world, he
+wished that he had been a villager in New Geneva, and that he might
+have had the faith to sing of the
+
+        "--land of pure delight
+    Where saints immortal reign,"
+
+with as much earnestness as his friend Priscilla on the other side of
+the aisle. In the prayer that followed D'Entremont noticed that all the
+church members knelt, and that the hearty _amens_ were not intoned, but
+were as spontaneous as the rest of the service. After reverently
+reading a chapter the old minister said: "Please sing without lining,
+
+    "'A charge to keep I have,'"
+
+and then the old time of "Kentucky" was sung with animation, after
+which came the sermon, of which the marquis understood but few words,
+though he understood the pantomime by which the venerable minister
+represented the return of the prodigal and the welcome he received.
+When he saw the tears in the eyes of the hearers, and heard the
+half-repressed "Bless the Lord!" of an old brother or sister, and saw
+them glance joyfully at one another's faces as the sermon went on, he
+was strangely impressed with the genuineness of the feeling.
+
+But the class meeting that followed, to which he remained, impressed
+him still more. The venerable Scotchman who led it had a face that
+beamed with sweetness and intelligence. It was fortunate that the
+marquis saw so good a specimen. In fact, Priscilla trembled lest Mr.
+Boreas, the stern, hard-featured "exhorter," should have been invited
+to lead. But as the sweet-faced old leader called upon one and another
+to speak, and as many spoke with streaming eyes, D'Entremont quivered
+with sympathy. He was not so blind that he could not see the sham and
+cant of some of the speeches, but in general there was much earnestness
+and truth. When Priscilla rose in her turn and spoke, with downcast
+eyes, he felt the beauty and simplicity of her religious life. And he
+rightly judged that from the soil of a cult so severe there must grow
+some noble and heroic lives. Last of all the class leader reached the
+marquis, whom he did not know.
+
+"Will our strange brother tell us how it is with him to-day?" he asked.
+
+Priscilla trembled. What awful thing might happen when a class leader
+invited a marquis, who could speak no English, and who was a disciple
+of Saint Simon, to tell his religious experience, was more than she
+could divine. If the world had come to an end in consequence of such a
+concatenation, I think she would hardly have been surprised. But
+nothing of the sort occurred. To her astonishment the marquis rose and
+said:
+
+"Is it that any one can speak French?"
+
+A brother who was a member of one of the old Swiss families volunteered
+his services as interpreter, and D'Entremont proceeded to tell them how
+much he had been interested in the exercises; that it was the first
+time he had ever been in such a meeting, and that he wished he had the
+simple faith which they showed.
+
+Then the old leader said, "Let us engage in prayer for our strange
+brother."
+
+And the marquis bowed his knees upon the hard floor.
+
+He could not understand much that was said, but he knew that they were
+praying for him; that this white-haired class leader, and the old
+ladies in the corner, and Priscilla, were interceding with the Father
+of all for him. He felt more confidence in the efficacy of their
+prayers than he had ever had in all the intercessions of the saints of
+which he was told when a boy. For surely God would hear such as
+Priscilla!
+
+It happened not long after this that D'Entremont was drawn even nearer
+to this simple Methodist life, which had already made such an
+impression on his imagination, by an incident which would make a
+chapter if this story were intended for the New York Weekly Dexter.
+Indeed, the story of his peril in a storm and freshet on Indian Creek,
+and of his deliverance by the courage of Henry Stevens, is so well
+suited to that periodical and others of its class, that I am almost
+sorry that Mrs. Eden, or Cobb, Jr., is not the author of this story.
+Either of them could make a chapter which would bear the title of "A
+Thrilling Incident." But with an unconquerable aversion to anything and
+everything "thrilling," the present writer can only say in plainest
+prose that this incident made the young marquis the grateful friend of
+his deliverer, Henry Stevens, who happened to be a zealous Methodist,
+and about his own age.
+
+The effort of the two friends to hold intercourse was a curious
+spectacle. Not only did they speak different languages, but they lived
+in different worlds. Not only did D'Entremont speak a very limited
+English, while Stevens spoke no French, but D'Entremont's life and
+thought had nothing in common with the life of Stevens, except the one
+thing that made a friendship possible. They were both generous, manly
+men, and each felt a strong drawing to the other. So it came about that
+when they tired of the marquis's English and of the gulf between their
+ideas, they used to call on Priscilla at her home with her mother in
+the outskirts of the village. She was an interpreter indeed! For with
+the keenest sympathy she entered into the world in which the marquis
+lived, which had always been a sort of intellectual paradise to her. It
+was strange indeed to meet a living denizen of a world that seemed to
+her impossible except in books. And as for the sphere in which Stevens
+moved, it was her own. He and she had been schoolmates from childhood,
+had looked on the same green hills, known the same people, been molded
+of the same strong religious feeling. Nothing was more delightful to
+D'Entremont than to be able to talk to Stevens, unless it was to have
+so good an excuse for conversation with Priscilla; and nothing was so
+pleasant to Henry Stevens as to be able to understand the marquis,
+unless it was to talk with Priscilla; while to Priscilla those were
+golden moments, in which she passed like a quick-winged messenger
+between her own native world and the world that she knew only in books,
+between the soul of one friend and that of another. And thus grew up a
+triple friendship, a friendship afterward sorely tried. For how strange
+it is that what brings together at one time may be a wall of division
+at another.
+
+I can not pretend to explain just how it came about. Doubtless Henry
+Stevens's influence had something to do with it, though I feel sure
+Priscilla's had more. Doubtless the marquis was naturally susceptible
+to religions influences. Certain it is that the socialistic opinions,
+never very deeply rooted, and at most but a reaction, disappeared, and
+there came a religious sentiment like that of his friends. He was drawn
+to the little class meeting, which seemed to him so simple a
+confessional that all his former notions of "liberty, fraternity, and
+equality" were satisfied by it. I believe he became a "probationer,"
+but his creed was never quite settled enough for him to accept "full
+membership."
+
+Some of the old folks could not refrain from expressions of triumph
+that "the Lord had got a hold of that French infidel": and old Sister
+Goodenough seized his hand, and, with many sighs and much upturning of
+the eyes, exhorted him: "Brother Markus, give up everything! give up
+everything, and come out from the world and be separated!" Which led
+D'Entremont to remark to Stevens, as they walked away, that "Madame
+Goodenough was vare curus indeed!" And Brother Boreas, the exhorter,
+who had the misfortune not to have a business reputation without
+blemish, but who made up for it by rigid scruples in regard to a
+melodeon in the church, and by a vicarious conscience which was kindly
+kept at everybody's service but his own--old Brother Boreas always
+remarked in regard to the marquis, that "as for his part he liked a
+deeper repentance and a sounder conversion." But the gray-haired old
+Scotch class leader, whose piety was at a premium everywhere, would
+take D'Entremont's hand and talk of indifferent subjects while he
+_beamed_ on him his affection and Christian fellowship.
+
+To the marquis Priscilla was a perpetual marvel. More brilliant women
+he had known in Paris, more devout women he had seen there, but a woman
+so gifted and so devout, and, above all, a woman so true, so modest,
+and of such perfect delicacy of feeling he had never known. And how
+poorly these words describe her! For she was Priscilla; and all who
+knew her will understand how much more that means than any adjectives
+of mine. Certainly Henry Stevens did, for he had known her always, and
+would have loved her always had he dared. It was only now, as she
+interpreted him to the marquis and the marquis to him, idealizing and
+elevating the thoughts of both, that he surrendered himself to hope.
+And so, toward the close of the summer, affairs came to this awkward
+posture that these two sworn friends loved the same woman.
+
+D'Entremont discovered this first. More a man of the world than Henry
+Stevens, he read the other's face and voice. He was perturbed. Had it
+occurred two years before, he might have settled the matter easily by a
+duel, for instance. And even now his passion got the better for a while
+of all his good feelings and Christian resolutions. When he got back to
+the Le Vert House with his unpleasant discovery he was burning like a
+furnace. In spite of a rain storm just beginning and a dark night, he
+strode out and walked he knew not whither. He found himself, he knew
+not how, on the bank of the Ohio. He untied a skiff and pushed out into
+the river. How to advance himself over his rival was his first thought.
+But this darkness and this beating rain and this fierce loneliness
+reminded him of that night when he had clung desperately to the
+abutment of the bridge that spanned Indian Creek, and when the courage
+and self-possession of Henry Stevens had rescued him. Could he be the
+rival of a man who had gone down into the flood that he might save the
+exhausted marquis?
+
+Then he hated himself. Why had he not drowned that night? And with this
+feeling of self-disgust added to his general mental misery and the
+physical misery that the rain brought to him, there came the great
+temptation to write "_Fin_," in French fashion, by jumping into the
+water. But something in the influence of Priscilla and that class
+meeting caused him to take a better resolution, and he returned to the
+hotel.
+
+The next day he sent for Henry Stevens to come to his room.
+
+"Henry, I am going to leave to-night on the mail boat. I am going back
+to New Orleans, and thence to France. You love Priscilla. You are a
+noble man; you will make her happy. I have read your love in your face.
+Meet me at the river to-night. When you are ready to be married, let me
+know, that I may send some token of my love for both. Do not tell
+mademoiselle that I am going; but tell her good-by for me afterward.
+Now, I must pack."
+
+Henry went out stupefied. What did it mean? And why was he half glad
+that D'Entremont was going? By degrees he got the better of his
+selfishness.
+
+"Marquis d'Entremont," he said, breaking into his room, "you must not
+go away. You love Priscilla. You have everything--learning, money,
+travel. I have nothing."
+
+"Nothing but a good heart, which I have not," said D'Entremont.
+
+"I will never marry Priscilla," said Henry, "unless she deliberately
+chooses to have me in preference to you."
+
+To this arrangement, so equitable, the marquis consented, and the
+matter was submitted to Priscilla by letter. Could she love either, and
+if either, which? She asked a week for deliberation.
+
+It was not easy to decide. By all her habits of thought and feeling, by
+all her prejudices, by all her religious life, she was drawn toward the
+peaceful and perhaps prosperous life that opened before her as the wife
+of Henry Stevens, living in her native village, near to her mother,
+surrounded by her old friends, and with the best of men for a husband.
+But by all the clamor of her intellectual nature for something better
+than her narrow life, by all her joy in the conversation of
+D'Entremont, the only man her equal in culture she had ever known, she
+felt drawn to be the wife of the marquis. Yet if there were roses,
+there were thorns in such a path. The village girl knew that _madame la
+marquise_ must lead a life very different from any she had known. She
+must bear with a husband whose mind was ever in a state of unrest and
+skepticism, and she must meet the great world.
+
+In truth there were two Priscillas. There was the Priscilla that her
+neighbors knew, the Priscilla that went to church, the Priscilla that
+taught Primary School No. 3. There was the other Priscilla, that read
+Chaucer and Shakespeare, Moliere and De Stael. With this Priscilla New
+Geneva had nothing to do. And it was the doubleness of her nature that
+caused her indecision.
+
+Then her conscience came in. Because there might be worldly attractions
+on one side, she leaned to the other. To reject a poor suitor and
+accept a rich and titled one, had something of treason in it.
+
+At the end of a week she sent for them both. Henry Stevens's flatboat
+had been ready to start for New Orleans for two days. And Challeau,
+Lafort & Company were expecting the marquis, who was in some sort a
+ward of theirs. Henry Stevens and the Marquis Antoine d'Entremont
+walked side by side, in an awkward silence, to the little vine-covered
+cottage. Of that interview I do not know enough to write fully. But I
+know that Priscilla said such words as these:
+
+"This is an awful responsibility. I suppose a judge trembles when he
+must pass sentence of death. But I must make a decision that involves
+the happiness of both my friends and myself. I can not do it now. Will
+you wait until you both return in the spring? I have a reason that I
+can not explain for wishing this matter postponed. It will be decided
+for me, perhaps."
+
+I do not know that she said just these words, and I know she did not
+say them all at once. But so they parted. And Miss Nancy More, who
+retailed ribbons and scandal, and whose only effort at mental
+improvement had been the plucking out of the hairs contiguous to her
+forehead, that she might look intellectual--Miss Nancy More from her
+lookout at the window descried the two friends walking away from Mrs.
+Haines's cottage, and remarked, as she had often remarked before, that
+it was "absolutely scandalious for a young woman who was a professor to
+have two beaux at once, and such good friends, too!"
+
+Gifted girls like Priscilla usually have a background in some friend,
+intelligent, quiet, restful. Anna Poindexter, a dark, thoughtful girl,
+was sometimes spoken of as "Priscilla's double"; but she was rather
+Priscilla's opposite: her traits were complementary to those of her
+friend. The two were all but inseparable; and so, when Priscilla found
+herself the next evening on the bank of the river, she naturally found
+Anna with her. Slowly the flatboat of which Henry Stevens was owner and
+master drifted by, while the three or four men at each long oar strode
+back and forward on the deck as they urged the boat on. Henry was
+standing on the elevated bench made for the pilot, holding the long
+"steering oar" and guiding the craft. As his manly form in the western
+sunlight attracted their attention, both the girls were struck with
+admiration. Both waved their handkerchiefs, and Henry returned the
+adieu by swinging his hat. So intent was he on watching them that he
+forgot his duty, and one of the men was obliged to call out, "Swing her
+round, captain, or the mail boat'll sink us."
+
+Hardly was the boat swung out of the way when the tall-chimneyed mail
+boat swept by.
+
+"See the marquis!" cried Anna, and again adieux were waved. And the
+marquis stepped to the guard and called out to Henry, "I'll see you in
+New Orleans," and the swift steamer immediately bore him out of
+speaking distance. And Henry watched him disappear with a choking
+feeling that thus the nobleman was to outstrip him in life.
+
+"See!" said Anna, "you are a lucky girl. You have your choice; you can
+go through life on the steamboat or on the flatboat. Of course you'll
+go by steam."
+
+"There are explosions on steamboats sometimes," said Priscilla. Then
+turning, she noticed a singular expression on Anna's face. Her insight
+was quick, and she said, "Confess that _you_ would choose the
+flat-float." And Anna turned away.
+
+"Two strings to her bow, or two beaux to her string, I should say," and
+she did say it, for this was Miss More's comment on the fact which she
+had just learned, that Miss Haines had received letters from "the lower
+country," the handwriting of the directions of which indicated that she
+had advices from both her friends. But poor Miss More, with never a
+string to her bow and never a beau to her string, might be forgiven for
+shooting popguns that did no harm.
+
+There was a time when Priscilla had letters from only one. Henry was
+very ill, and D'Entremont wrote bulletins of his condition to Priscilla
+and to his family. In one of these it was announced that he was beyond
+recovery, and Priscilla and Anna mingled their tears together. Then
+there came a letter saying that he was better. Then he was worse again.
+And then better.
