Transcriber’s Note: The Table of Contents and the list of
illustrations were added by the transcriber.

466

467

MCCLURE’s MAGAZINE.

Copyright, 1893, by S. S. MCCLURE, Limited. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Illustrations

REAL CONVERSATIONS.—III.
A DIALOGUE BETWEEN FRANK R. STOCKTON AND EDITH
M. THOMAS.

Recorded by Miss Thomas.

Nature provides no lovelier mise-en-scène for a story, a poem or, a “conversation”
than is to be found in the sylvan and pastoral world that looks out upon the
gradual crescendo of the Blue Ridge mountains in northern New Jersey.

Tall beeches, hickories, chestnuts, and maples, too, rise on all sides to clothe fertile slope
or wilder acclivity. Those who have never experimentally proved what riches the
landscape-loving eye counts for its own in this portion of the State may still hold to
the calumnious tradition that all Jersey is flat
and unprofitable to the searcher for the beautiful
in pictorial nature. There is no hilltop of this
gracious country that does not rise to salute some
yet more sightly hill; no sunny hollow or winding
dell that does not seem the key to some Happy Valley
beyond, where a Rasselas might be content to
abide forever; no woodland glade that would not
satisfy Leigh Hunt’s description,

MISS EDITH M. THOMAS.

Yet it would hardly be judicious for a poet to
live here, lest he should be diverted altogether from
thoughts of work, and, like the bees in Florida, lend
himself to present enjoyment, without forecast of
the morrow.

“Give me health and a day,” says Emerson,
“and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.”
While we venture no such reduction of
royal heads, we are rich in the sense of privilege
and of immunity from all the troubled voices of
the world, given such a scene, such a fair September
morning.

The Holt, the wooded hill on which stands Mr.
Stockton’s home, rises on three sides—gently, leisurely;
nothing abrupt, but as befits the site for an
ideal homestead. Even were no houses made with
hands erected in this place, the noble grove, comprising468
the whole congress of good trees and true, that yield fuel and timber for man’s
use, would enclose and tapestry around a sort of spacious woodland chamber for the
abode of contemplation and comfort. In truth, close beside the ample piazza, a group
of stately pines, joined in brotherly love, securely roof over a little parlor where the
gentle shower would scarce admonish a loiterer in a rustic seat.

Down this easy slope the trees descend to make a green, dream-lighted dell, through
which we see the winding course of a wood-path, where the pilgrim of a day may
saunter. So sauntering, or tarrying, the pilgrim proceeds leisurely along; at last, a
little climb and a deft turn of the path deliver us into a sweetly secluded nook
christened “Studio Bluff.”

And now to return to the sheltering eaves of the “Holt” and repair to the study.
Yonder is the great desk, as full, it may be, of hives and honey as were the pockets of
the Bee Man of Orn!

There is the bookcase, containing, among its volumes of reference and service,
sundry eccentricities of literature: “Mr. Salmon,” for instance, with his exhaustive
“Geographical and Historical Grammar,” sandwiching between its useful rules and
tables tidbits of valuable information, including such subjects as “Cleopatra’s Asp;”
adding also “a few paradoxes,” otherwise childish riddles, wherewith the simple
olden time was wont to amuse itself. Here, on the walls hangs the sampler of one of the
ladies Stockton, long
since skilled with
the “fine needle and
nice thread.” Close
beside this notable
needlework hangs a
parchment, the will
of one of the forefathers
of the house,
who held it no
“baseness to write
fair,” if this scarcely
faded engrossing
bespeaks the writer’s
creed in penmanship.
Here, a grim,
gaunt candlestick
does picket duty all
by itself: it is a
bayonet taken from
the last battlefield
of the South—a bayonet
inverted, the
point thrust into a standard, the stock serving as socket for the candle. In this rapid
survey of the room, the lines of old Turberville attract the eye, where they appear
inscribed over the mantel:

On the mantel reposes a wickedly crooked dirk, sheathed and quiescent now. It is
the weapon that slew the redoubted Po Money, a Dacoit chief, of whom the missionary
who consigned it to the present owner naïvely observes, on his card of presentation,
“Since he would never repent, it seemed best that he should be out of the world.”

By this window are flowers, a few; by choice a vase for each; for here the individuality
of a flower is prized, and the crowded and discomfited loveliness of flowers
in the mass is not tolerated. So a day-lily, or an early dahlia, may have its place,
by itself, in undisputed queendom. A branch of vari-colored “foliage plant” completes
the decorative floral company. But who is this—coming as in dyed garments
from Bozrah—that reposes among these pied leaves, beneath their “protective coloring”?
A cramped prisoner but a few hours before, in the world, but not of it. The
bright creature rests in the sunny window until its wings gain strength to lift and
bear it away.

469

Guest. And so you will give me the
fancy of packing the butterfly back
into his case?

Host. Yes, I give up all claim upon
it. It is yours to have and to hold—only
see that the poor fellow isn’t hurt
in packing him up.

Guest. That deserves caution. This
is the second lucky suggestion that has
come in my way to-day. Both are too
good to be lost. The muse learns
thrift and treasures up all suggestions.

Host. How does your muse ordinarily
get her suggestions?

Guest. Oh, in all sorts of ways; from
reading, from some one’s mere chance
expression; sometimes from the particular
insistence of some object in
nature to be seen or heard; as though
it had been waiting for its historian to
come along. Usually, with the object
is associated some slight touch of
pathos. Dreams, too, offer suggestions.
These suggestions, of course,
are fantastic. They often have a touch
of absurdity
which the muse
wisely omits,
generally taking
them for
their allegorical
face value.
I dreamed once
of seeing a rich
cluster of purple
blossoms,
heavy with
dew. The
name, I learned
was “honey-trope,”
and so
I transplanted
the flower, root
and branch, into
a small garden
plot of
verses. I
would think
some of your
whimsical situations
and
characters
might come in
this way.

Host. No, I don’t remember deriving
suggestions from actual dreams; but I
owe a great many to day-dreams. I
used to entertain myself in this way
constantly when a schoolboy. In
walking home from school I would
take up the thread of a plot and carry
it on from day to day until the thing
became a serial story. The habit was
continued for years, simply because
I enjoyed it—especially when walking.
If anybody had known or asked
me about it I should have confessed
that I thought it a dreadful waste of
time.

Guest. But it proved, I dare say, a
sort of peripatetic training-school of
fiction.

Host. Perhaps it might be called so.
At any rate, years after, I used to go
back to these stories for motives, especially
in tales written for children.
But there was another way in which, in
later years, I have made use of day-dreams.
I often woke very early in
the morning—too early to think of
rising, even if I had been thriftily
inclined—and after some experimenting
I found
that the best
way to put myself
to sleep
again was to
construct some
regular story.

Guest. (Stockton
stories do
not have that
effect in the
experience of
readers!)

Host. Some
regular story
carried
through to the
end. I would
begin a story
one morning,
continue it the
next, and the
next, until it
ran into the
serial. Some
of these stories
lasted for a
long time; one
ran through a470
whole year, I know. I got it all the
way from America to Africa.

Guest. Perhaps you anticipated reality.
For a friend of mine who reads
every book of travels in Africa which
she can lay hands on, firmly believes
that the Dark Continent
will be opened up as a
pleasure and health resort
for the whole world! But
what became of the story?

Host. Well, a long time
after, a portion of it came
to light again in “The
Great War Syndicate.”
The idea of “Negative
Gravity” was taken from
another day-dream, the
hero of which invented all
sorts of applications of
negative gravity, and from
these I made a selection for
the printed story.

Guest. Delightful—for
we may hear from this hero
again. I hope he is inexhaustible.
How fortunate
to have a treasure-house of
characters and exploits.
You have only to open the
door and whatever you
want comes out! You
don’t have to go to any
“Anatomy of Melancholy” or Lemprière,
or Old Play, where somebody
else is going, too, and will anticipate
you—the hard luck of some of the
rhyming fraternity!

Host. Of course, some suggestions
are wholly involuntary. You do not
know how or whence they come. I
think of a good illustration of this
involuntary action of the mind in
conjuring up suggestion for a story.
Some time ago, as I was lying in a
hammock under the trees, I happened
to look up through the branches and
saw a great patch of blue sky absolutely
clear. I said to myself: “Suppose
I saw a little black spot appear in that
blue sky.” I kept on thinking. Gradually
the idea came of a man who did
see such a little spot in the clear sky.
And now I am working up this notion
in a story I call “As One Woman to
Another.”

Guest. You literally had given you
less than the conditions given for
describing a circle, for you had but a
simple point to start with. One might
conclude, all that is necessary is to fix
upon some central idea, no matter how
slight, and then the rest will come,
drawn by a kind of mysterious attraction
toward the centre.

Host. Ah, but it will not do for the
professional writer to depend upon any
such luck or chance, for if you wait for
suggestions to come from the ether or
anywhere else, you may wait in vain.
You must begin something. If the
mind has been well stored with incident
and anecdote, these will furnish
useful material, but not the plot. It is
often necessary to get one’s self into a
proper condition for the reception of
impressions, and then to expose the
mind, thus prepared, to the influence of
the ideal atmosphere. If the proper
fancy floats along it is instantly absorbed
by the sensitive surface of the
mind, where it speedily grows into an
available thought, and from that anything
can come.

Guest. But with the maker of verse
such a resolution sometimes so offends
the muse that she turns upon her471
votary with the most inhuman cruelty.
Once I resolved, yes, deliberately resolved,
to write some verses about the
American Indian—to the effect that he
must soon bid good-by and take his
place with all broken and departed
dynasties of the world—the goal to be
some far western region of mournful
and dying splendors. The first result
of this resolution was rather encouraging.
It was:

There inspiration stopped short, limping
for lack of half a foot! Each
morning, on first waking up, I tried to
fill out the line. At last, one morning
it was done, presto!—quite taken out
of my hands. The result was totally
involuntary, I may say.

Host. Well, how did the lines run?

Guest.

Host. Yes, that was cruel! I suppose
you could never finish the poem after
that. But poets must have to do a
great deal more waiting than any other
class of literary workers, for they have
to wait not only for ideas but for
words, which, in poetry, have so much
to do with the mechanism of the verse
as well as the expression of the idea.

Guest. What the Dii Majores may
do, or may have done, I could not
presume to say; but with us verse-makers,
sometimes it is only the words
that do come, at first. The sense,
import, and whole motive sometimes
arrive much later. This ought to be
kept a secret, for it is not to our credit.
But I remember once, some one used
the phrase, “For the time being.” It
was immediately invested with a subtle
extra value which seemed left to me
to discover and define. Any maker of
verse, I should guess, would in the
same way be followed up continually
by refrains and catch-words—the mere
gossip of Parnassus, one might say.
You have the fragments of a puzzle;
they are scattered; some are missing.472
They must be hunted up and fitted
together. Sometimes the last will be
first and the first will be last, when the
metrical whole is completed. For example
of how detached and meaningless
these first suggestions may be,
take this line and a half:

It was months after this suggestion
came to me that I found the context
and motive of the verse. I had to
wait for the rest, and take whatever
came.

A CORNER OF THE DRAWING-ROOM.

