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+Project Gutenberg's McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: January 4, 2009 [EBook #27699]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE, VOL 31 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Annie McGuire and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS FROM THE PAINTING BY ELLEN EMMET
+
+  _Copyright, 1908, by Ellen Emmet_]
+
+
+
+
+  McCLURE'S MAGAZINE
+
+  VOL. XXXI      JUNE, 1908       No. 2
+
+  MY FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA
+  THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE
+  PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND HIS WAR ON CONGRESS
+  THE CRYSTAL-GAZER
+  BOB, DÉBUTANT
+  TWO PORTRAITS BY GILBERT STUART
+  MARY BAKER G. EDDY
+  HER FRUITS
+  THE KEY TO THE DOOR
+  THE WAYFARERS
+  THE PROBLEMS OF SUICIDE
+  PRAIRIE DAWN
+  THE DOINGS OF THE DEVIL
+  YOUNG HENRY AND THE OLD MAN
+  EDITORIAL
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  Transcriber's Note: The Table of Contents was
+                      added by the transcriber.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+MY FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA[1]
+
+BY
+
+ELLEN TERRY
+
+
+The first time that there was any talk of my going to America was, I
+think, in 1874, when I was playing in "The Wandering Heir." Dion
+Boucicault wanted me to go, and dazzled me with figures, but I expect
+the cautious Charles Reade influenced me against accepting the
+engagement.
+
+When I did go, in 1883, I was thirty-five and had an assured position in
+my profession. It was the first of eight tours, seven of which I went
+with Henry Irving. The last was in 1907, after his death. I also went to
+America one summer on a pleasure trip. The tours lasted three months at
+least, seven months at most. After a rough calculation, I find that I
+have spent not quite five years of my life in America. Five out of sixty
+is not a large proportion, yet I often feel that I am half American.
+This says a good deal for the hospitality of a people who can make a
+stranger feel so completely at home in their midst. Perhaps it also says
+something for my adaptableness!
+
+"When we do not speak of things with a partiality full of love, what we
+say is not worth being repeated." That was the answer of a courteous
+Frenchman, who was asked for his impressions of a country. In any case
+it is almost imprudent to give one's impressions of America. The country
+is so vast and complex that even those who have amassed mountains of
+impressions soon find that there still are mountains more. I have lived
+in New York, Boston, and Chicago for a month at a time, and have felt
+that to know any of these great towns even superficially would take a
+year. I have become acquainted with this and that class of Americans,
+but I realize that there are thousands of other classes that remain
+unknown.
+
+[Illustration: _Copyrighted by Window & Grove From the collections of
+Miss Frances Johnson and Mrs. Evelyn Smalley_
+
+ELLEN TERRY OPHELIA, AND HENRIETTA MARIA, THREE PARTS WHICH SHE PLAYED
+ON THE FIRST AMERICAN TOUR]
+
+
+_The Unknown Dangers of America_
+
+I set out in 1883 from Liverpool on board the "Britannic" with the fixed
+conviction that I should never, never return. For six weeks before we
+started the word America had only to be breathed to me, and I burst into
+floods of tears! I was leaving my children, my bullfinch, my parrot, my
+"aunt" Boo, whom I never expected to see again alive, just because she
+said I never would, and I was going to face the unknown dangers of the
+Atlantic and of a strange, barbarous land. Our farewell performances in
+London had cheered me up a little--though I wept copiously at every
+one--by showing us that we should be missed. Henry Irving's position
+seemed to be confirmed and ratified by all that took place before his
+departure. The dinners he had to eat, the speeches he had to make and to
+listen to, were really terrific! One speech at the Rabelais Club had, it
+was said, the longest peroration on record. It was this kind of thing:
+"Where is our friend Irving going? He is not going like Nares to face
+the perils of the far North. He is not going like A---- to face
+something else. He is not going to China," etc.--and so on. After about
+the hundredth "he is not going," Lord Houghton, who was one of the
+guests, grew very impatient and interrupted the orator with: "Of course
+he isn't! He's going to New York by the Cunard Line. It'll take him
+about a week!"
+
+
+_New York Before the "Sky-scrapers"_
+
+My first voyage was a voyage of enchantment to me. The ship was laden
+with pig-iron, but she rolled and rolled and rolled. She could never
+roll too much for me. I have always been a splendid sailor, and I feel
+jolly at sea. The sudden leap from home into the wilderness of waves
+does not give me any sensation of melancholy.
+
+What I thought I was going to see when I arrived in America, I hardly
+remember. I had a vague idea that all American women wore red flannel
+shirts and bowie knives and that I might be sandbagged in the street!
+From somewhere or other I had derived an impression that New York was an
+ugly, noisy place.
+
+Ugly! When I first saw that marvellous harbour I nearly cried--it was so
+beautiful. Whenever I come now to the unequalled approach to New York I
+wonder what Americans must think of the approach from the sea to London.
+How different are the mean, flat, marshy banks of the Thames, and the
+wooden toy light-house at Dungeness, to the vast, spreading harbour,
+with its busy multitude of steam boats and ferry boats, its wharf upon
+wharf, and its tall statue of Liberty dominating all the racket and
+bustle of the sea traffic of the world!
+
+That was one of the few times in America when I did not miss the poetry
+of the past. The poetry of the present, gigantic, colossal, and
+enormous, made me forget it. The "sky-scrapers," so splendid in the
+landscape now, did not exist in 1883; but I find it difficult to divide
+my early impressions from my later ones. There was Brooklyn Bridge,
+though, hung up high in the air like a vast spider's web. Between 1883
+and 1893 I noticed a great change in New York and other cities. In ten
+years they seemed to have grown with the energy of tropical plants. But
+between 1893 and 1907 I saw no evidence of such feverish increase. It is
+possible that the Americans are arriving at a stage when they can no
+longer beat the record! There is a vast difference between one of the
+old New York brownstone houses and one of the fourteen-storied buildings
+near the river, but between this and the Times Square Building or the
+still more amazing Flatiron Building, which is said to oscillate at the
+top--it is so far from the ground--there is very little difference. I
+hear that they are now beginning to build downwards into the earth, but
+this will not change the appearance of New York for a long time.
+
+[Illustration: _From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley_
+
+HENRY IRVING AS MATHIAS IN "THE BELLS"
+
+THE PART IN WHICH IRVING MADE HIS FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA]
+
+I had not to endure the wooden shed in which most people landing in
+America have to struggle with the custom-house officials--a struggle as
+brutal as a "round in the ring" as Paul Bourget describes it. We were
+taken off the "Britannic" in a tug, and Mr. Abbey, Lawrence Barrett, and
+many other friends met us--including the much-dreaded reporters.
+
+[Illustration: _Lent by The Century Co._
+
+THE REJECTED DESIGN FOR A COLUMBIAN MEDAL MADE BY AUGUSTUS
+SAINT-GAUDENS]
+
+When we landed, I drove to the Hotel Dam, Henry to the Brevoort House.
+There was no Diana on the top of the Madison Square Building then--the
+building did not exist, to cheer the heart of a new arrival as the first
+evidence of _beauty_ in the city. There were horse trams instead of
+cable cars; but a quarter of a century has not altered the peculiarly
+dilapidated carriages in which one drives from the dock, the muddy
+sidewalks, and the cavernous holes in the cobble-paved streets. Had the
+elevated railway, the first sign of _power_ that one notices after
+leaving the boat, begun to thunder through the streets? I cannot
+remember New York without it.
+
+[Illustration: _Lent by The Century Co._
+
+THE BAS-RELIEF PORTRAIT OF BASTIEN-LEPAGE MODELED BY AUGUSTUS
+SAINT-GAUDENS. SAINT-GAUDENS GAVE A CAST OF THE PORTRAIT TO MISS TERRY]
+
+I missed then, as I miss now, the numberless _hansoms_ of London plying
+in the streets for hire. People in New York get about in the cars,
+unless they have their own carriages. The hired carriage has no reason
+for existing, and when it does, it celebrates its unique position by
+charging two dollars for a journey which in London would not cost fifty
+cents!
+
+[Illustration: THE BAS-RELIEF PORTRAIT OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON MODELED
+BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS FOR THE ST. GILES CATHEDRAL, EDINBURGH.
+SAINT-GAUDENS GAVE A CAST OF THIS PORTRAIT TO MISS TERRY'S DAUGHTER,
+EDITH CRAIG]
+
+
+_Irving Brings Shakespeare to America_
+
+There were very few theatres in New York when we first went there. All
+that part of the city which is now "up town" did not exist, and what was
+then "up" is now more than "down" town. The American stage has changed
+almost as much. Even then there was a liking for local plays which
+showed the peculiarities of the different States, but they were more
+violent and crude than now. The original American genius and the true
+dramatic pleasure of the people is, I believe, in such plays, where very
+complete observation of certain phases of American life and very real
+pictures of manners are combined with comedy almost childlike in its
+naïveté. The sovereignty of the young girl which is such a marked
+feature in social life is reflected in American plays. This is by the
+way. What I want to make clear is that in 1883 there was no living
+American drama as there is now, that such productions of romantic plays
+and Shakespeare as Henry Irving brought over from England, were unknown,
+and that the extraordinary success of our first tours would be
+impossible now. We were the first, and we were pioneers and we were
+_new_. To be new is everything in America. Such palaces as the Hudson
+Theatre, New York, were not dreamed of when we were at the Star, which
+was, however, quite equal to any theatre in London, in front of the
+footlights. The stage itself, the lighting appliances, and the
+dressing-rooms were inferior.
+
+[Illustration: HENRY IRVING AS HAMLET
+
+FROM THE STATUE BY E. ONSLOW FORD, R. A., IN THE GUILDHALL OF THE CITY OF
+LONDON]
+
+[Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS IMOGEN
+
+DRAWN BY ALMA-TADEMA FOR MISS TERRY'S JUBILEE IN 1906]
+
+[Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS PORTIA
+
+FROM THE PAINTING BY SIR JOHN MILLAIS, R. A.]
+
+
+_Our First Appearance Before an American Audience_
+
+Henry made his first appearance in America in "The Bells." He was not at
+his best on the first night, but he could be pretty good even when he
+was not at his best. I watched him from a box. Nervousness made the
+company very slow. The audience was a splendid one--discriminating and
+appreciative. We felt that the Americans _wanted_ to like us. We felt in
+a few days so extraordinarily at home. The first sensation of entering a
+foreign city was quickly wiped out.
+
+[Illustration: WILLIAM WINTER--
+
+ONE OF THE FIRST CRITICS TO WELCOME IRVING TO THIS COUNTRY]
+
+On the second night in New York it was my turn. "Command yourself--this
+is the time to show you can act!" I said to myself as I went on the
+stage of the Star Theatre, dressed as Henrietta Maria. But I could not
+command myself. I played badly and cried too much in the last act. But
+the people liked me, and they liked the play, perhaps because it was
+historical, and of history the Americans are passionately fond. The
+audience took many points which had been ignored in London. I had always
+thought Henry as Charles I. most moving when he made that involuntary
+effort to kneel to his subject, Moray, but the Lyceum audiences never
+seemed to notice it. In New York the audience burst out into the most
+sympathetic, spontaneous applause that I have ever heard in a theatre.
+
+
+_American Clothes_
+
+My impression of the way the American women dressed in 1883 was not
+favourable. Some of them wore Indian shawls and diamond ear-rings. They
+dressed too grandly in the street and too dowdily in the theatre. All
+this has changed. The stores in New York are now the most beautiful in
+the world, and the women are dressed to perfection. They are as clever
+at the _demi-toilette_ as the Parisian, and the extreme neatness and
+smartness of their walking gowns is very refreshing after the floppy,
+blowsy, trailing dresses, accompanied by the inevitable feather boa, of
+which English girls, who used to be so tidy and "tailor-made," now seem
+so fond. The universal white "waist" is so pretty and trim on the
+American girl. It is one of the distinguishing marks of a land of the
+free, a land where "class" hardly exists. The girl in the store wears
+the white waist; so does the rich girl on Fifth Avenue. It costs
+anything from seventy-five cents to fifty dollars!
+
+London, when I come back from America, always seems at first like an
+ill-lighted village, strangely tame, peaceful, and backward. Above all,
+I miss the sunlight of America, and the clear blue skies of an evening.
+
+"Are you glad to get back?" said an English friend.
+
+"Very."
+
+"It's a land of vulgarity, isn't it?"
+
+"Oh, yes, if you mean by that a wonderful land--a land of sunshine and
+light, of happiness, of faith in the future!" I answered. I saw no
+misery or poverty there. Everyone looked happy. What hurts me on coming
+back to England is the _hopeless_ look on so many faces; the dejection
+and apathy of the people standing about in the streets. Of course there
+is poverty in New York, but not among the Americans. The Italians, the
+Russians, the Poles--all the host of immigrants washed in daily across
+the harbour--these are poor, but you don't see them unless you go Bowery
+ways and even then you can't help feeling that in their sufferings there
+is always hope. Vulgarity? I saw little of it. I thought that the people
+who had amassed large fortunes used their wealth beautifully. When a man
+is rich enough to build himself a big, new house, he remembers some old
+house which he once admired, and he has it imitated with all the
+technical skill and care that can be had in America. This accounts for
+the odd jumble of styles in Fifth Avenue, along the lake-side in
+Chicago, in the new avenues in St. Louis and elsewhere. One
+millionaire's house is modelled on a French château, another on an old
+Colonial house in Virginia, another on a monastery in Mexico, another is
+like an Italian _palazzo_. And their imitations are never weak or
+pretentious. The architects in America seem to me to be far more able
+than ours, or else they have a freer hand and more money.
+
+
+_The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens_
+
+It is sad to remember that Mr. Stanford White was one of the best of
+these splendid architects. It was Stanford White with Saint-Gaudens,
+that great sculptor, whose work dignifies nearly all the great cities in
+America, who had most to do with the Exhibition buildings of the World's
+Fair in Chicago in 1893. It was odd to see that fair dream city rising
+out of the lake, so far more beautiful in its fleeting loveliness than
+the Chicago of the stock-yards and the pit which had provided the money
+for its beauty. The millionaires did not interfere with the artists at
+all. They gave their thousands--and stood aside. The result was one of
+the loveliest things conceivable. Saint-Gaudens and the rest did their
+work as well as though the buildings were to endure for centuries
+instead of being burned in a year to save the trouble of pulling down!
+The World's Fair recalled to me the story of how Michelangelo carved a
+figure in snow which, says the chronicler Vasari who saw it, "was
+superb."
+
+Saint-Gaudens gave me a cast of his medallion of Bastien-Lepage, and
+wrote to a friend of mine: "Bastien had '_le coeur au métier_.' So has
+Miss Terry, and I will place that saying in the frame that is to replace
+the present unsatisfactory one." He was very fastidious about this frame
+and took such a lot of trouble to get it right.
+
+It must have been very irritating to Saint-Gaudens when he fell a victim
+to that extraordinary official Puritanism which sometimes exercises a
+petty censorship over works of art in America. The medal that he made
+for the World's Fair was rejected at Washington because it had on it a
+beautiful little nude figure of a boy--holding an olive
+branch--emblematical of young America. I think a commonplace wreath and
+some lettering were substituted.
+
+Saint-Gaudens did the fine bas-relief of Robert Louis Stevenson which
+was chosen for the monument in St. Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh. He gave
+my daughter a medallion cast from this, because he knew that she was a
+great lover of Stevenson. The bas-relief was dedicated to his friend,
+Joe Evans. I knew Saint-Gaudens first through Joe Evans, an artist who,
+while he lived, was to me and to my daughter the dearest of all in
+America. His character was so fine and noble--his nature so perfect.
+Many were the birthday cards he did for me, original in design,
+beautiful in execution. Whatever he did, he put the best of himself
+into it. I wrote this in my diary the year he died:
+
+     "I heard on Saturday that our dear Joe Evans is dangerously ill.
+     Yesterday came the worst news. Joe was not happy, but he was just
+     heroic, and this world wasn't half good enough for him. I wonder if
+     he has gone to a better. I keep on getting letters about him. He
+     seems to have been so glad to die. It was like a child's funeral, I
+     am told, and all his American friends seem to have been
+     there--Saint-Gaudens, Taber, etc. A poem about the dear fellow by
+     Mr. Gilder has one very good line in which he says the grave 'might
+     snatch a brightness from his presence there.' I thought that was
+     very happy, the love of light and gladness being the most
+     remarkable thing about him, the dear sad Joe."
+
+
+_Robert Taber_
+
+Robert Taber, dear, and rather sad too, was a great friend of Joe's.
+They both came to me first in the shape of a little book in which was
+inscribed: "Never anything can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender
+it." "Upon this hint I spake," the book began. It was all the work of a
+few boys and girls who from the gallery of the Star Theatre, New York,
+had watched Irving's productions and learned to love him and me. Joe
+Evans had done a lovely picture by way of frontispiece of a group of
+eager heads hanging over the gallery's edge, his own and Taber's among
+them. Eventually Taber came to England and acted with Henry Irving in
+"Peter the Great" and other plays.
+
+Like his friend Joe, he too was heroic. His health was bad and his life
+none too happy--but he struggled on. His career was cut short by
+consumption and he died in the Adirondacks in 1904.
+
+I cannot speak of all my friends in America, or anywhere, for the matter
+of that, _individually_. My personal friends are so many, and they are
+_all_ wonderful--wonderfully staunch to me! I have "tried" them so, and
+they have never given me up as a bad job.
+
+
+_Dramatic Criticism in America_
+
+William Winter, poet, critic, and exquisite man, was one of the first to
+write of Henry with whole-hearted appreciation. But all the criticism in
+America, favourable and unfavourable, surprised us by the scholarly
+knowledge it displayed. In Chicago the notices were worthy of the
+_Temps_ or the _Journal des Débats_. There was no attempt to force the
+personality of the writer into the foreground nor to write a style that
+would attract attention to the critic and leave the thing criticised to
+take care of itself. William Winter and, of late years, Alan Dale have
+had their personalities associated with their criticisms, but they are
+exceptions. Curiously enough, the art of acting appears to bore most
+dramatic critics, the very people who might be expected to be interested
+in it. The American critics, however, at the time of our early visits,
+were keenly interested, and showed it by their observation of many
+points which our English critics had passed over. For instance, writing
+of "Much Ado about Nothing," one of the Americans said of Henry in the
+Church Scene that "something of him as a subtle interpreter of doubtful
+situations was exquisitely shown in the early part of this fine scene by
+his suspicion of Don John--felt by him alone, and expressed only by a
+quick covert look, but a look so full of intelligence as to proclaim him
+a sharer in the secret with his audience."
+
+"Wherein does the superiority lie?" wrote another critic in comparing
+our productions with those which had been seen in America up to 1884.
+"Not in the amount of money expended, but in the amount of brains; in
+the artistic intelligence and careful and earnest pains with which every
+detail is studied and worked out. Nor is there any reason why Mr. Irving
+or any other foreigner should have a monopoly of either intelligence or
+pains. They are common property and one man's money can buy them as well
+as another's. The defect in the American manager's policy heretofore has
+been that he has squandered his money upon high salaries for a few of
+his actors; and in costly, because unintelligent, expenditure for mere
+dazzle and show."
+
+
+_William Winter and His Children_
+
+William Winter soon became a great personal friend of ours, and visited
+us in England. He was one of the few _sad_ people I met in America. He
+could have sat upon the ground and "told sad stories of the deaths of
+kings" with the best. In England he loved going to see graveyards, and
+knew where every poet was buried. He was very familiar with the poetry
+of the _immediate_ past--Cowper, Coleridge, Gray, Wordsworth, Shelley,
+Keats, and the rest. He _liked_ us, so everything we did was right to
+him. He could not help being guided entirely by his feelings. If he
+disliked a thing, he had no use for it. Some men can say, "I hate this
+play, but of its kind it is admirable." Willie Winter could never take
+that unemotional point of view.
+
+His children came to stay with me in London. When we were all coming
+home from the theatre one night after Faust (the year must have been
+1886), I said to little Willie:
+
+"Well, what do you think of the play?"
+
+"Oh my!" said he, "it takes the cake."
+
+"Takes the _cake_," said his little sister scornfully. "It takes the
+ice-cream!"
+
+"Won't you give me a kiss?" said Henry to the same little girl one
+night.
+
+"No, I _won't_, with all that blue stuff on your face." (He was made up
+for Mephistopheles.) Then, after a pause, "But why--why don't you _take_
+it!" She was only five years old at the time!
+
+
+_Discovering the Southern Darkey_
+
+For quite a while during the first tour I stayed in Washington with my
+friend, Miss Olive Seward, and all the servants of that delightful
+household were coloured. This was my first introduction to the negroes,
+whose presence in the country makes America seem more foreign than
+anything to European eyes. They are more sharply divided into high and
+low types than white people, and are not in the least alike in their
+types. It is safe to call any coloured man "George." They all love it,
+perhaps because of George Washington; and most of them are really named
+George. I never met with such perfect service as they can give. _Some_
+of them are delightful. The beautiful, full voice of the "darkey" is so
+attractive--so soothing, and they are so deft and gentle. Some of the
+women are beautiful, and all the young appeared to me to be well-formed.
+As for the babies! I washed two or three little piccaninnies when I was
+in the South, and the way they rolled their gorgeous eyes at me was "too
+cute," which means, in British-English, "fascinating."
+
+At the Washington house, the servants danced a cake-walk for me--the
+coloured cook, a magnificent type, who "took the cake," saying, "That
+was because I chose a good handsome boy to dance with, Missie." They
+sang, too. Their voices were beautiful--with such illimitable power, yet
+as sweet as treacle.
+
+The little page boy had a pet of a woolly head--Henry once gave him a
+tip, a "fee," in American-English, and said: "There, that's for a new
+wig when this one is worn out," gently pulling the astrakhan-like hair.
+The tip would have bought him many wigs, I think!
+
+"Why, Uncle Tom, how your face shines to-night!" said my hostess to one
+of the very old servants.
+
+"Yes, Missie, glycerine and rose-water, Missie!"
+
+He had taken some from her dressing-table to shine up his face in honour
+of me! A shiny complexion is considered to be a great beauty among the
+blacks. The dear old man! He was very bent and very old; and looked like
+one of the logs that he used to bring in for the fire--a log from some
+hoary, lichened tree whose life was long since past. He would produce
+pins from his head when you wanted one; he had them stuck in his pad of
+white woolly hair. "Always handy then, Missie," he would say.
+
+"Ask them to sing 'Sweet Violets,' Uncle Tom."
+
+He was acting as a sort of master of the ceremonies at the entertainment
+the servants were giving me.
+
+"Don't think they know dat, Miss Olly."
+
+"Why I heard them singing it the other night!" And she hummed the tune.
+
+"Oh, dat was 'Sweet Vio-_letts_,' Miss Olly!"
+
+
+_American Women_
+
+Washington was the first city I had seen in America where the people did
+not hurry, and where the social life did not seem entirely the work of
+women. The men asserted themselves here as something more than machines
+in the background, untiringly turning out the dollars while their wives
+and daughters give luncheons and teas at which only women are present.
+
+Beautifully as the women dress, they talk very little about clothes. I
+was much struck by their culture--by the evidence that they had read far
+more and developed a more fastidious taste than most young Englishwomen.
+Yet it is all mixed up with extraordinary naïveté. Their vivacity, the
+appearance, at least, of _reality_, the animation, the energy of
+American women, delighted me. They are very sympathetic, too, in spite
+of a certain callousness which comes of regarding everything in life,
+even love, as "lots of fun." I did not think that they, or the men
+either, had much natural sense of beauty. They admire beauty in a
+curious way through their intellect. Nearly every American girl has a
+cast of the winged Victory of the Louvre in her room. She makes it a
+point of her _education_ to admire it.
+
+There! I am beginning to generalize--the very thing I was resolute to
+avoid. How silly to generalize about a country which embraces such
+extremes of climate as the sharp winters of Boston and New York, and the
+warm winds of Florida which blow through palms and orange groves!
+
+
+
+
+THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE
+
+BY MARIE BELLOC LOWNDES
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTHUR G. DOVE
+
+
+James Tapster was eating his solitary, well-cooked dinner in his
+comfortable and handsome house, a house situated in one of the half-moon
+terraces which line and frame the more aristocratic side of Regent's
+Park, and which may, indeed, be said to have private grounds of their
+own, for each resident enjoys the use of a key to a portion of the Park
+entitled locally the "Inclosure."
+
+Very early in his life Mr. Tapster had made up his mind that he would
+like to live in Cumberland Crescent, and now he was living there; very
+early in his life he had decided that no one could order a plain yet
+palatable meal as well as he could himself, and now for some months past
+Mr. Tapster had given his own orders, each morning, to the cook.
+
+To-night Mr. Tapster had already eaten his fried sole, and was about to
+cut himself off a generous portion of the grilled undercut before him,
+when he heard the postman's steps hurrying around the Crescent. He rose
+with a certain quick deliberateness, and, going out into the hall,
+opened the front door just in time to avoid the rat-tat-tat. Then, the
+one letter he had expected duly in his hand, he waited till he had sat
+down again in front of his still empty plate before he broke the seal
+and glanced over the type-written sheet of note-paper:
+
+    SHORTERS COURT,
+    THROGMORTON ST.
+    November 4, 190-.
+
+    DEAR JAMES:
+
+    In reply to your letter of yesterday's date, I have been to Bedford
+    Row and seen Greenfield, and he thinks it probable that the Decree
+    will be made Absolute to-day; in that case you will have received a
+    wire before this letter reaches you.
+
+    Your affect' brother,
+    WM. A. TAPSTER.
+
+In the same handwriting as the signature were added two holograph lines:
+"Glad you have the children home again. Maud will be round to see them
+soon."
+
+Mr. Tapster read over once again the body of the letter, and there came
+upon him an instinctive feeling of intense relief; then, with a not less
+instinctive feeling of impatience, his eyes traveled down again to the
+postscript: "Maud will be round to see them soon." Well, he would see
+about that! But he did not exclaim, even mentally, as most men feeling
+as he then felt would have done, "I'll be damned if she will!" knowing
+the while that Maud certainly would.
+
+His brother's letter, though most satisfactory as regarded its main
+point, put Mr. Tapster out of conceit with the rest of his dinner; so he
+rang twice and had the table cleared, frowning at the parlor-maid as she
+hurried through her duties, and yet not daring to rebuke her for having
+neglected to answer the bell the first time he rang. After a pause, he
+rose and turned toward the door--but no, he could not face the large,
+cheerless drawing-room up-stairs; instead, he sat down by the fire, and
+set himself to consider his future and, in a more hazy sense, that of
+his now motherless children.
+
+But very soon, as generally happens to those who devote any time to that
+least profitable of occupations, Mr. Tapster found that his thoughts
+drifted aimlessly, not to the future where he would have them be, but to
+the past--that past which he desired to forget, to obliterate from his
+memory.
+
+Till rather more than a year ago few men of his age--he had then been
+sixty, he was now sixty-one--enjoyed a pleasanter and, from his own
+point of view, a better filled life than James Tapster. How he had
+scorned the gambler, the spendthrift, the adulterer--in a word, all
+those whose actions bring about their own inevitable punishment! He had
+always been self-respecting and conscientious--not a prig, mind you, but
+inclined rather to the serious than to the flippant side of life; and,
+so inclining, he had found contentment and great material prosperity.
+
+Not even in those days to which he was now looking back so regretfully
+had Mr. Tapster always been perfectly content; but now the poor man,
+sitting alone by his dining-room fire, remembered only what had been
+good and pleasant in his former state. He was aware that his brother
+William and William's wife, Maud, both thought that even now he had much
+to be thankful for. His line of business was brisk, scarcely touched by
+foreign competition, his income increasing at a steady rate of
+progression, and his children were exceptionally healthy. But, alas! now
+that, in place of there being a pretty little Mrs. Tapster on whom to
+spend easily earned money, his substance was being squandered by a crowd
+of unmanageable and yet indispensable thieves,--for so Mr. Tapster
+voicelessly described the five servants whose loud talk and laughter
+were even now floating up from the basement below,--he did not feel his
+financial stability so comfortable a thing as he had once done. His very
+children, who should now be, as he told himself complainingly, his
+greatest comfort, had degenerated from two sturdy, well-behaved little
+boys and a charming baby girl into three unruly, fretful imps, setting
+him at defiance, and terrorizing their two attendants, who, though
+carefully chosen by their Aunt Maud, did not seem to manage them as well
+as the old nurse who had been an ally of the ex-Mrs. Tapster.
+
+Looking back at the whole horrible affair--for so, in his own mind, Mr.
+Tapster justly designated the divorce case in which he had figured as
+the successful petitioner--he wondered uneasily if he had done quite
+wisely--wisely, that is, for his own repute and comfort.
+
+He knew very well that had it not been for William, or rather, for Maud,
+he would never have found out the dreadful truth. Nay, more, he was
+dimly aware that but for them, and for their insistence on it as the
+only proper course open to him, he would never have taken action. All
+would have been forgiven and forgotten, had not William, and more
+especially Maud, said he must divorce Flossy, if not for his own
+sake,--ah, what irony!--then for that of his children.
+
+Of course, he felt grateful to his brother William and to his brother's
+wife for all they had done for him since that sad time. Still, in the
+depths of his heart, Mr. Tapster felt entitled to blame and sometimes
+almost to hate his kind brother and sister. To them both, or rather, to
+Maud, he really owed the break-up of his life; for, when all was said
+and done, it had to be admitted (though Maud did not like him to remind
+her of it), that Flossy had met the villain while staying with the
+William Tapsters at Boulogne. Respectable London people should have
+known better than to take a furnished house at a disreputable French
+watering-place, a place full of low English!
+
+Sometimes it was only by a great exercise of self-control that he, James
+Tapster, could refrain from telling Maud what he thought of her conduct
+in this matter, the more so that she never seemed to understand how
+greatly she--and William--had been to blame. On one occasion Maud had
+even said how surprised she had been that James had cared to go away to
+America, leaving his pretty young wife alone for as long as three
+months. Why hadn't she said so at the time, then? Of course, he had
+thought that he could leave Flossy to be looked after and kept out of
+mischief by Maud and William. But he had been, in more than one sense,
+alas! bitterly deceived.
+
+Still, it's never any use crying over spilt milk, so Mr. Tapster got up
+from his chair and walked around the room, looking absently, as he did
+so, at the large Landseer engravings, of which he was naturally proud.
+If only he could forget, put out of his mind forever, the whole affair!
+Well, perhaps with the Decree being made Absolute would come oblivion.
+
+He sat down again before the fire. Staring at the hot embers, he
+reminded himself that Flossy, wicked, ungrateful Flossy, had disappeared
+out of his life. This being so, why think of her? The very children had
+at last left off asking inconvenient questions about their mama.
+
+By the way, would Flossy still be their mama after the Decree had been
+made Absolute? So Mr. Tapster now suddenly asked himself. He hesitated,
+perplexed. But, yes, the Decree being made Absolute would not undo, or
+even efface, that fact. The more so--though surely here James Tapster
+showed himself less logical than usual--the more so that Flossy, in
+spite of what Maud had always said about her, had been a loving and, in
+her own light-hearted way, a careful mother. But, though Flossy would
+remain the mother of his children,--odd that the Law hadn't provided for
+that contingency--she would soon be absolutely nothing, and less than
+nothing, to him, the father of those children. Mr. Tapster was a great
+believer in the infallibility of the Law, and he subscribed
+whole-heartedly to the new reading, "What Law has put asunder, let no
+man join together."
+
+To-night Mr. Tapster could not help looking back with a certain
+complacency to his one legal adventure. Nothing could have been better
+done or more admirably conducted than the way the whole matter had been
+carried through. His brother William, and William's solicitor, Mr.
+Greenfield, had managed it all so very nicely. True, there had been a
+few uncomfortable moments in the witness-box, but every one, including
+the judge, had been most kind. As for his counsel, the leading man who
+makes a specialty of these sad affairs, not even James Tapster himself
+could have put his own case in a more delicate and moving fashion. "A
+gentleman possessed of considerable fortune--" so had he justly been
+described; and counsel, without undue insistence on irrelevant detail,
+had drawn a touching and a true picture of Mr. Tapster's one romance,
+his marriage eight years before to the twenty-year-old daughter of an
+undischarged bankrupt. Even the Petitioner had scarcely seen Flossy's
+dreadful ingratitude in its true colors till he had heard his counsel's
+moderate comments on the case.
+
+[Illustration: "HE REMINDED HIMSELF THAT FLOSSY, WICKED, UNGRATEFUL
+FLOSSY, HAD DISAPPEARED OUT OF HIS LIFE"]
+
+This evening Mr. Tapster saw Flossy's dreadful ingratitude terribly
+clearly, and he wondered, not for the first time, how his wife could
+have had the heart to break up his happy home. Why, but for him and his
+offer of marriage, Flossy Ball--that had been his wife's maiden
+name--would have had to earn her own living! And as she had been very
+pretty, very "fetching," she would probably have married some
+good-for-nothing young fellow of her own age, lacking the means to
+support a wife in decent comfort,--such a fellow, for instance, as the
+wretched "co" in the case; while with Mr. Tapster--why, she had had
+everything the heart of woman could wish for--a good home, beautiful
+clothes, and the being waited on hand and foot. A strange choking
+feeling came into his throat as he thought of how good he had been to
+Flossy, and how very bad had been her return for that kindness.
+
+But this--this was dreadful! He was actually thinking of her again, and
+not, as he had meant to do, of himself and his poor motherless children!
+Time enough to think of Flossy when he had news of her again. If her
+lover did not marry her--and, from what Mr. Greenfield had discovered
+about him, it was most improbable that he would ever be in a position to
+do so--she would certainly reappear on the Tapster horizon: Mr.
+Greenfield said "they" always did. In that case, it was arranged that
+William should pay her a weekly allowance. Mr. Tapster, always, as he
+now reminded himself sadly, ready to do the generous thing, had fixed
+that allowance at three pounds a week, a sum which had astonished, in
+fact quite staggered, Mr. Greenfield's head clerk, a very decent fellow,
+by the way.
+
+"Of course, it shall be as you wish, Mr. Tapster, but you should think
+of the future and of your children. A hundred and fifty pounds a year is
+a large sum; you may feel it a tax, sir, as years go on----"
+
+"That is enough," Mr. Tapster had answered, kindly but firmly; "you have
+done your duty in laying that side of the case before me. I have,
+however, decided on the amount named; should I see reason to alter my
+mind, our arrangement leaves it open to me at any time to lower the
+allowance."
+
+But, though this conversation had taken place some months ago, and
+though Mr. Tapster still held true to his generous resolve, as yet
+Flossy had not reappeared. Mr. Tapster sometimes told himself that if he
+only knew where she was, what she was doing,--whether she was still with
+that young fellow, for instance,--he would think much less about her
+than he did now. Only last night, going for a moment into the night
+nursery,--poor Mr. Tapster now enjoyed his children's company only when
+he was quite sure that they were asleep,--he had had an extraordinary,
+almost a physical impression of Flossy's presence; he certainly had felt
+a faint whiff of her favorite perfume. Flossy had been fond of scent,
+and, though Maud always said that the use of scent was most unladylike,
+he, James, did not dislike it.
+
+With sudden soreness, Mr. Tapster now recalled the one letter Flossy had
+written to him just before the actual hearing of the divorce suit. It
+had been a wild, oddly worded appeal to him to take her back, not--as
+Maud had at once perceived on reading the letter--because she was sorry
+for the terrible thing she had done, but simply because she was
+beginning to hanker after her children. Maud had described the letter as
+shameless and unwomanly in the extreme, and even William, who had never
+judged his pretty young sister-in-law as severely as his wife had always
+done, had observed sadly that Flossy seemed quite unaware of the
+magnitude of her offense against God and man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Tapster, who prided himself on his sharp ears, suddenly heard a
+curious little sound. He knew it for that of the front door being first
+opened, and then shut again, extremely quietly. He half rose from his
+chair by the fire, then sat down again heavily.
+
+By Maud's advice, he always locked the area gate himself when he came
+home each evening. But how foolish of Maud--such a sensible woman,
+too--to think that servants and their evil ways could be circumvented so
+easily. Of course, the maids went in and out by the front door in the
+evening, and the policeman--a most respectable officer standing at point
+duty a few yards lower down the road--must be well aware of these
+disgraceful "goings on".
+
+For the first two or three months of his widowerhood (how else could he
+term his present peculiar wifeless condition?) there had been a constant
+coming and going of servants, first chosen, and then dismissed, by Maud.
+At last she suggested that her brother-in-law should engage a lady
+housekeeper, and the luckless James Tapster had even interviewed several
+applicants for the post after they had been chosen--sifted out, as it
+were--by Maud. Unfortunately, they had all been more or less of his own
+age, and plain, very plain; while he, naturally enough, would have
+preferred to see something young and pretty about him again.
+
+It was over this housekeeper question that he had at last escaped from
+Maud's domestic thraldom; for his sister-in-law, offended by his
+rejection of each of her candidates, had declared that she would take no
+more trouble about his household affairs! Nay, more, she had reminded
+him with a smile that she had honestly tried to make pleasant, that
+there is, after all, no fool like an old fool--about women. This
+insinuation had made Mr. Tapster very angry, and straightway he had
+engaged a respectable cook-housekeeper, and, although he had soon become
+aware that the woman was feathering her own nest,--James Tapster, as you
+will have divined ere now, was fond of good workaday phrases,--yet she
+had a pleasant, respectful manner, and kept rough order among the
+younger servants.
+
+Mr. Tapster's sister-in-law now interfered only where his children were
+concerned. Never having been herself a mother, she had, of course, been
+able to form a clear and unprejudiced judgment as to how children, and
+especially as to how little boys, should be physically and mentally
+trained. As yet, however, Maud had not been very successful with her two
+nephews and infant niece, but this was doubtless owing to the fact that
+there had been something gravely amiss with each of the five nurses who
+had been successively engaged by her during the last year.
+
+The elder of Mr. Tapster's sons was six, and the second four; the
+youngest child, a little girl named, unfortunately, Flora, after her
+mother, was three years old. There had been a fourth, Flossy's second
+baby, also a girl, who had only lived one day. All this being so, was it
+not strange that a young matron who had led, for some four years out of
+the eight years her married life had lasted, so wholly womanly and
+domestic an existence as had fallen to the lot of Flossy, should have
+been led astray by the meretricious allurements of unlawful
+love?--Maud's striking thought and phrase, this.
+
+[Illustration: "THERE STOOD CLOSE TO HIM, SO CLOSE THAT HE COULD ALMOST
+HAVE TOUCHED HER, FLOSSY, HIS WIFE"]
+
+And yet, Flossy, in spite of her frivolity, had somehow managed the
+children far better than Maud was now able to do. At the present time,
+so Mr. Tapster admitted to himself with something very like an inward
+groan, his two sons possessed every vice of which masculine infancy is
+capable. They had become, so he was told by their indignant nurses, the
+terror of the well-behaved children who shared with them the pleasures
+of the Park Inclosure, where they took their daily exercise; and Baby,
+once so sweet and good, was now very fretful and peevish.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again the train of Mr. Tapster's mournful thoughts was disturbed by a
+curious little sound--that of some one creeping softly down the
+staircase leading from the upper floors. Once more he half rose from his
+chair, only to fall heavily back again, with a look of impotent
+annoyance on his round, whiskered face. Where was the use of his going
+out into the hall and catching Nurse on her way to the kitchen? Maud had
+declared, very early in the day, that there should be as little
+communication as possible between the kitchen and the nursery, but Mr.
+Tapster sometimes found himself in secret sympathy with the two women
+whose disagreeable duty it was to be always with his three turbulent
+children.
+
+Mr. Tapster frowned and stared gloomily into the fire; then he suddenly
+pulled himself together rather sharply, for the door behind him had
+slowly swung open. This was intolerable! The parlor-maid had again and
+again been told that, whatever might have been the case in her former
+places, no door in Mr. Tapster's house was to be opened without the
+preliminary of a respectful knock.
+
+Fortified by the memory of what had been a positive order, he turned
+round, nerving himself to deliver the necessary rebuke. But instead of
+the shifty-eyed, impudent-looking woman he had thought to see, there
+stood close to him, so close that he could almost have touched her,
+Flossy, his wife, or rather the woman who, though no longer his wife,
+had still, as he had been informed to his discomfiture, the right to
+bear his name.
+
+A very strange feeling, and one so complicated that it sat uneasily upon
+him, took instant possession of Mr. Tapster: anger, surprise, and relief
+warred with one another in his heart.
+
+Then he began to think that his eyes must be playing him some curious
+trick, for the figure at which he was staring remained strangely still
+and motionless. Was it possible that his mind, dwelling constantly on
+Flossy, had evoked her wraith? But, no, looking up in startled silence
+at the still figure standing before him, he realized that not so would
+memory have conjured up the pretty, bright little woman of whom he had
+once been proud. Flossy still looked pretty, but she was thin and pale,
+and there were dark rings round her eyes; also, her dress was worn, her
+hat curiously shabby.
+
+As Mr. Tapster stared up at her, noting these things, one of her hands
+began playing nervously with the fringe of the dining-table cover, and
+the other sought the back of what had once been one of her dining-room
+chairs. As he watched her making these slight movements, nature so far
+reasserted itself that a feeling of poignant regret, of pity for her, as
+well as, of course, a much larger share of pity for himself, came over
+James Tapster.
+
+Had Flossy spoken then,--had she possessed the intuitive knowledge of
+men which is the gift of so many otherwise unintelligent women,--the
+whole of Mr. Tapster's future, to say nothing of her own, might have
+been different and, it may be suggested, happier.
+
+But the moment of softening and mansuetude slipped quickly by, and was
+succeeded by a burst of anger; for Mr. Tapster suddenly became aware
+that Flossy's left hand, the little thin hand resting on the back of the
+chair, was holding two keys which he recognized at once as his property.
+The one was a replica of the latch-key which always hung on his
+watch-chain, while the other and larger key, to which was attached a
+brass tag bearing the name of Tapster and the address of the house, gave
+access to the Inclosure Garden opposite Cumberland Crescent!
+
+Avoiding her eager, pitiful look, Mr. Tapster set himself to realize,
+with a shrewdness for which William and Maud would never have given him
+credit, what Flossy's possession of those two keys had meant during the
+last few months.
+
+This woman, who both was and was not Mrs. Tapster, had retained the
+power to come freely in and out of _his_ house! She had been able to
+make her way, with or without the connivance of the servants, into _his_
+children's nursery at any hour of the day or night convenient to
+herself! With the aid of that Inclosure key, she had no doubt often seen
+the children during their daily walk! In a word, Flossy had been able to
+enjoy all the privileges of motherhood while having forfeited all those
+of happy wifehood!
+
+His mind hastened heavily on. What a fool he must have looked before
+his servants! How they must have laughed to think that he was being so
+deceived and taken in! Why, even the policeman who stood at point duty
+outside must have known all about it!
+
+Small wonder that Mr. Tapster felt extremely incensed; small wonder that
+his heart, hardening, solidifying, expelled any feeling of pity provoked
+by Flossy's sad and downcast appearance.
+
+"I must request you," he said, in a voice which even to himself sounded
+harsh and needlessly loud, "to give me up those keys which you hold in
+your hand. You have no right to their possession, and I grieve to think
+that you took advantage of my great distress of mind not to return them
+with the things of which I sent you a list by my brother William. I
+cannot believe"--and now Mr. Tapster lied as only the very truthful can
+lie on occasion--"I cannot believe, I say, that you have taken advantage
+of my having overlooked them, and that you have ever before to-night
+forced yourself into this house! Still less can I believe that you have
+taught our--_my_--children to deceive their father!"
+
+Even when uttering his first sentence, he had noticed that there had
+come over Flossy's face--which was thinner, if quite as pretty and
+youthful-looking, as when he had last seen it--an expression of
+obstinacy which he had once well known and always dreaded. It had been
+Flossy's one poor weapon against her husband's superior sense and power
+of getting his own way, and sometimes it had vanquished him in that fair
+fight which is always being waged between the average husband and wife.
+
+"You are right," she cried passionately. "I have not taught the children
+to deceive you! I have never come into this house until I felt sure that
+they were asleep and alone, though I've often wondered that they never
+woke up and knew that their own mother was there! But more than once,
+James, I've felt like going after that society which looks after badly
+treated children--for the last nurse you had for them was so cruel! If
+she hadn't left you soon I should have _had_ to do something! I used to
+feel desperate when I saw her shake Baby in her pram; why, one day, in
+the Inclosure, a lady spoke to her about it, and threatened to tell
+her--her mistress----"
+
+Flossy's voice sank to a shamed whisper. The tears were rolling down her
+cheeks; she was speaking in angry gasps, and what she said actually made
+James Tapster feel, what he knew full well he had no reason to feel,
+ashamed of himself. "That is why," she went on, "that is why I have, as
+you say, forced myself into your house, and why, too, I have now come
+here to ask you to forgive me--to take me back--just for the sake of the
+children."
+
+Mr. Tapster's mind was one that traveled surely, if slowly. He saw his
+chance, and seized it. "And why," he said impressively, "had that
+woman--the nurse, I mean--no mistress? Tell me that, Flossy. You should
+have thought of all that before you behaved as you did!"
+
+"I didn't know--I didn't think----"
+
+Mr. Tapster finished the sentence for her: "You didn't think," he
+observed impressively, "that I should ever find you out."
+
+Then there came over him a morbid wish to discover--to learn from her
+own lips--why Flossy had done such a shameful and extraordinary thing as
+to be unfaithful to her marriage vow.
+
+"Whatever made you behave so?" he asked in a low voice. "I wasn't unkind
+to you, was I? You had a nice, comfortable home, hadn't you?"
+
+"I was mad," she answered, with a touch of sharp weariness. "I don't
+suppose I could ever make you understand; and yet,"--she looked at him
+deprecatingly,--"I suppose, James, that you too were young once,
+and--and--mad?"
+
+Mr. Tapster stared at Flossy. What extraordinary things she said! Of
+course he had been young once; for the matter of that, he didn't feel
+old--not to say _old_--even now. But he had always been perfectly
+sane--she knew that well enough! As for her calling herself mad, that
+was a mere figure of speech. Of course, in a sense, she had been mad to
+do what she had done, and he was glad that she now understood this; but
+her saying so simply begged the whole question, and left him no wiser
+than he was before.
+
+There was a long, tense silence between them. Then Mr. Tapster slowly
+rose from his arm-chair and faced his wife.
+
+"I see," he said, "that William was right. I mean, I suppose I may take
+it that that young fellow has gone and left you?"
+
+"Yes," she said, with a curious indifference, "he has gone and left me.
+His father made him take a job out in Brazil just after the case was
+through."
+
+"And what have you been doing since then?" asked Mr. Tapster
+suspiciously. "How have you been living?"
+
+"His father gives me a pound a week." Flossy still spoke with that
+curious indifference. "I tried to get something to do"--she hesitated,
+then offered the lame explanation--"just to have something to do, for
+I've been awfully lonely and miserable, James; but I don't seem to be
+able to get anything."
+
+"If you had written to Mr. Greenfield or to William, they would have
+told you that I had arranged for you to have an allowance," he said, and
+then again he fell into silence....
+
+Mr. Tapster was seeing a vision of himself, magnanimous,
+forgiving--taking the peccant Flossy back to his heart and becoming once
+more, in a material sense, comfortable! If he acceded to her wish, if he
+made up his mind to forgive her, he would have to begin life all over
+again, move away from Cumberland Crescent to some distant place where
+the story was not known--perhaps to Clapham, where he had spent his
+boyhood.
+
+But how about Maud? How about William? How about the very considerable
+expense to which he had been put in connection with the divorce
+proceedings? Was all that money to be wasted? Mr. Tapster suddenly saw
+the whole of his little world rising up in judgment, smiling pityingly
+at his folly and weakness. During the whole of a long and of what had
+been, till this last year, a very prosperous life, Mr. Tapster had
+always steered his safe course by what may be called the compass of
+public opinion, and now, when navigating an unknown sea, he could not
+afford to throw that compass overboard, so----
+
+"No," he said; "no, Flossy. It would not be right for me to take you
+back. _It wouldn't do._"
+
+"Wouldn't it?" she asked piteously. "Oh, James, don't say no like that,
+all at once! People do forgive each other--sometimes. I don't ask you to
+be as kind to me as you were before--only to let me come home and see
+after the children!"
+
+But Mr. Tapster shook his head. The children! Always the children! He
+noticed, even now, that she didn't say a word of wanting to come back to
+_him_; and yet, he had been such a kind, nay, if Maud were to be
+believed, such a foolishly indulgent husband.
+
+And then, Flossy looked so different. Mr. Tapster felt as if a stranger
+were standing there before him. Her appearance of poverty shocked him.
+Had she looked well and prosperous, he would have felt injured, and yet
+her pinched face and shabby clothes certainly repelled him. So again he
+shook his head, and there came into his face a look which Flossy had
+always known in old days to spell finality, and when he again spoke she
+saw that her knowledge had not misled her.
+
+"I don't want to be unkind," he said ponderously. "If you will only go
+to William, or write to him if you would rather not go to the
+office,"--Mr. Tapster did not like to think that any one once closely
+connected with him should "look like that" in his brother's office,--"he
+will tell you what you had better do. I'm quite ready to make you a
+handsome allowance--in fact, it is all arranged. You need not have
+anything more to do with that fellow's father--an army colonel, isn't
+he?--and his pound a week; but William thinks, and I must say I agree,
+that you ought to go back to your maiden name, Flossy, as being more
+fair to me."
+
+"And am I never to see the children again?" she asked.
+
+"No; it wouldn't be right for me to let you do so." He hesitated, then
+added, "They don't miss you any more now"; with no unkindly intent he
+concluded, "soon they'll have forgotten you altogether."
+
+And then, just as Mr. Tapster was hesitating, seeking for a suitable and
+not unkindly sentence of farewell, he saw a very strange, almost a
+desperate look come over Flossy's face, and, to his surprise, she
+suddenly turned and left the room, closing the door very carefully
+behind her.
+
+He stared after her. How very odd of her to say nothing! And what a
+strange look had come over her face! He could not help feeling hurt that
+she had not thanked him for what he knew to be a very generous and
+unusual provision on the part of an injured husband.... Mr. Tapster took
+a silk handkerchief out of his pocket and passed it twice over his face,
+then once more he sought and sank into the arm-chair by the fire.
+
+Even now he still felt keenly conscious of Flossy's nearness. What could
+she be doing? Then he straightened himself and listened; yes, it was as
+he feared; she had gone up-stairs--up-stairs to look at the children,
+for now he could hear her coming down again. How obstinate she was, how
+obstinate and ungrateful! Mr. Tapster wished he had the courage to go
+out into the hall and face her, in order to tell her how wrong her
+conduct was. Why, she had actually kept the keys--those keys that were
+his property!
+
+Suddenly he heard her light footsteps hurrying down the hall; now she
+was opening the front door--it slammed, and again Mr. Tapster felt
+pained to think how strangely indifferent Flossie was to his interests.
+Why, what would the servants think, hearing the front door slam like
+that?
+
+But still, now that it was over, he was glad the interview had taken
+place, for henceforth--or so, at least, Mr. Tapster believed--the Flossy
+of the past, the bright, pretty, prosperous Flossy of whom he had been
+so proud, would cease to haunt him. He remembered, with a feeling of
+relief, that she was going to his brother William; of course, she would
+then, among greater renunciations, be compelled to return the two
+keys--for they, that is, his brother and himself, would have her in
+their power. They would not behave unkindly to her--far from it; in
+fact, they would arrange for her to live with some quiet, religious lady
+in a country town a few hours from London.
+
+[Illustration: "HE SAW THAT WHICH RATHER SURPRISED HIM, AND MADE HIM
+FEEL ACTIVELY INDIGNANT"]
+
+Then Mr. Tapster began going over each incident of the strange little
+interview, for he wanted to tell his brother William exactly what had
+taken place.
+
+His conscience was quite clear, except with regard to one matter, and
+that, after all, needn't be mentioned to William. He felt rather ashamed
+of having asked the question which had provoked so strange and wild an
+answer--so unexpected a retort. Mad? What had Flossy meant by asking him
+if he had ever been mad? No one had ever used the word in connection
+with James Tapster before--save once. Oddly enough, that occasion also
+had been in a way connected with Flossy, for it had happened when he had
+gone to tell William and Maud of his engagement.
+
+It was on a fine day nine years ago come this May, and he had found
+William and William's wife walking in their little garden on Havenstock
+Hill. His kind brother, as always, had been most sympathetic, and had
+even made a suitable joke--Mr. Tapster remembered it very sadly
+to-night--concerning the spring and a young man's fancy; but Maud had
+been really disagreeable. She had said, "It's no use talking to you,
+James, for you're mad, quite mad!"
+
+Strange that he should remember all this to-night, for, after all, it
+had nothing to do with the present state of affairs.
+
+Mr. Tapster felt rather shaken and nervous; he pulled out his repeater
+watch, but, alas! it was still very early--only ten minutes to nine. He
+couldn't go to bed yet. Perhaps he would do well to join a club. He had
+always thought rather poorly of men who belonged to clubs--most of them
+were idle, lazy fellows; but still, circumstances alter cases.
+
+Suddenly he began to wish that Flossy had remained a little longer. He
+thought of all sorts of things--improving, kindly remarks--he would have
+liked to say to her. He blamed himself for not having offered her any
+refreshment; she would probably have refused to take anything, but
+still, it was wrong on his part not to have thought of it. A pound a
+week for everything! No wonder she looked starved. Why, his own
+household bills, exclusive of wine or beer, had worked out, since he had
+had this new expensive housekeeper, at something like fifteen shillings
+a head, a fact which he had managed to conceal from Maud, who "did" her
+William so well on exactly ten shillings and ninepence all round!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It struck nine from the neighboring church, where Mr. Tapster had
+sittings,--but where he seldom was able to go on Sunday mornings, for he
+was proud of being among those old-fashioned folk who still regard
+Sunday as essentially a day of rest,--and there came a sudden sound of
+hoarse shouting from the road outside. Though he was glad of anything
+that broke the oppressive silence with which he felt encompassed, Mr.
+Tapster found time to tell himself that it was disgraceful that vulgar
+street brawlers should invade so quiet a residential thoroughfare as
+Cumberland Crescent. But order would soon be restored, for the sound of
+a policeman's whistle cut sharply through the air.
+
+The noise, however, continued; he could hear the tramp of feet hurrying
+past his house and then leaving the pavement for the other side of the
+road. What could be the matter? Something very exciting must be going on
+just opposite his front door, that is, close to the Inclosure railings.
+
+Mr. Tapster got up from his chair, and walked in a leisurely way to the
+wide window. He drew aside the thick red rep curtains, and lifted a
+corner of the blind. Then, through the slightly foggy haze, he saw that
+which rather surprised him and made him feel actively indignant; for a
+string of people, men, women, and boys, were hurrying into the Inclosure
+Garden--that sacred place set apart for the exclusive use of the
+nobility and gentry who lived in Cumberland Crescent and the adjoining
+terraces.
+
+What an abominable thing! Why, the grass would all be trampled down; and
+these dirty people, these slum folk, who seem to spring out of the earth
+when anything of a disagreeable or shameful nature is taking place,--a
+fire, for instance, or a brawl,--might easily bring infectious diseases
+on to those gravel paths where the little Tapsters and their like run
+about, playing their innocent games. Some careless person had evidently
+left the gate unlocked, and the fight, or whatever it was, must be
+taking place inside the Inclosure!
+
+Mr. Tapster tried in vain to see what was going on inside the railings,
+but everything beyond the brightly lighted road was wrapped in gray
+darkness. Some one suddenly held up high a flaming torch, and the
+watcher at the window saw that the shadowy crowd which had managed to
+force its way into the Park hung together, like bees swarming, on the
+farther lawn through which flowed the Serpentine. With the gleaming of
+the yellow, wavering light there had fallen a sudden hush and silence,
+and Mr. Tapster wondered uneasily what those people were doing there,
+and what it was they were pressing forward so eagerly to see.
+
+[Illustration: "HE ... TURNED TO SEE HIS HALL INVADED BY A STRANGE AND
+SINISTER QUARTET"]
+
+Then he realized that it must have been a fight, after all, for now the
+crowd was parting in two, and down the lane so formed Mr. Tapster saw
+coming toward the gate, and so in a sense toward himself, a rather
+pitiful little procession. Some one had evidently been injured, and that
+seriously; for four men, bearing a sheep-hurdle on which lay a huddled
+mass, were walking slowly toward the gate, and he heard distinctly the
+gruffly uttered words: "Stand back, please--back, there! We're going
+across the road." The now large crowd suddenly swayed forward; indeed,
+to Mr. Tapster's astonished eyes, they seemed to be actually making a
+rush for his house, and a moment later they were pressing around his
+area-railings.
+
+Looking down on the upturned faces below him, Mr. Tapster was very glad
+that a stout pane of glass stood between himself and the
+sinister-looking men and women who seemed to be staring up at him, or
+rather at his windows, with faces full of cruel, wolfish curiosity. He
+let the blind fall to gently. His interest in the vulgar, sordid scene
+had suddenly died down; the drama was now over; in a moment the crowd
+would disperse, the human vermin (but Mr. Tapster would never have used,
+even to himself, so coarse an expression) would be on their way back to
+their burrows. But before he had even time to rearrange the curtains in
+their right folds, there came a sudden loud, persistent knocking at his
+front door.
+
+Mr. Tapster turned around sharply, feeling justly incensed. Of course,
+he knew what it was--some good-for-nothing urchin finding a vent for his
+excited feelings. His parlor-maid, who was never in any hurry to open
+the door,--she had once kept him waiting ten minutes when he had
+forgotten his latch-key,--would certainly take no notice of this
+unseemly noise, but he, James Tapster, would himself hurry out and try
+to catch the delinquent, take his name and address, and thoroughly
+frighten him.
+
+As he reached the door of the dining-room, Mr. Tapster heard the front
+door open--open, too,--and this was certainly very surprising,--from the
+outside! In the hall he saw that it was a policeman--in fact, the
+officer on point duty close by--who had opened his front door, and
+apparently with a latch-key.
+
+The constable spoke, as constables always do to the Mr. Tapsters of this
+world, in respectful and subdued tones:
+
+"Can I just come in and speak to you, sir? There's been a sad
+accident--your lady fallen in the water; we found these keys in her
+pocket, and then some one said she was Mrs. Tapster"; and the policeman
+held out the two keys which had played a not unimportant part in Mr.
+Tapster's interview with Flossy. "A man on the bridge saw her go in,"
+went on the policeman, "so she wasn't in the water long,--something like
+a quarter of an hour,--for we soon found her. I suppose you would like
+her taken up-stairs, sir?"
+
+"No, no," stammered Mr. Tapster, "not up-stairs; the children are
+up-stairs."
+
+Mr. Tapster's round, prominent eyes were shadowed with a great horror
+and an even greater surprise. He stood staring at the man before him,
+his hands clasped in a wholly unconscious gesture of supplication.
+
+The constable gradually edged himself backward into the dining-room.
+Realizing that he must take on himself the onus of decision, he gave a
+quiet look round.
+
+"If that's the case," he said firmly, "we had better bring her in here;
+that sofa that you have there, sir, will do nicely for her to be laid
+upon while they try to bring her round. We've got a doctor already."
+
+Mr. Tapster bent his head; he was too much bewildered to propose any
+other plan; and then he turned, turned to see his hall invaded by a
+strange and sinister quartet. It was composed of two policemen and of
+two of those loafers of whom he so greatly disapproved. They were
+carrying a hurdle from which Mr. Tapster quickly averted his eyes. But,
+though he was able to shut out the sight he feared to see, he could not
+prevent himself from hearing certain sounds, those, for instance, made
+by the two loafers, who breathed with ostentatious difficulty as if to
+show they were unaccustomed to bearing even so comparatively light a
+burden as Flossy drowned.
+
+There came a sudden short whisper-filled delay. The doorway of the
+dining-room was found to be too narrow, and the hurdle was perforce left
+in the hall.
+
+An urgent voice, full of wholly unconscious irony, muttered in Mr.
+Tapster's ear: "Of course, you would like to see her, sir," and he felt
+himself being propelled forward. Making an effort to bear himself so
+that he should not feel afterward ashamed of his lack of nerve, he
+forced himself to stare with dread-filled yet fascinated eyes at that
+which had just been laid upon the leather sofa.
+
+Flossy's hat, the shabby hat which had shocked Mr. Tapster's sense of
+what was seemly, was gone; her fair hair had all come down, and hung in
+pale-gold wisps about the face already fixed in the soft dignity which
+seems so soon to drape the features of those who die by drowning. Her
+widely opened eyes were now wholly emptied of the anguish with which
+they had gazed on Mr. Tapster in this very room less than an hour ago.
+Her mean brown serge gown, from which the water was still dripping,
+clung closely to her limbs, revealing the slender body which had four
+times endured, on behalf of Mr. Tapster, the greatest of woman's natural
+ordeals. But that thought, it is scarcely necessary to say, did not come
+to add an extra pang to those which that unfortunate man was now
+suffering, for Mr. Tapster naturally thought maternity was in every
+married woman's day's work--and pleasure.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It might have been a moment, for all that he knew, or it might have been
+an hour, when at last something came to relieve the unbearable tension
+of Mr. Tapster's feelings. He had been standing aside, helpless, aware
+of and yet not watching the efforts made to restore Flossy to
+consciousness.
+
+The doctor raised himself and straightened his cramped shoulders and
+tired arms. With a look of great concern on his face, he approached the
+bereaved husband.
+
+"I'm afraid it's no good," he said; "the shock of the plunge in the cold
+water probably killed her. She was evidently in poor health, and--and
+ill-nourished; but, of course, we shall go on for some time longer,
+and----"
+
+But whatever he had meant to say remained unspoken, for a telegraph-boy,
+with the impudence natural to his kind, was forcing his way into and
+through the crowded room. "James Tapster, Esquire?" he cried in a high,
+childish treble.
+
+The master of the house held out his hand mechanically. He took the buff
+envelop and stared down at it, sufficiently master of himself to
+perceive that some fool had apparently imagined Cumberland Crescent to
+be in South London; before his eyes swam the line, "Delayed in
+transmission." Then, opening the envelop, he saw the message for which
+he had now been waiting so eagerly for some days; but it was with
+indifference that he read the words,
+
+"_The Decree has been made Absolute._"
+
+
+
+
+PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND HIS WAR ON CONGRESS
+
+BY
+
+CARL SCHURZ
+
+ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
+
+
+I was on the point of returning to the West when I received a message
+from Horace Greeley, the famous editor of the New York _Tribune_, asking
+me to take charge of the news bureau of that journal in Washington, as
+its chief correspondent. Although the terms offered by Mr. Greeley were
+tempting, I was disinclined to accept, because I doubted whether the
+work would be congenial to me, and because it would keep me in the East.
+But Mr. Greeley, as well as some of my friends in Congress, persuaded me
+that, since I had studied the condition of things in the South and could
+give reliable information concerning it, my presence in Washington might
+be useful while the Southern question was under debate. This determined
+me to assent, with the understanding, however, that I should not
+consider myself bound beyond the pending session of Congress.
+
+Thus I entered the journalistic fraternity. My most agreeable experience
+consisted in my association with other members of the craft. I found
+among the correspondents of the press a number of gentlemen of uncommon
+ability and high principle--genuine gentlemen, who loved truth for its
+own sake, who heartily detested sham and false pretense, and whose sense
+of honor was of the finest. This was the rule, to which, as to all
+rules, there were of course some exceptions; but they were rare. My more
+or less intimate contact with public men high and low was not so
+uniformly gratifying. I enjoyed, indeed, the privilege of meeting
+statesmen of high purpose, of well-stored minds, of unselfish
+patriotism, and of the courage of their convictions. But disgustingly
+large was, on the other hand, the number of small, selfish politicians I
+ran against--men who seemed to know no higher end than the advantage of
+their party, which involved their own; who were always nervously
+sniffing for the popular breeze; whose most demonstrative ebullitions of
+virtue consisted in the most violent denunciations of the opposition;
+whose moral courage quaked at the appearance of the slightest danger to
+their own or their party's fortunes; and whose littlenesses exposed them
+sometimes with involuntary frankness to the newspaper correspondent whom
+they approached to beg for a "favorable notice" or for the suppression
+of an unwelcome news item. They were by no means in all instances men of
+small parts. On the contrary, there were men of marked ability and large
+acquirements among them. But never until then had I known how great a
+moral coward a member of Congress may be.
+
+It is probably now as it was then. There were few places in the United
+States where the public men appearing on the national stage were judged
+as fairly and accurately as they were in Newspaper Row in Washington.
+
+[Illustration: HORACE GREELEY
+
+AT WHOSE REQUEST CARL SCHURZ BECAME THE CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT
+OF THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE IN 1865]
+
+I remained at the head of the _Tribune_ office in Washington, according
+to my promise to Mr. Greeley, to the end of the winter season, and then
+accepted the chief-editorship of the Detroit _Post_, a new journal
+established at Detroit, Michigan, which was offered to me--I might
+almost say urged upon me--by Senator Zachariah Chandler. In the meantime
+I had occasion to witness the beginning of the political war between the
+executive and the legislative power concerning the reconstruction of the
+"States lately in rebellion."
+
+
+_The Beginnings of the Struggle_
+
+I am sure I do not exaggerate when I say that this political war has
+been one of the most unfortunate events in the history of this Republic,
+for it made the most important problem of the time, a problem of
+extraordinary complexity, which required the calmest and most delicate
+and circumspect treatment, the foot-ball of a personal and party brawl
+which was in the highest degree apt to inflame the passions and to
+obscure the judgment of everybody concerned in it. Since my return from
+the South, the evil effects of Mr. Johnson's conduct in encouraging the
+reactionary spirit prevalent among the Southern whites had become more
+and more evident and alarming from day to day. Charles Sumner told me
+that his personal experience with the President had been very much like
+mine. When Sumner left Washington in the spring, he had received from
+Mr. Johnson at repeated intervals the most emphatic assurances that he
+would do nothing to precipitate the restoration of the "States lately in
+rebellion" to the full exercise of self-governing functions, and even
+that he favored the extension of the suffrage to the freedmen. The two
+men had parted with all the appearance of a perfect friendly
+understanding. But when the Senator returned to Washington in the late
+autumn that understanding seemed to have entirely vanished from the
+President's mind and to have given place to an irritated temper and a
+certain acerbity of tone in the assertion of the "President's policy."
+
+From various other members of Congress I heard the same story. Mr.
+Johnson, strikingly unlike Abraham Lincoln, evidently belonged to that
+unfortunate class of men with whom a difference of opinion on any
+important matter will at once cause personal ill feeling and a
+disturbance of friendly intercourse. By many Congressmen Mr. Johnson was
+regarded as one who had broken faith, and the memory of the disgraceful
+exhibition of himself in a drunken state at the inauguration ceremonies,
+which under ordinary circumstances everybody would have been glad to
+forget, was revived, so as to make him appear as a person of
+ungentlemanly character. All these things combined to impart to the
+controversies which followed a flavor of reckless defiance and rancorous
+bitterness, the outbursts of which were sometimes almost ferocious.
+
+[Illustration: TWO PORTRAITS OF CHARLES SUMNER]
+
+The first gun of the political war between the President and Congress,
+which was to rage four years, was fired by Thaddeus Stevens in the House
+of Representatives by the introduction, even before the hearing of the
+President's Message, of the resolution already mentioned, which
+substantially proclaimed that the reconstruction of the late rebel
+States was the business, not of the President alone, but of Congress.
+This theory, which was constitutionally correct, was readily supported
+by the Republican majority, and thus the war was declared. Of
+Republican dissenters who openly took the President's part, there were
+but few--in the Senate, Doolittle of Wisconsin, Dixon of Connecticut,
+Norton of Minnesota, Cowan of Pennsylvania, and, for a short period,
+Morgan of New York, as the personal friend of Mr. Seward. In the House
+of Representatives, Mr. Raymond of New York, the famous founder of the
+New York _Times_, acted as the principal Republican champion of the
+"President's policy."
+
+[Illustration: PRESIDENT ANDREW JOHNSON
+
+WHOSE RECONSTRUCTION POLICY LED TO THE FOUR YEARS' WAR BETWEEN HIMSELF
+AND CONGRESS]
+
+
+_Stevens the Dominating Figure of the Struggle_
+
+Thaddeus Stevens was the acknowledged leader of the Republicans in the
+House. Few historic characters have ever been more differently judged
+from different points of view. A Southern writer of fiction has painted
+him as the fiend incarnate; others have spoken of him as a great leader
+of his time, far-sighted, a man of uncompromising convictions,
+intellectually honest, of unflinching courage and energy. I had come
+into personal contact with him in the Presidential campaigns of 1860 and
+1864, when he seemed to be pleased with my efforts. I had once heard him
+make a stump speech which was evidently inspired by intense hatred of
+slavery, and remarkable for argumentative pith and sarcastic wit. But
+the impression his personality made upon me was not sympathetic: his
+face, long and pallid, topped with an ample dark-brown wig which was at
+the first glance recognized as such; beetling brows overhanging keen
+eyes of uncertain color which sometimes seemed to scintillate with a
+sudden gleam; the under lip defiantly protruding; the whole expression
+usually stern. His figure would have looked stalwart but for a deformed
+foot which made him bend and limp. His conversation, carried on in a
+hollow voice devoid of music, easily disclosed a well-informed mind, but
+also a certain absolutism of opinion, with contemptuous scorn for
+adverse argument. He belonged to the fierce class of anti-slavery men
+who were inspired by humane sympathy with the slave and righteous
+abhorrence of slavery, but also by hatred of the slaveholder. What he
+himself seemed to enjoy most in his talk was his sardonic humor, which
+he made play upon men and things like lurid freaks of lightning. He shot
+out such sallies with a fearfully serious mien, or at least he
+accompanied them with a grim smile which was not at all like Abraham
+Lincoln's hearty laugh at his own jests.
+
+[Illustration: _From the collection of P. H. Meserve_
+
+JOHN SHERMAN
+
+WHO TRIED TO HEAL THE BREACH BETWEEN PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND THE SENATE]
+
+[Illustration: THADDEUS STEVENS
+
+THE LEADING OPPONENT OF THE MOVEMENT TO RESTORE SLAVERY, AND THE MOST
+BITTER OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S ANTAGONISTS]
+
+Thus Mr. Stevens' discourse was apt to make him appear a hardened cynic,
+inaccessible to the finer feelings, and indifferent whether he gave pain
+or pleasure. But now and then a remark escaped him--I say "escaped him,"
+because he evidently preferred to wear the acrid tendencies of his
+character on the outside--which indicated that there was behind his
+cynicism a rich fund of human kindness and sympathy. And this was
+strongly confirmed by his neighbors at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, his
+home, where on one of my campaigning tours I once spent a day and a
+night. With them, even with many of his political opponents, "old
+Thad," as they called him, appeared to be eminently popular. They had no
+end of stories to tell about the protection he had given to fugitive
+slaves, sometimes at much risk and sacrifice to himself, and of the many
+benefactions he had bestowed with a lavish hand upon the widows and
+orphans and other persons in need, and of his generous fidelity to his
+friends. They did not, indeed, revere him as a model of virtue, but of
+the occasional lapses of his bachelor life from correct moral standards,
+which seemed to be well known and freely talked about, they spoke with
+affectionate lenity of judgment.
+
+When I saw him again in Washington at the opening of the Thirty-ninth
+Congress, in December, 1865, he looked very much aged since our last
+meeting, and infirm in health. In repose his face was like a death-mask,
+and he was carried in a chair to his seat in the House by two stalwart
+young negroes. There is good authority for the story that once when they
+had set him down, he said to them, with his grim humor: "Thank you, my
+good fellows. What shall I do when you are dead and gone?" But his eyes
+glowed from under his bushy brows with the old keen sparkle, and his
+mind was as alert as ever. It may be that his age--he was then
+seventy-four--and his physical infirmities, admonishing him that at best
+he would have only a few years more to live, served to inspire him with
+an impatient craving and a fierce determination to make the best of his
+time, and thus to intensify the activity of his mental energies. To
+compass the abolition of slavery had been the passion of his life. He
+had hailed the Civil War as the great opportunity. He had never been
+quite satisfied with Lincoln, whose policy seemed to him too dilatory.
+He demanded quick, sharp, and decisive blows.
+
+[Illustration: WILLIAM PITT FESSENDEN
+
+HEAD OF THE JOINT COMMITTEE ON RECONSTRUCTION, WHICH WAS DENOUNCED BY
+PRESIDENT JOHNSON AS AN "IRRESPONSIBLE CENTRAL DIRECTORY"]
+
+Now that the abolition of slavery was actually decreed, he saw President
+Johnson follow a policy which, in his view, threatened to undo the great
+work. His scornful anger at Andrew Johnson was equaled only by his
+contempt for the Republicans who sided with the President. He was bound
+to defeat this reactionary attempt and to see slavery thoroughly killed
+beyond the possibility of resurrection, at any cost. As to the means to
+be employed, he scrupled little. He wanted the largest possible
+Republican majority in Congress, and to this end he would have expelled
+any number of Democrats from their seats, by hook or crook. When my old
+friend and quondam law partner, General Halbert E. Paine, who was
+chairman of the Committee on Elections in the House, told him that, in a
+certain contested election case to be voted upon, both contestants were
+rascals, Stevens simply asked: "Well, which is _our_ rascal?" He said
+this, not in jest, but with perfect seriousness. He would have seated
+Beelzebub in preference to the angel Gabriel, had he believed Beelzebub
+to be more certain than Gabriel to aid him in beating the President's
+reconstruction policy. His speeches were short, peremptory, and
+commanding. He bluntly avowed his purposes, however extreme they seemed
+to be. He disdained to make them more palatable by any art of
+persuasion, or to soften the asperity of his attacks by charitable
+circumlocution. There was no hypocrisy, no cant in his utterances. With
+inexorable intellectual honesty, he drew all the logical conclusions
+from his premises. He was a terror in debate. Whenever provoked, he
+brought his batteries of merciless sarcasm into play with deadly effect.
+Not seldom, a single sentence sufficed to lay a daring antagonist
+sprawling on the ground amid the roaring laughter of the House, the
+luckless victim feeling as if he had heedlessly touched a heavily
+charged electric wire. No wonder that even the readiest and boldest
+debaters were cautious in approaching old Thaddeus Stevens too closely,
+lest something stunning and sudden happen to them. Thus the fear he
+inspired became a distinct element of power in his leadership--not a
+wholesome element, indeed, at the time of a great problem which required
+the most circumspect and dispassionate treatment.
+
+
+_William Pitt Fessenden_
+
+A statesman of a very different stamp was Senator Fessenden of Maine,
+who, being at the head of the senatorial part of the joint Committee on
+Reconstruction, presided over that important body. William Pitt
+Fessenden was a man who might easily have been overlooked in a crowd.
+There was nothing in his slight figure, his thin face framed in spare
+gray hair and side whiskers, and his quiet demeanor, to attract
+particular notice. Neither did his appearance in the Senate Chamber
+impress one at first sight as that of a great power in that important
+assembly. I saw him more than once there walk with slow steps up and
+down in the open space behind the seats, with his hands in his trousers
+pockets, with seeming listlessness, while another senator was speaking,
+and then ask to be heard, and, without changing his attitude, make an
+argument in a calm conversational tone, unmixed with the slightest
+oratorical flourish, so solid and complete that little more remained to
+be said on the subject in question. He gave the impression of having at
+his disposal a rich and perfectly ordered store of thought and knowledge
+upon which he could draw with perfect ease and assurance. When I was
+first introduced to him, he appeared to be rather distant in manner than
+inviting friendly approach. But I was told that ill health had made him
+unsociable and somewhat morose and testy, and, indeed, there was often
+the trace of suffering and weariness in his face. It was also remarked
+in the Senate that at times he was ill-tempered and inclined to indulge
+in biting sarcasms and to administer unkind lectures to other senators,
+which in some instances disturbed his personal intercourse with his
+colleagues. But there was not one of them who did not hold him in the
+highest esteem as a statesman of commanding ability and of lofty ideals,
+as a gentleman of truth and conscience, as a great jurist and an eminent
+constitutional lawyer, as a party man of most honorable principles and
+methods, and as a patriot of noblest ambition for his country.
+
+[Illustration: WENDELL PHILLIPS
+
+WHOM PRESIDENT JOHNSON NAMED AS ONE OF THE ENEMIES OF THE REPUBLIC IN
+HIS SPEECH OF FEBRUARY 22]
+
+Being a man also of conservative instincts, averse to unnecessary
+conflicts, and always disinclined to go to extremes, in action as well
+as in language, he was expected to exert a moderating influence in his
+committee; and this expectation was not disappointed so far as his
+efforts to prevent a final breach between the President and the
+Republican majority in Congress were concerned. But regarding the main
+question whether the "States lately in rebellion" should be fully
+restored to their self-governing functions and to full participation in
+the government of the Republic without having given reasonable
+guaranties for the maintenance of the "legitimate results of the war,"
+he was in point of principle not far apart from Mr. Stevens.
+
+
+_The President's Logic_
+
+It must be admitted that, if we accept his premises, Mr. Johnson made in
+point of logic a pretty plausible case. His proposition was that a
+State, in the view of the Federal Constitution, is indestructible; that
+an ordinance of secession adopted by its inhabitants, or its political
+organs, did not take it out of the Union; that by declaring and treating
+those ordinances of secession as "null and void," of no force, virtually
+non-existent, the Federal government itself had accepted and sanctioned
+that theory; that during the rebellion the constitutional rights and
+functions of those States were merely suspended, and that when the
+rebellion ceased they were _ipso facto_ restored; that, therefore, the
+rebellion having actually ceased, those States were at once entitled to
+their former rights and privileges--that is, to the recognition of their
+self-elected State governments and to their representation in Congress.
+Admitting the premises, this was logically correct in the abstract.
+
+But this was one of the cases to which a saying, many years later set
+afloat by President Cleveland, might properly have been applied: we were
+confronting a condition, not a theory. The condition was this: Certain
+States had through their regular political organs declared themselves
+independent of the Union. They had, for all practical purposes, actually
+separated themselves from the Union. They had made war upon the Union.
+That war put those States in a position not foreseen by the
+Constitution. It imposed upon the government of the Union duties not
+foreseen by the Constitution; by "military necessity," war necessity,
+the Union was compelled to emancipate the negroes from slavery and to
+accept their military services. The war had compelled the government of
+the Union to levy large loans of money and thus to contract a huge
+public debt. The government had also, in the course of the war, the aid
+of the Union men of the South. It had thus assumed solemn obligations
+for value received or services rendered. It had assumed the duty to
+protect the emancipated negroes in their freedom, the Southern Union men
+in their security, and the public creditor from loss. This duty was a
+duty of honor as well as of policy. The Union could, therefore, not
+consent, either in point of honor or of sound policy, to the restoration
+of the late rebel States to the functions of self-government and to full
+participation in the national government so long as that restoration was
+reasonably certain to put the freedom of the emancipated slaves, or the
+security of the Southern Union men, or the rights of the public
+creditor, into serious jeopardy.
+
+[Illustration: SENATOR LYMAN TRUMBULL
+
+WHO MOVED THAT THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU BILL OF JANUARY 12 BE PASSED OVER
+PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S VETO]
+
+
+_Lincoln's Policy versus Johnson's_
+
+It was pretended at the time, and it has since been asserted by
+historians and publicists of high standing, that Mr. Johnson's
+Reconstruction policy was only a continuation of that of Mr. Lincoln.
+This was true only in a superficial sense, and not in reality. Mr.
+Lincoln had, indeed, put forth reconstruction plans which contemplated
+an early restoration of some of the rebel States; but he had done this
+while the Civil War was still going on, and for the evident purpose of
+encouraging loyal movements in those States and of weakening the
+Confederate State governments there by opposing to them governments
+organized in the interest of the Union, which could serve as
+rallying-points to the Union men. So long as the rebellion continued in
+any form and to any extent, the State governments he contemplated would
+have been substantially in the control of really loyal men who had been
+on the side of the Union during the war. Moreover, he always
+emphatically affirmed, in public as well as private utterance, that no
+plan of reconstruction he had ever put forth was meant to be "exclusive
+and inflexible," but might be changed according to different
+circumstances.
+
+Now circumstances did change; they changed essentially with the collapse
+of the Confederacy. There was no more organized armed resistance to the
+national government, to distract which loyal State governments in the
+South might have been efficacious. But there was an effort of persons
+lately in rebellion to get possession of the reconstructed Southern
+State governments for the purpose, in part, of using their power to save
+or restore as much of the system of slavery as could be saved or
+restored. The success of these efforts was to be accomplished by the
+precipitate and unconditional readmission of the late rebel States to
+all their constitutional functions. This situation had not yet developed
+when Lincoln was assassinated. He had not contemplated it when he put
+forth his plans of reconstructing Louisiana and the other States. Had he
+lived, he would have as ardently wished to stop bloodshed and to reunite
+all the States as he ever did. But is it to be supposed, for a moment,
+that, seeing the late master class in the South still under the
+influence of their old traditional notions and prejudices, and at the
+same time sorely pressed by the distressing necessities of their
+situation, intent upon subjecting the freedmen again to a system very
+much akin to slavery, Lincoln would have consented to abandon those
+freedmen to the mercies of that master class!
+
+
+_The Personal Bitterness of the Struggle_
+
+No less striking was the difference of the two policies in what may be
+called the personal character of the controversies of the time. When the
+Republican majority in Congress had already declared its unwillingness
+to accept President Johnson's leadership in the matter of
+reconstruction, a strong desire was still manifested by many Republican
+senators and members of the House to prevent a decided and irremediable
+breach with the President. Some of them were sanguine enough to hope
+that more or less harmonious coöperation, or at least a peaceable
+_modus vivendi_, might still be obtained. Others apprehended that the
+President's policy, with its plausibilities, might after all find favor
+with the popular mind, which was naturally tired of strife and
+excitement, eager for peace and quiet, and that its opponents might
+appear as reckless disturbers. Still others stood in fear of a rupture
+in the Republican party, which, among other evil consequences, might
+prove disastrous to their own political fortunes. Several men of
+importance, such as Fessenden and Sherman in the Senate and some
+prominent members of the House, seriously endeavored to pour oil upon
+the agitated waters by making speeches of a conciliatory tenor. Indeed,
+if Andrew Johnson had possessed only a little of Abraham Lincoln's sweet
+temper, generous tolerance, and patient tact in the treatment of
+opponents, he might at least have prevented the conflict of opinions
+from degenerating into an angry and vicious personal brawl. But the
+brawl was Johnson's congenial atmosphere.
+
+The Judiciary Committee of the Senate, on January 12, 1866, reported a
+bill to continue the existence, to increase the personnel, and to
+enlarge the powers of the Freedmen's Bureau. It was discussed in both
+Houses with great thoroughness and in a temperate spirit, and the
+necessity of the measure for the protection of the freedmen and the
+introduction of free labor in the South was so generally acknowledged
+that the recognized Republican friends of the President in the Senate as
+well as in the House supported it. It passed by overwhelming majorities
+in both Houses, and everybody, even those most intimate with the
+President, confidently expected that he would willingly accept and sign
+it. But on the 19th of February he returned it with his veto, mainly on
+the assumed ground that it was unnecessary and unconstitutional, and
+also because it was passed by a Congress from which eleven States, those
+lately in rebellion, were excluded--thus throwing out a dark hint that
+before the admission of the late rebel States to representation this
+Congress might be considered constitutionally unable to make any valid
+laws at all. Senator Trumbull, in an uncommonly able, statesmanlike, and
+calm speech, combated the President's arguments and moved that the bill
+pass, the President's veto notwithstanding. But the "Administration
+Republicans," although they had voted for the bill, now voted to sustain
+the veto, and, there being no two-thirds majority to overcome it, the
+veto prevailed. Thus President Johnson had won a victory over the
+Republican majority in Congress. This victory may have made him believe
+that he would be able to kill with his veto all legislation unpalatable
+to him, and that, therefore, he was actually master of the situation. He
+made the grave mistake of underestimating the opposition.
+
+
+_A Humiliating Spectacle_
+
+On February 22, 1866, a public meeting was held in Washington for the
+purpose of expressing popular approval of the President's reconstruction
+policy. The crowd marched from the meeting-place to the White House to
+congratulate the President upon his successful veto of the Freedmen's
+Bureau Bill. The President, called upon to make a speech in response,
+could not resist the temptation. He then dealt a blow to himself from
+which he never recovered. He spoke, in the egotistic strain usual with
+him, of the righteousness of his own course, and then began to inveigh
+in the most violent terms against those who opposed him. He denounced
+the joint Committee on Reconstruction, the committee headed by
+Fessenden, as "an irresponsible central directory" that had assumed the
+powers of Congress, described how he had fought the leaders of the
+rebellion, and added that there were men on the other side of the line
+who also worked for the dissolution of the Union. By this time some of
+the uproarious crowd felt that he had descended to their level, and
+called for names. He mentioned Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and
+Wendell Phillips as men who worked against the fundamental principles of
+the government, and excited the boisterous merriment of the audience by
+calling John W. Forney, the Secretary of the Senate and a prominent
+journalist, "a dead duck" upon whom "he would not waste his ammunition."
+Again he spoke of his rise from humble origin,--a tailor who "always
+made a close fit,"--and broadly insinuated that there were men in high
+places who were not satisfied with Lincoln's blood, but, wanting more,
+thought of getting rid of him, too, in the same way.
+
+I remember well the impression made by this speech as it came out in the
+newspapers. Many if not most of the public men I saw in Washington,
+remembering the disgraceful appearance of Andrew Johnson in a drunken
+state at the inauguration, at once expressed a belief that he must have
+been in the same condition when delivering that speech. Most of the
+newspapers favoring the President's policy were struck dumb. Of those
+opposing him, most of them spoke of it in grave but evidently restrained
+language. The general feeling was one of profound shame and humiliation
+in behalf of the country.
+
+In Congress, where Mr. Stevens, with his characteristic sarcasm,
+described the whole story of the President's speech as a malignant
+invention of Mr. Johnson's enemies, the hope of preventing a permanent
+breach between him and the Republican majority was even then not
+entirely extinct. On the 26th of February, Sherman made a long and
+carefully prepared speech in the Senate, advocating harmony. He
+recounted all the virtues Andrew Johnson professed and all the services
+he had rendered, and solemnly affirmed his belief that he had always
+acted upon patriotic motives and in good faith. But he could not refrain
+from "deeply regretting his speech of the 22d of February," He added
+that it was "impossible to conceive a more humiliating spectacle than
+the President of the United States invoking the wild passions of a mob
+around him with the utterance of such sentiments as he uttered on that
+day." Still, Mr. Sherman thought that "this was no time to quarrel with
+the Chief Magistrate." Other prominent Republicans, such as General
+J. D. Cox of Ohio--one of the noblest men I have ever known,--called
+upon him to expostulate with him in a friendly spirit, and he gave them
+amiable assurances, which, however, subsequently turned out to have been
+without meaning. Then something happened which cut off the last chance
+of mutual approach.
+
+On March 13th the House passed the Civil Rights Bill, which the Senate
+had already passed on the 2d of February. Its main provision was that
+all persons born in the United States, excepting Indians, not taxed,
+were declared to be citizens of the United States, and such citizens of
+every race and color should have the same right in every State and
+Territory of the United States to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be
+parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and
+convey real and personal property, and to have the full and equal
+benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and
+property as was enjoyed by white citizens. The bill had nothing to do
+with "social equity," and did not in any way interfere with Mr.
+Johnson's scheme of reconstruction. In fact, it was asserted, no doubt
+truthfully, that Mr. Johnson himself had at various times shown himself,
+by word and act, favorable to its provisions. It appeared, indeed, in
+every one of its features so reasonable and so necessary for the
+enforcement of the Thirteenth Constitutional Amendment prohibiting
+slavery, that disapproval of it by the President was regarded as almost
+impossible. Aside from the merits of the bill, there was another
+reason, a reason of policy, for the President to sign it. Had he done
+so, he would have greatly encouraged the conciliatory spirit which, in
+spite of all that had happened, was still flickering in many Republican
+bosoms, and he might thus, even at this late hour, have secured an
+effective following among the Republicans in Congress. But he did not.
+He returned the bill to Congress with a veto message so weak in argument
+that it appeared as if he had been laboriously groping for pretexts to
+kill the bill. One of the principal reasons he gave was again the
+sinister one that Congress had passed the bill while eleven States were
+unrepresented, thus repeating the threatening hint that the validity of
+the laws made by such a Congress might be questioned.
+
+
+_False Encouragement to the South_
+
+Congress promptly passed the bill over the President's veto by a
+two-thirds majority in each House, and thus the Civil Rights Bill became
+a law. President Johnson's defeat was more fatal than appeared on the
+surface. The prestige he had won by the success of his veto of the
+Freedmen's Bureau Bill was lost again. The Republicans, whom in some way
+he had led to expect that he would sign the Civil Rights Bill, now
+believed him to be an insincere man capable of any treachery. The last
+chance of an accommodation with the Republican party was now utterly
+gone. But, worse than all, the reactionists in the South, who were bent
+upon curtailing the freedom of the emancipated negroes as much as
+possible, received his veto of the Civil Rights Bill with shouts of
+delight. Believing him now unalterably opposed to the bestowal, upon the
+freedmen, of equal civil rights such as were specified in the bill, they
+hailed President Johnson as their champion more loudly than ever.
+Undisturbed by the defeat of the veto, which they looked upon as a mere
+temporary accident, they easily persuaded themselves that the President,
+aided by the Administration Republicans and the Democratic party at the
+North, would at last surely prevail, and that now they might safely deal
+with the negro and the labor question in the South as they pleased. The
+reactionary element felt itself encouraged to the point of foolhardiness
+by the President's attitude. Legislative enactments and municipal
+ordinances and regulations tending to reduce the colored people to a
+state of semi-slavery multiplied at a lively rate. Measures taken for
+the protection of the emancipated slaves were indiscriminately denounced
+in the name of the Constitution of the United States as acts of
+insufferable tyranny. The instant admission to seats in the national
+Congress of senators and representatives from the "States lately in
+rebellion" was loudly demanded as a constitutional right, and for these
+seats men were presented who but yesterday had stood in arms against the
+national government, or who had held high place in the insurrectionary
+Confederacy. And the highest authority cited for all these denunciations
+and demands was Andrew Johnson, President of the United States.
+
+The impression made by these things upon the minds of the Northern
+people can easily be imagined. Men of sober ways of thinking, not
+accessible to sensational appeals, asked themselves quite seriously
+whether there was not real danger that the legitimate results of the
+war, for the achievement of which they had sacrificed uncounted
+thousands of lives and the fruits of many, many years of labor, were in
+grave jeopardy again. Their alarm was not artificially produced by
+political agitation; it was sincere and profound, and began to grow
+angry. The gradual softening of the passions and resentments of the war
+was checked. The feeling that the Union had to be saved once more from
+the rule of the "rebels with the President at their head" spread with
+fearful rapidity, and well-meaning people looking to Congress to come to
+the rescue were becoming less and less squeamish as to the character of
+the means to be used to that end.
+
+This popular temper could not fail to exercise its influence upon
+Congress and to stimulate the radical tendencies among its members. Even
+men of a comparatively conservative and cautious disposition admitted
+that strong remedies were necessary to avert the threatening danger, and
+they soon turned to the most drastic as the best. Moreover, the partizan
+motive pressed to the front to reinforce the patriotic purpose. It had
+gradually become evident that President Johnson, whether such had been
+his original design or not,--probably not,--would by his political
+course be led into the Democratic party. The Democrats, delighted, of
+course, with the prospect of capturing a President elected by the
+Republicans, zealously supported his measures and flattered his vanity
+without stint. The old alliance between the pro-slavery sentiment in the
+South and the Democratic party in the North was thus revived--that
+alliance which had already cost the South so dearly in the recent past
+by making Southern people believe that if they revolted against the
+Federal Government the Northern Democracy would stand by them and help
+them to victory.
+
+    THE JULY INSTALMENT OF CARL SCHURZ' MEMOIRS WILL CONCLUDE THE STORY
+    OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S STRUGGLE WITH CONGRESS
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+THE CRYSTAL-GAZER
+
+BY MARY S. WATTS
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE GREAT NORTH ROAD," ETC.
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY FRANK A. NANKIVELL
+
+
+The carrier's cart--for my means afforded no more lordly style of
+travel--set me down at an elbow of white highroad, whence, between the
+sloping hills, I could see a V-shaped patch of blue, this half water and
+that sky; here and there the gable of a farmhouse with a plume of smoke
+streaming sidewise; and below me, in the exact point of the V, the masts
+and naked yards of a ketch at her moorings. Even in that sheltered
+harbor, to judge by the faint oscillations of her masts, she felt the
+tug of the waters around her keel. There had been a storm the night
+before; without, the sea ran strong about all these exposed coasts; and
+I knew that, hidden from sight behind the upper headland, the surf must
+be bursting in a cloud over the Brown Cow, and the perturbed tide
+setting like a mill-race between that great dun rock and the shore
+through the narrow gut we called the Cat's Mouth.
+
+"You'll be noticing some changes, Mr. Nick?" the carrier hinted at last,
+lingering to observe me. "Well, there's a deal may happen in two or
+three years. You can't look to find things just the way you left 'em."
+
+He used a certain respectful familiarity, having known me all my life,
+and, as he spoke, eyed me with the kind and open curiosity of a dog. He
+was a gentle little man, with a manner oddly compounded of the sailor's
+simplicity and the rustic's bootless cunning,--for he had followed both
+walks in his day,--and was popularly held to be somewhat weak-witted
+since a fall from the masthead to the decks of the brig _Hyperion_ some
+years before.
+
+"I am not near enough to see any changes yet, Crump," I answered him.
+"The changes, if any, show most, I dare say, in myself."
+
+"So they do, sir; so they do," he assented heartily. "My wife used to
+say you were a pretty boy, and had the makings of a fine, personable
+man. First thing I thought, when I clapped eyes on you to-day, was:
+'Well, this here's a lesson to Sarah not to be hasty in her judgments!'
+'Tain't often I get the better o' Sarah, you know, sir. They tell me
+you've been in Italy and learned to paint?"
+
+"I'm afraid I haven't quite learned all the art yet, Crump. It takes
+more than two or three years."
+
+"Depends on the person, I shouldn't wonder," he said, wagging his head.
+"Some people are slow by nature. Could a man make his living by it, d'ye
+think, sir?"
+
+I answered this devious inquiry as to my own financial standing by
+assuring him that I had contrived so far to make mine. "I'm not riding
+in my coach-and-four yet, as you see, Crump, but the time may come."
+
+"I'm sure I hope it will, Mr. Nick," he said rather dubiously. "But it's
+kind o' tempting Providence, seems to me. You might 'a' been walking
+your own quarter-deck, captain o' some tall East Indiaman by this, like
+your father and grandfather before you, making a safe, easy living, and
+looked up to by everybody."
+
+I interrupted his moralizing to ask, as, indeed, I had already done more
+than once, without being able to get his attention: "How does my
+grandfather seem?"
+
+Momentary gravity fell upon him. "He--he don't always answer the helm,
+Mr. Nicol," he said, and touched his forehead with a meaning look.
+"Barring that, I'd rate him seaworthy, for all he's cruised so
+long--nigh eighty year, ain't it?"
+
+"I'm glad I came home," I said, concerned. "The old man should not be
+alone."
+
+"He ain't exactly alone," said Crump, with an uneasy glance into my
+face. "He's signed on two new hands here lately--about a month ago, I
+b'lieve. I dessay he was making pretty heavy weather of it by himself,
+and so he--er--well----" He cleared his throat, hesitating in an odd
+embarrassment; he plainly felt that here was information bound to be
+distasteful, and set about imparting it with a painful diplomacy. "The
+cap'n--Cap'n Pendarves, your grandfather, sir, was, as you might say,
+short-handed, you being in foreign parts, and old John Behenna having
+slipped his cable 'long about the last o' May, as I was telling you; and
+so the cap'n he ups and ships these here--and--and, in fac', Mr. Nick,
+one of 'em's a woman!" He drew a long breath and wiped his forehead.
+
+"You don't mean he's married!" I shouted, and with, I am afraid, a
+pretty strong term of disapproval.
+
+"There, now, I _thought_ you'd take it that way!" Crump remarked, not
+without gratification. "But it ain't so bad as that, Mr. Nicol." And he
+went on to explain, with a variety of nautical metaphors, that the
+couple, an elderly man and a young girl supposedly his grandchild, had
+appeared in Chepstow some weeks ago during fair-time; that the young
+woman "took observations," which I translated to mean that she told
+fortunes, supporting them both, it would seem, by the pennies she gained
+this way, for the man did no work, and was most often seen "hove to,
+transhipping cargo," at the bar of the Three Old Cronies or elsewhere,
+Crump said. He did not know how or when or where my grandfather had
+first fallen in with these vagabonds. For several successive days he had
+been noticed in their company, or laying a straight course for the
+little booth wherein the girl plied her mean trade; and then, all at
+once, to the stupefied astonishment of Chepstow,--where the captain was
+reckoned, with reason, a particularly hard, sour, dour sort of body,
+anything but friendly or hospitable,--the pair of them were discovered
+comfortably installed beneath the Pendarves' roof, as snug as if they
+had lived there all their lives and never meant to go away! The thing
+was a mystery; it went near to being a scandal. For a final touch, Crump
+assured me that these precious gentry were all but nameless; no one had
+ever heard the woman called anything, and the man's name defied
+pronunciation.
+
+Upon all this agreeable intelligence, we parted, as Crump's way was by
+the round-about hill road, while I struck straight across by short cuts
+to my grandfathers house. If I had been content to loiter on the path
+heretofore, no amount of haste could satisfy me now. I doubt if any
+honest artist lad returning to the place of his birth after three years'
+absence ever met a grayer welcome. I had left my grandfather unimpaired,
+and it was well-nigh impossible to figure that harsh and domineering
+spirit in decay. Abram Pendarves belonged to the ancient hearty, savage
+race of British sea-captains, now fast waning to extinction. After a
+youth of wild and black adventure under the rule of just such salt-water
+despots as he himself became, he had spent some two score years
+practising the tyrannies and what one may call the brutal virtues he had
+learned on every sea and beneath every sky this planet owns; then came
+at last to settle down in the storm-beaten house on the cliffs by
+Chepstow (the house his father's father had built), whence he could see
+the surf whiten on the rocks and gulls forever circling about the Brown
+Cow. His was a narrow and surly old age, not overwell provided, for he
+had never been a thrifty man; and he found among the rattletrap
+furnishings of his neglected home one living chattel quite as
+worthless--a weird, lean goblin of a boy, his sole descendant,
+fatherless and motherless, playing lonely little games in corners,
+making crass drawings with a charred stick on the walls, and viewing the
+blossoming orchards of spring with a crazy delight in color. I fear
+there was not much affection between this ill-matched couple. For long
+years I saw in my grandfather only a coarse, violent old man, niggardly
+and censorious. And to him there was doubtless something unwholesome
+and repellent in the most innocent of my tastes; I could not even sin
+roundly, like other boys, by pilfering or truantry, but must display an
+exotic passion for reading forbidden books, an abhorred dexterity at
+caricature. I think we were equally headstrong and unreasonable, I in my
+young way, he in his old one; and as I trudged along the quiet homeward
+paths, it shamed me to remember with what hard words we had parted.
+
+
+II
+
+The sun was going down as I conquered the last steep rise toward my
+grandfather's gate. Hereabouts a pair of steps had been cut into the
+cliff and a hand-rail erected to help the visitor against the wind,
+coming, as it so often did, in flaws of extraordinary force and fury
+around the headland. From this high point a great expanse of ocean
+filled the eye, and the ceaseless, uneasy rumor of water assailed one
+even in the fairest weather. There was always a thin run of surf about
+the base of the Brown Cow and among those narrow conical rocks which,
+set in a rough crescent near the lower end of the Cat's Mouth, had not
+inaptly been named the Cat's Teeth.
+
+[Illustration: "'YOU DIDN'T SEE THE SIGN, I SUPPOSE?'"]
+
+The path followed the edge of the cliff on the hither side of a stone
+wall, behind which some few experienced old apple-trees bent and
+flattened themselves into strange, tortuous shapes to escape the winds.
+The inclosure went by the name of orchard, though it was in truth little
+else than a wild jungle of weeds and rubbish; but one tree in the most
+sheltered corner yearly made a conscientious effort to supply us with a
+bushel or so of pippins, and adventurous Chepstow urchins as regularly
+defeated the hope. I purposed to shorten my road by crossing here; and
+so, finding a toe-rest in certain familiar crannies of the masonry,
+clambered easily to the top of the wall, and paused there a moment,
+astride of the coping, to put aside the branches and take a distant view
+of the forlorn pile of ruins I called home. It was a dreary place; its
+roofs sagged, its chimneys leaned at perilous slants. Yet my heart
+warmed to the sight of it. I took hold of the stoutest bough to swing me
+to the ground, when----
+
+"Don't touch those apples, young man!" said somebody sharply.
+
+I was so startled as nearly to lose my hold, and came down with a run
+and hands well scored on the rough bark. There I stood, knee-high in
+rank undergrowth, staring all about in a surprise that must have been
+not a little ludicrous, for the voice uttered a short cicada-chirrup of
+laughter, shrill and sweet.
+
+"Here I am. What bats men are!" it said.
+
+I looked. She was standing almost immediately beneath the place where I
+had climbed over; my boot must have grazed her. She was what old women
+call a slip of a girl, in a cotton gown, white, figured with fine sprigs
+of green sadly faded, for it was not new. The wind whipped her red hair
+into her eyes. Her face was very much freckled; properly speaking, it
+was one freckle from brow to chin. She wore, besides, as I remember, a
+little muslin tucker (I think the garment is so named) and a little
+frilled muslin apron; and these articles, together with her old print
+frock, were washed, starched, and ironed to a degree it hath not entered
+into the mind of man to conceive. I took off my hat; and something about
+this young woman moved me thereafter hastily to adjust my cravat and
+shirt-ruffle. I believe these signs of perturbation (which were entirely
+genuine) pleased her in some subtle way, like a tribute, for she stopped
+to inquire: "You want to cut through here to the highroad? I'm very
+sorry, but I really cannot allow it. I've had a great deal of trouble
+keeping the village boys away from this tree. These are fine apples and
+good winter keepers--that is, I think they are----" she added a little
+tentatively, searching my face. "You didn't see the sign, I suppose?"
+
+I followed her gesture and beheld, nailed aloft on the stub of a dead
+tree, a square of white planking whereon was neatly lettered the legend:
+
+  NO TRESPASSING UNDER PENALTY OF
+
+  THE LAW
+
+  ABRAM AND NICOL PENDARVES, PROPRIETORS
+  PER MARY SMITH
+
+"I did it myself with a red-hot poker," she said proudly.
+
+I gazed from her to the sign-board, all but speechless. "It's very well
+done," I managed to get out at last.
+
+"Yes, isn't it? But, somehow, it doesn't keep the boys from coming.
+They're not at all law-abiding. I don't think they've been very well
+brought up. And then, of course, they're not accustomed to seeing any
+one in charge here." She looked around, and smoothed her apron with the
+most astonishing little air of resource and command. "I saw a bill with
+the names at the bottom that way, and per So-and-So below, so I copied
+it," she continued, surveying her handiwork fondly.
+
+"Ah? You are Miss Mary Smith?"
+
+"Yes." And now she looked at me, and away again, with a strange and
+sudden flush. "Yes, _Smith_. That's--that's a very good name, _I_
+think." There was a kind of tremulous defiance in her tone, as if she
+half expected me to question it.
+
+"I've heard it before, I believe," said I stupidly--for, in fact, I had
+scarcely yet got myself together. "You live here?"
+
+She nodded, with a perplexed and inquiring eye on me. "I'm Captain
+Pendarves' housekeeper," she said, with a prim and bridling air, and
+once more her expression challenged me. "Deny it if you can, sir!" was
+evidently her unspoken thought.
+
+"And how long has my--ahem!--has Captain Pendarves been employing you,
+may I ask?" I said, wondering that Crump had not prepared me for this as
+for the other changes.
+
+"Young man," said Mary Smith severely, "I have no time to stand here
+answering idle questions. If you want to see Captain Pendarves, I will
+speak to him; but if not, I really think you had better be getting on,
+for it's late."
+
+"I was thinking of stopping awhile," said I humbly, "with my
+grandfather. You see, I'm Nicol Pendarves."
+
+Had I said, "I am the Prince of Darkness," the announcement could not
+have wrought a more appalling change in her. She fell back a step,
+putting out one faltering hand to the wall for support. Her small
+bullying mien vanished like a garment twitched from her shoulders by
+unseen magic. Her face blanched piteously; terror looked from her eyes.
+"Oh, I was afraid of this!" she gasped, in a voice that went to the
+heart. "Sir, I--I--meant no harm!"
+
+"Harm!" said I, both touched and puzzled. "Why, you've done none. There
+is no need for excuses. I never saw a better steward; you did not know
+me, and you were within your rights to send me about my business."
+
+"Sir," she said, still in a tremble, "I have done no wrong. You will
+find everything just as you left it."
+
+"I shall find everything in a good deal better case, judging by what
+I've seen already, I think," said I heartily. "How long have you been
+here?"
+
+"Four weeks--next Wednesday," she answered nervously.
+
+"Then," said I, "maybe you can tell me something about the drift of
+things here. For--not to boggle about it--I am in some uneasiness, Miss
+Smith. These people--this man and woman who I hear have settled
+themselves upon Captain Pendarves of late--who are they? what are they?"
+
+As I spoke we emerged upon the stone-paved walk leading to our kitchen
+door; it had been picked free of weeds, and the currant-bushes on either
+side trimly harnessed up to a set of stakes. A white curtain flounced
+behind the old lattice; there was a row of flowering geraniums in pots
+upon the sill. Through the open door you might see a clear fire and Mary
+Smith's saucepans glowing on the wall. The place, I thought, wore, for a
+kitchen, the best air conceivable of decent and humble dignity; nor
+would one have supposed that mere thrift and cleanliness could be so
+comely. I turned to her with some such words, and found her facing me,
+so much of haggard trouble in her eyes that I stopped, aghast.
+
+"Sir," she said, twisting her fingers, "I see you do not understand--I
+thought you knew. I--I am the woman you speak of. Your grandfather is
+within, and the other--the man--with him."
+
+
+III
+
+Our old house being designed and built with a shiplike compactness,
+there was but one room on the ground floor besides the kitchen and its
+offices. It was a plain, comfortable place, wainscoted about, with
+shelves and lockers in the whimsical copy of a vessel's cabin. And it
+contained the single work of art our establishment could show; that is,
+a portrait of my grandfather's grandfather,--he who founded this
+house,--in a finicking attitude, with a brocade coat and a pair of
+compasses. In his rear were to be seen a pillar and a red velvet
+curtain, and (distantly) a fine storm of clouds and lightning. Never was
+a respectable old sailorman so misrepresented; but all his descendants
+except one regarded this gaudy daub with almost religious veneration.
+Every family has its one great man; the admiral was ours. His was the
+distinction of being the only Pendarves who had ever managed to amass a
+fortune. It had dribbled through the fingers of succeeding generations;
+but there was a tradition that some part of it, buried or otherwise
+secreted with an admirable forethought by the old gentleman, might yet
+be discovered, to the further glorification of our house.
+
+The picture hung directly opposite the door, favoring me, as I entered,
+with a disconcerting smirk; it needed no great stretch of fancy to
+credit him with cherishing some secret and villainous joke. Beneath it
+sat my grandfather, with his pipe, in the same place and attitude as I
+remembered him for upward of twenty years, but so spectral a likeness of
+himself that the sight of him shocked me like a blow. He had wasted to a
+mere parchment envelop of bones, and the eyes he turned to mine were
+bright with inward fever. I had looked for I do not know what signs of
+an unstable mind, but at first, save for the eyes, saw none. He showed
+only a not too well pleased surprise.
+
+"Nicol!" he said, and pushed back his chair, without rising. "Nicol!"
+and then for a moment sat staring closely at me under his heavy brows.
+With his next action something of the horror of his affliction came home
+to me, for I saw that, but for some confused sense that I had been
+absent against his will, he had utterly forgot everything concerning me,
+the terms of our last meeting, and the events of many years besides.
+
+"Hush, and sit down!" he said, in the habitually chiding tone he had
+used to the boy of ten or twelve. "Take your books and get your lesson!"
+He pointed with the stem of his pipe to a stool in the corner where, as
+a lad, I had passed more than one grim hour, and turned to his
+companion, as older people turn from the interruptions of children.
+
+Mary Smith, following behind, touched me gently on the arm. "Go and sit
+down," she formed the words with her lips rather than voiced them.
+
+There sat beside my grandfather a vast, fat creature with a forest of
+greasy black hair and beard about his pallid face; his heavy hands lay
+motionless in his lap, forcibly reminding me of an image I had seen of
+some Oriental god upon his throne. His eyes were scarcely opened, his
+breathing was almost imperceptible; a gross animal content appeared in
+him as of a full-fed, lethargic crocodile. Side by side, he and the
+gaunt, fierce-eyed old man presented no mean allegory of spirit and
+body. A table was before them, and in the middle of it a toy the like of
+which I had never seen in this house or elsewhere--a globe of crystal,
+perhaps the size of an orange, held up on a little bronze pedestal. The
+fat man's eyes, or so much of them as one might see, were fixed upon
+this thing with a kind of stupid intensity; one could have fancied him
+paying tribute to some idolatrous shrine. The captain watched him with
+an equal earnestness; so might the Roman mob have hung upon the reading
+of the sacred entrails; and there was about it the air of a
+well-practised, familiar rite. At last my grandfather asked:
+
+"What do you see?"
+
+[Illustration: "THE FAT MAN'S EYES ... WERE FIXED UPON THIS THING WITH A
+KIND OF STUPID INTENSITY"]
+
+The other's lips moved, and an unintelligible whisper reached me.
+
+"Ay, that's it, that's it," said the captain, and sent a quick,
+searching look about the room. "Doubloons--pieces-of-eight--Spanish
+pillar-dollars--doubloons, doubloons! That is what it would likely be
+made up of, eh? But where--try to see that--where?"
+
+Another interval of silent gazing, and the oracle uttered some further
+statement, which my grandfather received with an impatient groan.
+
+"Doubloons--piles of gold--I know!" he said. "And a ship. But
+whereabouts was it, eh? Surely you can see whereabouts it was?"
+
+"It's all a mist; I can see nothing," the other answered, after a pause.
+
+I could have found it in me to laugh at the whole miserable hocus-pocus,
+had I been less indignant. The situation was, besides, sufficiently
+grave; and as I listened to this silly and profane juggling, and
+observed the wildness of my grandfather's bearing, it became plain to me
+that he could not long endure such an influence. I guessed from his talk
+that the old man's disorder was based upon the idea of treasure lost,
+sunk, or hidden hereabout; for our coast was dangerous, a menace to
+vessels, and not innocent, besides, of smugglers and worse. Perhaps the
+poverty of his later years was at the root of his delusion; perhaps his
+madness would have taken this form anyhow. However he had fallen into
+the fat man's hands, this was the secret of the latter's power. While I
+pondered gloomily, the sitting (so to call it) came to an end. Perhaps
+my unwelcome appearance somewhat contracted it. My grandfather lapsed
+into his chair, his chin on his chest, brooding. Excitement died in him
+almost visibly, like the flickering down of a spent fire. Instead of
+eighty, he looked a hundred and eighty, and his face was as lifeless as
+a mummy's.
+
+"Zaira!" said the fat man, raising his thick lids (but I fancied he had
+already taken some shrewd peeps at me from under them), "I have slept,
+and the spirit has spoken. Arise! take away the mirror of Time and
+Space!"
+
+And hereupon the girl, advancing with a shamed glance at me, carried the
+globe to one of the lockers, shoved it in, and slammed the door on it
+savagely.
+
+"Have a care!" the seer warned her somberly; the mirror of Time and
+Space, apparently, was not immune from the ordinary risks of mirrors, as
+one might have expected so august an instrument to be. When speaking
+aloud thus, he used a great rolling, sonorous voice; it filled the room
+until the very window-panes vibrated.
+
+She gave him a look of angry rebellion, opened her lips as if to retort
+with some stinging word, stood irresolute a moment with eyes that
+wavered between the three of us, then walked off, leaving us sitting
+facing each other in silence.
+
+The fat man and I exchanged a long stare, I choking down my temper, he
+smooth and placid, to outward seeming, as the idol he resembled. The
+resolution with which he stuck to his silly pose was, in its way, a
+rogue's masterpiece; nothing more exasperating than this stolid
+effrontery was ever devised. The scoundrel feared, and yet knew he had,
+in a sense, the better of me; the helpless old man between us was his
+shield.
+
+"Young man," he said at last, in the same booming monotone, "have you
+the gift of the seeing eye?"
+
+"I have more the gift of the feeling fist, I think," said I, with what
+calmness I could muster. "If you doubt it, sir, I shall be pleased to
+show you. I am Nicol Pendarves, as a soothsayer like yourself will have
+guessed already. Perhaps you will honor me with your name and business
+here?"
+
+"Many names are mine," he answered, and made a solemn gesture. "Many
+names are mine----"
+
+"Doubtless," I said; "but I meant your _last_ alias."
+
+He went on, unruffled, in his great voice, as if I had not spoken: "Many
+names have been mine through the uncounted eons--many names. In this
+flesh men call me Constantine Paphluoides."
+
+It was no wonder Chepstow could not turn its tongue about that name;
+that and his manner together must have dumfounded our straight-thinking
+townspeople. I do not remember--indeed, I took no pains to note--what
+else he said; bits of mythology, history, poetry, rolled from him in a
+cataract of meaningless noise. Had I been an ardent disciple sitting at
+his feet, he could not have feigned a greater exaltation. The fellow was
+at once dull and crafty; he loosed this gust of windy rhetoric at me as
+if he thought to win upon me by mere sound and fury signifying nothing.
+
+I got up at length, when I had had enough of him, and, walking across to
+where he sat, "Mr. Constantine Paphluoides," said I, "this is my house;
+I give you until to-morrow morning to leave it; you will go quietly and
+without any formalities of farewell. You will find it expedient to obey
+me: otherwise, although I have not consulted the mirror of Time and
+Space, I should not be surprised if it revealed you, to the seeing eye,
+in the town jail and later in the stocks."
+
+He made no answer, but sat staring at me, blinking, and opening and
+shutting his mouth in a gasping fashion like a fish. I had striven to
+speak quietly, but (being in a breathing heat of anger) must
+unconsciously have raised my voice, for unexpectedly, and, as it were,
+for a warning, my grandfather came out of his semi-stupor and
+straightened up, eying me over with a kind of wandering severity.
+
+"Nicol, go to bed! You hear me? Go to bed!" He reached, cursing, for his
+cane. There was a grotesque familiarity in the act. With that very cane
+he had sought to coerce me into the straight and narrow road, as he
+conceived it, how many times during all my childhood!
+
+"Go to bed, I tell you!" he screamed, and half rose, brandishing his rod
+of correction.
+
+Somebody pulled at my sleeve; it was the girl. "Please come away, Mr.
+Pendarves; please do come away, sir, just for a minute, and then he'll
+forget it," she urged; and, with her earnest air of responsibility:
+"It's so bad for him."
+
+
+IV
+
+[Illustration: "'GO TO BED, I TELL YOU,' HE SCREAMED, AND HALF ROSE"]
+
+In the kitchen, Zaira Mary Smith was getting supper ready, as it
+appeared. I followed her out passively, and sat down in a sort of maze.
+It seemed incredible that, amid the shabby tragedy of this household,
+there should be time or thought for the kindly business of spreading a
+meal. The girl marched briskly to and fro, stooping to the oven door,
+tinkling softly among her spoons and bowls, evidently taking a timid
+zest in her labors. It made her seem the most sane, assured, and stable
+person among us, spite of her position. I could have imagined her
+singing as she went, had it not been for my presence. She was
+desperately conscious of me, watching me askant with the curiously
+commingled fear and trustfulness of a child. Nor, notwithstanding the
+untruths or half-truths she had told me, could her connection with the
+abominable rogue-fool in the next room appear other than an enormity--as
+if she might be the enchanted heroine of some fairy-tale, condemned to
+the service of a monster. At last, when she came and laid a board and
+pan on the table beside me, and, rolling up the sleeves about her
+capable, round little arms, began a severe maltreatment of a batch of
+dough, I could keep silence no longer; curiosity crowded every other
+feeling out of me.
+
+"Mary Smith!" I burst out, "for God's sake, tell me all about it!"
+
+She rested her hands on the edge of the bowl an instant. "About us?" she
+said, with a quick glance at me. She gave the dough one or two
+perfunctory pats and punches, biting her lips; and then suddenly, with a
+rush of color, her face puckered together, she clapped her befloured
+hands over it, and fell on the nearest bench in a perfect whirlwind of
+sobs.
+
+"I--I--I w-w-wanted to be respectable!" was all I could make out between
+gasps--but that was staggering enough news, I thought. She wanted to be
+respectable!
+
+She went on: "I didn't come here of my own free will, Mr. Pendarves,
+truly I didn't; but when we came, and I saw how nice I could make
+it,--and I never had a home before,--I knew, if you ever came back, that
+would end it all, and I did so hope you wouldn't!"
+
+"It seemed a pity not to make hay while the sun shone?" I suggested.
+
+She nodded, a little doubtfully. "I didn't think of it just that way,"
+she said. "But--yes, I suppose any one would put it so. Only--I haven't
+hurt anything, Mr. Pendarves; I--I only scrubbed--and cooked--and
+cleaned a little. I was so happy: there was no harm, it seemed to me.
+And when I pretended to be the housekeeper, that--that was just a little
+game I played with myself; it was silly, I dare say, but, after all, it
+did no harm, either. It was like another game I play by myself
+sometimes--of having a birthday, you know? I put little things I've made
+beside the bed, and when I wake up in the morning, I make believe it's
+my birthday, and I'm so surprised at all the presents I've got! It's
+silly, isn't it?' I knew you'd laugh."
+
+"I never felt less like it," I said. "Don't you know your real
+birthday?"
+
+She shook her head. No, she did not know that. She had never known
+anything about her father and mother. She was not even certain of her
+own name. "He calls me Zaira," she said, with a scornful jerk of her
+auburn head toward the other room; "but that's a stupid name, and I hate
+it. I tell every one my name's Mary Smith. Why not? I might as well call
+myself what I like--nobody cares. I think Mary Smith's beautiful, don't
+you? It's so respectable, isn't it?" she added wistfully.
+
+Of her childhood she could remember nothing but being in some sort of
+school or institution (a home for foundlings, most likely) governed by
+nuns, or at least by women who went about in black stuff dresses and
+white caps, and whom one called _ma soeur_--for this was in southern
+France, she thought. The life was clean, decorous, and peaceful, and she
+might have grown up to wear a white cap herself, and herd little waifs
+into chapel; but when she was probably ten or eleven years old, the fat
+man came and took her away, and they had been wandering up and down the
+world ever since. He said he was her uncle, but she was no more sure of
+that than of anything else concerning herself.
+
+When they had been in Chepstow a time, she said, her uncle came into
+their fortune-telling booth one day with Captain Pendarves, whose name
+she did not then know. He talked a great deal in an excited way about
+finding some treasure----"money I think he said his father or
+grandfather had hidden a long while ago. He kept saying it would all be
+in 'doubloons, doubloons,' because it was got in the Spanish Main and
+brought here in a ship. And he said there was treasure, heaps of it, in
+the bottom of the Cat's Mouth, where ships had sunk, gold pieces all in
+amongst the ribs of dead men. Mr. Pendarves,"--she looked at me with a
+shy, awed sympathy,--"I saw your grandfather was--was----"
+
+"He is crazy, or nearly so," said I. "Plain talk is best."
+
+"I'm afraid so. I thought shame to beguile a poor old man that way, but,
+sir, I could not stop it. He came every day, and they looked in the
+crystal--just as they were doing this afternoon, you know. He's worse
+now; I think he forgets betweenwhiles what was said the last time they
+looked. Then, one day, _he_ told me we were to come here to live. It was
+wrong--I knew it; but when I saw it, and thought what I could do--and I
+did so want to have a home and--and be respectable--and I thought, too,
+if I worked hard and made it nice, it would be a--a kind of payment,
+wouldn't it? I couldn't help longing to----"
+
+"Don't cry that way," I said. "I can't bear to see you cry."
+
+"I can't help it," she sobbed. "It's so hard to leave it all."
+
+"Well, then, why leave it?" said I. "_He_ has to, surely; but that need
+make no difference to you. We must have a housekeeper, you know."
+
+She gave me a woeful glance; and I understood that, according to her
+poor little code, it would be more "respectable" to resume her
+journeyings with the fat crystal-gazer than to stay in the house with
+Nick Pendarves as his grandfather's housekeeper. Here was a ticklish
+point to argue with her; and, for all her tears, there was a firmness in
+the set of her chin (it was dented with a dimple) that warned me such
+argument would be a waste of time. She had made up her mind, and would
+stand to it at all costs. It was martyrdom in an eminently feminine
+style; women deliver themselves up to it day by day, and contrive to be
+perfectly unreasonable, yet somehow in the right. She wiped her eyes
+presently, shut her mouth on a sob, and went resolutely about her work.
+We had, after all, a tolerably cheerful evening in the kitchen. It
+seemed wisest for me not to show myself again before Captain Pendarves,
+but I am afraid I did not repine greatly at the banishment. As the door
+swung to and fro behind Mary carrying their dishes, I caught glimpses of
+the gloomy parlor, my grandfather huddled in his chair by the table,
+with bright, roving eyes; the sorcerer surprisingly busy about the food
+for a person of his ethereal habits; and, on the wall beyond, old
+Admiral Pendarves simpering eternally over his private fun.
+
+
+V
+
+The wind came up strong again after sunset, and all night long went
+noisily about the gables, and piped down our trembling old chimneys. It
+did not lessen with the approach of morning, and when I thrust open the
+window, an hour or so after dawn, there was a low-hanging gray sky and a
+great, driving stir in the air. I had hardly pushed the casement out,
+had one brief vision of bare tormented trees, felt a slap of rain, and
+heard, not far away, the measured beating of breakers as they charged at
+the foot of our cliff, when the wind, plucking the latch from my grasp,
+slammed the lattice and went yelling around the corner of the house like
+a jocular demon. I began to dress, thinking, as I had often thought
+before, that the place had a kind of fantastic kinship with the sea;
+every timber in it seemed to strain and creak to the repeated onsets of
+the storm, like those of any ship. The house stood steady enough, yet
+our position, open to all the winds of heaven, and within a few hundred
+paces of the furious water, was surely such as none but a sailor would
+have chosen. We rode out the weather in the open, so to speak, with
+abundant sea-room. And, for the better carrying out of the simile, there
+presently arose, somewhere outside, a long, drawling hail, calculated,
+with a mariner's nicety, to overcome the wind. "Ah-o-oy! The house,
+ah-o-oy!"
+
+It came from the landward-looking or highroad side of the house--about
+two points on the starboard bow, as old Crump would have said. And, in
+fact, when I reached the door, there was Crump himself huddled in a
+pea-jacket on the seat of his cart, with his gray pony drooping
+dolefully between the shafts. I could just see them above the ragged
+hedge that divided our little front yard from the public way. Towering
+columns of rain swept across the landscape; Crump and the pony looked
+soaked to the core; and I was admiring the Spartan devotion to duty that
+brought him out at this hour, in such weather, when he began another
+wailing like a castaway banshee: "Ah-o-oy, the house! Pendarves,
+ah-o-oy!"
+
+I set a hand to either side of my mouth and roared an answering hail to
+him up the wind. We were a bare twenty yards apart, but if he had not
+chanced at that moment to look in my direction, I doubt if he would have
+been aware of me, for all my efforts. The wind, in a fresh swoop,
+snatched the sound from my lips and ranged through the house with a
+turmoil of banging doors, falling crockery, and wildly fluttering
+draperies. As it was, he caught sight of me, shouted something
+unintelligible, and gesticulated toward a formless heap tucked up in
+oilskins behind him in the cart. Then he descended laboriously and
+signaled for help to remove it.
+
+"What is it? What has he got?" screamed Mary Smith in my ear. She must
+have come running from the back of the house at the recent outburst of
+racket. Her petticoats swirled; her red curls streamed (they were
+shining with wet). She had certainly been outdoors already, as early as
+it was, in the teeth of all this blow, and I was startled by the pale
+anxiety of her look. "What is it? Who is there?" she cried again
+shrilly.
+
+"Nobody but Crump with my baggage," I cried back. "What's the matter?"
+
+"Oh, Mr. Pendarves, haven't you seen them? They are both gone! I've
+looked everywhere about the house. They were gone when I got up, and I
+can't find them high or low!"
+
+"You mean Captain Pendarves--and the other?"
+
+She nodded, with terror-struck eyes on me; then, raising on tiptoe,
+screamed painfully, with her mouth close to my ear (it was almost
+impossible to hear otherwise): "He--your grandfather--has done it
+before. He's always restless in a storm. He goes down to the shore
+sometimes. I'm so afraid----" her look said the rest.
+
+"Ask him--ask Crump; maybe he's seen them," she added in a shriek, as I
+started to the carrier's help. It was but a few steps to the gate, yet I
+reached it wet through, half blinded by sheets of water driven slantwise
+in my face, and with the breath nearly beaten out of me. In the open,
+thus, the storm seemed to increase tenfold in violence; it filled the
+vast cloudy hollow of the sky with reverberating din; and I felt, or
+fancied I felt, the solid ground shiver with the pounding of the waves
+on the ledges along the Cat's Mouth.
+
+Crump greeted me with a cheerful grin; he had all the seaman's tolerance
+for the vagaries of the weather.
+
+"Coming on to blow some, ain't it?" he remarked at the top of his lungs.
+"Your old apple-tree's carried away--that one in the corner of the
+orchard, I mean. I could see it as I came along by the upper road."
+
+"Have you seen my grandfather anywhere about?" I shouted.
+
+He could not have understood the question, for he answered, squinting up
+at me knowingly as he stooped over his end of my chest: "I see you got
+rid of _him_, Mr. Nick, and in short order, too. I spoke him a little
+way back, bound for Sidmouth with all sails set--at least, he was laying
+a course that way. Come on board, ma'am!" He pulled his forelock and
+made a leg respectfully before Mary (albeit eying her with no small
+interest) as we shoved our burden through the door. The girl clapped it
+shut, with a sharp struggle against the draught, and in the momentary
+silence that followed we stood awkwardly and apprehensively surveying
+one another, while the hurricane rumbled outside.
+
+"I asked you if you had seen my grandfather," I said to Crump, at last.
+
+"Seen the cap'n? Why, no, sir," he said, surprised. "I was telling you
+I saw----" He stopped, with a glance at Mary.
+
+"Yes, go on. You saw _him_? Where? What was he doing?" she said sharply.
+
+"I was saying he crossed my bows laying his course for Sidmouth, or that
+way," said Crump, evidently striving for a witness-box exactness. "He
+didn't answer my hail. Looked like he was in too much of a hurry."
+
+Mary cast a troubled look about. "Did he have anything with him? A
+portmanteau, or carpet-bag, or anything to carry clothes?"
+
+"Not that I noticed," said Crump carefully. "Looked as if he was going
+out in ballast--except his pockets; there was something in his pockets,
+I should say."
+
+I stared at Mary in some perplexity. What the fat man did, or what
+should become of him, were, indeed, matters of indifference to me,
+except so far as they concerned her. I was well enough pleased that he
+should go, but there was something unusual in the manner of his going;
+it was a headlong flight. To tell the truth, I had looked for further
+trouble with him. What would the girl do now? And where was Captain
+Pendarves? She met me with eyes at once frightened and resolute.
+
+"First of all we must find Captain Pendarves--we must go look for him,"
+she said, answering my thought and making up my mind for me in a trice.
+(She has a way of doing this, displaying the most unerring accuracy at
+it any time these twenty years!) And, in the turn of a hand, she had
+kilted up her skirts, tied a shawl, over her head, and was making for
+the kitchen door.
+
+"Lord love you, miss, you can't go out in this!" said Crump, aghast.
+
+"Why not? I've been out in it once already."
+
+"But, Mary!" I cried, and tried to withhold her. "What good can you do?
+Here is Crump, and here am I. We'll find them both. This is no work for
+a woman. You are wet, you may get hurt----"
+
+"And you?" she retorted. Then, in a lower voice, "Don't stop me, Mr.
+Pendarves; don't try to keep me from going. I can't stay quietly here,
+and wait, and wait, and not know what's happened. I think I should go
+mad. I _must_ go. You are wasting time; your grandfather--oh, can't you
+understand?"
+
+I understood only that she was frantic with anxiety, and might have
+offered further remonstrance had it not been for the sudden defection of
+Crump. He edged a little nearer, and gently jogged my elbow.
+
+"I'm with ye, miss," he announced, with startling alacrity; and, as we
+followed her out, he explained to me in a hoarse and perfectly audible
+whisper behind one hand: "I'm always with 'em when they get that look
+on, Mr. Nicol. Catch me adrift on a lee shore! I've learned a lot since
+I signed with Sarah."
+
+The breakfast-table had been laid, and the empty chairs stood around it
+in their places, under the smiling supervision of the admiral's
+portrait. In the kitchen, Mary had a bright fire going, her neat towels
+hanging to dry. She opened the door, and the next instant this pretty
+and comforting picture was shut behind us, and there we were crouching
+in the rain under the eaves, with the wind bellowing overhead.
+
+[Illustration: "IT LAY BEFORE US, A CONSIDERABLE HEAP OF GOLD AND SILVER
+COINS, TARNISHED BUT RECOGNIZABLE"]
+
+Mary stood on tiptoe again to scream: "I've been all over except in the
+orchard--you can see the shore from there."
+
+I took her hand within my arm, and we struggled forward. As we drew
+nearer the cliff, the loud and awful noise of breakers in the Cat's
+Mouth silenced the storm; yet the wind was no whit diminished. A man
+could hardly have kept his feet, I think, along the cliff path. Before
+we reached the corner where the ancient tree that had weathered so many
+gales lay prostrate, uprooted at last, although we had as yet no view of
+the immediate shore, we could see a white aureole of spray hang, vanish,
+and return in a breath, yards in air above the Brown Cow. We fetched a
+compass around the orchard, stumbling and staggering among stumps and
+matted weeds and half-hidden logs without finding my grandfather, or any
+trace of him; and Crump having dropped behind, we had lost sight of him
+when that eery screech he adopted to make himself heard traveled to us
+down the wind. He was kneeling by the dislodged roots of our old tree,
+and, as he caught my eye, began an uncouth pantomime of surprise and
+wonder; then stooped, grasped a handful of something, and held it aloft
+with extravagant gestures. He bawled again, and, having got closer by
+this time, I heard the words:
+
+"Doubloons, Mr. Nick! Pieces-of-eight! Spanish dollars! Doubloons!"
+
+"Heaven help us all!" went through me, "Here's another gone mad."
+
+The spectacle put our search momentarily from my mind. I knew Crump's
+head to be none of the strongest, and I should never have guessed what
+had actually happened--for surely this was a strange place and way in
+which to stumble upon old Admiral Pendarves' treasure!
+
+Yet that was what the carrier had done; he was never saner in his life.
+It lay before us, a considerable heap of gold and silver coins,
+tarnished but recognizable, in a rotting wooden keg sunk into the ground
+at the foot of the tree and partly meshed in its roots. Crump plowed
+among the coins with his hand.
+
+"There's a mort of money here, Mr. Nicol," he said, "and there's been
+more. Look, here's some of it scattered out in the grass; it couldn't
+have got away out there of itself. And here's a footprint in the mud."
+He looked up thoughtfully. "Likely some of it's on its way to Sidmouth
+now," said he. "I thought his pockets bulged."
+
+"Well, I wish him joy of it!" said I.
+
+"Lord, you could have the law on him for that, Mr. Nicol. Ain't you
+going to?"
+
+"Not I!" said I, holding Mary's hand.
+
+Something in this attitude must have moved Crump to his next remark. He
+looked us both over with an impartial and dispassionate air, cast a
+calculating eye on the treasure; then, "Enough left to get married and
+set up on, anyway," he said weightily. "There's worse things in the
+world than being married--though you'd hardly believe it. That's what I
+often says to Sarah!"
+
+At that Mary Smith snatched her hand suddenly from mine and moved toward
+the edge of the cliff, crying out that we must continue our search. I
+climbed the orchard wall and looked along the shore. Here the cliff
+dropped away almost sheer, and the narrow strip of shingle at its base
+was lost in the surf. Farther to the north it widened a little with the
+curve of the shore, and through a swaying curtain of rain I could follow
+it to a point we called the Notch, near the entrance of the Cat's Mouth;
+of late years they have dredged the channel and moored a bell-buoy off
+this headland. There was nothing alive in sight; some prone black
+objects I saw, with a start, were only a few fisher-boats drawn up on
+the sand, and none too safe. I looked out to sea; the tide was making,
+and, where the strait drew in toward the Cat's Teeth, the waves fought
+and clamored with a horrid vigor, like living monsters. Their huge
+voices outdid the winds, and, as one after another made forward,
+towered, and broke upon the reefs, the Teeth disappeared in a welter of
+foam. Hereabout we found the old man at last.
+
+Where he had got a boat, or with what madman's strength he had launched
+it, we could not guess. It was midway of the Cat's Mouth that I first
+caught sight of him, at no great distance measured by feet and inches,
+but as far beyond human aid as if the wide Atlantic had separated us. He
+was standing up in the stern, with folded arms, in something the posture
+he may have maintained on the poop of his ship in old days--where,
+perhaps, he fancied himself at this moment. I trust that reason was
+withheld from him in the utter hour; and certainly, although I could not
+discern his features, I saw him make no gesture either to invite help or
+to indicate that he had any understanding of his position. If mad, I
+thought (right or wrong) his death thus less ignoble than his life had
+become; if sane, he held a strong and steadfast heart, and bore himself
+well on his last voyage. By some strange chance, the boat spun and
+tossed among the breakers, yet kept an even keel, and boat and man
+together made a viking end. For, so standing, unconscious or unmoved, he
+went down, before our eyes, between the white and pointed reefs of the
+Cat's Teeth.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+BOB, DÉBUTANT
+
+BY HENRY GARDNER HUNTING
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY DENMAN FINK
+
+
+Of course, Bob knew that, as an abstract ethical principle, it is wrong
+to fight. His mother had been endeavoring to impress that idea upon him,
+from the moment it was first decided that he should go to public school
+till his books and his lunch-box were packed and he was on his way
+thither; and she had succeeded fairly well, for she had exacted a
+promise from him faithfully to avoid personal encounters as wholly
+sinful and unbecoming.
+
+As a matter of fact, Bob knew only so much about fighting as he had
+learned through round-eyed, somewhat frightened observation of a very
+few entirely bloodless encounters among older boys; and, inasmuch as he
+had found himself consistently excluded from nearly all other, more
+peaceful pursuits and interests of these older ones, it was not
+unnatural that he should feel merely a spectator's interest in their
+fistic battles also, and that he should look upon them as he would have
+looked upon any other natural phenomenon--with some excitement, perhaps,
+but with no personal concern.
+
+Bob admired his mother. To him, she was the most beautiful and the most
+resourceful woman in the world. He had found her judgment upon many
+subjects so wise that he was quite prepared to believe her position in
+this matter (which did not appear to be vital) completely and
+unquestionably correct, and to promise accordingly.
+
+But conditions which exist on the big, bare public-school playgrounds,
+away alike from parental restraint and parental protection, are quite
+different from those in the home door-yard, and the code which obtains
+in the ward-school world is not an open book to all mothers of
+chubby-fisted sons who are called upon to observe it. It seems difficult
+for mothers to comprehend that a normal boy's standing on the
+school-ground is, like that of a young cock in a barn-yard, simply a
+matter of mettle and muscle.
+
+So it was as early as Bob's second day at school--on the first Papa Jack
+had gone with him--that a revelation came both to him and to his mother.
+To him it was a painful revelation, first because he had this new code
+to learn, and afterward because of his promise; and it was the latter
+thing that made the real difficulty. When you are a small boy you can
+easily adapt yourself and your habits of mind to new conditions and
+environment; but when you have some one else to think of, and when you
+are bound by a promise, that complicates matters.
+
+[Illustration: "SCHOOL-BAG AND LUNCH-BOX DROPPED FROM HIS HANDS"]
+
+Now, one "Curly" Davis--who was said to have been christened Charles,
+but whose astonishingly spiral locks surely constituted better authority
+for a name than any possible application of baptismal water--was, by
+right of reputed might, dictator of the Vine Street Primary. Curly was
+alleged to be of pugnacious disposition, and had not been bred to
+appreciation of the Golden Rule. He had the outward bearing of one who
+has reason for confidence in his personal prowess. He was popularly
+believed to have fought many fights and fierce,--just when and where his
+admirers seemed not to consider important,--and he had a reputation for
+ferocity rather disproportionate to his stature. He had a way of glaring
+at you, too, if you happened to be a new boy at school, which was
+sufficiently suggestive of a sanguinary temperament to overawe the
+average youngster and to render quite unnecessary any more active
+demonstration.
+
+Like all despots who rule through fear, Curly had a following. It was
+made up of lesser lights of like tastes and ambitions, who toadied to
+and imitated the tyrant simply to avoid the unpleasant necessities which
+the alternative involved. These followers, numbering some six or eight,
+through their unity of aim and Curly's leadership, had gained a certain
+ascendency over the far greater, but unorganized, body of would-be
+independents who, chafe as they might under the yoke, dared not attempt
+to throw it off; and these loyal retainers were zealous in service of
+their lord's interests and pleasure.
+
+On that beautiful fall morning when Bob first went alone to school, he
+had not been ten minutes on the playground, standing upon its outer
+edge, school-bag and lunch-box in hand, to gaze upon its novelties,
+before a satellite of Curly's, one Percy Emery, espied him. Instantly it
+was as though Percy had discovered some new quarry, unearthed a fresh
+specimen of some genus, edible and choice.
+
+"Hi, Curly," he yelled, with the eager loyalty of his kind, "come 'ere.
+'Ere's a new one. Look at the school-bag to 'im."
+
+Curly, who was at the moment engaged in the pleasing pastime of
+hectoring a scared little five-year-old who ought still to have been in
+the kindergarten, pricked up his ears at the cry and, like a hungry
+bird of prey leaving a mouse for a lamb, promptly swooped down upon the
+new game. His movement was the signal for the gathering of a crowd, and,
+before Bob was fairly aware that he was the object of attention, he had
+become the center of a curious group whose interest, if not wholly
+hostile, was in the main certainly not friendly. The dictator himself
+confronted him with unmistakably bellicose intentions.
+
+"New shoes!" said Curly contemptuously, selecting the first obviously
+vulnerable point open to a shaft of insult. "New shoes! Spit on 'em!" He
+suited the action to the word, and immediately word and act alike were
+imitated by two or three of his more ardent admirers.
+
+"Stop!" said Bob. He did not know what it meant. He backed away from his
+persecutors.
+
+"Aw, stop, eh?" mocked Curly. "Who are _you_? What's yer name?"
+
+"Bob McAllister."
+
+"Bob! Bob-tail! Bob-cat!" chanted Curly, in gratuitous insult of which
+only bantam shamelessness is capable. "Stop, will I? Who'll make me?
+You? You want to fight?"
+
+He danced about Bob's quiet little figure, snapping his fingers in the
+new boy's eyes. Then, suddenly, he swung his wiry body and swept a
+stinging blow in Bob's face.
+
+A yell of delight from the despot's own drowned a weaker chorus of
+protest. Curly backed and squared, ready for some show of retaliation or
+resistance, a scornful little grin on his face.
+
+"Come on, now. Fight! Stop me!" he cried.
+
+But Bob did not move. Curly's blow had landed fair on the tender little
+red lip, and it had cut against the teeth behind; a tiny scarlet stream
+flowed down Bob's smooth little chin. In his eyes the dizziness of the
+first jar gradually gave way to slow amazement. Then the tears welled
+up, hot tears which overflowed the lids and ran scalding down the
+cheeks, but they did not conceal or quench a glitter which grew to a
+bright flame behind them.
+
+Bob's school-bag and lunch-box dropped from his hands. The pudgy fists
+which had never before been clinched with belligerent purpose, but which
+were, nevertheless, a boy's fists, doubled themselves into hard little
+knots; but still he stood quiet.
+
+[Illustration: "HE SET HIS FACE ONCE MORE TOWARD SCHOOL AND WALKED VERY
+FAST"]
+
+So far as his whirling little mind could think, he thought thus: So this
+was fighting; this was what he had promised mother not to do; what he
+had promised--had promised--promised. He was not so big, this boy who
+had struck him, not so big. Bob was not afraid. But that a promise is
+a thing to be kept inviolate he had learned, oh, years ago, from Papa
+Jack, along with all the other _of-course-ities_ of life, like telling
+the truth, keeping your troubles to yourself, and not being a cry-baby
+or a telltale. And a promise to mother--well, nothing could be more
+sacred. Yet here was a new condition which he had never met before, a
+new situation which suddenly made him see in an altogether different
+aspect a question supposedly settled--this question of to fight or not
+to fight. It made his sweeping promise to mother suddenly seem to have
+been very ill-advised indeed. He wondered if his mother could have known
+that he would meet this kind of thing at school. In that first instant
+after Curly's blow was struck, instinct told him that fists were made to
+be used, and reason added that self-defense is right; and now something
+else was stirring in his heart--something which might not, perhaps, be
+wholly unexpected, under such circumstances, to stir in the heart of a
+boy whose grandfather had carried a musket at Gettysburg and whose
+father had worn khaki at San Juan. He wondered if his mother could have
+known.
+
+[Illustration: "A RING OF BOYS--EXCITED, EAGER, YELLING"]
+
+But Bob's fists only clinched; they did not strike. All the sturdy
+little muscles in his small body stiffened, and he stood with head up
+and eyes blazing, but he did not strike. And then the school-bell
+suddenly began to ring, and the group about him broke away; and Curly
+Davis started off, shouting back something about fixing _him_ after
+school, and--he was alone.
+
+Bob stood still. He realized that the last bell for school had rung. He
+knew that he should have gone in with the others. That was what he had
+been sent to school for, certainly. But he stood still.
+
+The tears had dried upon his face, and so had the thin little line of
+red on his chin. His lip was swelling, and felt as if a hazelnut or a
+big bean had been pushed up under it and were sticking to and stinging
+the skin. He stooped and picked up his school-bag and lunch-box, stood
+still again for a moment, and then walked away. He was not going to
+school, and, naturally, as there was nowhere else to go, he was going
+home.
+
+But a great, heavy weight seemed to have settled down upon his breast
+and pressed in upon it, and it was hard to breathe. His thoughts were
+still confused, but he was wondering--wondering. Why was it? Why had
+they treated him so? Why had they singled him out to attack him? Why had
+that boy with the curly hair struck him? Why had the others laughed?
+Didn't they like him? Didn't any one like him? Why, what had he done?
+His heart swelled with sudden misery and wretchedness. Why was such an
+unkind thing permitted in the world? And then again returned that
+something which stirred inside him, something hot and hard, which made
+his cheeks and eyes burn and his fingers clinch once more. And then
+again the question, "Could mother have known?"
+
+Mrs. McAllister saw him coming a block away, and she ran down to the
+gate to meet him as he trudged in. Bob looked up into his mother's face.
+The quick concern in her eyes, as she saw the battered little lip and
+the stained chin, came nearer to making him sob than Curly's blow had
+done; but, though the tears would well up and his throat felt very
+tight, he only swallowed and carefully wet the puffed lip with his
+tongue.
+
+"Why, Bobbie, Bobbie, what is the matter?" cried his mother, dropping
+down on her knees on the walk beside him. She put both her hands on his
+shoulders and turned his face toward her; and Bob looked straight into
+her troubled blue eyes, and suddenly began to feel better--began to
+feel, indeed, that he did not have to care so much, after all.
+
+"Oh, Bobbie, _have_ you been fighting?"
+
+Bob shook his head.
+
+"How did you get your lip hurt so? Did you fall down?"
+
+Again he shook his head. He didn't know just how to tell her. It wasn't
+fighting. At least, _he_ didn't fight; it had been that other boy. But,
+somehow, he did not want to say that; he did not want to tell; he wanted
+something, but he did not know just what it was. He found himself
+forgetting how he had felt a moment before, and then he discovered that
+he was not thinking about what he wanted at all. He was thinking what a
+very _blue_ blue his mother's eyes were when she looked at him so, and,
+all at once, he felt more sorry for her than for himself, because she
+looked so troubled; and he kissed her quickly, and hurt his lip.
+
+Mrs. McAllister led him into the house. "Won't you tell mother, Bob?"
+she asked.
+
+But he couldn't. He was feeling better--much better--but he couldn't
+tell. There was another reason now, that he hadn't thought of before: it
+would make her feel more sorry. And after all, it didn't matter so
+much; that is, it didn't if-- He looked up at her with a new thought.
+
+"But, Bob, you must tell mother all about it," she was saying, as she
+carefully bathed his chin and lip, and so he had to shake his head
+again.
+
+"Then you must tell papa this noon, Bob."
+
+Bob considered. No, he couldn't tell Papa Jack, either. He felt pretty
+sure father himself wouldn't tell about such a thing if he were a boy.
+He was silent.
+
+Mrs. McAllister began to move about her work, though she still looked at
+him frequently and anxiously. Bob went away to the window, and stood
+looking out. He remembered how he had started out that morning, with
+school-bag and lunch; he remembered how he had approached the
+school-grounds, and how big and strange and attractive a place it had
+seemed to him at first, and what a good time all those boys had been
+having; and then he remembered how, suddenly, he had found them all
+around him, summoned by the call of that boy with the hateful grin, and
+how Curly Davis had sneered and spat and struck. Suddenly he found
+himself tingling all over, and pressing a burning forehead against the
+cool glass, and digging his knuckles into the corner of the sash till
+they ached. Then he went into the library, and lay down on father's big
+leather couch, and thought and thought.
+
+Papa Jack came home for lunch at noon, and mother told him. Bob heard
+them in the hall.
+
+"He says he didn't fight," said his mother, "and he says he didn't fall
+down. He won't tell me, and I told him he must tell you. I don't know
+why he doesn't want to tell; he isn't ashamed or very much frightened,
+and he didn't cry after he came home."
+
+Bob heard Papa Jack's footsteps cross the hall and come in upon the
+hard-wood library floor, and then on the big rug by the library couch.
+Papa Jack sat down beside him and put his big fingers around Bob's
+little ones.
+
+"Well, what about it, Son?"
+
+Bob looked up and smiled. Always such a pleasant, warm feeling came over
+him when Papa Jack came near him and talked to him.
+
+"What about it, Son?"
+
+But Bob could not reply. His eyes grew serious as they looked back into
+his father's.
+
+"What did this, Bob?" asked Papa Jack, gently touching the hazelnut
+bruise with a finger.
+
+"A boy," said Bob.
+
+"What boy?" asked Papa Jack. "A big boy?"
+
+Silence, and then a shake of the head.
+
+"Did you strike him first?"
+
+Again Bob shook his head.
+
+"What did you do to him?"
+
+Still another shake of the head.
+
+"Do you mean he just came up and struck you without any provocation?"
+
+"He laughed," said Bob.
+
+"What else?"
+
+"Spit on my new shoes," reddening.
+
+Papa Jack drew his mustache down between his lip and teeth. "Hm! He did,
+eh? What else?"
+
+"Said 'Bob-tail, bob-cat,'"
+
+Papa Jack looked puzzled.
+
+"Said I was--Bob, bob-tail, bob-cat," explained Bob.
+
+"Oh!" Papa Jack seemed to see light. "And then he struck you?"
+
+A nod once more.
+
+Mr. McAllister looked out the window and his fingers closed tightly
+around Bob's. "When was this, Bob--before school?"
+
+"Mm."
+
+"And you came right home?"
+
+A nod.
+
+"Did you strike him back?"
+
+Bob's eyes widened. "No."
+
+Papa Jack's eyes widened also. "Why?"
+
+"Because."
+
+"Because what, Bob?"
+
+"Because mama said not to fight."
+
+"And you promised?"
+
+Bob nodded again.
+
+"I see." Papa Jack's eyes suddenly lighted with something Bob did not
+understand, and he sat looking down at Bob for a long minute. "I see,"
+he said again, and then he turned and called to mother. "Helen!" And
+mother came in, with a piece of white sewing in her hands.
+
+"Helen," said Papa Jack, "it's a case of bullying. The boy promised you
+not to fight, and he didn't. It's a mistake, mother. He's been set upon
+by some young bully, and couldn't defend himself because of his
+promise."
+
+Mother looked at Bob; there was distress in her eyes, but something else
+came into them, too.
+
+"It's only the beginning, dear--the beginning of battles," said Papa
+Jack, and he put his other hand on mother's.
+
+"Bob," he said, "mother doesn't mean you're not to defend yourself.
+Understand? By fighting, mother only means beginning fights, picking
+fights, provoking other boys to fight. We _have_ to defend ourselves. It
+isn't right to pick a fight; that's what mother means."
+
+Bob saw tears come into his mother's eyes. Papa Jack saw them, too.
+
+"There's only one way among boys, Helen dear. The bullies must be
+fought, you know. Our boy's got to be a boy's boy if he's to be a man's
+man by-and-by."
+
+Suddenly mother bent over and kissed Bob, and held him, with her arms
+thrust under and about him--held him hard.
+
+"The only thing, Bob, is to be a man always. Be square and white. Do the
+right thing. I can't tell you what it will be every time; neither can
+anybody else: but you your own self will know. It may be right even to
+fight sometimes, for yourself and for others who are bullied; but every
+boy knows for himself when it's right and when it's wrong. If he does as
+he _knows_, he'll do right."
+
+It was a quiet lunch that day. Father and mother talked little and the
+meal was quickly over. Bob hardly knew what he himself ate or did or
+thought. There was a strange excitement in his heart and in his head, a
+feeling that he could not define. It was not that he was going back to
+school after dinner. It was not that he would probably meet those boys
+again, nor that he would sooner or later have to face again that Curly
+Davis. Neither was it that, when he did face Curly Davis, he meant
+to--yes, to fight him. No, it was none of these things, though his heart
+did beat the faster as he thought of them. It was something else; it was
+something about what his father had said, not so much his words, but the
+way he had said "a man's man" and "we must defend ourselves"--something
+that thrilled him, made him proud and humble, all at once. Someway,
+father seemed to have taken a new attitude toward him, and in that
+change even Bob seemed to see father's recognition that babyhood was
+over for his small son.
+
+Mother stood in the door and watched him go. She had been crying again,
+a little; she had even wanted to keep him at home. But father had said,
+"No, let him go; as well now as to-morrow," and so she had kissed him
+and cried again, a little. And then she had begged him to "try to keep
+away from those bad little boys," and to "play only with good boys who
+did not want to fight"; and Bob had said yes--doubtfully. He waved his
+hand to her from the gate, and again from the corner of the block, and
+then he set his face once more toward school, and walked very fast.
+
+It was five o'clock when Bob came home again. School closed at four, but
+the clock on the library mantel was tinkling five when he opened the
+door and closed it very softly. He didn't want mother to see him just
+then.
+
+He was trembling and very white--his little mirror by the window showed
+him that. There was a brown-and-blue bruise just in the corner of his
+little brown eyebrow, of which he had felt carefully a dozen times on
+the way home, but which did not look so big in the glass as it had felt.
+There was a rubbed place on his chin, and the soft knuckles of his hands
+were grimy and stained. He laid his school-bag and box carefully on a
+chair, and went to look out the window for a moment. And then a strange
+feeling came over him.
+
+--This was his little room; yes, it was his--the same little room; the
+same white curtains, the same little window, the same view of the little
+green door-yard and the apple-tree and the cedar-hedge; the same soft
+sunset light coming in upon him where it had come so many, many other
+evenings, ever since he could remember. But the boy--that little boy who
+had looked upon it all, who had lived there and loved the white curtains
+and the sun and the apple-tree--where was he? he wondered.
+
+When he closed his eyes he could see just one thing--one whirling,
+seething vision: a ring of boys, excited, eager, yelling, laughing,
+cheering, with only here and there a frightened face; and there in the
+midst himself and another--some one who was striking and kicking and
+scratching at him, but whose blows he did not seem to feel, so hard and
+fierce and fast he himself was striking, and so hotly ran his blood. And
+in his ears were ringing the cries which had gone up at the end, when
+that other boy--he of the curly hair--had suddenly, at last, turned from
+him and run away through the crowd, beaten and sniveling and--alone. And
+he remembered that he had felt sorry then--oh, so sorry--sorry for that
+other boy!