+
+In those days the mail was brought wholly by steamboats, and it took
+many days for intelligence to come. But the next letter that Priscilla
+had was from Henry Stevens himself. It was filled from first to last
+with praises of the marquis; that he had taken Henry out of his
+boarding place, and put him into his own large room in the St. Charles;
+that he had nursed him with more than a friend's tenderness, scarcely
+sleeping at all; that he had sold his cargo, relieved his mind of care,
+employed the most prominent physicians, and anticipated his every
+want--all this and more the letter told.
+
+And the very next steamboat from the lower country, the great heavy
+Duke of Orleans, with a green half moon of lattice work in each paddle
+box, brought the convalescent Henry and his friend. Both were invited
+to supper at the house of Priscilla's mother on the evening after their
+arrival. Neither of them liked to face Priscilla's decision, whatever
+it might be, but they were more than ever resolved that it should not
+in any way disturb their friendship. So they walked together to the
+cottage.
+
+Priscilla's mother was not well enough to come to the table, and she
+had to entertain both. It was hard for either of the guests to be
+cheerful, but Priscilla at least was not depressed by the approaching
+decision. Equally attentive to both, no one could have guessed in which
+direction her preference lay.
+
+"We must enjoy this supper," she said. "We must celebrate Henry's
+recovery and the goodness of his nurse together. Let's put the future
+out of sight and be happy."
+
+Her gayety proved infectious, and as she served her friends with her
+own hands they both abandoned themselves to the pleasure of the moment
+and talked of cheerful and amusing things.
+
+Only when they rose to leave did she allow her face to become sober,
+and even then the twilight of her joyousness lingered in her smile as
+she spoke, facing them both:
+
+"How I have enjoyed your coming! I wanted us to have this supper
+together before coming to the subject you spoke of before leaving. I
+shall have to say what will give you both pain." There was a moment's
+pause. Then she resumed:
+
+"The matter has been decided for me. I can marry neither of you. My
+father and all my brothers and sisters have died of consumption. I am
+the only one left of five. In a few months--" She lowered her voice,
+which trembled a little as she glanced toward her mother's room--"my
+poor mother will be childless."
+
+For the first time, in the imperfect light, they noticed the flushed
+cheeks, and for the first time they detected the quick breathing. When
+they walked away the two friends were nearer than ever by virtue of a
+common sorrow.
+
+And as day after day they visited her in company, the public, and
+particularly that part of the public which peeped out of Miss Nancy
+More's windows, was not a little mystified. Miss More thought a girl
+who was drawing near to the solemn and awful realities of eternal bliss
+should let such worldly vanities as markusses alone!
+
+A singular change came over Priscilla in one regard. As the prospect of
+life faded out, she was no longer in danger of being tempted by the
+title and wealth of the marquis. She could be sure that her heart was
+not bribed. And when this restraint of conscience abnormally sensitive
+was removed, it became every day more and more clear to her that she
+loved D'Entremont. Of all whom she had ever known, he only was a
+companion. And as he brought her choice passages from favorite writers
+every day, and as her mind grew with unwonted rapidity under the
+influence of that strange disease which shakes down the body while it
+ripens the soul, she felt more and more that she was growing out of
+sympathy with all that was narrow and provincial in her former life,
+and into sympathy with the great world, and with Antoine d'Entremont,
+who was the representative of the world to her.
+
+This rapidly growing gulf between his own intellectual life and that of
+Priscilla Henry Stevens felt keenly. But there is one great
+compensation for a soul like Henry's. Men and women of greater gifts
+might outstrip him in intellectual growth. He could not add one cell to
+his brain, or make the slightest change in his temperament. But neither
+the marquis nor Priscilla could excel him in that generosity which does
+not always go with genius, and which is not denied to the man of the
+plainest gifts. He wrote to the marquis:
+
+    "MY DEAR FRIEND: You are a good and generous friend. I have read in
+    her voice and her eyes what the decision of Priscilla must have
+    been. If I had not been blind, I ought to have seen it before in
+    the difference between us. Now I know that it will be a comfort to
+    you to have that noble woman die your wife. I doubt not it will be
+    a comfort to her. Do you think it will be any consolation to me to
+    have been an obstacle in the way? I hope you do not think so meanly
+    of me, and that you and Priscilla will give me the only consolation
+    I can have in our common sorrow--the feeling that I have been able
+    to make her last days more comfortable and your sorrow more
+    bearable. If you refuse, I shall always reproach myself.
+
+    "HENRY."
+
+I need not tell of the discussions that ensued. But it was concluded
+that it was best for all three that Priscilla and the marquis should be
+married, much to the disgust of Miss Nancy More, who thought that
+"she'd better be sayin' her prayers. What good would it do to be a
+march-oness and all that when she was in her coffin?"
+
+A wedding in prospect of death is more affecting than a funeral. Only
+Henry Stevens and Anna Poindexter were to be present. Priscilla's
+mother had completed the arrangements, blinded by tears. I think she
+could have dressed Priscilla for her coffin with less suffering. The
+white dress looked so like a shroud, under those sunken cheeks as white
+as the dress! Once or twice Priscilla had drawn her mother's head to
+her bosom and wept.
+
+"Poor mother!" she would say; "so soon to be alone! But Antoine will be
+your son."
+
+Just as the dressing of the pale bride was completed, there came one of
+those sudden breakdowns to which a consumptive is liable. The doctor
+gave hope of but a few hours of life. When the marquis came he was
+heartbroken to see her lying there, so still, so white--dying. She took
+his hand. She beckoned to Anna and Henry Stevens to stand by her, and
+then, with tear-blinded eyes, the old minister married them for
+eternity!
+
+Outside the door Priscilla's class of Slabtown boys stood with some
+roses and hollyhocks they had thought to bring for her wedding or her
+funeral, they hardly knew which. They were all abashed at the idea of
+entering the house.
+
+"You go in, Bill," said one.
+
+"No, you go. I can't do it," said Bill, scratching the gravel walk with
+his toes.
+
+"I say somebody's got to go," said the first speaker.
+
+"I'll go," said Boone Jones, the toughest of the party. "I ain't
+afeerd," he added huskily, as he took the flowers in his hand and
+knocked at the door.
+
+But when Boone got in, and saw Priscilla lying there so white, he began
+to choke with a strange emotion. Priscilla tried to take the flowers
+from his hand, but Anna Poindexter took them. Priscilla tried to thank
+him, but she could only whisper his name.
+
+"Boone----" she said, and ceased from weakness.
+
+But the lad did not wait. He burst into weeping, and bolted out the
+door.
+
+"I say, boys," he repeated, choking his sobs, "she's just dyin', and
+she said Boone--you know--and couldn't say no more, and I couldn't
+stand it."
+
+Feeling life ebbing, Priscilla took the hand of the marquis. Then,
+holding to the hand of D'Entremont, she beckoned Henry to come near. As
+he bent over her she whispered, looking significantly at the marquis,
+"Henry, God bless you, my noble-hearted friend!" And as Henry turned
+away, the marquis put his arm about him, but said nothing.
+
+Priscilla's nature abhorred anything dramatic in dying, or rather she
+did not think of effect at all; so she made no fine speeches. But when
+she had ceased to breathe, the old preacher said, "The bridegroom has
+come."
+
+She left an envelope for Henry. What it had in it no one but Henry ever
+knew. I have heard him say that it was one word, which became the key
+to all the happiness of his after life. Judging from the happiness he
+has in his home with Anna, his wife, it would not be hard to tell what
+the word was. The last time I was at his house I noticed that their
+eldest child was named Priscilla, and that the boy who came next was
+Antoine. Henry told me that Priscilla left a sort of "will" for the
+marquis, in which she asked him to do the Christian work that she would
+have liked to do. Nothing could have been wiser if she had sought only
+his own happiness, for in activity for others is the safety of a
+restless mind. He had made himself the special protector of the ten
+little Slabtown urchins.
+
+Henry told me in how many ways, through Challeau, Lafort & Company, the
+marquis had contrived to contribute to his prosperity without offending
+his delicacy. He found himself possessed of practically unlimited
+credit through the guarantee which the great New Orleans banking house
+was always ready to give.
+
+"What is that fine building?" I said, pointing to a picture on the
+wall.
+
+"Oh! that is the 'Hospice de Sainte Priscille,' which Antoine has
+erected in Paris. People there call it 'La Marquise.'"
+
+"By the way," said Priscilla's mother, who sat by, "Antoine is coming
+to see us next month, and is to look after his Slabtown friends when he
+comes. They used to call him at first 'Priscilla's Frenchman.'"
+
+And to this day Miss More declares that markusses is a thing she can't
+no ways understand.
+
+_1871._
+
+
+
+
+TALKING FOR LIFE.
+
+
+For many years following the war I felt that I owed a grudge to the
+medical faculty. Having a romantic temperament and a taste for heroics,
+I had wished to fight and eat hard tack for my country. But whenever I
+presented the feeble frame in which I then dwelt, the medical man stood
+in my path with the remonstrance, "Why should you fill another cot in a
+hospital and another strip in the graveyard?" In these late years I
+have been cured of my regrets; not by service-pension slogans and
+pension agents' circulars, as you may imagine, but by the war
+reminiscence which has flooded the magazines, invaded every social
+circle, and rendered the listener's life a burden. In any group of men
+of my own age, North or South, I do not dare introduce any military
+topic, not even the Soudan campaign of General Wolseley, or the East
+Indian yarns of Private Mulvaney, lest I should bring down upon my head
+stories of campaigning on the Shenandoah, the Red River, or the
+Rappahannock--stories that have gained like rolling snowballs during
+the rolling years. Not that the war reminiscence is inherently
+tedious, but it is frightfully overworked. A scientific friend of mine
+of great endurance has discovered, by a series of prolonged
+observations and experiments at the expense of his own health, that
+only one man in twenty-seven hundred and forty-six can tell a story
+well, and that only one in forty-three can narrate a personal
+experience bearably. If I had gone into the army the chances are
+forty-two to one that I should have bored my friends intolerably from
+that day to this, and twenty-seven hundred and forty-five to one
+against my stories having anything engaging in them. I thank Heaven for
+the medical man that made me stay at home.
+
+But once in a while it has been my luck to meet among old soldiers the
+twenty-seven hundred and forty-sixth man who can tell a story well. Ben
+Tillye is one of them, and here is an anecdote I heard from him, which
+is rather interesting, and which may even be true:
+
+"I had just been promoted to a first lieutenancy, and thought that I
+saw a generalship in the dim distance. Why, with such prospects, I
+should have straggled right into the arms of three bushwhackers, I do
+not know.
+
+"Falling into the hands of guerrillas was a serious business then. An
+order had been issued by the wiseacre in command of the Army of the
+Potomac that all guerrillas taken should be put to death. This did not
+deprive the bushwhackers of a single man, but they naturally retaliated
+by a counter-order that all prisoners of theirs should be shot. In this
+game of pop and pop again the guerrillas had decidedly the advantage,
+and I was one of the first to fall in their way. I had hardly
+surrendered before I regretted that I had not resisted capture. I might
+have killed one of them, or at least have forced them to shoot me on
+the spot, which would not have been so much worse than dying in cold
+blood the next morning, and which would have led to a pursuit and the
+breaking up of their camp. But here I was disarmed, and after an hour's
+march seated among them bushwhacking in an old cabin on a hillside.
+
+"The leader of the party of three who had captured me seemed a kindly
+man--one that, if it were his duty to behead me, would prefer to give
+me chloroform before the amputation. For obvious reasons I made myself
+as agreeable as possible to him. I tried also to talk to the captain of
+the band after I reached the camp, but he repelled my friendly advances
+with something like surliness. I reasoned that he intended to execute
+me, and did not wish to have his feelings taxed with regrets. At any
+rate, after finding that he could get no information of value from me,
+he went on with his writing at a table made by propping up an old
+wooden shutter in the corner of the cabin. Meantime I reflected that
+the only way in which I could avoid my doom was by awakening a friendly
+sympathy in the minds of my captors. I fell to talking for life. I
+trotted out my funniest stories, and the eight men about me laughed
+heartily as I proceeded.
+
+"The captain was visibly annoyed. My interlocutor in this conversation
+was his second in authority, the one who had captured me. He had no
+distinct mark of rank, but I fancied him to be a sergeant. At length
+the captain turned to him, and said, 'Jones, I can't write if you keep
+up this talking.'
+
+"I knew that this was meant as a hint for me, but I knew also that my
+very last hope lay in my winning the hearts of the guerrilla officer
+and his men. So with slightly lowered voice I kept on talking to the
+men, who looked at me from under their ragged slouched hats with the
+most eager interest. At the end of one of my stories their amusement
+broke forth into hearty laughter. The captain stopped writing, and
+turned upon me with the remark, only half in jest, I thought:
+
+"'I'll have to shoot you, lieutenant. You must be a valuable man in the
+Yankee camp.'
+
+"I forced a laugh, but went on with my stories, explaining to the
+captain that I meant to enjoy my last hours at all hazards. The accent
+of those about me reminded me irresistibly of the year that I, though
+of Northern birth, had spent in a school in eastern Virginia.
+
+"'You are a Virginian,' I said to Sergeant Jones.
+
+"'Yes.'
+
+"'What county?'
+
+"'I'm from Powhatan.'
+
+"'I went to school in the next county,' I said, 'at what was called
+Amelia Academy.'
+
+"'Goatville?' demanded Jones.
+
+"'Yes, I went to old Goat. That's what we all called him on account of
+his red goatee. We never dated a letter otherwise than "Goatville." And
+yet we loved and revered the principal. Did you go there?'
+
+"'No,' said Jones, 'but I knew a good many who did.'
+
+"Well, from this I broke into my stock of schoolboy stories of the
+jokes about the 'cat,' or roll pudding we had twice a week, of the rude
+tricks put upon greenhorns and their retorts in kind. The men enjoyed
+these yarns, and even the captain was amused, as I inferred, because I
+could no longer hear his pen scratching, for he sat behind me.
+
+"'Did you ever swim in the Appomattox?' asked Jones.
+
+"'Yes,' I replied; 'I came near losing my life there once. I had a
+roommate who was a good swimmer. I was also a pretty good swimmer, and
+we foolishly undertook for a small wager to see who could swim the
+river the oftenest, only stopping to touch bottom with our toes at each
+side. We went over side by side five times. The sixth crossing I fell
+behind; it was all I could do, and at its close I crept out on the bank
+and lay down. My roommate, Tom Freeman, struck out for a seventh. He
+was nearly over when the boys by my side uttered a cry. Tom was giving
+out. He was in a sort of hysterical laughter from exhaustion, and,
+though able to keep above the water, he could not make any headway. I
+got to my feet and begged the boys to go to his help, but they all had
+their clothes on, and they had so much confidence in Freeman as a
+swimmer that they only said, "He'll get out."
+
+"'But I could see no way in which he could get out. I had recovered a
+little by this time, and I seized a large piece of driftwood, plunged
+into the river again, and pushed this old limb of a tree across the
+stream ahead of me. Freeman was sinking out of sight when he got his
+hand on the bough. I was able to push him into water where he could get
+a footing, but I somehow lost my own hold on the wood and found myself
+sinking, utterly faint from a sort of collapse. There was a tree that
+had fallen into the stream a few yards below. I was just able to turn
+on my back and keep afloat until I could grasp the top branches of the
+tree. Then I crept out--I never knew how, for I was only half
+conscious. But I'll never forget the cry from the boys on the other
+side of the stream that reached my ears as I lay exhausted alongside of
+Freeman on the bank. "Hurrah for Tilley!" they shouted.'