Host. This subject of suggestions,
and how they come, is an interesting
one. It reminds me of what the astronomers
tell us of certain methods
they employ. For instance, they expose,
by means of telescopic action, a
sensitive photographic plate to the
action of light from portions of the
heavens where nothing is seen. After
a long exposure they look
at the plate, and something
may be seen that was never
seen before—star, nebulæ,
or perhaps a comet—something
which the telescope
will not reveal to the eye.
As an instance of my use
of this exposure plan I will
mention this: some years
ago I read a great deal
about shipwrecks—a subject
which always interests
me—some accounts in the
daily papers and some sea
stories, such as those of
Clark Russell, who is my
favorite marine author, and
the question came into my
mind: “Is it possible that
there should be any kind of
shipwreck which has not
been already discovered?”
For days and days I exposed
my mind to the influence
of ideas about shipwrecks.
At last a novel
notion floated in upon me,
and I wrote “The Remarkable
Wreck of the Thomas
Hyke.” I have since had
another idea of an out-of-the-way
shipwreck, which I
think is another example of a wreck
that has never occurred; but this is a
variation and amplification of a wreck
about which I read.

Guest. Has it ever happened that
any of your fancies turned out to be
actual fact? Truth is said to be
stranger than fiction.

Host. In some instances just that
thing has happened. In one story I
had a character whose occupation was
that of an analyzer of lava, specimens
being sent to him from all parts of the
world. In this connection a foreigner
inquired of him if there were any volcanoes
near Boston, to which city he
was on his way. This preposterous
idea was, of course, quickly dismissed
in the story. But I received a letter
from a scientific man in New England
who thought I would like to know that,
not far from Boston, but in a spot now
covered by the ocean, there existed in
prehistoric times an active volcano.473
As to the practical application of
some of my fanciful inventions, I may
say that two young ladies on Cape Cod
imitated the example of Mrs. Leeks
and Mrs. Aleshine, and having put on
life preservers, and each taking an oar,
found no difficulty in sweeping themselves
through the water, after the
fashion of the two good women in the
story. I will also say that the Negative
Gravity machine is nothing but a
condensed balloon. As soon as a man
can make a balloon which can bear his
weight and can also be put in a money
belt, he can do all the things that the
man in the story did. I may also say
that naval men have written to me
stating that it is not impossible that
some of the contrivances mentioned
in “The Great War Syndicate” may
some day be used in marine warfare.
I myself have no doubt of this, for
there is no reason why a turtle-backed
little ironclad, almost submerged,
should not steam under the stern of
a great man-of-war like the “Camperdown,”
and having disabled her propeller
blades, tow her nolens volens into
an American port, where she could be
detained until peace should be declared.

Guest. I would not like to live in the
port in whose harbor the captive vessel
was detained.

Host. It might be disagreeable; perhaps
it would be better to keep the
captured vessel continually on the
tow-path through unfrequented waters.

Guest. But we were speaking of the
necessity of having a definite purpose
at the outset of a piece of work.

Host. It amounts to a necessity,
almost. For instance, if I am about
to write a fairy tale, I must get my mind
in an entirely different condition from
what it would be were I planning a
story of country life of the present day.
With me the proper condition often requires
hard work. The fairy tale will
come when the other kind is wanted.
But the ideas of one class must be kept
back and those of the other encouraged
until at last the proper condition
exists and the story begins. But I
suppose you poets do not set out in
this way.

Guest. It would be a revelation to
the public to be let into the secret of
some of our “motives,” and the various
ways we have of mingling “poetic-honey”
and “trade-wax,” as Tom
Hood calls it. The spur of necessity,
real or fancied, is often a capital provocation
to eloquence. I know a woman
who writes verses, who is not only
unnecessarily neglectful of worldly interests,
but is careless in detail, and
self-indulgent and absent-minded. On
one occasion, losing quite a sum of
money from her pocket-book, and
wishing to give herself a lesson to be
remembered, she set herself the task of
writing certain verses to defray the expenses
of her carelessness,
as it were.
Involuntarily, and
yet with a kind of
grim fitness in
things, the subject
that came to hand
was, “Losses.”
The poem was
written and disposed
of, and the
writer was square
with her conscience
once more; and
the poem was not
manifestly worse
for having a prosaic
prompting behind
it. It is well,
I think, that the474
public doesn’t always fathom these
little hidden sequences in our logic.

Host. Speaking of “hidden sequences
in logic,” as you call them, reminds me
of a story a little girl told me. There
was a nest in a tree, and the nest was
full of young birds. One very forward
one always would sit on the edge of
the nest, and had several falls in this
way. The old birds picked it up repeatedly,
and told it that it would
most certainly be caught by cats.
After they found that it would not
reform, the mother-bird took it by one
wing and the father-bird took it by the
other, and together they carried it to
London, where they left it. I could
not imagine why they carried it to
London; but a day or two later I discovered
that the little girl had been
reading the story of Dick Whittington,
which was founded on the fact that
there were no cats in London.

Guest. I am constantly surprised
at the adroitness children manifest
in their little stories. Where
does it vanish when they grow older?
If almost any child kept up
the promise of its story-telling infancy,
every grown person would be
a clever novelist. But there was a
question I had in mind to ask you
while we were on the subject of
suggestion and plot. Do you ever
receive any available ideas from
other people?

Host. Yes, a great many excellent
suggestions have come to me from
others. But the better they are the
less I like to use them, for a good
idea deserves hard work, and when
the work were done I would not feel
that the story were really mine. In a
few cases I have used suggestions from
other people. For instance, there have
been publishers who desired a story
written upon a certain incident or idea.

Guest. The sense of ideal property is
strong. One feels an honest indignation
at taking what belongs to another,
even though but a thought, and that of
no account to the thinker, in his own
opinion of it. Nevertheless, you feel
how easily this ideal property of his
might be “realized” with just a touch
of art. Somehow, that touch of art,
contributed by you, you feel would not
quite make the material yours.

Host. I have been thinking why it is
that very often the work of an author
of fiction is not as true as the work of
an artist, and I have concluded that
the artist has one great advantage over
the author of fiction, and over the poet,475
even. The artist has his models for
his characters—models which he selects
to come as near as possible to what
his creations are going to be. The
unfortunate author has no such models.
He must rely entirely upon the characters
he has casually seen, upon reading,
upon imagination. How I envy
my friend Frost! Last summer, when
he wished to sketch a winter scene in
Canada, he had a model sitting with
two overcoats on, and the day was hot.
Now, I couldn’t have any such models.
I should have to describe my cold man
just by thinking of him.

Guest. Or learn to shiver, yourself,
like the boy in “Grimm’s Tales”—and
describe that!

Host. But it is a serious matter.
The best artists have live models to
work from. But your writer of fiction—how,
for instance, can he see a love
scene enacted? He must describe it
as best he can, and, although he may
remember some of his own, he will
never describe those.

Guest. Goethe was able to overcome
such objections, I believe; and Heine
tells us that,

But please go on.

Host. I think the beautiful young
heroine of fiction generally gives the
author of love stories a great deal of
trouble. Such ladies exist, and their
appearances may be described; but it
is very difficult to find out
what they would do under
certain conditions necessary to the
story, and therefore the author is
obliged to rely upon his imagination,
or upon the few examples he has met
with in his reading, where men or
women have delivered love-clinics at
their own bedsides, or have had the
rare opportunities of describing them
at the bedsides of others. For this
reason people who are not in love, and
whose actions are open to the observations
of others, are often better treated
by the novelist than are his lovers.
I have sometimes thought that a new
profession might be created—that of
Literary Model. Of course we would
have none but the very highest order
of dramatic performers, but such assistance
as they might be able to give
would be invaluable. Suppose the
writer wanted to portray the behavior
of a woman who has just received the
tidings of the sudden death of her rejected
lover. How does a writer, who
has never heard such intelligence delivered,
know what expressions of face,
or what gestures, to give to his heroine
in this situation? How would the intense,
high-strung, nervous woman conduct
herself? How would the fair-haired,
phlegmatic type of women
receive the news? The professional
literary model might be enormously
useful in delineating the various phases
assumed by one’s hero or heroine.

Guest. The idea is certainly novel.
But I’m afraid the professional literary
model, if a woman, would never
be content with “well enough.” She
would want to excel herself; and,
if you didn’t employ her constantly,
would be devising new rôles for herself476
to fill. She would be super-serviceable.

Host. Perhaps. But such zeal could
easily be restrained. It might be a
good idea for a novel-writer to have a
study near the greenroom of a theatre,
and then between the acts he might
send for this or that performer to give
him a living picture of a certain character
in a certain situation. It might
not take a minute to do this. By the
way, the writer’s model would have a
better time
than one who
sat for an artist,
for the sittings
would
generally be
very short.

Guest. All
the world’s a
stage, and a
thoroughly
good actor
might make a
good literary
model. But all
sorts of people
must help as
models, by simply
going on
with their own
little dramas of
life, before the
eyes of the sagacious author.

Host. That is
true enough,
so far as the
comedy scenes
of the play are
concerned.
But, as I said
before, who is
going to set the author the copy for
tragedy or love scenes? Occasionally
you get oblique views—mere intimations
of such scenes. I wish I had had
the good fortune to see what a lady of
my acquaintance saw a while ago. She
is one of the very few who have ever
seen a proposal of love and its acceptance,
carried on before spectators, exactly
as if the contracting parties were
alone. The scene took place in a street
car between two young persons of
foreign tongue, one of whom was about
to take a steamer; and the man knew
that what he had to say must be said
then or never said at all. With the
total oblivion of the presence of others
these two opened their hearts to each
other, the affair proceeded through all
its stages, and the compact was sealed.
This would have been a rare opportunity
for a literary artist.

THE DINING-ROOM.

Guest. How perverse fate is in this
respect! It seems as if there were a
conspiracy to show up the most dramatic
scenes
either just before
we come
into the audience
or just
after we have
left. But, take
it all in all, I
suppose the
material we are
best fitted to
make use of is
the kind that
sooner or later
comes in our
way. We only
take what we
can easiest assimilate;
the
novelist his
own proper
food, the essayist
another sort,
the writer of
verse the “cud
of sweet and
bitter fancies,”
most likely.
Have I asked
a great many
questions? I
want to ask
just one more—have you ever written
any poetry? It is a pet theory of mine
that everybody has, at some time or
other, made verses because he couldn’t
help it—it’s instinctive! Now for a
clean confession.

Host. Let me see. Yes, now I remember
one such effort. I devised a
poem, and two lines at the beginning
of it and two lines at the end of it came
readily into my mind. But I had only
written two or three lines when a breeze
came up and blew my paper away.

477

Guest. Lost, like
the Sibylline books!
Do you remember
what the lines were?

Host. Only the
first two and the
last two, which had
been in my mind for
some time. Those
I put on paper are
entirely gone.

Guest. Can you
give me the lines
and the intervening
argument?