+
+He washed his face and hands carefully, and looked again in the little
+mirror. Perhaps mother wouldn't notice--much. He opened his door and
+crept softly down the stairs and into the library, and there was mother,
+looking anxiously from the window, and father, who had just come in,
+putting on his hat as if he were going out again. And they both turned
+and looked at him; and mother ran and caught him up in her arms, just as
+if he were that baby-boy again--that baby he had been yesterday. He
+wondered.
+
+Father looked at the brown bruise and the scuffed knuckles critically,
+while mother held him with her face against his hair.
+
+"Do you think he'll bother you any more, Bob?" father asked, just as if
+the whole story had been told.
+
+Bob shook his head, and mother suddenly clasped him closer, while father
+turned away with a grim smile. And Bob himself just wondered--wondered
+about that baby-boy he had been yesterday.
+
+
+
+
+TWO PORTRAITS BY GILBERT STUART
+
+A NOTE ON A RECENT ACCESSION OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
+
+BY SAMUEL ISHAM
+
+
+The name of Don Josef de Jaudenes y Nebot has not impressed itself
+deeply on the memory of the world. It does not appear in the great,
+many-volumed biographical dictionaries nor in the indexes of the
+standard histories of the United States. Even in the library of the
+Hispanic Society of America there is no record of him. He was, however,
+a man of some importance in the early diplomacy of the nation. The
+beginning of his official career may be definitely determined by a
+letter of Washington's of July 20, 1791, in which he says: "I yesterday
+had Mr. Jaudenes, who was in this country with Mr. Gardoqui and is now
+come over in a public character, presented to me for the first time by
+Mr. Jefferson."
+
+Gardoqui came to America in 1786 as _chargé d'affaires_ for the
+negotiation of a treaty with Spain. The "public character" in which
+Jaudenes was presented in 1791 was that of commissioner of Spain, and he
+had united with him on the commission Josef de Viar, all their official
+documents being signed with both names. Their main business, like
+Gardoqui's, was the negotiation of a treaty between Spain and the United
+States; a treaty which was to settle boundaries, rights of trade between
+the two nations, and also the question of the "occlusion" of the
+Mississippi River; but there was much outside diplomatic sparring over
+the disputes between the Governor of Louisiana and the Georgians about
+trespasses and conflicting rights. The last communication of the
+commissioners was dated in 1794. The next year the negotiations were
+transferred to Madrid and the treaty was signed there and Jaudenes
+probably then returned to Spain. There seems to be no trace of him after
+that.
+
+The only other facts in regard to him are to be gathered from the two
+pictures recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which are
+the subject of this article. They are signed G. Stuart, R. A., New York,
+September 8, 1794, and bear inscriptions in Spanish which, to complete
+the record, are here given in full:
+
+     DON JOSEF DE JAUDENES Y NEBOT COMISARIO ORDENADOR DE LOS REALES
+     EXERCITOS Y MINISTRO EMBIADO DE SU MAGESTAD CATHOLICA CERCA DE LOS
+     ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA. NACIÓ EN LA CIUDAD DE VALENCIA REYNO DE
+     ESPAÑA EL 25 DE MARZO DE 1764.
+
+     DOÑA MATILDE STOUGHTON DE JAUDENES--ESPOSA DE DON JOSEF DE JAUDENES
+     Y NEBOT COMISARIO ORDENADOR DE LOS REALES EXERCITOS DE SU MAGESTAD
+     CATHOLICA Y SU MINISTRO EMBIADO CERCA DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS DE
+     AMERICA. NACIÓ EN LA CIUDAD DE NUEVA-YORK EN LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL
+     11 DE ENERO DE 1778.
+
+We learn from these that Don Josef was thirty and his bride in her
+seventeenth year, and that she was born in New York. Unfortunately this
+is all that we know about her. Stoughton is a sufficiently familiar name
+in the colonial records of the New England and Middle States, but the
+lady of the portrait has not yet been identified nor has a search of the
+newspapers of the day revealed any mention of her marriage. It may very
+probably have taken place on September 8th, 1794, the date placed after
+Stuart's name on both canvases; but the journalists of that time took
+less note of such international alliances than those of the present.
+Something more about the lady is, however, certain to be found by the
+genealogists and delvers in old diaries and correspondence, for the
+wedding of the young Spanish diplomat with the pretty American girl just
+midway in her teens must have set tongues wagging and pens inditing. How
+the match turned out we do not know, but some argument as to their
+happiness may be based on the fact that Jaudenes' successor, the Marquis
+d'Yrujo, followed his example and took an American bride in the person
+of Miss Sally McKean, who was also painted by Stuart.
+
+  _Two Portraits by_ GILBERT STUART
+
+  _reproduced by permission of_
+
+  THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
+
+
+  _Printed from plates made by the Colorplate Engraving Company, New York_
+
+[Illustration: _Doña_ MATILDE STOUGHTON DE JAUDENES _Wife of the First
+Minister from_ SPAIN _to the_ UNITED STATES]
+
+[Illustration: _Don_ JOSEF DE JAUDENES Y NEBOT _First Minister from_
+SPAIN _to the_ UNITED STATES]
+
+Having thus disposed (somewhat unsatisfactorily, it is true) of the
+personality of the sitters, we can turn to the portraits themselves. The
+accompanying reproductions make extended description unnecessary. They
+are characteristic Stuarts, more elaborate, more complete, than most of
+his subsequent work, but showing clearly his personal point of view
+and the difference between his portraits and those of his
+contemporaries. He is less poetic, more literal than the rivals with
+whom he had contended, not unsuccessfully, for the patronage of London
+society. For him a pretty girl is a pretty girl, and it is enough. He
+seats her comfortably in a chair and paints her as she is. One cannot
+imagine him turning her into a nymph, a shepherdess, or a priestess of
+Hymen, or painting her with a very modish coiffure on her head and a
+pair of blue-ribboned sandals on her bare feet. These things Reynolds
+did habitually and moreover put his figures in attitudes with up-rolled
+eyes and extended arms and filled out his larger canvases with altars
+and tombs and allegorical attributes. This he did to bring his pictures
+in accord with those of the old masters whom he laboriously studied and
+deeply admired. His achievement fully justified him. His sumptuous
+canvases, rich in color, elaborate in composition, perfected with every
+technical resource, have ever since remained unequalled of their kind.
+
+In spite of his stay in West's studio, Stuart had none of this respect
+for tradition nor any wish to attempt the grand style. In this he was
+more like Gainsborough, but Gainsborough invested his portraits, even of
+prosaic sitters, with a strange, penetrating, poetic charm such as no
+other painter has been able to convey. Ranking artists in the order of
+their merit is an unprofitable business, but it may gratify some
+methodical minds to have it stated that these canvases by Stuart are not
+in the same class as good Gainsboroughs or Reynolds. With the best of
+other contemporary portraits they stand approximately on a footing of
+equality. In spite of the quiet pose, the lack of strongly contrasted
+light and shade and all of the clever tricks and forced accents of
+Lawrence and his followers, they are alive and alert. The
+characterization is excellent. The young people were not of so profound
+or complicated a nature as the Father of his Country, and the faces are
+not wrought out with the delicate subtlety of the Gibbs-Channing
+Washington which hangs between them, but they are clear-cut, compelling
+belief in their truth. The execution, too, has all of Stuart's skill.
+Others may have attempted higher things, but none did what he attempted
+with such perfect ease and sureness. In neither of the canvases is there
+a sign of uncertainty, hesitation, or alteration. Each touch is put
+exactly where it should be and left. There is none of the scumbling and
+glazing and re-working so common in the English portraits of the time.
+It is to this that the canvases owe their admirable freshness which
+makes them look as if painted yesterday. The heads have all of Stuart's
+pearly gray and rose tones unimpaired by ill-usage or restoration. The
+clothes and accessories are more swiftly and summarily done, the silver
+lace and the high lights being touched in with amazing sureness and
+cleverness. The composition and arrangement is pleasing, and Stuart's
+besetting fault of putting his heads too low on the canvas is excused
+and justified in the case of Don Josef by the necessity of having his
+portrait correspond with that of his wife, whose elaborate and stylish
+head-dress fills the top of her picture. In short, New York is to be
+congratulated on the winning back after a sojourn abroad of more than a
+century of these two most important and charming paintings executed here
+in the early days of the Republic.
+
+At this point this article might well end, but there may be some who
+recall that last summer for a week or so there appeared in the papers
+articles headed "Fakes at the Museum" or "The Metropolitan Gets Lemons,"
+which assailed the genuineness of these portraits. The discussion did
+not get far beyond the daily press, which, after its habit, registered
+the charges as picturesquely and vehemently as it could, but attempted
+no serious investigation of them. They were brought by a critic whose
+position as a special student of Stuart entitled them to respectful
+consideration, but after giving them that they do not seem conclusive or
+even important. They were based on the fact that the pictures were
+signed G. Stuart, R. A., and bore coats of arms and long Spanish
+inscriptions. It was claimed that this made the genuineness of the
+canvases doubtful, for Stuart signed few of his paintings--possibly none
+except the standing Washington in the Philadelphia Academy; he was not
+an R. A. (Royal Academician); nor was he a heraldic illuminator.
+Furthermore, the painting of the male portrait and the dress and
+accessories in the companion piece did not seem to the critic to agree
+with Stuart's handling. To make his impressions fit with the pictures,
+the critic supposed that Stuart painted a smaller portrait of Jaudenes
+and started one of his wife, which through some freak of temper he left
+(as he frequently did) with only the head and part of the background
+finished. These being brought to Spain, some artist there finished the
+lady's portrait, painted from Stuart's original a companion piece of her
+husband, and added to both the coats of arms, the inscriptions, and
+Stuart's name.
+
+Now, frankly, this is not possible. As for the portrait of Doña Matilde
+being left unfinished, there exists in Stuart's handwriting a list of
+gentlemen who are to have copies of his portrait of Washington,
+consisting of thirty-two names. A few take two copies, no one takes more
+save Jaudenes, who subscribes for five. The list is dated April 20th,
+1795, which is seven months after the date on the pictures, and is the
+strongest possible evidence that Jaudenes was greatly pleased with
+Stuart--presumably on account of these portraits--and is entirely
+irreconcilable with the idea that the painter had quarreled with the
+diplomat's wife or left her portrait unfinished.
+
+As to the coats of arms, the most casual examination makes it clear that
+they were painted by another hand than executed any part of the
+portraits. In all probability they were done after the canvases reached
+Spain, and the inscriptions and signatures would naturally have been
+added at the same time. Stuart would never have engrossed a long Spanish
+inscription, and that he should have signed his name (contrary to his
+habit) and have added the "R. A." to which he had no right is most
+unlikely. What is most unlikely of all, however, is that there should
+have been found in Spain an artist capable of painting a portrait like
+the Don Josef. Both heads are absolutely alike in handling, in texture,
+in mixing of the pigments, and in all of those things are absolutely
+characteristic of Stuart, whose methods were peculiarly his own and
+could not be caught even by men like Sully, who not only intently
+studied his processes but sat and watched him when he was at work. That
+a Spaniard with entirely different training and ideals could have
+reproduced them is impossible.
+
+As for the costumes, it may be admitted that they differ from most of
+Stuart's American work; but the difference is more in subject than in
+method and is chiefly noticeable because he never again painted a
+gentleman in silver-sprigged scarlet waistcoat and small clothes. He
+hated such work, and his position in America enabled him to do as he
+chose, and he could tell sitters that if they wanted clothes they could
+go to a mantua-maker or a tailor, he painted the works of God. So
+distasteful was such labor to him that we know that he employed
+assistants in the details of some of his Washington portraits. In the
+present canvases the heads are painted with an interest and a
+thoroughness very different from that displayed in the costumes. These
+latter are skilfully done. The dexterity displayed is amazing and such
+as no copyist is at all likely to have had, but it is dexterity applied
+to getting a striking result as quickly as possible and with the least
+possible effort of hand or brain.
+
+Now, to explain this, we should remember that Stuart only returned to
+America in 1793, and the pictures are both dated September 8, 1794.
+Whatever that date may mean, both pictures were presumably finished
+before then and were thus among the first, perhaps the very first,
+important works that Stuart did in New York. He would consequently have
+every motive, both from the desire to establish his reputation and from
+the position and charm of his sitters, to do his very best. The
+workmanship should be compared, not with what he did afterwards in
+America but rather with what he had done before in England and Ireland,
+when he was compelled by the exigencies of his sitters and the rivalry
+of his fellow artists to give some importance to costume and
+composition. Unfortunately, Stuart's foreign work is practically unknown
+to Americans (and to foreigners also, for that matter). There is little
+of it in the public galleries, and a large proportion of it has probably
+been rechristened with other and more attractive names. As far as we may
+judge from a few examples and from the many engravings after it (some of
+them large enough and good enough to give an idea of the handling), the
+costumes were done much in the style of those we are considering.
+
+After all, the strongest argument for the authenticity of the portraits
+is the portraits themselves. They are beautiful, they are skilful, done
+in Stuart's style and entirely worthy of him. To suppose them done by
+any one else involves the doubter at once in a maze of improbabilities
+and impossibilities. The present writer is willing to put himself on
+record as quite convinced that they were painted by Stuart and are
+wholly by his own hand and are unusually important specimens of his
+work.
+
+
+
+
+MARY BAKER G. EDDY
+
+THE STORY OF HER LIFE AND THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
+
+BY
+
+GEORGINE MILMINE
+
+XIV
+
+MRS. EDDY'S BOOK AND DOCTRINE
+
+     "_No human tongue or pen taught me the Science contained in this
+     book, 'Science and Health'; and neither tongue nor pen can
+     overthrow it._"--MARY BAKER G. EDDY.
+
+
+Although Mrs. Eddy's book, "Science and Health," was not published until
+1875, from the time Mrs. Eddy left P. P. Quimby in 1864 she had been
+struggling to get his theories before the public. Dr. Patterson, her
+second husband, left her in 1866, and for the next four years Mrs. Eddy
+was able to make a bare living by her "Science," wandering about among
+the little shoe towns near Boston and teaching Quimby's theories here
+and there for her board and lodging. She went from house to house with
+her precious copy of Quimby's "Questions and Answers"[2] and the pile of
+letter-paper, covered with her own notes, which she was forever
+rewriting and revising. The one thing that everybody knew about Mrs.
+Glover (Eddy) was that she "was writing a book." While she was staying
+with the Wentworths, in Stoughton, she carried her pile of manuscript to
+Boston, and when the printer to whom she showed it demanded to be paid
+in advance, she tried to persuade Mrs. Wentworth to lend her the money.
+Had the printer who looked over that confused mass of notes known that
+they were the nucleus of a book of which over five hundred thousand
+copies would be sold by 1907, and had he printed the manuscript then and
+there, Christian Science in its present form would never have existed.
+For at that time Mrs. Eddy had not dreamed of calling her system of mind
+cure anything but Dr. Quimby's "Science." She talked of Quimby to every
+one she met; could talk, indeed, of little else. When she introduced the
+subject of mental healing to a stranger--and she never lost an
+opportunity--it was always with that conscious smile and the set phrases
+which the village girls used to imitate: "I _learned_ this from Dr.
+Quimby, and he made me _promise_ to teach at least _two_ persons before
+I _die_."
+
+The story of the Quimby manuscript from 1867 to 1875 and of the gradual
+growth of Mrs. Eddy's feeling of possession, has already been recounted
+in an earlier chapter of this history.[3] By the time the first edition
+of "Science and Health" appeared, Mrs. Eddy said no more about Quimby or
+her promise to him. Mrs. Eddy has always been able to believe anything
+she wishes to believe, especially about her own conduct and about that
+of persons who have displeased her, and it is very probable that by this
+time she had persuaded herself that she really owed very little to the
+old Maine philosopher.
+
+
+_How "Science and Health" was Published_
+
+Although Mrs. Eddy had been working upon her book for about eight years,
+writing and rewriting with almost incredible patience, she was unwilling
+to assume any financial risk in getting it printed. George Barry and
+Elizabeth Newhall, two of her students, agreed to furnish the sum of one
+thousand dollars, which the Boston printer asked for issuing an edition
+of one thousand copies. Mrs. Eddy made so many changes in the proofs,
+continuing her revisions even after the plates had been cast, that she
+ran the cost of the edition up to about twenty-two hundred dollars, and
+Miss Newhall and Mr. Barry lost about fifteen hundred dollars on the
+book. They would, indeed, have lost more, had not Daniel Spofford, much
+against Mrs. Eddy's will, paid over to them six hundred dollars which he
+had received for the copies of the book he had sold. Although Mrs. Eddy
+at that time owned the house in which she lived and had some money in
+bank, she did not, either then or later, suggest reimbursing Barry or
+Miss Newhall for their loss.
+
+Aside from the fact that she was unwilling to risk money upon it, Mrs.
+Eddy believed intensely in her book. One of her devoted students sent
+copies of "Science and Health" to the University of Heidelberg, to
+Thomas Carlyle, and to several noted theologians. But the book made no
+stir outside of Lynn, where it caused some perplexity. There was little
+about it, indeed, to suggest that it would be an historic volume. It was
+a book of 564 pages, badly printed and poorly bound; a mass of
+inconsequential statements and ill-constructed, ambiguous sentences
+which wander about the page with their arms full, so to speak,
+heedlessly dropping unrelated clauses about as they go.
+
+Although the basic ideas of the book are Quimby's, and even much of the
+terminology, the first edition of "Science and Health" was certainly
+written by Mrs. Eddy. Not only is there every internal evidence of her
+hand in the style of the book, but a number of her students are still
+alive who went over portions of the manuscript with her and worked with
+her upon the proofs. The same George Barry who helped to pay for the
+publication of the book copied out in longhand twenty-five hundred pages
+of the manuscript. He brought suit against Mrs. Eddy for payment for
+"copying the manuscript of the book 'Science and Health,' and aiding in
+the arrangement of capital letters and some of the grammatical
+constructions." He produced some of Mrs. Eddy's manuscript in court, and
+the judge allowed him more than the usual copyist's rate "on account of
+the difficulty which a portion of the pages presented to the copyist by
+reason of erasures and interlineations," as it is put in the judge's
+finding.
+
+Although Mrs. Eddy's book has been enlarged and greatly improved as to
+its order and grammar, the first edition contains all the essential
+elements of her philosophy, if such it may be called. Mr. Wiggin did
+good work in translating the book into comparatively conventional
+English, and gave a kind of unity to paragraphs and sentences, and later
+revisers have greatly improved upon his work; but the first edition
+gave a fairly complete and, on the whole, a comprehensible statement of
+Mrs. Eddy's platform.
+
+Mrs. Eddy's religion claims to be a system of metaphysics, a system of
+therapeutics, and an improved form of Christianity. As the founder of a
+system of idealistic philosophy, Mrs. Eddy does indeed, as Mr. Alfred
+Farlow says, "begin where the sages of the world left off." Other
+philosophers have reached the conclusion that we can have no absolute
+knowledge of matter, since our evidence regarding it consists of sense
+impressions, and that we can absolutely assert of matter only that it
+exists in human consciousness; but Mrs. Eddy begins boldly with, "There
+is no such thing as matter." She reaches her conclusion by steps which
+she deems complete and logical:
+
+     1. God is All in all.
+     2. God is good. Good is Mind.
+     3. God, Spirit, being all, nothing is matter.
+
+Mrs. Eddy calls attention to the fact that even if read backward, these
+propositions mean identically the same as when read in the usual order,
+and she seems to regard this as conclusive proof of their logical truth.
+She says, "The metaphysics of Christian Science, like the rules of
+mathematics, prove the rule by inversion. For example: there is no pain
+in Truth, and no truth in pain; no nerve in Mind, and no mind in nerve;
+no matter in Mind, and no mind in matter," etc.
+
+In his article upon Christian Science, published in _The Atlantic
+Monthly_, April, 1904, Dr. John Churchman says:
+
+     The uncompromising idealism, however, which Mrs. Eddy offers us not
+     only has these defects, but is guilty of a far more serious charge.
+     It poses as an explanation, and is in reality a total evasion. To
+     deny that matter exists, and assert that it is an illusion, is only
+     another way of asserting its existence; you are freed by your
+     suggestion from explaining the fact, but forced by it to explain
+     the illusion. It is the old mistake of imagining that an escape
+     from a problem is a solution. You are out of the frying-pan, it is
+     true, but you are in the fire instead.[4]
+
+Having thus disposed of matter, Mrs. Eddy seems to think that her
+definition has actually changed the nature of the case, and that though
+we live in houses, eat food, and endure the changes of the seasons, our
+relation to the material universe is changed because she has defined
+matter as an illusion.
+
+It is not, however, Mrs. Eddy's definition which is so remarkable, but
+her application of it. Having stated that matter is an illusion, she
+asserts that "matter cannot take cold";[5] that matter cannot "ache,
+swell and be inflamed";[6] that a boil cannot ache;[7] that "every law
+of matter or the body, supposed to govern man, is rendered null and void
+by the law of God".[8]
+
+
+_There is No Material Universe_
+
+Quimby acknowledged the actual existence of the universe, of the
+physical body, and of disease; Mrs. Eddy teaches that they are all
+illusory. The earth, the sun, the millions of stars, says Mrs. Eddy,
+exist only in erring "mortal mind"; and mortal mind itself does not
+exist. All phenomena of nature are merely illusory expressions of this
+fundamental error. "The compound minerals or aggregate substances
+composing the earth, the relations which constituent masses hold to each
+other, the magnitudes, distances, and revolution of the celestial
+bodies, are of no real importance.... Material substances, astronomical
+calculations, and all the paraphernalia of speculative theories ... will
+ultimately vanish, swallowed up in the infinite calculus of spirit."
+"Earthquake, wind, wave, lightning, fire, bestial ferocity" are merely
+the "vapid fury of mortal mind." "Heat and cold are products of
+mind"--even a "mill at work, or the action of a water wheel," is only a
+manifestation of "mortal mind force." Apart from mortal belief, there is
+no such thing as climate.
+
+"Repulsion, attraction, cohesion, and powers supposed to belong to
+matter are constituents of mind," Mrs. Eddy says. By this she does not
+mean that these forces exist, for us, in our minds, but that at some
+time in the dim past "mortal mind" imagined matter and imagined these
+properties in it. Christ, she says, was able to walk upon the water and
+to roll away the stone of the sepulcher because he had overcome the
+human _belief_ in the laws of gravity. (Yet, Mrs. Eddy is continually
+reminding us that the fall of an apple led Newton to discover a great
+law, etc.) "Geology," Mrs. Eddy says, "has never explained the earth's
+formations. It cannot explain them." "Natural Science is not really
+natural or scientific, because it is deduced from the evidences of the
+senses." "Vertebra, articulata, mollusca, and radiata are evolved by
+mortal and material thought." "Theorizing about man's development from
+mushrooms to monkeys, and from monkeys into men, amounts to nothing in
+the right direction, and very much in the wrong." But it is not only
+with the natural sciences that Mrs. Eddy is displeased. "Human history,"
+she says, "needs to be revised, and the _material record expunged_."
+
+Having dismissed the history of the race as trivial, the natural
+sciences as unscientific, the evidence of the senses as a cheat, and
+matter as non-existent, Mrs. Eddy proceeds to propound her own curious
+theory of the Universe and man. She has a theory; incomplete, but
+ingenious.
+
+
+_Mrs. Eddy's Exegesis_
+
+Mrs. Eddy says that her theory of the universe is founded, not upon
+human wisdom, but upon the Bible; and so it is, but she uses both
+addition and subtraction very liberally to get her Biblical
+corroboration. The Bible may be interpreted in two ways, Mrs. Eddy says,
+literally and spiritually, and what she sets out to do is to give us the
+spiritual interpretation. Her method is simple. She starts with the
+propositions that all is God and that there is no matter, and then
+reconstructs the Bible to accommodate these statements. Such portions of
+the Bible as can be made, by judicious treatment, to corroborate her
+theory, she takes and "spiritually interprets,"[9] that is, tells us
+once and for all what the passages really mean; and such portions as
+cannot possibly be converted into affirmative evidence she rejects as
+errors of the early copyists. Mrs. Eddy insists that the Bible is the
+record of truth, but a study of her exegesis shows that only such
+portions of it as meet with Mrs. Eddy's approval and lend
+themselves--under very rough handling--to the support of her theory, are
+accepted as the record of truth; the rest is thrown out as a mass of
+erroneous transcription. Mrs. Eddy's keen eye at once detects those
+meaningless passages which have for so long beguiled the world, just as
+it readily sees in familiar texts an entirely new meaning. She explains
+the creation of the world from the account in the first chapter of
+Genesis, but the unknown author of this disputed book would never
+recognize his narrative when Mrs. Eddy gets through with it.
+
+
+_Mrs. Eddy's Account of the Creation_[10]
+
+To begin with, Mrs. Eddy says, there was God, "All and in all, the
+eternal Principle." This Principle is both masculine and feminine;
+"Gender is embraced in Spirit, else God could never have shadowed forth
+from out Himself, the idea of male and female." But, Mrs. Eddy adds, "We
+have not as much authority for calling God masculine as feminine, the
+latter being the last, therefore highest idea given of Him."
+
+Mrs. Eddy next sets about the creation. The "waters" out of which God
+brought the dry land, she says, were "Love"; the dry land itself was
+"the condensed idea of creation." When God divided the light from the
+darkness, it means, says Mrs. Eddy, that "Truth and error were distinct
+from the beginning, and never mingled." But Mrs. Eddy has always
+insisted on the idea that "error" is a delusion which arose first in the
+mind of mortal man; what is error doing away back here before man was
+created, and why was God himself compelled to take measures against it?
+Certainly the account of the Creation which came from Lynn is even more
+perplexing than that which is related in the Pentateuch.
+
+With regard to the creation of grass and herbs, Mrs. Eddy eagerly points
+out that "God made every plant of the field before it was in the earth,
+and every herb of the field before it grew." And that, she says, proves
+that "creations of Wisdom are not dependent on laws of matter, but on
+Intelligence alone." She admits here that the Universe is the "idea of
+Creative Wisdom," which is getting dangerously near the very old idea
+that matter is but a manifestation of spirit. Call the universe
+"matter," and Mrs. Eddy flies into a rage; call it "an idea of God," and
+she is serenely complaisant. There was certainly never any one so put
+about and tricked by mere words; on the whole, it may be said that the
+English language has avenged itself on Mrs. Eddy.
+
+Arriving at the creation of the beasts of the field, Mrs. Eddy says that
+"The beast and reptile made by Love and Wisdom were neither carnivorous
+nor poisonous." Ferocious tendencies in animals are entirely the product
+of man's imagination. Daniel understood this, we are told, and that is
+why the lions did not hurt him.
+
+When she comes to the creation of man, Mrs. Eddy accepts the first
+account given in Genesis, but the second, which states that God formed
+man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath
+of life, she rejects as untrustworthy. The first account, she says, "was
+science; the second was metaphorical and mythical, even the supposed
+utterances of matter; the scripture not being understood by its
+translators, was misinterpreted."
+
+
+_The Story of Adam_
+
+"The history of Adam is allegorical throughout, a description of error
+and its results," etc. Man was created in God's likeness, free from sin,
+sickness, and death; but this Adam, who crept in, Mrs. Eddy does not
+explain how, was the origin of our belief that there is life in matter
+and was to obstruct our growth in spirituality. Mrs. Eddy says, "Divide
+the name Adam into two syllables, and it reads, _a dam_, or
+obstruction." This original method of word-analysis she seems to regard
+as final evidence concerning Adam. About the creation of Eve, Mrs. Eddy
+changes her mind. In the later editions of her book she says it is
+absurd to believe that God ever put Adam into a hypnotic sleep and
+performed "a surgical operation" upon him. In the first edition she says
+it is a mere chance that the human race is not still propagated by the
+removal of man's ribs. "The belief regarding the origin of mortal man
+has changed since Adam produced Eve, and the only reason a rib is not
+the present mode of evolution is because of this change," etc.
+
+Not to be warned by the footprints of time, Mrs. Eddy pauses in her
+revision of Genesis to wonder "whence came the wife of Cain?" But on the
+whole she profits by the story of Cain, for here she finds one of those
+little etymological clews which never escape her penetration. The fact
+that Adam and all his race were but a dream of mortal mind is proved,
+she says, by the fact that Cain went "to dwell _in the land of Nod, the
+land of dreams and illusions_." Mrs. Eddy offers this seriously, as
+"scientific" exegesis.
+
+Mrs. Eddy's conclusion about the Creation seems to be that we are all in
+reality the offspring of the first creation recounted in Genesis, in
+which man is not named but is simply said to be in the image of God; but
+we _think_ we are the children of the creation described in the second
+chapter; of the race that imagined sickness, sin, and death for itself.
+The tree of knowledge which caused Adam's fall, Mrs. Eddy says, was the
+belief of life in matter, and she suggests that the forbidden fruit
+which Eve gave to Adam may have been "a medical work, perhaps."
+
+
+_Mrs. Eddy Denies the Atonement_
+
+When she comes to the Atonement, Mrs. Eddy says that Christ did not come
+to save mankind from sin, but to show us that sin is a thing imagined
+by mortal mind, that it is an illusion which can be overcome, like
+sickness and death. It was by his understanding of the truths of
+Christian Science that Christ remained sinless, healed the sick, and
+that he "demonstrated" over death in the sepulcher and rose on the third
+day. His sacrifice had no more efficacy than that of any other man who
+dies as a result of his labors to bring a new truth into the world, and
+we profit by his death only as we realize the nothingness of sickness,
+sin, and death. "God's wrath, vented on his only son, is without logic
+or humanity, and but a man-made belief."
+
+The Trinity, as commonly accepted, Mrs. Eddy denies, though she seems to
+admit a kind of triune nature in God by saying over and over again that
+he is "Love, Truth, and Life."
+
+The Holy Ghost she defines as Christian Science; "This Comforter I
+understand to be Divine Science."
+
+
+_Mrs. Eddy's Revision of the Lord's Prayer_
+
+In the course of Mrs. Eddy's revision of the Bible, she paused to
+"spiritually interpret" the Lord's prayer. She has revised the prayer a
+great many times, and different renderings of it are given in different
+editions of "Science and Health." The following is taken from the
+edition of 1902:
+
+     "Our Father-Mother God, all-harmonious, adorable One. Thy kingdom
+     is within us, Thou art ever-present. Enable us to know--as in
+     heaven, so on earth--God is supreme. Give us grace for to-day; feed
+     the famished affections. And infinite Love is reflected in love.
+     And Love leadeth us not into temptation, but delivereth from sin,
+     disease, and death. For God is now and forever all Life, Truth, and
+     Love."
+
+In this interpretation the petitions have been converted into
+affirmations, and Mrs. Eddy's prayer seems a somewhat dry enumeration of
+the properties of the Deity rather than a supplication.
+
+This method of "spiritual interpretation" has given Mrs. Eddy the habit
+of a highly empirical use of English. At the back of her book, "Science
+and Health," there is a glossary in which a long list of serviceable old
+English words are said to mean very especial things. The word
+"bridegroom" means "spiritual understanding"; "death" means "an
+illusion"; "evening" means "mistiness of mortal thought"; "mother" means
+God, etc., etc. The seventh commandment, Mrs. Eddy insists, is an
+injunction against adulterating Christian Science, although she also
+admits the meaning ordinarily attached to it. In the _Journal_ of
+November, 1889, there is a long discussion of the ten commandments by
+the editor, in which he takes up both personal chastity and the Pure
+Food laws under the command, "Thou shalt not commit adultery."
+
+Mrs. Eddy insists, and doubtless believes, that her "Science" is simply
+an elaboration, a more advanced explanation, of the teachings of the New
+Testament. Yet on the subject of repentance, which occupies so important
+a place in the teachings of Christ, we hear never a word, and upon that
+consciousness of sin, which is the burden of the Epistles, she is
+consistently silent. Paul's reiterated explanation of original sin, of
+the Atonement and Redemption, are ignored. "As in Adam all die, so in
+Christ shall all be made alive" is made to read: "As in error all die,
+so in Truth shall all," etc. Even Paul's "Who shall deliver me from the
+body of this death?" is made substantially to mean, Who shall deliver me
+from the belief that there is sensation in matter? Whatever cannot be
+"spiritually interpreted" into a confirmation of Mrs. Eddy's theory that
+sin, sickness, and death are non-existent, she refuses to consider.
+
+
+_Mrs. Eddy's Therapeutics_
+
+Mrs. Eddy's theology is, of course, a mere derivative of her system of
+therapeutics, an attempt to base her peculiar variety of mind-cure upon
+Biblical authority. In her therapeutics there is nothing new except its
+extremeness. That the mind is able, in a large degree, to prevent or to
+cause sickness and even death, all thinking people admit. Mrs. Eddy's
+fundamental propositions are that death is wholly unnecessary and that
+the body and the organs of the body have nothing to do with life. A man
+could live just as well after his lungs had been removed as before, if
+he but thought he could. "Cold, heat, exercise, study, food, infection,
+etc., never caused a sick or healthy condition in man." "Scrofula,
+fever, consumption, rheumatism or small-pox never produced pain or
+inharmony." "A dislocation of the tarsal joint (ankle-joint) would
+produce insanity as perceptible as that produced by congestion of the
+brain, were it not that mortal mind thinks this joint less intimately
+connected with mind than is the brain."
+
+Sight and hearing do not depend upon the eyes and ears. The nervous
+system can really cause no suffering. "Nerves are not the source of pain
+or pleasure." "Nerves have no more sensation, apart from what belief
+bestows upon them, than the fibre of a plant." What really suffers is
+mind, or belief; and, if we change that belief, the pain will disappear.
+"You say a boil is painful," says Mrs. Eddy, "but that is impossible,
+for matter without mind is not painful. The boil simply manifests your
+belief in pain, through inflammation and swelling; and you call this
+belief a boil."
+
+Mrs. Eddy even argues against spanking children because "the use of the
+rod is virtually a declaration to the child's mind that sensation
+belongs to matter."[11]
+
+Mrs. Eddy's idea is that our lungs are necessary to us because we think
+they are, just as we think heavy underwear is necessary in winter.
+Horses and cows, certainly, do not think much about their lungs, but
+Mrs. Eddy says that domestic animals are controlled by the beliefs of
+their human masters, and that we have corrupted the horse and have
+taught him to have epizoötic and colic. "What," says Mrs. Eddy, "if the
+lungs are ulcerated? God is more to a man than his lungs." "Have no
+fears that matter can ache, swell, and be inflamed.... Your body would
+suffer no more from tension or wounds than would the trunk of a tree
+which you gash, were it not for mortal mind."
+
+All functional and organic diseases are produced by a popular belief in
+their reality. "No gastric juice accumulates ... apart from the action
+of mortal thought."
+
+"Inflammation, hemorrhages, tubercles, decompositions are all dream
+shadows," "Man is the same after, as before, a bone is broken or a head
+chopped off."
+
+But as to who invented the idea of pain and whence came the superstition
+that we must have lungs to breathe and that the heart is necessary to
+life, Mrs. Eddy maintains a discreet silence. Sin, sickness, and death,
+she says, are beliefs which originated in mortal mind. And how and when
+did mortal mind originate? Mortal mind does not exist, she answers,
+therefore it had no origin. This reasoning satisfies her; she believes
+it perfectly adequate.
+
+It is not only the diseased body which is to be disregarded and put out
+of mind, but all hygienic precautions. Mrs. Eddy particularly objects to
+diets, and she says that one food is as good as another. God gave man
+"dominion not only over the fish in the sea, but over the fish in the
+stomach also," she once said.
+
+There is no such thing as fatigue: "You would not say that a wheel is
+fatigued; and yet the body is just as material as the wheel. If it were
+not for what the human mind says of the body, the body would never be
+weary, any more than the inanimate wheel."
+
+Mrs. Eddy denies that physical exercise strengthens the muscles.
+"Because the muscles of the blacksmith's arm are strongly developed, it
+does not follow that exercise has produced this result, or that a
+less-used arm must be weak.... _The trip-hammer is not increased in size
+by exercise._ Why not, since muscles are as material as wood and iron?"
+
+Constant bathing, Mrs. Eddy says, received a "useful rebuke from Jesus'
+precept, 'Take no thought ... for the body,' We must beware of making
+clean merely the outside of the platter."
+
+
+_A Sensationless Body the Goal of Existence_
+
+"A sensationless body," Mrs. Eddy says, is the ultimate hope of
+Christian Science. Since insensibility to pain is the ultimate good
+which her system of philosophy offers, it is natural that she should
+often point us to the lower forms of animal life for our exemplars. "The
+conditions of life become less imperative in lower organisms, or where
+there is less mind and belief on this subject." She points out hopefully
+that certain marine animals multiply their species by self-division.
+"The less mind there is manifested in matter, the better. When the
+unthinking lobster loses his claw, it grows again." If we but believed
+that matter has no sensation, "then the human limb would be replaced as
+readily as the lobster's claw." She points out the fact that flowers
+produce their seed without pain. "The snowbird sings and soars amid the
+blasts; he has no catarrh from wet feet."
+
+"Obesity," Mrs. Eddy says, "is _an adipose belief of yourself as a
+substance_."
+
+
+_Mrs. Eddy's Physiology_
+
+The most discouraging thing about Mrs. Eddy's dissertations upon anatomy
+and physiology is that she seems to know so little about the physical
+facts and laws which she despises. She says, for instance, that a father
+"plunged his infant babe, only a few hours old, into water for several
+minutes and repeated this operation daily until the child could remain
+under water for twenty minutes, moving and playing without harm, like a
+fish." Does Mrs. Eddy actually believe that a child could live under
+water for twenty minutes? Again: "The supposition that we can correct
+insanity by the use of purgatives and narcotics is in itself a species
+of insanity." Where did Mrs. Eddy get the idea that such treatment was
+ever supposed to cure "insanity"? Mrs. Eddy says the fact that a finger
+which has been amputated continues to hurt is proof that nerves have
+nothing to do with pain, because, she states, "_the nerve is gone_"!
+
+Mrs. Eddy says that when we burn a finger, not fire but mortal mind
+causes the injury. To this statement she adds: "Holy inspiration has
+created states of mind which are able to nullify the action of the
+flames, as in the Bible case of the three young Hebrew captives, cast
+into the Babylonian furnace; while an opposite mental state might
+produce spontaneous combustion." That is, if mortal mind worked hard
+enough, we could burn our fingers without any fire, or we could produce
+the fire by willing it.
+
+The action of drugs depends entirely upon the belief of mortal mind.
+Stimulants, narcotics, poisons, affect the system solely because they
+are reputed to do so. And yet, with all her ingenuity, Mrs. Eddy has to
+admit that if a man took arsenic unknowingly it would probably kill him.
+This, she says, is because of the consensus of opinion that arsenic is
+deadly. Such would probably be her explanation of the destructive
+processes which go on in the world without the knowledge of man; fire
+consumes the forest, the tiger kills the antelope, and the bite of the
+cobra kills the tiger because the human mind has attributed such
+tendencies to fire, to the tiger, and to the cobra.
+
+
+_Mrs. Eddy's View of History_
+
+All the emanations of mortal mind are evil. Our redemption, Mrs. Eddy
+says, lies in Divine Mind, of which we are a part. "Spirit imparts the
+understanding which leads into all Truth.... This understanding is not
+intellectual, is not aided by scholarly attainments." There is no
+mistaking Mrs. Eddy's meaning; the thing in us which is capable of
+cultivation and expansion, that which inquires and investigates and
+reasons, is mortal mind, and is therefore evil. All the physical
+sciences are the harmful inventions of mortal mind, and the slow and
+painful accumulation of exact knowledge has been but the harmful
+activity of the baser element in human nature. There was never such a
+discouraging view of human history.
+
+It is scarcely necessary to remark that everything which civilization
+most cherishes has been the direct result of that spirit of inquiry and
+of those inductive processes of reasoning which Mrs. Eddy despises. If
+the morality of the civilized world is higher to-day than it was in the
+fifth century, it is not because men know any more about moral laws than
+they did two thousand years ago, but because this same spirit of inquiry
+has made cleaner living possible and imperative. Mrs. Eddy says that
+Christian Science would abolish war; but the diminution of war has come
+about, not through any growth of "Divine Mind" but, as Buckle pointed
+out, through three triumphs of the experimental tendency of the
+intellect;--the discovery of gunpowder, the discovery that war was
+detrimental to trade and to the best economic conditions, and the
+improvement in methods of transportation. Contemplating the history of
+civilization from Mrs. Eddy's point of view, we have simply gone on
+developing this injurious thing, "mortal mind"--applying our
+intelligence to the study of the physical universe--and have gone on
+piling up false belief on false belief. It is "matter" that is our great
+delusion and that stands between us and a full understanding of God; and
+matter exists, or seems to exist, only because we have invented it and
+invented laws to govern it and have given properties to its various
+manifestations. The more we know about the physical universe, the
+heavier do we make our chains; our progress in the physical sciences
+does but increase the dose of the drug which enslaves us. And there have
+been but two breaks in this jumbled dream of "error": the first when
+Jesus Christ "demonstrated the nothingness of matter," the second when
+Mrs. Eddy proclaimed its nothingness from Lynn.
+
+With a "sensationless body" for the goal of existence, the savage was
+certainly much higher in "the scale of being" than the nations of modern
+Europe, and Mrs. Eddy is perfectly right when she refers us to the
+amoeba and crustacea. Happy, indeed, the lobster who thinks so little
+about his anatomy that his lost claw is replaced by another!
+
+From all her flights Mrs. Eddy comes back to her starting-point:
+physical well-being. Not for a single page are we permitted to forget
+that her religion is primarily a kind of "doctoring"; therapeutics made
+religion, or religion made therapeutics. She makes the fact that Christ
+healed the sick the principal feature of his mission, and makes it
+authority for her assumption that religion and therapeutics are
+essentially one. Certainly the burden of the New Testament is not that
+man may avoid suffering, but that he may suffer with noble fortitude.
+
+
+_Lack of Religious Feeling in Mrs. Eddy's Book_
+
+But it is before such a word as fortitude that Mrs. Eddy's book takes on
+its most discouraging aspect. Her foolish logic, her ignorance of the
+human body, the liberties which she takes with the Bible, and her
+burlesque exegesis, could easily be overlooked if there were any
+nobility of feeling to be found in "Science and Health"; any
+great-hearted pity for suffering, any humility or self-forgetfulness
+before the mysteries of life. Mrs. Eddy professes to believe that she
+has found the Truth, and that all the long centuries behind her have
+gone out in darkness and wasted effort, yet not one page of her book is
+tinged with compassion. "Oh that mine head were waters, and mine eyes a
+fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the
+daughter of my people!" If there were one sentence like that in "Science
+and Health" no one would stop to quarrel with Mrs. Eddy's metaphysics.
+
+But if there is little intelligence displayed in Mrs. Eddy's book, there
+is even less emotion. It is not exaggeration to say that "Science and
+Health" is absolutely devoid of religious feeling. God remains for Mrs.
+Eddy a "principle" indeed, toward which she has no attitude but that of
+a somewhat patronizing and platitudinous expositor. She discusses sin
+and death and human suffering as if they were curves or equations.
+
+
+_Malicious Animal Magnetism_
+
+In all the editions of Mrs. Eddy's book there is the same shiftiness,
+the same hardness, and the same astonishing complacency, and the text of
+the first three editions is disfigured by innumerable ebullitions of
+spite and hatred. In the first edition the first fifteen pages of the
+chapter on "Healing the Sick" are given up to an attack upon Richard
+Kennedy, the young man who was her first practitioner, and of whose
+personal popularity she was so bitterly jealous. The second edition, a
+small volume, is largely made up of denunciations of Daniel Spofford.
+The third edition opens with a preface (signed Asa G. Eddy) attacking
+Edward Arens, and contains the famous chapter on "Demonology" in which
+Mrs. Eddy devotes forty-six pages to settling scores with half a dozen
+of her early students, charging one and another with theft, adultery,
+murder, blackmail, etc. The Reverend Mr. Wiggin, when he revised Mrs.
+Eddy's book in 1885, persuaded her to omit these vituperative passages
+on the ground that they were libelous.
+
+Mrs. Eddy's one original elemental contribution to Quimbyism, was her
+doctrine of Malicious Animal Magnetism; a grewsome superstition born of
+her own vindictiveness and distrust. Mrs. Eddy's more enlightened
+followers have for years tried to divert attention from this one of her
+doctrines, and there are hundreds of Christian Scientists in the field
+who know and think very little about it. But it has been a very
+important consideration in the lives of those who have come into
+personal contact with Mrs. Eddy. Between 1875 and 1888 many of Mrs.
+Eddy's students left her because in her lectures and conversation she
+dwelt more upon the malign power of mesmerism than upon the salutary
+power of truth. In her contributions to the _Journal_ during those years
+she frequently took up Animal Magnetism; she tells her followers over
+and over again that she will denounce it, and that she will not be
+silenced. For several years there was a regular department in the
+_Journal_ with the caption "Animal Magnetism," but the crimes which were
+charged to mesmerists were by no means confined to this department.
+"_Also they have dominion over our bodies, and over our cattle, at their
+pleasure, and we are in great distress_," the _Journal_ again and again
+affirms.
+
+
+_Poverty a False Belief_
+
+Mrs. Eddy surmounts economics as easily as she does physics and
+chemistry and physiology. Poverty is only a form of "error," a false
+belief. It can be abolished as readily as sin or disease or old age. She
+advertised the first edition of "Science and Health" as a book that
+"affords an opportunity to acquire a profession by which you can
+accumulate a fortune." "In the early history of Christian Science," Mrs.
+Eddy says, "among my thousands of students few were wealthy. Now,
+Christian Scientists are not indigent; and their comfortable fortunes
+are acquired by healing mankind morally, physically, and spiritually."
+Her healers should be well paid, she says. "Christian Science
+demonstrates that the patient who pays what he is able to pay, is more
+apt to recover than he who withholds a slight equivalent for health." In
+Mrs. Eddy's book[12] she publishes a long testimonial from a man who
+relates how Christian Science has helped him in his business.
+
+This view of poverty has been generally accepted among Mrs. Eddy's
+followers. One contributor to the _Journal_ writes: "We were
+demonstrating over a lack of means, which we had learned was just as
+much a claim of error to be overcome with truth as ever sickness or sin
+was."[13]
+
+Another contributor writes: "The lack of means is a lupine ghost sired
+by the same spectre as the lack of health, and both must be met and put
+to flight by the same mighty weapons of our spiritual warfare."[14]
+
+In the files of the _Journal_ there are many reports of the material
+prosperity of individual Christian Scientists. It is an evidence of
+"at-oneness" with God to prosper in business just as it is to overcome
+disease.
+
+In the _Journal_ of September, 1904, a contributor says:
+
+     "Is it reasonable to believe, as we have believed, that popular
+     fancy, whims, climate, the state of politics, any or all of a
+     hundred lawless elements, are able to ruin a man's business while
+     he stands by and doesn't know enough even to make an intelligent
+     protest?"
+
+Government, civilization, and even "climate" are demonstrated to be
+unreal, but the reality and importance of "business" is never
+questioned, and that each and every Christian Scientist should get on in
+the world remains a matter of indubitable moment, even to Mrs. Eddy
+herself.
+
+
+_Mrs. Eddy's Views on Marriage_
+
+Among the many incidental ideas which Mrs. Eddy has added to Quimbyism
+are her theory that the Godhead is more feminine than masculine, and her
+qualified disapproval of matrimony. Quimby himself had a large family
+and saw nothing unspiritual in marriage. In defining the real purpose of
+marriage Mrs. Eddy says nothing about children; "to happify existence by
+constant intercourse with those adapted to elevate it, is the true
+purpose of marriage." In her chapter on marriage she says: "The
+scientific _morale_ of marriage is spiritual unity.... Proportionately
+as human generation ceases, the unbroken links of eternal harmonious
+being will be spiritually discerned."
+
+In her chapter called "Wedlock" in Miscellaneous Writings (1897) Mrs.
+Eddy, after a vague and evasive discussion of the subject, squarely puts
+the question: "Is marriage nearer right than celibacy? Human knowledge
+inculcates that it is, while Science indicates that it is _not_." In the
+same chapter she further says: "Human nature has bestowed on a wife the
+right to become a mother; but if the wife esteems not this privilege, by
+mutual consent, exalted and increased affections, she may win a higher."
+
+Mrs. Eddy apparently believes that Jesus Christ taught us to ignore
+family relations: "Jesus acknowledged no ties of the flesh. He said:
+'Call no man your father upon the earth; for one is your father which is
+in heaven.' Again he asked: 'Who is my mother, and who are my brethren
+but they who will do the will of my father?' We have no record of his
+calling any man by the name of father."
+
+
+_Future of Christian Science_
+
+Whoever has watched the amazing growth of the Christian Science sect
+must feel some curiosity as to its future. Mrs. Eddy's followers are by
+no means the only people who are trying to meet, by suggestive
+treatment, nervous diseases and the many functional disorders which
+result from overwork, worry, and discouragement. The foremost
+neurologists of all countries are employing more and more this
+suggestive method which is the essential reality in Christian Science
+healing. The followers of the "New Thought" school apply this principle
+in their own way, and the hundreds of unaffiliated "mind curists" and
+"mental healers" are each applying it in ways more or less honest and
+legitimate.
+
+In October, 1906, Dr. Elwood Worcester and Dr. Samuel McComb, the rector
+and the associate rector of the Emmanuel (Episcopal) Church of Boston,
+organized the Emmanuel Church Health Class, for the treatment of nervous
+disorders. Believing that, as Professor William James has said, "the
+sovereign cure for worry is religious faith," the workers at Emmanuel
+Church have been endeavoring to cure nervous disorders by putting the
+patient at peace with himself. Every patient is examined by a physician,
+and if the root of his disorder proves to be nervous (hysteria, alcoholism,
+a drug habit, insomnia, or any one of the many forms of neurasthenia)
+he is admitted into the Health Class for psycho-therapeutical treatment.
+Here he is encouraged to unburden himself of the distress or perplexity
+which haunts him, and is given the kind of suggestive treatment which
+seems best adapted to his disorder. Dr. Worcester studied psychology
+under Wundt, in Germany, and taught it for six years at Lehigh
+University. Dr. McComb studied psychology at Oxford. The records of the
+Emmanuel Health Class show that of the 178 cases treated between March,
+1907, and November, 1907, the condition of seventy-five patients has
+been improved, forty-eight have not been helped at all, while in
+fifty-five cases the result is unknown.[15]
+
+
+_Mrs. Eddy's Opposition to the Mind Cure Movement_
+
+Mrs. Eddy and her followers have given a demonstration too great to be
+overlooked, of the fact that many ills which the sufferer believes
+entirely physical can be reached and eradicated by "ministering to a
+mind diseased," by persuading the sick man continually to suggest to
+himself ideas of health and hope and happiness and usefulness, instead
+of brooding upon the emptiness and unanswered needs of his life or upon
+his failing physical powers. Mrs. Eddy's sect, more than any other one
+of the cults which believe in and practise this method of bettering the
+patient's physical condition through his mind, has forced the most
+hide-bound medical practitioners to take account of this old but newly
+applied force in therapeutics.
+
+But what is Mrs. Eddy's own attitude toward the general awakening to the
+value of psycho-therapeutics in the treatment of human diseases? She
+declares that every kind of mind cure and suggestive treatment except
+her own is dangerous and harmful. As one of Mrs. Eddy's students wrote
+in the _Christian Science Journal_, September, 1901, "The loyal
+Christian Scientist knows that neither he nor his patient should read or
+study the books of any other author than those of our beloved Leader in
+order to learn the Science of the Christ truth, which she is teaching
+and demonstrating to this age."
+
+Mrs. Eddy's own editorials in the _Journal_ are never so bitter as when
+she is attacking the mental healers who do not practise her own
+copyrighted variety of mind cure. Recently the _Christian Science
+Sentinel_ of January 18, 1908, stated that Mrs. Eddy cannot countenance
+the work done at the Emmanuel Church. Mr. Archibald McClellan, the
+editor of that publication, published an article entitled "No Christian
+Psychology." He says: "Christian Psychology is equivalent to Christian
+phrenology, physiology and mythology, whereas Jesus predicted and
+demonstrated Christian healing on the basis of Spirit, God. He never
+complicated Spirit with matter, etc.... Her teachings (Mrs. Eddy's) show
+further that she cannot consistently endorse as Christianity the two
+distinctly contradictory statements and points of view contained in the
+term 'Christian psychology'--otherwise Christian materialism."
+
+Mrs. Eddy holds that any system of healing which at all takes account
+of, or admits physical structure, is not Christian.
+
+Mrs. Eddy's endeavor has been to convert a universal principle into a
+personal property. And she has gone a wonderfully long way toward doing
+it. Thousands of people believe that they owe their health and happiness
+to a healing principle which was revealed by God to Mrs. Eddy and by
+Mrs. Eddy to mankind; that since the ministry of Jesus Christ upon earth
+no one of the human race has understood this principle except Mrs. Eddy,
+and that she is the only human being now alive who fully understands it;
+that when she dies her works alone will stand between the world and
+darkness.
+
+But all the while that Mrs. Eddy was energetically copyrighting, and
+pruning, and expelling, and disciplining, that other stream which came
+from Quimby, through Dr. Evans and through Julius Dresser and his wife,
+was slowly and quietly doing its work.[16] Mind Cure and New Thought
+grew up side by side with Christian Science. As organizations they were
+not nearly so effective, and their ranks, like Mrs. Eddy's, were often
+darkened by the adventuress and the battered soldier of fortune. But the
+Mental healers and the New Thought healers treated the sick on exactly
+the same principle which Mrs. Eddy's successful healers employed.
+
+As to the future of Mrs. Eddy's church, her own attitude toward every
+attempt to investigate and to apply liberally the principle of mental
+healing, seems to determine that. It has been possible for her, during
+her own lifetime, absolutely to prohibit preaching, thinking,
+independent writing,--investigation or inquiry of any sort--in her
+churches. But after her death, when that compelling hand is withdrawn,
+either the church must renew itself from among the ignorant and
+superstitious, as Mormonism has done, or it must permit its members to
+use their minds. Those who use their minds will discover that Christian
+Science is only one method of applying a general truth, and that it is a
+method which is hampered by a great deal that is illogical and absurd;
+that if Christian Science, as Mrs. Eddy has promulgated it, were
+universally believed and practised, it would be the revolt of a species
+against its own physical structure; against its relation to its natural
+physical environment, against the needs of its own physical organism,
+against the perpetuation of its kind. The moment a Christian Scientist
+realizes that the helpful and hopeful principle of his religion can
+operate quite independently of all the inconsequential theories which
+Mrs. Eddy has attached to it, that moment he is, of course, lost to Mrs.
+Eddy. Mrs. Eddy's church organization stands as a sort of dyke between
+the general principle of mind cure and Mrs. Eddy's very empirical,
+violent, and temperamental interpretation of that principle. It is the
+future of psycho-therapeutics that will determine the future of
+Christian Science. If "Mind Cure," "Christian Psychology," and regular
+physicians offer the benefits of suggestive treatment in a more rational
+and direct way than does Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy's church will find
+in them very formidable competition. On the other hand, if Christian
+Scientists throw down their barriers and join the general mind-cure
+movement, and the two branches of Quimbyism meet, then half of Mrs.
+Eddy's life-work is lost. The labor of her days has been to keep these
+two streams apart; to prove one the true and the other the false. Her
+efforts to stem the progress of all other schools of mental healing have
+been secondary only to her efforts to advance her own. Yet,
+unconsciously and against her own wish, she has been the most effective
+instrument in promoting the interest of the whole movement.
+
+On the theoretical side, Mrs. Eddy's contribution to mental healing has
+been, in the main, fallacious, pseudodoxal, and absurd, but upon the
+practical side she has been wonderfully efficient. New movements are
+usually launched and old ideas are revivified, not through the efforts
+of a group of people, but through one person. These dynamic
+personalities have not always conformed to our highest ideals; their
+effectiveness has not always been associated with a large intelligence
+or with nobility of character. Not infrequently it has been true of
+them--as it seems to be true of Mrs. Eddy--that their power was
+generated in the ferment of an inharmonious and violent nature. But, for
+practical purposes, it is only fair to measure them by their actual
+accomplishment and by the machinery they have set in motion.
+
+
+  THE END
+
+
+
+
+HER FRUITS
+
+BY
+
+MARY ELEANOR ROBERTS
+
+  These are her fruits, kindness and gentleness,
+    And gratefully we take them at her hands;
+  Patience she has, and pity for distress,
+          And love that understands.
+
+  Ah, ask not how such rich reward was won,
+  How sharp the harrow in the former years,
+  Or mellowed in what agony of sun,
+          Or watered with what tears.
+
+
+
+
+THE KEY TO THE DOOR
+
+BY FIELDING BALL
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY WALTER JACK DUNCAN
+
+  "_There was the Door to which I found no Key;
+  There was the Veil through which I might not see.
+  Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
+  There was--and then no more of Thee and Me._"
+
+
+The postmaster was lounging in an open window, cleaning his fingernails
+with his pocket-knife, as Allison went into the post-office. He rose
+with some show of animation at sight of the tall, boyish figure in the
+doorway.
+
+"I got a hired girl for you all right, Mr. Allison," he said, advancing
+to meet him. "Used to work down to Webb City, in a restaurant, but got
+tired of it--hours too hard. She's a good cook, and she knows how to get
+things on the table so they look real nice--I knew that would mean
+considerable to you folks."
+
+He went on to dwell at length upon the girl's good points, becoming more
+nervously demonstrative in his praise as he found that Allison's face
+reflected none of his enthusiasm, but remained unexpectedly impassive
+and non-committal.
+
+Allison interrupted at the first opportunity.
+
+"You have been very kind, Mr. Barbour," he said, with impersonal
+civility. "Would you be so good as to get me my mail?"
+
+He took the letters which the man handed him and walked out without
+giving him another glance.
+
+Just outside of the door he met Jim Brown, man-of-all-work at the
+station. Allison himself was station agent. Allison looked at Jim as he
+passed with such a cold, unswerving gaze that in spite of himself the
+other dropped his eyes. Jim had been present at the interview between
+Billings and Allison that morning; Allison knew that he was coming now
+to tell the postmaster about it. The young man set his lips hard at the
+thought of some of the things he had done during the last two weeks,
+when he had been full of glad confidence in himself and in this
+invention of his--this brake which Billings had told him an hour ago was
+not worth the stuff of which it was made. The recountal of his
+performance would doubtless afford much entertainment to the pair in the
+post-office. Just yesterday he had asked the postmaster to find for him,
+if possible, a capable maid-servant, and had said, without thinking
+anything in particular about it, that he would pay a satisfactory girl
+five dollars a week. Five dollars a week--it had not seemed much to him;
+he had been amused by Barbour's evident astonishment. To-day he saw more
+reason in it.... Then there was that perfume for Gertrude--he should
+have to countermand his order for that. He had no choice in the matter,
+he told himself, with bitter resentment that a paltry nine dollars
+should mean so much to him. In spite of the fact that he had come to
+this decision before he reached the drug store, he did not go in, but
+walked past with his head in the air, looking neither to right nor to
+left. He felt as though every one must already know of the morning's
+experience; and he was fearful of meeting eyes alight with cynical
+understanding.
+
+The postmaster and Jim watched the young man from the post-office door
+as he made his way up the one hilly street of the little town. The
+soldierly precision of his carriage and gait, together with a certain
+air of distinction about his clothes, made him seem singularly out of
+keeping with all about him--the narrow, stony road, the straggling white
+houses on each side of it, the unkempt yards, the neglected trees, the
+dilapidated sidewalks half hidden by an amazing growth of dog-fennel.
+
+"You'd know somep'n had gone wrong by the way he had his head reared
+back, wouldn't you?" Jim asked with a smile on his dark face.
+
+He had just finished telling Barbour of what had happened that morning.
+Several days before, Allison had got word from the railroad company
+that some time this week they would send a man to tell him what offer
+they were prepared to make for the brake on which he had been working
+for so many weeks, and had finally finished; and this morning Billings
+had put in his appearance. The brake was practically good for nothing,
+he assured Allison--certainly not worth a cent to the company; and he
+told him the reasons why this was so.
+
+He went on to say, however, that he felt sorry for Allison,--sorry for
+that nice little wife of his,--Jim smiled grimly as he repeated the
+condescending phrase,--that he knew they were having a mighty hard time
+of it. Sixty dollars a month was not enough for a single man to live on
+decently, much less a married one; and the way in which Allison had been
+brought up made it harder. He didn't mean to criticize Allison's
+father--he didn't believe in criticizing the dead--but he certainly
+should not bring up _his_ son in such a way that he couldn't make a
+living for himself if necessary. You never could tell what was going to
+happen in this world; Allison wasn't the first gay young fellow who had
+grown up not expecting ever to have to do a day's work, and then all of
+a sudden had found himself glad to get almost any sort of a job. Well,
+as he said, he was sorry for Allison, and ready to help him out a
+little. He meant to see to it that Allison got something out of this
+brake of his--a couple of hundred dollars, perhaps; of course, two
+hundred dollars wasn't a great deal; it wouldn't mean much to
+him--Billings--but it would probably mean considerable to Allison.
+
+"What did Mr. Allison say?" the postmaster asked.
+
+"Never changed face. Set there starin' at Billings with those darned
+cool eyes o' his that look's if they'd never blink 'f a cannon went off
+under his very nose--waited till Billings got good and done, 'n' then
+said with that high 'n' mighty air of his, f'r all the world's if he was
+speakin' to some poor, half-witted Swede: 'Two hundred dollars doesn't
+mean as much to me as you think, Mr. Billings.' Then he stopped a
+minute, 'n' went on in a little diff'rent tone, 'You needn't concern
+yourself any further about me and my troubles'--'n' that had very much
+the sound of 'I'll make kindling-wood of you if you do!' Then he looks
+at his watch. 'I've given you all the time I can spare,' says he; and
+with that he swings around 'n' begins looking over some papers on his
+desk. Billings reddened up a little--coughed 'n' wriggled around in his
+chair, 'n' tried to get up courage to say somethin' more--but he simply
+didn't _darst_. He went off finally lookin' sort o' cheap. Mist'
+Allison never give him another glance, no more'n 's if he was that dog
+o' yours."
+
+The postmaster was silent for a minute or two. Then he turned to Jim.
+"I'm not particularly sorry to see Billings get left," he said. "Still,
+it might be just as well for Mr. Allison if he'd have kept on the right
+side of Billings from the start. There's no use talking, he's got an
+awfully uppish way with him, that boy."
+
+Jim nodded an emphatic assent. Along with other smaller grievances there
+still rankled in his mind the memory of how, when Allison had first come
+as station agent to the little town, a year ago now, he had one day
+asked Jim if he did not suppose that the nice-looking girl who had
+passed their house with Jim the Sunday before could be induced to come
+and work for them. Allison had asked the question in all innocence, not
+dreaming that this unshaven young man in blue seersucker shirt and
+greasy trousers considered himself in every way Allison's equal, and was
+as much affronted by this suggestion as Allison would have been by one
+of the same sort. Jim could not forgive him for it--any admiration he
+felt for Allison was invariably tempered by resentful remembrance.
+
+"It's about time he woke up to the fact that he doesn't have a father
+worth two millions behind him these days," Barbour went on.
+"Extravagant! Lord, he never stops to ask what a thing costs before
+getting it, as long as he has money in his pockets. Went into the
+book-store the other afternoon to get some magazines--carried off about
+everything Henry had in the place. Three dollars and fifteen cents his
+bill was. Never thinks, when he's buying anything in the way of shirts
+or ties, of getting less than half a dozen at a time--s'pose he hasn't
+found out you can buy them any other way. And his laundry bills--guess
+he about runs the laundry. And just yesterday he was telling me in the
+most off-hand way that he would pay five dollars a week to a hired girl.
+Five dollars a week! I could hardly believe my ears. But I guess he's
+gone back on that." The postmaster smiled sourly.
+
+The young man of whom they were talking was almost at the top of the
+hill by this time. So far he had met few people; and those whom he had
+met had not forced any formal recognition from him. But as he passed
+Mrs. Jennings, she called out a greeting that could not be ignored.
+Gertrude had stopped once to talk to her and to admire her collection of
+shells; and since then every noon and night he found her waiting here by
+her gate to speak to him; and she invariably asked the same question
+about his wife, always in the same tone, always with the same
+inflection. The meeting with her had become one of the frightfully
+unvarying things of his day. As he walked on now, he saw stretching
+before him an interminable vista of days, weeks, years--one deadly
+sameness of hard work, long hours, scanty pay, poor living, growing
+debts--and inextricably mixed up with it all, this dreary, gaunt black
+figure, waiting always for him at the top of the hill.... He had not
+realized what it meant to him, the success of his invention--how much he
+was depending on it. He felt now as he might if, moving blindly through
+a dark passage, hoping any minute to see a glimmer of light ahead, an
+outlet into the open air, he had run full into a locked door--a door to
+which he had no key.
+
+The thought of going home to his wife brought no comfort with it. They
+had long ago ceased to be honest with each other, Gertrude and he; their
+attempts to make the best of a sorry situation had in the end become a
+barrier which held them apart. Gertrude would not admit that she was
+ever tired, or lonesome, or discouraged; would find no fault with their
+poor little house, their scanty means, her unaccustomed duties. She
+never spoke of the past any more, nor of the future, lest in that there
+might be an implied criticism of the present; she was resolutely,
+unvaryingly, aggressively contented. But this contentment was too
+constant, too uniform, like false color on a woman's cheek. He sometimes
+wished she would throw pretense to the winds--would put her head on his
+shoulder, and sob and cry, and confess that she wished she were dead--or
+that she would upbraid him, reproach him, call him some of the hard
+names he called himself. But she was insistently cheerful; and there was
+nothing for him to do, in the face of this, but play an awkward second
+to her, ignore his aching back, his sore hands, his throbbing head, and
+keep a resolute silence as to all that happened to vex and humiliate and
+perplex and hurt him. It was not always easy; to-day he was conscious
+that he was walking more and more slowly as he drew near the house.
+
+How poor and forlorn it looked in this glare of light! During these last
+weeks his thoughts had turned often to that stately house where he had
+lived for nineteen years--its green, close-clipped lawn glistening under
+a perpetual play of water, its great beds of white and green and
+cardinal foliage plants, its shut-in porches, its awnings, its flowering
+shrubs, its vines, its heavy iron fence. He looked with bitter
+attentiveness at the dingy frame cottage he was approaching, noticing
+each homely detail--the dish-towels spread on the bushes in the back
+yard, the mop hanging by the door, the kerosene can under the step, the
+lean hen scuttling away under the currant bushes, the vegetable garden
+lying parched and dry along the fence. There was a small artificial
+mound of stones at one side of the house, with a somewhat scanty growth
+of portulaca springing from its top. The last occupant of the house was
+responsible for that adornment. Allison wondered how they had happened
+to leave it there so long. That mound of stones--all his hopes might
+have been buried under it and he could not have hated it more. It stood,
+somehow, for all that chafed and irritated him here--the moral, mental,
+and physical stuntedness of the people--their petty ambitions, petty
+jealousies, petty quarrels, petty virtues.
+
+Allison was seized with a sudden vague fear as he saw on the kitchen
+window-sill, just where he had left it at seven this morning, the
+package which Gertrude had promised to take to Mr. Fulton as soon as she
+had finished the breakfast dishes. He noticed almost at the same instant
+that the kitchen door was open; countless flies were sailing in and out;
+and there on the cellar door, in the blazing sunlight, was the morning's
+milk, thick and sour by this time. He quickened his steps--made his way
+hurriedly through the kitchen and dining-room, noticing, as he went,
+various signs of disorder. The kitchen fire was out--the floor unswept;
+the coffee he had knocked over when he had built the fire this morning
+lay where it had fallen: the room was full of its pungent odor. On the
+dining-room table were the remnants of breakfast, the oatmeal dry and
+stiff, the butter melted down to a thin oil. In the front room he found
+Gertrude, bending a flushed face over something she was writing. She
+gave a start of fright as he came in--then got very red.
+
+"I sat down to write a little of that play I was telling you about last
+night"--she was picking up her papers with frantic haste as she
+spoke--"and I had no idea it was getting so late." She cast an appalled
+glance around the room, and hurried out to begin clearing off the table,
+making a great clatter with the dishes in her excitement and haste.
+
+[Illustration: "THIS DREARY, GAUNT BLACK FIGURE, WAITING ALWAYS FOR HIM
+AT THE TOP OF THE HILL"]
+
+Allison stood for a minute looking after her wearily. Her manner hurt
+him. More than once, in days gone by, he had told her fondly that when
+she married him she should do nothing but what she liked to do--if she
+chose, she might work on her little dialogues and fairy stories from
+morning till night. The air of frightened apology which she wore--this
+servile haste--pained and irritated him. He threw himself into a chair
+and began mechanically to look over the mail which the postmaster had
+handed him. A week ago he had written to an Eastern firm asking for a
+catalogue of the refrigerators they made. Here it was--bulky,
+imposing, abounding in alluring pictures of tile-lined refrigerators
+filled with game, fish, fruit, wine. He found he could buy their
+smallest and most inexpensive refrigerator, "built especially to supply
+a demand for low-priced goods,"--so the advertisement ran--for
+forty-five dollars. He dropped the book, and turned to his other letter.
+It was from a great retail dry-goods house, and was in answer to a
+request he had made for samples of dotted swiss--he had thought he would
+like to get Gertrude a dress such as she had worn when he first knew
+her. The samples were sent, and along with them a letter expressing
+pleasure at being able to serve him, and a desire further to accommodate
+him whenever possible; its extreme deference and respect was like a
+calculated sarcasm. He pushed it away from him and leaned back in his
+chair, looking about the room with a curious stare, as a convict, who
+has just heard that his sentence is for life, might gaze at the walls of
+his cell. It was a low-ceiled room, with an uneven floor, cheap
+woodwork, painted in an unsuccessful imitation of natural wood, and
+walls hung with faded paper of an indeterminate pattern and even more
+indeterminate color. To-day it was in greater confusion than usual, with
+white dust thick on table and chair, a window-shade askew, the
+music-rack disarranged, and a plate of grape-skins which Allison had
+left last night on the piano still standing there. But it was not the
+disorder which irritated Allison most, nor the signs of poverty, but the
+fact that the poverty was so _genteel_, so self-respecting, so
+determined to make the best of things and present a brave front to the
+world. The kerosene lamp had a shade of red, crinkled tissue-paper--the
+cheap net curtains were arranged with the utmost elaboration--a rug was
+artfully laid down in such a way as almost to cover the square of zinc
+on which the stove stood in the winter time, and all of Gertrude's
+photographs were placed with a view to concealing various defects and
+deficiencies. His loathing for all this was intensified by a memory of
+vast rooms stretching out one after the other, hushed and cool, with
+gracious shadows lending their mystery and romance to everything. With
+sudden restlessness he rose, and walked over to the window; but the
+smell of dust and dry, dead vegetation smothered him. Gertrude had raked
+the long, sparse brown grass all in one direction; it had a grotesque
+look of having been combed.
+
+He seized his hat, and went to get Mr. Fulton's package from the
+window-sill. He had barely turned toward the gate, however, when his
+wife hurried out, remonstrating, apologizing, with an urgent hand on
+his arm. "It is important that Mr. Fulton should get these papers
+to-day," he said stiffly. It did not really matter whether Mr. Fulton
+got the roll of agricultural papers to-day, to-morrow, or next week; but
+Allison felt the necessity for doing something, it did not much matter
+what, to crush down his growing despair; and this was the only thing
+which suggested itself. Gertrude was persistent, however, in her
+entreaties that he come back; it was frightfully hot, and he already
+looked tired; she would take the papers to Mr. Fulton right after
+luncheon. He yielded at last, from sheer languidness, and came silently
+into the house. Gertrude's moist face, her loud, anxious voice, her
+warm, clinging hand, were exceedingly disagreeable to him--so much so
+that finally the desire to escape them became more importunate than any
+other.
+
+He was again standing by the window, gazing out, when his wife came into
+the dining-room to set the table. He did not turn--gave no sign of
+seeing her.
+
+"What are you thinking about, Philip?" she asked presently, with an
+effort to make her question sound casual.
+
+"I am not thinking--at least I am trying not to," Allison answered, in a
+somewhat strained, unnatural voice. Why would she not leave him alone?
+Could she not see that he did not wish to talk?
+
+"What was the last thing that you were thinking about before you
+stopped?" Gertrude spoke with painstaking gaiety.
+
+Would she always keep up this dissimulation? Allison asked himself. For
+his part, he was done with it!
+
+"I was thinking that this place was fit for a dog-kennel--and for
+nothing else!" he said. All the bitterness that was eating out his heart
+was in the low words.
+
+"It does look pretty bad to-day," Gertrude acquiesced, after an
+appreciable interval of time.
+
+"_To-day!_" Allison gave a hard, contemptuous little laugh. "As though
+it ever looked any other way!"
+
+Gertrude did not reply.... When Allison noticed her silence, and turned
+to look at her, he saw that there was a peculiar light in her eyes, a
+red flush over all her face; after a moment's dazed wonder, he realized
+that she had misunderstood him--had misunderstood him utterly. His
+thoughts had been on the sagging floors, the cheap furniture, the marred
+wall-paper, the miserable ugliness and poverty of the house, and
+everything in it; but she had seen in his remark only scorn for her
+housekeeping, irritation at the room's untidiness. She was very angry.
+As Allison realized this, a sudden fierce satisfaction possessed him.
+Now at last she would speak out, without pretence, without reserve! He
+should hear the truth at last.
+
+[Illustration: "HE HEARD HER MOVING ABOUT, GETTING HIS LUNCHEON"]
+
+But the wrathful look died out of her eyes. She began arranging the
+knives and forks, looking suddenly old, and steady, and sober.
+
+"I'm not much of a housekeeper," she said, quietly.
+
+"No, you're not." Allison made his tone as ugly as possible--and waited.
+Surely she would turn upon him now, overwhelm him with bitter words!
+
+She made no answer of any kind, however, but turned and hurried into the
+kitchen, striking her arm clumsily against one side of the door as she
+passed through, as though she had not seen very well. He heard her
+moving rapidly about, getting his luncheon. She brought it in with her
+head in the air and her lips compressed. The coffee was muddy, the steak
+burned, the creamed potatoes scorched--she had been having bad luck.
+Allison ate every scrap of what she brought him. He did not dare look at
+her--did not dare ask her to forgive him. What right had he to do that?
+He lingered on the steps some time before starting for the station,
+fussing with his cuff, pulling his hat into shape, breaking off from the
+tree at the corner of the house the branch Gertrude had complained was
+in her way. His wife usually followed him to the door to tell him
+good-by; but to-day she was sweeping the dining-room vigorously, singing
+the while a very gay and cheerful tune. It was one to which they had
+often danced together in the old days; at the same moment at which he
+realized it, the song stopped, as though Gertrude had been silenced by
+the same memory that had come to him. He whistled tentatively; but she
+did not answer, though she was near enough to hear, as he knew from the
+sound of her broom.
+
+Allison went about his work that afternoon with a droop to his head, and
+a dullness about his dark eyes, which Jim noticed with vague discomfort,
+and which made him wish heartily that he had not confided to the
+postmaster the story of Billings and the brake. He had quarreled with
+Gertrude--everything else seemed insignificant to Allison beside that.
+He had quarreled with Gertrude--Gertrude, who had been so brave, so
+uncomplaining, so patient, so forbearing--had gone away from her with
+the shadow of a misunderstanding between them. He kept repeating to
+himself everything he had said and everything she had said, recalling
+every tone and gesture. He wondered how he could have felt such a
+shrinking dislike as she stood with her hand--her poor little scarred
+hand!--on his arm, begging him to come back, to let her take the papers
+to Mr. Fulton. How sweet she had been--how sweet! And he!
+
+He started for home a little earlier than usual--Jim urged him to go,
+with a certain rough friendliness, saying that he could look out for
+things at the station. On his way home Allison went to the post-office,
+hoping to get a letter for Gertrude from her mother or sister, and he
+told the postmaster very humbly and simply why he had not felt like
+talking this noon, and of the fact that he could not really afford to
+pay five dollars a week for a maid. It was very strange, but after he
+had begun, it was not at all hard to go on. He wondered vaguely how he
+could have thought the postmaster a meddlesome, malicious, vulgar young
+man; he seemed very sensible and friendly and respectful to-night.
+
+Mrs. Jennings stood at the top of the hill, gaunt and black as usual;
+somehow Allison did not feel the usual resentment. He stopped to speak
+to her with unwonted warmth; and when, encouraged by his manner, she
+began to talk about Gertrude, and what a pretty girl, and what a smart
+girl, and what a sweet girl she was, he felt a sudden kindness for the
+old lady, and accepted almost demonstratively the bunch of magenta and
+orange vinnias she gave him to take to his wife.
+
+As Allison went into the house, he noticed signs of a vigorous cleaning.
+The back steps had been scrubbed--were still wet; the kitchen floor was
+as white as the rough, dark boards could be made; the dining-room table
+was set with their finest table-cloth and prettiest dishes, and was gay
+with yellow flowers; fresh white curtains, breathing out sweetness, hung
+at the windows. A note was pinned to the corner of the table.
+
+"If you should get home before I do," it ran, "this is to tell you that
+I have gone to Mr. Fulton's with those papers I promised to take right
+after luncheon--I forgot all about them till just now. I'll be back in
+three-quarters of an hour sure; it's half-past five now. Supper's all
+ready now but making the coffee. Be sure and wait."
+
+He smoothed the hurried scrawl out tenderly, feeling as if something
+hard and cold in his left side had melted with a sudden gush of warmth.
+Back in three-quarters of an hour! He laughed aloud at the sanguineness
+of it. Why, it took _him_ forty minutes to go to Mr. Fulton's and back!
+And the idea of telling him to be sure and wait! The little goose! Did
+she think he would take himself off in a temper at not finding her, as
+he had once months ago? He went out to the kitchen to put his flowers
+in water, and to finish slicing an egg over the top of the bowl of salad
+there--Gertrude had evidently just begun to do it when the package
+outside the window caught her eye. He put on some water for the coffee,
+and brought in an armful of wood; then he strolled to the gate to wait
+for his wife. The neighbor's two-year-old baby came staggering down the
+walk in front of the house. Allison caught up the child in his arms, and
+lifted it to the top of the gate-post, beside him. This was the little
+girl for whom Gertrude had been making a dress the other day; she had
+looked very shocked--Gertrude--when he had asked her if she proposed to
+make clothes for all the dirty little brats in the neighborhood, and had
+told him with some dignity that Dolly was a very pretty baby, and was
+kept as clean as could be expected. Dolly _was_ a pretty baby. He
+tightened the arm that was about her a little, and began to talk clumsy
+baby-talk to her; her mother looked on with a pleased smile from her
+front door. The sun was setting, and a strange bright peace was on
+everything.
+
+Suddenly Allison's eyes were caught by an unaccustomed sight--a crowd of
+people, men, women, and children, advancing down the road, slowly,
+steadily, and silently--very silently. He surveyed them curiously,
+ignorantly. Suddenly a man spoke to the one next him--Allison saw the
+dip of his head--and almost at the same instant a child--a
+twelve-year-old girl--put up her hands to shade her eyes, staring
+intently at Allison, and then with a loud shriek ran wildly, blindly, in
+the other direction. And then Allison knew that this silent company
+meant disaster to him.
+
+They dragged him away before he caught more than a glimpse of what they
+had in their midst--the limp, white-faced thing in the silly pink dress
+he had liked. She had started home by the short way, they told him--the
+short way over the old bridge--the bridge that every one knew was not
+safe. And how it happened no one could say--perhaps she had stumbled and
+caught hold of the rotten railing, and it had given under her hand; at
+any rate they had found her in the dry river-bottom, thirty feet below.
+He looked at them very calmly as they finished. "She is dead," he said
+quietly, "there is no need to tell me that." And then, suddenly, without
+a cry or any warning, he toppled over against the man nearest him.
+
+But she was not dead. He came out of his delirium and fever three weeks
+later to find her limping around the room, looking a little pale and
+tired, but very pretty in some sort of ruffled white dress, with her
+hair done up in the puffs and rolls he had always liked. People had been
+very good, she told him when he was strong enough to listen and
+understand. The doctor had said that he could eat eggs before he could
+eat anything else--so everybody had been sending fresh eggs. Mary said
+she was going to buy an incubator and start to raising chickens--they
+couldn't eat half the eggs that were sent in, even if they ate nothing
+but custard. Mary was the pretty girl that they had seen walking with
+Mr. Brown one Sunday, and had thought would be a nice person to have
+around. She was going to stay with them all winter; Gertrude was going
+to teach her German and music, and she was going to teach Gertrude how
+to cook. She was doing all the work just now, she and the neighbors.
+Mrs. Ferry came in every morning to scrub the kitchen and black the
+stove. They said Gertrude must keep her hands nice--Philip had seemed
+more worried about her hands than about anything else, all the time he
+was sick. Did he see how soft and white they were? She had been washing
+them in buttermilk--the doctor's wife had suggested that--and putting
+some sort of cream on them that Mr. Gilson, the young man who clerked in
+the drug store, had sent up by Mr. Brown. Mr. Brown had been so kind--it
+had been he who had sat up with Philip when his fever was at its
+worst--he had chopped all the ice that they had used from first to last.
+He was out in the back yard now, fixing--but there, that was to be a
+surprise.
+
+Allison lay very still, smoothing his wife's hand, and looking out
+through the open door at the dry grass of the yard, browner, dustier
+than ever, and at the portulaca waving on top of the pyramid of stones.
+He could hear Jim's whistle as he moved about the yard; some one at the
+back door was talking to Mary in a hushed, eager undertone; over on her
+porch Dolly was singing happily, sinking her voice to a mere murmur now
+and then at a low remonstrance from within the house. It all made a sort
+of accompaniment to Gertrude's happy talk.
+
+Suddenly she stopped, and leaned her cheek against his, with a little
+sigh. "Isn't it a nice world, dear?" she whispered.
+
+He turned so that he could look into her eyes, and said, with a little
+tremble in his voice:
+
+"It's a beautiful world!"
+
+[Illustration: "HE CAME TOWARD HER WITH THE PITCHER"]
+
+
+
+
+THE WAYFARERS
+
+BY
+
+MARY STEWART CUTTING
+
+AUTHOR OF "LITTLE STORIES OF COURTSHIP," "LITTLE STORIES OF MARRIED
+LIFE," ETC.
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALICE BARBER STEPHENS
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+"Slipped through your fingers like that! Like a--" Leverich's words were
+not fit for print. He had been away for a couple of days, and now sat
+tilted back in his office chair, a heavy, leather-covered thing not
+meant for tilting, his face puffed with anger, his mouth snarling--a
+wild beast balked of his prey. His eyes, ferociously insolent, dwelt on
+Justin, who, fine and keen and smiling a little, sat opposite him. Brute
+anger never had any effect on Justin but to give him a contemptuous,
+chill self-possession.
+
+"You're sure the agreement's made?"
+
+"Cater's been sending new consignments as fast as they could go for the
+past three days; he's loaded up with machines."
+
+Leverich swore again. "Confounded fools, not to have made terms with
+Hardanger first! If we'd only known! If there was only some way to put a
+spoke in the wheel, even yet!"
+
+"Oh, I've got the spoke, easily enough," said Justin indifferently. "The
+only trouble is, I can't use it."
+
+"Got a spoke! Why in heaven didn't you say that before?" Leverich came
+down on the front legs of his chair with a force that sent it rolling
+ahead on its casters. "What are you sitting here for? What do you mean
+by telling me that you can't use it?"
+
+"Just what I say. But it's not worth talking about."
+
+"See here, Alexander, could you get our machine in now instead of his?"
+
+"I suppose I might."
+
+"And you're not going to do it?"
+
+"I can't, I tell you, Leverich. The information came to me in such a way
+that I can't touch it."
+
+"'The information--' It's something damaging to do with the machine?"
+
+Justin drummed with his fingers on the desk without answering.
+
+"You have proof?"
+
+"What's the sense of talking, Leverich? Proof or no, I tell you, I can't
+use it. This isn't any funny business; you can see that. Don't you
+suppose, if I could use it, that I would? But there are some things a
+man can't do. At any rate, _I_ can't. And that settles it."
+
+Heaven knows he had gone over the matter insistently enough in the last
+few days, since the combination had been unwillingly given into his
+hands, but always with the foregone conclusion. The devil, as a rule,
+doesn't actively try to tempt us to evil: he simply confuses us, so that
+we are kept from using our reason. But this time he had no field for
+action. To use secret information against Cater, that could never have
+been had but for Cater's kindness to him in helping him to those bars in
+time of need, was first, last, and every time impossible to Justin
+Alexander. It was vain for argument to suggest that this very deed of
+kindness had worked his disaster--the fact remained the same. He might
+do other things; he might do worse things: this thing he could not
+do--not though the refusal worked his own ruin, not though Cater's ruin
+with Hardanger was insured anyway, but too late for the typometer to
+profit by it. Even if the typometer could by some means keep afloat
+until that day arrived, it would take a couple of years for such a
+timing-machine to regain its prestige in a foreign country.
+
+Justin had no excess of sentiment; no quixotic impulse urged him to go
+and tell Cater what he had learned. It was Cater's business to look
+after his end of the game. If the price of material or labor was too
+cheap, he must know that there was something wrong with it. The stream
+of Justin's mind ran clear in spite of that feeling of sharp practice
+toward himself--nay, because of it; it was impossible to use the weapon
+that a former kindness had placed in his hand. He looked at Leverich now
+with an expression which the latter quieted himself to meet. This was a
+situation, not for bluster and rage, but to be competently grappled
+with.
+
+"How about your obligations? Do you call this fair dealing to us,
+Alexander? There's Lewiston's note; once this deal was settled, we would
+have paid that, as you know. But it's out of the question as things
+stand. We'll have to get our money out the best way we can. If this is
+your sense of honor--to sacrifice your friends! See here, Alexander,
+let's talk this out. When it comes to talking of ruin, no man can afford
+to stand on terms. We didn't put you into the typometer business on any
+kindergarten principles--it isn't to form your character. What we did,
+we did for profit; and if the profit isn't there, we get out. We've no
+objection to doing a kindness for any one, if we can do it and make a
+profit; but it stands to reason that we're not in the business for
+philanthropy any more than for kindergartening. We liked you, and we
+were willing to give you a place in the game if you could run it to suit
+us. But we don't consider any scheme that doesn't make money. What
+doesn't make money has to go. Profit, profit, profit--that's what every
+sane man puts first, and there's no justice in losing a chance to make
+it. What you lose, another man takes. If you make another man's wife and
+children better off, you stint your own. You've got to consider a
+question on all sides. No woman respects a man who can't make money;
+it's his everlasting business to make money, and she knows it. Your wife
+won't think much of your fine scruples if she's to go without for 'em.
+And, by the Lord, she's right! When you go into business, you've got to
+make up your mind to one of two things: you've either got to step hard
+on the necks of those below you, or you've got to lie down and let them
+wipe their feet on you."
+
+[Illustration: "'I DON'T GIVE QUARTER, AND I DON'T EXPECT ANY. IF I'M
+SQUEEZED, I PAY'"]
+
+Leverich had stopped at intervals for comment from Justin. Since none
+was offered, he went on, with the large and easy manner of one who feels
+the justice of his convictions: "No man ever accused me of being close.
+I'm free-handed, if I say it that shouldn't. I like to give, and I _do_
+give. If there's money wanted for charity, the committees know very well
+where to come. And my wife likes to give, too; her name's on the books
+of twenty charitable organizations. But we give out of money I've made
+by _not_ being free-handed--by getting every last cent that belonged to
+me. You see, I don't leave my wife out of my calculations--any man's a
+fool that does. She's got the right to have as good as I can give her. I
+wouldn't talk like this to most men, Alexander, but between you and me
+it's different. It pays to keep your wife in a good humor, when you've
+got to go home after a hard day's work; you take a dissatisfied woman,
+and she'll make your home a hell. I know men--Great Scott! I don't know
+how they live!" He paused again. Justin did not answer. He sat with his
+head on his hand, looking, not at Leverich, but to one side of him.
+
+[Illustration: "EVEN REDGE ... HAD BEEN ALLOWED TO HOLD HIM"]
+
+"When I say I've made the money," continued Leverich, "I mean that I
+actually _have_ made most of it--made it out of nothing! like the first
+chapter of Genesis. If a man has money to start with, he can add to it
+as easily as you can roll up a snowball. It's no credit to him. But I've
+had only my brains. I've seen money where other men couldn't, and
+nothing has stood in my way of getting to it. That's the whole secret of
+success. And my attitude's fair--you couldn't find a fairer. When one of
+your clerks falls sick, you pay him his full salary for three or four
+months till he's around again. _I_ know! Well, I don't do any such
+stunts. When I was a clerk myself, I was on the sick-list once for three
+months, and nobody paid me. After the first month I was bounced, and I
+didn't expect anything else. I didn't expect any philanthropical
+business, and I don't give it. That's fair, isn't it? I don't give
+quarter, and I don't expect any. If I'm squeezed, I pay. I don't stand
+still in the middle of a deal and snivel about what I can do and what I
+can't do. I don't snivel about what you call moral obligations. I only
+recognize money obligations. Why, see here, Alexander," he broke off,
+"if you use the influence you spoke of, you don't have to tell me what
+it is--you don't have to tell anybody but Hardanger. Cater himself
+needn't know that you had anything to do with it."
+
+"But I'd know," said Justin quietly.
+
+Leverich lost his easy manner; his jaw protruded.
+
+"Very well, then; it comes down to this: If you fail us now, out of any
+of your fool scruples toward that poor devil across the street,--who's
+bound to get the blood sucked out of him anyway,--you ruin your own
+prospects, and you try and cheat us out of the money we put up on you.
+By ----, if you see any honor in that, I don't."
+
+"Mr. Leverich," said Justin, raising his head simply, with a steely
+gleam in his eyes that matched the other's, "when I try to cheat you or
+Lewiston or any man out of what has been put up on me, I'll give you
+leave to say what you please. At present I'll say good morning."
+
+[Illustration: "AFTER THIS HE ONLY APPEARED IN THE VILLAGE STREET
+GUARDED ON EITHER SIDE BY A FEMALE SNOW"]
+
+Leverich shrugged his shoulders and turned his back as he bent over his
+desk. Justin picked up his hat and went out, brushing, as he did so,
+against a dark, pleasant-faced man who had been sitting in the next
+room. Something in his face instantly conveyed to Justin the knowledge
+that the conversation he had just been engaged in had grown louder than
+the partition warranted. The next instant he recognized the man as a Mr.
+Warren, of Rondell & Co. Both men turned to look back at each other, and
+both bowed. The action had a certain definiteness in it, unwarranted by
+the slightness of the meeting. The next moment Justin was in the
+street.
+
+[Illustration: "TO PUT HER YOUNG ARMS AROUND LOIS AND HOLD HER CLOSE
+WITH ACHING PITY"]
+
+The active clash of steel always roused the blood in him; he felt
+actively stronger for combat. He was competently apportioning toward
+Lewiston's note the different sums coming in this month. There were
+large bills to be paid to the typometer's credit by several firms, one
+of them Coneways'. Coneways represented the largest counted-in asset for
+the entire year--it was the backbone of the establishment. If it went to
+Lewiston, what would be left for the business? That could come next.
+Lewiston was first. Leverich and Martin would exact every penny of their
+principal after these intervening six months of the year were over.
+Well, let them! Lewiston's note was what he had to think of now.
+
+All business undertakings, no matter how wild, how precarious, to the
+sense of the beholder, are started with confidence in their ultimate
+success; it is the one trite, universal reason for starting--that faith
+is the capital that all possess in common. Some of these doubtful
+ventures, while never really succeeding, do not really fail at once.
+They are always hard up, but they keep on, though gradually sinking
+lower all the time. Others seem to exist by the continuance of that
+first faith alone--a sheer optimism that keeps the courage alive and
+keen enough to seize hold of the slightest driftwood of opportunity,
+binding this flotsam into a raft that takes them triumphantly out on the
+high tide. For all the long drag, the anxiety, the physical strain, the
+harassment, failure in itself seemed as inherently impossible to Justin
+as that he should be stricken blind or lose the use of his limbs. He
+must think harder to find a way of accomplishment; that was all.
+
+His step had its own peculiar ring in it as he left Leverich's, but it
+lost somewhat of its alertness as he turned down the street that led to
+the factory, unaltered, since his first coming to it, save for the
+transformation of the neglected house he had noticed then, with its
+gruesome interior, which had been turned into a freshly painted shop
+long ago. The effect of association is inexorable. There was not a
+corner, not a building, along that too familiar way, that was not hung
+with some thought of care. There were moments of such strong repulsion
+that he felt as if he couldn't turn down that street again--moments
+lately when to enter the factory with its red-brick-arched yawning mouth
+of a doorway occasioned a physical nausea--a foolish, womanish state
+which irritated him.
+
+The mail brought him the usual miscellaneous assortment of orders and
+bills, and letters on minor points, and questions as to the typometer.
+The mail was rather apt to be encouraging in its suggestions of a large
+trade. Two letters this morning were full of enthusiastic encomium on
+the use of the machine. In spite of an enormous and long-outstanding
+bill for office stationery, insistently clamorous for payment--one of
+those bills looked upon as trifles until they suddenly become
+staggering--there was, after the mail, a general feeling of wielding the
+destiny of a large part of the world, where the typometer was a power.
+
+[Illustration: "'YOU'RE VERY GOOD TO BE SO SORRY FOR ME,' SHE
+WHISPERED"]
+
+A little woman whose husband, now dead, had been in his employ came in
+to get help in collecting his insurance; she was timid before Justin,
+deeply grateful for his kind and effective assistance. Two men came in,
+at different times, for advice and introductions to important people. A
+friend brought in a possible customer from the Sandwich Islands. There
+was all that aura of prosperity that has nothing to do with the payment
+of one's bills.
+
+Justin took both the friend and the customer out to lunch, his agreeable
+sense of hospitality only dimmed by the disagreeable fact of its taking
+every cent of the five dollars he had expected to last for the week. He
+was "strapped." The luncheon took longer, also, than he had counted on
+its doing. The morning, begun well, seemed to lead up only to sordid and
+anxious details--a sense of non-accomplishment, induced also by small
+requisitions from different people, requiring cash from a cash-drawer
+that was usually empty.
+
+It was a welcome relief to figure, with Harker's assistance, on the
+large sums coming in at the end of the month from Coneways. There were a
+hundred ways for them to go, but they were to go to Lewiston. Perhaps,
+after all, as Harker astutely suggested, Lewiston would be satisfied
+with a partial payment and extend the rest of the note. While they were
+still consulting, word was brought in that Mr. Lewiston was there.
+
+Mr. Lewiston was a young man, small-featured, black-haired,
+smooth-shaven, and with an air of nattiness and fashion, set at odds at
+present by a very pale and anxious face and eager, dilated black eyes.
+He cut short Justin's greeting with the words:
+
+"I've just come over to speak about that note, Alexander."
+
+"Well, I was just wanting to speak to you about it myself," said Justin
+easily. "Have a cigar?"
+
+"Thank you," said Lewiston mechanically, and as mechanically holding out
+his hand for the cigar, evidently forgetting it the next moment. "The
+fact is, I don't want to seem importunate, but if you could pay off that
+note fifteen days before date,--a week from to-day, that is,--we'd
+discount it to satisfy you, if you can collect now. I didn't want to
+bother you about it, and I tried outside first, but nobody will take up
+the paper just now, except at a ruinous rate. If you could make it
+convenient, Alexander." Young Lewiston sat with his small, eager face
+bent forward over his knees, his lips twitching slightly. "You know,
+that money wasn't loaned on strictly business principles, Alexander, but
+for friendship; I got father to consent to it. And if you could let us
+have it now, it would save us a world of trouble. It's really not
+much--only ten thousand."
+
+Justin shook his head, his keen blue eyes fixed on the other. "I can't
+let you have it, Lewiston; I wish I could! But I'm waiting payments
+myself. Can't you pull out without it?"
+
+Lewiston drew in his breath. "Oh, yes, of course we'll have to; but it
+means-- Well, I know you would if you could, Alexander; I told father
+so--father in a way holds me responsible. He was in London when I
+renewed the note the last time. There isn't anything to interfere with
+the payment when it's due?"
+
+"On my honor, no," said Justin. "You shall have it then without fail."
+
+"For if that should slip up--" continued young Lewiston, wrapped in
+somber contemplation of his own affairs alone; he threw his arms outward
+with a gesture suddenly tragic in its intensity, paused an instant, then
+wrung Justin's hand silently and departed.
+
+"Are you busy, Alexander? They said I could come in."
+
+"Why, Girard!"
+
+Justin wheeled a chair around with an instantly brightened face. "Sit
+down. I'm mighty glad to see you." He looked smilingly at his visitor,
+whose presence, long-limbed, straight, clean, and clear-eyed, always
+elicited a peculiar admiration from other men. "I heard that you had a
+room at the Snows' now, while Billy is away, but I haven't laid eyes on
+you for a month."
+
+"I've been coming in on a later train every morning and going out again
+on a very much later one at night. I'm back in town on the paper for a
+while."
+
+"Why don't you settle down to something worth while?" asked Justin, with
+the reserved disapproval of the business man for any mode of life but
+his own.
+
+[Illustration: "MRS. SNOW WAS FUMBLING WITH A PAPER"]
+
+"Settle down to this kind of thing?" said Girard thoughtfully. "Well, I
+did think of it last year, when I undertook those commissions for you.
+But what's the use--yet awhile, at any rate? You see, I can always make
+enough money for what I want and to spare, and there's nobody else to
+care. I like my liberty! The love of trade doesn't take hold of me,
+somehow--and you have to have such a tremendous amount of capital to
+keep your place. By the way, have you sold the island yet?" The island
+was a small one up near Nova Scotia, taken once for a debt.
+
+"Not yet."
+
+Girard gave him a quick glance. "How are things going with you?"
+
+"Fine," said Justin in a conventionally prosperous tone, with a sudden
+sight of a bottomless pit yawning below him. "I've a few things on my
+mind lately--but they're all right now. By the way, how do you like it
+at the Snows'?"
+
+"Oh, all right." Girard's gray eyes smiled in an irrepressible smile. "I
+score high at present. They all approve of me, and I am told that I am
+the only man who has never run into the Boston fern or got tangled in
+the Wandering Jew. Miss Bertha and I have long talks together--she's
+great. As for Mrs. Snow--she heard Sutton speak of her the other night
+to Ada as 'the old lady,' I assure you that since--" He shook his head,
+and both men laughed.
+
+"Come to see us. Miss Linden is back with us again," said Justin
+hospitably.
+
+"Thank you," said Girard, an indefinable stiffening change instantly
+coming over him. "By the way, I mustn't forget what I came for, before I
+hurry off."
+
+He took some bills out of his long, flat leather wallet as he rose. "Do
+you remember lending that sixty dollars to my friend Keston last year?
+He turned up yesterday, and asked me to see that you got this."
+
+"I'd forgotten all about it," averred Justin. He had not realized until
+he took the bills that he had been keeping up all day by main strength,
+with that caved-in sensation of there being nothing back of it--nothing
+back of it. There are times when the touch of money is as the elixir of
+life. Justin, holding on by the skin of his teeth for ten thousand
+dollars, and needing imperatively at least as much more, felt that with
+this paltry sixty dollars it was suddenly possible to draw a free
+breath, felt a sheer lightness of spirit that showed how terrible was
+the persistent weight under which he was living. The very feeling of
+those separate bills in his pocket made him calmly sanguine.
+
+He got ready to go home a little earlier than usual, saying lightly to
+Harker, who had come in for his signature to some papers:
+
+"Those payments will begin to straggle in next week. Coneways' isn't due
+until the 31st--the very last minute! But he's always prompt, thank
+Heaven--what are you doing?"
+
+"Knocking on wood," said Harker, with a grim smile.
+
+"Oh, knock on wood all you want to," returned Justin.
+
+He even thought of Lois on his way, and stopped to buy her some flowers.
+It was the first time he had thought of her unconsciously for a week.
+While he was waiting for a car to pass before he crossed the street, his
+eye caught the headline on a paper a newsboy was holding out to him:
+
+  GREAT CRASH
+
+  CONEWAYS & CO. FAIL
+
+  IN BOSTON
+
+
+XX
+
+"I don't think Justin looks very well," said Dosia that afternoon. She
+was sitting on the edge of the bed, with her arms spread out
+half-protectingly over Lois. The latter was only resting; she had been
+up and around the house now for three or four weeks, and, although she
+looked unusually fragile, seemed well, if not very strong.
+
+The baby, wrapped in a blue embroidered blanket, with only a round
+forehead and a small pink nose visible, was of that satisfactory variety
+entirely given to sleep. Zaidee and even Redge, adoring little sister
+and brother, had been allowed to hold him in their arms, so securely
+unstirring was their little burden. Lois, who had passionately rebelled
+against the prospect of additional motherhood, exhibited a not unusual
+phase of it now in as passionately adoring this second boy. He seemed
+peculiarly, intensely her own, not only a baby, but a spiritual
+possession that communicated a new strength to her. Lois was changed.
+She had always been beautiful, as a matter of fact, but there was
+something withheld, mysterious, in her expression, as if she were taking
+counsel of some half-slumberous force within, as of one listening at a
+shell for the murmur of the ocean.
+
+Not only Lois, but everything else, seemed changed to Dosia, at the same
+time being also flatly, unchangeably natural. She had longed--oh, how
+she had longed!--to be back here. Even while loving and working in her
+so-called home, she had felt that this was her real home, although here
+her cruelest blows had fallen on her; even while bleeding with the
+wrench of parting from her own flesh and blood, she had felt that this
+was the real home, for here she had really lived; and it was the home of
+the nicer, more delicate instincts. After the crude housekeeping, the
+lack of comforts that made the simplest nursing a grinding struggle with
+circumstance, it was a blessed relief to get back to a sphere where
+minor details were all in order as a matter of course. The Alexanders,
+with their three children, kept only one maid now; but even that
+restriction did not prevent the unlimited flow of hot and cold water!
+
+Yet she had also dreaded this returning,--how she had dreaded it!--with
+that old sickening shame which came over her inevitably as she thought
+of certain people and places and days. The mere thought of seeing Mrs.
+Leverich or George Sutton and that chorus of onlookers was like passing
+through fire. One braces one's self to withstand the pain of scenes of
+joy or sorrow revisited, to find that, after all, when the moment comes,
+there is little of that dreaded pain. It has been lived through and the
+climax passed in that previsioning which imagination made more intense,
+more harrowingly real, than the reality.
+
+Mrs. Leverich stopped her carriage one day to greet Dosia, and to ask
+her, with a tentative semblance of her old effusion, to come and make
+her a visit--an effusion which immediately died down into complete
+non-interest, on Dosia's polite refusal; and the incident was not
+especially heart-racking at the time, though afterward it set her
+unaccountably trembling. Mrs. Leverich had in the carriage with her a
+small, thin, long-nosed man with a pale-reddish mustache and hair, who,
+gossip said, passed most of his time at the Leverichs'--he was seen out
+driving alone with Myra nearly every day. He was "an old friend from
+home." It had been gossip at first, but it was growing to be scandal
+now, with audible wonder as to how much Mr. Leverich knew about it.
+
+Her avoidance of George Sutton was as nothing to his desire of avoiding
+her. He dived with surreptitious haste down side streets when he saw her
+coming, or disappeared within shop doorways. Once, when Dosia confronted
+him inadvertently on the platform of a car, and he had perforce to take
+off his hat and murmur, "Good morning," he turned pale and was evidently
+scared to death. After this he only appeared in the village street
+guarded on either side by a female Snow--usually Ada and her mother,
+though occasionally Bertha served as escort instead of the latter. The
+elder Snows, in spite of this apparent security, were in a state of
+constant nervous tension over Mr. Sutton's attention to Ada. He had not
+"spoken" yet, but it had begun to be felt severely of late that he
+ought to speak. Whenever Ada came into the house, her face was eagerly
+scanned by both mother and sister to see from its look if it bore any
+trace of the fateful words having been uttered. Every one knew, though
+how no one could tell, that that bold thing, Dosia Linden, had tried to
+get him once, and failed.
+
+The thing that had unaccountably stirred her most since her arrival was
+an unexpected meeting with Bailey Girard. Dosia, with Zaidee and Redge
+held by either hand and pressing close to her as they walked merrily
+along, suddenly came upon a gray-clad figure emerging from the
+post-office. He seemed to make an instinctive movement as if to draw
+back, that sent the swift color to her cheeks and then turned them
+white. Were all the men in the place trying to avoid her? Dosia thought,
+with bitter humor; but, if it were so, he instantly recovered himself,
+and came forward, hat in hand, with a quick access of bright courtesy, a
+punctilious warmth of manner. He walked along with her a few paces as he
+talked, lifting Zaidee over a flooded crossing, before going once more
+on his way. He was nothing to her, the stranger who had killed her
+ideal; yet all day it was as if his image were photographed in the
+colors of life upon the retina of her eye. She could not push it away,
+try as she might.
+
+Of Lawson Dosia had heard only such vague rumors as had sifted through
+the letters written by Lois. He had been reported as going on in his old
+way in the mining-camps, drifting from one to another. She heard nothing
+more now. He was the only one who had really loved her up here, except
+Lois, who loved her now. Dosia had slipped into her new position of
+sister and helper as if she had always filled it. She was not an
+outsider any more; she _belonged_.
+
+As she sat bending over Lois now, her attitude was instinct with
+something high-mindedly lovely. The Dosia who had only wanted to be
+loved now felt--after a year of trial and conflict with death--that she
+only wanted, and with the same youthful intensity, to be very good, even
+though it seemed sometimes to that same youthfulness a strange and
+tragic thing that it should be all she wanted. The mysterious,
+fathomless depression of youth, as of something akin to unknown primal
+depths of loneliness, sometimes laid its chill hand on her heart; but
+when Dosia "said her prayers," she got, child-fashion, very near to a
+Some One who brought her an intimate tender comfort of resurrection and
+of life.
+
+"I don't think Justin seems well," she repeated, Lois, looking up at her
+with calmly expressionless eyes from her pillow, having taken no notice
+of the remark. "He has changed, I think, even in the ten days since I
+came."
+
+"He has something on his mind," assented Lois, with a note of languor in
+her voice. "I suppose it's the business. I made up my mind to ask him
+about it to-night. He has been out every evening lately, and I hardly
+see him at all before he goes off in the morning, now that I don't get
+down to breakfast."
+
+"Oh, he gave me a message for you this morning," cried Dosia, with
+compunction at having so far forgotten it. "He said that Mr. Larue had
+come in to inquire about you yesterday. He is going to send you a basket
+of strawberries and roses from his place at Collingswood to-morrow."
+
+"Eugene Larue!" Lois' lips relaxed into a pleased curve; a slight color
+touched her cheek. "That was very nice of him. He knew I'd like to look
+forward to getting them. Strawberries and roses!"
+
+"I met Mr. Girard in the street to-day; he asked after you," continued
+Dosia, with the feeling that if she spoke of him she might get that
+tiresome, insistent image of him from before her eyes.
+
+"Bailey Girard? Yes; he has a room at the Snows'. Billy's out West."
+
+"So I've heard," said Dosia.
+
+It was one of the strange and melancholy ironies of life that the man of
+all others whom she had desired to meet should be thrown daily in her
+pathway now, after that desire was gone!
+
+"You'd better not talk any more now, Lois; you look tired. It's time for
+you to take a little rest. I'll see to the children. I hope baby will
+stay asleep. Let me pull this coverlet over you. Shall I pull down the
+shades?"
+
+"No, I'd rather have the light. Please hand me that book over there on
+the stand," said Lois, holding out her hand for the big, old-fashioned
+brown volume that Dosia brought to her.
+
+"You oughtn't to read; you ought to go to sleep," said Dosia, with
+tender severity.
+
+"I'm not going to read," returned Lois pacifically. Her hand closed over
+the book, she smiled, and Dosia closed the door. Lois turned to the
+sleeping child with a peculiar delight in being quite alone with
+him--alone with him, to think.
+
+The book was a novel of some forty years ago, called, as the title-page
+proclaimed, "A Woman's Kingdom," and written by Dinah Maria Mulock. A
+neighbor had brought it in to Lois during the first month of her
+convalescence. In all the time she had had it, she had never read any
+further than that title-page.
+
+There is often more in the birth of a child than the coming of another
+son or daughter into the world. Between those forces of life and death a
+woman may also get her chance to be born anew, made over again,
+spiritually as well as physically. In those long, restful hours
+afterward, when suspense is over and pain is over, and there is a
+freedom from household cares, and one is looked upon with renewed
+tenderness, the thoughts may flow over long, long ways. To face danger
+bravely in itself gives strength for the clearer vision; and a
+peculiarly loved child unlocks with its tiny hands springs unknown
+before.
+
+Lois, though she had been a mother twice before, had never felt toward
+either of the other children at all as she did now toward this little
+boy. She could not bear to be parted from him. Somehow that terrible
+corrosive selfishness had been blessedly taken away from her--for a
+little while only? She only felt at first that she must not think of
+those horrible depths, for fear of slipping back into the pit again;
+even to think of the slimy powers of darkness gave them a fresh hold on
+one. She put off her return to that soul-embracing egotism. It was sweet
+to lie there and meet the tender gentleness of her husband's gaze when
+he came home, and to talk to him about the baby as a child might talk
+about a new toy, though she could not but begin to perceive that she was
+as far, far out of his real life as if she had indeed been a child.
+
+One evening he came in to sit by her,--her convalescence had been a long
+and dragging one,--and she had paused in the midst of telling him
+something to await an answer. None came. She spoke again, and raised
+herself to look. Then she saw that even within that brief space he had
+fallen asleep, as a man may who is thoroughly exhausted. Thoroughly
+exhausted! Everything proclaimed it--his attitude, grimly grotesque in
+the dim light, one leg stretched out half in front of the other, as he
+had dropped into the seat, his relaxed arms hanging down, his head
+resting sidewise against the back of the chair, with the face sharply
+upturned. The shadows lay in the hollows under his cheek-bones and in
+those lines that marked his temples. Divested of color and the
+transforming play of expression, he looked strangely old, terribly
+lifeless. He slept without moving,--almost, it seemed, without
+breathing,--while Lois, with a new dread, watched him with frightened,
+dilated, fascinated eyes. How had he grown like this? What unnoticed
+change had been at work? She called him again, but he did not hear; she
+stretched out her arm, but he was just beyond reach. Suddenly it seemed
+to her that he was dead, and that she could never reach him again; an
+icy hand seemed to have been laid on her heart. What if never, never,
+never----
+
+Just then he opened his eyes and sat up, saying naturally, "Did you
+speak?"
+
+"Oh, you frightened me so! Don't go to sleep like that again," said
+Lois, with a shaking voice. "Come here."
+
+He came and knelt down by her, and she pressed his cheek close to hers
+with a rush of painful emotion. "Why, you mustn't get worked up over a
+little thing like that," he objected lightly, going out of the room
+afterward with a reassuring smile at her, while she gazed after him with
+strangely awakened eyes. For the first time in months, she thought of
+him without any thought of benefit to herself.
+
+The next day the neighbor sent her over the book; the title arrested her
+attention oddly--"The Woman's Kingdom." Another phrase correlated with
+it in her memory--"Queen of the Home." That was supposed to be woman's
+domain, where she was the sovereign power; there she was helper,
+sustainer, director, the dear dispenser of favors. The woman's kingdom,
+queen of the home. Gradually the words led her down long lanes of
+retrospect, led by the rose-leaf touch of the baby's fingers; _they_
+kept her strong. What kingdom had she ever made her own? She, poor,
+bedraggled, complaining suppliant, a beggar where she should have been a
+queen! Home and the heart of her husband--there lay her woman's kingdom,
+her realm, her God-given province. She had had the ordering of it, none
+other: she had married a good man. Glad or sorry, that kingdom was as
+her rule made it; she must be judged by her government--as she was queen
+enough to hold it. She fell asleep that day thinking of the words.
+
+Day by day, other thoughts came to her more or less disconnectedly,--set
+in motion by those magic words,--when she lay at rest in the afternoons,
+with the book in her fingers and the dear little baby form close beside
+her. Lois was one of those women of intense feeling who can never
+perceive from imagination, but only from experience--who cannot even
+adequately sympathize with sorrows and conditions which they have not
+personally experienced. No advice touches them, for the words that
+embody it are in a language not yet understood. The mistakes of the past
+seem to have been necessary, when they look back. Given the same
+circumstances, they could not have acted differently; but they seldom
+look back--the present, that is always climbing on into the future,
+occupies them exclusively.
+
+Lois with "The Woman's Kingdom" in her hand, felt that some source of
+power and happiness which she had not realized had slipped from her
+grasp, yet might still be hers. So many disconnected, half-childish
+thoughts came with the words--historic names of women whom men had loved
+devotedly, who had kept them as their friends and lovers even when they
+themselves had grown old, women who had never lost their charm. There
+were those women of the French salons, who could interest even other
+generations; queens indeed! She couldn't really interest _one_ man! She
+thought over the married couples of her acquaintance, in search of those
+who should reveal some secret, some guiding light. One woman across the
+street had no other object in life than purveying to the household
+comfort of her husband, and seemed, good soul, to expect nothing from
+him in return; if William liked his fish, she was repaid. A couple
+farther down appeared to be held together by the fact of marriage,
+nothing more; they were bored to death by each other's society. Another
+couple were happily absorbed in their children, to whom they were both
+sacrificially subordinate. With none of these conditions could Lois be
+satisfied. Then, there were the women who always spoke as if a man were
+an animal and a woman were not a woman, but a spirit; but Lois was very
+much a woman! She settled at last, after penetrative thought, on one
+husband and wife, the latter a plain little person no longer young.
+Every man liked to go to her charming, comfortable house; every man
+admired her; and that her husband, a very handsome man himself, admired
+her most of all was unobtrusively evident. Every look, every gesture,
+betrayed the charming, vivifying unity between those two. How was it
+accomplished?
+
+How could one interest a man like that? There was Eugene Larue--she
+could interest him! The thought of him always gave her a sense of
+conscious power; he paid her homage. She did not know what his relations
+were with other women, but of his with her she was sure: she felt her
+woman's kingdom. If you could talk to the soul of a man like that as if
+he had the soul of an angel, and learn from him what you wanted to
+know--get his guidance-- But Lois was before all things inviolably a
+wife, with the instinctive dignity of one. The sympathy between her and
+Eugene Larue was so deep that she feared sometimes that in some brief
+moment she might reveal in words, to be forever regretted afterward,
+conditions which he knew without her telling. To be loved as Eugene
+Larue would love a woman! But his wife had not cared to be loved that
+way. She took deep, thoughtful counsel of her heart. If they two, she
+and Eugene, had met while both were free? The answer was what she had
+known it would be, else she had not dared to make the test. The man who
+was her husband was the only man who could ever have been her husband.
+Justin!
+
+With "The Woman's Kingdom" in her hand now, her lips touching the cheek
+of the soft little darling thing beside her, she felt that some new
+knowledge had been gradually revealed to her, of which she was now
+really aware only for the first time. Justin was not looking well--that
+was what Dosia had said. Oh, he was _not_ looking well! But she would
+make him forget his cares, his anxieties, with this new-found power of
+hers; she would bewitch him, take him off his feet, so that he would be
+able to think of nothing, of no one, but her--he had not always thought
+of her. _She would not pity herself._ She would learn to laugh, even if
+it took heroic effort; men liked you to laugh. She had always taken
+everything too seriously. The vision of his sleeping, _dead_ face of a
+month ago frightened her for a moment, painfully; but he had seemed
+better since, though, as Dosia said, he didn't look well. Oh, when he
+came home to-night----!
+
+She dressed herself with a new care, putting on a soft yellowish gown
+with a yoke of creamy lace, unworn for months. The color was more
+brilliant than ever in her cheeks, her lips redder, her eyes more deeply
+blue. The children exclaimed over their "pretty mama." She looked
+younger, more beautiful, than Dosia had ever seen her. She could not
+help saying:
+
+"How lovely you are, Lois! And you're all dressed up, too; do you expect
+any one?"
+
+"Only Justin," said Lois.
+
+"Only Justin"! The words brought an exquisite joy with them--only
+Justin, the one man in all the world for her. There was but a half-hour
+now until dinner-time. It had passed, and he had not come; but he was
+often late-- Still he did not come; that happened too, sometimes. The
+two women sat down to dinner alone, at last. The baby woke up afterward,
+an unusual thing, and wailed, and would not stop. Lois, divested of her
+rich apparel and once more swathed in a loose, shabby gown, rocked and
+soothed the infant interminably, while Dosia, her efforts to help
+unavailing, crouched over a book down-stairs, trying to read. After an
+interval of quiet she went up-stairs, to find Lois at last lying down.
+
+"It's eleven o'clock, Lois; I think I'll go to bed. Shall I leave the
+gas burning down-stairs?"
+
+"Yes, please do; he can't get anything now but the last train out."
+
+"And you don't want me to stay here with you?"
+
+"No--oh, no."
+
+As once before, Lois waited for that train--yet how differently! If that
+injured feeling rose, for an instant, at his not having sent her word,
+she crushed it back as one would crush the head of a viper that showed
+itself between the crevices of the hearthstone. She would not pity
+herself--she would not pity herself! She knew now that madness lay that
+way.
+
+The night was clear and warm, the stars were shining, as she got up and
+sat by the window, looking out from behind the curtain, her beautiful
+braided hair over one shoulder. The last train came in; the people from
+it, in twos and threes, straggled down the street, but not Justin. He
+must have missed that last train out. Of course he must have missed it!
+
+We are apt to fancy causeless disaster to those we love; the amount of
+"worry" more or less willingly indulged in by uncontrolled minds seems
+at times enough to swamp the understanding: yet there is a foreboding,
+unsought, unwelcomed, combated, which, once felt, can never be
+counterfeited; it carries with it some chill, unfathomed quality of
+truth.
+
+Lois knew now that she had had this foreboding all day.
+
+
+XXI
+
+"And you haven't heard _anything_ of him yet?"
+
+"Not yet, Mrs. Alexander. I'm sorry--oh, so sorry--to have nothing more
+to tell you. But I'm sure we'll hear something before morning."
+
+Bailey Girard spoke with confidence, his eyes bent controllingly on
+Lois, who trembled as she stood in the little hallway, looking up at
+him, with Dosia behind her. This was the third night since that one when
+Justin had failed to appear, and there had been no word from him in the
+interim. Owing to that curious way that women have of waiting for events
+to happen that will end suspense, rather than seeking to end it by any
+unaccustomed action of their own, no inquiry had been made at the
+Typometer Company until late in the afternoon of the next day, which had
+been passed in the hourly expectation of hearing from Justin or seeing
+him walk in. However, nobody at the company knew anything of Justin's
+movements, except that he had left the office rather early the afternoon
+before, and had been seen to take a car going up-town. It was presumable
+that he had been called suddenly out of town, and had sent some word to
+Mrs. Alexander that had miscarried.
+
+That evening, however, Lois sent for Leverich, who was evidently
+bothered; though bluffly and rather irritatingly making light of her
+fears, he seemed to be both a little reluctant and a little
+contemptuous.
+
+"My dear Mrs. Alexander, you can't expect a fellow to be always tied to
+his wife's apron-strings! He doesn't tell you everything. We like to
+have a free foot once in a while. Why, my wife's glad when I get off for
+a day or two--coaxes me to go away herself! And as for anything
+happening to Alexander--well, an able-bodied man can look out for
+himself every time; there's nothing in the world to be anxious about.
+He's meant to wire to you and forgotten to do it, that's all. I did that
+myself last year, when I was called away suddenly; but Myra didn't turn
+a hair. She knew I was all right. And if I were you, Mrs.
+Alexander,--this is just a tip,--I wouldn't go around telling _every_
+one that he's gone off and you don't know where he is. It's the kind of
+thing folks get talking about in all kinds of ways; his affairs aren't
+in any too good shape, as he may have told you."
+
+"Isn't the business all right?" queried Lois, with a puzzled fear.
+
+"Oh, yes, of course--all right; but--I wouldn't go around wondering
+about his being away; he's got his own reasons. You haven't a telephone,
+have you? I'll send around word to have one put in to-day. I'll tell you
+what: I'll ask Bailey Girard to come around and see you on the
+quiet--he's got lots of wires he can pull. You won't need me any more."
+
+Leverich's meeting with Dosia had been characterized by a sort of
+brusque uninterest. He seemed to her indefinably lowered and coarsened
+in some way; his cheeks sagged; in his eyes was an unpleasant admission
+that he must bluster to avoid the detection of some weakness. And Dosia
+had lived in his house, eaten at his table, received benefits from him,
+caressed him prettily! He had been really kind to her. She ought not to
+let that fact be defaced. But everything connected with that time seemed
+now to lower her in retrospect, to fill her with a sort of horror. All
+his loud rebuttal of anxiety now could not cover an undercurrent of
+uneasiness that made the anxiety of the two women tenfold greater when
+he was gone.
+
+Mr. Girard had come twice the next morning. Dosia, as well as Lois, had
+seen him both times. He had greeted her with matter-of-fact courtesy,
+and appealed to her with earnest painstaking, whenever necessary, for
+details or confirmation, in their mutual office of helpers to Mrs.
+Alexander; but the retrieving warmth and intimacy of his manner the day
+he had avoided her in the street was lacking. There was certainly
+nothing in Dosia's quietly impersonal attitude to call it forth. Her
+face no longer swiftly mirrored each fleeting emotion at all times, for
+any one to see. Poor Dosia had learned in a bitter school her woman's
+lesson of concealment.
+
+But, if Girard were only sensibly consulting with her, toward Lois his
+sympathy was instinct with strength and helpfulness. He seemed to have
+affiliations with reporters, with telegraph operators, with a hundred
+lower runways of life unknown to other people. He gave the tortured wife
+the feeling so dear, so sustaining to one in sorrow, of his being
+entirely one with her in its absorption--of there being no other
+interest, no other issue in life, but this one of Justin's return. When
+Girard came, bright and alert and confident, all fears seemed to be set
+at rest; during the few minutes that he stayed all difficulties were
+swept away, everything was on the right train, word would arrive from
+Justin at once; and when he left, all was black and terrible again.
+
+The children had clung to Dosia in the hours of these strange days when
+mama never seemed to hear their questions. Dosia read to them, made
+merry for them, and saw to her household, which was dependent on the
+services of a new and untrained maid, going back in the interval to put
+her young arms around Lois and hold her close with aching pity.
+
+The suspense of these days had changed Lois terribly. Her cheeks were
+hollow, her mouth was drawn, her eyes looked twice their natural size,
+with the black circles below them. Only the knowledge that her baby's
+welfare--perhaps his life--depended on her, kept her from giving way
+entirely. Redge, always a complicating child, had an attack of croup,
+which necessitated a visit from the doctor and further anxiety. Toward
+afternoon of this third day a man came to put in the telephone, which
+set them in touch with the unseen world. Girard's voice over it later
+had been mistakenly understood to promise an immediate ending of the
+mystery.
+
+Everything was excitement: delicacies were bought, in case Justin might
+like them; Redge and Zaidee were hurriedly dressed in their best "to see
+dear papa," and, even though they had to go to bed without the desired
+result, Redge in a fresh spasm of coughing, it was with the repeated
+promise that the father should come up-stairs to kiss them as soon as he
+got in.
+
+Expectation had been unwarrantedly raised so high in the suddenly
+sanguine heart of Lois that now, to-night, at Girard's word that nothing
+more had been heard, as she was still looking up at him everything
+turned black before her. She found herself half lying on the little
+spindle-legged sofa, without knowing how she got there, her head
+pillowed on a green silken cushion, with Dosia fanning her, while Girard
+leaned against the little mirrored mantelpiece with set face and
+contracted brows. Presently Lois pushed away the fan, made a motion as
+if to rise, only to relapse again on the cushion, looked up at Girard,
+and tried to smile with piteous, brimming eyes.
+
+"Ah, don't!" he said, with a quick gesture. His voice had an odd sound,
+as if drawing breath hurt him, yet with it mingled also a compassionate
+tenderness so great that it seemed to inform not only his face but his
+whole attitude as he bent over her.
+
+"You're very good to be so sorry for me," she whispered.
+
+He made a swift gesture of protest. "There's one thing I _can't_
+stand--to see a woman suffer."
+
+She waited a moment, as if to take in his words, and then motioned him
+to the seat beside her. When she spoke again, it was slowly, as if she
+were trying to concentrate her mind:
+
+"You have known sorrow?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Tell me."
+
+He saw that she wished to forget her own trouble for a moment in that of
+another, yet the effort to obey evidently cost him much. They had both
+spoken as if they two were alone in the room. Dosia, who had withdrawn
+to the ottoman some paces away, out of the radius of the lamp, sat there
+in her white cotton frock, leaning a little forward, her hands clasped
+loosely in her lap, her face upraised and her eyes looking somewhere
+beyond. So still was she, so gentle, so fair, that she might have been a
+spirit outside the stormy circle in which these two communed. (In such
+moments as these she prayed for Lawson.)
+
+"I"--it was Girard who spoke at last--"my mother--Cater said once that
+he'd told you something about me."
+
+"Yes, I remember."
+
+"I was so little when we drifted off. I didn't know how to help, how to
+save anything. Yet it has always seemed to me since that I ought to have
+known--I ought to have known!" His hands clenched; his voice had
+subsided to a groan.
+
+"You were her comfort when you least thought it," said Lois.
+
+"Perhaps. I've always hoped so, in my saner moments. We stumbled along
+from day to day, and slept out at night, always trying to keep away from
+people, when--she thought we were going home, and that they would
+prevent me." He stopped for a moment, and then went on, driven by that
+Ancient Mariner spirit which makes people, once they have touched on a
+forbidden subject, probe it to its haunting depths. "Did Cater tell you
+how she died? She died in a barn. My _mother_! She used to hold me in
+her arms at night, and make me rest my head against her bosom when I was
+tired; and I didn't even have a pillow for her when she was dying! It's
+one of those things you can never make up for--that you can never
+change, no matter how you live, no matter what you do. It comes back to
+you when you least expect it."
+
+Both were silent for a while before Lois murmured: "But the pain ended
+in happiness and peace for her. It would hurt her more than anything to
+know that you grieved."
+
+"Yes, I believe that," he acquiesced simply. "I'm glad you said it now.
+I couldn't rest until I got money enough to take her out of her pauper
+grave and lay her by the side of her own people at home."
+
+"And you have had a pretty hard time."
+
+"Oh, that's nothing!" He squared his shoulders with unconscious rebuttal
+of sympathy. "When I was a kid, perhaps--but I get a lot of pleasure out
+of life."
+
+"But you must be lonely without any one belonging to you," said Lois,
+trying to grope her way into the labyrinth. "Wouldn't you be happier if
+you were married?"
+
+He laughed involuntarily and shook his head, with a slight flush that
+seemed to come from the embarrassment of some secret thought. The
+action, and the change of expression, made him singularly charming.
+"Possibly; but the chance of that is small. Women--that is, unmarried
+women--don't care for my society."
+
+"Oh, oh!" protested Lois, with quick knowledge, as she looked at him, of
+how much the reverse the truth must be. "But if you found the right
+woman you might make her care for you."
+
+He shook his head, with a sudden gleam in his gray eyes. "No; there
+you're wrong. I'd never make any woman care for me, because I'd never
+want to. If she couldn't care for me without my _making_ her--! I'd have
+to know, when I first looked at her, that she was _mine_. And if she
+were not, if she did not care for me herself, I'd never want to make
+her--never!"
+
+"Oh, oh!" protested Lois again, with interested amusement, shattered the
+next instant as a fragile glass may be shattered by the blow of a
+hammer.
+
+The telephone-bell had rung, and Girard ran to it, closing the
+intervening door behind him. The curtain of anxiety, lifted for
+breathing-space for a moment, hung over them again somberly, like a
+pall. Where was Justin?
+
+The two women clinging together hung breathlessly on Girard's movements;
+his low, murmuring voice told nothing. When he returned to where they
+stood, his face was impassive.
+
+"Nothing new; I'm just going to town for a couple of hours, that's all."
+
+"Oh, must you leave us?"
+
+"I'm coming back, if you'll let me." He bent over Lois with that earnest
+look which seemed somehow to insure protection. "I want you to let me
+stay down-stairs here all night, if you will. I'm going to make
+arrangements to get a special message through, no matter what time it
+comes, and I'll sit here in the parlor and wait for it, so that you two
+ladies can sleep."
+
+"Oh, I'd be so glad to have you here! Redge has that croupy cough again.
+But you can't sit up," said Lois.
+
+"Why not? It's luxury to stay awake in a comfortable chair with a lot of
+books around. I'll be back in a couple of hours without fail."
+
+A couple of hours! If he had said a couple of years, the words could
+have brought, it seemed, no deeper sense of desolation. Hardly had he
+gone, however, when the door-bell rang, and word was brought to Lois,
+who with Dosia had gone up-stairs, that it was Mr. Harker from the
+typometer office. The visitor, a tall, colorless, darkly sack-coated
+man, with a jaded necktie, had entered the little drawing-room with a
+decorously self-effacing step, and sat now on the edge of his chair, his
+body bent forward and his hat still held in one hand, with an effect of
+being entirely isolated from social relations and existing here solely
+at the behest of business. He rose as Lois came into the room, and
+handed her a small packet, in response to her greeting, before reseating
+himself.
+
+"Thank you very much," said Lois. "This is the money, I suppose. I'm
+sorry you went to the trouble of bringing it out yourself. I thought you
+might send me out a check."
+
+Mr. Harker shook his head with a grim semblance of a smile. "That's the
+trouble, Mrs. Alexander. We can't send any checks. Mr. Alexander is the
+one who does that. Everything is in Mr. Alexander's name. I went to Mr.
+Leverich to-day to see how we were going to straighten out things; but
+he doesn't seem inclined to take hold at all, though he could help us
+out easily enough if he wanted to. I--there's no use keeping it back,
+Mrs. Alexander. This is a pretty bad time for Mr. Alexander to stay
+away. He ought to be home."
+
+"Why, yes," said Lois.
+
+"Exactly. His absence places us all in a very strange, very unpleasant
+position." Mr. Harker spoke with a sort of somber monotony, with his
+gaze on the ground. "The business requires the most particular
+management at the moment--the most particular. I--" He raised his eyes
+with such tragic earnestness that Lois realized for the first time that
+this manner of his might not be his usual manner, but was called forth
+by the stress of anxiety. For the first time also, the force of the
+daily tie of business companionship was borne in upon her. She looked at
+Mr. Harker. This man spent more waking hours with Justin than she
+did--knew him, perhaps, in a sense, better.
+
+He went on now, with a tremor in his voice: "Mrs. Alexander, your
+husband and I have worked together for a year and a half now, with never
+a word between us. I'm ready to swear by him any moment, if I've got him
+to swear by. I'll back him up in anything, no matter what, if it's his
+say-so. We've pulled through a good many tight places. But I can't do it
+alone; it's madness to try. If he doesn't show up, I'd better close the
+place down at once."
+
+"Why do you say this to me?" asked Lois, shrinking a little.
+
+"Why? Because, Mrs. Alexander, this is no time to mince words. If you
+know where your husband is, for God's sake, get word to him to come
+back--every minute is precious. He may be ill,--Heaven knows he had
+enough to make him so; my wife knows the strain I've been through; she
+says she wonders I'm alive,--but he can't look after his health now. If
+he's on top of ground, he's got to _come_. I've put every cent I own
+into this business. I haven't drawn my whole salary, even, for months. I
+don't know what reasons he has for staying away, but his nerve mustn't
+give out now."
+
+"Mr. Harker!" cried Lois. She turned blankly to Dosia, who had come
+forward. "What does he mean?"
+
+"She doesn't know where her husband is," said the girl convincingly. Her
+eyes and Mr. Harker's met. The somber eagerness faded out of his; he
+sighed and rose.
+
+"Anything I can do for you, Mrs. Alexander? I think I'll hurry to catch
+the next train; I haven't been home to my dinner yet."
+
+"Won't you have something here before you go?" asked Lois. "It's so
+late."
+
+"Oh, that's nothing. I'm used to it," returned Mr. Harker, with a pale
+smile and the passive, self-effacing business manner as he departed,
+while Lois went up-stairs once more. The baby cried, and she soothed
+him, holding the warm little form close, closer to her--some thing
+tangible before she put him down again to step back into this strange
+void where Justin was not.
+
+For the first time, in this meeting with Mr. Harker, Lois realized the
+existence of a world beyond her ken--a world that had been Justin's. New
+as the visitor's words had been, they seemed to open to her a vision of
+herculean struggle: the way this man had looked--_his_ wife had
+"wondered that he was still alive." And Justin--where was he now? _She_
+had not noticed, she had not wondered--until lately.
+
+Slight as seemed her recognition, her sympathy, her help, it was the one
+thing now that kept her reason firm. She knew that she had not been all
+unfaithful; sometimes he had been rested, sometimes cheered, when she
+was near. She had suffered, too; _she_ had longed for _his_ help and
+sympathy. No, she would not think of that; she would not. When two are
+separated, one must love enough to bridge the gulf--what matter which
+one? It seemed now as if there were so much that she might have given,
+if all this torrent of love that nearly broke her heart might have been
+poured out and poured out at his feet--lavished on him, without regard
+to need or fitness or expense, as Mary lavished her precious box of
+spikenard on One she loved. Now that he was gone, there could be nothing
+too hard to have done for him, no words too sweet for her to have said
+to him.
+
+Redge woke up and cried for her, and she told him hoarsely to be still;
+and then, suddenly conscience-stricken and fearful at the slighting of
+this other demand of love,--what awful reprisal might it not exact from
+her?--she went to kiss the child, to infold him in her arms, the boy
+that Justin loved, before she bade him go to sleep, for mother would
+stay by her darling. And, left to herself again, the grinding and
+destroying wheel of thought had her bound to it once more.
+
+He could not have left her of his own will! If he did not come, it would
+be because he was dead--and then he could never know, never, never know.
+There would be nothing left to her but the place where he had been. She
+looked at the walls and the homely furnishings as one seeing them for
+the first time bare forever of the beloved presence, and fell on her
+knees, and went on them around the room, dragging herself from chair to
+sofa, from sofa to bed,--these were the Stations of the Cross that she
+was making,--with sobs and cries, low and inarticulate, yet carrying
+with them the awful anguish of a heart laid bare before the Almighty.
+Here his dear hand had rested, while he thought of her; on this
+table--here--and here; and here his head had lain. Her tears ceased; she
+buried her face in the pillow. She must go after him, wherever he was,
+in this world or another. For he was her husband. Where he was she must
+be, either in body or in spirit.
+
+The telephone-bell rang, and Dosia answered it, the voice at the other
+end inquiring for Mr. Girard, cautiously, it seemed, withholding
+information from any other. The doctor rang up, in response to an
+earlier call, with directions for Redge. Hardly had the receiver been
+laid down when the door-bell clanged. This was to be a night of the
+ringing of bells!
+
+
+XXII
+
+This time, of course, the visitor was Mrs. Snow. In any exigency, any
+mind-and body-absorbing event of life, the inopportune presence of Mrs.
+Snow was inexorably to be counted on, though it came always as one of
+those exasperating recurrences which bring with them a ridiculously
+fresh irritation each time. It seemed to be the one extra thing you
+couldn't stand. In either trouble or joy, she affected one like a
+clinging, ankle-flapping mackintosh on a rainy day. She bowed now to
+Dosia with a patronizing dignity, pointed by the plaintive warmth of the
+greeting to Lois, who had come hurrying down-stairs out of those
+passion-depths of darkness, so that Mrs. Snow wouldn't suspect anything.
+She had an uncanny faculty of divining just what you didn't want her to.
+
+Once before Lois had suspended tragedy for Mrs. Snow. The same things
+happen to us over and over again daily in our crowded yet restricted
+lives--it is we who change in our meeting with them. We have our great
+passions, our great joys, our heartbreaks, no matter how small our
+environment.
+
+"How do you do, my dear? Mr. Girard has just told me that he was going
+to stay here to-night, in Mr. Alexander's absence. He said little Redge
+was threatened with the croup. Now, if I had only known that Mr.
+Alexander was away, _I_ could have come and stayed with you!"
+
+"Oh, that wasn't at all necessary," said Lois hastily. "Thank you very
+much. Do sit down, won't you, Mrs. Snow?"
+
+"Only for a minute, then; I must go back to Bertha," said Mrs. Snow,
+seating herself and fumbling for something under her cloak. "I just came
+over to read you a letter. It's in my bag--I can't seem to find it.
+Well, perhaps I'd better rest for a minute." Mrs. Snow's face looked
+unusually lined and set; in spite of her plaintiveness, her eyes had a
+harassed glitter.
+
+"Isn't it rather late for you to be out alone?" asked Lois.
+
+"Yes; Ada would have come around here with me, but she was expecting Mr.
+Sutton. She was expecting him last night, but he didn't come. If _I_
+were a young lady, I'd let a gentleman wait for _me_ the next time; it
+used to be thought more attractive, in my day: but Ada's so afraid of
+not seeming cordial; gentlemen seem to be so sensitive nowadays! I said
+to her, 'Ada, when a man is enough at home in a house to kick the cat,
+and ask for cake whenever he feels like it, I do _not_ see that it is
+necessary to stand on ceremony with him.' But Ada thinks differently."
+
+"It is difficult to make rules," said Lois vaguely.
+
+"Yes," sighed Mrs. Snow. "As I was saying to Bertha, you don't find a
+young man like Mr. Girard, so considerate of every one--not that he's so
+_very_ young, either; I'm sure he often appears much older than he is.
+It's his manner--he has a manner like my dear father. He and Bertha have
+long chats together; really, he is what _I_ would call quite attentive,
+though she won't hear of such a thing--but sometimes young men _do_ take
+a great fancy for older girls. I had a friend who married a gentleman
+twenty-seven years younger--he died soon afterward. But many people
+think nothing of a little difference of twelve or fifteen years. I said
+to Bertha this morning, 'Bertha, if you'd dress yourself a little
+younger--if you'd only wear a blue bow in your hair.' But no; I can't
+say anything nowadays to my own children without being flown at!" Mrs.
+Snow's voice trembled. "If my darling William were here!"
+
+"Have you heard from William lately?" asked Lois, with supreme effort.
+
+"My dear, he's in Chicago. I came over to read you a letter from him
+that I got to-night. That new postman left it at the Scovels', by
+mistake, and they never sent it over until a little while ago. There was
+a sentence in it," Mrs. Snow was fumbling with a paper, "that I thought
+you'd like to hear. Where is it? Let me see. 'Next month I hope to be
+able to send you more'--no, no, that's not it. 'When my socks get holes
+in them I throw them'--that's not it, either. Oh! he says, 'I caught a
+glimpse of Mr. Alexander last night, getting on a West Side car'--this
+was written yesterday morning. 'I called to him, but too late. I'm
+sorry, for I'd like to have seen him,' That's all; but Mr. Girard seemed
+so pleased with the letter, I promised that I would bring it around to
+you that very minute,--he had to run for the train,--but I was detained.
+He thought you'd like to hear that William had seen Mr. Alexander."
+
+Like to hear! The relief for the moment turned Lois faint. Yet, after
+Mrs. Snow went, the torturing questions began to repeat themselves
+again. Justin was alive--Justin was alive on Tuesday night. Was he alive
+now? And why had he gone to Chicago at all? Why had he sent her no word?
+The wall between them seemed only the more opaque. Every fear that
+imagination could devise seemed to center around this new fact.
+
+She and Dosia went around, straightening up the little drawing-room,
+making it ready for Girard's occupancy--pulling out a big chair for his
+use, and putting fresh books on the table. The maid had long ago gone to
+bed, and there was coffee to be made for him--he might get hungry in the
+night. When he came in at last, he brought all the brightness and
+courage of hope with him. He had wired to William; he had phoned to a
+dozen different places in Chicago.
+
+"Oh, what should we do without you?" breathed Lois, her foot on the
+stairway.
+
+"It doesn't seem to me I've helped you very much so far. Our one clue
+has been from Mrs. Snow. I want you to go to bed now, and to sleep, Mrs.
+Alexander; take all the rest you can. I'm here to do the watching. If
+there's anything really to tell, I'll call you. I promise faithfully.
+What is it, Miss Linden? Did you want to speak to me?"
+
+"There was a message for you while you were gone," said Dosia in a low
+tone.
+
+His eyes assented. "Yes, I know. I went there--to the place that
+they--but it wasn't Alexander, I'm glad to say, though I was afraid when
+I went in----"
+
+"I know," said Dosia.
+
+Another strange night had begun, with the master of the house away. Lois
+went to her room to lie down clothed, jumping up to come to the head of
+the stairs whenever the telephone-bell rang, and then going back again
+when she found that those who were consulting were asking for
+information instead of giving it; but by and by the messages ceased.
+
+Suppose Justin never came back! She began to feel that he had been gone
+for years, and tried confusedly to plan out the future. There were the
+children--how should she support them? She must support them. It was
+hard to get work when you had a baby. If she hadn't the baby--no one
+should take the baby from her! She clasped him to her for a moment in
+terror, as if she were being hunted, before she grew calm and began
+planning again. There was only a little money left. To-morrow they must
+still eat. She must make the money last.
+
+Dosia, on the bed by Redge's crib, went softly after a while into the
+other room, and saw that Lois at last slept, though she herself could
+not. Each time that she saw Girard he seemed more and more a stranger,
+so far removed was he from her dream of him. Through all his softness,
+his gentleness, she felt the streak of hardness, if nobody else did
+(though Mr. Cater, she remembered now, had spoken of it too), that the
+fires of adversity had molded. Perhaps no man could have worked up from
+the cruel circumstances of his early days without that hardening streak
+to uphold him. She divined, with some surprising new power of
+divination, that, for all his strong, capable dealing with actualities,
+his magnetic drawing of men, for the inner conduct of his own life he
+was shyly dependent on odd, deeply held theory--theory that he had
+solitarily woven for himself. She felt impersonally sorry for him, as
+for a boy who must be disappointed, though he was nothing to her.
+
+Yet, as Dosia lay there in the dumb stretches of the night, her tired
+eyes wide open, close to Redge's crib, with his little hot hand clinging
+to hers, the mere fact of Girard's bodily presence in the house,
+down-stairs, seemed something overpoweringly insistent; she couldn't get
+away from it. It gave her, apparently, neither pleasure nor pain; it
+called forth no conscious excitement as had been the case with
+Lawson--unless this strange, rarefied sense was a higher excitement.
+This consciousness of his presence was, tiresomely enough, something not
+to be escaped from; it pulsed in every vein, keeping her awake. She
+tried to lose it in the thought of Lois' great trouble, of this
+weighting, pitiful mystery of Justin's absence--of what it meant to him
+and to the household. She tried to lose it in the thought of Lawson,
+with the prayer that always instinctively came at his name. Nothing
+availed; through everything was that wearing, persistent consciousness
+of Girard's bodily presence down-stairs. If it would only fade out, so
+that she might sleep, she was so tired! The clock struck two. A voice
+spoke from the other room, sending her to her feet instantly:
+
+"Dosia?"
+
+"Yes, Lois, dearest, I'm here."
+
+"Has any word come from Justin?"
+
+"No."
+
+Lois shivered. "I think, when Redge wakes up next, you'd better give him
+a drink of water; he sounds so hoarse. I've used all I brought up. Do
+you mind going down to get some more? I would go myself, but I can't
+slip my arm from under baby; he wakes when I move. Here is the pitcher."
+
+"Yes," said Dosia, stopping for a moment to pull the coverlet tenderly
+over Lois, before stepping out into the lighted hall.
+
+It seemed very silent; there was no sound from below. Dosia went down
+the low, wide stairs with that indescribable air of the watcher in the
+night. Her white cotton gown, the same that she had worn throughout the
+afternoon, had lost its freshness, and clung to her figure in twisted
+folds; the waist was slightly open at the throat, and the long white
+necktie hung half untied. One cheek was warm where it had pressed the
+pillow; the other was pale, and her hair, half loosened, hung against
+it. Her eyes, very blue, showed a rayed starriness, the pupils
+contracted from the sudden light--her expression, tired and half
+bewildered, had in it somewhat of the little lost look of a child, up in
+the unwonted middle of the night, who might go naturally and comfortably
+into any kind arms held out to her. The turn of the stairs brought her
+fronting the little drawing-room and the figure of Girard, who sat
+leaning forward, smoking, in the Morris chair, with his elbow resting on
+the arm of it and his head on his hand. The books and bric-à-brac on the
+table beside him had been pushed back to make room for the tray
+containing the coffee-pot, a cup and saucer, and a plate with some
+biscuits. A newspaper lay on the floor at his feet. Notwithstanding the
+light in the hallway and the room, there was that odd atmospheric effect
+which belongs only to the late and solitary hours of the night, when the
+very furniture itself seems to share in a chill detachment from the life
+of the day. Yet, in the midst of this night silence, this withdrawing of
+the ordinary vital forces, the figure of Bailey Girard seemed to be
+extraordinarily instinct with vitality, even in that second before he
+moved; his attitude, his eyes, his expression, were informed with such
+intense and eager thoughts that it was as startling, as instantly
+arresting, as the blast of a trumpet.
+
+At the sound of Dosia's light oncoming step opposite the door, he rose
+at once--however, laying the cigar on the table--and with a quick stride
+stood beside her. He seemed tall and unexpectedly dazzling as he
+confronted her; his deep-set gray eyes were very brilliant.
+
+"What is the matter? Is Mrs. Alexander ill?"
+
+"No--oh, no; the children have been restless, that is all," said Dosia,
+recovering, with annoyed self-possession, from a momentary shock, and
+feeling disagreeably conscious of looking tumbled and forlorn. "I came
+down to get a pitcher of water."
+
+"Can't I get it in the dining-room for you?" he asked, with formal
+politeness.
+
+"Thank you. The water isn't running in the butler's pantry; I have to go
+in the kitchen for it. If you would light the gas there for me----"
+
+"Yes, certainly," he responded promptly, pushing the portières aside to
+make a passage for her, as he went ahead to scratch a match and light
+the long, one-armed flickering kitchen burner. The bare, deeply shadowed
+floor, the kitchen table, the blank windows, and the blackened range, in
+which the fire was out, came desolately into view. There was a sense as
+of deep darkness of the night outside around everything.
+
+A large white cat lying on a red-striped cushion on a chair by the
+chilly hearth stretched itself and blinked its yellow eyes toward the
+two intruders.
+
+"Let me fill this," said Girard, taking the pitcher from her--a rather
+large, clumsy majolica article with a twisted vine for a handle--and
+carrying it over to the faucet. The intimacy of the hour and the scene
+emphasized the more the punctilious aloofness of this enforced
+companionship.
+
+Dosia leaned back against the table, while he let the water run, that it
+might grow cold. It sounded in the silence as if it were falling on a
+drumhead. The moment--it was hardly more--seemed interminable to Dosia.
+The white cat, jumping up on the table, put its paws on her shoulders,
+and she leaned back very absently, and curved her throat sideways, that
+her cheek might touch him in recognition. Some inner thought claimed
+her, to the exclusion of the present; her eyes, looking dreamily before
+her, took on that expression that was indescribably gentle, intolerably
+sweet.
+
+Dosia has been ill described if it has not been made evident that to
+caress, to _touch_ her, seemed the involuntarily natural expression of
+any feeling toward her. Something in the bright, tendril-curling hair,
+the curve of her young cheek, the curve of her red lips, her light, yet
+round form, with its confiding, unconscious movements, made as
+inevitable an allure as the soft rosiness of a darling child, with
+always the suggestion of that illusive spirit that dared, and retreated,
+ever giving, ere it veiled itself, the promise of some lovelier glimpse
+to come.
+
+The water had stopped running, and Dosia straightened herself. She
+raised her head, to meet his eyes upon her. What was in them? The color
+flamed in her face and left her white, although in a second there was
+nothing more to see in his but a deep and guarded gentleness as he came
+toward her with the pitcher.
+
+"I'll take it now, please," she said hurriedly.
+
+"Won't you let me carry it up for you?"
+
+"Thank you, it isn't necessary. I'll go along, if you'll wait and turn
+out the light."
+
+"Very well. You're sure it's not too heavy for you?" he asked anxiously,
+as her wrists bent a little with the weight.
+
+"Oh, no, indeed," said Dosia quickly, turning to go. At that moment the
+white cat, jumping down from the table in front of her, rubbed itself
+against her skirts, and she stumbled slightly.
+
+"Take care!" cried Girard, grasping the shaking pitcher over her slight
+hold of it.
+
+Their hands touched--for the first time since the night of disaster, the
+night of her trust and his protection. The next instant there was a
+crash; the fragments of the jug lay upon the kitchen floor, the water
+streaming over it in rivulets.
+
+"Dosia!" called the frightened voice of Lois from above.
+
+"Yes, I'm coming," Dosia called back. "There's nothing the matter!" She
+had run from the room without looking up at that figure beside her,
+snatching a glass of water automatically from the dining-table as she
+passed by it. Fast as her feet might carry her, they could not keep pace
+with her beating heart.
+
+When the telephone-bell rang a moment after, it was to confirm the
+tidings given before. Justin was in Chicago.
+
+
+TO BE CONCLUDED
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+THE PROBLEMS OF SUICIDE
+
+BY GEORGE KENNAN
+
+
+Few branches of sociological investigation have more practical
+importance, or present a greater number of problems, difficulties, and
+interesting speculative questions, than the branch that deals with the
+complex, varied, and often inexplicable phenomena of suicide. When we
+consider the fact that more than ten thousand persons take their own
+lives in the United States every year, that more than seventy thousand
+die annually by their own hands in Europe, and that the suicide rate is
+constantly and rapidly increasing throughout the greater part of the
+civilized world, we are forced to admit that, from the view-point of
+vital economy at least, the subject is one of the utmost gravity. In
+1881 the annual suicide rate of the United States was only 12 per
+million of the population, and our total number of suicides was only
+605; last year our suicide rate had risen to 126 per million, and our
+suicides numbered 10,782. If the present rate of increase be maintained,
+we shall lose by suicide, in the next five years, nearly as many lives
+as were lost by the Union armies in battle in the five years of the
+Civil War. We are already losing annually from this cause more men than
+were killed on the Union side in the three great battles of Gettysburg,
+Spottsylvania, and the Wilderness taken together.
+
+Statisticians have estimated that, in the world as a whole, there is a
+suicide every three minutes, and we know, with an approximation to
+certainty, that there is a suicide every six minutes and a half in
+Europe and the United States alone. Suicide has cost France 274,000
+lives since 1871, Germany 158,000 since 1893, and the United States
+120,000 since 1890. I need hardly point out the practical importance of
+the questions that present themselves in connection with this abnormal
+and apparently unnecessary waste of human life. Among such questions
+are: Upon what general and world-wide conditions does suicide depend?
+Are any of its causes removable? What are the reasons for the steady and
+progressive increase of self-destruction in civilized countries? Is
+suicide controlled or affected by any natural laws, and, if so, by what
+laws? These are all questions of practical importance, because upon the
+answers to them depends the possibility of economizing human life and
+increasing the sum total of human happiness. But the subject is one of
+deep interest, entirely apart from its practical importance.
+
+
+_Psychological Problems of Suicide_
+
+In some of its aspects, suicide raises psychological questions which
+bristle with difficulties, but which, nevertheless, pique the curiosity
+and demand explanatory answers. Why, for example, is the rate of suicide
+strictly dependent everywhere upon season and weather? Why is the
+tendency to self-destruction lessened by war? What is the explanation of
+suicide in the face of impending death, when there is still a fair
+chance of escape, or when the natural death that is threatened would
+involve less suffering than the act of self-destruction? What is the
+mental state of the hundreds of persons who kill themselves every year
+upon what would seem to be absurdly inadequate provocation--of the man,
+for example, who commits suicide because his wife declines to get out
+his clean underclothes, or the woman who takes poison because she has
+received a comic valentine? In its religious aspect, why is the tendency
+to suicide greatest among Protestant Christians and least among
+Mohammedans and Jews? In its racial aspect, why is the suicide rate of
+Japan eight times that of Portugal, and the rate of American whites
+eight or ten times that of full-blooded American blacks? Why do the
+Slavs of Bohemia kill themselves at the rate of 158 per million, while
+the Slavs of Russia commit suicide at the rate of only 31 per million?