+
+"'No, they didn't.' It was the captain who contradicted me thus
+abruptly, and I looked up in surprise.
+
+"'That's not what they called you in those days,' said the captain.
+'They shouted, "Hurrah for Stumpey!" They never called you anything but
+"Stumpey."'
+
+"'Who in thunder are you?' I said, getting to my feet.
+
+"'Tom Freeman,' replied the captain, rising and grasping my hand.
+
+"Well, I wasn't shot, as you can see for yourselves."
+
+
+
+
+PERIWINKLE.
+
+
+"Bring me that slate, Henriettar!"
+
+Miss Tucker added a superfluous r to some words, but then she made
+amends by dropping the final r where it was preceded by a broad vowel.
+If she said _idear_, she compounded for it by saying _waw_. She said
+_lor_ for law, and _dror_ for draw, but then she said _cah_ for car.
+Some of our Americans are as free with the final r as the cockney is
+with his initial h.
+
+Miss Tucker was the schoolmistress at the new schoolhouse in West
+Easton. I am not quite sure, either, that I have the name of the place
+right. I think it may have been East Weston. Weston or Easton,
+whichever it is, is a country township east of the Hudson River, whose
+chief article of export is chestnuts; consequently it is not set down
+in the gazetteer. After all, it doesn't matter. We'll call it East
+Weston, if you please.
+
+The schoolhouse was near a brook--a murmuring brook, of course. Its
+pleasant murmur could not be shut out. The school trustees had built
+the windows high, so that the children might not be diverted from their
+lessons by any sight of occasional passers-by. As though children could
+study better in a prison! As though you could shut in a child's mind,
+traveling in its vagrant fancies like Prospero's Ariel round about the
+earth in twenty minutes! The dull sound of a horse's hoofs would come
+in now and then from the road, and the children, longing for some new
+sight, would spend the next half hour in mental debate whether it could
+have been a boy astride a bag of turnips, for instance, or the doctor
+in his gig, that had passed under the windows.
+
+It was getting late in the afternoon. Miss Tucker had dominated her
+little flock faithfully all day, until even she grew tired of
+monotonous despotism. Perhaps the drowsy, distant sounds--the cawing of
+crows far away, the almost inaudible rattle of a mowing machine, and
+the unvarying gurgle of the brook near at hand--had softened Miss
+Tucker's temper. More likely it had made her sleepy, for she relaxed
+her watchfulness so much that Rob Riley had time to look at the radiant
+face of Henrietta full two minutes without a rebuke. At last Miss
+Tucker actually yawned two or three times. Then she brought herself up
+with a guilty start. Full twenty minutes had passed in which she,
+Rebecca--or, as she pronounced it, Rebekker--Tucker, schoolmistress and
+intellectual drum-major, had scolded nobody and had scowled at nobody.
+She determined to make amends at once for this remissness. Her eye
+lighted on Henrietta. It was always safe to light on Henrietta. Miss
+Tucker might punish her at any time on general principles and not go
+far astray, especially when she sat, as now, bent over her slate.
+
+Henrietta was a girl past sixteen, somewhat tallish, and a little
+awkward; her hair was light, her eyes blue, and her face not yet
+developed, but there were the crude elements of a possible beauty in
+her features. When her temper was aroused, and she gathered up the
+habitual slovenly expression of her face into a look of vigor and
+concentrated resolution, she was "splendid," in the vocabulary of her
+schoolmates. She was one of those country girls who want only the
+trimmings to make a fine lady. Rob Riley, for his part, did not miss
+the trimmings. Fine lady she was to him, and his admiration for her was
+the only thing that interfered with his diligence. For Rob had actually
+learned a good deal in spite of the educational influences of the
+school. In fact, he had long since passed out of the possibility of
+Miss Tucker's helping him. When he could not "do a sum" and referred it
+to her, she always told him that it would do him much more good to get
+it himself. Thus put upon his mettle, Rob was sure to come out of the
+struggle somehow with the "answer" in his teeth. Miss Tucker would have
+liked Rob if Rob had not loved Henrietta, who was Miss Tucker's
+deadliest foe.
+
+"Bring me that slate this instant!" repeated the schoolmistress when
+Henrietta hesitated, "and don't you rub out the picture."
+
+Henrietta's face took on a sullen look; she rose slowly, dropping the
+slate with a clatter on her desk, whence it slid with a bang to the
+floor, without any effort on her part to arrest it. Miss Tucker did not
+observe--she was nearsighted--that in its fall, and in Henrietta's
+picking it up, it was reversed, so that the side presented to the
+schoolmistress was not the side on which the girl had last been at
+work. All Miss Tucker saw was that the side which faced her when she
+took the slate from Henrietta's hand contained a picture of a little
+child. It was a chubby little face, with a funny-serious expression.
+The execution was by no means correct, the foreshortening of the little
+bare legs was not well done, the hands were out of drawing, and the
+whole picture had the stillness that comes from inexperience. But Miss
+Tucker did not see that. All she saw was that it was to her eye a
+miraculously good picture.
+
+"That's the way you get your arithmetic lesson! You haven't done a sum
+this morning. You spend your time drawing little brats like that."
+
+"She isn't a brat."
+
+"Who isn't a brat?"
+
+"Periwinkle isn't. That's Periwinkle."
+
+"Who's Periwinkle?"
+
+"She's my niece. She's Jane's little girl. You sha'n't call her a brat,
+neither."
+
+"Don't you talk to me that way, you impudent thing! That's the way you
+spend your time, drawing pictures."
+
+Miss Tucker here held the slate up in front of her and stared at the
+picture of Periwinkle. Whereupon the scholars who were spectators of
+Miss Tucker's indignation smiled. Some of them grew red in the face and
+looked at their companions. Little Charity Jones rattled out a good,
+hearty, irrepressible giggle, which she succeeded in arresting only by
+stuffing her apron into her mouth.
+
+"Charity Jones, what are you laughing at?"
+
+But Charity only stuck her head down on the desk and went into another
+snicker.
+
+"Come here!"
+
+Charity was sober enough now. Miss Tucker got a little switch out of
+her desk and threatened little Charity with "a good sound whipping" if
+she didn't tell what she was laughing at.
+
+"At the picture," whimpered the child.
+
+"I don't see anything to laugh at," said the mistress, holding the
+slate up before her.
+
+Whereupon the school again showed signs of a sensation.
+
+"What are you laughing at?" and Miss Tucker instinctively felt of her
+back hair.
+
+"It's on the other side of the slate," burst out Charity's brother, who
+was determined to deliver his sister out of the den of lions.
+
+Miss Tucker turned the slate over, and there was Henrietta's
+masterpiece. It was a stunning caricature of the schoolmistress in the
+act of yawning. Of course, when that high and mighty authority had, in
+her indignation held up the slate so as to get a good view of the
+picture of Periwinkle, she was unconsciously exhibiting to the school
+the character study on the reverse of the slate. And now, as she looked
+with unutterable wrath and consternation at the dreadful drawing, the
+scholars were full of suppressed emotion--half of it terror, and the
+other half a served-her-right feeling.
+
+"The school is dismissed. Henriettar Newton will stay," said the
+schoolmistress. The children arose, glad to escape, while Henrietta
+felt that her friends were all deserting her, and she was left alone
+with a wild beast.
+
+"Chaw her all up," said one of the boys to another. "I wouldn't be in
+there with her for a good deal."
+
+Rob Riley left the room the last of all, and he lingered under the
+window. But what could he do? After a while he hurried away to
+Henrietta's father, on the adjoining farm, and made a statement of the
+case to him.
+
+"I sha'n't interfere," said the old man sternly. "That girl's give me
+trouble enough, I'm sure. Spends her time makin' fool pictures on a
+slate. I hope the schoolmistress'll cure her."
+
+Rob did not know what to say to this. He went back across the field to
+the schoolhouse door and sat down and listened. He could hear an angry
+collocation. He thought best not to interfere unless the matter came to
+blows.
+
+The old man Newton entered his house soon after Rob Riley left him, and
+repeated to his wife what Rob had said from his own standpoint. The
+little grandchild, Periwinkle, sat on the floor with that funny-serious
+air that belonged to her chubby face.
+
+"I'll go down and see about that, I will," she said with an air of
+great importance.
+
+"What?" said the old man, looking tenderly and fondly at Periwinkle.
+
+"I'll see about that, I will," said the barefoot cherub, as she pulled
+on her sunbonnet and set out for the schoolhouse, pushing resolutely
+forward on her sturdy little legs.
+
+"I vum!" said the old man, as he saw her disappear round the fence
+corner.
+
+The quaint little thing had not yet been in the house a week. She was
+sent on to the grandparents after her mother's death, and, as the child
+of the daughter who had left them years ago never to return, she had
+found immediate entrance into the hearts of the old folks. The
+reprobate Henrietta, who wasted her time drawing pictures, and who was
+generally in a state of siege at home and at school, had found in
+little Periwinkle, as they called her, a fountain of affection. And now
+that Henrietta was in trouble, the little Illinois Periwinkle had gone
+off in her self-reliant fashion to see about it.
+
+When she reached the schoolhouse she found Rob Riley, whom she had come
+to know as Henrietta's friend, standing listening.
+
+"I've come down to see about that, I have," said Periwinkle, nodding
+her head toward the schoolhouse. Then she listened a while to the angry
+voice of Miss Tucker, and the surly, sobbing, and defiant replies of
+Henrietta, who was saying, "Stand back, or I'll hit you!"
+
+"Open that door this minute, Wob Wiley! I'm a goin' to see about that."
+
+Rob hesitated. The latch was clearly out of Periwinkle's reach. Rob had
+a faint hope that the little thing might divert the wrathful teacher
+from her prey. He raised the latch and set the door slightly ajar.
+
+"Now push," he said to Periwinkle.
+
+She pushed the door open a little way and entered the schoolroom
+without being seen by the angry mistress, who was facing the other way,
+having driven Henrietta into a corner. Here stood the defiant girl at
+bay, waving a ruler, which she had snatched from the irate teacher, and
+warning the latter to let her alone. Periwinkle walked up to the
+teacher, pulled her dress, and said:
+
+"I've come down to see about that, I have."
+
+"Who are you?" said the frightened Miss Tucker, to whom it seemed that
+the little chub had dropped down out of the sky, or come to life off
+Henrietta's slate.
+
+"I'm Periwinkle, and you mustn't touch my Henrietta. I've come down to
+see about it, I have."
+
+Miss Tucker, in a sudden reaction, sank down on a chair exhausted and
+bewildered. Then she sobbed a little in despair.
+
+"What shall I do with that girl?" she muttered. "I'm beat out."
+
+"Come home, Henrietta," said Periwinkle, and she marched Henrietta out
+the door under the very eyes of the schoolmistress.
+
+"Come back this minute!" cried Miss Tucker, rallying when it was too
+late. But the weeping Henrietta, the solemn Periwinkle, and the
+rejoicing Rob Riley went away and answered the poor woman never a word.
+
+Miss Tucker, who was not without some good sense and good intentions,
+found out that evening that she did not like teaching. She forthwith
+resigned the school in East Weston. In a week or two a new teacher was
+engaged, "a young thing from town," as the people put it, "who never
+could manage that Henrietta Newton."
+
+But sometimes even a "young thing" is gifted with that undefined
+something that we call tact. Sarah Reade soon found out, from the
+gratuitous advice lavished upon her, that her chief trouble would be
+from Henrietta; so she took pains to get acquainted with the unruly
+girl the first day. Finding that the center of Henrietta's heart was
+Periwinkle, she took great interest in getting the girl to tell her all
+about Periwinkle. Henrietta was so much softened by this treatment that
+for three whole days after the advent of Miss Reade she did not draw a
+picture on the slate. But the self-denial was too great. On the fourth
+day, while Miss Reade was hearing recitation, and the girls at the desk
+behind Henrietta were looking over at her, she drew a cow very
+elaborately.
+
+She was just trying to make the horns look right, rubbing them out and
+retouching them, while the other girls rose up in their seats and
+brought their heads together in a cluster to see, declaring in a
+whisper that "it was the wonderfullest thing how Henrietta could draw,"
+when who should look down among them but Miss Reade herself. As soon as
+Henrietta became conscious of Miss Reade's attention she dropped her
+pencil, not with the old defiant feeling, but with a melancholy sense
+of having lost standing with one whose good opinion she would fain have
+retained.
+
+The teacher took the slate in her hand, not in Miss Tucker's energetic
+fashion, but with a polite "Excuse me," which made Henrietta's heart
+sink down within her. For half a minute Miss Reade scrutinized the
+drawing without saying a word.
+
+"Did anybody ever give you any drawing lessons?" she said to the
+detected criminal.
+
+"No, ma'am."
+
+"You draw well; you ought to have a chance. You'll make an artist some
+day. Your cow is not quite right. If you'll bring the picture to me
+after school I'll show you some things about it. I think you'd better
+put it away now till you get your geography lesson."
+
+Henrietta, full of wonder at finding her art no longer regarded as a
+sin, put the slate into the desk, and cheerfully resumed the study of
+the boundaries and chief products of North Carolina, while Miss Reade
+returned to the hearing of the third-reader class.
+
+"I say, Henrietta, she's j-u-s-t  s-p-l-e-n-d-i-d!" whispered Maria
+Thomas. And Rob Riley thought Miss Reade was almost as fine as
+Henrietta herself.
+
+"You see," said Miss Reade to Henrietta after school, "that the hind
+legs of your cow look longer than the fore legs."
+
+"There's something wrong." said the girl, "but that isn't it. I've
+measured, and the cow's just as high before as behind, though she
+doesn't look so."
+
+"Yes, but you've put her head a little toward you. The hind legs ought
+to seem shorter at a little distance off. Now try it. Make her not so
+high from the ground behind," and Miss Reade proceeded to explain one
+or two principles of perspective. When Henrietta had experimented on
+her cow and saw the result, she was delighted.
+
+"I don't know much about drawing," said Miss Reade, "but I've a set of
+drawing books and some drawing cards. Now, if you'll let drawing alone
+till you get your lessons each day, I'll lend you my drawing books and
+give you all the help I can."
+
+When the old man Newton heard that the "new school ma'am" was
+permitting Henrietta to draw "fool picters on her slate," he was sure
+that it never would work. He believed in breaking a child's will, for
+his part, "though the one that broke Henriettar's will would hev to git
+up purty airly in the mornin' now, certain," he added with a grim
+smile. But when the old man found Henrietta unexpectedly industrious,
+toiling over her studies at night, he was surprised beyond measure; and
+when he understood the compact by which studies were to come first and
+drawing afterward, he winked his eye knowingly at his wife.