Host. The poem
began thus:

The story then proceeded to the effect
that Sir Cupid and I walked through
the narrow alleys side by side, while
Miss Jane always flitted some distance
in front, and would never stop that I
might overtake her. I entreated her
to wait for me, but she always laughed,
and declined, hurrying on, sometimes
picking a white rose, sometimes a red,
and always answering, when she spoke
at all, that the paths were not wide
enough for three. After a good deal
of this fruitless chase I became disheartened,
and, with my companion,
Sir Cupid, left the garden. The poem
concluded thus:

Now, will you not take these lines and
these ideas and finish the poem?[1] I
shall never be able to do it.

Guest. Ah! Those Sibylline leaves
should have blown into the hands of a
Dobson. But we’ll try at restoring the
lost passages.

Host. The experiment may lead to
great things. I almost think I see a
new volume, with the title, “Collaborative
Verses,” etc. And now choose
whether you will go for a drive to
Green Village or to the Black Meadows.

A Gentle Voice of Deprecation. Oh!
don’t take her to Green Village! There
isn’t anything remarkable there. She
will like the Black Meadows much
more.

VIEW FROM A WINDOW IN THE TOWER.

Guest. Yes, there might be adventures
in such a region. And I want to
put in a plea to be taken to that sylvan
road where you saw the original
sign of the Squirrel Inn.

Host. Well, it shall be to the Black
Meadows, and so, on!

478

“INCURABLE”
A GHETTO TRAGEDY

By I. Zangwill,
Author of “Children of the Ghetto.”

There was a restless air about the
Refuge. In a few minutes the
friends of the patients would be admitted.
The incurables would hear
the latest gossip of the Ghetto, for the
world was still very much with these
abortive lives, avid of sensations,
Jewish to the end. It was an unpretentious
institution—two corner houses
knocked together—near the east lung
of London; supported mainly by the
poor at a penny a week, and scarcely
recognized by the rich, so that paraplegia
and vertigo and rachitis and a
dozen other hopeless diseases knocked
hopelessly at its narrow portals. But
it was a model institution all the same,
and the patients lacked for nothing except
freedom from pain. There was
even a miniature synagogue for their
spiritual needs, with the women’s compartment
religiously railed off from
the men’s, as if these grotesque ruins
of sex might still distract each other’s
devotions.

Yet the rabbis knew human nature.
The sprightly hydrocephalous paralytic,
Leah, had had the chair she inhabited
carried down into the men’s
sitting-room to beguile the moments,
and was smiling fascinatingly upon the
deaf blind man who had the Braille
Bible at his fingers’ ends, and read on
as stolidly as St. Anthony. Mad Mo
had strolled vacuously into the ladies’
ward, and, indifferent to the pretty,
white-aproned Christian nurses, was
loitering by the side of a weird, hatchet-faced
cripple, with a stiletto-shaped
nose supporting big spectacles. Like
most of the patients, she was up and
dressed. Only a few of the white pallets
ranged along the walls were occupied.

“Leah says she’d be quite happy if
she could walk like you,” said Mad
Mo, in complimentary tones. “She
always says Milly walks so beautiful.
She says you can walk the whole
length of the garden.” Milly, huddled
in her chair, smiled miserably.

“You’re crying again, Rachel,” protested
a dark-eyed, bright-faced dwarf,
in excellent English, as she touched
her friend’s withered hand. “You are
in the blues again. Why, that page is
all blistered.”

“No, I feel so nice,” said the sad-eyed
Russian in her quaint, musical
accent, “You sall not tink I cry because479
I am not happy. When I read
sad tings—like my life—den only I am
happy.”

The dwarf gave a short laugh that
made her pendant earrings oscillate.
“I thought you were brooding over
your love affairs,” she said.

“Me!” cried Rachel. “I lost too
young my leg to be in love. No, it is
Psalm lxxxviii that I brood over. ‘I
am afflicted and ready to die from my
youth up.’ Yes, I
was only a girl
when I had to go
to Königsberg to
find a doctor to
cut off my leg.
‘Lover and friend
hast thou put far
from me, and mine
acquaintance into
darkness.’”

Her face shone
ecstatic.

“Hush!” whispered
the dwarf,
with a warning
nudge and a slight
nod in the direction
of a neighboring
waterbed, on
which a pale, rigid,
middle-aged woman
lay with shut,
sleepless eyes.

“Se cannot understand
Englis,”
said the Russian
girl, proudly.

“Don’t be so
sure. Look how
the nurses here
have picked up
Yiddish!”

Rachel shook her head incredulously.
“Sarah is a Polis’ woman,” she said.
“For years dey are in England and
dey learn noding.”

“Ich bin krank! Krank! Krank!”
suddenly moaned a shrivelled Polish
grandmother, as if to corroborate the
girl’s contention. She was squatting
monkey-like on her bed, every now and
again murmuring her querulous burden
of sickness, and jabbering at the
nurses to shut all the windows. Fresh
air she objected to as vehemently as if
it were butter or some other heterodox
dainty.

Hard upon her crooning came blood-curdling
screams from the room above,
sounds that reminded the visitor he
was not in a Barnum show, that the
monstrosities were genuine. Pretty
Sister Margaret—not yet indurated—thrilled
with pity, as before her inner
vision rose the ashen, perspiring face
of the palsied sufferer, who sat quivering
all the long day in an easy-chair,
her swollen, jelly-like hands resting on
cotton-wool pads, an air pillow between
her knees, her whole frame racked at
frequent intervals by fierce spasms of
pain, her only diversion faint, blurred
reflections of episodes of the street in
the glass of a framed picture: yet
morbidly suspicious of slow poison in
her drink, and cursed with an incurable
vitality.

Meantime Sarah lay silent, bitter
thoughts moving beneath her white,480
impassive face like salt tides below a
frozen surface. It was a strong, stern
face, telling of a present of pain and
faintly hinting of a past of prettiness.
She seemed alone in the populated
ward, and, indeed, the world was bare
for her. Most of her life had been
spent in the Warsaw Ghetto, where she
was married at sixteen, nineteen years
before. Her only surviving son—a
youth whom the English atmosphere
had not improved—had sailed away to
trade with the Kafirs. And her husband
had not been to see her for a
fortnight.

When the visitors began to arrive
her torpor vanished. She eagerly
raised the half of her that was not
paralyzed, partially sitting up. But
gradually expectation died out of her
large gray eyes. There was a buzz of
talk in the room—the hydrocephalous
girl was the gay centre of a group;
the Polish grandmother who cursed her
grandchildren when they didn’t come,
and when they did, was denouncing
their neglect of her to their faces;
everybody had somebody to kiss or
quarrel with. One or two acquaintances
approached the bed-ridden wife,
too, but she would speak no word, too
proud to ask after her husband, and
wincing under the significant glances
occasionally cast in her direction. By
and by she had the red screen placed
round her bed, which gave her artificial
walls and a quasi-privacy. Her husband
would know where to look for her.

“Woe is me!” wailed her octogenarian
countrywoman, rocking to and
fro. “What sin have I committed to
get such grandchildren? You only
come to see if the old grandmother
isn’t dead yet. So sick! So sick! So
sick!”

Twilight filled the wards. The white
beds looked ghostly in the darkness.
The last visitor departed. Sarah’s
husband had not yet come.

“He is not well, Mrs. Kretznow,”
Sister Margaret ventured to say in her
best Yiddish. “Or he is busy working.
Work is not so slack any more.”
Alone in the institution she shared
Sarah’s ignorance of the Kretznow
scandal. Talk of it died before her
youth and sweetness.

“He would have written,” said Sarah,
sternly. “He is wearied of me. I
have lain here a year. Job’s curse is
on me.”

“Shall I to him,” Sister Margaret
paused to excogitate the word, “write?”

“No. He hears me knocking at his
heart.”

They had flashes of strange savage
poetry, these crude yet complex
souls. Sister Margaret, who was still
liable to be startled, murmured feebly,
“But——”

“Leave me in peace!” with a cry
like that of a wounded animal.

The matron gently touched the novice’s
arm, and drew her away. “I will
write to him,” she whispered.

Night fell, but sleep fell only for
some. Sarah Kretznow tossed in a hell
of loneliness. Ah, surely her husband
had not forgotten her; surely she would
not lie thus till death—that far-off death
her strong religious instinct would forbid
her hastening! She had gone into
the Refuge to save him the constant
sight of her helplessness and the cost
of her keep. Was she now to be cut
off forever from the sight of his
strength?

The next day he came by special invitation.
His face was sallow, rimmed
with swarthy hair; his under lip was
sensuous. He hung his head, half veiling
the shifty eyes.

Sister Margaret ran to tell his wife.
Sarah’s face sparkled.

“Put up the screen!” she murmured,
and in its shelter drew her husband’s
head to her bosom and pressed
her lips to his hair.

But he, surprised into indiscretion,
murmured: “I thought thou wast dying.”

A beautiful light came into the gray
eyes.

“Thy heart told thee right, Herzel,
my life, I was dying for a sight of
thee.”

“But the matron wrote to me pressingly,”
he blurted out.

He felt her breast heave convulsively
under his face; with her hands she
thrust him away.

“God’s fool that I am—I should
have known; to-day is not visiting
day. They have compassion on me—they481
see my sorrows—it is public
talk.”

His pulse seemed to stop. “They
have talked to thee of me,” he faltered.

“I did not ask their pity. But they
saw how I suffered—one cannot hide
one’s heart.”

“They have no right to talk,” he
muttered, in sulky trepidation.

“They have every right,” she rejoined,
sharply. “If thou hadst come
to see me even once—why hast thou
not?”

“I—I—have been travelling in the
country with cheap jewelry. The tailoring
is so slack.”

“Look me in the eyes! The law
of Moses? No; it is a lie. God shall
forgive thee. Why hast thou not
come?”

“I have told thee.”

“Tell that to the Sabbath fire-woman!
Why hast thou not come?
Is it so very much to spare me an hour
or two a week? If I could go out like
some of the patients, I would come to
thee. But I have tired thee out utterly——”

“No, no, Sarah,” he murmured uneasily.

“Then why——”

He was covered with shame and confusion.
His face was turned away. “I
did not like to come,” he said desperately.

“Why not?” Crimson patches came
and went on the white cheeks; her
heart beat madly.

“Surely thou canst understand?”

“Understand what? I speak of
green and thou answerest of blue.”

“I answer as thou askest.”

“Thou answerest not at all.”

“No answer is also an answer,” he
snarled, driven to bay. “Thou understandest
well enough. Thyself saidst
it was public talk.”

“Ah-h-h!” in a stifled shriek of
despair. Her intuition divined everything.
The shadowy, sinister suggestions
she had so long beat back by
force of will took form and substance.
Her head fell back on the pillow, the
eyes closed.

He stayed on, bending awkwardly
over her.

“So sick! So sick! So sick!”
moaned the grandmother.

“Thou sayest they have compassion
on thee in their talk,” he murmured at
last, half deprecatingly, half resentfully.
“Have they none on me?”

Her silence chilled him. “But thou
hast compassion, Sarah,” he urged.
“Thou understandest.”

Presently she reopened her eyes.

“Thou art not gone?” she murmured.

“No; thou seest I am not tired of
thee, Sarah, my life. Only——”

“Wilt thou wash my skin and not
make me wet?” she interrupted bitterly.
“Go home. Go home to her!”

“I will not go home.”

“Then go under like Korah.”