+Why do emigrants, going to a new country, carry their national suicide
+rates with them, and maintain such rates, with little or no alteration,
+long after their environment has completely changed? These questions may
+not have great practical importance, but, from the view-point of the
+psychologist and the sociologist, they are full of speculative interest.
+
+When we study the phenomena of suicide as they appear in the light of
+statistics, we are struck by the fact that among the general and
+world-wide conditions that limit or control the suicidal impulse are
+weather and war. Other factors, such as education, religion, or economic
+status, may seem to be more influential, if observation be limited to a
+single nation or a single continent; but if a comprehensive survey be
+made of the whole world, weather and war will be seen to take a
+prominent place among the few agencies that affect uniformly the
+suicidal tendency.
+
+As soon as accurate and trustworthy statistics of self-destruction
+became available in Europe, sociologists began to study the question
+whether suicide is controlled or regulated in any way by natural laws,
+and, if so, whether cosmical causes, such as climate, temperature,
+season, and weather, have any perceptible influence upon the suicide
+rate. It was soon discovered that the tendency to self-destruction is
+greatest in the zone lying between the fiftieth and fifty-fifth
+parallels of north latitude. South of forty-three degrees the annual
+suicide rate is only 21 per million, and north of fifty-five degrees it
+is only 88 per million; but between the parallels of forty-three and
+fifty it rises to 93 per million, and between fifty and fifty-five it
+reaches its maximum of 172 per million. The suicide belt, therefore,
+lies in the north temperate zone, where the climate is most favorable to
+human development and happiness. This fact, however, does not prove that
+a moderate and equable climate predisposes to suicide. Things may
+coexist without being in any way related to each other, and the
+frequency of suicide in the north temperate zone may be due wholly to
+the fact that the zone in question is the home of the most cultivated
+races and the seat of the highest and most complicated civilization. In
+this zone the struggle for life is fiercest, the interference with
+natural laws is most extensive, and the physical and emotional wear and
+tear of the economic contest is most acutely felt. It is more than
+probable, therefore, that the high rate of suicide in the north
+temperate zone is due to the civilization, rather than to the climate,
+of that region. This phase of the subject need not be discussed at
+length, because all competent authorities agree that climate, in its
+relation to suicide, is not a controlling or determining factor.
+
+A very different state of affairs appears, however, when we bring the
+suicide rate into correlation with season and weather. Long ago, before
+accurate statistics made a scientific investigation of the subject
+possible, there was a widely prevalent popular belief that dark and
+dismal months of the year, and gloomy, rainy, or uncomfortable weather,
+predisposed mankind to self-destruction, and that the suicide rate was
+highest in November or December, and lowest in spring or early summer.
+
+
+_Spring and Summer the Suicide Seasons_
+
+The French philosopher Montesquieu went so far as to explain the
+supposed frequency of suicide in London by connecting it with English
+rains and fogs. It was only natural, he argued, that unhappy people
+should kill themselves in a country where the autumnal and winter months
+were so dark, and where there was so much gloomy, depressing weather.
+When, however, investigators began to study the subject in the light of
+accurate statistics, when they grouped suicides by months and compared
+one month with another, they were surprised to find that the tendency to
+suicide was greatest, not in the gloomy and depressing months of
+November and December, but in the bright and cheerful month of June. In
+1898 Dr. Oscar Geck, of Strasburg, published statistics of about 100,000
+suicides that took place in Prussia in the twenty-year period between
+1876 and 1896. They showed that, so far at least as Prussia was
+concerned, suicides invariably attained their maximum in June and their
+minimum in December. There was a constant rise in the suicide curve from
+January to the end of June, and a constant decline from June to the end
+of the first winter month.
+
+Durkheim, of Paris, and Dr. Gubski, of St. Petersburg, who are among the
+most recent investigators of the subject, assert that, so far as the
+seasonal distribution of suicides is concerned, the figures for Prussia
+hold good throughout Europe. June is everywhere the suicide month, and
+December is everywhere the month in which self-destruction is least
+frequent. Durkheim gives tabulated statistics for seven of the principal
+countries of Europe, which show conclusively that, in point of
+predisposing tendency to suicide, the four seasons stand in the
+following order: summer first, spring second, autumn third, and winter
+last.[17] Even in Russia, which differs most from the rest of Europe in
+ethnology and economic status, the seasonal distribution of suicides is
+the same. Dr. Gubski's statistics show that of every thousand Russian
+suicides, 328 take place in summer, 272 in spring, 215 in autumn, and
+185 in winter. If we divide the year into halves, and group the suicides
+in semi-annual periods, we find that 600 occur in the pleasant spring
+and summer months and only 400 in the gloomy months of winter and fall.
+
+A study of American statistics brings us to almost exactly the same
+result. In September, 1895, Dr. Forbes Winslow, of New York, read a
+paper before the medico-legal congress which was then in session in that
+city upon the subject of "Suicide as a Mental Epidemic." The statistics
+which he submitted showed that in the United States, as in Europe,
+suicide reaches its maximum in June and falls to its minimum in
+December. The average annual number of American suicides in June is 336
+and in December 217. If we divide the year into halves and compare the
+figures of the semi-annual periods with those of Russia, the
+correspondence is almost startling.
+
+Notwithstanding the immense difference between the population of Russia
+and that of the United States, in environment, in education, in
+religion, in inherited character, in temperament, and in civilization
+generally, the mysterious law that controls the seasonal distribution of
+suicides operates in America exactly as it operates in the great empire
+of the Slavs. In Russia, out of every thousand suicides, the number who
+kill themselves in the fall-and-winter half of the year is precisely
+400; in America it is 386. In Russia, the proportion per thousand in the
+spring-and-summer half of the year is 600; in America it is 614. There
+is a slightly greater tendency to spring-and-summer suicide in the
+United States than in Russia, but the variation is only a little more
+than one per cent., and taking into consideration the great difference
+between the oppressed and ignorant peasants of Russia, and the free,
+well-educated citizens of our own country, the practical identity of
+their seasonal suicide rates seems to me a most extraordinary social and
+psychological fact.
+
+This, however, is by no means a complete statement of the problem
+involved in the seasonal distribution of suicides. Spring and summer are
+the suicide seasons, not only among the closely related nationalities of
+Europe and the United States, but among the ethnologically alien peoples
+of the Far East. The reports of the Statistical Bureau of Japan show
+that between 1899 and 1903 the average annual number of suicides was
+8,840. They were distributed through the year as follows: winter 1,711,
+spring 2,475, summer 2,703, fall 1,951. If we divide the year into
+halves, we find that 59 per cent. of the Japanese suicides occur in the
+spring and summer months and only 41 per cent. in the months of fall and
+winter. This corresponds almost exactly with the annual distribution of
+suicides in the United States, in Russia, and in Europe as a whole. The
+seasonal percentages may be shown in tabular form as follows:[18]
+
+                      United
+                      States      Russia      Europe      Japan
+                     per cent.   per cent.   per cent.   per cent.
+  Spring and summer    61          60           59         59
+  Fall and winter      39          40           41         41
+
+It thus appears that the tendency of mankind to commit suicide in spring
+and summer, rather than in fall and winter, is quite as strongly marked
+in Japan as it is in Europe and America. Despite all differences of
+character and environment, the suicidal impulses of Yankee, muzhik, and
+coolie are governed by the same law.
+
+
+_Suicide Weather_
+
+The evidence above set forth, and much more for which I cannot here find
+space, seems conclusively to establish the fact that, throughout the
+civilized world, the pleasantest seasons of the year are most conducive
+to suicide. The question then arises, Does this rule hold good if
+applied to the pleasantest days of the pleasantest seasons? In other
+words, is the tendency to suicide greater on clear, dry, and sunny days
+in June than on dark, cloudy, and rainy days in June? Professor Edwin G.
+Dexter, of the University of Illinois, published in the _Popular Science
+Monthly_, in April, 1901, a long and interesting paper entitled "Suicide
+and the Weather," in which he gave the result of a comparison between
+the police records of 1,962 cases of suicide in the city of New York and
+the records of the New York Weather Bureau for all the days on which
+these suicides occurred. His comparisons and computations, which seem to
+have been made with great thoroughness and care, show not only that the
+tendency to suicide is greatest in the spring and summer months, but
+that it is most marked on the clearest, sunniest, and pleasantest days
+of those months. To state his conclusions in his own words: "The clear,
+dry days show the greatest number of suicides, and the wet, partly
+cloudy days the least; and with differences too great to be attributed
+to accident or chance. In fact, there are thirty-one per cent. more
+suicides on dry than on wet days, and twenty-one per cent. more on clear
+days than on days that are partly cloudy."
+
+It thus appears that, as a rule, the tendency to suicide, throughout the
+civilized world, is greatest in the pleasantest seasons of the year;
+that it is everywhere greatest in the pleasantest month of the
+pleasantest season; and that in New York City it is greatest on the
+clearest and sunniest days of the pleasantest month. From the point of
+view of science, therefore, it is perfectly reasonable and absolutely
+accurate to say on a beautiful, sunny day in early June, "This is
+regular suicide weather."
+
+Now, what is the explanation of this world-wide tendency to
+self-destruction in the seasons, months, and days when life would seem
+to be best worth living? The cause, whatever it be, can have no
+connection with race, religion, history, political status, or
+geographical location, because it acts uniformly among peoples as widely
+different, in all these respects, as the Russians, the Italians, the
+Americans, and the Japanese. It is evidently a cosmic cause, but what is
+its nature?
+
+Some investigators have suggested that the suicidal tendency is
+dependent on heat; but June is not the hottest month, nor is December
+the coldest. Durkheim has tested this conjecture by comparing
+temperatures with suicides in France, Italy, and Prussia. He finds that,
+in all three of these countries, suicides reach their maximum in June
+and their minimum in December, while the temperature does not rise to
+its maximum until July and does not fall to its minimum until
+January.[19] Moreover, if heat were a predisposing cause of suicide, we
+should find the suicide rate of Europeans much higher in the tropics
+than it is in the north temperate zone; but such is not the case. Heat,
+therefore, as a possible cause, must be eliminated. Other writers,
+including Dr. Gubski, have called attention to the very close relation
+between suicide and light. It is true that daylight, if measured by
+hours, has its minimum in December and its maximum in June, in precise
+correspondence with the seasonal rates of suicide; but what about the
+equinoctial periods of March and September?
+
+If light be the efficient cause, the tendency to suicide should be as
+great at the time of the fall equinox as it is at the time of the spring
+equinox; but this is not the case. Two hundred and seventy-two suicides
+out of every thousand occur in the vernal equinoctial period and only
+two hundred and fifteen in the autumnal equinoctial period, and this
+proportion holds good throughout the whole northern hemisphere. Light,
+therefore, must also be eliminated.
+
+Morselli suggests that suicide is influenced by the first heat of early
+spring and summer, which "seizes upon the organism not yet acclimated
+and still under the influence of the cold season." But is there any such
+thing as winter debility, and, if so, why should it last until June?
+Many physicians, on the other hand, assert that during the period of
+early summer the organism, instead of being debilitated, is working at a
+high tension, that every function of mind and body is then more active
+than at any other period of the year, and, that, consequently, there is
+then greater liability to sudden mental and physical collapse. But there
+is no evidence to show that suicides, generally, are caused by seasonal
+overtension and subsequent collapse.
+
+Goldwin Smith thinks that with the revival of vitality in the spring and
+early summer "all feelings and impressions become more lively," those
+that impel to suicide among the rest. But if all the feelings "become
+more lively," why do not the stimulated sensations of joy and pleasure
+on a beautiful day in June overcome, or at least evenly balance, the
+stimulated sensations of suffering and unhappiness?
+
+
+_Influence of Environment on Self-Destruction_
+
+None of these explanations is at all satisfactory, and it seems to me
+that the solution of the problem is to be found, not in the mere
+physical action of light, heat, or weather on the human body, but in the
+influence of the whole environment on the human mind. Sir Arthur Helps
+was the first, so far as I know, to suggest that the increased tendency
+to suicide in spring and summer is due to a psychological rather than a
+physical cause. Speaking, in "Realmah," of the fact that suicides are
+more frequent on pleasant days than on unpleasant ones, he says:
+"Perhaps it is because, on these beautiful days, the higher powers seem
+to be more beneficent; and the wretch overladen with misery thinks that
+he can trust more to their mercy."
+
+This explanation is little more satisfactory than the others; but it
+does, nevertheless, recognize and take into account the influence of the
+environment on a preëxisting emotional state. It errs only in
+interpretation. The smiling, happy, joyous aspect of Nature in June does
+not inspire the unhappy man with confidence in the beneficence and mercy
+of the higher powers. On the contrary, it shows him that the higher
+powers pay no attention at all to his feelings and have no sympathy
+whatever with his grief. The blue skies, sunshine, leafy trees, and
+singing birds, which make up the environment of June, add to the
+happiness of the man who is happy already, but they intensify, by
+contrast, the misery of the man who is already miserable. In November
+and December, when all is dark, bare, and cheerless, Nature seems to be
+in sympathy with the unhappy man's mood, and from that voiceless,
+pitying sympathy of the great World-Mother he derives a certain
+sustaining comfort and consolation. In June his mood is the same, but
+the mood of Nature has changed. The great World-Mother no longer
+sympathizes with his grief, but laughs him to scorn with her sunshine,
+her blossoming flowers, her leafy trees, and her jubilation of mating
+birds. He looks about him and thinks: "Everybody is happy, everything is
+rejoicing. I am the solitary exception; I am the only living thing that
+is out of place." And then there comes upon him a heartbreaking sense of
+loneliness, a feeling of complete isolation, as if the great, happy
+world had cast him off and gone on its way singing. He has thought of
+suicide before--he has thought of it often; and now, when the world, in
+its triumphant gladness, ignores his very existence, when there is no
+longer sympathy, nor pity, nor any further hope of a share in the
+happiness that he sees about him, it seems to him that the time for
+self-destruction has come. Whether he be a Russian, an American, or a
+Japanese, he can observe and he can feel: and when he sees that the
+whole world is jubilant, while he himself is wretched, he becomes more
+acutely conscious than ever before of his loneliness and misery, and
+resolves to give up the struggle and get out of the way of the world's
+laughing, singing, summer-carnival procession. He ends his life; and in
+some Russian, American, or Japanese table of statistics his death adds
+one more to the suicides in June.[20]
+
+The close relation that exists between suicide and war was first brought
+to my attention by the sudden and remarkable decrease of suicide in the
+United States in 1898, the year of the war with Spain. Instead of
+increasing that year, as it had every previous year for more than a
+decade, the number of suicides decreased suddenly from 6,600 to 5,920, a
+falling off of 680 cases. Then, when the war in the Philippines followed
+the war in Cuba, the number was again reduced by 580 cases. When,
+however, in 1900, we began to lose interest in the Philippines and to
+think of our own home troubles and trials, the number of suicides rose
+suddenly from 5,340 to 7,245, an increase of 1,905 cases in two years.
+The decrease in the suicide rate during the war was nearly 16 per cent.,
+and the increase after the war about 23 per cent.
+
+
+_War As a Deterrent to Suicide_
+
+This struck me as a phenomenon interesting enough to warrant
+investigation, and I began study of it by looking up the statistics of
+suicide in the national capital. It seemed to me that if the decrease in
+1898 was due to a general economic cause, it would not be particularly
+noticeable in the city of Washington, for the reason that Washington is
+not a manufacturing or business center. If, on the other hand, the fall
+in the suicide rate was really due to the war as a specific cause, it
+would be most marked at the nation's capital, where the war attracted
+most attention and created most excitement. I went to the District
+Health Office and made an examination of the suicide records for a term
+of six years, beginning with 1895 and ending with 1900. I found not only
+that the depression in the Washington suicide curve was precisely
+synchronous with that of the national suicide curve, but that it was
+much deeper, amounting, in fact, to a sudden decrease of fifty per cent.
+
+As suicides are tabulated in the Health Office of the District of
+Columbia by months, I was able to ascertain, furthermore, that the
+decrease began, not in the first month of the year, but in the spring
+months, when the war excitement became epidemic. Normally, the suicide
+rate should have risen, from January to June, in accordance with the
+seasonal law; but, instead of so doing, it fell rapidly at the very time
+when it should have been approaching its maximum. The colored population
+of the city, taken separately, was affected in the same way and to an
+even greater degree, the number of suicides among the blacks falling off
+fifty-six per cent., as compared with fifty per cent. among the whites.
+The number of suicides in both races remained low throughout the year
+1899, and then rose suddenly in 1900, an almost precise correspondence
+with the suicide curve of the nation as a whole.
+
+During our Civil War the suicidal tendency was affected in the same way,
+but to a much greater extent. I have not been able to find mortality
+statistics of the whole country for the period in question, but in New
+York City the average rate of suicide in the five years of the Civil War
+was forty-two per cent. lower than the average for the five preceding
+years, and forty-three per cent. lower than the average for the five
+subsequent years. In the State of Massachusetts, where accurate
+statistics were kept, the number of suicides decreased seventeen per
+cent. in the five-year period from 1861 to 1865, as compared with the
+five-year period from 1856 to 1860.
+
+In Europe the restraining influence of war upon the suicidal impulse is
+equally marked. The war between Austria and Italy in 1866 decreased the
+suicide rate of each country about fourteen per cent. The Franco-German
+war of 1870-71 lowered the suicide rate of Saxony 8.0 per cent., that of
+Prussia 11.4 per cent., and that of France 18.7 per cent. The reduction
+was greatest in France, because the German invasion of that country made
+the war excitement there much more general and intense than it was in
+Saxony or Prussia.
+
+An explanation of the decrease of suicide in time of war may be found,
+perhaps, in the power that any strong excitement has to change the
+current of thought and substitute one emotion for another. Suicide,
+among civilized peoples, is largely due to morbid introspection and long
+brooding over real or imaginary trouble; and anything that takes a man's
+mind away from his own unhappiness, and gives him a keen interest in
+things or events about him, weakens his suicidal impulse. An unhappy man
+might resolve to end his life, and might load a revolver with the
+intention of shooting himself; but if he should happen to see a couple
+of his neighbors fighting in his front door-yard, he would probably lay
+the revolver aside, for a time, and watch the combat. The cause of his
+unhappiness would still remain, but the current of his thought would
+suddenly be diverted into a new channel and his despondency would give
+way to the excitement of a fresh and vivid interest. War acts upon men
+in the same way, but with greater force.
+
+Then, too, war restrains suicide by strengthening the bonds of social
+sympathy and drawing large masses of people more closely together. The
+unhappy man always thinks of himself as lonely, isolated, and out of
+harmony with his environment; but when, as a result of the victories or
+defeats of war, he finds himself participating in the triumph or sharing
+the grief of thousands of other persons, the mere consciousness of
+sympathetic association with his fellow-men becomes a source of comfort
+and consolation to him and makes his life more endurable. But war is not
+the only agency that exerts a restraining influence upon
+self-destruction. Any great calamity which causes intense public
+excitement, and which at the same time draws people together in friendly
+sympathy and coöperation, lowers the suicide rate. The calamity may
+greatly intensify suffering, and may make life, for a time, almost
+intolerable; but it does not increase the number of persons who try to
+escape from life; on the contrary, it reduces it.
+
+
+_San Francisco Earthquake Decreased Suicides_
+
+A striking illustration of this fact was furnished by San Francisco in
+1906. Before the earthquake and fire of April 18 the suicides in that
+city averaged twelve a week. After the earthquake, when the whole
+population was homeless, destitute, and exposed to hardships and
+privations of every kind, there were only three suicides in two months.
+The decrease, therefore, in the suicide rate was more than 97 per cent.
+This surprising result of a disheartening and depressing calamity was
+due partly to the excitement of life under new and extraordinary
+conditions, and partly to the feeling, which every man had, that he was
+enduring and working with a host of sympathetic comrades, and not
+suffering and striving alone. If life were always vividly interesting,
+as it was in San Francisco after the earthquake, and if all men worked
+and suffered together as the San Franciscans did for a few weeks,
+suicide would not end ten thousand American lives every year, as it does
+now.
+
+The dependence of suicide upon such conditions as age, sex, occupation,
+and religion does not offer any problem as difficult and baffling as
+that involved in the relation of suicide to weather, nor any as curious
+and suggestive as that which connects suicide with war; but there is
+hardly a phase of the subject that does not present some more or less
+interesting question. The researches of Durkheim and Gubski show that,
+after the period of childhood, the tendency to suicide increases
+steadily with advancing age. In France, for example, if the population
+be segregated in groups comprising all persons ten to twenty years of
+age, all persons twenty to thirty years of age, all persons thirty to
+forty years of age, and so on, by decades, the annual number of suicides
+per million rises as follows: first group 56, second group 130, third
+155, fourth 204, fifth 217, sixth 274, seventh 317, and the rate finally
+reaches its maximum in the group that comprises persons more than eighty
+years of age.
+
+In the United States, the rate increases from 128 per million, in the
+age group comprising persons under forty-five, to 300 per million in the
+age group comprising persons over sixty-five. The figures vary in
+different countries, according to the hereditary national suicide
+tendencies; but the steady increase with advancing age is common to all.
+These statistics would seem to support the pessimistic philosophy of
+Schopenhauer, and to prove that the longer one lives the less one wants
+to live; but it must not be forgotten that the suicide rate is a measure
+of exceptional unhappiness, not of the general welfare.
+
+In the suicidal tendencies of the sexes there is, as might be expected,
+a very great difference. In all countries and in all parts of the world,
+suicides among women are far less frequent than among men. The ratio
+varies from one to two to two to five. This difference is generally
+attributed to the supposed fact that women are sheltered and protected
+by men, as well as by their domestic environment, and that,
+consequently, they suffer less from the wear and tear of life; but I
+doubt very much the adequacy of this explanation. The life of women, in
+the world at large, is quite as hard as that of men, and often harder.
+In the higher and wealthier classes of society women may be, and
+doubtless are, sheltered and protected; but in the poorer classes they
+take their full share of the suffering, even if they do not bear the
+brunt of the struggle.
+
+The hundreds of Russian women who between 1877 and 1885 were exiled to
+eastern Siberia for political offenses had no shelter or protection
+whatever, and must necessarily have suffered more than the exiled men
+from the hardships and privations of banishment; and yet, I am quite
+sure that I understate the fact when I say that the number of suicides
+among the men was at least five times greater than it was among the
+women. The exiled men themselves admitted to me that when it came to the
+endurance of suffering against which no fight could be made and from
+which there was no escape, the women were greatly their superiors. The
+infrequency of self-destruction among women, as compared with that among
+men, seems to me to be due, not to their comparative immunity from
+suffering, but to three other causes, namely, first, a greater power of
+patient, passive endurance, when there is no fight to be made; second, a
+mind and heart that are more influenced by feelings and beliefs that may
+be called religious; and, third, a peculiar capacity for self-restraint
+and self-preservation, based on the maternal instinct, that is, on
+closer and more intimate relations with, stronger love for, and greater
+devotion to young children.
+
+A study of the relation that suicide bears to occupation discloses some
+interesting and noteworthy facts. The first is that soldiers, both in
+Europe and in the United States, must be put in a class by themselves,
+for the reason that the suicide rate of army officers and men is so much
+higher than that of the populations to which they belong that they can
+hardly be included in the same category. In Prussia, for example, the
+proportion of military suicides to civilian suicides is 1-1/2 to 1; in
+England 2-1/2 to 1; in Italy 5 to 1; in Austria 10 to 1; and in Russia
+nearly 11 to 1. Even in the United States, the tendency of soldiers to
+kill themselves is 8-1/2 times that of adult men in civil life.
+
+This disproportionately high suicide rate in armies is not easy of
+explanation. In countries where military service is compulsory, and
+where inexperienced young men, torn suddenly from their families, are
+subjected to rigorous discipline in a strange and uncongenial
+environment, the suicidal impulse may be intensified by homesickness,
+loneliness, humiliation, and the monotony of camp or barrack life; but
+in our own country, where the army is filled by voluntary enlistment,
+and where the relations between officers and men are fairly sympathetic
+and cordial, there would seem to be fewer reasons for unhappiness and
+suffering than in the military service of Italy, Austria, or Russia. The
+American soldier is generally well taken care of and well treated; and
+while his life, in time of peace, is not exciting, it is easier and less
+monotonous than that of a factory operative, and it is hard to
+understand why he should be abnormally disposed to self-destruction. His
+suicidal tendency, however, is reduced by war, just as that of the civil
+population is, and for the same reasons.
+
+
+_Professional Classes Furnish Most Suicides_
+
+Statistics of self-destruction are not yet accurate and detailed enough
+to enable us to determine the relation that suicide bears to business
+employment; but it may be said, in a general way, that the occupations
+in which the suicide rate is lowest are those that involve rough manual
+labor out of doors and employ men of comparatively little educational
+culture, such as miners, quarrymen, shipwrights, fishermen, gardeners,
+bricklayers, and masons. Next come farmers, shopkeepers, and town
+artisans. And at the head of the list, with the highest suicide rate of
+all, are physicians, journalists, teachers, and lawyers. The tendency
+of these professional classes to commit suicide is from one and a half
+to three times as great as that of the population generally.
+
+Clergymen, however, who also constitute an educated professional class,
+have a suicide rate which is only half that of the population as a
+whole, and this is undoubtedly due to the restraining influence of
+religion, which is much stronger in clergymen than in laymen. The
+relation of suicide to religion raises a number of curious and
+interesting questions, but, unfortunately, the religious factor is so
+involved with other factors in the complicated problem of
+self-destruction that it is almost impossible to isolate it so as to
+study it alone. For example, the suicide rate of Protestant Christians
+in the northern part of Ireland is twice that of Roman Catholics in the
+southern part; but here education comes in as a complication: the
+Protestants are generally better educated than the Catholics, and their
+higher suicide rate may be due to their education and not to the form of
+their religion. In Europe generally, the tendency to suicide is much
+greater among both Protestants and Catholics than among Jews; but here
+education, race, and economic condition all come in as complicating
+factors, so that it is impossible to credit the Jewish faith alone with
+the lower rate. In view, however, of the fact that the suicide rate of
+the Protestant cantons in Switzerland is nearly four times that of the
+Catholic cantons, it seems probable that Catholicism, as a form of
+religious belief, does restrain the suicidal impulse. The efficient
+cause may be the Catholic practice of confessing to priests, which
+probably gives much encouragement and consolation to unhappy but devout
+believers, and thus induces many of them to struggle on in spite of
+misfortune and depression.
+
+The Salvation Army, in attempting to lessen self-destruction by opening
+"anti-suicide bureaus" in large cities, and by inviting persons who are
+contemplating suicide to visit these bureaus and talk over their
+troubles, is virtually introducing a system of confession which, so far
+as this particular evil is concerned, resembles that of the Catholic
+Church.
+
+In view, however, of the conflicting nature of the evidence, and the
+extreme difficulty of disentangling religious factors from other
+important factors, I doubt the possibility of drawing any trustworthy
+conclusions with regard to the dependence of suicide upon religious
+belief. It may be said, as a matter of record, that the tendency to
+self-destruction is greatest among Protestant Christians, next largest
+among Roman Catholics and Orthodox Greeks, and lowest among Mohammedans
+and Jews; but the differences are not certainly due to religion.
+
+The dependence of suicide upon nationality and race presents a number of
+problems of great interest, but of extraordinary difficulty and
+complexity. I can state a few of these problems, but I cannot solve any
+of them.
+
+Among the highest suicide rates in Europe are those of Saxony and
+Denmark, and among the lowest those of Italy, Portugal, and Spain. You
+may perhaps conclude, from this, that the tendency to self-destruction
+is much greater among the Slavs and Scandinavians of the north than it
+is among the Latin peoples of the south, and that the differences are
+due to latitude or race; but your specious generalization is shattered
+when you discover that the suicide rates of Norway and Russia, both
+northern countries inhabited by Scandinavians and Slavs, are almost as
+low as those of Italy, Portugal, and Spain, all southern countries
+inhabited by Latins.
+
+From an ethnological point of view, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are
+nearly homogeneous Scandinavian states, and we should therefore expect
+their suicide rates to be nearly if not quite identical; but the rate of
+Denmark is twice that of Sweden and three times that of Norway.
+
+The Slavs of Bohemia do not differ ethnologically from the Slavs of
+Dalmatia, but the suicide rate of the one group is 158 per million,
+while that of the other is only 14 per million. Saxony is not far away,
+geographically, from Belgium; but the suicide rate of the former is 324
+per million, while that of the latter is only 128 per million.
+
+I am unable to offer even a conjectural solution of the problems
+involved in the differences thus shown to exist between populations that
+are ethnologically identical, or that stand at nearly the same level of
+educational culture and economic well being.
+
+
+_Germany's High Suicide Rates_
+
+The extremely high suicide rate of the Germanic peoples long ago
+attracted the attention of European sociologists, but, so far as I know,
+it has never been satisfactorily explained. If it were limited to adults
+it might possibly be attributed to economic causes, particularly to the
+rapid development of manufacturing industry, which seems everywhere to
+increase the suicidal tendency; but self-destruction in Germany is
+almost as common among children as among grown people. Between 1883 and
+1903 there were 1,125 suicides among the pupils of the public schools
+in Prussia alone, and most of them were of boys and girls under fifteen
+years of age. An investigation made by the ministry of public
+instruction showed that this prevalence of suicide among children was
+not due to the conditions of modern life in cities, inasmuch as the
+proportion of cases was fully as large in places of the smallest size as
+in crowded centers of population. It seemed to be due, rather, to an
+inherent suicidal tendency in the race.
+
+Racial characteristics, however, do not by any means account for the
+extraordinary differences in suicide rates that we find among the
+European peoples, as shown in the following table:[21]
+
+EUROPEAN PEOPLES GROUPED RACIALLY
+
+NUMBER OF SUICIDES PER MILLION INHABITANTS
+
+  I. SLAVS
+
+  In Dalmatia (about 1896)       14
+     European Russia (1900)      31
+     Bulgaria (about 1900)      118
+
+
+  II. SCANDINAVIANS
+
+  In Norway (1901-'05)           65
+     Sweden (1900-'04)          142
+     Denmark (1901-'05)         227
+
+
+  III. LATINS
+
+  In Spain (1893)                21
+     Portugal (1906)             23
+     Italy (1901-'05)            64
+     France (1900-'04)          227
+
+
+  IV. GERMANS
+
+  In Austria (1902)             173
+     Prussia (1902-'06)         201
+     Saxony (1902-06)           324
+     Bavaria (1902-'06)         141
+
+
+  V. ENGLISH
+
+  In Ireland (1906)              34
+     Scotland (1905)             65
+     England and Wales (1906)   100
+     Australasia (1903)         121
+     United States (1907)       126
+
+
+  VI. ASIATICS
+
+  In Japan (1905)               209
+
+It is difficult to assign definite or satisfactory reasons for the wide
+differences shown in the above table. Skelton has suggested that the low
+suicide rates of certain countries are due to emigration, "which
+provides an outlet for a great deal of misery and constitutes a hopeful
+alternative to suicide"; but this conjecture, although ingenious, is
+hardly supported by the facts. It might perhaps explain the low suicide
+rates of Italy and Ireland, but it does not account for the equally low
+suicide rate of the Russian peasants, who emigrate hardly at all, nor
+for the extremely high suicide rate of the Germans, who emigrate in
+large numbers. Neither does it throw any light upon the persistence of
+national suicide rates long after emigration. The generalization that
+seems to harmonize and explain the greatest number of facts is that
+suicide is most prevalent in countries where education goes hand in hand
+with highly developed manufacturing industry. In Spain, Portugal, Italy,
+and Russia the people have little education, manufacturing industries
+are feebly developed, and the suicide rate is low. In Saxony the
+percentage of illiteracy is very small, more than half of the population
+work in factories, and the suicide rate is the highest in Europe. I do
+not dare to assert that even this rude generalization is warranted by
+the facts; but, if it were sustained, it would seem to show that suicide
+is a by-product of the great, complicated machine that we call modern
+civilization.
+
+Whatever may be the reasons for differences in national suicide rates,
+and whatever may be the causes that have produced them, there is little
+doubt, I think, that the rates themselves are true manifestations of
+national character, and that they are as permanent as the character of
+which they are an outcome. When, therefore, a people migrates from one
+place to another, it takes both its character and its suicide rate to
+the new location. This is clearly apparent in the vital statistics of
+immigrants who come from various parts of Europe to the United States.
+Such immigrants, as a rule, prosper here and become happier here, but
+the increased prosperity and happiness do not greatly affect the
+suicidal tendencies that they had when they were poor and wretched in
+their original homes. Even their descendants, born in America, keep
+substantially unchanged the suicide rates that they have inherited, with
+their character, from their European ancestors. The Germans who came
+here forty or fifty years ago brought a high suicide rate with them, and
+their descendants maintain it. The Irish, on the contrary, brought a low
+suicide rate to this country, and their children have it still. In the
+following table will be found the suicide rates of a few nationalities
+in Europe and of their descendants in the United States.[22]
+
+SUICIDES PER MILLION OF POPULATION
+
+  NATIONALITIES      IN EUROPE  IN THE U. S.
+
+  Native Americans                  68
+  Hungarians            114        118
+  Germans               213        193
+  French                228        220
+  English               100        104
+
+In an address delivered before the Anthropological Society of
+Washington, D. C., on October 19, 1880, Mr. M. B. W. Hough said: "As
+long as the features of the ancestor are repeated in his descendants, so
+long will the traits of his character reappear. Language may change,
+customs be left behind, races may migrate from place to place and
+subsist on whatever the country they occupy affords; but their
+fundamental characteristics will survive, because they are comparatively
+uninfluenced by the mere accidents of nutrition." This statement is as
+true of suicide as it is of other manifestations of national character.
+
+
+_Odd Methods Employed by Suicides_
+
+Nothing is more surprising in the records of suicide than the
+extraordinary variety and novelty of the methods to which man has
+resorted in his efforts to escape from the sufferings and misfortunes of
+life. One would naturally suppose that a person who had made up his mind
+to commit suicide would do so in the easiest, most convenient, and least
+painful way; but the literature of the subject proves conclusively that
+hundreds of suicides, every year, take their lives in the most
+difficult, agonizing, and extraordinary ways; and that there is hardly a
+possible or conceivable method of self-destruction that has not been
+tried. When I clipped from a newspaper my first case of self-cremation
+with kerosene and a match, I regarded it as rather a remarkable and
+unusual method of taking life; but I soon discovered that self-cremation
+is comparatively common. When I learned that Mary Reinhardt, of New
+York, had sung "Rock of Ages" and had then killed herself by inhaling
+gas in a barrel stuffed with pillows, I thought it a curious and
+noteworthy case; but when I compared it with suicides that came to my
+knowledge later, it seemed quite simple and natural. I have
+well-authenticated cases in which men or women have committed suicide by
+hanging themselves, or taking poison, in the tops of high trees; by
+throwing themselves upon swiftly revolving circular saws; by exploding
+dynamite in their mouths; by thrusting red-hot pokers down their
+throats; by hugging red-hot stoves; by stripping themselves naked and
+allowing themselves to freeze to death on winter snow-drifts out of
+doors, or on piles of ice in refrigerator-cars; by lacerating their
+throats on barbed-wire fences; by drowning themselves head downward in
+barrels; by suffocating themselves head downward in chimneys; by diving
+into white-hot coke-ovens; by throwing themselves into craters of
+volcanoes; by shooting themselves with ingenious combinations of a rifle
+with a sewing-machine; by strangling themselves with their hair; by
+swallowing poisonous spiders; by piercing their hearts with corkscrews
+and darning-needles; by cutting their throats with hand-saws and
+sheep-shears; by hanging themselves with grape vines; by swallowing
+strips of under-clothing and buckles of suspenders; by forcing teams of
+horses to tear their heads off; by drowning themselves in vats of soft
+soap; by plunging into retorts of molten glass; by jumping into
+slaughter-house tanks of blood; by decapitation with home-made
+guillotines; and by self-crucifixion.
+
+Of course, persons who resort to such methods as these are, in most
+cases, mentally unsound. A man who shoots, hangs, poisons, or drowns
+himself may be sane; but the man who crucifies himself, buries himself
+alive, cuts his throat on a barbed-wire fence, or climbs into the top of
+a tree to take poison, is evidently on the border-line of insanity, even
+if he be not a recognized lunatic.
+
+The most prevalent methods of suicide in Europe are, first, hanging,
+second, drowning. In the United States they are, first, poisoning,
+second, shooting. About three fourths of all the persons who commit
+suicide in the United States use pistol or poison. The difference
+between European and American methods is probably due to the fact that
+on the other side of the Atlantic drugs and fire-arms are not so easily
+obtainable as they are here, and Europeans therefore resort to water and
+the rope as the best and surest means accessible. Police restrictions
+and regulations make it almost impossible for a Russian peasant to get
+either poison or a pistol; but all the police in the empire cannot
+prevent him from drowning himself in a pond, or hanging himself in his
+own barn.
+
+A careful comparison of all the facts accessible seems to show that in
+Europe, at least, suicide bears a certain definite relation to education
+and manufactures; and that, as I have already said, it is a by-product
+of the great, complicated world-machine that we call modern
+civilization. Its specific causes, so far as they can be ascertained,
+are, on the educational side, the development of increased nervous and
+psychic sensibility, which makes men feel more acutely all wants,
+deprivations, misfortunes, and sufferings; and, on the manufacturing
+side, a monotony of employment which wearies and exhausts the body while
+it gives little exercise to the educated mind and leaves the latter free
+to brood over its unsatisfied longings and desires, as well as its many
+trials and disappointments. There are other causes, such as the growing
+disproportion between wants generally and the means of gratification
+generally; alcoholism; unhealthful work, especially in manufacturing
+districts; barrack and tenement-house life; and all the evils incident
+to poverty, overcrowding, and bad sanitary conditions in cities. So far
+as I can see, these causes, at present, are not removable. Education
+must continue to intensify sensibility and increase the number of men's
+wants, and the great economic machine must grind on, even though it
+crush thousands of human beings, every year, in the cogs of its
+innumerable wheels. A high suicide rate is part of the price that we pay
+for the educational and material achievements upon which we pride
+ourselves. We have greatly multiplied the means of human happiness, but
+whether, on the whole, we have increased the sum total of human
+happiness is perhaps an open question. In any event, the high and
+rapidly increasing suicide rate shows that we are pushing the weaklings
+to the wall.
+
+The question of what can be done to lessen the suicide tendency and
+check this great waste of human power and energy brings me to the only
+important cause of self-destruction which seems to me removable, and
+that is newspaper publicity. No argument is needed to prove that man is
+essentially an imitative animal. In dress, in behavior, in speech, in
+modes of thought, and in social conventions, we are all prone to do what
+we see others do; and when unhappy men and women learn, from the
+newspapers, that scores of other unhappy people are daily escaping from
+their troubles through the always open door of suicide, when familiarity
+with the idea of self-destruction deprives the act of all its natural
+terror, it is not at all surprising that they yield to what seems to be
+the general current of their social environment. I have, in my own
+collection of material, a surprisingly large number of cases in which
+the suicidal act may be traced directly to newspaper publicity and
+imitation; but I must limit myself to a single striking
+illustration--the suicidal epidemic in Emporia, Kansas, in the summer of
+1901. As a result, apparently, of the publication of the details of two
+or three suicides of people prominent in that little Kansas town, there
+broke out an epidemic of self-destruction which culminated in the
+sunny, flowery month of June, and which carried the annual suicide rate
+from about 90 per million to 1,665 per million--a rate five times
+greater than that of Saxony. Mr. Morse, the mayor of the city, consulted
+the Board of Health, and decided to stop the publication of the details
+of suicides in the local papers, even if it should require the
+employment of force. He issued a proclamation, on the 16th of June, in
+which he said: "I have consulted the Board of Health, and if the Emporia
+papers do not comply with my request, I shall have a right to stop, and
+I will stop summarily, the publication of these suicide details, under
+the law providing for the suppression of epidemics. There is clearly an
+epidemic in this city, and although it is mental, it is none the less
+deadly. Its contagion may be clearly shown to come from what is known in
+medicine as the psychic suggestion, found in the publication of the
+details of suicides. If the paper on which the local journals are
+printed had been kept in a place infected with small-pox, I could demand
+that the journals stop using that paper, or stop publication. If they
+spread another contagion--the contagious suggestion of suicide--I
+believe the liberty of the press is not to be considered before the
+public welfare, and that the courts would sustain me in using force to
+prevent the publication of newspapers containing matter clearly
+deleterious to the public health."
+
+I believe that the reasoning of Mayor Morse is perfectly sound, and that
+the position taken by him is absolutely impregnable. The prevention of
+the publication of suicides in the newspapers of a State would require a
+special legislative act, but it would probably do more to lessen the
+suicidal tendency than any other single measure that could be taken. In
+the winter of 1902, Representative Jenkins introduced in the National
+House of Representatives a bill making periodicals containing details of
+suicides unmailable; but I think it was never reported from committee.
+
+
+_The Emotional Temperament as a Cause_
+
+There is one other way in which the suicide rate may possibly be
+lowered, or at least held in check, and that is through the cultivation
+of what may be called the heroic spirit. We are becoming too emotional
+and sentimental, and too much inclined to regard weakness with sympathy,
+instead of with the contempt that it generally deserves. In the language
+of the prize ring, the pugilist who lies down while he can yet stand and
+see is called a "quitter." It would be harsh and unjust to apply to all
+suicides this opprobrious name; but there can be little doubt, I think,
+that the majority of them are weaklings who give up and lie down while
+they still have a fighting chance.
+
+Readers of shipping news may still remember the wreck of a German
+kerosene steamer on the wildest, most precipitous part of the coast of
+Newfoundland, in February, 1901. The steamer took fire during a heavy
+winter gale, and the captain ran her ashore, at the nearest point of
+land, with the hope of saving the lives of the crew. She struck on a
+submerged reef in a little cove, about an eighth of a mile from a coast
+which was three or four hundred feet high and as precipitous as a wall.
+When she was first seen by a few fishermen at daylight, her boats were
+gone, and all of her crew had apparently perished except three men. Two
+were standing on the bridge, and one was lashed aloft in the
+fore-rigging. About ten o'clock in the forenoon a tremendous sea carried
+away the bridge and the two men on it, and they were seen no more. At
+three o'clock in the afternoon the solitary survivor,--the man in the
+fore-rigging,--who was evidently suffering intensely from hunger and
+cold, unlashed himself, threshed his arms against his body for five
+minutes to restore the circulation in them, and then took off his coat,
+waved his hand to the fishermen on top of the cliff, climbed down the
+shrouds, and plunged into the sea--but not to commit suicide. He swam to
+the shore, made three attempts in different places to get a footing
+among the rocks at the base of the cliff, but was swept away every time
+by the surf, and finally abandoned the attempt as hopeless. At that
+crisis in the struggle ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have given
+up and allowed themselves to drown; but this man was not a "quitter." He
+turned his face again seaward, struck out for the half-submerged ship,
+and after a long and desperate struggle succeeded in reaching her and
+getting on board. He climbed the fore-shrouds, waved his hand to the
+pitying but powerless fishermen on the edge of the cliff, and lashed
+himself again in the rigging. At intervals, until dark, he made signals
+to the fishermen to show that he was yet alive. At daybreak on the
+following morning he could still be seen in the fore-rigging, but his
+head had fallen on his breast and he was motionless. He had frozen to
+death in the night. That man died, as a man in adverse circumstances
+ought to die, fighting to the last. You may call it foolish, and say
+that he might better have ended his sufferings by allowing himself to
+drown when he found that he could not make a landing at the base of the
+cliff; but deep down in your hearts you pay secret homage to his
+courage, his endurance, and his indomitable will. He was defeated at
+last, but, so long as he had consciousness, neither fire nor cold nor
+tempest could break down his manhood.
+
+The Caucasian mountaineers have a proverb which says: "Heroism is
+endurance for one moment more." That proverb recognizes the fact that in
+this world the human spirit, with its dominating force, the will, may be
+and ought to be superior to all bodily sensations and all accidents of
+environment. We should not only feel, but we should teach, by our
+conversation and by our literature, that, in the struggle of life, it is
+essentially a noble thing and a heroic thing to die fighting. In a
+recent psychological story called "My Friend Will," Charles F. Lummis
+pays a striking tribute to the power of the human mind over the
+accidents of life and chance when he makes his "friend Will" say: "I am
+bigger than anything that can happen to me. All these things--sorrow,
+misfortune, and suffering--are outside my door. I'm in the house and
+I've got the key!"
+
+
+
+
+PRAIRIE DAWN
+
+BY WILLA SIBERT CATHER
+
+
+  A crimson fire that vanquishes the stars;
+  A pungent odor from the dusty sage;
+  A sudden stirring of the huddled herds;
+  A breaking of the distant table-lands
+  Through purple mists ascending, and the flare
+  Of water ditches silver in the light;
+  A swift, bright lance hurled low across the world;
+  A sudden sickness for the hills of home.
+
+  --_From April Twilights._
+
+
+
+
+THE DOINGS OF THE DEVIL
+
+BY HARVEY J. O'HIGGINS
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY THOMAS FOGARTY
+
+
+Mrs. Cregan wept, and her tears were ludicrous. She was as fat as a
+Falstaff. Her features were as ill-suited for the expression of grief as
+a circus clown's. She had not even a channel in her plump cheeks to
+drain the tears from the corners of her eyes; and the slow drops, large
+and unctuous, trickled down her round jowl and soaked into her
+bonnet-strings, leaving her cheeks as fresh and as ruddy in the sunlight
+as if they had been merely wet with perspiration. Her eyes stared,
+unpuckered, apparently unconscious that they wept. Her mouth was tight
+in an expression of resentful determination. Only her little round chin
+trembled--like a child's.
+
+And yet Mrs. Cregan was as nearly heart-broken as she had ever been in
+her life. She was leaving her husband; what was more grievous to her,
+she was leaving her home; she was on the streets of New York, with her
+small savings in her greasy purse--clasped tightly in her two hands
+under her "Sunday cape," that was trimmed with fringe and tassels in a
+way to remind you of a lambrequin. She did not know where to go. There
+was no one to whom she could turn for aid, and she would not go to any
+one for pity. Behind her was the wreck of a breakfast table--the visible
+symbol of her ruined home--with a cursing Irishman, whom nobody could
+live with any longer, shouting, "_Your_ house, is it? I'll show yeh
+whose house it is! I'll show yeh! I'll break ev'ry danged thing in the
+place!" Before her were the crooked byways of what had once been
+"Greenwich village," as quiet as a desert, and as indifferent, in the
+early morning radiance, with shuttered windows and closed doors.
+
+The domestic peace of those old streets made her own homelessness the
+more pitiful to her. She felt as she had felt once before--years
+before--in her childhood, when she had set sail with her parents for
+America. It had been a cold day; and the mists had steamed up horridly
+from the water, with a desolate, wet sea-odor; and the memory of the
+sunlight on green fields and the warm perfume of the land had been like
+a longing for health and daylight to the darkness of a death-bed. The
+future had threatened her with the terrors of an unknown world. The
+past--despite its poverty and starvation--had been as dear as life. She
+had suffered all those pangs of dissolution that assail the home-loving
+Irish when they have to leave what association has made dear to them;
+for, with the Irish, familiarity does not breed contempt but affection.
+
+She suffered these same miseries now. She saw her home through tears of
+regret, though unhappiness had driven her from it. And her lips were set
+in a determination never to return to Cregan, though her chin trembled
+with pity of herself in the determination.
+
+Some distance behind her came a smaller woman, as shrunken, as withered,
+and as yellow as an old leaf. Even her shoes seemed to have dried and
+shriveled, curling up at the toes. And she fluttered along in the light
+morning breeze, holding back against it, on her heels, with an odd
+effect of being carried forward faster than she wished to go.
+
+She was Mrs. Byrne, from the floor below Mrs. Cregan's flat, and she had
+been starting out on a secret errand of her own when she heard the
+quarrel overhead and stopped to hear the end of it. There was something
+guilty in her manner, and she was evidently struggling between her
+desire to reach the next street unseen by Mrs. Cregan and her desire to
+know what had happened in the Cregan flat. Her curiosity proved the
+stronger.
+
+She let the wind blow her alongside her friend's portly despair. She
+said, in the hoarse whisper that was all she had left of her voice: "Is
+it yerself, Missus Cregan? Yuh're off to choorch early this mornin'."
+
+Mrs. Cregan looked around, blinking to clear her eyes. "Choorch?" she
+said, on the plaintiveness of a high note that broke in her throat.
+
+"Yuh're cryin', woman!". Her look of craftiness had changed at once to
+one of startled distress. "Come back out o' this with yuh." She caught
+Mrs. Cregan's arm. "It's no thing to be doin' on the street! Come back,
+now. Where're yuh goin'?"
+
+Mrs. Cregan marched stolidly ahead and carried her neighbor with her.
+"I've quit 'm."
+
+"Quit who?"
+
+"Himsilf.... Dinny."
+
+Mrs. Byrne expressed her emotion and showed her tact by silently
+compressing her lips.
+
+"I've quit 'im, fer good an' all." She stroked a tear down her cheek
+with a thick forefinger. "I'll niver go back. Niver!"
+
+"Come away with yuh, Mary Cregan," Mrs. Byrne cried, in her breathy
+huskiness. "At _your_ age! Faith, yuh're as flighty as one o' them girls
+with the pink silk petticoats. He's yer husban', ain't he? D'yuh think
+yuh were married over the broomstick? Come an' behave yerself like a
+decent woman. What'd Father Dumphy say to _this_, think yuh?"
+
+"He's a man. I know what he'd say. He'd tell me to go back to Cregan.
+I'll niver go back. Niver!"
+
+"Yuh won't! What'll yuh do, then? Where'll yuh go to?"
+
+"I'll niver go back. Niver! He's broke me best chiny--an' kicked the leg
+off the chair--an' overtoorned the table--an' ordered me out o' the
+little bit o' home I been all these years puttin' together. The teapot
+th' ol' man brought from Ireland--the very teapot--smashed to
+smithereens! An' the little white dishes with the gilt trimmin's I had
+to me weddin' day, Mrs. Byrne! There was the poor things all broke to
+bits!" She stopped to point at the sidewalk, as if the wreckage lay
+there before her. "All me little bit o' chiny. All of it. All of it,
+Mrs. Byrne. Ev'ry bit! Boorsted!"
+
+Her tears choked her. She could not express the piercing irreparability
+of the injury. It would not have been so bad if he had beaten her; a
+hurt will heal. But the innocent, wee cups--and the fat old brown
+teapot--and the sweet little chair with its pretty legs, carved and
+turned so daintily! She had washed them and wiped them, and dusted and
+polished them, and been so careful of them and felt so proud of them,
+for twenty years past. And, now, there they were lying, all in
+bits--past mending--gone forever. And they so pretty and so harmless.
+
+The crash as they fell on the floor had sounded in her ears like the
+scream of a child murdered.
+
+She started forward again, determinedly. "I'll niver go back to 'm. He
+can have his house to himsilf.... What do I care for Father Dumphy? He
+wants nothin' but the dime I leaves at the choorch doore, an' the dime I
+drops on the plate! Whin me poorse's impty, he'll not bother his head
+about me!"
+
+"Shame _on_ yuh!" Mrs. Byrne wheezed, with her eye on the house she was
+passing. "Yuh talk no better than a Prod'stunt."
+
+"An' if I _was_ a Prod'stint," she cried, "I'd not have to pay money
+iv'ry time I wanted to hear mass. I'd not be out on the street here, not
+knowin' where I'm goin' to, ner how I'm to live. It's _thim_ that knows
+how to take care o' their own--givin' the women worrk, an' takin' the
+childer off to the farrms, an' all the like o' that. You Dogans----"
+
+Mrs. Byrne glanced about her fearfully, "Stop yer talk, now. Stop yer
+talk. Stop it before someone hears yuh makin' a big fool o' yerself."
+
+"I'll not stop it. What do I care who hears me? I'm goin' off from here
+fer good an' all. 'Twill know me no more. 'Twill not. I'm done with it
+all. I'm done with it." She held out her purse. "I've got me bit o'
+money. I'll hire me a little room up-town. I'm done with _him_ an'
+Father Dumphy an' the whole dang lot o' yuz. Slavin' an' savin' fer
+nothin' at all. I'll worrk fer mesilf now, an' none other. Neither
+Cregan ner the choorch ner no one ilse 'll get a penny's good o' me no
+more. I got no one in the wide worrld but mesilf to look to, an' I'll go
+it alone."
+
+Mrs. Byrne was a little woman of a somewhat sinister aspect, her dull
+eyes very deep in their wrinkles, her nose pushed aside out of the
+perpendicular, her long lips stretched tightly over protruding teeth.
+She was as curious as an old monkey; but it was not only her curiosity
+that made her the busiest gossip and the most charitable "good soul" in
+the street; she had her share of human kindness, and if she was as
+crafty as a hypocrite, it was because she enjoyed handling men and
+women, like a politician.
+
+Seeing that Mrs. Cregan was beyond the reach of shame or the appeal of
+the priest, she said: "Well, I don't blame yuh, woman. Cregan's a
+fool--like all the rest o' the men. An' yerself such a good manager.
+Well, well! Yer rooms was that purty 't 'ud make yuh wistful. Where will
+yuh be goin'?"
+
+"I dunno."
+
+"Have yuh had yer breakfast?"
+
+Mrs. Cregan shook her head.
+
+"Come back, then, an' have a bite with me."
+
+"Niver! I'll niver go back."
+
+Mrs. Byrne hitched up her shawl. "Come along then to the da-ary
+restr'unt. There's no one home to miss me. Ill take a bit o' holiday,
+this mornin', meself. I've been wantin' to taste one o' those batter
+cakes they make in the restr'unt windahs, this long enough."
+
+"Yuh've ate yer breakfast."
+
+"I have not" Mrs. Byrne replied. "I was off to the grocer to buy some
+sugar when yuh stopped me."
+
+It was a lie. She had, in fact; started out, secretly, on a guilty
+errand which she should not acknowledge.
+
+"It's a lonely meal I'd 've been havin'," she said, "with Byrne down at
+the boiler house an' the boy off on his run."
+
+Mrs. Cregan did not reply, and they came to Sixth Avenue without more
+words. They paused before a dairy restaurant that advertised its
+"Surpassing Coffee" in white-enamel letters on its shop-front windows.
+Mrs. Cregan's hunger drew her in, but slowly; and Mrs. Byrne followed,
+coughing to conceal her embarrassment.
+
+[Illustration: "'YOUR HOUSE, IS IT? I'LL SHOW YEH WHOSE HOUSE IT IS!'"]
+
+
+II
+
+It was the first time that Mrs. Byrne had ever sat down in any public
+restaurant, except the eating-halls at Coney Island (where she went with
+"basket parties") or the ice-cream "parlors" at Fort George. And she
+glanced about her at tiled walls and mosaic floors with a furtiveness
+that was none the less critical for being so sly. "It's eatin' in a
+bathroom we are," she whispered. "An' will yuh look at the cup yonder.
+The sides of it are that thick there's scarce room fer the coffee in it!
+Well, well! It do beat the Dutch! They're drawin' the drink out of a
+boiler big enough fer wash day." The approach of a waitress silenced
+her. When she saw that Mrs. Cregan was not going to speak, she looked up
+at the girl with a bargain-counter keenness. "Have y' any pancakes fit
+t' eat? How much are they? Ten cents! Fer how many? Fer three pancakes?
+Fer three! D'yuh hear that?" she appealed to Mrs. Cregan. "Come home
+with me, that's a good woman. It's a sin to pay it. Three cents fer a
+pancake! Aw, come along out o' this. Ten cents! We c'u'd get two loaves
+o' bread fer the money an' live on it fer a week!"
+
+But Mrs. Cregan was beyond the reach of practicalities, and she ordered
+her buckwheat cakes and coffee with an air that was mournfully distrait.
+Mrs. Byrne made a vain attempt to get her own cakes from the waitress
+for five cents, and then resigned herself to the senseless extravagance.
+"Yuh'll not make yer own livin' an' eat the likes o' this," she
+grumbled asthmatically. "Yuh'd better be savin' yer money."
+
+Mrs. Cregan was looking at the thick china with a sort of aggrieved
+despondence. (It was almost the expression of a bereaved mother looking
+at one of her neighbor's children and thinking it a healthy, ugly brat
+whom nobody would have missed!) She stared at the bare walls and the
+bare tables of the restaurant, and found the place, by comparison with
+her own cozy flat, as unhome-like as the waiting-room of a railroad
+station--the waiting-room of a railroad station when you have said
+good-bye to your past and the train has not yet arrived to carry you to
+your future.
+
+As her pancakes were served to her, she bent over the plate to hide a
+tear that trickled down her nose. It splashed on the piece of food that
+she raised to her mouth. She ate it--tear and all.
+
+"An' them no bigger than the top of a tomato can!" Mrs. Byrne was
+muttering.
+
+Mrs. Cregan ate, and the food helped, to stop her tears. It was the
+strong coffee, at last, that brought her back her voice. "If it'd b'en
+_him_, he'd 'a' gone an' got drunk," she said, wiping her cheeks with
+her napkin. "The men have the best of it. Us women have to take it all
+starin' sober."
+
+"They're no more than children," Mrs. Byrne replied, "an' they're to be
+treated as such. Sure, Cregan couldn't live without yuh. He'd have no
+buttons to his pants in a week."
+
+"An' him!" Mrs. Cregan cried. "Iver, since the Raypublicuns got licked,
+there's be'n no gettin' on with him at all. Thim Sunday papers 've
+toorned his head. He's all blather about his rights an' his wrongs. Th'
+other moornin' didn't I try to get on his bus from the wrong side o' the
+crossin', an' he bawls at me: 'Th' other side! Th' other side! Yuh're no
+better than any one ilse!' An' I had to chase through the mud after him!
+The little wizened runt! He's talkin' like an arnachist! An' that's why
+he smashed me dish. He'll have no one say 'No' to 'im.... Ah, Mrs.
+Byrne, niver marry a man older than yersilf."
+
+"Thank yuh," Mrs. Byrne replied with hoarse sarcasm. "I'm not likely to,
+at my age." She added, consolingly: "Cregan's young fer his years.
+Drivin' a Fift' Avenah bus is fine, preservin', outdoor work."
+
+"It is _that!_" And Mrs. Cregan's tone remarked that the fact was the
+more to be deplored. "He'll be crankier an' crabbeder the older he
+grows." She dipped to her coffee and swallowed hard.
+
+Mrs. Byrne had screwed up her eyes to squint at an idea that could not
+well be looked in the face. When she spoke it was to say slyly: "God
+forbid! But they do go off sometimes in a puff. He looks as if he'd live
+fer long enough, thank Heaven. But yuh never can tell."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Mrs. Cregan blinked, held her hand for a moment, and then began hastily
+to fill her mouth with food. The silence that ensued was long enough to
+take on an appearance of guilt.
+
+It was long enough, too, for Mrs. Byrne to "contrive a procedure."
+
+"Yuh never can tell," she began, "unless yuh have doin's with the
+devil--like them gipsies that see what's comin' by lookin' in the flat
+o' yer hand. There's one o' them aroun' the corner, an' they say she
+told Minnie Doyle the name o' the man she was to marry. An' he married
+her, at that!" Mrs. Cregan looked blank. Mrs. Byrne leaned forward to
+her. "I never whispered it to a livin' soul but yerself--but it was her
+told Mrs. Gunn that her last was to be a boy. A good month ahead! An'
+when she saw it was true she had no peace o' mind till she heard the
+priest say the words over the poor child an' saw that the sprinkle o'
+holy water didn't bubble off him like yuh'd sprinkled it on a hot
+stove." Mrs. Cregan's vacant regard had slowly gathered a gleam of
+startled intelligence. "An' if I was yerself, Mrs. Cregan--not knowin'
+where I was to go to, ner how I was to live--I'd go an' have a talk with
+her before I went further, d'yuh see?"
+
+"God forbid! 'Tis a mortal sin."
+
+"'Tis not. When I told Father Dumphy what I'd done, he called me an ol'
+fool an' gave me an extry litany fer penance. What's a litany!"
+
+"I'd be scared o' me life!"
+
+"Yuh w'd not. Come along with me. I was goin'. I got troubles o' me own.
+Never mind that. There's nothin' to be scared of. Nothin' at all. No
+one'll see us. I been there meself, many's the time, an' no one knows
+it."
+
+
+III
+
+Mrs. Byrne entered the "reception rooms" of Madame Wampa, "clairvoyant,
+palmist, and card-reader," with the propitiatory smile of the woman who
+knows she is doing wrong but is prepared to argue that there is "no
+great harm into it." She was followed by Mrs. Cregan, as guiltily
+reverential as if she were an altar boy who had been persuaded to join
+in some mischievous trespass on the "sanctuary." Madame Wampa received
+them, professionally insolent in her indifference. Mrs. Byrne explained
+that she wanted only a "small card reading" for twenty-five cents.
+Madame Wampa said curtly: "Sit down!"
+
+They sat down.
+
+She had been a music-hall singer when her husband was a sleight-of-hand
+artist, "The Great Malino, the Wizard of Milan." Her voice had long
+since left her; she had nothing of her beauty but its yellow ruins; and
+her life was made up of the consideration of two great grievances:
+first, that her husband was always idle, and second, that her landlord
+overcharged her for her rooms on account of the nature of her
+"business."
+
+[Illustration: MADAME WAMPA]
+
+She saw nothing in Mrs. Byrne and Mrs. Cregan but their inability to
+help her pay her rent. She said: "I give a full trance readin' with
+names, dates, and all questions answered, for a dollar, or a full card
+readin' for fifty cents. It's impossible to tell much for a quarter."
+
+Mrs. Byrne shook her head.
+
+Madame Wampa said "Very well," in a tone of haughty resignation. She
+turned to a booth that had been made of turkey-red chintz in one corner
+of the room. She lit a small red lamp and sat down before a little
+bamboo table. A toy angel from a Christmas tree hung above her. A
+stuffed alligator sat up, on its hind legs, beside her--a porcelain bell
+hung on a red ribbon about its neck--to grin with a cheerful uncanniness
+on the rigmaroles of magic.
+
+She said: "Come!"
+
+Mrs. Byrne entered the gipsy tent, and Mrs. Cregan was left alone in the
+atmosphere of a bespangled past reduced to its lowest terms of
+imposture. There were strings of Indian corn hanging from the ceiling,
+Chinese coins and rabbits' feet on the walls, a horseshoe wrapped in
+tinfoil over the door, and a collection of absurdly grotesque
+bric-à-brac on shelves and tables. There were necklaces of lucky beads
+for sale, and love charms in the shape of small glass hearts enclosing
+imitation shamrocks, and dream books and manuals of palmistry and gipsy
+cards for fortune-telling, and photographs of Madame Wampa in a gorgeous
+evening dress trimmed with feathers. Over all was a smoky odor of
+kerosene from an oil heater.
+
+Mrs. Cregan looked from side to side with a vaguely worried feeling that
+it must take a power of dusting and wiping to keep such a clutter of
+things clean; and this feeling gradually rose into her consciousness
+above the dull stupefaction of her grief.
+
+Madame Wampa, in the chintz tent, recited without expression: "Though
+you travel east or west, may your luck be the best." She dropped her
+voice to a toneless mutter about a "journey," and some papers that were
+to be signed, and a "false" dark woman who pretended to be Mrs. Byrne's
+friend, but would do her an injury.
+
+Mrs. Cregan sat as if she were waiting for her turn to enter a
+confessional, her hands folded, her head dropped. She heard Mrs. Byrne
+whispering hoarsely, but she did not listen.
+
+Madame Wampa said, at last, wearily: "Very well. Send her in."
+
+She shuffled her cards and sighed. She was professionally acquainted
+with many griefs, and she took her toll of them. They meant no more to
+her than sickness does to a quack. She looked up at Mrs. Cregan's
+entrance almost absent-mindedly.
+
+But there was, at once, something so helplessly stricken about the
+woman's plump despair, so infantile, so touchingly ridiculous, that
+Madame Wampa even smiled faintly and moved the bamboo table to let Mrs.
+Cregan squeeze into the chair that waited her. She sat down and held out
+her money in her palm. Madame Wampa took her hand. "I will tell you,"
+she said. "I will see it in your hand."
+
+She crossed the palm three times with the coin, and began in the
+monotonous voice and with the expressionless face of the fakir: "You are
+married. Many years. I see many years. You have not been happy. Monday
+is your unlucky day. Do not begin anything on Monday. You are thinkin'
+of takin' a journey--somethin'--some change. It will not end well. You
+had better remain without the change--whatever it is. There is a man--a
+man who has horses--who drives horses, perhaps. I see horses. He will
+meet with an accident--I think, a runaway--a collision, perhaps. He will
+be hurt. He will be--hurt. Yes. He is an old man. It will be bad. He may
+die. Perhaps. He is a relative--related to you. You must beware of
+animals. One will do you an injury. You will never be rich--but
+comfortable. The best of your life is comin'. You will have your wish."
+
+She had finished, but Mrs. Cregan did not move. She had drawn back in
+her chair. Her mouth had loosened; her hand lay limp on the table; all
+her intelligence seemed to have concentrated in her eyes in an
+expression of guilty and horrified surprise. She said faintly: "Is't
+Cregan?"
+
+Madame Wampa shrugged one shoulder in her red kimono. "The lines do not
+say." She blew out the lamp and rose from the table. "That is all. It is
+impossible to tell much for a quarter. I give a full trance readin',
+with names, dates, and all questions answered----"
+
+Mrs. Cregan "blessed" herself,--with the sign of the cross,--gasped,
+"God forgi' me!" and blundered out into the room. Mrs. Byrne cried:
+"What's wrong?" Mrs. Cregan did not hear. She stampeded to the door in
+the ponderous fright of a panic-stricken elephant. Her one thought was
+to find a place where she might get on her knees.... Cregan! It was
+himself! It was Dinny! Killed, maybe! She had blasphemed against the
+Church and Father Dumphy, and she must pray. She must pray for herself
+and for Cregan. She would "take back" everything she had said. She would
+never leave him. She would be good.
+
+Mrs. Byrne tugged at her cape. "Whist! Whist! What's come over yuh,
+woman? What is it?"
+
+"It's Dinny!"
+
+That was all that could be had out of her. Even when she reached her
+home again, and Mrs. Byrne followed her in, afraid of leaving the
+frightened woman alone lest she should "blab" the whole secret to the
+first person she met,--even then Mrs. Cregan could not speak until she
+had gathered up the broken dishes and propped the broken chair against
+the wall, as frantically as if she were trying to conceal the evidence
+of a crime. Then she sank down on a sofa and burst into tears. "The poor
+creature!" she wept. "The poor ol' man. Poor Dinny!"
+
+Mrs. Byrne folded her arms. "Mary Cregan," she said, in hoarse disgust,
+"when yuh've done makin' a fool o' yerself, I'll trouble yuh to listen
+to _me_. _Now!_ If y' ever breathe a word o' this to Cregan, he'll laugh
+himself blind! Mind yuh that! He'll not believe yuh. No one'll believe
+yuh. No one! An' if yuh don't want somethin' turrible to happen, yuh'll
+say nothin', but yuh'll behave yerself like a decent married woman an'
+go to church an' say yer prayers against trouble. That woman with the
+cards says whatever th' old Nick puts into her head to say."
+
+Mrs. Cregan cried: "She saw it in me hand!"
+
+Mrs. Byrne drew herself up like a prophetess. "Dip yer hand in holy
+water, an' yuh'll hear no more of it. Now, then. Behave yerself."
+
+"I was wishin' it!" she wailed. "I was wishin' somethin' 'd happen to
+him to leave me free here in m' own home!"
+
+"An' that," Mrs. Byrne said, "is the judgment o' heaven on yuh fer
+carin' more fer yer dishes than yuh did fer yer husband. Yuh're a good
+manager, Mrs. Cregan, but yuh've been a dang poor wife. Think of yer man
+first an' yer house after, an' yuh'll be a happier woman, I tell yuh."
+
+"I will that. I will," Mrs. Cregan wept, "if he's spared to me."
+
+"Never fear," Mrs. Byrne said drily. "He'll be spared to yuh."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And he _has_ been spared to her. At first he was suspicious of her
+subdued manner and remorseful gentleness; and for a long time he
+watched her, very warily, with an eye for treachery. Then he understood
+that she had succumbed to his masterful handling of her, and he was
+masculinely proud of his conquest.
+
+[Illustration: "MRS. CREGAN SAT AS IF SHE WERE WAITING FOR HER TURN TO
+ENTER A CONFESSIONAL."]
+
+Mrs. Cregan is beginning to hope that she has warded off the predicted
+bad fortune by her devoutness, but she still has her fears. "Twas the
+doin's o' the divil," she says to Mrs. Byrne.
+
+"He had a hand in it, no doubt," Mrs. Byrne agrees. "An' how's Cregan?"
+she says, "Well, I'm glad o' that.... An' the new dishes?... Good luck
+to them. Yuh're off early to church again."
+
+
+
+
+YOUNG HENRY AND THE OLD MAN
+
+BY JOHN M. OSKISON
+
+
+The ranchman and I were discussing courage. I had that day seen young
+Henry Thomas mount and ride a horse which had bucked in a way to impress
+the imagination. I spoke of it.
+
+"Was it the gray?" queried Brunner, and when I said it was, he scoffed.
+"That horse is trained to buck just the way young Henry wants him, and
+he hobbles the stirrups."
+
+Brunner's scepticism was disappointing. I ventured to speak of another
+instance that seemed to illustrate the nerve of Henry Thomas:
+
+"Didn't he help capture the 'Kep' Queen bunch of outlaws a few years
+ago? I've heard he showed nerve then."
+
+"I reckon you have." Brunner glanced across at me, then stooped to dig a
+live coal out of the ashes. He held it for half a minute before packing
+it into the bowl of his pipe, shifting it imperceptibly in his toughened
+hand as he studied the backlog. When his tobacco was burning steadily,
+he spoke:
+
+"I can tell you the truth about young Henry--and the old man, too." I
+thought his tone changed. "Twenty-four years ago I came to this Indian
+country. For twelve years I rode with the posses as a deputy marshal and
+for twelve years now I've been running cattle here on Cabin Creek. I've
+been all over the Territory. I know every man in the Cherokee Nation
+that ever handled a hot iron. And I know young Henry Thomas, too.
+
+"It was in 1882 that Queen 'went bad,' and began to hold up trains on
+the 'Katy' and 'Frisco roads. All of that fall and winter we were after
+him and his gang, but we never got a sight of them. They were 'goers'
+all right, and when we came up to a two-weeks-old camp-fire they'd
+built, we thought we were lucky.
+
+"For six months after the first of the year they did nothing. We heard
+that Queen was in California. Then, in June, 1883, while I was at
+Muscogee, I got a telegram from 'Cap' White asking me to report at once
+to him at Red Oak. Paden Tolbert and I caught the eleven o'clock train
+up, dropping off at Red Oak at one in the morning. 'Cap' met us, told us
+he had two men ready, and that the five of us would start for Pryor
+Creek at once.
+
+"It was a fifteen-mile ride. We planned to pick up four men from the
+ranches on the way down, and get to 'Kep' Queen's camp at daylight. We
+had been told that there were five men in the camp, that they had been
+in the Pryor Creek woods for two days, and that it was their plan to
+hold up the flyer from the north next evening. 'Cap' White was sure of
+his information, and he had decided upon the men he wanted from the
+ranches. The two Thomases--old man Henry and young Henry--were picked
+out, for there was no one else in the family except a younger brother of
+eighteen, who has since died. 'Bud' Ryder and Jim Kelso were the other
+two--both good on horses and handy with a gun.
+
+"'Cap' was proud of his posse when he finally got us together. The
+Thomases came out and joined us like bees a-swarming. The young fellow
+was all up in the air with excitement, like a boy going to a circus. He
+was so brash that at first we couldn't keep him from riding on ahead of
+the rest of us; you'd think he wanted to bring in the bunch all by
+himself.
+
+"That was all right; brash, eager young fellows ain't always so brave
+when trouble begins, but they steady into good fighters. It's hard
+enough to get 'em that want to go after a man like 'Cap' Queen at all."
+
+Brunner told me then of the fight in the woods at daybreak. It was his
+summary of young Henry Thomas that interested me.
+
+One of the men whom White took from Red Oak led the posse to the camp on
+Pryor Creek. It was on a ledge on a hillside. The fires had been built
+under a jutting rock. Only a bush wren could have hidden its nest more
+completely--Bruce had been lucky in spying it out. He told White that
+there was but one unprotected approach--a long unused trail that led
+down from the cliff-top and ended in a briar tangle fifty feet above the
+ledge. That trail, it was evident, 'Kep' Queen did not know existed.
+
+Young Thomas had ridden with Brunner, seeking him out, as the novice
+always seeks out the veteran, to practise his valorous speeches upon.
+For four hours young Thomas talked about bravery, with illustrations.
+From one incident to another he skipped, for the history of outlawry
+west of St. Louis, in the last generation, was more familiar to him than
+many another topic he had gathered from books. Brunner could have set
+him right on the facts many times, but what was the use?
+
+After a time the youngster's monologue became a sort of soothing hum,
+for which the other was grateful. "I was cross and sleepy and chilly and
+nervous," Brunner explained, "and the boy's gabble rested me."
+
+I gathered that the young man was more excited than he cared to confess,
+even to himself. He talked, as others whistle, to "keep up his courage."
+Yet the implication that he needed distraction or stimulation would have
+angered him. Youth and courage are twins, or should be, and a man of
+twenty-two takes it for granted. At forty, a man may confess to turning
+tail and yet save his self-respect. I had heard Brunner tell of "back
+downs" that would have shamed a young village constable, and it had
+never occurred to me to question his courage.
+
+It was only in the last mile of their ride that the chatter of young
+Thomas really became audible to Brunner.
+
+"I woke up," he said, "and actually listened to him. I don't remember
+exactly what he was saying, but this was the idea: 'All of you fellows
+that chase outlaws make too much fuss about it.' Well, some of us do,
+though the newspapers and the wind-bags that follow us around make ten
+times the fuss we do. He went on to say that the only way to nab a
+horse-thief or an express robber was to go right up to him, don't you
+know, like the little boy went up to the sign-post that he thought was a
+ghost.
+
+"It's a good theory and generally works. I told him so, and then
+apologized for doing any other way. The way I thought about this
+business of a deputy marshal's was the way an old soldier thinks about
+war. I was hired to get the criminals, and not to be caught by the
+criminals, to shoot the bad man, if I had to, but not to be shot by the
+bad man if there was any way to help it. One way to help it is to run
+and hide. It's a good way, too, for I've tried it."
+
+The young man roused Brunner's curiosity. It was possible that he might
+be of the exceptional breed that puts a fine theory to the test of
+action.
+
+"I decided to watch him," the ranchman told me, "and see if he would
+play up to his big talk. When we left our ponies, half a mile from the
+camp, I pretended to argue with 'Cap' White, told him he ought to leave
+young Thomas with the horses and not get such a boy as that all shot
+up. 'Cap' caught my point and begged him to stay, but, of course, he
+wouldn't hear of it. 'I'll stick to Brunner,' says he.
+
+"'All right,' says I, 'come on.'
+
+"When we started afoot, we trailed out single file, and I noticed that
+old man Thomas waited for the boy and me to pass him, dropping in right
+behind his son. 'Cap' was in front, then Bruce, then Paden Tolbert, then
+Ryder and Kelso, and then I and the Thomases. The old man was at the
+tail of the procession.
+
+"Old man Thomas was the kind that you never think about one way or the
+other. You said to yourself that he would do his share, whatever it
+amounted to, and you wouldn't have to bother about him. That's your
+notion of him, ain't it?"
+
+It _was_ my notion of the older Thomas. I don't think a more commonplace
+looking man ever lived. Brunner told me that he had not changed in
+fourteen years.
+
+"'Young Henry swells around and talks big; the old man he says nothing
+and chaws tobacco,' That's the way people size 'em up around here."
+Brunner thus confirmed my own impression of the pair.
+
+"What a man can see out of the back of his head," Brunner went on, "is a
+lot different from what comes in front of his eyes. He feels a lot that
+don't make a sound and that ain't visible. I did see, out of the corner
+of my eye, that young Henry Thomas was dropping behind me little by
+little, but I didn't see why it was he moved up again. I know why,
+though. The old man had ordered him up--not in words, you understand,
+for I could have heard a whisper in the still dawn, the way we were
+snaking it over the trail. From that time on, every foot of the way, the
+old man drove the boy. You ask me how, and I can't tell you. There
+wasn't a word, not a motion that I could see, but all the time it was
+one man driving the other as plain as could be. And it wasn't easy. I
+felt that young Henry was worse than balky, that he would have broke
+through the bushes and run off screaming if that old man had taken his
+eyes off of him for ten seconds.
+
+"A quarter of a mile it was, and we went slow--twenty feet forward
+picking our way, then the eight of us would stop to listen. If you ever
+get a chance, ask young Henry how long that trail was. If he don't stop
+to think, he'll tell you we crawled through the bushes for five miles,
+but if he remembers his part as the hero of the fight, he'll say, 'Oh,
+we sneaked a hundred yards or so before lighting into Queen's bunch.'"
+
+The trail from above ended in a briar tangle fifty feet up the hill
+from the ledge on which four of the five outlaws slept. The fifth man,
+posted as a sentry, was on the lower trail, somewhere out of sight of
+the party led by "Cap" White. When the deputies came up to the briars,
+therefore, they could see no one. As soon as the four sleepers came out
+of shelter, however, White's men could cover them with their guns.
+
+What had to be done, obviously, was to rouse the four outlaws without
+revealing the presence of the deputies above. It could be done by some
+one in the woods below the ledge. But the outpost was down there to
+reckon with. They could not all be trapped merely by waiting, for they
+would come out, after waking, one by one; and White wanted the whole
+bunch.
+
+It was decided that three men should be sent, by a round-about trail,
+down to the creek; that they should follow it up until they got opposite
+to the ledge; and that they should then rouse the sleeping men. They
+were also to find the sentry and capture him. The risk was that the
+sentry might discover the three first and spoil the chance to take him.
+The detail might be dangerous, though with luck it should prove easy.
+
+Brunner was assigned to lead the three. Young Thomas and Kelso were
+named by White as the other two, but Brunner, who had been aware of that
+duel on the trail, said he preferred the old man to Jim Kelso.
+
+They beat back for a short distance, then, separating, dropped down the
+steep hillside to the creek. In open order, they went forward quietly,
+slowly; they might come upon 'Kep' Queen's outpost at any turn. Now and
+then they came in sight of one another. Each time Brunner saw that the
+old man was edging closer to his son. Still there was no word
+spoken--only a grim old man's gray eyes were fixed upon a young man's
+shifting, over-bright eyes, and the young man moved on, cautiously.
+
+Brunner held close to the creek bank; the old man was twenty yards away
+and moving farther out as he approached his son. So they advanced,
+abreast, until they came out upon the trail leading up to the ledge.
+Then Brunner saw old man Thomas run, with short, noiseless steps, to
+young Henry's side and point up the trail. Hidden from both and out of
+sight of what had attracted the old man's attention, Brunner yet knew
+what was happening. Farther up the trail was the sentry, half asleep in
+the chill dawn.
+
+Brunner saw, as he himself came up cautiously, that the old man was
+whispering to young Henry. He grasped the boy's arm, half-shoving him
+forward and pointing with his rifle. The youngster moved a step, then
+turned with a look of utter panic on his face. His father's eyes glared;
+a sort of savage anger blazed on his face. From his grip on young
+Henry's arm, the old man's hand sprang to the boy's throat. There was
+one fierce, terrible shake, a sort of gurgling scream that expressed
+terror, and protest, too, but which was scarcely audible to Brunner,
+twenty feet away. In the tone of a man enraged to the point of madness,
+old man Thomas snapped out:
+
+"Go on, you confounded whelp!"
+
+Young Henry shook himself free, his terror replaced by a sudden,
+resentful anger. Fifty yards away the sentry nodded, his back against a
+tree and his gun across his lap. Brunner saw the man now, and stepped
+aside to cover him as young Henry approached. But there was no need of
+that. The boy was swift and noiseless; before the outlaw could wake or
+move, his gun was in Henry's hand, and he heard the command, "hands up!"
+
+The sentry was quick-witted. He couldn't shoot, but he could yell.
+Brunner, however was ready for that. He began to bawl a reveler's song,
+popular with cowboys on a spree, and old man Thomas joined him. From
+above, it sounded as if a drunken riot had broken out, in which the
+outpost's warning shout became only a meaningless discord. The babel
+brought the four sleeping men out of their blankets. They listened a
+moment, then stepped out in view of the posse in the briars.
+
+As Brunner came up, old man Thomas turned to face him. On his seamed
+face the sweat had almost dried, but when he shoved his hat up with his
+forearm, his sleeve came away from his forehead damp. The compelling
+glitter in the gray eyes turned to a challenging stare. Brunner met it,
+then glanced up the trail towards young Thomas and his captive.
+
+"He got him all right," said Brunner.
+
+"Yes," the old man triumphed, "my boy got him. He captured 'Kep' Queen
+himself."
+
+"I reckon you've heard young Henry's story of how he got 'Kep' Queen,"
+Brunner finished. "If you've ever talked with him when he was out of
+sight of the old man, I know you have. What I've told you to-night is
+what old man Henry could tell if he wanted to. But he never will. As I
+said awhile ago, 'young Henry swells around and talks big; the old man
+he says nothing and chaws tobacco.'"
+
+
+
+
+EDITORIAL
+
+THE TRUTH OF ORCHARD'S STORY
+
+
+McClure's Magazine printed during last summer and fall the Autobiography
+of Harry Orchard, with its confessions of wholesale assassinations
+during the labor war in the mining districts of the West. There was, at
+that time, repeated and angry denial of the truth of his story; and,
+since the acquittal of W. D. Haywood, secretary and treasurer of the
+Western Federation of Miners, and of George A. Pettibone, whom Orchard
+charged with being the instigators of his crimes, their adherents have,
+of course, maintained that Orchard's story has been entirely disproved.
+
+Logically, this does not follow. The acquittal of these two men means
+nothing more than that they were not proved guilty to the satisfaction
+of the juries trying them. Before a final judgment as to the truth or
+falsity of Orchard's statement is made, the last development in this
+matter must be thoroughly considered. On March 18, Orchard, persisting
+in his story to the last, pleaded guilty to the murder of Governor Frank
+Steunenberg, at Caldwell, Idaho, and was sentenced to be hanged--with
+the recommendation by the presiding judge that his sentence be commuted
+to life imprisonment by the Prison Board of the State. In pronouncing
+sentence upon Orchard, Judge Fremont Wood, who presided over the trials
+of both Haywood and Pettibone, expressed his belief in Orchard's story
+in a most convincing way. The parts of the Judge's statement dealing
+with Orchard's testimony, which follow, are of peculiar value to those
+desiring to arrive at a final conclusion regarding the responsibility
+for the campaign of murders which took place during the labor wars of
+the Western Federation of Miners; they are the summing up of the entire
+matter by a mind whose judicial fairness has been recognized by both
+parties in this great controversy.
+
+     "I am more than satisfied," said Judge Wood, "that the defendant
+     now at the bar of this court awaiting final sentence has not only
+     acted in good faith in making the disclosures that he did, but that
+     he also testified fully and fairly to the whole truth, withholding
+     nothing that was material and declaring nothing that had not
+     actually taken place.
+
+     "During the two trials the testimony of the defendant covered a
+     long series of transactions involving personal relations between
+     himself and many others. In the first trial he was subjected to the
+     most critical cross-examination by very able counsel for at least
+     six days, and I do not now recall that at any point he contradicted
+     himself in any material manner, but on the other hand disclosed his
+     connection with many crimes that were probably not known to the
+     attorneys for the State, at least not brought out by them on the
+     direct examination of the witness.
+
+     "Upon the second trial the same testimony underwent a most thorough
+     and critical examination and in no particular was there any
+     discrepancy in a material matter between the testimony given upon
+     the latter trial as compared with the testimony given by the same
+     witness at the former trial. I am of the opinion that no man living
+     could conceive the stories of crime told by the witness and
+     maintain himself under the merciless fire of the leading
+     cross-examining attorneys of the country unless upon the theory
+     that he was testifying to facts and to circumstances which had an
+     actual existence within his own experience.
+
+     "A child can testify truly and maintain itself on
+     cross-examination. A man may be able to frame his testimony and
+     testify falsely to a brief statement of facts involving a short and
+     single transaction and maintain himself on cross-examination.
+
+     "But I cannot conceive of a case where even the greatest intellect
+     can conceive a story of crime covering years of duration, with
+     constantly shifting scenes and changing characters, and maintain
+     that story with circumstantial detail as to times, places, persons,
+     and particular circumstances and under as merciless a
+     cross-examination as was ever given a witness in an American court
+     unless the witness thus testifying was speaking truthfully and
+     without any attempt either to misrepresent or conceal.... It is my
+     opinion, after a careful examination of this case in all its
+     details, that this defendant and the crimes which he committed were
+     only the natural product and outcome of the system which he
+     represented and the doctrines taught by its leaders, some of which
+     were boldly proclaimed and maintained, even upon the trial of the
+     defendant Haywood.
+
+     "This defendant had evidently become imbued with the idea
+     inculcated by those around him that the organized miners were
+     engaged in an industrial warfare upon one side of which his own
+     organization was alone represented, while on the other hand they
+     were confronted with the powers of organized capital, supported by
+     executive authority, and which counter organization included, or at
+     least controlled, the courts, which were the final arbiters upon
+     all legal questions involved.
+
+     "With the promulgation of such doctrines it is not a difficult
+     matter for some people to justify murder, arson, and other
+     outrages, and I am satisfied that it was that condition of mind
+     that sustained, bore up and nerved on this defendant and his
+     associates in the commission of the various crimes with which he
+     was connected."
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1]
+  _Copyright, 1908, by Ellen Terry (Mrs. Carew)_
+  _Copyright, 1908, by The S. S. McClure Co. All rights reserved_
+
+[2] Mrs. Eddy also had copies of other Quimby manuscripts in her
+possession.
+
+[3] See MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE, May, 1907.
+
+[4] Many typical instances of Christian Science logic may be found in
+Mr. Alfred Farlow's answer to Dr. Churchman's article (_Christian
+Science Journal_, 1904). Mr. Farlow takes up Dr. Churchman's statement,
+"To deny that matter exists and assert that it is an illusion, is only
+another way of asserting its existence." Says Mr. Farlow: "According to
+this logic, when a defendant denies a charge brought against him in
+court, he is only choosing a method of asserting its truth."
+
+Mr. Farlow seems to think that Mrs. Eddy arrived at her discovery of the
+non-existence of matter, not by any process of reasoning, but by
+_personal experience_. He says:
+
+     "From doubting matter and learning by experience its utter
+     emptiness Mrs. Eddy began to search for the universal spiritual
+     cause, and having found it through actual demonstration in spirit,
+     she was obliged in consistence therewith to deny the material sense
+     of existence."
+
+Mr. Farlow seems to consider the logic of this progression inevitable.
+
+[5] Science and Health (1898), page 375.
+
+[6] " " " " " 392.
+
+[7] " " " " " 46.
+
+[8] " " " " " 379.
+
+[9] Mrs. Eddy and her followers believe that she possesses an
+enlightened or spiritual understanding of the Bible and the universe,
+not common to the rest of mankind.
+
+[10] This account of the Creation is taken from the first edition of
+"Science and Health." It remains practically the same in later editions
+under the chapter called "Genesis."
+
+[11] Miscellaneous Writings (1896), page 51.
+
+[12] "Science and Health" (1906), pages 696, 697.
+
+[13] _Christian Science Journal_, September. 1898.
+
+[14] _Christian Science Journal_, October, 1904.
+
+[15] For an exposition of the theory upon which this work at Emmanuel
+Church is conducted, the reader is referred to a pamphlet, "The Healing
+Ministry of the Church," by the Reverend Samuel McComb, issued by the
+Emmanuel Church, Boston. For a detailed account of the method of healing
+practised there and its results, see an article, "New Phases in the
+Relation of the Church to Health," by Dr. Richard Cabot, in the
+_Outlook_, February 29, 1908. The reader who is interested in the
+principle and possibilities of psycho-therapeutics or "mental healing" is
+again referred to Paul Dubois' remarkable book, "Psychical Treatment of
+Nervous Disorders."
+
+[16] The reader who is interested in Quimby's teaching and healing is
+referred to "The True History of Mental Science," by Julius A. Dresser,
+published by George H. Ellis, 272 Congress Street, Boston.
+
+Dr. Warren F. Evans, in his book, "Mental Medicine," published three
+years before the first edition of "Science and Health," said: "Disease
+being in its root a _wrong belief_, change that belief and we cure the
+disease. By faith we are thus made whole. There is a law here which the
+world will sometime understand and use in the cure of the diseases that
+afflict mankind. The late Dr. Quimby, of Portland, one of the most
+successful healers of this or any age, embraced this view of the nature
+of disease, and by a long succession of the most remarkable cures,
+effected by psychopathic remedies, at the same time proved the truth of
+the theory and the efficiency of that mode of treatment. Had he lived in
+a remote age or country, the wonderful facts which occurred in his
+practise would now have been deemed either mythical or miraculous. He
+seemed to reproduce the wonders of Gospel history. But all this was only
+an exhibition of the force of suggestion, or the action of the law of
+faith, over a patient in the impressible condition."
+
+[17] Distribution of every 1000 suicides by season:
+
+  _Country  Summer  Spring   Fall   Winter    Total_
+
+  Denmark    312      284     227     177     1,000
+  Belgium    301      275     229     195     1,000
+  France     306      283     210     201     1,000
+  Saxony     307      281     217     195     1,000
+  Bavaria    308      282     218     192     1,000
+  Austria    315      281     219     185     1,000
+  Prussia    290      284     227     199     1,000
+
+Durkheim, "Le Suicide," (Paris, 1897), p. 88.
+
+[18] The figures are those of Dr. Forbes Winslow for the United States,
+those of Dr. M. Gubski for Russia, those of Dr. Rehfisch (in _Der
+Selbsmord_) for Europe, and those of the Government Statistical Bureau
+for Japan.
+
+[19] Durkheim, "Le Suicide" (Paris, 1897), p. 93.
+
+[20] Five or six years ago, in a paper that I read before the Literary
+Society of Washington, D. C., I suggested this explanation of the high
+suicide rate in June. At the conclusion of the reading, a young Italian
+student, who happened to be present as a guest, came to me and said: "If
+I did not know it to be impossible, I should think that your explanation
+of June suicides had been suggested by, if not copied from, a letter
+left by a dear friend of mine who killed himself in Genoa, two years
+ago, on a beautiful evening in June. You have expressed his thoughts
+almost in the words that he used."
+
+[21] For the suicide statistics embodied in this table I am largely
+indebted to the coöperation and assistance of Mr. M. L. Jacobson, of the
+Bureau of Statistics in Washington. In the literature of the subject
+there are no figures more recent than 1893 for most of the European
+countries. In this table they are nearly all later than 1900.
+
+[22] The figures for Europe are from the latest reports of government
+statistical bureaus, and for America from the registration area covered
+in the twelfth census.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June
+1908, by Various
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE, VOL 31 ***
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+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI June, 1908 No. 2, by Various.
+    </title>
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: January 4, 2009 [EBook #27699]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE, VOL 31 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Annie McGuire and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="trans-note">
+    Transcriber's Note: The Table of Contents was
+    added by the transcriber.
+</div>
+
+<p><!-- Page 120 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 254px;">
+<img src="images/illus0310.jpg" width="254" height="400" alt="AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS FROM THE PAINTING BY ELLEN EMMET" title="" />
+
+<span class="caption">AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS FROM THE PAINTING BY ELLEN EMMET
+
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Copyright, 1908, by Ellen Emmet</span></span><br />
+</div>
+<p><!-- Page 121 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+<h1>McCLURE'S MAGAZINE</h1>
+
+<h3>VOL. XXXI &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;JUNE, 1908 &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;No. 2</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="CONTENTS">
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#MY_FIRST_APPEARANCE_IN_AMERICA1"><b>MY FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#THE_DECREE_MADE_ABSOLUTE"><b>THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#PRESIDENT_JOHNSON_AND_HIS_WAR_ON_CONGRESS"><b>PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND HIS WAR ON CONGRESS</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#THE_CRYSTAL-GAZER"><b>THE CRYSTAL-GAZER</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#BOB_DEBUTANT"><b>BOB, D&Eacute;BUTANT</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#TWO_PORTRAITS_BY_GILBERT_STUART"><b>TWO PORTRAITS BY GILBERT STUART</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#MARY_BAKER_G_EDDY"><b>MARY BAKER G. EDDY</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#HER_FRUITS"><b>HER FRUITS</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#THE_KEY_TO_THE_DOOR"><b>THE KEY TO THE DOOR</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#THE_WAYFARERS"><b>THE WAYFARERS</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#THE_PROBLEMS_OF_SUICIDE"><b>THE PROBLEMS OF SUICIDE</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#PRAIRIE_DAWN"><b>PRAIRIE DAWN</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#THE_DOINGS_OF_THE_DEVIL"><b>THE DOINGS OF THE DEVIL</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#YOUNG_HENRY_AND_THE_OLD_MAN"><b>YOUNG HENRY AND THE OLD MAN</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#EDITORIAL"><b>EDITORIAL</b></a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" /><div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/illus-121.jpg" width="500" height="339" alt="MY FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="MY_FIRST_APPEARANCE_IN_AMERICA1" id="MY_FIRST_APPEARANCE_IN_AMERICA1"></a>MY FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>ELLEN TERRY</h2>
+
+<p>The first time that there was any talk of my going to America was, I
+think, in 1874, when I was playing in "The Wandering Heir." Dion
+Boucicault wanted me to go, and dazzled me with figures, but I expect
+the cautious Charles Reade influenced me against accepting the
+engagement.</p>
+
+<p>When I did go, in 1883, I was thirty-five and had an assured position in
+my profession. It was the first of eight tours, seven of which I went
+with Henry Irving. The last was in 1907, after his death. I also went to
+America one summer on a pleasure trip. The tours lasted three months at
+least, seven months at most. After a rough calculation, I find that I
+have spent not quite five years of my life in America. Five out of sixty
+is not a large proportion, yet I often feel that I am half American.
+This says a good deal for the hospitality of a people who can make a
+stranger feel so completely at home in their midst. Perhaps it also says
+something for my adaptableness!</p>
+
+<p>"When we do not speak of things with a partiality full of love, what we
+say is not worth being repeated." That was the answer of a courteous
+Frenchman, who was asked for his impressions of a country. In any case
+it is almost imprudent to give one's impressions of America. The country
+is so vast and complex that even those who have amassed mountains of
+impressions soon find that there still are mountains more. I have lived
+in New York, Boston, and Chicago for a month at a time, and have felt
+that to know any of these great towns even superficially would take a
+year. I have become acquainted with this and that class of Americans,
+but I realize that there are thousands of other classes that remain
+unknown.<!-- Page 122 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/illus0311.jpg" width="400" height="281" alt="Copyrighted by Window &amp; Grove From the collections of
+Miss Frances Johnson and Mrs. Evelyn Smalley
+
+ELLEN TERRY OPHELIA, AND HENRIETTA MARIA, THREE PARTS WHICH SHE PLAYED
+ON THE FIRST AMERICAN TOUR" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Copyrighted by Window &amp; Grove From the collections of
+Miss Frances Johnson and Mrs. Evelyn Smalley
+<br />
+ELLEN TERRY OPHELIA, AND HENRIETTA MARIA, THREE PARTS WHICH SHE PLAYED
+ON THE FIRST AMERICAN TOUR</span>
+</div>
+
+<h3><i>The Unknown Dangers of America</i></h3>
+
+<p>I set out in 1883 from Liverpool on board the "Britannic" with the fixed
+conviction that I should never, never return. For six weeks before we
+started the word America had only to be breathed to me, and I burst into
+floods of tears! I was leaving my children, my bullfinch, my parrot, my
+"aunt" Boo, whom I never expected to see again alive, just because she
+said I never would, and I was going to face the unknown dangers of the
+Atlantic and of a strange, barbarous land. Our farewell performances in
+London had cheered me up a little&mdash;though I wept copiously at every
+one&mdash;by showing us that we should be missed. Henry Irving's position
+seemed to be confirmed and ratified by all that took place before his
+departure. The dinners he had to eat, the speeches he had to make and to
+listen to, were really terrific! One speech at the Rabelais Club had, it
+was said, the longest peroration on record. It was this kind of thing:
+"Where is our friend Irving going? He is not going like Nares to face
+the perils of the far North. He is not going like A&mdash;&mdash; to face
+something else. He is not going to China," etc.&mdash;and so on. After about
+the hundredth "he is not going," Lord Houghton, who was one of the
+guests, grew very impatient and interrupted the orator with: "Of course
+he isn't! He's going to New York by the Cunard Line. It'll take him
+about a week!"</p>
+
+<h3><i>New York Before the "Sky-scrapers"</i></h3>
+
+<p>My first voyage was a voyage of enchantment to me. The ship was laden
+with pig-iron, but she rolled and rolled and rolled. She could never
+roll too much for me. I have always been a splendid sailor, and I feel
+jolly at sea. The sudden leap from home into the wilderness of waves
+does not give me any sensation of melancholy.</p>
+
+<p>What I thought I was going to see when I arrived in America, I hardly
+remember. I had a vague idea that all American women wore red flannel
+shirts and bowie knives and that I might be sandbagged in the street!
+From somewhere or other I had derived an impression that New York was an
+ugly, noisy place.</p>
+
+<p>Ugly! When I first saw that marvellous harbour I nearly cried&mdash;it was so
+beautiful. Whenever I come now to the unequalled approach to New York I
+wonder what Americans must think of the approach from the sea to London.
+How different are the mean, flat, marshy banks of the Thames, and the
+wooden toy light-house at Dungeness, to the vast, spreading harbour,
+with its busy multitude of steam boats and ferry boats, its wharf upon
+wharf, and its tall statue of Liberty dominating all the racket and
+bustle of the sea traffic of the world!<!-- Page 123 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>That was one of the few times in America when I did not miss the poetry
+of the past. The poetry of the present, gigantic, colossal, and
+enormous, made me forget it. The "sky-scrapers," so splendid in the
+landscape now, did not exist in 1883; but I find it difficult to divide
+my early impressions from my later ones. There was Brooklyn Bridge,
+though, hung up high in the air like a vast spider's web. Between 1883
+and 1893 I noticed a great change in New York and other cities. In ten
+years they seemed to have grown with the energy of tropical plants. But
+between 1893 and 1907 I saw no evidence of such feverish increase. It is
+possible that the Americans are arriving at a stage when they can no
+longer beat the record! There is a vast difference between one of the
+old New York brownstone houses and one of the fourteen-storied buildings
+near the river, but between this and the Times Square Building or the
+still more amazing Flatiron Building, which is said to oscillate at the
+top&mdash;it is so far from the ground&mdash;there is very little difference. I
+hear that they are now beginning to build downwards into the earth, but
+this will not change the appearance of New York for a long time.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 237px;">
+<img src="images/illus0312.jpg" width="237" height="400" alt="From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley
+
+HENRY IRVING AS MATHIAS IN &quot;THE BELLS&quot;
+
+THE PART IN WHICH IRVING MADE HIS FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA" title="" />
+<span class="caption">From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley
+<br />
+HENRY IRVING AS MATHIAS IN &quot;THE BELLS&quot;
+<br />
+THE PART IN WHICH IRVING MADE HIS FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I had not to endure the wooden shed in which<!-- Page 124 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> most people landing in
+America have to struggle with the custom-house officials&mdash;a struggle as
+brutal as a "round in the ring" as Paul Bourget describes it. We were
+taken off the "Britannic" in a tug, and Mr. Abbey, Lawrence Barrett, and
+many other friends met us&mdash;including the much-dreaded reporters.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/illus0313.jpg" width="400" height="200" alt="Lent by The Century Co.
+
+THE REJECTED DESIGN FOR A COLUMBIAN MEDAL MADE BY AUGUSTUS
+SAINT-GAUDENS" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Lent by The Century Co.
+
+<br />THE REJECTED DESIGN FOR A COLUMBIAN MEDAL MADE BY AUGUSTUS
+SAINT-GAUDENS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>When we landed, I drove to the Hotel Dam, Henry to the Brevoort House.
+There was no Diana on the top of the Madison Square Building then&mdash;the
+building did not exist, to cheer the heart of a new arrival as the first
+evidence of <i>beauty</i> in the city. There were horse trams instead of
+cable cars; but a quarter of a century has not altered the peculiarly
+dilapidated carriages in which one drives from the dock, the muddy
+sidewalks, and the cavernous holes in the cobble-paved streets. Had the
+elevated railway, the first sign of <i>power</i> that one notices after
+leaving the boat, begun to thunder through the streets? I cannot
+remember New York without it.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 291px;">
+<img src="images/illus0314.jpg" width="291" height="400" alt="Lent by The Century Co.
+
+THE BAS-RELIEF PORTRAIT OF BASTIEN-LEPAGE MODELED BY AUGUSTUS
+SAINT-GAUDENS. SAINT-GAUDENS GAVE A CAST OF THE PORTRAIT TO MISS TERRY" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Lent by The Century Co.
+
+<br />THE BAS-RELIEF PORTRAIT OF BASTIEN-LEPAGE MODELED BY AUGUSTUS
+SAINT-GAUDENS. SAINT-GAUDENS GAVE A CAST OF THE PORTRAIT TO MISS TERRY</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I missed then, as I miss now, the numberless <i>hansoms</i> of London plying
+in the streets for hire. People in New York get about in the cars,
+unless they have their own carriages. The hired carriage has no reason
+for existing, and when it does, it celebrates its unique position by
+charging two dollars for a journey which in London would not cost fifty
+cents!</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 488px;">
+<img src="images/illus0315.jpg" width="488" height="400" alt="THE BAS-RELIEF PORTRAIT OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON MODELED
+BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS FOR THE ST. GILES CATHEDRAL, EDINBURGH.
+SAINT-GAUDENS GAVE A CAST OF THIS PORTRAIT TO MISS TERRY&#39;S DAUGHTER,
+EDITH CRAIG" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE BAS-RELIEF PORTRAIT OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON MODELED
+BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS FOR THE ST. GILES CATHEDRAL, EDINBURGH.
+SAINT-GAUDENS GAVE A CAST OF THIS PORTRAIT TO MISS TERRY&#39;S DAUGHTER,
+EDITH CRAIG</span>
+</div>
+<p><!-- Page 125 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3><i>Irving Brings Shakespeare to America</i></h3>
+
+<p>There were very few theatres in New York when we first went there. All
+that part of the city which is now "up town" did not exist, and what was
+then "up" is now more than "down" town. The American stage has changed
+almost as much. Even then there was a liking for local plays which
+showed the peculiarities of the different States, but they were more
+violent and crude than now. The original American genius and the true
+dramatic pleasure of the people is, I believe, in such plays, where very
+complete observation of certain phases of American life and very real
+pictures of manners are combined with comedy almost childlike in its<!-- Page 126 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>
+na&iuml;vet&eacute;. The sovereignty of the young girl which is such a marked
+feature in social life is reflected in American plays. This is by the
+way. What I want to make clear is that in 1883 there was no living
+American drama as there is now, that such productions of romantic plays
+and Shakespeare as Henry Irving brought over from England, were unknown,
+and that the extraordinary success of our first tours would be
+impossible now. We were the first, and we were pioneers and we were
+<i>new</i>. To be new is everything in America. Such palaces as the Hudson
+Theatre, New York, were not dreamed of when we were at the Star, which
+was, however, quite equal to any theatre in London, in front of the
+footlights. The<!-- Page 127 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> stage itself, the lighting appliances, and the
+dressing-rooms were inferior.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 128 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 323px;">
+<img src="images/illus0316.jpg" width="323" height="400" alt="HENRY IRVING AS HAMLET
+
+FROM THE STATUE BY E. ONSLOW FORD, R.&nbsp;A., IN THE GUILDHALL OF THE CITY OF
+LONDON" title="" />
+<span class="caption">HENRY IRVING AS HAMLET
+
+<br />FROM THE STATUE BY E. ONSLOW FORD, R.&nbsp;A., IN THE GUILDHALL OF THE CITY OF
+LONDON</span>
+</div>
+<p><!-- Page 129 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 251px;">
+<img src="images/illus0317.jpg" width="251" height="400" alt="ELLEN TERRY AS IMOGEN
+
+DRAWN BY ALMA-TADEMA FOR MISS TERRY&#39;S JUBILEE IN 1906" title="" />
+<span class="caption">ELLEN TERRY AS IMOGEN
+
+<br />DRAWN BY ALMA-TADEMA FOR MISS TERRY&#39;S JUBILEE IN 1906</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 253px;">
+<img src="images/illus0318.jpg" width="253" height="400" alt="ELLEN TERRY AS PORTIA
+
+FROM THE PAINTING BY SIR JOHN MILLAIS, R.&nbsp;A." title="" />
+<span class="caption">ELLEN TERRY AS PORTIA
+
+<br />FROM THE PAINTING BY SIR JOHN MILLAIS, R.&nbsp;A.</span>
+</div>
+
+<h3><i>Our First Appearance Before an American Audience</i></h3>
+
+<p>Henry made his first appearance in America in "The Bells." He was not at
+his best on the first night, but he could be pretty good even when he
+was not at his best. I watched him from a box. Nervousness made the
+company very slow. The audience was a splendid one&mdash;discriminating and
+appreciative. We felt that the Americans <i>wanted</i> to like us. We felt in
+a few days so extraordinarily at home. The first sensation of entering a
+foreign city was quickly wiped out.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 256px;">
+<img src="images/illus0319.jpg" width="256" height="400" alt="WILLIAM WINTER&mdash;
+
+ONE OF THE FIRST CRITICS TO WELCOME IRVING TO THIS COUNTRY" title="" />
+<span class="caption">WILLIAM WINTER&mdash;
+
+<br />ONE OF THE FIRST CRITICS TO WELCOME IRVING TO THIS COUNTRY</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>On the second night in New York it was my turn. "Command yourself&mdash;this
+is the time to show you can act!" I said to myself as I went on the
+stage of the Star Theatre, dressed as Henrietta Maria. But I could not
+command myself. I played badly and cried too much in the last act. But
+the people liked me, and they liked the play, perhaps because it was
+historical, and of history the Americans are passionately fond. The
+audience took many points which had been ignored in London. I had always
+thought Henry as Charles I. most moving when he made that involuntary
+effort to kneel to his subject, Moray, but the Lyceum audiences never
+seemed to notice it. In New York the audience burst out into the most
+sympathetic, spontaneous applause that I have ever heard in a theatre.</p>
+
+<h3><i>American Clothes</i></h3>
+
+<p>My impression of the way the American women dressed in 1883 was not
+favourable.<!-- Page 130 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> Some of them wore Indian shawls and diamond ear-rings. They
+dressed too grandly in the street and too dowdily in the theatre. All
+this has changed. The stores in New York are now the most beautiful in
+the world, and the women are dressed to perfection. They are as clever
+at the <i>demi-toilette</i> as the Parisian, and the extreme neatness and
+smartness of their walking gowns is very refreshing after the floppy,
+blowsy, trailing dresses, accompanied by the inevitable feather boa, of
+which English girls, who used to be so tidy and "tailor-made," now seem
+so fond. The universal white "waist" is so pretty and trim on the
+American girl. It is one of the distinguishing marks of a land of the
+free, a land where "class" hardly exists. The girl in the store wears
+the white waist; so does the rich girl on Fifth Avenue. It costs
+anything from seventy-five cents to fifty dollars!</p>
+
+<p>London, when I come back from America, always seems at first like an
+ill-lighted village, strangely tame, peaceful, and backward. Above all,
+I miss the sunlight of America, and the clear blue skies of an evening.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you glad to get back?" said an English friend.</p>
+
+<p>"Very."</p>
+
+<p>"It's a land of vulgarity, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, if you mean by that a wonderful land&mdash;a land of sunshine and
+light, of happiness, of faith in the future!" I answered. I saw no
+misery or poverty there. Everyone looked happy. What hurts me on coming
+back to England is the <i>hopeless</i> look on so many faces; the dejection
+and apathy of the people standing about in the streets. Of course there
+is poverty in New York, but not among the Americans. The Italians, the
+Russians, the Poles&mdash;all the host of immigrants washed in daily across
+the harbour&mdash;these are poor, but you don't see them unless you go Bowery
+ways and even then you can't help feeling that in their sufferings there
+is always hope. Vulgarity? I saw little of it. I thought that the people
+who had amassed large fortunes used their wealth beautifully. When a man
+is rich enough to build himself a big, new house, he remembers some old
+house which he once admired, and he has it imitated with all the
+technical skill and care that can be had in America. This accounts for
+the odd jumble of styles in Fifth Avenue, along the lake-side in
+Chicago, in the new avenues in St. Louis and elsewhere. One
+millionaire's house is modelled on a French ch&acirc;teau, another on an old
+Colonial house in Virginia, another on a monastery in Mexico, another is
+like an Italian <i>palazzo</i>. And their imitations are never weak or
+pretentious. The architects in America seem to me to be far more able
+than ours, or else they have a freer hand and more money.</p>
+
+<h3><a name="The_Work_of_Augustus_Saint-Gaudens" id="The_Work_of_Augustus_Saint-Gaudens"></a><i>The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens</i></h3>
+
+<p>It is sad to remember that Mr. Stanford White was one of the best of
+these splendid architects. It was Stanford White with Saint-Gaudens,
+that great sculptor, whose work dignifies nearly all the great cities in
+America, who had most to do with the Exhibition buildings of the World's
+Fair in Chicago in 1893. It was odd to see that fair dream city rising
+out of the lake, so far more beautiful in its fleeting loveliness than
+the Chicago of the stock-yards and the pit which had provided the money
+for its beauty. The millionaires did not interfere with the artists at
+all. They gave their thousands&mdash;and stood aside. The result was one of
+the loveliest things conceivable. Saint-Gaudens and the rest did their
+work as well as though the buildings were to endure for centuries
+instead of being burned in a year to save the trouble of pulling down!
+The World's Fair recalled to me the story of how Michelangelo carved a
+figure in snow which, says the chronicler Vasari who saw it, "was
+superb."</p>
+
+<p>Saint-Gaudens gave me a cast of his medallion of Bastien-Lepage, and
+wrote to a friend of mine: "Bastien had '<i>le coeur au m&eacute;tier</i>.' So has
+Miss Terry, and I will place that saying in the frame that is to replace
+the present unsatisfactory one." He was very fastidious about this frame
+and took such a lot of trouble to get it right.</p>
+
+<p>It must have been very irritating to Saint-Gaudens when he fell a victim
+to that extraordinary official Puritanism which sometimes exercises a
+petty censorship over works of art in America. The medal that he made
+for the World's Fair was rejected at Washington because it had on it a
+beautiful little nude figure of a boy&mdash;holding an olive
+branch&mdash;emblematical of young America. I think a commonplace wreath and
+some lettering were substituted.</p>
+
+<p>Saint-Gaudens did the fine bas-relief of Robert Louis Stevenson which
+was chosen for the monument in St. Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh. He gave
+my daughter a medallion cast from this, because he knew that she was a
+great lover of Stevenson. The bas-relief was dedicated to his friend,
+Joe Evans. I knew Saint-Gaudens first through Joe Evans, an artist who,
+while he lived, was to me and to my daughter the dearest of all in
+America. His character was so fine and noble&mdash;his nature so perfect.
+Many were the birthday cards he did for me, original in design,
+beautiful in execution.<!-- Page 131 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> Whatever he did, he put the best of himself
+into it. I wrote this in my diary the year he died:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"I heard on Saturday that our dear Joe Evans is dangerously ill.
+Yesterday came the worst news. Joe was not happy, but he was just
+heroic, and this world wasn't half good enough for him. I wonder if
+he has gone to a better. I keep on getting letters about him. He
+seems to have been so glad to die. It was like a child's funeral, I
+am told, and all his American friends seem to have been
+there&mdash;Saint-Gaudens, Taber, etc. A poem about the dear fellow by
+Mr. Gilder has one very good line in which he says the grave 'might
+snatch a brightness from his presence there.' I thought that was
+very happy, the love of light and gladness being the most
+remarkable thing about him, the dear sad Joe."</p></div>
+
+<h3><a name="Robert_Taber" id="Robert_Taber"></a><i>Robert Taber</i></h3>
+
+<p>Robert Taber, dear, and rather sad too, was a great friend of Joe's.
+They both came to me first in the shape of a little book in which was
+inscribed: "Never anything can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender
+it." "Upon this hint I spake," the book began. It was all the work of a
+few boys and girls who from the gallery of the Star Theatre, New York,
+had watched Irving's productions and learned to love him and me. Joe
+Evans had done a lovely picture by way of frontispiece of a group of
+eager heads hanging over the gallery's edge, his own and Taber's among
+them. Eventually Taber came to England and acted with Henry Irving in
+"Peter the Great" and other plays.</p>
+
+<p>Like his friend Joe, he too was heroic. His health was bad and his life
+none too happy&mdash;but he struggled on. His career was cut short by
+consumption and he died in the Adirondacks in 1904.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot speak of all my friends in America, or anywhere, for the matter
+of that, <i>individually</i>. My personal friends are so many, and they are
+<i>all</i> wonderful&mdash;wonderfully staunch to me! I have "tried" them so, and
+they have never given me up as a bad job.</p>
+
+<h3><i>Dramatic Criticism in America</i></h3>
+
+<p>William Winter, poet, critic, and exquisite man, was one of the first to
+write of Henry with whole-hearted appreciation. But all the criticism in
+America, favourable and unfavourable, surprised us by the scholarly
+knowledge it displayed. In Chicago the notices were worthy of the
+<i>Temps</i> or the <i>Journal des D&eacute;bats</i>. There was no attempt to force the
+personality of the writer into the foreground nor to write a style that
+would attract attention to the critic and leave the thing criticised to
+take care of itself. William Winter and, of late years, Alan Dale have
+had their personalities associated with their criticisms, but they are
+exceptions. Curiously enough, the art of acting appears to bore most
+dramatic critics, the very people who might be expected to be interested
+in it. The American critics, however, at the time of our early visits,
+were keenly interested, and showed it by their observation of many
+points which our English critics had passed over. For instance, writing
+of "Much Ado about Nothing," one of the Americans said of Henry in the
+Church Scene that "something of him as a subtle interpreter of doubtful
+situations was exquisitely shown in the early part of this fine scene by
+his suspicion of Don John&mdash;felt by him alone, and expressed only by a
+quick covert look, but a look so full of intelligence as to proclaim him
+a sharer in the secret with his audience."</p>
+
+<p>"Wherein does the superiority lie?" wrote another critic in comparing
+our productions with those which had been seen in America up to 1884.
+"Not in the amount of money expended, but in the amount of brains; in
+the artistic intelligence and careful and earnest pains with which every
+detail is studied and worked out. Nor is there any reason why Mr. Irving
+or any other foreigner should have a monopoly of either intelligence or
+pains. They are common property and one man's money can buy them as well
+as another's. The defect in the American manager's policy heretofore has
+been that he has squandered his money upon high salaries for a few of
+his actors; and in costly, because unintelligent, expenditure for mere
+dazzle and show."</p>
+
+<h3><i>William Winter and His Children</i></h3>
+
+<p>William Winter soon became a great personal friend of ours, and visited
+us in England. He was one of the few <i>sad</i> people I met in America. He
+could have sat upon the ground and "told sad stories of the deaths of
+kings" with the best. In England he loved going to see graveyards, and
+knew where every poet was buried. He was very familiar with the poetry
+of the <i>immediate</i> past&mdash;Cowper, Coleridge, Gray, Wordsworth, Shelley,
+Keats, and the rest. He <i>liked</i> us, so everything we did was right to
+him. He could not help being guided entirely by his feelings. If he
+disliked a thing, he had no use for it. Some men can say, "I hate this
+play, but of its kind it is admirable." Willie Winter could never take
+that unemotional point of view.</p>
+
+<p>His children came to stay with me in London. When we were all coming
+home from the theatre<!-- Page 132 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> one night after Faust (the year must have been
+1886), I said to little Willie:</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what do you think of the play?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh my!" said he, "it takes the cake."</p>
+
+<p>"Takes the <i>cake</i>," said his little sister scornfully. "It takes the
+ice-cream!"</p>
+
+<p>"Won't you give me a kiss?" said Henry to the same little girl one
+night.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I <i>won't</i>, with all that blue stuff on your face." (He was made up
+for Mephistopheles.) Then, after a pause, "But why&mdash;why don't you <i>take</i>
+it!" She was only five years old at the time!</p>
+
+<h3><i>Discovering the Southern Darkey</i></h3>
+
+<p>For quite a while during the first tour I stayed in Washington with my
+friend, Miss Olive Seward, and all the servants of that delightful
+household were coloured. This was my first introduction to the negroes,
+whose presence in the country makes America seem more foreign than
+anything to European eyes. They are more sharply divided into high and
+low types than white people, and are not in the least alike in their
+types. It is safe to call any coloured man "George." They all love it,
+perhaps because of George Washington; and most of them are really named
+George. I never met with such perfect service as they can give. <i>Some</i>
+of them are delightful. The beautiful, full voice of the "darkey" is so
+attractive&mdash;so soothing, and they are so deft and gentle. Some of the
+women are beautiful, and all the young appeared to me to be well-formed.
+As for the babies! I washed two or three little piccaninnies when I was
+in the South, and the way they rolled their gorgeous eyes at me was "too
+cute," which means, in British-English, "fascinating."</p>
+
+<p>At the Washington house, the servants danced a cake-walk for me&mdash;the
+coloured cook, a magnificent type, who "took the cake," saying, "That
+was because I chose a good handsome boy to dance with, Missie." They
+sang, too. Their voices were beautiful&mdash;with such illimitable power, yet
+as sweet as treacle.</p>
+
+<p>The little page boy had a pet of a woolly head&mdash;Henry once gave him a
+tip, a "fee," in American-English, and said: "There, that's for a new
+wig when this one is worn out," gently pulling the astrakhan-like hair.
+The tip would have bought him many wigs, I think!</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Uncle Tom, how your face shines to-night!" said my hostess to one
+of the very old servants.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Missie, glycerine and rose-water, Missie!"</p>
+
+<p>He had taken some from her dressing-table to shine up his face in honour
+of me! A shiny complexion is considered to be a great beauty among the
+blacks. The dear old man! He was very bent and very old; and looked like
+one of the logs that he used to bring in for the fire&mdash;a log from some
+hoary, lichened tree whose life was long since past. He would produce
+pins from his head when you wanted one; he had them stuck in his pad of
+white woolly hair. "Always handy then, Missie," he would say.</p>
+
+<p>"Ask them to sing 'Sweet Violets,' Uncle Tom."</p>
+
+<p>He was acting as a sort of master of the ceremonies at the entertainment
+the servants were giving me.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't think they know dat, Miss Olly."</p>
+
+<p>"Why I heard them singing it the other night!" And she hummed the tune.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, dat was 'Sweet Vio-<i>letts</i>,' Miss Olly!"</p>
+
+<h3><i>American Women</i></h3>
+
+<p>Washington was the first city I had seen in America where the people did
+not hurry, and where the social life did not seem entirely the work of
+women. The men asserted themselves here as something more than machines
+in the background, untiringly turning out the dollars while their wives
+and daughters give luncheons and teas at which only women are present.</p>
+
+<p>Beautifully as the women dress, they talk very little about clothes. I
+was much struck by their culture&mdash;by the evidence that they had read far
+more and developed a more fastidious taste than most young Englishwomen.
+Yet it is all mixed up with extraordinary na&iuml;vet&eacute;. Their vivacity, the
+appearance, at least, of <i>reality</i>, the animation, the energy of
+American women, delighted me. They are very sympathetic, too, in spite
+of a certain callousness which comes of regarding everything in life,
+even love, as "lots of fun." I did not think that they, or the men
+either, had much natural sense of beauty. They admire beauty in a
+curious way through their intellect. Nearly every American girl has a
+cast of the winged Victory of the Louvre in her room. She makes it a
+point of her <i>education</i> to admire it.</p>
+
+<p>There! I am beginning to generalize&mdash;the very thing I was resolute to
+avoid. How silly to generalize about a country which embraces such
+extremes of climate as the sharp winters of Boston and New York, and the
+warm winds of Florida which blow through palms and orange groves!<!-- Page 133 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_DECREE_MADE_ABSOLUTE" id="THE_DECREE_MADE_ABSOLUTE"></a>THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE</h2>
+
+<h3>BY MARIE BELLOC LOWNDES</h3>
+
+<h3>ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTHUR G. DOVE</h3>
+
+<p>James Tapster was eating his solitary, well-cooked dinner in his
+comfortable and handsome house, a house situated in one of the half-moon
+terraces which line and frame the more aristocratic side of Regent's
+Park, and which may, indeed, be said to have private grounds of their
+own, for each resident enjoys the use of a key to a portion of the Park
+entitled locally the "Inclosure."</p>
+
+<p>Very early in his life Mr. Tapster had made up his mind that he would
+like to live in Cumberland Crescent, and now he was living there; very
+early in his life he had decided that no one could order a plain yet
+palatable meal as well as he could himself, and now for some months past
+Mr. Tapster had given his own orders, each morning, to the cook.</p>
+
+<p>To-night Mr. Tapster had already eaten his fried sole, and was about to
+cut himself off a generous portion of the grilled undercut before him,
+when he heard the postman's steps hurrying around the Crescent. He rose
+with a certain quick deliberateness, and, going out into the hall,
+opened the front door just in time to avoid the rat-tat-tat. Then, the
+one letter he had expected duly in his hand, he waited till he had sat
+down again in front of his still empty plate before he broke the seal
+and glanced over the type-written sheet of note-paper:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class="author">
+<span class="smcap">Shorters Court</span>,<br />
+<span class="smcap">Throgmorton St.</span><br />
+November 4, 190-.<br />
+</p>
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><span class="smcap">Dear James</span>:</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>In reply to your letter of yesterday's date, I have been to Bedford Row
+and seen Greenfield, and he thinks it probable that the Decree will be
+made Absolute to-day; in that case you will have received a wire before
+this letter reaches you.</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+Your affect' brother,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;"><span class="smcap">Wm. A. Tapster.</span></span><br />
+</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>In the same handwriting as the signature were added two holograph lines:
+"Glad you have the children home again. Maud will be round to see them
+soon."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tapster read over once again the body of the letter, and there came
+upon him an instinctive feeling of intense relief; then, with a not less
+instinctive feeling of impatience, his eyes traveled down again to the
+postscript: "Maud will be round to see them soon." Well, he would see
+about that! But he did not exclaim, even mentally, as most men feeling
+as he then felt would have done, "I'll be damned if she will!" knowing
+the while that Maud certainly would.</p>
+
+<p>His brother's letter, though most satisfactory as regarded its main
+point, put Mr. Tapster out of conceit with the rest of his dinner; so he
+rang twice and had the table cleared, frowning at the parlor-maid as she
+hurried through her duties, and yet not daring to rebuke her for having
+neglected to answer the bell the first time he rang. After a pause, he
+rose and turned toward the door&mdash;but no, he could not face the large,
+cheerless drawing-room up-stairs; instead, he sat down by the fire, and
+set himself to consider his future and, in a more hazy sense, that of
+his now motherless children.</p>
+
+<p>But very soon, as generally happens to those who devote any time to that
+least profitable of occupations, Mr. Tapster found that his thoughts
+drifted aimlessly, not to the future where he would have them be, but to
+the past&mdash;that past which he desired to forget, to obliterate from his
+memory.</p>
+
+<p>Till rather more than a year ago few men of his age&mdash;he had then been
+sixty, he was now sixty-one&mdash;enjoyed a pleasanter and, from his own
+point of view, a better filled life than James Tapster. How he had
+scorned the gambler, the spendthrift, the adulterer&mdash;in a word, all
+those whose actions bring about their own inevitable punishment! He had
+always been self-respecting and conscientious&mdash;not a prig, mind you, but
+inclined rather to the serious than to the flippant side of life; and,
+so inclining, he had found contentment and great material prosperity.</p>
+
+<p>Not even in those days to which he was now looking back so regretfully
+had Mr. Tapster always been perfectly content; but now the<!-- Page 134 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> poor man,
+sitting alone by his dining-room fire, remembered only what had been
+good and pleasant in his former state. He was aware that his brother
+William and William's wife, Maud, both thought that even now he had much
+to be thankful for. His line of business was brisk, scarcely touched by
+foreign competition, his income increasing at a steady rate of
+progression, and his children were exceptionally healthy. But, alas! now
+that, in place of there being a pretty little Mrs. Tapster on whom to
+spend easily earned money, his substance was being squandered by a crowd
+of unmanageable and yet indispensable thieves,&mdash;for so Mr. Tapster
+voicelessly described the five servants whose loud talk and laughter
+were even now floating up from the basement below,&mdash;he did not feel his
+financial stability so comfortable a thing as he had once done. His very
+children, who should now be, as he told himself complainingly, his
+greatest comfort, had degenerated from two sturdy, well-behaved little
+boys and a charming baby girl into three unruly, fretful imps, setting
+him at defiance, and terrorizing their two attendants, who, though
+carefully chosen by their Aunt Maud, did not seem to manage them as well
+as the old nurse who had been an ally of the ex-Mrs. Tapster.</p>
+
+<p>Looking back at the whole horrible affair&mdash;for so, in his own mind, Mr.
+Tapster justly designated the divorce case in which he had figured as
+the successful petitioner&mdash;he wondered uneasily if he had done quite
+wisely&mdash;wisely, that is, for his own repute and comfort.</p>
+
+<p>He knew very well that had it not been for William, or rather, for Maud,
+he would never have found out the dreadful truth. Nay, more, he was
+dimly aware that but for them, and for their insistence on it as the
+only proper course open to him, he would never have taken action. All
+would have been forgiven and forgotten, had not William, and more
+especially Maud, said he must divorce Flossy, if not for his own
+sake,&mdash;ah, what irony!&mdash;then for that of his children.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, he felt grateful to his brother William and to his brother's
+wife for all they had done for him since that sad time. Still, in the
+depths of his heart, Mr. Tapster felt entitled to blame and sometimes
+almost to hate his kind brother and sister. To them both, or rather, to
+Maud, he really owed the break-up of his life; for, when all was said
+and done, it had to be admitted (though Maud did not like him to remind
+her of it), that Flossy had met the villain while staying with the
+William Tapsters at Boulogne. Respectable London people should have
+known better than to take a furnished house at a disreputable French
+watering-place, a place full of low English!</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes it was only by a great exercise of self-control that he, James
+Tapster, could refrain from telling Maud what he thought of her conduct
+in this matter, the more so that she never seemed to understand how
+greatly she&mdash;and William&mdash;had been to blame. On one occasion Maud had
+even said how surprised she had been that James had cared to go away to
+America, leaving his pretty young wife alone for as long as three
+months. Why hadn't she said so at the time, then? Of course, he had
+thought that he could leave Flossy to be looked after and kept out of
+mischief by Maud and William. But he had been, in more than one sense,
+alas! bitterly deceived.</p>
+
+<p>Still, it's never any use crying over spilt milk, so Mr. Tapster got up
+from his chair and walked around the room, looking absently, as he did
+so, at the large Landseer engravings, of which he was naturally proud.
+If only he could forget, put out of his mind forever, the whole affair!
+Well, perhaps with the Decree being made Absolute would come oblivion.</p>
+
+<p>He sat down again before the fire. Staring at the hot embers, he
+reminded himself that Flossy, wicked, ungrateful Flossy, had disappeared
+out of his life. This being so, why think of her? The very children had
+at last left off asking inconvenient questions about their mama.</p>
+
+<p>By the way, would Flossy still be their mama after the Decree had been
+made Absolute? So Mr. Tapster now suddenly asked himself. He hesitated,
+perplexed. But, yes, the Decree being made Absolute would not undo, or
+even efface, that fact. The more so&mdash;though surely here James Tapster
+showed himself less logical than usual&mdash;the more so that Flossy, in
+spite of what Maud had always said about her, had been a loving and, in
+her own light-hearted way, a careful mother. But, though Flossy would
+remain the mother of his children,&mdash;odd that the Law hadn't provided for
+that contingency&mdash;she would soon be absolutely nothing, and less than
+nothing, to him, the father of those children. Mr. Tapster was a great
+believer in the infallibility of the Law, and he subscribed
+whole-heartedly to the new reading, "What Law has put asunder, let no
+man join together."</p>
+
+<p>To-night Mr. Tapster could not help looking back with a certain
+complacency to his one legal adventure. Nothing could have been better
+done or more admirably conducted than the way the whole matter had been
+carried through. His brother William, and William's solicitor,<!-- Page 135 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> Mr.
+Greenfield, had managed it all so very nicely. True, there had been a
+few uncomfortable moments in the witness-box, but every one, including
+the judge, had been most kind. As for his counsel, the leading man who
+makes a specialty of these sad affairs, not even James Tapster himself
+could have put his own case in a more delicate and moving fashion. "A
+gentleman possessed of considerable fortune&mdash;" so had he justly been
+described; and counsel, without undue insistence on irrelevant detail,
+had drawn a touching and a true picture of Mr. Tapster's one romance,
+his marriage eight years before to the twenty-year-old daughter of an
+undischarged bankrupt. Even the Petitioner had scarcely seen Flossy's
+dreadful ingratitude in its true colors till he had heard his counsel's
+moderate comments on the case.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/illus0320.jpg" width="400" height="281" alt="&quot;HE REMINDED HIMSELF THAT FLOSSY, WICKED, UNGRATEFUL
+FLOSSY, HAD DISAPPEARED OUT OF HIS LIFE&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;HE REMINDED HIMSELF THAT FLOSSY, WICKED, UNGRATEFUL
+FLOSSY, HAD DISAPPEARED OUT OF HIS LIFE&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>This evening Mr. Tapster saw Flossy's dreadful ingratitude terribly
+clearly, and he wondered, not for the first time, how his wife could
+have had the heart to break up his happy home. Why, but for him and his
+offer of marriage, Flossy Ball&mdash;that had been his wife's maiden
+name&mdash;would have had to earn her own living! And as she had been very
+pretty, very "fetching," she would probably have married some
+good-for-nothing young fellow of her own age, lacking the means to
+support a wife in decent comfort,&mdash;such a fellow, for instance, as the
+wretched "co" in the case; while with Mr. Tapster&mdash;why, she had had
+everything the heart of woman could wish for&mdash;a good home, beautiful
+clothes, and the being waited on hand and foot. A strange choking
+feeling came into his throat as he thought of how good he had been to
+Flossy, and how very bad had been her return for that kindness.</p>
+
+<p>But this&mdash;this was dreadful! He was actually thinking of her again, and
+not, as he had meant to do, of himself and his poor motherless children!
+Time enough to think of Flossy when he had news of her again. If her
+lover did not marry her&mdash;and, from what Mr. Greenfield had discovered
+about him, it was most improbable that he would ever be in a position to
+do so&mdash;she would certainly reappear on the Tapster horizon: Mr.
+Greenfield said "they" always did. In that case, it was arranged that
+William should pay her a weekly allowance. Mr. Tapster, always, as he
+now reminded himself sadly, ready to do the generous thing, had fixed
+that allowance at three pounds a week, a sum which had astonished, in
+fact quite staggered, Mr. Greenfield's head clerk, a very decent fellow,
+by the way.<!-- Page 136 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Of course, it shall be as you wish, Mr. Tapster, but you should think
+of the future and of your children. A hundred and fifty pounds a year is
+a large sum; you may feel it a tax, sir, as years go on&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"That is enough," Mr. Tapster had answered, kindly but firmly; "you have
+done your duty in laying that side of the case before me. I have,
+however, decided on the amount named; should I see reason to alter my
+mind, our arrangement leaves it open to me at any time to lower the
+allowance."</p>
+
+<p>But, though this conversation had taken place some months ago, and
+though Mr. Tapster still held true to his generous resolve, as yet
+Flossy had not reappeared. Mr. Tapster sometimes told himself that if he
+only knew where she was, what she was doing,&mdash;whether she was still with
+that young fellow, for instance,&mdash;he would think much less about her
+than he did now. Only last night, going for a moment into the night
+nursery,&mdash;poor Mr. Tapster now enjoyed his children's company only when
+he was quite sure that they were asleep,&mdash;he had had an extraordinary,
+almost a physical impression of Flossy's presence; he certainly had felt
+a faint whiff of her favorite perfume. Flossy had been fond of scent,
+and, though Maud always said that the use of scent was most unladylike,
+he, James, did not dislike it.</p>
+
+<p>With sudden soreness, Mr. Tapster now recalled the one letter Flossy had
+written to him just before the actual hearing of the divorce suit. It
+had been a wild, oddly worded appeal to him to take her back, not&mdash;as
+Maud had at once perceived on reading the letter&mdash;because she was sorry
+for the terrible thing she had done, but simply because she was
+beginning to hanker after her children. Maud had described the letter as
+shameless and unwomanly in the extreme, and even William, who had never
+judged his pretty young sister-in-law as severely as his wife had always
+done, had observed sadly that Flossy seemed quite unaware of the
+magnitude of her offense against God and man.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Mr. Tapster, who prided himself on his sharp ears, suddenly heard a
+curious little sound. He knew it for that of the front door being first
+opened, and then shut again, extremely quietly. He half rose from his
+chair by the fire, then sat down again heavily.</p>
+
+<p>By Maud's advice, he always locked the area gate himself when he came
+home each evening. But how foolish of Maud&mdash;such a sensible woman,
+too&mdash;to think that servants and their evil ways could be circumvented so
+easily. Of course, the maids went in and out by the front door in the
+evening, and the policeman&mdash;a most respectable officer standing at point
+duty a few yards lower down the road&mdash;must be well aware of these
+disgraceful "goings on".</p>
+
+<p>For the first two or three months of his widowerhood (how else could he
+term his present peculiar wifeless condition?) there had been a constant
+coming and going of servants, first chosen, and then dismissed, by Maud.
+At last she suggested that her brother-in-law should engage a lady
+housekeeper, and the luckless James Tapster had even interviewed several
+applicants for the post after they had been chosen&mdash;sifted out, as it
+were&mdash;by Maud. Unfortunately, they had all been more or less of his own
+age, and plain, very plain; while he, naturally enough, would have
+preferred to see something young and pretty about him again.</p>
+
+<p>It was over this housekeeper question that he had at last escaped from
+Maud's domestic thraldom; for his sister-in-law, offended by his
+rejection of each of her candidates, had declared that she would take no
+more trouble about his household affairs! Nay, more, she had reminded
+him with a smile that she had honestly tried to make pleasant, that
+there is, after all, no fool like an old fool&mdash;about women. This
+insinuation had made Mr. Tapster very angry, and straightway he had
+engaged a respectable cook-housekeeper, and, although he had soon become
+aware that the woman was feathering her own nest,&mdash;James Tapster, as you
+will have divined ere now, was fond of good workaday phrases,&mdash;yet she
+had a pleasant, respectful manner, and kept rough order among the
+younger servants.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tapster's sister-in-law now interfered only where his children were
+concerned. Never having been herself a mother, she had, of course, been
+able to form a clear and unprejudiced judgment as to how children, and
+especially as to how little boys, should be physically and mentally
+trained. As yet, however, Maud had not been very successful with her two
+nephews and infant niece, but this was doubtless owing to the fact that
+there had been something gravely amiss with each of the five nurses who
+had been successively engaged by her during the last year.</p>
+
+<p>The elder of Mr. Tapster's sons was six, and the second four; the
+youngest child, a little girl named, unfortunately, Flora, after her
+mother, was three years old. There had been a fourth, Flossy's second
+baby, also a girl, who had only lived one day. All this being so, was it
+not strange that a young matron who had led, for some four years out of
+the eight years her married life had lasted, so wholly womanly and<!-- Page 137 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>
+domestic an existence as had fallen to the lot of Flossy, should have
+been led astray by the meretricious allurements of unlawful
+love?&mdash;Maud's striking thought and phrase, this.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 138 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 272px;">
+<img src="images/illus0321.jpg" width="272" height="400" alt="&quot;THERE STOOD CLOSE TO HIM, SO CLOSE THAT HE COULD ALMOST
+HAVE TOUCHED HER, FLOSSY, HIS WIFE&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;THERE STOOD CLOSE TO HIM, SO CLOSE THAT HE COULD ALMOST
+HAVE TOUCHED HER, FLOSSY, HIS WIFE&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>And yet, Flossy, in spite of her frivolity, had somehow managed the
+children far better than Maud was now able to do. At the present time,
+so Mr. Tapster admitted to himself with something very like an inward
+groan, his two sons possessed every vice of which masculine infancy is
+capable. They had become, so he was told by their indignant nurses, the
+terror of the well-behaved children who shared with them the pleasures
+of the Park Inclosure, where they took their daily exercise; and Baby,
+once so sweet and good, was now very fretful and peevish.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Again the train of Mr. Tapster's mournful thoughts was disturbed by a
+curious little sound&mdash;that of some one creeping softly down the
+staircase leading from the upper floors. Once more he half rose from his
+chair, only to fall heavily back again, with a look of impotent
+annoyance on his round, whiskered face. Where was the use of his going
+out into the hall and catching Nurse on her way to the kitchen? Maud had
+declared, very early in the day, that there should be as little
+communication as possible between the kitchen and the nursery, but Mr.
+Tapster sometimes found himself in secret sympathy with the two women
+whose disagreeable duty it was to be always with his three turbulent
+children.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tapster frowned and stared gloomily into the fire; then he suddenly
+pulled himself together rather sharply, for the door behind him had
+slowly swung open. This was intolerable! The parlor-maid had again and
+again been told that, whatever might have been the case in her former
+places, no door in Mr. Tapster's house was to be opened without the
+preliminary of a respectful knock.</p>
+
+<p>Fortified by the memory of what had been a positive order, he turned
+round, nerving himself to deliver the necessary rebuke. But instead of
+the shifty-eyed, impudent-looking woman he had thought to see, there
+stood close to him, so close that he could almost have touched her,
+Flossy, his wife, or rather the woman who, though no longer his wife,
+had still, as he had been informed to his discomfiture, the right to
+bear his name.</p>
+
+<p>A very strange feeling, and one so complicated that it sat uneasily upon
+him, took instant possession of Mr. Tapster: anger, surprise, and relief
+warred with one another in his heart.</p>
+
+<p>Then he began to think that his eyes must be playing him some curious
+trick, for the figure at which he was staring remained strangely still
+and motionless. Was it possible that his mind, dwelling constantly on
+Flossy, had evoked her wraith? But, no, looking up in startled silence
+at the still figure standing before him, he realized that not so would
+memory have conjured up the pretty, bright little woman of whom he had
+once been proud. Flossy still looked pretty, but she was thin and pale,
+and there were dark rings round her eyes; also, her dress was worn, her
+hat curiously shabby.</p>
+
+<p>As Mr. Tapster stared up at her, noting these things, one of her hands
+began playing nervously with the fringe of the dining-table cover, and
+the other sought the back of what had once been one of her dining-room
+chairs. As he watched her making these slight movements, nature so far
+reasserted itself that a feeling of poignant regret, of pity for her, as
+well as, of course, a much larger share of pity for himself, came over
+James Tapster.</p>
+
+<p>Had Flossy spoken then,&mdash;had she possessed the intuitive knowledge of
+men which is the gift of so many otherwise unintelligent women,&mdash;the
+whole of Mr. Tapster's future, to say nothing of her own, might have
+been different and, it may be suggested, happier.</p>
+
+<p>But the moment of softening and mansuetude slipped quickly by, and was
+succeeded by a burst of anger; for Mr. Tapster suddenly became aware
+that Flossy's left hand, the little thin hand resting on the back of the
+chair, was holding two keys which he recognized at once as his property.
+The one was a replica of the latch-key which always hung on his
+watch-chain, while the other and larger key, to which was attached a
+brass tag bearing the name of Tapster and the address of the house, gave
+access to the Inclosure Garden opposite Cumberland Crescent!</p>
+
+<p>Avoiding her eager, pitiful look, Mr. Tapster set himself to realize,
+with a shrewdness for which William and Maud would never have given him
+credit, what Flossy's possession of those two keys had meant during the
+last few months.</p>
+
+<p>This woman, who both was and was not Mrs. Tapster, had retained the
+power to come freely in and out of <i>his</i> house! She had been able to
+make her way, with or without the connivance of the servants, into <i>his</i>
+children's nursery at any hour of the day or night convenient to
+herself! With the aid of that Inclosure key, she had no doubt often seen
+the children during their daily walk! In a word, Flossy had been able to
+enjoy all the privileges of motherhood while having forfeited all those
+of happy wifehood!</p>
+
+<p>His mind hastened heavily on. What a fool<!-- Page 139 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> he must have looked before
+his servants! How they must have laughed to think that he was being so
+deceived and taken in! Why, even the policeman who stood at point duty
+outside must have known all about it!</p>
+
+<p>Small wonder that Mr. Tapster felt extremely incensed; small wonder that
+his heart, hardening, solidifying, expelled any feeling of pity provoked
+by Flossy's sad and downcast appearance.</p>
+
+<p>"I must request you," he said, in a voice which even to himself sounded
+harsh and needlessly loud, "to give me up those keys which you hold in
+your hand. You have no right to their possession, and I grieve to think
+that you took advantage of my great distress of mind not to return them
+with the things of which I sent you a list by my brother William. I
+cannot believe"&mdash;and now Mr. Tapster lied as only the very truthful can
+lie on occasion&mdash;"I cannot believe, I say, that you have taken advantage
+of my having overlooked them, and that you have ever before to-night
+forced yourself into this house! Still less can I believe that you have
+taught our&mdash;<i>my</i>&mdash;children to deceive their father!"</p>
+
+<p>Even when uttering his first sentence, he had noticed that there had
+come over Flossy's face&mdash;which was thinner, if quite as pretty and
+youthful-looking, as when he had last seen it&mdash;an expression of
+obstinacy which he had once well known and always dreaded. It had been
+Flossy's one poor weapon against her husband's superior sense and power
+of getting his own way, and sometimes it had vanquished him in that fair
+fight which is always being waged between the average husband and wife.</p>
+
+<p>"You are right," she cried passionately. "I have not taught the children
+to deceive you! I have never come into this house until I felt sure that
+they were asleep and alone, though I've often wondered that they never
+woke up and knew that their own mother was there! But more than once,
+James, I've felt like going after that society which looks after badly
+treated children&mdash;for the last nurse you had for them was so cruel! If
+she hadn't left you soon I should have <i>had</i> to do something! I used to
+feel desperate when I saw her shake Baby in her pram; why, one day, in
+the Inclosure, a lady spoke to her about it, and threatened to tell
+her&mdash;her mistress&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Flossy's voice sank to a shamed whisper. The tears were rolling down her
+cheeks; she was speaking in angry gasps, and what she said actually made
+James Tapster feel, what he knew full well he had no reason to feel,
+ashamed of himself. "That is why," she went on, "that is why I have, as
+you say, forced myself into your house, and why, too, I have now come
+here to ask you to forgive me&mdash;to take me back&mdash;just for the sake of the
+children."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tapster's mind was one that traveled surely, if slowly. He saw his
+chance, and seized it. "And why," he said impressively, "had that
+woman&mdash;the nurse, I mean&mdash;no mistress? Tell me that, Flossy. You should
+have thought of all that before you behaved as you did!"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know&mdash;I didn't think&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tapster finished the sentence for her: "You didn't think," he
+observed impressively, "that I should ever find you out."</p>
+
+<p>Then there came over him a morbid wish to discover&mdash;to learn from her
+own lips&mdash;why Flossy had done such a shameful and extraordinary thing as
+to be unfaithful to her marriage vow.</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever made you behave so?" he asked in a low voice. "I wasn't unkind
+to you, was I? You had a nice, comfortable home, hadn't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I was mad," she answered, with a touch of sharp weariness. "I don't
+suppose I could ever make you understand; and yet,"&mdash;she looked at him
+deprecatingly,&mdash;"I suppose, James, that you too were young once,
+and&mdash;and&mdash;mad?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tapster stared at Flossy. What extraordinary things she said! Of
+course he had been young once; for the matter of that, he didn't feel
+old&mdash;not to say <i>old</i>&mdash;even now. But he had always been perfectly
+sane&mdash;she knew that well enough! As for her calling herself mad, that
+was a mere figure of speech. Of course, in a sense, she had been mad to
+do what she had done, and he was glad that she now understood this; but
+her saying so simply begged the whole question, and left him no wiser
+than he was before.</p>
+
+<p>There was a long, tense silence between them. Then Mr. Tapster slowly
+rose from his arm-chair and faced his wife.</p>
+
+<p>"I see," he said, "that William was right. I mean, I suppose I may take
+it that that young fellow has gone and left you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, with a curious indifference, "he has gone and left me.
+His father made him take a job out in Brazil just after the case was
+through."</p>
+
+<p>"And what have you been doing since then?" asked Mr. Tapster
+suspiciously. "How have you been living?"</p>
+
+<p>"His father gives me a pound a week." Flossy still spoke with that
+curious indifference. "I tried to get something to do"&mdash;she hesitated,
+then offered the lame explanation&mdash;"just to have something to do, for
+I've been<!-- Page 140 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> awfully lonely and miserable, James; but I don't seem to be
+able to get anything."</p>
+
+<p>"If you had written to Mr. Greenfield or to William, they would have
+told you that I had arranged for you to have an allowance," he said, and
+then again he fell into silence....</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tapster was seeing a vision of himself, magnanimous,
+forgiving&mdash;taking the peccant Flossy back to his heart and becoming once
+more, in a material sense, comfortable! If he acceded to her wish, if he
+made up his mind to forgive her, he would have to begin life all over
+again, move away from Cumberland Crescent to some distant place where
+the story was not known&mdash;perhaps to Clapham, where he had spent his
+boyhood.</p>
+
+<p>But how about Maud? How about William? How about the very considerable
+expense to which he had been put in connection with the divorce
+proceedings? Was all that money to be wasted? Mr. Tapster suddenly saw
+the whole of his little world rising up in judgment, smiling pityingly
+at his folly and weakness. During the whole of a long and of what had
+been, till this last year, a very prosperous life, Mr. Tapster had
+always steered his safe course by what may be called the compass of
+public opinion, and now, when navigating an unknown sea, he could not
+afford to throw that compass overboard, so&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"No," he said; "no, Flossy. It would not be right for me to take you
+back. <i>It wouldn't do.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"Wouldn't it?" she asked piteously. "Oh, James, don't say no like that,
+all at once! People do forgive each other&mdash;sometimes. I don't ask you to
+be as kind to me as you were before&mdash;only to let me come home and see
+after the children!"</p>
+
+<p>But Mr. Tapster shook his head. The children! Always the children! He
+noticed, even now, that she didn't say a word of wanting to come back to
+<i>him</i>; and yet, he had been such a kind, nay, if Maud were to be
+believed, such a foolishly indulgent husband.</p>
+
+<p>And then, Flossy looked so different. Mr. Tapster felt as if a stranger
+were standing there before him. Her appearance of poverty shocked him.
+Had she looked well and prosperous, he would have felt injured, and yet
+her pinched face and shabby clothes certainly repelled him. So again he
+shook his head, and there came into his face a look which Flossy had
+always known in old days to spell finality, and when he again spoke she
+saw that her knowledge had not misled her.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to be unkind," he said ponderously. "If you will only go
+to William, or write to him if you would rather not go to the
+office,"&mdash;Mr. Tapster did not like to think that any one once closely
+connected with him should "look like that" in his brother's office,&mdash;"he
+will tell you what you had better do. I'm quite ready to make you a
+handsome allowance&mdash;in fact, it is all arranged. You need not have
+anything more to do with that fellow's father&mdash;an army colonel, isn't
+he?&mdash;and his pound a week; but William thinks, and I must say I agree,
+that you ought to go back to your maiden name, Flossy, as being more
+fair to me."</p>
+
+<p>"And am I never to see the children again?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No; it wouldn't be right for me to let you do so." He hesitated, then
+added, "They don't miss you any more now"; with no unkindly intent he
+concluded, "soon they'll have forgotten you altogether."</p>
+
+<p>And then, just as Mr. Tapster was hesitating, seeking for a suitable and
+not unkindly sentence of farewell, he saw a very strange, almost a
+desperate look come over Flossy's face, and, to his surprise, she
+suddenly turned and left the room, closing the door very carefully
+behind her.</p>
+
+<p>He stared after her. How very odd of her to say nothing! And what a
+strange look had come over her face! He could not help feeling hurt that
+she had not thanked him for what he knew to be a very generous and
+unusual provision on the part of an injured husband.... Mr. Tapster took
+a silk handkerchief out of his pocket and passed it twice over his face,
+then once more he sought and sank into the arm-chair by the fire.</p>
+
+<p>Even now he still felt keenly conscious of Flossy's nearness. What could
+she be doing? Then he straightened himself and listened; yes, it was as
+he feared; she had gone up-stairs&mdash;up-stairs to look at the children,
+for now he could hear her coming down again. How obstinate she was, how
+obstinate and ungrateful! Mr. Tapster wished he had the courage to go
+out into the hall and face her, in order to tell her how wrong her
+conduct was. Why, she had actually kept the keys&mdash;those keys that were
+his property!</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he heard her light footsteps hurrying down the hall; now she
+was opening the front door&mdash;it slammed, and again Mr. Tapster felt
+pained to think how strangely indifferent Flossie was to his interests.
+Why, what would the servants think, hearing the front door slam like
+that?</p>
+
+<p>But still, now that it was over, he was glad the interview had taken
+place, for henceforth&mdash;or so, at least, Mr. Tapster believed&mdash;the Flossy
+of the past, the bright, pretty, prosperous<!-- Page 141 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> Flossy of whom he had been
+so proud, would cease to haunt him. He remembered, with a feeling of
+relief, that she was going to his brother William; of course, she would
+then, among greater renunciations, be compelled to return the two
+keys&mdash;for they, that is, his brother and himself, would have her in
+their power. They would not behave unkindly to her&mdash;far from it; in
+fact, they would arrange for her to live with some quiet, religious lady
+in a country town a few hours from London.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 142 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 258px;">
+<img src="images/illus0322.jpg" width="258" height="400" alt="&quot;HE SAW THAT WHICH RATHER SURPRISED HIM, AND MADE HIM
+FEEL ACTIVELY INDIGNANT&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;HE SAW THAT WHICH RATHER SURPRISED HIM, AND MADE HIM
+FEEL ACTIVELY INDIGNANT&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Then Mr. Tapster began going over each incident of the strange little
+interview, for he wanted to tell his brother William exactly what had
+taken place.</p>
+
+<p>His conscience was quite clear, except with regard to one matter, and
+that, after all, needn't be mentioned to William. He felt rather ashamed
+of having asked the question which had provoked so strange and wild an
+answer&mdash;so unexpected a retort. Mad? What had Flossy meant by asking him
+if he had ever been mad? No one had ever used the word in connection
+with James Tapster before&mdash;save once. Oddly enough, that occasion also
+had been in a way connected with Flossy, for it had happened when he had
+gone to tell William and Maud of his engagement.</p>
+
+<p>It was on a fine day nine years ago come this May, and he had found
+William and William's wife walking in their little garden on Havenstock
+Hill. His kind brother, as always, had been most sympathetic, and had
+even made a suitable joke&mdash;Mr. Tapster remembered it very sadly
+to-night&mdash;concerning the spring and a young man's fancy; but Maud had
+been really disagreeable. She had said, "It's no use talking to you,
+James, for you're mad, quite mad!"</p>
+
+<p>Strange that he should remember all this to-night, for, after all, it
+had nothing to do with the present state of affairs.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tapster felt rather shaken and nervous; he pulled out his repeater
+watch, but, alas! it was still very early&mdash;only ten minutes to nine. He
+couldn't go to bed yet. Perhaps he would do well to join a club. He had
+always thought rather poorly of men who belonged to clubs&mdash;most of them
+were idle, lazy fellows; but still, circumstances alter cases.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he began to wish that Flossy had remained a little longer. He
+thought of all sorts of things&mdash;improving, kindly remarks&mdash;he would have
+liked to say to her. He blamed himself for not having offered her any
+refreshment; she would probably have refused to take anything, but
+still, it was wrong on his part not to have thought of it. A pound a
+week for everything! No wonder she looked starved. Why, his own
+household bills, exclusive of wine or beer, had worked out, since he had
+had this new expensive housekeeper, at something like fifteen shillings
+a head, a fact which he had managed to conceal from Maud, who "did" her
+William so well on exactly ten shillings and ninepence all round!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It struck nine from the neighboring church, where Mr. Tapster had
+sittings,&mdash;but where he seldom was able to go on Sunday mornings, for he
+was proud of being among those old-fashioned folk who still regard
+Sunday as essentially a day of rest,&mdash;and there came a sudden sound of
+hoarse shouting from the road outside. Though he was glad of anything
+that broke the oppressive silence with which he felt encompassed, Mr.