+
+"Who'd a thought that little red-headed school ma'am would a ben so
+cute? She knows the very bait for Henriettar now. That woman would do
+to trade hosses."
+
+But when the little schoolmistress seriously proposed that he should
+send Henrietta down to New York to take lessons in drawing, he quickly
+changed his mind. Of what kind of use was drawing? And then, it would
+cost, according to Miss Reade's own account, about two or three hundred
+dollars a year for board; all to learn a lot of nonsense. It is true,
+when the teacher craftily told him stories of the prices that some
+lucky artists received for their work, he felt as though she were
+pointing down into a gold mine. But the money in his hand was good
+money, and he never sent good money after bad. And so Henrietta's newly
+raised hope of being an artist was dashed, and Rob Riley was grievously
+disappointed; for he was sure that Henrietta would astonish the
+metropolis if once she could take her transcendent ability out of East
+Weston into New York. Besides, Rob Riley himself was going off to New
+York to develop his own talent by learning the granite cutter's trade.
+He confided to Henrietta that he expected to come to something better
+than granite cutting, for he had heard that there had been granite
+cutters who, being, like himself, good at figures, in time had come to
+be great contractors and builders and bosses. He was going to be
+something, and when he was settled at work in New York Henrietta had a
+letter from him telling that he was learning mechanical drawing in the
+Cooper Union night school, and that he got books out of the
+Apprentices' Library. He also attended free lectures, and was looking
+out for a chance to be something some day. Henrietta carried the letter
+about with her, and wished heartily that she also might go to New York,
+where she could improve herself and see Rob Riley occasionally.
+
+Now it happened that Mrs. Newton had a cousin, a rich man, in New
+York--at least, he seemed rich to those not used to the measure applied
+to wealth in a great city. She had not seen him since he left the
+little town in western Massachusetts, where they were both brought up.
+But she often talked about Cousin John. Whenever she saw his business
+advertisements in the papers she started out afresh in her talk about
+Cousin John. It is something quite worth the having--a cousin in New
+York whose name is in the papers, and who is rich. Whenever Mrs. Jones,
+Mrs. Newton's neighbor, talked too ostentatiously about her uncle, who
+was both a deacon and a justice of the peace up in New Hampshire, then
+Mrs. Newton said something about Cousin John. To save her life she
+couldn't imagine how Cousin John lived, except that he kept a carriage
+or two, or in what precisely his greatness consisted, since he held no
+office either in church or State, but the old lady evidently believed
+in her heart that a cousin who was a big man down in New York was
+nearly as good as an uncle who was a deacon up in New Hampshire.
+
+Now it happened that John Willard, the Cousin John of Mrs. Newton's
+gossip, was spending the summer at Lebanon Springs, and at the close of
+his vacation he started to drive home through the beautiful region once
+the scene of the anti-renters' conflict with the old patroons. He
+stopped to see the Shaker villages, and then drove on among the rich
+farms, taking great pleasure in explaining to his town-bred wife the
+difference between wheat and rye as it stood in the shock, feeling for
+once the superiority of one whose early life has been passed in the
+country. He happened to remember that he had a cousin over in Weston,
+and though he had not seen her for many years, he proposed to turn
+aside and eat one dinner with old Farmer Newton and his wife.
+
+And thus it happened that Cousin John Willard, and especially that Mrs.
+Cousin John Willard, saw Henrietta's drawings, and heard of her
+aspiration to learn to draw and paint; and thus it happened that Cousin
+John, and, what is of more consequence, Mrs. Cousin John, invited the
+girl to come down to New York and spend the winter with them and
+develop her talent for drawing; though Mrs. Willard did not think so
+much of Henrietta's developing her gift for art as that she had a fine
+face, and would undoubtedly develop into a beauty under city
+influences. And as Mrs. Willard had no children, and her house was
+lonesome, she thought it might add to her own consequence and to the
+cheerfulness of her house to have a handsome cousin under her care.
+Henrietta's father was rather unwilling to let her go; he didn't see
+how she could be spared from the housework; but the mother was resolved
+that she should go, and go she did.
+
+The first things that excited the country girl's wonder were not the
+streets and buildings and the works of art, but the unwonted luxury of
+city life. Velvet carpets, large panes of plate glass, hot and cold
+water that came for the turning of a stopcock, illumination that burst
+forth as by magic, mirrors that showed the whole person and
+reduplicated the room--even doorbells and sliding doors, and dumb
+waiters and speaking-tubes, were things that filled her with
+astonishment. For weeks she felt that she had moved out of the world
+into a fairy book. But, being a high-spirited girl, she carefully
+concealed her wonder, moving about with apparent nonchalance, as though
+she had lived in the enchanted ground all her life. Secretly she
+carried on experiments upon water works, gas fixtures, and plate-glass
+mirrors, using the inductive method of reasoning, as all intelligent
+people have from the beginning, without any of the cumbrous and
+pedantic machinery provided for them by Lord Chancellor Bacon.
+
+She was soon at work, but drawing from uninteresting plaster casts of
+scroll-work in the lower classes of the School of Design for Women was
+not so pleasant as spontaneous picture-making on her slate had been. In
+Weston, too, she had been a prodigy; her gift for drawing was little
+less than miraculous in the eyes of her companions. But in Cooper
+Institute she was one of many, and there were those whom much practice
+had rendered more skillful. She would slip away from her work and go
+through the alcoves sometimes, on one pretext or another, to envy the
+girls who were in their second year, and were drawing from a bust of
+Psyche or The Young Augustus, and especially did she wish that she were
+one of the favored circle in the Venus Room. She thought it would be
+fine to try the statue of the Venus de Milo. But day in and day out she
+had to stand before a cast of a meaningless scroll, endeavoring to
+represent it on drawing paper. This was no longer play, but work as
+tedious as the geography lessons in Weston. There is a great difference
+between work and play, though they both may consist in doing the same
+thing. Nevertheless Henrietta had positive ability, and the almost
+mechanical training of the first months did her good.
+
+But somehow she was not so glad to see Rob Riley, the granite cutter,
+as she had expected to be. When Rob called at first to see her, the
+maid, who had received many warnings against allowing sneak thieves and
+tramps to stand in the hall, did not dare leave him by the hatrack. She
+eyed him suspiciously, cross-questioned him sharply, and finally called
+the cook upstairs to stand guard over him and the overcoats while she
+went to call Henrietta. Poor Rob, already frightened at having to ring
+the door-bell of a brown-stone house, stood in the hall fumbling his
+hat, while the stalwart cook never once took her eyes off him, but
+stood ready to throttle him if he made a motion to seize a coat or to
+open the door behind him. Somehow the greeting between the two under
+these circumstances was as different as possible from their parting in
+the country. Henrietta felt that by receiving Rob Riley in his Sunday
+clothes she had forever compromised herself with Hibernia downstairs;
+and poor Rob, half chilled by Henrietta's reception, and wholly
+dampened by the rosewood furniture and the lace curtains, and the
+necessity for sitting down on damask upholstery, was very ill at ease.
+Henrietta longed to speak freely, as she had done in the old days when
+they strolled through the hill pasture together, but then she trembled
+lest the door-bell should ring and some of Mrs. Cousin John's fine
+visitors enter the reception room. So the meeting was a failure. Rob
+even forgot that he had meant to ask Henrietta to go with him to the
+free lecture the next evening. And he was glad when he got out, and
+Henrietta was relieved, though she cried with vexation and
+disappointment when he was gone. As for Rob, he went home in great
+doubt whether it was worth while trying to be something. Of what use
+was it to seek to get to be a boss, a builder, or the owner of a
+quarry? Things were all wrong anyhow.
+
+After this he only met Henrietta now and then as she came in or went
+out, though this was not easy, for he had to work with the hammer all
+day, and his evenings were spent in mechanical drawing. On second
+thought, he _would_ be something, if only just to show folks that
+looked down on him. Though, if he had only known it, Henrietta did not
+look down on him at all; all her contempt was expended on herself.
+
+But this feeling wore away as she became naturalized in Mrs. Cousin
+John's world. There were little dance parties, and though Henrietta was
+obliged to dress plainly, she grew more to be a beautiful woman. The
+simplicity of her dress set off this fine loveliness, and Henrietta
+Newton was artist enough to understand this, so that her clothes did
+not make her abashed in company. She had no party dresses, but with
+Mrs. Willard's assistance she always looked the beautiful country
+cousin. Other girls remarked upon the monotony of her dress, but then
+the gentlemen did not care that one woolen gown did duty on many
+occasions. Some women can stand the ordeal of a uniform for church and
+theater, party and _tete-a-tete_.
+
+Mrs. Willard meant well by Henrietta. If Henrietta's art got on slowly,
+and her chance for a prize decreased steadily under the dissipating
+influences about her, it was not that Mrs. Willard intended to do her
+harm by parading her pretty cousin on Sundays and week days. It was
+only a second growth of vanity in Cousin John's wife. When one is no
+longer sought after for one's own sake, the next best thing is to be
+sought after for somebody else's sake. Mrs. Willard shone now in a
+reflected glory, as the keeper of the pretty Miss Newton. Young
+gentlemen stood squarely in front of Mrs. Willard and made full bows to
+her, and were delighted when she asked them to call. Mrs. Willard also
+carried it up to her own credit, in her confidential talks with ladies
+of her own age, that she was doing so much for John's cousin, whom she
+had found buried in an old farmhouse. For Mrs. Willard was a Christian
+and a philanthropist, besides being a reformer.
+
+She was endeavoring with all her heart to reform a younger brother of
+her own, who was enough to have filled the hands of three or four red,
+white, and blue ribbon associations. He was a fine subject to work on,
+this young Harrison Lowder. Few young men have been so much reformed.
+He had a bright wit and genial manners, but moral endowments had been
+accidentally omitted in his makeup. Nothing that was pleasant could
+seem wrong to him. He was a magnificent sinner, with an artistic
+lightness of touch in wrongdoing, and he took his evil courses with
+such unfailing good nature that people forgave him.
+
+It was a happy thought of Mrs. Willard's, when she saw him becoming
+fascinated with Henrietta, to reform him and render Henrietta a service
+at the same time. For Lowder had money, and to a poor country girl such
+a marriage ought to be a heaven-send, while it would serve to reform
+Harry, no doubt. It isn't always that a matchmaker can be sure of being
+a benefactor to both sides. One of the most remarkable things in
+nature, however, is the willingness of women to lay a girl's life on
+the altar for the chance of saving the morals of a scapegrace man. If a
+pious mother can only marry her son Beelzebub to some "good, religious
+girl," the chance of his reformation is greatly increased. The girl is
+neither here nor there when one considers the necessity for saving the
+dear Beelzebub.
+
+Harry Lowder had the advantage of all other comers with Henrietta. The
+keeper was on his side, in the first place; and he was half
+domesticated at the house, coming and going when he pleased. The city
+dazzled the country girl, and it was a great pleasure to him to take
+her to theaters and operas. His winning manners, his apparent
+frankness, and the round of amusements he kept her in, could not but
+have their effect on a strong-willed creature such as she was. Her
+pent-up intensity of life burst out now into the keenest enjoyment of
+all that she saw and heard and felt for the first time.
+
+There were times when the memory of her country home and little
+Periwinkle came into her mind like a fresh breeze from the hills. At
+such times she recoiled from the round of unhealthful excitement in
+which she found herself; she hated the high-wrought plays and burlesque
+operas that she had seen; she despised the exciting novels that Harry
+Lowder had lent her. Then the old farm, with its stern and quiet ways,
+seemed a sort of paradise; she longed for her mother's voice, and even
+for her father's rebuke, for Rob Riley's homely love-making, and
+Periwinkle's quaint ways. At such times she had a sense of standing in
+some imminent peril, a dark foreboding shadowed her, and she wished
+that she had never come to New York, for the drawing did not get on
+well. Harry Lowder said it didn't matter about the drawing; she was
+meant for something better. There was always an easy way out of such
+depressions. Harry told her that she had the blues, and that if she
+would go to see this or that the blues would disappear. There is an
+easy way of getting rid of the blues by pawning to-morrow to pay
+to-day's debts.
+
+It would hardly be right to say that Lowder was in love with Henrietta
+Newton, for in our good English tongue there is usually a moral element
+to the word love. But Harry certainly was fascinated with
+Henrietta--more fascinated than he had ever been with any one else. And
+as he had become convinced that it was best for him to marry and to
+reform--just a little--he thought that Henrietta Newton would be the
+girl to marry.
+
+So it happened that Periwinkle, who had waited for Christmas to come
+that she might see Henrietta again, was bitterly disappointed. At
+Christmas Henrietta had been promised two great treats--Fox in Humpty
+Dumpty and the sight of St. Dives's Church in its decorations, with the
+best music in the city. And then there were to be other things quite as
+wonderful to the country girl. In truth, Henrietta was afraid to go
+home. Somewhere in the associations of home there lay in wait for her a
+revengeful conscience which she feared to meet. Then, too, Rob Riley
+would be at home, and a meeting with him must produce shame in her, and
+bring on a decision that she would rather postpone. Mrs. Willard begged
+her to stay, and it was hard to resist her benefactress. But in her
+girl's heart at times she was tired and homesick, and the staying in
+the city cost her two or three good crying spells. And when the
+holidays were past she bitterly repented that she had not gone home.
+
+In this mood she sat down and wrote a long letter to her mother, full
+of regrets and homesickness, and longing and contradictoriness. She
+liked the city and she didn't. She hadn't done very well in her
+drawing, as she confessed, but she meant to do better. It was a letter
+that gave the good old mother much uneasiness. This city world was
+something that she could not understand--a great sea for the navigation
+of which she had no chart. She got from Henrietta's letter a vague
+sense of danger, a danger terrible because entirely incomprehensible to
+her.
+
+And, indeed, she had already become uneasy, for when Rob Riley came
+home at Christmas time he did not come to see them, nor did he bring
+any messages from Henrietta. When she asked him about the girl, at
+meeting time on Sunday, Rob hung his head and looked at the toe of his
+boot a minute, and then said that he "hadn't laid eyes on her for six
+weeks." What did it all mean? Had Henrietta got into some disgrace? The
+father was alarmed also. He thought it about time that she should be
+getting a thousand dollars for a picture; though, for his part, he
+couldn't see why anybody should pay for a picture enough money to build
+two or three barns.
+
+The little Periwinkle heard all of these discussions, though nobody
+thought of her understanding them.
+
+"I'm going down there," she said. "I'm going to see about that, I am."
+
+"What?" said the grandfather, looking at the little thing fondly.
+
+"About Henrietta. I'm a-goin' down with Wob Wiley."
+
+"Hello! you air, air you?"
+
+Now it happened that in her fit of repentance and homesickness
+Henrietta had written: "I wish you would send dear little Periwinkle
+down here some time. I do want to see her, and she would be such a good
+model to draw from." Henrietta had not thought of the practical
+difficulties of getting the chubby little thing down, nor of how she
+would keep her if she came, nor, indeed, of the possibility of her
+words being understood in their literal sense. It was only a cry of
+longing.