He shuffled out. That night her
lonely hell was made lonelier by the
opening of a peephole into paradise—a
paradise of Adam and Eve and forbidden
fruit. For days she preserved
a stony silence toward the sympathy
of the inmates. Of what avail words
against the flames of jealousy in which
she writhed?

He lingered about the passage on
the next visiting day, vaguely remorseful;
but she would not see him. So he
went away sulkily indignant, and his
new housemate comforted him, and he
came no more.

When you lie on your back all day
and all night, you have time to think,
especially if you do not sleep. A situation
presents itself in many lights
from dawn to dusk, and from dusk to
dawn. One such light flashed on the
paradise and showed it to her as but
the portico of purgatory. Her husband
would be damned in the next
world, even as she was in this. His
soul would be cut off from among its
people.

On this thought she brooded till it
loomed horribly in her darkness. And
at last she dictated a letter to the
matron, asking Herzel to come and
see her.

He obeyed, and stood shame-faced
at her side, fidgeting with his peaked
cap. Her hard face softened momentarily
at the sight of him, her bosom
heaved, suppressed sobs swelled her
throat.

482

“Thou hast sent for me?” he murmured.

“Yes; perhaps thou didst again
imagine I was on my deathbed?” she
replied, with bitter irony.

“It is not so, Sarah. I would have
come of myself, only thou wouldst
not see my face.”

“I have seen it for twenty years—it
is another’s turn now.”

He was silent.

“It is true all the same. I am on
my deathbed.”

He started. A pang shot through
his breast. He darted an agitated
glance at her face.

“Is it not so? In this bed I shall
die. But God knows how many years
I shall lie in it.”

Her calm gave him an uncanny
shudder.

“And till the Holy One, blessed be
He, takes me, thou wilt live a daily
sinner.”

“I am not to blame. God has
stricken me. I am a young man.”

“Thou art to blame!” Her eyes
flashed fire. “Blasphemer! Life is
sweet to thee, yet perhaps thou wilt
die first.”

His face grew livid.

“I am a young man,” he repeated
tremulously.

“Thou dost forget what Rabbi
Eliezer said: ‘Repent one day before
thy death’—that is to-day, for who
knows?”

“What wouldst thou have me do?”

“Give up——”

“No, no,” he interrupted. “It is
useless. I cannot. I am so lonely.”

“Give up,” she repeated inexorably,
“thy wife.”

“What sayest thou? My wife! But
she is not my wife. Thou art my
wife.”

“Even so. Give me up. Give me
Gett [divorce].”

483

His breath failed, his heart thumped
at the suggestion.

“Give thee Gett!” he whispered.

“Yes. Why didst thou not send me
a bill of divorcement when I left thy
home for this?”

He averted his face. “I thought of
it,” he stammered. “And then——”

“And then?” He seemed to see a
sardonic glitter in the gray eyes.

“I—I was afraid.”

“Afraid!” She laughed in grim
mirthlessness. “Afraid of a bed-ridden
woman!”

“I was afraid it would make thee
unhappy.” The sardonic gleam melted
into softness, then became more terrible
than before.

“And so thou hast made me happy
instead!”

“Stab me not more than I merit. I
did not think people would be cruel
enough to tell thee.”

“Thine own lips told me.”

“Nay, by my soul,” he cried, startled.

“Thine eyes told me, then.”

“I feared so,” he said, turning
them away. “When she—came into
my house, I—I dared not go to see
thee—that was why I did not come,
though I always meant to, Sarah, my
life. I feared to look thee in the eyes.
I foresaw they would read the secret
in mine—so I was afraid.”

“Afraid!” she repeated, bitterly.
“Afraid I would scratch them out!
Nay, they are good eyes. Have they
not seen my heart? For twenty years
they have been my light. Those eyes
and mine have seen our children die.”

Spasmodic sobs came thickly now.
Swallowing them down, she said:
“And she—did she not ask thee to
give me Gett?”

“Nay; she was willing to go without.
She said thou wast as one dead—look
not thus at me. It is the will of
God. It was for thy sake, too, Sarah,
that she did not become my wife by
law. She, too, would have spared thee
the knowledge of her.”

“Yes, ye have both tender hearts!
She is a mother in Israel, and thou art
a spark of our father Abraham.”

“Thou dost not believe what I say?”

“I can disbelieve it and still remain
a Jewess.” Then, satire boiling over
into passion, she cried, vehemently:
“We are threshing empty ears.
Thinkst thou I am not aware of the
judgments—I, the granddaughter of
Reb Shloumi? Thinkst thou I am ignorant
thou couldst not obtain a Gett
against me—me, who have borne thee
children, who have wrought no evil?
I speak not of the Beth-Din, for in this
impious country they are loath to follow
the judgments, and from the English
Beth-Din thou wouldst find it impossible
to obtain the Gett in any case,
even though thou didst not marry me
in this country, nor according to its
laws. I speak of our own Rabbonim—thou
knowest even the Maggid would
not give thee Gett merely because thy
wife is bed-ridden. That—that is what
thou wast afraid of.”

“But if thou art willing,” he replied,
eagerly, ignoring her scornful scepticism.

His readiness to accept the sacrifice
was salt upon her wounds.

“Thou deservest I should let thee
burn in the lowest Gehenna,” she
cried.

“The Almighty is more merciful
than thou,” he answered. “It is He
that hath ordained it is not good for
man to live alone; and yet men shun
me—people talk—and she—she may
leave me to my loneliness again.” His
voice faltered with self-pity. “Here
thou hast friends, nurses, visitors. I—I
have nothing. True, thou didst bear
me children, but they withered as by
the evil eye. My only son is across
the ocean; he hath no love for me or
you.”

The recital of their common griefs
softened her toward him.

“Go,” she whispered. “Go and send
me the Gett. Go to the Maggid; he
knew my grandfather. He is the man
to arrange it for thee with his friends.
Tell him it is my wish.”

“God shall reward thee. How can
I thank thee for giving thy consent?”

“What else have I to give thee, my
Herzel, I, who eat the bread of strangers?
Truly says the proverb: ‘When
one begs of a beggar, the Herr God
laughs!’”

“I will send thee the Gett as soon
as possible.”

484

“Thou art right, I am a thorn in
thine eye. Pluck me out quickly.”

“Thou wilt not refuse the Gett when
it comes?” he replied, apprehensively.

“Is it not a wife’s duty to submit?
Nay, have no fear. Thou shalt have
no difficulty in serving the Gett upon
me. I will not throw it in the messenger’s
face. And thou wilt marry
her?”

“Assuredly. People will no longer
talk. And she must bide with me. It
is my one desire.”

“It is mine likewise. Thou must
atone and save thy soul.”

He lingered uncertainly.

“And thy dowry?” he said at last.
“Thou wilt not make claim for compensation?”

“Be easy—I scarce know where my
cesubah [marriage certificate] is. What
need have I of money? As thou sayest,
I have all I want. I do not even desire
to purchase a grave—lying already so
long in a charity grave. The bitterness
is over.”

He shivered. “Thou art very good
to me,” he said. “Good-by.”

He stooped down; she drew the bedclothes
frenziedly over her face.

“Kiss me not!”

“Good-by, then,” he stammered.
“God be good to thee!” He moved
away.

“Herzel!” She had uncovered her
face with a despairing cry. He slouched
back toward her, perturbed, dreading
she would retract.

“Do not send it—bring it thyself.
Let me take it from thy hand.”

A lump rose in his throat. “I will
bring it,” he said, brokenly.

The long days of pain grew longer;
the summer was coming, harbingered
by sunny days, that flooded the wards
with golden mockery. The evening
Herzel brought the Gett, Sarah could
have read every word on the parchment485
plainly if her eyes had not been
blinded by tears.

She put out her hand toward her
husband, groping for the document he
bore. He placed it in her burning
palm. The fingers closed automatically
upon it, then relaxed, and the paper
fluttered to the floor. But Sarah
was no longer a wife.

Herzel was glad to hide his burning
face by stooping for the fallen bill of
divorcement. He was long picking it
up. When his eyes met hers again,
she had propped herself up in her bed.
Two big round tears trickled down
her cheeks, but she received the parchment
calmly, and thrust it into her
bosom.

“Let it lie there,” she said stonily,
“there, where thy head hath lain.
Blessed be the true Judge!”

“Thou art not angry with me,
Sarah?”

“Why should I be angry? She was
right—I am but a dead woman. Only
no one may say Kaddish for me—no
one may pray for the repose of my
soul. I am not angry, Herzel. A
wife should light the Sabbath candles,
and throw in the fire the morsel of
dough. But thy house was desolate;
there was none to do these things.
Here I have all I need. Now thou
wilt be happy, too.”

“Thou hast been a good wife,
Sarah,” he murmured, touched.

“Recall not the past, we are strangers
now,” she said, with recurrent
harshness.

“But I may come and see thee—sometimes?”
He had stirrings of remorse
as the moment of final parting
came.

“Wouldst thou reopen my wounds?”

“Farewell, then.”

He put out his hand timidly. She
seized it and held it passionately.

“Yes, yes, Herzel! Do not leave
me! Come and see me here—as a
friend, an acquaintance, a man I used
to know. The others are thoughtless—they
forget me—I shall lie here—perhaps
the Angel of Death will forget
me, too.” Her grasp tightened
till it hurt him acutely.

“Yes, I will come—I will come often,”
he said, with a sob of physical pain.

Her clasp loosened. She dropped
his hand.

“But not till thou art married,” she
said.

“Be it so.”

“Of course, thou must have a ‘still
wedding.’ The English Synagogue will
not marry thee.”

“The Maggid will marry me.”

“Thou wilt show me her cesubah
when thou comest next?”

“Yes, I will borrow it of her.”

A week passed. He brought the
marriage certificate.

Outwardly she was calm. She
glanced through it.

“God be thanked!” she said, and
handed it back.

They chatted of indifferent things,
of the doings of the neighbors. When
he was going she said: “Thou wilt
come again?”

“Yes, I will come again.”

“Thou art so good to spend thy
time on me thus. But thy wife. Will
she not be jealous?”

He stared, bewildered by her strange,
eery moments.

“Jealous of thee!” he murmured.

She took it in its contemptuous
sense, and her white lips twitched.
But she only said: “Is she aware thou
hast come here?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Do I
know? I have not told her.”

“Tell her.”

“As thou wishest.”

There was a pause. Presently the
woman spoke.

“Wilt thou not bring her to see
me? Then she will know that thou
hast no love left for me.”

He flinched as at a stab. After a
painful moment he said, “Art thou
in earnest?”

“I am no marriage jester. Bring
her to me. Will she not come to see
an invalid? It is a Mitzvah [good
deed] to visit the sick. It will wipe
out her trespass.”

“She shall come.”

She came. Sarah stared at her for
an instant with poignant curiosity;
then her eyelids drooped to shut out
the dazzle of her youth and freshness.
Herzel’s wife moved awkwardly and
sheepishly. But she was beautiful; a486
buxom, comely country girl from a
Russian village, with a swelling bust
and a cheek rosy with health and confusion.

Sarah’s breast was racked by a thousand
needles; but she found breath at
last.