+Tapster found time to tell himself that it was disgraceful that vulgar
+street brawlers should invade so quiet a residential thoroughfare as
+Cumberland Crescent. But order would soon be restored, for the sound of
+a policeman's whistle cut sharply through the air.</p>
+
+<p>The noise, however, continued; he could hear the tramp of feet hurrying
+past his house and then leaving the pavement for the other side of the
+road. What could be the matter? Something very exciting must be going on
+just opposite his front door, that is, close to the Inclosure railings.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tapster got up from his chair, and walked in a leisurely way to the
+wide window. He drew aside the thick red rep curtains, and lifted a
+corner of the blind. Then, through the slightly foggy haze, he saw that
+which rather surprised him and made him feel actively indignant; for a
+string of people, men, women, and boys, were hurrying into the Inclosure
+Garden&mdash;that sacred place set apart for the exclusive use of the
+nobility and gentry who lived in Cumberland Crescent and the adjoining
+terraces.</p>
+
+<p>What an abominable thing! Why, the grass would all be trampled down; and
+these dirty people, these slum folk, who seem to spring out of the earth
+when anything of a disagreeable or shameful nature is taking place,&mdash;a
+fire, for instance, or a brawl,&mdash;might easily bring infectious diseases
+on to those gravel paths where the little Tapsters and their like run
+about, playing their innocent games. Some careless person had evidently
+left the gate unlocked, and the fight, or whatever it was, must be
+taking place inside the Inclosure!</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tapster tried in vain to see what was going on inside the railings,
+but everything beyond the brightly lighted road was wrapped in gray
+darkness. Some one suddenly held up<!-- Page 143 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> high a flaming torch, and the
+watcher at the window saw that the shadowy crowd which had managed to
+force its way into the Park hung together, like bees swarming, on the
+farther lawn through which flowed the Serpentine. With the gleaming of
+the yellow, wavering light there had fallen a sudden hush and silence,
+and Mr. Tapster wondered uneasily what those people were doing there,
+and what it was they were pressing forward so eagerly to see.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/illus0323.jpg" width="400" height="278" alt="&quot;HE ... TURNED TO SEE HIS HALL INVADED BY A STRANGE AND
+SINISTER QUARTET&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;HE ... TURNED TO SEE HIS HALL INVADED BY A STRANGE AND
+SINISTER QUARTET&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Then he realized that it must have been a fight, after all, for now the
+crowd was parting in two, and down the lane so formed Mr. Tapster saw
+coming toward the gate, and so in a sense toward himself, a rather
+pitiful little procession. Some one had evidently been injured, and that
+seriously; for four men, bearing a sheep-hurdle on which lay a huddled
+mass, were walking slowly toward the gate, and he heard distinctly the
+gruffly uttered words: "Stand back, please&mdash;back, there! We're going
+across the road." The now large crowd suddenly swayed forward; indeed,
+to Mr. Tapster's astonished eyes, they seemed to be actually making a
+rush for his house, and a moment later they were pressing around his
+area-railings.</p>
+
+<p>Looking down on the upturned faces below him, Mr. Tapster was very glad
+that a stout pane of glass stood between himself and the
+sinister-looking men and women who seemed to be staring up at him, or
+rather at his windows, with faces full of cruel, wolfish curiosity. He
+let the blind fall to gently. His interest in the vulgar, sordid scene
+had suddenly died down; the drama was now over; in a moment the crowd
+would disperse, the human vermin (but Mr. Tapster would never have used,
+even to himself, so coarse an expression) would be on their way back to
+their burrows. But before he had even time to rearrange the curtains in
+their right folds, there came a sudden loud, persistent knocking at his
+front door.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tapster turned around sharply, feeling justly incensed. Of course,
+he knew what it was&mdash;some good-for-nothing urchin finding a vent for his
+excited feelings. His parlor-maid, who was never in any hurry to open
+the door,&mdash;she had once kept him waiting ten minutes when he had
+forgotten his latch-key,&mdash;would certainly take no notice of this
+unseemly noise, but he, James Tapster, would himself hurry out and try
+to catch the delinquent, take his name and address, and thoroughly
+frighten him.</p>
+
+<p>As he reached the door of the dining-room, Mr. Tapster heard the front
+door open&mdash;open, too,&mdash;and this was certainly very surprising,&mdash;from the
+outside! In the hall he saw that it<!-- Page 144 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> was a policeman&mdash;in fact, the
+officer on point duty close by&mdash;who had opened his front door, and
+apparently with a latch-key.</p>
+
+<p>The constable spoke, as constables always do to the Mr. Tapsters of this
+world, in respectful and subdued tones:</p>
+
+<p>"Can I just come in and speak to you, sir? There's been a sad
+accident&mdash;your lady fallen in the water; we found these keys in her
+pocket, and then some one said she was Mrs. Tapster"; and the policeman
+held out the two keys which had played a not unimportant part in Mr.
+Tapster's interview with Flossy. "A man on the bridge saw her go in,"
+went on the policeman, "so she wasn't in the water long,&mdash;something like
+a quarter of an hour,&mdash;for we soon found her. I suppose you would like
+her taken up-stairs, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no," stammered Mr. Tapster, "not up-stairs; the children are
+up-stairs."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tapster's round, prominent eyes were shadowed with a great horror
+and an even greater surprise. He stood staring at the man before him,
+his hands clasped in a wholly unconscious gesture of supplication.</p>
+
+<p>The constable gradually edged himself backward into the dining-room.
+Realizing that he must take on himself the onus of decision, he gave a
+quiet look round.</p>
+
+<p>"If that's the case," he said firmly, "we had better bring her in here;
+that sofa that you have there, sir, will do nicely for her to be laid
+upon while they try to bring her round. We've got a doctor already."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tapster bent his head; he was too much bewildered to propose any
+other plan; and then he turned, turned to see his hall invaded by a
+strange and sinister quartet. It was composed of two policemen and of
+two of those loafers of whom he so greatly disapproved. They were
+carrying a hurdle from which Mr. Tapster quickly averted his eyes. But,
+though he was able to shut out the sight he feared to see, he could not
+prevent himself from hearing certain sounds, those, for instance, made
+by the two loafers, who breathed with ostentatious difficulty as if to
+show they were unaccustomed to bearing even so comparatively light a
+burden as Flossy drowned.</p>
+
+<p>There came a sudden short whisper-filled delay. The doorway of the
+dining-room was found to be too narrow, and the hurdle was perforce left
+in the hall.</p>
+
+<p>An urgent voice, full of wholly unconscious irony, muttered in Mr.
+Tapster's ear: "Of course, you would like to see her, sir," and he felt
+himself being propelled forward. Making an effort to bear himself so
+that he should not feel afterward ashamed of his lack of nerve, he
+forced himself to stare with dread-filled yet fascinated eyes at that
+which had just been laid upon the leather sofa.</p>
+
+<p>Flossy's hat, the shabby hat which had shocked Mr. Tapster's sense of
+what was seemly, was gone; her fair hair had all come down, and hung in
+pale-gold wisps about the face already fixed in the soft dignity which
+seems so soon to drape the features of those who die by drowning. Her
+widely opened eyes were now wholly emptied of the anguish with which
+they had gazed on Mr. Tapster in this very room less than an hour ago.
+Her mean brown serge gown, from which the water was still dripping,
+clung closely to her limbs, revealing the slender body which had four
+times endured, on behalf of Mr. Tapster, the greatest of woman's natural
+ordeals. But that thought, it is scarcely necessary to say, did not come
+to add an extra pang to those which that unfortunate man was now
+suffering, for Mr. Tapster naturally thought maternity was in every
+married woman's day's work&mdash;and pleasure.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It might have been a moment, for all that he knew, or it might have been
+an hour, when at last something came to relieve the unbearable tension
+of Mr. Tapster's feelings. He had been standing aside, helpless, aware
+of and yet not watching the efforts made to restore Flossy to
+consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor raised himself and straightened his cramped shoulders and
+tired arms. With a look of great concern on his face, he approached the
+bereaved husband.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid it's no good," he said; "the shock of the plunge in the cold
+water probably killed her. She was evidently in poor health, and&mdash;and
+ill-nourished; but, of course, we shall go on for some time longer,
+and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But whatever he had meant to say remained unspoken, for a telegraph-boy,
+with the impudence natural to his kind, was forcing his way into and
+through the crowded room. "James Tapster, Esquire?" he cried in a high,
+childish treble.</p>
+
+<p>The master of the house held out his hand mechanically. He took the buff
+envelop and stared down at it, sufficiently master of himself to
+perceive that some fool had apparently imagined Cumberland Crescent to
+be in South London; before his eyes swam the line, "Delayed in
+transmission." Then, opening the envelop, he saw the message for which
+he had now been waiting so eagerly for some days; but it was with
+indifference that he read the words,</p>
+
+<p>"<i>The Decree has been made Absolute.</i>"<!-- Page 145 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/illus-145.jpg" width="500" height="340" alt="PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND HIS WAR ON CONGRESS" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="PRESIDENT_JOHNSON_AND_HIS_WAR_ON_CONGRESS" id="PRESIDENT_JOHNSON_AND_HIS_WAR_ON_CONGRESS"></a>PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND HIS WAR ON CONGRESS</h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h3>CARL SCHURZ</h3>
+
+<h3>ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS</h3>
+
+<p>I was on the point of returning to the West when I received a message
+from Horace Greeley, the famous editor of the New York <i>Tribune</i>, asking
+me to take charge of the news bureau of that journal in Washington, as
+its chief correspondent. Although the terms offered by Mr. Greeley were
+tempting, I was disinclined to accept, because I doubted whether the
+work would be congenial to me, and because it would keep me in the East.
+But Mr. Greeley, as well as some of my friends in Congress, persuaded me
+that, since I had studied the condition of things in the South and could
+give reliable information concerning it, my presence in Washington might
+be useful while the Southern question was under debate. This determined
+me to assent, with the understanding, however, that I should not
+consider myself bound beyond the pending session of Congress.</p>
+
+<p>Thus I entered the journalistic fraternity. My most agreeable experience
+consisted in my association with other members of the craft. I found
+among the correspondents of the press a number of gentlemen of uncommon
+ability and high principle&mdash;genuine gentlemen, who loved truth for its
+own sake, who heartily detested sham and false pretense, and whose sense
+of honor was of the finest. This was the rule, to which, as to all
+rules, there were of course some exceptions; but they were rare. My more
+or less intimate contact with public men high and low was not so
+uniformly gratifying. I enjoyed, indeed, the privilege of meeting
+statesmen of high purpose, of well-stored minds, of unselfish
+patriotism, and of the courage of their convictions. But disgustingly
+large was, on the other hand, the number of small, selfish politicians I
+ran against&mdash;men who seemed to know no higher end than the advantage of
+their party, which involved their own; who were always nervously
+sniffing for the popular breeze; whose most demonstrative ebullitions of
+virtue consisted in the most violent denunciations of the opposition;
+whose moral courage quaked at the appearance of the slightest danger to
+their own or their party's fortunes; and whose littlenesses exposed them
+sometimes with involuntary frankness to the newspaper correspondent whom
+they approached to beg for a "favorable notice" or for the suppression
+of an unwelcome news item. They were by no means in all instances men of
+small parts. On the contrary, there were men of marked ability and large
+acquirements among them. But never until then had I known how great a
+moral coward a member of Congress may be.</p>
+
+<p>It is probably now as it was then. There were few places in the United
+States where<!-- Page 146 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> the public men appearing on the national stage were judged
+as fairly and accurately as they were in Newspaper Row in Washington.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 287px;">
+<img src="images/illus0324.jpg" width="287" height="400" alt="HORACE GREELEY
+
+AT WHOSE REQUEST CARL SCHURZ BECAME THE CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT
+OF THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE IN 1865" title="" />
+<span class="caption">HORACE GREELEY
+
+<br />AT WHOSE REQUEST CARL SCHURZ BECAME THE CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT
+OF THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE IN 1865</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I remained at the head of the <i>Tribune</i> office in Washington, according
+to my promise to Mr. Greeley, to the end of the winter season, and then
+accepted the chief-editorship of the Detroit <i>Post</i>, a new journal
+established at Detroit, Michigan, which was offered to me&mdash;I might
+almost say urged upon me&mdash;by Senator Zachariah Chandler. In the meantime
+I had occasion to witness the beginning of the political war between the
+executive and the legislative power concerning the reconstruction of the
+"States lately in rebellion."</p>
+
+<h3><i>The Beginnings of the Struggle</i></h3>
+
+<p>I am sure I do not exaggerate when I say that this political war has
+been one of the most unfortunate events in the history of this Republic,
+for it made the most important problem of the time, a problem of
+extraordinary complexity, which required the calmest and most delicate
+and circumspect treatment, the foot-ball of a personal and party brawl
+which was in the highest degree apt to inflame the passions and to
+obscure the judgment of everybody concerned<!-- Page 147 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> in it. Since my return from
+the South, the evil effects of Mr. Johnson's conduct in encouraging the
+reactionary spirit prevalent among the Southern whites had become more
+and more evident and alarming from day to day. Charles Sumner told me
+that his personal experience with the President had been very much like
+mine. When Sumner left Washington in the spring, he had received from
+Mr. Johnson at repeated intervals the most emphatic assurances that he
+would do nothing to precipitate the restoration of the "States lately in
+rebellion" to the full exercise of self-governing functions, and even
+that he favored the extension of the suffrage to the freedmen. The two
+men had parted with all the appearance of a perfect friendly
+understanding. But when the Senator returned to Washington in the late
+autumn that understanding seemed to have entirely vanished from the
+President's mind and to have given place to an irritated temper and a
+certain acerbity of tone in the assertion of the "President's policy."</p>
+
+<p>From various other members of Congress I heard the same story. Mr.
+Johnson, strikingly unlike Abraham Lincoln, evidently belonged to that
+unfortunate class of men with whom a difference of opinion on any
+important matter will at once cause personal ill feeling and a
+disturbance of friendly intercourse. By many Congressmen Mr. Johnson was
+regarded as one who had broken faith, and the memory of the disgraceful
+exhibition of himself in a drunken state at the inauguration ceremonies,
+which under ordinary circumstances everybody would have been glad to
+forget, was revived, so as to make him appear as a person of
+ungentlemanly character. All these things combined to impart to the
+controversies which followed a flavor of reckless defiance and rancorous
+bitterness, the outbursts of which were sometimes almost ferocious.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/illus0325.jpg" width="400" height="301" alt="TWO PORTRAITS OF CHARLES SUMNER" title="" />
+<span class="caption">TWO PORTRAITS OF CHARLES SUMNER</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The first gun of the political war between the President and Congress,
+which was to rage four years, was fired by Thaddeus Stevens in the House
+of Representatives by the introduction, even before the hearing of the
+President's Message, of the resolution already mentioned, which
+substantially proclaimed that the reconstruction of the late rebel
+States was the business, not of the President alone, but of Congress.
+This theory, which was constitutionally correct, was readily supported
+by the Republican majority, and thus the war<!-- Page 148 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> was declared. Of
+Republican dissenters who openly took the President's part, there were
+but few&mdash;in the Senate, Doolittle of Wisconsin, Dixon of Connecticut,
+Norton of Minnesota, Cowan of Pennsylvania, and, for a short period,
+Morgan of New York, as the personal friend of Mr. Seward. In the House
+of Representatives, Mr. Raymond of New York, the famous founder of the
+New York <i>Times</i>, acted as the principal Republican champion of the
+"President's policy."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 271px;">
+<img src="images/illus0326.jpg" width="271" height="400" alt="PRESIDENT ANDREW JOHNSON
+
+WHOSE RECONSTRUCTION POLICY LED TO THE FOUR YEARS&#39; WAR BETWEEN HIMSELF
+AND CONGRESS" title="" />
+<span class="caption">PRESIDENT ANDREW JOHNSON
+
+<br />WHOSE RECONSTRUCTION POLICY LED TO THE FOUR YEARS&#39; WAR BETWEEN HIMSELF
+AND CONGRESS</span>
+</div>
+
+<h3><i>Stevens the Dominating Figure of the Struggle</i></h3>
+
+<p>Thaddeus Stevens was the acknowledged leader of the Republicans in the
+House. Few historic characters have ever been more differently judged
+from different points of view. A Southern writer of fiction has painted
+him as the fiend incarnate; others have spoken of him as a great leader
+of his time, far-sighted, a man of uncompromising convictions,
+intellectually honest, of unflinching courage and energy. I had come
+into personal contact with him in the Presidential campaigns of 1860 and
+1864, when he seemed to be pleased with my efforts. I had once heard him
+make a stump speech which was evidently inspired by intense hatred of
+slavery, and remarkable for argumentative pith and sarcastic wit. But
+the impression his personality made upon me was not sympathetic: his
+face, long and pallid, topped with an ample dark-brown wig which was at
+the first glance recognized as such; beetling brows overhanging keen
+eyes of uncertain color which sometimes seemed to scintillate with a
+sudden gleam; the under lip defiantly protruding; the whole expression
+usually stern. His figure would have looked stalwart but for a deformed
+foot which made him bend and limp. His conversation, carried on in a
+hollow voice devoid of music, easily disclosed a well-informed mind, but
+also a certain absolutism of opinion, with contemptuous scorn for
+adverse argument. He belonged to the fierce class of anti-slavery men
+who were inspired by humane sympathy with the slave and righteous
+abhorrence of slavery, but also by hatred of the slaveholder. What he
+himself seemed to enjoy most in his talk was his sardonic humor, which
+he made play upon men and things like lurid freaks of lightning. He shot
+out such sallies with a fearfully serious mien, or at least he
+accompanied them with a grim smile which was not at all like Abraham
+Lincoln's hearty laugh at his own jests.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 149 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 271px;">
+<img src="images/illus0327.jpg" width="271" height="400" alt="From the collection of P.&nbsp;H. Meserve
+
+JOHN SHERMAN
+
+WHO TRIED TO HEAL THE BREACH BETWEEN PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND THE SENATE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">From the collection of P.&nbsp;H. Meserve
+
+<br />JOHN SHERMAN
+
+<br />WHO TRIED TO HEAL THE BREACH BETWEEN PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND THE SENATE</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 307px;">
+<img src="images/illus0328.jpg" width="307" height="400" alt="THADDEUS STEVENS
+
+THE LEADING OPPONENT OF THE MOVEMENT TO RESTORE SLAVERY, AND THE MOST
+BITTER OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON&#39;S ANTAGONISTS" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THADDEUS STEVENS>
+
+<br />THE LEADING OPPONENT OF THE MOVEMENT TO RESTORE SLAVERY, AND THE MOST
+BITTER OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON&#39;S ANTAGONISTS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Thus Mr. Stevens' discourse was apt to make him appear a hardened cynic,
+inaccessible to the finer feelings, and indifferent whether he gave pain
+or pleasure. But now and then a remark escaped him&mdash;I say "escaped him,"
+because he evidently preferred to wear the acrid tendencies of his
+character on the outside&mdash;which indicated that there was behind his
+cynicism a rich fund of human kindness and sympathy. And this was
+strongly confirmed by his neighbors at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, his
+home, where on one of my campaigning tours I once spent a day and a
+night. With them, even with many of his political opponents,<!-- Page 150 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> "old
+Thad," as they called him, appeared to be eminently popular. They had no
+end of stories to tell about the protection he had given to fugitive
+slaves, sometimes at much risk and sacrifice to himself, and of the many
+benefactions he had bestowed with a lavish hand upon the widows and
+orphans and other persons in need, and of his generous fidelity to his
+friends. They did not, indeed, revere him as a model of virtue, but of
+the occasional lapses of his bachelor life from correct moral standards,
+which seemed to be well known and freely talked about, they spoke with
+affectionate lenity of judgment.</p>
+
+<p>When I saw him again in Washington at the opening of the Thirty-ninth
+Congress, in December, 1865, he looked very much aged since our last
+meeting, and infirm in health. In repose his face was like a death-mask,
+and he was carried in a chair to his seat in the House by two stalwart
+young negroes. There is good authority for the story that once when they
+had set him down, he said to them, with his grim humor: "Thank you, my
+good fellows. What shall I do when you are dead and gone?" But his eyes
+glowed from under his bushy brows with the old keen sparkle, and his
+mind was as alert as ever. It may be that his age&mdash;he was then
+seventy-four&mdash;and his physical infirmities, admonishing him that at best
+he would have only a few years more to live, served to inspire him with
+an impatient craving and a fierce determination to make the best of his
+time, and thus to intensify the activity of his mental energies. To
+compass the abolition of slavery had been the passion of his life. He
+had hailed the Civil War as the great opportunity. He had never been
+quite satisfied with Lincoln, whose policy seemed to him too dilatory.
+He demanded quick, sharp, and decisive blows.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 271px;">
+<img src="images/illus0329.jpg" width="271" height="400" alt="WILLIAM PITT FESSENDEN
+
+HEAD OF THE JOINT COMMITTEE ON RECONSTRUCTION, WHICH WAS DENOUNCED BY
+PRESIDENT JOHNSON AS AN &quot;IRRESPONSIBLE CENTRAL DIRECTORY&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">WILLIAM PITT FESSENDEN
+
+<br />HEAD OF THE JOINT COMMITTEE ON RECONSTRUCTION, WHICH WAS DENOUNCED BY
+PRESIDENT JOHNSON AS AN &quot;IRRESPONSIBLE CENTRAL DIRECTORY&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Now that the abolition of slavery was actually decreed, he saw President
+Johnson follow a policy which, in his view, threatened to undo the great
+work. His scornful anger at Andrew Johnson was equaled only by his
+contempt for the Republicans who sided with the President. He was bound
+to defeat this reactionary attempt and to see slavery thoroughly killed
+beyond the possibility of resurrection, at any cost. As to the means to
+be employed, he scrupled little. He wanted the largest possible
+Republican majority in Congress, and to this end he would have expelled
+any number of Democrats from their seats, by hook or crook. When my old
+friend and quondam law partner, General Halbert E. Paine, who was
+chairman of the Committee on Elections in the House, told him that, in a
+certain contested election case to be voted upon, both contestants were
+rascals, Stevens simply asked: "Well, which is <i>our</i> rascal?" He said
+this, not in jest, but with perfect seriousness. He would have seated
+Beelzebub in preference to the angel Gabriel, had he believed Beelzebub
+to be more certain than Gabriel to aid him in beating the President's
+reconstruction policy. His speeches were short, peremptory, and
+commanding. He bluntly avowed his purposes, however extreme they seemed
+to be. He disdained to make them more palatable by any art of
+persuasion, or to soften the asperity of his attacks by charitable
+circumlocution. There was no hypocrisy, no cant in his utterances. With
+inexorable intellectual honesty, he drew all the logical conclusions
+from his premises. He was a terror in debate. Whenever provoked, he
+brought his batteries of merciless sarcasm into play with deadly effect.
+Not seldom, a single sentence sufficed to lay a daring antagonist
+sprawling on the ground amid the roaring laughter of the House, the
+luckless victim feeling as if he had heedlessly touched a<!-- Page 151 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> heavily
+charged electric wire. No wonder that even the readiest and boldest
+debaters were cautious in approaching old Thaddeus Stevens too closely,
+lest something stunning and sudden happen to them. Thus the fear he
+inspired became a distinct element of power in his leadership&mdash;not a
+wholesome element, indeed, at the time of a great problem which required
+the most circumspect and dispassionate treatment.</p>
+
+<h3><i>William Pitt Fessenden</i></h3>
+
+<p>A statesman of a very different stamp was Senator Fessenden of Maine,
+who, being at the head of the senatorial part of the joint Committee on
+Reconstruction, presided over that important body. William Pitt
+Fessenden was a man who might easily have been overlooked in a crowd.
+There was nothing in his slight figure, his thin face framed in spare
+gray hair and side whiskers, and his quiet demeanor, to attract
+particular notice. Neither did his appearance in the Senate Chamber
+impress one at first sight as that of a great power in that important
+assembly. I saw him more than once there walk with slow steps up and
+down in the open space behind the seats, with his hands in his trousers
+pockets, with seeming listlessness, while another senator was speaking,
+and then ask to be heard, and, without changing his attitude, make an
+argument in a calm conversational tone, unmixed with the slightest
+oratorical flourish, so solid and complete that little more remained to
+be said on the subject in question. He gave the impression of having at
+his disposal a rich and perfectly ordered store of thought and knowledge
+upon which he could draw with perfect ease and assurance. When I was
+first introduced to him, he appeared to be rather distant in manner than
+inviting friendly approach. But I was told that ill health had made him
+unsociable and somewhat morose and testy, and, indeed, there was often
+the trace of suffering and weariness in his face. It was also remarked
+in the Senate that at times he was ill-tempered and inclined to indulge
+in biting sarcasms and to administer unkind lectures to other senators,
+which in some instances disturbed his personal intercourse with his
+colleagues. But there was not one of them who did not hold him in the
+highest esteem as a statesman of commanding ability and of lofty ideals,
+as a gentleman of truth and conscience, as a great jurist and an eminent
+constitutional lawyer, as a party man of most honorable principles and
+methods, and as a patriot of noblest ambition for his country.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 286px;">
+<img src="images/illus0330.jpg" width="286" height="400" alt="WENDELL PHILLIPS
+
+WHOM PRESIDENT JOHNSON NAMED AS ONE OF THE ENEMIES OF THE REPUBLIC IN
+HIS SPEECH OF FEBRUARY 22" title="" />
+<span class="caption">WENDELL PHILLIPS
+
+<br />WHOM PRESIDENT JOHNSON NAMED AS ONE OF THE ENEMIES OF THE REPUBLIC IN
+HIS SPEECH OF FEBRUARY 22</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Being a man also of conservative instincts, averse to unnecessary
+conflicts, and always disinclined to go to extremes, in action as well
+as in language, he was expected to exert a moderating influence in his
+committee; and this expectation was not disappointed so far as his
+efforts to prevent a final breach between the President and the
+Republican majority in Congress were concerned. But regarding the main
+question whether the "States lately in rebellion" should be fully
+restored to their self-governing functions and to full participation in
+the government of the Republic without having given reasonable
+guaranties for the maintenance of the "legitimate results of the war,"
+he was in<!-- Page 152 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> point of principle not far apart from Mr. Stevens.</p>
+
+<h3><i>The President's Logic</i></h3>
+
+<p>It must be admitted that, if we accept his premises, Mr. Johnson made in
+point of logic a pretty plausible case. His proposition was that a
+State, in the view of the Federal Constitution, is indestructible; that
+an ordinance of secession adopted by its inhabitants, or its political
+organs, did not take it out of the Union; that by declaring and treating
+those ordinances of secession as "null and void," of no force, virtually
+non-existent, the Federal government itself had accepted and sanctioned
+that theory; that during the rebellion the constitutional rights and
+functions of those States were merely suspended, and that when the
+rebellion ceased they were <i>ipso facto</i> restored; that, therefore, the
+rebellion having actually ceased, those States were at once entitled to
+their former rights and privileges&mdash;that is, to the recognition of their
+self-elected State governments and to their representation in Congress.
+Admitting the premises, this was logically correct in the abstract.</p>
+
+<p>But this was one of the cases to which a saying, many years later set
+afloat by President Cleveland, might properly have been applied: we were
+confronting a condition, not a theory. The condition was this: Certain
+States had through their regular political organs declared themselves
+independent of the Union. They had, for all practical purposes, actually
+separated themselves from the Union. They had made war upon the Union.
+That war put those States in a position not foreseen by the
+Constitution. It imposed upon the government of the Union duties not
+foreseen by the Constitution; by "military necessity," war necessity,
+the Union was compelled to emancipate the negroes from slavery and to
+accept their military services. The war had compelled the government of
+the Union to levy large loans of money and thus to contract a huge
+public debt. The government had also, in the course of the war, the aid
+of the Union men of the South. It had thus assumed solemn obligations
+for value received or services rendered. It had assumed the duty to
+protect the emancipated negroes in their freedom, the Southern Union men
+in their security, and the public creditor from loss. This duty was a
+duty of honor as well as of policy. The Union could, therefore, not
+consent, either in point of honor or of sound policy, to the restoration
+of the late rebel States to the functions of self-government and to full
+participation in the national government so long as that restoration was
+reasonably certain to put the freedom of the emancipated slaves, or the
+security of the Southern Union men, or the rights of the public
+creditor, into serious jeopardy.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 331px;">
+<img src="images/illus0331.jpg" width="331" height="400" alt="SENATOR LYMAN TRUMBULL
+
+WHO MOVED THAT THE FREEDMEN&#39;S BUREAU BILL OF JANUARY 12 BE PASSED OVER
+PRESIDENT JOHNSON&#39;S VETO" title="" />
+<span class="caption">SENATOR LYMAN TRUMBULL
+
+<br />WHO MOVED THAT THE FREEDMEN&#39;S BUREAU BILL OF JANUARY 12 BE PASSED OVER
+PRESIDENT JOHNSON&#39;S VETO</span>
+</div>
+
+<h3><i>Lincoln's Policy versus Johnson's</i></h3>
+
+<p>It was pretended at the time, and it has since been asserted by
+historians and publicists of high standing, that Mr. Johnson's
+Reconstruction policy was only a continuation of that of Mr. Lincoln.
+This was true only in a superficial sense, and not in reality. Mr.
+Lincoln had, indeed, put forth reconstruction plans which contemplated
+an early restoration of some of the rebel States; but he had done this
+while the Civil War was still going on, and for the evident purpose of
+encouraging loyal movements<!-- Page 153 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> in those States and of weakening the
+Confederate State governments there by opposing to them governments
+organized in the interest of the Union, which could serve as
+rallying-points to the Union men. So long as the rebellion continued in
+any form and to any extent, the State governments he contemplated would
+have been substantially in the control of really loyal men who had been
+on the side of the Union during the war. Moreover, he always
+emphatically affirmed, in public as well as private utterance, that no
+plan of reconstruction he had ever put forth was meant to be "exclusive
+and inflexible," but might be changed according to different
+circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>Now circumstances did change; they changed essentially with the collapse
+of the Confederacy. There was no more organized armed resistance to the
+national government, to distract which loyal State governments in the
+South might have been efficacious. But there was an effort of persons
+lately in rebellion to get possession of the reconstructed Southern
+State governments for the purpose, in part, of using their power to save
+or restore as much of the system of slavery as could be saved or
+restored. The success of these efforts was to be accomplished by the
+precipitate and unconditional readmission of the late rebel States to
+all their constitutional functions. This situation had not yet developed
+when Lincoln was assassinated. He had not contemplated it when he put
+forth his plans of reconstructing Louisiana and the other States. Had he
+lived, he would have as ardently wished to stop bloodshed and to reunite
+all the States as he ever did. But is it to be supposed, for a moment,
+that, seeing the late master class in the South still under the
+influence of their old traditional notions and prejudices, and at the
+same time sorely pressed by the distressing necessities of their
+situation, intent upon subjecting the freedmen again to a system very
+much akin to slavery, Lincoln would have consented to abandon those
+freedmen to the mercies of that master class!</p>
+
+<h3><i>The Personal Bitterness of the Struggle</i></h3>
+
+<p>No less striking was the difference of the two policies in what may be
+called the personal character of the controversies of the time. When the
+Republican majority in Congress had already declared its unwillingness
+to accept President Johnson's leadership in the matter of
+reconstruction, a strong desire was still manifested by many Republican
+senators and members of the House to prevent a decided and irremediable
+breach with the President. Some of them were sanguine enough to hope
+that more or less harmonious co&ouml;peration, or at least a peaceable
+<i>modus vivendi</i>, might still be obtained. Others apprehended that the
+President's policy, with its plausibilities, might after all find favor
+with the popular mind, which was naturally tired of strife and
+excitement, eager for peace and quiet, and that its opponents might
+appear as reckless disturbers. Still others stood in fear of a rupture
+in the Republican party, which, among other evil consequences, might
+prove disastrous to their own political fortunes. Several men of
+importance, such as Fessenden and Sherman in the Senate and some
+prominent members of the House, seriously endeavored to pour oil upon
+the agitated waters by making speeches of a conciliatory tenor. Indeed,
+if Andrew Johnson had possessed only a little of Abraham Lincoln's sweet
+temper, generous tolerance, and patient tact in the treatment of
+opponents, he might at least have prevented the conflict of opinions
+from degenerating into an angry and vicious personal brawl. But the
+brawl was Johnson's congenial atmosphere.</p>
+
+<p>The Judiciary Committee of the Senate, on January 12, 1866, reported a
+bill to continue the existence, to increase the personnel, and to
+enlarge the powers of the Freedmen's Bureau. It was discussed in both
+Houses with great thoroughness and in a temperate spirit, and the
+necessity of the measure for the protection of the freedmen and the
+introduction of free labor in the South was so generally acknowledged
+that the recognized Republican friends of the President in the Senate as
+well as in the House supported it. It passed by overwhelming majorities
+in both Houses, and everybody, even those most intimate with the
+President, confidently expected that he would willingly accept and sign
+it. But on the 19th of February he returned it with his veto, mainly on
+the assumed ground that it was unnecessary and unconstitutional, and
+also because it was passed by a Congress from which eleven States, those
+lately in rebellion, were excluded&mdash;thus throwing out a dark hint that
+before the admission of the late rebel States to representation this
+Congress might be considered constitutionally unable to make any valid
+laws at all. Senator Trumbull, in an uncommonly able, statesmanlike, and
+calm speech, combated the President's arguments and moved that the bill
+pass, the President's veto notwithstanding. But the "Administration
+Republicans," although they had voted for the bill, now voted to sustain
+the veto, and, there being no two-thirds majority to overcome it, the
+veto prevailed. Thus President Johnson had won a victory over the
+Republican majority in Congress. This victory may have made him<!-- Page 154 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> believe
+that he would be able to kill with his veto all legislation unpalatable
+to him, and that, therefore, he was actually master of the situation. He
+made the grave mistake of underestimating the opposition.</p>
+
+<h3><i>A Humiliating Spectacle</i></h3>
+
+<p>On February 22, 1866, a public meeting was held in Washington for the
+purpose of expressing popular approval of the President's reconstruction
+policy. The crowd marched from the meeting-place to the White House to
+congratulate the President upon his successful veto of the Freedmen's
+Bureau Bill. The President, called upon to make a speech in response,
+could not resist the temptation. He then dealt a blow to himself from
+which he never recovered. He spoke, in the egotistic strain usual with
+him, of the righteousness of his own course, and then began to inveigh
+in the most violent terms against those who opposed him. He denounced
+the joint Committee on Reconstruction, the committee headed by
+Fessenden, as "an irresponsible central directory" that had assumed the
+powers of Congress, described how he had fought the leaders of the
+rebellion, and added that there were men on the other side of the line
+who also worked for the dissolution of the Union. By this time some of
+the uproarious crowd felt that he had descended to their level, and
+called for names. He mentioned Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and
+Wendell Phillips as men who worked against the fundamental principles of
+the government, and excited the boisterous merriment of the audience by
+calling John W. Forney, the Secretary of the Senate and a prominent
+journalist, "a dead duck" upon whom "he would not waste his ammunition."
+Again he spoke of his rise from humble origin,&mdash;a tailor who "always
+made a close fit,"&mdash;and broadly insinuated that there were men in high
+places who were not satisfied with Lincoln's blood, but, wanting more,
+thought of getting rid of him, too, in the same way.</p>
+
+<p>I remember well the impression made by this speech as it came out in the
+newspapers. Many if not most of the public men I saw in Washington,
+remembering the disgraceful appearance of Andrew Johnson in a drunken
+state at the inauguration, at once expressed a belief that he must have
+been in the same condition when delivering that speech. Most of the
+newspapers favoring the President's policy were struck dumb. Of those
+opposing him, most of them spoke of it in grave but evidently restrained
+language. The general feeling was one of profound shame and humiliation
+in behalf of the country.</p>
+
+<p>In Congress, where Mr. Stevens, with his characteristic sarcasm,
+described the whole story of the President's speech as a malignant
+invention of Mr. Johnson's enemies, the hope of preventing a permanent
+breach between him and the Republican majority was even then not
+entirely extinct. On the 26th of February, Sherman made a long and
+carefully prepared speech in the Senate, advocating harmony. He
+recounted all the virtues Andrew Johnson professed and all the services
+he had rendered, and solemnly affirmed his belief that he had always
+acted upon patriotic motives and in good faith. But he could not refrain
+from "deeply regretting his speech of the 22d of February," He added
+that it was "impossible to conceive a more humiliating spectacle than
+the President of the United States invoking the wild passions of a mob
+around him with the utterance of such sentiments as he uttered on that
+day." Still, Mr. Sherman thought that "this was no time to quarrel with
+the Chief Magistrate." Other prominent Republicans, such as General J.&nbsp;D.
+Cox of Ohio&mdash;one of the noblest men I have ever known,&mdash;called upon
+him to expostulate with him in a friendly spirit, and he gave them
+amiable assurances, which, however, subsequently turned out to have been
+without meaning. Then something happened which cut off the last chance
+of mutual approach.</p>
+
+<p>On March 13th the House passed the Civil Rights Bill, which the Senate
+had already passed on the 2d of February. Its main provision was that
+all persons born in the United States, excepting Indians, not taxed,
+were declared to be citizens of the United States, and such citizens of
+every race and color should have the same right in every State and
+Territory of the United States to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be
+parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and
+convey real and personal property, and to have the full and equal
+benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and
+property as was enjoyed by white citizens. The bill had nothing to do
+with "social equity," and did not in any way interfere with Mr.
+Johnson's scheme of reconstruction. In fact, it was asserted, no doubt
+truthfully, that Mr. Johnson himself had at various times shown himself,
+by word and act, favorable to its provisions. It appeared, indeed, in
+every one of its features so reasonable and so necessary for the
+enforcement of the Thirteenth Constitutional Amendment prohibiting
+slavery, that disapproval of it by the President was regarded as almost
+impossible. Aside from the merits of the bill, there was another
+reason,<!-- Page 155 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> a reason of policy, for the President to sign it. Had he done
+so, he would have greatly encouraged the conciliatory spirit which, in
+spite of all that had happened, was still flickering in many Republican
+bosoms, and he might thus, even at this late hour, have secured an
+effective following among the Republicans in Congress. But he did not.
+He returned the bill to Congress with a veto message so weak in argument
+that it appeared as if he had been laboriously groping for pretexts to
+kill the bill. One of the principal reasons he gave was again the
+sinister one that Congress had passed the bill while eleven States were
+unrepresented, thus repeating the threatening hint that the validity of
+the laws made by such a Congress might be questioned.</p>
+
+<h3><i>False Encouragement to the South</i></h3>
+
+<p>Congress promptly passed the bill over the President's veto by a
+two-thirds majority in each House, and thus the Civil Rights Bill became
+a law. President Johnson's defeat was more fatal than appeared on the
+surface. The prestige he had won by the success of his veto of the
+Freedmen's Bureau Bill was lost again. The Republicans, whom in some way
+he had led to expect that he would sign the Civil Rights Bill, now
+believed him to be an insincere man capable of any treachery. The last
+chance of an accommodation with the Republican party was now utterly
+gone. But, worse than all, the reactionists in the South, who were bent
+upon curtailing the freedom of the emancipated negroes as much as
+possible, received his veto of the Civil Rights Bill with shouts of
+delight. Believing him now unalterably opposed to the bestowal, upon the
+freedmen, of equal civil rights such as were specified in the bill, they
+hailed President Johnson as their champion more loudly than ever.
+Undisturbed by the defeat of the veto, which they looked upon as a mere
+temporary accident, they easily persuaded themselves that the President,
+aided by the Administration Republicans and the Democratic party at the
+North, would at last surely prevail, and that now they might safely deal
+with the negro and the labor question in the South as they pleased. The
+reactionary element felt itself encouraged to the point of foolhardiness
+by the President's attitude. Legislative enactments and municipal
+ordinances and regulations tending to reduce the colored people to a
+state of semi-slavery multiplied at a lively rate. Measures taken for
+the protection of the emancipated slaves were indiscriminately denounced
+in the name of the Constitution of the United States as acts of
+insufferable tyranny. The instant admission to seats in the national
+Congress of senators and representatives from the "States lately in
+rebellion" was loudly demanded as a constitutional right, and for these
+seats men were presented who but yesterday had stood in arms against the
+national government, or who had held high place in the insurrectionary
+Confederacy. And the highest authority cited for all these denunciations
+and demands was Andrew Johnson, President of the United States.</p>
+
+<p>The impression made by these things upon the minds of the Northern
+people can easily be imagined. Men of sober ways of thinking, not
+accessible to sensational appeals, asked themselves quite seriously
+whether there was not real danger that the legitimate results of the
+war, for the achievement of which they had sacrificed uncounted
+thousands of lives and the fruits of many, many years of labor, were in
+grave jeopardy again. Their alarm was not artificially produced by
+political agitation; it was sincere and profound, and began to grow
+angry. The gradual softening of the passions and resentments of the war
+was checked. The feeling that the Union had to be saved once more from
+the rule of the "rebels with the President at their head" spread with
+fearful rapidity, and well-meaning people looking to Congress to come to
+the rescue were becoming less and less squeamish as to the character of
+the means to be used to that end.</p>
+
+<p>This popular temper could not fail to exercise its influence upon
+Congress and to stimulate the radical tendencies among its members. Even
+men of a comparatively conservative and cautious disposition admitted
+that strong remedies were necessary to avert the threatening danger, and
+they soon turned to the most drastic as the best. Moreover, the partizan
+motive pressed to the front to reinforce the patriotic purpose. It had
+gradually become evident that President Johnson, whether such had been
+his original design or not,&mdash;probably not,&mdash;would by his political
+course be led into the Democratic party. The Democrats, delighted, of
+course, with the prospect of capturing a President elected by the
+Republicans, zealously supported his measures and flattered his vanity
+without stint. The old alliance between the pro-slavery sentiment in the
+South and the Democratic party in the North was thus revived&mdash;that
+alliance which had already cost the South so dearly in the recent past
+by making Southern people believe that if they revolted against the
+Federal Government the Northern Democracy would stand by them and help
+them to victory.</p>
+
+<p class="center">THE JULY INSTALMENT OF CARL SCHURZ' MEMOIRS WILL CONCLUDE THE STORY OF
+PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S STRUGGLE WITH CONGRESS<!-- Page 156 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/illus0332.jpg" width="400" height="189" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_CRYSTAL-GAZER" id="THE_CRYSTAL-GAZER"></a>THE CRYSTAL-GAZER</h2>
+
+<h3>BY MARY S. WATTS</h3>
+
+<h4>AUTHOR OF "THE GREAT NORTH ROAD," ETC.</h4>
+
+<h3>ILLUSTRATIONS BY FRANK A. NANKIVELL</h3>
+
+<p>The carrier's cart&mdash;for my means afforded no more lordly style of
+travel&mdash;set me down at an elbow of white highroad, whence, between the
+sloping hills, I could see a V-shaped patch of blue, this half water and
+that sky; here and there the gable of a farmhouse with a plume of smoke
+streaming sidewise; and below me, in the exact point of the V, the masts
+and naked yards of a ketch at her moorings. Even in that sheltered
+harbor, to judge by the faint oscillations of her masts, she felt the
+tug of the waters around her keel. There had been a storm the night
+before; without, the sea ran strong about all these exposed coasts; and
+I knew that, hidden from sight behind the upper headland, the surf must
+be bursting in a cloud over the Brown Cow, and the perturbed tide
+setting like a mill-race between that great dun rock and the shore
+through the narrow gut we called the Cat's Mouth.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll be noticing some changes, Mr. Nick?" the carrier hinted at last,
+lingering to observe me. "Well, there's a deal may happen in two or
+three years. You can't look to find things just the way you left 'em."</p>
+
+<p>He used a certain respectful familiarity, having known me all my life,
+and, as he spoke, eyed me with the kind and open curiosity of a dog. He
+was a gentle little man, with a manner oddly compounded of the sailor's
+simplicity and the rustic's bootless cunning,&mdash;for he had followed both
+walks in his day,&mdash;and was popularly held to be somewhat weak-witted
+since a fall from the masthead to the decks of the brig <i>Hyperion</i> some
+years before.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not near enough to see any changes yet, Crump," I answered him.
+"The changes, if any, show most, I dare say, in myself."</p>
+
+<p>"So they do, sir; so they do," he assented heartily. "My wife used to
+say you were a pretty boy, and had the makings of a fine, personable
+man. First thing I thought, when I clapped eyes on you to-day, was:
+'Well, this here's a lesson to Sarah not to be hasty in her judgments!'
+'Tain't often I get the better o' Sarah, you know, sir. They tell me
+you've been in Italy and learned to paint?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid I haven't quite learned all the art yet, Crump. It takes
+more than two or three years."</p>
+
+<p>"Depends on the person, I shouldn't wonder," he said, wagging his head.
+"Some people are slow by nature. Could a man make his living by it, d'ye
+think, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>I answered this devious inquiry as to my own financial standing by
+assuring him that I had<!-- Page 157 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> contrived so far to make mine. "I'm not riding
+in my coach-and-four yet, as you see, Crump, but the time may come."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure I hope it will, Mr. Nick," he said rather dubiously. "But it's
+kind o' tempting Providence, seems to me. You might 'a' been walking
+your own quarter-deck, captain o' some tall East Indiaman by this, like
+your father and grandfather before you, making a safe, easy living, and
+looked up to by everybody."</p>
+
+<p>I interrupted his moralizing to ask, as, indeed, I had already done more
+than once, without being able to get his attention: "How does my
+grandfather seem?"</p>
+
+<p>Momentary gravity fell upon him. "He&mdash;he don't always answer the helm,
+Mr. Nicol," he said, and touched his forehead with a meaning look.
+"Barring that, I'd rate him seaworthy, for all he's cruised so
+long&mdash;nigh eighty year, ain't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad I came home," I said, concerned. "The old man should not be
+alone."</p>
+
+<p>"He ain't exactly alone," said Crump, with an uneasy glance into my
+face. "He's signed on two new hands here lately&mdash;about a month ago, I
+b'lieve. I dessay he was making pretty heavy weather of it by himself,
+and so he&mdash;er&mdash;well&mdash;&mdash;" He cleared his throat, hesitating in an odd
+embarrassment; he plainly felt that here was information bound to be
+distasteful, and set about imparting it with a painful diplomacy. "The
+cap'n&mdash;Cap'n Pendarves, your grandfather, sir, was, as you might say,
+short-handed, you being in foreign parts, and old John Behenna having
+slipped his cable 'long about the last o' May, as I was telling you; and
+so the cap'n he ups and ships these here&mdash;and&mdash;and, in fac', Mr. Nick,
+one of 'em's a woman!" He drew a long breath and wiped his forehead.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean he's married!" I shouted, and with, I am afraid, a
+pretty strong term of disapproval.</p>
+
+<p>"There, now, I <i>thought</i> you'd take it that way!" Crump remarked, not
+without gratification. "But it ain't so bad as that, Mr. Nicol." And he
+went on to explain, with a variety of nautical metaphors, that the
+couple, an elderly man and a young girl supposedly his grandchild, had
+appeared in Chepstow some weeks ago during fair-time; that the young
+woman "took observations," which I translated to mean that she told
+fortunes, supporting them both, it would seem, by the pennies she gained
+this way, for the man did no work, and was most often seen "hove to,
+transhipping cargo," at the bar of the Three Old Cronies or elsewhere,
+Crump said. He did not know how or when or where my grandfather had
+first fallen in with these vagabonds. For several successive days he had
+been noticed in their company, or laying a straight course for the
+little booth wherein the girl plied her mean trade; and then, all at
+once, to the stupefied astonishment of Chepstow,&mdash;where the captain was
+reckoned, with reason, a particularly hard, sour, dour sort of body,
+anything but friendly or hospitable,&mdash;the pair of them were discovered
+comfortably installed beneath the Pendarves' roof, as snug as if they
+had lived there all their lives and never meant to go away! The thing
+was a mystery; it went near to being a scandal. For a final touch, Crump
+assured me that these precious gentry were all but nameless; no one had
+ever heard the woman called anything, and the man's name defied
+pronunciation.</p>
+
+<p>Upon all this agreeable intelligence, we parted, as Crump's way was by
+the round-about hill road, while I struck straight across by short cuts
+to my grandfathers house. If I had been content to loiter on the path
+heretofore, no amount of haste could satisfy me now. I doubt if any
+honest artist lad returning to the place of his birth after three years'
+absence ever met a grayer welcome. I had left my grandfather unimpaired,
+and it was well-nigh impossible to figure that harsh and domineering
+spirit in decay. Abram Pendarves belonged to the ancient hearty, savage
+race of British sea-captains, now fast waning to extinction. After a
+youth of wild and black adventure under the rule of just such salt-water
+despots as he himself became, he had spent some two score years
+practising the tyrannies and what one may call the brutal virtues he had
+learned on every sea and beneath every sky this planet owns; then came
+at last to settle down in the storm-beaten house on the cliffs by
+Chepstow (the house his father's father had built), whence he could see
+the surf whiten on the rocks and gulls forever circling about the Brown
+Cow. His was a narrow and surly old age, not overwell provided, for he
+had never been a thrifty man; and he found among the rattletrap
+furnishings of his neglected home one living chattel quite as
+worthless&mdash;a weird, lean goblin of a boy, his sole descendant,
+fatherless and motherless, playing lonely little games in corners,
+making crass drawings with a charred stick on the walls, and viewing the
+blossoming orchards of spring with a crazy delight in color. I fear
+there was not much affection between this ill-matched couple. For long
+years I saw in my grandfather only a coarse, violent old man, niggardly
+and censorious. And to him there<!-- Page 158 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> was doubtless something unwholesome
+and repellent in the most innocent of my tastes; I could not even sin
+roundly, like other boys, by pilfering or truantry, but must display an
+exotic passion for reading forbidden books, an abhorred dexterity at
+caricature. I think we were equally headstrong and unreasonable, I in my
+young way, he in his old one; and as I trudged along the quiet homeward
+paths, it shamed me to remember with what hard words we had parted.</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>The sun was going down as I conquered the last steep rise toward my
+grandfather's gate. Hereabouts a pair of steps had been cut into the
+cliff and a hand-rail erected to help the visitor against the wind,
+coming, as it so often did, in flaws of extraordinary force and fury
+around the headland. From this high point a great expanse of ocean
+filled the eye, and the ceaseless, uneasy rumor of water assailed one
+even in the fairest weather. There was always a thin run of surf about
+the base of the Brown Cow and among those narrow conical rocks which,
+set in a rough crescent near the lower end of the Cat's Mouth, had not
+inaptly been named the Cat's Teeth.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 396px;">
+<img src="images/illus0333.jpg" width="396" height="400" alt="&quot;&#39;YOU DIDN&#39;T SEE THE SIGN, I SUPPOSE?&#39;&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;&#39;YOU DIDN&#39;T SEE THE SIGN, I SUPPOSE?&#39;&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The path followed the edge of the cliff on the hither side of a stone
+wall, behind which some few experienced old apple-trees bent and
+flattened themselves into strange, tortuous shapes to escape the winds.
+The inclosure went by the name of orchard, though it was in truth little
+else than a wild jungle of weeds and rubbish; but one tree in the most
+sheltered corner yearly made a conscientious effort to supply us with a
+bushel or so of pippins, and adventurous Chepstow urchins as regularly
+defeated the hope. I purposed to shorten my road by crossing here; and
+so, finding a toe-rest in certain familiar crannies of the masonry,
+clambered easily to the top of the wall, and paused there a moment,<!-- Page 159 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>
+astride of the coping, to put aside the branches and take a distant view
+of the forlorn pile of ruins I called home. It was a dreary place; its
+roofs sagged, its chimneys leaned at perilous slants. Yet my heart
+warmed to the sight of it. I took hold of the stoutest bough to swing me
+to the ground, when&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Don't touch those apples, young man!" said somebody sharply.</p>
+
+<p>I was so startled as nearly to lose my hold, and came down with a run
+and hands well scored on the rough bark. There I stood, knee-high in
+rank undergrowth, staring all about in a surprise that must have been
+not a little ludicrous, for the voice uttered a short cicada-chirrup of
+laughter, shrill and sweet.</p>
+
+<p>"Here I am. What bats men are!" it said.</p>
+
+<p>I looked. She was standing almost immediately beneath the place where I
+had climbed over; my boot must have grazed her. She was what old women
+call a slip of a girl, in a cotton gown, white, figured with fine sprigs
+of green sadly faded, for it was not new. The wind whipped her red hair
+into her eyes. Her face was very much freckled; properly speaking, it
+was one freckle from brow to chin. She wore, besides, as I remember, a
+little muslin tucker (I think the garment is so named) and a little
+frilled muslin apron; and these articles, together with her old print
+frock, were washed, starched, and ironed to a degree it hath not entered
+into the mind of man to conceive. I took off my hat; and something about
+this young woman moved me thereafter hastily to adjust my cravat and
+shirt-ruffle. I believe these signs of perturbation (which were entirely
+genuine) pleased her in some subtle way, like a tribute, for she stopped
+to inquire: "You want to cut through here to the highroad? I'm very
+sorry, but I really cannot allow it. I've had a great deal of trouble
+keeping the village boys away from this tree. These are fine apples and
+good winter keepers&mdash;that is, I think they are&mdash;&mdash;" she added a little
+tentatively, searching my face. "You didn't see the sign, I suppose?"</p>
+
+<p>I followed her gesture and beheld, nailed aloft on the stub of a dead
+tree, a square of white planking whereon was neatly lettered the legend:</p>
+
+<h4>NO TRESPASSING UNDER PENALTY OF</h4>
+
+<h4>THE LAW</h4>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Abram and Nicol Pendarves, Proprietors</span></h4>
+<h4><span class="smcap">per Mary Smith</span></h4>
+
+<p>"I did it myself with a red-hot poker," she said proudly.</p>
+
+<p>I gazed from her to the sign-board, all but speechless. "It's very well
+done," I managed to get out at last.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, isn't it? But, somehow, it doesn't keep the boys from coming.
+They're not at all law-abiding. I don't think they've been very well
+brought up. And then, of course, they're not accustomed to seeing any
+one in charge here." She looked around, and smoothed her apron with the
+most astonishing little air of resource and command. "I saw a bill with
+the names at the bottom that way, and per So-and-So below, so I copied
+it," she continued, surveying her handiwork fondly.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah? You are Miss Mary Smith?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes." And now she looked at me, and away again, with a strange and
+sudden flush. "Yes, <i>Smith</i>. That's&mdash;that's a very good name, <i>I</i>
+think." There was a kind of tremulous defiance in her tone, as if she
+half expected me to question it.</p>
+
+<p>"I've heard it before, I believe," said I stupidly&mdash;for, in fact, I had
+scarcely yet got myself together. "You live here?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded, with a perplexed and inquiring eye on me. "I'm Captain
+Pendarves' housekeeper," she said, with a prim and bridling air, and
+once more her expression challenged me. "Deny it if you can, sir!" was
+evidently her unspoken thought.</p>
+
+<p>"And how long has my&mdash;ahem!&mdash;has Captain Pendarves been employing you,
+may I ask?" I said, wondering that Crump had not prepared me for this as
+for the other changes.</p>
+
+<p>"Young man," said Mary Smith severely, "I have no time to stand here
+answering idle questions. If you want to see Captain Pendarves, I will
+speak to him; but if not, I really think you had better be getting on,
+for it's late."</p>
+
+<p>"I was thinking of stopping awhile," said I humbly, "with my
+grandfather. You see, I'm Nicol Pendarves."</p>
+
+<p>Had I said, "I am the Prince of Darkness," the announcement could not
+have wrought a more appalling change in her. She fell back a step,
+putting out one faltering hand to the wall for support. Her small
+bullying mien vanished like a garment twitched from her shoulders by
+unseen magic. Her face blanched piteously; terror looked from her eyes.
+"Oh, I was afraid of this!" she gasped, in a voice that went to the
+heart. "Sir, I&mdash;I&mdash;meant no harm!"</p>
+
+<p>"Harm!" said I, both touched and puzzled. "Why, you've done none. There
+is no need for excuses. I never saw a better steward; you did not know
+me, and you were within your rights to send me about my business."</p>
+
+<p>"Sir," she said, still in a tremble, "I have<!-- Page 160 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> done no wrong. You will
+find everything just as you left it."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall find everything in a good deal better case, judging by what
+I've seen already, I think," said I heartily. "How long have you been
+here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Four weeks&mdash;next Wednesday," she answered nervously.</p>
+
+<p>"Then," said I, "maybe you can tell me something about the drift of
+things here. For&mdash;not to boggle about it&mdash;I am in some uneasiness, Miss
+Smith. These people&mdash;this man and woman who I hear have settled
+themselves upon Captain Pendarves of late&mdash;who are they? what are they?"</p>
+
+<p>As I spoke we emerged upon the stone-paved walk leading to our kitchen
+door; it had been picked free of weeds, and the currant-bushes on either
+side trimly harnessed up to a set of stakes. A white curtain flounced
+behind the old lattice; there was a row of flowering geraniums in pots
+upon the sill. Through the open door you might see a clear fire and Mary
+Smith's saucepans glowing on the wall. The place, I thought, wore, for a
+kitchen, the best air conceivable of decent and humble dignity; nor
+would one have supposed that mere thrift and cleanliness could be so
+comely. I turned to her with some such words, and found her facing me,
+so much of haggard trouble in her eyes that I stopped, aghast.</p>
+
+<p>"Sir," she said, twisting her fingers, "I see you do not understand&mdash;I
+thought you knew. I&mdash;I am the woman you speak of. Your grandfather is
+within, and the other&mdash;the man&mdash;with him."</p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>Our old house being designed and built with a shiplike compactness,
+there was but one room on the ground floor besides the kitchen and its
+offices. It was a plain, comfortable place, wainscoted about, with
+shelves and lockers in the whimsical copy of a vessel's cabin. And it
+contained the single work of art our establishment could show; that is,
+a portrait of my grandfather's grandfather,&mdash;he who founded this
+house,&mdash;in a finicking attitude, with a brocade coat and a pair of
+compasses. In his rear were to be seen a pillar and a red velvet
+curtain, and (distantly) a fine storm of clouds and lightning. Never was
+a respectable old sailorman so misrepresented; but all his descendants
+except one regarded this gaudy daub with almost religious veneration.
+Every family has its one great man; the admiral was ours. His was the
+distinction of being the only Pendarves who had ever managed to amass a
+fortune. It had dribbled through the fingers of succeeding generations;
+but there was a tradition that some part of it, buried or otherwise
+secreted with an admirable forethought by the old gentleman, might yet
+be discovered, to the further glorification of our house.</p>
+
+<p>The picture hung directly opposite the door, favoring me, as I entered,
+with a disconcerting smirk; it needed no great stretch of fancy to
+credit him with cherishing some secret and villainous joke. Beneath it
+sat my grandfather, with his pipe, in the same place and attitude as I
+remembered him for upward of twenty years, but so spectral a likeness of
+himself that the sight of him shocked me like a blow. He had wasted to a
+mere parchment envelop of bones, and the eyes he turned to mine were
+bright with inward fever. I had looked for I do not know what signs of
+an unstable mind, but at first, save for the eyes, saw none. He showed
+only a not too well pleased surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"Nicol!" he said, and pushed back his chair, without rising. "Nicol!"
+and then for a moment sat staring closely at me under his heavy brows.
+With his next action something of the horror of his affliction came home
+to me, for I saw that, but for some confused sense that I had been
+absent against his will, he had utterly forgot everything concerning me,
+the terms of our last meeting, and the events of many years besides.</p>
+
+<p>"Hush, and sit down!" he said, in the habitually chiding tone he had
+used to the boy of ten or twelve. "Take your books and get your lesson!"
+He pointed with the stem of his pipe to a stool in the corner where, as
+a lad, I had passed more than one grim hour, and turned to his
+companion, as older people turn from the interruptions of children.</p>
+
+<p>Mary Smith, following behind, touched me gently on the arm. "Go and sit
+down," she formed the words with her lips rather than voiced them.</p>
+
+<p>There sat beside my grandfather a vast, fat creature with a forest of
+greasy black hair and beard about his pallid face; his heavy hands lay
+motionless in his lap, forcibly reminding me of an image I had seen of
+some Oriental god upon his throne. His eyes were scarcely opened, his
+breathing was almost imperceptible; a gross animal content appeared in
+him as of a full-fed, lethargic crocodile. Side by side, he and the
+gaunt, fierce-eyed old man presented no mean allegory of spirit and
+body. A table was before them, and in the middle of it a toy the like of
+which I had never seen in this house or elsewhere&mdash;a globe of crystal,
+perhaps the size of an orange, held up on a little bronze pedestal. The
+fat man's eyes, or so much of them as one<!-- Page 161 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> might see, were fixed upon
+this thing with a kind of stupid intensity; one could have fancied him
+paying tribute to some idolatrous shrine. The captain watched him with
+an equal earnestness; so might the Roman mob have hung upon the reading
+of the sacred entrails; and there was about it the air of a
+well-practised, familiar rite. At last my grandfather asked:</p>
+
+<p>"What do you see?"</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 309px;">
+<img src="images/illus0334.jpg" width="309" height="400" alt="&quot;THE FAT MAN&#39;S EYES ... WERE FIXED UPON THIS THING WITH A
+KIND OF STUPID INTENSITY&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;THE FAT MAN&#39;S EYES ... WERE FIXED UPON THIS THING WITH A
+KIND OF STUPID INTENSITY&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The other's lips moved, and an unintelligible whisper reached me.</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, that's it, that's it," said the captain, and sent a quick,
+searching look about the room. "Doubloons&mdash;pieces-of-eight&mdash;Spanish
+pillar-dollars&mdash;doubloons, doubloons! That is what it would likely be
+made up of, eh? But where&mdash;try to see that&mdash;where?"</p>
+
+<p>Another interval of silent gazing, and the<!-- Page 162 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> oracle uttered some further
+statement, which my grandfather received with an impatient groan.</p>
+
+<p>"Doubloons&mdash;piles of gold&mdash;I know!" he said. "And a ship. But
+whereabouts was it, eh? Surely you can see whereabouts it was?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's all a mist; I can see nothing," the other answered, after a pause.</p>
+
+<p>I could have found it in me to laugh at the whole miserable hocus-pocus,
+had I been less indignant. The situation was, besides, sufficiently
+grave; and as I listened to this silly and profane juggling, and
+observed the wildness of my grandfather's bearing, it became plain to me
+that he could not long endure such an influence. I guessed from his talk
+that the old man's disorder was based upon the idea of treasure lost,
+sunk, or hidden hereabout; for our coast was dangerous, a menace to
+vessels, and not innocent, besides, of smugglers and worse. Perhaps the
+poverty of his later years was at the root of his delusion; perhaps his
+madness would have taken this form anyhow. However he had fallen into
+the fat man's hands, this was the secret of the latter's power. While I
+pondered gloomily, the sitting (so to call it) came to an end. Perhaps
+my unwelcome appearance somewhat contracted it. My grandfather lapsed
+into his chair, his chin on his chest, brooding. Excitement died in him
+almost visibly, like the flickering down of a spent fire. Instead of
+eighty, he looked a hundred and eighty, and his face was as lifeless as
+a mummy's.</p>
+
+<p>"Zaira!" said the fat man, raising his thick lids (but I fancied he had
+already taken some shrewd peeps at me from under them), "I have slept,
+and the spirit has spoken. Arise! take away the mirror of Time and
+Space!"</p>
+
+<p>And hereupon the girl, advancing with a shamed glance at me, carried the
+globe to one of the lockers, shoved it in, and slammed the door on it
+savagely.</p>
+
+<p>"Have a care!" the seer warned her somberly; the mirror of Time and
+Space, apparently, was not immune from the ordinary risks of mirrors, as
+one might have expected so august an instrument to be. When speaking
+aloud thus, he used a great rolling, sonorous voice; it filled the room
+until the very window-panes vibrated.</p>
+
+<p>She gave him a look of angry rebellion, opened her lips as if to retort
+with some stinging word, stood irresolute a moment with eyes that
+wavered between the three of us, then walked off, leaving us sitting
+facing each other in silence.</p>
+
+<p>The fat man and I exchanged a long stare, I choking down my temper, he
+smooth and placid, to outward seeming, as the idol he resembled. The
+resolution with which he stuck to his silly pose was, in its way, a
+rogue's masterpiece; nothing more exasperating than this stolid
+effrontery was ever devised. The scoundrel feared, and yet knew he had,
+in a sense, the better of me; the helpless old man between us was his
+shield.</p>
+
+<p>"Young man," he said at last, in the same booming monotone, "have you
+the gift of the seeing eye?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have more the gift of the feeling fist, I think," said I, with what
+calmness I could muster. "If you doubt it, sir, I shall be pleased to
+show you. I am Nicol Pendarves, as a soothsayer like yourself will have
+guessed already. Perhaps you will honor me with your name and business
+here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Many names are mine," he answered, and made a solemn gesture. "Many
+names are mine&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Doubtless," I said; "but I meant your <i>last</i> alias."</p>
+
+<p>He went on, unruffled, in his great voice, as if I had not spoken: "Many
+names have been mine through the uncounted eons&mdash;many names. In this
+flesh men call me Constantine Paphluoides."</p>
+
+<p>It was no wonder Chepstow could not turn its tongue about that name;
+that and his manner together must have dumfounded our straight-thinking
+townspeople. I do not remember&mdash;indeed, I took no pains to note&mdash;what
+else he said; bits of mythology, history, poetry, rolled from him in a
+cataract of meaningless noise. Had I been an ardent disciple sitting at
+his feet, he could not have feigned a greater exaltation. The fellow was
+at once dull and crafty; he loosed this gust of windy rhetoric at me as
+if he thought to win upon me by mere sound and fury signifying nothing.</p>
+
+<p>I got up at length, when I had had enough of him, and, walking across to
+where he sat, "Mr. Constantine Paphluoides," said I, "this is my house;
+I give you until to-morrow morning to leave it; you will go quietly and
+without any formalities of farewell. You will find it expedient to obey
+me: otherwise, although I have not consulted the mirror of Time and
+Space, I should not be surprised if it revealed you, to the seeing eye,
+in the town jail and later in the stocks."</p>
+
+<p>He made no answer, but sat staring at me, blinking, and opening and
+shutting his mouth in a gasping fashion like a fish. I had striven to
+speak quietly, but (being in a breathing heat of anger) must
+unconsciously have raised my voice, for unexpectedly, and, as it were,
+for a warning, my grandfather came out of his semi-stupor<!-- Page 163 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> and
+straightened up, eying me over with a kind of wandering severity.</p>
+
+<p>"Nicol, go to bed! You hear me? Go to bed!" He reached, cursing, for his
+cane. There was a grotesque familiarity in the act. With that very cane
+he had sought to coerce me into the straight and narrow road, as he
+conceived it, how many times during all my childhood!</p>
+
+<p>"Go to bed, I tell you!" he screamed, and half rose, brandishing his rod
+of correction.</p>
+
+<p>Somebody pulled at my sleeve; it was the girl. "Please come away, Mr.
+Pendarves; please do come away, sir, just for a minute, and then he'll
+forget it," she urged; and, with her earnest air of responsibility:
+"It's so bad for him."</p>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/illus0335.jpg" width="400" height="388" alt="&quot;&#39;GO TO BED, I TELL YOU,&#39; HE SCREAMED, AND HALF ROSE&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;&#39;GO TO BED, I TELL YOU,&#39; HE SCREAMED, AND HALF ROSE&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the kitchen, Zaira Mary Smith was getting supper ready, as it
+appeared. I followed her out passively, and sat down in a sort of maze.
+It seemed incredible that, amid the shabby tragedy of this household,
+there should be time or thought for the kindly business of spreading a
+meal. The girl marched briskly to and fro, stooping to the oven door,
+tinkling softly among her spoons and bowls, evidently taking a timid
+zest in her labors. It made her seem the most sane, assured, and stable
+person among us, spite of her position. I could have imagined her
+singing as she went, had it not been for my presence. She was
+desperately conscious of me, watching me askant<!-- Page 164 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> with the curiously
+commingled fear and trustfulness of a child. Nor, notwithstanding the
+untruths or half-truths she had told me, could her connection with the
+abominable rogue-fool in the next room appear other than an enormity&mdash;as
+if she might be the enchanted heroine of some fairy-tale, condemned to
+the service of a monster. At last, when she came and laid a board and
+pan on the table beside me, and, rolling up the sleeves about her
+capable, round little arms, began a severe maltreatment of a batch of
+dough, I could keep silence no longer; curiosity crowded every other
+feeling out of me.</p>
+
+<p>"Mary Smith!" I burst out, "for God's sake, tell me all about it!"</p>
+
+<p>She rested her hands on the edge of the bowl an instant. "About us?" she
+said, with a quick glance at me. She gave the dough one or two
+perfunctory pats and punches, biting her lips; and then suddenly, with a
+rush of color, her face puckered together, she clapped her befloured
+hands over it, and fell on the nearest bench in a perfect whirlwind of
+sobs.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;I&mdash;I w-w-wanted to be respectable!" was all I could make out between
+gasps&mdash;but that was staggering enough news, I thought. She wanted to be
+respectable!</p>
+
+<p>She went on: "I didn't come here of my own free will, Mr. Pendarves,
+truly I didn't; but when we came, and I saw how nice I could make
+it,&mdash;and I never had a home before,&mdash;I knew, if you ever came back, that
+would end it all, and I did so hope you wouldn't!"</p>
+
+<p>"It seemed a pity not to make hay while the sun shone?" I suggested.</p>
+
+<p>She nodded, a little doubtfully. "I didn't think of it just that way,"
+she said. "But&mdash;yes, I suppose any one would put it so. Only&mdash;I haven't
+hurt anything, Mr. Pendarves; I&mdash;I only scrubbed&mdash;and cooked&mdash;and
+cleaned a little. I was so happy: there was no harm, it seemed to me.
+And when I pretended to be the housekeeper, that&mdash;that was just a little
+game I played with myself; it was silly, I dare say, but, after all, it
+did no harm, either. It was like another game I play by myself
+sometimes&mdash;of having a birthday, you know? I put little things I've made
+beside the bed, and when I wake up in the morning, I make believe it's
+my birthday, and I'm so surprised at all the presents I've got! It's
+silly, isn't it?' I knew you'd laugh."</p>
+
+<p>"I never felt less like it," I said. "Don't you know your real
+birthday?"</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head. No, she did not know that. She had never known
+anything about her father and mother. She was not even certain of her
+own name. "He calls me Zaira," she said, with a scornful jerk of her
+auburn head toward the other room; "but that's a stupid name, and I hate
+it. I tell every one my name's Mary Smith. Why not? I might as well call
+myself what I like&mdash;nobody cares. I think Mary Smith's beautiful, don't
+you? It's so respectable, isn't it?" she added wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>Of her childhood she could remember nothing but being in some sort of
+school or institution (a home for foundlings, most likely) governed by
+nuns, or at least by women who went about in black stuff dresses and
+white caps, and whom one called <i>ma s&oelig;ur</i>&mdash;for this was in southern
+France, she thought. The life was clean, decorous, and peaceful, and she
+might have grown up to wear a white cap herself, and herd little waifs
+into chapel; but when she was probably ten or eleven years old, the fat
+man came and took her away, and they had been wandering up and down the
+world ever since. He said he was her uncle, but she was no more sure of
+that than of anything else concerning herself.</p>
+
+<p>When they had been in Chepstow a time, she said, her uncle came into
+their fortune-telling booth one day with Captain Pendarves, whose name
+she did not then know. He talked a great deal in an excited way about
+finding some treasure&mdash;&mdash;"money I think he said his father or
+grandfather had hidden a long while ago. He kept saying it would all be
+in 'doubloons, doubloons,' because it was got in the Spanish Main and
+brought here in a ship. And he said there was treasure, heaps of it, in
+the bottom of the Cat's Mouth, where ships had sunk, gold pieces all in
+amongst the ribs of dead men. Mr. Pendarves,"&mdash;she looked at me with a
+shy, awed sympathy,&mdash;"I saw your grandfather was&mdash;was&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"He is crazy, or nearly so," said I. "Plain talk is best."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid so. I thought shame to beguile a poor old man that way, but,
+sir, I could not stop it. He came every day, and they looked in the
+crystal&mdash;just as they were doing this afternoon, you know. He's worse
+now; I think he forgets betweenwhiles what was said the last time they
+looked. Then, one day, <i>he</i> told me we were to come here to live. It was
+wrong&mdash;I knew it; but when I saw it, and thought what I could do&mdash;and I
+did so want to have a home and&mdash;and be respectable&mdash;and I thought, too,
+if I worked hard and made it nice, it would be a&mdash;a kind of payment,
+wouldn't it? I couldn't help longing to&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't cry that way," I said. "I can't bear to see you cry."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't help it," she sobbed. "It's so hard to leave it all."<!-- Page 165 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, why leave it?" said I. "<i>He</i> has to, surely; but that need
+make no difference to you. We must have a housekeeper, you know."</p>
+
+<p>She gave me a woeful glance; and I understood that, according to her
+poor little code, it would be more "respectable" to resume her
+journeyings with the fat crystal-gazer than to stay in the house with
+Nick Pendarves as his grandfather's housekeeper. Here was a ticklish
+point to argue with her; and, for all her tears, there was a firmness in
+the set of her chin (it was dented with a dimple) that warned me such
+argument would be a waste of time. She had made up her mind, and would
+stand to it at all costs. It was martyrdom in an eminently feminine
+style; women deliver themselves up to it day by day, and contrive to be
+perfectly unreasonable, yet somehow in the right. She wiped her eyes
+presently, shut her mouth on a sob, and went resolutely about her work.
+We had, after all, a tolerably cheerful evening in the kitchen. It
+seemed wisest for me not to show myself again before Captain Pendarves,
+but I am afraid I did not repine greatly at the banishment. As the door
+swung to and fro behind Mary carrying their dishes, I caught glimpses of
+the gloomy parlor, my grandfather huddled in his chair by the table,
+with bright, roving eyes; the sorcerer surprisingly busy about the food
+for a person of his ethereal habits; and, on the wall beyond, old
+Admiral Pendarves simpering eternally over his private fun.</p>
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>The wind came up strong again after sunset, and all night long went
+noisily about the gables, and piped down our trembling old chimneys. It
+did not lessen with the approach of morning, and when I thrust open the
+window, an hour or so after dawn, there was a low-hanging gray sky and a
+great, driving stir in the air. I had hardly pushed the casement out,
+had one brief vision of bare tormented trees, felt a slap of rain, and
+heard, not far away, the measured beating of breakers as they charged at
+the foot of our cliff, when the wind, plucking the latch from my grasp,
+slammed the lattice and went yelling around the corner of the house like
+a jocular demon. I began to dress, thinking, as I had often thought
+before, that the place had a kind of fantastic kinship with the sea;
+every timber in it seemed to strain and creak to the repeated onsets of
+the storm, like those of any ship. The house stood steady enough, yet
+our position, open to all the winds of heaven, and within a few hundred
+paces of the furious water, was surely such as none but a sailor would
+have chosen. We rode out the weather in the open, so to speak, with
+abundant sea-room. And, for the better carrying out of the simile, there
+presently arose, somewhere outside, a long, drawling hail, calculated,
+with a mariner's nicety, to overcome the wind. "Ah-o-oy! The house,
+ah-o-oy!"</p>
+
+<p>It came from the landward-looking or highroad side of the house&mdash;about
+two points on the starboard bow, as old Crump would have said. And, in
+fact, when I reached the door, there was Crump himself huddled in a
+pea-jacket on the seat of his cart, with his gray pony drooping
+dolefully between the shafts. I could just see them above the ragged
+hedge that divided our little front yard from the public way. Towering
+columns of rain swept across the landscape; Crump and the pony looked
+soaked to the core; and I was admiring the Spartan devotion to duty that
+brought him out at this hour, in such weather, when he began another
+wailing like a castaway banshee: "Ah-o-oy, the house! Pendarves,
+ah-o-oy!"</p>
+
+<p>I set a hand to either side of my mouth and roared an answering hail to
+him up the wind. We were a bare twenty yards apart, but if he had not
+chanced at that moment to look in my direction, I doubt if he would have
+been aware of me, for all my efforts. The wind, in a fresh swoop,
+snatched the sound from my lips and ranged through the house with a
+turmoil of banging doors, falling crockery, and wildly fluttering
+draperies. As it was, he caught sight of me, shouted something
+unintelligible, and gesticulated toward a formless heap tucked up in
+oilskins behind him in the cart. Then he descended laboriously and
+signaled for help to remove it.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it? What has he got?" screamed Mary Smith in my ear. She must
+have come running from the back of the house at the recent outburst of
+racket. Her petticoats swirled; her red curls streamed (they were
+shining with wet). She had certainly been outdoors already, as early as
+it was, in the teeth of all this blow, and I was startled by the pale
+anxiety of her look. "What is it? Who is there?" she cried again
+shrilly.</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody but Crump with my baggage," I cried back. "What's the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Mr. Pendarves, haven't you seen them? They are both gone! I've
+looked everywhere about the house. They were gone when I got up, and I
+can't find them high or low!"</p>
+
+<p>"You mean Captain Pendarves&mdash;and the other?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded, with terror-struck eyes on me; then, raising on tiptoe,
+screamed painfully, with<!-- Page 166 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> her mouth close to my ear (it was almost
+impossible to hear otherwise): "He&mdash;your grandfather&mdash;has done it
+before. He's always restless in a storm. He goes down to the shore
+sometimes. I'm so afraid&mdash;&mdash;" her look said the rest.</p>
+
+<p>"Ask him&mdash;ask Crump; maybe he's seen them," she added in a shriek, as I
+started to the carrier's help. It was but a few steps to the gate, yet I
+reached it wet through, half blinded by sheets of water driven slantwise
+in my face, and with the breath nearly beaten out of me. In the open,
+thus, the storm seemed to increase tenfold in violence; it filled the
+vast cloudy hollow of the sky with reverberating din; and I felt, or
+fancied I felt, the solid ground shiver with the pounding of the waves
+on the ledges along the Cat's Mouth.</p>
+
+<p>Crump greeted me with a cheerful grin; he had all the seaman's tolerance
+for the vagaries of the weather.</p>
+
+<p>"Coming on to blow some, ain't it?" he remarked at the top of his lungs.
+"Your old apple-tree's carried away&mdash;that one in the corner of the
+orchard, I mean. I could see it as I came along by the upper road."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you seen my grandfather anywhere about?" I shouted.</p>
+
+<p>He could not have understood the question, for he answered, squinting up
+at me knowingly as he stooped over his end of my chest: "I see you got
+rid of <i>him</i>, Mr. Nick, and in short order, too. I spoke him a little
+way back, bound for Sidmouth with all sails set&mdash;at least, he was laying
+a course that way. Come on board, ma'am!" He pulled his forelock and
+made a leg respectfully before Mary (albeit eying her with no small
+interest) as we shoved our burden through the door. The girl clapped it
+shut, with a sharp struggle against the draught, and in the momentary
+silence that followed we stood awkwardly and apprehensively surveying
+one another, while the hurricane rumbled outside.</p>
+
+<p>"I asked you if you had seen my grandfather," I said to Crump, at last.</p>
+
+<p>"Seen the cap'n? Why, no, sir," he said, surprised. "I was telling you
+I saw&mdash;&mdash;" He stopped, with a glance at Mary.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, go on. You saw <i>him?</i> Where? What was he doing?" she said sharply.</p>
+
+<p>"I was saying he crossed my bows laying his course for Sidmouth, or that
+way," said Crump, evidently striving for a witness-box exactness. "He
+didn't answer my hail. Looked like he was in too much of a hurry."</p>
+
+<p>Mary cast a troubled look about. "Did he have anything with him? A
+portmanteau, or carpet-bag, or anything to carry clothes?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not that I noticed," said Crump carefully. "Looked as if he was going
+out in ballast&mdash;except his pockets; there was something in his pockets,
+I should say."</p>
+
+<p>I stared at Mary in some perplexity. What the fat man did, or what
+should become of him, were, indeed, matters of indifference to me,
+except so far as they concerned her. I was well enough pleased that he
+should go, but there was something unusual in the manner of his going;
+it was a headlong flight. To tell the truth, I had looked for further
+trouble with him. What would the girl do now? And where was Captain
+Pendarves? She met me with eyes at once frightened and resolute.</p>
+
+<p>"First of all we must find Captain Pendarves&mdash;we must go look for him,"
+she said, answering my thought and making up my mind for me in a trice.
+(She has a way of doing this, displaying the most unerring accuracy at
+it any time these twenty years!) And, in the turn of a hand, she had
+kilted up her skirts, tied a shawl, over her head, and was making for
+the kitchen door.</p>
+
+<p>"Lord love you, miss, you can't go out in this!" said Crump, aghast.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? I've been out in it once already."</p>
+
+<p>"But, Mary!" I cried, and tried to withhold her. "What good can you do?
+Here is Crump, and here am I. We'll find them both. This is no work for
+a woman. You are wet, you may get hurt&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And you?" she retorted. Then, in a lower voice, "Don't stop me, Mr.
+Pendarves; don't try to keep me from going. I can't stay quietly here,
+and wait, and wait, and not know what's happened. I think I should go
+mad. I <i>must</i> go. You are wasting time; your grandfather&mdash;oh, can't you
+understand?"</p>
+
+<p>I understood only that she was frantic with anxiety, and might have
+offered further remonstrance had it not been for the sudden defection of
+Crump. He edged a little nearer, and gently jogged my elbow.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm with ye, miss," he announced, with startling alacrity; and, as we
+followed her out, he explained to me in a hoarse and perfectly audible
+whisper behind one hand: "I'm always with 'em when they get that look
+on, Mr. Nicol. Catch me adrift on a lee shore! I've learned a lot since
+I signed with Sarah."</p>
+
+<p>The breakfast-table had been laid, and the empty chairs stood around it
+in their places, under the smiling supervision of the admiral's
+portrait. In the kitchen, Mary had a bright fire going, her neat towels
+hanging to dry. She opened the door, and the next instant this pretty
+and comforting picture was shut behind us, and there we were crouching
+in the rain under the eaves, with the wind bellowing overhead.<!-- Page 167 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 372px;">
+<img src="images/illus0336.jpg" width="372" height="400" alt="&quot;IT LAY BEFORE US, A CONSIDERABLE HEAP OF GOLD AND SILVER
+COINS, TARNISHED BUT RECOGNIZABLE&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;IT LAY BEFORE US, A CONSIDERABLE HEAP OF GOLD AND SILVER
+COINS, TARNISHED BUT RECOGNIZABLE&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mary stood on tiptoe again to scream: "I've been all over except in the
+orchard&mdash;you can see the shore from there."</p>
+
+<p>I took her hand within my arm, and we struggled forward. As we drew
+nearer the cliff, the loud and awful noise of breakers in the Cat's
+Mouth silenced the storm; yet the wind was no whit diminished. A man
+could hardly have kept his feet, I think, along the cliff path. Before
+we reached the corner where the ancient tree that had weathered so many
+gales lay prostrate, uprooted at last, although we had as yet no view of
+the immediate shore, we could see a white aureole of spray hang, vanish,
+and return in a breath, yards in air above the Brown Cow. We fetched a
+compass around the orchard, stumbling and staggering among stumps and
+matted weeds and half-hidden logs without finding my grandfather, or any
+trace of him; and Crump having dropped behind, we had lost sight of him
+when that eery screech he adopted to make himself heard traveled to us
+down the wind. He was kneeling by the dislodged roots of our old tree,
+and, as he caught my eye, began an uncouth pantomime of surprise and
+wonder; then stooped, grasped a handful of something, and held it aloft
+with extravagant gestures. He bawled again, and, having got closer by
+this time, I heard the words:<!-- Page 168 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Doubloons, Mr. Nick! Pieces-of-eight! Spanish dollars! Doubloons!"</p>
+
+<p>"Heaven help us all!" went through me, "Here's another gone mad."</p>
+
+<p>The spectacle put our search momentarily from my mind. I knew Crump's
+head to be none of the strongest, and I should never have guessed what
+had actually happened&mdash;for surely this was a strange place and way in
+which to stumble upon old Admiral Pendarves' treasure!</p>
+
+<p>Yet that was what the carrier had done; he was never saner in his life.
+It lay before us, a considerable heap of gold and silver coins,
+tarnished but recognizable, in a rotting wooden keg sunk into the ground
+at the foot of the tree and partly meshed in its roots. Crump plowed
+among the coins with his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"There's a mort of money here, Mr. Nicol," he said, "and there's been
+more. Look, here's some of it scattered out in the grass; it couldn't
+have got away out there of itself. And here's a footprint in the mud."
+He looked up thoughtfully. "Likely some of it's on its way to Sidmouth
+now," said he. "I thought his pockets bulged."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I wish him joy of it!" said I.</p>
+
+<p>"Lord, you could have the law on him for that, Mr. Nicol. Ain't you
+going to?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not I!" said I, holding Mary's hand.</p>
+
+<p>Something in this attitude must have moved Crump to his next remark. He
+looked us both over with an impartial and dispassionate air, cast a
+calculating eye on the treasure; then, "Enough left to get married and
+set up on, anyway," he said weightily. "There's worse things in the
+world than being married&mdash;though you'd hardly believe it. That's what I
+often says to Sarah!"</p>
+
+<p>At that Mary Smith snatched her hand suddenly from mine and moved toward
+the edge of the cliff, crying out that we must continue our search. I
+climbed the orchard wall and looked along the shore. Here the cliff
+dropped away almost sheer, and the narrow strip of shingle at its base
+was lost in the surf. Farther to the north it widened a little with the
+curve of the shore, and through a swaying curtain of rain I could follow
+it to a point we called the Notch, near the entrance of the Cat's Mouth;
+of late years they have dredged the channel and moored a bell-buoy off
+this headland. There was nothing alive in sight; some prone black
+objects I saw, with a start, were only a few fisher-boats drawn up on
+the sand, and none too safe. I looked out to sea; the tide was making,
+and, where the strait drew in toward the Cat's Teeth, the waves fought
+and clamored with a horrid vigor, like living monsters. Their huge
+voices outdid the winds, and, as one after another made forward,
+towered, and broke upon the reefs, the Teeth disappeared in a welter of
+foam. Hereabout we found the old man at last.</p>
+
+<p>Where he had got a boat, or with what madman's strength he had launched
+it, we could not guess. It was midway of the Cat's Mouth that I first
+caught sight of him, at no great distance measured by feet and inches,
+but as far beyond human aid as if the wide Atlantic had separated us. He
+was standing up in the stern, with folded arms, in something the posture
+he may have maintained on the poop of his ship in old days&mdash;where,
+perhaps, he fancied himself at this moment. I trust that reason was
+withheld from him in the utter hour; and certainly, although I could not
+discern his features, I saw him make no gesture either to invite help or
+to indicate that he had any understanding of his position. If mad, I
+thought (right or wrong) his death thus less ignoble than his life had
+become; if sane, he held a strong and steadfast heart, and bore himself
+well on his last voyage. By some strange chance, the boat spun and
+tossed among the breakers, yet kept an even keel, and boat and man
+together made a viking end. For, so standing, unconscious or unmoved, he
+went down, before our eyes, between the white and pointed reefs of the
+Cat's Teeth.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 169 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span></p><div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/illus-168.jpg" width="500" height="110" alt="Decoration" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/illus0337.jpg" width="400" height="262" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<h2><a name="BOB_DEBUTANT" id="BOB_DEBUTANT"></a>BOB, D&Eacute;BUTANT</h2>
+
+<h3>BY HENRY GARDNER HUNTING</h3>
+
+<h3>ILLUSTRATIONS BY DENMAN FINK</h3>
+
+<p>Of course, Bob knew that, as an abstract ethical principle, it is wrong
+to fight. His mother had been endeavoring to impress that idea upon him,
+from the moment it was first decided that he should go to public school
+till his books and his lunch-box were packed and he was on his way
+thither; and she had succeeded fairly well, for she had exacted a
+promise from him faithfully to avoid personal encounters as wholly
+sinful and unbecoming.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, Bob knew only so much about fighting as he had
+learned through round-eyed, somewhat frightened observation of a very
+few entirely bloodless encounters among older boys; and, inasmuch as he
+had found himself consistently excluded from nearly all other, more
+peaceful pursuits and interests of these older ones, it was not
+unnatural that he should feel merely a spectator's interest in their
+fistic battles also, and that he should look upon them as he would have
+looked upon any other natural phenomenon&mdash;with some excitement, perhaps,
+but with no personal concern.</p>
+
+<p>Bob admired his mother. To him, she was the most beautiful and the most
+resourceful woman in the world. He had found her judgment upon many
+subjects so wise that he was quite prepared to believe her position in
+this matter (which did not appear to be vital) completely and
+unquestionably correct, and to promise accordingly.</p>
+
+<p>But conditions which exist on the big, bare public-school playgrounds,
+away alike from parental restraint and parental protection, are quite
+different from those in the home door-yard, and the code which obtains
+in the ward-school world is not an open book to all mothers of
+chubby-fisted sons who are called upon to observe it. It seems difficult
+for mothers to comprehend that a normal boy's standing on the
+school-ground is, like that of a young cock in a barn-yard, simply a
+matter of mettle and muscle.</p>
+
+<p>So it was as early as Bob's second day at school&mdash;on the first Papa Jack
+had gone with him&mdash;that a revelation came both to him and to his mother.
+To him it was a painful revelation,<!-- Page 170 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> first because he had this new code
+to learn, and afterward because of his promise; and it was the latter
+thing that made the real difficulty. When you are a small boy you can
+easily adapt yourself and your habits of mind to new conditions and
+environment; but when you have some one else to think of, and when you
+are bound by a promise, that complicates matters.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 130px;">
+<img src="images/illus0338.jpg" width="130" height="400" alt="&quot;SCHOOL-BAG AND LUNCH-BOX DROPPED FROM HIS HANDS&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;SCHOOL-BAG AND LUNCH-BOX DROPPED FROM HIS HANDS&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 130px;">
+<img src="images/illus0339.jpg" width="130" height="400" alt="&quot;HE SET HIS FACE ONCE MORE TOWARD SCHOOL AND WALKED VERY
+FAST&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;HE SET HIS FACE ONCE MORE TOWARD SCHOOL AND WALKED VERY
+FAST&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Now, one "Curly" Davis&mdash;who was said to have been christened Charles,
+but whose astonishingly spiral locks surely constituted better authority
+for a name than any possible application of baptismal water&mdash;was, by
+right of reputed might, dictator of the Vine Street Primary. Curly was
+alleged to be of pugnacious disposition, and had not been bred to
+appreciation of the Golden Rule. He had the outward bearing of one who
+has reason for confidence in his personal prowess. He was popularly
+believed to have fought many fights and fierce,&mdash;just when and where his
+admirers seemed not to consider important,&mdash;and he had a reputation for
+ferocity rather disproportionate to his stature. He had a way of glaring
+at you, too, if you happened to be a new boy at school, which was
+sufficiently suggestive of a sanguinary temperament to overawe the
+average youngster and to render quite unnecessary any more active
+demonstration.</p>
+
+<p>Like all despots who rule through fear, Curly had a following. It was
+made up of lesser lights of like tastes and ambitions, who toadied to
+and imitated the tyrant simply to avoid the unpleasant necessities which
+the alternative involved. These followers, numbering some six or eight,
+through their unity of aim and Curly's leadership, had gained a certain
+ascendency over the far greater, but unorganized, body of would-be
+independents who, chafe as they might under the yoke, dared not attempt
+to throw it off; and these loyal retainers were zealous in service of
+their lord's interests and pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>On that beautiful fall morning when Bob first went alone to school, he
+had not been ten minutes on the playground, standing upon its outer
+edge, school-bag and lunch-box in hand, to gaze upon its novelties,
+before a satellite of Curly's, one Percy Emery, espied him. Instantly it
+was as though Percy had discovered some new quarry, unearthed a fresh
+specimen of some genus, edible and choice.</p>
+
+<p>"Hi, Curly," he yelled, with the eager loyalty of his kind, "come 'ere.
+'Ere's a new one. Look at the school-bag to 'im."</p>
+
+<p>Curly, who was at the moment engaged in the pleasing pastime of
+hectoring a scared little five-year-old who ought still to have been in
+the<!-- Page 171 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> kindergarten, pricked up his ears at the cry and, like a hungry
+bird of prey leaving a mouse for a lamb, promptly swooped down upon the
+new game. His movement was the signal for the gathering of a crowd, and,
+before Bob was fairly aware that he was the object of attention, he had
+become the center of a curious group whose interest, if not wholly
+hostile, was in the main certainly not friendly. The dictator himself
+confronted him with unmistakably bellicose intentions.</p>
+
+<p>"New shoes!" said Curly contemptuously, selecting the first obviously
+vulnerable point open to a shaft of insult. "New shoes! Spit on 'em!" He
+suited the action to the word, and immediately word and act alike were
+imitated by two or three of his more ardent admirers.</p>
+
+<p>"Stop!" said Bob. He did not know what it meant. He backed away from his
+persecutors.</p>
+
+<p>"Aw, stop, eh?" mocked Curly. "Who are <i>you?</i> What's yer name?"</p>
+
+<p>"Bob McAllister."</p>
+
+<p>"Bob! Bob-tail! Bob-cat!" chanted Curly, in gratuitous insult of which
+only bantam shamelessness is capable. "Stop, will I? Who'll make me?
+You? You want to fight?"</p>
+
+<p>He danced about Bob's quiet little figure, snapping his fingers in the
+new boy's eyes. Then, suddenly, he swung his wiry body and swept a
+stinging blow in Bob's face.</p>
+
+<p>A yell of delight from the despot's own drowned a weaker chorus of
+protest. Curly backed and squared, ready for some show of retaliation or
+resistance, a scornful little grin on his face.</p>
+
+<p>"Come on, now. Fight! Stop me!" he cried.</p>
+
+<p>But Bob did not move. Curly's blow had landed fair on the tender little
+red lip, and it had cut against the teeth behind; a tiny scarlet stream
+flowed down Bob's smooth little chin. In his eyes the dizziness of the
+first jar gradually gave way to slow amazement. Then the tears welled
+up, hot tears which overflowed the lids and ran scalding down the
+cheeks, but they did not conceal or quench a glitter which grew to a
+bright flame behind them.</p>
+
+<p>Bob's school-bag and lunch-box dropped from his hands. The pudgy fists
+which had never before been clinched with belligerent purpose, but which
+were, nevertheless, a boy's fists, doubled themselves into hard little
+knots; but still he stood quiet.</p>
+
+<p>So far as his whirling little mind could think, he thought thus: So this
+was fighting; this was what he had promised mother not to do; what he
+had promised&mdash;had promised&mdash;promised. He was not so big, this boy who
+had struck him,<!-- Page 172 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> not so big. Bob was not afraid. But that a promise is
+a thing to be kept inviolate he had learned, oh, years ago, from Papa
+Jack, along with all the other <i>of-course-ities</i> of life, like telling
+the truth, keeping your troubles to yourself, and not being a cry-baby
+or a telltale. And a promise to mother&mdash;well, nothing could be more
+sacred. Yet here was a new condition which he had never met before, a
+new situation which suddenly made him see in an altogether different
+aspect a question supposedly settled&mdash;this question of to fight or not
+to fight. It made his sweeping promise to mother suddenly seem to have
+been very ill-advised indeed. He wondered if his mother could have known
+that he would meet this kind of thing at school. In that first instant
+after Curly's blow was struck, instinct told him that fists were made to
+be used, and reason added that self-defense is right; and now something
+else was stirring in his heart&mdash;something which might not, perhaps, be
+wholly unexpected, under such circumstances, to stir in the heart of a
+boy whose grandfather had carried a musket at Gettysburg and whose
+father had worn khaki at San Juan. He wondered if his mother could have
+known.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/illus0340.jpg" width="400" height="293" alt="&quot;A RING OF BOYS&mdash;EXCITED, EAGER, YELLING&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;A RING OF BOYS&mdash;EXCITED, EAGER, YELLING&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/illus0341.jpg" width="400" height="297" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p>But Bob's fists only clinched; they did not strike. All the sturdy
+little muscles in his small body stiffened, and he stood with head up
+and eyes blazing, but he did not strike. And then the school-bell
+suddenly began to ring, and the group about him broke away; and Curly
+Davis started off, shouting back something about fixing <i>him</i> after
+school, and&mdash;he was alone.</p>
+
+<p>Bob stood still. He realized that the last bell for school had rung. He
+knew that he should have gone in with the others. That was what he had
+been sent to school for, certainly. But he stood still.</p>
+
+<p>The tears had dried upon his face, and so had the thin little line of
+red on his chin. His lip was swelling, and felt as if a hazelnut or a
+big bean had been pushed up under it and were sticking to and stinging
+the skin. He stooped and picked up his school-bag and lunch-box, stood
+still again for a moment, and then walked away. He was not going to
+school, and, naturally, as there was nowhere else to go, he was going
+home.</p>
+
+<p>But a great, heavy weight seemed to have settled down upon his breast
+and pressed in upon it, and it was hard to breathe. His thoughts were
+still confused, but he was wondering&mdash;wondering. Why was it? Why had<!-- Page 173 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>
+they treated him so? Why had they singled him out to attack him? Why had
+that boy with the curly hair struck him? Why had the others laughed?
+Didn't they like him? Didn't any one like him? Why, what had he done?
+His heart swelled with sudden misery and wretchedness. Why was such an
+unkind thing permitted in the world? And then again returned that
+something which stirred inside him, something hot and hard, which made
+his cheeks and eyes burn and his fingers clinch once more. And then
+again the question, "Could mother have known?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. McAllister saw him coming a block away, and she ran down to the
+gate to meet him as he trudged in. Bob looked up into his mother's face.
+The quick concern in her eyes, as she saw the battered little lip and
+the stained chin, came nearer to making him sob than Curly's blow had
+done; but, though the tears would well up and his throat felt very
+tight, he only swallowed and carefully wet the puffed lip with his
+tongue.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Bobbie, Bobbie, what is the matter?" cried his mother, dropping
+down on her knees on the walk beside him. She put both her hands on his
+shoulders and turned his face toward her; and Bob looked straight into
+her troubled blue eyes, and suddenly began to feel better&mdash;began to
+feel, indeed, that he did not have to care so much, after all.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Bobbie, <i>have</i> you been fighting?"</p>
+
+<p>Bob shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"How did you get your lip hurt so? Did you fall down?"</p>
+
+<p>Again he shook his head. He didn't know just how to tell her. It wasn't
+fighting. At least, <i>he</i> didn't fight; it had been that other boy. But,
+somehow, he did not want to say that; he did not want to tell; he wanted
+something, but he did not know just what it was. He found himself
+forgetting how he had felt a moment before, and then he discovered that
+he was not thinking about what he wanted at all. He was thinking what a
+very <i>blue</i> blue his mother's eyes were when she looked at him so, and,
+all at once, he felt more sorry for her than for himself, because she
+looked so troubled; and he kissed her quickly, and hurt his lip.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. McAllister led him into the house. "Won't you tell mother, Bob?"
+she asked.</p>
+
+<p>But he couldn't. He was feeling better&mdash;much better&mdash;but he couldn't
+tell. There was another reason now, that he hadn't thought of before: it
+would make her feel more sorry. And<!-- Page 174 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> after all, it didn't matter so
+much; that is, it didn't if&mdash; He looked up at her with a new thought.</p>
+
+<p>"But, Bob, you must tell mother all about it," she was saying, as she
+carefully bathed his chin and lip, and so he had to shake his head
+again.</p>
+
+<p>"Then you must tell papa this noon, Bob."</p>
+
+<p>Bob considered. No, he couldn't tell Papa Jack, either. He felt pretty
+sure father himself wouldn't tell about such a thing if he were a boy.
+He was silent.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. McAllister began to move about her work, though she still looked at
+him frequently and anxiously. Bob went away to the window, and stood
+looking out. He remembered how he had started out that morning, with
+school-bag and lunch; he remembered how he had approached the
+school-grounds, and how big and strange and attractive a place it had
+seemed to him at first, and what a good time all those boys had been
+having; and then he remembered how, suddenly, he had found them all
+around him, summoned by the call of that boy with the hateful grin, and
+how Curly Davis had sneered and spat and struck. Suddenly he found
+himself tingling all over, and pressing a burning forehead against the
+cool glass, and digging his knuckles into the corner of the sash till
+they ached. Then he went into the library, and lay down on father's big
+leather couch, and thought and thought.</p>
+
+<p>Papa Jack came home for lunch at noon, and mother told him. Bob heard
+them in the hall.</p>
+
+<p>"He says he didn't fight," said his mother, "and he says he didn't fall
+down. He won't tell me, and I told him he must tell you. I don't know
+why he doesn't want to tell; he isn't ashamed or very much frightened,
+and he didn't cry after he came home."</p>
+
+<p>Bob heard Papa Jack's footsteps cross the hall and come in upon the
+hard-wood library floor, and then on the big rug by the library couch.
+Papa Jack sat down beside him and put his big fingers around Bob's
+little ones.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what about it, Son?"</p>
+
+<p>Bob looked up and smiled. Always such a pleasant, warm feeling came over
+him when Papa Jack came near him and talked to him.</p>
+
+<p>"What about it, Son?"</p>
+
+<p>But Bob could not reply. His eyes grew serious as they looked back into
+his father's.</p>
+
+<p>"What did this, Bob?" asked Papa Jack, gently touching the hazelnut
+bruise with a finger.</p>
+
+<p>"A boy," said Bob.</p>
+
+<p>"What boy?" asked Papa Jack. "A big boy?"</p>
+
+<p>Silence, and then a shake of the head.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you strike him first?"</p>
+
+<p>Again Bob shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"What did you do to him?"</p>
+
+<p>Still another shake of the head.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean he just came up and struck you without any provocation?"</p>
+
+<p>"He laughed," said Bob.</p>
+
+<p>"What else?"</p>
+
+<p>"Spit on my new shoes," reddening.</p>
+
+<p>Papa Jack drew his mustache down between his lip and teeth. "Hm! He did,
+eh? What else?"</p>
+
+<p>"Said 'Bob-tail, bob-cat,'"</p>
+
+<p>Papa Jack looked puzzled.</p>
+
+<p>"Said I was&mdash;Bob, bob-tail, bob-cat," explained Bob.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" Papa Jack seemed to see light. "And then he struck you?"</p>
+
+<p>A nod once more.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. McAllister looked out the window and his fingers closed tightly
+around Bob's. "When was this, Bob&mdash;before school?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mm."</p>
+
+<p>"And you came right home?"</p>
+
+<p>A nod.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you strike him back?"</p>
+
+<p>Bob's eyes widened. "No."</p>
+
+<p>Papa Jack's eyes widened also. "Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because."</p>
+
+<p>"Because what, Bob?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because mama said not to fight."</p>
+
+<p>"And you promised?"</p>
+
+<p>Bob nodded again.</p>
+
+<p>"I see." Papa Jack's eyes suddenly lighted with something Bob did not
+understand, and he sat looking down at Bob for a long minute. "I see,"
+he said again, and then he turned and called to mother. "Helen!" And
+mother came in, with a piece of white sewing in her hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Helen," said Papa Jack, "it's a case of bullying. The boy promised you
+not to fight, and he didn't. It's a mistake, mother. He's been set upon
+by some young bully, and couldn't defend himself because of his
+promise."</p>
+
+<p>Mother looked at Bob; there was distress in her eyes, but something else
+came into them, too.</p>
+
+<p>"It's only the beginning, dear&mdash;the beginning of battles," said Papa
+Jack, and he put his other hand on mother's.</p>
+
+<p>"Bob," he said, "mother doesn't mean you're not to defend yourself.
+Understand? By fighting, mother only means beginning fights, picking
+fights, provoking other boys to fight. We <i>have</i> to defend ourselves. It
+isn't right to pick a fight; that's what mother means."</p>
+
+<p>Bob saw tears come into his mother's eyes. Papa Jack saw them, too.</p>
+
+<p>"There's only one way among boys, Helen<!-- Page 175 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> dear. The bullies must be
+fought, you know. Our boy's got to be a boy's boy if he's to be a man's
+man by-and-by."</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly mother bent over and kissed Bob, and held him, with her arms
+thrust under and about him&mdash;held him hard.</p>
+
+<p>"The only thing, Bob, is to be a man always. Be square and white. Do the
+right thing. I can't tell you what it will be every time; neither can
+anybody else: but you your own self will know. It may be right even to
+fight sometimes, for yourself and for others who are bullied; but every
+boy knows for himself when it's right and when it's wrong. If he does as
+he <i>knows</i>, he'll do right."</p>
+
+<p>It was a quiet lunch that day. Father and mother talked little and the
+meal was quickly over. Bob hardly knew what he himself ate or did or
+thought. There was a strange excitement in his heart and in his head, a
+feeling that he could not define. It was not that he was going back to
+school after dinner. It was not that he would probably meet those boys
+again, nor that he would sooner or later have to face again that Curly
+Davis. Neither was it that, when he did face Curly Davis, he meant
+to&mdash;yes, to fight him. No, it was none of these things, though his heart
+did beat the faster as he thought of them. It was something else; it was
+something about what his father had said, not so much his words, but the
+way he had said "a man's man" and "we must defend ourselves"&mdash;something
+that thrilled him, made him proud and humble, all at once. Someway,
+father seemed to have taken a new attitude toward him, and in that
+change even Bob seemed to see father's recognition that babyhood was
+over for his small son.</p>
+
+<p>Mother stood in the door and watched him go. She had been crying again,
+a little; she had even wanted to keep him at home. But father had said,
+"No, let him go; as well now as to-morrow," and so she had kissed him
+and cried again, a little. And then she had begged him to "try to keep
+away from those bad little boys," and to "play only with good boys who
+did not want to fight"; and Bob had said yes&mdash;doubtfully. He waved his
+hand to her from the gate, and again from the corner of the block, and
+then he set his face once more toward school, and walked very fast.</p>
+
+<p>It was five o'clock when Bob came home again. School closed at four, but
+the clock on the library mantel was tinkling five when he opened the
+door and closed it very softly. He didn't want mother to see him just
+then.</p>
+
+<p>He was trembling and very white&mdash;his little mirror by the window showed
+him that. There was a brown-and-blue bruise just in the corner of his
+little brown eyebrow, of which he had felt carefully a dozen times on
+the way home, but which did not look so big in the glass as it had felt.
+There was a rubbed place on his chin, and the soft knuckles of his hands
+were grimy and stained. He laid his school-bag and box carefully on a
+chair, and went to look out the window for a moment. And then a strange
+feeling came over him.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;This was his little room; yes, it was his&mdash;the same little room; the
+same white curtains, the same little window, the same view of the little
+green door-yard and the apple-tree and the cedar-hedge; the same soft
+sunset light coming in upon him where it had come so many, many other
+evenings, ever since he could remember. But the boy&mdash;that little boy who
+had looked upon it all, who had lived there and loved the white curtains
+and the sun and the apple-tree&mdash;where was he? he wondered.</p>
+
+<p>When he closed his eyes he could see just one thing&mdash;one whirling,
+seething vision: a ring of boys, excited, eager, yelling, laughing,
+cheering, with only here and there a frightened face; and there in the
+midst himself and another&mdash;some one who was striking and kicking and
+scratching at him, but whose blows he did not seem to feel, so hard and
+fierce and fast he himself was striking, and so hotly ran his blood. And
+in his ears were ringing the cries which had gone up at the end, when
+that other boy&mdash;he of the curly hair&mdash;had suddenly, at last, turned from
+him and run away through the crowd, beaten and sniveling and&mdash;alone. And
+he remembered that he had felt sorry then&mdash;oh, so sorry&mdash;sorry for that
+other boy!</p>
+
+<p>He washed his face and hands carefully, and looked again in the little
+mirror. Perhaps mother wouldn't notice&mdash;much. He opened his door and
+crept softly down the stairs and into the library, and there was mother,
+looking anxiously from the window, and father, who had just come in,
+putting on his hat as if he were going out again. And they both turned
+and looked at him; and mother ran and caught him up in her arms, just as
+if he were that baby-boy again&mdash;that baby he had been yesterday. He
+wondered.</p>
+
+<p>Father looked at the brown bruise and the scuffed knuckles critically,
+while mother held him with her face against his hair.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think he'll bother you any more, Bob?" father asked, just as if
+the whole story had been told.</p>
+
+<p>Bob shook his head, and mother suddenly clasped him closer, while father
+turned away with a grim smile. And Bob himself just wondered&mdash;wondered
+about that baby-boy he had been yesterday.<!-- Page 176 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="TWO_PORTRAITS_BY_GILBERT_STUART" id="TWO_PORTRAITS_BY_GILBERT_STUART"></a>TWO PORTRAITS BY GILBERT STUART</h2>
+
+<h3>A NOTE ON A RECENT ACCESSION OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART</h3>
+
+<h3>BY SAMUEL ISHAM</h3>
+
+<p>The name of Don Josef de Jaudenes y Nebot has not impressed itself
+deeply on the memory of the world. It does not appear in the great,
+many-volumed biographical dictionaries nor in the indexes of the
+standard histories of the United States. Even in the library of the
+Hispanic Society of America there is no record of him. He was, however,
+a man of some importance in the early diplomacy of the nation. The
+beginning of his official career may be definitely determined by a
+letter of Washington's of July 20, 1791, in which he says: "I yesterday
+had Mr. Jaudenes, who was in this country with Mr. Gardoqui and is now
+come over in a public character, presented to me for the first time by
+Mr. Jefferson."</p>
+
+<p>Gardoqui came to America in 1786 as <i>charg&eacute; d'affaires</i> for the
+negotiation of a treaty with Spain. The "public character" in which
+Jaudenes was presented in 1791 was that of commissioner of Spain, and he
+had united with him on the commission Josef de Viar, all their official
+documents being signed with both names. Their main business, like
+Gardoqui's, was the negotiation of a treaty between Spain and the United
+States; a treaty which was to settle boundaries, rights of trade between
+the two nations, and also the question of the "occlusion" of the
+Mississippi River; but there was much outside diplomatic sparring over
+the disputes between the Governor of Louisiana and the Georgians about
+trespasses and conflicting rights. The last communication of the
+commissioners was dated in 1794. The next year the negotiations were
+transferred to Madrid and the treaty was signed there and Jaudenes
+probably then returned to Spain. There seems to be no trace of him after
+that.</p>
+
+<p>The only other facts in regard to him are to be gathered from the two
+pictures recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which are
+the subject of this article. They are signed G. Stuart, R.&nbsp;A., New York,
+September 8, 1794, and bear inscriptions in Spanish which, to complete
+the record, are here given in full:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Don Josef de Jaudenes y Nebot Comisario Ordenador de los Reales
+Exercitos y Ministro Embiado de Su Magestad Catholica cerca de los
+Estados Unidos de America. Naci&oacute; en la Ciudad de Valencia Reyno de
+Espa&ntilde;a el 25 de Marzo de 1764.</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Do&ntilde;a Matilde Stoughton de Jaudenes&mdash;Esposa de Don Josef de Jaudenes
+y Nebot Comisario Ordenador de los Reales Exercitos de Su Magestad
+Catholica y su Ministro Embiado cerca de los Estados Unidos de
+America. Naci&oacute; en la Ciudad de Nueva-York en los Estados Unidos el
+11 de Enero de 1778.</span></p></div>
+
+<p>We learn from these that Don Josef was thirty and his bride in her
+seventeenth year, and that she was born in New York. Unfortunately this
+is all that we know about her. Stoughton is a sufficiently familiar name
+in the colonial records of the New England and Middle States, but the
+lady of the portrait has not yet been identified nor has a search of the
+newspapers of the day revealed any mention of her marriage. It may very
+probably have taken place on September 8th, 1794, the date placed after
+Stuart's name on both canvases; but the journalists of that time took
+less note of such international alliances than those of the present.
+Something more about the lady is, however, certain to be found by the
+genealogists and delvers in old diaries and correspondence, for the
+wedding of the young Spanish diplomat with the pretty American girl just
+midway in her teens must have set tongues wagging and pens inditing. How
+the match turned out we do not know, but some argument as to their
+happiness may be based on the fact that Jaudenes' successor, the Marquis
+d'Yrujo, followed his example and took an American bride in the person
+of Miss Sally McKean, who was also painted by Stuart.</p>
+
+<h4><i>Two Portraits by</i> <span class="smcap">Gilbert Stuart</span></h4>
+
+<h4><i>reproduced by permission of</i></h4>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">The Metropolitan Museum of Art</span></h4>
+
+<h4><i>Printed from plates made by the Colorplate Engraving Company, New York</i></h4>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 318px;">
+<img src="images/illus0342.jpg" width="318" height="400" alt="Do&ntilde;a Matilde Stoughton de Jaudenes Wife of the First
+Minister from Spain to the United States" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Do&ntilde;a Matilde Stoughton de Jaudenes Wife of the First
+Minister from Spain to the United States</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 315px;">
+<img src="images/illus0343.jpg" width="315" height="400" alt="Don Josef de Jaudenes y Nebot First Minister from
+Spain to the United States" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Don Josef de Jaudenes y Nebot First Minister from
+Spain to the United States</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Having thus disposed (somewhat unsatisfactorily, it is true) of the
+personality of the sitters, we can turn to the portraits themselves. The
+accompanying reproductions make extended description unnecessary. They
+are characteristic Stuarts, more elaborate, more complete, than most of
+his subsequent work,<!-- Page 177 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> but showing clearly his personal point of view
+and the difference between his portraits and those of his
+contemporaries. He is less poetic, more literal than the rivals with
+whom he had contended, not unsuccessfully, for the patronage of London
+society. For him a pretty girl is a pretty girl, and it is enough. He
+seats her comfortably in a chair and paints her as she is. One cannot
+imagine him turning her into a nymph, a shepherdess, or a priestess of
+Hymen, or painting her with a very modish coiffure on her head and a
+pair of blue-ribboned sandals on her bare feet. These things Reynolds
+did habitually and moreover put his figures in attitudes with up-rolled
+eyes and extended arms and filled out his larger canvases with altars
+and tombs and allegorical attributes. This he did to bring his pictures
+in accord with those of the old masters whom he laboriously studied and
+deeply admired. His achievement fully justified him. His sumptuous
+canvases, rich in color, elaborate in composition, perfected with every
+technical resource, have ever since remained unequalled of their kind.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of his stay in West's studio, Stuart had none of this respect
+for tradition nor any wish to attempt the grand style. In this he was
+more like Gainsborough, but Gainsborough invested his portraits, even of
+prosaic sitters, with a strange, penetrating, poetic charm such as no
+other painter has been able to convey. Ranking artists in the order of
+their merit is an unprofitable business, but it may gratify some
+methodical minds to have it stated that these canvases by Stuart are not
+in the same class as good Gainsboroughs or Reynolds. With the best of
+other contemporary portraits they stand approximately on a footing of
+equality. In spite of the quiet pose, the lack of strongly contrasted
+light and shade and all of the clever tricks and forced accents of
+Lawrence and his followers, they are alive and alert. The
+characterization is excellent. The young people were not of so profound
+or complicated a nature as the Father of his Country, and the faces are
+not wrought out with the delicate subtlety of the Gibbs-Channing
+Washington which hangs between them, but they are clear-cut, compelling
+belief in their truth. The execution, too, has all of Stuart's skill.
+Others may have attempted higher things, but none did what he attempted
+with such perfect ease and sureness. In neither of the canvases is there
+a sign of uncertainty, hesitation, or alteration. Each touch is put
+exactly where it should be and left. There is none of the scumbling and
+glazing and re-working so common in the English portraits of the time.
+It is to this that the canvases owe their admirable freshness which
+makes them look as if painted yesterday. The heads have all of Stuart's
+pearly gray and rose tones unimpaired by ill-usage or restoration. The
+clothes and accessories are more swiftly and summarily done, the silver
+lace and the high lights being touched in with amazing sureness and
+cleverness. The composition and arrangement is pleasing, and Stuart's
+besetting fault of putting his heads too low on the canvas is excused
+and justified in the case of Don Josef by the necessity of having his
+portrait correspond with that of his wife, whose elaborate and stylish
+head-dress fills the top of her picture. In short, New York is to be
+congratulated on the winning back after a sojourn abroad of more than a
+century of these two most important and charming paintings executed here
+in the early days of the Republic.</p>
+
+<p>At this point this article might well end, but there may be some who
+recall that last summer for a week or so there appeared in the papers
+articles headed "Fakes at the Museum" or "The Metropolitan Gets Lemons,"
+which assailed the genuineness of these portraits. The discussion did
+not get far beyond the daily press, which, after its habit, registered
+the charges as picturesquely and vehemently as it could, but attempted
+no serious investigation of them. They were brought by a critic whose
+position as a special student of Stuart entitled them to respectful
+consideration, but after giving them that they do not seem conclusive or
+even important. They were based on the fact that the pictures were
+signed G. Stuart, R.&nbsp;A., and bore coats of arms and long Spanish
+inscriptions. It was claimed that this made the genuineness of the
+canvases doubtful, for Stuart signed few of his paintings&mdash;possibly none
+except the standing Washington in the Philadelphia Academy; he was not
+an R.&nbsp;A. (Royal Academician); nor was he a heraldic illuminator.
+Furthermore, the painting of the male portrait and the dress and
+accessories in the companion piece did not seem to the critic to agree
+with Stuart's handling. To make his impressions fit with the pictures,
+the critic supposed that Stuart painted a smaller portrait of Jaudenes
+and started one of his wife, which through some freak of temper he left
+(as he frequently did) with only the head and part of the background
+finished. These being brought to Spain, some artist there finished the
+lady's portrait, painted from Stuart's original a companion piece of her
+husband, and added to both the coats of arms, the inscriptions, and
+Stuart's name.</p>
+
+<p>Now, frankly, this is not possible. As for the portrait of Do&ntilde;a Matilde
+being left unfinished, there exists in Stuart's handwriting a<!-- Page 178 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> list of
+gentlemen who are to have copies of his portrait of Washington,
+consisting of thirty-two names. A few take two copies, no one takes more
+save Jaudenes, who subscribes for five. The list is dated April 20th,
+1795, which is seven months after the date on the pictures, and is the
+strongest possible evidence that Jaudenes was greatly pleased with
+Stuart&mdash;presumably on account of these portraits&mdash;and is entirely
+irreconcilable with the idea that the painter had quarreled with the
+diplomat's wife or left her portrait unfinished.</p>
+
+<p>As to the coats of arms, the most casual examination makes it clear that
+they were painted by another hand than executed any part of the
+portraits. In all probability they were done after the canvases reached
+Spain, and the inscriptions and signatures would naturally have been
+added at the same time. Stuart would never have engrossed a long Spanish
+inscription, and that he should have signed his name (contrary to his
+habit) and have added the "R.&nbsp;A." to which he had no right is most
+unlikely. What is most unlikely of all, however, is that there should
+have been found in Spain an artist capable of painting a portrait like
+the Don Josef. Both heads are absolutely alike in handling, in texture,
+in mixing of the pigments, and in all of those things are absolutely
+characteristic of Stuart, whose methods were peculiarly his own and
+could not be caught even by men like Sully, who not only intently
+studied his processes but sat and watched him when he was at work. That
+a Spaniard with entirely different training and ideals could have
+reproduced them is impossible.</p>
+
+<p>As for the costumes, it may be admitted that they differ from most of
+Stuart's American work; but the difference is more in subject than in
+method and is chiefly noticeable because he never again painted a
+gentleman in silver-sprigged scarlet waistcoat and small clothes. He
+hated such work, and his position in America enabled him to do as he
+chose, and he could tell sitters that if they wanted clothes they could
+go to a mantua-maker or a tailor, he painted the works of God. So
+distasteful was such labor to him that we know that he employed
+assistants in the details of some of his Washington portraits. In the
+present canvases the heads are painted with an interest and a
+thoroughness very different from that displayed in the costumes. These
+latter are skilfully done. The dexterity displayed is amazing and such
+as no copyist is at all likely to have had, but it is dexterity applied
+to getting a striking result as quickly as possible and with the least
+possible effort of hand or brain.</p>
+
+<p>Now, to explain this, we should remember that Stuart only returned to
+America in 1793, and the pictures are both dated September 8, 1794.
+Whatever that date may mean, both pictures were presumably finished
+before then and were thus among the first, perhaps the very first,
+important works that Stuart did in New York. He would consequently have
+every motive, both from the desire to establish his reputation and from
+the position and charm of his sitters, to do his very best. The
+workmanship should be compared, not with what he did afterwards in
+America but rather with what he had done before in England and Ireland,
+when he was compelled by the exigencies of his sitters and the rivalry
+of his fellow artists to give some importance to costume and
+composition. Unfortunately, Stuart's foreign work is practically unknown
+to Americans (and to foreigners also, for that matter). There is little
+of it in the public galleries, and a large proportion of it has probably
+been rechristened with other and more attractive names. As far as we may
+judge from a few examples and from the many engravings after it (some of
+them large enough and good enough to give an idea of the handling), the
+costumes were done much in the style of those we are considering.</p>
+
+<p>After all, the strongest argument for the authenticity of the portraits
+is the portraits themselves. They are beautiful, they are skilful, done
+in Stuart's style and entirely worthy of him. To suppose them done by
+any one else involves the doubter at once in a maze of improbabilities
+and impossibilities. The present writer is willing to put himself on
+record as quite convinced that they were painted by Stuart and are
+wholly by his own hand and are unusually important specimens of his
+work.<!-- Page 179 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="MARY_BAKER_G_EDDY" id="MARY_BAKER_G_EDDY"></a>MARY BAKER G. EDDY</h2>
+
+<h3>THE STORY OF HER LIFE AND THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE</h3>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h3>GEORGINE MILMINE</h3>
+
+<h3>XIV</h3>
+
+<h3>MRS. EDDY'S BOOK AND DOCTRINE</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<i>No human tongue or pen taught me the Science contained in this
+book, 'Science and Health'; and neither tongue nor pen can
+overthrow it.</i>"&mdash;<span class="smcap">Mary Baker G. Eddy</span>.</p></div>
+
+<p>Although Mrs. Eddy's book, "Science and Health," was not published until
+1875, from the time Mrs. Eddy left P.&nbsp;P. Quimby in 1864 she had been
+struggling to get his theories before the public. Dr. Patterson, her
+second husband, left her in 1866, and for the next four years Mrs. Eddy
+was able to make a bare living by her "Science," wandering about among
+the little shoe towns near Boston and teaching Quimby's theories here
+and there for her board and lodging. She went from house to house with
+her precious copy of Quimby's "Questions and Answers"<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> and the pile of
+letter-paper, covered with her own notes, which she was forever
+rewriting and revising. The one thing that everybody knew about Mrs.
+Glover (Eddy) was that she "was writing a book." While she was staying
+with the Wentworths, in Stoughton, she carried her pile of manuscript to
+Boston, and when the printer to whom she showed it demanded to be paid
+in advance, she tried to persuade Mrs. Wentworth to lend her the money.
+Had the printer who looked over that confused mass of notes known that
+they were the nucleus of a book of which over five hundred thousand
+copies would be sold by 1907, and had he printed the manuscript then and
+there, Christian Science in its present form would never have existed.
+For at that time Mrs. Eddy had not dreamed of calling her system of mind
+cure anything but Dr. Quimby's "Science." She talked of Quimby to every
+one she met; could talk, indeed, of little else. When she introduced the
+subject of mental healing to a stranger&mdash;and she never lost an
+opportunity&mdash;it was always with that conscious smile and the set phrases
+which the village girls used to imitate: "I <i>learned</i> this from Dr.
+Quimby, and he made me <i>promise</i> to teach at least <i>two</i> persons before
+I <i>die</i>."</p>
+
+<p>The story of the Quimby manuscript from 1867 to 1875 and of the gradual
+growth of Mrs. Eddy's feeling of possession, has already been recounted
+in an earlier chapter of this history.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> By the time the first edition
+of "Science and Health" appeared, Mrs. Eddy said no more about Quimby or
+her promise to him. Mrs. Eddy has always been able to believe anything
+she wishes to believe, especially about her own conduct and about that
+of persons who have displeased her, and it is very probable that by this
+time she had persuaded herself that she really owed very little to the
+old Maine philosopher.</p>
+
+<h3><i>How "Science and Health" was Published</i></h3>
+
+<p>Although Mrs. Eddy had been working upon her book for about eight years,
+writing and rewriting with almost incredible patience, she was unwilling
+to assume any financial risk in getting it printed. George Barry and
+Elizabeth Newhall, two of her students, agreed to furnish the sum of one
+thousand dollars, which the Boston printer asked for issuing an edition
+of one thousand copies. Mrs. Eddy made so many changes in the proofs,
+continuing her revisions even after the plates had been cast, that she
+ran the cost of the edition up to about twenty-two hundred dollars, and
+Miss<!-- Page 180 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> Newhall and Mr. Barry lost about fifteen hundred dollars on the
+book. They would, indeed, have lost more, had not Daniel Spofford, much
+against Mrs. Eddy's will, paid over to them six hundred dollars which he
+had received for the copies of the book he had sold. Although Mrs. Eddy
+at that time owned the house in which she lived and had some money in
+bank, she did not, either then or later, suggest reimbursing Barry or
+Miss Newhall for their loss.</p>
+
+<p>Aside from the fact that she was unwilling to risk money upon it, Mrs.
+Eddy believed intensely in her book. One of her devoted students sent
+copies of "Science and Health" to the University of Heidelberg, to
+Thomas Carlyle, and to several noted theologians. But the book made no
+stir outside of Lynn, where it caused some perplexity. There was little
+about it, indeed, to suggest that it would be an historic volume. It was
+a book of 564 pages, badly printed and poorly bound; a mass of
+inconsequential statements and ill-constructed, ambiguous sentences
+which wander about the page with their arms full, so to speak,
+heedlessly dropping unrelated clauses about as they go.</p>
+
+<p>Although the basic ideas of the book are Quimby's, and even much of the
+terminology, the first edition of "Science and Health" was certainly
+written by Mrs. Eddy. Not only is there every internal evidence of her
+hand in the style of the book, but a number of her students are still
+alive who went over portions of the manuscript with her and worked with
+her upon the proofs. The same George Barry who helped to pay for the
+publication of the book copied out in longhand twenty-five hundred pages
+of the manuscript. He brought suit against Mrs. Eddy for payment for
+"copying the manuscript of the book 'Science and Health,' and aiding in
+the arrangement of capital letters and some of the grammatical
+constructions." He produced some of Mrs. Eddy's manuscript in court, and
+the judge allowed him more than the usual copyist's rate "on account of
+the difficulty which a portion of the pages presented to the copyist by
+reason of erasures and interlineations," as it is put in the judge's
+finding.</p>
+
+<p>Although Mrs. Eddy's book has been enlarged and greatly improved as to
+its order and grammar, the first edition contains all the essential
+elements of her philosophy, if such it may be called. Mr. Wiggin did
+good work in translating the book into comparatively conventional
+English, and gave a kind of unity to paragraphs and sentences, and later
+revisers have greatly improved upon his work; but the first edition
+gave a fairly complete and, on the whole, a comprehensible statement of
+Mrs. Eddy's platform.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Eddy's religion claims to be a system of metaphysics, a system of
+therapeutics, and an improved form of Christianity. As the founder of a
+system of idealistic philosophy, Mrs. Eddy does indeed, as Mr. Alfred
+Farlow says, "begin where the sages of the world left off." Other
+philosophers have reached the conclusion that we can have no absolute
+knowledge of matter, since our evidence regarding it consists of sense
+impressions, and that we can absolutely assert of matter only that it
+exists in human consciousness; but Mrs. Eddy begins boldly with, "There
+is no such thing as matter." She reaches her conclusion by steps which
+she deems complete and logical:</p>
+
+<ol><li>God is All in all.</li>
+<li>God is good. Good is Mind.</li>
+<li>God, Spirit, being all, nothing is matter.</li>
+</ol>
+
+<p>Mrs. Eddy calls attention to the fact that even if read backward, these
+propositions mean identically the same as when read in the usual order,
+and she seems to regard this as conclusive proof of their logical truth.
+She says, "The metaphysics of Christian Science, like the rules of
+mathematics, prove the rule by inversion. For example: there is no pain
+in Truth, and no truth in pain; no nerve in Mind, and no mind in nerve;
+no matter in Mind, and no mind in matter," etc.</p>
+
+<p>In his article upon Christian Science, published in <i>The Atlantic
+Monthly</i>, April, 1904, Dr. John Churchman says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The uncompromising idealism, however, which Mrs. Eddy offers us not
+only has these defects, but is guilty of a far more serious charge.
+It poses as an explanation, and is in reality a total evasion. To
+deny that matter exists, and assert that it is an illusion, is only
+another way of asserting its existence; you are freed by your
+suggestion from explaining the fact, but forced by it to explain
+the illusion. It is the old mistake of imagining that an escape
+from a problem is a solution. You are out of the frying-pan, it is
+true, but you are in the fire instead.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></p></div><p><!-- Page 181 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Having thus disposed of matter, Mrs. Eddy seems to think that her
+definition has actually changed the nature of the case, and that though
+we live in houses, eat food, and endure the changes of the seasons, our
+relation to the material universe is changed because she has defined
+matter as an illusion.</p>
+
+<p>It is not, however, Mrs. Eddy's definition which is so remarkable, but
+her application of it. Having stated that matter is an illusion, she
+asserts that "matter cannot take cold";<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> that matter cannot "ache,
+swell and be inflamed";<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> that a boil cannot ache;<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> that "every law
+of matter or the body, supposed to govern man, is rendered null and void
+by the law of God".<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></p>
+
+<h3><i>There is No Material Universe</i></h3>
+
+<p>Quimby acknowledged the actual existence of the universe, of the
+physical body, and of disease; Mrs. Eddy teaches that they are all
+illusory. The earth, the sun, the millions of stars, says Mrs. Eddy,
+exist only in erring "mortal mind"; and mortal mind itself does not
+exist. All phenomena of nature are merely illusory expressions of this
+fundamental error. "The compound minerals or aggregate substances
+composing the earth, the relations which constituent masses hold to each
+other, the magnitudes, distances, and revolution of the celestial
+bodies, are of no real importance.... Material substances, astronomical
+calculations, and all the paraphernalia of speculative theories ... will
+ultimately vanish, swallowed up in the infinite calculus of spirit."
+"Earthquake, wind, wave, lightning, fire, bestial ferocity" are merely
+the "vapid fury of mortal mind." "Heat and cold are products of
+mind"&mdash;even a "mill at work, or the action of a water wheel," is only a
+manifestation of "mortal mind force." Apart from mortal belief, there is
+no such thing as climate.</p>
+
+<p>"Repulsion, attraction, cohesion, and powers supposed to belong to
+matter are constituents of mind," Mrs. Eddy says. By this she does not
+mean that these forces exist, for us, in our minds, but that at some
+time in the dim past "mortal mind" imagined matter and imagined these
+properties in it. Christ, she says, was able to walk upon the water and
+to roll away the stone of the sepulcher because he had overcome the
+human <i>belief</i> in the laws of gravity. (Yet, Mrs. Eddy is continually
+reminding us that the fall of an apple led Newton to discover a great
+law, etc.) "Geology," Mrs. Eddy says, "has never explained the earth's
+formations. It cannot explain them." "Natural Science is not really
+natural or scientific, because it is deduced from the evidences of the
+senses." "Vertebra, articulata, mollusca, and radiata are evolved by
+mortal and material thought." "Theorizing about man's development from
+mushrooms to monkeys, and from monkeys into men, amounts to nothing in
+the right direction, and very much in the wrong." But it is not only
+with the natural sciences that Mrs. Eddy is displeased. "Human history,"
+she says, "needs to be revised, and the <i>material record expunged</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Having dismissed the history of the race as trivial, the natural
+sciences as unscientific, the evidence of the senses as a cheat, and
+matter as non-existent, Mrs. Eddy proceeds to propound her own curious
+theory of the Universe and man. She has a theory; incomplete, but
+ingenious.</p>
+
+<h3><i>Mrs. Eddy's Exegesis</i></h3>
+
+<p>Mrs. Eddy says that her theory of the universe is founded, not upon
+human wisdom, but upon the Bible; and so it is, but she uses both
+addition and subtraction very liberally to get her Biblical
+corroboration. The Bible may be interpreted in two ways, Mrs. Eddy says,
+literally and spiritually, and what she sets out to do is to give us the
+spiritual interpretation. Her method is simple. She starts with the
+propositions that all is God and that there is no matter, and then
+reconstructs the Bible to accommodate these statements. Such portions of
+the Bible as can be made, by judicious treatment, to corroborate her
+theory, she takes and "spiritually interprets,"<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> that is, tells us
+once and for all what the passages really mean; and such portions as
+cannot possibly be converted into affirmative evidence she rejects as
+errors of the early copyists. Mrs. Eddy insists that the Bible is the
+record of truth, but a study of her exegesis shows that only such
+portions of it as meet with Mrs. Eddy's approval and lend
+themselves&mdash;under very rough handling&mdash;to the support of her theory, are
+accepted as the record of truth; the rest is thrown out as a mass of
+erroneous transcription. Mrs. Eddy's keen eye at once detects those
+meaningless passages which have for so long beguiled the world, just as
+it readily sees in familiar texts an entirely new meaning. She explains
+the creation of the world from the account in the first chapter of
+Genesis, but the unknown author of this disputed book would never
+recognize his narrative when Mrs. Eddy gets through with it.<!-- Page 182 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3><i>Mrs. Eddy's Account of the Creation</i><a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></h3>
+
+<p>To begin with, Mrs. Eddy says, there was God, "All and in all, the
+eternal Principle." This Principle is both masculine and feminine;
+"Gender is embraced in Spirit, else God could never have shadowed forth
+from out Himself, the idea of male and female." But, Mrs. Eddy adds, "We
+have not as much authority for calling God masculine as feminine, the
+latter being the last, therefore highest idea given of Him."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Eddy next sets about the creation. The "waters" out of which God
+brought the dry land, she says, were "Love"; the dry land itself was
+"the condensed idea of creation." When God divided the light from the
+darkness, it means, says Mrs. Eddy, that "Truth and error were distinct
+from the beginning, and never mingled." But Mrs. Eddy has always
+insisted on the idea that "error" is a delusion which arose first in the
+mind of mortal man; what is error doing away back here before man was
+created, and why was God himself compelled to take measures against it?
+Certainly the account of the Creation which came from Lynn is even more
+perplexing than that which is related in the Pentateuch.</p>
+
+<p>With regard to the creation of grass and herbs, Mrs. Eddy eagerly points
+out that "God made every plant of the field before it was in the earth,
+and every herb of the field before it grew." And that, she says, proves
+that "creations of Wisdom are not dependent on laws of matter, but on
+Intelligence alone." She admits here that the Universe is the "idea of
+Creative Wisdom," which is getting dangerously near the very old idea
+that matter is but a manifestation of spirit. Call the universe
+"matter," and Mrs. Eddy flies into a rage; call it "an idea of God," and
+she is serenely complaisant. There was certainly never any one so put
+about and tricked by mere words; on the whole, it may be said that the
+English language has avenged itself on Mrs. Eddy.</p>
+
+<p>Arriving at the creation of the beasts of the field, Mrs. Eddy says that
+"The beast and reptile made by Love and Wisdom were neither carnivorous
+nor poisonous." Ferocious tendencies in animals are entirely the product
+of man's imagination. Daniel understood this, we are told, and that is
+why the lions did not hurt him.</p>
+
+<p>When she comes to the creation of man, Mrs. Eddy accepts the first
+account given in Genesis, but the second, which states that God formed
+man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath
+of life, she rejects as untrustworthy. The first account, she says, "was
+science; the second was metaphorical and mythical, even the supposed
+utterances of matter; the scripture not being understood by its
+translators, was misinterpreted."</p>
+
+<h3><i>The Story of Adam</i></h3>
+
+<p>"The history of Adam is allegorical throughout, a description of error
+and its results," etc. Man was created in God's likeness, free from sin,
+sickness, and death; but this Adam, who crept in, Mrs. Eddy does not
+explain how, was the origin of our belief that there is life in matter
+and was to obstruct our growth in spirituality. Mrs. Eddy says, "Divide
+the name Adam into two syllables, and it reads, <i>a dam</i>, or
+obstruction." This original method of word-analysis she seems to regard
+as final evidence concerning Adam. About the creation of Eve, Mrs. Eddy
+changes her mind. In the later editions of her book she says it is
+absurd to believe that God ever put Adam into a hypnotic sleep and
+performed "a surgical operation" upon him. In the first edition she says
+it is a mere chance that the human race is not still propagated by the
+removal of man's ribs. "The belief regarding the origin of mortal man
+has changed since Adam produced Eve, and the only reason a rib is not
+the present mode of evolution is because of this change," etc.</p>
+
+<p>Not to be warned by the footprints of time, Mrs. Eddy pauses in her
+revision of Genesis to wonder "whence came the wife of Cain?" But on the
+whole she profits by the story of Cain, for here she finds one of those
+little etymological clews which never escape her penetration. The fact
+that Adam and all his race were but a dream of mortal mind is proved,
+she says, by the fact that Cain went "to dwell <i>in the land of Nod, the
+land of dreams and illusions</i>." Mrs. Eddy offers this seriously, as
+"scientific" exegesis.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Eddy's conclusion about the Creation seems to be that we are all in
+reality the offspring of the first creation recounted in Genesis, in
+which man is not named but is simply said to be in the image of God; but
+we <i>think</i> we are the children of the creation described in the second
+chapter; of the race that imagined sickness, sin, and death for itself.
+The tree of knowledge which caused Adam's fall, Mrs. Eddy says, was the
+belief of life in matter, and she suggests that the forbidden fruit
+which Eve gave to Adam may have been "a medical work, perhaps."</p>
+
+<h3><i>Mrs. Eddy Denies the Atonement</i></h3>
+
+<p>When she comes to the Atonement, Mrs. Eddy says that Christ did not come
+to save<!-- Page 183 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> mankind from sin, but to show us that sin is a thing imagined
+by mortal mind, that it is an illusion which can be overcome, like
+sickness and death. It was by his understanding of the truths of
+Christian Science that Christ remained sinless, healed the sick, and
+that he "demonstrated" over death in the sepulcher and rose on the third
+day. His sacrifice had no more efficacy than that of any other man who
+dies as a result of his labors to bring a new truth into the world, and
+we profit by his death only as we realize the nothingness of sickness,
+sin, and death. "God's wrath, vented on his only son, is without logic
+or humanity, and but a man-made belief."</p>
+
+<p>The Trinity, as commonly accepted, Mrs. Eddy denies, though she seems to
+admit a kind of triune nature in God by saying over and over again that
+he is "Love, Truth, and Life."</p>
+
+<p>The Holy Ghost she defines as Christian Science; "This Comforter I
+understand to be Divine Science."</p>
+
+<h3><i>Mrs. Eddy's Revision of the Lord's Prayer</i></h3>
+
+<p>In the course of Mrs. Eddy's revision of the Bible, she paused to
+"spiritually interpret" the Lord's prayer. She has revised the prayer a
+great many times, and different renderings of it are given in different
+editions of "Science and Health." The following is taken from the
+edition of 1902:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Our Father-Mother God, all-harmonious, adorable One. Thy kingdom
+is within us, Thou art ever-present. Enable us to know&mdash;as in
+heaven, so on earth&mdash;God is supreme. Give us grace for to-day; feed
+the famished affections. And infinite Love is reflected in love.
+And Love leadeth us not into temptation, but delivereth from sin,
+disease, and death. For God is now and forever all Life, Truth, and
+Love."</p></div>
+
+<p>In this interpretation the petitions have been converted into
+affirmations, and Mrs. Eddy's prayer seems a somewhat dry enumeration of
+the properties of the Deity rather than a supplication.</p>
+
+<p>This method of "spiritual interpretation" has given Mrs. Eddy the habit
+of a highly empirical use of English. At the back of her book, "Science
+and Health," there is a glossary in which a long list of serviceable old
+English words are said to mean very especial things. The word
+"bridegroom" means "spiritual understanding"; "death" means "an
+illusion"; "evening" means "mistiness of mortal thought"; "mother" means
+God, etc., etc. The seventh commandment, Mrs. Eddy insists, is an
+injunction against adulterating Christian Science, although she also
+admits the meaning ordinarily attached to it. In the <i>Journal</i> of
+November, 1889, there is a long discussion of the ten commandments by
+the editor, in which he takes up both personal chastity and the Pure
+Food laws under the command, "Thou shalt not commit adultery."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Eddy insists, and doubtless believes, that her "Science" is simply
+an elaboration, a more advanced explanation, of the teachings of the New
+Testament. Yet on the subject of repentance, which occupies so important
+a place in the teachings of Christ, we hear never a word, and upon that
+consciousness of sin, which is the burden of the Epistles, she is
+consistently silent. Paul's reiterated explanation of original sin, of
+the Atonement and Redemption, are ignored. "As in Adam all die, so in
+Christ shall all be made alive" is made to read: "As in error all die,
+so in Truth shall all," etc. Even Paul's "Who shall deliver me from the
+body of this death?" is made substantially to mean, Who shall deliver me
+from the belief that there is sensation in matter? Whatever cannot be
+"spiritually interpreted" into a confirmation of Mrs. Eddy's theory that
+sin, sickness, and death are non-existent, she refuses to consider.</p>
+
+<h3><i>Mrs. Eddy's Therapeutics</i></h3>
+
+<p>Mrs. Eddy's theology is, of course, a mere derivative of her system of
+therapeutics, an attempt to base her peculiar variety of mind-cure upon
+Biblical authority. In her therapeutics there is nothing new except its
+extremeness. That the mind is able, in a large degree, to prevent or to
+cause sickness and even death, all thinking people admit. Mrs. Eddy's
+fundamental propositions are that death is wholly unnecessary and that
+the body and the organs of the body have nothing to do with life. A man
+could live just as well after his lungs had been removed as before, if
+he but thought he could. "Cold, heat, exercise, study, food, infection,
+etc., never caused a sick or healthy condition in man." "Scrofula,
+fever, consumption, rheumatism or small-pox never produced pain or
+inharmony." "A dislocation of the tarsal joint (ankle-joint) would
+produce insanity as perceptible as that produced by congestion of the
+brain, were it not that mortal mind thinks this joint less intimately
+connected with mind than is the brain."</p>
+
+<p>Sight and hearing do not depend upon the eyes and ears. The nervous
+system can really cause no suffering. "Nerves are not the source of pain
+or pleasure." "Nerves have no more sensation, apart from what belief
+bestows<!-- Page 184 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> upon them, than the fibre of a plant." What really suffers is
+mind, or belief; and, if we change that belief, the pain will disappear.
+"You say a boil is painful," says Mrs. Eddy, "but that is impossible,
+for matter without mind is not painful. The boil simply manifests your
+belief in pain, through inflammation and swelling; and you call this
+belief a boil."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Eddy even argues against spanking children because "the use of the
+rod is virtually a declaration to the child's mind that sensation
+belongs to matter."<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Eddy's idea is that our lungs are necessary to us because we think
+they are, just as we think heavy underwear is necessary in winter.
+Horses and cows, certainly, do not think much about their lungs, but
+Mrs. Eddy says that domestic animals are controlled by the beliefs of
+their human masters, and that we have corrupted the horse and have
+taught him to have epizo&ouml;tic and colic. "What," says Mrs. Eddy, "if the
+lungs are ulcerated? God is more to a man than his lungs." "Have no
+fears that matter can ache, swell, and be inflamed.... Your body would
+suffer no more from tension or wounds than would the trunk of a tree
+which you gash, were it not for mortal mind."</p>
+
+<p>All functional and organic diseases are produced by a popular belief in
+their reality. "No gastric juice accumulates ... apart from the action
+of mortal thought."</p>
+
+<p>"Inflammation, hemorrhages, tubercles, decompositions are all dream
+shadows," "Man is the same after, as before, a bone is broken or a head
+chopped off."</p>
+
+<p>But as to who invented the idea of pain and whence came the superstition
+that we must have lungs to breathe and that the heart is necessary to
+life, Mrs. Eddy maintains a discreet silence. Sin, sickness, and death,
+she says, are beliefs which originated in mortal mind. And how and when
+did mortal mind originate? Mortal mind does not exist, she answers,
+therefore it had no origin. This reasoning satisfies her; she believes
+it perfectly adequate.</p>
+
+<p>It is not only the diseased body which is to be disregarded and put out
+of mind, but all hygienic precautions. Mrs. Eddy particularly objects to
+diets, and she says that one food is as good as another. God gave man
+"dominion not only over the fish in the sea, but over the fish in the
+stomach also," she once said.</p>
+
+<p>There is no such thing as fatigue: "You would not say that a wheel is
+fatigued; and yet the body is just as material as the wheel. If it were
+not for what the human mind says of the body, the body would never be
+weary, any more than the inanimate wheel."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Eddy denies that physical exercise strengthens the muscles.
+"Because the muscles of the blacksmith's arm are strongly developed, it
+does not follow that exercise has produced this result, or that a
+less-used arm must be weak.... <i>The trip-hammer is not increased in size
+by exercise</i>. Why not, since muscles are as material as wood and iron?"</p>
+
+<p>Constant bathing, Mrs. Eddy says, received a "useful rebuke from Jesus'
+precept, 'Take no thought ... for the body,' We must beware of making
+clean merely the outside of the platter."</p>
+
+<h3><i>A Sensationless Body the Goal of Existence</i></h3>
+
+<p>"A sensationless body," Mrs. Eddy says, is the ultimate hope of
+Christian Science. Since insensibility to pain is the ultimate good
+which her system of philosophy offers, it is natural that she should
+often point us to the lower forms of animal life for our exemplars. "The
+conditions of life become less imperative in lower organisms, or where
+there is less mind and belief on this subject." She points out hopefully
+that certain marine animals multiply their species by self-division.
+"The less mind there is manifested in matter, the better. When the
+unthinking lobster loses his claw, it grows again." If we but believed
+that matter has no sensation, "then the human limb would be replaced as
+readily as the lobster's claw." She points out the fact that flowers
+produce their seed without pain. "The snowbird sings and soars amid the
+blasts; he has no catarrh from wet feet."</p>
+
+<p>"Obesity," Mrs. Eddy says, "is <i>an adipose belief of yourself as a
+substance</i>."</p>
+
+<h3><i>Mrs. Eddy's Physiology</i></h3>
+
+<p>The most discouraging thing about Mrs. Eddy's dissertations upon anatomy
+and physiology is that she seems to know so little about the physical
+facts and laws which she despises. She says, for instance, that a father
+"plunged his infant babe, only a few hours old, into water for several
+minutes and repeated this operation daily until the child could remain
+under water for twenty minutes, moving and playing without harm, like a
+fish." Does Mrs. Eddy actually believe that a child could live under
+water for twenty minutes? Again: "The supposition that we can correct
+insanity by the use of purgatives and narcotics is in itself a species
+of insanity." Where did Mrs. Eddy get the idea that such treatment was
+ever supposed to cure "insanity"? Mrs. Eddy says the fact that a finger
+which has been amputated continues to hurt is proof that nerves have
+nothing<!-- Page 185 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> to do with pain, because, she states, "<i>the nerve is gone</i>"!</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Eddy says that when we burn a finger, not fire but mortal mind
+causes the injury. To this statement she adds: "Holy inspiration has
+created states of mind which are able to nullify the action of the
+flames, as in the Bible case of the three young Hebrew captives, cast
+into the Babylonian furnace; while an opposite mental state might
+produce spontaneous combustion." That is, if mortal mind worked hard
+enough, we could burn our fingers without any fire, or we could produce
+the fire by willing it.</p>
+
+<p>The action of drugs depends entirely upon the belief of mortal mind.
+Stimulants, narcotics, poisons, affect the system solely because they
+are reputed to do so. And yet, with all her ingenuity, Mrs. Eddy has to
+admit that if a man took arsenic unknowingly it would probably kill him.
+This, she says, is because of the consensus of opinion that arsenic is
+deadly. Such would probably be her explanation of the destructive
+processes which go on in the world without the knowledge of man; fire
+consumes the forest, the tiger kills the antelope, and the bite of the
+cobra kills the tiger because the human mind has attributed such
+tendencies to fire, to the tiger, and to the cobra.</p>
+
+<h3><i>Mrs. Eddy's View of History</i></h3>
+
+<p>All the emanations of mortal mind are evil. Our redemption, Mrs. Eddy
+says, lies in Divine Mind, of which we are a part. "Spirit imparts the
+understanding which leads into all Truth.... This understanding is not
+intellectual, is not aided by scholarly attainments." There is no
+mistaking Mrs. Eddy's meaning; the thing in us which is capable of
+cultivation and expansion, that which inquires and investigates and
+reasons, is mortal mind, and is therefore evil. All the physical
+sciences are the harmful inventions of mortal mind, and the slow and
+painful accumulation of exact knowledge has been but the harmful
+activity of the baser element in human nature. There was never such a
+discouraging view of human history.</p>
+
+<p>It is scarcely necessary to remark that everything which civilization
+most cherishes has been the direct result of that spirit of inquiry and
+of those inductive processes of reasoning which Mrs. Eddy despises. If
+the morality of the civilized world is higher to-day than it was in the
+fifth century, it is not because men know any more about moral laws than
+they did two thousand years ago, but because this same spirit of inquiry
+has made cleaner living possible and imperative. Mrs. Eddy says that
+Christian Science would abolish war; but the diminution of war has come
+about, not through any growth of "Divine Mind" but, as Buckle pointed
+out, through three triumphs of the experimental tendency of the
+intellect;&mdash;the discovery of gunpowder, the discovery that war was
+detrimental to trade and to the best economic conditions, and the
+improvement in methods of transportation. Contemplating the history of
+civilization from Mrs. Eddy's point of view, we have simply gone on
+developing this injurious thing, "mortal mind"&mdash;applying our
+intelligence to the study of the physical universe&mdash;and have gone on
+piling up false belief on false belief. It is "matter" that is our great
+delusion and that stands between us and a full understanding of God; and
+matter exists, or seems to exist, only because we have invented it and
+invented laws to govern it and have given properties to its various
+manifestations. The more we know about the physical universe, the
+heavier do we make our chains; our progress in the physical sciences
+does but increase the dose of the drug which enslaves us. And there have
+been but two breaks in this jumbled dream of "error": the first when
+Jesus Christ "demonstrated the nothingness of matter," the second when
+Mrs. Eddy proclaimed its nothingness from Lynn.</p>
+
+<p>With a "sensationless body" for the goal of existence, the savage was
+certainly much higher in "the scale of being" than the nations of modern
+Europe, and Mrs. Eddy is perfectly right when she refers us to the
+am&oelig;ba and crustacea. Happy, indeed, the lobster who thinks so little
+about his anatomy that his lost claw is replaced by another!</p>
+
+<p>From all her flights Mrs. Eddy comes back to her starting-point:
+physical well-being. Not for a single page are we permitted to forget
+that her religion is primarily a kind of "doctoring"; therapeutics made
+religion, or religion made therapeutics. She makes the fact that Christ
+healed the sick the principal feature of his mission, and makes it
+authority for her assumption that religion and therapeutics are
+essentially one. Certainly the burden of the New Testament is not that
+man may avoid suffering, but that he may suffer with noble fortitude.</p>
+
+<h3><i>Lack of Religious Feeling in Mrs. Eddy's Book</i></h3>
+
+<p>But it is before such a word as fortitude that Mrs. Eddy's book takes on
+its most discouraging aspect. Her foolish logic, her ignorance of the
+human body, the liberties which she takes with the Bible, and her
+burlesque exegesis, could easily be overlooked if there were any
+nobility of feeling to be found in "Science and Health"; any
+great-hearted pity for suffering, any humility<!-- Page 186 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> or self-forgetfulness
+before the mysteries of life. Mrs. Eddy professes to believe that she
+has found the Truth, and that all the long centuries behind her have
+gone out in darkness and wasted effort, yet not one page of her book is
+tinged with compassion. "Oh that mine head were waters, and mine eyes a
+fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the
+daughter of my people!" If there were one sentence like that in "Science
+and Health" no one would stop to quarrel with Mrs. Eddy's metaphysics.</p>
+
+<p>But if there is little intelligence displayed in Mrs. Eddy's book, there
+is even less emotion. It is not exaggeration to say that "Science and
+Health" is absolutely devoid of religious feeling. God remains for Mrs.