+
+But now the mother, full of apprehension and at her wits' end what to
+do, looked with a sort of superstitions respect at the self-confident
+little creature who proposed to go down to the city and see about
+things.
+
+The old lady at first proposed to go down herself and take little
+Periwinkle with her; but she felt timid about the great city, and about
+Cousin John's fine ways of living. She wouldn't be able to find her way
+around, and she felt "scarr't" when she thought about it. Besides,
+who'd get father's breakfast for him if she went away?
+
+So she decided to send Periwinkle down. Rob Riley could take her, and
+Cousin John's wife had always liked her and she'd be glad to see her.
+She hadn't any children of her own, and might be real glad to have the
+merry little thing about; and as for sending her back, there was always
+somebody coming up from the city. Of course Grandma Newton didn't think
+how large the village of New York had grown to be, and how unlikely it
+was that Henrietta should find any one going to Weston.
+
+The greatest difficulty was to persuade Rob Riley to take her. His
+pride was wounded, and he didn't want to have anything to do with
+Henrietta and her fine folks. But the old lady persisted, and, above
+all, little Periwinkle informed Rob that she was going down to see
+about Henrietta. This touched Rob; he remembered when she had snatched
+Henrietta out of the jaws of Miss Tucker. He consented to take her to
+Mr. Willard's house and ring the door-bell.
+
+Henrietta had recovered from her attack of penitence, and was again
+floating on the eddying current of excitement. One evening she went
+with Lowder to see La Dame aux Camelias. She had never before seen "an
+emotional play" of the French school, and it affected her deeply. Harry
+took advantage of her softened feelings to envelop her in a cloud of
+flattery, and to make love to her. Something of the better sense of the
+girl had heretofore held her back from any committal of her trust to
+him; but when they reached Mrs. Willard's parlor, Harry laid direct
+siege to Henrietta's affection, telling her what moral miracles her
+influence had wrought in him, and how nothing but her love was needed
+to keep him steadfast in the future; and, in truth, he more than half
+believed what he said. The whole scene was quite in the key of the
+play, and her overwrought feelings drifted toward the man pleading thus
+earnestly for affection. Harry saw the advantage of the situation, and
+urged on her an immediate decision. Henrietta, still shaken by
+passionate excitement, and without rest in herself, was on the point of
+promising eternal affection, in the manner of the heroine of the play,
+when there came a loud ringing of the door-bell. So highly strained
+were the girl's nerves, that she uttered a sharp cry at this unexpected
+midnight alarm. The servants had gone to bed when Henrietta came in.
+There was nothing for it but to open the door herself. With Harry
+Lowder behind her for a reserve, she timidly opened the front door, to
+find a child, muffled in an old-fashioned cloak and hood, standing upon
+the stoop, while a man was descending the steps. Looking around just
+enough to see who came to the door, he said, "Your mother said you
+wanted her, and she would have me bring her to you."
+
+Then, without a word of good-night, Rob Riley walked away, Henrietta
+recognizing the voice with a pang.
+
+"I come down to see about you," spoke the solemn and quizzical figure
+on the stoop.
+
+"Where on earth did that droll creature come from?" broke out Lowder.
+"What is the matter, Miss Newton?"
+
+For the suddenness of the apparition, the rude air with which Rob Riley
+had turned his back upon her, had started a new set of emotions in the
+mind of Henrietta. A wind from the old farm had blown suddenly over her
+and swept away the fog. She felt now, with that intuitive quickness
+that belongs to the artistic temperament, that she had recoiled but
+just in time from a brink. For a moment she seemed likely to faint,
+though she was not the kind of woman to faint when startled.
+
+She reached out her hand to Periwinkle, and then, with a reaction of
+feeling, folded her in her arms and wept. Harry was puzzled. She
+suddenly became stiff and almost repellent toward him. She seemed
+impatient for him to be gone. It was a curious effect of surprise upon
+her nerves, he thought. He mentally confounded his luck, and said good
+night.
+
+Henrietta bore Periwinkle off to her own room and removed her cloak,
+crying a little all the time. She was quite too full of emotion to take
+into account as yet all the perplexities in which she would be involved
+by the presence of Periwinkle in the house of Cousin John Willard.
+
+"What brought you down here?" she said at last, when the sturdy little
+girl, divested of her shawl and cloak and mittens and hood, sat upon a
+chair in front of Henrietta, who sat upon the floor looking at her.
+
+"I come down to see about you. Gran'ma said some things, and gran'pa
+said some things, and Wob Wiley he looked bad, and I thought maybe I'd
+just come down and see about you; and gran'ma said you wanted to make a
+picture of me. You don't want to make a picture to-night, do you?
+'cause I'm awful sleepy. You see, Wob had to come on the seven o'clock
+twain, and that gits in at 'leven; and it took us till midnight to git
+here, and Wob he's got to go ever so fur yet. What made 'em build such
+a big town?" Here Periwinkle yawned and seemed about to fall off the
+chair. In a few minutes she was lying fast asleep on Henrietta's
+pillow.
+
+But Henrietta slept not. It was a night of stormy trial. By turns one
+mood and then another dominated. At times she resolved to be a lady,
+admired and courted in the luxury of the city. As for possible
+consequences, she had never been in the habit of counting the cost of
+her actions carefully. There is a delicious excitement to a nature like
+hers in defying consequences.
+
+But then a sight of Periwinkle's sleeping innocence sent back the tide
+with a rush. How much better were the simple old home ways and the love
+of this little heart, and the faithful devotion of that most kindly Rob
+Riley! She remembered her walks with him, her teasing him, his
+interference against Miss Tucker, and the deliverance wrought by the
+little creature lying there. She would go back to her old self, how
+painful soever it might be.
+
+But she couldn't stay in the city and turn away Harrison Lowder; and to
+go home was to confess that she had failed in her art. And how could
+she humble herself to seem to wish to regain Rob Riley's love? And
+then, what kind of an outlook did the life of a granite-cutter's wife
+afford her? Here she looked at herself in the glass. All her pride
+rebelled against going home. But all her pride sank down when she
+stooped to kiss the cheek of the sleeping child.
+
+In this alternation of feeling she passed the night. When breakfast
+time came she took Periwinkle down, making such explanations as she
+could with much embarrassment.
+
+"You're sick, Henrietta," said Cousin John. "You don't eat anything.
+You've been working too steadily."
+
+After breakfast the family doctor called, and said that Henrietta was
+suffering from too close application to her art, and from steam heat in
+the alcoves. She must have rest.
+
+The poor, tired, perplexed girl, badgered with conflicting emotions,
+but resolved at last to escape from temptations that she could not
+resist effectually, received this verdict eagerly. She would go home;
+and the doctor agreed that change of scene was what she wanted. Her
+life in town was too dull.
+
+Harry Lowder called that evening, but Henrietta had taken the
+precaution to be sick abed. At eight o'clock the next morning she was
+on the Harlem train.
+
+"You see, I brought her home," said Periwinkle to her grandmother, in
+confidence. "I didn't like Cousin John's folks. They wasn't glad to see
+me; and I didn't like to leave Henrietta there."
+
+But Henrietta, who had blossomed out into something quite different
+from the Henrietta of other times, made no explanation except that she
+was sick. For a week she took little interest in anything, ate but
+little, and went about in a dazed way, resuming her old cares as though
+she had never given them up. Somehow she seemed a fine lady in the
+dignity of manner and the self-possession that she had taken on with
+characteristic quickness of apprehension and imitation, and Mrs. Newton
+felt as if the housework were unsuited to her. Even her father looked
+at her with a sort of respect, and forbore to chide her as had been his
+wont.
+
+But when a week had passed she suddenly got out her material and began
+to draw. Periwinkle was set up first for a model, then her father and
+her mother, and then the dog, as he lay sleeping before the fire, had
+his portrait taken, to Periwinkle's delight. So persistent was her
+ambitious industry that every living thing on the place came in for a
+sketch. But Periwinkle was the favorite.
+
+Rob Riley came home for July and August, the work in the yard being
+dull. He kept aloof from Henrietta, and she nodded to him with a severe
+and almost disdainful air that made him wretched. After three or four
+weeks of this coolness, during which Henrietta got a reputation for
+pride in the whole country, Rob grew desperate. What did he care for
+the "stuck-up" girl? He would have it out, anyhow, the next time he had
+a chance.
+
+They met one day on the little bridge that crossed the brook near the
+schoolhouse. Henrietta nodded a bare recognition.
+
+"You didn't treat me that way once, Henrietta. What's the matter? Have
+I done anything wrong? Can't you be friendly?"
+
+"Why don't _you_ be friendly?" said the girl, looking down.
+
+"I--I?" said Rob.
+
+"You haven't spoken to me since you came home."
+
+"Well, that isn't my fault; you wouldn't look at me. I'm not going to
+run after a person that lives in a fine house and that only nods her
+head at me."
+
+"I don't live in a fine house, but in that old frame."
+
+"Well, why don't you be friendly?"
+
+"It isn't a girl's place to be friendly first, is it?"
+
+Rob stared at her.
+
+"But you had other young men come to see you in town, and--you know I
+couldn't."
+
+"I don't live in town now."
+
+"What made you come home?"
+
+"If I'd wanted to I might have stayed there and had 'other young men,'
+as you call them, coming to see me yet."
+
+Rob gasped, but said nothing.
+
+"Are you going over to Mr. Brown's?" asked Henrietta, to break the
+awkward silence that followed, at the same time moving toward home.
+
+"Well--no," said Rob; "I think I'm going to your house, if you've no
+objection," and he laughed, a foolish little laugh.
+
+"Periwinkle was asking about you this morning," said Henrietta
+evasively as they walked on toward Mr. Newton's.
+
+Having once fallen into the old habit of going to Mr. Newton's, Rob
+could never get out of the way of walking down that lane. Just to see
+how Henrietta got on with her drawing, as he said, he went there every
+evening. He confided to Henrietta that he had shown such proficiency in
+"figures" in the night school that he was to have a place in a civil
+engineer's office when he returned to the city in the fall. It wasn't
+much of a place; the salary was small, but it gave him an opportunity
+to study and a chance of being something some day.
+
+And Henrietta went on with her drawing, but without ever saying
+anything about a return to Cousin John's. And, indeed, she never did go
+back to Cousin John's from that day to this. She spent three years in
+Weston. If they were tedious years, she said nothing about them. Rob
+came home on Christmas and for a week in summer. Once in a long time he
+would run up the Harlem road on Saturday evening. These were white
+Sundays when Rob was at home, for then he and Henrietta went to meeting
+together, and sat on the porch in the afternoons while Rob told her how
+he expected to be somebody some day.
+
+But being somebody is hard work and slow for most of us, as Rob Riley
+found out. His salary was not increased very fast, but he made up for
+that by steadily increasing his knowledge and his value in the office.
+For Rob had discovered that being somebody means being something. You
+can't hide any man under a bushel if he has a real light in him.
+
+It was not till last year that Henrietta returned to the city. She is a
+student now in oil painting. But she does not live at Cousin John's.
+Nor, indeed, does she live in a very fashionable street, if I must
+confess it. There are many old houses in New York that have been
+abandoned by their owners because of the uptown movement and the
+west-side movement of fashion. These houses are as quaint in their
+antique interiors as a bric-a-brac cabinet. In an upper story of one of
+these subdivided houses Rob Riley and his wife, Henrietta, have two
+old-fashioned rooms; the front room is large and airy, with a carved
+mantelpiece, the back room small and cosy. The furniture is rather
+plain and scant, for Rob has not yet got to be a great engineer working
+on his own account. At present he is one of those little fish that the
+big fish are made to eat--an obscure man whose brains are carried up to
+the credit of his chief. But he is already something, and is sure to be
+somebody. And, for that matter, the rooms in the old mansion in De Witt
+Place are quite good enough for two stout-hearted young people who are
+happy. The walls are well ornamented with pictures from Henrietta's own
+brush and pencil. These are not framed, but tacked up wherever the
+light is good. The best of them is a chubby little girl with a
+droll-serious air, clad in an old-fashioned hood and muffled in cloaks
+and shawls. It is a portrait of Periwinkle as she stood that night on
+Cousin John's steps when she had come down to see about Henrietta.
+
+Henrietta is just finishing a picture called The Culprit, which she
+hopes will be successful. It represents a girl in a country school
+arraigned for drawing pictures on a slate. Rob, at least, thinks it
+very fine, but he is not a harsh critic of anything Henrietta makes.
+
+Rob was talking one evening, as usual, about the time when he should
+come to be somebody. But Henrietta said: "O Rob, things are nice enough
+as they are; I don't believe we'd be any happier in a house as fine as
+Cousin John's. Let's have a good time as we go along, and not mind
+about being somebody. But, Rob, I wish somebody'd buy this picture, and
+then we could have something to set off this room a little. Don't you
+think a sofa would be nice?" And then she looked at him, and said, "You
+dear, good old Rob, you!" though why she should call him old, or what
+connection this remark had with the previous conversation, I do not
+know.
+
+
+
+
+THE CHRISTMAS CLUB.
+
+A GHOST STORY.
+
+
+"The Dickens!"
+
+That was just what Charley Vanderhuyn said that Christmas Eve, and as a
+faithful historian I give the exact words. It sounded like swearing,
+though why we should regard it profane to make free with the devil's
+name, or even his nickname, I never could see. Can you? Besides, there
+was some ambiguity about Charley's use of the word under the
+circumstances, and he himself couldn't tell whether his exclamation had
+reference to the Author of Evils or only to the Author of Novels. The
+circumstances were calculated to suggest equally thoughts of the Great
+Teller of Stories and of the Great Story-teller, and I have a mind to
+amuse you at this Christmas season by telling you the circumstances,
+and letting you decide, if you can, which Dickens it was that Charles
+Vanderhuyn intended.
+
+Charley Vanderhuyn was one of those young men that could grow nowhere
+on this continent except in New York. He had none of the severe dignity
+that belongs to a young man of wealth who has passed his life in sight
+of long rows of red brick houses with clean doorsteps and white wooden
+shutters. Something of the venerableness of Independence Hall, the
+dignity of Girard College, and the air of financial importance that
+belongs to the Mint gets into the blood of a Philadelphian. Charley had
+none of that. Neither did he have that air of profound thought, that
+Adams-Hancock-Quincy-Webster-Emerson-Sumner look that is the inevitable
+mark of Beacon Street. When you see such a young man you know that he
+has grown part of Faneuil Hall, and the Common, and the Pond, and the
+historic elm. He has lived where the very trees are learned and carry
+their Latin names about with them. Charley had none of the "vim" and
+dash that belongs to a Westerner. He was of the metropolis--metropolitan.
+He had good blood in him, else he could never have founded the
+Christmas Club, for you can not get more out of a man than there is in
+his blood. Charley Vanderhuyn bore a good old Dutch name--I have heard
+that the Van der Huyns were a famous and noble family; his Dutch blood
+was mingled with other good strains, and the whole was mellowed into
+generousness and geniality in generations of prosperous ancestors; for
+the richest and choicest fruit (and the rankest weeds as well!) can be
+produced only in the sunlight. And a very choice fruit of a very choice
+stock was and is our Charley Vanderhuyn. That everybody knows who knows
+him now, and that we all felt who knew him earlier in the days of the
+Hasheesh Club.