“God bless—thee, Mrs.—Kretznow,”
she said gaspingly. She took
the girl’s hand. “How good thou art
to come and see a sick creature!”

“My husband willed it,” the new
wife said, in clumsy deprecation. She
had a simple, stupid air that did not
seem wholly due to the constraint of
the strange situation.

“Thou wast right to obey. Be good
to him, my child. For three years he
waited on me, when I lay helpless. He
has suffered much. Be good to him!”

With an impulsive movement she
drew the girl’s head down to her and
kissed her on the lips. Then, with an
anguished cry of “Leave me for to-day!”
she jerked the blanket over her
face and burst into tears. She heard
the couple move hesitatingly away.
The girl’s beauty shone on her through
the opaque coverings.

“O God!” she wailed, “God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, let me die
now! For the merits of the patriarchs
take me soon, take me soon!”

Her vain, passionate prayer, muffled
by the bedclothes, was wholly drowned
by ear-piercing shrieks from the ward
above—screams of agony mingled
with half-articulate accusations of attempted
poisoning—the familiar paroxysm
of the palsied woman who
clung to life.

The thrill passed again through Sister
Margaret. She uplifted her sweet,
humid eyes.

“Ah, Christ!” she whispered, “if
I could die for her!”

487

“HUMAN DOCUMENTS.”
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES.

488

A. CONAN DOYLE.

AGE 4.

AGE 14.

AGE 22.

AGE 28.

A. CONAN DOYLE IN 1892. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY ELLIOTT & DOYLE, LONDON.

489

R. E. PEARY, C. E., U. S. N.

AGE 3.

AGE 22. 1875.

490

AGE 31. 1884.

AGE 33. 1886.

AGE 36. 1889.

491

CAMILLE FLAMMARION.

AGE 18.

AGE 22.

TO-DAY.

492

F. HOPKINSON SMITH.

AGE 17.

AGE 25.

AGE 45.

TO-DAY.

493

THE PERSONAL FORCE OF CLEVELAND.

By E. Jay Edwards.

In his eulogium upon President Garfield,
Mr. Blaine touched with impressive
emphasis upon the rapidity
with which honors came to him. Within
six years after Williams College had
sent Garfield forth equipped, “he was
successively president of a college,
State Senator of Ohio, Major-General
of the Army of the United States, and
a Representative-elect to the national
Congress. A combination of honors
so varied, so elevated, within a period
so brief and to a man so young, is
without precedent or parallel in the
history of the country.”

Those whose privilege it was to hear
that matchless eulogy will not forget
the meaning glance with which Mr.
Blaine, lifting his eyes from his manuscript,
swept that splendid company
before him, the President and his Cabinet,
the Justices of the Supreme Court,
in their silken robes, the deliberate
Senate and impetuous House, and the
remaining distinguished heroes of the
war, in brilliant uniform, as though
saying to them, “You at least can understand
how wonderful a thing it is to
so speedily gain such honors as these.”

Yet before the echoes of this eulogy
had ceased, a political career had been
begun which was to be more marvellous
in its successes and the celerity
of its successive achievements than
that of Garfield. Within ten years
after Mr. Blaine pronounced this eulogy,
a man then unknown beyond the
city in which he lived had been chosen
Governor of New York by a plurality
unparalleled in the history of any
State; had stepped from that office
before its term was ended to the chair
of the Chief Executive of the nation,
and had again been elected to the
presidency; and elected the second
time while a private citizen—an unmatched
political honor.

The swiftly succeeding successes of
Garfield are no longer unparalleled and
unprecedented; that distinction is now
Grover Cleveland’s. Carrying a torch
as a private in evening campaign processions
in 1880, he was to be four
years later the successful presidential
candidate of his party. He had gained
no distinction for subtle or extraordinary
strategy; he had not sat as a
member in a legislative hall; his name
had been associated with no important
measure conceived and executed for
public good; not of social inclination,
not greatly learned, possessing no wide
acquaintance, and having somewhat
limited experience, he, nevertheless, revealed
himself to the American people
within the short space of two years as
a man of extraordinary personal force,
the quality of which is a puzzling mystery,
which men of intellectual power
seem to find a fascination in trying to
analyze.

What is this mysterious and impressive
quality? We may tell its manifestations;
its influence has made history.

“What is it that is so impressive and
overwhelming about your friend Governor
Cleveland?” said a distinguished
politician to the late Daniel Manning,
at a time when Mr. Manning was with
great skill directing the politics that
had Cleveland’s first presidential nomination
in view.

“I do not know what it is, but I
know that it is there,” was Mr. Manning’s
reply.

“My political intuitions are infallible,”
said Governor Tilden, after a
single interview with Mr. Cleveland;
“and I am of opinion that this man is
of somewhat coarse mental fibre and
disposition, but of great force and
stubbornly honest in his convictions.”

“His name should be Petros,” Mr.
Blaine once said of Mr. Cleveland,
“for when he has once formed opinions494
he stands upon them with the
firmness of a granite foundation.”

It would be possible to quote many
similar opinions uttered by able men
who have had opportunity to see and
study Mr. Cleveland. Some of these
opinions do not wholly compliment
Cleveland’s mental powers. But all of
the opinions, whether uttered by political
friends or enemies, have this in common:
they express amazement, not so
much at the swift successes of his career,
as for that mystic personal quality
which has made him able to hold
the politicians of his party in the hollow
of his hand, to defy political conventionalities,
to break down machines,
and, above all, to gain the confidence
of the American people. This personal
quality, which has given him
these victories, he seems to have furnished
no hint of in his childhood or
youth. Before he came to his majority
he must have led an unimpressive life,
for those who knew him in those early
days have no anecdote to tell of him
which suggests that anything he did
or said was of uncommon quality.

GROVER CLEVELAND. FROM THE LATEST PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN BY PACK BROTHERS OF NEW YORK.

The Buffalo bar at that time was a
brilliant one. The leaders of it were
men of great ambition. It would have
been impossible for a young man, and
especially for a young Democrat, to
have gained influence with those men
had there not been even then some
personal quality which won their respect;
and Mr. Cleveland gained a
great measure of respect while he was
still a very young man, and he seems
to have been able to form close and
permanent intimacies with young men
whose advantage in beginning life had
been much greater than his. He passed
swiftly from the ranks of the poor law-student
to the companionship of such
men.

When young Bissell, fresh from his
successful career at Yale College,
blessed with some wealth, and possessing
all the advantages which gentle
social relations give, returned to Buffalo
from his college life, one of his
closest intimacies was developed with
Grover Cleveland. Mr. Folsom, one
of the brightest men at the Buffalo
bar, must have been early impressed495
by this quality of Cleveland’s, for he
took the young man into partnership,
and before Cleveland was thirty years
of age he had established, with men of
intellectual power, a standing not due
to unusual mental gifts, but to this
same personal quality which has made
him conspicuous above other Americans
for the past twelve years.

In 1884, after Mr. Cleveland’s nomination
for the presidency, President Arthur
was asked if he knew the man whom
the Democratic party had nominated.

“I know him slightly, and have heard
much of him,” was the President’s reply.
“I know that he is a good companion
among the rather worldly men at the
Buffalo bar, or was when he was there;
but I also know this of him: he is a man
of splendid moral fibre, and I have been
told that his fidelity to his convictions
and professional duties is regarded by
his associates at the Buffalo bar as
something wonderful. I do not think
that he is a man of strong, original
mind, but he is the faithfullest man to
what he believes to be right and his
duty that his party has—at least in
New York State.”

Roscoe Conkling, not long after Mr.
Cleveland’s nomination, was asked if
he knew the Democratic candidate,
and Mr. Conkling replied, with more
of emphasis than he was accustomed
to employ in speaking of any public
man at that time:

“I do not know much about Mr.
Cleveland as a politician, but my impression
is that he is no politician, as
the word is commonly understood.
But I do know this about him. As
a lawyer he prepares his cases well, as
thoroughly, perhaps, as any man whom
I have known in my practice.”

Mr. Manning said, after he had retired
from Mr. Cleveland’s cabinet:

“Whatever may be said of the President
as to his relations with the politicians,
this much must be said, that he
has never done anything since he has
been in the White House for any selfish,
personal motive, and that he is
the most conscientious man in his
adherence to what he believes to be
his duty, and in his attempts to make
out his duty when he is not entirely
clear about it, that I have ever seen;
and I do not believe any President
has ever exceeded him in these respects.”

One of the greater powers in one of
the greatest railway systems of the
United States, not long ago meeting a
company of friends at a private dinner
in the Union League Club, sat for some
time listening to the very interesting
and acute analyses of Cleveland which
were made by many brilliant men who
were in that party.

This railway prince, for that word
justly describes him, at last said:

“I do not think any of you has
touched upon what is, after all, the
quality which has made Mr. Cleveland
what he is in American politics. I had
some reason to know wherein his power
lies, at a time when he probably had
no other thought of his future than
the expectation of earning a competence
at the bar. It so happened that
I was associated with certain litigations
in which Mr. Cleveland was employed
as counsel. He was not employed
either for or against the
interests which I represented, for they
were merely incidental to these suits.
I was amazed, after a little experience
with him, to see the way in which he
worked. I thought I had seen hard
work and patient fidelity, but I never
saw a lawyer so patient and so faithful
to his clients as Cleveland was. I remember
speaking about it to an eminent
lawyer who has since become a
judge, and he told me that Grover
Cleveland was the most conscientious
man in his relations with his clients
that he had ever met. I spoke of it to
somebody else, and that man told me
that Cleveland had once actually lost
a case by over-conscientiousness and
too thorough preparation. He had
examined his witnesses so persistently
and exhaustively in private, and had
pursued the case in all its details with
such supreme drudgery, that when his
witnesses went upon the stand their
testimony seemed to the jury to be
almost parrot-like; to be so glib, so
perfectly consistent, that it seemed as
though there must be a weakness in
the case, and that such perfection must
have come from rehearsals. For that
reason the jury decided against him,496
although he won the case afterwards
on appeal.

“Now, I am satisfied that it is just
this quality in that man which made it
possible for him, in Buffalo, where the
Republican party was predominant, to
gain minor political victories, and it certainly
was that which brought to him
such Republican support as enabled him
to carry the city in a mayoralty election.
We have been seeing just this
thing manifested throughout the country
since Cleveland became prominent.
There probably never was a President
since Washington who so completely
gained the confidence of a great element
in the opposing party as Mr.
Cleveland has done; and you can’t
explain it in any other way than that
just as in Buffalo, in his professional
struggles, or in political contests, he
was believed to be a faithful man, rigid
and true in his convictions; so the opinion
has spread throughout the United
States, and is entertained by a great
many members of the opposing political
party, that here is a man who is absolutely
true to his own convictions and
who is faithful to his responsibilities as
he understands them. Now, I have seen
enough of American politics to know
that while our people admire talent,
and sometimes go into spasms of enthusiasm
over men who have emotional
qualities which appeal to the masses,
and which make them personally popular,
yet, after all, there is an abiding
faith in sincerity, fidelity, and character
which compels the American masses to
choose the man who has these qualities
rather than that one who has brilliant
talents; and I think there is no
doubt that it was a latent suspicion
that Mr. Blaine did not always possess
that higher character, while endowed
with far more brilliant genius than Mr.
Cleveland possesses, which caused the
people to choose Cleveland rather than
Blaine in 1884.”