+Eddy a "principle" indeed, toward which she has no attitude but that of
+a somewhat patronizing and platitudinous expositor. She discusses sin
+and death and human suffering as if they were curves or equations.</p>
+
+<h3><i>Malicious Animal Magnetism</i></h3>
+
+<p>In all the editions of Mrs. Eddy's book there is the same shiftiness,
+the same hardness, and the same astonishing complacency, and the text of
+the first three editions is disfigured by innumerable ebullitions of
+spite and hatred. In the first edition the first fifteen pages of the
+chapter on "Healing the Sick" are given up to an attack upon Richard
+Kennedy, the young man who was her first practitioner, and of whose
+personal popularity she was so bitterly jealous. The second edition, a
+small volume, is largely made up of denunciations of Daniel Spofford.
+The third edition opens with a preface (signed Asa G. Eddy) attacking
+Edward Arens, and contains the famous chapter on "Demonology" in which
+Mrs. Eddy devotes forty-six pages to settling scores with half a dozen
+of her early students, charging one and another with theft, adultery,
+murder, blackmail, etc. The Reverend Mr. Wiggin, when he revised Mrs.
+Eddy's book in 1885, persuaded her to omit these vituperative passages
+on the ground that they were libelous.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Eddy's one original elemental contribution to Quimbyism, was her
+doctrine of Malicious Animal Magnetism; a grewsome superstition born of
+her own vindictiveness and distrust. Mrs. Eddy's more enlightened
+followers have for years tried to divert attention from this one of her
+doctrines, and there are hundreds of Christian Scientists in the field
+who know and think very little about it. But it has been a very
+important consideration in the lives of those who have come into
+personal contact with Mrs. Eddy. Between 1875 and 1888 many of Mrs.
+Eddy's students left her because in her lectures and conversation she
+dwelt more upon the malign power of mesmerism than upon the salutary
+power of truth. In her contributions to the <i>Journal</i> during those years
+she frequently took up Animal Magnetism; she tells her followers over
+and over again that she will denounce it, and that she will not be
+silenced. For several years there was a regular department in the
+<i>Journal</i> with the caption "Animal Magnetism," but the crimes which were
+charged to mesmerists were by no means confined to this department.
+"<i>Also they have dominion over our bodies, and over our cattle, at their
+pleasure, and we are in great distress</i>," the <i>Journal</i> again and again
+affirms.</p>
+
+<h3><i>Poverty a False Belief</i></h3>
+
+<p>Mrs. Eddy surmounts economics as easily as she does physics and
+chemistry and physiology. Poverty is only a form of "error," a false
+belief. It can be abolished as readily as sin or disease or old age. She
+advertised the first edition of "Science and Health" as a book that
+"affords an opportunity to acquire a profession by which you can
+accumulate a fortune." "In the early history of Christian Science," Mrs.
+Eddy says, "among my thousands of students few were wealthy. Now,
+Christian Scientists are not indigent; and their comfortable fortunes
+are acquired by healing mankind morally, physically, and spiritually."
+Her healers should be well paid, she says. "Christian Science
+demonstrates that the patient who pays what he is able to pay, is more
+apt to recover than he who withholds a slight equivalent for health." In
+Mrs. Eddy's book<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> she publishes a long testimonial from a man who
+relates how Christian Science has helped him in his business.</p>
+
+<p>This view of poverty has been generally accepted among Mrs. Eddy's
+followers. One contributor to the <i>Journal</i> writes: "We were
+demonstrating over a lack of means, which we had learned was just as
+much a claim of error to be overcome with truth as ever sickness or sin
+was."<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a></p>
+
+<p>Another contributor writes: "The lack of means is a lupine ghost sired
+by the same spectre as the lack of health, and both must be met and put
+to flight by the same mighty weapons of our spiritual warfare."<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a></p>
+
+<p>In the files of the <i>Journal</i> there are many reports of the material
+prosperity of individual Christian Scientists. It is an evidence of
+"at-oneness" with God to prosper in business just as it is to overcome
+disease.<!-- Page 187 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the <i>Journal</i> of September, 1904, a contributor says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Is it reasonable to believe, as we have believed, that popular
+fancy, whims, climate, the state of politics, any or all of a
+hundred lawless elements, are able to ruin a man's business while
+he stands by and doesn't know enough even to make an intelligent
+protest?"</p></div>
+
+<p>Government, civilization, and even "climate" are demonstrated to be
+unreal, but the reality and importance of "business" is never
+questioned, and that each and every Christian Scientist should get on in
+the world remains a matter of indubitable moment, even to Mrs. Eddy
+herself.</p>
+
+<h3><i>Mrs. Eddy's Views on Marriage</i></h3>
+
+<p>Among the many incidental ideas which Mrs. Eddy has added to Quimbyism
+are her theory that the Godhead is more feminine than masculine, and her
+qualified disapproval of matrimony. Quimby himself had a large family
+and saw nothing unspiritual in marriage. In defining the real purpose of
+marriage Mrs. Eddy says nothing about children; "to happify existence by
+constant intercourse with those adapted to elevate it, is the true
+purpose of marriage." In her chapter on marriage she says: "The
+scientific <i>morale</i> of marriage is spiritual unity.... Proportionately
+as human generation ceases, the unbroken links of eternal harmonious
+being will be spiritually discerned."</p>
+
+<p>In her chapter called "Wedlock" in Miscellaneous Writings (1897) Mrs.
+Eddy, after a vague and evasive discussion of the subject, squarely puts
+the question: "Is marriage nearer right than celibacy? Human knowledge
+inculcates that it is, while Science indicates that it is <i>not</i>." In the
+same chapter she further says: "Human nature has bestowed on a wife the
+right to become a mother; but if the wife esteems not this privilege, by
+mutual consent, exalted and increased affections, she may win a higher."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Eddy apparently believes that Jesus Christ taught us to ignore
+family relations: "Jesus acknowledged no ties of the flesh. He said:
+'Call no man your father upon the earth; for one is your father which is
+in heaven.' Again he asked: 'Who is my mother, and who are my brethren
+but they who will do the will of my father?' We have no record of his
+calling any man by the name of father."</p>
+
+<h3><i>Future of Christian Science</i></h3>
+
+<p>Whoever has watched the amazing growth of the Christian Science sect
+must feel some curiosity as to its future. Mrs. Eddy's followers are by
+no means the only people who are trying to meet, by suggestive
+treatment, nervous diseases and the many functional disorders which
+result from overwork, worry, and discouragement. The foremost
+neurologists of all countries are employing more and more this
+suggestive method which is the essential reality in Christian Science
+healing. The followers of the "New Thought" school apply this principle
+in their own way, and the hundreds of unaffiliated "mind curists" and
+"mental healers" are each applying it in ways more or less honest and
+legitimate.</p>
+
+<p>In October, 1906, Dr. Elwood Worcester and Dr. Samuel McComb, the rector
+and the associate rector of the Emmanuel (Episcopal) Church of Boston,
+organized the Emmanuel Church Health Class, for the treatment of nervous
+disorders. Believing that, as Professor William James has said, "the
+sovereign cure for worry is religious faith," the workers at Emmanuel
+Church have been endeavoring to cure nervous disorders by putting the
+patient at peace with himself. Every patient is examined by a physician,
+and if the root of his disorder proves to be nervous (hysteria, alcoholism,
+a drug habit, insomnia, or any one of the many forms of neurasthenia)
+he is admitted into the Health Class for psycho-therapeutical treatment.
+Here he is encouraged to unburden himself of the distress or perplexity
+which haunts him, and is given the kind of suggestive treatment which
+seems best adapted to his disorder. Dr. Worcester studied psychology
+under Wundt, in Germany, and taught it for six years at Lehigh
+University. Dr. McComb studied psychology at Oxford. The records of the
+Emmanuel Health Class show that of the 178 cases treated between March,
+1907, and November, 1907, the condition of seventy-five patients has
+been improved, forty-eight have not been helped at all, while in
+fifty-five cases the result is unknown.<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></p>
+
+<h3><i>Mrs. Eddy's Opposition to the Mind Cure Movement</i></h3>
+
+<p>Mrs. Eddy and her followers have given a demonstration too great to be
+overlooked, of the fact that many ills which the sufferer believes
+entirely physical can be reached and eradicated by "ministering to a
+mind diseased," by persuading the sick man continually to suggest to
+himself ideas of health and hope<!-- Page 188 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> and happiness and usefulness, instead
+of brooding upon the emptiness and unanswered needs of his life or upon
+his failing physical powers. Mrs. Eddy's sect, more than any other one
+of the cults which believe in and practise this method of bettering the
+patient's physical condition through his mind, has forced the most
+hide-bound medical practitioners to take account of this old but newly
+applied force in therapeutics.</p>
+
+<p>But what is Mrs. Eddy's own attitude toward the general awakening to the
+value of psycho-therapeutics in the treatment of human diseases? She
+declares that every kind of mind cure and suggestive treatment except
+her own is dangerous and harmful. As one of Mrs. Eddy's students wrote
+in the <i>Christian Science Journal</i>, September, 1901, "The loyal
+Christian Scientist knows that neither he nor his patient should read or
+study the books of any other author than those of our beloved Leader in
+order to learn the Science of the Christ truth, which she is teaching
+and demonstrating to this age."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Eddy's own editorials in the <i>Journal</i> are never so bitter as when
+she is attacking the mental healers who do not practise her own
+copyrighted variety of mind cure. Recently the <i>Christian Science
+Sentinel</i> of January 18, 1908, stated that Mrs. Eddy cannot countenance
+the work done at the Emmanuel Church. Mr. Archibald McClellan, the
+editor of that publication, published an article entitled "No Christian
+Psychology." He says: "Christian Psychology is equivalent to Christian
+phrenology, physiology and mythology, whereas Jesus predicted and
+demonstrated Christian healing on the basis of Spirit, God. He never
+complicated Spirit with matter, etc.... Her teachings (Mrs. Eddy's) show
+further that she cannot consistently endorse as Christianity the two
+distinctly contradictory statements and points of view contained in the
+term 'Christian psychology'&mdash;otherwise Christian materialism."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Eddy holds that any system of healing which at all takes account
+of, or admits physical structure, is not Christian.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Eddy's endeavor has been to convert a universal principle into a
+personal property. And she has gone a wonderfully long way toward doing
+it. Thousands of people believe that they owe their health and happiness
+to a healing principle which was revealed by God to Mrs. Eddy and by
+Mrs. Eddy to mankind; that since the ministry of Jesus Christ upon earth
+no one of the human race has understood this principle except Mrs. Eddy,
+and that she is the only human being now alive who fully understands it;
+that when she dies her works alone will stand between the world and
+darkness.</p>
+
+<p>But all the while that Mrs. Eddy was energetically copyrighting, and
+pruning, and expelling, and disciplining, that other stream which came
+from Quimby, through Dr. Evans and through Julius Dresser and his wife,
+was slowly and quietly doing its work.<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> Mind Cure and New Thought
+grew up side by side with Christian Science. As organizations they were
+not nearly so effective, and their ranks, like Mrs. Eddy's, were often
+darkened by the adventuress and the battered soldier of fortune. But the
+Mental healers and the New Thought healers treated the sick on exactly
+the same principle which Mrs. Eddy's successful healers employed.</p>
+
+<p>As to the future of Mrs. Eddy's church, her own attitude toward every
+attempt to investigate and to apply liberally the principle of mental
+healing, seems to determine that. It has been possible for her, during
+her own lifetime, absolutely to prohibit preaching, thinking,
+independent writing,&mdash;investigation or inquiry of any sort&mdash;in her
+churches. But after her death, when that compelling hand is withdrawn,
+either the church must renew itself from among the ignorant and
+superstitious, as Mormonism has done, or it must permit its members to
+use their minds. Those who use their minds will discover that Christian
+Science is only one method of applying a general truth, and that it is a
+method which is hampered by a great deal that is illogical and absurd;
+that if Christian Science, as Mrs. Eddy has promulgated it, were
+universally believed and practised, it would be the revolt of a species
+against its own physical structure; against its relation to its natural
+physical environment, against the needs of its own physical organism,
+against the perpetuation of its kind. The moment a Christian Scientist
+realizes that the helpful and hopeful principle of his religion can
+operate quite independently of all the inconsequential theories which
+Mrs. Eddy has attached to it, that moment he is, of course, lost to Mrs.
+Eddy. Mrs. Eddy's church organization stands as a sort of dyke between
+the general principle of mind cure<!-- Page 189 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> and Mrs. Eddy's very empirical,
+violent, and temperamental interpretation of that principle. It is the
+future of psycho-therapeutics that will determine the future of
+Christian Science. If "Mind Cure," "Christian Psychology," and regular
+physicians offer the benefits of suggestive treatment in a more rational
+and direct way than does Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy's church will find
+in them very formidable competition. On the other hand, if Christian
+Scientists throw down their barriers and join the general mind-cure
+movement, and the two branches of Quimbyism meet, then half of Mrs.
+Eddy's life-work is lost. The labor of her days has been to keep these
+two streams apart; to prove one the true and the other the false. Her
+efforts to stem the progress of all other schools of mental healing have
+been secondary only to her efforts to advance her own. Yet,
+unconsciously and against her own wish, she has been the most effective
+instrument in promoting the interest of the whole movement.</p>
+
+<p>On the theoretical side, Mrs. Eddy's contribution to mental healing has
+been, in the main, fallacious, pseudodoxal, and absurd, but upon the
+practical side she has been wonderfully efficient. New movements are
+usually launched and old ideas are revivified, not through the efforts
+of a group of people, but through one person. These dynamic
+personalities have not always conformed to our highest ideals; their
+effectiveness has not always been associated with a large intelligence
+or with nobility of character. Not infrequently it has been true of
+them&mdash;as it seems to be true of Mrs. Eddy&mdash;that their power was
+generated in the ferment of an inharmonious and violent nature. But, for
+practical purposes, it is only fair to measure them by their actual
+accomplishment and by the machinery they have set in motion.</p>
+
+<h3>THE END</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="HER_FRUITS" id="HER_FRUITS"></a>HER FRUITS</h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h3>MARY ELEANOR ROBERTS</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">These are her fruits, kindness and gentleness,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 16em;">And gratefully we take them at her hands;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Patience she has, and pity for distress,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 19em;">And love that understands.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Ah, ask not how such rich reward was won,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">How sharp the harrow in the former years,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Or mellowed in what agony of sun,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 19em;">Or watered with what tears.</span><br />
+<!-- Page 190 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_KEY_TO_THE_DOOR" id="THE_KEY_TO_THE_DOOR"></a>THE KEY TO THE DOOR</h2>
+
+<h3>BY FIELDING BALL</h3>
+
+<h3>ILLUSTRATIONS BY WALTER JACK DUNCAN</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">"<i>There was the Door to which I found no Key;</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;"><i>There was the Veil through which I might not see.</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;"><i>Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;"><i>There was&mdash;and then no more of Thee and Me</i>."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The postmaster was lounging in an open window, cleaning his fingernails
+with his pocket-knife, as Allison went into the post-office. He rose
+with some show of animation at sight of the tall, boyish figure in the
+doorway.</p>
+
+<p>"I got a hired girl for you all right, Mr. Allison," he said, advancing
+to meet him. "Used to work down to Webb City, in a restaurant, but got
+tired of it&mdash;hours too hard. She's a good cook, and she knows how to get
+things on the table so they look real nice&mdash;I knew that would mean
+considerable to you folks."</p>
+
+<p>He went on to dwell at length upon the girl's good points, becoming more
+nervously demonstrative in his praise as he found that Allison's face
+reflected none of his enthusiasm, but remained unexpectedly impassive
+and non-committal.</p>
+
+<p>Allison interrupted at the first opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>"You have been very kind, Mr. Barbour," he said, with impersonal
+civility. "Would you be so good as to get me my mail?"</p>
+
+<p>He took the letters which the man handed him and walked out without
+giving him another glance.</p>
+
+<p>Just outside of the door he met Jim Brown, man-of-all-work at the
+station. Allison himself was station agent. Allison looked at Jim as he
+passed with such a cold, unswerving gaze that in spite of himself the
+other dropped his eyes. Jim had been present at the interview between
+Billings and Allison that morning; Allison knew that he was coming now
+to tell the postmaster about it. The young man set his lips hard at the
+thought of some of the things he had done during the last two weeks,
+when he had been full of glad confidence in himself and in this
+invention of his&mdash;this brake which Billings had told him an hour ago was
+not worth the stuff of which it was made. The recountal of his
+performance would doubtless afford much entertainment to the pair in the
+post-office. Just yesterday he had asked the postmaster to find for him,
+if possible, a capable maid-servant, and had said, without thinking
+anything in particular about it, that he would pay a satisfactory girl
+five dollars a week. Five dollars a week&mdash;it had not seemed much to him;
+he had been amused by Barbour's evident astonishment. To-day he saw more
+reason in it.... Then there was that perfume for Gertrude&mdash;he should
+have to countermand his order for that. He had no choice in the matter,
+he told himself, with bitter resentment that a paltry nine dollars
+should mean so much to him. In spite of the fact that he had come to
+this decision before he reached the drug store, he did not go in, but
+walked past with his head in the air, looking neither to right nor to
+left. He felt as though every one must already know of the morning's
+experience; and he was fearful of meeting eyes alight with cynical
+understanding.</p>
+
+<p>The postmaster and Jim watched the young man from the post-office door
+as he made his way up the one hilly street of the little town. The
+soldierly precision of his carriage and gait, together with a certain
+air of distinction about his clothes, made him seem singularly out of
+keeping with all about him&mdash;the narrow, stony road, the straggling white
+houses on each side of it, the unkempt yards, the neglected trees, the
+dilapidated sidewalks half hidden by an amazing growth of dog-fennel.</p>
+
+<p>"You'd know somep'n had gone wrong by the way he had his head reared
+back, wouldn't you?" Jim asked with a smile on his dark face.</p>
+
+<p>He had just finished telling Barbour of what had happened that morning.
+Several days before,<!-- Page 191 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> Allison had got word from the railroad company
+that some time this week they would send a man to tell him what offer
+they were prepared to make for the brake on which he had been working
+for so many weeks, and had finally finished; and this morning Billings
+had put in his appearance. The brake was practically good for nothing,
+he assured Allison&mdash;certainly not worth a cent to the company; and he
+told him the reasons why this was so.</p>
+
+<p>He went on to say, however, that he felt sorry for Allison,&mdash;sorry for
+that nice little wife of his,&mdash;Jim smiled grimly as he repeated the
+condescending phrase,&mdash;that he knew they were having a mighty hard time
+of it. Sixty dollars a month was not enough for a single man to live on
+decently, much less a married one; and the way in which Allison had been
+brought up made it harder. He didn't mean to criticize Allison's
+father&mdash;he didn't believe in criticizing the dead&mdash;but he certainly
+should not bring up <i>his</i> son in such a way that he couldn't make a
+living for himself if necessary. You never could tell what was going to
+happen in this world; Allison wasn't the first gay young fellow who had
+grown up not expecting ever to have to do a day's work, and then all of
+a sudden had found himself glad to get almost any sort of a job. Well,
+as he said, he was sorry for Allison, and ready to help him out a
+little. He meant to see to it that Allison got something out of this
+brake of his&mdash;a couple of hundred dollars, perhaps; of course, two
+hundred dollars wasn't a great deal; it wouldn't mean much to
+him&mdash;Billings&mdash;but it would probably mean considerable to Allison.</p>
+
+<p>"What did Mr. Allison say?" the postmaster asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Never changed face. Set there starin' at Billings with those darned
+cool eyes o' his that look's if they'd never blink 'f a cannon went off
+under his very nose&mdash;waited till Billings got good and done, 'n' then
+said with that high 'n' mighty air of his, f'r all the world's if he was
+speakin' to some poor, half-witted Swede: 'Two hundred dollars doesn't
+mean as much to me as you think, Mr. Billings.' Then he stopped a
+minute, 'n' went on in a little diff'rent tone, 'You needn't concern
+yourself any further about me and my troubles'&mdash;'n' that had very much
+the sound of 'I'll make kindling-wood of you if you do!' Then he looks
+at his watch. 'I've given you all the time I can spare,' says he; and
+with that he swings around 'n' begins looking over some papers on his
+desk. Billings reddened up a little&mdash;coughed 'n' wriggled around in his
+chair, 'n' tried to get up courage to say somethin' more&mdash;but he simply
+didn't <i>darst</i>. He went off finally lookin' sort o' cheap. Mist'
+Allison never give him another glance, no more'n 's if he was that dog
+o' yours."</p>
+
+<p>The postmaster was silent for a minute or two. Then he turned to Jim.
+"I'm not particularly sorry to see Billings get left," he said. "Still,
+it might be just as well for Mr. Allison if he'd have kept on the right
+side of Billings from the start. There's no use talking, he's got an
+awfully uppish way with him, that boy."</p>
+
+<p>Jim nodded an emphatic assent. Along with other smaller grievances there
+still rankled in his mind the memory of how, when Allison had first come
+as station agent to the little town, a year ago now, he had one day
+asked Jim if he did not suppose that the nice-looking girl who had
+passed their house with Jim the Sunday before could be induced to come
+and work for them. Allison had asked the question in all innocence, not
+dreaming that this unshaven young man in blue seersucker shirt and
+greasy trousers considered himself in every way Allison's equal, and was
+as much affronted by this suggestion as Allison would have been by one
+of the same sort. Jim could not forgive him for it&mdash;any admiration he
+felt for Allison was invariably tempered by resentful remembrance.</p>
+
+<p>"It's about time he woke up to the fact that he doesn't have a father
+worth two millions behind him these days," Barbour went on.
+"Extravagant! Lord, he never stops to ask what a thing costs before
+getting it, as long as he has money in his pockets. Went into the
+book-store the other afternoon to get some magazines&mdash;carried off about
+everything Henry had in the place. Three dollars and fifteen cents his
+bill was. Never thinks, when he's buying anything in the way of shirts
+or ties, of getting less than half a dozen at a time&mdash;s'pose he hasn't
+found out you can buy them any other way. And his laundry bills&mdash;guess
+he about runs the laundry. And just yesterday he was telling me in the
+most off-hand way that he would pay five dollars a week to a hired girl.
+Five dollars a week! I could hardly believe my ears. But I guess he's
+gone back on that." The postmaster smiled sourly.</p>
+
+<p>The young man of whom they were talking was almost at the top of the
+hill by this time. So far he had met few people; and those whom he had
+met had not forced any formal recognition from him. But as he passed
+Mrs. Jennings, she called out a greeting that could not be ignored.
+Gertrude had stopped once to talk to her and to admire her collection of
+shells; and since then every noon and night he found her waiting here by
+her gate to speak to him; and she invariably asked the same question
+about his wife, always in the same tone, always with the same
+inflection. The meeting with<!-- Page 192 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> her had become one of the frightfully
+unvarying things of his day. As he walked on now, he saw stretching
+before him an interminable vista of days, weeks, years&mdash;one deadly
+sameness of hard work, long hours, scanty pay, poor living, growing
+debts&mdash;and inextricably mixed up with it all, this dreary, gaunt black
+figure, waiting always for him at the top of the hill.... He had not
+realized what it meant to him, the success of his invention&mdash;how much he
+was depending on it. He felt now as he might if, moving blindly through
+a dark passage, hoping any minute to see a glimmer of light ahead, an
+outlet into the open air, he had run full into a locked door&mdash;a door to
+which he had no key.</p>
+
+<p>The thought of going home to his wife brought no comfort with it. They
+had long ago ceased to be honest with each other, Gertrude and he; their
+attempts to make the best of a sorry situation had in the end become a
+barrier which held them apart. Gertrude would not admit that she was
+ever tired, or lonesome, or discouraged; would find no fault with their
+poor little house, their scanty means, her unaccustomed duties. She
+never spoke of the past any more, nor of the future, lest in that there
+might be an implied criticism of the present; she was resolutely,
+unvaryingly, aggressively contented. But this contentment was too
+constant, too uniform, like false color on a woman's cheek. He sometimes
+wished she would throw pretense to the winds&mdash;would put her head on his
+shoulder, and sob and cry, and confess that she wished she were dead&mdash;or
+that she would upbraid him, reproach him, call him some of the hard
+names he called himself. But she was insistently cheerful; and there was
+nothing for him to do, in the face of this, but play an awkward second
+to her, ignore his aching back, his sore hands, his throbbing head, and
+keep a resolute silence as to all that happened to vex and humiliate and
+perplex and hurt him. It was not always easy; to-day he was conscious
+that he was walking more and more slowly as he drew near the house.</p>
+
+<p>How poor and forlorn it looked in this glare of light! During these last
+weeks his thoughts had turned often to that stately house where he had
+lived for nineteen years&mdash;its green, close-clipped lawn glistening under
+a perpetual play of water, its great beds of white and green and
+cardinal foliage plants, its shut-in porches, its awnings, its flowering
+shrubs, its vines, its heavy iron fence. He looked with bitter
+attentiveness at the dingy frame cottage he was approaching, noticing
+each homely detail&mdash;the dish-towels spread on the bushes in the back
+yard, the mop hanging by the door, the kerosene can under the step, the
+lean hen scuttling away under the currant bushes, the vegetable garden
+lying parched and dry along the fence. There was a small artificial
+mound of stones at one side of the house, with a somewhat scanty growth
+of portulaca springing from its top. The last occupant of the house was
+responsible for that adornment. Allison wondered how they had happened
+to leave it there so long. That mound of stones&mdash;all his hopes might
+have been buried under it and he could not have hated it more. It stood,
+somehow, for all that chafed and irritated him here&mdash;the moral, mental,
+and physical stuntedness of the people&mdash;their petty ambitions, petty
+jealousies, petty quarrels, petty virtues.</p>
+
+<p>Allison was seized with a sudden vague fear as he saw on the kitchen
+window-sill, just where he had left it at seven this morning, the
+package which Gertrude had promised to take to Mr. Fulton as soon as she
+had finished the breakfast dishes. He noticed almost at the same instant
+that the kitchen door was open; countless flies were sailing in and out;
+and there on the cellar door, in the blazing sunlight, was the morning's
+milk, thick and sour by this time. He quickened his steps&mdash;made his way
+hurriedly through the kitchen and dining-room, noticing, as he went,
+various signs of disorder. The kitchen fire was out&mdash;the floor unswept;
+the coffee he had knocked over when he had built the fire this morning
+lay where it had fallen: the room was full of its pungent odor. On the
+dining-room table were the remnants of breakfast, the oatmeal dry and
+stiff, the butter melted down to a thin oil. In the front room he found
+Gertrude, bending a flushed face over something she was writing. She
+gave a start of fright as he came in&mdash;then got very red.</p>
+
+<p>"I sat down to write a little of that play I was telling you about last
+night"&mdash;she was picking up her papers with frantic haste as she
+spoke&mdash;"and I had no idea it was getting so late." She cast an appalled
+glance around the room, and hurried out to begin clearing off the table,
+making a great clatter with the dishes in her excitement and haste.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 284px;">
+<img src="images/illus0344.jpg" width="284" height="400" alt="&quot;THIS DREARY, GAUNT BLACK FIGURE, WAITING ALWAYS FOR HIM
+AT THE TOP OF THE HILL&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;THIS DREARY, GAUNT BLACK FIGURE, WAITING ALWAYS FOR HIM
+AT THE TOP OF THE HILL&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><!-- Page 193 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Allison stood for a minute looking after her wearily. Her manner hurt
+him. More than once, in days gone by, he had told her fondly that when
+she married him she should do nothing but what she liked to do&mdash;if she
+chose, she might work on her little dialogues and fairy stories from
+morning till night. The air of frightened apology which she wore&mdash;this
+servile haste&mdash;pained and irritated him. He threw himself into a chair
+and began mechanically to look over the mail which the postmaster had
+handed him. A week ago he had written to an Eastern firm asking for a
+catalogue of the<!-- Page 194 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> refrigerators they made. Here it was&mdash;bulky,
+imposing, abounding in alluring pictures of tile-lined refrigerators
+filled with game, fish, fruit, wine. He found he could buy their
+smallest and most inexpensive refrigerator, "built especially to supply
+a demand for low-priced goods,"&mdash;so the advertisement ran&mdash;for
+forty-five dollars. He dropped the book, and turned to his other letter.
+It was from a great retail dry-goods house, and was in answer to a
+request he had made for samples of dotted swiss&mdash;he had thought he would
+like to get Gertrude a dress such as she had worn when he first knew
+her. The samples were sent, and along with them a letter expressing
+pleasure at being able to serve him, and a desire further to accommodate
+him whenever possible; its extreme deference and respect was like a
+calculated sarcasm. He pushed it away from him and leaned back in his
+chair, looking about the room with a curious stare, as a convict, who
+has just heard that his sentence is for life, might gaze at the walls of
+his cell. It was a low-ceiled room, with an uneven floor, cheap
+woodwork, painted in an unsuccessful imitation of natural wood, and
+walls hung with faded paper of an indeterminate pattern and even more
+indeterminate color. To-day it was in greater confusion than usual, with
+white dust thick on table and chair, a window-shade askew, the
+music-rack disarranged, and a plate of grape-skins which Allison had
+left last night on the piano still standing there. But it was not the
+disorder which irritated Allison most, nor the signs of poverty, but the
+fact that the poverty was so <i>genteel</i>, so self-respecting, so
+determined to make the best of things and present a brave front to the
+world. The kerosene lamp had a shade of red, crinkled tissue-paper&mdash;the
+cheap net curtains were arranged with the utmost elaboration&mdash;a rug was
+artfully laid down in such a way as almost to cover the square of zinc
+on which the stove stood in the winter time, and all of Gertrude's
+photographs were placed with a view to concealing various defects and
+deficiencies. His loathing for all this was intensified by a memory of
+vast rooms stretching out one after the other, hushed and cool, with
+gracious shadows lending their mystery and romance to everything. With
+sudden restlessness he rose, and walked over to the window; but the
+smell of dust and dry, dead vegetation smothered him. Gertrude had raked
+the long, sparse brown grass all in one direction; it had a grotesque
+look of having been combed.</p>
+
+<p>He seized his hat, and went to get Mr. Fulton's package from the
+window-sill. He had barely turned toward the gate, however, when his
+wife hurried out, remonstrating, apologizing, with an urgent hand on
+his arm. "It is important that Mr. Fulton should get these papers
+to-day," he said stiffly. It did not really matter whether Mr. Fulton
+got the roll of agricultural papers to-day, to-morrow, or next week; but
+Allison felt the necessity for doing something, it did not much matter
+what, to crush down his growing despair; and this was the only thing
+which suggested itself. Gertrude was persistent, however, in her
+entreaties that he come back; it was frightfully hot, and he already
+looked tired; she would take the papers to Mr. Fulton right after
+luncheon. He yielded at last, from sheer languidness, and came silently
+into the house. Gertrude's moist face, her loud, anxious voice, her
+warm, clinging hand, were exceedingly disagreeable to him&mdash;so much so
+that finally the desire to escape them became more importunate than any
+other.</p>
+
+<p>He was again standing by the window, gazing out, when his wife came into
+the dining-room to set the table. He did not turn&mdash;gave no sign of
+seeing her.</p>
+
+<p>"What are you thinking about, Philip?" she asked presently, with an
+effort to make her question sound casual.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not thinking&mdash;at least I am trying not to," Allison answered, in a
+somewhat strained, unnatural voice. Why would she not leave him alone?
+Could she not see that he did not wish to talk?</p>
+
+<p>"What was the last thing that you were thinking about before you
+stopped?" Gertrude spoke with painstaking gaiety.</p>
+
+<p>Would she always keep up this dissimulation? Allison asked himself. For
+his part, he was done with it!</p>
+
+<p>"I was thinking that this place was fit for a dog-kennel&mdash;and for
+nothing else!" he said. All the bitterness that was eating out his heart
+was in the low words.</p>
+
+<p>"It does look pretty bad to-day," Gertrude acquiesced, after an
+appreciable interval of time.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>To-day!</i>" Allison gave a hard, contemptuous little laugh. "As though
+it ever looked any other way!"</p>
+
+<p>Gertrude did not reply.... When Allison noticed her silence, and turned
+to look at her, he saw that there was a peculiar light in her eyes, a
+red flush over all her face; after a moment's dazed wonder, he realized
+that she had misunderstood him&mdash;had misunderstood him utterly. His
+thoughts had been on the sagging floors, the cheap furniture, the marred
+wall-paper, the miserable ugliness and poverty of the house, and
+everything in it; but she had seen in his remark only scorn for her
+housekeeping, irritation at the room's untidiness. She<!-- Page 195 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> was very angry.
+As Allison realized this, a sudden fierce satisfaction possessed him.
+Now at last she would speak out, without pretence, without reserve! He
+should hear the truth at last.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 196 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 315px;">
+<img src="images/illus0345.jpg" width="315" height="400" alt="&quot;HE HEARD HER MOVING ABOUT, GETTING HIS LUNCHEON&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;HE HEARD HER MOVING ABOUT, GETTING HIS LUNCHEON&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>But the wrathful look died out of her eyes. She began arranging the
+knives and forks, looking suddenly old, and steady, and sober.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not much of a housekeeper," she said, quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"No, you're not." Allison made his tone as ugly as possible&mdash;and waited.
+Surely she would turn upon him now, overwhelm him with bitter words!</p>
+
+<p>She made no answer of any kind, however, but turned and hurried into the
+kitchen, striking her arm clumsily against one side of the door as she
+passed through, as though she had not seen very well. He heard her
+moving rapidly about, getting his luncheon. She brought it in with her
+head in the air and her lips compressed. The coffee was muddy, the steak
+burned, the creamed potatoes scorched&mdash;she had been having bad luck.
+Allison ate every scrap of what she brought him. He did not dare look at
+her&mdash;did not dare ask her to forgive him. What right had he to do that?
+He lingered on the steps some time before starting for the station,
+fussing with his cuff, pulling his hat into shape, breaking off from the
+tree at the corner of the house the branch Gertrude had complained was
+in her way. His wife usually followed him to the door to tell him
+good-by; but to-day she was sweeping the dining-room vigorously, singing
+the while a very gay and cheerful tune. It was one to which they had
+often danced together in the old days; at the same moment at which he
+realized it, the song stopped, as though Gertrude had been silenced by
+the same memory that had come to him. He whistled tentatively; but she
+did not answer, though she was near enough to hear, as he knew from the
+sound of her broom.</p>
+
+<p>Allison went about his work that afternoon with a droop to his head, and
+a dullness about his dark eyes, which Jim noticed with vague discomfort,
+and which made him wish heartily that he had not confided to the
+postmaster the story of Billings and the brake. He had quarreled with
+Gertrude&mdash;everything else seemed insignificant to Allison beside that.
+He had quarreled with Gertrude&mdash;Gertrude, who had been so brave, so
+uncomplaining, so patient, so forbearing&mdash;had gone away from her with
+the shadow of a misunderstanding between them. He kept repeating to
+himself everything he had said and everything she had said, recalling
+every tone and gesture. He wondered how he could have felt such a
+shrinking dislike as she stood with her hand&mdash;her poor little scarred
+hand!&mdash;on his arm, begging him to come back, to let her take the papers
+to Mr. Fulton. How sweet she had been&mdash;how sweet! And he!</p>
+
+<p>He started for home a little earlier than usual&mdash;Jim urged him to go,
+with a certain rough friendliness, saying that he could look out for
+things at the station. On his way home Allison went to the post-office,
+hoping to get a letter for Gertrude from her mother or sister, and he
+told the postmaster very humbly and simply why he had not felt like
+talking this noon, and of the fact that he could not really afford to
+pay five dollars a week for a maid. It was very strange, but after he
+had begun, it was not at all hard to go on. He wondered vaguely how he
+could have thought the postmaster a meddlesome, malicious, vulgar young
+man; he seemed very sensible and friendly and respectful to-night.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Jennings stood at the top of the hill, gaunt and black as usual;
+somehow Allison did not feel the usual resentment. He stopped to speak
+to her with unwonted warmth; and when, encouraged by his manner, she
+began to talk about Gertrude, and what a pretty girl, and what a smart
+girl, and what a sweet girl she was, he felt a sudden kindness for the
+old lady, and accepted almost demonstratively the bunch of magenta and
+orange vinnias she gave him to take to his wife.</p>
+
+<p>As Allison went into the house, he noticed signs of a vigorous cleaning.
+The back steps had been scrubbed&mdash;were still wet; the kitchen floor was
+as white as the rough, dark boards could be made; the dining-room table
+was set with their finest table-cloth and prettiest dishes, and was gay
+with yellow flowers; fresh white curtains, breathing out sweetness, hung
+at the windows. A note was pinned to the corner of the table.</p>
+
+<p>"If you should get home before I do," it ran, "this is to tell you that
+I have gone to Mr. Fulton's with those papers I promised to take right
+after luncheon&mdash;I forgot all about them till just now. I'll be back in
+three-quarters of an hour sure; it's half-past five now. Supper's all
+ready now but making the coffee. Be sure and wait."</p>
+
+<p>He smoothed the hurried scrawl out tenderly, feeling as if something
+hard and cold in his left side had melted with a sudden gush of warmth.
+Back in three-quarters of an hour! He laughed aloud at the sanguineness
+of it. Why, it took <i>him</i> forty minutes to go to Mr. Fulton's and back!
+And the idea of telling him to be sure and wait! The little goose! Did
+she think he would take himself off in a temper at not finding her, as
+he had once months ago? He went out<!-- Page 197 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> to the kitchen to put his flowers
+in water, and to finish slicing an egg over the top of the bowl of salad
+there&mdash;Gertrude had evidently just begun to do it when the package
+outside the window caught her eye. He put on some water for the coffee,
+and brought in an armful of wood; then he strolled to the gate to wait
+for his wife. The neighbor's two-year-old baby came staggering down the
+walk in front of the house. Allison caught up the child in his arms, and
+lifted it to the top of the gate-post, beside him. This was the little
+girl for whom Gertrude had been making a dress the other day; she had
+looked very shocked&mdash;Gertrude&mdash;when he had asked her if she proposed to
+make clothes for all the dirty little brats in the neighborhood, and had
+told him with some dignity that Dolly was a very pretty baby, and was
+kept as clean as could be expected. Dolly <i>was</i> a pretty baby. He
+tightened the arm that was about her a little, and began to talk clumsy
+baby-talk to her; her mother looked on with a pleased smile from her
+front door. The sun was setting, and a strange bright peace was on
+everything.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly Allison's eyes were caught by an unaccustomed sight&mdash;a crowd of
+people, men, women, and children, advancing down the road, slowly,
+steadily, and silently&mdash;very silently. He surveyed them curiously,
+ignorantly. Suddenly a man spoke to the one next him&mdash;Allison saw the
+dip of his head&mdash;and almost at the same instant a child&mdash;a
+twelve-year-old girl&mdash;put up her hands to shade her eyes, staring
+intently at Allison, and then with a loud shriek ran wildly, blindly, in
+the other direction. And then Allison knew that this silent company
+meant disaster to him.</p>
+
+<p>They dragged him away before he caught more than a glimpse of what they
+had in their midst&mdash;the limp, white-faced thing in the silly pink dress
+he had liked. She had started home by the short way, they told him&mdash;the
+short way over the old bridge&mdash;the bridge that every one knew was not
+safe. And how it happened no one could say&mdash;perhaps she had stumbled and
+caught hold of the rotten railing, and it had given under her hand; at
+any rate they had found her in the dry river-bottom, thirty feet below.
+He looked at them very calmly as they finished. "She is dead," he said
+quietly, "there is no need to tell me that." And then, suddenly, without
+a cry or any warning, he toppled over against the man nearest him.</p>
+
+<p>But she was not dead. He came out of his delirium and fever three weeks
+later to find her limping around the room, looking a little pale and
+tired, but very pretty in some sort of ruffled white dress, with her
+hair done up in the puffs and rolls he had always liked. People had been
+very good, she told him when he was strong enough to listen and
+understand. The doctor had said that he could eat eggs before he could
+eat anything else&mdash;so everybody had been sending fresh eggs. Mary said
+she was going to buy an incubator and start to raising chickens&mdash;they
+couldn't eat half the eggs that were sent in, even if they ate nothing
+but custard. Mary was the pretty girl that they had seen walking with
+Mr. Brown one Sunday, and had thought would be a nice person to have
+around. She was going to stay with them all winter; Gertrude was going
+to teach her German and music, and she was going to teach Gertrude how
+to cook. She was doing all the work just now, she and the neighbors.
+Mrs. Ferry came in every morning to scrub the kitchen and black the
+stove. They said Gertrude must keep her hands nice&mdash;Philip had seemed
+more worried about her hands than about anything else, all the time he
+was sick. Did he see how soft and white they were? She had been washing
+them in buttermilk&mdash;the doctor's wife had suggested that&mdash;and putting
+some sort of cream on them that Mr. Gilson, the young man who clerked in
+the drug store, had sent up by Mr. Brown. Mr. Brown had been so kind&mdash;it
+had been he who had sat up with Philip when his fever was at its
+worst&mdash;he had chopped all the ice that they had used from first to last.
+He was out in the back yard now, fixing&mdash;but there, that was to be a
+surprise.</p>
+
+<p>Allison lay very still, smoothing his wife's hand, and looking out
+through the open door at the dry grass of the yard, browner, dustier
+than ever, and at the portulaca waving on top of the pyramid of stones.
+He could hear Jim's whistle as he moved about the yard; some one at the
+back door was talking to Mary in a hushed, eager undertone; over on her
+porch Dolly was singing happily, sinking her voice to a mere murmur now
+and then at a low remonstrance from within the house. It all made a sort
+of accompaniment to Gertrude's happy talk.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly she stopped, and leaned her cheek against his, with a little
+sigh. "Isn't it a nice world, dear?" she whispered.</p>
+
+<p>He turned so that he could look into her eyes, and said, with a little
+tremble in his voice:</p>
+
+<p>"It's a beautiful world!"<!-- Page 198 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 199 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span></p><div class="figcenter" style="width: 275px;">
+<img src="images/illus0346.jpg" width="275" height="400" alt="&quot;HE CAME TOWARD HER WITH THE PITCHER&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;HE CAME TOWARD HER WITH THE PITCHER&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_WAYFARERS" id="THE_WAYFARERS"></a>THE WAYFARERS</h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h3>MARY STEWART CUTTING</h3>
+
+<h3>AUTHOR OF "LITTLE STORIES OF COURTSHIP," "LITTLE STORIES OF MARRIED
+LIFE," ETC.</h3>
+
+<h3>ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALICE BARBER STEPHENS</h3>
+
+<h3>XIX</h3>
+
+<p>"Slipped through your fingers like that! Like a&mdash;" Leverich's words were
+not fit for print. He had been away for a couple of days, and now sat
+tilted back in his office chair, a heavy, leather-covered thing not
+meant for tilting, his face puffed with anger, his mouth snarling&mdash;a
+wild beast balked of his prey. His eyes, ferociously insolent, dwelt on
+Justin, who, fine and keen and smiling a little, sat opposite him. Brute
+anger never had any effect on Justin but to give him a contemptuous,
+chill self-possession.</p>
+
+<p>"You're sure the agreement's made?"</p>
+
+<p>"Cater's been sending new consignments as fast as they could go for the
+past three days; he's loaded up with machines."</p>
+
+<p>Leverich swore again. "Confounded fools, not to have made terms with
+Hardanger first! If we'd only known! If there was only some way to put a
+spoke in the wheel, even yet!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I've got the spoke, easily enough," said Justin indifferently. "The
+only trouble is, I can't use it."</p>
+
+<p>"Got a spoke! Why in heaven didn't you say that before?" Leverich came
+down on the front legs of his chair with a force that sent it rolling
+ahead on its casters. "What are you sitting here for? What do you mean
+by telling me that you can't use it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just what I say. But it's not worth talking about."</p>
+
+<p>"See here, Alexander, could you get our machine in now instead of his?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose I might."</p>
+
+<p>"And you're not going to do it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can't, I tell you, Leverich. The information came to me in such a way
+that I can't touch it."</p>
+
+<p>"'The information&mdash;' It's something damaging to do with the machine?"</p>
+
+<p>Justin drummed with his fingers on the desk without answering.</p>
+
+<p>"You have proof?"</p>
+
+<p>"What's the sense of talking, Leverich? Proof or no, I tell you, I can't
+use it. This isn't any funny business; you can see that. Don't you
+suppose, if I could use it, that I would? But there are some things a
+man can't do. At any rate, <i>I</i> can't. And that settles it."</p>
+
+<p>Heaven knows he had gone over the matter insistently enough in the last
+few days, since the combination had been unwillingly given into his
+hands, but always with the foregone conclusion. The devil, as a rule,
+doesn't actively try to tempt us to evil: he simply confuses us, so that
+we are kept from using our reason. But this time he had no field for
+action. To use secret information against Cater, that could never have
+been had but for Cater's kindness to him in helping him to those bars in
+time of need, was first, last, and every time impossible to Justin
+Alexander. It was vain for argument to suggest that this very deed of
+kindness had worked his disaster&mdash;the fact remained the same. He might
+do other things; he might do worse things: this thing he could not
+do&mdash;not though the refusal worked his own ruin, not though Cater's ruin
+with Hardanger was insured anyway, but too late for the typometer to
+profit by it. Even if the typometer could by some means keep afloat
+until that day arrived, it would take a couple of years for such a
+timing-machine to regain its prestige in a foreign country.</p>
+
+<p>Justin had no excess of sentiment; no quixotic impulse urged him to go
+and tell Cater what he had learned. It was Cater's business to look
+after his end of the game. If the price of material or labor was too
+cheap, he must know that there was something wrong with it. The stream
+of Justin's mind ran clear in spite of that feeling of sharp practice
+toward himself&mdash;nay, because of it; it was impossible to use the<!-- Page 200 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> weapon
+that a former kindness had placed in his hand. He looked at Leverich now
+with an expression which the latter quieted himself to meet. This was a
+situation, not for bluster and rage, but to be competently grappled
+with.</p>
+
+<p>"How about your obligations? Do you call this fair dealing to us,
+Alexander? There's Lewiston's note; once this deal was settled, we would
+have paid that, as you know. But it's out of the question as things
+stand. We'll have to get our money out the best way we can. If this is
+your sense of honor&mdash;to sacrifice your friends! See here, Alexander,
+let's talk this out. When it comes to talking of ruin, no man can afford
+to stand on terms. We didn't put you into the typometer business on any
+kindergarten principles&mdash;it isn't to form your character. What we did,
+we did for profit; and if the profit isn't there, we get out. We've no
+objection to doing a kindness for any one, if we can do it and make a
+profit; but it stands to reason that we're not in the business for
+philanthropy any more than for kindergartening. We liked you, and we
+were willing to give you a place in the game if you could run it to suit
+us. But we don't consider any scheme that doesn't make money. What
+doesn't make money has to go. Profit, profit, profit&mdash;that's what every
+sane man puts first, and there's no justice in losing a chance to make
+it. What you lose, another man takes. If you make another man's wife and
+children better off, you stint your own. You've got to consider a
+question on all sides. No woman respects a man who can't make money;
+it's his everlasting business to make money, and she knows it. Your wife
+won't think much of your fine scruples if she's to go without for 'em.
+And, by the Lord, she's right! When you go into business, you've got to
+make up your mind to one of two things: you've either got to step hard
+on the necks of those below you, or you've got to lie down and let them
+wipe their feet on you."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/illus0347.jpg" width="400" height="315" alt="&quot;&#39;I DON&#39;T GIVE QUARTER, AND I DON&#39;T EXPECT ANY. IF I&#39;M
+SQUEEZED, I PAY&#39;&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;&#39;I DON&#39;T GIVE QUARTER, AND I DON&#39;T EXPECT ANY. IF I&#39;M
+SQUEEZED, I PAY&#39;&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Leverich had stopped at intervals for comment from Justin. Since none
+was offered, he went on, with the large and easy manner of one who feels
+the justice of his convictions: "No man ever accused me of being close.
+I'm free-handed, if I say it that shouldn't. I like to give, and I <i>do</i>
+give. If there's money wanted for charity, the committees know very well
+where to come. And my wife likes to give,<!-- Page 201 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> too; her name's on the books
+of twenty charitable organizations. But we give out of money I've made
+by <i>not</i> being free-handed&mdash;by getting every last cent that belonged to
+me. You see, I don't leave my wife out of my calculations&mdash;any man's a
+fool that does. She's got the right to have as good as I can give her. I
+wouldn't talk like this to most men, Alexander, but between you and me
+it's different. It pays to keep your wife in a good humor, when you've
+got to go home after a hard day's work; you take a dissatisfied woman,
+and she'll make your home a hell. I know men&mdash;Great Scott! I don't know
+how they live!" He paused again. Justin did not answer. He sat with his
+head on his hand, looking, not at Leverich, but to one side of him.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/illus0348.jpg" width="400" height="359" alt="&quot;EVEN REDGE ... HAD BEEN ALLOWED TO HOLD HIM&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;EVEN REDGE ... HAD BEEN ALLOWED TO HOLD HIM&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>"When I say I've made the money," continued Leverich, "I mean that I
+actually <i>have</i> made most of it&mdash;made it out of nothing! like the first
+chapter of Genesis. If a man has money to start with, he can add to it
+as easily as you can roll up a snowball. It's no credit to him. But I've
+had only my brains. I've seen money where other men couldn't, and
+nothing has stood in my way of getting to it. That's the whole secret of
+success. And my attitude's fair&mdash;you couldn't find a fairer. When one of
+your clerks falls sick, you pay him his full salary for three or four
+months till he's around again. <i>I</i> know! Well, I don't do any such
+stunts. When I was a clerk myself, I was on the sick-list once for three
+months, and nobody paid me. After the first month I was bounced, and I
+didn't expect anything else. I didn't expect any philanthropical
+business, and I don't give it. That's fair, isn't it? I don't give
+quarter, and I don't expect any. If I'm squeezed, I pay. I don't stand
+still in the middle of a deal and snivel about what I can do and what I
+can't do. I don't snivel about what you call moral obligations. I only
+recognize money obligations. Why, see here, Alexander," he broke off,
+"if you use the influence you spoke of, you don't have to tell me what
+it is&mdash;you don't have to tell anybody but Hardanger. Cater himself
+needn't know that you had anything to do with it."</p>
+
+<p>"But I'd know," said Justin quietly.</p>
+
+<p>Leverich lost his easy manner; his jaw protruded.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well, then; it comes down to this: If you fail us now, out of any
+of your fool scruples toward that poor devil across the street,&mdash;who's
+bound to get the blood sucked out of him anyway,&mdash;you ruin your own
+prospects, and<!-- Page 202 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> you try and cheat us out of the money we put up on you.
+By &mdash;&mdash;, if you see any honor in that, I don't."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Leverich," said Justin, raising his head simply, with a steely
+gleam in his eyes that matched the other's, "when I try to cheat you or
+Lewiston or any man out of what has been put up on me, I'll give you
+leave to say what you please. At present I'll say good morning."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 274px;">
+<img src="images/illus0349.jpg" width="274" height="400" alt="&quot;AFTER THIS HE ONLY APPEARED IN THE VILLAGE STREET
+GUARDED ON EITHER SIDE BY A FEMALE SNOW&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;AFTER THIS HE ONLY APPEARED IN THE VILLAGE STREET
+GUARDED ON EITHER SIDE BY A FEMALE SNOW&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Leverich shrugged his shoulders and turned his back as he bent over his
+desk. Justin picked up his hat and went out, brushing, as he did so,
+against a dark, pleasant-faced man who had been sitting in the next
+room. Something in his face instantly conveyed to Justin the knowledge
+that the conversation he had just been engaged in had grown louder than
+the partition warranted. The next instant he recognized the man as a Mr.
+Warren, of Rondell &amp; Co. Both men turned to look back at each other, and
+both bowed. The action had a certain definiteness in it, unwarranted by
+the slightness<!-- Page 203 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> of the meeting. The next moment Justin was in the
+street.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/illus0350.jpg" width="400" height="369" alt="&quot;TO PUT HER YOUNG ARMS AROUND LOIS AND HOLD HER CLOSE
+WITH ACHING PITY&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;TO PUT HER YOUNG ARMS AROUND LOIS AND HOLD HER CLOSE
+WITH ACHING PITY&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The active clash of steel always roused the blood in him; he felt
+actively stronger for combat. He was competently apportioning toward
+Lewiston's note the different sums coming in this month. There were
+large bills to be paid to the typometer's credit by several firms, one
+of them Coneways'. Coneways represented the largest counted-in asset for
+the entire year&mdash;it was the backbone of the establishment. If it went to
+Lewiston, what would be left for the business? That could come next.
+Lewiston was first. Leverich and Martin would exact every penny of their
+principal after these intervening six months of the year were over.
+Well, let them! Lewiston's note was what he had to think of now.</p>
+
+<p>All business undertakings, no matter how wild, how precarious, to the
+sense of the beholder, are started with confidence in their ultimate
+success; it is the one trite, universal reason for starting&mdash;that faith
+is the capital that all possess in common. Some of these doubtful
+ventures, while never really succeeding, do not really fail at once.
+They are always hard up, but they keep on, though gradually sinking
+lower all the time. Others seem to exist by the continuance of that
+first faith alone&mdash;a sheer optimism that keeps the courage alive and
+keen enough to seize hold of the slightest driftwood of opportunity,
+binding this flotsam into a raft that takes them triumphantly out on the
+high tide. For all the long drag, the anxiety, the physical strain, the
+harassment, failure in itself seemed as inherently impossible to Justin
+as that he should be stricken blind or lose the use of his limbs. He
+must think harder to find a way of accomplishment; that was all.</p>
+
+<p>His step had its own peculiar ring in it as he left Leverich's, but it
+lost somewhat of its alertness as he turned down the street that led to
+the factory, unaltered, since his first coming to it, save for the
+transformation of the neglected house he had noticed then, with its
+gruesome interior, which had been turned into a freshly painted shop
+long ago. The effect of association is inexorable. There was not a
+corner, not a building, along that too familiar way, that was not hung
+with some thought of care. There were moments of such strong repulsion
+that he felt as if he couldn't turn down that street again&mdash;moments
+lately when to enter the factory with its red-brick-arched yawning mouth
+of a doorway occasioned a physical nausea&mdash;a foolish, womanish state
+which irritated him.</p>
+
+<p>The mail brought him the usual miscellaneous assortment of orders and
+bills, and letters on minor points, and questions as to the typometer.
+The mail was rather apt to be encouraging in its suggestions of a large
+trade. Two letters this morning were full of enthusiastic encomium on
+the use of the machine. In spite<!-- Page 204 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> of an enormous and long-outstanding
+bill for office stationery, insistently clamorous for payment&mdash;one of
+those bills looked upon as trifles until they suddenly become
+staggering&mdash;there was, after the mail, a general feeling of wielding the
+destiny of a large part of the world, where the typometer was a power.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/illus0351.jpg" width="400" height="308" alt="&quot;&#39;YOU&#39;RE VERY GOOD TO BE SO SORRY FOR ME,&#39; SHE
+WHISPERED&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;&#39;YOU&#39;RE VERY GOOD TO BE SO SORRY FOR ME,&#39; SHE
+WHISPERED&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>A little woman whose husband, now dead, had been in his employ came in
+to get help in collecting his insurance; she was timid before Justin,
+deeply grateful for his kind and effective assistance. Two men came in,
+at different times, for advice and introductions to important people. A
+friend brought in a possible customer from the Sandwich Islands. There
+was all that aura of prosperity that has nothing to do with the payment
+of one's bills.</p>
+
+<p>Justin took both the friend and the customer out to lunch, his agreeable
+sense of hospitality only dimmed by the disagreeable fact of its taking
+every cent of the five dollars he had expected to last for the week. He
+was "strapped." The luncheon took longer, also, than he had counted on
+its doing. The morning, begun well, seemed to lead up only to sordid and
+anxious details&mdash;a sense of non-accomplishment, induced also by small
+requisitions from different people, requiring cash from a cash-drawer
+that was usually empty.</p>
+
+<p>It was a welcome relief to figure, with Harker's assistance, on the
+large sums coming in at the end of the month from Coneways. There were a
+hundred ways for them to go, but they were to go to Lewiston. Perhaps,
+after all, as Harker astutely suggested, Lewiston would be satisfied
+with a partial payment and extend the rest of the note. While they were
+still consulting, word was brought in that Mr. Lewiston was there.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lewiston was a young man, small-featured, black-haired,
+smooth-shaven, and with an air of nattiness and fashion, set at odds at
+present by a very pale and anxious face and eager, dilated black eyes.
+He cut short Justin's greeting with the words:</p>
+
+<p>"I've just come over to speak about that note, Alexander."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I was just wanting to speak to you about it myself," said Justin
+easily. "Have a cigar?"</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," said Lewiston mechanically, and as mechanically holding out
+his hand for the cigar, evidently forgetting it the next moment. "The
+fact is, I don't want to seem importunate, but if you could pay off that
+note fifteen days before date,&mdash;a week from to-day, that is,&mdash;we'd
+discount it to satisfy you, if you can collect now. I didn't want to
+bother you<!-- Page 205 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> about it, and I tried outside first, but nobody will take up
+the paper just now, except at a ruinous rate. If you could make it
+convenient, Alexander." Young Lewiston sat with his small, eager face
+bent forward over his knees, his lips twitching slightly. "You know,
+that money wasn't loaned on strictly business principles, Alexander, but
+for friendship; I got father to consent to it. And if you could let us
+have it now, it would save us a world of trouble. It's really not
+much&mdash;only ten thousand."</p>
+
+<p>Justin shook his head, his keen blue eyes fixed on the other. "I can't
+let you have it, Lewiston; I wish I could! But I'm waiting payments
+myself. Can't you pull out without it?"</p>
+
+<p>Lewiston drew in his breath. "Oh, yes, of course we'll have to; but it
+means&mdash; Well, I know you would if you could, Alexander; I told father
+so&mdash;father in a way holds me responsible. He was in London when I
+renewed the note the last time. There isn't anything to interfere with
+the payment when it's due?"</p>
+
+<p>"On my honor, no," said Justin. "You shall have it then without fail."</p>
+
+<p>"For if that should slip up&mdash;" continued young Lewiston, wrapped in
+somber contemplation of his own affairs alone; he threw his arms outward
+with a gesture suddenly tragic in its intensity, paused an instant, then
+wrung Justin's hand silently and departed.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you busy, Alexander? They said I could come in."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Girard!"</p>
+
+<p>Justin wheeled a chair around with an instantly brightened face. "Sit
+down. I'm mighty glad to see you." He looked smilingly at his visitor,
+whose presence, long-limbed, straight, clean, and clear-eyed, always
+elicited a peculiar admiration from other men. "I heard that you had a
+room at the Snows' now, while Billy is away, but I haven't laid eyes on
+you for a month."</p>
+
+<p>"I've been coming in on a later train every morning and going out again
+on a very much later one at night. I'm back in town on the paper for a
+while."</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you settle down to something worth while?" asked Justin, with
+the reserved disapproval of the business man for any mode of life but
+his own.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/illus0352.jpg" width="400" height="363" alt="&quot;MRS. SNOW WAS FUMBLING WITH A PAPER&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;MRS. SNOW WAS FUMBLING WITH A PAPER&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>"Settle down to this kind of thing?" said<!-- Page 206 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> Girard thoughtfully. "Well, I
+did think of it last year, when I undertook those commissions for you.
+But what's the use&mdash;yet awhile, at any rate? You see, I can always make
+enough money for what I want and to spare, and there's nobody else to
+care. I like my liberty! The love of trade doesn't take hold of me,
+somehow&mdash;and you have to have such a tremendous amount of capital to
+keep your place. By the way, have you sold the island yet?" The island
+was a small one up near Nova Scotia, taken once for a debt.</p>
+
+<p>"Not yet."</p>
+
+<p>Girard gave him a quick glance. "How are things going with you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Fine," said Justin in a conventionally prosperous tone, with a sudden
+sight of a bottomless pit yawning below him. "I've a few things on my
+mind lately&mdash;but they're all right now. By the way, how do you like it
+at the Snows'?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, all right." Girard's gray eyes smiled in an irrepressible smile. "I
+score high at present. They all approve of me, and I am told that I am
+the only man who has never run into the Boston fern or got tangled in
+the Wandering Jew. Miss Bertha and I have long talks together&mdash;she's
+great. As for Mrs. Snow&mdash;she heard Sutton speak of her the other night
+to Ada as 'the old lady,' I assure you that since&mdash;" He shook his head,
+and both men laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"Come to see us. Miss Linden is back with us again," said Justin
+hospitably.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," said Girard, an indefinable stiffening change instantly
+coming over him. "By the way, I mustn't forget what I came for, before I
+hurry off."</p>
+
+<p>He took some bills out of his long, flat leather wallet as he rose. "Do
+you remember lending that sixty dollars to my friend Keston last year?
+He turned up yesterday, and asked me to see that you got this."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd forgotten all about it," averred Justin. He had not realized until
+he took the bills that he had been keeping up all day by main strength,
+with that caved-in sensation of there being nothing back of it&mdash;nothing
+back of it. There are times when the touch of money is as the elixir of
+life. Justin, holding on by the skin of his teeth for ten thousand
+dollars, and needing imperatively at least as much more, felt that with
+this paltry sixty dollars it was suddenly possible to draw a free
+breath, felt a sheer lightness of spirit that showed how terrible was
+the persistent weight under which he was living. The very feeling of
+those separate bills in his pocket made him calmly sanguine.</p>
+
+<p>He got ready to go home a little earlier than usual, saying lightly to
+Harker, who had come in for his signature to some papers:</p>
+
+<p>"Those payments will begin to straggle in next week. Coneways' isn't due
+until the 31st&mdash;the very last minute! But he's always prompt, thank
+Heaven&mdash;what are you doing?"</p>
+
+<p>"Knocking on wood," said Harker, with a grim smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, knock on wood all you want to," returned Justin.</p>
+
+<p>He even thought of Lois on his way, and stopped to buy her some flowers.
+It was the first time he had thought of her unconsciously for a week.
+While he was waiting for a car to pass before he crossed the street, his
+eye caught the headline on a paper a newsboy was holding out to him:</p>
+
+<h4>GREAT CRASH</h4>
+
+<h4>CONEWAYS &amp; CO. FAIL</h4>
+
+<h4>IN BOSTON</h4>
+
+<h3>XX</h3>
+
+<p>"I don't think Justin looks very well," said Dosia that afternoon. She
+was sitting on the edge of the bed, with her arms spread out
+half-protectingly over Lois. The latter was only resting; she had been
+up and around the house now for three or four weeks, and, although she
+looked unusually fragile, seemed well, if not very strong.</p>
+
+<p>The baby, wrapped in a blue embroidered blanket, with only a round
+forehead and a small pink nose visible, was of that satisfactory variety
+entirely given to sleep. Zaidee and even Redge, adoring little sister
+and brother, had been allowed to hold him in their arms, so securely
+unstirring was their little burden. Lois, who had passionately rebelled
+against the prospect of additional motherhood, exhibited a not unusual
+phase of it now in as passionately adoring this second boy. He seemed
+peculiarly, intensely her own, not only a baby, but a spiritual
+possession that communicated a new strength to her. Lois was changed.
+She had always been beautiful, as a matter of fact, but there was
+something withheld, mysterious, in her expression, as if she were taking
+counsel of some half-slumberous force within, as of one listening at a
+shell for the murmur of the ocean.</p>
+
+<p>Not only Lois, but everything else, seemed changed to Dosia, at the same
+time being also flatly, unchangeably natural. She had longed&mdash;oh, how
+she had longed!&mdash;to be back here. Even while loving and working in her
+so-called home, she had felt that this was her real home, although here
+her cruelest blows had fallen on her; even while bleeding with the
+wrench of<!-- Page 207 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> parting from her own flesh and blood, she had felt that this
+was the real home, for here she had really lived; and it was the home of
+the nicer, more delicate instincts. After the crude housekeeping, the
+lack of comforts that made the simplest nursing a grinding struggle with
+circumstance, it was a blessed relief to get back to a sphere where
+minor details were all in order as a matter of course. The Alexanders,
+with their three children, kept only one maid now; but even that
+restriction did not prevent the unlimited flow of hot and cold water!</p>
+
+<p>Yet she had also dreaded this returning,&mdash;how she had dreaded it!&mdash;with
+that old sickening shame which came over her inevitably as she thought
+of certain people and places and days. The mere thought of seeing Mrs.
+Leverich or George Sutton and that chorus of onlookers was like passing
+through fire. One braces one's self to withstand the pain of scenes of
+joy or sorrow revisited, to find that, after all, when the moment comes,
+there is little of that dreaded pain. It has been lived through and the
+climax passed in that previsioning which imagination made more intense,
+more harrowingly real, than the reality.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Leverich stopped her carriage one day to greet Dosia, and to ask
+her, with a tentative semblance of her old effusion, to come and make
+her a visit&mdash;an effusion which immediately died down into complete
+non-interest, on Dosia's polite refusal; and the incident was not
+especially heart-racking at the time, though afterward it set her
+unaccountably trembling. Mrs. Leverich had in the carriage with her a
+small, thin, long-nosed man with a pale-reddish mustache and hair, who,
+gossip said, passed most of his time at the Leverichs'&mdash;he was seen out
+driving alone with Myra nearly every day. He was "an old friend from
+home." It had been gossip at first, but it was growing to be scandal
+now, with audible wonder as to how much Mr. Leverich knew about it.</p>
+
+<p>Her avoidance of George Sutton was as nothing to his desire of avoiding
+her. He dived with surreptitious haste down side streets when he saw her
+coming, or disappeared within shop doorways. Once, when Dosia confronted
+him inadvertently on the platform of a car, and he had perforce to take
+off his hat and murmur, "Good morning," he turned pale and was evidently
+scared to death. After this he only appeared in the village street
+guarded on either side by a female Snow&mdash;usually Ada and her mother,
+though occasionally Bertha served as escort instead of the latter. The
+elder Snows, in spite of this apparent security, were in a state of
+constant nervous tension over Mr. Sutton's attention to Ada. He had not
+"spoken" yet, but it had begun to be felt severely of late that he
+ought to speak. Whenever Ada came into the house, her face was eagerly
+scanned by both mother and sister to see from its look if it bore any
+trace of the fateful words having been uttered. Every one knew, though
+how no one could tell, that that bold thing, Dosia Linden, had tried to
+get him once, and failed.</p>
+
+<p>The thing that had unaccountably stirred her most since her arrival was
+an unexpected meeting with Bailey Girard. Dosia, with Zaidee and Redge
+held by either hand and pressing close to her as they walked merrily
+along, suddenly came upon a gray-clad figure emerging from the
+post-office. He seemed to make an instinctive movement as if to draw
+back, that sent the swift color to her cheeks and then turned them
+white. Were all the men in the place trying to avoid her? Dosia thought,
+with bitter humor; but, if it were so, he instantly recovered himself,
+and came forward, hat in hand, with a quick access of bright courtesy, a
+punctilious warmth of manner. He walked along with her a few paces as he
+talked, lifting Zaidee over a flooded crossing, before going once more
+on his way. He was nothing to her, the stranger who had killed her
+ideal; yet all day it was as if his image were photographed in the
+colors of life upon the retina of her eye. She could not push it away,
+try as she might.</p>
+
+<p>Of Lawson Dosia had heard only such vague rumors as had sifted through
+the letters written by Lois. He had been reported as going on in his old
+way in the mining-camps, drifting from one to another. She heard nothing
+more now. He was the only one who had really loved her up here, except
+Lois, who loved her now. Dosia had slipped into her new position of
+sister and helper as if she had always filled it. She was not an
+outsider any more; she <i>belonged</i>.</p>
+
+<p>As she sat bending over Lois now, her attitude was instinct with
+something high-mindedly lovely. The Dosia who had only wanted to be
+loved now felt&mdash;after a year of trial and conflict with death&mdash;that she
+only wanted, and with the same youthful intensity, to be very good, even
+though it seemed sometimes to that same youthfulness a strange and
+tragic thing that it should be all she wanted. The mysterious,
+fathomless depression of youth, as of something akin to unknown primal
+depths of loneliness, sometimes laid its chill hand on her heart; but
+when Dosia "said her prayers," she got, child-fashion, very near to a
+Some One who brought her an intimate tender comfort of resurrection and
+of life.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think Justin seems well," she repeated, Lois, looking up at her
+with calmly expressionless<!-- Page 208 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> eyes from her pillow, having taken no notice
+of the remark. "He has changed, I think, even in the ten days since I
+came."</p>
+
+<p>"He has something on his mind," assented Lois, with a note of languor in
+her voice. "I suppose it's the business. I made up my mind to ask him
+about it to-night. He has been out every evening lately, and I hardly
+see him at all before he goes off in the morning, now that I don't get
+down to breakfast."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, he gave me a message for you this morning," cried Dosia, with
+compunction at having so far forgotten it. "He said that Mr. Larue had
+come in to inquire about you yesterday. He is going to send you a basket
+of strawberries and roses from his place at Collingswood to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>"Eugene Larue!" Lois' lips relaxed into a pleased curve; a slight color
+touched her cheek. "That was very nice of him. He knew I'd like to look
+forward to getting them. Strawberries and roses!"</p>
+
+<p>"I met Mr. Girard in the street to-day; he asked after you," continued
+Dosia, with the feeling that if she spoke of him she might get that
+tiresome, insistent image of him from before her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Bailey Girard? Yes; he has a room at the Snows'. Billy's out West."</p>
+
+<p>"So I've heard," said Dosia.</p>
+
+<p>It was one of the strange and melancholy ironies of life that the man of
+all others whom she had desired to meet should be thrown daily in her
+pathway now, after that desire was gone!</p>
+
+<p>"You'd better not talk any more now, Lois; you look tired. It's time for
+you to take a little rest. I'll see to the children. I hope baby will
+stay asleep. Let me pull this coverlet over you. Shall I pull down the
+shades?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I'd rather have the light. Please hand me that book over there on
+the stand," said Lois, holding out her hand for the big, old-fashioned
+brown volume that Dosia brought to her.</p>
+
+<p>"You oughtn't to read; you ought to go to sleep," said Dosia, with
+tender severity.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not going to read," returned Lois pacifically. Her hand closed over
+the book, she smiled, and Dosia closed the door. Lois turned to the
+sleeping child with a peculiar delight in being quite alone with
+him&mdash;alone with him, to think.</p>
+
+<p>The book was a novel of some forty years ago, called, as the title-page
+proclaimed, "A Woman's Kingdom," and written by Dinah Maria Mulock. A
+neighbor had brought it in to Lois during the first month of her
+convalescence. In all the time she had had it, she had never read any
+further than that title-page.</p>
+
+<p>There is often more in the birth of a child than the coming of another
+son or daughter into the world. Between those forces of life and death a
+woman may also get her chance to be born anew, made over again,
+spiritually as well as physically. In those long, restful hours
+afterward, when suspense is over and pain is over, and there is a
+freedom from household cares, and one is looked upon with renewed
+tenderness, the thoughts may flow over long, long ways. To face danger
+bravely in itself gives strength for the clearer vision; and a
+peculiarly loved child unlocks with its tiny hands springs unknown
+before.</p>
+
+<p>Lois, though she had been a mother twice before, had never felt toward
+either of the other children at all as she did now toward this little
+boy. She could not bear to be parted from him. Somehow that terrible
+corrosive selfishness had been blessedly taken away from her&mdash;for a
+little while only? She only felt at first that she must not think of
+those horrible depths, for fear of slipping back into the pit again;
+even to think of the slimy powers of darkness gave them a fresh hold on
+one. She put off her return to that soul-embracing egotism. It was sweet
+to lie there and meet the tender gentleness of her husband's gaze when
+he came home, and to talk to him about the baby as a child might talk
+about a new toy, though she could not but begin to perceive that she was
+as far, far out of his real life as if she had indeed been a child.</p>
+
+<p>One evening he came in to sit by her,&mdash;her convalescence had been a long
+and dragging one,&mdash;and she had paused in the midst of telling him
+something to await an answer. None came. She spoke again, and raised
+herself to look. Then she saw that even within that brief space he had
+fallen asleep, as a man may who is thoroughly exhausted. Thoroughly
+exhausted! Everything proclaimed it&mdash;his attitude, grimly grotesque in
+the dim light, one leg stretched out half in front of the other, as he
+had dropped into the seat, his relaxed arms hanging down, his head
+resting sidewise against the back of the chair, with the face sharply
+upturned. The shadows lay in the hollows under his cheek-bones and in
+those lines that marked his temples. Divested of color and the
+transforming play of expression, he looked strangely old, terribly
+lifeless. He slept without moving,&mdash;almost, it seemed, without
+breathing,&mdash;while Lois, with a new dread, watched him with frightened,
+dilated, fascinated eyes. How had he grown like this? What unnoticed
+change had been at work? She called him again, but he did not hear; she
+stretched out her arm, but he was just beyond reach. Suddenly it seemed
+to her that he was dead, and that she could<!-- Page 209 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> never reach him again; an
+icy hand seemed to have been laid on her heart. What if never, never,
+never&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Just then he opened his eyes and sat up, saying naturally, "Did you
+speak?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you frightened me so! Don't go to sleep like that again," said
+Lois, with a shaking voice. "Come here."</p>
+
+<p>He came and knelt down by her, and she pressed his cheek close to hers
+with a rush of painful emotion. "Why, you mustn't get worked up over a
+little thing like that," he objected lightly, going out of the room
+afterward with a reassuring smile at her, while she gazed after him with
+strangely awakened eyes. For the first time in months, she thought of
+him without any thought of benefit to herself.</p>
+
+<p>The next day the neighbor sent her over the book; the title arrested her
+attention oddly&mdash;"The Woman's Kingdom." Another phrase correlated with
+it in her memory&mdash;"Queen of the Home." That was supposed to be woman's
+domain, where she was the sovereign power; there she was helper,
+sustainer, director, the dear dispenser of favors. The woman's kingdom,
+queen of the home. Gradually the words led her down long lanes of
+retrospect, led by the rose-leaf touch of the baby's fingers; <i>they</i>
+kept her strong. What kingdom had she ever made her own? She, poor,
+bedraggled, complaining suppliant, a beggar where she should have been a
+queen! Home and the heart of her husband&mdash;there lay her woman's kingdom,
+her realm, her God-given province. She had had the ordering of it, none
+other: she had married a good man. Glad or sorry, that kingdom was as
+her rule made it; she must be judged by her government&mdash;as she was queen
+enough to hold it. She fell asleep that day thinking of the words.</p>
+
+<p>Day by day, other thoughts came to her more or less disconnectedly,&mdash;set
+in motion by those magic words,&mdash;when she lay at rest in the afternoons,
+with the book in her fingers and the dear little baby form close beside
+her. Lois was one of those women of intense feeling who can never
+perceive from imagination, but only from experience&mdash;who cannot even
+adequately sympathize with sorrows and conditions which they have not
+personally experienced. No advice touches them, for the words that
+embody it are in a language not yet understood. The mistakes of the past
+seem to have been necessary, when they look back. Given the same
+circumstances, they could not have acted differently; but they seldom
+look back&mdash;the present, that is always climbing on into the future,
+occupies them exclusively.</p>
+
+<p>Lois with "The Woman's Kingdom" in her hand, felt that some source of
+power and happiness which she had not realized had slipped from her
+grasp, yet might still be hers. So many disconnected, half-childish
+thoughts came with the words&mdash;historic names of women whom men had loved
+devotedly, who had kept them as their friends and lovers even when they
+themselves had grown old, women who had never lost their charm. There
+were those women of the French salons, who could interest even other
+generations; queens indeed! She couldn't really interest <i>one</i> man! She
+thought over the married couples of her acquaintance, in search of those
+who should reveal some secret, some guiding light. One woman across the
+street had no other object in life than purveying to the household
+comfort of her husband, and seemed, good soul, to expect nothing from
+him in return; if William liked his fish, she was repaid. A couple
+farther down appeared to be held together by the fact of marriage,
+nothing more; they were bored to death by each other's society. Another
+couple were happily absorbed in their children, to whom they were both
+sacrificially subordinate. With none of these conditions could Lois be
+satisfied. Then, there were the women who always spoke as if a man were
+an animal and a woman were not a woman, but a spirit; but Lois was very
+much a woman! She settled at last, after penetrative thought, on one
+husband and wife, the latter a plain little person no longer young.
+Every man liked to go to her charming, comfortable house; every man
+admired her; and that her husband, a very handsome man himself, admired
+her most of all was unobtrusively evident. Every look, every gesture,
+betrayed the charming, vivifying unity between those two. How was it
+accomplished?</p>
+
+<p>How could one interest a man like that? There was Eugene Larue&mdash;she
+could interest him! The thought of him always gave her a sense of
+conscious power; he paid her homage. She did not know what his relations
+were with other women, but of his with her she was sure: she felt her
+woman's kingdom. If you could talk to the soul of a man like that as if
+he had the soul of an angel, and learn from him what you wanted to
+know&mdash;get his guidance&mdash; But Lois was before all things inviolably a
+wife, with the instinctive dignity of one. The sympathy between her and
+Eugene Larue was so deep that she feared sometimes that in some brief
+moment she might reveal in words, to be forever regretted afterward,
+conditions which he knew without her telling. To be loved as Eugene
+Larue would love a woman! But his wife had not cared to be loved that
+way. She took deep, thoughtful counsel of her heart. If they two, she
+and Eugene, had met while both were free?<!-- Page 210 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> The answer was what she had
+known it would be, else she had not dared to make the test. The man who
+was her husband was the only man who could ever have been her husband.
+Justin!</p>
+
+<p>With "The Woman's Kingdom" in her hand now, her lips touching the cheek
+of the soft little darling thing beside her, she felt that some new
+knowledge had been gradually revealed to her, of which she was now
+really aware only for the first time. Justin was not looking well&mdash;that
+was what Dosia had said. Oh, he was <i>not</i> looking well! But she would
+make him forget his cares, his anxieties, with this new-found power of
+hers; she would bewitch him, take him off his feet, so that he would be
+able to think of nothing, of no one, but her&mdash;he had not always thought
+of her. <i>She would not pity herself.</i> She would learn to laugh, even if
+it took heroic effort; men liked you to laugh. She had always taken
+everything too seriously. The vision of his sleeping, <i>dead</i> face of a
+month ago frightened her for a moment, painfully; but he had seemed
+better since, though, as Dosia said, he didn't look well. Oh, when he
+came home to-night&mdash;&mdash;!</p>
+
+<p>She dressed herself with a new care, putting on a soft yellowish gown
+with a yoke of creamy lace, unworn for months. The color was more
+brilliant than ever in her cheeks, her lips redder, her eyes more deeply
+blue. The children exclaimed over their "pretty mama." She looked
+younger, more beautiful, than Dosia had ever seen her. She could not
+help saying:</p>
+
+<p>"How lovely you are, Lois! And you're all dressed up, too; do you expect
+any one?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only Justin," said Lois.</p>
+
+<p>"Only Justin"! The words brought an exquisite joy with them&mdash;only
+Justin, the one man in all the world for her. There was but a half-hour
+now until dinner-time. It had passed, and he had not come; but he was
+often late&mdash; Still he did not come; that happened too, sometimes. The
+two women sat down to dinner alone, at last. The baby woke up afterward,
+an unusual thing, and wailed, and would not stop. Lois, divested of her
+rich apparel and once more swathed in a loose, shabby gown, rocked and
+soothed the infant interminably, while Dosia, her efforts to help
+unavailing, crouched over a book down-stairs, trying to read. After an
+interval of quiet she went up-stairs, to find Lois at last lying down.</p>
+
+<p>"It's eleven o'clock, Lois; I think I'll go to bed. Shall I leave the
+gas burning down-stairs?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, please do; he can't get anything now but the last train out."</p>
+
+<p>"And you don't want me to stay here with you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;oh, no."</p>
+
+<p>As once before, Lois waited for that train&mdash;yet how differently! If that
+injured feeling rose, for an instant, at his not having sent her word,
+she crushed it back as one would crush the head of a viper that showed
+itself between the crevices of the hearthstone. She would not pity
+herself&mdash;she would not pity herself! She knew now that madness lay that
+way.</p>
+
+<p>The night was clear and warm, the stars were shining, as she got up and
+sat by the window, looking out from behind the curtain, her beautiful
+braided hair over one shoulder. The last train came in; the people from
+it, in twos and threes, straggled down the street, but not Justin. He
+must have missed that last train out. Of course he must have missed it!</p>
+
+<p>We are apt to fancy causeless disaster to those we love; the amount of
+"worry" more or less willingly indulged in by uncontrolled minds seems
+at times enough to swamp the understanding: yet there is a foreboding,
+unsought, unwelcomed, combated, which, once felt, can never be
+counterfeited; it carries with it some chill, unfathomed quality of
+truth.</p>
+
+<p>Lois knew now that she had had this foreboding all day.</p>
+
+<h3>XXI</h3>
+
+<p>"And you haven't heard <i>anything</i> of him yet?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not yet, Mrs. Alexander. I'm sorry&mdash;oh, so sorry&mdash;to have nothing more
+to tell you. But I'm sure we'll hear something before morning."</p>
+
+<p>Bailey Girard spoke with confidence, his eyes bent controllingly on
+Lois, who trembled as she stood in the little hallway, looking up at
+him, with Dosia behind her. This was the third night since that one when
+Justin had failed to appear, and there had been no word from him in the
+interim. Owing to that curious way that women have of waiting for events
+to happen that will end suspense, rather than seeking to end it by any
+unaccustomed action of their own, no inquiry had been made at the
+Typometer Company until late in the afternoon of the next day, which had
+been passed in the hourly expectation of hearing from Justin or seeing
+him walk in. However, nobody at the company knew anything of Justin's
+movements, except that he had left the office rather early the afternoon
+before, and had been seen to take a car going up-town. It was presumable
+that he had been called suddenly out of town, and had sent some word to
+Mrs. Alexander that had miscarried.</p>
+
+<p>That evening, however, Lois sent for Leverich, who was evidently
+bothered; though<!-- Page 211 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> bluffly and rather irritatingly making light of her
+fears, he seemed to be both a little reluctant and a little
+contemptuous.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear Mrs. Alexander, you can't expect a fellow to be always tied to
+his wife's apron-strings! He doesn't tell you everything. We like to
+have a free foot once in a while. Why, my wife's glad when I get off for
+a day or two&mdash;coaxes me to go away herself! And as for anything
+happening to Alexander&mdash;well, an able-bodied man can look out for
+himself every time; there's nothing in the world to be anxious about.
+He's meant to wire to you and forgotten to do it, that's all. I did that
+myself last year, when I was called away suddenly; but Myra didn't turn
+a hair. She knew I was all right. And if I were you, Mrs.
+Alexander,&mdash;this is just a tip,&mdash;I wouldn't go around telling <i>every</i>
+one that he's gone off and you don't know where he is. It's the kind of
+thing folks get talking about in all kinds of ways; his affairs aren't
+in any too good shape, as he may have told you."</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't the business all right?" queried Lois, with a puzzled fear.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, of course&mdash;all right; but&mdash;I wouldn't go around wondering
+about his being away; he's got his own reasons. You haven't a telephone,
+have you? I'll send around word to have one put in to-day. I'll tell you
+what: I'll ask Bailey Girard to come around and see you on the
+quiet&mdash;he's got lots of wires he can pull. You won't need me any more."</p>
+
+<p>Leverich's meeting with Dosia had been characterized by a sort of
+brusque uninterest. He seemed to her indefinably lowered and coarsened
+in some way; his cheeks sagged; in his eyes was an unpleasant admission
+that he must bluster to avoid the detection of some weakness. And Dosia
+had lived in his house, eaten at his table, received benefits from him,
+caressed him prettily! He had been really kind to her. She ought not to
+let that fact be defaced. But everything connected with that time seemed
+now to lower her in retrospect, to fill her with a sort of horror. All
+his loud rebuttal of anxiety now could not cover an undercurrent of
+uneasiness that made the anxiety of the two women tenfold greater when
+he was gone.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Girard had come twice the next morning. Dosia, as well as Lois, had
+seen him both times. He had greeted her with matter-of-fact courtesy,
+and appealed to her with earnest painstaking, whenever necessary, for
+details or confirmation, in their mutual office of helpers to Mrs.
+Alexander; but the retrieving warmth and intimacy of his manner the day
+he had avoided her in the street was lacking. There was certainly
+nothing in Dosia's quietly impersonal attitude to call it forth. Her
+face no longer swiftly mirrored each fleeting emotion at all times, for
+any one to see. Poor Dosia had learned in a bitter school her woman's
+lesson of concealment.</p>
+
+<p>But, if Girard were only sensibly consulting with her, toward Lois his
+sympathy was instinct with strength and helpfulness. He seemed to have
+affiliations with reporters, with telegraph operators, with a hundred
+lower runways of life unknown to other people. He gave the tortured wife
+the feeling so dear, so sustaining to one in sorrow, of his being
+entirely one with her in its absorption&mdash;of there being no other
+interest, no other issue in life, but this one of Justin's return. When
+Girard came, bright and alert and confident, all fears seemed to be set
+at rest; during the few minutes that he stayed all difficulties were
+swept away, everything was on the right train, word would arrive from
+Justin at once; and when he left, all was black and terrible again.</p>
+
+<p>The children had clung to Dosia in the hours of these strange days when
+mama never seemed to hear their questions. Dosia read to them, made
+merry for them, and saw to her household, which was dependent on the
+services of a new and untrained maid, going back in the interval to put
+her young arms around Lois and hold her close with aching pity.</p>
+
+<p>The suspense of these days had changed Lois terribly. Her cheeks were
+hollow, her mouth was drawn, her eyes looked twice their natural size,
+with the black circles below them. Only the knowledge that her baby's
+welfare&mdash;perhaps his life&mdash;depended on her, kept her from giving way
+entirely. Redge, always a complicating child, had an attack of croup,
+which necessitated a visit from the doctor and further anxiety. Toward
+afternoon of this third day a man came to put in the telephone, which
+set them in touch with the unseen world. Girard's voice over it later
+had been mistakenly understood to promise an immediate ending of the
+mystery.</p>
+
+<p>Everything was excitement: delicacies were bought, in case Justin might
+like them; Redge and Zaidee were hurriedly dressed in their best "to see
+dear papa," and, even though they had to go to bed without the desired
+result, Redge in a fresh spasm of coughing, it was with the repeated
+promise that the father should come up-stairs to kiss them as soon as he
+got in.</p>
+
+<p>Expectation had been unwarrantedly raised so high in the suddenly
+sanguine heart of Lois that now, to-night, at Girard's word that nothing
+more had been heard, as she was still looking up at him everything
+turned black before her. She found herself half lying on the little
+spindle-legged sofa, without knowing how she<!-- Page 212 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> got there, her head
+pillowed on a green silken cushion, with Dosia fanning her, while Girard
+leaned against the little mirrored mantelpiece with set face and
+contracted brows. Presently Lois pushed away the fan, made a motion as
+if to rise, only to relapse again on the cushion, looked up at Girard,
+and tried to smile with piteous, brimming eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, don't!" he said, with a quick gesture. His voice had an odd sound,
+as if drawing breath hurt him, yet with it mingled also a compassionate
+tenderness so great that it seemed to inform not only his face but his
+whole attitude as he bent over her.</p>
+
+<p>"You're very good to be so sorry for me," she whispered.</p>
+
+<p>He made a swift gesture of protest. "There's one thing I <i>can't</i>
+stand&mdash;to see a woman suffer."</p>
+
+<p>She waited a moment, as if to take in his words, and then motioned him
+to the seat beside her. When she spoke again, it was slowly, as if she
+were trying to concentrate her mind:</p>
+
+<p>"You have known sorrow?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me."</p>
+
+<p>He saw that she wished to forget her own trouble for a moment in that of
+another, yet the effort to obey evidently cost him much. They had both
+spoken as if they two were alone in the room. Dosia, who had withdrawn
+to the ottoman some paces away, out of the radius of the lamp, sat there
+in her white cotton frock, leaning a little forward, her hands clasped
+loosely in her lap, her face upraised and her eyes looking somewhere
+beyond. So still was she, so gentle, so fair, that she might have been a
+spirit outside the stormy circle in which these two communed. (In such
+moments as these she prayed for Lawson.)</p>
+
+<p>"I"&mdash;it was Girard who spoke at last&mdash;"my mother&mdash;Cater said once that
+he'd told you something about me."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I remember."</p>
+
+<p>"I was so little when we drifted off. I didn't know how to help, how to
+save anything. Yet it has always seemed to me since that I ought to have
+known&mdash;I ought to have known!" His hands clenched; his voice had
+subsided to a groan.</p>
+
+<p>"You were her comfort when you least thought it," said Lois.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps. I've always hoped so, in my saner moments. We stumbled along
+from day to day, and slept out at night, always trying to keep away from
+people, when&mdash;she thought we were going home, and that they would
+prevent me." He stopped for a moment, and then went on, driven by that
+Ancient Mariner spirit which makes people, once they have touched on a
+forbidden subject, probe it to its haunting depths. "Did Cater tell you
+how she died? She died in a barn. My <i>mother</i>! She used to hold me in
+her arms at night, and make me rest my head against her bosom when I was
+tired; and I didn't even have a pillow for her when she was dying! It's
+one of those things you can never make up for&mdash;that you can never
+change, no matter how you live, no matter what you do. It comes back to
+you when you least expect it."</p>
+
+<p>Both were silent for a while before Lois murmured: "But the pain ended
+in happiness and peace for her. It would hurt her more than anything to
+know that you grieved."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I believe that," he acquiesced simply. "I'm glad you said it now.
+I couldn't rest until I got money enough to take her out of her pauper
+grave and lay her by the side of her own people at home."</p>
+
+<p>"And you have had a pretty hard time."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that's nothing!" He squared his shoulders with unconscious rebuttal
+of sympathy. "When I was a kid, perhaps&mdash;but I get a lot of pleasure out
+of life."</p>
+
+<p>"But you must be lonely without any one belonging to you," said Lois,
+trying to grope her way into the labyrinth. "Wouldn't you be happier if
+you were married?"</p>
+
+<p>He laughed involuntarily and shook his head, with a slight flush that
+seemed to come from the embarrassment of some secret thought. The
+action, and the change of expression, made him singularly charming.
+"Possibly; but the chance of that is small. Women&mdash;that is, unmarried
+women&mdash;don't care for my society."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, oh!" protested Lois, with quick knowledge, as she looked at him, of
+how much the reverse the truth must be. "But if you found the right
+woman you might make her care for you."</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head, with a sudden gleam in his gray eyes. "No; there
+you're wrong. I'd never make any woman care for me, because I'd never
+want to. If she couldn't care for me without my <i>making</i> her&mdash;! I'd have
+to know, when I first looked at her, that she was <i>mine</i>. And if she
+were not, if she did not care for me herself, I'd never want to make
+her&mdash;never!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, oh!" protested Lois again, with interested amusement, shattered the
+next instant as a fragile glass may be shattered by the blow of a
+hammer.</p>
+
+<p>The telephone-bell had rung, and Girard ran to it, closing the
+intervening door behind him. The curtain of anxiety, lifted for
+breathing-space for a moment, hung over them again somberly, like a
+pall. Where was Justin?<!-- Page 213 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The two women clinging together hung breathlessly on Girard's movements;
+his low, murmuring voice told nothing. When he returned to where they
+stood, his face was impassive.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing new; I'm just going to town for a couple of hours, that's all."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, must you leave us?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm coming back, if you'll let me." He bent over Lois with that earnest
+look which seemed somehow to insure protection. "I want you to let me
+stay down-stairs here all night, if you will. I'm going to make
+arrangements to get a special message through, no matter what time it
+comes, and I'll sit here in the parlor and wait for it, so that you two
+ladies can sleep."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'd be so glad to have you here! Redge has that croupy cough again.
+But you can't sit up," said Lois.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? It's luxury to stay awake in a comfortable chair with a lot of
+books around. I'll be back in a couple of hours without fail."</p>
+
+<p>A couple of hours! If he had said a couple of years, the words could
+have brought, it seemed, no deeper sense of desolation. Hardly had he
+gone, however, when the door-bell rang, and word was brought to Lois,
+who with Dosia had gone up-stairs, that it was Mr. Harker from the
+typometer office. The visitor, a tall, colorless, darkly sack-coated
+man, with a jaded necktie, had entered the little drawing-room with a
+decorously self-effacing step, and sat now on the edge of his chair, his
+body bent forward and his hat still held in one hand, with an effect of
+being entirely isolated from social relations and existing here solely
+at the behest of business. He rose as Lois came into the room, and
+handed her a small packet, in response to her greeting, before reseating
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you very much," said Lois. "This is the money, I suppose. I'm
+sorry you went to the trouble of bringing it out yourself. I thought you
+might send me out a check."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Harker shook his head with a grim semblance of a smile. "That's the
+trouble, Mrs. Alexander. We can't send any checks. Mr. Alexander is the
+one who does that. Everything is in Mr. Alexander's name. I went to Mr.
+Leverich to-day to see how we were going to straighten out things; but
+he doesn't seem inclined to take hold at all, though he could help us
+out easily enough if he wanted to. I&mdash;there's no use keeping it back,
+Mrs. Alexander. This is a pretty bad time for Mr. Alexander to stay
+away. He ought to be home."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes," said Lois.</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly. His absence places us all in a very strange, very unpleasant
+position." Mr. Harker spoke with a sort of somber monotony, with his
+gaze on the ground. "The business requires the most particular
+management at the moment&mdash;the most particular. I&mdash;" He raised his eyes
+with such tragic earnestness that Lois realized for the first time that
+this manner of his might not be his usual manner, but was called forth
+by the stress of anxiety. For the first time also, the force of the
+daily tie of business companionship was borne in upon her. She looked at
+Mr. Harker. This man spent more waking hours with Justin than she
+did&mdash;knew him, perhaps, in a sense, better.</p>
+
+<p>He went on now, with a tremor in his voice: "Mrs. Alexander, your
+husband and I have worked together for a year and a half now, with never
+a word between us. I'm ready to swear by him any moment, if I've got him
+to swear by. I'll back him up in anything, no matter what, if it's his
+say-so. We've pulled through a good many tight places. But I can't do it
+alone; it's madness to try. If he doesn't show up, I'd better close the
+place down at once."</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you say this to me?" asked Lois, shrinking a little.</p>
+
+<p>"Why? Because, Mrs. Alexander, this is no time to mince words. If you
+know where your husband is, for God's sake, get word to him to come
+back&mdash;every minute is precious. He may be ill,&mdash;Heaven knows he had
+enough to make him so; my wife knows the strain I've been through; she
+says she wonders I'm alive,&mdash;but he can't look after his health now. If
+he's on top of ground, he's got to <i>come</i>. I've put every cent I own
+into this business. I haven't drawn my whole salary, even, for months. I
+don't know what reasons he has for staying away, but his nerve mustn't
+give out now."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Harker!" cried Lois. She turned blankly to Dosia, who had come
+forward. "What does he mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"She doesn't know where her husband is," said the girl convincingly. Her
+eyes and Mr. Harker's met. The somber eagerness faded out of his; he
+sighed and rose.</p>
+
+<p>"Anything I can do for you, Mrs. Alexander? I think I'll hurry to catch
+the next train; I haven't been home to my dinner yet."</p>
+
+<p>"Won't you have something here before you go?" asked Lois. "It's so
+late."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that's nothing. I'm used to it," returned Mr. Harker, with a pale
+smile and the passive, self-effacing business manner as he departed,
+while Lois went up-stairs once more. The baby cried, and she soothed
+him, holding the warm little form close, closer to her&mdash;some thing
+tangible before she put him down again<!-- Page 214 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> to step back into this strange
+void where Justin was not.</p>
+
+<p>For the first time, in this meeting with Mr. Harker, Lois realized the
+existence of a world beyond her ken&mdash;a world that had been Justin's. New
+as the visitor's words had been, they seemed to open to her a vision of
+herculean struggle: the way this man had looked&mdash;<i>his</i> wife had
+"wondered that he was still alive." And Justin&mdash;where was he now? <i>She</i>
+had not noticed, she had not wondered&mdash;until lately.</p>
+
+<p>Slight as seemed her recognition, her sympathy, her help, it was the one
+thing now that kept her reason firm. She knew that she had not been all
+unfaithful; sometimes he had been rested, sometimes cheered, when she
+was near. She had suffered, too; <i>she</i> had longed for <i>his</i> help and
+sympathy. No, she would not think of that; she would not. When two are
+separated, one must love enough to bridge the gulf&mdash;what matter which
+one? It seemed now as if there were so much that she might have given,
+if all this torrent of love that nearly broke her heart might have been
+poured out and poured out at his feet&mdash;lavished on him, without regard
+to need or fitness or expense, as Mary lavished her precious box of
+spikenard on One she loved. Now that he was gone, there could be nothing
+too hard to have done for him, no words too sweet for her to have said
+to him.</p>
+
+<p>Redge woke up and cried for her, and she told him hoarsely to be still;
+and then, suddenly conscience-stricken and fearful at the slighting of
+this other demand of love,&mdash;what awful reprisal might it not exact from
+her?&mdash;she went to kiss the child, to infold him in her arms, the boy
+that Justin loved, before she bade him go to sleep, for mother would
+stay by her darling. And, left to herself again, the grinding and
+destroying wheel of thought had her bound to it once more.</p>
+
+<p>He could not have left her of his own will! If he did not come, it would
+be because he was dead&mdash;and then he could never know, never, never know.
+There would be nothing left to her but the place where he had been. She
+looked at the walls and the homely furnishings as one seeing them for
+the first time bare forever of the beloved presence, and fell on her
+knees, and went on them around the room, dragging herself from chair to
+sofa, from sofa to bed,&mdash;these were the Stations of the Cross that she
+was making,&mdash;with sobs and cries, low and inarticulate, yet carrying
+with them the awful anguish of a heart laid bare before the Almighty.
+Here his dear hand had rested, while he thought of her; on this
+table&mdash;here&mdash;and here; and here his head had lain. Her tears ceased; she
+buried her face in the pillow. She must go after him, wherever he was,
+in this world or another. For he was her husband. Where he was she must
+be, either in body or in spirit.</p>
+
+<p>The telephone-bell rang, and Dosia answered it, the voice at the other
+end inquiring for Mr. Girard, cautiously, it seemed, withholding
+information from any other. The doctor rang up, in response to an
+earlier call, with directions for Redge. Hardly had the receiver been
+laid down when the door-bell clanged. This was to be a night of the
+ringing of bells!</p>
+
+<h3>XXII</h3>
+
+<p>This time, of course, the visitor was Mrs. Snow. In any exigency, any
+mind-and body-absorbing event of life, the inopportune presence of Mrs.
+Snow was inexorably to be counted on, though it came always as one of
+those exasperating recurrences which bring with them a ridiculously
+fresh irritation each time. It seemed to be the one extra thing you
+couldn't stand. In either trouble or joy, she affected one like a
+clinging, ankle-flapping mackintosh on a rainy day. She bowed now to
+Dosia with a patronizing dignity, pointed by the plaintive warmth of the
+greeting to Lois, who had come hurrying down-stairs out of those
+passion-depths of darkness, so that Mrs. Snow wouldn't suspect anything.
+She had an uncanny faculty of divining just what you didn't want her to.</p>
+
+<p>Once before Lois had suspended tragedy for Mrs. Snow. The same things
+happen to us over and over again daily in our crowded yet restricted
+lives&mdash;it is we who change in our meeting with them. We have our great
+passions, our great joys, our heartbreaks, no matter how small our
+environment.</p>
+
+<p>"How do you do, my dear? Mr. Girard has just told me that he was going
+to stay here to-night, in Mr. Alexander's absence. He said little Redge
+was threatened with the croup. Now, if I had only known that Mr.
+Alexander was away, <i>I</i> could have come and stayed with you!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that wasn't at all necessary," said Lois hastily. "Thank you very
+much. Do sit down, won't you, Mrs. Snow?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only for a minute, then; I must go back to Bertha," said Mrs. Snow,
+seating herself and fumbling for something under her cloak. "I just came
+over to read you a letter. It's in my bag&mdash;I can't seem to find it.
+Well, perhaps I'd better rest for a minute." Mrs. Snow's face looked
+unusually lined and set; in spite of her plaintiveness, her eyes had a
+harassed glitter.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't it rather late for you to be out alone?" asked Lois.<!-- Page 215 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes; Ada would have come around here with me, but she was expecting Mr.
+Sutton. She was expecting him last night, but he didn't come. If <i>I</i>
+were a young lady, I'd let a gentleman wait for <i>me</i> the next time; it
+used to be thought more attractive, in my day: but Ada's so afraid of
+not seeming cordial; gentlemen seem to be so sensitive nowadays! I said
+to her, 'Ada, when a man is enough at home in a house to kick the cat,
+and ask for cake whenever he feels like it, I do <i>not</i> see that it is
+necessary to stand on ceremony with him.' But Ada thinks differently."</p>
+
+<p>"It is difficult to make rules," said Lois vaguely.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," sighed Mrs. Snow. "As I was saying to Bertha, you don't find a
+young man like Mr. Girard, so considerate of every one&mdash;not that he's so
+<i>very</i> young, either; I'm sure he often appears much older than he is.
+It's his manner&mdash;he has a manner like my dear father. He and Bertha have
+long chats together; really, he is what <i>I</i> would call quite attentive,
+though she won't hear of such a thing&mdash;but sometimes young men <i>do</i> take
+a great fancy for older girls. I had a friend who married a gentleman
+twenty-seven years younger&mdash;he died soon afterward. But many people
+think nothing of a little difference of twelve or fifteen years. I said
+to Bertha this morning, 'Bertha, if you'd dress yourself a little
+younger&mdash;if you'd only wear a blue bow in your hair.' But no; I can't
+say anything nowadays to my own children without being flown at!" Mrs.
+Snow's voice trembled. "If my darling William were here!"</p>
+
+<p>"Have you heard from William lately?" asked Lois, with supreme effort.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear, he's in Chicago. I came over to read you a letter from him
+that I got to-night. That new postman left it at the Scovels', by
+mistake, and they never sent it over until a little while ago. There was
+a sentence in it," Mrs. Snow was fumbling with a paper, "that I thought
+you'd like to hear. Where is it? Let me see. 'Next month I hope to be
+able to send you more'&mdash;no, no, that's not it. 'When my socks get holes
+in them I throw them'&mdash;that's not it, either. Oh! he says, 'I caught a
+glimpse of Mr. Alexander last night, getting on a West Side car'&mdash;this
+was written yesterday morning. 'I called to him, but too late. I'm
+sorry, for I'd like to have seen him,' That's all; but Mr. Girard seemed
+so pleased with the letter, I promised that I would bring it around to
+you that very minute,&mdash;he had to run for the train,&mdash;but I was detained.
+He thought you'd like to hear that William had seen Mr. Alexander."</p>
+
+<p>Like to hear! The relief for the moment turned Lois faint. Yet, after
+Mrs. Snow went, the torturing questions began to repeat themselves
+again. Justin was alive&mdash;Justin was alive on Tuesday night. Was he alive
+now? And why had he gone to Chicago at all? Why had he sent her no word?
+The wall between them seemed only the more opaque. Every fear that
+imagination could devise seemed to center around this new fact.</p>
+
+<p>She and Dosia went around, straightening up the little drawing-room,
+making it ready for Girard's occupancy&mdash;pulling out a big chair for his
+use, and putting fresh books on the table. The maid had long ago gone to
+bed, and there was coffee to be made for him&mdash;he might get hungry in the
+night. When he came in at last, he brought all the brightness and
+courage of hope with him. He had wired to William; he had phoned to a
+dozen different places in Chicago.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, what should we do without you?" breathed Lois, her foot on the
+stairway.</p>
+
+<p>"It doesn't seem to me I've helped you very much so far. Our one clue
+has been from Mrs. Snow. I want you to go to bed now, and to sleep, Mrs.
+Alexander; take all the rest you can. I'm here to do the watching. If
+there's anything really to tell, I'll call you. I promise faithfully.
+What is it, Miss Linden? Did you want to speak to me?"</p>
+
+<p>"There was a message for you while you were gone," said Dosia in a low
+tone.</p>
+
+<p>His eyes assented. "Yes, I know. I went there&mdash;to the place that
+they&mdash;but it wasn't Alexander, I'm glad to say, though I was afraid when
+I went in&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know," said Dosia.</p>
+
+<p>Another strange night had begun, with the master of the house away. Lois
+went to her room to lie down clothed, jumping up to come to the head of
+the stairs whenever the telephone-bell rang, and then going back again
+when she found that those who were consulting were asking for
+information instead of giving it; but by and by the messages ceased.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose Justin never came back! She began to feel that he had been gone
+for years, and tried confusedly to plan out the future. There were the
+children&mdash;how should she support them? She must support them. It was
+hard to get work when you had a baby. If she hadn't the baby&mdash;no one
+should take the baby from her! She clasped him to her for a moment in
+terror, as if she were being hunted, before she grew calm and began
+planning again. There was only a little money left. To-morrow they must
+still eat. She must make the money last.</p>
+
+<p>Dosia, on the bed by Redge's crib, went softly after a while into the
+other room, and saw that<!-- Page 216 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> Lois at last slept, though she herself could
+not. Each time that she saw Girard he seemed more and more a stranger,
+so far removed was he from her dream of him. Through all his softness,
+his gentleness, she felt the streak of hardness, if nobody else did
+(though Mr. Cater, she remembered now, had spoken of it too), that the
+fires of adversity had molded. Perhaps no man could have worked up from
+the cruel circumstances of his early days without that hardening streak
+to uphold him. She divined, with some surprising new power of
+divination, that, for all his strong, capable dealing with actualities,
+his magnetic drawing of men, for the inner conduct of his own life he
+was shyly dependent on odd, deeply held theory&mdash;theory that he had
+solitarily woven for himself. She felt impersonally sorry for him, as
+for a boy who must be disappointed, though he was nothing to her.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, as Dosia lay there in the dumb stretches of the night, her tired
+eyes wide open, close to Redge's crib, with his little hot hand clinging
+to hers, the mere fact of Girard's bodily presence in the house,
+down-stairs, seemed something overpoweringly insistent; she couldn't get
+away from it. It gave her, apparently, neither pleasure nor pain; it
+called forth no conscious excitement as had been the case with
+Lawson&mdash;unless this strange, rarefied sense was a higher excitement.
+This consciousness of his presence was, tiresomely enough, something not
+to be escaped from; it pulsed in every vein, keeping her awake. She
+tried to lose it in the thought of Lois' great trouble, of this
+weighting, pitiful mystery of Justin's absence&mdash;of what it meant to him
+and to the household. She tried to lose it in the thought of Lawson,
+with the prayer that always instinctively came at his name. Nothing
+availed; through everything was that wearing, persistent consciousness
+of Girard's bodily presence down-stairs. If it would only fade out, so
+that she might sleep, she was so tired! The clock struck two. A voice
+spoke from the other room, sending her to her feet instantly:</p>
+
+<p>"Dosia?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Lois, dearest, I'm here."</p>
+
+<p>"Has any word come from Justin?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>Lois shivered. "I think, when Redge wakes up next, you'd better give him
+a drink of water; he sounds so hoarse. I've used all I brought up. Do
+you mind going down to get some more? I would go myself, but I can't
+slip my arm from under baby; he wakes when I move. Here is the pitcher."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Dosia, stopping for a moment to pull the coverlet tenderly
+over Lois, before stepping out into the lighted hall.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed very silent; there was no sound from below. Dosia went down
+the low, wide stairs with that indescribable air of the watcher in the
+night. Her white cotton gown, the same that she had worn throughout the
+afternoon, had lost its freshness, and clung to her figure in twisted
+folds; the waist was slightly open at the throat, and the long white
+necktie hung half untied. One cheek was warm where it had pressed the
+pillow; the other was pale, and her hair, half loosened, hung against
+it. Her eyes, very blue, showed a rayed starriness, the pupils
+contracted from the sudden light&mdash;her expression, tired and half
+bewildered, had in it somewhat of the little lost look of a child, up in
+the unwonted middle of the night, who might go naturally and comfortably
+into any kind arms held out to her. The turn of the stairs brought her
+fronting the little drawing-room and the figure of Girard, who sat
+leaning forward, smoking, in the Morris chair, with his elbow resting on
+the arm of it and his head on his hand. The books and bric-&agrave;-brac on the
+table beside him had been pushed back to make room for the tray
+containing the coffee-pot, a cup and saucer, and a plate with some
+biscuits. A newspaper lay on the floor at his feet. Notwithstanding the
+light in the hallway and the room, there was that odd atmospheric effect
+which belongs only to the late and solitary hours of the night, when the
+very furniture itself seems to share in a chill detachment from the life
+of the day. Yet, in the midst of this night silence, this withdrawing of
+the ordinary vital forces, the figure of Bailey Girard seemed to be
+extraordinarily instinct with vitality, even in that second before he
+moved; his attitude, his eyes, his expression, were informed with such
+intense and eager thoughts that it was as startling, as instantly
+arresting, as the blast of a trumpet.</p>
+
+<p>At the sound of Dosia's light oncoming step opposite the door, he rose
+at once&mdash;however, laying the cigar on the table&mdash;and with a quick stride
+stood beside her. He seemed tall and unexpectedly dazzling as he
+confronted her; his deep-set gray eyes were very brilliant.</p>
+
+<p>"What is the matter? Is Mrs. Alexander ill?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;oh, no; the children have been restless, that is all," said Dosia,
+recovering, with annoyed self-possession, from a momentary shock, and
+feeling disagreeably conscious of looking tumbled and forlorn. "I came
+down to get a pitcher of water."</p>
+
+<p>"Can't I get it in the dining-room for you?" he asked, with formal
+politeness.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you. The water isn't running in the butler's pantry; I have to go
+in the kitchen for it. If you would light the gas there for me&mdash;&mdash;"<!-- Page 217 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes, certainly," he responded promptly, pushing the porti&egrave;res aside to
+make a passage for her, as he went ahead to scratch a match and light
+the long, one-armed flickering kitchen burner. The bare, deeply shadowed
+floor, the kitchen table, the blank windows, and the blackened range, in
+which the fire was out, came desolately into view. There was a sense as
+of deep darkness of the night outside around everything.</p>
+
+<p>A large white cat lying on a red-striped cushion on a chair by the
+chilly hearth stretched itself and blinked its yellow eyes toward the
+two intruders.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me fill this," said Girard, taking the pitcher from her&mdash;a rather
+large, clumsy majolica article with a twisted vine for a handle&mdash;and
+carrying it over to the faucet. The intimacy of the hour and the scene
+emphasized the more the punctilious aloofness of this enforced
+companionship.</p>
+
+<p>Dosia leaned back against the table, while he let the water run, that it
+might grow cold. It sounded in the silence as if it were falling on a
+drumhead. The moment&mdash;it was hardly more&mdash;seemed interminable to Dosia.
+The white cat, jumping up on the table, put its paws on her shoulders,
+and she leaned back very absently, and curved her throat sideways, that
+her cheek might touch him in recognition. Some inner thought claimed
+her, to the exclusion of the present; her eyes, looking dreamily before
+her, took on that expression that was indescribably gentle, intolerably
+sweet.</p>
+
+<p>Dosia has been ill described if it has not been made evident that to
+caress, to <i>touch</i> her, seemed the involuntarily natural expression of
+any feeling toward her. Something in the bright, tendril-curling hair,
+the curve of her young cheek, the curve of her red lips, her light, yet
+round form, with its confiding, unconscious movements, made as
+inevitable an allure as the soft rosiness of a darling child, with
+always the suggestion of that illusive spirit that dared, and retreated,
+ever giving, ere it veiled itself, the promise of some lovelier glimpse
+to come.</p>
+
+<p>The water had stopped running, and Dosia straightened herself. She
+raised her head, to meet his eyes upon her. What was in them? The color
+flamed in her face and left her white, although in a second there was
+nothing more to see in his but a deep and guarded gentleness as he came
+toward her with the pitcher.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll take it now, please," she said hurriedly.</p>
+
+<p>"Won't you let me carry it up for you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, it isn't necessary. I'll go along, if you'll wait and turn
+out the light."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well. You're sure it's not too heavy for you?" he asked anxiously,
+as her wrists bent a little with the weight.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no, indeed," said Dosia quickly, turning to go. At that moment the
+white cat, jumping down from the table in front of her, rubbed itself
+against her skirts, and she stumbled slightly.</p>
+
+<p>"Take care!" cried Girard, grasping the shaking pitcher over her slight
+hold of it.</p>
+
+<p>Their hands touched&mdash;for the first time since the night of disaster, the
+night of her trust and his protection. The next instant there was a
+crash; the fragments of the jug lay upon the kitchen floor, the water
+streaming over it in rivulets.</p>
+
+<p>"Dosia!" called the frightened voice of Lois from above.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I'm coming," Dosia called back. "There's nothing the matter!" She
+had run from the room without looking up at that figure beside her,
+snatching a glass of water automatically from the dining-table as she
+passed by it. Fast as her feet might carry her, they could not keep pace
+with her beating heart.</p>
+
+<p>When the telephone-bell rang a moment after, it was to confirm the
+tidings given before. Justin was in Chicago.</p>
+
+<p>TO BE CONCLUDED</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 218 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span></p><div class="figcenter" style="width: 100px;">
+<img src="images/illus-217.jpg" width="100" height="43" alt="Decoration" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_PROBLEMS_OF_SUICIDE" id="THE_PROBLEMS_OF_SUICIDE"></a>THE PROBLEMS OF SUICIDE</h2>
+
+<h3>BY GEORGE KENNAN</h3>
+
+<p>Few branches of sociological investigation have more practical
+importance, or present a greater number of problems, difficulties, and
+interesting speculative questions, than the branch that deals with the
+complex, varied, and often inexplicable phenomena of suicide. When we
+consider the fact that more than ten thousand persons take their own
+lives in the United States every year, that more than seventy thousand
+die annually by their own hands in Europe, and that the suicide rate is
+constantly and rapidly increasing throughout the greater part of the
+civilized world, we are forced to admit that, from the view-point of
+vital economy at least, the subject is one of the utmost gravity. In
+1881 the annual suicide rate of the United States was only 12 per
+million of the population, and our total number of suicides was only
+605; last year our suicide rate had risen to 126 per million, and our
+suicides numbered 10,782. If the present rate of increase be maintained,
+we shall lose by suicide, in the next five years, nearly as many lives
+as were lost by the Union armies in battle in the five years of the
+Civil War. We are already losing annually from this cause more men than
+were killed on the Union side in the three great battles of Gettysburg,
+Spottsylvania, and the Wilderness taken together.</p>
+
+<p>Statisticians have estimated that, in the world as a whole, there is a
+suicide every three minutes, and we know, with an approximation to
+certainty, that there is a suicide every six minutes and a half in
+Europe and the United States alone. Suicide has cost France 274,000
+lives since 1871, Germany 158,000 since 1893, and the United States
+120,000 since 1890. I need hardly point out the practical importance of
+the questions that present themselves in connection with this abnormal
+and apparently unnecessary waste of human life. Among such questions
+are: Upon what general and world-wide conditions does suicide depend?
+Are any of its causes removable? What are the reasons for the steady and
+progressive increase of self-destruction in civilized countries? Is
+suicide controlled or affected by any natural laws, and, if so, by what
+laws? These are all questions of practical importance, because upon the
+answers to them depends the possibility of economizing human life and
+increasing the sum total of human happiness. But the subject is one of
+deep interest, entirely apart from its practical importance.</p>
+
+<h3><i>Psychological Problems of Suicide</i></h3>
+
+<p>In some of its aspects, suicide raises psychological questions which
+bristle with difficulties, but which, nevertheless, pique the curiosity
+and demand explanatory answers. Why, for example, is the rate of suicide
+strictly dependent everywhere upon season and weather? Why is the
+tendency to self-destruction lessened by war? What is the explanation of
+suicide in the face of impending death, when there is still a fair
+chance of escape, or when the natural death that is threatened would
+involve less suffering than the act of self-destruction? What is the
+mental state of the hundreds of persons who kill themselves every year
+upon what would seem to be absurdly inadequate provocation&mdash;of the man,
+for example, who commits suicide because his wife declines to get out
+his clean underclothes, or the woman who takes poison because she has
+received a comic valentine? In its religious aspect, why is the tendency
+to suicide greatest among Protestant Christians and least among
+Mohammedans and Jews? In its racial aspect, why is the suicide rate of
+Japan eight times that of Portugal, and the rate of American whites
+eight or ten times that of full-blooded American blacks? Why do the
+Slavs of Bohemia kill themselves at the rate of 158 per million, while
+the Slavs of Russia commit suicide at the rate of only 31 per million?
+Why do emigrants, going to a new country, carry their national suicide
+rates with them, and maintain such rates, with little or no alteration,
+long after their environment has completely changed? These questions may
+not have great practical importance, but, from the view-point of the
+psychologist and the sociologist, they are full of speculative interest.</p>
+
+<p>When we study the phenomena of suicide as<!-- Page 219 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> they appear in the light of
+statistics, we are struck by the fact that among the general and
+world-wide conditions that limit or control the suicidal impulse are
+weather and war. Other factors, such as education, religion, or economic
+status, may seem to be more influential, if observation be limited to a
+single nation or a single continent; but if a comprehensive survey be
+made of the whole world, weather and war will be seen to take a
+prominent place among the few agencies that affect uniformly the
+suicidal tendency.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as accurate and trustworthy statistics of self-destruction
+became available in Europe, sociologists began to study the question
+whether suicide is controlled or regulated in any way by natural laws,
+and, if so, whether cosmical causes, such as climate, temperature,
+season, and weather, have any perceptible influence upon the suicide
+rate. It was soon discovered that the tendency to self-destruction is
+greatest in the zone lying between the fiftieth and fifty-fifth
+parallels of north latitude. South of forty-three degrees the annual
+suicide rate is only 21 per million, and north of fifty-five degrees it
+is only 88 per million; but between the parallels of forty-three and
+fifty it rises to 93 per million, and between fifty and fifty-five it
+reaches its maximum of 172 per million. The suicide belt, therefore,
+lies in the north temperate zone, where the climate is most favorable to
+human development and happiness. This fact, however, does not prove that
+a moderate and equable climate predisposes to suicide. Things may
+coexist without being in any way related to each other, and the
+frequency of suicide in the north temperate zone may be due wholly to
+the fact that the zone in question is the home of the most cultivated
+races and the seat of the highest and most complicated civilization. In
+this zone the struggle for life is fiercest, the interference with
+natural laws is most extensive, and the physical and emotional wear and
+tear of the economic contest is most acutely felt. It is more than
+probable, therefore, that the high rate of suicide in the north
+temperate zone is due to the civilization, rather than to the climate,
+of that region. This phase of the subject need not be discussed at
+length, because all competent authorities agree that climate, in its
+relation to suicide, is not a controlling or determining factor.</p>
+
+<p>A very different state of affairs appears, however, when we bring the
+suicide rate into correlation with season and weather. Long ago, before
+accurate statistics made a scientific investigation of the subject
+possible, there was a widely prevalent popular belief that dark and
+dismal months of the year, and gloomy, rainy, or uncomfortable weather,
+predisposed mankind to self-destruction, and that the suicide rate was
+highest in November or December, and lowest in spring or early summer.</p>
+
+<h3><i>Spring and Summer the Suicide Seasons</i></h3>
+
+<p>The French philosopher Montesquieu went so far as to explain the
+supposed frequency of suicide in London by connecting it with English
+rains and fogs. It was only natural, he argued, that unhappy people
+should kill themselves in a country where the autumnal and winter months
+were so dark, and where there was so much gloomy, depressing weather.
+When, however, investigators began to study the subject in the light of
+accurate statistics, when they grouped suicides by months and compared
+one month with another, they were surprised to find that the tendency to
+suicide was greatest, not in the gloomy and depressing months of
+November and December, but in the bright and cheerful month of June. In
+1898 Dr. Oscar Geck, of Strasburg, published statistics of about 100,000
+suicides that took place in Prussia in the twenty-year period between
+1876 and 1896. They showed that, so far at least as Prussia was
+concerned, suicides invariably attained their maximum in June and their
+minimum in December. There was a constant rise in the suicide curve from
+January to the end of June, and a constant decline from June to the end
+of the first winter month.</p>
+
+<p>Durkheim, of Paris, and Dr. Gubski, of St. Petersburg, who are among the
+most recent investigators of the subject, assert that, so far as the
+seasonal distribution of suicides is concerned, the figures for Prussia
+hold good throughout Europe. June is everywhere the suicide month, and
+December is everywhere the month in which self-destruction is least
+frequent. Durkheim gives tabulated statistics for seven of the principal
+countries of Europe, which show conclusively that, in point of
+predisposing tendency to suicide, the four seasons stand in the
+following order: summer first, spring second, autumn third, and winter
+last.<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> Even in Russia, which differs most from the rest of Europe in
+ethnology and economic status, the seasonal distribution of suicides<!-- Page 220 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> is
+the same. Dr. Gubski's statistics show that of every thousand Russian
+suicides, 328 take place in summer, 272 in spring, 215 in autumn, and
+185 in winter. If we divide the year into halves, and group the suicides
+in semi-annual periods, we find that 600 occur in the pleasant spring
+and summer months and only 400 in the gloomy months of winter and fall.</p>
+
+<p>A study of American statistics brings us to almost exactly the same
+result. In September, 1895, Dr. Forbes Winslow, of New York, read a
+paper before the medico-legal congress which was then in session in that
+city upon the subject of "Suicide as a Mental Epidemic." The statistics
+which he submitted showed that in the United States, as in Europe,
+suicide reaches its maximum in June and falls to its minimum in
+December. The average annual number of American suicides in June is 336
+and in December 217. If we divide the year into halves and compare the
+figures of the semi-annual periods with those of Russia, the
+correspondence is almost startling.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding the immense difference between the population of Russia
+and that of the United States, in environment, in education, in
+religion, in inherited character, in temperament, and in civilization
+generally, the mysterious law that controls the seasonal distribution of
+suicides operates in America exactly as it operates in the great empire
+of the Slavs. In Russia, out of every thousand suicides, the number who
+kill themselves in the fall-and-winter half of the year is precisely
+400; in America it is 386. In Russia, the proportion per thousand in the
+spring-and-summer half of the year is 600; in America it is 614. There
+is a slightly greater tendency to spring-and-summer suicide in the
+United States than in Russia, but the variation is only a little more
+than one per cent., and taking into consideration the great difference
+between the oppressed and ignorant peasants of Russia, and the free,
+well-educated citizens of our own country, the practical identity of
+their seasonal suicide rates seems to me a most extraordinary social and
+psychological fact.</p>
+
+<p>This, however, is by no means a complete statement of the problem
+involved in the seasonal distribution of suicides. Spring and summer are
+the suicide seasons, not only among the closely related nationalities of
+Europe and the United States, but among the ethnologically alien peoples
+of the Far East. The reports of the Statistical Bureau of Japan show
+that between 1899 and 1903 the average annual number of suicides was
+8,840. They were distributed through the year as follows: winter 1,711,
+spring 2,475, summer 2,703, fall 1,951. If we divide the year into
+halves, we find that 59 per cent. of the Japanese suicides occur in the
+spring and summer months and only 41 per cent. in the months of fall and
+winter. This corresponds almost exactly with the annual distribution of
+suicides in the United States, in Russia, and in Europe as a whole. The
+seasonal percentages may be shown in tabular form as follows:<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a></p>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="seasonal percentages">
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='right'>United</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='right'>States</td><td align='right'>Russia</td><td align='right'>Europe</td><td align='right'>Japan</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='right'>per cent.</td><td align='right'>per cent.</td><td align='right'>per cent.</td><td align='right'>per cent.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Spring and summer</td><td align='right'>61</td><td align='right'>60</td><td align='right'>59</td><td align='right'>59</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Fall and winter</td><td align='right'>39</td><td align='right'>40</td><td align='right'>41</td><td align='right'>41</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p>It thus appears that the tendency of mankind to commit suicide in
+spring and summer, rather than in fall and winter, is quite as strongly
+marked in Japan as it is in Europe and America. Despite all differences
+of character and environment, the suicidal impulses of Yankee, muzhik,
+and coolie are governed by the same law.</p>
+
+<h3><i>Suicide Weather</i></h3>
+
+<p>The evidence above set forth, and much more for which I cannot here find
+space, seems conclusively to establish the fact that, throughout the
+civilized world, the pleasantest seasons of the year are most conducive
+to suicide. The question then arises, Does this rule hold good if
+applied to the pleasantest days of the pleasantest seasons? In other
+words, is the tendency to suicide greater on clear, dry, and sunny days
+in June than on dark, cloudy, and rainy days in June? Professor Edwin G.
+Dexter, of the University of Illinois, published in the <i>Popular Science
+Monthly</i>, in April, 1901, a long and interesting paper entitled "Suicide
+and the Weather," in which he gave the result of a comparison between
+the police records of 1,962 cases of suicide in the city of New York and
+the records of the New York Weather Bureau for all the days on which
+these suicides occurred. His comparisons and computations, which seem to
+have been made with great thoroughness and care, show not only that the
+tendency to suicide is greatest in the spring and summer months, but
+that it is most marked on the clearest, sunniest, and pleasantest days
+of those months. To state his conclusions in his own words: "The clear,
+dry days show the greatest number of suicides, and the wet, partly
+cloudy days the least; and with differences too great to be attributed
+<!-- Page 221 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>to accident or chance. In fact, there are thirty-one per cent. more
+suicides on dry than on wet days, and twenty-one per cent. more on clear
+days than on days that are partly cloudy."</p>
+
+<p>It thus appears that, as a rule, the tendency to suicide, throughout the
+civilized world, is greatest in the pleasantest seasons of the year;
+that it is everywhere greatest in the pleasantest month of the
+pleasantest season; and that in New York City it is greatest on the
+clearest and sunniest days of the pleasantest month. From the point of
+view of science, therefore, it is perfectly reasonable and absolutely
+accurate to say on a beautiful, sunny day in early June, "This is
+regular suicide weather."</p>
+
+<p>Now, what is the explanation of this world-wide tendency to
+self-destruction in the seasons, months, and days when life would seem
+to be best worth living? The cause, whatever it be, can have no
+connection with race, religion, history, political status, or
+geographical location, because it acts uniformly among peoples as widely
+different, in all these respects, as the Russians, the Italians, the
+Americans, and the Japanese. It is evidently a cosmic cause, but what is
+its nature?</p>
+
+<p>Some investigators have suggested that the suicidal tendency is
+dependent on heat; but June is not the hottest month, nor is December
+the coldest. Durkheim has tested this conjecture by comparing
+temperatures with suicides in France, Italy, and Prussia. He finds that,
+in all three of these countries, suicides reach their maximum in June
+and their minimum in December, while the temperature does not rise to
+its maximum until July and does not fall to its minimum until
+January.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> Moreover, if heat were a predisposing cause of suicide, we
+should find the suicide rate of Europeans much higher in the tropics
+than it is in the north temperate zone; but such is not the case. Heat,
+therefore, as a possible cause, must be eliminated. Other writers,
+including Dr. Gubski, have called attention to the very close relation
+between suicide and light. It is true that daylight, if measured by
+hours, has its minimum in December and its maximum in June, in precise
+correspondence with the seasonal rates of suicide; but what about the
+equinoctial periods of March and September?</p>
+
+<p>If light be the efficient cause, the tendency to suicide should be as
+great at the time of the fall equinox as it is at the time of the spring
+equinox; but this is not the case. Two hundred and seventy-two suicides
+out of every thousand occur in the vernal equinoctial period and only
+two hundred and fifteen in the autumnal equinoctial period, and this
+proportion holds good throughout the whole northern hemisphere. Light,
+therefore, must also be eliminated.</p>
+
+<p>Morselli suggests that suicide is influenced by the first heat of early
+spring and summer, which "seizes upon the organism not yet acclimated
+and still under the influence of the cold season." But is there any such
+thing as winter debility, and, if so, why should it last until June?
+Many physicians, on the other hand, assert that during the period of
+early summer the organism, instead of being debilitated, is working at a
+high tension, that every function of mind and body is then more active
+than at any other period of the year, and, that, consequently, there is
+then greater liability to sudden mental and physical collapse. But there
+is no evidence to show that suicides, generally, are caused by seasonal
+overtension and subsequent collapse.</p>
+
+<p>Goldwin Smith thinks that with the revival of vitality in the spring and
+early summer "all feelings and impressions become more lively," those
+that impel to suicide among the rest. But if all the feelings "become
+more lively," why do not the stimulated sensations of joy and pleasure
+on a beautiful day in June overcome, or at least evenly balance, the
+stimulated sensations of suffering and unhappiness?</p>
+
+<h3><i>Influence of Environment on Self-Destruction</i></h3>
+
+<p>None of these explanations is at all satisfactory, and it seems to me
+that the solution of the problem is to be found, not in the mere
+physical action of light, heat, or weather on the human body, but in the
+influence of the whole environment on the human mind. Sir Arthur Helps
+was the first, so far as I know, to suggest that the increased tendency
+to suicide in spring and summer is due to a psychological rather than a
+physical cause. Speaking, in "Realmah," of the fact that suicides are
+more frequent on pleasant days than on unpleasant ones, he says:
+"Perhaps it is because, on these beautiful days, the higher powers seem
+to be more beneficent; and the wretch overladen with misery thinks that
+he can trust more to their mercy."</p>
+
+<p>This explanation is little more satisfactory than the others; but it
+does, nevertheless, recognize and take into account the influence of the
+environment on a pre&euml;xisting emotional state. It errs only in
+interpretation. The smiling, happy, joyous aspect of Nature in June does
+not inspire the unhappy man with confidence in the beneficence and mercy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>
+of the higher powers. On the contrary, it shows him that the higher
+powers pay no attention at all to his feelings and have no sympathy
+whatever with his grief. The blue skies, sunshine, leafy trees, and
+singing birds, which make up the environment of June, add to the
+happiness of the man who is happy already, but they intensify, by
+contrast, the misery of the man who is already miserable. In November
+and December, when all is dark, bare, and cheerless, Nature seems to be
+in sympathy with the unhappy man's mood, and from that voiceless,
+pitying sympathy of the great World-Mother he derives a certain
+sustaining comfort and consolation. In June his mood is the same, but
+the mood of Nature has changed. The great World-Mother no longer
+sympathizes with his grief, but laughs him to scorn with her sunshine,
+her blossoming flowers, her leafy trees, and her jubilation of mating
+birds. He looks about him and thinks: "Everybody is happy, everything is
+rejoicing. I am the solitary exception; I am the only living thing that
+is out of place." And then there comes upon him a heartbreaking sense of
+loneliness, a feeling of complete isolation, as if the great, happy
+world had cast him off and gone on its way singing. He has thought of
+suicide before&mdash;he has thought of it often; and now, when the world, in
+its triumphant gladness, ignores his very existence, when there is no
+longer sympathy, nor pity, nor any further hope of a share in the
+happiness that he sees about him, it seems to him that the time for
+self-destruction has come. Whether he be a Russian, an American, or a
+Japanese, he can observe and he can feel: and when he sees that the
+whole world is jubilant, while he himself is wretched, he becomes more
+acutely conscious than ever before of his loneliness and misery, and
+resolves to give up the struggle and get out of the way of the world's
+laughing, singing, summer-carnival procession. He ends his life; and in
+some Russian, American, or Japanese table of statistics his death adds
+one more to the suicides in June.<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a></p>
+
+<p>The close relation that exists between suicide and war was first brought
+to my attention by the sudden and remarkable decrease of suicide in the
+United States in 1898, the year of the war with Spain. Instead of
+increasing that year, as it had every previous year for more than a
+decade, the number of suicides decreased suddenly from 6,600 to 5,920, a
+falling off of 680 cases. Then, when the war in the Philippines followed
+the war in Cuba, the number was again reduced by 580 cases. When,
+however, in 1900, we began to lose interest in the Philippines and to
+think of our own home troubles and trials, the number of suicides rose
+suddenly from 5,340 to 7,245, an increase of 1,905 cases in two years.
+The decrease in the suicide rate during the war was nearly 16 per cent.,
+and the increase after the war about 23 per cent.</p>
+
+<h3><i>War As a Deterrent to Suicide</i></h3>
+
+<p>This struck me as a phenomenon interesting enough to warrant
+investigation, and I began study of it by looking up the statistics of
+suicide in the national capital. It seemed to me that if the decrease in
+1898 was due to a general economic cause, it would not be particularly
+noticeable in the city of Washington, for the reason that Washington is
+not a manufacturing or business center. If, on the other hand, the fall
+in the suicide rate was really due to the war as a specific cause, it
+would be most marked at the nation's capital, where the war attracted
+most attention and created most excitement. I went to the District
+Health Office and made an examination of the suicide records for a term
+of six years, beginning with 1895 and ending with 1900. I found not only
+that the depression in the Washington suicide curve was precisely
+synchronous with that of the national suicide curve, but that it was
+much deeper, amounting, in fact, to a sudden decrease of fifty per cent.</p>
+
+<p>As suicides are tabulated in the Health Office of the District of
+Columbia by months, I was able to ascertain, furthermore, that the
+decrease began, not in the first month of the year, but in the spring
+months, when the war excitement became epidemic. Normally, the suicide
+rate should have risen, from January to June, in accordance with the
+seasonal law; but, instead of so doing, it fell rapidly at the very time
+when it should have been approaching its maximum. The colored population
+of the city, taken separately, was affected in the same way and to an
+even greater degree, the number of suicides among the blacks falling off
+fifty-six per cent., as compared with fifty per cent. among the whites.
+The number of suicides in both races remained low throughout the year
+1899, and then rose suddenly in 1900, an almost precise correspondence
+with the suicide curve of the nation as a whole.</p>
+
+<p>During our Civil War the suicidal tendency was affected in the same way,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>
+but to a much greater extent. I have not been able to find mortality
+statistics of the whole country for the period in question, but in New
+York City the average rate of suicide in the five years of the Civil War
+was forty-two per cent. lower than the average for the five preceding
+years, and forty-three per cent. lower than the average for the five
+subsequent years. In the State of Massachusetts, where accurate
+statistics were kept, the number of suicides decreased seventeen per
+cent. in the five-year period from 1861 to 1865, as compared with the
+five-year period from 1856 to 1860.</p>
+
+<p>In Europe the restraining influence of war upon the suicidal impulse is
+equally marked. The war between Austria and Italy in 1866 decreased the
+suicide rate of each country about fourteen per cent. The Franco-German
+war of 1870-71 lowered the suicide rate of Saxony 8.0 per cent., that of
+Prussia 11.4 per cent., and that of France 18.7 per cent. The reduction
+was greatest in France, because the German invasion of that country made
+the war excitement there much more general and intense than it was in
+Saxony or Prussia.</p>
+
+<p>An explanation of the decrease of suicide in time of war may be found,
+perhaps, in the power that any strong excitement has to change the
+current of thought and substitute one emotion for another. Suicide,
+among civilized peoples, is largely due to morbid introspection and long
+brooding over real or imaginary trouble; and anything that takes a man's
+mind away from his own unhappiness, and gives him a keen interest in
+things or events about him, weakens his suicidal impulse. An unhappy man
+might resolve to end his life, and might load a revolver with the
+intention of shooting himself; but if he should happen to see a couple
+of his neighbors fighting in his front door-yard, he would probably lay
+the revolver aside, for a time, and watch the combat. The cause of his
+unhappiness would still remain, but the current of his thought would
+suddenly be diverted into a new channel and his despondency would give
+way to the excitement of a fresh and vivid interest. War acts upon men
+in the same way, but with greater force.</p>
+
+<p>Then, too, war restrains suicide by strengthening the bonds of social
+sympathy and drawing large masses of people more closely together. The
+unhappy man always thinks of himself as lonely, isolated, and out of
+harmony with his environment; but when, as a result of the victories or
+defeats of war, he finds himself participating in the triumph or sharing
+the grief of thousands of other persons, the mere consciousness of
+sympathetic association with his fellow-men becomes a source of comfort
+and consolation to him and makes his life more endurable. But war is not
+the only agency that exerts a restraining influence upon
+self-destruction. Any great calamity which causes intense public
+excitement, and which at the same time draws people together in friendly
+sympathy and co&ouml;peration, lowers the suicide rate. The calamity may
+greatly intensify suffering, and may make life, for a time, almost
+intolerable; but it does not increase the number of persons who try to
+escape from life; on the contrary, it reduces it.</p>
+
+<h3><i>San Francisco Earthquake Decreased Suicides</i></h3>
+
+<p>A striking illustration of this fact was furnished by San Francisco in
+1906. Before the earthquake and fire of April 18 the suicides in that
+city averaged twelve a week. After the earthquake, when the whole
+population was homeless, destitute, and exposed to hardships and
+privations of every kind, there were only three suicides in two months.
+The decrease, therefore, in the suicide rate was more than 97 per cent.
+This surprising result of a disheartening and depressing calamity was
+due partly to the excitement of life under new and extraordinary
+conditions, and partly to the feeling, which every man had, that he was
+enduring and working with a host of sympathetic comrades, and not
+suffering and striving alone. If life were always vividly interesting,
+as it was in San Francisco after the earthquake, and if all men worked
+and suffered together as the San Franciscans did for a few weeks,
+suicide would not end ten thousand American lives every year, as it does
+now.</p>
+
+<p>The dependence of suicide upon such conditions as age, sex, occupation,
+and religion does not offer any problem as difficult and baffling as
+that involved in the relation of suicide to weather, nor any as curious
+and suggestive as that which connects suicide with war; but there is
+hardly a phase of the subject that does not present some more or less
+interesting question. The researches of Durkheim and Gubski show that,
+after the period of childhood, the tendency to suicide increases
+steadily with advancing age. In France, for example, if the population
+be segregated in groups comprising all persons ten to twenty years of
+age, all persons twenty to thirty years of age, all persons thirty to
+forty years of age, and so on, by decades, the annual number of suicides
+per million rises as follows: first group 56, second group 130, third
+155, fourth 204, fifth 217, sixth 274, seventh 317, and the rate finally
+reaches its maximum in the group that comprises persons more than eighty<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>
+years of age.</p>
+
+<p>In the United States, the rate increases from 128 per million, in the
+age group comprising persons under forty-five, to 300 per million in the
+age group comprising persons over sixty-five. The figures vary in
+different countries, according to the hereditary national suicide
+tendencies; but the steady increase with advancing age is common to all.
+These statistics would seem to support the pessimistic philosophy of
+Schopenhauer, and to prove that the longer one lives the less one wants
+to live; but it must not be forgotten that the suicide rate is a measure
+of exceptional unhappiness, not of the general welfare.</p>
+
+<p>In the suicidal tendencies of the sexes there is, as might be expected,
+a very great difference. In all countries and in all parts of the world,
+suicides among women are far less frequent than among men. The ratio
+varies from one to two to two to five. This difference is generally
+attributed to the supposed fact that women are sheltered and protected
+by men, as well as by their domestic environment, and that,
+consequently, they suffer less from the wear and tear of life; but I
+doubt very much the adequacy of this explanation. The life of women, in
+the world at large, is quite as hard as that of men, and often harder.
+In the higher and wealthier classes of society women may be, and
+doubtless are, sheltered and protected; but in the poorer classes they
+take their full share of the suffering, even if they do not bear the
+brunt of the struggle.</p>
+
+<p>The hundreds of Russian women who between 1877 and 1885 were exiled to
+eastern Siberia for political offenses had no shelter or protection
+whatever, and must necessarily have suffered more than the exiled men
+from the hardships and privations of banishment; and yet, I am quite
+sure that I understate the fact when I say that the number of suicides
+among the men was at least five times greater than it was among the
+women. The exiled men themselves admitted to me that when it came to the
+endurance of suffering against which no fight could be made and from
+which there was no escape, the women were greatly their superiors. The
+infrequency of self-destruction among women, as compared with that among
+men, seems to me to be due, not to their comparative immunity from
+suffering, but to three other causes, namely, first, a greater power of
+patient, passive endurance, when there is no fight to be made; second, a
+mind and heart that are more influenced by feelings and beliefs that may
+be called religious; and, third, a peculiar capacity for self-restraint
+and self-preservation, based on the maternal instinct, that is, on
+closer and more intimate relations with, stronger love for, and greater
+devotion to young children.</p>
+
+<p>A study of the relation that suicide bears to occupation discloses some
+interesting and noteworthy facts. The first is that soldiers, both in
+Europe and in the United States, must be put in a class by themselves,
+for the reason that the suicide rate of army officers and men is so much
+higher than that of the populations to which they belong that they can
+hardly be included in the same category. In Prussia, for example, the
+proportion of military suicides to civilian suicides is 1&frac12; to 1; in
+England 2&frac12; to 1; in Italy 5 to 1; in Austria 10 to 1; and in Russia
+nearly 11 to 1. Even in the United States, the tendency of soldiers to
+kill themselves is 8&frac12; times that of adult men in civil life.</p>
+
+<p>This disproportionately high suicide rate in armies is not easy of
+explanation. In countries where military service is compulsory, and
+where inexperienced young men, torn suddenly from their families, are
+subjected to rigorous discipline in a strange and uncongenial
+environment, the suicidal impulse may be intensified by homesickness,
+loneliness, humiliation, and the monotony of camp or barrack life; but
+in our own country, where the army is filled by voluntary enlistment,
+and where the relations between officers and men are fairly sympathetic
+and cordial, there would seem to be fewer reasons for unhappiness and
+suffering than in the military service of Italy, Austria, or Russia. The
+American soldier is generally well taken care of and well treated; and
+while his life, in time of peace, is not exciting, it is easier and less
+monotonous than that of a factory operative, and it is hard to
+understand why he should be abnormally disposed to self-destruction. His
+suicidal tendency, however, is reduced by war, just as that of the civil
+population is, and for the same reasons.</p>
+
+<h3><i>Professional Classes Furnish Most Suicides</i></h3>
+
+<p>Statistics of self-destruction are not yet accurate and detailed enough
+to enable us to determine the relation that suicide bears to business
+employment; but it may be said, in a general way, that the occupations
+in which the suicide rate is lowest are those that involve rough manual
+labor out of doors and employ men of comparatively little educational
+culture, such as miners, quarrymen, shipwrights, fishermen, gardeners,
+bricklayers, and masons. Next come farmers, shopkeepers, and town
+artisans. And at the head of the list, with the highest suicide rate of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>
+all, are physicians, journalists, teachers, and lawyers. The tendency
+of these professional classes to commit suicide is from one and a half
+to three times as great as that of the population generally.</p>
+
+<p>Clergymen, however, who also constitute an educated professional class,
+have a suicide rate which is only half that of the population as a
+whole, and this is undoubtedly due to the restraining influence of
+religion, which is much stronger in clergymen than in laymen. The
+relation of suicide to religion raises a number of curious and
+interesting questions, but, unfortunately, the religious factor is so
+involved with other factors in the complicated problem of
+self-destruction that it is almost impossible to isolate it so as to
+study it alone. For example, the suicide rate of Protestant Christians
+in the northern part of Ireland is twice that of Roman Catholics in the
+southern part; but here education comes in as a complication: the
+Protestants are generally better educated than the Catholics, and their
+higher suicide rate may be due to their education and not to the form of
+their religion. In Europe generally, the tendency to suicide is much
+greater among both Protestants and Catholics than among Jews; but here
+education, race, and economic condition all come in as complicating
+factors, so that it is impossible to credit the Jewish faith alone with
+the lower rate. In view, however, of the fact that the suicide rate of
+the Protestant cantons in Switzerland is nearly four times that of the
+Catholic cantons, it seems probable that Catholicism, as a form of
+religious belief, does restrain the suicidal impulse. The efficient
+cause may be the Catholic practice of confessing to priests, which
+probably gives much encouragement and consolation to unhappy but devout
+believers, and thus induces many of them to struggle on in spite of
+misfortune and depression.</p>
+
+<p>The Salvation Army, in attempting to lessen self-destruction by opening
+"anti-suicide bureaus" in large cities, and by inviting persons who are
+contemplating suicide to visit these bureaus and talk over their
+troubles, is virtually introducing a system of confession which, so far
+as this particular evil is concerned, resembles that of the Catholic
+Church.</p>
+
+<p>In view, however, of the conflicting nature of the evidence, and the
+extreme difficulty of disentangling religious factors from other
+important factors, I doubt the possibility of drawing any trustworthy
+conclusions with regard to the dependence of suicide upon religious
+belief. It may be said, as a matter of record, that the tendency to
+self-destruction is greatest among Protestant Christians, next largest
+among Roman Catholics and Orthodox Greeks, and lowest among Mohammedans
+and Jews; but the differences are not certainly due to religion.</p>
+
+<p>The dependence of suicide upon nationality and race presents a number of
+problems of great interest, but of extraordinary difficulty and
+complexity. I can state a few of these problems, but I cannot solve any
+of them.</p>
+
+<p>Among the highest suicide rates in Europe are those of Saxony and
+Denmark, and among the lowest those of Italy, Portugal, and Spain. You
+may perhaps conclude, from this, that the tendency to self-destruction
+is much greater among the Slavs and Scandinavians of the north than it
+is among the Latin peoples of the south, and that the differences are
+due to latitude or race; but your specious generalization is shattered
+when you discover that the suicide rates of Norway and Russia, both
+northern countries inhabited by Scandinavians and Slavs, are almost as
+low as those of Italy, Portugal, and Spain, all southern countries
+inhabited by Latins.</p>
+
+<p>From an ethnological point of view, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are
+nearly homogeneous Scandinavian states, and we should therefore expect
+their suicide rates to be nearly if not quite identical; but the rate of
+Denmark is twice that of Sweden and three times that of Norway.</p>
+
+<p>The Slavs of Bohemia do not differ ethnologically from the Slavs of
+Dalmatia, but the suicide rate of the one group is 158 per million,
+while that of the other is only 14 per million. Saxony is not far away,
+geographically, from Belgium; but the suicide rate of the former is 324
+per million, while that of the latter is only 128 per million.</p>
+
+<p>I am unable to offer even a conjectural solution of the problems
+involved in the differences thus shown to exist between populations that
+are ethnologically identical, or that stand at nearly the same level of
+educational culture and economic well being.</p>
+
+<h3><i>Germany's High Suicide Rates</i><br /></h3>
+
+<p>The extremely high suicide rate of the Germanic peoples long ago
+attracted the attention of European sociologists, but, so far as I know,
+it has never been satisfactorily explained. If it were limited to adults
+it might possibly be attributed to economic causes, particularly to the
+rapid development of manufacturing industry, which seems everywhere to
+increase the suicidal tendency; but self-destruction in Germany is
+almost as common among children as among grown people. Between 1883 and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>
+1903 there were 1,125 suicides among the pupils of the public schools
+in Prussia alone, and most of them were of boys and girls under fifteen
+years of age. An investigation made by the ministry of public
+instruction showed that this prevalence of suicide among children was
+not due to the conditions of modern life in cities, inasmuch as the
+proportion of cases was fully as large in places of the smallest size as
+in crowded centers of population. It seemed to be due, rather, to an
+inherent suicidal tendency in the race.</p>
+
+<p>Racial characteristics, however, do not by any means account for the
+extraordinary differences in suicide rates that we find among the
+European peoples, as shown in the following table:<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a></p>
+
+<h3>EUROPEAN PEOPLES GROUPED RACIALLY</h3>
+
+<h3>NUMBER OF SUICIDES PER MILLION INHABITANTS</h3>
+
+<h3>I. <span class="smcap">Slavs</span></h3>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="Slavs">
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>In Dalmatia (about 1896)&nbsp;&nbsp;</td><td align='right'>14</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>European Russia (1900)</td><td align='right'>31</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Bulgaria (about 1900)</td><td align='right'>118</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<h3>II. <span class="smcap">Scandinavians</span></h3>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="Scandinavians">
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>In Norway (1901-'05)&nbsp;&nbsp;</td><td align='right'>65</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Sweden (1900-'04)</td><td align='right'>142</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Denmark (1901-'05)</td><td align='right'>227</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<h3>III. <span class="smcap">Latins</span></h3>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="Latins">
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>In Spain (1893)</td><td align='right'>21</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Portugal (1906)</td><td align='right'>23</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Italy (1901-'05)</td><td align='right'>64</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>France (1900-'04)&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td><td align='right'>227</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<h3>IV. <span class="smcap">Germans</span></h3>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="Germans">
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>In Austria (1902)</td><td align='right'>173</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Prussia (1902-'06)&nbsp;&nbsp;</td><td align='right'>201</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Saxony (1902-06)</td><td align='right'>324</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Bavaria (1902-'06)</td><td align='right'>141</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<h3>V. <span class="smcap">English</span></h3>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="English">
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>In Ireland (1906)</td><td align='right'>34</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Scotland (1905)</td><td align='right'>65</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>England and Wales (1906)&nbsp;&nbsp;</td><td align='right'>100</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Australasia (1903)</td><td align='right'>121</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>United States (1907)</td><td align='right'>126</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<h3>VI. <span class="smcap">Asiatics</span></h3>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="Asiatics">
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>In Japan (1905)&nbsp;&nbsp;</td><td align='right'>209</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p>It is difficult to assign definite or satisfactory reasons for the wide
+differences shown in the above table. Skelton has suggested that the low
+suicide rates of certain countries are due to emigration, "which
+provides an outlet for a great deal of misery and constitutes a hopeful
+alternative to suicide"; but this conjecture, although ingenious, is
+hardly supported by the facts. It might perhaps explain the low suicide
+rates of Italy and Ireland, but it does not account for the equally low
+suicide rate of the Russian peasants, who emigrate hardly at all, nor
+for the extremely high suicide rate of the Germans, who emigrate in
+large numbers. Neither does it throw any light upon the persistence of
+national suicide rates long after emigration. The generalization that
+seems to harmonize and explain the greatest number of facts is that
+suicide is most prevalent in countries where education goes hand in hand
+with highly developed manufacturing industry. In Spain, Portugal, Italy,
+and Russia the people have little education, manufacturing industries
+are feebly developed, and the suicide rate is low. In Saxony the
+percentage of illiteracy is very small, more than half of the population
+work in factories, and the suicide rate is the highest in Europe. I do
+not dare to assert that even this rude generalization is warranted by
+the facts; but, if it were sustained, it would seem to show that suicide
+is a by-product of the great, complicated machine that we call modern
+civilization.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever may be the reasons for differences in national suicide rates,
+and whatever may be the causes that have produced them, there is little
+doubt, I think, that the rates themselves are true manifestations of
+national character, and that they are as permanent as the character of
+which they are an outcome. When, therefore, a people migrates from one
+place to another, it takes both its character and its suicide rate to
+the new location. This is clearly apparent in the vital statistics of
+immigrants who come from various parts of Europe to the United States.