+
+You remember the Hasheesh Club, doubtless. In its day it numbered the
+choicest spirits in New York, and the very center of all of them was
+this same Charley Vanderhuyn, whose face, the boys used to say, was
+like the British Empire--for on it the sun never set. His unflagging
+spirits, his keen love for society, his quick sympathy with everybody,
+his fine appreciation of every man's good points, whatever they might
+be, made Charley a prince wherever he went. I said he was the center of
+the circle of young men about the Hasheesh Club ten years ago; and so
+he was, though, to tell the truth, he was then but about twenty-one
+years of age. They had a great time at the club, I remember, when he
+came of age and came into possession of his patrimony--a trifle of half
+a million, I believe. He gave a dinner, and there was such a time as
+the Hasheesh Club never saw before nor since. I fear there was overmuch
+wine-drinking, and I am sure there was a fearful amount of punch drunk.
+Charley never drank to excess, never lost his self-control for a moment
+under any temptation. But there was many another young man, of
+different temperament, to whom the rooms of the club were what candles
+are to moths. One poor fellow, who always burned his wings, was a
+blue-eyed, golden-haired young magazine writer of that day. We all
+thought of his ability and promise--his name was John Perdue, but you
+will doubtless remember him by his _nom de plume_ of "Baron Bertram."
+Poor fellow! he loved Charley passionately, and always drank himself
+drunk at the club. He wasted all he had and all he made; his clothes
+grew shabby, he borrowed of Charley, who was always open-handed, until
+his pride would allow him to borrow no more. He had just married, too,
+and he was so ashamed of his own wreck that he completed his ruin by
+drinking to forget it.
+
+I am not writing a story with a temperance moral; temperance tales are
+always stupid and always useless. The world is brimful of walking
+morals on that subject, and if one will not read the lesson of the life
+of his next-door neighbor, what use of bringing Lazarus from the dead
+to warn him of a perdition that glares at him out of the eyes of so
+many men?
+
+I mentioned John Perdue--poor golden-haired "Baron Bertram"--only
+because he had something to do with the circumstances which led Charley
+Vanderhuyn to use that ambiguous interjection about "the Dickens!"
+Perdue, as I said, dropped away from the Hasheesh Club, lost his
+employment as literary editor of the Luminary, fell out of good
+society, and at last earned barely enough to keep him and his wife and
+his child in bread, and to supply himself with whisky, by writing
+sensation stories for the "penny dreadfuls." We all suspected that he
+would not have received half so much for his articles had they been
+paid for on their merits or at the standard price for hack writing. But
+Charley Vanderhuyn had something to do with it. He sent Henry Vail--he
+always sent Henry Vail on his missions of mercy--to find out where
+Perdue sold his articles, and I have no doubt the price of each article
+was doubled, at Vanderhuyn's expense.
+
+And that mention of Henry Vail reminds me that I can not tell this
+story rightly unless I let you know who he was. A distant relation of
+Charley's, I believe. He was a studious fellow from the country, and
+quite awkward in company. The contrast between him and Charley was
+marked. Vanderhuyn was absolutely _au fait_ in all the usages of
+society; he knew by instinct how a thing ought to be done, and his
+example was law. He had a genius for it, everybody said. Vail was
+afraid of his shadow; did not know just what was proper to do in any
+new circumstances. His manners hung about him loosely; Vanderhuyn's
+were part of himself. When Vail came to the Hasheesh Club for the first
+time it was on the occasion of Charley's majority dinner. Vail
+consulted Vanderhuyn about his costume, and was told that he must wear
+evening dress; and, never having seen anything but provincial society,
+he went with perfect assurance to a tailor's and ordered a new frock
+coat and a white vest. When he saw that the other gentlemen present
+wore dress coats, and that most of them had black vests, he was in some
+consternation. He even debated whether he should not go out and hire a
+dress coat for the evening. He drew Charley aside, and asked him why he
+did not tell him that those sparrow-tail things had come into fashion
+again!
+
+But he never took kindly to the club life; he soon saw that however
+harmless it might be to some men, it was destruction to others. After
+attending a few times, Henry Vail, who was something of a Puritan and
+much of a philanthropist, declared his opposition to what he called an
+English dissipation.
+
+Henry Vail was a scholarly fellow, of real genius, and had studied for
+the ministry; but he had original notions, and about the time he was to
+have taken deacon's orders in the Episcopal Church he drew back. He
+said that orders would do for some men, but he did not intend to build
+a wall between himself and his fellows. He could do more by remaining a
+man of like passions with other men than he could by casing himself in
+a clerical "strait-jacket," as he called it. Having a little income of
+his own, he set up on his own account in the dingiest part of that
+dingy street called Huckleberry Street--the name, with all its
+suggestions of fresh fields and pure air and liberty, is a dreary
+mockery. Just where Greenfield Court--the dirtiest of New York
+alleys--runs out of Huckleberry Street, he set up shop, to use his own
+expression, He was a kind of independent lay clergyman, ministering to
+the physical and spiritual wants of his neighbors, climbing to garrets
+and penetrating to cellars, now talking to a woman who owned a candy
+and gingerbread stall, and now helping to bury a drunken sailor. Such a
+life for a scholar! But he always declared that digging out Greek and
+Hebrew roots was not half so fascinating a work as digging out human
+souls from the filth of Huckleberry Street.
+
+Of course he did not want for money to carry on his operations. Charley
+Vanderhuyn's investments brought large returns, and Charley knew how to
+give. When Vail would begin a pathetic story, Vanderhuyn would draw out
+his check book, and say: "How much shall it be, Harry?--never mind the
+story. It's handy to have you to give away my money for me. I should
+never take the trouble to see that it went to the people that need. One
+dollar given by you is worth ten that I bestow on Tom, Dick, and Harry;
+so I prefer to let Tom and Dick go without, and give it all to Harry."
+In fact Vanderhuyn had been the prey of so many impostors that he
+adopted the plan of sending all of his applicants to Vail, with a note
+to him, which generally ran thus, "Please investigate." The tramps soon
+ceased to trouble him, and then he took to intrusting to Vail each
+month a sum equal to what he had been in the habit of giving away
+loosely.
+
+It was about the first of December, four years ago, that Harry Vail,
+grown younger and fresher in two years of toil among the
+poor--glorified he seemed by the tenderness of his sympathies and the
+nobleness of his aims--it was four years ago that Harry came into
+Charley Vanderhuyn's rooms for his regular monthly allotment. Vail
+generally came in the evening, and Charley generally managed to be
+disengaged for that evening. The two old friends whose paths diverged
+so widely were fond of each other's company, and Vail declared that he
+needed one evening in the month with Vanderhuyn; he liked to carry away
+some of Charley's sunshine to the darkness of Huckleberry Street and
+Greenfield Court. And Charley said that Harry brought more sunlight
+than he took. I believe he was right. Charley, like all men who live
+without a purpose, was growing less refined and charming than he had
+been, his cheeks were just a trifle graver than those of the young
+Charley had been. But he talked magnificently as ever. Vail said that
+he himself was an explorer in a barbarous desert, and that Charles
+Vanderhuyn was the one civilized man he could meet.
+
+It is a curious thing that Vail had never urged Charley to a different
+life from the self-indulgent one that he led, but it was a peculiarity
+of Henry's that he was slow to attack a man directly. I have heard that
+it was one great secret of his success among the poor, that he would
+meet an intemperate man twenty times, perhaps, before he attacked his
+vice. Then, when the man had ceased to stand guard, Vail would suddenly
+find an entrance to him by an unwatched gate. It was remarkable, too,
+that when he did seize on a man he never for an instant relaxed his
+grasp. I have often looked at his aquiline nose, and wondered if it
+were not an index to this eagle-like swoop at the right moment, and
+this unwavering firmness of hold.
+
+On this evening, about the first of December, four years ago, he sat in
+Charley's cozy bedroom and listened to Vanderhuyn's stories of a life
+antipodal to the life he was accustomed to see--for the antipodes do
+not live round the world, but round the first street corner; he
+listened and laughed at the graphic and eloquent and grotesque pictures
+that Charley drew for him till nearly midnight, and then got ready to
+go back to his home, among the noisy saloons of Huckleberry Street.
+Charley drew out his check book and wrote and tore off the check, and
+handed it to Vail.
+
+"I want more, Charley, this time," said Vail in his quiet, earnest way,
+with gray eyes fixed on his friend's blue ones.
+
+"Got more widows without coal than usual, eh, old fellow? How much
+shall it be? Double? Ask anything. I can't refuse the half of my
+fortune to such a good angel as you are, Vail. I don't spend any money
+that pays so well as what I give you. I go to the clubs and to parties.
+I sit at the opera and listen to Signora Scracchioli, and say to
+myself, 'Well, there's Vail using my money to help some poor devil in
+trouble.' I tell you I get a comfortable conscience by an easy system
+of commutation. Here, exchange with me; this is for double the amount,
+and I am glad you mentioned it."
+
+"But I want more than that this time," and Vail fixed his eyes on
+Charley in a way that made the latter feel just a little ill at ease, a
+sensation very new to him.
+
+"Well, how much, Harry? Don't be afraid to ask. I told you you should
+have half my kingdom, old fellow!" And Vanderhuyn took his pen and
+began to date another check.
+
+"But, Charley, I am almost afraid to ask. I want more than half you
+have--I want something worth more than all you have."
+
+"Why, you make me curious. Never saw you in that vein before, Vail,"
+and Charley twisted a piece of paper, lighted it in the gas jet, and
+held it gracefully in his fingers while he set his cigar going, hoping
+to hide his restlessness under the wistful gaze of his friend by this
+occupation of his attention.
+
+But however nervous Henry Vail might be in the performance of little
+acts that were mere matters of convention, there was no lack of quiet
+self-possession in matters that called out his earnestness of spirit.
+And now he sat gazing steadily at Charley until the cigar had been
+gracefully lighted, the bit of paper tossed on the grate, and until
+Charley had watched his cigar a moment. When the latter reluctantly
+brought his eyes back into range with the dead-earnest ones that had
+never ceased to look on him with that strange wistful expression, then
+Henry Vail proceeded:
+
+"I want _you_, Charley."
+
+Charley laughed heartily now. "Me? What a missionary _I_ would make!
+Kid-glove gospeller I'd be called in the first three days. What a
+superb Sunday-school teacher I'd make! Why, Henry Vail, you know
+better. There's just one thing in this world I have a talent for, and
+that's society. I'm a man of the world in my very fiber. But as for
+following in your illustrious footsteps--I wish I could be so good a
+man, but you see I'm not built in that way. I'm a man of the world."
+
+"That's just what I want," said Henry Vail, looking with the same
+tender wistfulness into his friend's eyes. "If I'd wanted a missionary
+I shouldn't have come to you. If I'd wanted a Sunday-school teacher I
+could have found twenty better; and as for tract distributing and Bible
+reading, you couldn't do either if you'd try. What I want for
+Huckleberry Street more than I want anything else is a man of the
+world. You are a man of the world--of the whole world. I have seen a
+restaurant waiter stop and gape and listen to your talk. I have seen a
+coal-heaver delighted with your manners when you paid him. Charley,
+you're the most magnificent man of the world I ever saw. Must a man of
+the world be useless? I tell you I want you for God and Huckleberry
+Street, and I mean to have you some day, old fellow." And the perfect
+assurance with which he said this, and the settled conviction of final
+success that was visible in his quiet gray eyes, fascinated Charley
+Vanderhuyn, and he felt spellbound, like the wedding guest held by the
+"Ancient Mariner."
+
+"I tell you what, Henry," he said presently, "I've got no call. I'm an
+Epicurean. I say to you, in the words of an American poet:
+
+    'Take the current of your nature, make it stagnant if you will:
+    Dam it up to drudge forever at the service of your will.
+    Mine the rapture and the freedom of the torrent on the hill!
+    I shall wander o'er the meadows where the fairest blossoms call:
+    Though the ledges seize and fling me headlong from the rocky wall,
+    I shall leave a rainbow hanging o'er the ruins of my fall.'"
+
+"Charley, I don't want to preach," said Vail; "but you know that this
+doctrine of mere selfish floating on the current of impulse which your
+traveler poet teaches is devilish laziness, and devilish laziness
+always tends to something worse. You may live such a life, and quote
+such poetry, but you don't believe that a man should flow on like a
+purposeless river. The lines you quoted bear the mark of a restless
+desire to apologize to conscience for a fearful waste of power and
+possibility. No," he said, rising, "I don't want that check. This one
+will do; but you won't forget that God and Huckleberry Street want you,
+and they will have you, too, noble-hearted fellow! Good night! God
+bless you!" and he shook Charley's hand and went out into the night to
+seek his home in Huckleberry Street. And the genial Charley never saw
+his brave friend again. Yes, he did, too. Or did he?
+
+
+II.
+
+The month of December, four years ago, was a month of much festivity in
+the metropolis. Charley was wanted nearly every night to grace some
+gathering or other, and Charley was too obliging to refuse to go where
+he was wanted--that is, when he was wanted in Fifth Avenue or
+Thirty-fourth Street[3]. As for Huckleberry Street and Greenfield
+Court, they were fast fading out of Charley's mind. He knew that Henry
+Vail would introduce the subject when he came for his January check,
+and he expected some annoyance from the discussion of the
+question--annoyance, because there was something in his own breast that
+answered to Vail's appeal. Charley was more than an Epicurean. To eat
+and drink, to laugh and talk, and die, was not enough for such a soul.
+He mentally compared himself to Felix, and said that Vail wouldn't let
+him forget his duty, anyhow. But for the present it was too delightful
+to him to honor the entertainment given by the Honorable Mr. So-and-so
+and Mrs. So-and-so; it was pleasant to be assured by Mrs.
+Forty-Millions that her party would fail but for his presence. And then
+he had just achieved the end of his ambition. He was president of the
+Hasheesh Club. He took his seat at the head of the table on Christmas
+Eve.
+
+      [3] The reader will remember that this was written in 1872. I do
+      not know how far the uptown centers of fashion will be in twenty
+      years more.
+
+Now, patient reader, we draw near to the time when Charley uttered the
+exclamation set down at the head of this story. Bear a little longer
+with my roundabout way of telling. It is Christmastide anyway; why
+should we hurry ourselves through this happy season?
+
+Just as Charley went into the door of the clubhouse--you remember the
+Hasheesh clubhouse was in Madison Avenue then--just as Charley entered
+he met the burly form and genial face of the eminent Dr. Van Doser, who
+said, "Well, Vanderhuyn, how's your cousin Vail?"
+
+"Is he sick?" asked Charley, struck with a foreboding that made him
+tremble.