We had some indication that this
railway prince was correct in his estimate,
at a time during the past summer
when Mr. Cleveland was in some peril
of physical ailment. The greatest of
American advocates, himself an ardent
Republican, a man whom his party
would be delighted to honor if he
would permit it, having heard of Mr.
Cleveland’s illness, said to a friend:

“I am more deeply interested in
these reports about Mr. Cleveland’s
health than I can tell you. I have
every confidence in Mr. Cleveland’s
integrity of purpose, and in the sincerity
of his desire to lift these financial
questions above the range of partisanship,
and it would be a terrible
misfortune for this country if he were
to be disabled by illness at this time.”

This from a man who did not vote
for Cleveland, who had never met him
more than once or twice, but who
had intuitively recognized that quality
which is Cleveland’s power. Again,
another man, one of preëminent genius
in the world of finance, a very strong
Republican, having also heard that
Mr. Cleveland was seriously ill, went
to a friend who had intimacy with the
President, and said:

“I wish you would find out for me
whether it is true that the President is
in danger. I have heard that it is so,
and if it is, it is the blackest cloud
upon our horizon to-day. I did not
vote for Mr. Cleveland, for I do not
believe in some of the principles of his
party, and I do not agree with him in
some of his views. Yet if he had been
the candidate of my party I would
gladly have voted for him, for I think
he is the most conscientious man I
ever knew. I have perfect faith in his
fidelity to his sense of duty, and I
have never seen an action of his as
President which I thought was inspired
simply by a desire for partisan
advantage. I think he is the faithfullest
public man that we have had since
Lincoln in his adherence to his convictions.”

There is only one word that will
give a name to this quality that distinguishes
Mr. Cleveland, and that is,
Character—that quality which Emerson
describes as a reserve force
which acts directly and without means,
whose essence, with Mr. Cleveland, is
the courage of truth.

Not long ago a group of notable
men were discussing Cleveland as a
politician, and they seemed to be
agreed that in the sense in which the
word “politician” is customarily used497
he is not a man of remarkable ability,
and there were anecdotes told to justify
such opinion as that. His nomination
for governor was the result
of as purely political manipulation as
New York State has ever seen, but he
had no part in it. Those who were
sincerely urging his nomination permitted
him to take no part in these
politics, for they had learned that he
was possessed of two weaknesses as a
politician, which, unless he were restrained,
would be likely to defeat
their plans: one of them the political
fault of honesty. It was displayed in
Buffalo once, when, it being proposed
to nominate him for mayor, and the
ticket agreed upon having been shown
to him, he declared, with expressions
more emphatic than pious, that he
would not permit his name to go on
the ticket upon which was the name of
a certain man whom he believed to be
unworthy, although this man had great
political influence.

Another weakness, from the politicians’
point of view, is a seeming incapacity
to understand the need of
organization in political work. It is
not only incapacity to understand the
need, but also ignorance of the way
in which organization can be effected.
It has been revealed in all of Mr.
Cleveland’s campaigns. After his election
as Governor of New York by a
plurality of nearly two hundred thousand,
his availability as a presidential
candidate was recognized, and, later,
was strengthened by the assurance that
his messages while Mayor of Buffalo
had brought him the respect and confidence
of the independent element;
yet Mr. Cleveland’s friends very soon
discovered that if they were to bring
about his nomination for President, it
must be done through organization of
which he was either ignorant or to
which he would be indifferent. So
Mr. Cleveland had almost no part in
that splendid game of 1884. He knew
almost nothing of those things which
were being done for him. Mr. Manning
and the others had taken him up
at first because of his availability; but
Mr. Manning soon discovered that a
man might be available and still be
as ignorant of the science of politics,
as understood by those who make it a
professional pursuit, as a child.

After Mr. Cleveland became President,
he sometimes drove his friends
almost to distraction by his seeming
incapacity to understand movements
in the game of politics, which his
friends suggested to him. A number
of them went to him some time near
the middle of his term as President, to
set forth the political condition in New
York State. They were men of long
training and considerable achievement
in politics. They had made successes
both in New York City and New York
State. They spoke to him with freedom—some
of them with bluntness.
They said to Mr. Cleveland that the
then Governor of New York, Mr. Hill,
was constructing with unusual cunning
and consummate ability a political
machine which might not be friendly,
and was perhaps likely to be actively
hostile, to him; and then, with much
of detail, they showed Mr. Cleveland
how he could break down such organization,
utterly scatter it, and create
and maintain in New York State one
upon which he could rely with serenity.
The merest tyro in politics can easily
understand with what chagrin and
astonishment these friends departed
from his presence, because he did not
seem to have been impressed in the
slightest by their assertion that he was
in political danger in New York State,
and did not appear to comprehend the
methods which they suggested by which
the danger could be overcome.

Then again, in the spring and summer
of 1892, when it seemed for a time
as though the tide was setting against
his nomination, when it was certain
that the most powerful influence ever
arrayed against a leading candidate
for a presidential nomination had been
secured, and one which, according to
all precedent, would be successful, Mr.
Cleveland astonished and almost vexed
those friends of his who were working
in and out of season to bring about
his nomination, by professing indifference
to the opposition of the New
York State delegation, and of some of
the most powerful politicians in the
Democratic party. He had been at the
Victoria Hotel one evening, listening498
in an almost perfunctory way to the
plaints and warnings of his friends.
He had no suggestions to offer, no
advice to give. A stranger seeing him
there would have thought that he was
not one of that company holding this
consultation, but perhaps a friend, there
by chance, whose presence was not
offensive, and was therefore tolerated.

At last, complaining of the warmth
of the evening, he proposed a stroll;
then, taking two friends by their arms,
he walked slowly up Fifth Avenue, and
astonished them by saying:

“These things which you have told
me do not alarm me at all. They can
do their worst, and yet I shall be nominated
in spite of them.”

And, later on, after his prediction
was justified, and his name in the
Chicago Convention had triumphed
over all political precedent, and conquered
the most powerful and perfect
opposition ever arrayed against a candidate,
while there was still grumbling
and bitter feeling and revengeful
threats of New York State, he again
amazed these friends by saying to them,
when they proposed a certain form of
counter-organization to prevent treachery,
“No, no, do not do it. Let them
do their worst; I can be elected without
New York.”

At a time when the financial clouds
were gathering last spring, a little
company of politicians, who were personal
friends as well, called upon Mr.
Cleveland by appointment, and were
received in that upper chamber through
which for many days a persistent procession
filed before the President asking
for office. Mr. Cleveland planted
himself firmly for an instant before
each supplicant, so firmly that it almost
seemed to these friends of his standing
a little way off that his determination
to be persuaded by no appeal to emotion,
gratitude, friendship, or by any
other thing than fitness revealed itself
even in the rigidness of the muscles of
his body. Patiently listening to each
request and making perfunctory response,
the President then received the
next and then the next, and no man of
all that number who thus met him
knew whether his plea had met with
favor or refusal. At last the throng
was gone, the doors were closed, and
there came to the face of the President
a strange, hard look, tinged with something
of surprise, and turning to his
friends who remained he threw himself
wearily into his chair and was silent for
a moment. When he spoke there was
something of sadness, something of
reproach, in his tone and manner, and
he said:

“You have seen a picture which I
see every day, and you may now know
why it is that my ears must be deaf to
such appeals; why I scarcely hear the
words they speak; why I almost fear
that with most men who seek with
great persistence political office the
sense of truth is apt to be blunted, and
why, therefore, it is imperative for me
to be always suspicious.” Then the
President added, with something of indignation:

“But how any man who is a good
citizen can come to me now and plead
for office, when there is impending
financial calamity, I cannot understand.
Politics! Is it possible that the politicians
do not see that the best as well
as the imperative politics now is that
which will bring the country back to
financial prosperity?”

Some hours later, one of that company
had another glimpse of the President.
Washington was still for the
night. The White House was dark,
excepting for a light that burned in
the room where the President works.
At his desk sat the man who had said
in the morning that his ears were deaf
to the office-seekers’ appeals, and yet
with patient drudgery he was now examining
the indorsements and recommendations
of the different applicants,
as he had been doing for hours. Then,
taking up his pen, he began to write.
The pen seemed scarcely ever to
stop, and, watching through the partly
opened door that led into an outer
office, the President’s friend was reminded
by it of something which he
had read or heard. “Where have I
heard or seen something which that
sight brings to my memory?” he
asked himself. The impression remained
with him after he left Washington,
until at last, taking down from499
his library shelf a biography, he read
this passage:

“Since we sat down I have been
watching a hand which I see behind
the window of that room across the
street. It fascinates my eye; it never
stops. Page after page is finished and
put upon a heap of manuscript, and still
the hand goes on unwearied, and so
it will be till candles are brought, and
God knows how long after that. It is
the same every night. I well know
what hand it is—’tis Walter Scott’s.”

Cleveland is not, however, indifferent
to political organization. He believes
in it; he supports it. That
was revealed at the conference which
he held in October, 1892, in the Victoria
Hotel, with some of the leaders
of what is called the Democratic
machine in New York. Some time
there will be a revelation of what
was said and done there in all detail,
and it will furnish important light
upon Mr. Cleveland’s character as well
as his more purely political capacity.
This much is known: that he did there
and with emphasis maintain the right
and duty of party men to form associations,
to submit to discipline, and to
act by common agreement—in other
words, to use a colloquialism, he “recognized
the machine.” But he also
made one magnificent manifestation of
that higher quality of his which is his
character, for when there was something
like threatening intimation made
by one of those present, Mr. Cleveland
declared that rather than do the thing
that was asked of him he would withdraw
from the ticket, and the country
would know why he had withdrawn;
and, after he said that, he held those
men who had dared to make such intimation
of threat subdued and supple in
the hollow of his fist, from which condition
they have not strayed from that
day to this.

He would have been a failure in the
House of Representatives as a parliamentary
leader, probably a failure as a
debater. The parliamentary leader is
for his party always, right or wrong,
and Mr. Cleveland could never have
assumed command incurring such responsibilities
as that. His intellectual
processes are not quick enough for the
give and take of debate. Blaine or
Garfield, Randall or Thurman, would
have overmatched him. Probably no
member of either House has more
greatly interested him than Mr. Reed,
who in all respects, excepting personal
force, differs from him. Each has expressed
something of regard for the
personal qualities of the other, and
there has come to light a keen interest
in Mr. Cleveland’s eyes as friends
have described Reed, the parliamentary
leader and debater, to him. He
has never seen Reed standing in the
aisle just beyond his desk, a throng of
associates with hot, eager faces surrounding
him, he towering above them,
his head thrust slightly forward and
a little to one side, a half-whimsical,
half-defiant curl upon his lips, and the
sneer of the coming sarcasm already
betrayed by suggestive swelling of his
nostrils; or else with the placid, serene,
and tantalizing composure with which
he prepares to hurl an epigram, already
in his mind, at his antagonists. Nor
has Mr. Cleveland seen that readiness
to deliver almost tiger-like ferocity of
attack if it be needed. The black flag—no
quarter asked or given—hoisted
when necessary, that furious, all-controlling,
unconquerable determination
to win, to beat down opposition at all
hazards and any cost except outright
dishonor, straining even a little toward
unfair advantage when that and nothing
else will win, and expecting to
meet unfairness in return; bent on winning—somehow,
anyhow, but winning—Mr.
Cleveland has never seen such
impressive spectacle as Reed makes
when at his finest as the champion of
his party in parliamentary battle and
debate. But they have told him of
these things, and he has seemed not
to tire, but to delight to hear them.