+Such immigrants, as a rule, prosper here and become happier here, but
+the increased prosperity and happiness do not greatly affect the
+suicidal tendencies that they had when they were poor and wretched in
+their original homes. Even their descendants, born in America, keep
+substantially unchanged the suicide rates that they have inherited, with
+their character, from their European ancestors. The Germans who came
+here forty or fifty years ago brought a high suicide rate with them, and
+their descendants maintain it. The Irish, on the contrary, brought a low
+suicide rate to this country, and their children have it still. In the
+following table will be found the suicide rates of a few nationalities
+in Europe and of their descendants in the United States.<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor"></a>[22]<!-- Page 227 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>SUICIDES PER MILLION OF POPULATION</h3>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="SUICIDES PER MILLION OF POPULATION">
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Nationalities</span></td><td align='right'><span class="smcap">In Europe</span></td><td align='right'>&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">In the U.&nbsp;S.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td align='left'>Native Americans&nbsp;&nbsp;</td><td align='right'>68</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td align='left'>Hungarians</td><td align='right'>114</td><td align='right'>118</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td align='left'>Germans</td><td align='right'>213</td><td align='right'>193</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td align='left'>French</td><td align='right'>228</td><td align='right'>220</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td align='left'>English</td><td align='right'>100</td><td align='right'>104</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p>In an address delivered before the Anthropological Society of
+Washington, D.&nbsp;C., on October 19, 1880, Mr. M.&nbsp;B.&nbsp;W. Hough said: "As
+long as the features of the ancestor are repeated in his descendants, so
+long will the traits of his character reappear. Language may change,
+customs be left behind, races may migrate from place to place and
+subsist on whatever the country they occupy affords; but their
+fundamental characteristics will survive, because they are comparatively
+uninfluenced by the mere accidents of nutrition." This statement is as
+true of suicide as it is of other manifestations of national character.</p>
+
+<h3><i>Odd Methods Employed by Suicides</i></h3>
+
+<p>Nothing is more surprising in the records of suicide than the
+extraordinary variety and novelty of the methods to which man has
+resorted in his efforts to escape from the sufferings and misfortunes of
+life. One would naturally suppose that a person who had made up his mind
+to commit suicide would do so in the easiest, most convenient, and least
+painful way; but the literature of the subject proves conclusively that
+hundreds of suicides, every year, take their lives in the most
+difficult, agonizing, and extraordinary ways; and that there is hardly a
+possible or conceivable method of self-destruction that has not been
+tried. When I clipped from a newspaper my first case of self-cremation
+with kerosene and a match, I regarded it as rather a remarkable and
+unusual method of taking life; but I soon discovered that self-cremation
+is comparatively common. When I learned that Mary Reinhardt, of New
+York, had sung "Rock of Ages" and had then killed herself by inhaling
+gas in a barrel stuffed with pillows, I thought it a curious and
+noteworthy case; but when I compared it with suicides that came to my
+knowledge later, it seemed quite simple and natural. I have
+well-authenticated cases in which men or women have committed suicide by
+hanging themselves, or taking poison, in the tops of high trees; by
+throwing themselves upon swiftly revolving circular saws; by exploding
+dynamite in their mouths; by thrusting red-hot pokers down their
+throats; by hugging red-hot stoves; by stripping themselves naked and
+allowing themselves to freeze to death on winter snow-drifts out of
+doors, or on piles of ice in refrigerator-cars; by lacerating their
+throats on barbed-wire fences; by drowning themselves head downward in
+barrels; by suffocating themselves head downward in chimneys; by diving
+into white-hot coke-ovens; by throwing themselves into craters of
+volcanoes; by shooting themselves with ingenious combinations of a rifle
+with a sewing-machine; by strangling themselves with their hair; by
+swallowing poisonous spiders; by piercing their hearts with corkscrews
+and darning-needles; by cutting their throats with hand-saws and
+sheep-shears; by hanging themselves with grape vines; by swallowing
+strips of under-clothing and buckles of suspenders; by forcing teams of
+horses to tear their heads off; by drowning themselves in vats of soft
+soap; by plunging into retorts of molten glass; by jumping into
+slaughter-house tanks of blood; by decapitation with home-made
+guillotines; and by self-crucifixion.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, persons who resort to such methods as these are, in most
+cases, mentally unsound. A man who shoots, hangs, poisons, or drowns
+himself may be sane; but the man who crucifies himself, buries himself
+alive, cuts his throat on a barbed-wire fence, or climbs into the top of
+a tree to take poison, is evidently on the border-line of insanity, even
+if he be not a recognized lunatic.</p>
+
+<p>The most prevalent methods of suicide in Europe are, first, hanging,
+second, drowning. In the United States they are, first, poisoning,
+second, shooting. About three fourths of all the persons who commit
+suicide in the United States use pistol or poison. The difference
+between European and American methods is probably due to the fact that
+on the other side of the Atlantic drugs and fire-arms are not so easily
+obtainable as they are here, and Europeans therefore resort to water and
+the rope as the best and surest means accessible. Police restrictions
+and regulations make it almost impossible for a Russian peasant to get
+either poison or a pistol; but all the police in the empire cannot
+prevent him from drowning himself in a pond, or hanging himself in his
+own barn.</p>
+
+<p>A careful comparison of all the facts accessible seems to show that in
+Europe, at least, suicide bears a certain definite relation to education
+and manufactures; and that, as I have already said, it is a by-product
+of the great, complicated world-machine that we call modern
+civilization. Its specific causes, so far as they can be ascertained,
+are, on the educational side, the development of increased nervous and
+psychic sensibility, which makes men feel more acutely all wants,
+deprivations,<!-- Page 228 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> misfortunes, and sufferings; and, on the manufacturing
+side, a monotony of employment which wearies and exhausts the body while
+it gives little exercise to the educated mind and leaves the latter free
+to brood over its unsatisfied longings and desires, as well as its many
+trials and disappointments. There are other causes, such as the growing
+disproportion between wants generally and the means of gratification
+generally; alcoholism; unhealthful work, especially in manufacturing
+districts; barrack and tenement-house life; and all the evils incident
+to poverty, overcrowding, and bad sanitary conditions in cities. So far
+as I can see, these causes, at present, are not removable. Education
+must continue to intensify sensibility and increase the number of men's
+wants, and the great economic machine must grind on, even though it
+crush thousands of human beings, every year, in the cogs of its
+innumerable wheels. A high suicide rate is part of the price that we pay
+for the educational and material achievements upon which we pride
+ourselves. We have greatly multiplied the means of human happiness, but
+whether, on the whole, we have increased the sum total of human
+happiness is perhaps an open question. In any event, the high and
+rapidly increasing suicide rate shows that we are pushing the weaklings
+to the wall.</p>
+
+<p>The question of what can be done to lessen the suicide tendency and
+check this great waste of human power and energy brings me to the only
+important cause of self-destruction which seems to me removable, and
+that is newspaper publicity. No argument is needed to prove that man is
+essentially an imitative animal. In dress, in behavior, in speech, in
+modes of thought, and in social conventions, we are all prone to do what
+we see others do; and when unhappy men and women learn, from the
+newspapers, that scores of other unhappy people are daily escaping from
+their troubles through the always open door of suicide, when familiarity
+with the idea of self-destruction deprives the act of all its natural
+terror, it is not at all surprising that they yield to what seems to be
+the general current of their social environment. I have, in my own
+collection of material, a surprisingly large number of cases in which
+the suicidal act may be traced directly to newspaper publicity and
+imitation; but I must limit myself to a single striking
+illustration&mdash;the suicidal epidemic in Emporia, Kansas, in the summer of
+1901. As a result, apparently, of the publication of the details of two
+or three suicides of people prominent in that little Kansas town, there
+broke out an epidemic of self-destruction which culminated in the
+sunny, flowery month of June, and which carried the annual suicide rate
+from about 90 per million to 1,665 per million&mdash;a rate five times
+greater than that of Saxony. Mr. Morse, the mayor of the city, consulted
+the Board of Health, and decided to stop the publication of the details
+of suicides in the local papers, even if it should require the
+employment of force. He issued a proclamation, on the 16th of June, in
+which he said: "I have consulted the Board of Health, and if the Emporia
+papers do not comply with my request, I shall have a right to stop, and
+I will stop summarily, the publication of these suicide details, under
+the law providing for the suppression of epidemics. There is clearly an
+epidemic in this city, and although it is mental, it is none the less
+deadly. Its contagion may be clearly shown to come from what is known in
+medicine as the psychic suggestion, found in the publication of the
+details of suicides. If the paper on which the local journals are
+printed had been kept in a place infected with small-pox, I could demand
+that the journals stop using that paper, or stop publication. If they
+spread another contagion&mdash;the contagious suggestion of suicide&mdash;I
+believe the liberty of the press is not to be considered before the
+public welfare, and that the courts would sustain me in using force to
+prevent the publication of newspapers containing matter clearly
+deleterious to the public health."</p>
+
+<p>I believe that the reasoning of Mayor Morse is perfectly sound, and that
+the position taken by him is absolutely impregnable. The prevention of
+the publication of suicides in the newspapers of a State would require a
+special legislative act, but it would probably do more to lessen the
+suicidal tendency than any other single measure that could be taken. In
+the winter of 1902, Representative Jenkins introduced in the National
+House of Representatives a bill making periodicals containing details of
+suicides unmailable; but I think it was never reported from committee.</p>
+
+<h3><i>The Emotional Temperament as a Cause</i></h3>
+
+<p>There is one other way in which the suicide rate may possibly be
+lowered, or at least held in check, and that is through the cultivation
+of what may be called the heroic spirit. We are becoming too emotional
+and sentimental, and too much inclined to regard weakness with sympathy,
+instead of with the contempt that it generally deserves. In the language
+of the prize ring, the pugilist who lies down while he can yet stand and
+see is called a "quitter." It would be harsh and unjust to apply to all<!-- Page 229 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>
+suicides this opprobrious name; but there can be little doubt, I think,
+that the majority of them are weaklings who give up and lie down while
+they still have a fighting chance.</p>
+
+<p>Readers of shipping news may still remember the wreck of a German
+kerosene steamer on the wildest, most precipitous part of the coast of
+Newfoundland, in February, 1901. The steamer took fire during a heavy
+winter gale, and the captain ran her ashore, at the nearest point of
+land, with the hope of saving the lives of the crew. She struck on a
+submerged reef in a little cove, about an eighth of a mile from a coast
+which was three or four hundred feet high and as precipitous as a wall.
+When she was first seen by a few fishermen at daylight, her boats were
+gone, and all of her crew had apparently perished except three men. Two
+were standing on the bridge, and one was lashed aloft in the
+fore-rigging. About ten o'clock in the forenoon a tremendous sea carried
+away the bridge and the two men on it, and they were seen no more. At
+three o'clock in the afternoon the solitary survivor,&mdash;the man in the
+fore-rigging,&mdash;who was evidently suffering intensely from hunger and
+cold, unlashed himself, threshed his arms against his body for five
+minutes to restore the circulation in them, and then took off his coat,
+waved his hand to the fishermen on top of the cliff, climbed down the
+shrouds, and plunged into the sea&mdash;but not to commit suicide. He swam to
+the shore, made three attempts in different places to get a footing
+among the rocks at the base of the cliff, but was swept away every time
+by the surf, and finally abandoned the attempt as hopeless. At that
+crisis in the struggle ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have given
+up and allowed themselves to drown; but this man was not a "quitter." He
+turned his face again seaward, struck out for the half-submerged ship,
+and after a long and desperate struggle succeeded in reaching her and
+getting on board. He climbed the fore-shrouds, waved his hand to the
+pitying but powerless fishermen on the edge of the cliff, and lashed
+himself again in the rigging. At intervals, until dark, he made signals
+to the fishermen to show that he was yet alive. At daybreak on the
+following morning he could still be seen in the fore-rigging, but his
+head had fallen on his breast and he was motionless. He had frozen to
+death in the night. That man died, as a man in adverse circumstances
+ought to die, fighting to the last. You may call it foolish, and say
+that he might better have ended his sufferings by allowing himself to
+drown when he found that he could not make a landing at the base of the
+cliff; but deep down in your hearts you pay secret homage to his
+courage, his endurance, and his indomitable will. He was defeated at
+last, but, so long as he had consciousness, neither fire nor cold nor
+tempest could break down his manhood.</p>
+
+<p>The Caucasian mountaineers have a proverb which says: "Heroism is
+endurance for one moment more." That proverb recognizes the fact that in
+this world the human spirit, with its dominating force, the will, may be
+and ought to be superior to all bodily sensations and all accidents of
+environment. We should not only feel, but we should teach, by our
+conversation and by our literature, that, in the struggle of life, it is
+essentially a noble thing and a heroic thing to die fighting. In a
+recent psychological story called "My Friend Will," Charles F. Lummis
+pays a striking tribute to the power of the human mind over the
+accidents of life and chance when he makes his "friend Will" say: "I am
+bigger than anything that can happen to me. All these things&mdash;sorrow,
+misfortune, and suffering&mdash;are outside my door. I'm in the house and
+I've got the key!"</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="PRAIRIE_DAWN" id="PRAIRIE_DAWN"></a>PRAIRIE DAWN</h2>
+
+<h3>BY WILLA SIBERT CATHER</h3>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">A crimson fire that vanquishes the stars;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">A pungent odor from the dusty sage;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">A sudden stirring of the huddled herds;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">A breaking of the distant table-lands</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Through purple mists ascending, and the flare</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Of water ditches silver in the light;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">A swift, bright lance hurled low across the world;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">A sudden sickness for the hills of home.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 20em;">&mdash;<i>From April Twilights</i>.</span><br />
+<!-- Page 230 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_DOINGS_OF_THE_DEVIL" id="THE_DOINGS_OF_THE_DEVIL"></a>THE DOINGS OF THE DEVIL</h2>
+
+<h3>BY HARVEY J.&nbsp;O'HIGGINS</h3>
+
+<h3>ILLUSTRATIONS BY THOMAS FOGARTY</h3>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cregan wept, and her tears were ludicrous. She was as fat as a
+Falstaff. Her features were as ill-suited for the expression of grief as
+a circus clown's. She had not even a channel in her plump cheeks to
+drain the tears from the corners of her eyes; and the slow drops, large
+and unctuous, trickled down her round jowl and soaked into her
+bonnet-strings, leaving her cheeks as fresh and as ruddy in the sunlight
+as if they had been merely wet with perspiration. Her eyes stared,
+unpuckered, apparently unconscious that they wept. Her mouth was tight
+in an expression of resentful determination. Only her little round chin
+trembled&mdash;like a child's.</p>
+
+<p>And yet Mrs. Cregan was as nearly heart-broken as she had ever been in
+her life. She was leaving her husband; what was more grievous to her,
+she was leaving her home; she was on the streets of New York, with her
+small savings in her greasy purse&mdash;clasped tightly in her two hands
+under her "Sunday cape," that was trimmed with fringe and tassels in a
+way to remind you of a lambrequin. She did not know where to go. There
+was no one to whom she could turn for aid, and she would not go to any
+one for pity. Behind her was the wreck of a breakfast table&mdash;the visible
+symbol of her ruined home&mdash;with a cursing Irishman, whom nobody could
+live with any longer, shouting, "<i>Your</i> house, is it? I'll show yeh
+whose house it is! I'll show yeh! I'll break ev'ry danged thing in the
+place!" Before her were the crooked byways of what had once been
+"Greenwich village," as quiet as a desert, and as indifferent, in the
+early morning radiance, with shuttered windows and closed doors.</p>
+
+<p>The domestic peace of those old streets made her own homelessness the
+more pitiful to her. She felt as she had felt once before&mdash;years
+before&mdash;in her childhood, when she had set sail with her parents for
+America. It had been a cold day; and the mists had steamed up horridly
+from the water, with a desolate, wet sea-odor; and the memory of the
+sunlight on green fields and the warm perfume of the land had been like
+a longing for health and daylight to the darkness of a death-bed. The
+future had threatened her with the terrors of an unknown world. The
+past&mdash;despite its poverty and starvation&mdash;had been as dear as life. She
+had suffered all those pangs of dissolution that assail the home-loving
+Irish when they have to leave what association has made dear to them;
+for, with the Irish, familiarity does not breed contempt but affection.</p>
+
+<p>She suffered these same miseries now. She saw her home through tears of
+regret, though unhappiness had driven her from it. And her lips were set
+in a determination never to return to Cregan, though her chin trembled
+with pity of herself in the determination.</p>
+
+<p>Some distance behind her came a smaller woman, as shrunken, as withered,
+and as yellow as an old leaf. Even her shoes seemed to have dried and
+shriveled, curling up at the toes. And she fluttered along in the light
+morning breeze, holding back against it, on her heels, with an odd
+effect of being carried forward faster than she wished to go.</p>
+
+<p>She was Mrs. Byrne, from the floor below Mrs. Cregan's flat, and she had
+been starting out on a secret errand of her own when she heard the
+quarrel overhead and stopped to hear the end of it. There was something
+guilty in her manner, and she was evidently struggling between her
+desire to reach the next street unseen by Mrs. Cregan and her desire to
+know what had happened in the Cregan flat. Her curiosity proved the
+stronger.</p>
+
+<p>She let the wind blow her alongside her friend's portly despair. She
+said, in the hoarse whisper that was all she had left of her voice: "Is
+it yerself, Missus Cregan? Yuh're off to choorch early this mornin'."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cregan looked around, blinking to clear her eyes. "Choorch?" she
+said, on the plaintiveness of a high note that broke in her throat.</p>
+
+<p>"Yuh're cryin', woman!". Her look of craftiness had changed at once to
+one of<!-- Page 231 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> startled distress. "Come back out o' this with yuh." She caught
+Mrs. Cregan's arm. "It's no thing to be doin' on the street! Come back,
+now. Where're yuh goin'?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cregan marched stolidly ahead and carried her neighbor with her.
+"I've quit 'm."</p>
+
+<p>"Quit who?"</p>
+
+<p>"Himsilf.... Dinny."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Byrne expressed her emotion and showed her tact by silently
+compressing her lips.</p>
+
+<p>"I've quit 'im, fer good an' all." She stroked a tear down her cheek
+with a thick forefinger. "I'll niver go back. Niver!"</p>
+
+<p>"Come away with yuh, Mary Cregan," Mrs. Byrne cried, in her breathy
+huskiness. "At <i>your</i> age! Faith, yuh're as flighty as one o' them girls
+with the pink silk petticoats. He's yer husban', ain't he? D'yuh think
+yuh were married over the broomstick? Come an' behave yerself like a
+decent woman. What'd Father Dumphy say to <i>this</i>, think yuh?"</p>
+
+<p>"He's a man. I know what he'd say. He'd tell me to go back to Cregan.
+I'll niver go back. Niver!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yuh won't! What'll yuh do, then? Where'll yuh go to?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll niver go back. Niver! He's broke me best chiny&mdash;an' kicked the leg
+off the chair&mdash;an' overtoorned the table&mdash;an' ordered me out o' the
+little bit o' home I been all these years puttin' together. The teapot
+th' ol' man brought from Ireland&mdash;the very teapot&mdash;smashed to
+smithereens! An' the little white dishes with the gilt trimmin's I had
+to me weddin' day, Mrs. Byrne! There was the poor things all broke to
+bits!" She stopped to point at the sidewalk, as if the wreckage lay
+there before her. "All me little bit o' chiny. All of it. All of it,
+Mrs. Byrne. Ev'ry bit! Boorsted!"</p>
+
+<p>Her tears choked her. She could not express the piercing irreparability
+of the injury. It would not have been so bad if he had beaten her; a
+hurt will heal. But the innocent, wee cups&mdash;and the fat old brown
+teapot&mdash;and the sweet little chair with its pretty legs, carved and
+turned so daintily! She had washed them and wiped them, and dusted and
+polished them, and been so careful of them and felt so proud of them,
+for twenty years past. And, now, there they were lying, all in
+bits&mdash;past mending&mdash;gone forever. And they so pretty and so harmless.</p>
+
+<p>The crash as they fell on the floor had sounded in her ears like the
+scream of a child murdered.</p>
+
+<p>She started forward again, determinedly. "I'll niver go back to 'm. He
+can have his house to himsilf.... What do I care for Father Dumphy? He
+wants nothin' but the dime I leaves at the choorch doore, an' the dime I
+drops on the plate! Whin me poorse's impty, he'll not bother his head
+about me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Shame <i>on</i> yuh!" Mrs. Byrne wheezed, with her eye on the house she was
+passing. "Yuh talk no better than a Prod'stunt."</p>
+
+<p>"An' if I <i>was</i> a Prod'stint," she cried, "I'd not have to pay money
+iv'ry time I wanted to hear mass. I'd not be out on the street here, not
+knowin' where I'm goin' to, ner how I'm to live. It's <i>thim</i> that knows
+how to take care o' their own&mdash;givin' the women worrk, an' takin' the
+childer off to the farrms, an' all the like o' that. You Dogans&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Byrne glanced about her fearfully, "Stop yer talk, now. Stop yer
+talk. Stop it before someone hears yuh makin' a big fool o' yerself."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll not stop it. What do I care who hears me? I'm goin' off from here
+fer good an' all. 'Twill know me no more. 'Twill not. I'm done with it
+all. I'm done with it." She held out her purse. "I've got me bit o'
+money. I'll hire me a little room up-town. I'm done with <i>him</i> an'
+Father Dumphy an' the whole dang lot o' yuz. Slavin' an' savin' fer
+nothin' at all. I'll worrk fer mesilf now, an' none other. Neither
+Cregan ner the choorch ner no one ilse 'll get a penny's good o' me no
+more. I got no one in the wide worrld but mesilf to look to, an' I'll go
+it alone."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Byrne was a little woman of a somewhat sinister aspect, her dull
+eyes very deep in their wrinkles, her nose pushed aside out of the
+perpendicular, her long lips stretched tightly over protruding teeth.
+She was as curious as an old monkey; but it was not only her curiosity
+that made her the busiest gossip and the most charitable "good soul" in
+the street; she had her share of human kindness, and if she was as
+crafty as a hypocrite, it was because she enjoyed handling men and
+women, like a politician.</p>
+
+<p>Seeing that Mrs. Cregan was beyond the reach of shame or the appeal of
+the priest, she said: "Well, I don't blame yuh, woman. Cregan's a
+fool&mdash;like all the rest o' the men. An' yerself such a good manager.
+Well, well! Yer rooms was that purty 't 'ud make yuh wistful. Where will
+yuh be goin'?"</p>
+
+<p>"I dunno."</p>
+
+<p>"Have yuh had yer breakfast?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cregan shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Come back, then, an' have a bite with me."</p>
+
+<p>"Niver! I'll niver go back."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Byrne hitched up her shawl. "Come along then to the da-ary
+restr'unt. There's no<!-- Page 232 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> one home to miss me. Ill take a bit o' holiday,
+this mornin', meself. I've been wantin' to taste one o' those batter
+cakes they make in the restr'unt windahs, this long enough."</p>
+
+<p>"Yuh've ate yer breakfast."</p>
+
+<p>"I have not" Mrs. Byrne replied. "I was off to the grocer to buy some
+sugar when yuh stopped me."</p>
+
+<p>It was a lie. She had, in fact; started out, secretly, on a guilty
+errand which she should not acknowledge.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a lonely meal I'd 've been havin'," she said, "with Byrne down at
+the boiler house an' the boy off on his run."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cregan did not reply, and they came to Sixth Avenue without more
+words. They paused before a dairy restaurant that advertised its
+"Surpassing Coffee" in white-enamel letters on its shop-front windows.
+Mrs. Cregan's hunger drew her in, but slowly; and Mrs. Byrne followed,
+coughing to conceal her embarrassment.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/illus0353.jpg" width="400" height="275" alt="&quot;&#39;YOUR HOUSE, IS IT? I&#39;LL SHOW YEH WHOSE HOUSE IT IS!&#39;&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;&#39;YOUR HOUSE, IS IT? I&#39;LL SHOW YEH WHOSE HOUSE IT IS!&#39;&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>It was the first time that Mrs. Byrne had ever sat down in any public
+restaurant, except the eating-halls at Coney Island (where she went with
+"basket parties") or the ice-cream "parlors" at Fort George. And she
+glanced about her at tiled walls and mosaic floors with a furtiveness
+that was none the less critical for being so sly. "It's eatin' in a
+bathroom we are," she whispered. "An' will yuh look at the cup yonder.
+The sides of it are that thick there's scarce room fer the coffee in it!
+Well, well! It do beat the Dutch! They're drawin' the drink out of a
+boiler big enough fer wash day." The approach of a waitress silenced
+her. When she saw that Mrs. Cregan was not going to speak, she looked up
+at the girl with a bargain-counter keenness. "Have y' any pancakes fit
+t' eat? How much are they? Ten cents! Fer how many? Fer three pancakes?
+Fer three! D'yuh hear that?" she appealed to Mrs. Cregan. "Come home
+with me, that's a good woman. It's a sin to pay it. Three cents fer a
+pancake! Aw, come along out o' this. Ten cents! We c'u'd get two loaves
+o' bread fer the money an' live on it fer a week!"</p>
+
+<p>But Mrs. Cregan was beyond the reach of practicalities, and she ordered
+her buckwheat cakes and coffee with an air that was mournfully distrait.
+Mrs. Byrne made a vain attempt to get her own cakes from the waitress
+for five cents, and then resigned herself to the senseless extravagance.
+"Yuh'll not make yer own<!-- Page 233 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> livin' an' eat the likes o' this," she
+grumbled asthmatically. "Yuh'd better be savin' yer money."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cregan was looking at the thick china with a sort of aggrieved
+despondence. (It was almost the expression of a bereaved mother looking
+at one of her neighbor's children and thinking it a healthy, ugly brat
+whom nobody would have missed!) She stared at the bare walls and the
+bare tables of the restaurant, and found the place, by comparison with
+her own cozy flat, as unhome-like as the waiting-room of a railroad
+station&mdash;the waiting-room of a railroad station when you have said
+good-bye to your past and the train has not yet arrived to carry you to
+your future.</p>
+
+<p>As her pancakes were served to her, she bent over the plate to hide a
+tear that trickled down her nose. It splashed on the piece of food that
+she raised to her mouth. She ate it&mdash;tear and all.</p>
+
+<p>"An' them no bigger than the top of a tomato can!" Mrs. Byrne was
+muttering.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cregan ate, and the food helped, to stop her tears. It was the
+strong coffee, at last, that brought her back her voice. "If it'd b'en
+<i>him</i>, he'd 'a' gone an' got drunk," she said, wiping her cheeks with
+her napkin. "The men have the best of it. Us women have to take it all
+starin' sober."</p>
+
+<p>"They're no more than children," Mrs. Byrne replied, "an' they're to be
+treated as such. Sure, Cregan couldn't live without yuh. He'd have no
+buttons to his pants in a week."</p>
+
+<p>"An' him!" Mrs. Cregan cried. "Iver, since the Raypublicuns got licked,
+there's be'n no gettin' on with him at all. Thim Sunday papers 've
+toorned his head. He's all blather about his rights an' his wrongs. Th'
+other moornin' didn't I try to get on his bus from the wrong side o' the
+crossin', an' he bawls at me: 'Th' other side! Th' other side! Yuh're no
+better than any one ilse!' An' I had to chase through the mud after him!
+The little wizened runt! He's talkin' like an arnachist! An' that's why
+he smashed me dish. He'll have no one say 'No' to 'im.... Ah, Mrs.
+Byrne, niver marry a man older than yersilf."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank yuh," Mrs. Byrne replied with hoarse sarcasm. "I'm not likely to,
+at my age." She added, consolingly: "Cregan's young fer his years.
+Drivin' a Fift' Avenah bus is fine, preservin', outdoor work."</p>
+
+<p>"It is <i>that!</i>" And Mrs. Cregan's tone remarked that the fact was the
+more to be deplored. "He'll be crankier an' crabbeder the older he
+grows." She dipped to her coffee and swallowed hard.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Byrne had screwed up her eyes to squint at an idea that could not
+well be looked in the face. When she spoke it was to say slyly: "God
+forbid! But they do go off sometimes in a puff. He looks as if he'd live
+fer long enough, thank Heaven. But yuh never can tell."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 185px;">
+<img src="images/illus0354.jpg" width="185" height="400" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cregan blinked, held her hand for a moment, and then began hastily
+to fill her mouth with food. The silence that ensued was long enough to
+take on an appearance of guilt.</p>
+
+<p>It was long enough, too, for Mrs. Byrne to "contrive a procedure."</p>
+
+<p>"Yuh never can tell," she began, "unless yuh have doin's with the
+devil&mdash;like them gipsies that see what's comin' by lookin' in the flat
+o' yer hand. There's one o' them aroun' the corner, an' they say she
+told Minnie Doyle the name o' the man she was to marry. An' he married
+her, at that!" Mrs. Cregan looked blank. Mrs. Byrne leaned forward to
+her. "I never whispered it to a livin' soul but yerself&mdash;but it was her
+told Mrs. Gunn that her last was to be a boy. A good month ahead! An'
+when she saw it was true she had no peace o' mind till she heard the
+priest say the words over the poor child an' saw that the sprinkle o'
+holy water didn't bubble off him like yuh'd sprinkled it on a hot
+stove." Mrs. Cregan's vacant regard had slowly gathered a gleam of
+startled intelligence. "An' if I was yerself, Mrs. Cregan&mdash;not knowin'<!-- Page 234 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>
+where I was to go to, ner how I was to live&mdash;I'd go an' have a talk with
+her before I went further, d'yuh see?"</p>
+
+<p>"God forbid! 'Tis a mortal sin."</p>
+
+<p>"'Tis not. When I told Father Dumphy what I'd done, he called me an ol'
+fool an' gave me an extry litany fer penance. What's a litany!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'd be scared o' me life!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yuh w'd not. Come along with me. I was goin'. I got troubles o' me own.
+Never mind that. There's nothin' to be scared of. Nothin' at all. No
+one'll see us. I been there meself, many's the time, an' no one knows
+it."</p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>Mrs. Byrne entered the "reception rooms" of Madame Wampa, "clairvoyant,
+palmist, and card-reader," with the propitiatory smile of the woman who
+knows she is doing wrong but is prepared to argue that there is "no
+great harm into it." She was followed by Mrs. Cregan, as guiltily
+reverential as if she were an altar boy who had been persuaded to join
+in some mischievous trespass on the "sanctuary." Madame Wampa received
+them, professionally insolent in her indifference. Mrs. Byrne explained
+that she wanted only a "small card reading" for twenty-five cents.
+Madame Wampa said curtly: "Sit down!"</p>
+
+<p>They sat down.</p>
+
+<p>She had been a music-hall singer when her husband was a sleight-of-hand
+artist, "The Great Malino, the Wizard of Milan." Her voice had long
+since left her; she had nothing of her beauty but its yellow ruins; and
+her life was made up of the consideration of two great grievances:
+first, that her husband was always idle, and second, that her landlord
+overcharged her for her rooms on account of the nature of her
+"business."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 198px;">
+<img src="images/illus0355.jpg" width="198" height="400" alt="MADAME WAMPA" title="" />
+<span class="caption">MADAME WAMPA</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>She saw nothing in Mrs. Byrne and Mrs. Cregan but their inability to
+help her pay her rent. She said: "I give a full trance readin' with
+names, dates, and all questions answered, for a dollar, or a full card
+readin' for fifty cents. It's impossible to tell much for a quarter."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Byrne shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>Madame Wampa said "Very well," in a tone of haughty resignation. She
+turned to a booth that had been made of turkey-red chintz in one corner
+of the room. She lit a small red lamp and sat down before a little
+bamboo table. A toy angel from a Christmas tree hung above her. A
+stuffed alligator sat up, on its hind legs, beside her&mdash;a porcelain bell
+hung on a red ribbon about its neck&mdash;to grin with a cheerful uncanniness
+on the rigmaroles of magic.</p>
+
+<p>She said: "Come!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Byrne entered the gipsy tent, and Mrs. Cregan was left alone in the
+atmosphere of a bespangled past reduced to its lowest terms of
+imposture. There were strings of Indian corn hanging from the ceiling,
+Chinese coins and rabbits' feet on the walls, a horseshoe wrapped in
+tinfoil over the door, and a collection of absurdly grotesque
+bric-&agrave;-brac on shelves and tables. There were necklaces of lucky beads
+for sale, and love charms in the shape of small glass hearts enclosing
+imitation shamrocks, and dream books and manuals of palmistry and gipsy
+cards for fortune-telling, and photographs of Madame Wampa in a gorgeous
+evening dress trimmed with feathers. Over all was a smoky odor of
+kerosene from an oil heater.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cregan looked from side to side with a vaguely worried feeling that
+it must take a power of dusting and wiping to keep such a clutter of
+things clean; and this feeling gradually rose into her consciousness
+above the dull stupefaction of her grief.</p>
+
+<p>Madame Wampa, in the chintz tent, recited without expression: "Though
+you travel east or west, may your luck be the best." She dropped her
+voice to a toneless mutter about a "journey," and some papers that were
+to be signed, and a "false" dark woman who pretended to be Mrs. Byrne's
+friend, but would do her an injury.<!-- Page 235 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cregan sat as if she were waiting for her turn to enter a
+confessional, her hands folded, her head dropped. She heard Mrs. Byrne
+whispering hoarsely, but she did not listen.</p>
+
+<p>Madame Wampa said, at last, wearily: "Very well. Send her in."</p>
+
+<p>She shuffled her cards and sighed. She was professionally acquainted
+with many griefs, and she took her toll of them. They meant no more to
+her than sickness does to a quack. She looked up at Mrs. Cregan's
+entrance almost absent-mindedly.</p>
+
+<p>But there was, at once, something so helplessly stricken about the
+woman's plump despair, so infantile, so touchingly ridiculous, that
+Madame Wampa even smiled faintly and moved the bamboo table to let Mrs.
+Cregan squeeze into the chair that waited her. She sat down and held out
+her money in her palm. Madame Wampa took her hand. "I will tell you,"
+she said. "I will see it in your hand."</p>
+
+<p>She crossed the palm three times with the coin, and began in the
+monotonous voice and with the expressionless face of the fakir: "You are
+married. Many years. I see many years. You have not been happy. Monday
+is your unlucky day. Do not begin anything on Monday. You are thinkin'
+of takin' a journey&mdash;somethin'&mdash;some change. It will not end well. You
+had better remain without the change&mdash;whatever it is. There is a man&mdash;a
+man who has horses&mdash;who drives horses, perhaps. I see horses. He will
+meet with an accident&mdash;I think, a runaway&mdash;a collision, perhaps. He will
+be hurt. He will be&mdash;hurt. Yes. He is an old man. It will be bad. He may
+die. Perhaps. He is a relative&mdash;related to you. You must beware of
+animals. One will do you an injury. You will never be rich&mdash;but
+comfortable. The best of your life is comin'. You will have your wish."</p>
+
+<p>She had finished, but Mrs. Cregan did not move. She had drawn back in
+her chair. Her mouth had loosened; her hand lay limp on the table; all
+her intelligence seemed to have concentrated in her eyes in an
+expression of guilty and horrified surprise. She said faintly: "Is't
+Cregan?"</p>
+
+<p>Madame Wampa shrugged one shoulder in her red kimono. "The lines do not
+say." She blew out the lamp and rose from the table. "That is all. It is
+impossible to tell much for a quarter. I give a full trance readin',
+with names, dates, and all questions answered&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cregan "blessed" herself,&mdash;with the sign of the cross,&mdash;gasped,
+"God forgi' me!" and blundered out into the room. Mrs. Byrne cried:
+"What's wrong?" Mrs. Cregan did not hear. She stampeded to the door in
+the ponderous fright of a panic-stricken elephant. Her one thought was
+to find a place where she might get on her knees.... Cregan! It was
+himself! It was Dinny! Killed, maybe! She had blasphemed against the
+Church and Father Dumphy, and she must pray. She must pray for herself
+and for Cregan. She would "take back" everything she had said. She would
+never leave him. She would be good.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Byrne tugged at her cape. "Whist! Whist! What's come over yuh,
+woman? What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's Dinny!"</p>
+
+<p>That was all that could be had out of her. Even when she reached her
+home again, and Mrs. Byrne followed her in, afraid of leaving the
+frightened woman alone lest she should "blab" the whole secret to the
+first person she met,&mdash;even then Mrs. Cregan could not speak until she
+had gathered up the broken dishes and propped the broken chair against
+the wall, as frantically as if she were trying to conceal the evidence
+of a crime. Then she sank down on a sofa and burst into tears. "The poor
+creature!" she wept. "The poor ol' man. Poor Dinny!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Byrne folded her arms. "Mary Cregan," she said, in hoarse disgust,
+"when yuh've done makin' a fool o' yerself, I'll trouble yuh to listen
+to <i>me</i>. <i>Now!</i> If y' ever breathe a word o' this to Cregan, he'll laugh
+himself blind! Mind yuh that! He'll not believe yuh. No one'll believe
+yuh. No one! An' if yuh don't want somethin' turrible to happen, yuh'll
+say nothin', but yuh'll behave yerself like a decent married woman an'
+go to church an' say yer prayers against trouble. That woman with the
+cards says whatever th' old Nick puts into her head to say."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cregan cried: "She saw it in me hand!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Byrne drew herself up like a prophetess. "Dip yer hand in holy
+water, an' yuh'll hear no more of it. Now, then. Behave yerself."</p>
+
+<p>"I was wishin' it!" she wailed. "I was wishin' somethin' 'd happen to
+him to leave me free here in m' own home!"</p>
+
+<p>"An' that," Mrs. Byrne said, "is the judgment o' heaven on yuh fer
+carin' more fer yer dishes than yuh did fer yer husband. Yuh're a good
+manager, Mrs. Cregan, but yuh've been a dang poor wife. Think of yer man
+first an' yer house after, an' yuh'll be a happier woman, I tell yuh."</p>
+
+<p>"I will that. I will," Mrs. Cregan wept, "if he's spared to me."</p>
+
+<p>"Never fear," Mrs. Byrne said drily. "He'll be spared to yuh."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>And he <i>has</i> been spared to her. At first he was suspicious of her
+subdued manner and remorseful<!-- Page 236 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> gentleness; and for a long time he
+watched her, very warily, with an eye for treachery. Then he understood
+that she had succumbed to his masterful handling of her, and he was
+masculinely proud of his conquest.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 318px;">
+<img src="images/illus0356.jpg" width="318" height="400" alt="&quot;MRS. CREGAN SAT AS IF SHE WERE WAITING FOR HER TURN TO
+ENTER A CONFESSIONAL.&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;MRS. CREGAN SAT AS IF SHE WERE WAITING FOR HER TURN TO
+ENTER A CONFESSIONAL.&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cregan is beginning to hope that she has warded off the predicted
+bad fortune by her devoutness, but she still has her fears. "Twas the
+doin's o' the divil," she says to Mrs. Byrne.</p>
+
+<p>"He had a hand in it, no doubt," Mrs. Byrne agrees. "An' how's Cregan?"
+she says, "Well, I'm glad o' that.... An' the new dishes?... Good luck
+to them. Yuh're off early to church again."<!-- Page 237 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="YOUNG_HENRY_AND_THE_OLD_MAN" id="YOUNG_HENRY_AND_THE_OLD_MAN"></a>YOUNG HENRY AND THE OLD MAN</h2>
+
+<h3>BY JOHN M. OSKISON</h3>
+
+<p>The ranchman and I were discussing courage. I had that day seen young
+Henry Thomas mount and ride a horse which had bucked in a way to impress
+the imagination. I spoke of it.</p>
+
+<p>"Was it the gray?" queried Brunner, and when I said it was, he scoffed.
+"That horse is trained to buck just the way young Henry wants him, and
+he hobbles the stirrups."</p>
+
+<p>Brunner's scepticism was disappointing. I ventured to speak of another
+instance that seemed to illustrate the nerve of Henry Thomas:</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't he help capture the 'Kep' Queen bunch of outlaws a few years
+ago? I've heard he showed nerve then."</p>
+
+<p>"I reckon you have." Brunner glanced across at me, then stooped to dig a
+live coal out of the ashes. He held it for half a minute before packing
+it into the bowl of his pipe, shifting it imperceptibly in his toughened
+hand as he studied the backlog. When his tobacco was burning steadily,
+he spoke:</p>
+
+<p>"I can tell you the truth about young Henry&mdash;and the old man, too." I
+thought his tone changed. "Twenty-four years ago I came to this Indian
+country. For twelve years I rode with the posses as a deputy marshal and
+for twelve years now I've been running cattle here on Cabin Creek. I've
+been all over the Territory. I know every man in the Cherokee Nation
+that ever handled a hot iron. And I know young Henry Thomas, too.</p>
+
+<p>"It was in 1882 that Queen 'went bad,' and began to hold up trains on
+the 'Katy' and 'Frisco roads. All of that fall and winter we were after
+him and his gang, but we never got a sight of them. They were 'goers'
+all right, and when we came up to a two-weeks-old camp-fire they'd
+built, we thought we were lucky.</p>
+
+<p>"For six months after the first of the year they did nothing. We heard
+that Queen was in California. Then, in June, 1883, while I was at
+Muscogee, I got a telegram from 'Cap' White asking me to report at once
+to him at Red Oak. Paden Tolbert and I caught the eleven o'clock train
+up, dropping off at Red Oak at one in the morning. 'Cap' met us, told us
+he had two men ready, and that the five of us would start for Pryor
+Creek at once.</p>
+
+<p>"It was a fifteen-mile ride. We planned to pick up four men from the
+ranches on the way down, and get to 'Kep' Queen's camp at daylight. We
+had been told that there were five men in the camp, that they had been
+in the Pryor Creek woods for two days, and that it was their plan to
+hold up the flyer from the north next evening. 'Cap' White was sure of
+his information, and he had decided upon the men he wanted from the
+ranches. The two Thomases&mdash;old man Henry and young Henry&mdash;were picked
+out, for there was no one else in the family except a younger brother of
+eighteen, who has since died. 'Bud' Ryder and Jim Kelso were the other
+two&mdash;both good on horses and handy with a gun.</p>
+
+<p>"'Cap' was proud of his posse when he finally got us together. The
+Thomases came out and joined us like bees a-swarming. The young fellow
+was all up in the air with excitement, like a boy going to a circus. He
+was so brash that at first we couldn't keep him from riding on ahead of
+the rest of us; you'd think he wanted to bring in the bunch all by
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>"That was all right; brash, eager young fellows ain't always so brave
+when trouble begins, but they steady into good fighters. It's hard
+enough to get 'em that want to go after a man like 'Cap' Queen at all."</p>
+
+<p>Brunner told me then of the fight in the woods at daybreak. It was his
+summary of young Henry Thomas that interested me.</p>
+
+<p>One of the men whom White took from Red Oak led the posse to the camp on
+Pryor Creek. It was on a ledge on a hillside. The fires had been built
+under a jutting rock. Only a bush wren could have hidden its nest more
+completely&mdash;Bruce had been lucky in spying it out. He told White that
+there was but one unprotected approach&mdash;a long unused trail that led
+down from the cliff-top and ended in a briar tangle fifty feet above the
+ledge. That trail, it was evident, 'Kep' Queen did not know existed.</p>
+
+<p>Young Thomas had ridden with Brunner, seeking him out, as the novice
+always seeks out the veteran, to practise his valorous speeches<!-- Page 238 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> upon.
+For four hours young Thomas talked about bravery, with illustrations.
+From one incident to another he skipped, for the history of outlawry
+west of St. Louis, in the last generation, was more familiar to him than
+many another topic he had gathered from books. Brunner could have set
+him right on the facts many times, but what was the use?</p>
+
+<p>After a time the youngster's monologue became a sort of soothing hum,
+for which the other was grateful. "I was cross and sleepy and chilly and
+nervous," Brunner explained, "and the boy's gabble rested me."</p>
+
+<p>I gathered that the young man was more excited than he cared to confess,
+even to himself. He talked, as others whistle, to "keep up his courage."
+Yet the implication that he needed distraction or stimulation would have
+angered him. Youth and courage are twins, or should be, and a man of
+twenty-two takes it for granted. At forty, a man may confess to turning
+tail and yet save his self-respect. I had heard Brunner tell of "back
+downs" that would have shamed a young village constable, and it had
+never occurred to me to question his courage.</p>
+
+<p>It was only in the last mile of their ride that the chatter of young
+Thomas really became audible to Brunner.</p>
+
+<p>"I woke up," he said, "and actually listened to him. I don't remember
+exactly what he was saying, but this was the idea: 'All of you fellows
+that chase outlaws make too much fuss about it.' Well, some of us do,
+though the newspapers and the wind-bags that follow us around make ten
+times the fuss we do. He went on to say that the only way to nab a
+horse-thief or an express robber was to go right up to him, don't you
+know, like the little boy went up to the sign-post that he thought was a
+ghost.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a good theory and generally works. I told him so, and then
+apologized for doing any other way. The way I thought about this
+business of a deputy marshal's was the way an old soldier thinks about
+war. I was hired to get the criminals, and not to be caught by the
+criminals, to shoot the bad man, if I had to, but not to be shot by the
+bad man if there was any way to help it. One way to help it is to run
+and hide. It's a good way, too, for I've tried it."</p>
+
+<p>The young man roused Brunner's curiosity. It was possible that he might
+be of the exceptional breed that puts a fine theory to the test of
+action.</p>
+
+<p>"I decided to watch him," the ranchman told me, "and see if he would
+play up to his big talk. When we left our ponies, half a mile from the
+camp, I pretended to argue with 'Cap' White, told him he ought to leave
+young Thomas with the horses and not get such a boy as that all shot
+up. 'Cap' caught my point and begged him to stay, but, of course, he
+wouldn't hear of it. 'I'll stick to Brunner,' says he.</p>
+
+<p>"'All right,' says I, 'come on.'</p>
+
+<p>"When we started afoot, we trailed out single file, and I noticed that
+old man Thomas waited for the boy and me to pass him, dropping in right
+behind his son. 'Cap' was in front, then Bruce, then Paden Tolbert, then
+Ryder and Kelso, and then I and the Thomases. The old man was at the
+tail of the procession.</p>
+
+<p>"Old man Thomas was the kind that you never think about one way or the
+other. You said to yourself that he would do his share, whatever it
+amounted to, and you wouldn't have to bother about him. That's your
+notion of him, ain't it?"</p>
+
+<p>It <i>was</i> my notion of the older Thomas. I don't think a more commonplace
+looking man ever lived. Brunner told me that he had not changed in
+fourteen years.</p>
+
+<p>"'Young Henry swells around and talks big; the old man he says nothing
+and chaws tobacco,' That's the way people size 'em up around here."
+Brunner thus confirmed my own impression of the pair.</p>
+
+<p>"What a man can see out of the back of his head," Brunner went on, "is a
+lot different from what comes in front of his eyes. He feels a lot that
+don't make a sound and that ain't visible. I did see, out of the corner
+of my eye, that young Henry Thomas was dropping behind me little by
+little, but I didn't see why it was he moved up again. I know why,
+though. The old man had ordered him up&mdash;not in words, you understand,
+for I could have heard a whisper in the still dawn, the way we were
+snaking it over the trail. From that time on, every foot of the way, the
+old man drove the boy. You ask me how, and I can't tell you. There
+wasn't a word, not a motion that I could see, but all the time it was
+one man driving the other as plain as could be. And it wasn't easy. I
+felt that young Henry was worse than balky, that he would have broke
+through the bushes and run off screaming if that old man had taken his
+eyes off of him for ten seconds.</p>
+
+<p>"A quarter of a mile it was, and we went slow&mdash;twenty feet forward
+picking our way, then the eight of us would stop to listen. If you ever
+get a chance, ask young Henry how long that trail was. If he don't stop
+to think, he'll tell you we crawled through the bushes for five miles,
+but if he remembers his part as the hero of the fight, he'll say, 'Oh,
+we sneaked a hundred yards or so before lighting into Queen's bunch.'"</p>
+
+<p>The trail from above ended in a briar tangle<!-- Page 239 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> fifty feet up the hill
+from the ledge on which four of the five outlaws slept. The fifth man,
+posted as a sentry, was on the lower trail, somewhere out of sight of
+the party led by "Cap" White. When the deputies came up to the briars,
+therefore, they could see no one. As soon as the four sleepers came out
+of shelter, however, White's men could cover them with their guns.</p>
+
+<p>What had to be done, obviously, was to rouse the four outlaws without
+revealing the presence of the deputies above. It could be done by some
+one in the woods below the ledge. But the outpost was down there to
+reckon with. They could not all be trapped merely by waiting, for they
+would come out, after waking, one by one; and White wanted the whole
+bunch.</p>
+
+<p>It was decided that three men should be sent, by a round-about trail,
+down to the creek; that they should follow it up until they got opposite
+to the ledge; and that they should then rouse the sleeping men. They
+were also to find the sentry and capture him. The risk was that the
+sentry might discover the three first and spoil the chance to take him.
+The detail might be dangerous, though with luck it should prove easy.</p>
+
+<p>Brunner was assigned to lead the three. Young Thomas and Kelso were
+named by White as the other two, but Brunner, who had been aware of that
+duel on the trail, said he preferred the old man to Jim Kelso.</p>
+
+<p>They beat back for a short distance, then, separating, dropped down the
+steep hillside to the creek. In open order, they went forward quietly,
+slowly; they might come upon 'Kep' Queen's outpost at any turn. Now and
+then they came in sight of one another. Each time Brunner saw that the
+old man was edging closer to his son. Still there was no word
+spoken&mdash;only a grim old man's gray eyes were fixed upon a young man's
+shifting, over-bright eyes, and the young man moved on, cautiously.</p>
+
+<p>Brunner held close to the creek bank; the old man was twenty yards away
+and moving farther out as he approached his son. So they advanced,
+abreast, until they came out upon the trail leading up to the ledge.
+Then Brunner saw old man Thomas run, with short, noiseless steps, to
+young Henry's side and point up the trail. Hidden from both and out of
+sight of what had attracted the old man's attention, Brunner yet knew
+what was happening. Farther up the trail was the sentry, half asleep in
+the chill dawn.</p>
+
+<p>Brunner saw, as he himself came up cautiously, that the old man was
+whispering to young Henry. He grasped the boy's arm, half-shoving him
+forward and pointing with his rifle. The youngster moved a step, then
+turned with a look of utter panic on his face. His father's eyes glared;
+a sort of savage anger blazed on his face. From his grip on young
+Henry's arm, the old man's hand sprang to the boy's throat. There was
+one fierce, terrible shake, a sort of gurgling scream that expressed
+terror, and protest, too, but which was scarcely audible to Brunner,
+twenty feet away. In the tone of a man enraged to the point of madness,
+old man Thomas snapped out:</p>
+
+<p>"Go on, you confounded whelp!"</p>
+
+<p>Young Henry shook himself free, his terror replaced by a sudden,
+resentful anger. Fifty yards away the sentry nodded, his back against a
+tree and his gun across his lap. Brunner saw the man now, and stepped
+aside to cover him as young Henry approached. But there was no need of
+that. The boy was swift and noiseless; before the outlaw could wake or
+move, his gun was in Henry's hand, and he heard the command, "hands up!"</p>
+
+<p>The sentry was quick-witted. He couldn't shoot, but he could yell.
+Brunner, however was ready for that. He began to bawl a reveler's song,
+popular with cowboys on a spree, and old man Thomas joined him. From
+above, it sounded as if a drunken riot had broken out, in which the
+outpost's warning shout became only a meaningless discord. The babel
+brought the four sleeping men out of their blankets. They listened a
+moment, then stepped out in view of the posse in the briars.</p>
+
+<p>As Brunner came up, old man Thomas turned to face him. On his seamed
+face the sweat had almost dried, but when he shoved his hat up with his
+forearm, his sleeve came away from his forehead damp. The compelling
+glitter in the gray eyes turned to a challenging stare. Brunner met it,
+then glanced up the trail towards young Thomas and his captive.</p>
+
+<p>"He got him all right," said Brunner.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," the old man triumphed, "my boy got him. He captured 'Kep' Queen
+himself."</p>
+
+<p>"I reckon you've heard young Henry's story of how he got 'Kep' Queen,"
+Brunner finished. "If you've ever talked with him when he was out of
+sight of the old man, I know you have. What I've told you to-night is
+what old man Henry could tell if he wanted to. But he never will. As I
+said awhile ago, 'young Henry swells around and talks big; the old man
+he says nothing and chaws tobacco.'"<!-- Page 240 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="EDITORIAL" id="EDITORIAL"></a>EDITORIAL</h2>
+
+<h3>THE TRUTH OF ORCHARD'S STORY</h3>
+
+<p>McClure's Magazine printed during last summer and fall the Autobiography
+of Harry Orchard, with its confessions of wholesale assassinations
+during the labor war in the mining districts of the West. There was, at
+that time, repeated and angry denial of the truth of his story; and,
+since the acquittal of W.&nbsp;D. Haywood, secretary and treasurer of the
+Western Federation of Miners, and of George A. Pettibone, whom Orchard
+charged with being the instigators of his crimes, their adherents have,
+of course, maintained that Orchard's story has been entirely disproved.</p>
+
+<p>Logically, this does not follow. The acquittal of these two men means
+nothing more than that they were not proved guilty to the satisfaction
+of the juries trying them. Before a final judgment as to the truth or
+falsity of Orchard's statement is made, the last development in this
+matter must be thoroughly considered. On March 18, Orchard, persisting
+in his story to the last, pleaded guilty to the murder of Governor Frank
+Steunenberg, at Caldwell, Idaho, and was sentenced to be hanged&mdash;with
+the recommendation by the presiding judge that his sentence be commuted
+to life imprisonment by the Prison Board of the State. In pronouncing
+sentence upon Orchard, Judge Fremont Wood, who presided over the trials
+of both Haywood and Pettibone, expressed his belief in Orchard's story
+in a most convincing way. The parts of the Judge's statement dealing
+with Orchard's testimony, which follow, are of peculiar value to those
+desiring to arrive at a final conclusion regarding the responsibility
+for the campaign of murders which took place during the labor wars of
+the Western Federation of Miners; they are the summing up of the entire
+matter by a mind whose judicial fairness has been recognized by both
+parties in this great controversy.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"I am more than satisfied," said Judge Wood, "that the defendant
+now at the bar of this court awaiting final sentence has not only
+acted in good faith in making the disclosures that he did, but that
+he also testified fully and fairly to the whole truth, withholding
+nothing that was material and declaring nothing that had not
+actually taken place.</p>
+
+<p>"During the two trials the testimony of the defendant covered a
+long series of transactions involving personal relations between
+himself and many others. In the first trial he was subjected to the
+most critical cross-examination by very able counsel for at least
+six days, and I do not now recall that at any point he contradicted
+himself in any material manner, but on the other hand disclosed his
+connection with many crimes that were probably not known to the
+attorneys for the State, at least not brought out by them on the
+direct examination of the witness.</p>
+
+<p>"Upon the second trial the same testimony underwent a most thorough
+and critical examination and in no particular was there any
+discrepancy in a material matter between the testimony given upon
+the latter trial as compared with the testimony given by the same
+witness at the former trial. I am of the opinion that no man living
+could conceive the stories of crime told by the witness and
+maintain himself under the merciless fire of the leading
+cross-examining attorneys of the country unless upon the theory
+that he was testifying to facts and to circumstances which had an
+actual existence within his own experience.</p>
+
+<p>"A child can testify truly and maintain itself on
+cross-examination. A man may be able to frame his testimony and
+testify falsely to a brief statement of facts involving a short and
+single transaction and maintain himself on cross-examination.</p>
+
+<p>"But I cannot conceive of a case where even the greatest intellect
+can conceive a story of crime covering years of duration, with
+constantly shifting scenes and changing characters, and maintain
+that story with circumstantial detail as to times, places, persons,
+and particular circumstances and under as merciless a
+cross-examination as was ever given a witness in an American court
+unless the witness thus testifying was speaking truthfully and
+without any attempt either to misrepresent or conceal.... It is my
+opinion, after a careful examination of this case in all its
+details, that this defendant and the crimes which he committed were
+only the natural product and outcome of the system which he
+represented and the doctrines taught by its leaders, some of which
+were boldly proclaimed and maintained, even upon the trial of the
+defendant Haywood.</p>
+
+<p>"This defendant had evidently become imbued with the idea
+inculcated by those around him that the organized miners were
+engaged in an industrial warfare upon one side of which his own
+organization was alone represented, while on the other hand they
+were confronted with the powers of organized capital, supported by
+executive authority, and which counter organization included, or at
+least controlled, the courts, which were the final arbiters upon
+all legal questions involved.</p>
+
+<p>"With the promulgation of such doctrines it is not a difficult
+matter for some people to justify murder, arson, and other
+outrages, and I am satisfied that it was that condition of mind
+that sustained, bore up and nerved on this defendant and his
+associates in the commission of the various crimes with which he
+was connected."</p></div>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a>
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Copyright, 1908, by Ellen Terry (Mrs. Carew)</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Copyright, 1908, by The S.&nbsp;S. McClure Co. All rights reserved</i></span><br />
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Mrs. Eddy also had copies of other Quimby manuscripts in
+her possession.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> See <span class="smcap">McClure's Magazine</span>, May, 1907.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Many typical instances of Christian Science logic may be
+found in Mr. Alfred Farlow's answer to Dr. Churchman's article
+(<i>Christian Science Journal</i>, 1904). Mr. Farlow takes up Dr. Churchman's
+statement, "To deny that matter exists and assert that it is an
+illusion, is only another way of asserting its existence." Says Mr.
+Farlow: "According to this logic, when a defendant denies a charge
+brought against him in court, he is only choosing a method of asserting
+its truth."
+</p><p>
+Mr. Farlow seems to think that Mrs. Eddy arrived at her discovery of the
+non-existence of matter, not by any process of reasoning, but by
+<i>personal experience</i>. He says:
+</p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"From doubting matter and learning by experience its utter
+emptiness Mrs. Eddy began to search for the universal spiritual
+cause, and having found it through actual demonstration in spirit,
+she was obliged in consistence therewith to deny the material sense
+of existence."</p></div>
+<p>
+Mr. Farlow seems to consider the logic of this progression inevitable.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Science and Health (1898), page 375.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;" &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;" &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;" &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;" &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;" &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;392.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;" &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;" &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;" &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;" &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;" &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;46.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;" &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;" &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;" &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;" &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;" &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;379.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> Mrs. Eddy and her followers believe that she possesses an
+enlightened or spiritual understanding of the Bible and the universe,
+not common to the rest of mankind.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> This account of the Creation is taken from the first
+edition of "Science and Health." It remains practically the same in
+later editions under the chapter called "Genesis."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> Miscellaneous Writings (1896), page 51.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> "Science and Health" (1906), pages 696, 697.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> <i>Christian Science Journal</i>, September. 1898.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> <i>Christian Science Journal</i>, October, 1904.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> For an exposition of the theory upon which this work at
+Emmanuel Church is conducted, the reader is referred to a pamphlet, "The
+Healing Ministry of the Church," by the Reverend Samuel McComb, issued
+by the Emmanuel Church, Boston. For a detailed account of the method of
+healing practised there and its results, see an article, "New Phases in
+the Relation of the Church to Health," by Dr. Richard Cabot, in the
+<i>Outlook</i>, February 29, 1908. The reader who is interested in the
+principle and possibilities of psychotherapeutics or "mental healing" is
+again referred to Paul Dubois' remarkable book, "Psychical Treatment of
+Nervous Disorders."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> The reader who is interested in Quimby's teaching and
+healing is referred to "The True History of Mental Science," by Julius
+A. Dresser, published by George H. Ellis, 272 Congress Street, Boston.
+</p><p>
+Dr. Warren F. Evans, in his book, "Mental Medicine," published three
+years before the first edition of "Science and Health," said: "Disease
+being in its root a <i>wrong belief</i>, change that belief and we cure the
+disease. By faith we are thus made whole. There is a law here which the
+world will sometime understand and use in the cure of the diseases that
+afflict mankind. The late Dr. Quimby, of Portland, one of the most
+successful healers of this or any age, embraced this view of the nature
+of disease, and by a long succession of the most remarkable cures,
+effected by psychopathic remedies, at the same time proved the truth of
+the theory and the efficiency of that mode of treatment. Had he lived in
+a remote age or country, the wonderful facts which occurred in his
+practise would now have been deemed either mythical or miraculous. He
+seemed to reproduce the wonders of Gospel history. But all this was only
+an exhibition of the force of suggestion, or the action of the law of
+faith, over a patient in the impressible condition."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> Distribution of every 1000 suicides by season:
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="Footnote 17">
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td align='left'><i>Country</i></td><td align='right'><i>Summer</i></td><td align='right'><i>Spring</i></td><td align='right'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>Fall</i></td><td align='right'><i>Winter</i></td><td align='right'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>Total</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td align='left'>Denmark</td><td align='right'>312</td><td align='right'>284</td><td align='right'>227</td><td align='right'>177</td><td align='right'>1,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td align='left'>Belgium</td><td align='right'>301</td><td align='right'>275</td><td align='right'>229</td><td align='right'>195</td><td align='right'>1,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td align='left'>France</td><td align='right'>306</td><td align='right'>283</td><td align='right'>210</td><td align='right'>201</td><td align='right'>1,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td align='left'>Saxony</td><td align='right'>307</td><td align='right'>281</td><td align='right'>217</td><td align='right'>195</td><td align='right'>1,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td align='left'>Bavaria</td><td align='right'>308</td><td align='right'>282</td><td align='right'>218</td><td align='right'>192</td><td align='right'>1,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td align='left'>Austria</td><td align='right'>315</td><td align='right'>281</td><td align='right'>219</td><td align='right'>185</td><td align='right'>1,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td align='left'>Prussia</td><td align='right'>290</td><td align='right'>284</td><td align='right'>227</td><td align='right'>199</td><td align='right'>1,000</td></tr>
+</table></div><br />
+Durkheim, "Le Suicide," (Paris, 1897), p. 88.</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> The figures are those of Dr. Forbes Winslow for the United
+States, those of Dr. M. Gubski for Russia, those of Dr. Rehfisch (in
+<i>Der Selbsmord</i>) for Europe, and those of the Government Statistical
+Bureau for Japan.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> Durkheim, "Le Suicide" (Paris, 1897), p. 93.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> Five or six years ago, in a paper that I read before the
+Literary Society of Washington, D.&nbsp;C., I suggested this explanation of
+the high suicide rate in June. At the conclusion of the reading, a young
+Italian student, who happened to be present as a guest, came to me and
+said: "If I did not know it to be impossible, I should think that your
+explanation of June suicides had been suggested by, if not copied from,
+a letter left by a dear friend of mine who killed himself in Genoa, two
+years ago, on a beautiful evening in June. You have expressed his
+thoughts almost in the words that he used."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> For the suicide statistics embodied in this table I am
+largely indebted to the co&ouml;peration and assistance of Mr. M.&nbsp;L.
+Jacobson, of the Bureau of Statistics in Washington. In the literature
+of the subject there are no figures more recent than 1893 for most of
+the European countries. In this table they are nearly all later than
+1900.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> The figures for Europe are from the latest reports of
+government statistical bureaus, and for America from the registration
+area covered in the twelfth census.</p></div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June
+1908, by Various
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE, VOL 31 ***
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+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg's McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: January 4, 2009 [EBook #27699]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE, VOL 31 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Annie McGuire and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS FROM THE PAINTING BY ELLEN EMMET
+
+  _Copyright, 1908, by Ellen Emmet_]
+
+
+
+
+  McCLURE'S MAGAZINE
+
+  VOL. XXXI      JUNE, 1908       No. 2
+
+  MY FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA
+  THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE
+  PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND HIS WAR ON CONGRESS
+  THE CRYSTAL-GAZER
+  BOB, DEBUTANT
+  TWO PORTRAITS BY GILBERT STUART
+  MARY BAKER G. EDDY
+  HER FRUITS
+  THE KEY TO THE DOOR
+  THE WAYFARERS
+  THE PROBLEMS OF SUICIDE
+  PRAIRIE DAWN
+  THE DOINGS OF THE DEVIL
+  YOUNG HENRY AND THE OLD MAN
+  EDITORIAL
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  Transcriber's Note: The Table of Contents was
+                      added by the transcriber.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+MY FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA[1]
+
+BY
+
+ELLEN TERRY
+
+
+The first time that there was any talk of my going to America was, I
+think, in 1874, when I was playing in "The Wandering Heir." Dion
+Boucicault wanted me to go, and dazzled me with figures, but I expect
+the cautious Charles Reade influenced me against accepting the
+engagement.
+
+When I did go, in 1883, I was thirty-five and had an assured position in
+my profession. It was the first of eight tours, seven of which I went
+with Henry Irving. The last was in 1907, after his death. I also went to
+America one summer on a pleasure trip. The tours lasted three months at
+least, seven months at most. After a rough calculation, I find that I
+have spent not quite five years of my life in America. Five out of sixty
+is not a large proportion, yet I often feel that I am half American.
+This says a good deal for the hospitality of a people who can make a
+stranger feel so completely at home in their midst. Perhaps it also says
+something for my adaptableness!
+
+"When we do not speak of things with a partiality full of love, what we
+say is not worth being repeated." That was the answer of a courteous
+Frenchman, who was asked for his impressions of a country. In any case
+it is almost imprudent to give one's impressions of America. The country
+is so vast and complex that even those who have amassed mountains of
+impressions soon find that there still are mountains more. I have lived
+in New York, Boston, and Chicago for a month at a time, and have felt
+that to know any of these great towns even superficially would take a
+year. I have become acquainted with this and that class of Americans,
+but I realize that there are thousands of other classes that remain
+unknown.
+
+[Illustration: _Copyrighted by Window & Grove From the collections of
+Miss Frances Johnson and Mrs. Evelyn Smalley_
+
+ELLEN TERRY OPHELIA, AND HENRIETTA MARIA, THREE PARTS WHICH SHE PLAYED
+ON THE FIRST AMERICAN TOUR]
+
+
+_The Unknown Dangers of America_
+
+I set out in 1883 from Liverpool on board the "Britannic" with the fixed
+conviction that I should never, never return. For six weeks before we
+started the word America had only to be breathed to me, and I burst into
+floods of tears! I was leaving my children, my bullfinch, my parrot, my
+"aunt" Boo, whom I never expected to see again alive, just because she
+said I never would, and I was going to face the unknown dangers of the
+Atlantic and of a strange, barbarous land. Our farewell performances in
+London had cheered me up a little--though I wept copiously at every
+one--by showing us that we should be missed. Henry Irving's position
+seemed to be confirmed and ratified by all that took place before his
+departure. The dinners he had to eat, the speeches he had to make and to
+listen to, were really terrific! One speech at the Rabelais Club had, it
+was said, the longest peroration on record. It was this kind of thing:
+"Where is our friend Irving going? He is not going like Nares to face
+the perils of the far North. He is not going like A---- to face
+something else. He is not going to China," etc.--and so on. After about
+the hundredth "he is not going," Lord Houghton, who was one of the
+guests, grew very impatient and interrupted the orator with: "Of course
+he isn't! He's going to New York by the Cunard Line. It'll take him
+about a week!"
+
+
+_New York Before the "Sky-scrapers"_
+
+My first voyage was a voyage of enchantment to me. The ship was laden
+with pig-iron, but she rolled and rolled and rolled. She could never
+roll too much for me. I have always been a splendid sailor, and I feel
+jolly at sea. The sudden leap from home into the wilderness of waves
+does not give me any sensation of melancholy.
+
+What I thought I was going to see when I arrived in America, I hardly
+remember. I had a vague idea that all American women wore red flannel
+shirts and bowie knives and that I might be sandbagged in the street!
+From somewhere or other I had derived an impression that New York was an
+ugly, noisy place.
+
+Ugly! When I first saw that marvellous harbour I nearly cried--it was so
+beautiful. Whenever I come now to the unequalled approach to New York I
+wonder what Americans must think of the approach from the sea to London.
+How different are the mean, flat, marshy banks of the Thames, and the
+wooden toy light-house at Dungeness, to the vast, spreading harbour,
+with its busy multitude of steam boats and ferry boats, its wharf upon
+wharf, and its tall statue of Liberty dominating all the racket and
+bustle of the sea traffic of the world!
+
+That was one of the few times in America when I did not miss the poetry
+of the past. The poetry of the present, gigantic, colossal, and
+enormous, made me forget it. The "sky-scrapers," so splendid in the
+landscape now, did not exist in 1883; but I find it difficult to divide
+my early impressions from my later ones. There was Brooklyn Bridge,
+though, hung up high in the air like a vast spider's web. Between 1883
+and 1893 I noticed a great change in New York and other cities. In ten
+years they seemed to have grown with the energy of tropical plants. But
+between 1893 and 1907 I saw no evidence of such feverish increase. It is
+possible that the Americans are arriving at a stage when they can no
+longer beat the record! There is a vast difference between one of the
+old New York brownstone houses and one of the fourteen-storied buildings
+near the river, but between this and the Times Square Building or the
+still more amazing Flatiron Building, which is said to oscillate at the
+top--it is so far from the ground--there is very little difference. I
+hear that they are now beginning to build downwards into the earth, but
+this will not change the appearance of New York for a long time.
+
+[Illustration: _From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley_
+
+HENRY IRVING AS MATHIAS IN "THE BELLS"
+
+THE PART IN WHICH IRVING MADE HIS FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA]
+
+I had not to endure the wooden shed in which most people landing in
+America have to struggle with the custom-house officials--a struggle as
+brutal as a "round in the ring" as Paul Bourget describes it. We were
+taken off the "Britannic" in a tug, and Mr. Abbey, Lawrence Barrett, and
+many other friends met us--including the much-dreaded reporters.
+
+[Illustration: _Lent by The Century Co._
+
+THE REJECTED DESIGN FOR A COLUMBIAN MEDAL MADE BY AUGUSTUS
+SAINT-GAUDENS]
+
+When we landed, I drove to the Hotel Dam, Henry to the Brevoort House.
+There was no Diana on the top of the Madison Square Building then--the
+building did not exist, to cheer the heart of a new arrival as the first
+evidence of _beauty_ in the city. There were horse trams instead of
+cable cars; but a quarter of a century has not altered the peculiarly
+dilapidated carriages in which one drives from the dock, the muddy
+sidewalks, and the cavernous holes in the cobble-paved streets. Had the
+elevated railway, the first sign of _power_ that one notices after
+leaving the boat, begun to thunder through the streets? I cannot
+remember New York without it.
+
+[Illustration: _Lent by The Century Co._
+
+THE BAS-RELIEF PORTRAIT OF BASTIEN-LEPAGE MODELED BY AUGUSTUS
+SAINT-GAUDENS. SAINT-GAUDENS GAVE A CAST OF THE PORTRAIT TO MISS TERRY]
+
+I missed then, as I miss now, the numberless _hansoms_ of London plying
+in the streets for hire. People in New York get about in the cars,
+unless they have their own carriages. The hired carriage has no reason
+for existing, and when it does, it celebrates its unique position by
+charging two dollars for a journey which in London would not cost fifty
+cents!
+
+[Illustration: THE BAS-RELIEF PORTRAIT OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON MODELED
+BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS FOR THE ST. GILES CATHEDRAL, EDINBURGH.
+SAINT-GAUDENS GAVE A CAST OF THIS PORTRAIT TO MISS TERRY'S DAUGHTER,
+EDITH CRAIG]
+
+
+_Irving Brings Shakespeare to America_
+
+There were very few theatres in New York when we first went there. All
+that part of the city which is now "up town" did not exist, and what was
+then "up" is now more than "down" town. The American stage has changed
+almost as much. Even then there was a liking for local plays which
+showed the peculiarities of the different States, but they were more
+violent and crude than now. The original American genius and the true
+dramatic pleasure of the people is, I believe, in such plays, where very
+complete observation of certain phases of American life and very real
+pictures of manners are combined with comedy almost childlike in its
+naivete. The sovereignty of the young girl which is such a marked
+feature in social life is reflected in American plays. This is by the
+way. What I want to make clear is that in 1883 there was no living
+American drama as there is now, that such productions of romantic plays
+and Shakespeare as Henry Irving brought over from England, were unknown,
+and that the extraordinary success of our first tours would be
+impossible now. We were the first, and we were pioneers and we were
+_new_. To be new is everything in America. Such palaces as the Hudson
+Theatre, New York, were not dreamed of when we were at the Star, which
+was, however, quite equal to any theatre in London, in front of the
+footlights. The stage itself, the lighting appliances, and the
+dressing-rooms were inferior.
+
+[Illustration: HENRY IRVING AS HAMLET
+
+FROM THE STATUE BY E. ONSLOW FORD, R. A., IN THE GUILDHALL OF THE CITY OF
+LONDON]
+
+[Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS IMOGEN
+
+DRAWN BY ALMA-TADEMA FOR MISS TERRY'S JUBILEE IN 1906]
+
+[Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS PORTIA
+
+FROM THE PAINTING BY SIR JOHN MILLAIS, R. A.]
+
+
+_Our First Appearance Before an American Audience_
+
+Henry made his first appearance in America in "The Bells." He was not at
+his best on the first night, but he could be pretty good even when he
+was not at his best. I watched him from a box. Nervousness made the
+company very slow. The audience was a splendid one--discriminating and
+appreciative. We felt that the Americans _wanted_ to like us. We felt in
+a few days so extraordinarily at home. The first sensation of entering a
+foreign city was quickly wiped out.
+
+[Illustration: WILLIAM WINTER--
+
+ONE OF THE FIRST CRITICS TO WELCOME IRVING TO THIS COUNTRY]
+
+On the second night in New York it was my turn. "Command yourself--this
+is the time to show you can act!" I said to myself as I went on the
+stage of the Star Theatre, dressed as Henrietta Maria. But I could not
+command myself. I played badly and cried too much in the last act. But
+the people liked me, and they liked the play, perhaps because it was
+historical, and of history the Americans are passionately fond. The
+audience took many points which had been ignored in London. I had always
+thought Henry as Charles I. most moving when he made that involuntary
+effort to kneel to his subject, Moray, but the Lyceum audiences never
+seemed to notice it. In New York the audience burst out into the most
+sympathetic, spontaneous applause that I have ever heard in a theatre.
+
+
+_American Clothes_
+
+My impression of the way the American women dressed in 1883 was not
+favourable. Some of them wore Indian shawls and diamond ear-rings. They
+dressed too grandly in the street and too dowdily in the theatre. All
+this has changed. The stores in New York are now the most beautiful in
+the world, and the women are dressed to perfection. They are as clever
+at the _demi-toilette_ as the Parisian, and the extreme neatness and
+smartness of their walking gowns is very refreshing after the floppy,
+blowsy, trailing dresses, accompanied by the inevitable feather boa, of
+which English girls, who used to be so tidy and "tailor-made," now seem
+so fond. The universal white "waist" is so pretty and trim on the
+American girl. It is one of the distinguishing marks of a land of the
+free, a land where "class" hardly exists. The girl in the store wears
+the white waist; so does the rich girl on Fifth Avenue. It costs
+anything from seventy-five cents to fifty dollars!
+
+London, when I come back from America, always seems at first like an
+ill-lighted village, strangely tame, peaceful, and backward. Above all,
+I miss the sunlight of America, and the clear blue skies of an evening.
+
+"Are you glad to get back?" said an English friend.
+
+"Very."
+
+"It's a land of vulgarity, isn't it?"
+
+"Oh, yes, if you mean by that a wonderful land--a land of sunshine and
+light, of happiness, of faith in the future!" I answered. I saw no
+misery or poverty there. Everyone looked happy. What hurts me on coming
+back to England is the _hopeless_ look on so many faces; the dejection
+and apathy of the people standing about in the streets. Of course there
+is poverty in New York, but not among the Americans. The Italians, the
+Russians, the Poles--all the host of immigrants washed in daily across
+the harbour--these are poor, but you don't see them unless you go Bowery
+ways and even then you can't help feeling that in their sufferings there
+is always hope. Vulgarity? I saw little of it. I thought that the people
+who had amassed large fortunes used their wealth beautifully. When a man
+is rich enough to build himself a big, new house, he remembers some old
+house which he once admired, and he has it imitated with all the
+technical skill and care that can be had in America. This accounts for
+the odd jumble of styles in Fifth Avenue, along the lake-side in
+Chicago, in the new avenues in St. Louis and elsewhere. One
+millionaire's house is modelled on a French chateau, another on an old
+Colonial house in Virginia, another on a monastery in Mexico, another is
+like an Italian _palazzo_. And their imitations are never weak or
+pretentious. The architects in America seem to me to be far more able
+than ours, or else they have a freer hand and more money.
+
+
+_The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens_
+
+It is sad to remember that Mr. Stanford White was one of the best of
+these splendid architects. It was Stanford White with Saint-Gaudens,
+that great sculptor, whose work dignifies nearly all the great cities in
+America, who had most to do with the Exhibition buildings of the World's
+Fair in Chicago in 1893. It was odd to see that fair dream city rising
+out of the lake, so far more beautiful in its fleeting loveliness than
+the Chicago of the stock-yards and the pit which had provided the money
+for its beauty. The millionaires did not interfere with the artists at
+all. They gave their thousands--and stood aside. The result was one of
+the loveliest things conceivable. Saint-Gaudens and the rest did their
+work as well as though the buildings were to endure for centuries
+instead of being burned in a year to save the trouble of pulling down!
+The World's Fair recalled to me the story of how Michelangelo carved a
+figure in snow which, says the chronicler Vasari who saw it, "was
+superb."
+
+Saint-Gaudens gave me a cast of his medallion of Bastien-Lepage, and
+wrote to a friend of mine: "Bastien had '_le coeur au metier_.' So has
+Miss Terry, and I will place that saying in the frame that is to replace
+the present unsatisfactory one." He was very fastidious about this frame
+and took such a lot of trouble to get it right.
+
+It must have been very irritating to Saint-Gaudens when he fell a victim
+to that extraordinary official Puritanism which sometimes exercises a
+petty censorship over works of art in America. The medal that he made
+for the World's Fair was rejected at Washington because it had on it a
+beautiful little nude figure of a boy--holding an olive
+branch--emblematical of young America. I think a commonplace wreath and
+some lettering were substituted.
+
+Saint-Gaudens did the fine bas-relief of Robert Louis Stevenson which
+was chosen for the monument in St. Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh. He gave
+my daughter a medallion cast from this, because he knew that she was a
+great lover of Stevenson. The bas-relief was dedicated to his friend,
+Joe Evans. I knew Saint-Gaudens first through Joe Evans, an artist who,
+while he lived, was to me and to my daughter the dearest of all in
+America. His character was so fine and noble--his nature so perfect.
+Many were the birthday cards he did for me, original in design,
+beautiful in execution. Whatever he did, he put the best of himself
+into it. I wrote this in my diary the year he died:
+
+     "I heard on Saturday that our dear Joe Evans is dangerously ill.
+     Yesterday came the worst news. Joe was not happy, but he was just
+     heroic, and this world wasn't half good enough for him. I wonder if
+     he has gone to a better. I keep on getting letters about him. He
+     seems to have been so glad to die. It was like a child's funeral, I
+     am told, and all his American friends seem to have been
+     there--Saint-Gaudens, Taber, etc. A poem about the dear fellow by
+     Mr. Gilder has one very good line in which he says the grave 'might
+     snatch a brightness from his presence there.' I thought that was
+     very happy, the love of light and gladness being the most
+     remarkable thing about him, the dear sad Joe."
+
+
+_Robert Taber_
+
+Robert Taber, dear, and rather sad too, was a great friend of Joe's.
+They both came to me first in the shape of a little book in which was
+inscribed: "Never anything can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender
+it." "Upon this hint I spake," the book began. It was all the work of a
+few boys and girls who from the gallery of the Star Theatre, New York,
+had watched Irving's productions and learned to love him and me. Joe
+Evans had done a lovely picture by way of frontispiece of a group of
+eager heads hanging over the gallery's edge, his own and Taber's among
+them. Eventually Taber came to England and acted with Henry Irving in
+"Peter the Great" and other plays.
+
+Like his friend Joe, he too was heroic. His health was bad and his life
+none too happy--but he struggled on. His career was cut short by
+consumption and he died in the Adirondacks in 1904.
+
+I cannot speak of all my friends in America, or anywhere, for the matter
+of that, _individually_. My personal friends are so many, and they are
+_all_ wonderful--wonderfully staunch to me! I have "tried" them so, and
+they have never given me up as a bad job.
+
+
+_Dramatic Criticism in America_
+
+William Winter, poet, critic, and exquisite man, was one of the first to
+write of Henry with whole-hearted appreciation. But all the criticism in
+America, favourable and unfavourable, surprised us by the scholarly
+knowledge it displayed. In Chicago the notices were worthy of the
+_Temps_ or the _Journal des Debats_. There was no attempt to force the
+personality of the writer into the foreground nor to write a style that
+would attract attention to the critic and leave the thing criticised to
+take care of itself. William Winter and, of late years, Alan Dale have
+had their personalities associated with their criticisms, but they are
+exceptions. Curiously enough, the art of acting appears to bore most
+dramatic critics, the very people who might be expected to be interested
+in it. The American critics, however, at the time of our early visits,
+were keenly interested, and showed it by their observation of many
+points which our English critics had passed over. For instance, writing
+of "Much Ado about Nothing," one of the Americans said of Henry in the
+Church Scene that "something of him as a subtle interpreter of doubtful
+situations was exquisitely shown in the early part of this fine scene by
+his suspicion of Don John--felt by him alone, and expressed only by a
+quick covert look, but a look so full of intelligence as to proclaim him
+a sharer in the secret with his audience."
+
+"Wherein does the superiority lie?" wrote another critic in comparing
+our productions with those which had been seen in America up to 1884.
+"Not in the amount of money expended, but in the amount of brains; in
+the artistic intelligence and careful and earnest pains with which every
+detail is studied and worked out. Nor is there any reason why Mr. Irving
+or any other foreigner should have a monopoly of either intelligence or
+pains. They are common property and one man's money can buy them as well
+as another's. The defect in the American manager's policy heretofore has
+been that he has squandered his money upon high salaries for a few of
+his actors; and in costly, because unintelligent, expenditure for mere
+dazzle and show."
+
+
+_William Winter and His Children_
+
+William Winter soon became a great personal friend of ours, and visited
+us in England. He was one of the few _sad_ people I met in America. He
+could have sat upon the ground and "told sad stories of the deaths of
+kings" with the best. In England he loved going to see graveyards, and
+knew where every poet was buried. He was very familiar with the poetry
+of the _immediate_ past--Cowper, Coleridge, Gray, Wordsworth, Shelley,
+Keats, and the rest. He _liked_ us, so everything we did was right to
+him. He could not help being guided entirely by his feelings. If he
+disliked a thing, he had no use for it. Some men can say, "I hate this
+play, but of its kind it is admirable." Willie Winter could never take
+that unemotional point of view.
+
+His children came to stay with me in London. When we were all coming
+home from the theatre one night after Faust (the year must have been
+1886), I said to little Willie:
+
+"Well, what do you think of the play?"
+
+"Oh my!" said he, "it takes the cake."
+
+"Takes the _cake_," said his little sister scornfully. "It takes the
+ice-cream!"
+
+"Won't you give me a kiss?" said Henry to the same little girl one
+night.
+
+"No, I _won't_, with all that blue stuff on your face." (He was made up
+for Mephistopheles.) Then, after a pause, "But why--why don't you _take_
+it!" She was only five years old at the time!
+
+
+_Discovering the Southern Darkey_
+
+For quite a while during the first tour I stayed in Washington with my
+friend, Miss Olive Seward, and all the servants of that delightful
+household were coloured. This was my first introduction to the negroes,
+whose presence in the country makes America seem more foreign than
+anything to European eyes. They are more sharply divided into high and
+low types than white people, and are not in the least alike in their
+types. It is safe to call any coloured man "George." They all love it,
+perhaps because of George Washington; and most of them are really named
+George. I never met with such perfect service as they can give. _Some_
+of them are delightful. The beautiful, full voice of the "darkey" is so
+attractive--so soothing, and they are so deft and gentle. Some of the
+women are beautiful, and all the young appeared to me to be well-formed.
+As for the babies! I washed two or three little piccaninnies when I was
+in the South, and the way they rolled their gorgeous eyes at me was "too
+cute," which means, in British-English, "fascinating."
+
+At the Washington house, the servants danced a cake-walk for me--the
+coloured cook, a magnificent type, who "took the cake," saying, "That
+was because I chose a good handsome boy to dance with, Missie." They
+sang, too. Their voices were beautiful--with such illimitable power, yet
+as sweet as treacle.
+
+The little page boy had a pet of a woolly head--Henry once gave him a
+tip, a "fee," in American-English, and said: "There, that's for a new
+wig when this one is worn out," gently pulling the astrakhan-like hair.
+The tip would have bought him many wigs, I think!
+
+"Why, Uncle Tom, how your face shines to-night!" said my hostess to one
+of the very old servants.
+
+"Yes, Missie, glycerine and rose-water, Missie!"
+
+He had taken some from her dressing-table to shine up his face in honour
+of me! A shiny complexion is considered to be a great beauty among the
+blacks. The dear old man! He was very bent and very old; and looked like
+one of the logs that he used to bring in for the fire--a log from some
+hoary, lichened tree whose life was long since past. He would produce
+pins from his head when you wanted one; he had them stuck in his pad of
+white woolly hair. "Always handy then, Missie," he would say.
+
+"Ask them to sing 'Sweet Violets,' Uncle Tom."
+
+He was acting as a sort of master of the ceremonies at the entertainment
+the servants were giving me.
+
+"Don't think they know dat, Miss Olly."
+
+"Why I heard them singing it the other night!" And she hummed the tune.
+
+"Oh, dat was 'Sweet Vio-_letts_,' Miss Olly!"
+
+
+_American Women_
+
+Washington was the first city I had seen in America where the people did
+not hurry, and where the social life did not seem entirely the work of
+women. The men asserted themselves here as something more than machines
+in the background, untiringly turning out the dollars while their wives
+and daughters give luncheons and teas at which only women are present.
+
+Beautifully as the women dress, they talk very little about clothes. I
+was much struck by their culture--by the evidence that they had read far
+more and developed a more fastidious taste than most young Englishwomen.
+Yet it is all mixed up with extraordinary naivete. Their vivacity, the
+appearance, at least, of _reality_, the animation, the energy of
+American women, delighted me. They are very sympathetic, too, in spite
+of a certain callousness which comes of regarding everything in life,
+even love, as "lots of fun." I did not think that they, or the men
+either, had much natural sense of beauty. They admire beauty in a
+curious way through their intellect. Nearly every American girl has a
+cast of the winged Victory of the Louvre in her room. She makes it a
+point of her _education_ to admire it.
+
+There! I am beginning to generalize--the very thing I was resolute to
+avoid. How silly to generalize about a country which embraces such
+extremes of climate as the sharp winters of Boston and New York, and the
+warm winds of Florida which blow through palms and orange groves!
+
+
+
+
+THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE
+
+BY MARIE BELLOC LOWNDES
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTHUR G. DOVE
+
+
+James Tapster was eating his solitary, well-cooked dinner in his
+comfortable and handsome house, a house situated in one of the half-moon
+terraces which line and frame the more aristocratic side of Regent's
+Park, and which may, indeed, be said to have private grounds of their
+own, for each resident enjoys the use of a key to a portion of the Park
+entitled locally the "Inclosure."
+
+Very early in his life Mr. Tapster had made up his mind that he would
+like to live in Cumberland Crescent, and now he was living there; very
+early in his life he had decided that no one could order a plain yet
+palatable meal as well as he could himself, and now for some months past
+Mr. Tapster had given his own orders, each morning, to the cook.
+
+To-night Mr. Tapster had already eaten his fried sole, and was about to
+cut himself off a generous portion of the grilled undercut before him,
+when he heard the postman's steps hurrying around the Crescent. He rose
+with a certain quick deliberateness, and, going out into the hall,
+opened the front door just in time to avoid the rat-tat-tat. Then, the
+one letter he had expected duly in his hand, he waited till he had sat
+down again in front of his still empty plate before he broke the seal
+and glanced over the type-written sheet of note-paper:
+
+    SHORTERS COURT,
+    THROGMORTON ST.
+    November 4, 190-.
+
+    DEAR JAMES:
+
+    In reply to your letter of yesterday's date, I have been to Bedford
+    Row and seen Greenfield, and he thinks it probable that the Decree
+    will be made Absolute to-day; in that case you will have received a
+    wire before this letter reaches you.
+
+    Your affect' brother,
+    WM. A. TAPSTER.
+
+In the same handwriting as the signature were added two holograph lines:
+"Glad you have the children home again. Maud will be round to see them
+soon."
+
+Mr. Tapster read over once again the body of the letter, and there came
+upon him an instinctive feeling of intense relief; then, with a not less
+instinctive feeling of impatience, his eyes traveled down again to the
+postscript: "Maud will be round to see them soon." Well, he would see
+about that! But he did not exclaim, even mentally, as most men feeling
+as he then felt would have done, "I'll be damned if she will!" knowing
+the while that Maud certainly would.
+
+His brother's letter, though most satisfactory as regarded its main
+point, put Mr. Tapster out of conceit with the rest of his dinner; so he
+rang twice and had the table cleared, frowning at the parlor-maid as she
+hurried through her duties, and yet not daring to rebuke her for having
+neglected to answer the bell the first time he rang. After a pause, he
+rose and turned toward the door--but no, he could not face the large,
+cheerless drawing-room up-stairs; instead, he sat down by the fire, and
+set himself to consider his future and, in a more hazy sense, that of
+his now motherless children.
+
+But very soon, as generally happens to those who devote any time to that
+least profitable of occupations, Mr. Tapster found that his thoughts
+drifted aimlessly, not to the future where he would have them be, but to
+the past--that past which he desired to forget, to obliterate from his
+memory.
+
+Till rather more than a year ago few men of his age--he had then been
+sixty, he was now sixty-one--enjoyed a pleasanter and, from his own
+point of view, a better filled life than James Tapster. How he had
+scorned the gambler, the spendthrift, the adulterer--in a word, all
+those whose actions bring about their own inevitable punishment! He had
+always been self-respecting and conscientious--not a prig, mind you, but
+inclined rather to the serious than to the flippant side of life; and,
+so inclining, he had found contentment and great material prosperity.
+
+Not even in those days to which he was now looking back so regretfully
+had Mr. Tapster always been perfectly content; but now the poor man,
+sitting alone by his dining-room fire, remembered only what had been
+good and pleasant in his former state. He was aware that his brother
+William and William's wife, Maud, both thought that even now he had much
+to be thankful for. His line of business was brisk, scarcely touched by
+foreign competition, his income increasing at a steady rate of
+progression, and his children were exceptionally healthy. But, alas! now
+that, in place of there being a pretty little Mrs. Tapster on whom to
+spend easily earned money, his substance was being squandered by a crowd
+of unmanageable and yet indispensable thieves,--for so Mr. Tapster
+voicelessly described the five servants whose loud talk and laughter
+were even now floating up from the basement below,--he did not feel his
+financial stability so comfortable a thing as he had once done. His very
+children, who should now be, as he told himself complainingly, his
+greatest comfort, had degenerated from two sturdy, well-behaved little
+boys and a charming baby girl into three unruly, fretful imps, setting
+him at defiance, and terrorizing their two attendants, who, though
+carefully chosen by their Aunt Maud, did not seem to manage them as well
+as the old nurse who had been an ally of the ex-Mrs. Tapster.
+
+Looking back at the whole horrible affair--for so, in his own mind, Mr.
+Tapster justly designated the divorce case in which he had figured as
+the successful petitioner--he wondered uneasily if he had done quite
+wisely--wisely, that is, for his own repute and comfort.
+
+He knew very well that had it not been for William, or rather, for Maud,
+he would never have found out the dreadful truth. Nay, more, he was
+dimly aware that but for them, and for their insistence on it as the
+only proper course open to him, he would never have taken action. All
+would have been forgiven and forgotten, had not William, and more
+especially Maud, said he must divorce Flossy, if not for his own
+sake,--ah, what irony!--then for that of his children.
+
+Of course, he felt grateful to his brother William and to his brother's
+wife for all they had done for him since that sad time. Still, in the
+depths of his heart, Mr. Tapster felt entitled to blame and sometimes
+almost to hate his kind brother and sister. To them both, or rather, to
+Maud, he really owed the break-up of his life; for, when all was said
+and done, it had to be admitted (though Maud did not like him to remind
+her of it), that Flossy had met the villain while staying with the
+William Tapsters at Boulogne. Respectable London people should have
+known better than to take a furnished house at a disreputable French
+watering-place, a place full of low English!
+
+Sometimes it was only by a great exercise of self-control that he, James
+Tapster, could refrain from telling Maud what he thought of her conduct
+in this matter, the more so that she never seemed to understand how
+greatly she--and William--had been to blame. On one occasion Maud had
+even said how surprised she had been that James had cared to go away to
+America, leaving his pretty young wife alone for as long as three
+months. Why hadn't she said so at the time, then? Of course, he had
+thought that he could leave Flossy to be looked after and kept out of
+mischief by Maud and William. But he had been, in more than one sense,
+alas! bitterly deceived.
+
+Still, it's never any use crying over spilt milk, so Mr. Tapster got up
+from his chair and walked around the room, looking absently, as he did
+so, at the large Landseer engravings, of which he was naturally proud.
+If only he could forget, put out of his mind forever, the whole affair!
+Well, perhaps with the Decree being made Absolute would come oblivion.
+
+He sat down again before the fire. Staring at the hot embers, he
+reminded himself that Flossy, wicked, ungrateful Flossy, had disappeared
+out of his life. This being so, why think of her? The very children had
+at last left off asking inconvenient questions about their mama.
+
+By the way, would Flossy still be their mama after the Decree had been
+made Absolute? So Mr. Tapster now suddenly asked himself. He hesitated,
+perplexed. But, yes, the Decree being made Absolute would not undo, or
+even efface, that fact. The more so--though surely here James Tapster
+showed himself less logical than usual--the more so that Flossy, in
+spite of what Maud had always said about her, had been a loving and, in
+her own light-hearted way, a careful mother. But, though Flossy would
+remain the mother of his children,--odd that the Law hadn't provided for
+that contingency--she would soon be absolutely nothing, and less than
+nothing, to him, the father of those children. Mr. Tapster was a great
+believer in the infallibility of the Law, and he subscribed
+whole-heartedly to the new reading, "What Law has put asunder, let no
+man join together."
+
+To-night Mr. Tapster could not help looking back with a certain
+complacency to his one legal adventure. Nothing could have been better
+done or more admirably conducted than the way the whole matter had been
+carried through. His brother William, and William's solicitor, Mr.
+Greenfield, had managed it all so very nicely. True, there had been a
+few uncomfortable moments in the witness-box, but every one, including
+the judge, had been most kind. As for his counsel, the leading man who
+makes a specialty of these sad affairs, not even James Tapster himself
+could have put his own case in a more delicate and moving fashion. "A
+gentleman possessed of considerable fortune--" so had he justly been
+described; and counsel, without undue insistence on irrelevant detail,
+had drawn a touching and a true picture of Mr. Tapster's one romance,
+his marriage eight years before to the twenty-year-old daughter of an
+undischarged bankrupt. Even the Petitioner had scarcely seen Flossy's
+dreadful ingratitude in its true colors till he had heard his counsel's
+moderate comments on the case.
+
+[Illustration: "HE REMINDED HIMSELF THAT FLOSSY, WICKED, UNGRATEFUL
+FLOSSY, HAD DISAPPEARED OUT OF HIS LIFE"]
+
+This evening Mr. Tapster saw Flossy's dreadful ingratitude terribly
+clearly, and he wondered, not for the first time, how his wife could
+have had the heart to break up his happy home. Why, but for him and his
+offer of marriage, Flossy Ball--that had been his wife's maiden
+name--would have had to earn her own living! And as she had been very
+pretty, very "fetching," she would probably have married some
+good-for-nothing young fellow of her own age, lacking the means to
+support a wife in decent comfort,--such a fellow, for instance, as the
+wretched "co" in the case; while with Mr. Tapster--why, she had had
+everything the heart of woman could wish for--a good home, beautiful
+clothes, and the being waited on hand and foot. A strange choking
+feeling came into his throat as he thought of how good he had been to
+Flossy, and how very bad had been her return for that kindness.
+
+But this--this was dreadful! He was actually thinking of her again, and
+not, as he had meant to do, of himself and his poor motherless children!
+Time enough to think of Flossy when he had news of her again. If her
+lover did not marry her--and, from what Mr. Greenfield had discovered
+about him, it was most improbable that he would ever be in a position to
+do so--she would certainly reappear on the Tapster horizon: Mr.
+Greenfield said "they" always did. In that case, it was arranged that
+William should pay her a weekly allowance. Mr. Tapster, always, as he
+now reminded himself sadly, ready to do the generous thing, had fixed
+that allowance at three pounds a week, a sum which had astonished, in
+fact quite staggered, Mr. Greenfield's head clerk, a very decent fellow,
+by the way.
+
+"Of course, it shall be as you wish, Mr. Tapster, but you should think
+of the future and of your children. A hundred and fifty pounds a year is
+a large sum; you may feel it a tax, sir, as years go on----"
+
+"That is enough," Mr. Tapster had answered, kindly but firmly; "you have
+done your duty in laying that side of the case before me. I have,
+however, decided on the amount named; should I see reason to alter my
+mind, our arrangement leaves it open to me at any time to lower the
+allowance."
+
+But, though this conversation had taken place some months ago, and
+though Mr. Tapster still held true to his generous resolve, as yet
+Flossy had not reappeared. Mr. Tapster sometimes told himself that if he
+only knew where she was, what she was doing,--whether she was still with
+that young fellow, for instance,--he would think much less about her
+than he did now. Only last night, going for a moment into the night
+nursery,--poor Mr. Tapster now enjoyed his children's company only when
+he was quite sure that they were asleep,--he had had an extraordinary,
+almost a physical impression of Flossy's presence; he certainly had felt
+a faint whiff of her favorite perfume. Flossy had been fond of scent,
+and, though Maud always said that the use of scent was most unladylike,
+he, James, did not dislike it.
+
+With sudden soreness, Mr. Tapster now recalled the one letter Flossy had
+written to him just before the actual hearing of the divorce suit. It
+had been a wild, oddly worded appeal to him to take her back, not--as
+Maud had at once perceived on reading the letter--because she was sorry
+for the terrible thing she had done, but simply because she was
+beginning to hanker after her children. Maud had described the letter as
+shameless and unwomanly in the extreme, and even William, who had never
+judged his pretty young sister-in-law as severely as his wife had always
+done, had observed sadly that Flossy seemed quite unaware of the
+magnitude of her offense against God and man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Tapster, who prided himself on his sharp ears, suddenly heard a
+curious little sound. He knew it for that of the front door being first
+opened, and then shut again, extremely quietly. He half rose from his
+chair by the fire, then sat down again heavily.
+
+By Maud's advice, he always locked the area gate himself when he came
+home each evening. But how foolish of Maud--such a sensible woman,
+too--to think that servants and their evil ways could be circumvented so
+easily. Of course, the maids went in and out by the front door in the
+evening, and the policeman--a most respectable officer standing at point
+duty a few yards lower down the road--must be well aware of these
+disgraceful "goings on".
+
+For the first two or three months of his widowerhood (how else could he
+term his present peculiar wifeless condition?) there had been a constant
+coming and going of servants, first chosen, and then dismissed, by Maud.
+At last she suggested that her brother-in-law should engage a lady
+housekeeper, and the luckless James Tapster had even interviewed several
+applicants for the post after they had been chosen--sifted out, as it
+were--by Maud. Unfortunately, they had all been more or less of his own
+age, and plain, very plain; while he, naturally enough, would have
+preferred to see something young and pretty about him again.
+
+It was over this housekeeper question that he had at last escaped from
+Maud's domestic thraldom; for his sister-in-law, offended by his
+rejection of each of her candidates, had declared that she would take no
+more trouble about his household affairs! Nay, more, she had reminded
+him with a smile that she had honestly tried to make pleasant, that
+there is, after all, no fool like an old fool--about women. This
+insinuation had made Mr. Tapster very angry, and straightway he had
+engaged a respectable cook-housekeeper, and, although he had soon become
+aware that the woman was feathering her own nest,--James Tapster, as you
+will have divined ere now, was fond of good workaday phrases,--yet she
+had a pleasant, respectful manner, and kept rough order among the
+younger servants.
+
+Mr. Tapster's sister-in-law now interfered only where his children were
+concerned. Never having been herself a mother, she had, of course, been
+able to form a clear and unprejudiced judgment as to how children, and
+especially as to how little boys, should be physically and mentally
+trained. As yet, however, Maud had not been very successful with her two
+nephews and infant niece, but this was doubtless owing to the fact that
+there had been something gravely amiss with each of the five nurses who
+had been successively engaged by her during the last year.
+
+The elder of Mr. Tapster's sons was six, and the second four; the
+youngest child, a little girl named, unfortunately, Flora, after her
+mother, was three years old. There had been a fourth, Flossy's second
+baby, also a girl, who had only lived one day. All this being so, was it
+not strange that a young matron who had led, for some four years out of
+the eight years her married life had lasted, so wholly womanly and
+domestic an existence as had fallen to the lot of Flossy, should have
+been led astray by the meretricious allurements of unlawful
+love?--Maud's striking thought and phrase, this.
+
+[Illustration: "THERE STOOD CLOSE TO HIM, SO CLOSE THAT HE COULD ALMOST
+HAVE TOUCHED HER, FLOSSY, HIS WIFE"]
+
+And yet, Flossy, in spite of her frivolity, had somehow managed the
+children far better than Maud was now able to do. At the present time,
+so Mr. Tapster admitted to himself with something very like an inward
+groan, his two sons possessed every vice of which masculine infancy is
+capable. They had become, so he was told by their indignant nurses, the
+terror of the well-behaved children who shared with them the pleasures
+of the Park Inclosure, where they took their daily exercise; and Baby,
+once so sweet and good, was now very fretful and peevish.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again the train of Mr. Tapster's mournful thoughts was disturbed by a
+curious little sound--that of some one creeping softly down the
+staircase leading from the upper floors. Once more he half rose from his
+chair, only to fall heavily back again, with a look of impotent
+annoyance on his round, whiskered face. Where was the use of his going
+out into the hall and catching Nurse on her way to the kitchen? Maud had
+declared, very early in the day, that there should be as little
+communication as possible between the kitchen and the nursery, but Mr.
+Tapster sometimes found himself in secret sympathy with the two women
+whose disagreeable duty it was to be always with his three turbulent
+children.
+
+Mr. Tapster frowned and stared gloomily into the fire; then he suddenly
+pulled himself together rather sharply, for the door behind him had
+slowly swung open. This was intolerable! The parlor-maid had again and
+again been told that, whatever might have been the case in her former
+places, no door in Mr. Tapster's house was to be opened without the
+preliminary of a respectful knock.
+
+Fortified by the memory of what had been a positive order, he turned
+round, nerving himself to deliver the necessary rebuke. But instead of
+the shifty-eyed, impudent-looking woman he had thought to see, there
+stood close to him, so close that he could almost have touched her,
+Flossy, his wife, or rather the woman who, though no longer his wife,
+had still, as he had been informed to his discomfiture, the right to
+bear his name.
+
+A very strange feeling, and one so complicated that it sat uneasily upon
+him, took instant possession of Mr. Tapster: anger, surprise, and relief
+warred with one another in his heart.
+
+Then he began to think that his eyes must be playing him some curious
+trick, for the figure at which he was staring remained strangely still
+and motionless. Was it possible that his mind, dwelling constantly on
+Flossy, had evoked her wraith? But, no, looking up in startled silence
+at the still figure standing before him, he realized that not so would
+memory have conjured up the pretty, bright little woman of whom he had
+once been proud. Flossy still looked pretty, but she was thin and pale,
+and there were dark rings round her eyes; also, her dress was worn, her
+hat curiously shabby.
+
+As Mr. Tapster stared up at her, noting these things, one of her hands
+began playing nervously with the fringe of the dining-table cover, and
+the other sought the back of what had once been one of her dining-room
+chairs. As he watched her making these slight movements, nature so far
+reasserted itself that a feeling of poignant regret, of pity for her, as
+well as, of course, a much larger share of pity for himself, came over
+James Tapster.
+
+Had Flossy spoken then,--had she possessed the intuitive knowledge of
+men which is the gift of so many otherwise unintelligent women,--the
+whole of Mr. Tapster's future, to say nothing of her own, might have
+been different and, it may be suggested, happier.
+
+But the moment of softening and mansuetude slipped quickly by, and was
+succeeded by a burst of anger; for Mr. Tapster suddenly became aware
+that Flossy's left hand, the little thin hand resting on the back of the
+chair, was holding two keys which he recognized at once as his property.
+The one was a replica of the latch-key which always hung on his
+watch-chain, while the other and larger key, to which was attached a
+brass tag bearing the name of Tapster and the address of the house, gave
+access to the Inclosure Garden opposite Cumberland Crescent!
+
+Avoiding her eager, pitiful look, Mr. Tapster set himself to realize,
+with a shrewdness for which William and Maud would never have given him
+credit, what Flossy's possession of those two keys had meant during the
+last few months.
+
+This woman, who both was and was not Mrs. Tapster, had retained the
+power to come freely in and out of _his_ house! She had been able to
+make her way, with or without the connivance of the servants, into _his_
+children's nursery at any hour of the day or night convenient to
+herself! With the aid of that Inclosure key, she had no doubt often seen
+the children during their daily walk! In a word, Flossy had been able to
+enjoy all the privileges of motherhood while having forfeited all those
+of happy wifehood!
+
+His mind hastened heavily on. What a fool he must have looked before
+his servants! How they must have laughed to think that he was being so
+deceived and taken in! Why, even the policeman who stood at point duty
+outside must have known all about it!
+
+Small wonder that Mr. Tapster felt extremely incensed; small wonder that
+his heart, hardening, solidifying, expelled any feeling of pity provoked
+by Flossy's sad and downcast appearance.
+
+"I must request you," he said, in a voice which even to himself sounded
+harsh and needlessly loud, "to give me up those keys which you hold in
+your hand. You have no right to their possession, and I grieve to think
+that you took advantage of my great distress of mind not to return them
+with the things of which I sent you a list by my brother William. I
+cannot believe"--and now Mr. Tapster lied as only the very truthful can
+lie on occasion--"I cannot believe, I say, that you have taken advantage
+of my having overlooked them, and that you have ever before to-night
+forced yourself into this house! Still less can I believe that you have
+taught our--_my_--children to deceive their father!"
+
+Even when uttering his first sentence, he had noticed that there had
+come over Flossy's face--which was thinner, if quite as pretty and
+youthful-looking, as when he had last seen it--an expression of
+obstinacy which he had once well known and always dreaded. It had been
+Flossy's one poor weapon against her husband's superior sense and power
+of getting his own way, and sometimes it had vanquished him in that fair
+fight which is always being waged between the average husband and wife.
+
+"You are right," she cried passionately. "I have not taught the children
+to deceive you! I have never come into this house until I felt sure that
+they were asleep and alone, though I've often wondered that they never
+woke up and knew that their own mother was there! But more than once,
+James, I've felt like going after that society which looks after badly
+treated children--for the last nurse you had for them was so cruel! If
+she hadn't left you soon I should have _had_ to do something! I used to
+feel desperate when I saw her shake Baby in her pram; why, one day, in
+the Inclosure, a lady spoke to her about it, and threatened to tell
+her--her mistress----"
+
+Flossy's voice sank to a shamed whisper. The tears were rolling down her
+cheeks; she was speaking in angry gasps, and what she said actually made
+James Tapster feel, what he knew full well he had no reason to feel,
+ashamed of himself. "That is why," she went on, "that is why I have, as
+you say, forced myself into your house, and why, too, I have now come
+here to ask you to forgive me--to take me back--just for the sake of the
+children."
+
+Mr. Tapster's mind was one that traveled surely, if slowly. He saw his
+chance, and seized it. "And why," he said impressively, "had that
+woman--the nurse, I mean--no mistress? Tell me that, Flossy. You should
+have thought of all that before you behaved as you did!"
+
+"I didn't know--I didn't think----"
+
+Mr. Tapster finished the sentence for her: "You didn't think," he
+observed impressively, "that I should ever find you out."
+
+Then there came over him a morbid wish to discover--to learn from her
+own lips--why Flossy had done such a shameful and extraordinary thing as
+to be unfaithful to her marriage vow.
+
+"Whatever made you behave so?" he asked in a low voice. "I wasn't unkind
+to you, was I? You had a nice, comfortable home, hadn't you?"
+
+"I was mad," she answered, with a touch of sharp weariness. "I don't
+suppose I could ever make you understand; and yet,"--she looked at him
+deprecatingly,--"I suppose, James, that you too were young once,
+and--and--mad?"
+
+Mr. Tapster stared at Flossy. What extraordinary things she said! Of
+course he had been young once; for the matter of that, he didn't feel
+old--not to say _old_--even now. But he had always been perfectly
+sane--she knew that well enough! As for her calling herself mad, that
+was a mere figure of speech. Of course, in a sense, she had been mad to
+do what she had done, and he was glad that she now understood this; but
+her saying so simply begged the whole question, and left him no wiser
+than he was before.
+
+There was a long, tense silence between them. Then Mr. Tapster slowly
+rose from his arm-chair and faced his wife.
+
+"I see," he said, "that William was right. I mean, I suppose I may take
+it that that young fellow has gone and left you?"
+
+"Yes," she said, with a curious indifference, "he has gone and left me.
+His father made him take a job out in Brazil just after the case was
+through."
+
+"And what have you been doing since then?" asked Mr. Tapster
+suspiciously. "How have you been living?"
+
+"His father gives me a pound a week." Flossy still spoke with that
+curious indifference. "I tried to get something to do"--she hesitated,
+then offered the lame explanation--"just to have something to do, for
+I've been awfully lonely and miserable, James; but I don't seem to be
+able to get anything."
+
+"If you had written to Mr. Greenfield or to William, they would have
+told you that I had arranged for you to have an allowance," he said, and
+then again he fell into silence....
+
+Mr. Tapster was seeing a vision of himself, magnanimous,
+forgiving--taking the peccant Flossy back to his heart and becoming once
+more, in a material sense, comfortable! If he acceded to her wish, if he
+made up his mind to forgive her, he would have to begin life all over
+again, move away from Cumberland Crescent to some distant place where
+the story was not known--perhaps to Clapham, where he had spent his
+boyhood.
+
+But how about Maud? How about William? How about the very considerable
+expense to which he had been put in connection with the divorce
+proceedings? Was all that money to be wasted? Mr. Tapster suddenly saw
+the whole of his little world rising up in judgment, smiling pityingly
+at his folly and weakness. During the whole of a long and of what had
+been, till this last year, a very prosperous life, Mr. Tapster had
+always steered his safe course by what may be called the compass of
+public opinion, and now, when navigating an unknown sea, he could not
+afford to throw that compass overboard, so----
+
+"No," he said; "no, Flossy. It would not be right for me to take you
+back. _It wouldn't do._"
+
+"Wouldn't it?" she asked piteously. "Oh, James, don't say no like that,
+all at once! People do forgive each other--sometimes. I don't ask you to
+be as kind to me as you were before--only to let me come home and see
+after the children!"
+
+But Mr. Tapster shook his head. The children! Always the children! He
+noticed, even now, that she didn't say a word of wanting to come back to
+_him_; and yet, he had been such a kind, nay, if Maud were to be
+believed, such a foolishly indulgent husband.
+
+And then, Flossy looked so different. Mr. Tapster felt as if a stranger
+were standing there before him. Her appearance of poverty shocked him.
+Had she looked well and prosperous, he would have felt injured, and yet
+her pinched face and shabby clothes certainly repelled him. So again he
+shook his head, and there came into his face a look which Flossy had
+always known in old days to spell finality, and when he again spoke she
+saw that her knowledge had not misled her.
+
+"I don't want to be unkind," he said ponderously. "If you will only go
+to William, or write to him if you would rather not go to the
+office,"--Mr. Tapster did not like to think that any one once closely
+connected with him should "look like that" in his brother's office,--"he
+will tell you what you had better do. I'm quite ready to make you a
+handsome allowance--in fact, it is all arranged. You need not have
+anything more to do with that fellow's father--an army colonel, isn't
+he?--and his pound a week; but William thinks, and I must say I agree,
+that you ought to go back to your maiden name, Flossy, as being more
+fair to me."
+
+"And am I never to see the children again?" she asked.
+
+"No; it wouldn't be right for me to let you do so." He hesitated, then
+added, "They don't miss you any more now"; with no unkindly intent he
+concluded, "soon they'll have forgotten you altogether."
+
+And then, just as Mr. Tapster was hesitating, seeking for a suitable and
+not unkindly sentence of farewell, he saw a very strange, almost a
+desperate look come over Flossy's face, and, to his surprise, she
+suddenly turned and left the room, closing the door very carefully
+behind her.
+
+He stared after her. How very odd of her to say nothing! And what a
+strange look had come over her face! He could not help feeling hurt that
+she had not thanked him for what he knew to be a very generous and
+unusual provision on the part of an injured husband.... Mr. Tapster took
+a silk handkerchief out of his pocket and passed it twice over his face,
+then once more he sought and sank into the arm-chair by the fire.
+
+Even now he still felt keenly conscious of Flossy's nearness. What could
+she be doing? Then he straightened himself and listened; yes, it was as
+he feared; she had gone up-stairs--up-stairs to look at the children,
+for now he could hear her coming down again. How obstinate she was, how
+obstinate and ungrateful! Mr. Tapster wished he had the courage to go
+out into the hall and face her, in order to tell her how wrong her
+conduct was. Why, she had actually kept the keys--those keys that were
+his property!
+
+Suddenly he heard her light footsteps hurrying down the hall; now she
+was opening the front door--it slammed, and again Mr. Tapster felt
+pained to think how strangely indifferent Flossie was to his interests.
+Why, what would the servants think, hearing the front door slam like
+that?
+
+But still, now that it was over, he was glad the interview had taken
+place, for henceforth--or so, at least, Mr. Tapster believed--the Flossy
+of the past, the bright, pretty, prosperous Flossy of whom he had been
+so proud, would cease to haunt him. He remembered, with a feeling of
+relief, that she was going to his brother William; of course, she would
+then, among greater renunciations, be compelled to return the two
+keys--for they, that is, his brother and himself, would have her in
+their power. They would not behave unkindly to her--far from it; in
+fact, they would arrange for her to live with some quiet, religious lady
+in a country town a few hours from London.
+
+[Illustration: "HE SAW THAT WHICH RATHER SURPRISED HIM, AND MADE HIM
+FEEL ACTIVELY INDIGNANT"]
+
+Then Mr. Tapster began going over each incident of the strange little
+interview, for he wanted to tell his brother William exactly what had
+taken place.
+
+His conscience was quite clear, except with regard to one matter, and
+that, after all, needn't be mentioned to William. He felt rather ashamed
+of having asked the question which had provoked so strange and wild an
+answer--so unexpected a retort. Mad? What had Flossy meant by asking him
+if he had ever been mad? No one had ever used the word in connection
+with James Tapster before--save once. Oddly enough, that occasion also
+had been in a way connected with Flossy, for it had happened when he had
+gone to tell William and Maud of his engagement.
+
+It was on a fine day nine years ago come this May, and he had found
+William and William's wife walking in their little garden on Havenstock
+Hill. His kind brother, as always, had been most sympathetic, and had
+even made a suitable joke--Mr. Tapster remembered it very sadly
+to-night--concerning the spring and a young man's fancy; but Maud had
+been really disagreeable. She had said, "It's no use talking to you,
+James, for you're mad, quite mad!"
+
+Strange that he should remember all this to-night, for, after all, it
+had nothing to do with the present state of affairs.
+
+Mr. Tapster felt rather shaken and nervous; he pulled out his repeater
+watch, but, alas! it was still very early--only ten minutes to nine. He
+couldn't go to bed yet. Perhaps he would do well to join a club. He had
+always thought rather poorly of men who belonged to clubs--most of them
+were idle, lazy fellows; but still, circumstances alter cases.
+
+Suddenly he began to wish that Flossy had remained a little longer. He
+thought of all sorts of things--improving, kindly remarks--he would have
+liked to say to her. He blamed himself for not having offered her any
+refreshment; she would probably have refused to take anything, but
+still, it was wrong on his part not to have thought of it. A pound a
+week for everything! No wonder she looked starved. Why, his own
+household bills, exclusive of wine or beer, had worked out, since he had
+had this new expensive housekeeper, at something like fifteen shillings
+a head, a fact which he had managed to conceal from Maud, who "did" her
+William so well on exactly ten shillings and ninepence all round!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It struck nine from the neighboring church, where Mr. Tapster had
+sittings,--but where he seldom was able to go on Sunday mornings, for he
+was proud of being among those old-fashioned folk who still regard
+Sunday as essentially a day of rest,--and there came a sudden sound of
+hoarse shouting from the road outside. Though he was glad of anything
+that broke the oppressive silence with which he felt encompassed, Mr.
+Tapster found time to tell himself that it was disgraceful that vulgar
+street brawlers should invade so quiet a residential thoroughfare as
+Cumberland Crescent. But order would soon be restored, for the sound of
+a policeman's whistle cut sharply through the air.
+
+The noise, however, continued; he could hear the tramp of feet hurrying
+past his house and then leaving the pavement for the other side of the
+road. What could be the matter? Something very exciting must be going on
+just opposite his front door, that is, close to the Inclosure railings.
+
+Mr. Tapster got up from his chair, and walked in a leisurely way to the
+wide window. He drew aside the thick red rep curtains, and lifted a
+corner of the blind. Then, through the slightly foggy haze, he saw that
+which rather surprised him and made him feel actively indignant; for a
+string of people, men, women, and boys, were hurrying into the Inclosure
+Garden--that sacred place set apart for the exclusive use of the
+nobility and gentry who lived in Cumberland Crescent and the adjoining
+terraces.
+
+What an abominable thing! Why, the grass would all be trampled down; and
+these dirty people, these slum folk, who seem to spring out of the earth
+when anything of a disagreeable or shameful nature is taking place,--a
+fire, for instance, or a brawl,--might easily bring infectious diseases
+on to those gravel paths where the little Tapsters and their like run
+about, playing their innocent games. Some careless person had evidently
+left the gate unlocked, and the fight, or whatever it was, must be
+taking place inside the Inclosure!
+
+Mr. Tapster tried in vain to see what was going on inside the railings,
+but everything beyond the brightly lighted road was wrapped in gray
+darkness. Some one suddenly held up high a flaming torch, and the
+watcher at the window saw that the shadowy crowd which had managed to
+force its way into the Park hung together, like bees swarming, on the
+farther lawn through which flowed the Serpentine. With the gleaming of
+the yellow, wavering light there had fallen a sudden hush and silence,
+and Mr. Tapster wondered uneasily what those people were doing there,
+and what it was they were pressing forward so eagerly to see.
+
+[Illustration: "HE ... TURNED TO SEE HIS HALL INVADED BY A STRANGE AND
+SINISTER QUARTET"]
+
+Then he realized that it must have been a fight, after all, for now the
+crowd was parting in two, and down the lane so formed Mr. Tapster saw
+coming toward the gate, and so in a sense toward himself, a rather
+pitiful little procession. Some one had evidently been injured, and that
+seriously; for four men, bearing a sheep-hurdle on which lay a huddled
+mass, were walking slowly toward the gate, and he heard distinctly the
+gruffly uttered words: "Stand back, please--back, there! We're going
+across the road." The now large crowd suddenly swayed forward; indeed,
+to Mr. Tapster's astonished eyes, they seemed to be actually making a
+rush for his house, and a moment later they were pressing around his
+area-railings.
+
+Looking down on the upturned faces below him, Mr. Tapster was very glad
+that a stout pane of glass stood between himself and the
+sinister-looking men and women who seemed to be staring up at him, or
+rather at his windows, with faces full of cruel, wolfish curiosity. He
+let the blind fall to gently. His interest in the vulgar, sordid scene
+had suddenly died down; the drama was now over; in a moment the crowd
+would disperse, the human vermin (but Mr. Tapster would never have used,
+even to himself, so coarse an expression) would be on their way back to
+their burrows. But before he had even time to rearrange the curtains in
+their right folds, there came a sudden loud, persistent knocking at his
+front door.
+
+Mr. Tapster turned around sharply, feeling justly incensed. Of course,
+he knew what it was--some good-for-nothing urchin finding a vent for his
+excited feelings. His parlor-maid, who was never in any hurry to open
+the door,--she had once kept him waiting ten minutes when he had
+forgotten his latch-key,--would certainly take no notice of this
+unseemly noise, but he, James Tapster, would himself hurry out and try
+to catch the delinquent, take his name and address, and thoroughly
+frighten him.
+
+As he reached the door of the dining-room, Mr. Tapster heard the front
+door open--open, too,--and this was certainly very surprising,--from the
+outside! In the hall he saw that it was a policeman--in fact, the
+officer on point duty close by--who had opened his front door, and
+apparently with a latch-key.
+
+The constable spoke, as constables always do to the Mr. Tapsters of this
+world, in respectful and subdued tones:
+
+"Can I just come in and speak to you, sir? There's been a sad
+accident--your lady fallen in the water; we found these keys in her
+pocket, and then some one said she was Mrs. Tapster"; and the policeman
+held out the two keys which had played a not unimportant part in Mr.
+Tapster's interview with Flossy. "A man on the bridge saw her go in,"
+went on the policeman, "so she wasn't in the water long,--something like
+a quarter of an hour,--for we soon found her. I suppose you would like
+her taken up-stairs, sir?"
+
+"No, no," stammered Mr. Tapster, "not up-stairs; the children are
+up-stairs."
+
+Mr. Tapster's round, prominent eyes were shadowed with a great horror
+and an even greater surprise. He stood staring at the man before him,
+his hands clasped in a wholly unconscious gesture of supplication.
+
+The constable gradually edged himself backward into the dining-room.
+Realizing that he must take on himself the onus of decision, he gave a
+quiet look round.
+
+"If that's the case," he said firmly, "we had better bring her in here;
+that sofa that you have there, sir, will do nicely for her to be laid
+upon while they try to bring her round. We've got a doctor already."
+
+Mr. Tapster bent his head; he was too much bewildered to propose any
+other plan; and then he turned, turned to see his hall invaded by a
+strange and sinister quartet. It was composed of two policemen and of
+two of those loafers of whom he so greatly disapproved. They were
+carrying a hurdle from which Mr. Tapster quickly averted his eyes. But,
+though he was able to shut out the sight he feared to see, he could not
+prevent himself from hearing certain sounds, those, for instance, made
+by the two loafers, who breathed with ostentatious difficulty as if to
+show they were unaccustomed to bearing even so comparatively light a
+burden as Flossy drowned.
+
+There came a sudden short whisper-filled delay. The doorway of the
+dining-room was found to be too narrow, and the hurdle was perforce left
+in the hall.
+
+An urgent voice, full of wholly unconscious irony, muttered in Mr.
+Tapster's ear: "Of course, you would like to see her, sir," and he felt
+himself being propelled forward. Making an effort to bear himself so
+that he should not feel afterward ashamed of his lack of nerve, he
+forced himself to stare with dread-filled yet fascinated eyes at that
+which had just been laid upon the leather sofa.
+
+Flossy's hat, the shabby hat which had shocked Mr. Tapster's sense of
+what was seemly, was gone; her fair hair had all come down, and hung in
+pale-gold wisps about the face already fixed in the soft dignity which
+seems so soon to drape the features of those who die by drowning. Her
+widely opened eyes were now wholly emptied of the anguish with which
+they had gazed on Mr. Tapster in this very room less than an hour ago.
+Her mean brown serge gown, from which the water was still dripping,
+clung closely to her limbs, revealing the slender body which had four
+times endured, on behalf of Mr. Tapster, the greatest of woman's natural
+ordeals. But that thought, it is scarcely necessary to say, did not come
+to add an extra pang to those which that unfortunate man was now
+suffering, for Mr. Tapster naturally thought maternity was in every
+married woman's day's work--and pleasure.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It might have been a moment, for all that he knew, or it might have been
+an hour, when at last something came to relieve the unbearable tension
+of Mr. Tapster's feelings. He had been standing aside, helpless, aware
+of and yet not watching the efforts made to restore Flossy to
+consciousness.
+
+The doctor raised himself and straightened his cramped shoulders and
+tired arms. With a look of great concern on his face, he approached the
+bereaved husband.
+
+"I'm afraid it's no good," he said; "the shock of the plunge in the cold
+water probably killed her. She was evidently in poor health, and--and
+ill-nourished; but, of course, we shall go on for some time longer,
+and----"
+
+But whatever he had meant to say remained unspoken, for a telegraph-boy,
+with the impudence natural to his kind, was forcing his way into and
+through the crowded room. "James Tapster, Esquire?" he cried in a high,
+childish treble.
+
+The master of the house held out his hand mechanically. He took the buff
+envelop and stared down at it, sufficiently master of himself to
+perceive that some fool had apparently imagined Cumberland Crescent to
+be in South London; before his eyes swam the line, "Delayed in
+transmission." Then, opening the envelop, he saw the message for which
+he had now been waiting so eagerly for some days; but it was with
+indifference that he read the words,
+
+"_The Decree has been made Absolute._"
+
+
+
+
+PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND HIS WAR ON CONGRESS
+
+BY
+
+CARL SCHURZ
+
+ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
+
+
+I was on the point of returning to the West when I received a message
+from Horace Greeley, the famous editor of the New York _Tribune_, asking
+me to take charge of the news bureau of that journal in Washington, as
+its chief correspondent. Although the terms offered by Mr. Greeley were
+tempting, I was disinclined to accept, because I doubted whether the
+work would be congenial to me, and because it would keep me in the East.
+But Mr. Greeley, as well as some of my friends in Congress, persuaded me
+that, since I had studied the condition of things in the South and could
+give reliable information concerning it, my presence in Washington might
+be useful while the Southern question was under debate. This determined
+me to assent, with the understanding, however, that I should not
+consider myself bound beyond the pending session of Congress.
+
+Thus I entered the journalistic fraternity. My most agreeable experience
+consisted in my association with other members of the craft. I found
+among the correspondents of the press a number of gentlemen of uncommon
+ability and high principle--genuine gentlemen, who loved truth for its
+own sake, who heartily detested sham and false pretense, and whose sense
+of honor was of the finest. This was the rule, to which, as to all
+rules, there were of course some exceptions; but they were rare. My more
+or less intimate contact with public men high and low was not so
+uniformly gratifying. I enjoyed, indeed, the privilege of meeting
+statesmen of high purpose, of well-stored minds, of unselfish
+patriotism, and of the courage of their convictions. But disgustingly
+large was, on the other hand, the number of small, selfish politicians I
+ran against--men who seemed to know no higher end than the advantage of
+their party, which involved their own; who were always nervously
+sniffing for the popular breeze; whose most demonstrative ebullitions of
+virtue consisted in the most violent denunciations of the opposition;
+whose moral courage quaked at the appearance of the slightest danger to
+their own or their party's fortunes; and whose littlenesses exposed them
+sometimes with involuntary frankness to the newspaper correspondent whom
+they approached to beg for a "favorable notice" or for the suppression
+of an unwelcome news item. They were by no means in all instances men of
+small parts. On the contrary, there were men of marked ability and large
+acquirements among them. But never until then had I known how great a
+moral coward a member of Congress may be.
+
+It is probably now as it was then. There were few places in the United
+States where the public men appearing on the national stage were judged
+as fairly and accurately as they were in Newspaper Row in Washington.
+
+[Illustration: HORACE GREELEY
+
+AT WHOSE REQUEST CARL SCHURZ BECAME THE CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT
+OF THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE IN 1865]
+
+I remained at the head of the _Tribune_ office in Washington, according
+to my promise to Mr. Greeley, to the end of the winter season, and then
+accepted the chief-editorship of the Detroit _Post_, a new journal
+established at Detroit, Michigan, which was offered to me--I might
+almost say urged upon me--by Senator Zachariah Chandler. In the meantime
+I had occasion to witness the beginning of the political war between the
+executive and the legislative power concerning the reconstruction of the
+"States lately in rebellion."
+
+
+_The Beginnings of the Struggle_
+
+I am sure I do not exaggerate when I say that this political war has
+been one of the most unfortunate events in the history of this Republic,
+for it made the most important problem of the time, a problem of
+extraordinary complexity, which required the calmest and most delicate
+and circumspect treatment, the foot-ball of a personal and party brawl
+which was in the highest degree apt to inflame the passions and to
+obscure the judgment of everybody concerned in it. Since my return from
+the South, the evil effects of Mr. Johnson's conduct in encouraging the
+reactionary spirit prevalent among the Southern whites had become more
+and more evident and alarming from day to day. Charles Sumner told me
+that his personal experience with the President had been very much like
+mine. When Sumner left Washington in the spring, he had received from
+Mr. Johnson at repeated intervals the most emphatic assurances that he
+would do nothing to precipitate the restoration of the "States lately in
+rebellion" to the full exercise of self-governing functions, and even
+that he favored the extension of the suffrage to the freedmen. The two
+men had parted with all the appearance of a perfect friendly
+understanding. But when the Senator returned to Washington in the late
+autumn that understanding seemed to have entirely vanished from the
+President's mind and to have given place to an irritated temper and a
+certain acerbity of tone in the assertion of the "President's policy."
+
+From various other members of Congress I heard the same story. Mr.
+Johnson, strikingly unlike Abraham Lincoln, evidently belonged to that
+unfortunate class of men with whom a difference of opinion on any
+important matter will at once cause personal ill feeling and a
+disturbance of friendly intercourse. By many Congressmen Mr. Johnson was
+regarded as one who had broken faith, and the memory of the disgraceful
+exhibition of himself in a drunken state at the inauguration ceremonies,
+which under ordinary circumstances everybody would have been glad to
+forget, was revived, so as to make him appear as a person of
+ungentlemanly character. All these things combined to impart to the
+controversies which followed a flavor of reckless defiance and rancorous
+bitterness, the outbursts of which were sometimes almost ferocious.
+
+[Illustration: TWO PORTRAITS OF CHARLES SUMNER]
+
+The first gun of the political war between the President and Congress,
+which was to rage four years, was fired by Thaddeus Stevens in the House
+of Representatives by the introduction, even before the hearing of the
+President's Message, of the resolution already mentioned, which
+substantially proclaimed that the reconstruction of the late rebel
+States was the business, not of the President alone, but of Congress.
+This theory, which was constitutionally correct, was readily supported
+by the Republican majority, and thus the war was declared. Of
+Republican dissenters who openly took the President's part, there were
+but few--in the Senate, Doolittle of Wisconsin, Dixon of Connecticut,
+Norton of Minnesota, Cowan of Pennsylvania, and, for a short period,
+Morgan of New York, as the personal friend of Mr. Seward. In the House
+of Representatives, Mr. Raymond of New York, the famous founder of the
+New York _Times_, acted as the principal Republican champion of the
+"President's policy."
+
+[Illustration: PRESIDENT ANDREW JOHNSON
+
+WHOSE RECONSTRUCTION POLICY LED TO THE FOUR YEARS' WAR BETWEEN HIMSELF
+AND CONGRESS]
+
+
+_Stevens the Dominating Figure of the Struggle_
+
+Thaddeus Stevens was the acknowledged leader of the Republicans in the
+House. Few historic characters have ever been more differently judged
+from different points of view. A Southern writer of fiction has painted
+him as the fiend incarnate; others have spoken of him as a great leader
+of his time, far-sighted, a man of uncompromising convictions,
+intellectually honest, of unflinching courage and energy. I had come
+into personal contact with him in the Presidential campaigns of 1860 and
+1864, when he seemed to be pleased with my efforts. I had once heard him
+make a stump speech which was evidently inspired by intense hatred of
+slavery, and remarkable for argumentative pith and sarcastic wit. But
+the impression his personality made upon me was not sympathetic: his
+face, long and pallid, topped with an ample dark-brown wig which was at
+the first glance recognized as such; beetling brows overhanging keen
+eyes of uncertain color which sometimes seemed to scintillate with a
+sudden gleam; the under lip defiantly protruding; the whole expression
+usually stern. His figure would have looked stalwart but for a deformed
+foot which made him bend and limp. His conversation, carried on in a
+hollow voice devoid of music, easily disclosed a well-informed mind, but
+also a certain absolutism of opinion, with contemptuous scorn for
+adverse argument. He belonged to the fierce class of anti-slavery men
+who were inspired by humane sympathy with the slave and righteous
+abhorrence of slavery, but also by hatred of the slaveholder. What he
+himself seemed to enjoy most in his talk was his sardonic humor, which
+he made play upon men and things like lurid freaks of lightning. He shot
+out such sallies with a fearfully serious mien, or at least he
+accompanied them with a grim smile which was not at all like Abraham
+Lincoln's hearty laugh at his own jests.
+
+[Illustration: _From the collection of P. H. Meserve_
+
+JOHN SHERMAN
+
+WHO TRIED TO HEAL THE BREACH BETWEEN PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND THE SENATE]
+
+[Illustration: THADDEUS STEVENS
+
+THE LEADING OPPONENT OF THE MOVEMENT TO RESTORE SLAVERY, AND THE MOST
+BITTER OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S ANTAGONISTS]
+
+Thus Mr. Stevens' discourse was apt to make him appear a hardened cynic,
+inaccessible to the finer feelings, and indifferent whether he gave pain
+or pleasure. But now and then a remark escaped him--I say "escaped him,"
+because he evidently preferred to wear the acrid tendencies of his
+character on the outside--which indicated that there was behind his
+cynicism a rich fund of human kindness and sympathy. And this was
+strongly confirmed by his neighbors at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, his
+home, where on one of my campaigning tours I once spent a day and a
+night. With them, even with many of his political opponents, "old
+Thad," as they called him, appeared to be eminently popular. They had no
+end of stories to tell about the protection he had given to fugitive
+slaves, sometimes at much risk and sacrifice to himself, and of the many
+benefactions he had bestowed with a lavish hand upon the widows and
+orphans and other persons in need, and of his generous fidelity to his
+friends. They did not, indeed, revere him as a model of virtue, but of
+the occasional lapses of his bachelor life from correct moral standards,
+which seemed to be well known and freely talked about, they spoke with
+affectionate lenity of judgment.
+
+When I saw him again in Washington at the opening of the Thirty-ninth
+Congress, in December, 1865, he looked very much aged since our last
+meeting, and infirm in health. In repose his face was like a death-mask,
+and he was carried in a chair to his seat in the House by two stalwart
+young negroes. There is good authority for the story that once when they
+had set him down, he said to them, with his grim humor: "Thank you, my
+good fellows. What shall I do when you are dead and gone?" But his eyes
+glowed from under his bushy brows with the old keen sparkle, and his
+mind was as alert as ever. It may be that his age--he was then
+seventy-four--and his physical infirmities, admonishing him that at best
+he would have only a few years more to live, served to inspire him with
+an impatient craving and a fierce determination to make the best of his
+time, and thus to intensify the activity of his mental energies. To
+compass the abolition of slavery had been the passion of his life. He
+had hailed the Civil War as the great opportunity. He had never been
+quite satisfied with Lincoln, whose policy seemed to him too dilatory.
+He demanded quick, sharp, and decisive blows.
+
+[Illustration: WILLIAM PITT FESSENDEN
+
+HEAD OF THE JOINT COMMITTEE ON RECONSTRUCTION, WHICH WAS DENOUNCED BY
+PRESIDENT JOHNSON AS AN "IRRESPONSIBLE CENTRAL DIRECTORY"]
+
+Now that the abolition of slavery was actually decreed, he saw President
+Johnson follow a policy which, in his view, threatened to undo the great
+work. His scornful anger at Andrew Johnson was equaled only by his
+contempt for the Republicans who sided with the President. He was bound
+to defeat this reactionary attempt and to see slavery thoroughly killed
+beyond the possibility of resurrection, at any cost. As to the means to
+be employed, he scrupled little. He wanted the largest possible
+Republican majority in Congress, and to this end he would have expelled
+any number of Democrats from their seats, by hook or crook. When my old
+friend and quondam law partner, General Halbert E. Paine, who was
+chairman of the Committee on Elections in the House, told him that, in a
+certain contested election case to be voted upon, both contestants were
+rascals, Stevens simply asked: "Well, which is _our_ rascal?" He said
+this, not in jest, but with perfect seriousness. He would have seated
+Beelzebub in preference to the angel Gabriel, had he believed Beelzebub
+to be more certain than Gabriel to aid him in beating the President's
+reconstruction policy. His speeches were short, peremptory, and
+commanding. He bluntly avowed his purposes, however extreme they seemed
+to be. He disdained to make them more palatable by any art of
+persuasion, or to soften the asperity of his attacks by charitable
+circumlocution. There was no hypocrisy, no cant in his utterances. With
+inexorable intellectual honesty, he drew all the logical conclusions
+from his premises. He was a terror in debate. Whenever provoked, he
+brought his batteries of merciless sarcasm into play with deadly effect.
+Not seldom, a single sentence sufficed to lay a daring antagonist
+sprawling on the ground amid the roaring laughter of the House, the
+luckless victim feeling as if he had heedlessly touched a heavily
+charged electric wire. No wonder that even the readiest and boldest
+debaters were cautious in approaching old Thaddeus Stevens too closely,
+lest something stunning and sudden happen to them. Thus the fear he
+inspired became a distinct element of power in his leadership--not a
+wholesome element, indeed, at the time of a great problem which required
+the most circumspect and dispassionate treatment.
+
+
+_William Pitt Fessenden_
+
+A statesman of a very different stamp was Senator Fessenden of Maine,
+who, being at the head of the senatorial part of the joint Committee on
+Reconstruction, presided over that important body. William Pitt
+Fessenden was a man who might easily have been overlooked in a crowd.
+There was nothing in his slight figure, his thin face framed in spare
+gray hair and side whiskers, and his quiet demeanor, to attract
+particular notice. Neither did his appearance in the Senate Chamber
+impress one at first sight as that of a great power in that important
+assembly. I saw him more than once there walk with slow steps up and
+down in the open space behind the seats, with his hands in his trousers
+pockets, with seeming listlessness, while another senator was speaking,
+and then ask to be heard, and, without changing his attitude, make an
+argument in a calm conversational tone, unmixed with the slightest
+oratorical flourish, so solid and complete that little more remained to
+be said on the subject in question. He gave the impression of having at
+his disposal a rich and perfectly ordered store of thought and knowledge
+upon which he could draw with perfect ease and assurance. When I was
+first introduced to him, he appeared to be rather distant in manner than
+inviting friendly approach. But I was told that ill health had made him
+unsociable and somewhat morose and testy, and, indeed, there was often
+the trace of suffering and weariness in his face. It was also remarked
+in the Senate that at times he was ill-tempered and inclined to indulge
+in biting sarcasms and to administer unkind lectures to other senators,
+which in some instances disturbed his personal intercourse with his
+colleagues. But there was not one of them who did not hold him in the
+highest esteem as a statesman of commanding ability and of lofty ideals,
+as a gentleman of truth and conscience, as a great jurist and an eminent
+constitutional lawyer, as a party man of most honorable principles and
+methods, and as a patriot of noblest ambition for his country.
+
+[Illustration: WENDELL PHILLIPS
+
+WHOM PRESIDENT JOHNSON NAMED AS ONE OF THE ENEMIES OF THE REPUBLIC IN
+HIS SPEECH OF FEBRUARY 22]
+
+Being a man also of conservative instincts, averse to unnecessary
+conflicts, and always disinclined to go to extremes, in action as well
+as in language, he was expected to exert a moderating influence in his
+committee; and this expectation was not disappointed so far as his
+efforts to prevent a final breach between the President and the
+Republican majority in Congress were concerned. But regarding the main
+question whether the "States lately in rebellion" should be fully
+restored to their self-governing functions and to full participation in
+the government of the Republic without having given reasonable
+guaranties for the maintenance of the "legitimate results of the war,"
+he was in point of principle not far apart from Mr. Stevens.
+
+
+_The President's Logic_
+
+It must be admitted that, if we accept his premises, Mr. Johnson made in
+point of logic a pretty plausible case. His proposition was that a
+State, in the view of the Federal Constitution, is indestructible; that
+an ordinance of secession adopted by its inhabitants, or its political
+organs, did not take it out of the Union; that by declaring and treating
+those ordinances of secession as "null and void," of no force, virtually
+non-existent, the Federal government itself had accepted and sanctioned
+that theory; that during the rebellion the constitutional rights and
+functions of those States were merely suspended, and that when the
+rebellion ceased they were _ipso facto_ restored; that, therefore, the
+rebellion having actually ceased, those States were at once entitled to
+their former rights and privileges--that is, to the recognition of their
+self-elected State governments and to their representation in Congress.
+Admitting the premises, this was logically correct in the abstract.
+
+But this was one of the cases to which a saying, many years later set
+afloat by President Cleveland, might properly have been applied: we were
+confronting a condition, not a theory. The condition was this: Certain
+States had through their regular political organs declared themselves
+independent of the Union. They had, for all practical purposes, actually
+separated themselves from the Union. They had made war upon the Union.
+That war put those States in a position not foreseen by the
+Constitution. It imposed upon the government of the Union duties not
+foreseen by the Constitution; by "military necessity," war necessity,
+the Union was compelled to emancipate the negroes from slavery and to
+accept their military services. The war had compelled the government of
+the Union to levy large loans of money and thus to contract a huge
+public debt. The government had also, in the course of the war, the aid
+of the Union men of the South. It had thus assumed solemn obligations
+for value received or services rendered. It had assumed the duty to
+protect the emancipated negroes in their freedom, the Southern Union men
+in their security, and the public creditor from loss. This duty was a
+duty of honor as well as of policy. The Union could, therefore, not
+consent, either in point of honor or of sound policy, to the restoration
+of the late rebel States to the functions of self-government and to full
+participation in the national government so long as that restoration was
+reasonably certain to put the freedom of the emancipated slaves, or the
+security of the Southern Union men, or the rights of the public
+creditor, into serious jeopardy.
+
+[Illustration: SENATOR LYMAN TRUMBULL
+
+WHO MOVED THAT THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU BILL OF JANUARY 12 BE PASSED OVER
+PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S VETO]
+
+
+_Lincoln's Policy versus Johnson's_
+
+It was pretended at the time, and it has since been asserted by
+historians and publicists of high standing, that Mr. Johnson's
+Reconstruction policy was only a continuation of that of Mr. Lincoln.
+This was true only in a superficial sense, and not in reality. Mr.
+Lincoln had, indeed, put forth reconstruction plans which contemplated
+an early restoration of some of the rebel States; but he had done this
+while the Civil War was still going on, and for the evident purpose of
+encouraging loyal movements in those States and of weakening the
+Confederate State governments there by opposing to them governments
+organized in the interest of the Union, which could serve as
+rallying-points to the Union men. So long as the rebellion continued in
+any form and to any extent, the State governments he contemplated would
+have been substantially in the control of really loyal men who had been
+on the side of the Union during the war. Moreover, he always
+emphatically affirmed, in public as well as private utterance, that no
+plan of reconstruction he had ever put forth was meant to be "exclusive
+and inflexible," but might be changed according to different
+circumstances.
+
+Now circumstances did change; they changed essentially with the collapse
+of the Confederacy. There was no more organized armed resistance to the
+national government, to distract which loyal State governments in the
+South might have been efficacious. But there was an effort of persons
+lately in rebellion to get possession of the reconstructed Southern
+State governments for the purpose, in part, of using their power to save
+or restore as much of the system of slavery as could be saved or
+restored. The success of these efforts was to be accomplished by the
+precipitate and unconditional readmission of the late rebel States to
+all their constitutional functions. This situation had not yet developed
+when Lincoln was assassinated. He had not contemplated it when he put
+forth his plans of reconstructing Louisiana and the other States. Had he
+lived, he would have as ardently wished to stop bloodshed and to reunite
+all the States as he ever did. But is it to be supposed, for a moment,
+that, seeing the late master class in the South still under the
+influence of their old traditional notions and prejudices, and at the
+same time sorely pressed by the distressing necessities of their
+situation, intent upon subjecting the freedmen again to a system very
+much akin to slavery, Lincoln would have consented to abandon those
+freedmen to the mercies of that master class!
+
+
+_The Personal Bitterness of the Struggle_
+
+No less striking was the difference of the two policies in what may be
+called the personal character of the controversies of the time. When the
+Republican majority in Congress had already declared its unwillingness
+to accept President Johnson's leadership in the matter of
+reconstruction, a strong desire was still manifested by many Republican
+senators and members of the House to prevent a decided and irremediable
+breach with the President. Some of them were sanguine enough to hope
+that more or less harmonious cooeperation, or at least a peaceable
+_modus vivendi_, might still be obtained. Others apprehended that the
+President's policy, with its plausibilities, might after all find favor
+with the popular mind, which was naturally tired of strife and
+excitement, eager for peace and quiet, and that its opponents might
+appear as reckless disturbers. Still others stood in fear of a rupture
+in the Republican party, which, among other evil consequences, might
+prove disastrous to their own political fortunes. Several men of
+importance, such as Fessenden and Sherman in the Senate and some
+prominent members of the House, seriously endeavored to pour oil upon
+the agitated waters by making speeches of a conciliatory tenor. Indeed,
+if Andrew Johnson had possessed only a little of Abraham Lincoln's sweet
+temper, generous tolerance, and patient tact in the treatment of
+opponents, he might at least have prevented the conflict of opinions
+from degenerating into an angry and vicious personal brawl. But the
+brawl was Johnson's congenial atmosphere.
+
+The Judiciary Committee of the Senate, on January 12, 1866, reported a
+bill to continue the existence, to increase the personnel, and to
+enlarge the powers of the Freedmen's Bureau. It was discussed in both
+Houses with great thoroughness and in a temperate spirit, and the
+necessity of the measure for the protection of the freedmen and the
+introduction of free labor in the South was so generally acknowledged
+that the recognized Republican friends of the President in the Senate as
+well as in the House supported it. It passed by overwhelming majorities
+in both Houses, and everybody, even those most intimate with the
+President, confidently expected that he would willingly accept and sign
+it. But on the 19th of February he returned it with his veto, mainly on
+the assumed ground that it was unnecessary and unconstitutional, and
+also because it was passed by a Congress from which eleven States, those
+lately in rebellion, were excluded--thus throwing out a dark hint that
+before the admission of the late rebel States to representation this
+Congress might be considered constitutionally unable to make any valid
+laws at all. Senator Trumbull, in an uncommonly able, statesmanlike, and
+calm speech, combated the President's arguments and moved that the bill
+pass, the President's veto notwithstanding. But the "Administration
+Republicans," although they had voted for the bill, now voted to sustain
+the veto, and, there being no two-thirds majority to overcome it, the
+veto prevailed. Thus President Johnson had won a victory over the
+Republican majority in Congress. This victory may have made him believe
+that he would be able to kill with his veto all legislation unpalatable
+to him, and that, therefore, he was actually master of the situation. He
+made the grave mistake of underestimating the opposition.
+
+
+_A Humiliating Spectacle_
+
+On February 22, 1866, a public meeting was held in Washington for the
+purpose of expressing popular approval of the President's reconstruction
+policy. The crowd marched from the meeting-place to the White House to
+congratulate the President upon his successful veto of the Freedmen's
+Bureau Bill. The President, called upon to make a speech in response,
+could not resist the temptation. He then dealt a blow to himself from
+which he never recovered. He spoke, in the egotistic strain usual with
+him, of the righteousness of his own course, and then began to inveigh
+in the most violent terms against those who opposed him. He denounced
+the joint Committee on Reconstruction, the committee headed by
+Fessenden, as "an irresponsible central directory" that had assumed the
+powers of Congress, described how he had fought the leaders of the
+rebellion, and added that there were men on the other side of the line
+who also worked for the dissolution of the Union. By this time some of
+the uproarious crowd felt that he had descended to their level, and
+called for names. He mentioned Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and
+Wendell Phillips as men who worked against the fundamental principles of
+the government, and excited the boisterous merriment of the audience by
+calling John W. Forney, the Secretary of the Senate and a prominent
+journalist, "a dead duck" upon whom "he would not waste his ammunition."
+Again he spoke of his rise from humble origin,--a tailor who "always
+made a close fit,"--and broadly insinuated that there were men in high
+places who were not satisfied with Lincoln's blood, but, wanting more,
+thought of getting rid of him, too, in the same way.
+
+I remember well the impression made by this speech as it came out in the
+newspapers. Many if not most of the public men I saw in Washington,
+remembering the disgraceful appearance of Andrew Johnson in a drunken
+state at the inauguration, at once expressed a belief that he must have
+been in the same condition when delivering that speech. Most of the
+newspapers favoring the President's policy were struck dumb. Of those
+opposing him, most of them spoke of it in grave but evidently restrained
+language. The general feeling was one of profound shame and humiliation
+in behalf of the country.
+
+In Congress, where Mr. Stevens, with his characteristic sarcasm,
+described the whole story of the President's speech as a malignant
+invention of Mr. Johnson's enemies, the hope of preventing a permanent
+breach between him and the Republican majority was even then not
+entirely extinct. On the 26th of February, Sherman made a long and
+carefully prepared speech in the Senate, advocating harmony. He
+recounted all the virtues Andrew Johnson professed and all the services
+he had rendered, and solemnly affirmed his belief that he had always
+acted upon patriotic motives and in good faith. But he could not refrain
+from "deeply regretting his speech of the 22d of February," He added
+that it was "impossible to conceive a more humiliating spectacle than
+the President of the United States invoking the wild passions of a mob
+around him with the utterance of such sentiments as he uttered on that
+day." Still, Mr. Sherman thought that "this was no time to quarrel with
+the Chief Magistrate." Other prominent Republicans, such as General
+J. D. Cox of Ohio--one of the noblest men I have ever known,--called
+upon him to expostulate with him in a friendly spirit, and he gave them
+amiable assurances, which, however, subsequently turned out to have been
+without meaning. Then something happened which cut off the last chance
+of mutual approach.
+
+On March 13th the House passed the Civil Rights Bill, which the Senate
+had already passed on the 2d of February. Its main provision was that
+all persons born in the United States, excepting Indians, not taxed,
+were declared to be citizens of the United States, and such citizens of
+every race and color should have the same right in every State and
+Territory of the United States to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be
+parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and
+convey real and personal property, and to have the full and equal
+benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and
+property as was enjoyed by white citizens. The bill had nothing to do
+with "social equity," and did not in any way interfere with Mr.
+Johnson's scheme of reconstruction. In fact, it was asserted, no doubt
+truthfully, that Mr. Johnson himself had at various times shown himself,
+by word and act, favorable to its provisions. It appeared, indeed, in
+every one of its features so reasonable and so necessary for the
+enforcement of the Thirteenth Constitutional Amendment prohibiting
+slavery, that disapproval of it by the President was regarded as almost
+impossible. Aside from the merits of the bill, there was another
+reason, a reason of policy, for the President to sign it. Had he done
+so, he would have greatly encouraged the conciliatory spirit which, in
+spite of all that had happened, was still flickering in many Republican
+bosoms, and he might thus, even at this late hour, have secured an
+effective following among the Republicans in Congress. But he did not.
+He returned the bill to Congress with a veto message so weak in argument
+that it appeared as if he had been laboriously groping for pretexts to
+kill the bill. One of the principal reasons he gave was again the
+sinister one that Congress had passed the bill while eleven States were
+unrepresented, thus repeating the threatening hint that the validity of
+the laws made by such a Congress might be questioned.
+
+
+_False Encouragement to the South_
+
+Congress promptly passed the bill over the President's veto by a
+two-thirds majority in each House, and thus the Civil Rights Bill became
+a law. President Johnson's defeat was more fatal than appeared on the
+surface. The prestige he had won by the success of his veto of the
+Freedmen's Bureau Bill was lost again. The Republicans, whom in some way
+he had led to expect that he would sign the Civil Rights Bill, now
+believed him to be an insincere man capable of any treachery. The last
+chance of an accommodation with the Republican party was now utterly
+gone. But, worse than all, the reactionists in the South, who were bent
+upon curtailing the freedom of the emancipated negroes as much as
+possible, received his veto of the Civil Rights Bill with shouts of
+delight. Believing him now unalterably opposed to the bestowal, upon the
+freedmen, of equal civil rights such as were specified in the bill, they
+hailed President Johnson as their champion more loudly than ever.
+Undisturbed by the defeat of the veto, which they looked upon as a mere
+temporary accident, they easily persuaded themselves that the President,
+aided by the Administration Republicans and the Democratic party at the
+North, would at last surely prevail, and that now they might safely deal
+with the negro and the labor question in the South as they pleased. The
+reactionary element felt itself encouraged to the point of foolhardiness
+by the President's attitude. Legislative enactments and municipal
+ordinances and regulations tending to reduce the colored people to a
+state of semi-slavery multiplied at a lively rate. Measures taken for
+the protection of the emancipated slaves were indiscriminately denounced
+in the name of the Constitution of the United States as acts of
+insufferable tyranny. The instant admission to seats in the national
+Congress of senators and representatives from the "States lately in
+rebellion" was loudly demanded as a constitutional right, and for these
+seats men were presented who but yesterday had stood in arms against the
+national government, or who had held high place in the insurrectionary
+Confederacy. And the highest authority cited for all these denunciations
+and demands was Andrew Johnson, President of the United States.
+
+The impression made by these things upon the minds of the Northern
+people can easily be imagined. Men of sober ways of thinking, not
+accessible to sensational appeals, asked themselves quite seriously
+whether there was not real danger that the legitimate results of the
+war, for the achievement of which they had sacrificed uncounted
+thousands of lives and the fruits of many, many years of labor, were in
+grave jeopardy again. Their alarm was not artificially produced by
+political agitation; it was sincere and profound, and began to grow
+angry. The gradual softening of the passions and resentments of the war
+was checked. The feeling that the Union had to be saved once more from
+the rule of the "rebels with the President at their head" spread with
+fearful rapidity, and well-meaning people looking to Congress to come to
+the rescue were becoming less and less squeamish as to the character of
+the means to be used to that end.