+
+"Sick? Didn't you know? Well, that's just like Vail. He was taken with
+smallpox two weeks ago, and I wanted to take the risk of penalties and
+not report his case, but he said if I didn't he would do it himself;
+that sanitary regulations requiring smallpox patients to go to a
+hospital were necessary, and that it became one in his position to set
+a good example to Huckleberry Street. So I was compelled to report him
+and let him go to the island. And he hasn't let you know?--for fear you
+would try to communicate with him probably, and thus expose yourself to
+infection. Extraordinary man, that Vail. I never saw his like," and
+with that the doctor turned to speak to some gentlemen who had just
+come in.
+
+And so Charley's Christmas Eve dinner at the Hasheesh Club was spoiled.
+There are two inconvenient things in this world, a conscience and a
+tender heart, and Charley Vanderhuyn was plagued with both. While going
+through with the toasts, his mind was busy with poor Henry Vail
+suffering in a smallpox hospital. In his graceful response to the
+sentiment, "The President of the Hasheesh Club," he alluded to the
+retiring president, and made some witty remark--I forget what--about
+his being a denizen of Lexington Avenue; but in saying Lexington Avenue
+he came near slipping into Huckleberry Street, and in fact he did get
+the first syllable out before he checked himself. He was horrified
+afterward to think how near he had come, later in the evening, to
+addressing the company as "Gentlemen of the Smallpox Hospital."
+
+Charley drank more wine and punch than usual. Those who sat near him
+looked at one another significantly, in a way that implied their belief
+that Vanderhuyn was too much elated over his election. Little did they
+know that at that moment the presidency of the famous Hasheesh Club
+appeared to Charley the veriest bawble in the world. If he had not
+known how futile would be any attempt to gain an entrance to the
+smallpox hospital, he would have excused himself and started for the
+island on the instant.
+
+But it was one o'clock before Charley got away. Out of the brilliantly
+lighted rooms he walked, stunned with grief, and a little heavy with
+the wine and punch he had drunk, for in his preoccupation of mind he
+had forgotten to be as cautious as usual. Following an impulse, he took
+a car and went directly downtown, and then made his way to Huckleberry
+Street. He stopped at a saloon door and asked if they could tell him
+where Mr. Vail's rooms were.
+
+"The blissed man as wint about like a saint? Shore and I can," said the
+boozy Irishman. "It's right ferninst where yer afther stan'in, up the
+stairs on the corner of Granefield Coort--over there, bedad."
+
+Seeing a light in the rooms indicated by the man, Charley crossed over,
+passed through a sorrowful-looking crowd at the door, and went up the
+stairs. He found the negro woman who kept the rooms for Vail standing
+talking to an Irish woman. Both the women were deeply pitted with
+smallpox.
+
+He inquired if they could tell him how Mr. Vail was.
+
+"O honey, he's done dead sence three o'clock," said the black woman,
+sitting down in a chair and beginning to wipe her eyes on her apron.
+"This Misses Mcgroarty's jist done tole me this minute."
+
+The Irish woman came round in front of Mr. Vanderhuyn and looked
+inquisitively at him a moment, and then said, "Faix, mister, and is yer
+name Charley?"
+
+"Why do you ask?" said Vanderhuyn.
+
+"Because I thought, mebbe, you might be after him, the gentleman. It's
+me husband, Pat Mcgroarty, as is a nurruss in the horsepital, and a
+good one as iver ye seed, and it's Pat as has been a-tellin' me about
+that blissed saint of a man, as how in his delairyum he kept a-talkin'
+to Charley all the time, and Pat said as he seemed to have something on
+his mind he wanted to say to Charley. An' whin I see yer face, sich a
+gintleman's face as ye've got, too, I says shure that must be Charley."
+
+"What did he say?" asked Vanderhuyn.
+
+"Shure, and Pat said it wasn't much he could gether, for he was in a
+awful delairyum, ye know, but he would keep a-sayin', 'Charley,
+Charley, God and Huckleberry Street want you.' Pat says he'd say it so
+awful as would make him shiver, that God and Huckleberry Street wanted
+Charley. Shure it must a bin the delairyum, you know, that made him mix
+up things loike, and put God and Huckleberry Street together, when its
+more loike the divil would seem more proper to go with Huckleberry
+Street, ye know. But if yer name's Charley, and yer loike the loikes of
+him as is dead, shure Huckleberry Street is after wantin' of you, bad
+enough."
+
+"My name's Charley, but I'm not a bit like him, though, I'm sorry to
+say, my good woman. Tell your husband to come and see me--there's my
+number."
+
+Charley went out, and the men at the door whispered, "That must be the
+rich man as give him all the money." He took the last car uptown, and
+he who had been two hours before in that brilliant company at the
+Hasheesh was now one of ten people riding in a street car. Of his
+fellow-passengers six were drunken men and two were low women of the
+town; one of them had no bonnet, and lacked a penny of enough to pay
+her fare, but the conductor mercifully let her ride, remarking to
+Vanderhuyn, who stood on the platform, that "the poor devil has a hard
+life any how." Said I not a minute ago, that the antipodes live not
+around the world, but around the street corner? Antipodes ride in the
+same street car.
+
+As the car was passing Mott Street, a passenger, half drunk, came out,
+turned his haggard face a moment toward the face of Charley Vanderhuyn,
+and then, with an exclamation of startled recognition, leaped from the
+car and hurried away in the darkness. It was not till the car had gone
+three blocks farther that Vanderhuyn guessed, from the golden hair,
+that this was Perdue, the brilliant "Baron Bertram" of the early days
+of the Hasheesh Club.
+
+When Charley got back to his luxurious apartment he was possessed with
+a superstitious feeling. He took up the paper weight that Henry Vail
+had held in his hand the very last night he was in this parlor, and he
+thought the whole conversation over as he smoked his cigar, fearing to
+put out his light.
+
+"Confound the man that invented ghost stories for a Christmas
+amusement!" he said, as he remembered Old Scrooge and Tiny Tim. "Well,
+I'm not Old Scrooge, anyhow, if I'm not as good as poor Henry Vail."
+
+I do not know whether it was the reaction from the punch he had drunk,
+or the sudden shock of Vail's death, or the troubled conscience, or
+from all three, but when he got into bed he found himself shaking with
+nervousness.
+
+He had been asleep an hour, perhaps, when he heard a genuine Irish
+voice say, "Faix, mister, and is yer name Charley?"
+
+He started up--looked around the room. He had made so much concession
+to his nervous feeling that he had not turned the gas quite out, as was
+his custom. The dim duskiness made him shudder; he expected to see the
+Huckleberry Street Irish woman looking at him. But he shook off his
+terror a little, uttered another malediction on the man that invented
+Christmas ghost stories, concluded that his illusion must have come
+from his lying on his left side, turned over, and reflected that by so
+doing he would relieve his heart and stomach from the weight of his
+liver, repeated this physiological reflection in a soothing way two or
+three times, dropped off into a quiet snooze, and almost immediately
+found himself sitting bolt upright in bed, shaking with a chill terror,
+sure that the Irish voice had again asked the question, "Faix, mister,
+and is yer name Charley?" He had a feeling, though his back was toward
+the table, that some one sat at the table. Charley was no coward, but
+it took him a minute or two to shake off his terror and regain enough
+self-control to look around.
+
+For a moment he saw, or thought he saw, a form sitting at the table,
+then it disappeared, and then, after a good while, Charley got himself
+composed to sleep again, this time with his head well bolstered, to
+reduce the circulation in the brain, as he reflected.
+
+He did not get to sleep, however, for before he became unconscious the
+Irish voice from just above the carved headboard spoke out so clear now
+that there could be no mistake, "Faix, mister, and is yer name
+Charley?" It was then that he rose in bed and uttered the exclamation
+which I set down in the first line of this story. Charley Vanderhuyn
+could not tell whether he meant Charles Dickens or Nick. Perhaps you
+can. Indeed, it doesn't seem to matter much, after all.
+
+
+III.
+
+A narrative of this sort, like a French sermon, divides itself into
+three parts. I have now got through the preliminary tanglements of the
+history of the founding of the Christmas Club, and I hope to be able to
+tell the remainder of the story with as few digressions as possible,
+for at Christmastide a body doesn't want his stories to stretch out to
+eternity, even if they are ghostly.
+
+Charley Vanderhuyn said "The Dickens!" and though his meaning was
+indefinite, he really meant it, whatever it might be. He looked up at
+the ornamental figure carved on the rich headboard of his bed as if he
+suspected that the headboard of English walnut had spoken in Irish. He
+looked at the headboard intently a long time, partly because the Irish
+voice had come from that direction, and partly because he was afraid to
+look round toward the table. He _knew_, just as well before he looked
+around as he did afterward, what he should see. He saw it before he
+looked round by some other vision than that of his eyes, and that was
+what made him shiver so. He knew that the persistent gray eyes were
+upon him, that they would never move until he looked round. _He could
+feel the look before he saw it._
+
+At last he turned slowly. Sure enough, in that very chair by the table
+sat the Presence, the Ghost--the--it was Henry Vail; or was it? There,
+in the dim light, was the aquiline nose like an eagle's beak, there
+were the steady, unwavering gray eyes, with that same earnest, wistful
+look fastened on Vanderhuyn; the features were Vail's, but the face was
+plowed and pitted fearfully as with the smallpox. All this Charley saw,
+while seeing through the ghost and beyond--the carving on the rosewood
+dressing case was quite as visible through the unsubstantial apparition
+as before. Charley was not ordinarily superstitious, and he quickly
+reasoned that his excited imagination had confounded the features of
+Harry Vail's face with the pock-marked visage of the Huckleberry Street
+Irish woman. So he shook himself, rubbed his eyes and looked again.
+The apparition this time was much more distinct, and it lifted the
+paper weight, as Henry had three weeks before. Charley was so sure that
+it was Henry Vail himself that he began to get up to shake hands with
+his friend, but the perfect transparency of the apparition checked him,
+and he hid his face in his hands a moment, in a terror that he could no
+longer conceal from himself.
+
+"What do you want?" he said at last, lifting his eyes.
+
+"I want you, Charley!" said the ghost.
+
+Now I hardly know how to describe to you the manner in which the ghost
+replied. It was not speech, nor any attempt at speech. You have seen a
+mesmerist or biologist, or whatever-you-call-him-ist, communicate with
+a man under his spell without speech. He looks at him, _wills_ that a
+distinct impression shall be made on his victim, and the poor fellow
+does or says as the master spirit wishes him. By some such subtle
+influence the ghost, without the intervention of sound or the sense of
+hearing, conveyed this reply to Charley. There was no doubt about the
+reply. It was far more distinct than speech--an impression made
+directly upon the consciousness.
+
+Charley arose and dressed himself under some sort of fascination. His
+own will had abdicated; the tender, eager, wistful eyes of Vail held
+him fast, and he did not feel either inclination or power to resist.
+The eyes directed him to one article of clothing, and then to another,
+until he found himself muffled to the ears for a night walk.
+
+"Where are we going?" asked Charley huskily.
+
+"To Huckleberry Street," answered the eyes, without a sound, and in a
+minute more the two were passing down the silent streets. They met
+several policemen and private watchmen, but Vanderhuyn observed that no
+one took notice either of him or the ghost. The feet of the watchmen
+made a grinding noise in the crisp snow, but Charley was horrified to
+find that his own tread and that of his companion made no sound
+whatever as their feet fell upon the icy sidewalks. Was he, then, out
+of the body also? This silence and this loss of the power of choice
+made him doubtful, indeed, whether he were dead or alive.
+
+In Huckleberry Street they went first to a large saloon, where a set of
+roysterers were having a Christmas-Eve spree preparatory to a
+Christmas-morning headache. Charley could not imagine why the ghost had
+brought him here, to be smothered with the smell of this villainous
+tobacco, for to nothing was Charley more sensitive than to the smell of
+a poor cigar or a cheap pipe. He thought if he should have to stay here
+long he would like to distribute a box of his best brand among these
+smokers, so as to give the room the odor of the Hasheesh Club. At first
+it seemed a Babel of voices; there were men of several different
+nationalities talking in three or four languages. Six men were standing
+at the long counter drinking--one German, two Irishmen, a Portuguese
+sailor, a white American, and a black one. The spirit of Vail seemed to
+be looking for somebody; it peered round from table to table, where men
+slammed down the cards so as to make as much noise as possible. Nobody
+paid the least attention to the two strangers, and at last it flashed
+upon Vanderhuyn that he and Vail were both invisible to the throng
+around them.
+
+The Presence stopped in front of a table where two young men sat. They
+were playing euchre, and they were drinking. It is an old adage that
+truth is told in wine, and with some men sense comes with whisky.
+
+"I say, Joe," said one, "blamed ef it 'taint too bad; you and me
+spendin' our time this way! The ole woman's mos' broke 'r heart over me
+t'day. Sh' said I ought be the s'port 'f her ole dage, 'stid 'f boozin'
+roun' thish yer way. 'S so! Tell you, Joe, 's so! Blam'd 'f 'taint.
+Hey? W'at y' say? Hey?"
+
+"Of course 'tis, Ben," growled the other; "we all know that. But what's
+a feller goin' to do for company? Go on; it's your deal."
+
+"Who kyeers fer th' deal? I d--on't. Now, Joe, I says, t--to th' ole
+lady, y' see, I says, a young man can't live up a dingy stairs on th'
+top floor al'ays, and never git no comp'ny. Can't do it. I don't want
+t' 'rink much, but I c--ome here to git comp'ny. Comp'ny drinks, and I
+git drunk 'f--fore I know 'fore you--pshaw! deal yerself 'f you want t'
+play."
+
+After a while he put the cards down again, and began:
+
+"What think I done wunst? He, he! Went to th' Young Men's Chrissen
+Soshiashen. Ole lady, you know, coaxed. He! he! You bet! Prayer
+meetin', Bible class, or somethin'. All slick young fellers 'th side
+whiskers. Talked pious, an' so genteel, you know. I went there fer
+comp'ny! Didn' go no more. Druther git drunk at the 'free-and-easy'
+ever' night, by George, 'n to be a slick kind 'f feller 'th side
+whiskers a lis'nin' t' myself make purty speeches 'n a prayer Bible
+class meetin' or such, you know. Hey? w'at ye say? Hey? 'S comp'ny a
+feller wants, and 's comp'ny a feller's got t' have, by cracky! Hey?
+W'at ye say? Hey, Joe?"
+
+"Blam'd 'f 'tain't," said Joe.
+
+"That's w'at them rich fellers goes to the club fer? Hey? w'at ye say,
+Joe? Hey?"
+
+"Yes, of course."
+
+"Wish I had a club! Better'n this place to go to. Vail, he used to do a
+fellow good. If he'd 'a' lived he'd 'a' pulled me out this yer, would,
+you, know. He got 's eyes onto me, and they say when he got 's eyes
+onto feller never let go, you know. Done me good. Made me 'shamed. Does
+feller good t' be 'shamed, Joe. Don't it? Hey? W'at you say?"
+
+"Yes," said Joe.
+
+"But w'en a feller's lonesome, a young feller, I mean, he's got to have
+company if he has to go down to Davy Jones's, and play seven-up with
+Ole Nick. Hey, Joe? W'at you say? Hey?"