He could not do that. He would
stand by a principle or fall with it.
Reed might beat him down in a turbulent
body like the House, but he
would go down like Galileo, crying,
“But the world DOES move!”

Mr. Cleveland has himself recognized
this intellectual defect, if it be
one, for last spring, when a company
of New York friends were speaking to
him about the financial condition, he500
said, with great earnestness, “I do not
quite see where I am; I must have
time;” and then added a favorite expression
of his, “My head is in a bag
now; I cannot see clearly.” But these
men, when they heard him say this,
realized that when he did see clearly,
as he believed, then his convictions
would become established, and it would
almost be as easy to move the earth
from its axis as to shift him from them.

When he met his first cabinet, there
were gathered around the table two
men of extraordinary brilliancy of intellect,
another of splendid repute and
vast experience, and all of them were
men of perhaps finer intellectual quality,
and certainly had many advantages,
both natural and acquired, which he
did not possess. Yet Secretary Whitney,
speaking of this meeting to an old
college friend of his, some time after,
said, “When we met the President in
the cabinet room, we had not been
there ten minutes before we realized
that ‘Where MacGregor sat, there was
the head of the table.’” Whitney himself
was the only member of the cabinet
who was younger than Cleveland,
and three members of it had been
active in public life before Cleveland
was admitted to the bar.

After Mr. Cleveland had been elected
to the presidency the second time, but
before his inauguration, he spent an
evening with a gentleman whose political
experience began with the formation
of the Republican party. They
were together in Mr. Cleveland’s library
in New York, until long past midnight.
The conversation touched upon public
men and political history, and it was
then revealed to his visitor that Mr.
Cleveland had that order of intellect
which absorbs not from books but from
personal contact with men of experience.
It was evident that he had
learned far more of public men than
he was believed to know, and he had
gleaned this information by persistent
inquiry. It was made plain that he
got such grasp of public questions as
he possessed, by searching investigation,
not of books, but of men’s
minds and experience. Late that night
Mr. Cleveland asked his visitor about
Lincoln, being anxious to know everything
that this man could tell him
about the Republican party’s first
President; and when Mr. Cleveland
put a certain question to his friend,
then it was made plain that Lincoln’s
career had been deeply studied by Mr.
Cleveland, and that he anxiously sought
to learn the secret of his mastery of
men and direction of events. That
question was, “How was Mr. Lincoln
able to overcome the politicians, to
defeat conspiracies, to control a half-rebellious
and not personally loyal
cabinet, and to maintain himself in
spite of attack, open and insidious?”
And the visitor, who knew Lincoln well,
said in reply, “Mr. Cleveland, Lincoln
did this because he weighed every act
by his judgment of what the estimation
of the plain people of the country
would be about it. He reached over
the heads of the politicians, and out to
that great body of American citizens
whom he called ‘the plain people.’ He
believed that the plain people were
year in and out accurate in their
judgments, and he believed that the
man who had their confidence could
face the politicians with contempt even,
because he was sure to be right.”

For some moments Mr. Cleveland
said nothing, and then, with great impressiveness
and something of serenity,
he said, “I have long seen that.
The public man cannot go astray who
follows the plain people, nor can the
politician err who respects their impulses.”
In this single remark we have
probably the secret revealed of the influence
which controls Mr. Cleveland.

It has been said of Mr. Cleveland
that Republicans have supported him
because he is a better man than his
party, but the assertion seems a flippant
and thoughtless one. Mr. Cleveland
is no better than the best ideals
of the Democratic party, although he
is immeasurably better than the false
and abhorrent influences and elements
which have been pleased to associate
themselves with that party. At its best
the Democratic party is a splendid
force. Mr. Cleveland is esteemed
better than his party by some Republicans,
because his party has not
always been true to its principles.
But he is a true Democrat.

501

PATTI AT CRAIG-Y-NOS.

By Arthur Warren.

Two queens travel
from the Paddington
station of the
Great Western Railway
in London to
their palatial homes—the
Queen of England,
and the Queen
of Song. If you ask at Paddington
for directions to Craig-y-Nos Castle,
the porters will inform you with not
less alacrity than they would have
shown had you inquired the way to
Windsor. And you observe they delight
in the duty. They make you as
comfortable as possible for your two-hundred-mile
journey. You depart
with the circumstance of an ambassador.
Had you been accredited to the
foot of the throne by some reigning
monarch of the continent you could
not be more thoughtfully attended by
the railway serving-men. You are a
guest of Madame Patti, and that, in the
eyes of these honest fellows, is as good
as being a guest of Queen Victoria.

I pulled up at the end of a broiling
hot day in August, at a wee bit station
on the top of a Welsh mountain. The
station is called “Penwyllt;” it overlooks
the Swansea Valley, and stands
about half-way between Brecon and
the sea. When a traveller alights at
Penwyllt there is no need to question
his purpose. He can have but one
destination, and that is Craig-y-Nos
Castle. A carriage from the castle was
awaiting me, and we set off down the
steep road to the valley, a sudden turn
showing the Patti palace there on the
banks of the Tawe. The place was
two miles distant, and a thousand feet
below our wheels, but I could see an
American flag flying from the square
tower, and there it waved during the
successive days of my visit; for it is
Madame Patti’s way to welcome a
guest with the emblem of his nationality.
A prettier compliment is not conceivable.

Mr. Gladstone, in a vein of pleasantry,
once told Madame Patti that he would
like to make her Queen of Wales. But
she is that already, and more. She is
Queen of Hearts the world over, and
every soul with an ear is her liege.
But, literally, in Wales Madame Patti
is very like a queen. She lives in a
palace; people come to her from the
ends of the earth; she is attended
with “love, honor, troops of friends;”
and whenever she stirs beyond her own
immediate domain the country folk
gather by the roadside, dropping courtesies,
and throwing kisses to her bonny
majesty.

Her greeting of me was characteristic
of this most famous and fortunate
of women, this unspoiled favorite of
our whirling planet. A group of her
friends stood merrily chatting in the
hall, and, as I approached, a dainty
little woman with big brown eyes came
running out from the centre of the
company, stretched forth a hand, spoke
a hearty welcome, and accompanied it
with the inimitable smile which has
made slaves of emperors. The vivacious
and charming creature was Madame
Patti, or, as we know her in private life,
Madame Patti-Nicolini. Her husband
is a handsome man of fifty-eight, though
he looks twenty years younger. He is
as devoted as if he were the newly
accepted lover of an entrancing lass in
her teens, and though his English is
rather hazardous, he contrives to get
about bravely in Wales.

My visit could not have been more
happily timed. I found a sort of family
party at Craig-y-Nos, and there was
no stiff ceremonial to be encountered.

Note.—Our illustrations of Craig-y-Nos, interior and exterior, are reproductions from photographs specially
taken for McClure’s Magazine by W. Arthur Smith, Swansea, South Wales.—Ed.502
as the case usually is in British country-houses.
La Diva’s guests were intimate
friends, and chiefly a company of
fair English girls who pass every summer
with her. When the guests, in full
dinner-dress, assembled in the drawing-room,
I found that we covered five
nationalities—Italian, German, French,
English, and American—and while we
awaited the appearance of our hostess,
the gathering seemed like a polyglot
congress.

As the chimes in the clock-tower
pealed the hour of eight, a pretty
vision appeared at the drawing-room
door. It was Patti, royally bedecked.
The defects of the masculine mind
leave me incapable of describing the
attire of that sparkling little woman.
But the spectacle brought us to our
feet, bowing as if we had been a company
of court-gallants in the “spacious
days of great Elizabeth,” and we
added the modern tribute of applause,
which our queen acknowledged with a
silvery laugh. I remember only that
the gown was white, and of some silky
stuff, and that about La Diva’s neck
were loops of pearls, and that above
her fluffy chestnut hair were glittering
jewels. With women it may be different,
but no man can give a list of Patti’s
adornments on any occasion; he knows
only that they become her, and that he
sees only her radiant face. Before our
murmurs of delight had ceased, Patti,
who had not entered the room, but
merely stood in the portal of it, turned,
taking the arm of the guest who was
to sit at her right hand, and away we
marched in her train, as if she were
truly the queen, through the corridors
to the conservatory, where dinner was
served.

CRAIG-Y-NOS.

It was my privilege at the castle table
to sit at Madame Patti’s left. At her
right was one whose friendship with
her dates from the instant of her first
European triumph, thirty-two years
ago. I was taken into the family, as
it were. But the best of my privilege
was that it brought me so near our
hostess, and made easy conversation
possible. The delight of those déjeuners
and dinners at Craig-y-Nos is not
to be forgotten. There is a notion503
abroad that these meals are held in
state; but they are not. There is
merely the ordinary dinner custom of
an English mansion. The menu, though,
is stately enough, for the art culinary
is practised in its most exquisite
fashion there. The dining-room is very
seldom used, for, handsome as that
apartment is, Patti, and her guests
too, for that matter, prefer to eat in
the great glass room which was formerly
the conservatory and is still called
so. There we sit, as far as outlook
goes, out of doors, for, in whatever
direction we gaze, we look up or down
the Swansea Valley, across to the
mountains, and along the tumbling
course of the river Tawe. To the imminent
neglect of my repast, I sat
gazing at the wood-covered cliffs of
Craig-y-Nos (Rock-of-the-Night) opposite,
and listening to the ceaseless
music of the mountain stream. Patti,
noticing my admiration for the view,
said, “You see what a dreadful place
it is in which I bury myself.”

CRAIG-Y-NOS AND TERRACES FROM THE RIVER.

“‘Bury’ yourself! On the contrary,
you have here all the charms
of life, and you seem to have discovered
the fountain of perpetual
youth. A ‘dreadful’ place? Indeed,
it is a paradise in miniature!”

“But one of your countrymen says
that I hide far from the world among
the ugly Welsh hills. He writes it in
an American journal
of fabulous
circulation, and I
suppose people
believe the tale,
do they not?” La
Diva laughed
heartily at the
thought of a too
credulous public,
and then she added:
“Really,
they do write the
oddest things
about my home,
as if it were either
the scene of Jack
the Giant-killer’s
exploits on the
top of the Beanstalk,
or a prison in
a desolate land.”

After visiting Patti at Craig-y-Nos
one need no longer wonder why this
enchanting woman sings “Home,
Sweet Home” with such feeling. For
she inhabits a paradise. There is not
anywhere a lovelier spot, nor is there
elsewhere a place so remote and at the
same time so complete in attractiveness,
and in every resource of civilization.