+
+This popular temper could not fail to exercise its influence upon
+Congress and to stimulate the radical tendencies among its members. Even
+men of a comparatively conservative and cautious disposition admitted
+that strong remedies were necessary to avert the threatening danger, and
+they soon turned to the most drastic as the best. Moreover, the partizan
+motive pressed to the front to reinforce the patriotic purpose. It had
+gradually become evident that President Johnson, whether such had been
+his original design or not,--probably not,--would by his political
+course be led into the Democratic party. The Democrats, delighted, of
+course, with the prospect of capturing a President elected by the
+Republicans, zealously supported his measures and flattered his vanity
+without stint. The old alliance between the pro-slavery sentiment in the
+South and the Democratic party in the North was thus revived--that
+alliance which had already cost the South so dearly in the recent past
+by making Southern people believe that if they revolted against the
+Federal Government the Northern Democracy would stand by them and help
+them to victory.
+
+    THE JULY INSTALMENT OF CARL SCHURZ' MEMOIRS WILL CONCLUDE THE STORY
+    OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S STRUGGLE WITH CONGRESS
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+THE CRYSTAL-GAZER
+
+BY MARY S. WATTS
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE GREAT NORTH ROAD," ETC.
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY FRANK A. NANKIVELL
+
+
+The carrier's cart--for my means afforded no more lordly style of
+travel--set me down at an elbow of white highroad, whence, between the
+sloping hills, I could see a V-shaped patch of blue, this half water and
+that sky; here and there the gable of a farmhouse with a plume of smoke
+streaming sidewise; and below me, in the exact point of the V, the masts
+and naked yards of a ketch at her moorings. Even in that sheltered
+harbor, to judge by the faint oscillations of her masts, she felt the
+tug of the waters around her keel. There had been a storm the night
+before; without, the sea ran strong about all these exposed coasts; and
+I knew that, hidden from sight behind the upper headland, the surf must
+be bursting in a cloud over the Brown Cow, and the perturbed tide
+setting like a mill-race between that great dun rock and the shore
+through the narrow gut we called the Cat's Mouth.
+
+"You'll be noticing some changes, Mr. Nick?" the carrier hinted at last,
+lingering to observe me. "Well, there's a deal may happen in two or
+three years. You can't look to find things just the way you left 'em."
+
+He used a certain respectful familiarity, having known me all my life,
+and, as he spoke, eyed me with the kind and open curiosity of a dog. He
+was a gentle little man, with a manner oddly compounded of the sailor's
+simplicity and the rustic's bootless cunning,--for he had followed both
+walks in his day,--and was popularly held to be somewhat weak-witted
+since a fall from the masthead to the decks of the brig _Hyperion_ some
+years before.
+
+"I am not near enough to see any changes yet, Crump," I answered him.
+"The changes, if any, show most, I dare say, in myself."
+
+"So they do, sir; so they do," he assented heartily. "My wife used to
+say you were a pretty boy, and had the makings of a fine, personable
+man. First thing I thought, when I clapped eyes on you to-day, was:
+'Well, this here's a lesson to Sarah not to be hasty in her judgments!'
+'Tain't often I get the better o' Sarah, you know, sir. They tell me
+you've been in Italy and learned to paint?"
+
+"I'm afraid I haven't quite learned all the art yet, Crump. It takes
+more than two or three years."
+
+"Depends on the person, I shouldn't wonder," he said, wagging his head.
+"Some people are slow by nature. Could a man make his living by it, d'ye
+think, sir?"
+
+I answered this devious inquiry as to my own financial standing by
+assuring him that I had contrived so far to make mine. "I'm not riding
+in my coach-and-four yet, as you see, Crump, but the time may come."
+
+"I'm sure I hope it will, Mr. Nick," he said rather dubiously. "But it's
+kind o' tempting Providence, seems to me. You might 'a' been walking
+your own quarter-deck, captain o' some tall East Indiaman by this, like
+your father and grandfather before you, making a safe, easy living, and
+looked up to by everybody."
+
+I interrupted his moralizing to ask, as, indeed, I had already done more
+than once, without being able to get his attention: "How does my
+grandfather seem?"
+
+Momentary gravity fell upon him. "He--he don't always answer the helm,
+Mr. Nicol," he said, and touched his forehead with a meaning look.
+"Barring that, I'd rate him seaworthy, for all he's cruised so
+long--nigh eighty year, ain't it?"
+
+"I'm glad I came home," I said, concerned. "The old man should not be
+alone."
+
+"He ain't exactly alone," said Crump, with an uneasy glance into my
+face. "He's signed on two new hands here lately--about a month ago, I
+b'lieve. I dessay he was making pretty heavy weather of it by himself,
+and so he--er--well----" He cleared his throat, hesitating in an odd
+embarrassment; he plainly felt that here was information bound to be
+distasteful, and set about imparting it with a painful diplomacy. "The
+cap'n--Cap'n Pendarves, your grandfather, sir, was, as you might say,
+short-handed, you being in foreign parts, and old John Behenna having
+slipped his cable 'long about the last o' May, as I was telling you; and
+so the cap'n he ups and ships these here--and--and, in fac', Mr. Nick,
+one of 'em's a woman!" He drew a long breath and wiped his forehead.
+
+"You don't mean he's married!" I shouted, and with, I am afraid, a
+pretty strong term of disapproval.
+
+"There, now, I _thought_ you'd take it that way!" Crump remarked, not
+without gratification. "But it ain't so bad as that, Mr. Nicol." And he
+went on to explain, with a variety of nautical metaphors, that the
+couple, an elderly man and a young girl supposedly his grandchild, had
+appeared in Chepstow some weeks ago during fair-time; that the young
+woman "took observations," which I translated to mean that she told
+fortunes, supporting them both, it would seem, by the pennies she gained
+this way, for the man did no work, and was most often seen "hove to,
+transhipping cargo," at the bar of the Three Old Cronies or elsewhere,
+Crump said. He did not know how or when or where my grandfather had
+first fallen in with these vagabonds. For several successive days he had
+been noticed in their company, or laying a straight course for the
+little booth wherein the girl plied her mean trade; and then, all at
+once, to the stupefied astonishment of Chepstow,--where the captain was
+reckoned, with reason, a particularly hard, sour, dour sort of body,
+anything but friendly or hospitable,--the pair of them were discovered
+comfortably installed beneath the Pendarves' roof, as snug as if they
+had lived there all their lives and never meant to go away! The thing
+was a mystery; it went near to being a scandal. For a final touch, Crump
+assured me that these precious gentry were all but nameless; no one had
+ever heard the woman called anything, and the man's name defied
+pronunciation.
+
+Upon all this agreeable intelligence, we parted, as Crump's way was by
+the round-about hill road, while I struck straight across by short cuts
+to my grandfathers house. If I had been content to loiter on the path
+heretofore, no amount of haste could satisfy me now. I doubt if any
+honest artist lad returning to the place of his birth after three years'
+absence ever met a grayer welcome. I had left my grandfather unimpaired,
+and it was well-nigh impossible to figure that harsh and domineering
+spirit in decay. Abram Pendarves belonged to the ancient hearty, savage
+race of British sea-captains, now fast waning to extinction. After a
+youth of wild and black adventure under the rule of just such salt-water
+despots as he himself became, he had spent some two score years
+practising the tyrannies and what one may call the brutal virtues he had
+learned on every sea and beneath every sky this planet owns; then came
+at last to settle down in the storm-beaten house on the cliffs by
+Chepstow (the house his father's father had built), whence he could see
+the surf whiten on the rocks and gulls forever circling about the Brown
+Cow. His was a narrow and surly old age, not overwell provided, for he
+had never been a thrifty man; and he found among the rattletrap
+furnishings of his neglected home one living chattel quite as
+worthless--a weird, lean goblin of a boy, his sole descendant,
+fatherless and motherless, playing lonely little games in corners,
+making crass drawings with a charred stick on the walls, and viewing the
+blossoming orchards of spring with a crazy delight in color. I fear
+there was not much affection between this ill-matched couple. For long
+years I saw in my grandfather only a coarse, violent old man, niggardly
+and censorious. And to him there was doubtless something unwholesome
+and repellent in the most innocent of my tastes; I could not even sin
+roundly, like other boys, by pilfering or truantry, but must display an
+exotic passion for reading forbidden books, an abhorred dexterity at
+caricature. I think we were equally headstrong and unreasonable, I in my
+young way, he in his old one; and as I trudged along the quiet homeward
+paths, it shamed me to remember with what hard words we had parted.
+
+
+II
+
+The sun was going down as I conquered the last steep rise toward my
+grandfather's gate. Hereabouts a pair of steps had been cut into the
+cliff and a hand-rail erected to help the visitor against the wind,
+coming, as it so often did, in flaws of extraordinary force and fury
+around the headland. From this high point a great expanse of ocean
+filled the eye, and the ceaseless, uneasy rumor of water assailed one
+even in the fairest weather. There was always a thin run of surf about
+the base of the Brown Cow and among those narrow conical rocks which,
+set in a rough crescent near the lower end of the Cat's Mouth, had not
+inaptly been named the Cat's Teeth.
+
+[Illustration: "'YOU DIDN'T SEE THE SIGN, I SUPPOSE?'"]
+
+The path followed the edge of the cliff on the hither side of a stone
+wall, behind which some few experienced old apple-trees bent and
+flattened themselves into strange, tortuous shapes to escape the winds.
+The inclosure went by the name of orchard, though it was in truth little
+else than a wild jungle of weeds and rubbish; but one tree in the most
+sheltered corner yearly made a conscientious effort to supply us with a
+bushel or so of pippins, and adventurous Chepstow urchins as regularly
+defeated the hope. I purposed to shorten my road by crossing here; and
+so, finding a toe-rest in certain familiar crannies of the masonry,
+clambered easily to the top of the wall, and paused there a moment,
+astride of the coping, to put aside the branches and take a distant view
+of the forlorn pile of ruins I called home. It was a dreary place; its
+roofs sagged, its chimneys leaned at perilous slants. Yet my heart
+warmed to the sight of it. I took hold of the stoutest bough to swing me
+to the ground, when----
+
+"Don't touch those apples, young man!" said somebody sharply.
+
+I was so startled as nearly to lose my hold, and came down with a run
+and hands well scored on the rough bark. There I stood, knee-high in
+rank undergrowth, staring all about in a surprise that must have been
+not a little ludicrous, for the voice uttered a short cicada-chirrup of
+laughter, shrill and sweet.
+
+"Here I am. What bats men are!" it said.
+
+I looked. She was standing almost immediately beneath the place where I
+had climbed over; my boot must have grazed her. She was what old women
+call a slip of a girl, in a cotton gown, white, figured with fine sprigs
+of green sadly faded, for it was not new. The wind whipped her red hair
+into her eyes. Her face was very much freckled; properly speaking, it
+was one freckle from brow to chin. She wore, besides, as I remember, a
+little muslin tucker (I think the garment is so named) and a little
+frilled muslin apron; and these articles, together with her old print
+frock, were washed, starched, and ironed to a degree it hath not entered
+into the mind of man to conceive. I took off my hat; and something about
+this young woman moved me thereafter hastily to adjust my cravat and
+shirt-ruffle. I believe these signs of perturbation (which were entirely
+genuine) pleased her in some subtle way, like a tribute, for she stopped
+to inquire: "You want to cut through here to the highroad? I'm very
+sorry, but I really cannot allow it. I've had a great deal of trouble
+keeping the village boys away from this tree. These are fine apples and
+good winter keepers--that is, I think they are----" she added a little
+tentatively, searching my face. "You didn't see the sign, I suppose?"
+
+I followed her gesture and beheld, nailed aloft on the stub of a dead
+tree, a square of white planking whereon was neatly lettered the legend:
+
+  NO TRESPASSING UNDER PENALTY OF
+
+  THE LAW
+
+  ABRAM AND NICOL PENDARVES, PROPRIETORS
+  PER MARY SMITH
+
+"I did it myself with a red-hot poker," she said proudly.
+
+I gazed from her to the sign-board, all but speechless. "It's very well
+done," I managed to get out at last.
+
+"Yes, isn't it? But, somehow, it doesn't keep the boys from coming.
+They're not at all law-abiding. I don't think they've been very well
+brought up. And then, of course, they're not accustomed to seeing any
+one in charge here." She looked around, and smoothed her apron with the
+most astonishing little air of resource and command. "I saw a bill with
+the names at the bottom that way, and per So-and-So below, so I copied
+it," she continued, surveying her handiwork fondly.
+
+"Ah? You are Miss Mary Smith?"
+
+"Yes." And now she looked at me, and away again, with a strange and
+sudden flush. "Yes, _Smith_. That's--that's a very good name, _I_
+think." There was a kind of tremulous defiance in her tone, as if she
+half expected me to question it.
+
+"I've heard it before, I believe," said I stupidly--for, in fact, I had
+scarcely yet got myself together. "You live here?"
+
+She nodded, with a perplexed and inquiring eye on me. "I'm Captain
+Pendarves' housekeeper," she said, with a prim and bridling air, and
+once more her expression challenged me. "Deny it if you can, sir!" was
+evidently her unspoken thought.
+
+"And how long has my--ahem!--has Captain Pendarves been employing you,
+may I ask?" I said, wondering that Crump had not prepared me for this as
+for the other changes.
+
+"Young man," said Mary Smith severely, "I have no time to stand here
+answering idle questions. If you want to see Captain Pendarves, I will
+speak to him; but if not, I really think you had better be getting on,
+for it's late."
+
+"I was thinking of stopping awhile," said I humbly, "with my
+grandfather. You see, I'm Nicol Pendarves."
+
+Had I said, "I am the Prince of Darkness," the announcement could not
+have wrought a more appalling change in her. She fell back a step,
+putting out one faltering hand to the wall for support. Her small
+bullying mien vanished like a garment twitched from her shoulders by
+unseen magic. Her face blanched piteously; terror looked from her eyes.
+"Oh, I was afraid of this!" she gasped, in a voice that went to the
+heart. "Sir, I--I--meant no harm!"
+
+"Harm!" said I, both touched and puzzled. "Why, you've done none. There
+is no need for excuses. I never saw a better steward; you did not know
+me, and you were within your rights to send me about my business."
+
+"Sir," she said, still in a tremble, "I have done no wrong. You will
+find everything just as you left it."
+
+"I shall find everything in a good deal better case, judging by what
+I've seen already, I think," said I heartily. "How long have you been
+here?"
+
+"Four weeks--next Wednesday," she answered nervously.
+
+"Then," said I, "maybe you can tell me something about the drift of
+things here. For--not to boggle about it--I am in some uneasiness, Miss
+Smith. These people--this man and woman who I hear have settled
+themselves upon Captain Pendarves of late--who are they? what are they?"
+
+As I spoke we emerged upon the stone-paved walk leading to our kitchen
+door; it had been picked free of weeds, and the currant-bushes on either
+side trimly harnessed up to a set of stakes. A white curtain flounced
+behind the old lattice; there was a row of flowering geraniums in pots
+upon the sill. Through the open door you might see a clear fire and Mary
+Smith's saucepans glowing on the wall. The place, I thought, wore, for a
+kitchen, the best air conceivable of decent and humble dignity; nor
+would one have supposed that mere thrift and cleanliness could be so
+comely. I turned to her with some such words, and found her facing me,
+so much of haggard trouble in her eyes that I stopped, aghast.
+
+"Sir," she said, twisting her fingers, "I see you do not understand--I
+thought you knew. I--I am the woman you speak of. Your grandfather is
+within, and the other--the man--with him."
+
+
+III
+
+Our old house being designed and built with a shiplike compactness,
+there was but one room on the ground floor besides the kitchen and its
+offices. It was a plain, comfortable place, wainscoted about, with
+shelves and lockers in the whimsical copy of a vessel's cabin. And it
+contained the single work of art our establishment could show; that is,
+a portrait of my grandfather's grandfather,--he who founded this
+house,--in a finicking attitude, with a brocade coat and a pair of
+compasses. In his rear were to be seen a pillar and a red velvet
+curtain, and (distantly) a fine storm of clouds and lightning. Never was
+a respectable old sailorman so misrepresented; but all his descendants
+except one regarded this gaudy daub with almost religious veneration.
+Every family has its one great man; the admiral was ours. His was the
+distinction of being the only Pendarves who had ever managed to amass a
+fortune. It had dribbled through the fingers of succeeding generations;
+but there was a tradition that some part of it, buried or otherwise
+secreted with an admirable forethought by the old gentleman, might yet
+be discovered, to the further glorification of our house.
+
+The picture hung directly opposite the door, favoring me, as I entered,
+with a disconcerting smirk; it needed no great stretch of fancy to
+credit him with cherishing some secret and villainous joke. Beneath it
+sat my grandfather, with his pipe, in the same place and attitude as I
+remembered him for upward of twenty years, but so spectral a likeness of
+himself that the sight of him shocked me like a blow. He had wasted to a
+mere parchment envelop of bones, and the eyes he turned to mine were
+bright with inward fever. I had looked for I do not know what signs of
+an unstable mind, but at first, save for the eyes, saw none. He showed
+only a not too well pleased surprise.
+
+"Nicol!" he said, and pushed back his chair, without rising. "Nicol!"
+and then for a moment sat staring closely at me under his heavy brows.
+With his next action something of the horror of his affliction came home
+to me, for I saw that, but for some confused sense that I had been
+absent against his will, he had utterly forgot everything concerning me,
+the terms of our last meeting, and the events of many years besides.
+
+"Hush, and sit down!" he said, in the habitually chiding tone he had
+used to the boy of ten or twelve. "Take your books and get your lesson!"
+He pointed with the stem of his pipe to a stool in the corner where, as
+a lad, I had passed more than one grim hour, and turned to his
+companion, as older people turn from the interruptions of children.
+
+Mary Smith, following behind, touched me gently on the arm. "Go and sit
+down," she formed the words with her lips rather than voiced them.
+
+There sat beside my grandfather a vast, fat creature with a forest of
+greasy black hair and beard about his pallid face; his heavy hands lay
+motionless in his lap, forcibly reminding me of an image I had seen of
+some Oriental god upon his throne. His eyes were scarcely opened, his
+breathing was almost imperceptible; a gross animal content appeared in
+him as of a full-fed, lethargic crocodile. Side by side, he and the
+gaunt, fierce-eyed old man presented no mean allegory of spirit and
+body. A table was before them, and in the middle of it a toy the like of
+which I had never seen in this house or elsewhere--a globe of crystal,
+perhaps the size of an orange, held up on a little bronze pedestal. The
+fat man's eyes, or so much of them as one might see, were fixed upon
+this thing with a kind of stupid intensity; one could have fancied him
+paying tribute to some idolatrous shrine. The captain watched him with
+an equal earnestness; so might the Roman mob have hung upon the reading
+of the sacred entrails; and there was about it the air of a
+well-practised, familiar rite. At last my grandfather asked:
+
+"What do you see?"
+
+[Illustration: "THE FAT MAN'S EYES ... WERE FIXED UPON THIS THING WITH A
+KIND OF STUPID INTENSITY"]
+
+The other's lips moved, and an unintelligible whisper reached me.
+
+"Ay, that's it, that's it," said the captain, and sent a quick,
+searching look about the room. "Doubloons--pieces-of-eight--Spanish
+pillar-dollars--doubloons, doubloons! That is what it would likely be
+made up of, eh? But where--try to see that--where?"
+
+Another interval of silent gazing, and the oracle uttered some further
+statement, which my grandfather received with an impatient groan.
+
+"Doubloons--piles of gold--I know!" he said. "And a ship. But
+whereabouts was it, eh? Surely you can see whereabouts it was?"
+
+"It's all a mist; I can see nothing," the other answered, after a pause.
+
+I could have found it in me to laugh at the whole miserable hocus-pocus,
+had I been less indignant. The situation was, besides, sufficiently
+grave; and as I listened to this silly and profane juggling, and
+observed the wildness of my grandfather's bearing, it became plain to me
+that he could not long endure such an influence. I guessed from his talk
+that the old man's disorder was based upon the idea of treasure lost,
+sunk, or hidden hereabout; for our coast was dangerous, a menace to
+vessels, and not innocent, besides, of smugglers and worse. Perhaps the
+poverty of his later years was at the root of his delusion; perhaps his
+madness would have taken this form anyhow. However he had fallen into
+the fat man's hands, this was the secret of the latter's power. While I
+pondered gloomily, the sitting (so to call it) came to an end. Perhaps
+my unwelcome appearance somewhat contracted it. My grandfather lapsed
+into his chair, his chin on his chest, brooding. Excitement died in him
+almost visibly, like the flickering down of a spent fire. Instead of
+eighty, he looked a hundred and eighty, and his face was as lifeless as
+a mummy's.
+
+"Zaira!" said the fat man, raising his thick lids (but I fancied he had
+already taken some shrewd peeps at me from under them), "I have slept,
+and the spirit has spoken. Arise! take away the mirror of Time and
+Space!"
+
+And hereupon the girl, advancing with a shamed glance at me, carried the
+globe to one of the lockers, shoved it in, and slammed the door on it
+savagely.
+
+"Have a care!" the seer warned her somberly; the mirror of Time and
+Space, apparently, was not immune from the ordinary risks of mirrors, as
+one might have expected so august an instrument to be. When speaking
+aloud thus, he used a great rolling, sonorous voice; it filled the room
+until the very window-panes vibrated.
+
+She gave him a look of angry rebellion, opened her lips as if to retort
+with some stinging word, stood irresolute a moment with eyes that
+wavered between the three of us, then walked off, leaving us sitting
+facing each other in silence.
+
+The fat man and I exchanged a long stare, I choking down my temper, he
+smooth and placid, to outward seeming, as the idol he resembled. The
+resolution with which he stuck to his silly pose was, in its way, a
+rogue's masterpiece; nothing more exasperating than this stolid
+effrontery was ever devised. The scoundrel feared, and yet knew he had,
+in a sense, the better of me; the helpless old man between us was his
+shield.
+
+"Young man," he said at last, in the same booming monotone, "have you
+the gift of the seeing eye?"
+
+"I have more the gift of the feeling fist, I think," said I, with what
+calmness I could muster. "If you doubt it, sir, I shall be pleased to
+show you. I am Nicol Pendarves, as a soothsayer like yourself will have
+guessed already. Perhaps you will honor me with your name and business
+here?"
+
+"Many names are mine," he answered, and made a solemn gesture. "Many
+names are mine----"
+
+"Doubtless," I said; "but I meant your _last_ alias."
+
+He went on, unruffled, in his great voice, as if I had not spoken: "Many
+names have been mine through the uncounted eons--many names. In this
+flesh men call me Constantine Paphluoides."
+
+It was no wonder Chepstow could not turn its tongue about that name;
+that and his manner together must have dumfounded our straight-thinking
+townspeople. I do not remember--indeed, I took no pains to note--what
+else he said; bits of mythology, history, poetry, rolled from him in a
+cataract of meaningless noise. Had I been an ardent disciple sitting at
+his feet, he could not have feigned a greater exaltation. The fellow was
+at once dull and crafty; he loosed this gust of windy rhetoric at me as
+if he thought to win upon me by mere sound and fury signifying nothing.
+
+I got up at length, when I had had enough of him, and, walking across to
+where he sat, "Mr. Constantine Paphluoides," said I, "this is my house;
+I give you until to-morrow morning to leave it; you will go quietly and
+without any formalities of farewell. You will find it expedient to obey
+me: otherwise, although I have not consulted the mirror of Time and
+Space, I should not be surprised if it revealed you, to the seeing eye,
+in the town jail and later in the stocks."
+
+He made no answer, but sat staring at me, blinking, and opening and
+shutting his mouth in a gasping fashion like a fish. I had striven to
+speak quietly, but (being in a breathing heat of anger) must
+unconsciously have raised my voice, for unexpectedly, and, as it were,
+for a warning, my grandfather came out of his semi-stupor and
+straightened up, eying me over with a kind of wandering severity.
+
+"Nicol, go to bed! You hear me? Go to bed!" He reached, cursing, for his
+cane. There was a grotesque familiarity in the act. With that very cane
+he had sought to coerce me into the straight and narrow road, as he
+conceived it, how many times during all my childhood!
+
+"Go to bed, I tell you!" he screamed, and half rose, brandishing his rod
+of correction.
+
+Somebody pulled at my sleeve; it was the girl. "Please come away, Mr.
+Pendarves; please do come away, sir, just for a minute, and then he'll
+forget it," she urged; and, with her earnest air of responsibility:
+"It's so bad for him."
+
+
+IV
+
+[Illustration: "'GO TO BED, I TELL YOU,' HE SCREAMED, AND HALF ROSE"]
+
+In the kitchen, Zaira Mary Smith was getting supper ready, as it
+appeared. I followed her out passively, and sat down in a sort of maze.
+It seemed incredible that, amid the shabby tragedy of this household,
+there should be time or thought for the kindly business of spreading a
+meal. The girl marched briskly to and fro, stooping to the oven door,
+tinkling softly among her spoons and bowls, evidently taking a timid
+zest in her labors. It made her seem the most sane, assured, and stable
+person among us, spite of her position. I could have imagined her
+singing as she went, had it not been for my presence. She was
+desperately conscious of me, watching me askant with the curiously
+commingled fear and trustfulness of a child. Nor, notwithstanding the
+untruths or half-truths she had told me, could her connection with the
+abominable rogue-fool in the next room appear other than an enormity--as
+if she might be the enchanted heroine of some fairy-tale, condemned to
+the service of a monster. At last, when she came and laid a board and
+pan on the table beside me, and, rolling up the sleeves about her
+capable, round little arms, began a severe maltreatment of a batch of
+dough, I could keep silence no longer; curiosity crowded every other
+feeling out of me.
+
+"Mary Smith!" I burst out, "for God's sake, tell me all about it!"
+
+She rested her hands on the edge of the bowl an instant. "About us?" she
+said, with a quick glance at me. She gave the dough one or two
+perfunctory pats and punches, biting her lips; and then suddenly, with a
+rush of color, her face puckered together, she clapped her befloured
+hands over it, and fell on the nearest bench in a perfect whirlwind of
+sobs.
+
+"I--I--I w-w-wanted to be respectable!" was all I could make out between
+gasps--but that was staggering enough news, I thought. She wanted to be
+respectable!
+
+She went on: "I didn't come here of my own free will, Mr. Pendarves,
+truly I didn't; but when we came, and I saw how nice I could make
+it,--and I never had a home before,--I knew, if you ever came back, that
+would end it all, and I did so hope you wouldn't!"
+
+"It seemed a pity not to make hay while the sun shone?" I suggested.
+
+She nodded, a little doubtfully. "I didn't think of it just that way,"
+she said. "But--yes, I suppose any one would put it so. Only--I haven't
+hurt anything, Mr. Pendarves; I--I only scrubbed--and cooked--and
+cleaned a little. I was so happy: there was no harm, it seemed to me.
+And when I pretended to be the housekeeper, that--that was just a little
+game I played with myself; it was silly, I dare say, but, after all, it
+did no harm, either. It was like another game I play by myself
+sometimes--of having a birthday, you know? I put little things I've made
+beside the bed, and when I wake up in the morning, I make believe it's
+my birthday, and I'm so surprised at all the presents I've got! It's
+silly, isn't it?' I knew you'd laugh."
+
+"I never felt less like it," I said. "Don't you know your real
+birthday?"
+
+She shook her head. No, she did not know that. She had never known
+anything about her father and mother. She was not even certain of her
+own name. "He calls me Zaira," she said, with a scornful jerk of her
+auburn head toward the other room; "but that's a stupid name, and I hate
+it. I tell every one my name's Mary Smith. Why not? I might as well call
+myself what I like--nobody cares. I think Mary Smith's beautiful, don't
+you? It's so respectable, isn't it?" she added wistfully.
+
+Of her childhood she could remember nothing but being in some sort of
+school or institution (a home for foundlings, most likely) governed by
+nuns, or at least by women who went about in black stuff dresses and
+white caps, and whom one called _ma soeur_--for this was in southern
+France, she thought. The life was clean, decorous, and peaceful, and she
+might have grown up to wear a white cap herself, and herd little waifs
+into chapel; but when she was probably ten or eleven years old, the fat
+man came and took her away, and they had been wandering up and down the
+world ever since. He said he was her uncle, but she was no more sure of
+that than of anything else concerning herself.
+
+When they had been in Chepstow a time, she said, her uncle came into
+their fortune-telling booth one day with Captain Pendarves, whose name
+she did not then know. He talked a great deal in an excited way about
+finding some treasure----"money I think he said his father or
+grandfather had hidden a long while ago. He kept saying it would all be
+in 'doubloons, doubloons,' because it was got in the Spanish Main and
+brought here in a ship. And he said there was treasure, heaps of it, in
+the bottom of the Cat's Mouth, where ships had sunk, gold pieces all in
+amongst the ribs of dead men. Mr. Pendarves,"--she looked at me with a
+shy, awed sympathy,--"I saw your grandfather was--was----"
+
+"He is crazy, or nearly so," said I. "Plain talk is best."
+
+"I'm afraid so. I thought shame to beguile a poor old man that way, but,
+sir, I could not stop it. He came every day, and they looked in the
+crystal--just as they were doing this afternoon, you know. He's worse
+now; I think he forgets betweenwhiles what was said the last time they
+looked. Then, one day, _he_ told me we were to come here to live. It was
+wrong--I knew it; but when I saw it, and thought what I could do--and I
+did so want to have a home and--and be respectable--and I thought, too,
+if I worked hard and made it nice, it would be a--a kind of payment,
+wouldn't it? I couldn't help longing to----"
+
+"Don't cry that way," I said. "I can't bear to see you cry."
+
+"I can't help it," she sobbed. "It's so hard to leave it all."
+
+"Well, then, why leave it?" said I. "_He_ has to, surely; but that need
+make no difference to you. We must have a housekeeper, you know."
+
+She gave me a woeful glance; and I understood that, according to her
+poor little code, it would be more "respectable" to resume her
+journeyings with the fat crystal-gazer than to stay in the house with
+Nick Pendarves as his grandfather's housekeeper. Here was a ticklish
+point to argue with her; and, for all her tears, there was a firmness in
+the set of her chin (it was dented with a dimple) that warned me such
+argument would be a waste of time. She had made up her mind, and would
+stand to it at all costs. It was martyrdom in an eminently feminine
+style; women deliver themselves up to it day by day, and contrive to be
+perfectly unreasonable, yet somehow in the right. She wiped her eyes
+presently, shut her mouth on a sob, and went resolutely about her work.
+We had, after all, a tolerably cheerful evening in the kitchen. It
+seemed wisest for me not to show myself again before Captain Pendarves,
+but I am afraid I did not repine greatly at the banishment. As the door
+swung to and fro behind Mary carrying their dishes, I caught glimpses of
+the gloomy parlor, my grandfather huddled in his chair by the table,
+with bright, roving eyes; the sorcerer surprisingly busy about the food
+for a person of his ethereal habits; and, on the wall beyond, old
+Admiral Pendarves simpering eternally over his private fun.
+
+
+V
+
+The wind came up strong again after sunset, and all night long went
+noisily about the gables, and piped down our trembling old chimneys. It
+did not lessen with the approach of morning, and when I thrust open the
+window, an hour or so after dawn, there was a low-hanging gray sky and a
+great, driving stir in the air. I had hardly pushed the casement out,
+had one brief vision of bare tormented trees, felt a slap of rain, and
+heard, not far away, the measured beating of breakers as they charged at
+the foot of our cliff, when the wind, plucking the latch from my grasp,
+slammed the lattice and went yelling around the corner of the house like
+a jocular demon. I began to dress, thinking, as I had often thought
+before, that the place had a kind of fantastic kinship with the sea;
+every timber in it seemed to strain and creak to the repeated onsets of
+the storm, like those of any ship. The house stood steady enough, yet
+our position, open to all the winds of heaven, and within a few hundred
+paces of the furious water, was surely such as none but a sailor would
+have chosen. We rode out the weather in the open, so to speak, with
+abundant sea-room. And, for the better carrying out of the simile, there
+presently arose, somewhere outside, a long, drawling hail, calculated,
+with a mariner's nicety, to overcome the wind. "Ah-o-oy! The house,
+ah-o-oy!"
+
+It came from the landward-looking or highroad side of the house--about
+two points on the starboard bow, as old Crump would have said. And, in
+fact, when I reached the door, there was Crump himself huddled in a
+pea-jacket on the seat of his cart, with his gray pony drooping
+dolefully between the shafts. I could just see them above the ragged
+hedge that divided our little front yard from the public way. Towering
+columns of rain swept across the landscape; Crump and the pony looked
+soaked to the core; and I was admiring the Spartan devotion to duty that
+brought him out at this hour, in such weather, when he began another
+wailing like a castaway banshee: "Ah-o-oy, the house! Pendarves,
+ah-o-oy!"
+
+I set a hand to either side of my mouth and roared an answering hail to
+him up the wind. We were a bare twenty yards apart, but if he had not
+chanced at that moment to look in my direction, I doubt if he would have
+been aware of me, for all my efforts. The wind, in a fresh swoop,
+snatched the sound from my lips and ranged through the house with a
+turmoil of banging doors, falling crockery, and wildly fluttering
+draperies. As it was, he caught sight of me, shouted something
+unintelligible, and gesticulated toward a formless heap tucked up in
+oilskins behind him in the cart. Then he descended laboriously and
+signaled for help to remove it.
+
+"What is it? What has he got?" screamed Mary Smith in my ear. She must
+have come running from the back of the house at the recent outburst of
+racket. Her petticoats swirled; her red curls streamed (they were
+shining with wet). She had certainly been outdoors already, as early as
+it was, in the teeth of all this blow, and I was startled by the pale
+anxiety of her look. "What is it? Who is there?" she cried again
+shrilly.
+
+"Nobody but Crump with my baggage," I cried back. "What's the matter?"
+
+"Oh, Mr. Pendarves, haven't you seen them? They are both gone! I've
+looked everywhere about the house. They were gone when I got up, and I
+can't find them high or low!"
+
+"You mean Captain Pendarves--and the other?"
+
+She nodded, with terror-struck eyes on me; then, raising on tiptoe,
+screamed painfully, with her mouth close to my ear (it was almost
+impossible to hear otherwise): "He--your grandfather--has done it
+before. He's always restless in a storm. He goes down to the shore
+sometimes. I'm so afraid----" her look said the rest.
+
+"Ask him--ask Crump; maybe he's seen them," she added in a shriek, as I
+started to the carrier's help. It was but a few steps to the gate, yet I
+reached it wet through, half blinded by sheets of water driven slantwise
+in my face, and with the breath nearly beaten out of me. In the open,
+thus, the storm seemed to increase tenfold in violence; it filled the
+vast cloudy hollow of the sky with reverberating din; and I felt, or
+fancied I felt, the solid ground shiver with the pounding of the waves
+on the ledges along the Cat's Mouth.
+
+Crump greeted me with a cheerful grin; he had all the seaman's tolerance
+for the vagaries of the weather.
+
+"Coming on to blow some, ain't it?" he remarked at the top of his lungs.
+"Your old apple-tree's carried away--that one in the corner of the
+orchard, I mean. I could see it as I came along by the upper road."
+
+"Have you seen my grandfather anywhere about?" I shouted.
+
+He could not have understood the question, for he answered, squinting up
+at me knowingly as he stooped over his end of my chest: "I see you got
+rid of _him_, Mr. Nick, and in short order, too. I spoke him a little
+way back, bound for Sidmouth with all sails set--at least, he was laying
+a course that way. Come on board, ma'am!" He pulled his forelock and
+made a leg respectfully before Mary (albeit eying her with no small
+interest) as we shoved our burden through the door. The girl clapped it
+shut, with a sharp struggle against the draught, and in the momentary
+silence that followed we stood awkwardly and apprehensively surveying
+one another, while the hurricane rumbled outside.
+
+"I asked you if you had seen my grandfather," I said to Crump, at last.
+
+"Seen the cap'n? Why, no, sir," he said, surprised. "I was telling you
+I saw----" He stopped, with a glance at Mary.
+
+"Yes, go on. You saw _him_? Where? What was he doing?" she said sharply.
+
+"I was saying he crossed my bows laying his course for Sidmouth, or that
+way," said Crump, evidently striving for a witness-box exactness. "He
+didn't answer my hail. Looked like he was in too much of a hurry."
+
+Mary cast a troubled look about. "Did he have anything with him? A
+portmanteau, or carpet-bag, or anything to carry clothes?"
+
+"Not that I noticed," said Crump carefully. "Looked as if he was going
+out in ballast--except his pockets; there was something in his pockets,
+I should say."
+
+I stared at Mary in some perplexity. What the fat man did, or what
+should become of him, were, indeed, matters of indifference to me,
+except so far as they concerned her. I was well enough pleased that he
+should go, but there was something unusual in the manner of his going;
+it was a headlong flight. To tell the truth, I had looked for further
+trouble with him. What would the girl do now? And where was Captain
+Pendarves? She met me with eyes at once frightened and resolute.
+
+"First of all we must find Captain Pendarves--we must go look for him,"
+she said, answering my thought and making up my mind for me in a trice.
+(She has a way of doing this, displaying the most unerring accuracy at
+it any time these twenty years!) And, in the turn of a hand, she had
+kilted up her skirts, tied a shawl, over her head, and was making for
+the kitchen door.
+
+"Lord love you, miss, you can't go out in this!" said Crump, aghast.
+
+"Why not? I've been out in it once already."
+
+"But, Mary!" I cried, and tried to withhold her. "What good can you do?
+Here is Crump, and here am I. We'll find them both. This is no work for
+a woman. You are wet, you may get hurt----"
+
+"And you?" she retorted. Then, in a lower voice, "Don't stop me, Mr.
+Pendarves; don't try to keep me from going. I can't stay quietly here,
+and wait, and wait, and not know what's happened. I think I should go
+mad. I _must_ go. You are wasting time; your grandfather--oh, can't you
+understand?"
+
+I understood only that she was frantic with anxiety, and might have
+offered further remonstrance had it not been for the sudden defection of
+Crump. He edged a little nearer, and gently jogged my elbow.
+
+"I'm with ye, miss," he announced, with startling alacrity; and, as we
+followed her out, he explained to me in a hoarse and perfectly audible
+whisper behind one hand: "I'm always with 'em when they get that look
+on, Mr. Nicol. Catch me adrift on a lee shore! I've learned a lot since
+I signed with Sarah."
+
+The breakfast-table had been laid, and the empty chairs stood around it
+in their places, under the smiling supervision of the admiral's
+portrait. In the kitchen, Mary had a bright fire going, her neat towels
+hanging to dry. She opened the door, and the next instant this pretty
+and comforting picture was shut behind us, and there we were crouching
+in the rain under the eaves, with the wind bellowing overhead.
+
+[Illustration: "IT LAY BEFORE US, A CONSIDERABLE HEAP OF GOLD AND SILVER
+COINS, TARNISHED BUT RECOGNIZABLE"]
+
+Mary stood on tiptoe again to scream: "I've been all over except in the
+orchard--you can see the shore from there."
+
+I took her hand within my arm, and we struggled forward. As we drew
+nearer the cliff, the loud and awful noise of breakers in the Cat's
+Mouth silenced the storm; yet the wind was no whit diminished. A man
+could hardly have kept his feet, I think, along the cliff path. Before
+we reached the corner where the ancient tree that had weathered so many
+gales lay prostrate, uprooted at last, although we had as yet no view of
+the immediate shore, we could see a white aureole of spray hang, vanish,
+and return in a breath, yards in air above the Brown Cow. We fetched a
+compass around the orchard, stumbling and staggering among stumps and
+matted weeds and half-hidden logs without finding my grandfather, or any
+trace of him; and Crump having dropped behind, we had lost sight of him
+when that eery screech he adopted to make himself heard traveled to us
+down the wind. He was kneeling by the dislodged roots of our old tree,
+and, as he caught my eye, began an uncouth pantomime of surprise and
+wonder; then stooped, grasped a handful of something, and held it aloft
+with extravagant gestures. He bawled again, and, having got closer by
+this time, I heard the words:
+
+"Doubloons, Mr. Nick! Pieces-of-eight! Spanish dollars! Doubloons!"
+
+"Heaven help us all!" went through me, "Here's another gone mad."
+
+The spectacle put our search momentarily from my mind. I knew Crump's
+head to be none of the strongest, and I should never have guessed what
+had actually happened--for surely this was a strange place and way in
+which to stumble upon old Admiral Pendarves' treasure!
+
+Yet that was what the carrier had done; he was never saner in his life.
+It lay before us, a considerable heap of gold and silver coins,
+tarnished but recognizable, in a rotting wooden keg sunk into the ground
+at the foot of the tree and partly meshed in its roots. Crump plowed
+among the coins with his hand.
+
+"There's a mort of money here, Mr. Nicol," he said, "and there's been
+more. Look, here's some of it scattered out in the grass; it couldn't
+have got away out there of itself. And here's a footprint in the mud."
+He looked up thoughtfully. "Likely some of it's on its way to Sidmouth
+now," said he. "I thought his pockets bulged."
+
+"Well, I wish him joy of it!" said I.
+
+"Lord, you could have the law on him for that, Mr. Nicol. Ain't you
+going to?"
+
+"Not I!" said I, holding Mary's hand.
+
+Something in this attitude must have moved Crump to his next remark. He
+looked us both over with an impartial and dispassionate air, cast a
+calculating eye on the treasure; then, "Enough left to get married and
+set up on, anyway," he said weightily. "There's worse things in the
+world than being married--though you'd hardly believe it. That's what I
+often says to Sarah!"
+
+At that Mary Smith snatched her hand suddenly from mine and moved toward
+the edge of the cliff, crying out that we must continue our search. I
+climbed the orchard wall and looked along the shore. Here the cliff
+dropped away almost sheer, and the narrow strip of shingle at its base
+was lost in the surf. Farther to the north it widened a little with the
+curve of the shore, and through a swaying curtain of rain I could follow
+it to a point we called the Notch, near the entrance of the Cat's Mouth;
+of late years they have dredged the channel and moored a bell-buoy off
+this headland. There was nothing alive in sight; some prone black
+objects I saw, with a start, were only a few fisher-boats drawn up on
+the sand, and none too safe. I looked out to sea; the tide was making,
+and, where the strait drew in toward the Cat's Teeth, the waves fought
+and clamored with a horrid vigor, like living monsters. Their huge
+voices outdid the winds, and, as one after another made forward,
+towered, and broke upon the reefs, the Teeth disappeared in a welter of
+foam. Hereabout we found the old man at last.
+
+Where he had got a boat, or with what madman's strength he had launched
+it, we could not guess. It was midway of the Cat's Mouth that I first
+caught sight of him, at no great distance measured by feet and inches,
+but as far beyond human aid as if the wide Atlantic had separated us. He
+was standing up in the stern, with folded arms, in something the posture
+he may have maintained on the poop of his ship in old days--where,
+perhaps, he fancied himself at this moment. I trust that reason was
+withheld from him in the utter hour; and certainly, although I could not
+discern his features, I saw him make no gesture either to invite help or
+to indicate that he had any understanding of his position. If mad, I
+thought (right or wrong) his death thus less ignoble than his life had
+become; if sane, he held a strong and steadfast heart, and bore himself
+well on his last voyage. By some strange chance, the boat spun and
+tossed among the breakers, yet kept an even keel, and boat and man
+together made a viking end. For, so standing, unconscious or unmoved, he
+went down, before our eyes, between the white and pointed reefs of the
+Cat's Teeth.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+BOB, DEBUTANT
+
+BY HENRY GARDNER HUNTING
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY DENMAN FINK
+
+
+Of course, Bob knew that, as an abstract ethical principle, it is wrong
+to fight. His mother had been endeavoring to impress that idea upon him,
+from the moment it was first decided that he should go to public school
+till his books and his lunch-box were packed and he was on his way
+thither; and she had succeeded fairly well, for she had exacted a
+promise from him faithfully to avoid personal encounters as wholly
+sinful and unbecoming.
+
+As a matter of fact, Bob knew only so much about fighting as he had
+learned through round-eyed, somewhat frightened observation of a very
+few entirely bloodless encounters among older boys; and, inasmuch as he
+had found himself consistently excluded from nearly all other, more
+peaceful pursuits and interests of these older ones, it was not
+unnatural that he should feel merely a spectator's interest in their
+fistic battles also, and that he should look upon them as he would have
+looked upon any other natural phenomenon--with some excitement, perhaps,
+but with no personal concern.
+
+Bob admired his mother. To him, she was the most beautiful and the most
+resourceful woman in the world. He had found her judgment upon many
+subjects so wise that he was quite prepared to believe her position in
+this matter (which did not appear to be vital) completely and
+unquestionably correct, and to promise accordingly.
+
+But conditions which exist on the big, bare public-school playgrounds,
+away alike from parental restraint and parental protection, are quite
+different from those in the home door-yard, and the code which obtains
+in the ward-school world is not an open book to all mothers of
+chubby-fisted sons who are called upon to observe it. It seems difficult
+for mothers to comprehend that a normal boy's standing on the
+school-ground is, like that of a young cock in a barn-yard, simply a
+matter of mettle and muscle.
+
+So it was as early as Bob's second day at school--on the first Papa Jack
+had gone with him--that a revelation came both to him and to his mother.
+To him it was a painful revelation, first because he had this new code
+to learn, and afterward because of his promise; and it was the latter
+thing that made the real difficulty. When you are a small boy you can
+easily adapt yourself and your habits of mind to new conditions and
+environment; but when you have some one else to think of, and when you
+are bound by a promise, that complicates matters.
+
+[Illustration: "SCHOOL-BAG AND LUNCH-BOX DROPPED FROM HIS HANDS"]
+
+Now, one "Curly" Davis--who was said to have been christened Charles,
+but whose astonishingly spiral locks surely constituted better authority
+for a name than any possible application of baptismal water--was, by
+right of reputed might, dictator of the Vine Street Primary. Curly was
+alleged to be of pugnacious disposition, and had not been bred to
+appreciation of the Golden Rule. He had the outward bearing of one who
+has reason for confidence in his personal prowess. He was popularly
+believed to have fought many fights and fierce,--just when and where his
+admirers seemed not to consider important,--and he had a reputation for
+ferocity rather disproportionate to his stature. He had a way of glaring
+at you, too, if you happened to be a new boy at school, which was
+sufficiently suggestive of a sanguinary temperament to overawe the
+average youngster and to render quite unnecessary any more active
+demonstration.
+
+Like all despots who rule through fear, Curly had a following. It was
+made up of lesser lights of like tastes and ambitions, who toadied to
+and imitated the tyrant simply to avoid the unpleasant necessities which
+the alternative involved. These followers, numbering some six or eight,
+through their unity of aim and Curly's leadership, had gained a certain
+ascendency over the far greater, but unorganized, body of would-be
+independents who, chafe as they might under the yoke, dared not attempt
+to throw it off; and these loyal retainers were zealous in service of
+their lord's interests and pleasure.
+
+On that beautiful fall morning when Bob first went alone to school, he
+had not been ten minutes on the playground, standing upon its outer
+edge, school-bag and lunch-box in hand, to gaze upon its novelties,
+before a satellite of Curly's, one Percy Emery, espied him. Instantly it
+was as though Percy had discovered some new quarry, unearthed a fresh
+specimen of some genus, edible and choice.
+
+"Hi, Curly," he yelled, with the eager loyalty of his kind, "come 'ere.
+'Ere's a new one. Look at the school-bag to 'im."
+
+Curly, who was at the moment engaged in the pleasing pastime of
+hectoring a scared little five-year-old who ought still to have been in
+the kindergarten, pricked up his ears at the cry and, like a hungry
+bird of prey leaving a mouse for a lamb, promptly swooped down upon the
+new game. His movement was the signal for the gathering of a crowd, and,
+before Bob was fairly aware that he was the object of attention, he had
+become the center of a curious group whose interest, if not wholly
+hostile, was in the main certainly not friendly. The dictator himself
+confronted him with unmistakably bellicose intentions.
+
+"New shoes!" said Curly contemptuously, selecting the first obviously
+vulnerable point open to a shaft of insult. "New shoes! Spit on 'em!" He
+suited the action to the word, and immediately word and act alike were
+imitated by two or three of his more ardent admirers.
+
+"Stop!" said Bob. He did not know what it meant. He backed away from his
+persecutors.
+
+"Aw, stop, eh?" mocked Curly. "Who are _you_? What's yer name?"
+
+"Bob McAllister."
+
+"Bob! Bob-tail! Bob-cat!" chanted Curly, in gratuitous insult of which
+only bantam shamelessness is capable. "Stop, will I? Who'll make me?
+You? You want to fight?"
+
+He danced about Bob's quiet little figure, snapping his fingers in the
+new boy's eyes. Then, suddenly, he swung his wiry body and swept a
+stinging blow in Bob's face.
+
+A yell of delight from the despot's own drowned a weaker chorus of
+protest. Curly backed and squared, ready for some show of retaliation or
+resistance, a scornful little grin on his face.
+
+"Come on, now. Fight! Stop me!" he cried.
+
+But Bob did not move. Curly's blow had landed fair on the tender little
+red lip, and it had cut against the teeth behind; a tiny scarlet stream
+flowed down Bob's smooth little chin. In his eyes the dizziness of the
+first jar gradually gave way to slow amazement. Then the tears welled
+up, hot tears which overflowed the lids and ran scalding down the
+cheeks, but they did not conceal or quench a glitter which grew to a
+bright flame behind them.
+
+Bob's school-bag and lunch-box dropped from his hands. The pudgy fists
+which had never before been clinched with belligerent purpose, but which
+were, nevertheless, a boy's fists, doubled themselves into hard little
+knots; but still he stood quiet.
+
+[Illustration: "HE SET HIS FACE ONCE MORE TOWARD SCHOOL AND WALKED VERY
+FAST"]
+
+So far as his whirling little mind could think, he thought thus: So this
+was fighting; this was what he had promised mother not to do; what he
+had promised--had promised--promised. He was not so big, this boy who
+had struck him, not so big. Bob was not afraid. But that a promise is
+a thing to be kept inviolate he had learned, oh, years ago, from Papa
+Jack, along with all the other _of-course-ities_ of life, like telling
+the truth, keeping your troubles to yourself, and not being a cry-baby
+or a telltale. And a promise to mother--well, nothing could be more
+sacred. Yet here was a new condition which he had never met before, a
+new situation which suddenly made him see in an altogether different
+aspect a question supposedly settled--this question of to fight or not
+to fight. It made his sweeping promise to mother suddenly seem to have
+been very ill-advised indeed. He wondered if his mother could have known
+that he would meet this kind of thing at school. In that first instant
+after Curly's blow was struck, instinct told him that fists were made to
+be used, and reason added that self-defense is right; and now something
+else was stirring in his heart--something which might not, perhaps, be
+wholly unexpected, under such circumstances, to stir in the heart of a
+boy whose grandfather had carried a musket at Gettysburg and whose
+father had worn khaki at San Juan. He wondered if his mother could have
+known.
+
+[Illustration: "A RING OF BOYS--EXCITED, EAGER, YELLING"]
+
+But Bob's fists only clinched; they did not strike. All the sturdy
+little muscles in his small body stiffened, and he stood with head up
+and eyes blazing, but he did not strike. And then the school-bell
+suddenly began to ring, and the group about him broke away; and Curly
+Davis started off, shouting back something about fixing _him_ after
+school, and--he was alone.
+
+Bob stood still. He realized that the last bell for school had rung. He
+knew that he should have gone in with the others. That was what he had
+been sent to school for, certainly. But he stood still.
+
+The tears had dried upon his face, and so had the thin little line of
+red on his chin. His lip was swelling, and felt as if a hazelnut or a
+big bean had been pushed up under it and were sticking to and stinging
+the skin. He stooped and picked up his school-bag and lunch-box, stood
+still again for a moment, and then walked away. He was not going to
+school, and, naturally, as there was nowhere else to go, he was going
+home.
+
+But a great, heavy weight seemed to have settled down upon his breast
+and pressed in upon it, and it was hard to breathe. His thoughts were
+still confused, but he was wondering--wondering. Why was it? Why had
+they treated him so? Why had they singled him out to attack him? Why had
+that boy with the curly hair struck him? Why had the others laughed?
+Didn't they like him? Didn't any one like him? Why, what had he done?
+His heart swelled with sudden misery and wretchedness. Why was such an
+unkind thing permitted in the world? And then again returned that
+something which stirred inside him, something hot and hard, which made
+his cheeks and eyes burn and his fingers clinch once more. And then
+again the question, "Could mother have known?"
+
+Mrs. McAllister saw him coming a block away, and she ran down to the
+gate to meet him as he trudged in. Bob looked up into his mother's face.
+The quick concern in her eyes, as she saw the battered little lip and
+the stained chin, came nearer to making him sob than Curly's blow had
+done; but, though the tears would well up and his throat felt very
+tight, he only swallowed and carefully wet the puffed lip with his
+tongue.
+
+"Why, Bobbie, Bobbie, what is the matter?" cried his mother, dropping
+down on her knees on the walk beside him. She put both her hands on his
+shoulders and turned his face toward her; and Bob looked straight into
+her troubled blue eyes, and suddenly began to feel better--began to
+feel, indeed, that he did not have to care so much, after all.
+
+"Oh, Bobbie, _have_ you been fighting?"
+
+Bob shook his head.
+
+"How did you get your lip hurt so? Did you fall down?"
+
+Again he shook his head. He didn't know just how to tell her. It wasn't
+fighting. At least, _he_ didn't fight; it had been that other boy. But,
+somehow, he did not want to say that; he did not want to tell; he wanted
+something, but he did not know just what it was. He found himself
+forgetting how he had felt a moment before, and then he discovered that
+he was not thinking about what he wanted at all. He was thinking what a
+very _blue_ blue his mother's eyes were when she looked at him so, and,
+all at once, he felt more sorry for her than for himself, because she
+looked so troubled; and he kissed her quickly, and hurt his lip.
+
+Mrs. McAllister led him into the house. "Won't you tell mother, Bob?"
+she asked.
+
+But he couldn't. He was feeling better--much better--but he couldn't
+tell. There was another reason now, that he hadn't thought of before: it
+would make her feel more sorry. And after all, it didn't matter so
+much; that is, it didn't if-- He looked up at her with a new thought.
+
+"But, Bob, you must tell mother all about it," she was saying, as she
+carefully bathed his chin and lip, and so he had to shake his head
+again.
+
+"Then you must tell papa this noon, Bob."
+
+Bob considered. No, he couldn't tell Papa Jack, either. He felt pretty
+sure father himself wouldn't tell about such a thing if he were a boy.
+He was silent.
+
+Mrs. McAllister began to move about her work, though she still looked at
+him frequently and anxiously. Bob went away to the window, and stood
+looking out. He remembered how he had started out that morning, with
+school-bag and lunch; he remembered how he had approached the
+school-grounds, and how big and strange and attractive a place it had
+seemed to him at first, and what a good time all those boys had been
+having; and then he remembered how, suddenly, he had found them all
+around him, summoned by the call of that boy with the hateful grin, and
+how Curly Davis had sneered and spat and struck. Suddenly he found
+himself tingling all over, and pressing a burning forehead against the
+cool glass, and digging his knuckles into the corner of the sash till
+they ached. Then he went into the library, and lay down on father's big
+leather couch, and thought and thought.
+
+Papa Jack came home for lunch at noon, and mother told him. Bob heard
+them in the hall.
+
+"He says he didn't fight," said his mother, "and he says he didn't fall
+down. He won't tell me, and I told him he must tell you. I don't know
+why he doesn't want to tell; he isn't ashamed or very much frightened,
+and he didn't cry after he came home."
+
+Bob heard Papa Jack's footsteps cross the hall and come in upon the
+hard-wood library floor, and then on the big rug by the library couch.
+Papa Jack sat down beside him and put his big fingers around Bob's
+little ones.
+
+"Well, what about it, Son?"
+
+Bob looked up and smiled. Always such a pleasant, warm feeling came over
+him when Papa Jack came near him and talked to him.
+
+"What about it, Son?"
+
+But Bob could not reply. His eyes grew serious as they looked back into
+his father's.
+
+"What did this, Bob?" asked Papa Jack, gently touching the hazelnut
+bruise with a finger.
+
+"A boy," said Bob.
+
+"What boy?" asked Papa Jack. "A big boy?"
+
+Silence, and then a shake of the head.
+
+"Did you strike him first?"
+
+Again Bob shook his head.
+
+"What did you do to him?"
+
+Still another shake of the head.
+
+"Do you mean he just came up and struck you without any provocation?"
+
+"He laughed," said Bob.
+
+"What else?"
+
+"Spit on my new shoes," reddening.
+
+Papa Jack drew his mustache down between his lip and teeth. "Hm! He did,
+eh? What else?"
+
+"Said 'Bob-tail, bob-cat,'"
+
+Papa Jack looked puzzled.
+
+"Said I was--Bob, bob-tail, bob-cat," explained Bob.
+
+"Oh!" Papa Jack seemed to see light. "And then he struck you?"
+
+A nod once more.
+
+Mr. McAllister looked out the window and his fingers closed tightly
+around Bob's. "When was this, Bob--before school?"
+
+"Mm."
+
+"And you came right home?"
+
+A nod.
+
+"Did you strike him back?"
+
+Bob's eyes widened. "No."
+
+Papa Jack's eyes widened also. "Why?"
+
+"Because."
+
+"Because what, Bob?"
+
+"Because mama said not to fight."
+
+"And you promised?"
+
+Bob nodded again.
+
+"I see." Papa Jack's eyes suddenly lighted with something Bob did not
+understand, and he sat looking down at Bob for a long minute. "I see,"
+he said again, and then he turned and called to mother. "Helen!" And
+mother came in, with a piece of white sewing in her hands.
+
+"Helen," said Papa Jack, "it's a case of bullying. The boy promised you
+not to fight, and he didn't. It's a mistake, mother. He's been set upon
+by some young bully, and couldn't defend himself because of his
+promise."
+
+Mother looked at Bob; there was distress in her eyes, but something else
+came into them, too.
+
+"It's only the beginning, dear--the beginning of battles," said Papa
+Jack, and he put his other hand on mother's.
+
+"Bob," he said, "mother doesn't mean you're not to defend yourself.
+Understand? By fighting, mother only means beginning fights, picking
+fights, provoking other boys to fight. We _have_ to defend ourselves. It
+isn't right to pick a fight; that's what mother means."
+
+Bob saw tears come into his mother's eyes. Papa Jack saw them, too.
+
+"There's only one way among boys, Helen dear. The bullies must be
+fought, you know. Our boy's got to be a boy's boy if he's to be a man's
+man by-and-by."
+
+Suddenly mother bent over and kissed Bob, and held him, with her arms
+thrust under and about him--held him hard.
+
+"The only thing, Bob, is to be a man always. Be square and white. Do the
+right thing. I can't tell you what it will be every time; neither can
+anybody else: but you your own self will know. It may be right even to
+fight sometimes, for yourself and for others who are bullied; but every
+boy knows for himself when it's right and when it's wrong. If he does as
+he _knows_, he'll do right."
+
+It was a quiet lunch that day. Father and mother talked little and the
+meal was quickly over. Bob hardly knew what he himself ate or did or
+thought. There was a strange excitement in his heart and in his head, a
+feeling that he could not define. It was not that he was going back to
+school after dinner. It was not that he would probably meet those boys
+again, nor that he would sooner or later have to face again that Curly
+Davis. Neither was it that, when he did face Curly Davis, he meant
+to--yes, to fight him. No, it was none of these things, though his heart
+did beat the faster as he thought of them. It was something else; it was
+something about what his father had said, not so much his words, but the
+way he had said "a man's man" and "we must defend ourselves"--something
+that thrilled him, made him proud and humble, all at once. Someway,
+father seemed to have taken a new attitude toward him, and in that
+change even Bob seemed to see father's recognition that babyhood was
+over for his small son.
+
+Mother stood in the door and watched him go. She had been crying again,
+a little; she had even wanted to keep him at home. But father had said,
+"No, let him go; as well now as to-morrow," and so she had kissed him
+and cried again, a little. And then she had begged him to "try to keep
+away from those bad little boys," and to "play only with good boys who
+did not want to fight"; and Bob had said yes--doubtfully. He waved his
+hand to her from the gate, and again from the corner of the block, and
+then he set his face once more toward school, and walked very fast.
+
+It was five o'clock when Bob came home again. School closed at four, but
+the clock on the library mantel was tinkling five when he opened the
+door and closed it very softly. He didn't want mother to see him just
+then.
+
+He was trembling and very white--his little mirror by the window showed
+him that. There was a brown-and-blue bruise just in the corner of his
+little brown eyebrow, of which he had felt carefully a dozen times on
+the way home, but which did not look so big in the glass as it had felt.
+There was a rubbed place on his chin, and the soft knuckles of his hands
+were grimy and stained. He laid his school-bag and box carefully on a
+chair, and went to look out the window for a moment. And then a strange
+feeling came over him.
+
+--This was his little room; yes, it was his--the same little room; the
+same white curtains, the same little window, the same view of the little
+green door-yard and the apple-tree and the cedar-hedge; the same soft
+sunset light coming in upon him where it had come so many, many other
+evenings, ever since he could remember. But the boy--that little boy who
+had looked upon it all, who had lived there and loved the white curtains
+and the sun and the apple-tree--where was he? he wondered.
+
+When he closed his eyes he could see just one thing--one whirling,
+seething vision: a ring of boys, excited, eager, yelling, laughing,
+cheering, with only here and there a frightened face; and there in the
+midst himself and another--some one who was striking and kicking and
+scratching at him, but whose blows he did not seem to feel, so hard and
+fierce and fast he himself was striking, and so hotly ran his blood. And
+in his ears were ringing the cries which had gone up at the end, when
+that other boy--he of the curly hair--had suddenly, at last, turned from
+him and run away through the crowd, beaten and sniveling and--alone. And
+he remembered that he had felt sorry then--oh, so sorry--sorry for that
+other boy!
+
+He washed his face and hands carefully, and looked again in the little
+mirror. Perhaps mother wouldn't notice--much. He opened his door and
+crept softly down the stairs and into the library, and there was mother,
+looking anxiously from the window, and father, who had just come in,
+putting on his hat as if he were going out again. And they both turned
+and looked at him; and mother ran and caught him up in her arms, just as
+if he were that baby-boy again--that baby he had been yesterday. He
+wondered.
+
+Father looked at the brown bruise and the scuffed knuckles critically,
+while mother held him with her face against his hair.
+
+"Do you think he'll bother you any more, Bob?" father asked, just as if
+the whole story had been told.
+
+Bob shook his head, and mother suddenly clasped him closer, while father
+turned away with a grim smile. And Bob himself just wondered--wondered
+about that baby-boy he had been yesterday.
+
+
+
+
+TWO PORTRAITS BY GILBERT STUART
+
+A NOTE ON A RECENT ACCESSION OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
+
+BY SAMUEL ISHAM
+
+
+The name of Don Josef de Jaudenes y Nebot has not impressed itself
+deeply on the memory of the world. It does not appear in the great,
+many-volumed biographical dictionaries nor in the indexes of the
+standard histories of the United States. Even in the library of the
+Hispanic Society of America there is no record of him. He was, however,
+a man of some importance in the early diplomacy of the nation. The
+beginning of his official career may be definitely determined by a
+letter of Washington's of July 20, 1791, in which he says: "I yesterday
+had Mr. Jaudenes, who was in this country with Mr. Gardoqui and is now
+come over in a public character, presented to me for the first time by
+Mr. Jefferson."
+
+Gardoqui came to America in 1786 as _charge d'affaires_ for the
+negotiation of a treaty with Spain. The "public character" in which
+Jaudenes was presented in 1791 was that of commissioner of Spain, and he
+had united with him on the commission Josef de Viar, all their official
+documents being signed with both names. Their main business, like
+Gardoqui's, was the negotiation of a treaty between Spain and the United
+States; a treaty which was to settle boundaries, rights of trade between
+the two nations, and also the question of the "occlusion" of the
+Mississippi River; but there was much outside diplomatic sparring over
+the disputes between the Governor of Louisiana and the Georgians about
+trespasses and conflicting rights. The last communication of the
+commissioners was dated in 1794. The next year the negotiations were
+transferred to Madrid and the treaty was signed there and Jaudenes
+probably then returned to Spain. There seems to be no trace of him after
+that.
+
+The only other facts in regard to him are to be gathered from the two
+pictures recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which are
+the subject of this article. They are signed G. Stuart, R. A., New York,
+September 8, 1794, and bear inscriptions in Spanish which, to complete
+the record, are here given in full:
+
+     DON JOSEF DE JAUDENES Y NEBOT COMISARIO ORDENADOR DE LOS REALES
+     EXERCITOS Y MINISTRO EMBIADO DE SU MAGESTAD CATHOLICA CERCA DE LOS
+     ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA. NACIO EN LA CIUDAD DE VALENCIA REYNO DE
+     ESPANA EL 25 DE MARZO DE 1764.
+
+     DONA MATILDE STOUGHTON DE JAUDENES--ESPOSA DE DON JOSEF DE JAUDENES
+     Y NEBOT COMISARIO ORDENADOR DE LOS REALES EXERCITOS DE SU MAGESTAD
+     CATHOLICA Y SU MINISTRO EMBIADO CERCA DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS DE
+     AMERICA. NACIO EN LA CIUDAD DE NUEVA-YORK EN LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL
+     11 DE ENERO DE 1778.
+
+We learn from these that Don Josef was thirty and his bride in her
+seventeenth year, and that she was born in New York. Unfortunately this
+is all that we know about her. Stoughton is a sufficiently familiar name
+in the colonial records of the New England and Middle States, but the
+lady of the portrait has not yet been identified nor has a search of the
+newspapers of the day revealed any mention of her marriage. It may very
+probably have taken place on September 8th, 1794, the date placed after
+Stuart's name on both canvases; but the journalists of that time took
+less note of such international alliances than those of the present.
+Something more about the lady is, however, certain to be found by the
+genealogists and delvers in old diaries and correspondence, for the
+wedding of the young Spanish diplomat with the pretty American girl just
+midway in her teens must have set tongues wagging and pens inditing. How
+the match turned out we do not know, but some argument as to their
+happiness may be based on the fact that Jaudenes' successor, the Marquis
+d'Yrujo, followed his example and took an American bride in the person
+of Miss Sally McKean, who was also painted by Stuart.
+
+  _Two Portraits by_ GILBERT STUART
+
+  _reproduced by permission of_
+
+  THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
+
+
+  _Printed from plates made by the Colorplate Engraving Company, New York_
+
+[Illustration: _Dona_ MATILDE STOUGHTON DE JAUDENES _Wife of the First
+Minister from_ SPAIN _to the_ UNITED STATES]
+
+[Illustration: _Don_ JOSEF DE JAUDENES Y NEBOT _First Minister from_
+SPAIN _to the_ UNITED STATES]
+
+Having thus disposed (somewhat unsatisfactorily, it is true) of the
+personality of the sitters, we can turn to the portraits themselves. The
+accompanying reproductions make extended description unnecessary. They
+are characteristic Stuarts, more elaborate, more complete, than most of
+his subsequent work, but showing clearly his personal point of view
+and the difference between his portraits and those of his
+contemporaries. He is less poetic, more literal than the rivals with
+whom he had contended, not unsuccessfully, for the patronage of London
+society. For him a pretty girl is a pretty girl, and it is enough. He
+seats her comfortably in a chair and paints her as she is. One cannot
+imagine him turning her into a nymph, a shepherdess, or a priestess of
+Hymen, or painting her with a very modish coiffure on her head and a
+pair of blue-ribboned sandals on her bare feet. These things Reynolds
+did habitually and moreover put his figures in attitudes with up-rolled
+eyes and extended arms and filled out his larger canvases with altars
+and tombs and allegorical attributes. This he did to bring his pictures
+in accord with those of the old masters whom he laboriously studied and
+deeply admired. His achievement fully justified him. His sumptuous
+canvases, rich in color, elaborate in composition, perfected with every
+technical resource, have ever since remained unequalled of their kind.
+
+In spite of his stay in West's studio, Stuart had none of this respect
+for tradition nor any wish to attempt the grand style. In this he was
+more like Gainsborough, but Gainsborough invested his portraits, even of
+prosaic sitters, with a strange, penetrating, poetic charm such as no
+other painter has been able to convey. Ranking artists in the order of
+their merit is an unprofitable business, but it may gratify some
+methodical minds to have it stated that these canvases by Stuart are not
+in the same class as good Gainsboroughs or Reynolds. With the best of
+other contemporary portraits they stand approximately on a footing of
+equality. In spite of the quiet pose, the lack of strongly contrasted
+light and shade and all of the clever tricks and forced accents of
+Lawrence and his followers, they are alive and alert. The
+characterization is excellent. The young people were not of so profound
+or complicated a nature as the Father of his Country, and the faces are
+not wrought out with the delicate subtlety of the Gibbs-Channing
+Washington which hangs between them, but they are clear-cut, compelling
+belief in their truth. The execution, too, has all of Stuart's skill.
+Others may have attempted higher things, but none did what he attempted
+with such perfect ease and sureness. In neither of the canvases is there
+a sign of uncertainty, hesitation, or alteration. Each touch is put
+exactly where it should be and left. There is none of the scumbling and
+glazing and re-working so common in the English portraits of the time.
+It is to this that the canvases owe their admirable freshness which
+makes them look as if painted yesterday. The heads have all of Stuart's
+pearly gray and rose tones unimpaired by ill-usage or restoration. The
+clothes and accessories are more swiftly and summarily done, the silver
+lace and the high lights being touched in with amazing sureness and
+cleverness. The composition and arrangement is pleasing, and Stuart's
+besetting fault of putting his heads too low on the canvas is excused
+and justified in the case of Don Josef by the necessity of having his
+portrait correspond with that of his wife, whose elaborate and stylish
+head-dress fills the top of her picture. In short, New York is to be
+congratulated on the winning back after a sojourn abroad of more than a
+century of these two most important and charming paintings executed here
+in the early days of the Republic.
+
+At this point this article might well end, but there may be some who
+recall that last summer for a week or so there appeared in the papers
+articles headed "Fakes at the Museum" or "The Metropolitan Gets Lemons,"
+which assailed the genuineness of these portraits. The discussion did
+not get far beyond the daily press, which, after its habit, registered
+the charges as picturesquely and vehemently as it could, but attempted
+no serious investigation of them. They were brought by a critic whose
+position as a special student of Stuart entitled them to respectful
+consideration, but after giving them that they do not seem conclusive or
+even important. They were based on the fact that the pictures were
+signed G. Stuart, R. A., and bore coats of arms and long Spanish
+inscriptions. It was claimed that this made the genuineness of the
+canvases doubtful, for Stuart signed few of his paintings--possibly none
+except the standing Washington in the Philadelphia Academy; he was not
+an R. A. (Royal Academician); nor was he a heraldic illuminator.
+Furthermore, the painting of the male portrait and the dress and
+accessories in the companion piece did not seem to the critic to agree
+with Stuart's handling. To make his impressions fit with the pictures,
+the critic supposed that Stuart painted a smaller portrait of Jaudenes
+and started one of his wife, which through some freak of temper he left
+(as he frequently did) with only the head and part of the background
+finished. These being brought to Spain, some artist there finished the
+lady's portrait, painted from Stuart's original a companion piece of her
+husband, and added to both the coats of arms, the inscriptions, and
+Stuart's name.
+
+Now, frankly, this is not possible. As for the portrait of Dona Matilde
+being left unfinished, there exists in Stuart's handwriting a list of
+gentlemen who are to have copies of his portrait of Washington,
+consisting of thirty-two names. A few take two copies, no one takes more
+save Jaudenes, who subscribes for five. The list is dated April 20th,
+1795, which is seven months after the date on the pictures, and is the
+strongest possible evidence that Jaudenes was greatly pleased with
+Stuart--presumably on account of these portraits--and is entirely
+irreconcilable with the idea that the painter had quarreled with the
+diplomat's wife or left her portrait unfinished.
+
+As to the coats of arms, the most casual examination makes it clear that
+they were painted by another hand than executed any part of the
+portraits. In all probability they were done after the canvases reached
+Spain, and the inscriptions and signatures would naturally have been
+added at the same time. Stuart would never have engrossed a long Spanish
+inscription, and that he should have signed his name (contrary to his
+habit) and have added the "R. A." to which he had no right is most
+unlikely. What is most unlikely of all, however, is that there should
+have been found in Spain an artist capable of painting a portrait like
+the Don Josef. Both heads are absolutely alike in handling, in texture,
+in mixing of the pigments, and in all of those things are absolutely
+characteristic of Stuart, whose methods were peculiarly his own and
+could not be caught even by men like Sully, who not only intently
+studied his processes but sat and watched him when he was at work. That
+a Spaniard with entirely different training and ideals could have
+reproduced them is impossible.
+
+As for the costumes, it may be admitted that they differ from most of
+Stuart's American work; but the difference is more in subject than in
+method and is chiefly noticeable because he never again painted a
+gentleman in silver-sprigged scarlet waistcoat and small clothes. He
+hated such work, and his position in America enabled him to do as he
+chose, and he could tell sitters that if they wanted clothes they could
+go to a mantua-maker or a tailor, he painted the works of God. So
+distasteful was such labor to him that we know that he employed
+assistants in the details of some of his Washington portraits. In the
+present canvases the heads are painted with an interest and a
+thoroughness very different from that displayed in the costumes. These
+latter are skilfully done. The dexterity displayed is amazing and such
+as no copyist is at all likely to have had, but it is dexterity applied
+to getting a striking result as quickly as possible and with the least
+possible effort of hand or brain.
+
+Now, to explain this, we should remember that Stuart only returned to
+America in 1793, and the pictures are both dated September 8, 1794.
+Whatever that date may mean, both pictures were presumably finished
+before then and were thus among the first, perhaps the very first,
+important works that Stuart did in New York. He would consequently have
+every motive, both from the desire to establish his reputation and from
+the position and charm of his sitters, to do his very best. The
+workmanship should be compared, not with what he did afterwards in
+America but rather with what he had done before in England and Ireland,
+when he was compelled by the exigencies of his sitters and the rivalry
+of his fellow artists to give some importance to costume and
+composition. Unfortunately, Stuart's foreign work is practically unknown
+to Americans (and to foreigners also, for that matter). There is little
+of it in the public galleries, and a large proportion of it has probably
+been rechristened with other and more attractive names. As far as we may
+judge from a few examples and from the many engravings after it (some of
+them large enough and good enough to give an idea of the handling), the
+costumes were done much in the style of those we are considering.
+
+After all, the strongest argument for the authenticity of the portraits
+is the portraits themselves. They are beautiful, they are skilful, done
+in Stuart's style and entirely worthy of him. To suppose them done by
+any one else involves the doubter at once in a maze of improbabilities
+and impossibilities. The present writer is willing to put himself on
+record as quite convinced that they were painted by Stuart and are
+wholly by his own hand and are unusually important specimens of his
+work.
+
+
+
+
+MARY BAKER G. EDDY
+
+THE STORY OF HER LIFE AND THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
+
+BY
+
+GEORGINE MILMINE
+
+XIV
+
+MRS. EDDY'S BOOK AND DOCTRINE
+
+     "_No human tongue or pen taught me the Science contained in this
+     book, 'Science and Health'; and neither tongue nor pen can
+     overthrow it._"--MARY BAKER G. EDDY.
+
+
+Although Mrs. Eddy's book, "Science and Health," was not published until
+1875, from the time Mrs. Eddy left P. P. Quimby in 1864 she had been
+struggling to get his theories before the public. Dr. Patterson, her
+second husband, left her in 1866, and for the next four years Mrs. Eddy
+was able to make a bare living by her "Science," wandering about among
+the little shoe towns near Boston and teaching Quimby's theories here
+and there for her board and lodging. She went from house to house with
+her precious copy of Quimby's "Questions and Answers"[2] and the pile of
+letter-paper, covered with her own notes, which she was forever
+rewriting and revising. The one thing that everybody knew about Mrs.
+Glover (Eddy) was that she "was writing a book." While she was staying
+with the Wentworths, in Stoughton, she carried her pile of manuscript to
+Boston, and when the printer to whom she showed it demanded to be paid
+in advance, she tried to persuade Mrs. Wentworth to lend her the money.
+Had the printer who looked over that confused mass of notes known that
+they were the nucleus of a book of which over five hundred thousand
+copies would be sold by 1907, and had he printed the manuscript then and
+there, Christian Science in its present form would never have existed.
+For at that time Mrs. Eddy had not dreamed of calling her system of mind
+cure anything but Dr. Quimby's "Science." She talked of Quimby to every
+one she met; could talk, indeed, of little else. When she introduced the
+subject of mental healing to a stranger--and she never lost an
+opportunity--it was always with that conscious smile and the set phrases
+which the village girls used to imitate: "I _learned_ this from Dr.
+Quimby, and he made me _promise_ to teach at least _two_ persons before
+I _die_."
+
+The story of the Quimby manuscript from 1867 to 1875 and of the gradual
+growth of Mrs. Eddy's feeling of possession, has already been recounted
+in an earlier chapter of this history.[3] By the time the first edition
+of "Science and Health" appeared, Mrs. Eddy said no more about Quimby or
+her promise to him. Mrs. Eddy has always been able to believe anything
+she wishes to believe, especially about her own conduct and about that
+of persons who have displeased her, and it is very probable that by this
+time she had persuaded herself that she really owed very little to the
+old Maine philosopher.
+
+
+_How "Science and Health" was Published_
+
+Although Mrs. Eddy had been working upon her book for about eight years,
+writing and rewriting with almost incredible patience, she was unwilling
+to assume any financial risk in getting it printed. George Barry and
+Elizabeth Newhall, two of her students, agreed to furnish the sum of one
+thousand dollars, which the Boston printer asked for issuing an edition
+of one thousand copies. Mrs. Eddy made so many changes in the proofs,
+continuing her revisions even after the plates had been cast, that she
+ran the cost of the edition up to about twenty-two hundred dollars, and
+Miss Newhall and Mr. Barry lost about fifteen hundred dollars on the
+book. They would, indeed, have lost more, had not Daniel Spofford, much
+against Mrs. Eddy's will, paid over to them six hundred dollars which he
+had received for the copies of the book he had sold. Although Mrs. Eddy
+at that time owned the house in which she lived and had some money in
+bank, she did not, either then or later, suggest reimbursing Barry or
+Miss Newhall for their loss.
+
+Aside from the fact that she was unwilling to risk money upon it, Mrs.
+Eddy believed intensely in her book. One of her devoted students sent
+copies of "Science and Health" to the University of Heidelberg, to
+Thomas Carlyle, and to several noted theologians. But the book made no
+stir outside of Lynn, where it caused some perplexity. There was little
+about it, indeed, to suggest that it would be an historic volume. It was
+a book of 564 pages, badly printed and poorly bound; a mass of
+inconsequential statements and ill-constructed, ambiguous sentences
+which wander about the page with their arms full, so to speak,
+heedlessly dropping unrelated clauses about as they go.
+
+Although the basic ideas of the book are Quimby's, and even much of the
+terminology, the first edition of "Science and Health" was certainly
+written by Mrs. Eddy. Not only is there every internal evidence of her
+hand in the style of the book, but a number of her students are still
+alive who went over portions of the manuscript with her and worked with
+her upon the proofs. The same George Barry who helped to pay for the
+publication of the book copied out in longhand twenty-five hundred pages
+of the manuscript. He brought suit against Mrs. Eddy for payment for
+"copying the manuscript of the book 'Science and Health,' and aiding in
+the arrangement of capital letters and some of the grammatical
+constructions." He produced some of Mrs. Eddy's manuscript in court, and
+the judge allowed him more than the usual copyist's rate "on account of
+the difficulty which a portion of the pages presented to the copyist by
+reason of erasures and interlineations," as it is put in the judge's
+finding.
+
+Although Mrs. Eddy's book has been enlarged and greatly improved as to
+its order and grammar, the first edition contains all the essential
+elements of her philosophy, if such it may be called. Mr. Wiggin did
+good work in translating the book into comparatively conventional
+English, and gave a kind of unity to paragraphs and sentences, and later
+revisers have greatly improved upon his work; but the first edition
+gave a fairly complete and, on the whole, a comprehensible statement of
+Mrs. Eddy's platform.
+
+Mrs. Eddy's religion claims to be a system of metaphysics, a system of
+therapeutics, and an improved form of Christianity. As the founder of a
+system of idealistic philosophy, Mrs. Eddy does indeed, as Mr. Alfred
+Farlow says, "begin where the sages of the world left off." Other
+philosophers have reached the conclusion that we can have no absolute
+knowledge of matter, since our evidence regarding it consists of sense
+impressions, and that we can absolutely assert of matter only that it
+exists in human consciousness; but Mrs. Eddy begins boldly with, "There
+is no such thing as matter." She reaches her conclusion by steps which
+she deems complete and logical:
+
+     1. God is All in all.
+     2. God is good. Good is Mind.
+     3. God, Spirit, being all, nothing is matter.
+
+Mrs. Eddy calls attention to the fact that even if read backward, these
+propositions mean identically the same as when read in the usual order,
+and she seems to regard this as conclusive proof of their logical truth.
+She says, "The metaphysics of Christian Science, like the rules of
+mathematics, prove the rule by inversion. For example: there is no pain
+in Truth, and no truth in pain; no nerve in Mind, and no mind in nerve;
+no matter in Mind, and no mind in matter," etc.
+
+In his article upon Christian Science, published in _The Atlantic
+Monthly_, April, 1904, Dr. John Churchman says:
+
+     The uncompromising idealism, however, which Mrs. Eddy offers us not
+     only has these defects, but is guilty of a far more serious charge.
+     It poses as an explanation, and is in reality a total evasion. To
+     deny that matter exists, and assert that it is an illusion, is only
+     another way of asserting its existence; you are freed by your
+     suggestion from explaining the fact, but forced by it to explain
+     the illusion. It is the old mistake of imagining that an escape
+     from a problem is a solution. You are out of the frying-pan, it is
+     true, but you are in the fire instead.[4]
+
+Having thus disposed of matter, Mrs. Eddy seems to think that her
+definition has actually changed the nature of the case, and that though
+we live in houses, eat food, and endure the changes of the seasons, our
+relation to the material universe is changed because she has defined
+matter as an illusion.
+
+It is not, however, Mrs. Eddy's definition which is so remarkable, but
+her application of it. Having stated that matter is an illusion, she
+asserts that "matter cannot take cold";[5] that matter cannot "ache,
+swell and be inflamed";[6] that a boil cannot ache;[7] that "every law
+of matter or the body, supposed to govern man, is rendered null and void
+by the law of God".[8]
+
+
+_There is No Material Universe_
+
+Quimby acknowledged the actual existence of the universe, of the
+physical body, and of disease; Mrs. Eddy teaches that they are all
+illusory. The earth, the sun, the millions of stars, says Mrs. Eddy,
+exist only in erring "mortal mind"; and mortal mind itself does not
+exist. All phenomena of nature are merely illusory expressions of this
+fundamental error. "The compound minerals or aggregate substances
+composing the earth, the relations which constituent masses hold to each
+other, the magnitudes, distances, and revolution of the celestial
+bodies, are of no real importance.... Material substances, astronomical
+calculations, and all the paraphernalia of speculative theories ... will
+ultimately vanish, swallowed up in the infinite calculus of spirit."
+"Earthquake, wind, wave, lightning, fire, bestial ferocity" are merely
+the "vapid fury of mortal mind." "Heat and cold are products of
+mind"--even a "mill at work, or the action of a water wheel," is only a
+manifestation of "mortal mind force." Apart from mortal belief, there is
+no such thing as climate.
+
+"Repulsion, attraction, cohesion, and powers supposed to belong to
+matter are constituents of mind," Mrs. Eddy says. By this she does not
+mean that these forces exist, for us, in our minds, but that at some
+time in the dim past "mortal mind" imagined matter and imagined these
+properties in it. Christ, she says, was able to walk upon the water and
+to roll away the stone of the sepulcher because he had overcome the
+human _belief_ in the laws of gravity. (Yet, Mrs. Eddy is continually
+reminding us that the fall of an apple led Newton to discover a great
+law, etc.) "Geology," Mrs. Eddy says, "has never explained the earth's
+formations. It cannot explain them." "Natural Science is not really
+natural or scientific, because it is deduced from the evidences of the
+senses." "Vertebra, articulata, mollusca, and radiata are evolved by
+mortal and material thought." "Theorizing about man's development from
+mushrooms to monkeys, and from monkeys into men, amounts to nothing in
+the right direction, and very much in the wrong." But it is not only
+with the natural sciences that Mrs. Eddy is displeased. "Human history,"
+she says, "needs to be revised, and the _material record expunged_."
+
+Having dismissed the history of the race as trivial, the natural
+sciences as unscientific, the evidence of the senses as a cheat, and
+matter as non-existent, Mrs. Eddy proceeds to propound her own curious
+theory of the Universe and man. She has a theory; incomplete, but
+ingenious.
+
+
+_Mrs. Eddy's Exegesis_
+
+Mrs. Eddy says that her theory of the universe is founded, not upon
+human wisdom, but upon the Bible; and so it is, but she uses both
+addition and subtraction very liberally to get her Biblical
+corroboration. The Bible may be interpreted in two ways, Mrs. Eddy says,
+literally and spiritually, and what she sets out to do is to give us the
+spiritual interpretation. Her method is simple. She starts with the
+propositions that all is God and that there is no matter, and then
+reconstructs the Bible to accommodate these statements. Such portions of
+the Bible as can be made, by judicious treatment, to corroborate her
+theory, she takes and "spiritually interprets,"[9] that is, tells us
+once and for all what the passages really mean; and such portions as
+cannot possibly be converted into affirmative evidence she rejects as
+errors of the early copyists. Mrs. Eddy insists that the Bible is the
+record of truth, but a study of her exegesis shows that only such
+portions of it as meet with Mrs. Eddy's approval and lend
+themselves--under very rough handling--to the support of her theory, are
+accepted as the record of truth; the rest is thrown out as a mass of
+erroneous transcription. Mrs. Eddy's keen eye at once detects those
+meaningless passages which have for so long beguiled the world, just as
+it readily sees in familiar texts an entirely new meaning. She explains
+the creation of the world from the account in the first chapter of
+Genesis, but the unknown author of this disputed book would never
+recognize his narrative when Mrs. Eddy gets through with it.
+
+
+_Mrs. Eddy's Account of the Creation_[10]
+
+To begin with, Mrs. Eddy says, there was God, "All and in all, the
+eternal Principle." This Principle is both masculine and feminine;
+"Gender is embraced in Spirit, else God could never have shadowed forth
+from out Himself, the idea of male and female." But, Mrs. Eddy adds, "We
+have not as much authority for calling God masculine as feminine, the
+latter being the last, therefore highest idea given of Him."
+
+Mrs. Eddy next sets about the creation. The "waters" out of which God
+brought the dry land, she says, were "Love"; the dry land itself was
+"the condensed idea of creation." When God divided the light from the
+darkness, it means, says Mrs. Eddy, that "Truth and error were distinct
+from the beginning, and never mingled." But Mrs. Eddy has always
+insisted on the idea that "error" is a delusion which arose first in the
+mind of mortal man; what is error doing away back here before man was
+created, and why was God himself compelled to take measures against it?
+Certainly the account of the Creation which came from Lynn is even more
+perplexing than that which is related in the Pentateuch.
+
+With regard to the creation of grass and herbs, Mrs. Eddy eagerly points
+out that "God made every plant of the field before it was in the earth,
+and every herb of the field before it grew." And that, she says, proves
+that "creations of Wisdom are not dependent on laws of matter, but on
+Intelligence alone." She admits here that the Universe is the "idea of
+Creative Wisdom," which is getting dangerously near the very old idea
+that matter is but a manifestation of spirit. Call the universe
+"matter," and Mrs. Eddy flies into a rage; call it "an idea of God," and
+she is serenely complaisant. There was certainly never any one so put
+about and tricked by mere words; on the whole, it may be said that the
+English language has avenged itself on Mrs. Eddy.
+
+Arriving at the creation of the beasts of the field, Mrs. Eddy says that
+"The beast and reptile made by Love and Wisdom were neither carnivorous
+nor poisonous." Ferocious tendencies in animals are entirely the product
+of man's imagination. Daniel understood this, we are told, and that is
+why the lions did not hurt him.
+
+When she comes to the creation of man, Mrs. Eddy accepts the first
+account given in Genesis, but the second, which states that God formed
+man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath
+of life, she rejects as untrustworthy. The first account, she says, "was
+science; the second was metaphorical and mythical, even the supposed
+utterances of matter; the scripture not being understood by its
+translators, was misinterpreted."
+
+
+_The Story of Adam_
+
+"The history of Adam is allegorical throughout, a description of error
+and its results," etc. Man was created in God's likeness, free from sin,
+sickness, and death; but this Adam, who crept in, Mrs. Eddy does not
+explain how, was the origin of our belief that there is life in matter
+and was to obstruct our growth in spirituality. Mrs. Eddy says, "Divide
+the name Adam into two syllables, and it reads, _a dam_, or
+obstruction." This original method of word-analysis she seems to regard
+as final evidence concerning Adam. About the creation of Eve, Mrs. Eddy
+changes her mind. In the later editions of her book she says it is
+absurd to believe that God ever put Adam into a hypnotic sleep and
+performed "a surgical operation" upon him. In the first edition she says
+it is a mere chance that the human race is not still propagated by the
+removal of man's ribs. "The belief regarding the origin of mortal man
+has changed since Adam produced Eve, and the only reason a rib is not
+the present mode of evolution is because of this change," etc.
+
+Not to be warned by the footprints of time, Mrs. Eddy pauses in her
+revision of Genesis to wonder "whence came the wife of Cain?" But on the
+whole she profits by the story of Cain, for here she finds one of those
+little etymological clews which never escape her penetration. The fact
+that Adam and all his race were but a dream of mortal mind is proved,
+she says, by the fact that Cain went "to dwell _in the land of Nod, the
+land of dreams and illusions_." Mrs. Eddy offers this seriously, as
+"scientific" exegesis.
+
+Mrs. Eddy's conclusion about the Creation seems to be that we are all in
+reality the offspring of the first creation recounted in Genesis, in
+which man is not named but is simply said to be in the image of God; but
+we _think_ we are the children of the creation described in the second
+chapter; of the race that imagined sickness, sin, and death for itself.
+The tree of knowledge which caused Adam's fall, Mrs. Eddy says, was the
+belief of life in matter, and she suggests that the forbidden fruit
+which Eve gave to Adam may have been "a medical work, perhaps."
+
+
+_Mrs. Eddy Denies the Atonement_
+
+When she comes to the Atonement, Mrs. Eddy says that Christ did not come
+to save mankind from sin, but to show us that sin is a thing imagined
+by mortal mind, that it is an illusion which can be overcome, like
+sickness and death. It was by his understanding of the truths of
+Christian Science that Christ remained sinless, healed the sick, and
+that he "demonstrated" over death in the sepulcher and rose on the third
+day. His sacrifice had no more efficacy than that of any other man who
+dies as a result of his labors to bring a new truth into the world, and
+we profit by his death only as we realize the nothingness of sickness,
+sin, and death. "God's wrath, vented on his only son, is without logic
+or humanity, and but a man-made belief."
+
+The Trinity, as commonly accepted, Mrs. Eddy denies, though she seems to
+admit a kind of triune nature in God by saying over and over again that
+he is "Love, Truth, and Life."
+
+The Holy Ghost she defines as Christian Science; "This Comforter I
+understand to be Divine Science."
+
+
+_Mrs. Eddy's Revision of the Lord's Prayer_
+
+In the course of Mrs. Eddy's revision of the Bible, she paused to
+"spiritually interpret" the Lord's prayer. She has revised the prayer a
+great many times, and different renderings of it are given in different
+editions of "Science and Health." The following is taken from the
+edition of 1902:
+
+     "Our Father-Mother God, all-harmonious, adorable One. Thy kingdom
+     is within us, Thou art ever-present. Enable us to know--as in
+     heaven, so on earth--God is supreme. Give us grace for to-day; feed
+     the famished affections. And infinite Love is reflected in love.
+     And Love leadeth us not into temptation, but delivereth from sin,
+     disease, and death. For God is now and forever all Life, Truth, and
+     Love."
+
+In this interpretation the petitions have been converted into
+affirmations, and Mrs. Eddy's prayer seems a somewhat dry enumeration of
+the properties of the Deity rather than a supplication.
+
+This method of "spiritual interpretation" has given Mrs. Eddy the habit
+of a highly empirical use of English. At the back of her book, "Science
+and Health," there is a glossary in which a long list of serviceable old
+English words are said to mean very especial things. The word
+"bridegroom" means "spiritual understanding"; "death" means "an
+illusion"; "evening" means "mistiness of mortal thought"; "mother" means
+God, etc., etc. The seventh commandment, Mrs. Eddy insists, is an
+injunction against adulterating Christian Science, although she also
+admits the meaning ordinarily attached to it. In the _Journal_ of
+November, 1889, there is a long discussion of the ten commandments by
+the editor, in which he takes up both personal chastity and the Pure
+Food laws under the command, "Thou shalt not commit adultery."
+
+Mrs. Eddy insists, and doubtless believes, that her "Science" is simply
+an elaboration, a more advanced explanation, of the teachings of the New
+Testament. Yet on the subject of repentance, which occupies so important
+a place in the teachings of Christ, we hear never a word, and upon that
+consciousness of sin, which is the burden of the Epistles, she is
+consistently silent. Paul's reiterated explanation of original sin, of
+the Atonement and Redemption, are ignored. "As in Adam all die, so in
+Christ shall all be made alive" is made to read: "As in error all die,
+so in Truth shall all," etc. Even Paul's "Who shall deliver me from the
+body of this death?" is made substantially to mean, Who shall deliver me
+from the belief that there is sensation in matter? Whatever cannot be
+"spiritually interpreted" into a confirmation of Mrs. Eddy's theory that
+sin, sickness, and death are non-existent, she refuses to consider.
+
+
+_Mrs. Eddy's Therapeutics_
+
+Mrs. Eddy's theology is, of course, a mere derivative of her system of
+therapeutics, an attempt to base her peculiar variety of mind-cure upon
+Biblical authority. In her therapeutics there is nothing new except its
+extremeness. That the mind is able, in a large degree, to prevent or to
+cause sickness and even death, all thinking people admit. Mrs. Eddy's
+fundamental propositions are that death is wholly unnecessary and that
+the body and the organs of the body have nothing to do with life. A man
+could live just as well after his lungs had been removed as before, if
+he but thought he could. "Cold, heat, exercise, study, food, infection,
+etc., never caused a sick or healthy condition in man." "Scrofula,
+fever, consumption, rheumatism or small-pox never produced pain or
+inharmony." "A dislocation of the tarsal joint (ankle-joint) would
+produce insanity as perceptible as that produced by congestion of the
+brain, were it not that mortal mind thinks this joint less intimately
+connected with mind than is the brain."
+
+Sight and hearing do not depend upon the eyes and ears. The nervous
+system can really cause no suffering. "Nerves are not the source of pain
+or pleasure." "Nerves have no more sensation, apart from what belief
+bestows upon them, than the fibre of a plant." What really suffers is
+mind, or belief; and, if we change that belief, the pain will disappear.
+"You say a boil is painful," says Mrs. Eddy, "but that is impossible,
+for matter without mind is not painful. The boil simply manifests your
+belief in pain, through inflammation and swelling; and you call this
+belief a boil."
+
+Mrs. Eddy even argues against spanking children because "the use of the
+rod is virtually a declaration to the child's mind that sensation
+belongs to matter."[11]
+
+Mrs. Eddy's idea is that our lungs are necessary to us because we think
+they are, just as we think heavy underwear is necessary in winter.
+Horses and cows, certainly, do not think much about their lungs, but
+Mrs. Eddy says that domestic animals are controlled by the beliefs of
+their human masters, and that we have corrupted the horse and have
+taught him to have epizooetic and colic. "What," says Mrs. Eddy, "if the
+lungs are ulcerated? God is more to a man than his lungs." "Have no
+fears that matter can ache, swell, and be inflamed.... Your body would
+suffer no more from tension or wounds than would the trunk of a tree
+which you gash, were it not for mortal mind."
+
+All functional and organic diseases are produced by a popular belief in
+their reality. "No gastric juice accumulates ... apart from the action
+of mortal thought."
+
+"Inflammation, hemorrhages, tubercles, decompositions are all dream
+shadows," "Man is the same after, as before, a bone is broken or a head
+chopped off."
+
+But as to who invented the idea of pain and whence came the superstition
+that we must have lungs to breathe and that the heart is necessary to
+life, Mrs. Eddy maintains a discreet silence. Sin, sickness, and death,
+she says, are beliefs which originated in mortal mind. And how and when
+did mortal mind originate? Mortal mind does not exist, she answers,
+therefore it had no origin. This reasoning satisfies her; she believes
+it perfectly adequate.
+
+It is not only the diseased body which is to be disregarded and put out
+of mind, but all hygienic precautions. Mrs. Eddy particularly objects to
+diets, and she says that one food is as good as another. God gave man
+"dominion not only over the fish in the sea, but over the fish in the
+stomach also," she once said.
+
+There is no such thing as fatigue: "You would not say that a wheel is
+fatigued; and yet the body is just as material as the wheel. If it were
+not for what the human mind says of the body, the body would never be
+weary, any more than the inanimate wheel."
+
+Mrs. Eddy denies that physical exercise strengthens the muscles.
+"Because the muscles of the blacksmith's arm are strongly developed, it
+does not follow that exercise has produced this result, or that a
+less-used arm must be weak.... _The trip-hammer is not increased in size
+by exercise._ Why not, since muscles are as material as wood and iron?"
+
+Constant bathing, Mrs. Eddy says, received a "useful rebuke from Jesus'
+precept, 'Take no thought ... for the body,' We must beware of making
+clean merely the outside of the platter."
+
+
+_A Sensationless Body the Goal of Existence_
+
+"A sensationless body," Mrs. Eddy says, is the ultimate hope of
+Christian Science. Since insensibility to pain is the ultimate good
+which her system of philosophy offers, it is natural that she should
+often point us to the lower forms of animal life for our exemplars. "The
+conditions of life become less imperative in lower organisms, or where
+there is less mind and belief on this subject." She points out hopefully
+that certain marine animals multiply their species by self-division.
+"The less mind there is manifested in matter, the better. When the
+unthinking lobster loses his claw, it grows again." If we but believed
+that matter has no sensation, "then the human limb would be replaced as
+readily as the lobster's claw." She points out the fact that flowers
+produce their seed without pain. "The snowbird sings and soars amid the
+blasts; he has no catarrh from wet feet."
+
+"Obesity," Mrs. Eddy says, "is _an adipose belief of yourself as a
+substance_."
+
+
+_Mrs. Eddy's Physiology_
+
+The most discouraging thing about Mrs. Eddy's dissertations upon anatomy
+and physiology is that she seems to know so little about the physical
+facts and laws which she despises. She says, for instance, that a father
+"plunged his infant babe, only a few hours old, into water for several
+minutes and repeated this operation daily until the child could remain
+under water for twenty minutes, moving and playing without harm, like a
+fish." Does Mrs. Eddy actually believe that a child could live under
+water for twenty minutes? Again: "The supposition that we can correct
+insanity by the use of purgatives and narcotics is in itself a species
+of insanity." Where did Mrs. Eddy get the idea that such treatment was
+ever supposed to cure "insanity"? Mrs. Eddy says the fact that a finger
+which has been amputated continues to hurt is proof that nerves have
+nothing to do with pain, because, she states, "_the nerve is gone_"!
+
+Mrs. Eddy says that when we burn a finger, not fire but mortal mind
+causes the injury. To this statement she adds: "Holy inspiration has
+created states of mind which are able to nullify the action of the
+flames, as in the Bible case of the three young Hebrew captives, cast
+into the Babylonian furnace; while an opposite mental state might
+produce spontaneous combustion." That is, if mortal mind worked hard
+enough, we could burn our fingers without any fire, or we could produce
+the fire by willing it.
+
+The action of drugs depends entirely upon the belief of mortal mind.
+Stimulants, narcotics, poisons, affect the system solely because they
+are reputed to do so. And yet, with all her ingenuity, Mrs. Eddy has to
+admit that if a man took arsenic unknowingly it would probably kill him.
+This, she says, is because of the consensus of opinion that arsenic is
+deadly. Such would probably be her explanation of the destructive
+processes which go on in the world without the knowledge of man; fire
+consumes the forest, the tiger kills the antelope, and the bite of the
+cobra kills the tiger because the human mind has attributed such
+tendencies to fire, to the tiger, and to the cobra.
+
+
+_Mrs. Eddy's View of History_
+
+All the emanations of mortal mind are evil. Our redemption, Mrs. Eddy
+says, lies in Divine Mind, of which we are a part. "Spirit imparts the
+understanding which leads into all Truth.... This understanding is not
+intellectual, is not aided by scholarly attainments." There is no
+mistaking Mrs. Eddy's meaning; the thing in us which is capable of
+cultivation and expansion, that which inquires and investigates and
+reasons, is mortal mind, and is therefore evil. All the physical
+sciences are the harmful inventions of mortal mind, and the slow and
+painful accumulation of exact knowledge has been but the harmful
+activity of the baser element in human nature. There was never such a
+discouraging view of human history.
+
+It is scarcely necessary to remark that everything which civilization
+most cherishes has been the direct result of that spirit of inquiry and
+of those inductive processes of reasoning which Mrs. Eddy despises. If
+the morality of the civilized world is higher to-day than it was in the
+fifth century, it is not because men know any more about moral laws than
+they did two thousand years ago, but because this same spirit of inquiry
+has made cleaner living possible and imperative. Mrs. Eddy says that
+Christian Science would abolish war; but the diminution of war has come
+about, not through any growth of "Divine Mind" but, as Buckle pointed
+out, through three triumphs of the experimental tendency of the
+intellect;--the discovery of gunpowder, the discovery that war was
+detrimental to trade and to the best economic conditions, and the
+improvement in methods of transportation. Contemplating the history of
+civilization from Mrs. Eddy's point of view, we have simply gone on
+developing this injurious thing, "mortal mind"--applying our
+intelligence to the study of the physical universe--and have gone on
+piling up false belief on false belief. It is "matter" that is our great
+delusion and that stands between us and a full understanding of God; and
+matter exists, or seems to exist, only because we have invented it and
+invented laws to govern it and have given properties to its various
+manifestations. The more we know about the physical universe, the
+heavier do we make our chains; our progress in the physical sciences
+does but increase the dose of the drug which enslaves us. And there have
+been but two breaks in this jumbled dream of "error": the first when
+Jesus Christ "demonstrated the nothingness of matter," the second when
+Mrs. Eddy proclaimed its nothingness from Lynn.
+
+With a "sensationless body" for the goal of existence, the savage was
+certainly much higher in "the scale of being" than the nations of modern
+Europe, and Mrs. Eddy is perfectly right when she refers us to the
+amoeba and crustacea. Happy, indeed, the lobster who thinks so little
+about his anatomy that his lost claw is replaced by another!
+
+From all her flights Mrs. Eddy comes back to her starting-point:
+physical well-being. Not for a single page are we permitted to forget
+that her religion is primarily a kind of "doctoring"; therapeutics made
+religion, or religion made therapeutics. She makes the fact that Christ
+healed the sick the principal feature of his mission, and makes it
+authority for her assumption that religion and therapeutics are
+essentially one. Certainly the burden of the New Testament is not that
+man may avoid suffering, but that he may suffer with noble fortitude.
+
+
+_Lack of Religious Feeling in Mrs. Eddy's Book_
+
+But it is before such a word as fortitude that Mrs. Eddy's book takes on
+its most discouraging aspect. Her foolish logic, her ignorance of the
+human body, the liberties which she takes with the Bible, and her
+burlesque exegesis, could easily be overlooked if there were any
+nobility of feeling to be found in "Science and Health"; any
+great-hearted pity for suffering, any humility or self-forgetfulness
+before the mysteries of life. Mrs. Eddy professes to believe that she
+has found the Truth, and that all the long centuries behind her have
+gone out in darkness and wasted effort, yet not one page of her book is
+tinged with compassion. "Oh that mine head were waters, and mine eyes a
+fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the
+daughter of my people!" If there were one sentence like that in "Science
+and Health" no one would stop to quarrel with Mrs. Eddy's metaphysics.
+
+But if there is little intelligence displayed in Mrs. Eddy's book, there
+is even less emotion. It is not exaggeration to say that "Science and
+Health" is absolutely devoid of religious feeling. God remains for Mrs.
+Eddy a "principle" indeed, toward which she has no attitude but that of
+a somewhat patronizing and platitudinous expositor. She discusses sin
+and death and human suffering as if they were curves or equations.
+
+
+_Malicious Animal Magnetism_
+
+In all the editions of Mrs. Eddy's book there is the same shiftiness,
+the same hardness, and the same astonishing complacency, and the text of
+the first three editions is disfigured by innumerable ebullitions of
+spite and hatred. In the first edition the first fifteen pages of the
+chapter on "Healing the Sick" are given up to an attack upon Richard
+Kennedy, the young man who was her first practitioner, and of whose
+personal popularity she was so bitterly jealous. The second edition, a
+small volume, is largely made up of denunciations of Daniel Spofford.
+The third edition opens with a preface (signed Asa G. Eddy) attacking
+Edward Arens, and contains the famous chapter on "Demonology" in which
+Mrs. Eddy devotes forty-six pages to settling scores with half a dozen
+of her early students, charging one and another with theft, adultery,
+murder, blackmail, etc. The Reverend Mr. Wiggin, when he revised Mrs.
+Eddy's book in 1885, persuaded her to omit these vituperative passages
+on the ground that they were libelous.
+
+Mrs. Eddy's one original elemental contribution to Quimbyism, was her
+doctrine of Malicious Animal Magnetism; a grewsome superstition born of
+her own vindictiveness and distrust. Mrs. Eddy's more enlightened
+followers have for years tried to divert attention from this one of her
+doctrines, and there are hundreds of Christian Scientists in the field
+who know and think very little about it. But it has been a very
+important consideration in the lives of those who have come into
+personal contact with Mrs. Eddy. Between 1875 and 1888 many of Mrs.
+Eddy's students left her because in her lectures and conversation she
+dwelt more upon the malign power of mesmerism than upon the salutary
+power of truth. In her contributions to the _Journal_ during those years
+she frequently took up Animal Magnetism; she tells her followers over
+and over again that she will denounce it, and that she will not be
+silenced. For several years there was a regular department in the
+_Journal_ with the caption "Animal Magnetism," but the crimes which were
+charged to mesmerists were by no means confined to this department.
+"_Also they have dominion over our bodies, and over our cattle, at their
+pleasure, and we are in great distress_," the _Journal_ again and again
+affirms.
+
+
+_Poverty a False Belief_
+
+Mrs. Eddy surmounts economics as easily as she does physics and
+chemistry and physiology. Poverty is only a form of "error," a false
+belief. It can be abolished as readily as sin or disease or old age. She
+advertised the first edition of "Science and Health" as a book that
+"affords an opportunity to acquire a profession by which you can
+accumulate a fortune." "In the early history of Christian Science," Mrs.
+Eddy says, "among my thousands of students few were wealthy. Now,
+Christian Scientists are not indigent; and their comfortable fortunes
+are acquired by healing mankind morally, physically, and spiritually."
+Her healers should be well paid, she says. "Christian Science
+demonstrates that the patient who pays what he is able to pay, is more
+apt to recover than he who withholds a slight equivalent for health." In
+Mrs. Eddy's book[12] she publishes a long testimonial from a man who
+relates how Christian Science has helped him in his business.
+
+This view of poverty has been generally accepted among Mrs. Eddy's
+followers. One contributor to the _Journal_ writes: "We were
+demonstrating over a lack of means, which we had learned was just as
+much a claim of error to be overcome with truth as ever sickness or sin
+was."[13]
+
+Another contributor writes: "The lack of means is a lupine ghost sired
+by the same spectre as the lack of health, and both must be met and put
+to flight by the same mighty weapons of our spiritual warfare."[14]
+
+In the files of the _Journal_ there are many reports of the material
+prosperity of individual Christian Scientists. It is an evidence of
+"at-oneness" with God to prosper in business just as it is to overcome
+disease.
+
+In the _Journal_ of September, 1904, a contributor says:
+
+     "Is it reasonable to believe, as we have believed, that popular
+     fancy, whims, climate, the state of politics, any or all of a
+     hundred lawless elements, are able to ruin a man's business while
+     he stands by and doesn't know enough even to make an intelligent
+     protest?"
+
+Government, civilization, and even "climate" are demonstrated to be
+unreal, but the reality and importance of "business" is never
+questioned, and that each and every Christian Scientist should get on in
+the world remains a matter of indubitable moment, even to Mrs. Eddy
+herself.
+
+
+_Mrs. Eddy's Views on Marriage_
+
+Among the many incidental ideas which Mrs. Eddy has added to Quimbyism
+are her theory that the Godhead is more feminine than masculine, and her
+qualified disapproval of matrimony. Quimby himself had a large family
+and saw nothing unspiritual in marriage. In defining the real purpose of
+marriage Mrs. Eddy says nothing about children; "to happify existence by
+constant intercourse with those adapted to elevate it, is the true
+purpose of marriage." In her chapter on marriage she says: "The
+scientific _morale_ of marriage is spiritual unity.... Proportionately
+as human generation ceases, the unbroken links of eternal harmonious
+being will be spiritually discerned."
+
+In her chapter called "Wedlock" in Miscellaneous Writings (1897) Mrs.
+Eddy, after a vague and evasive discussion of the subject, squarely puts
+the question: "Is marriage nearer right than celibacy? Human knowledge
+inculcates that it is, while Science indicates that it is _not_." In the
+same chapter she further says: "Human nature has bestowed on a wife the
+right to become a mother; but if the wife esteems not this privilege, by
+mutual consent, exalted and increased affections, she may win a higher."
+
+Mrs. Eddy apparently believes that Jesus Christ taught us to ignore
+family relations: "Jesus acknowledged no ties of the flesh. He said:
+'Call no man your father upon the earth; for one is your father which is
+in heaven.' Again he asked: 'Who is my mother, and who are my brethren
+but they who will do the will of my father?' We have no record of his
+calling any man by the name of father."
+
+
+_Future of Christian Science_
+
+Whoever has watched the amazing growth of the Christian Science sect
+must feel some curiosity as to its future. Mrs. Eddy's followers are by
+no means the only people who are trying to meet, by suggestive
+treatment, nervous diseases and the many functional disorders which
+result from overwork, worry, and discouragement. The foremost
+neurologists of all countries are employing more and more this
+suggestive method which is the essential reality in Christian Science
+healing. The followers of the "New Thought" school apply this principle
+in their own way, and the hundreds of unaffiliated "mind curists" and
+"mental healers" are each applying it in ways more or less honest and
+legitimate.
+
+In October, 1906, Dr. Elwood Worcester and Dr. Samuel McComb, the rector
+and the associate rector of the Emmanuel (Episcopal) Church of Boston,
+organized the Emmanuel Church Health Class, for the treatment of nervous
+disorders. Believing that, as Professor William James has said, "the
+sovereign cure for worry is religious faith," the workers at Emmanuel
+Church have been endeavoring to cure nervous disorders by putting the
+patient at peace with himself. Every patient is examined by a physician,
+and if the root of his disorder proves to be nervous (hysteria, alcoholism,
+a drug habit, insomnia, or any one of the many forms of neurasthenia)
+he is admitted into the Health Class for psycho-therapeutical treatment.
+Here he is encouraged to unburden himself of the distress or perplexity
+which haunts him, and is given the kind of suggestive treatment which
+seems best adapted to his disorder. Dr. Worcester studied psychology
+under Wundt, in Germany, and taught it for six years at Lehigh
+University. Dr. McComb studied psychology at Oxford. The records of the
+Emmanuel Health Class show that of the 178 cases treated between March,
+1907, and November, 1907, the condition of seventy-five patients has
+been improved, forty-eight have not been helped at all, while in
+fifty-five cases the result is unknown.[15]
+
+
+_Mrs. Eddy's Opposition to the Mind Cure Movement_
+
+Mrs. Eddy and her followers have given a demonstration too great to be
+overlooked, of the fact that many ills which the sufferer believes
+entirely physical can be reached and eradicated by "ministering to a
+mind diseased," by persuading the sick man continually to suggest to
+himself ideas of health and hope and happiness and usefulness, instead
+of brooding upon the emptiness and unanswered needs of his life or upon
+his failing physical powers. Mrs. Eddy's sect, more than any other one
+of the cults which believe in and practise this method of bettering the
+patient's physical condition through his mind, has forced the most
+hide-bound medical practitioners to take account of this old but newly
+applied force in therapeutics.
+
+But what is Mrs. Eddy's own attitude toward the general awakening to the
+value of psycho-therapeutics in the treatment of human diseases? She
+declares that every kind of mind cure and suggestive treatment except
+her own is dangerous and harmful. As one of Mrs. Eddy's students wrote
+in the _Christian Science Journal_, September, 1901, "The loyal
+Christian Scientist knows that neither he nor his patient should read or
+study the books of any other author than those of our beloved Leader in
+order to learn the Science of the Christ truth, which she is teaching
+and demonstrating to this age."
+
+Mrs. Eddy's own editorials in the _Journal_ are never so bitter as when
+she is attacking the mental healers who do not practise her own
+copyrighted variety of mind cure. Recently the _Christian Science
+Sentinel_ of January 18, 1908, stated that Mrs. Eddy cannot countenance
+the work done at the Emmanuel Church. Mr. Archibald McClellan, the
+editor of that publication, published an article entitled "No Christian
+Psychology." He says: "Christian Psychology is equivalent to Christian
+phrenology, physiology and mythology, whereas Jesus predicted and
+demonstrated Christian healing on the basis of Spirit, God. He never
+complicated Spirit with matter, etc.... Her teachings (Mrs. Eddy's) show
+further that she cannot consistently endorse as Christianity the two
+distinctly contradictory statements and points of view contained in the
+term 'Christian psychology'--otherwise Christian materialism."
+
+Mrs. Eddy holds that any system of healing which at all takes account
+of, or admits physical structure, is not Christian.
+
+Mrs. Eddy's endeavor has been to convert a universal principle into a
+personal property. And she has gone a wonderfully long way toward doing
+it. Thousands of people believe that they owe their health and happiness
+to a healing principle which was revealed by God to Mrs. Eddy and by
+Mrs. Eddy to mankind; that since the ministry of Jesus Christ upon earth
+no one of the human race has understood this principle except Mrs. Eddy,
+and that she is the only human being now alive who fully understands it;
+that when she dies her works alone will stand between the world and
+darkness.
+
+But all the while that Mrs. Eddy was energetically copyrighting, and
+pruning, and expelling, and disciplining, that other stream which came
+from Quimby, through Dr. Evans and through Julius Dresser and his wife,
+was slowly and quietly doing its work.[16] Mind Cure and New Thought
+grew up side by side with Christian Science. As organizations they were
+not nearly so effective, and their ranks, like Mrs. Eddy's, were often
+darkened by the adventuress and the battered soldier of fortune. But the
+Mental healers and the New Thought healers treated the sick on exactly
+the same principle which Mrs. Eddy's successful healers employed.
+
+As to the future of Mrs. Eddy's church, her own attitude toward every
+attempt to investigate and to apply liberally the principle of mental
+healing, seems to determine that. It has been possible for her, during
+her own lifetime, absolutely to prohibit preaching, thinking,
+independent writing,--investigation or inquiry of any sort--in her
+churches. But after her death, when that compelling hand is withdrawn,
+either the church must renew itself from among the ignorant and
+superstitious, as Mormonism has done, or it must permit its members to
+use their minds. Those who use their minds will discover that Christian
+Science is only one method of applying a general truth, and that it is a
+method which is hampered by a great deal that is illogical and absurd;
+that if Christian Science, as Mrs. Eddy has promulgated it, were
+universally believed and practised, it would be the revolt of a species
+against its own physical structure; against its relation to its natural
+physical environment, against the needs of its own physical organism,
+against the perpetuation of its kind. The moment a Christian Scientist
+realizes that the helpful and hopeful principle of his religion can
+operate quite independently of all the inconsequential theories which
+Mrs. Eddy has attached to it, that moment he is, of course, lost to Mrs.
+Eddy. Mrs. Eddy's church organization stands as a sort of dyke between
+the general principle of mind cure and Mrs. Eddy's very empirical,
+violent, and temperamental interpretation of that principle. It is the
+future of psycho-therapeutics that will determine the future of
+Christian Science. If "Mind Cure," "Christian Psychology," and regular
+physicians offer the benefits of suggestive treatment in a more rational
+and direct way than does Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy's church will find
+in them very formidable competition. On the other hand, if Christian
+Scientists throw down their barriers and join the general mind-cure
+movement, and the two branches of Quimbyism meet, then half of Mrs.
+Eddy's life-work is lost. The labor of her days has been to keep these
+two streams apart; to prove one the true and the other the false. Her
+efforts to stem the progress of all other schools of mental healing have
+been secondary only to her efforts to advance her own. Yet,
+unconsciously and against her own wish, she has been the most effective
+instrument in promoting the interest of the whole movement.
+
+On the theoretical side, Mrs. Eddy's contribution to mental healing has
+been, in the main, fallacious, pseudodoxal, and absurd, but upon the
+practical side she has been wonderfully efficient. New movements are
+usually launched and old ideas are revivified, not through the efforts
+of a group of people, but through one person. These dynamic
+personalities have not always conformed to our highest ideals; their
+effectiveness has not always been associated with a large intelligence
+or with nobility of character. Not infrequently it has been true of
+them--as it seems to be true of Mrs. Eddy--that their power was
+generated in the ferment of an inharmonious and violent nature. But, for
+practical purposes, it is only fair to measure them by their actual
+accomplishment and by the machinery they have set in motion.
+
+
+  THE END
+
+
+
+
+HER FRUITS
+
+BY
+
+MARY ELEANOR ROBERTS
+
+  These are her fruits, kindness and gentleness,
+    And gratefully we take them at her hands;
+  Patience she has, and pity for distress,
+          And love that understands.
+
+  Ah, ask not how such rich reward was won,
+  How sharp the harrow in the former years,
+  Or mellowed in what agony of sun,
+          Or watered with what tears.
+
+
+
+
+THE KEY TO THE DOOR
+
+BY FIELDING BALL
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY WALTER JACK DUNCAN
+
+  "_There was the Door to which I found no Key;
+  There was the Veil through which I might not see.
+  Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
+  There was--and then no more of Thee and Me._"
+
+
+The postmaster was lounging in an open window, cleaning his fingernails
+with his pocket-knife, as Allison went into the post-office. He rose
+with some show of animation at sight of the tall, boyish figure in the
+doorway.
+
+"I got a hired girl for you all right, Mr. Allison," he said, advancing
+to meet him. "Used to work down to Webb City, in a restaurant, but got
+tired of it--hours too hard. She's a good cook, and she knows how to get
+things on the table so they look real nice--I knew that would mean
+considerable to you folks."
+
+He went on to dwell at length upon the girl's good points, becoming more
+nervously demonstrative in his praise as he found that Allison's face
+reflected none of his enthusiasm, but remained unexpectedly impassive
+and non-committal.
+
+Allison interrupted at the first opportunity.
+
+"You have been very kind, Mr. Barbour," he said, with impersonal
+civility. "Would you be so good as to get me my mail?"
+
+He took the letters which the man handed him and walked out without
+giving him another glance.
+
+Just outside of the door he met Jim Brown, man-of-all-work at the
+station. Allison himself was station agent. Allison looked at Jim as he
+passed with such a cold, unswerving gaze that in spite of himself the
+other dropped his eyes. Jim had been present at the interview between
+Billings and Allison that morning; Allison knew that he was coming now
+to tell the postmaster about it. The young man set his lips hard at the
+thought of some of the things he had done during the last two weeks,
+when he had been full of glad confidence in himself and in this
+invention of his--this brake which Billings had told him an hour ago was
+not worth the stuff of which it was made. The recountal of his
+performance would doubtless afford much entertainment to the pair in the
+post-office. Just yesterday he had asked the postmaster to find for him,
+if possible, a capable maid-servant, and had said, without thinking
+anything in particular about it, that he would pay a satisfactory girl
+five dollars a week. Five dollars a week--it had not seemed much to him;
+he had been amused by Barbour's evident astonishment. To-day he saw more
+reason in it.... Then there was that perfume for Gertrude--he should
+have to countermand his order for that. He had no choice in the matter,
+he told himself, with bitter resentment that a paltry nine dollars
+should mean so much to him. In spite of the fact that he had come to
+this decision before he reached the drug store, he did not go in, but
+walked past with his head in the air, looking neither to right nor to
+left. He felt as though every one must already know of the morning's
+experience; and he was fearful of meeting eyes alight with cynical
+understanding.
+
+The postmaster and Jim watched the young man from the post-office door
+as he made his way up the one hilly street of the little town. The
+soldierly precision of his carriage and gait, together with a certain
+air of distinction about his clothes, made him seem singularly out of
+keeping with all about him--the narrow, stony road, the straggling white
+houses on each side of it, the unkempt yards, the neglected trees, the
+dilapidated sidewalks half hidden by an amazing growth of dog-fennel.
+
+"You'd know somep'n had gone wrong by the way he had his head reared
+back, wouldn't you?" Jim asked with a smile on his dark face.
+
+He had just finished telling Barbour of what had happened that morning.
+Several days before, Allison had got word from the railroad company
+that some time this week they would send a man to tell him what offer
+they were prepared to make for the brake on which he had been working
+for so many weeks, and had finally finished; and this morning Billings
+had put in his appearance. The brake was practically good for nothing,
+he assured Allison--certainly not worth a cent to the company; and he
+told him the reasons why this was so.
+
+He went on to say, however, that he felt sorry for Allison,--sorry for
+that nice little wife of his,--Jim smiled grimly as he repeated the
+condescending phrase,--that he knew they were having a mighty hard time
+of it. Sixty dollars a month was not enough for a single man to live on
+decently, much less a married one; and the way in which Allison had been
+brought up made it harder. He didn't mean to criticize Allison's
+father--he didn't believe in criticizing the dead--but he certainly
+should not bring up _his_ son in such a way that he couldn't make a
+living for himself if necessary. You never could tell what was going to
+happen in this world; Allison wasn't the first gay young fellow who had
+grown up not expecting ever to have to do a day's work, and then all of
+a sudden had found himself glad to get almost any sort of a job. Well,
+as he said, he was sorry for Allison, and ready to help him out a
+little. He meant to see to it that Allison got something out of this
+brake of his--a couple of hundred dollars, perhaps; of course, two
+hundred dollars wasn't a great deal; it wouldn't mean much to
+him--Billings--but it would probably mean considerable to Allison.
+
+"What did Mr. Allison say?" the postmaster asked.
+
+"Never changed face. Set there starin' at Billings with those darned
+cool eyes o' his that look's if they'd never blink 'f a cannon went off
+under his very nose--waited till Billings got good and done, 'n' then
+said with that high 'n' mighty air of his, f'r all the world's if he was
+speakin' to some poor, half-witted Swede: 'Two hundred dollars doesn't
+mean as much to me as you think, Mr. Billings.' Then he stopped a
+minute, 'n' went on in a little diff'rent tone, 'You needn't concern
+yourself any further about me and my troubles'--'n' that had very much
+the sound of 'I'll make kindling-wood of you if you do!' Then he looks
+at his watch. 'I've given you all the time I can spare,' says he; and
+with that he swings around 'n' begins looking over some papers on his
+desk. Billings reddened up a little--coughed 'n' wriggled around in his
+chair, 'n' tried to get up courage to say somethin' more--but he simply
+didn't _darst_. He went off finally lookin' sort o' cheap. Mist'
+Allison never give him another glance, no more'n 's if he was that dog
+o' yours."
+
+The postmaster was silent for a minute or two. Then he turned to Jim.
+"I'm not particularly sorry to see Billings get left," he said. "Still,
+it might be just as well for Mr. Allison if he'd have kept on the right
+side of Billings from the start. There's no use talking, he's got an
+awfully uppish way with him, that boy."
+
+Jim nodded an emphatic assent. Along with other smaller grievances there
+still rankled in his mind the memory of how, when Allison had first come
+as station agent to the little town, a year ago now, he had one day
+asked Jim if he did not suppose that the nice-looking girl who had
+passed their house with Jim the Sunday before could be induced to come
+and work for them. Allison had asked the question in all innocence, not
+dreaming that this unshaven young man in blue seersucker shirt and
+greasy trousers considered himself in every way Allison's equal, and was
+as much affronted by this suggestion as Allison would have been by one
+of the same sort. Jim could not forgive him for it--any admiration he
+felt for Allison was invariably tempered by resentful remembrance.
+
+"It's about time he woke up to the fact that he doesn't have a father
+worth two millions behind him these days," Barbour went on.
+"Extravagant! Lord, he never stops to ask what a thing costs before
+getting it, as long as he has money in his pockets. Went into the
+book-store the other afternoon to get some magazines--carried off about
+everything Henry had in the place. Three dollars and fifteen cents his
+bill was. Never thinks, when he's buying anything in the way of shirts
+or ties, of getting less than half a dozen at a time--s'pose he hasn't
+found out you can buy them any other way. And his laundry bills--guess
+he about runs the laundry. And just yesterday he was telling me in the
+most off-hand way that he would pay five dollars a week to a hired girl.
+Five dollars a week! I could hardly believe my ears. But I guess he's
+gone back on that." The postmaster smiled sourly.
+
+The young man of whom they were talking was almost at the top of the
+hill by this time. So far he had met few people; and those whom he had
+met had not forced any formal recognition from him. But as he passed
+Mrs. Jennings, she called out a greeting that could not be ignored.
+Gertrude had stopped once to talk to her and to admire her collection of
+shells; and since then every noon and night he found her waiting here by
+her gate to speak to him; and she invariably asked the same question
+about his wife, always in the same tone, always with the same
+inflection. The meeting with her had become one of the frightfully
+unvarying things of his day. As he walked on now, he saw stretching
+before him an interminable vista of days, weeks, years--one deadly
+sameness of hard work, long hours, scanty pay, poor living, growing
+debts--and inextricably mixed up with it all, this dreary, gaunt black
+figure, waiting always for him at the top of the hill.... He had not
+realized what it meant to him, the success of his invention--how much he
+was depending on it. He felt now as he might if, moving blindly through
+a dark passage, hoping any minute to see a glimmer of light ahead, an
+outlet into the open air, he had run full into a locked door--a door to
+which he had no key.
+
+The thought of going home to his wife brought no comfort with it. They
+had long ago ceased to be honest with each other, Gertrude and he; their
+attempts to make the best of a sorry situation had in the end become a
+barrier which held them apart. Gertrude would not admit that she was
+ever tired, or lonesome, or discouraged; would find no fault with their
+poor little house, their scanty means, her unaccustomed duties. She
+never spoke of the past any more, nor of the future, lest in that there
+might be an implied criticism of the present; she was resolutely,
+unvaryingly, aggressively contented. But this contentment was too
+constant, too uniform, like false color on a woman's cheek. He sometimes
+wished she would throw pretense to the winds--would put her head on his
+shoulder, and sob and cry, and confess that she wished she were dead--or
+that she would upbraid him, reproach him, call him some of the hard
+names he called himself. But she was insistently cheerful; and there was
+nothing for him to do, in the face of this, but play an awkward second
+to her, ignore his aching back, his sore hands, his throbbing head, and
+keep a resolute silence as to all that happened to vex and humiliate and
+perplex and hurt him. It was not always easy; to-day he was conscious
+that he was walking more and more slowly as he drew near the house.
+
+How poor and forlorn it looked in this glare of light! During these last
+weeks his thoughts had turned often to that stately house where he had
+lived for nineteen years--its green, close-clipped lawn glistening under
+a perpetual play of water, its great beds of white and green and
+cardinal foliage plants, its shut-in porches, its awnings, its flowering
+shrubs, its vines, its heavy iron fence. He looked with bitter
+attentiveness at the dingy frame cottage he was approaching, noticing
+each homely detail--the dish-towels spread on the bushes in the back
+yard, the mop hanging by the door, the kerosene can under the step, the
+lean hen scuttling away under the currant bushes, the vegetable garden
+lying parched and dry along the fence. There was a small artificial
+mound of stones at one side of the house, with a somewhat scanty growth
+of portulaca springing from its top. The last occupant of the house was
+responsible for that adornment. Allison wondered how they had happened
+to leave it there so long. That mound of stones--all his hopes might
+have been buried under it and he could not have hated it more. It stood,
+somehow, for all that chafed and irritated him here--the moral, mental,
+and physical stuntedness of the people--their petty ambitions, petty
+jealousies, petty quarrels, petty virtues.
+
+Allison was seized with a sudden vague fear as he saw on the kitchen
+window-sill, just where he had left it at seven this morning, the
+package which Gertrude had promised to take to Mr. Fulton as soon as she
+had finished the breakfast dishes. He noticed almost at the same instant
+that the kitchen door was open; countless flies were sailing in and out;
+and there on the cellar door, in the blazing sunlight, was the morning's
+milk, thick and sour by this time. He quickened his steps--made his way
+hurriedly through the kitchen and dining-room, noticing, as he went,
+various signs of disorder. The kitchen fire was out--the floor unswept;
+the coffee he had knocked over when he had built the fire this morning
+lay where it had fallen: the room was full of its pungent odor. On the
+dining-room table were the remnants of breakfast, the oatmeal dry and
+stiff, the butter melted down to a thin oil. In the front room he found
+Gertrude, bending a flushed face over something she was writing. She
+gave a start of fright as he came in--then got very red.
+
+"I sat down to write a little of that play I was telling you about last
+night"--she was picking up her papers with frantic haste as she
+spoke--"and I had no idea it was getting so late." She cast an appalled
+glance around the room, and hurried out to begin clearing off the table,
+making a great clatter with the dishes in her excitement and haste.
+
+[Illustration: "THIS DREARY, GAUNT BLACK FIGURE, WAITING ALWAYS FOR HIM
+AT THE TOP OF THE HILL"]
+
+Allison stood for a minute looking after her wearily. Her manner hurt
+him. More than once, in days gone by, he had told her fondly that when
+she married him she should do nothing but what she liked to do--if she
+chose, she might work on her little dialogues and fairy stories from
+morning till night. The air of frightened apology which she wore--this
+servile haste--pained and irritated him. He threw himself into a chair
+and began mechanically to look over the mail which the postmaster had
+handed him. A week ago he had written to an Eastern firm asking for a
+catalogue of the refrigerators they made. Here it was--bulky,
+imposing, abounding in alluring pictures of tile-lined refrigerators
+filled with game, fish, fruit, wine. He found he could buy their
+smallest and most inexpensive refrigerator, "built especially to supply
+a demand for low-priced goods,"--so the advertisement ran--for
+forty-five dollars. He dropped the book, and turned to his other letter.
+It was from a great retail dry-goods house, and was in answer to a
+request he had made for samples of dotted swiss--he had thought he would
+like to get Gertrude a dress such as she had worn when he first knew
+her. The samples were sent, and along with them a letter expressing
+pleasure at being able to serve him, and a desire further to accommodate
+him whenever possible; its extreme deference and respect was like a
+calculated sarcasm. He pushed it away from him and leaned back in his
+chair, looking about the room with a curious stare, as a convict, who
+has just heard that his sentence is for life, might gaze at the walls of
+his cell. It was a low-ceiled room, with an uneven floor, cheap
+woodwork, painted in an unsuccessful imitation of natural wood, and
+walls hung with faded paper of an indeterminate pattern and even more
+indeterminate color. To-day it was in greater confusion than usual, with
+white dust thick on table and chair, a window-shade askew, the
+music-rack disarranged, and a plate of grape-skins which Allison had
+left last night on the piano still standing there. But it was not the
+disorder which irritated Allison most, nor the signs of poverty, but the
+fact that the poverty was so _genteel_, so self-respecting, so
+determined to make the best of things and present a brave front to the
+world. The kerosene lamp had a shade of red, crinkled tissue-paper--the
+cheap net curtains were arranged with the utmost elaboration--a rug was
+artfully laid down in such a way as almost to cover the square of zinc
+on which the stove stood in the winter time, and all of Gertrude's
+photographs were placed with a view to concealing various defects and
+deficiencies. His loathing for all this was intensified by a memory of
+vast rooms stretching out one after the other, hushed and cool, with
+gracious shadows lending their mystery and romance to everything. With
+sudden restlessness he rose, and walked over to the window; but the
+smell of dust and dry, dead vegetation smothered him. Gertrude had raked
+the long, sparse brown grass all in one direction; it had a grotesque
+look of having been combed.
+
+He seized his hat, and went to get Mr. Fulton's package from the
+window-sill. He had barely turned toward the gate, however, when his
+wife hurried out, remonstrating, apologizing, with an urgent hand on
+his arm. "It is important that Mr. Fulton should get these papers
+to-day," he said stiffly. It did not really matter whether Mr. Fulton
+got the roll of agricultural papers to-day, to-morrow, or next week; but
+Allison felt the necessity for doing something, it did not much matter
+what, to crush down his growing despair; and this was the only thing
+which suggested itself. Gertrude was persistent, however, in her
+entreaties that he come back; it was frightfully hot, and he already
+looked tired; she would take the papers to Mr. Fulton right after
+luncheon. He yielded at last, from sheer languidness, and came silently
+into the house. Gertrude's moist face, her loud, anxious voice, her
+warm, clinging hand, were exceedingly disagreeable to him--so much so
+that finally the desire to escape them became more importunate than any
+other.
+
+He was again standing by the window, gazing out, when his wife came into
+the dining-room to set the table. He did not turn--gave no sign of
+seeing her.
+
+"What are you thinking about, Philip?" she asked presently, with an
+effort to make her question sound casual.
+
+"I am not thinking--at least I am trying not to," Allison answered, in a
+somewhat strained, unnatural voice. Why would she not leave him alone?
+Could she not see that he did not wish to talk?
+
+"What was the last thing that you were thinking about before you
+stopped?" Gertrude spoke with painstaking gaiety.
+
+Would she always keep up this dissimulation? Allison asked himself. For
+his part, he was done with it!
+
+"I was thinking that this place was fit for a dog-kennel--and for
+nothing else!" he said. All the bitterness that was eating out his heart
+was in the low words.
+
+"It does look pretty bad to-day," Gertrude acquiesced, after an
+appreciable interval of time.
+
+"_To-day!_" Allison gave a hard, contemptuous little laugh. "As though
+it ever looked any other way!"
+
+Gertrude did not reply.... When Allison noticed her silence, and turned
+to look at her, he saw that there was a peculiar light in her eyes, a
+red flush over all her face; after a moment's dazed wonder, he realized
+that she had misunderstood him--had misunderstood him utterly. His
+thoughts had been on the sagging floors, the cheap furniture, the marred
+wall-paper, the miserable ugliness and poverty of the house, and
+everything in it; but she had seen in his remark only scorn for her
+housekeeping, irritation at the room's untidiness. She was very angry.
+As Allison realized this, a sudden fierce satisfaction possessed him.
+Now at last she would speak out, without pretence, without reserve! He
+should hear the truth at last.
+
+[Illustration: "HE HEARD HER MOVING ABOUT, GETTING HIS LUNCHEON"]
+
+But the wrathful look died out of her eyes. She began arranging the
+knives and forks, looking suddenly old, and steady, and sober.
+
+"I'm not much of a housekeeper," she said, quietly.
+
+"No, you're not." Allison made his tone as ugly as possible--and waited.
+Surely she would turn upon him now, overwhelm him with bitter words!
+
+She made no answer of any kind, however, but turned and hurried into the
+kitchen, striking her arm clumsily against one side of the door as she
+passed through, as though she had not seen very well. He heard her
+moving rapidly about, getting his luncheon. She brought it in with her
+head in the air and her lips compressed. The coffee was muddy, the steak
+burned, the creamed potatoes scorched--she had been having bad luck.
+Allison ate every scrap of what she brought him. He did not dare look at
+her--did not dare ask her to forgive him. What right had he to do that?
+He lingered on the steps some time before starting for the station,
+fussing with his cuff, pulling his hat into shape, breaking off from the
+tree at the corner of the house the branch Gertrude had complained was
+in her way. His wife usually followed him to the door to tell him
+good-by; but to-day she was sweeping the dining-room vigorously, singing
+the while a very gay and cheerful tune. It was one to which they had
+often danced together in the old days; at the same moment at which he
+realized it, the song stopped, as though Gertrude had been silenced by
+the same memory that had come to him. He whistled tentatively; but she
+did not answer, though she was near enough to hear, as he knew from the
+sound of her broom.
+
+Allison went about his work that afternoon with a droop to his head, and
+a dullness about his dark eyes, which Jim noticed with vague discomfort,
+and which made him wish heartily that he had not confided to the
+postmaster the story of Billings and the brake. He had quarreled with
+Gertrude--everything else seemed insignificant to Allison beside that.
+He had quarreled with Gertrude--Gertrude, who had been so brave, so
+uncomplaining, so patient, so forbearing--had gone away from her with
+the shadow of a misunderstanding between them. He kept repeating to
+himself everything he had said and everything she had said, recalling
+every tone and gesture. He wondered how he could have felt such a
+shrinking dislike as she stood with her hand--her poor little scarred
+hand!--on his arm, begging him to come back, to let her take the papers
+to Mr. Fulton. How sweet she had been--how sweet! And he!
+
+He started for home a little earlier than usual--Jim urged him to go,
+with a certain rough friendliness, saying that he could look out for
+things at the station. On his way home Allison went to the post-office,
+hoping to get a letter for Gertrude from her mother or sister, and he
+told the postmaster very humbly and simply why he had not felt like
+talking this noon, and of the fact that he could not really afford to
+pay five dollars a week for a maid. It was very strange, but after he
+had begun, it was not at all hard to go on. He wondered vaguely how he
+could have thought the postmaster a meddlesome, malicious, vulgar young
+man; he seemed very sensible and friendly and respectful to-night.
+
+Mrs. Jennings stood at the top of the hill, gaunt and black as usual;
+somehow Allison did not feel the usual resentment. He stopped to speak
+to her with unwonted warmth; and when, encouraged by his manner, she
+began to talk about Gertrude, and what a pretty girl, and what a smart
+girl, and what a sweet girl she was, he felt a sudden kindness for the
+old lady, and accepted almost demonstratively the bunch of magenta and
+orange vinnias she gave him to take to his wife.
+
+As Allison went into the house, he noticed signs of a vigorous cleaning.
+The back steps had been scrubbed--were still wet; the kitchen floor was
+as white as the rough, dark boards could be made; the dining-room table
+was set with their finest table-cloth and prettiest dishes, and was gay
+with yellow flowers; fresh white curtains, breathing out sweetness, hung
+at the windows. A note was pinned to the corner of the table.
+
+"If you should get home before I do," it ran, "this is to tell you that
+I have gone to Mr. Fulton's with those papers I promised to take right
+after luncheon--I forgot all about them till just now. I'll be back in
+three-quarters of an hour sure; it's half-past five now. Supper's all
+ready now but making the coffee. Be sure and wait."
+
+He smoothed the hurried scrawl out tenderly, feeling as if something
+hard and cold in his left side had melted with a sudden gush of warmth.
+Back in three-quarters of an hour! He laughed aloud at the sanguineness
+of it. Why, it took _him_ forty minutes to go to Mr. Fulton's and back!
+And the idea of telling him to be sure and wait! The little goose! Did
+she think he would take himself off in a temper at not finding her, as
+he had once months ago? He went out to the kitchen to put his flowers
+in water, and to finish slicing an egg over the top of the bowl of salad
+there--Gertrude had evidently just begun to do it when the package
+outside the window caught her eye. He put on some water for the coffee,
+and brought in an armful of wood; then he strolled to the gate to wait
+for his wife. The neighbor's two-year-old baby came staggering down the
+walk in front of the house. Allison caught up the child in his arms, and
+lifted it to the top of the gate-post, beside him. This was the little
+girl for whom Gertrude had been making a dress the other day; she had
+looked very shocked--Gertrude--when he had asked her if she proposed to
+make clothes for all the dirty little brats in the neighborhood, and had
+told him with some dignity that Dolly was a very pretty baby, and was
+kept as clean as could be expected. Dolly _was_ a pretty baby. He
+tightened the arm that was about her a little, and began to talk clumsy
+baby-talk to her; her mother looked on with a pleased smile from her
+front door. The sun was setting, and a strange bright peace was on
+everything.
+
+Suddenly Allison's eyes were caught by an unaccustomed sight--a crowd of
+people, men, women, and children, advancing down the road, slowly,
+steadily, and silently--very silently. He surveyed them curiously,
+ignorantly. Suddenly a man spoke to the one next him--Allison saw the
+dip of his head--and almost at the same instant a child--a
+twelve-year-old girl--put up her hands to shade her eyes, staring
+intently at Allison, and then with a loud shriek ran wildly, blindly, in
+the other direction. And then Allison knew that this silent company
+meant disaster to him.
+
+They dragged him away before he caught more than a glimpse of what they
+had in their midst--the limp, white-faced thing in the silly pink dress
+he had liked. She had started home by the short way, they told him--the
+short way over the old bridge--the bridge that every one knew was not
+safe. And how it happened no one could say--perhaps she had stumbled and
+caught hold of the rotten railing, and it had given under her hand; at
+any rate they had found her in the dry river-bottom, thirty feet below.
+He looked at them very calmly as they finished. "She is dead," he said
+quietly, "there is no need to tell me that." And then, suddenly, without
+a cry or any warning, he toppled over against the man nearest him.
+
+But she was not dead. He came out of his delirium and fever three weeks
+later to find her limping around the room, looking a little pale and
+tired, but very pretty in some sort of ruffled white dress, with her
+hair done up in the puffs and rolls he had always liked. People had been
+very good, she told him when he was strong enough to listen and
+understand. The doctor had said that he could eat eggs before he could
+eat anything else--so everybody had been sending fresh eggs. Mary said
+she was going to buy an incubator and start to raising chickens--they
+couldn't eat half the eggs that were sent in, even if they ate nothing
+but custard. Mary was the pretty girl that they had seen walking with
+Mr. Brown one Sunday, and had thought would be a nice person to have
+around. She was going to stay with them all winter; Gertrude was going
+to teach her German and music, and she was going to teach Gertrude how
+to cook. She was doing all the work just now, she and the neighbors.
+Mrs. Ferry came in every morning to scrub the kitchen and black the
+stove. They said Gertrude must keep her hands nice--Philip had seemed
+more worried about her hands than about anything else, all the time he
+was sick. Did he see how soft and white they were? She had been washing
+them in buttermilk--the doctor's wife had suggested that--and putting
+some sort of cream on them that Mr. Gilson, the young man who clerked in
+the drug store, had sent up by Mr. Brown. Mr. Brown had been so kind--it
+had been he who had sat up with Philip when his fever was at its
+worst--he had chopped all the ice that they had used from first to last.
+He was out in the back yard now, fixing--but there, that was to be a
+surprise.
+
+Allison lay very still, smoothing his wife's hand, and looking out
+through the open door at the dry grass of the yard, browner, dustier
+than ever, and at the portulaca waving on top of the pyramid of stones.
+He could hear Jim's whistle as he moved about the yard; some one at the
+back door was talking to Mary in a hushed, eager undertone; over on her
+porch Dolly was singing happily, sinking her voice to a mere murmur now
+and then at a low remonstrance from within the house. It all made a sort
+of accompaniment to Gertrude's happy talk.
+
+Suddenly she stopped, and leaned her cheek against his, with a little
+sigh. "Isn't it a nice world, dear?" she whispered.
+
+He turned so that he could look into her eyes, and said, with a little
+tremble in his voice:
+
+"It's a beautiful world!"
+
+[Illustration: "HE CAME TOWARD HER WITH THE PITCHER"]
+
+
+
+
+THE WAYFARERS
+
+BY
+
+MARY STEWART CUTTING
+
+AUTHOR OF "LITTLE STORIES OF COURTSHIP," "LITTLE STORIES OF MARRIED
+LIFE," ETC.
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALICE BARBER STEPHENS
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+"Slipped through your fingers like that! Like a--" Leverich's words were
+not fit for print. He had been away for a couple of days, and now sat
+tilted back in his office chair, a heavy, leather-covered thing not
+meant for tilting, his face puffed with anger, his mouth snarling--a
+wild beast balked of his prey. His eyes, ferociously insolent, dwelt on
+Justin, who, fine and keen and smiling a little, sat opposite him. Brute
+anger never had any effect on Justin but to give him a contemptuous,
+chill self-possession.
+
+"You're sure the agreement's made?"
+
+"Cater's been sending new consignments as fast as they could go for the
+past three days; he's loaded up with machines."
+
+Leverich swore again. "Confounded fools, not to have made terms with
+Hardanger first! If we'd only known! If there was only some way to put a
+spoke in the wheel, even yet!"
+
+"Oh, I've got the spoke, easily enough," said Justin indifferently. "The
+only trouble is, I can't use it."
+
+"Got a spoke! Why in heaven didn't you say that before?" Leverich came
+down on the front legs of his chair with a force that sent it rolling
+ahead on its casters. "What are you sitting here for? What do you mean
+by telling me that you can't use it?"
+
+"Just what I say. But it's not worth talking about."
+
+"See here, Alexander, could you get our machine in now instead of his?"
+
+"I suppose I might."
+
+"And you're not going to do it?"
+
+"I can't, I tell you, Leverich. The information came to me in such a way
+that I can't touch it."
+
+"'The information--' It's something damaging to do with the machine?"
+
+Justin drummed with his fingers on the desk without answering.
+
+"You have proof?"
+
+"What's the sense of talking, Leverich? Proof or no, I tell you, I can't
+use it. This isn't any funny business; you can see that. Don't you
+suppose, if I could use it, that I would? But there are some things a
+man can't do. At any rate, _I_ can't. And that settles it."
+
+Heaven knows he had gone over the matter insistently enough in the last
+few days, since the combination had been unwillingly given into his
+hands, but always with the foregone conclusion. The devil, as a rule,
+doesn't actively try to tempt us to evil: he simply confuses us, so that
+we are kept from using our reason. But this time he had no field for
+action. To use secret information against Cater, that could never have
+been had but for Cater's kindness to him in helping him to those bars in
+time of need, was first, last, and every time impossible to Justin
+Alexander. It was vain for argument to suggest that this very deed of
+kindness had worked his disaster--the fact remained the same. He might
+do other things; he might do worse things: this thing he could not
+do--not though the refusal worked his own ruin, not though Cater's ruin
+with Hardanger was insured anyway, but too late for the typometer to
+profit by it. Even if the typometer could by some means keep afloat
+until that day arrived, it would take a couple of years for such a
+timing-machine to regain its prestige in a foreign country.
+
+Justin had no excess of sentiment; no quixotic impulse urged him to go
+and tell Cater what he had learned. It was Cater's business to look
+after his end of the game. If the price of material or labor was too
+cheap, he must know that there was something wrong with it. The stream
+of Justin's mind ran clear in spite of that feeling of sharp practice
+toward himself--nay, because of it; it was impossible to use the weapon
+that a former kindness had placed in his hand. He looked at Leverich now
+with an expression which the latter quieted himself to meet. This was a
+situation, not for bluster and rage, but to be competently grappled
+with.
+
+"How about your obligations? Do you call this fair dealing to us,
+Alexander? There's Lewiston's note; once this deal was settled, we would
+have paid that, as you know. But it's out of the question as things
+stand. We'll have to get our money out the best way we can. If this is
+your sense of honor--to sacrifice your friends! See here, Alexander,
+let's talk this out. When it comes to talking of ruin, no man can afford
+to stand on terms. We didn't put you into the typometer business on any
+kindergarten principles--it isn't to form your character. What we did,
+we did for profit; and if the profit isn't there, we get out. We've no
+objection to doing a kindness for any one, if we can do it and make a
+profit; but it stands to reason that we're not in the business for
+philanthropy any more than for kindergartening. We liked you, and we
+were willing to give you a place in the game if you could run it to suit
+us. But we don't consider any scheme that doesn't make money. What
+doesn't make money has to go. Profit, profit, profit--that's what every
+sane man puts first, and there's no justice in losing a chance to make
+it. What you lose, another man takes. If you make another man's wife and
+children better off, you stint your own. You've got to consider a
+question on all sides. No woman respects a man who can't make money;
+it's his everlasting business to make money, and she knows it. Your wife
+won't think much of your fine scruples if she's to go without for 'em.
+And, by the Lord, she's right! When you go into business, you've got to
+make up your mind to one of two things: you've either got to step hard
+on the necks of those below you, or you've got to lie down and let them
+wipe their feet on you."
+
+[Illustration: "'I DON'T GIVE QUARTER, AND I DON'T EXPECT ANY. IF I'M
+SQUEEZED, I PAY'"]
+
+Leverich had stopped at intervals for comment from Justin. Since none
+was offered, he went on, with the large and easy manner of one who feels
+the justice of his convictions: "No man ever accused me of being close.
+I'm free-handed, if I say it that shouldn't. I like to give, and I _do_
+give. If there's money wanted for charity, the committees know very well
+where to come. And my wife likes to give, too; her name's on the books
+of twenty charitable organizations. But we give out of money I've made
+by _not_ being free-handed--by getting every last cent that belonged to
+me. You see, I don't leave my wife out of my calculations--any man's a
+fool that does. She's got the right to have as good as I can give her. I
+wouldn't talk like this to most men, Alexander, but between you and me
+it's different. It pays to keep your wife in a good humor, when you've
+got to go home after a hard day's work; you take a dissatisfied woman,
+and she'll make your home a hell. I know men--Great Scott! I don't know
+how they live!" He paused again. Justin did not answer. He sat with his
+head on his hand, looking, not at Leverich, but to one side of him.
+
+[Illustration: "EVEN REDGE ... HAD BEEN ALLOWED TO HOLD HIM"]
+
+"When I say I've made the money," continued Leverich, "I mean that I
+actually _have_ made most of it--made it out of nothing! like the first
+chapter of Genesis. If a man has money to start with, he can add to it
+as easily as you can roll up a snowball. It's no credit to him. But I've
+had only my brains. I've seen money where other men couldn't, and
+nothing has stood in my way of getting to it. That's the whole secret of
+success. And my attitude's fair--you couldn't find a fairer. When one of
+your clerks falls sick, you pay him his full salary for three or four
+months till he's around again. _I_ know! Well, I don't do any such
+stunts. When I was a clerk myself, I was on the sick-list once for three
+months, and nobody paid me. After the first month I was bounced, and I
+didn't expect anything else. I didn't expect any philanthropical
+business, and I don't give it. That's fair, isn't it? I don't give
+quarter, and I don't expect any. If I'm squeezed, I pay. I don't stand
+still in the middle of a deal and snivel about what I can do and what I
+can't do. I don't snivel about what you call moral obligations. I only
+recognize money obligations. Why, see here, Alexander," he broke off,
+"if you use the influence you spoke of, you don't have to tell me what
+it is--you don't have to tell anybody but Hardanger. Cater himself
+needn't know that you had anything to do with it."
+
+"But I'd know," said Justin quietly.
+
+Leverich lost his easy manner; his jaw protruded.
+
+"Very well, then; it comes down to this: If you fail us now, out of any
+of your fool scruples toward that poor devil across the street,--who's
+bound to get the blood sucked out of him anyway,--you ruin your own
+prospects, and you try and cheat us out of the money we put up on you.
+By ----, if you see any honor in that, I don't."
+
+"Mr. Leverich," said Justin, raising his head simply, with a steely
+gleam in his eyes that matched the other's, "when I try to cheat you or
+Lewiston or any man out of what has been put up on me, I'll give you
+leave to say what you please. At present I'll say good morning."
+
+[Illustration: "AFTER THIS HE ONLY APPEARED IN THE VILLAGE STREET
+GUARDED ON EITHER SIDE BY A FEMALE SNOW"]
+
+Leverich shrugged his shoulders and turned his back as he bent over his
+desk. Justin picked up his hat and went out, brushing, as he did so,
+against a dark, pleasant-faced man who had been sitting in the next
+room. Something in his face instantly conveyed to Justin the knowledge
+that the conversation he had just been engaged in had grown louder than
+the partition warranted. The next instant he recognized the man as a Mr.
+Warren, of Rondell & Co. Both men turned to look back at each other, and
+both bowed. The action had a certain definiteness in it, unwarranted by
+the slightness of the meeting. The next moment Justin was in the
+street.