+
+"I s'pose so," said Joe; "but come, deal, old fellow; don't go to
+preachin'."
+
+I have heard Charley say that he never heard anything half so
+distinctly in his life as he felt what the apparition said to him when
+their eyes met at that moment.
+
+"God and Huckleberry Street want you, Charley."
+
+Charley looked away restively, and then caught the eyes of the ghost
+again, and this time the ghost said:
+
+"And they're going to have you, too."
+
+I have heard Charley tell of several other visits they made that night;
+but, as I said before, even a Christmas yarn and a ghost story must not
+spin itself out, like Banquo's line, to the crack of doom. However true
+or authentic a story may be--and you can easily verify this by asking
+any member of the Christmas Club in Huckleberry Street--however true a
+yarn may be, it must not be so long that it can never be wound up.
+
+The very last of the wretched places they looked in upon was a bare
+room in a third story. There was a woman sitting on a box in one
+corner, holding a sick child. A man with golden hair was pacing the
+floor.
+
+"There's that devil again!" he said, pointing to the blank wall. "Now
+he's gone. You see, Carrie, I could quit if I had anybody to help me.
+Oh! I heard to night that Charley Vanderhuyn had been elected president
+of the Hasheesh. And I saw him an hour ago on a Second Avenue car. I
+wish Charley would come and talk to me. He'd give me money, but 'tain't
+money. I could make money if I could let whisky alone. I used to love
+to hear Charley talk better than to live. I believe it was the ruin of
+me. But he don't seem to care for a fellow when his clothes get shabby.
+See there!" and he picked up a piece of wood and threw it at the wall,
+startling his wife and making the child cry. "I hit him that time! I
+wish I could hear Charley Vanderhuyn talk once more. His talk is enough
+to drive devils away any time. Great God, what an awful Christmas this
+is!"
+
+Charley wanted to begin to talk on the spot, but when he found that
+poor "Baron Bertram" could neither see him nor hear a word he spoke, he
+had a fearful sense of being a disembodied spirit. The ghost looked
+wistfully at him, and said, "God and Huckleberry Street want _you_,
+Charley."
+
+Charley was very loath to leave Perdue and his wife in this condition;
+he would have loved dearly to while away the dreary night for them, but
+he could not speak to them, and the eyes of the ghost bade him follow,
+and the two went swiftly back to Charley's rooms again.
+
+Then the apparition sat down by the table and fastened its sad and
+wistful eyes upon the soul of Charley Vanderhuyn. Not a word did it
+speak. But the look, the old tender, earnest look of Henry Vail, drew
+Charley's heart into his eyes and made him weep. There Vail sat, still
+and wistful, until Charley, roused by all that he had seen, resolved to
+do what he could for Huckleberry Street. He made no communication of
+his purpose to the ghost. He meant to keep it close in his own breast.
+But no sooner had he formed the purpose than a smile--the old familiar
+smile--came across the face of Vail, the hideous scars of his loathsome
+disease disappeared, and the face began to shine, while a faint aureole
+appeared about his head. And Vanderhuyn became conscious that the room
+was full of other mysterious beings. And to his regret Vail ceased now
+to regard his friend any more, but looked about him at the Huckleberry
+Street angels, who seemed to be pulling him away. He and they vanished
+slowly, and on the wall there shone some faint luminous letters, which
+Vanderhuyn tried to read, but the light of the Christmas dawn disturbed
+his vision, and he was able to see only the latter part, and even that
+was not clear to his eyes, but he partly read and partly remembered the
+words, "When ye fail on earth they may receive you into everlasting
+habitations."
+
+He rang for his servant, had the fire replenished, opened his desk and
+began to write letters. First he resigned the presidency of the
+Hasheesh Club. Next he begged that Mrs. Rear-Admiral Albatross would
+excuse him from her Christmas dinner. Unforeseen circumstances, and the
+death of an intimate friend, were his apologies. Then he sent his
+regrets, and declined all the invitations to holiday parties. He
+canceled his engagements to make New-Year's calls[4] in company with
+Bird, the painter. Then he had breakfast, ordered his carriage, and
+drove to Huckleberry Street. On the way down he debated what he should
+do. He couldn't follow in Vail's footsteps. He was not a missionary. He
+went first and found Perdue, who had been fighting off a threatened
+attack of tremens all night, relieved the necessities of his family,
+and took the golden-haired fellow into his carriage. He ordered the
+coachman to drive the whole length of Huckleberry Street slowly.
+
+      [4] The New-Year's call is one of several things alluded to in
+      the text that were in vogue when the story was written, but seem
+      anachronisms in 1893.
+
+"Perdue, what can I do down here? Vail always said that I could do
+something, if I would try."
+
+"Why, Charley, start a club. That's what these fellows need. How I
+should like to hear you talk again!"
+
+
+IV.
+
+How provoking this is! I thought I should get through with three parts.
+But Christmas is a time when a man can not avoid a tendency to long
+stories. One can not quite control one's self in a time of mirth, and
+here my history has grown until I shall have to put on a mansard roof
+to accommodate it. For in all these three parts I have told you about
+everything but what my title promised. If you have ever gone through
+Huckleberry Street--of course you never have gone through such a street
+except by accident, since you are neither poor, vicious, nor
+benevolent, and only the poor, the vicious, and the benevolent ever go
+there intentionally--but if you have ever happened to go there of late
+years, you have seen the Christmas Club building. For on that very
+morning, with poor "Baron Bertram" in the carriage, Charley resolved to
+found a club in Huckleberry Street. And what house so good as the one
+in which Henry Vail had lived?
+
+So he drove up to the house on the corner of Greenfield Court and began
+to examine it. It was an old-fashioned house; and in its time, when the
+old families inhabited the downtown streets, it had been an
+aristocratic mansion. The lower floor was occupied by a butcher's shop,
+and in the front room, where an old family had once entertained its
+guests, cheap roasts were being dispensed to the keepers of low
+boarding houses. The antique fireplace and the ancient mantelpiece were
+forced to keep company with meat blocks and butchers' cleavers. Above
+this were Henry Vail's rooms, where the old chambers had been carefully
+restored; and above these the third story and attic were crowded with
+tenants. But everywhere the house had traces of its former gentility.
+
+"Good!" said Charley; "Vail preserved his taste for the antique to the
+last."
+
+"Perdue, what do you think of this for a club-house?"
+
+"Just the thing if you can get it. Ten chances to one it belongs to
+some saloonkeeper who wouldn't rent it for purposes of civilization."
+
+"Oh, I'll get it! Such men are always susceptible to the influence of
+money, and I'm sure this is the spot, or Vail wouldn't have chosen it."
+
+And with that Charley and the delighted Perdue drove to the house of
+Charley's business agent, the same who had been his father's manager.
+
+"Mr. Johnston," said Charley, "I don't like to ask you to work on
+Christmas, but I want you to find out to-day, if you can, who owns No.
+164 Huckleberry Street."
+
+"Do you mean the house Mr. Vail lived in?"
+
+"Yes, that's it. Look it up for me, if you can."
+
+"Oh, that's not hard. The house belongs to you."
+
+"To me! I didn't know I had anything there."
+
+"Yes, that house was your grandfather's, and your mother lived there in
+her childhood, and your father wouldn't sell it. It brought good rent,
+and I have never bothered you about it."
+
+"And you let Harry pay me rent?"
+
+"Well, sir, he asked me not to mention to you that he was in your
+house. He liked to pay his own way. Strange man, that Mr. Vail! I heard
+from another tenant last night that he is dead."
+
+"Perdue," said Charley, "I wish you would go down there to-day and find
+out what each tenant in that house will sell his lease for and give
+possession immediately. Give them a note to Johnston stating the
+amount, and I want Johnston to give them something over the amount
+agreed on. I must be on good terms with Huckleberry Street."
+
+Johnston wondered what whim Charley had in his head. "Baron Bertram"
+completed his negotiations for the leases of the tenants, and then went
+off and drank Charley's health in so many saloons that he went home
+entirely drunk, and the next morning was ashamed to see Vanderhuyn. But
+Charley never even looked a disapproval at him. He had learned from
+Vail how easy it is for reformers to throw their influence on the wrong
+side in such a life-and-death struggle as that of Perdue's. In the year
+that followed he had to forgive him many more than seven times. But
+Perdue grew stronger in the sunlight of Vanderhuyn's steady friendship.
+
+They had a great time opening the club on New-Year's Eve. There was a
+banquet, not quite in Delmonico's style, nor quite so fine as those at
+the Hasheesh; but still it was a grand affair to the dilapidated wrecks
+that Charley gathered about him. Charley was president, and Vail's
+portrait hung over the mantelpiece, with this inscription beneath, "The
+Founder of the Club." Most of Charley's fine paintings were here, and
+the rooms were indeed brilliant. And if lemonade and root beer and good
+strong coffee could have made people drunk, there would not have been
+one sober man there. But Ben delighted "the old lady" by going home
+sober, owning it was better than the free-and-easy, and his friends all
+agreed with him. To Charley, as he looked round on them, this was a far
+grander moment than when, one week before, he had presided over the gay
+company at the Hasheesh. Here were good cheer, laughter, funny stories,
+and a New-Year's Eve worth the having. The gray eyes of the portrait
+over the antique mantel-piece seemed happy and satisfied.
+
+"Gentlemen," said Charley, "I rise to propose the memory of our
+founder," and he proceeded to set forth the virtues of Henry Vail. If
+there had been a reporter present he could have inserted in
+parenthesis, at several places in Charley's speech, the words, "great
+applause"; and if he had reported its effect exactly, he would, at
+several other places, have inserted the words "great sensation," which,
+in reporter's phrase, expresses any great emotion, especially one which
+makes an audience weep. In conclusion, Charley lifted his glass of
+lemonade, and said, "To the memory of Henry Vail, the Founder of the
+Christmas Club."
+
+"Christmas!" said Baron Bertram, "a good name! For this man," pointing
+to Charley, "receiveth sinners and eateth with them" (applause).
+
+I have done. Dear friends, a Merry Christmas to you all!
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+D. APPLETON & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS.
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+_THE FAITH DOCTOR._ By EDWARD EGGLESTON, author of "The Hoosier
+Schoolmaster," "The Circuit Rider," etc. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.
+
+"One of _the_ novels of the decade."--_Rochester Union and Advertiser._
+
+"The author of 'The Hoosier Schoolmaster' has enhanced his reputation
+by this beautiful and touching study of the character of a girl to love
+whom proved a liberal education to both of her admirers."--_London
+Athenaeum._
+
+"'The Faith Doctor' is worth reading for its style, its wit, and its
+humor, and not less, we may add, for its pathos."--_London Spectator._
+
+"Much skill is shown by the author in making these 'fads' the basis of
+a novel of great interest.... One who tries to keep in the current of
+good novel-reading must certainly find time to read 'The Faith
+Doctor.'"--_Buffalo Commercial._
+
+An excellent piece of work.... With each new novel the author of 'The
+Hoosier Schoolmaster' enlarges his audience and surprises old friends
+by reserve forces unsuspected. Sterling integrity of character and high
+moral motives illuminate Dr. Eggleston's fiction, and assure its place
+in the literature of America which is to stand as a worthy reflex of
+the best thoughts of this age."--_New York World._
+
+"It is extremely fortunate that the fine subject indicated in the title
+should have fallen into such competent hands."--_Pittsburg
+Chronicle-Telegraph._
+
+"This delightful story would alone be sufficient to place Dr. Eggleston
+in the front rank of American writers of fiction."--_Chicago Tribune._
+
+"The subject is treated with perfect fidelity and artistic
+truthfulness."--_The Critic._
+
+
+_"LA BELLA" AND OTHERS._ By EGERTON CASTLE, author of "Consequences."
+Paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00.
+
+"The stories will be welcomed with a sense of refreshing pungency by
+readers who have been cloyed by a too long succession of insipid
+sweetness and familiar incident."--_London Athenaeum._
+
+"The author is gifted with a lively fancy, and the clever plots he has
+devised gain greatly in interest, thanks to the unfamiliar surroundings
+in which the action for the most part takes place."--_London Literary
+World._
+
+"Eight stories, all exhibiting notable originality in conception and
+mastery of art, the first two illustrating them best. They add a
+dramatic power that makes them masterpieces. Both belong to the period
+when fencing was most skillful, and illustrate its practice."--_Boston
+Globe._
+
+
+_ELINE VERE._ By LOUIS COUPERUS. Translated from the Dutch by J. T.
+GREIN. With an Introduction by EDMUND GOSSE. Holland Fiction Series.
+12mo. Cloth, $1.00.
+
+"Most careful in its details of description, most picturesque in its
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+
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+
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+World._
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+New York: D. APPLETON & CO., 1, 3, & 5 Bond Street.
+
+
+
+
+D. APPLETON & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS.
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+"This work marks an epoch in the history-writing of this
+country."--_St. Louis Post-Dispatch._
+
+[Illustration: COLONIAL COURT-HOUSE. PHILADELPHIA, 1707]
+
+_THE HOUSEHOLD HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES AND ITS PEOPLE._ For YOUNG
+AMERICANS. By EDWARD EGGLESTON. Richly illustrated with 350 Drawings,
+75 Maps, etc. Square 8vo. Cloth, $2.50.
+
+_FROM THE PREFACE._
+
+The present work is meant, in the first instance, for the young--not
+alone for boys and girls, but for young men and women who have yet to
+make themselves familiar with the more important features of their
+country's history. By a book for the young is meant one in which the
+author studies to make his statements clear and explicit, in which
+curious and picturesque details are inserted, and in which the writer
+does not neglect such anecdotes as lend the charm of a human and
+personal interest to the broader facts of the nation's story. That
+history is often tiresome to the young is not so much the fault of
+history as of a false method of writing by which one contrives to
+relate events without sympathy or imagination, without narrative
+connection or animation. The attempt to master vague and general
+records of kiln-dried facts is certain to beget in the ordinary reader
+a repulsion from the study of history--one of the very most important
+of all studies for its widening influence on general culture.
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: INDIAN'S TRAP.]
+
+"Fills a decided gap which has existed for the past twenty years in
+American historical literature. The work is admirably planned and
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+life, growth, and development of the nation. It is profusely and
+beautifully illustrated."--_Boston Transcript._
+
+"The book in its new dress makes a much finer appearance than before,
+and will be welcomed by older readers as gladly as its predecessor was
+greeted by girls and boys. The lavish use the publishers have made of
+colored plates, woodcuts and photographic reproductions, gives an
+unwonted piquancy to the printed page, catching the eye as surely as
+the text engages the mind."--_New York Critic._
+
+[Illustration: GENERAL PUTNAM.]
+
+"The author writes history as a story. It can never be less than that.
+The book will enlist the interest of young people, enlighten their
+understanding, and by the glow of its statements fix the great events
+of the country firmly in the mind."--_San Francisco Bulletin._
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+New York: D. APPLETON & CO., 1, 3, & 5 Bond Street.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Duffels, by Edward Eggleston
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