+
+[Illustration: "TO PUT HER YOUNG ARMS AROUND LOIS AND HOLD HER CLOSE
+WITH ACHING PITY"]
+
+The active clash of steel always roused the blood in him; he felt
+actively stronger for combat. He was competently apportioning toward
+Lewiston's note the different sums coming in this month. There were
+large bills to be paid to the typometer's credit by several firms, one
+of them Coneways'. Coneways represented the largest counted-in asset for
+the entire year--it was the backbone of the establishment. If it went to
+Lewiston, what would be left for the business? That could come next.
+Lewiston was first. Leverich and Martin would exact every penny of their
+principal after these intervening six months of the year were over.
+Well, let them! Lewiston's note was what he had to think of now.
+
+All business undertakings, no matter how wild, how precarious, to the
+sense of the beholder, are started with confidence in their ultimate
+success; it is the one trite, universal reason for starting--that faith
+is the capital that all possess in common. Some of these doubtful
+ventures, while never really succeeding, do not really fail at once.
+They are always hard up, but they keep on, though gradually sinking
+lower all the time. Others seem to exist by the continuance of that
+first faith alone--a sheer optimism that keeps the courage alive and
+keen enough to seize hold of the slightest driftwood of opportunity,
+binding this flotsam into a raft that takes them triumphantly out on the
+high tide. For all the long drag, the anxiety, the physical strain, the
+harassment, failure in itself seemed as inherently impossible to Justin
+as that he should be stricken blind or lose the use of his limbs. He
+must think harder to find a way of accomplishment; that was all.
+
+His step had its own peculiar ring in it as he left Leverich's, but it
+lost somewhat of its alertness as he turned down the street that led to
+the factory, unaltered, since his first coming to it, save for the
+transformation of the neglected house he had noticed then, with its
+gruesome interior, which had been turned into a freshly painted shop
+long ago. The effect of association is inexorable. There was not a
+corner, not a building, along that too familiar way, that was not hung
+with some thought of care. There were moments of such strong repulsion
+that he felt as if he couldn't turn down that street again--moments
+lately when to enter the factory with its red-brick-arched yawning mouth
+of a doorway occasioned a physical nausea--a foolish, womanish state
+which irritated him.
+
+The mail brought him the usual miscellaneous assortment of orders and
+bills, and letters on minor points, and questions as to the typometer.
+The mail was rather apt to be encouraging in its suggestions of a large
+trade. Two letters this morning were full of enthusiastic encomium on
+the use of the machine. In spite of an enormous and long-outstanding
+bill for office stationery, insistently clamorous for payment--one of
+those bills looked upon as trifles until they suddenly become
+staggering--there was, after the mail, a general feeling of wielding the
+destiny of a large part of the world, where the typometer was a power.
+
+[Illustration: "'YOU'RE VERY GOOD TO BE SO SORRY FOR ME,' SHE
+WHISPERED"]
+
+A little woman whose husband, now dead, had been in his employ came in
+to get help in collecting his insurance; she was timid before Justin,
+deeply grateful for his kind and effective assistance. Two men came in,
+at different times, for advice and introductions to important people. A
+friend brought in a possible customer from the Sandwich Islands. There
+was all that aura of prosperity that has nothing to do with the payment
+of one's bills.
+
+Justin took both the friend and the customer out to lunch, his agreeable
+sense of hospitality only dimmed by the disagreeable fact of its taking
+every cent of the five dollars he had expected to last for the week. He
+was "strapped." The luncheon took longer, also, than he had counted on
+its doing. The morning, begun well, seemed to lead up only to sordid and
+anxious details--a sense of non-accomplishment, induced also by small
+requisitions from different people, requiring cash from a cash-drawer
+that was usually empty.
+
+It was a welcome relief to figure, with Harker's assistance, on the
+large sums coming in at the end of the month from Coneways. There were a
+hundred ways for them to go, but they were to go to Lewiston. Perhaps,
+after all, as Harker astutely suggested, Lewiston would be satisfied
+with a partial payment and extend the rest of the note. While they were
+still consulting, word was brought in that Mr. Lewiston was there.
+
+Mr. Lewiston was a young man, small-featured, black-haired,
+smooth-shaven, and with an air of nattiness and fashion, set at odds at
+present by a very pale and anxious face and eager, dilated black eyes.
+He cut short Justin's greeting with the words:
+
+"I've just come over to speak about that note, Alexander."
+
+"Well, I was just wanting to speak to you about it myself," said Justin
+easily. "Have a cigar?"
+
+"Thank you," said Lewiston mechanically, and as mechanically holding out
+his hand for the cigar, evidently forgetting it the next moment. "The
+fact is, I don't want to seem importunate, but if you could pay off that
+note fifteen days before date,--a week from to-day, that is,--we'd
+discount it to satisfy you, if you can collect now. I didn't want to
+bother you about it, and I tried outside first, but nobody will take up
+the paper just now, except at a ruinous rate. If you could make it
+convenient, Alexander." Young Lewiston sat with his small, eager face
+bent forward over his knees, his lips twitching slightly. "You know,
+that money wasn't loaned on strictly business principles, Alexander, but
+for friendship; I got father to consent to it. And if you could let us
+have it now, it would save us a world of trouble. It's really not
+much--only ten thousand."
+
+Justin shook his head, his keen blue eyes fixed on the other. "I can't
+let you have it, Lewiston; I wish I could! But I'm waiting payments
+myself. Can't you pull out without it?"
+
+Lewiston drew in his breath. "Oh, yes, of course we'll have to; but it
+means-- Well, I know you would if you could, Alexander; I told father
+so--father in a way holds me responsible. He was in London when I
+renewed the note the last time. There isn't anything to interfere with
+the payment when it's due?"
+
+"On my honor, no," said Justin. "You shall have it then without fail."
+
+"For if that should slip up--" continued young Lewiston, wrapped in
+somber contemplation of his own affairs alone; he threw his arms outward
+with a gesture suddenly tragic in its intensity, paused an instant, then
+wrung Justin's hand silently and departed.
+
+"Are you busy, Alexander? They said I could come in."
+
+"Why, Girard!"
+
+Justin wheeled a chair around with an instantly brightened face. "Sit
+down. I'm mighty glad to see you." He looked smilingly at his visitor,
+whose presence, long-limbed, straight, clean, and clear-eyed, always
+elicited a peculiar admiration from other men. "I heard that you had a
+room at the Snows' now, while Billy is away, but I haven't laid eyes on
+you for a month."
+
+"I've been coming in on a later train every morning and going out again
+on a very much later one at night. I'm back in town on the paper for a
+while."
+
+"Why don't you settle down to something worth while?" asked Justin, with
+the reserved disapproval of the business man for any mode of life but
+his own.
+
+[Illustration: "MRS. SNOW WAS FUMBLING WITH A PAPER"]
+
+"Settle down to this kind of thing?" said Girard thoughtfully. "Well, I
+did think of it last year, when I undertook those commissions for you.
+But what's the use--yet awhile, at any rate? You see, I can always make
+enough money for what I want and to spare, and there's nobody else to
+care. I like my liberty! The love of trade doesn't take hold of me,
+somehow--and you have to have such a tremendous amount of capital to
+keep your place. By the way, have you sold the island yet?" The island
+was a small one up near Nova Scotia, taken once for a debt.
+
+"Not yet."
+
+Girard gave him a quick glance. "How are things going with you?"
+
+"Fine," said Justin in a conventionally prosperous tone, with a sudden
+sight of a bottomless pit yawning below him. "I've a few things on my
+mind lately--but they're all right now. By the way, how do you like it
+at the Snows'?"
+
+"Oh, all right." Girard's gray eyes smiled in an irrepressible smile. "I
+score high at present. They all approve of me, and I am told that I am
+the only man who has never run into the Boston fern or got tangled in
+the Wandering Jew. Miss Bertha and I have long talks together--she's
+great. As for Mrs. Snow--she heard Sutton speak of her the other night
+to Ada as 'the old lady,' I assure you that since--" He shook his head,
+and both men laughed.
+
+"Come to see us. Miss Linden is back with us again," said Justin
+hospitably.
+
+"Thank you," said Girard, an indefinable stiffening change instantly
+coming over him. "By the way, I mustn't forget what I came for, before I
+hurry off."
+
+He took some bills out of his long, flat leather wallet as he rose. "Do
+you remember lending that sixty dollars to my friend Keston last year?
+He turned up yesterday, and asked me to see that you got this."
+
+"I'd forgotten all about it," averred Justin. He had not realized until
+he took the bills that he had been keeping up all day by main strength,
+with that caved-in sensation of there being nothing back of it--nothing
+back of it. There are times when the touch of money is as the elixir of
+life. Justin, holding on by the skin of his teeth for ten thousand
+dollars, and needing imperatively at least as much more, felt that with
+this paltry sixty dollars it was suddenly possible to draw a free
+breath, felt a sheer lightness of spirit that showed how terrible was
+the persistent weight under which he was living. The very feeling of
+those separate bills in his pocket made him calmly sanguine.
+
+He got ready to go home a little earlier than usual, saying lightly to
+Harker, who had come in for his signature to some papers:
+
+"Those payments will begin to straggle in next week. Coneways' isn't due
+until the 31st--the very last minute! But he's always prompt, thank
+Heaven--what are you doing?"
+
+"Knocking on wood," said Harker, with a grim smile.
+
+"Oh, knock on wood all you want to," returned Justin.
+
+He even thought of Lois on his way, and stopped to buy her some flowers.
+It was the first time he had thought of her unconsciously for a week.
+While he was waiting for a car to pass before he crossed the street, his
+eye caught the headline on a paper a newsboy was holding out to him:
+
+  GREAT CRASH
+
+  CONEWAYS & CO. FAIL
+
+  IN BOSTON
+
+
+XX
+
+"I don't think Justin looks very well," said Dosia that afternoon. She
+was sitting on the edge of the bed, with her arms spread out
+half-protectingly over Lois. The latter was only resting; she had been
+up and around the house now for three or four weeks, and, although she
+looked unusually fragile, seemed well, if not very strong.
+
+The baby, wrapped in a blue embroidered blanket, with only a round
+forehead and a small pink nose visible, was of that satisfactory variety
+entirely given to sleep. Zaidee and even Redge, adoring little sister
+and brother, had been allowed to hold him in their arms, so securely
+unstirring was their little burden. Lois, who had passionately rebelled
+against the prospect of additional motherhood, exhibited a not unusual
+phase of it now in as passionately adoring this second boy. He seemed
+peculiarly, intensely her own, not only a baby, but a spiritual
+possession that communicated a new strength to her. Lois was changed.
+She had always been beautiful, as a matter of fact, but there was
+something withheld, mysterious, in her expression, as if she were taking
+counsel of some half-slumberous force within, as of one listening at a
+shell for the murmur of the ocean.
+
+Not only Lois, but everything else, seemed changed to Dosia, at the same
+time being also flatly, unchangeably natural. She had longed--oh, how
+she had longed!--to be back here. Even while loving and working in her
+so-called home, she had felt that this was her real home, although here
+her cruelest blows had fallen on her; even while bleeding with the
+wrench of parting from her own flesh and blood, she had felt that this
+was the real home, for here she had really lived; and it was the home of
+the nicer, more delicate instincts. After the crude housekeeping, the
+lack of comforts that made the simplest nursing a grinding struggle with
+circumstance, it was a blessed relief to get back to a sphere where
+minor details were all in order as a matter of course. The Alexanders,
+with their three children, kept only one maid now; but even that
+restriction did not prevent the unlimited flow of hot and cold water!
+
+Yet she had also dreaded this returning,--how she had dreaded it!--with
+that old sickening shame which came over her inevitably as she thought
+of certain people and places and days. The mere thought of seeing Mrs.
+Leverich or George Sutton and that chorus of onlookers was like passing
+through fire. One braces one's self to withstand the pain of scenes of
+joy or sorrow revisited, to find that, after all, when the moment comes,
+there is little of that dreaded pain. It has been lived through and the
+climax passed in that previsioning which imagination made more intense,
+more harrowingly real, than the reality.
+
+Mrs. Leverich stopped her carriage one day to greet Dosia, and to ask
+her, with a tentative semblance of her old effusion, to come and make
+her a visit--an effusion which immediately died down into complete
+non-interest, on Dosia's polite refusal; and the incident was not
+especially heart-racking at the time, though afterward it set her
+unaccountably trembling. Mrs. Leverich had in the carriage with her a
+small, thin, long-nosed man with a pale-reddish mustache and hair, who,
+gossip said, passed most of his time at the Leverichs'--he was seen out
+driving alone with Myra nearly every day. He was "an old friend from
+home." It had been gossip at first, but it was growing to be scandal
+now, with audible wonder as to how much Mr. Leverich knew about it.
+
+Her avoidance of George Sutton was as nothing to his desire of avoiding
+her. He dived with surreptitious haste down side streets when he saw her
+coming, or disappeared within shop doorways. Once, when Dosia confronted
+him inadvertently on the platform of a car, and he had perforce to take
+off his hat and murmur, "Good morning," he turned pale and was evidently
+scared to death. After this he only appeared in the village street
+guarded on either side by a female Snow--usually Ada and her mother,
+though occasionally Bertha served as escort instead of the latter. The
+elder Snows, in spite of this apparent security, were in a state of
+constant nervous tension over Mr. Sutton's attention to Ada. He had not
+"spoken" yet, but it had begun to be felt severely of late that he
+ought to speak. Whenever Ada came into the house, her face was eagerly
+scanned by both mother and sister to see from its look if it bore any
+trace of the fateful words having been uttered. Every one knew, though
+how no one could tell, that that bold thing, Dosia Linden, had tried to
+get him once, and failed.
+
+The thing that had unaccountably stirred her most since her arrival was
+an unexpected meeting with Bailey Girard. Dosia, with Zaidee and Redge
+held by either hand and pressing close to her as they walked merrily
+along, suddenly came upon a gray-clad figure emerging from the
+post-office. He seemed to make an instinctive movement as if to draw
+back, that sent the swift color to her cheeks and then turned them
+white. Were all the men in the place trying to avoid her? Dosia thought,
+with bitter humor; but, if it were so, he instantly recovered himself,
+and came forward, hat in hand, with a quick access of bright courtesy, a
+punctilious warmth of manner. He walked along with her a few paces as he
+talked, lifting Zaidee over a flooded crossing, before going once more
+on his way. He was nothing to her, the stranger who had killed her
+ideal; yet all day it was as if his image were photographed in the
+colors of life upon the retina of her eye. She could not push it away,
+try as she might.
+
+Of Lawson Dosia had heard only such vague rumors as had sifted through
+the letters written by Lois. He had been reported as going on in his old
+way in the mining-camps, drifting from one to another. She heard nothing
+more now. He was the only one who had really loved her up here, except
+Lois, who loved her now. Dosia had slipped into her new position of
+sister and helper as if she had always filled it. She was not an
+outsider any more; she _belonged_.
+
+As she sat bending over Lois now, her attitude was instinct with
+something high-mindedly lovely. The Dosia who had only wanted to be
+loved now felt--after a year of trial and conflict with death--that she
+only wanted, and with the same youthful intensity, to be very good, even
+though it seemed sometimes to that same youthfulness a strange and
+tragic thing that it should be all she wanted. The mysterious,
+fathomless depression of youth, as of something akin to unknown primal
+depths of loneliness, sometimes laid its chill hand on her heart; but
+when Dosia "said her prayers," she got, child-fashion, very near to a
+Some One who brought her an intimate tender comfort of resurrection and
+of life.
+
+"I don't think Justin seems well," she repeated, Lois, looking up at her
+with calmly expressionless eyes from her pillow, having taken no notice
+of the remark. "He has changed, I think, even in the ten days since I
+came."
+
+"He has something on his mind," assented Lois, with a note of languor in
+her voice. "I suppose it's the business. I made up my mind to ask him
+about it to-night. He has been out every evening lately, and I hardly
+see him at all before he goes off in the morning, now that I don't get
+down to breakfast."
+
+"Oh, he gave me a message for you this morning," cried Dosia, with
+compunction at having so far forgotten it. "He said that Mr. Larue had
+come in to inquire about you yesterday. He is going to send you a basket
+of strawberries and roses from his place at Collingswood to-morrow."
+
+"Eugene Larue!" Lois' lips relaxed into a pleased curve; a slight color
+touched her cheek. "That was very nice of him. He knew I'd like to look
+forward to getting them. Strawberries and roses!"
+
+"I met Mr. Girard in the street to-day; he asked after you," continued
+Dosia, with the feeling that if she spoke of him she might get that
+tiresome, insistent image of him from before her eyes.
+
+"Bailey Girard? Yes; he has a room at the Snows'. Billy's out West."
+
+"So I've heard," said Dosia.
+
+It was one of the strange and melancholy ironies of life that the man of
+all others whom she had desired to meet should be thrown daily in her
+pathway now, after that desire was gone!
+
+"You'd better not talk any more now, Lois; you look tired. It's time for
+you to take a little rest. I'll see to the children. I hope baby will
+stay asleep. Let me pull this coverlet over you. Shall I pull down the
+shades?"
+
+"No, I'd rather have the light. Please hand me that book over there on
+the stand," said Lois, holding out her hand for the big, old-fashioned
+brown volume that Dosia brought to her.
+
+"You oughtn't to read; you ought to go to sleep," said Dosia, with
+tender severity.
+
+"I'm not going to read," returned Lois pacifically. Her hand closed over
+the book, she smiled, and Dosia closed the door. Lois turned to the
+sleeping child with a peculiar delight in being quite alone with
+him--alone with him, to think.
+
+The book was a novel of some forty years ago, called, as the title-page
+proclaimed, "A Woman's Kingdom," and written by Dinah Maria Mulock. A
+neighbor had brought it in to Lois during the first month of her
+convalescence. In all the time she had had it, she had never read any
+further than that title-page.
+
+There is often more in the birth of a child than the coming of another
+son or daughter into the world. Between those forces of life and death a
+woman may also get her chance to be born anew, made over again,
+spiritually as well as physically. In those long, restful hours
+afterward, when suspense is over and pain is over, and there is a
+freedom from household cares, and one is looked upon with renewed
+tenderness, the thoughts may flow over long, long ways. To face danger
+bravely in itself gives strength for the clearer vision; and a
+peculiarly loved child unlocks with its tiny hands springs unknown
+before.
+
+Lois, though she had been a mother twice before, had never felt toward
+either of the other children at all as she did now toward this little
+boy. She could not bear to be parted from him. Somehow that terrible
+corrosive selfishness had been blessedly taken away from her--for a
+little while only? She only felt at first that she must not think of
+those horrible depths, for fear of slipping back into the pit again;
+even to think of the slimy powers of darkness gave them a fresh hold on
+one. She put off her return to that soul-embracing egotism. It was sweet
+to lie there and meet the tender gentleness of her husband's gaze when
+he came home, and to talk to him about the baby as a child might talk
+about a new toy, though she could not but begin to perceive that she was
+as far, far out of his real life as if she had indeed been a child.
+
+One evening he came in to sit by her,--her convalescence had been a long
+and dragging one,--and she had paused in the midst of telling him
+something to await an answer. None came. She spoke again, and raised
+herself to look. Then she saw that even within that brief space he had
+fallen asleep, as a man may who is thoroughly exhausted. Thoroughly
+exhausted! Everything proclaimed it--his attitude, grimly grotesque in
+the dim light, one leg stretched out half in front of the other, as he
+had dropped into the seat, his relaxed arms hanging down, his head
+resting sidewise against the back of the chair, with the face sharply
+upturned. The shadows lay in the hollows under his cheek-bones and in
+those lines that marked his temples. Divested of color and the
+transforming play of expression, he looked strangely old, terribly
+lifeless. He slept without moving,--almost, it seemed, without
+breathing,--while Lois, with a new dread, watched him with frightened,
+dilated, fascinated eyes. How had he grown like this? What unnoticed
+change had been at work? She called him again, but he did not hear; she
+stretched out her arm, but he was just beyond reach. Suddenly it seemed
+to her that he was dead, and that she could never reach him again; an
+icy hand seemed to have been laid on her heart. What if never, never,
+never----
+
+Just then he opened his eyes and sat up, saying naturally, "Did you
+speak?"
+
+"Oh, you frightened me so! Don't go to sleep like that again," said
+Lois, with a shaking voice. "Come here."
+
+He came and knelt down by her, and she pressed his cheek close to hers
+with a rush of painful emotion. "Why, you mustn't get worked up over a
+little thing like that," he objected lightly, going out of the room
+afterward with a reassuring smile at her, while she gazed after him with
+strangely awakened eyes. For the first time in months, she thought of
+him without any thought of benefit to herself.
+
+The next day the neighbor sent her over the book; the title arrested her
+attention oddly--"The Woman's Kingdom." Another phrase correlated with
+it in her memory--"Queen of the Home." That was supposed to be woman's
+domain, where she was the sovereign power; there she was helper,
+sustainer, director, the dear dispenser of favors. The woman's kingdom,
+queen of the home. Gradually the words led her down long lanes of
+retrospect, led by the rose-leaf touch of the baby's fingers; _they_
+kept her strong. What kingdom had she ever made her own? She, poor,
+bedraggled, complaining suppliant, a beggar where she should have been a
+queen! Home and the heart of her husband--there lay her woman's kingdom,
+her realm, her God-given province. She had had the ordering of it, none
+other: she had married a good man. Glad or sorry, that kingdom was as
+her rule made it; she must be judged by her government--as she was queen
+enough to hold it. She fell asleep that day thinking of the words.
+
+Day by day, other thoughts came to her more or less disconnectedly,--set
+in motion by those magic words,--when she lay at rest in the afternoons,
+with the book in her fingers and the dear little baby form close beside
+her. Lois was one of those women of intense feeling who can never
+perceive from imagination, but only from experience--who cannot even
+adequately sympathize with sorrows and conditions which they have not
+personally experienced. No advice touches them, for the words that
+embody it are in a language not yet understood. The mistakes of the past
+seem to have been necessary, when they look back. Given the same
+circumstances, they could not have acted differently; but they seldom
+look back--the present, that is always climbing on into the future,
+occupies them exclusively.
+
+Lois with "The Woman's Kingdom" in her hand, felt that some source of
+power and happiness which she had not realized had slipped from her
+grasp, yet might still be hers. So many disconnected, half-childish
+thoughts came with the words--historic names of women whom men had loved
+devotedly, who had kept them as their friends and lovers even when they
+themselves had grown old, women who had never lost their charm. There
+were those women of the French salons, who could interest even other
+generations; queens indeed! She couldn't really interest _one_ man! She
+thought over the married couples of her acquaintance, in search of those
+who should reveal some secret, some guiding light. One woman across the
+street had no other object in life than purveying to the household
+comfort of her husband, and seemed, good soul, to expect nothing from
+him in return; if William liked his fish, she was repaid. A couple
+farther down appeared to be held together by the fact of marriage,
+nothing more; they were bored to death by each other's society. Another
+couple were happily absorbed in their children, to whom they were both
+sacrificially subordinate. With none of these conditions could Lois be
+satisfied. Then, there were the women who always spoke as if a man were
+an animal and a woman were not a woman, but a spirit; but Lois was very
+much a woman! She settled at last, after penetrative thought, on one
+husband and wife, the latter a plain little person no longer young.
+Every man liked to go to her charming, comfortable house; every man
+admired her; and that her husband, a very handsome man himself, admired
+her most of all was unobtrusively evident. Every look, every gesture,
+betrayed the charming, vivifying unity between those two. How was it
+accomplished?
+
+How could one interest a man like that? There was Eugene Larue--she
+could interest him! The thought of him always gave her a sense of
+conscious power; he paid her homage. She did not know what his relations
+were with other women, but of his with her she was sure: she felt her
+woman's kingdom. If you could talk to the soul of a man like that as if
+he had the soul of an angel, and learn from him what you wanted to
+know--get his guidance-- But Lois was before all things inviolably a
+wife, with the instinctive dignity of one. The sympathy between her and
+Eugene Larue was so deep that she feared sometimes that in some brief
+moment she might reveal in words, to be forever regretted afterward,
+conditions which he knew without her telling. To be loved as Eugene
+Larue would love a woman! But his wife had not cared to be loved that
+way. She took deep, thoughtful counsel of her heart. If they two, she
+and Eugene, had met while both were free? The answer was what she had
+known it would be, else she had not dared to make the test. The man who
+was her husband was the only man who could ever have been her husband.
+Justin!
+
+With "The Woman's Kingdom" in her hand now, her lips touching the cheek
+of the soft little darling thing beside her, she felt that some new
+knowledge had been gradually revealed to her, of which she was now
+really aware only for the first time. Justin was not looking well--that
+was what Dosia had said. Oh, he was _not_ looking well! But she would
+make him forget his cares, his anxieties, with this new-found power of
+hers; she would bewitch him, take him off his feet, so that he would be
+able to think of nothing, of no one, but her--he had not always thought
+of her. _She would not pity herself._ She would learn to laugh, even if
+it took heroic effort; men liked you to laugh. She had always taken
+everything too seriously. The vision of his sleeping, _dead_ face of a
+month ago frightened her for a moment, painfully; but he had seemed
+better since, though, as Dosia said, he didn't look well. Oh, when he
+came home to-night----!
+
+She dressed herself with a new care, putting on a soft yellowish gown
+with a yoke of creamy lace, unworn for months. The color was more
+brilliant than ever in her cheeks, her lips redder, her eyes more deeply
+blue. The children exclaimed over their "pretty mama." She looked
+younger, more beautiful, than Dosia had ever seen her. She could not
+help saying:
+
+"How lovely you are, Lois! And you're all dressed up, too; do you expect
+any one?"
+
+"Only Justin," said Lois.
+
+"Only Justin"! The words brought an exquisite joy with them--only
+Justin, the one man in all the world for her. There was but a half-hour
+now until dinner-time. It had passed, and he had not come; but he was
+often late-- Still he did not come; that happened too, sometimes. The
+two women sat down to dinner alone, at last. The baby woke up afterward,
+an unusual thing, and wailed, and would not stop. Lois, divested of her
+rich apparel and once more swathed in a loose, shabby gown, rocked and
+soothed the infant interminably, while Dosia, her efforts to help
+unavailing, crouched over a book down-stairs, trying to read. After an
+interval of quiet she went up-stairs, to find Lois at last lying down.
+
+"It's eleven o'clock, Lois; I think I'll go to bed. Shall I leave the
+gas burning down-stairs?"
+
+"Yes, please do; he can't get anything now but the last train out."
+
+"And you don't want me to stay here with you?"
+
+"No--oh, no."
+
+As once before, Lois waited for that train--yet how differently! If that
+injured feeling rose, for an instant, at his not having sent her word,
+she crushed it back as one would crush the head of a viper that showed
+itself between the crevices of the hearthstone. She would not pity
+herself--she would not pity herself! She knew now that madness lay that
+way.
+
+The night was clear and warm, the stars were shining, as she got up and
+sat by the window, looking out from behind the curtain, her beautiful
+braided hair over one shoulder. The last train came in; the people from
+it, in twos and threes, straggled down the street, but not Justin. He
+must have missed that last train out. Of course he must have missed it!
+
+We are apt to fancy causeless disaster to those we love; the amount of
+"worry" more or less willingly indulged in by uncontrolled minds seems
+at times enough to swamp the understanding: yet there is a foreboding,
+unsought, unwelcomed, combated, which, once felt, can never be
+counterfeited; it carries with it some chill, unfathomed quality of
+truth.
+
+Lois knew now that she had had this foreboding all day.
+
+
+XXI
+
+"And you haven't heard _anything_ of him yet?"
+
+"Not yet, Mrs. Alexander. I'm sorry--oh, so sorry--to have nothing more
+to tell you. But I'm sure we'll hear something before morning."
+
+Bailey Girard spoke with confidence, his eyes bent controllingly on
+Lois, who trembled as she stood in the little hallway, looking up at
+him, with Dosia behind her. This was the third night since that one when
+Justin had failed to appear, and there had been no word from him in the
+interim. Owing to that curious way that women have of waiting for events
+to happen that will end suspense, rather than seeking to end it by any
+unaccustomed action of their own, no inquiry had been made at the
+Typometer Company until late in the afternoon of the next day, which had
+been passed in the hourly expectation of hearing from Justin or seeing
+him walk in. However, nobody at the company knew anything of Justin's
+movements, except that he had left the office rather early the afternoon
+before, and had been seen to take a car going up-town. It was presumable
+that he had been called suddenly out of town, and had sent some word to
+Mrs. Alexander that had miscarried.
+
+That evening, however, Lois sent for Leverich, who was evidently
+bothered; though bluffly and rather irritatingly making light of her
+fears, he seemed to be both a little reluctant and a little
+contemptuous.
+
+"My dear Mrs. Alexander, you can't expect a fellow to be always tied to
+his wife's apron-strings! He doesn't tell you everything. We like to
+have a free foot once in a while. Why, my wife's glad when I get off for
+a day or two--coaxes me to go away herself! And as for anything
+happening to Alexander--well, an able-bodied man can look out for
+himself every time; there's nothing in the world to be anxious about.
+He's meant to wire to you and forgotten to do it, that's all. I did that
+myself last year, when I was called away suddenly; but Myra didn't turn
+a hair. She knew I was all right. And if I were you, Mrs.
+Alexander,--this is just a tip,--I wouldn't go around telling _every_
+one that he's gone off and you don't know where he is. It's the kind of
+thing folks get talking about in all kinds of ways; his affairs aren't
+in any too good shape, as he may have told you."
+
+"Isn't the business all right?" queried Lois, with a puzzled fear.
+
+"Oh, yes, of course--all right; but--I wouldn't go around wondering
+about his being away; he's got his own reasons. You haven't a telephone,
+have you? I'll send around word to have one put in to-day. I'll tell you
+what: I'll ask Bailey Girard to come around and see you on the
+quiet--he's got lots of wires he can pull. You won't need me any more."
+
+Leverich's meeting with Dosia had been characterized by a sort of
+brusque uninterest. He seemed to her indefinably lowered and coarsened
+in some way; his cheeks sagged; in his eyes was an unpleasant admission
+that he must bluster to avoid the detection of some weakness. And Dosia
+had lived in his house, eaten at his table, received benefits from him,
+caressed him prettily! He had been really kind to her. She ought not to
+let that fact be defaced. But everything connected with that time seemed
+now to lower her in retrospect, to fill her with a sort of horror. All
+his loud rebuttal of anxiety now could not cover an undercurrent of
+uneasiness that made the anxiety of the two women tenfold greater when
+he was gone.
+
+Mr. Girard had come twice the next morning. Dosia, as well as Lois, had
+seen him both times. He had greeted her with matter-of-fact courtesy,
+and appealed to her with earnest painstaking, whenever necessary, for
+details or confirmation, in their mutual office of helpers to Mrs.
+Alexander; but the retrieving warmth and intimacy of his manner the day
+he had avoided her in the street was lacking. There was certainly
+nothing in Dosia's quietly impersonal attitude to call it forth. Her
+face no longer swiftly mirrored each fleeting emotion at all times, for
+any one to see. Poor Dosia had learned in a bitter school her woman's
+lesson of concealment.
+
+But, if Girard were only sensibly consulting with her, toward Lois his
+sympathy was instinct with strength and helpfulness. He seemed to have
+affiliations with reporters, with telegraph operators, with a hundred
+lower runways of life unknown to other people. He gave the tortured wife
+the feeling so dear, so sustaining to one in sorrow, of his being
+entirely one with her in its absorption--of there being no other
+interest, no other issue in life, but this one of Justin's return. When
+Girard came, bright and alert and confident, all fears seemed to be set
+at rest; during the few minutes that he stayed all difficulties were
+swept away, everything was on the right train, word would arrive from
+Justin at once; and when he left, all was black and terrible again.
+
+The children had clung to Dosia in the hours of these strange days when
+mama never seemed to hear their questions. Dosia read to them, made
+merry for them, and saw to her household, which was dependent on the
+services of a new and untrained maid, going back in the interval to put
+her young arms around Lois and hold her close with aching pity.
+
+The suspense of these days had changed Lois terribly. Her cheeks were
+hollow, her mouth was drawn, her eyes looked twice their natural size,
+with the black circles below them. Only the knowledge that her baby's
+welfare--perhaps his life--depended on her, kept her from giving way
+entirely. Redge, always a complicating child, had an attack of croup,
+which necessitated a visit from the doctor and further anxiety. Toward
+afternoon of this third day a man came to put in the telephone, which
+set them in touch with the unseen world. Girard's voice over it later
+had been mistakenly understood to promise an immediate ending of the
+mystery.
+
+Everything was excitement: delicacies were bought, in case Justin might
+like them; Redge and Zaidee were hurriedly dressed in their best "to see
+dear papa," and, even though they had to go to bed without the desired
+result, Redge in a fresh spasm of coughing, it was with the repeated
+promise that the father should come up-stairs to kiss them as soon as he
+got in.
+
+Expectation had been unwarrantedly raised so high in the suddenly
+sanguine heart of Lois that now, to-night, at Girard's word that nothing
+more had been heard, as she was still looking up at him everything
+turned black before her. She found herself half lying on the little
+spindle-legged sofa, without knowing how she got there, her head
+pillowed on a green silken cushion, with Dosia fanning her, while Girard
+leaned against the little mirrored mantelpiece with set face and
+contracted brows. Presently Lois pushed away the fan, made a motion as
+if to rise, only to relapse again on the cushion, looked up at Girard,
+and tried to smile with piteous, brimming eyes.
+
+"Ah, don't!" he said, with a quick gesture. His voice had an odd sound,
+as if drawing breath hurt him, yet with it mingled also a compassionate
+tenderness so great that it seemed to inform not only his face but his
+whole attitude as he bent over her.
+
+"You're very good to be so sorry for me," she whispered.
+
+He made a swift gesture of protest. "There's one thing I _can't_
+stand--to see a woman suffer."
+
+She waited a moment, as if to take in his words, and then motioned him
+to the seat beside her. When she spoke again, it was slowly, as if she
+were trying to concentrate her mind:
+
+"You have known sorrow?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Tell me."
+
+He saw that she wished to forget her own trouble for a moment in that of
+another, yet the effort to obey evidently cost him much. They had both
+spoken as if they two were alone in the room. Dosia, who had withdrawn
+to the ottoman some paces away, out of the radius of the lamp, sat there
+in her white cotton frock, leaning a little forward, her hands clasped
+loosely in her lap, her face upraised and her eyes looking somewhere
+beyond. So still was she, so gentle, so fair, that she might have been a
+spirit outside the stormy circle in which these two communed. (In such
+moments as these she prayed for Lawson.)
+
+"I"--it was Girard who spoke at last--"my mother--Cater said once that
+he'd told you something about me."
+
+"Yes, I remember."
+
+"I was so little when we drifted off. I didn't know how to help, how to
+save anything. Yet it has always seemed to me since that I ought to have
+known--I ought to have known!" His hands clenched; his voice had
+subsided to a groan.
+
+"You were her comfort when you least thought it," said Lois.
+
+"Perhaps. I've always hoped so, in my saner moments. We stumbled along
+from day to day, and slept out at night, always trying to keep away from
+people, when--she thought we were going home, and that they would
+prevent me." He stopped for a moment, and then went on, driven by that
+Ancient Mariner spirit which makes people, once they have touched on a
+forbidden subject, probe it to its haunting depths. "Did Cater tell you
+how she died? She died in a barn. My _mother_! She used to hold me in
+her arms at night, and make me rest my head against her bosom when I was
+tired; and I didn't even have a pillow for her when she was dying! It's
+one of those things you can never make up for--that you can never
+change, no matter how you live, no matter what you do. It comes back to
+you when you least expect it."
+
+Both were silent for a while before Lois murmured: "But the pain ended
+in happiness and peace for her. It would hurt her more than anything to
+know that you grieved."
+
+"Yes, I believe that," he acquiesced simply. "I'm glad you said it now.
+I couldn't rest until I got money enough to take her out of her pauper
+grave and lay her by the side of her own people at home."
+
+"And you have had a pretty hard time."
+
+"Oh, that's nothing!" He squared his shoulders with unconscious rebuttal
+of sympathy. "When I was a kid, perhaps--but I get a lot of pleasure out
+of life."
+
+"But you must be lonely without any one belonging to you," said Lois,
+trying to grope her way into the labyrinth. "Wouldn't you be happier if
+you were married?"
+
+He laughed involuntarily and shook his head, with a slight flush that
+seemed to come from the embarrassment of some secret thought. The
+action, and the change of expression, made him singularly charming.
+"Possibly; but the chance of that is small. Women--that is, unmarried
+women--don't care for my society."
+
+"Oh, oh!" protested Lois, with quick knowledge, as she looked at him, of
+how much the reverse the truth must be. "But if you found the right
+woman you might make her care for you."
+
+He shook his head, with a sudden gleam in his gray eyes. "No; there
+you're wrong. I'd never make any woman care for me, because I'd never
+want to. If she couldn't care for me without my _making_ her--! I'd have
+to know, when I first looked at her, that she was _mine_. And if she
+were not, if she did not care for me herself, I'd never want to make
+her--never!"
+
+"Oh, oh!" protested Lois again, with interested amusement, shattered the
+next instant as a fragile glass may be shattered by the blow of a
+hammer.
+
+The telephone-bell had rung, and Girard ran to it, closing the
+intervening door behind him. The curtain of anxiety, lifted for
+breathing-space for a moment, hung over them again somberly, like a
+pall. Where was Justin?
+
+The two women clinging together hung breathlessly on Girard's movements;
+his low, murmuring voice told nothing. When he returned to where they
+stood, his face was impassive.
+
+"Nothing new; I'm just going to town for a couple of hours, that's all."
+
+"Oh, must you leave us?"
+
+"I'm coming back, if you'll let me." He bent over Lois with that earnest
+look which seemed somehow to insure protection. "I want you to let me
+stay down-stairs here all night, if you will. I'm going to make
+arrangements to get a special message through, no matter what time it
+comes, and I'll sit here in the parlor and wait for it, so that you two
+ladies can sleep."
+
+"Oh, I'd be so glad to have you here! Redge has that croupy cough again.
+But you can't sit up," said Lois.
+
+"Why not? It's luxury to stay awake in a comfortable chair with a lot of
+books around. I'll be back in a couple of hours without fail."
+
+A couple of hours! If he had said a couple of years, the words could
+have brought, it seemed, no deeper sense of desolation. Hardly had he
+gone, however, when the door-bell rang, and word was brought to Lois,
+who with Dosia had gone up-stairs, that it was Mr. Harker from the
+typometer office. The visitor, a tall, colorless, darkly sack-coated
+man, with a jaded necktie, had entered the little drawing-room with a
+decorously self-effacing step, and sat now on the edge of his chair, his
+body bent forward and his hat still held in one hand, with an effect of
+being entirely isolated from social relations and existing here solely
+at the behest of business. He rose as Lois came into the room, and
+handed her a small packet, in response to her greeting, before reseating
+himself.
+
+"Thank you very much," said Lois. "This is the money, I suppose. I'm
+sorry you went to the trouble of bringing it out yourself. I thought you
+might send me out a check."
+
+Mr. Harker shook his head with a grim semblance of a smile. "That's the
+trouble, Mrs. Alexander. We can't send any checks. Mr. Alexander is the
+one who does that. Everything is in Mr. Alexander's name. I went to Mr.
+Leverich to-day to see how we were going to straighten out things; but
+he doesn't seem inclined to take hold at all, though he could help us
+out easily enough if he wanted to. I--there's no use keeping it back,
+Mrs. Alexander. This is a pretty bad time for Mr. Alexander to stay
+away. He ought to be home."
+
+"Why, yes," said Lois.
+
+"Exactly. His absence places us all in a very strange, very unpleasant
+position." Mr. Harker spoke with a sort of somber monotony, with his
+gaze on the ground. "The business requires the most particular
+management at the moment--the most particular. I--" He raised his eyes
+with such tragic earnestness that Lois realized for the first time that
+this manner of his might not be his usual manner, but was called forth
+by the stress of anxiety. For the first time also, the force of the
+daily tie of business companionship was borne in upon her. She looked at
+Mr. Harker. This man spent more waking hours with Justin than she
+did--knew him, perhaps, in a sense, better.
+
+He went on now, with a tremor in his voice: "Mrs. Alexander, your
+husband and I have worked together for a year and a half now, with never
+a word between us. I'm ready to swear by him any moment, if I've got him
+to swear by. I'll back him up in anything, no matter what, if it's his
+say-so. We've pulled through a good many tight places. But I can't do it
+alone; it's madness to try. If he doesn't show up, I'd better close the
+place down at once."
+
+"Why do you say this to me?" asked Lois, shrinking a little.
+
+"Why? Because, Mrs. Alexander, this is no time to mince words. If you
+know where your husband is, for God's sake, get word to him to come
+back--every minute is precious. He may be ill,--Heaven knows he had
+enough to make him so; my wife knows the strain I've been through; she
+says she wonders I'm alive,--but he can't look after his health now. If
+he's on top of ground, he's got to _come_. I've put every cent I own
+into this business. I haven't drawn my whole salary, even, for months. I
+don't know what reasons he has for staying away, but his nerve mustn't
+give out now."
+
+"Mr. Harker!" cried Lois. She turned blankly to Dosia, who had come
+forward. "What does he mean?"
+
+"She doesn't know where her husband is," said the girl convincingly. Her
+eyes and Mr. Harker's met. The somber eagerness faded out of his; he
+sighed and rose.
+
+"Anything I can do for you, Mrs. Alexander? I think I'll hurry to catch
+the next train; I haven't been home to my dinner yet."
+
+"Won't you have something here before you go?" asked Lois. "It's so
+late."
+
+"Oh, that's nothing. I'm used to it," returned Mr. Harker, with a pale
+smile and the passive, self-effacing business manner as he departed,
+while Lois went up-stairs once more. The baby cried, and she soothed
+him, holding the warm little form close, closer to her--some thing
+tangible before she put him down again to step back into this strange
+void where Justin was not.
+
+For the first time, in this meeting with Mr. Harker, Lois realized the
+existence of a world beyond her ken--a world that had been Justin's. New
+as the visitor's words had been, they seemed to open to her a vision of
+herculean struggle: the way this man had looked--_his_ wife had
+"wondered that he was still alive." And Justin--where was he now? _She_
+had not noticed, she had not wondered--until lately.
+
+Slight as seemed her recognition, her sympathy, her help, it was the one
+thing now that kept her reason firm. She knew that she had not been all
+unfaithful; sometimes he had been rested, sometimes cheered, when she
+was near. She had suffered, too; _she_ had longed for _his_ help and
+sympathy. No, she would not think of that; she would not. When two are
+separated, one must love enough to bridge the gulf--what matter which
+one? It seemed now as if there were so much that she might have given,
+if all this torrent of love that nearly broke her heart might have been
+poured out and poured out at his feet--lavished on him, without regard
+to need or fitness or expense, as Mary lavished her precious box of
+spikenard on One she loved. Now that he was gone, there could be nothing
+too hard to have done for him, no words too sweet for her to have said
+to him.
+
+Redge woke up and cried for her, and she told him hoarsely to be still;
+and then, suddenly conscience-stricken and fearful at the slighting of
+this other demand of love,--what awful reprisal might it not exact from
+her?--she went to kiss the child, to infold him in her arms, the boy
+that Justin loved, before she bade him go to sleep, for mother would
+stay by her darling. And, left to herself again, the grinding and
+destroying wheel of thought had her bound to it once more.
+
+He could not have left her of his own will! If he did not come, it would
+be because he was dead--and then he could never know, never, never know.
+There would be nothing left to her but the place where he had been. She
+looked at the walls and the homely furnishings as one seeing them for
+the first time bare forever of the beloved presence, and fell on her
+knees, and went on them around the room, dragging herself from chair to
+sofa, from sofa to bed,--these were the Stations of the Cross that she
+was making,--with sobs and cries, low and inarticulate, yet carrying
+with them the awful anguish of a heart laid bare before the Almighty.
+Here his dear hand had rested, while he thought of her; on this
+table--here--and here; and here his head had lain. Her tears ceased; she
+buried her face in the pillow. She must go after him, wherever he was,
+in this world or another. For he was her husband. Where he was she must
+be, either in body or in spirit.
+
+The telephone-bell rang, and Dosia answered it, the voice at the other
+end inquiring for Mr. Girard, cautiously, it seemed, withholding
+information from any other. The doctor rang up, in response to an
+earlier call, with directions for Redge. Hardly had the receiver been
+laid down when the door-bell clanged. This was to be a night of the
+ringing of bells!
+
+
+XXII
+
+This time, of course, the visitor was Mrs. Snow. In any exigency, any
+mind-and body-absorbing event of life, the inopportune presence of Mrs.
+Snow was inexorably to be counted on, though it came always as one of
+those exasperating recurrences which bring with them a ridiculously
+fresh irritation each time. It seemed to be the one extra thing you
+couldn't stand. In either trouble or joy, she affected one like a
+clinging, ankle-flapping mackintosh on a rainy day. She bowed now to
+Dosia with a patronizing dignity, pointed by the plaintive warmth of the
+greeting to Lois, who had come hurrying down-stairs out of those
+passion-depths of darkness, so that Mrs. Snow wouldn't suspect anything.
+She had an uncanny faculty of divining just what you didn't want her to.
+
+Once before Lois had suspended tragedy for Mrs. Snow. The same things
+happen to us over and over again daily in our crowded yet restricted
+lives--it is we who change in our meeting with them. We have our great
+passions, our great joys, our heartbreaks, no matter how small our
+environment.
+
+"How do you do, my dear? Mr. Girard has just told me that he was going
+to stay here to-night, in Mr. Alexander's absence. He said little Redge
+was threatened with the croup. Now, if I had only known that Mr.
+Alexander was away, _I_ could have come and stayed with you!"
+
+"Oh, that wasn't at all necessary," said Lois hastily. "Thank you very
+much. Do sit down, won't you, Mrs. Snow?"
+
+"Only for a minute, then; I must go back to Bertha," said Mrs. Snow,
+seating herself and fumbling for something under her cloak. "I just came
+over to read you a letter. It's in my bag--I can't seem to find it.
+Well, perhaps I'd better rest for a minute." Mrs. Snow's face looked
+unusually lined and set; in spite of her plaintiveness, her eyes had a
+harassed glitter.
+
+"Isn't it rather late for you to be out alone?" asked Lois.
+
+"Yes; Ada would have come around here with me, but she was expecting Mr.
+Sutton. She was expecting him last night, but he didn't come. If _I_
+were a young lady, I'd let a gentleman wait for _me_ the next time; it
+used to be thought more attractive, in my day: but Ada's so afraid of
+not seeming cordial; gentlemen seem to be so sensitive nowadays! I said
+to her, 'Ada, when a man is enough at home in a house to kick the cat,
+and ask for cake whenever he feels like it, I do _not_ see that it is
+necessary to stand on ceremony with him.' But Ada thinks differently."
+
+"It is difficult to make rules," said Lois vaguely.
+
+"Yes," sighed Mrs. Snow. "As I was saying to Bertha, you don't find a
+young man like Mr. Girard, so considerate of every one--not that he's so
+_very_ young, either; I'm sure he often appears much older than he is.
+It's his manner--he has a manner like my dear father. He and Bertha have
+long chats together; really, he is what _I_ would call quite attentive,
+though she won't hear of such a thing--but sometimes young men _do_ take
+a great fancy for older girls. I had a friend who married a gentleman
+twenty-seven years younger--he died soon afterward. But many people
+think nothing of a little difference of twelve or fifteen years. I said
+to Bertha this morning, 'Bertha, if you'd dress yourself a little
+younger--if you'd only wear a blue bow in your hair.' But no; I can't
+say anything nowadays to my own children without being flown at!" Mrs.
+Snow's voice trembled. "If my darling William were here!"
+
+"Have you heard from William lately?" asked Lois, with supreme effort.
+
+"My dear, he's in Chicago. I came over to read you a letter from him
+that I got to-night. That new postman left it at the Scovels', by
+mistake, and they never sent it over until a little while ago. There was
+a sentence in it," Mrs. Snow was fumbling with a paper, "that I thought
+you'd like to hear. Where is it? Let me see. 'Next month I hope to be
+able to send you more'--no, no, that's not it. 'When my socks get holes
+in them I throw them'--that's not it, either. Oh! he says, 'I caught a
+glimpse of Mr. Alexander last night, getting on a West Side car'--this
+was written yesterday morning. 'I called to him, but too late. I'm
+sorry, for I'd like to have seen him,' That's all; but Mr. Girard seemed
+so pleased with the letter, I promised that I would bring it around to
+you that very minute,--he had to run for the train,--but I was detained.
+He thought you'd like to hear that William had seen Mr. Alexander."
+
+Like to hear! The relief for the moment turned Lois faint. Yet, after
+Mrs. Snow went, the torturing questions began to repeat themselves
+again. Justin was alive--Justin was alive on Tuesday night. Was he alive
+now? And why had he gone to Chicago at all? Why had he sent her no word?
+The wall between them seemed only the more opaque. Every fear that
+imagination could devise seemed to center around this new fact.
+
+She and Dosia went around, straightening up the little drawing-room,
+making it ready for Girard's occupancy--pulling out a big chair for his
+use, and putting fresh books on the table. The maid had long ago gone to
+bed, and there was coffee to be made for him--he might get hungry in the
+night. When he came in at last, he brought all the brightness and
+courage of hope with him. He had wired to William; he had phoned to a
+dozen different places in Chicago.
+
+"Oh, what should we do without you?" breathed Lois, her foot on the
+stairway.
+
+"It doesn't seem to me I've helped you very much so far. Our one clue
+has been from Mrs. Snow. I want you to go to bed now, and to sleep, Mrs.
+Alexander; take all the rest you can. I'm here to do the watching. If
+there's anything really to tell, I'll call you. I promise faithfully.
+What is it, Miss Linden? Did you want to speak to me?"
+
+"There was a message for you while you were gone," said Dosia in a low
+tone.
+
+His eyes assented. "Yes, I know. I went there--to the place that
+they--but it wasn't Alexander, I'm glad to say, though I was afraid when
+I went in----"
+
+"I know," said Dosia.
+
+Another strange night had begun, with the master of the house away. Lois
+went to her room to lie down clothed, jumping up to come to the head of
+the stairs whenever the telephone-bell rang, and then going back again
+when she found that those who were consulting were asking for
+information instead of giving it; but by and by the messages ceased.
+
+Suppose Justin never came back! She began to feel that he had been gone
+for years, and tried confusedly to plan out the future. There were the
+children--how should she support them? She must support them. It was
+hard to get work when you had a baby. If she hadn't the baby--no one
+should take the baby from her! She clasped him to her for a moment in
+terror, as if she were being hunted, before she grew calm and began
+planning again. There was only a little money left. To-morrow they must
+still eat. She must make the money last.
+
+Dosia, on the bed by Redge's crib, went softly after a while into the
+other room, and saw that Lois at last slept, though she herself could
+not. Each time that she saw Girard he seemed more and more a stranger,
+so far removed was he from her dream of him. Through all his softness,
+his gentleness, she felt the streak of hardness, if nobody else did
+(though Mr. Cater, she remembered now, had spoken of it too), that the
+fires of adversity had molded. Perhaps no man could have worked up from
+the cruel circumstances of his early days without that hardening streak
+to uphold him. She divined, with some surprising new power of
+divination, that, for all his strong, capable dealing with actualities,
+his magnetic drawing of men, for the inner conduct of his own life he
+was shyly dependent on odd, deeply held theory--theory that he had
+solitarily woven for himself. She felt impersonally sorry for him, as
+for a boy who must be disappointed, though he was nothing to her.
+
+Yet, as Dosia lay there in the dumb stretches of the night, her tired
+eyes wide open, close to Redge's crib, with his little hot hand clinging
+to hers, the mere fact of Girard's bodily presence in the house,
+down-stairs, seemed something overpoweringly insistent; she couldn't get
+away from it. It gave her, apparently, neither pleasure nor pain; it
+called forth no conscious excitement as had been the case with
+Lawson--unless this strange, rarefied sense was a higher excitement.
+This consciousness of his presence was, tiresomely enough, something not
+to be escaped from; it pulsed in every vein, keeping her awake. She
+tried to lose it in the thought of Lois' great trouble, of this
+weighting, pitiful mystery of Justin's absence--of what it meant to him
+and to the household. She tried to lose it in the thought of Lawson,
+with the prayer that always instinctively came at his name. Nothing
+availed; through everything was that wearing, persistent consciousness
+of Girard's bodily presence down-stairs. If it would only fade out, so
+that she might sleep, she was so tired! The clock struck two. A voice
+spoke from the other room, sending her to her feet instantly:
+
+"Dosia?"
+
+"Yes, Lois, dearest, I'm here."
+
+"Has any word come from Justin?"
+
+"No."
+
+Lois shivered. "I think, when Redge wakes up next, you'd better give him
+a drink of water; he sounds so hoarse. I've used all I brought up. Do
+you mind going down to get some more? I would go myself, but I can't
+slip my arm from under baby; he wakes when I move. Here is the pitcher."
+
+"Yes," said Dosia, stopping for a moment to pull the coverlet tenderly
+over Lois, before stepping out into the lighted hall.
+
+It seemed very silent; there was no sound from below. Dosia went down
+the low, wide stairs with that indescribable air of the watcher in the
+night. Her white cotton gown, the same that she had worn throughout the
+afternoon, had lost its freshness, and clung to her figure in twisted
+folds; the waist was slightly open at the throat, and the long white
+necktie hung half untied. One cheek was warm where it had pressed the
+pillow; the other was pale, and her hair, half loosened, hung against
+it. Her eyes, very blue, showed a rayed starriness, the pupils
+contracted from the sudden light--her expression, tired and half
+bewildered, had in it somewhat of the little lost look of a child, up in
+the unwonted middle of the night, who might go naturally and comfortably
+into any kind arms held out to her. The turn of the stairs brought her
+fronting the little drawing-room and the figure of Girard, who sat
+leaning forward, smoking, in the Morris chair, with his elbow resting on
+the arm of it and his head on his hand. The books and bric-a-brac on the
+table beside him had been pushed back to make room for the tray
+containing the coffee-pot, a cup and saucer, and a plate with some
+biscuits. A newspaper lay on the floor at his feet. Notwithstanding the
+light in the hallway and the room, there was that odd atmospheric effect
+which belongs only to the late and solitary hours of the night, when the
+very furniture itself seems to share in a chill detachment from the life
+of the day. Yet, in the midst of this night silence, this withdrawing of
+the ordinary vital forces, the figure of Bailey Girard seemed to be
+extraordinarily instinct with vitality, even in that second before he
+moved; his attitude, his eyes, his expression, were informed with such
+intense and eager thoughts that it was as startling, as instantly
+arresting, as the blast of a trumpet.
+
+At the sound of Dosia's light oncoming step opposite the door, he rose
+at once--however, laying the cigar on the table--and with a quick stride
+stood beside her. He seemed tall and unexpectedly dazzling as he
+confronted her; his deep-set gray eyes were very brilliant.
+
+"What is the matter? Is Mrs. Alexander ill?"
+
+"No--oh, no; the children have been restless, that is all," said Dosia,
+recovering, with annoyed self-possession, from a momentary shock, and
+feeling disagreeably conscious of looking tumbled and forlorn. "I came
+down to get a pitcher of water."
+
+"Can't I get it in the dining-room for you?" he asked, with formal
+politeness.
+
+"Thank you. The water isn't running in the butler's pantry; I have to go
+in the kitchen for it. If you would light the gas there for me----"
+
+"Yes, certainly," he responded promptly, pushing the portieres aside to
+make a passage for her, as he went ahead to scratch a match and light
+the long, one-armed flickering kitchen burner. The bare, deeply shadowed
+floor, the kitchen table, the blank windows, and the blackened range, in
+which the fire was out, came desolately into view. There was a sense as
+of deep darkness of the night outside around everything.
+
+A large white cat lying on a red-striped cushion on a chair by the
+chilly hearth stretched itself and blinked its yellow eyes toward the
+two intruders.
+
+"Let me fill this," said Girard, taking the pitcher from her--a rather
+large, clumsy majolica article with a twisted vine for a handle--and
+carrying it over to the faucet. The intimacy of the hour and the scene
+emphasized the more the punctilious aloofness of this enforced
+companionship.
+
+Dosia leaned back against the table, while he let the water run, that it
+might grow cold. It sounded in the silence as if it were falling on a
+drumhead. The moment--it was hardly more--seemed interminable to Dosia.
+The white cat, jumping up on the table, put its paws on her shoulders,
+and she leaned back very absently, and curved her throat sideways, that
+her cheek might touch him in recognition. Some inner thought claimed
+her, to the exclusion of the present; her eyes, looking dreamily before
+her, took on that expression that was indescribably gentle, intolerably
+sweet.
+
+Dosia has been ill described if it has not been made evident that to
+caress, to _touch_ her, seemed the involuntarily natural expression of
+any feeling toward her. Something in the bright, tendril-curling hair,
+the curve of her young cheek, the curve of her red lips, her light, yet
+round form, with its confiding, unconscious movements, made as
+inevitable an allure as the soft rosiness of a darling child, with
+always the suggestion of that illusive spirit that dared, and retreated,
+ever giving, ere it veiled itself, the promise of some lovelier glimpse
+to come.
+
+The water had stopped running, and Dosia straightened herself. She
+raised her head, to meet his eyes upon her. What was in them? The color
+flamed in her face and left her white, although in a second there was
+nothing more to see in his but a deep and guarded gentleness as he came
+toward her with the pitcher.
+
+"I'll take it now, please," she said hurriedly.
+
+"Won't you let me carry it up for you?"
+
+"Thank you, it isn't necessary. I'll go along, if you'll wait and turn
+out the light."
+
+"Very well. You're sure it's not too heavy for you?" he asked anxiously,
+as her wrists bent a little with the weight.
+
+"Oh, no, indeed," said Dosia quickly, turning to go. At that moment the
+white cat, jumping down from the table in front of her, rubbed itself
+against her skirts, and she stumbled slightly.
+
+"Take care!" cried Girard, grasping the shaking pitcher over her slight
+hold of it.
+
+Their hands touched--for the first time since the night of disaster, the
+night of her trust and his protection. The next instant there was a
+crash; the fragments of the jug lay upon the kitchen floor, the water
+streaming over it in rivulets.
+
+"Dosia!" called the frightened voice of Lois from above.
+
+"Yes, I'm coming," Dosia called back. "There's nothing the matter!" She
+had run from the room without looking up at that figure beside her,
+snatching a glass of water automatically from the dining-table as she
+passed by it. Fast as her feet might carry her, they could not keep pace
+with her beating heart.
+
+When the telephone-bell rang a moment after, it was to confirm the
+tidings given before. Justin was in Chicago.
+
+
+TO BE CONCLUDED
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+THE PROBLEMS OF SUICIDE
+
+BY GEORGE KENNAN
+
+
+Few branches of sociological investigation have more practical
+importance, or present a greater number of problems, difficulties, and
+interesting speculative questions, than the branch that deals with the
+complex, varied, and often inexplicable phenomena of suicide. When we
+consider the fact that more than ten thousand persons take their own
+lives in the United States every year, that more than seventy thousand
+die annually by their own hands in Europe, and that the suicide rate is
+constantly and rapidly increasing throughout the greater part of the
+civilized world, we are forced to admit that, from the view-point of
+vital economy at least, the subject is one of the utmost gravity. In
+1881 the annual suicide rate of the United States was only 12 per
+million of the population, and our total number of suicides was only
+605; last year our suicide rate had risen to 126 per million, and our
+suicides numbered 10,782. If the present rate of increase be maintained,
+we shall lose by suicide, in the next five years, nearly as many lives
+as were lost by the Union armies in battle in the five years of the
+Civil War. We are already losing annually from this cause more men than
+were killed on the Union side in the three great battles of Gettysburg,
+Spottsylvania, and the Wilderness taken together.
+
+Statisticians have estimated that, in the world as a whole, there is a
+suicide every three minutes, and we know, with an approximation to
+certainty, that there is a suicide every six minutes and a half in
+Europe and the United States alone. Suicide has cost France 274,000
+lives since 1871, Germany 158,000 since 1893, and the United States
+120,000 since 1890. I need hardly point out the practical importance of
+the questions that present themselves in connection with this abnormal
+and apparently unnecessary waste of human life. Among such questions
+are: Upon what general and world-wide conditions does suicide depend?
+Are any of its causes removable? What are the reasons for the steady and
+progressive increase of self-destruction in civilized countries? Is
+suicide controlled or affected by any natural laws, and, if so, by what
+laws? These are all questions of practical importance, because upon the
+answers to them depends the possibility of economizing human life and
+increasing the sum total of human happiness. But the subject is one of
+deep interest, entirely apart from its practical importance.
+
+
+_Psychological Problems of Suicide_
+
+In some of its aspects, suicide raises psychological questions which
+bristle with difficulties, but which, nevertheless, pique the curiosity
+and demand explanatory answers. Why, for example, is the rate of suicide
+strictly dependent everywhere upon season and weather? Why is the
+tendency to self-destruction lessened by war? What is the explanation of
+suicide in the face of impending death, when there is still a fair
+chance of escape, or when the natural death that is threatened would
+involve less suffering than the act of self-destruction? What is the
+mental state of the hundreds of persons who kill themselves every year
+upon what would seem to be absurdly inadequate provocation--of the man,
+for example, who commits suicide because his wife declines to get out
+his clean underclothes, or the woman who takes poison because she has
+received a comic valentine? In its religious aspect, why is the tendency
+to suicide greatest among Protestant Christians and least among
+Mohammedans and Jews? In its racial aspect, why is the suicide rate of
+Japan eight times that of Portugal, and the rate of American whites
+eight or ten times that of full-blooded American blacks? Why do the
+Slavs of Bohemia kill themselves at the rate of 158 per million, while
+the Slavs of Russia commit suicide at the rate of only 31 per million?
+Why do emigrants, going to a new country, carry their national suicide
+rates with them, and maintain such rates, with little or no alteration,
+long after their environment has completely changed? These questions may
+not have great practical importance, but, from the view-point of the
+psychologist and the sociologist, they are full of speculative interest.
+
+When we study the phenomena of suicide as they appear in the light of
+statistics, we are struck by the fact that among the general and
+world-wide conditions that limit or control the suicidal impulse are
+weather and war. Other factors, such as education, religion, or economic
+status, may seem to be more influential, if observation be limited to a
+single nation or a single continent; but if a comprehensive survey be
+made of the whole world, weather and war will be seen to take a
+prominent place among the few agencies that affect uniformly the
+suicidal tendency.
+
+As soon as accurate and trustworthy statistics of self-destruction
+became available in Europe, sociologists began to study the question
+whether suicide is controlled or regulated in any way by natural laws,
+and, if so, whether cosmical causes, such as climate, temperature,
+season, and weather, have any perceptible influence upon the suicide
+rate. It was soon discovered that the tendency to self-destruction is
+greatest in the zone lying between the fiftieth and fifty-fifth
+parallels of north latitude. South of forty-three degrees the annual
+suicide rate is only 21 per million, and north of fifty-five degrees it
+is only 88 per million; but between the parallels of forty-three and
+fifty it rises to 93 per million, and between fifty and fifty-five it
+reaches its maximum of 172 per million. The suicide belt, therefore,
+lies in the north temperate zone, where the climate is most favorable to
+human development and happiness. This fact, however, does not prove that
+a moderate and equable climate predisposes to suicide. Things may
+coexist without being in any way related to each other, and the
+frequency of suicide in the north temperate zone may be due wholly to
+the fact that the zone in question is the home of the most cultivated
+races and the seat of the highest and most complicated civilization. In
+this zone the struggle for life is fiercest, the interference with
+natural laws is most extensive, and the physical and emotional wear and
+tear of the economic contest is most acutely felt. It is more than
+probable, therefore, that the high rate of suicide in the north
+temperate zone is due to the civilization, rather than to the climate,
+of that region. This phase of the subject need not be discussed at
+length, because all competent authorities agree that climate, in its
+relation to suicide, is not a controlling or determining factor.
+
+A very different state of affairs appears, however, when we bring the
+suicide rate into correlation with season and weather. Long ago, before
+accurate statistics made a scientific investigation of the subject
+possible, there was a widely prevalent popular belief that dark and
+dismal months of the year, and gloomy, rainy, or uncomfortable weather,
+predisposed mankind to self-destruction, and that the suicide rate was
+highest in November or December, and lowest in spring or early summer.
+
+
+_Spring and Summer the Suicide Seasons_
+
+The French philosopher Montesquieu went so far as to explain the
+supposed frequency of suicide in London by connecting it with English
+rains and fogs. It was only natural, he argued, that unhappy people
+should kill themselves in a country where the autumnal and winter months
+were so dark, and where there was so much gloomy, depressing weather.
+When, however, investigators began to study the subject in the light of
+accurate statistics, when they grouped suicides by months and compared
+one month with another, they were surprised to find that the tendency to
+suicide was greatest, not in the gloomy and depressing months of
+November and December, but in the bright and cheerful month of June. In
+1898 Dr. Oscar Geck, of Strasburg, published statistics of about 100,000
+suicides that took place in Prussia in the twenty-year period between
+1876 and 1896. They showed that, so far at least as Prussia was
+concerned, suicides invariably attained their maximum in June and their
+minimum in December. There was a constant rise in the suicide curve from
+January to the end of June, and a constant decline from June to the end
+of the first winter month.
+
+Durkheim, of Paris, and Dr. Gubski, of St. Petersburg, who are among the
+most recent investigators of the subject, assert that, so far as the
+seasonal distribution of suicides is concerned, the figures for Prussia
+hold good throughout Europe. June is everywhere the suicide month, and
+December is everywhere the month in which self-destruction is least
+frequent. Durkheim gives tabulated statistics for seven of the principal
+countries of Europe, which show conclusively that, in point of
+predisposing tendency to suicide, the four seasons stand in the
+following order: summer first, spring second, autumn third, and winter
+last.[17] Even in Russia, which differs most from the rest of Europe in
+ethnology and economic status, the seasonal distribution of suicides is
+the same. Dr. Gubski's statistics show that of every thousand Russian
+suicides, 328 take place in summer, 272 in spring, 215 in autumn, and
+185 in winter. If we divide the year into halves, and group the suicides
+in semi-annual periods, we find that 600 occur in the pleasant spring
+and summer months and only 400 in the gloomy months of winter and fall.
+
+A study of American statistics brings us to almost exactly the same
+result. In September, 1895, Dr. Forbes Winslow, of New York, read a
+paper before the medico-legal congress which was then in session in that
+city upon the subject of "Suicide as a Mental Epidemic." The statistics
+which he submitted showed that in the United States, as in Europe,
+suicide reaches its maximum in June and falls to its minimum in
+December. The average annual number of American suicides in June is 336
+and in December 217. If we divide the year into halves and compare the
+figures of the semi-annual periods with those of Russia, the
+correspondence is almost startling.
+
+Notwithstanding the immense difference between the population of Russia
+and that of the United States, in environment, in education, in
+religion, in inherited character, in temperament, and in civilization
+generally, the mysterious law that controls the seasonal distribution of
+suicides operates in America exactly as it operates in the great empire
+of the Slavs. In Russia, out of every thousand suicides, the number who
+kill themselves in the fall-and-winter half of the year is precisely
+400; in America it is 386. In Russia, the proportion per thousand in the
+spring-and-summer half of the year is 600; in America it is 614. There
+is a slightly greater tendency to spring-and-summer suicide in the
+United States than in Russia, but the variation is only a little more
+than one per cent., and taking into consideration the great difference
+between the oppressed and ignorant peasants of Russia, and the free,
+well-educated citizens of our own country, the practical identity of
+their seasonal suicide rates seems to me a most extraordinary social and
+psychological fact.
+
+This, however, is by no means a complete statement of the problem
+involved in the seasonal distribution of suicides. Spring and summer are
+the suicide seasons, not only among the closely related nationalities of
+Europe and the United States, but among the ethnologically alien peoples
+of the Far East. The reports of the Statistical Bureau of Japan show
+that between 1899 and 1903 the average annual number of suicides was
+8,840. They were distributed through the year as follows: winter 1,711,
+spring 2,475, summer 2,703, fall 1,951. If we divide the year into
+halves, we find that 59 per cent. of the Japanese suicides occur in the
+spring and summer months and only 41 per cent. in the months of fall and
+winter. This corresponds almost exactly with the annual distribution of
+suicides in the United States, in Russia, and in Europe as a whole. The
+seasonal percentages may be shown in tabular form as follows:[18]
+
+                      United
+                      States      Russia      Europe      Japan
+                     per cent.   per cent.   per cent.   per cent.
+  Spring and summer    61          60           59         59
+  Fall and winter      39          40           41         41
+
+It thus appears that the tendency of mankind to commit suicide in spring
+and summer, rather than in fall and winter, is quite as strongly marked
+in Japan as it is in Europe and America. Despite all differences of
+character and environment, the suicidal impulses of Yankee, muzhik, and
+coolie are governed by the same law.
+
+
+_Suicide Weather_
+
+The evidence above set forth, and much more for which I cannot here find
+space, seems conclusively to establish the fact that, throughout the
+civilized world, the pleasantest seasons of the year are most conducive
+to suicide. The question then arises, Does this rule hold good if
+applied to the pleasantest days of the pleasantest seasons? In other
+words, is the tendency to suicide greater on clear, dry, and sunny days
+in June than on dark, cloudy, and rainy days in June? Professor Edwin G.
+Dexter, of the University of Illinois, published in the _Popular Science
+Monthly_, in April, 1901, a long and interesting paper entitled "Suicide
+and the Weather," in which he gave the result of a comparison between
+the police records of 1,962 cases of suicide in the city of New York and
+the records of the New York Weather Bureau for all the days on which
+these suicides occurred. His comparisons and computations, which seem to
+have been made with great thoroughness and care, show not only that the
+tendency to suicide is greatest in the spring and summer months, but
+that it is most marked on the clearest, sunniest, and pleasantest days
+of those months. To state his conclusions in his own words: "The clear,
+dry days show the greatest number of suicides, and the wet, partly
+cloudy days the least; and with differences too great to be attributed
+to accident or chance. In fact, there are thirty-one per cent. more
+suicides on dry than on wet days, and twenty-one per cent. more on clear
+days than on days that are partly cloudy."
+
+It thus appears that, as a rule, the tendency to suicide, throughout the
+civilized world, is greatest in the pleasantest seasons of the year;
+that it is everywhere greatest in the pleasantest month of the
+pleasantest season; and that in New York City it is greatest on the
+clearest and sunniest days of the pleasantest month. From the point of
+view of science, therefore, it is perfectly reasonable and absolutely
+accurate to say on a beautiful, sunny day in early June, "This is
+regular suicide weather."
+
+Now, what is the explanation of this world-wide tendency to
+self-destruction in the seasons, months, and days when life would seem
+to be best worth living? The cause, whatever it be, can have no
+connection with race, religion, history, political status, or
+geographical location, because it acts uniformly among peoples as widely
+different, in all these respects, as the Russians, the Italians, the
+Americans, and the Japanese. It is evidently a cosmic cause, but what is
+its nature?
+
+Some investigators have suggested that the suicidal tendency is
+dependent on heat; but June is not the hottest month, nor is December
+the coldest. Durkheim has tested this conjecture by comparing
+temperatures with suicides in France, Italy, and Prussia. He finds that,
+in all three of these countries, suicides reach their maximum in June
+and their minimum in December, while the temperature does not rise to
+its maximum until July and does not fall to its minimum until
+January.[19] Moreover, if heat were a predisposing cause of suicide, we
+should find the suicide rate of Europeans much higher in the tropics
+than it is in the north temperate zone; but such is not the case. Heat,
+therefore, as a possible cause, must be eliminated. Other writers,
+including Dr. Gubski, have called attention to the very close relation
+between suicide and light. It is true that daylight, if measured by
+hours, has its minimum in December and its maximum in June, in precise
+correspondence with the seasonal rates of suicide; but what about the
+equinoctial periods of March and September?
+
+If light be the efficient cause, the tendency to suicide should be as
+great at the time of the fall equinox as it is at the time of the spring
+equinox; but this is not the case. Two hundred and seventy-two suicides
+out of every thousand occur in the vernal equinoctial period and only
+two hundred and fifteen in the autumnal equinoctial period, and this
+proportion holds good throughout the whole northern hemisphere. Light,
+therefore, must also be eliminated.
+
+Morselli suggests that suicide is influenced by the first heat of early
+spring and summer, which "seizes upon the organism not yet acclimated
+and still under the influence of the cold season." But is there any such
+thing as winter debility, and, if so, why should it last until June?
+Many physicians, on the other hand, assert that during the period of
+early summer the organism, instead of being debilitated, is working at a
+high tension, that every function of mind and body is then more active
+than at any other period of the year, and, that, consequently, there is
+then greater liability to sudden mental and physical collapse. But there
+is no evidence to show that suicides, generally, are caused by seasonal
+overtension and subsequent collapse.
+
+Goldwin Smith thinks that with the revival of vitality in the spring and
+early summer "all feelings and impressions become more lively," those
+that impel to suicide among the rest. But if all the feelings "become
+more lively," why do not the stimulated sensations of joy and pleasure
+on a beautiful day in June overcome, or at least evenly balance, the
+stimulated sensations of suffering and unhappiness?
+
+
+_Influence of Environment on Self-Destruction_
+
+None of these explanations is at all satisfactory, and it seems to me
+that the solution of the problem is to be found, not in the mere
+physical action of light, heat, or weather on the human body, but in the
+influence of the whole environment on the human mind. Sir Arthur Helps
+was the first, so far as I know, to suggest that the increased tendency
+to suicide in spring and summer is due to a psychological rather than a
+physical cause. Speaking, in "Realmah," of the fact that suicides are
+more frequent on pleasant days than on unpleasant ones, he says:
+"Perhaps it is because, on these beautiful days, the higher powers seem
+to be more beneficent; and the wretch overladen with misery thinks that
+he can trust more to their mercy."
+
+This explanation is little more satisfactory than the others; but it
+does, nevertheless, recognize and take into account the influence of the
+environment on a preexisting emotional state. It errs only in
+interpretation. The smiling, happy, joyous aspect of Nature in June does
+not inspire the unhappy man with confidence in the beneficence and mercy
+of the higher powers. On the contrary, it shows him that the higher
+powers pay no attention at all to his feelings and have no sympathy
+whatever with his grief. The blue skies, sunshine, leafy trees, and
+singing birds, which make up the environment of June, add to the
+happiness of the man who is happy already, but they intensify, by
+contrast, the misery of the man who is already miserable. In November
+and December, when all is dark, bare, and cheerless, Nature seems to be
+in sympathy with the unhappy man's mood, and from that voiceless,
+pitying sympathy of the great World-Mother he derives a certain
+sustaining comfort and consolation. In June his mood is the same, but
+the mood of Nature has changed. The great World-Mother no longer
+sympathizes with his grief, but laughs him to scorn with her sunshine,
+her blossoming flowers, her leafy trees, and her jubilation of mating
+birds. He looks about him and thinks: "Everybody is happy, everything is
+rejoicing. I am the solitary exception; I am the only living thing that
+is out of place." And then there comes upon him a heartbreaking sense of
+loneliness, a feeling of complete isolation, as if the great, happy
+world had cast him off and gone on its way singing. He has thought of
+suicide before--he has thought of it often; and now, when the world, in
+its triumphant gladness, ignores his very existence, when there is no
+longer sympathy, nor pity, nor any further hope of a share in the
+happiness that he sees about him, it seems to him that the time for
+self-destruction has come. Whether he be a Russian, an American, or a
+Japanese, he can observe and he can feel: and when he sees that the
+whole world is jubilant, while he himself is wretched, he becomes more
+acutely conscious than ever before of his loneliness and misery, and
+resolves to give up the struggle and get out of the way of the world's
+laughing, singing, summer-carnival procession. He ends his life; and in
+some Russian, American, or Japanese table of statistics his death adds
+one more to the suicides in June.[20]
+
+The close relation that exists between suicide and war was first brought
+to my attention by the sudden and remarkable decrease of suicide in the
+United States in 1898, the year of the war with Spain. Instead of
+increasing that year, as it had every previous year for more than a
+decade, the number of suicides decreased suddenly from 6,600 to 5,920, a
+falling off of 680 cases. Then, when the war in the Philippines followed
+the war in Cuba, the number was again reduced by 580 cases. When,
+however, in 1900, we began to lose interest in the Philippines and to
+think of our own home troubles and trials, the number of suicides rose
+suddenly from 5,340 to 7,245, an increase of 1,905 cases in two years.
+The decrease in the suicide rate during the war was nearly 16 per cent.,
+and the increase after the war about 23 per cent.
+
+
+_War As a Deterrent to Suicide_
+
+This struck me as a phenomenon interesting enough to warrant
+investigation, and I began study of it by looking up the statistics of
+suicide in the national capital. It seemed to me that if the decrease in
+1898 was due to a general economic cause, it would not be particularly
+noticeable in the city of Washington, for the reason that Washington is
+not a manufacturing or business center. If, on the other hand, the fall
+in the suicide rate was really due to the war as a specific cause, it
+would be most marked at the nation's capital, where the war attracted
+most attention and created most excitement. I went to the District
+Health Office and made an examination of the suicide records for a term
+of six years, beginning with 1895 and ending with 1900. I found not only
+that the depression in the Washington suicide curve was precisely
+synchronous with that of the national suicide curve, but that it was
+much deeper, amounting, in fact, to a sudden decrease of fifty per cent.
+
+As suicides are tabulated in the Health Office of the District of
+Columbia by months, I was able to ascertain, furthermore, that the
+decrease began, not in the first month of the year, but in the spring
+months, when the war excitement became epidemic. Normally, the suicide
+rate should have risen, from January to June, in accordance with the
+seasonal law; but, instead of so doing, it fell rapidly at the very time
+when it should have been approaching its maximum. The colored population
+of the city, taken separately, was affected in the same way and to an
+even greater degree, the number of suicides among the blacks falling off
+fifty-six per cent., as compared with fifty per cent. among the whites.
+The number of suicides in both races remained low throughout the year
+1899, and then rose suddenly in 1900, an almost precise correspondence
+with the suicide curve of the nation as a whole.
+
+During our Civil War the suicidal tendency was affected in the same way,
+but to a much greater extent. I have not been able to find mortality
+statistics of the whole country for the period in question, but in New
+York City the average rate of suicide in the five years of the Civil War
+was forty-two per cent. lower than the average for the five preceding
+years, and forty-three per cent. lower than the average for the five
+subsequent years. In the State of Massachusetts, where accurate
+statistics were kept, the number of suicides decreased seventeen per
+cent. in the five-year period from 1861 to 1865, as compared with the
+five-year period from 1856 to 1860.
+
+In Europe the restraining influence of war upon the suicidal impulse is
+equally marked. The war between Austria and Italy in 1866 decreased the
+suicide rate of each country about fourteen per cent. The Franco-German
+war of 1870-71 lowered the suicide rate of Saxony 8.0 per cent., that of
+Prussia 11.4 per cent., and that of France 18.7 per cent. The reduction
+was greatest in France, because the German invasion of that country made
+the war excitement there much more general and intense than it was in
+Saxony or Prussia.
+
+An explanation of the decrease of suicide in time of war may be found,
+perhaps, in the power that any strong excitement has to change the
+current of thought and substitute one emotion for another. Suicide,
+among civilized peoples, is largely due to morbid introspection and long
+brooding over real or imaginary trouble; and anything that takes a man's
+mind away from his own unhappiness, and gives him a keen interest in
+things or events about him, weakens his suicidal impulse. An unhappy man
+might resolve to end his life, and might load a revolver with the
+intention of shooting himself; but if he should happen to see a couple
+of his neighbors fighting in his front door-yard, he would probably lay
+the revolver aside, for a time, and watch the combat. The cause of his
+unhappiness would still remain, but the current of his thought would
+suddenly be diverted into a new channel and his despondency would give
+way to the excitement of a fresh and vivid interest. War acts upon men
+in the same way, but with greater force.
+
+Then, too, war restrains suicide by strengthening the bonds of social
+sympathy and drawing large masses of people more closely together. The
+unhappy man always thinks of himself as lonely, isolated, and out of
+harmony with his environment; but when, as a result of the victories or
+defeats of war, he finds himself participating in the triumph or sharing
+the grief of thousands of other persons, the mere consciousness of
+sympathetic association with his fellow-men becomes a source of comfort
+and consolation to him and makes his life more endurable. But war is not
+the only agency that exerts a restraining influence upon
+self-destruction. Any great calamity which causes intense public
+excitement, and which at the same time draws people together in friendly
+sympathy and cooeperation, lowers the suicide rate. The calamity may
+greatly intensify suffering, and may make life, for a time, almost
+intolerable; but it does not increase the number of persons who try to
+escape from life; on the contrary, it reduces it.
+
+
+_San Francisco Earthquake Decreased Suicides_
+
+A striking illustration of this fact was furnished by San Francisco in
+1906. Before the earthquake and fire of April 18 the suicides in that
+city averaged twelve a week. After the earthquake, when the whole
+population was homeless, destitute, and exposed to hardships and
+privations of every kind, there were only three suicides in two months.
+The decrease, therefore, in the suicide rate was more than 97 per cent.
+This surprising result of a disheartening and depressing calamity was
+due partly to the excitement of life under new and extraordinary
+conditions, and partly to the feeling, which every man had, that he was
+enduring and working with a host of sympathetic comrades, and not
+suffering and striving alone. If life were always vividly interesting,
+as it was in San Francisco after the earthquake, and if all men worked
+and suffered together as the San Franciscans did for a few weeks,
+suicide would not end ten thousand American lives every year, as it does
+now.
+
+The dependence of suicide upon such conditions as age, sex, occupation,
+and religion does not offer any problem as difficult and baffling as
+that involved in the relation of suicide to weather, nor any as curious
+and suggestive as that which connects suicide with war; but there is
+hardly a phase of the subject that does not present some more or less
+interesting question. The researches of Durkheim and Gubski show that,
+after the period of childhood, the tendency to suicide increases
+steadily with advancing age. In France, for example, if the population
+be segregated in groups comprising all persons ten to twenty years of
+age, all persons twenty to thirty years of age, all persons thirty to
+forty years of age, and so on, by decades, the annual number of suicides
+per million rises as follows: first group 56, second group 130, third
+155, fourth 204, fifth 217, sixth 274, seventh 317, and the rate finally
+reaches its maximum in the group that comprises persons more than eighty
+years of age.
+
+In the United States, the rate increases from 128 per million, in the
+age group comprising persons under forty-five, to 300 per million in the
+age group comprising persons over sixty-five. The figures vary in
+different countries, according to the hereditary national suicide
+tendencies; but the steady increase with advancing age is common to all.
+These statistics would seem to support the pessimistic philosophy of
+Schopenhauer, and to prove that the longer one lives the less one wants
+to live; but it must not be forgotten that the suicide rate is a measure
+of exceptional unhappiness, not of the general welfare.
+
+In the suicidal tendencies of the sexes there is, as might be expected,
+a very great difference. In all countries and in all parts of the world,
+suicides among women are far less frequent than among men. The ratio
+varies from one to two to two to five. This difference is generally
+attributed to the supposed fact that women are sheltered and protected
+by men, as well as by their domestic environment, and that,
+consequently, they suffer less from the wear and tear of life; but I
+doubt very much the adequacy of this explanation. The life of women, in
+the world at large, is quite as hard as that of men, and often harder.
+In the higher and wealthier classes of society women may be, and
+doubtless are, sheltered and protected; but in the poorer classes they
+take their full share of the suffering, even if they do not bear the
+brunt of the struggle.
+
+The hundreds of Russian women who between 1877 and 1885 were exiled to
+eastern Siberia for political offenses had no shelter or protection
+whatever, and must necessarily have suffered more than the exiled men
+from the hardships and privations of banishment; and yet, I am quite
+sure that I understate the fact when I say that the number of suicides
+among the men was at least five times greater than it was among the
+women. The exiled men themselves admitted to me that when it came to the
+endurance of suffering against which no fight could be made and from
+which there was no escape, the women were greatly their superiors. The
+infrequency of self-destruction among women, as compared with that among
+men, seems to me to be due, not to their comparative immunity from
+suffering, but to three other causes, namely, first, a greater power of
+patient, passive endurance, when there is no fight to be made; second, a
+mind and heart that are more influenced by feelings and beliefs that may
+be called religious; and, third, a peculiar capacity for self-restraint
+and self-preservation, based on the maternal instinct, that is, on
+closer and more intimate relations with, stronger love for, and greater
+devotion to young children.
+
+A study of the relation that suicide bears to occupation discloses some
+interesting and noteworthy facts. The first is that soldiers, both in
+Europe and in the United States, must be put in a class by themselves,
+for the reason that the suicide rate of army officers and men is so much
+higher than that of the populations to which they belong that they can
+hardly be included in the same category. In Prussia, for example, the
+proportion of military suicides to civilian suicides is 1-1/2 to 1; in
+England 2-1/2 to 1; in Italy 5 to 1; in Austria 10 to 1; and in Russia
+nearly 11 to 1. Even in the United States, the tendency of soldiers to
+kill themselves is 8-1/2 times that of adult men in civil life.
+
+This disproportionately high suicide rate in armies is not easy of
+explanation. In countries where military service is compulsory, and
+where inexperienced young men, torn suddenly from their families, are
+subjected to rigorous discipline in a strange and uncongenial
+environment, the suicidal impulse may be intensified by homesickness,
+loneliness, humiliation, and the monotony of camp or barrack life; but
+in our own country, where the army is filled by voluntary enlistment,
+and where the relations between officers and men are fairly sympathetic
+and cordial, there would seem to be fewer reasons for unhappiness and
+suffering than in the military service of Italy, Austria, or Russia. The
+American soldier is generally well taken care of and well treated; and
+while his life, in time of peace, is not exciting, it is easier and less
+monotonous than that of a factory operative, and it is hard to
+understand why he should be abnormally disposed to self-destruction. His
+suicidal tendency, however, is reduced by war, just as that of the civil
+population is, and for the same reasons.
+
+
+_Professional Classes Furnish Most Suicides_
+
+Statistics of self-destruction are not yet accurate and detailed enough
+to enable us to determine the relation that suicide bears to business
+employment; but it may be said, in a general way, that the occupations
+in which the suicide rate is lowest are those that involve rough manual
+labor out of doors and employ men of comparatively little educational
+culture, such as miners, quarrymen, shipwrights, fishermen, gardeners,
+bricklayers, and masons. Next come farmers, shopkeepers, and town
+artisans. And at the head of the list, with the highest suicide rate of
+all, are physicians, journalists, teachers, and lawyers. The tendency
+of these professional classes to commit suicide is from one and a half
+to three times as great as that of the population generally.
+
+Clergymen, however, who also constitute an educated professional class,
+have a suicide rate which is only half that of the population as a
+whole, and this is undoubtedly due to the restraining influence of
+religion, which is much stronger in clergymen than in laymen. The
+relation of suicide to religion raises a number of curious and
+interesting questions, but, unfortunately, the religious factor is so
+involved with other factors in the complicated problem of
+self-destruction that it is almost impossible to isolate it so as to
+study it alone. For example, the suicide rate of Protestant Christians
+in the northern part of Ireland is twice that of Roman Catholics in the
+southern part; but here education comes in as a complication: the
+Protestants are generally better educated than the Catholics, and their
+higher suicide rate may be due to their education and not to the form of
+their religion. In Europe generally, the tendency to suicide is much
+greater among both Protestants and Catholics than among Jews; but here
+education, race, and economic condition all come in as complicating
+factors, so that it is impossible to credit the Jewish faith alone with
+the lower rate. In view, however, of the fact that the suicide rate of
+the Protestant cantons in Switzerland is nearly four times that of the
+Catholic cantons, it seems probable that Catholicism, as a form of
+religious belief, does restrain the suicidal impulse. The efficient
+cause may be the Catholic practice of confessing to priests, which
+probably gives much encouragement and consolation to unhappy but devout
+believers, and thus induces many of them to struggle on in spite of
+misfortune and depression.
+
+The Salvation Army, in attempting to lessen self-destruction by opening
+"anti-suicide bureaus" in large cities, and by inviting persons who are
+contemplating suicide to visit these bureaus and talk over their
+troubles, is virtually introducing a system of confession which, so far
+as this particular evil is concerned, resembles that of the Catholic
+Church.
+
+In view, however, of the conflicting nature of the evidence, and the
+extreme difficulty of disentangling religious factors from other
+important factors, I doubt the possibility of drawing any trustworthy
+conclusions with regard to the dependence of suicide upon religious
+belief. It may be said, as a matter of record, that the tendency to
+self-destruction is greatest among Protestant Christians, next largest
+among Roman Catholics and Orthodox Greeks, and lowest among Mohammedans
+and Jews; but the differences are not certainly due to religion.
+
+The dependence of suicide upon nationality and race presents a number of
+problems of great interest, but of extraordinary difficulty and
+complexity. I can state a few of these problems, but I cannot solve any
+of them.
+
+Among the highest suicide rates in Europe are those of Saxony and
+Denmark, and among the lowest those of Italy, Portugal, and Spain. You
+may perhaps conclude, from this, that the tendency to self-destruction
+is much greater among the Slavs and Scandinavians of the north than it
+is among the Latin peoples of the south, and that the differences are
+due to latitude or race; but your specious generalization is shattered
+when you discover that the suicide rates of Norway and Russia, both
+northern countries inhabited by Scandinavians and Slavs, are almost as
+low as those of Italy, Portugal, and Spain, all southern countries
+inhabited by Latins.
+
+From an ethnological point of view, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are
+nearly homogeneous Scandinavian states, and we should therefore expect
+their suicide rates to be nearly if not quite identical; but the rate of
+Denmark is twice that of Sweden and three times that of Norway.
+
+The Slavs of Bohemia do not differ ethnologically from the Slavs of
+Dalmatia, but the suicide rate of the one group is 158 per million,
+while that of the other is only 14 per million. Saxony is not far away,
+geographically, from Belgium; but the suicide rate of the former is 324
+per million, while that of the latter is only 128 per million.
+
+I am unable to offer even a conjectural solution of the problems
+involved in the differences thus shown to exist between populations that
+are ethnologically identical, or that stand at nearly the same level of
+educational culture and economic well being.
+
+
+_Germany's High Suicide Rates_
+
+The extremely high suicide rate of the Germanic peoples long ago
+attracted the attention of European sociologists, but, so far as I know,
+it has never been satisfactorily explained. If it were limited to adults
+it might possibly be attributed to economic causes, particularly to the
+rapid development of manufacturing industry, which seems everywhere to
+increase the suicidal tendency; but self-destruction in Germany is
+almost as common among children as among grown people. Between 1883 and
+1903 there were 1,125 suicides among the pupils of the public schools
+in Prussia alone, and most of them were of boys and girls under fifteen
+years of age. An investigation made by the ministry of public
+instruction showed that this prevalence of suicide among children was
+not due to the conditions of modern life in cities, inasmuch as the
+proportion of cases was fully as large in places of the smallest size as
+in crowded centers of population. It seemed to be due, rather, to an
+inherent suicidal tendency in the race.
+
+Racial characteristics, however, do not by any means account for the
+extraordinary differences in suicide rates that we find among the
+European peoples, as shown in the following table:[21]
+
+EUROPEAN PEOPLES GROUPED RACIALLY
+
+NUMBER OF SUICIDES PER MILLION INHABITANTS
+
+  I. SLAVS
+
+  In Dalmatia (about 1896)       14
+     European Russia (1900)      31
+     Bulgaria (about 1900)      118
+
+
+  II. SCANDINAVIANS
+
+  In Norway (1901-'05)           65
+     Sweden (1900-'04)          142
+     Denmark (1901-'05)         227
+
+
+  III. LATINS
+
+  In Spain (1893)                21
+     Portugal (1906)             23
+     Italy (1901-'05)            64
+     France (1900-'04)          227
+
+
+  IV. GERMANS
+
+  In Austria (1902)             173
+     Prussia (1902-'06)         201
+     Saxony (1902-06)           324
+     Bavaria (1902-'06)         141
+
+
+  V. ENGLISH
+
+  In Ireland (1906)              34
+     Scotland (1905)             65
+     England and Wales (1906)   100
+     Australasia (1903)         121
+     United States (1907)       126
+
+
+  VI. ASIATICS
+
+  In Japan (1905)               209
+
+It is difficult to assign definite or satisfactory reasons for the wide
+differences shown in the above table. Skelton has suggested that the low
+suicide rates of certain countries are due to emigration, "which
+provides an outlet for a great deal of misery and constitutes a hopeful
+alternative to suicide"; but this conjecture, although ingenious, is
+hardly supported by the facts. It might perhaps explain the low suicide
+rates of Italy and Ireland, but it does not account for the equally low
+suicide rate of the Russian peasants, who emigrate hardly at all, nor
+for the extremely high suicide rate of the Germans, who emigrate in
+large numbers. Neither does it throw any light upon the persistence of
+national suicide rates long after emigration. The generalization that
+seems to harmonize and explain the greatest number of facts is that
+suicide is most prevalent in countries where education goes hand in hand
+with highly developed manufacturing industry. In Spain, Portugal, Italy,
+and Russia the people have little education, manufacturing industries
+are feebly developed, and the suicide rate is low. In Saxony the
+percentage of illiteracy is very small, more than half of the population
+work in factories, and the suicide rate is the highest in Europe. I do
+not dare to assert that even this rude generalization is warranted by
+the facts; but, if it were sustained, it would seem to show that suicide
+is a by-product of the great, complicated machine that we call modern
+civilization.
+
+Whatever may be the reasons for differences in national suicide rates,
+and whatever may be the causes that have produced them, there is little
+doubt, I think, that the rates themselves are true manifestations of
+national character, and that they are as permanent as the character of
+which they are an outcome. When, therefore, a people migrates from one
+place to another, it takes both its character and its suicide rate to
+the new location. This is clearly apparent in the vital statistics of
+immigrants who come from various parts of Europe to the United States.
+Such immigrants, as a rule, prosper here and become happier here, but
+the increased prosperity and happiness do not greatly affect the
+suicidal tendencies that they had when they were poor and wretched in
+their original homes. Even their descendants, born in America, keep
+substantially unchanged the suicide rates that they have inherited, with
+their character, from their European ancestors. The Germans who came
+here forty or fifty years ago brought a high suicide rate with them, and
+their descendants maintain it. The Irish, on the contrary, brought a low
+suicide rate to this country, and their children have it still. In the
+following table will be found the suicide rates of a few nationalities
+in Europe and of their descendants in the United States.[22]
+
+SUICIDES PER MILLION OF POPULATION
+
+  NATIONALITIES      IN EUROPE  IN THE U. S.
+
+  Native Americans                  68
+  Hungarians            114        118
+  Germans               213        193
+  French                228        220
+  English               100        104
+
+In an address delivered before the Anthropological Society of
+Washington, D. C., on October 19, 1880, Mr. M. B. W. Hough said: "As
+long as the features of the ancestor are repeated in his descendants, so
+long will the traits of his character reappear. Language may change,
+customs be left behind, races may migrate from place to place and
+subsist on whatever the country they occupy affords; but their
+fundamental characteristics will survive, because they are comparatively
+uninfluenced by the mere accidents of nutrition." This statement is as
+true of suicide as it is of other manifestations of national character.
+
+
+_Odd Methods Employed by Suicides_
+
+Nothing is more surprising in the records of suicide than the
+extraordinary variety and novelty of the methods to which man has
+resorted in his efforts to escape from the sufferings and misfortunes of
+life. One would naturally suppose that a person who had made up his mind
+to commit suicide would do so in the easiest, most convenient, and least
+painful way; but the literature of the subject proves conclusively that
+hundreds of suicides, every year, take their lives in the most
+difficult, agonizing, and extraordinary ways; and that there is hardly a
+possible or conceivable method of self-destruction that has not been
+tried. When I clipped from a newspaper my first case of self-cremation
+with kerosene and a match, I regarded it as rather a remarkable and
+unusual method of taking life; but I soon discovered that self-cremation
+is comparatively common. When I learned that Mary Reinhardt, of New
+York, had sung "Rock of Ages" and had then killed herself by inhaling
+gas in a barrel stuffed with pillows, I thought it a curious and
+noteworthy case; but when I compared it with suicides that came to my
+knowledge later, it seemed quite simple and natural. I have
+well-authenticated cases in which men or women have committed suicide by
+hanging themselves, or taking poison, in the tops of high trees; by
+throwing themselves upon swiftly revolving circular saws; by exploding
+dynamite in their mouths; by thrusting red-hot pokers down their
+throats; by hugging red-hot stoves; by stripping themselves naked and
+allowing themselves to freeze to death on winter snow-drifts out of
+doors, or on piles of ice in refrigerator-cars; by lacerating their
+throats on barbed-wire fences; by drowning themselves head downward in
+barrels; by suffocating themselves head downward in chimneys; by diving
+into white-hot coke-ovens; by throwing themselves into craters of
+volcanoes; by shooting themselves with ingenious combinations of a rifle
+with a sewing-machine; by strangling themselves with their hair; by
+swallowing poisonous spiders; by piercing their hearts with corkscrews
+and darning-needles; by cutting their throats with hand-saws and
+sheep-shears; by hanging themselves with grape vines; by swallowing
+strips of under-clothing and buckles of suspenders; by forcing teams of
+horses to tear their heads off; by drowning themselves in vats of soft
+soap; by plunging into retorts of molten glass; by jumping into
+slaughter-house tanks of blood; by decapitation with home-made
+guillotines; and by self-crucifixion.
+
+Of course, persons who resort to such methods as these are, in most
+cases, mentally unsound. A man who shoots, hangs, poisons, or drowns
+himself may be sane; but the man who crucifies himself, buries himself
+alive, cuts his throat on a barbed-wire fence, or climbs into the top of
+a tree to take poison, is evidently on the border-line of insanity, even
+if he be not a recognized lunatic.
+
+The most prevalent methods of suicide in Europe are, first, hanging,
+second, drowning. In the United States they are, first, poisoning,
+second, shooting. About three fourths of all the persons who commit
+suicide in the United States use pistol or poison. The difference
+between European and American methods is probably due to the fact that
+on the other side of the Atlantic drugs and fire-arms are not so easily
+obtainable as they are here, and Europeans therefore resort to water and
+the rope as the best and surest means accessible. Police restrictions
+and regulations make it almost impossible for a Russian peasant to get
+either poison or a pistol; but all the police in the empire cannot
+prevent him from drowning himself in a pond, or hanging himself in his
+own barn.
+
+A careful comparison of all the facts accessible seems to show that in
+Europe, at least, suicide bears a certain definite relation to education
+and manufactures; and that, as I have already said, it is a by-product
+of the great, complicated world-machine that we call modern
+civilization. Its specific causes, so far as they can be ascertained,
+are, on the educational side, the development of increased nervous and
+psychic sensibility, which makes men feel more acutely all wants,
+deprivations, misfortunes, and sufferings; and, on the manufacturing
+side, a monotony of employment which wearies and exhausts the body while
+it gives little exercise to the educated mind and leaves the latter free
+to brood over its unsatisfied longings and desires, as well as its many
+trials and disappointments. There are other causes, such as the growing
+disproportion between wants generally and the means of gratification
+generally; alcoholism; unhealthful work, especially in manufacturing
+districts; barrack and tenement-house life; and all the evils incident
+to poverty, overcrowding, and bad sanitary conditions in cities. So far
+as I can see, these causes, at present, are not removable. Education
+must continue to intensify sensibility and increase the number of men's
+wants, and the great economic machine must grind on, even though it
+crush thousands of human beings, every year, in the cogs of its
+innumerable wheels. A high suicide rate is part of the price that we pay
+for the educational and material achievements upon which we pride
+ourselves. We have greatly multiplied the means of human happiness, but
+whether, on the whole, we have increased the sum total of human
+happiness is perhaps an open question. In any event, the high and
+rapidly increasing suicide rate shows that we are pushing the weaklings
+to the wall.
+
+The question of what can be done to lessen the suicide tendency and
+check this great waste of human power and energy brings me to the only
+important cause of self-destruction which seems to me removable, and
+that is newspaper publicity. No argument is needed to prove that man is
+essentially an imitative animal. In dress, in behavior, in speech, in
+modes of thought, and in social conventions, we are all prone to do what
+we see others do; and when unhappy men and women learn, from the
+newspapers, that scores of other unhappy people are daily escaping from
+their troubles through the always open door of suicide, when familiarity
+with the idea of self-destruction deprives the act of all its natural
+terror, it is not at all surprising that they yield to what seems to be
+the general current of their social environment. I have, in my own
+collection of material, a surprisingly large number of cases in which
+the suicidal act may be traced directly to newspaper publicity and
+imitation; but I must limit myself to a single striking
+illustration--the suicidal epidemic in Emporia, Kansas, in the summer of
+1901. As a result, apparently, of the publication of the details of two
+or three suicides of people prominent in that little Kansas town, there
+broke out an epidemic of self-destruction which culminated in the
+sunny, flowery month of June, and which carried the annual suicide rate
+from about 90 per million to 1,665 per million--a rate five times
+greater than that of Saxony. Mr. Morse, the mayor of the city, consulted
+the Board of Health, and decided to stop the publication of the details
+of suicides in the local papers, even if it should require the
+employment of force. He issued a proclamation, on the 16th of June, in
+which he said: "I have consulted the Board of Health, and if the Emporia
+papers do not comply with my request, I shall have a right to stop, and
+I will stop summarily, the publication of these suicide details, under
+the law providing for the suppression of epidemics. There is clearly an
+epidemic in this city, and although it is mental, it is none the less
+deadly. Its contagion may be clearly shown to come from what is known in
+medicine as the psychic suggestion, found in the publication of the
+details of suicides. If the paper on which the local journals are
+printed had been kept in a place infected with small-pox, I could demand
+that the journals stop using that paper, or stop publication. If they
+spread another contagion--the contagious suggestion of suicide--I
+believe the liberty of the press is not to be considered before the
+public welfare, and that the courts would sustain me in using force to
+prevent the publication of newspapers containing matter clearly
+deleterious to the public health."
+
+I believe that the reasoning of Mayor Morse is perfectly sound, and that
+the position taken by him is absolutely impregnable. The prevention of
+the publication of suicides in the newspapers of a State would require a
+special legislative act, but it would probably do more to lessen the
+suicidal tendency than any other single measure that could be taken. In
+the winter of 1902, Representative Jenkins introduced in the National
+House of Representatives a bill making periodicals containing details of
+suicides unmailable; but I think it was never reported from committee.
+
+
+_The Emotional Temperament as a Cause_
+
+There is one other way in which the suicide rate may possibly be
+lowered, or at least held in check, and that is through the cultivation
+of what may be called the heroic spirit. We are becoming too emotional
+and sentimental, and too much inclined to regard weakness with sympathy,
+instead of with the contempt that it generally deserves. In the language
+of the prize ring, the pugilist who lies down while he can yet stand and
+see is called a "quitter." It would be harsh and unjust to apply to all
+suicides this opprobrious name; but there can be little doubt, I think,
+that the majority of them are weaklings who give up and lie down while
+they still have a fighting chance.
+
+Readers of shipping news may still remember the wreck of a German
+kerosene steamer on the wildest, most precipitous part of the coast of
+Newfoundland, in February, 1901. The steamer took fire during a heavy
+winter gale, and the captain ran her ashore, at the nearest point of
+land, with the hope of saving the lives of the crew. She struck on a
+submerged reef in a little cove, about an eighth of a mile from a coast
+which was three or four hundred feet high and as precipitous as a wall.
+When she was first seen by a few fishermen at daylight, her boats were
+gone, and all of her crew had apparently perished except three men. Two
+were standing on the bridge, and one was lashed aloft in the
+fore-rigging. About ten o'clock in the forenoon a tremendous sea carried
+away the bridge and the two men on it, and they were seen no more. At
+three o'clock in the afternoon the solitary survivor,--the man in the
+fore-rigging,--who was evidently suffering intensely from hunger and
+cold, unlashed himself, threshed his arms against his body for five
+minutes to restore the circulation in them, and then took off his coat,
+waved his hand to the fishermen on top of the cliff, climbed down the
+shrouds, and plunged into the sea--but not to commit suicide. He swam to
+the shore, made three attempts in different places to get a footing
+among the rocks at the base of the cliff, but was swept away every time
+by the surf, and finally abandoned the attempt as hopeless. At that
+crisis in the struggle ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have given
+up and allowed themselves to drown; but this man was not a "quitter." He
+turned his face again seaward, struck out for the half-submerged ship,
+and after a long and desperate struggle succeeded in reaching her and
+getting on board. He climbed the fore-shrouds, waved his hand to the
+pitying but powerless fishermen on the edge of the cliff, and lashed
+himself again in the rigging. At intervals, until dark, he made signals
+to the fishermen to show that he was yet alive. At daybreak on the
+following morning he could still be seen in the fore-rigging, but his
+head had fallen on his breast and he was motionless. He had frozen to
+death in the night. That man died, as a man in adverse circumstances
+ought to die, fighting to the last. You may call it foolish, and say
+that he might better have ended his sufferings by allowing himself to
+drown when he found that he could not make a landing at the base of the
+cliff; but deep down in your hearts you pay secret homage to his
+courage, his endurance, and his indomitable will. He was defeated at
+last, but, so long as he had consciousness, neither fire nor cold nor
+tempest could break down his manhood.
+
+The Caucasian mountaineers have a proverb which says: "Heroism is
+endurance for one moment more." That proverb recognizes the fact that in
+this world the human spirit, with its dominating force, the will, may be
+and ought to be superior to all bodily sensations and all accidents of
+environment. We should not only feel, but we should teach, by our
+conversation and by our literature, that, in the struggle of life, it is
+essentially a noble thing and a heroic thing to die fighting. In a
+recent psychological story called "My Friend Will," Charles F. Lummis
+pays a striking tribute to the power of the human mind over the
+accidents of life and chance when he makes his "friend Will" say: "I am
+bigger than anything that can happen to me. All these things--sorrow,
+misfortune, and suffering--are outside my door. I'm in the house and
+I've got the key!"
+
+
+
+
+PRAIRIE DAWN
+
+BY WILLA SIBERT CATHER
+
+
+  A crimson fire that vanquishes the stars;
+  A pungent odor from the dusty sage;
+  A sudden stirring of the huddled herds;
+  A breaking of the distant table-lands
+  Through purple mists ascending, and the flare
+  Of water ditches silver in the light;
+  A swift, bright lance hurled low across the world;
+  A sudden sickness for the hills of home.
+
+  --_From April Twilights._
+
+
+
+
+THE DOINGS OF THE DEVIL
+
+BY HARVEY J. O'HIGGINS
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY THOMAS FOGARTY
+
+
+Mrs. Cregan wept, and her tears were ludicrous. She was as fat as a
+Falstaff. Her features were as ill-suited for the expression of grief as
+a circus clown's. She had not even a channel in her plump cheeks to
+drain the tears from the corners of her eyes; and the slow drops, large
+and unctuous, trickled down her round jowl and soaked into her
+bonnet-strings, leaving her cheeks as fresh and as ruddy in the sunlight
+as if they had been merely wet with perspiration. Her eyes stared,
+unpuckered, apparently unconscious that they wept. Her mouth was tight
+in an expression of resentful determination. Only her little round chin
+trembled--like a child's.
+
+And yet Mrs. Cregan was as nearly heart-broken as she had ever been in
+her life. She was leaving her husband; what was more grievous to her,
+she was leaving her home; she was on the streets of New York, with her
+small savings in her greasy purse--clasped tightly in her two hands
+under her "Sunday cape," that was trimmed with fringe and tassels in a
+way to remind you of a lambrequin. She did not know where to go. There
+was no one to whom she could turn for aid, and she would not go to any
+one for pity. Behind her was the wreck of a breakfast table--the visible
+symbol of her ruined home--with a cursing Irishman, whom nobody could
+live with any longer, shouting, "_Your_ house, is it? I'll show yeh
+whose house it is! I'll show yeh! I'll break ev'ry danged thing in the
+place!" Before her were the crooked byways of what had once been
+"Greenwich village," as quiet as a desert, and as indifferent, in the
+early morning radiance, with shuttered windows and closed doors.
+
+The domestic peace of those old streets made her own homelessness the
+more pitiful to her. She felt as she had felt once before--years
+before--in her childhood, when she had set sail with her parents for
+America. It had been a cold day; and the mists had steamed up horridly
+from the water, with a desolate, wet sea-odor; and the memory of the
+sunlight on green fields and the warm perfume of the land had been like
+a longing for health and daylight to the darkness of a death-bed. The
+future had threatened her with the terrors of an unknown world. The
+past--despite its poverty and starvation--had been as dear as life. She
+had suffered all those pangs of dissolution that assail the home-loving
+Irish when they have to leave what association has made dear to them;
+for, with the Irish, familiarity does not breed contempt but affection.
+
+She suffered these same miseries now. She saw her home through tears of
+regret, though unhappiness had driven her from it. And her lips were set
+in a determination never to return to Cregan, though her chin trembled
+with pity of herself in the determination.
+
+Some distance behind her came a smaller woman, as shrunken, as withered,
+and as yellow as an old leaf. Even her shoes seemed to have dried and
+shriveled, curling up at the toes. And she fluttered along in the light
+morning breeze, holding back against it, on her heels, with an odd
+effect of being carried forward faster than she wished to go.
+
+She was Mrs. Byrne, from the floor below Mrs. Cregan's flat, and she had
+been starting out on a secret errand of her own when she heard the
+quarrel overhead and stopped to hear the end of it. There was something
+guilty in her manner, and she was evidently struggling between her
+desire to reach the next street unseen by Mrs. Cregan and her desire to
+know what had happened in the Cregan flat. Her curiosity proved the
+stronger.
+
+She let the wind blow her alongside her friend's portly despair. She
+said, in the hoarse whisper that was all she had left of her voice: "Is
+it yerself, Missus Cregan? Yuh're off to choorch early this mornin'."
+
+Mrs. Cregan looked around, blinking to clear her eyes. "Choorch?" she
+said, on the plaintiveness of a high note that broke in her throat.
+
+"Yuh're cryin', woman!". Her look of craftiness had changed at once to
+one of startled distress. "Come back out o' this with yuh." She caught
+Mrs. Cregan's arm. "It's no thing to be doin' on the street! Come back,
+now. Where're yuh goin'?"
+
+Mrs. Cregan marched stolidly ahead and carried her neighbor with her.
+"I've quit 'm."
+
+"Quit who?"
+
+"Himsilf.... Dinny."
+
+Mrs. Byrne expressed her emotion and showed her tact by silently
+compressing her lips.
+
+"I've quit 'im, fer good an' all." She stroked a tear down her cheek
+with a thick forefinger. "I'll niver go back. Niver!"
+
+"Come away with yuh, Mary Cregan," Mrs. Byrne cried, in her breathy
+huskiness. "At _your_ age! Faith, yuh're as flighty as one o' them girls
+with the pink silk petticoats. He's yer husban', ain't he? D'yuh think
+yuh were married over the broomstick? Come an' behave yerself like a
+decent woman. What'd Father Dumphy say to _this_, think yuh?"
+
+"He's a man. I know what he'd say. He'd tell me to go back to Cregan.
+I'll niver go back. Niver!"
+
+"Yuh won't! What'll yuh do, then? Where'll yuh go to?"
+
+"I'll niver go back. Niver! He's broke me best chiny--an' kicked the leg
+off the chair--an' overtoorned the table--an' ordered me out o' the
+little bit o' home I been all these years puttin' together. The teapot
+th' ol' man brought from Ireland--the very teapot--smashed to
+smithereens! An' the little white dishes with the gilt trimmin's I had
+to me weddin' day, Mrs. Byrne! There was the poor things all broke to
+bits!" She stopped to point at the sidewalk, as if the wreckage lay
+there before her. "All me little bit o' chiny. All of it. All of it,
+Mrs. Byrne. Ev'ry bit! Boorsted!"
+
+Her tears choked her. She could not express the piercing irreparability
+of the injury. It would not have been so bad if he had beaten her; a
+hurt will heal. But the innocent, wee cups--and the fat old brown
+teapot--and the sweet little chair with its pretty legs, carved and
+turned so daintily! She had washed them and wiped them, and dusted and
+polished them, and been so careful of them and felt so proud of them,
+for twenty years past. And, now, there they were lying, all in
+bits--past mending--gone forever. And they so pretty and so harmless.
+
+The crash as they fell on the floor had sounded in her ears like the
+scream of a child murdered.
+
+She started forward again, determinedly. "I'll niver go back to 'm. He
+can have his house to himsilf.... What do I care for Father Dumphy? He
+wants nothin' but the dime I leaves at the choorch doore, an' the dime I
+drops on the plate! Whin me poorse's impty, he'll not bother his head
+about me!"
+
+"Shame _on_ yuh!" Mrs. Byrne wheezed, with her eye on the house she was
+passing. "Yuh talk no better than a Prod'stunt."
+
+"An' if I _was_ a Prod'stint," she cried, "I'd not have to pay money
+iv'ry time I wanted to hear mass. I'd not be out on the street here, not
+knowin' where I'm goin' to, ner how I'm to live. It's _thim_ that knows
+how to take care o' their own--givin' the women worrk, an' takin' the
+childer off to the farrms, an' all the like o' that. You Dogans----"
+
+Mrs. Byrne glanced about her fearfully, "Stop yer talk, now. Stop yer
+talk. Stop it before someone hears yuh makin' a big fool o' yerself."
+
+"I'll not stop it. What do I care who hears me? I'm goin' off from here
+fer good an' all. 'Twill know me no more. 'Twill not. I'm done with it
+all. I'm done with it." She held out her purse. "I've got me bit o'
+money. I'll hire me a little room up-town. I'm done with _him_ an'
+Father Dumphy an' the whole dang lot o' yuz. Slavin' an' savin' fer
+nothin' at all. I'll worrk fer mesilf now, an' none other. Neither
+Cregan ner the choorch ner no one ilse 'll get a penny's good o' me no
+more. I got no one in the wide worrld but mesilf to look to, an' I'll go
+it alone."
+
+Mrs. Byrne was a little woman of a somewhat sinister aspect, her dull
+eyes very deep in their wrinkles, her nose pushed aside out of the
+perpendicular, her long lips stretched tightly over protruding teeth.
+She was as curious as an old monkey; but it was not only her curiosity
+that made her the busiest gossip and the most charitable "good soul" in
+the street; she had her share of human kindness, and if she was as
+crafty as a hypocrite, it was because she enjoyed handling men and
+women, like a politician.
+
+Seeing that Mrs. Cregan was beyond the reach of shame or the appeal of
+the priest, she said: "Well, I don't blame yuh, woman. Cregan's a
+fool--like all the rest o' the men. An' yerself such a good manager.
+Well, well! Yer rooms was that purty 't 'ud make yuh wistful. Where will
+yuh be goin'?"
+
+"I dunno."
+
+"Have yuh had yer breakfast?"
+
+Mrs. Cregan shook her head.
+
+"Come back, then, an' have a bite with me."
+
+"Niver! I'll niver go back."
+
+Mrs. Byrne hitched up her shawl. "Come along then to the da-ary
+restr'unt. There's no one home to miss me. Ill take a bit o' holiday,
+this mornin', meself. I've been wantin' to taste one o' those batter
+cakes they make in the restr'unt windahs, this long enough."
+
+"Yuh've ate yer breakfast."
+
+"I have not" Mrs. Byrne replied. "I was off to the grocer to buy some
+sugar when yuh stopped me."
+
+It was a lie. She had, in fact; started out, secretly, on a guilty
+errand which she should not acknowledge.
+
+"It's a lonely meal I'd 've been havin'," she said, "with Byrne down at
+the boiler house an' the boy off on his run."
+
+Mrs. Cregan did not reply, and they came to Sixth Avenue without more
+words. They paused before a dairy restaurant that advertised its
+"Surpassing Coffee" in white-enamel letters on its shop-front windows.
+Mrs. Cregan's hunger drew her in, but slowly; and Mrs. Byrne followed,
+coughing to conceal her embarrassment.
+
+[Illustration: "'YOUR HOUSE, IS IT? I'LL SHOW YEH WHOSE HOUSE IT IS!'"]
+
+
+II
+
+It was the first time that Mrs. Byrne had ever sat down in any public
+restaurant, except the eating-halls at Coney Island (where she went with
+"basket parties") or the ice-cream "parlors" at Fort George. And she
+glanced about her at tiled walls and mosaic floors with a furtiveness
+that was none the less critical for being so sly. "It's eatin' in a
+bathroom we are," she whispered. "An' will yuh look at the cup yonder.
+The sides of it are that thick there's scarce room fer the coffee in it!
+Well, well! It do beat the Dutch! They're drawin' the drink out of a
+boiler big enough fer wash day." The approach of a waitress silenced
+her. When she saw that Mrs. Cregan was not going to speak, she looked up
+at the girl with a bargain-counter keenness. "Have y' any pancakes fit
+t' eat? How much are they? Ten cents! Fer how many? Fer three pancakes?
+Fer three! D'yuh hear that?" she appealed to Mrs. Cregan. "Come home
+with me, that's a good woman. It's a sin to pay it. Three cents fer a
+pancake! Aw, come along out o' this. Ten cents! We c'u'd get two loaves
+o' bread fer the money an' live on it fer a week!"
+
+But Mrs. Cregan was beyond the reach of practicalities, and she ordered
+her buckwheat cakes and coffee with an air that was mournfully distrait.
+Mrs. Byrne made a vain attempt to get her own cakes from the waitress
+for five cents, and then resigned herself to the senseless extravagance.
+"Yuh'll not make yer own livin' an' eat the likes o' this," she
+grumbled asthmatically. "Yuh'd better be savin' yer money."
+
+Mrs. Cregan was looking at the thick china with a sort of aggrieved
+despondence. (It was almost the expression of a bereaved mother looking
+at one of her neighbor's children and thinking it a healthy, ugly brat
+whom nobody would have missed!) She stared at the bare walls and the
+bare tables of the restaurant, and found the place, by comparison with
+her own cozy flat, as unhome-like as the waiting-room of a railroad
+station--the waiting-room of a railroad station when you have said
+good-bye to your past and the train has not yet arrived to carry you to
+your future.
+
+As her pancakes were served to her, she bent over the plate to hide a
+tear that trickled down her nose. It splashed on the piece of food that
+she raised to her mouth. She ate it--tear and all.
+
+"An' them no bigger than the top of a tomato can!" Mrs. Byrne was
+muttering.
+
+Mrs. Cregan ate, and the food helped, to stop her tears. It was the
+strong coffee, at last, that brought her back her voice. "If it'd b'en
+_him_, he'd 'a' gone an' got drunk," she said, wiping her cheeks with
+her napkin. "The men have the best of it. Us women have to take it all
+starin' sober."
+
+"They're no more than children," Mrs. Byrne replied, "an' they're to be
+treated as such. Sure, Cregan couldn't live without yuh. He'd have no
+buttons to his pants in a week."
+
+"An' him!" Mrs. Cregan cried. "Iver, since the Raypublicuns got licked,
+there's be'n no gettin' on with him at all. Thim Sunday papers 've
+toorned his head. He's all blather about his rights an' his wrongs. Th'
+other moornin' didn't I try to get on his bus from the wrong side o' the
+crossin', an' he bawls at me: 'Th' other side! Th' other side! Yuh're no
+better than any one ilse!' An' I had to chase through the mud after him!
+The little wizened runt! He's talkin' like an arnachist! An' that's why
+he smashed me dish. He'll have no one say 'No' to 'im.... Ah, Mrs.
+Byrne, niver marry a man older than yersilf."
+
+"Thank yuh," Mrs. Byrne replied with hoarse sarcasm. "I'm not likely to,
+at my age." She added, consolingly: "Cregan's young fer his years.
+Drivin' a Fift' Avenah bus is fine, preservin', outdoor work."
+
+"It is _that!_" And Mrs. Cregan's tone remarked that the fact was the
+more to be deplored. "He'll be crankier an' crabbeder the older he
+grows." She dipped to her coffee and swallowed hard.
+
+Mrs. Byrne had screwed up her eyes to squint at an idea that could not
+well be looked in the face. When she spoke it was to say slyly: "God
+forbid! But they do go off sometimes in a puff. He looks as if he'd live
+fer long enough, thank Heaven. But yuh never can tell."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Mrs. Cregan blinked, held her hand for a moment, and then began hastily
+to fill her mouth with food. The silence that ensued was long enough to
+take on an appearance of guilt.
+
+It was long enough, too, for Mrs. Byrne to "contrive a procedure."
+
+"Yuh never can tell," she began, "unless yuh have doin's with the
+devil--like them gipsies that see what's comin' by lookin' in the flat
+o' yer hand. There's one o' them aroun' the corner, an' they say she
+told Minnie Doyle the name o' the man she was to marry. An' he married
+her, at that!" Mrs. Cregan looked blank. Mrs. Byrne leaned forward to
+her. "I never whispered it to a livin' soul but yerself--but it was her
+told Mrs. Gunn that her last was to be a boy. A good month ahead! An'
+when she saw it was true she had no peace o' mind till she heard the
+priest say the words over the poor child an' saw that the sprinkle o'
+holy water didn't bubble off him like yuh'd sprinkled it on a hot
+stove." Mrs. Cregan's vacant regard had slowly gathered a gleam of
+startled intelligence. "An' if I was yerself, Mrs. Cregan--not knowin'
+where I was to go to, ner how I was to live--I'd go an' have a talk with
+her before I went further, d'yuh see?"
+
+"God forbid! 'Tis a mortal sin."
+
+"'Tis not. When I told Father Dumphy what I'd done, he called me an ol'
+fool an' gave me an extry litany fer penance. What's a litany!"
+
+"I'd be scared o' me life!"
+
+"Yuh w'd not. Come along with me. I was goin'. I got troubles o' me own.
+Never mind that. There's nothin' to be scared of. Nothin' at all. No
+one'll see us. I been there meself, many's the time, an' no one knows
+it."
+
+
+III
+
+Mrs. Byrne entered the "reception rooms" of Madame Wampa, "clairvoyant,
+palmist, and card-reader," with the propitiatory smile of the woman who
+knows she is doing wrong but is prepared to argue that there is "no
+great harm into it." She was followed by Mrs. Cregan, as guiltily
+reverential as if she were an altar boy who had been persuaded to join
+in some mischievous trespass on the "sanctuary." Madame Wampa received
+them, professionally insolent in her indifference. Mrs. Byrne explained
+that she wanted only a "small card reading" for twenty-five cents.
+Madame Wampa said curtly: "Sit down!"
+
+They sat down.
+
+She had been a music-hall singer when her husband was a sleight-of-hand
+artist, "The Great Malino, the Wizard of Milan." Her voice had long
+since left her; she had nothing of her beauty but its yellow ruins; and
+her life was made up of the consideration of two great grievances:
+first, that her husband was always idle, and second, that her landlord
+overcharged her for her rooms on account of the nature of her
+"business."
+
+[Illustration: MADAME WAMPA]
+
+She saw nothing in Mrs. Byrne and Mrs. Cregan but their inability to
+help her pay her rent. She said: "I give a full trance readin' with
+names, dates, and all questions answered, for a dollar, or a full card
+readin' for fifty cents. It's impossible to tell much for a quarter."
+
+Mrs. Byrne shook her head.
+
+Madame Wampa said "Very well," in a tone of haughty resignation. She
+turned to a booth that had been made of turkey-red chintz in one corner
+of the room. She lit a small red lamp and sat down before a little
+bamboo table. A toy angel from a Christmas tree hung above her. A
+stuffed alligator sat up, on its hind legs, beside her--a porcelain bell
+hung on a red ribbon about its neck--to grin with a cheerful uncanniness
+on the rigmaroles of magic.
+
+She said: "Come!"
+
+Mrs. Byrne entered the gipsy tent, and Mrs. Cregan was left alone in the
+atmosphere of a bespangled past reduced to its lowest terms of
+imposture. There were strings of Indian corn hanging from the ceiling,
+Chinese coins and rabbits' feet on the walls, a horseshoe wrapped in
+tinfoil over the door, and a collection of absurdly grotesque
+bric-a-brac on shelves and tables. There were necklaces of lucky beads
+for sale, and love charms in the shape of small glass hearts enclosing
+imitation shamrocks, and dream books and manuals of palmistry and gipsy
+cards for fortune-telling, and photographs of Madame Wampa in a gorgeous
+evening dress trimmed with feathers. Over all was a smoky odor of
+kerosene from an oil heater.
+
+Mrs. Cregan looked from side to side with a vaguely worried feeling that
+it must take a power of dusting and wiping to keep such a clutter of
+things clean; and this feeling gradually rose into her consciousness
+above the dull stupefaction of her grief.
+
+Madame Wampa, in the chintz tent, recited without expression: "Though
+you travel east or west, may your luck be the best." She dropped her
+voice to a toneless mutter about a "journey," and some papers that were
+to be signed, and a "false" dark woman who pretended to be Mrs. Byrne's
+friend, but would do her an injury.
+
+Mrs. Cregan sat as if she were waiting for her turn to enter a
+confessional, her hands folded, her head dropped. She heard Mrs. Byrne
+whispering hoarsely, but she did not listen.
+
+Madame Wampa said, at last, wearily: "Very well. Send her in."
+
+She shuffled her cards and sighed. She was professionally acquainted
+with many griefs, and she took her toll of them. They meant no more to
+her than sickness does to a quack. She looked up at Mrs. Cregan's
+entrance almost absent-mindedly.
+
+But there was, at once, something so helplessly stricken about the
+woman's plump despair, so infantile, so touchingly ridiculous, that
+Madame Wampa even smiled faintly and moved the bamboo table to let Mrs.
+Cregan squeeze into the chair that waited her. She sat down and held out
+her money in her palm. Madame Wampa took her hand. "I will tell you,"
+she said. "I will see it in your hand."
+
+She crossed the palm three times with the coin, and began in the
+monotonous voice and with the expressionless face of the fakir: "You are
+married. Many years. I see many years. You have not been happy. Monday
+is your unlucky day. Do not begin anything on Monday. You are thinkin'
+of takin' a journey--somethin'--some change. It will not end well. You
+had better remain without the change--whatever it is. There is a man--a
+man who has horses--who drives horses, perhaps. I see horses. He will
+meet with an accident--I think, a runaway--a collision, perhaps. He will
+be hurt. He will be--hurt. Yes. He is an old man. It will be bad. He may
+die. Perhaps. He is a relative--related to you. You must beware of
+animals. One will do you an injury. You will never be rich--but
+comfortable. The best of your life is comin'. You will have your wish."
+
+She had finished, but Mrs. Cregan did not move. She had drawn back in
+her chair. Her mouth had loosened; her hand lay limp on the table; all
+her intelligence seemed to have concentrated in her eyes in an
+expression of guilty and horrified surprise. She said faintly: "Is't
+Cregan?"
+
+Madame Wampa shrugged one shoulder in her red kimono. "The lines do not
+say." She blew out the lamp and rose from the table. "That is all. It is
+impossible to tell much for a quarter. I give a full trance readin',
+with names, dates, and all questions answered----"
+
+Mrs. Cregan "blessed" herself,--with the sign of the cross,--gasped,
+"God forgi' me!" and blundered out into the room. Mrs. Byrne cried:
+"What's wrong?" Mrs. Cregan did not hear. She stampeded to the door in
+the ponderous fright of a panic-stricken elephant. Her one thought was
+to find a place where she might get on her knees.... Cregan! It was
+himself! It was Dinny! Killed, maybe! She had blasphemed against the
+Church and Father Dumphy, and she must pray. She must pray for herself
+and for Cregan. She would "take back" everything she had said. She would
+never leave him. She would be good.
+
+Mrs. Byrne tugged at her cape. "Whist! Whist! What's come over yuh,
+woman? What is it?"
+
+"It's Dinny!"
+
+That was all that could be had out of her. Even when she reached her
+home again, and Mrs. Byrne followed her in, afraid of leaving the
+frightened woman alone lest she should "blab" the whole secret to the
+first person she met,--even then Mrs. Cregan could not speak until she
+had gathered up the broken dishes and propped the broken chair against
+the wall, as frantically as if she were trying to conceal the evidence
+of a crime. Then she sank down on a sofa and burst into tears. "The poor
+creature!" she wept. "The poor ol' man. Poor Dinny!"
+
+Mrs. Byrne folded her arms. "Mary Cregan," she said, in hoarse disgust,
+"when yuh've done makin' a fool o' yerself, I'll trouble yuh to listen
+to _me_. _Now!_ If y' ever breathe a word o' this to Cregan, he'll laugh
+himself blind! Mind yuh that! He'll not believe yuh. No one'll believe
+yuh. No one! An' if yuh don't want somethin' turrible to happen, yuh'll
+say nothin', but yuh'll behave yerself like a decent married woman an'
+go to church an' say yer prayers against trouble. That woman with the
+cards says whatever th' old Nick puts into her head to say."
+
+Mrs. Cregan cried: "She saw it in me hand!"
+
+Mrs. Byrne drew herself up like a prophetess. "Dip yer hand in holy
+water, an' yuh'll hear no more of it. Now, then. Behave yerself."
+
+"I was wishin' it!" she wailed. "I was wishin' somethin' 'd happen to
+him to leave me free here in m' own home!"
+
+"An' that," Mrs. Byrne said, "is the judgment o' heaven on yuh fer
+carin' more fer yer dishes than yuh did fer yer husband. Yuh're a good
+manager, Mrs. Cregan, but yuh've been a dang poor wife. Think of yer man
+first an' yer house after, an' yuh'll be a happier woman, I tell yuh."
+
+"I will that. I will," Mrs. Cregan wept, "if he's spared to me."
+
+"Never fear," Mrs. Byrne said drily. "He'll be spared to yuh."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And he _has_ been spared to her. At first he was suspicious of her
+subdued manner and remorseful gentleness; and for a long time he
+watched her, very warily, with an eye for treachery. Then he understood
+that she had succumbed to his masterful handling of her, and he was
+masculinely proud of his conquest.
+
+[Illustration: "MRS. CREGAN SAT AS IF SHE WERE WAITING FOR HER TURN TO
+ENTER A CONFESSIONAL."]
+
+Mrs. Cregan is beginning to hope that she has warded off the predicted
+bad fortune by her devoutness, but she still has her fears. "Twas the
+doin's o' the divil," she says to Mrs. Byrne.
+
+"He had a hand in it, no doubt," Mrs. Byrne agrees. "An' how's Cregan?"
+she says, "Well, I'm glad o' that.... An' the new dishes?... Good luck
+to them. Yuh're off early to church again."
+
+
+
+
+YOUNG HENRY AND THE OLD MAN
+
+BY JOHN M. OSKISON
+
+
+The ranchman and I were discussing courage. I had that day seen young
+Henry Thomas mount and ride a horse which had bucked in a way to impress
+the imagination. I spoke of it.
+
+"Was it the gray?" queried Brunner, and when I said it was, he scoffed.
+"That horse is trained to buck just the way young Henry wants him, and
+he hobbles the stirrups."
+
+Brunner's scepticism was disappointing. I ventured to speak of another
+instance that seemed to illustrate the nerve of Henry Thomas:
+
+"Didn't he help capture the 'Kep' Queen bunch of outlaws a few years
+ago? I've heard he showed nerve then."
+
+"I reckon you have." Brunner glanced across at me, then stooped to dig a
+live coal out of the ashes. He held it for half a minute before packing
+it into the bowl of his pipe, shifting it imperceptibly in his toughened
+hand as he studied the backlog. When his tobacco was burning steadily,
+he spoke:
+
+"I can tell you the truth about young Henry--and the old man, too." I
+thought his tone changed. "Twenty-four years ago I came to this Indian
+country. For twelve years I rode with the posses as a deputy marshal and
+for twelve years now I've been running cattle here on Cabin Creek. I've
+been all over the Territory. I know every man in the Cherokee Nation
+that ever handled a hot iron. And I know young Henry Thomas, too.
+
+"It was in 1882 that Queen 'went bad,' and began to hold up trains on
+the 'Katy' and 'Frisco roads. All of that fall and winter we were after
+him and his gang, but we never got a sight of them. They were 'goers'
+all right, and when we came up to a two-weeks-old camp-fire they'd
+built, we thought we were lucky.
+
+"For six months after the first of the year they did nothing. We heard
+that Queen was in California. Then, in June, 1883, while I was at
+Muscogee, I got a telegram from 'Cap' White asking me to report at once
+to him at Red Oak. Paden Tolbert and I caught the eleven o'clock train
+up, dropping off at Red Oak at one in the morning. 'Cap' met us, told us
+he had two men ready, and that the five of us would start for Pryor
+Creek at once.
+
+"It was a fifteen-mile ride. We planned to pick up four men from the
+ranches on the way down, and get to 'Kep' Queen's camp at daylight. We
+had been told that there were five men in the camp, that they had been
+in the Pryor Creek woods for two days, and that it was their plan to
+hold up the flyer from the north next evening. 'Cap' White was sure of
+his information, and he had decided upon the men he wanted from the
+ranches. The two Thomases--old man Henry and young Henry--were picked
+out, for there was no one else in the family except a younger brother of
+eighteen, who has since died. 'Bud' Ryder and Jim Kelso were the other
+two--both good on horses and handy with a gun.
+
+"'Cap' was proud of his posse when he finally got us together. The
+Thomases came out and joined us like bees a-swarming. The young fellow
+was all up in the air with excitement, like a boy going to a circus. He
+was so brash that at first we couldn't keep him from riding on ahead of
+the rest of us; you'd think he wanted to bring in the bunch all by
+himself.
+
+"That was all right; brash, eager young fellows ain't always so brave
+when trouble begins, but they steady into good fighters. It's hard
+enough to get 'em that want to go after a man like 'Cap' Queen at all."
+
+Brunner told me then of the fight in the woods at daybreak. It was his
+summary of young Henry Thomas that interested me.
+
+One of the men whom White took from Red Oak led the posse to the camp on
+Pryor Creek. It was on a ledge on a hillside. The fires had been built
+under a jutting rock. Only a bush wren could have hidden its nest more
+completely--Bruce had been lucky in spying it out. He told White that
+there was but one unprotected approach--a long unused trail that led
+down from the cliff-top and ended in a briar tangle fifty feet above the
+ledge. That trail, it was evident, 'Kep' Queen did not know existed.
+
+Young Thomas had ridden with Brunner, seeking him out, as the novice
+always seeks out the veteran, to practise his valorous speeches upon.
+For four hours young Thomas talked about bravery, with illustrations.
+From one incident to another he skipped, for the history of outlawry
+west of St. Louis, in the last generation, was more familiar to him than
+many another topic he had gathered from books. Brunner could have set
+him right on the facts many times, but what was the use?
+
+After a time the youngster's monologue became a sort of soothing hum,
+for which the other was grateful. "I was cross and sleepy and chilly and
+nervous," Brunner explained, "and the boy's gabble rested me."
+
+I gathered that the young man was more excited than he cared to confess,
+even to himself. He talked, as others whistle, to "keep up his courage."
+Yet the implication that he needed distraction or stimulation would have
+angered him. Youth and courage are twins, or should be, and a man of
+twenty-two takes it for granted. At forty, a man may confess to turning
+tail and yet save his self-respect. I had heard Brunner tell of "back
+downs" that would have shamed a young village constable, and it had
+never occurred to me to question his courage.
+
+It was only in the last mile of their ride that the chatter of young
+Thomas really became audible to Brunner.
+
+"I woke up," he said, "and actually listened to him. I don't remember
+exactly what he was saying, but this was the idea: 'All of you fellows
+that chase outlaws make too much fuss about it.' Well, some of us do,
+though the newspapers and the wind-bags that follow us around make ten
+times the fuss we do. He went on to say that the only way to nab a
+horse-thief or an express robber was to go right up to him, don't you
+know, like the little boy went up to the sign-post that he thought was a
+ghost.
+
+"It's a good theory and generally works. I told him so, and then
+apologized for doing any other way. The way I thought about this
+business of a deputy marshal's was the way an old soldier thinks about
+war. I was hired to get the criminals, and not to be caught by the
+criminals, to shoot the bad man, if I had to, but not to be shot by the
+bad man if there was any way to help it. One way to help it is to run
+and hide. It's a good way, too, for I've tried it."
+
+The young man roused Brunner's curiosity. It was possible that he might
+be of the exceptional breed that puts a fine theory to the test of
+action.
+
+"I decided to watch him," the ranchman told me, "and see if he would
+play up to his big talk. When we left our ponies, half a mile from the
+camp, I pretended to argue with 'Cap' White, told him he ought to leave
+young Thomas with the horses and not get such a boy as that all shot
+up. 'Cap' caught my point and begged him to stay, but, of course, he
+wouldn't hear of it. 'I'll stick to Brunner,' says he.
+
+"'All right,' says I, 'come on.'
+
+"When we started afoot, we trailed out single file, and I noticed that
+old man Thomas waited for the boy and me to pass him, dropping in right
+behind his son. 'Cap' was in front, then Bruce, then Paden Tolbert, then
+Ryder and Kelso, and then I and the Thomases. The old man was at the
+tail of the procession.
+
+"Old man Thomas was the kind that you never think about one way or the
+other. You said to yourself that he would do his share, whatever it
+amounted to, and you wouldn't have to bother about him. That's your
+notion of him, ain't it?"
+
+It _was_ my notion of the older Thomas. I don't think a more commonplace
+looking man ever lived. Brunner told me that he had not changed in
+fourteen years.
+
+"'Young Henry swells around and talks big; the old man he says nothing
+and chaws tobacco,' That's the way people size 'em up around here."
+Brunner thus confirmed my own impression of the pair.
+
+"What a man can see out of the back of his head," Brunner went on, "is a
+lot different from what comes in front of his eyes. He feels a lot that
+don't make a sound and that ain't visible. I did see, out of the corner
+of my eye, that young Henry Thomas was dropping behind me little by
+little, but I didn't see why it was he moved up again. I know why,
+though. The old man had ordered him up--not in words, you understand,
+for I could have heard a whisper in the still dawn, the way we were
+snaking it over the trail. From that time on, every foot of the way, the
+old man drove the boy. You ask me how, and I can't tell you. There
+wasn't a word, not a motion that I could see, but all the time it was
+one man driving the other as plain as could be. And it wasn't easy. I
+felt that young Henry was worse than balky, that he would have broke
+through the bushes and run off screaming if that old man had taken his
+eyes off of him for ten seconds.
+
+"A quarter of a mile it was, and we went slow--twenty feet forward
+picking our way, then the eight of us would stop to listen. If you ever
+get a chance, ask young Henry how long that trail was. If he don't stop
+to think, he'll tell you we crawled through the bushes for five miles,
+but if he remembers his part as the hero of the fight, he'll say, 'Oh,
+we sneaked a hundred yards or so before lighting into Queen's bunch.'"
+
+The trail from above ended in a briar tangle fifty feet up the hill
+from the ledge on which four of the five outlaws slept. The fifth man,
+posted as a sentry, was on the lower trail, somewhere out of sight of
+the party led by "Cap" White. When the deputies came up to the briars,
+therefore, they could see no one. As soon as the four sleepers came out
+of shelter, however, White's men could cover them with their guns.
+
+What had to be done, obviously, was to rouse the four outlaws without
+revealing the presence of the deputies above. It could be done by some
+one in the woods below the ledge. But the outpost was down there to
+reckon with. They could not all be trapped merely by waiting, for they
+would come out, after waking, one by one; and White wanted the whole
+bunch.
+
+It was decided that three men should be sent, by a round-about trail,
+down to the creek; that they should follow it up until they got opposite
+to the ledge; and that they should then rouse the sleeping men. They
+were also to find the sentry and capture him. The risk was that the
+sentry might discover the three first and spoil the chance to take him.
+The detail might be dangerous, though with luck it should prove easy.
+
+Brunner was assigned to lead the three. Young Thomas and Kelso were
+named by White as the other two, but Brunner, who had been aware of that
+duel on the trail, said he preferred the old man to Jim Kelso.
+
+They beat back for a short distance, then, separating, dropped down the
+steep hillside to the creek. In open order, they went forward quietly,
+slowly; they might come upon 'Kep' Queen's outpost at any turn. Now and
+then they came in sight of one another. Each time Brunner saw that the
+old man was edging closer to his son. Still there was no word
+spoken--only a grim old man's gray eyes were fixed upon a young man's
+shifting, over-bright eyes, and the young man moved on, cautiously.
+
+Brunner held close to the creek bank; the old man was twenty yards away
+and moving farther out as he approached his son. So they advanced,
+abreast, until they came out upon the trail leading up to the ledge.
+Then Brunner saw old man Thomas run, with short, noiseless steps, to
+young Henry's side and point up the trail. Hidden from both and out of
+sight of what had attracted the old man's attention, Brunner yet knew
+what was happening. Farther up the trail was the sentry, half asleep in
+the chill dawn.
+
+Brunner saw, as he himself came up cautiously, that the old man was
+whispering to young Henry. He grasped the boy's arm, half-shoving him
+forward and pointing with his rifle. The youngster moved a step, then
+turned with a look of utter panic on his face. His father's eyes glared;
+a sort of savage anger blazed on his face. From his grip on young
+Henry's arm, the old man's hand sprang to the boy's throat. There was
+one fierce, terrible shake, a sort of gurgling scream that expressed
+terror, and protest, too, but which was scarcely audible to Brunner,
+twenty feet away. In the tone of a man enraged to the point of madness,
+old man Thomas snapped out:
+
+"Go on, you confounded whelp!"
+
+Young Henry shook himself free, his terror replaced by a sudden,
+resentful anger. Fifty yards away the sentry nodded, his back against a
+tree and his gun across his lap. Brunner saw the man now, and stepped
+aside to cover him as young Henry approached. But there was no need of
+that. The boy was swift and noiseless; before the outlaw could wake or
+move, his gun was in Henry's hand, and he heard the command, "hands up!"
+
+The sentry was quick-witted. He couldn't shoot, but he could yell.
+Brunner, however was ready for that. He began to bawl a reveler's song,
+popular with cowboys on a spree, and old man Thomas joined him. From
+above, it sounded as if a drunken riot had broken out, in which the
+outpost's warning shout became only a meaningless discord. The babel
+brought the four sleeping men out of their blankets. They listened a
+moment, then stepped out in view of the posse in the briars.
+
+As Brunner came up, old man Thomas turned to face him. On his seamed
+face the sweat had almost dried, but when he shoved his hat up with his
+forearm, his sleeve came away from his forehead damp. The compelling
+glitter in the gray eyes turned to a challenging stare. Brunner met it,
+then glanced up the trail towards young Thomas and his captive.
+
+"He got him all right," said Brunner.
+
+"Yes," the old man triumphed, "my boy got him. He captured 'Kep' Queen
+himself."
+
+"I reckon you've heard young Henry's story of how he got 'Kep' Queen,"
+Brunner finished. "If you've ever talked with him when he was out of
+sight of the old man, I know you have. What I've told you to-night is
+what old man Henry could tell if he wanted to. But he never will. As I
+said awhile ago, 'young Henry swells around and talks big; the old man
+he says nothing and chaws tobacco.'"
+
+
+
+
+EDITORIAL
+
+THE TRUTH OF ORCHARD'S STORY
+
+
+McClure's Magazine printed during last summer and fall the Autobiography
+of Harry Orchard, with its confessions of wholesale assassinations
+during the labor war in the mining districts of the West. There was, at
+that time, repeated and angry denial of the truth of his story; and,
+since the acquittal of W. D. Haywood, secretary and treasurer of the
+Western Federation of Miners, and of George A. Pettibone, whom Orchard
+charged with being the instigators of his crimes, their adherents have,
+of course, maintained that Orchard's story has been entirely disproved.
+
+Logically, this does not follow. The acquittal of these two men means
+nothing more than that they were not proved guilty to the satisfaction
+of the juries trying them. Before a final judgment as to the truth or
+falsity of Orchard's statement is made, the last development in this
+matter must be thoroughly considered. On March 18, Orchard, persisting
+in his story to the last, pleaded guilty to the murder of Governor Frank
+Steunenberg, at Caldwell, Idaho, and was sentenced to be hanged--with
+the recommendation by the presiding judge that his sentence be commuted
+to life imprisonment by the Prison Board of the State. In pronouncing
+sentence upon Orchard, Judge Fremont Wood, who presided over the trials
+of both Haywood and Pettibone, expressed his belief in Orchard's story
+in a most convincing way. The parts of the Judge's statement dealing
+with Orchard's testimony, which follow, are of peculiar value to those
+desiring to arrive at a final conclusion regarding the responsibility
+for the campaign of murders which took place during the labor wars of
+the Western Federation of Miners; they are the summing up of the entire
+matter by a mind whose judicial fairness has been recognized by both
+parties in this great controversy.
+
+     "I am more than satisfied," said Judge Wood, "that the defendant
+     now at the bar of this court awaiting final sentence has not only
+     acted in good faith in making the disclosures that he did, but that
+     he also testified fully and fairly to the whole truth, withholding
+     nothing that was material and declaring nothing that had not
+     actually taken place.
+
+     "During the two trials the testimony of the defendant covered a
+     long series of transactions involving personal relations between
+     himself and many others. In the first trial he was subjected to the
+     most critical cross-examination by very able counsel for at least
+     six days, and I do not now recall that at any point he contradicted
+     himself in any material manner, but on the other hand disclosed his
+     connection with many crimes that were probably not known to the
+     attorneys for the State, at least not brought out by them on the
+     direct examination of the witness.
+
+     "Upon the second trial the same testimony underwent a most thorough
+     and critical examination and in no particular was there any
+     discrepancy in a material matter between the testimony given upon
+     the latter trial as compared with the testimony given by the same
+     witness at the former trial. I am of the opinion that no man living
+     could conceive the stories of crime told by the witness and
+     maintain himself under the merciless fire of the leading
+     cross-examining attorneys of the country unless upon the theory
+     that he was testifying to facts and to circumstances which had an
+     actual existence within his own experience.
+
+     "A child can testify truly and maintain itself on
+     cross-examination. A man may be able to frame his testimony and
+     testify falsely to a brief statement of facts involving a short and
+     single transaction and maintain himself on cross-examination.
+
+     "But I cannot conceive of a case where even the greatest intellect
+     can conceive a story of crime covering years of duration, with
+     constantly shifting scenes and changing characters, and maintain
+     that story with circumstantial detail as to times, places, persons,
+     and particular circumstances and under as merciless a
+     cross-examination as was ever given a witness in an American court
+     unless the witness thus testifying was speaking truthfully and
+     without any attempt either to misrepresent or conceal.... It is my
+     opinion, after a careful examination of this case in all its
+     details, that this defendant and the crimes which he committed were
+     only the natural product and outcome of the system which he
+     represented and the doctrines taught by its leaders, some of which
+     were boldly proclaimed and maintained, even upon the trial of the
+     defendant Haywood.
+
+     "This defendant had evidently become imbued with the idea
+     inculcated by those around him that the organized miners were
+     engaged in an industrial warfare upon one side of which his own
+     organization was alone represented, while on the other hand they
+     were confronted with the powers of organized capital, supported by
+     executive authority, and which counter organization included, or at
+     least controlled, the courts, which were the final arbiters upon
+     all legal questions involved.
+
+     "With the promulgation of such doctrines it is not a difficult
+     matter for some people to justify murder, arson, and other
+     outrages, and I am satisfied that it was that condition of mind
+     that sustained, bore up and nerved on this defendant and his
+     associates in the commission of the various crimes with which he
+     was connected."
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1]
+  _Copyright, 1908, by Ellen Terry (Mrs. Carew)_
+  _Copyright, 1908, by The S. S. McClure Co. All rights reserved_
+
+[2] Mrs. Eddy also had copies of other Quimby manuscripts in her
+possession.
+
+[3] See MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE, May, 1907.
+
+[4] Many typical instances of Christian Science logic may be found in
+Mr. Alfred Farlow's answer to Dr. Churchman's article (_Christian
+Science Journal_, 1904). Mr. Farlow takes up Dr. Churchman's statement,
+"To deny that matter exists and assert that it is an illusion, is only
+another way of asserting its existence." Says Mr. Farlow: "According to
+this logic, when a defendant denies a charge brought against him in
+court, he is only choosing a method of asserting its truth."
+
+Mr. Farlow seems to think that Mrs. Eddy arrived at her discovery of the
+non-existence of matter, not by any process of reasoning, but by
+_personal experience_. He says:
+
+     "From doubting matter and learning by experience its utter
+     emptiness Mrs. Eddy began to search for the universal spiritual
+     cause, and having found it through actual demonstration in spirit,
+     she was obliged in consistence therewith to deny the material sense
+     of existence."
+
+Mr. Farlow seems to consider the logic of this progression inevitable.
+
+[5] Science and Health (1898), page 375.
+
+[6] " " " " " 392.
+
+[7] " " " " " 46.
+
+[8] " " " " " 379.
+
+[9] Mrs. Eddy and her followers believe that she possesses an
+enlightened or spiritual understanding of the Bible and the universe,
+not common to the rest of mankind.
+
+[10] This account of the Creation is taken from the first edition of
+"Science and Health." It remains practically the same in later editions
+under the chapter called "Genesis."
+
+[11] Miscellaneous Writings (1896), page 51.
+
+[12] "Science and Health" (1906), pages 696, 697.
+
+[13] _Christian Science Journal_, September. 1898.
+
+[14] _Christian Science Journal_, October, 1904.
+
+[15] For an exposition of the theory upon which this work at Emmanuel
+Church is conducted, the reader is referred to a pamphlet, "The Healing
+Ministry of the Church," by the Reverend Samuel McComb, issued by the
+Emmanuel Church, Boston. For a detailed account of the method of healing
+practised there and its results, see an article, "New Phases in the
+Relation of the Church to Health," by Dr. Richard Cabot, in the
+_Outlook_, February 29, 1908. The reader who is interested in the
+principle and possibilities of psycho-therapeutics or "mental healing" is
+again referred to Paul Dubois' remarkable book, "Psychical Treatment of
+Nervous Disorders."
+
+[16] The reader who is interested in Quimby's teaching and healing is
+referred to "The True History of Mental Science," by Julius A. Dresser,
+published by George H. Ellis, 272 Congress Street, Boston.
+
+Dr. Warren F. Evans, in his book, "Mental Medicine," published three
+years before the first edition of "Science and Health," said: "Disease
+being in its root a _wrong belief_, change that belief and we cure the
+disease. By faith we are thus made whole. There is a law here which the
+world will sometime understand and use in the cure of the diseases that
+afflict mankind. The late Dr. Quimby, of Portland, one of the most
+successful healers of this or any age, embraced this view of the nature
+of disease, and by a long succession of the most remarkable cures,
+effected by psychopathic remedies, at the same time proved the truth of
+the theory and the efficiency of that mode of treatment. Had he lived in
+a remote age or country, the wonderful facts which occurred in his
+practise would now have been deemed either mythical or miraculous. He
+seemed to reproduce the wonders of Gospel history. But all this was only
+an exhibition of the force of suggestion, or the action of the law of
+faith, over a patient in the impressible condition."
+
+[17] Distribution of every 1000 suicides by season:
+
+  _Country  Summer  Spring   Fall   Winter    Total_
+
+  Denmark    312      284     227     177     1,000
+  Belgium    301      275     229     195     1,000
+  France     306      283     210     201     1,000
+  Saxony     307      281     217     195     1,000
+  Bavaria    308      282     218     192     1,000
+  Austria    315      281     219     185     1,000
+  Prussia    290      284     227     199     1,000
+
+Durkheim, "Le Suicide," (Paris, 1897), p. 88.
+
+[18] The figures are those of Dr. Forbes Winslow for the United States,
+those of Dr. M. Gubski for Russia, those of Dr. Rehfisch (in _Der
+Selbsmord_) for Europe, and those of the Government Statistical Bureau
+for Japan.
+
+[19] Durkheim, "Le Suicide" (Paris, 1897), p. 93.
+
+[20] Five or six years ago, in a paper that I read before the Literary
+Society of Washington, D. C., I suggested this explanation of the high
+suicide rate in June. At the conclusion of the reading, a young Italian
+student, who happened to be present as a guest, came to me and said: "If
+I did not know it to be impossible, I should think that your explanation
+of June suicides had been suggested by, if not copied from, a letter
+left by a dear friend of mine who killed himself in Genoa, two years
+ago, on a beautiful evening in June. You have expressed his thoughts
+almost in the words that he used."
+
+[21] For the suicide statistics embodied in this table I am largely
+indebted to the cooeperation and assistance of Mr. M. L. Jacobson, of the
+Bureau of Statistics in Washington. In the literature of the subject
+there are no figures more recent than 1893 for most of the European
+countries. In this table they are nearly all later than 1900.
+
+[22] The figures for Europe are from the latest reports of government
+statistical bureaus, and for America from the registration area covered
+in the twelfth census.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June
+1908, by Various
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