The dinner passed on merrily. Merrily
is exactly the word to describe it.
Up and down the table good stories
flew, sometimes faster than we could
catch them. Nobody likes a good
joke better than Patti, and when she
heard one that particularly pleased her
she would interpret it to some guest
who had not sufficiently mastered the
language in which the original anecdote
was told. It was delightful comedy,
and after watching it with high
pleasure, while La Diva spoke in a
brace of languages, I said: “I wonder
if you have what people call a native
tongue, or whether in all of them you
are ‘native and to the manner born’?”

“Oh, I don’t know so many,” she
replied, “only—let’s see—English,
German, French, Italian, Spanish, and
Russian.”

“And which language do you speak
best, if I may ask?”

“I really don’t know. To me there
is no difference, as far as readiness goes,504
and I suppose that in all of
them readiness helps.”

MADAME PATTI’S FATHER.

“But you have a favorite
among them?”

“Oh, yes, Italian. Listen!”
And then she recited
an Italian poem. Next to
hearing Patti sing, the sweetest
sound is her Italian
speech. I expressed my delight,
and she said:

“Speaking of languages,
Mr. Gladstone paid me a
pretty compliment a little
while ago. I will show you
his letter to-morrow, if you
care to see it.”

Patti forgets nothing. The
next day she brought me Mr.
Gladstone’s letter. The
Grand Old Man had been
among her auditors at Edinburgh,
and after her performance
he went upon the
stage to thank her for the
pleasure he had felt in listening
to her songs.
He complained a
little of a cold
which had been
troubling him,
and Patti begged
him to try some
lozenges which
she had found
useful. That
night she sent a
little box of them
to Mr. Gladstone,
and the statesman
acknowledged
the gift
with this letter:

MADAME PATTI AT EIGHTEEN.

This letter very naturally
gave our conversation a reminiscent
turn, and, after some
talk of great folk she has
known, I asked Madame Patti
what had been the proudest
experience in her career.
“For a great and unexpected
honor most gracefully tendered,
nothing that has
touched me deeper than a
compliment paid by the
Prince of Wales and a distinguished
company, at a dinner
given in honor of the
Duke of York and the Princess
May, a little while before
their wedding.
The dinner
was given by
Mr. Alfred
Rothschild, one
of my oldest and
best friends.
There were many
royalties present,
and more dukes
and duchesses
than I can easily
remember. During
the ceremonies
the Prince of
Wales arose, and
to my great astonishment,
proposed
the health
of his ‘old and
valued friend
Madame Patti.’
He made such a
pretty speech,
and in the course
of it said that he
had first seen and
heard me in Philadelphia
in 1860,
when I sang in
‘Martha,’ and505
that since then his own attendance at
what he was good enough to call my
‘victories in the realm of song’ had
been among his most pleasant recollections.
He recalled the fact that on one
of the occasions when the princess and
himself had invited me to
Marlborough House, his
wife had held up little
Prince George, in whose
honor we were this night
assembled, and bade him
kiss me, so that in after
life he might say that he
had ‘kissed the famous
Madame Patti.’ And
then, do you know, that
whole company of royalty,
nobility, and men of
genius rose and cheered
me and drank my health.
Don’t you think that any
little woman would be
proud, and ought to be
proud, of a spontaneous
tribute
like that?”

It is difficult,
when repeating
thus in print such
snatches of autobiography,
to suggest
the modest
tone and manner
of the person
whose words may
be recorded. It is
particularly difficult
in the case of
Madame Patti, who
is as absolutely
unspoiled as the
freshest ingénue.
Autobiography
such as hers must
read a little fanciful
to most folk; it
is so far removed
from the common
experiences of us all, and even from the
extraordinary experiences of the renowned
persons we usually hear about.
But there is not a patch of vanity in
Patti’s sunny nature. Her life has
been a long, unbroken record of success—success
of a degree attained by
no other woman; no one else has won
and held such homage; no one else
has been so wondrously endowed with
beauty and genius and sweet simplicity
of nature—a nature unspoiled by flattery,
by applause, by wealth, by the possession
and exercise of power. Patti at
fifty is like a girl in her
ways, in her thoughts, in
her spirit, in her disinterestedness,
in her enjoyments.
Time has
dimmed none of her
charms, it has lessened
none of her superb gifts.
She said to me one day:
“They tell me I am getting
to be an old woman,
but I don’t believe it. I
don’t feel old. I feel
young. I am the youngest
person of my acquaintance.”
That is true
enough, as they know
who see Patti from day
to day. She has
all the enthusiasms
and none of the affectations
of a
young girl. When
she speaks of herself
it is with the
most delicious
frankness and lack
of self-consciousness.
She is perfectly
natural.

MADAME PATTI IN 1869 AND IN 1877.

She promised to
show me the programme
of that
Philadelphia performance
before
the Prince of
Wales so long ago,
and the next day
she put it before
me. It is a satin
programme with
gilt fringe, and its
announcement is
surmounted by the Prince of Wales’s
feathers. At that Philadelphia performance
Adelina Patti made her first
appearance before royalty. In the
next year she made her London début.
It was at Covent Garden, as Amina in
“La Sonnambula.” The next morning
Europe rang with the fame of the506
new prima donna from America. “I
tried to show them that the young
lady from America was entitled to a
hearing,” said she, as we looked over
the old programmes.

THE DINING-ROOM.

“And has the ‘young lady from
America’ retained that spirit of national
pride, or has she become so
much a citizen of the world that no
corner of it has any greater claim than
another upon her affections?”

“I love the Italian language, the
American people, the English country,
and my Welsh home.”

“A choice yet catholic selection.
The national preferences, if you can
be said to own any, have reason on
their side. Your parents were Italian,
you were born in Spain, you grew from
girlhood to womanhood in America,
you first won international fame in
England, and among these Welsh hills
you have planted a paradise.”

“How nice of you! That evening
at Mr. Alfred Rothschild’s, the Prince
of Wales asked me why I do not stay
in London during ‘the season,’ and take
some part in its endless social pleasures.
‘Because, your Royal Highness,’
I replied, ‘I have a lovely home in
Wales, and whenever I come away
from it I leave my heart there.’ ‘After
all,’ said the prince, ‘why should you
stay in London when the whole world
is only too glad to make pilgrimages
to Craig-y-Nos?’ Wasn’t that pretty?”

I wish I could somehow convey the
naïveté with which the last three words
were uttered. The tone expressed the
most innocent pleasure in the world.
Indeed, when Patti speaks in this way
she seems to be wondering why people
should say and do so many pleasant
things in her behalf. There is an air
of childish wonder in her look and
voice.

I said: “All good republicans have
a passion for royalty. I find that an
article about a king or a queen or a
prince is in greater demand in the
United States than anywhere else in
the world. Do tell me something more
about the Prince and Princess of
Wales. I promise you, as a zealous
democrat, that no one on the far side
of the Atlantic will skip a word. Have
the prince and princess visited Craig-y-Nos?”

“No. But they were coming here
a couple of years ago. See—here is507
the prince’s letter fixing the date.
But it was followed by their sudden
bereavement, and then for many,
many months they lived in quiet and
mourning, only coming forth in their
usual way just before the recent royal
wedding. They sent me an invitation
to the wedding festivities. But alas! I
could not attend them. I had just finished
my season, and was lying painfully
ill with rheumatism. You heard
of that? For weeks I suffered acutely.
It’s an old complaint. I have had it at
intervals since I was a child. But about
the royal wedding. When the Prince
and Princess of Wales learned that I
was too ill to accept their gracious invitation,
they—well, what do you suppose
they did next?”

“Something very apt and graceful.”

“They sent me two large portraits of
themselves, bearing their autographs,
and fitted into great gilt frames. You
shall see the portraits after dinner.
They occupy the place of honor in
Craig-y-Nos Castle.”

THE CONSERVATORY.

We had reached the coffee stage of
the dinner, and the cigars were being
passed. The ladies did not withdraw,
according to the mediæval and popular
English habit, but the company remained
unbroken, and while the gentlemen
smoked, the ladies kept them
in conversation. Presently, some one
proposed Patti’s health, and we all
stood, singing “For She’s a Jolly Good
Fellow.”

That put the ball of merriment in
motion. One of the young ladies, a
goddaughter of our hostess, carolled a
stanza from a popular ditty. At first
I thought it audacious that any one
should sing in the presence of La Diva.
It seemed an act of sacrilege. But in
another instant we were all at it, piping
the chorus, and Patti leading off. The
fun of the thing was infectious. The
song finished, we ventured another, and
Patti joined us in the refrains of a medley
of music-hall airs, beginning with
London’s latest mania, “Daisy Bell, or
a Bicycle Made for Two,” and winding
up with Chevalier’s “Old Kent Road”
and the “Coster’s Serenade,” Coburn’s
“Man that Broke the Bank at Monte
Carlo,” and the transatlantic “Daddy
Wouldn’t Buy me a Bow-Wow.”

Madame turned with an arch look—“You
will think our behavior abominable.”

“On the contrary, I find it very jolly,
not to say a rare experience; for it is
not everybody who has heard you sing
comic songs.”

508

Patti’s answer was a peal of laughter,
and then she sat there singing very
softly a stanza of “My Old Kentucky
Home,” and as we finished the chorus
she lifted a clear, sweet note, which
thrilled us through and through, and
stirred us to rapturous applause. “What
have I done?” Patti put the question
with a puzzled look. The reply came
from the adjoining library: “High E.”
One of our number had run to sound
the piano pitch. Then I recalled what
Sir Morell Mackenzie had told me a
little while before he died. I was chatting
with the great physician in that
famous room of his in Harley Street.
We happened to mention Madame
Patti. “That great singer,” said Sir
Morell, “has the most wonderful throat
I have ever seen; it is the only one I
have ever seen with the vocal chords
in absolutely perfect condition after
many years of use. They are not
strained, or warped or roughened, but,
as I tell you, they are absolutely perfect.
There is no reason why they
should not remain so ten years longer,
and with care and health twenty years
longer.”

MADAME’S BOUDOIR.

Remembering this, I asked Madame
Patti if she had taken extraordinary
care of her voice. “I have never tired
it,” said she; “I never sing when I am
tired, and that means that I am never
tired when I sing. And I have never
strained for high notes. I have heard
that the first question asked of new
vocalists nowadays is ‘How high can
you sing?’ But I have always thought
that the least important matter in singing.
One should sing only what one
can sing with perfect ease.”

“But in eating and drinking? According
to all accounts you are most
abstemious in these things.”

“No, indeed. I avoid very hot and
very cold dishes, otherwise I eat and
drink whatever I like. My care is
chiefly to avoid taking cold, and to
avoid indigestion. But these are the
ordinary precautions of one who knows
that health is the key to happiness.”

509

THE SITTING-ROOM.

“And in practising? Have you rigid
rules for that? One hears of astounding
exercise and self-denial.”

“Brilliant achievements in fiction.
For practising I run a few scales twenty
minutes a day. After a long professional
tour I let my voice rest for a
month and do not practise at all during
that time.”

During my visit to Craig-y-Nos we
usually spent our evenings in the
billiard-rooms. There are two at the
castle, an English room and a French
one. In the French room there is the
great orchestrion which Madame Patti
had built in Geneva at a cost of
twenty thousand dollars. It is operated
by electricity, and is said to be the
finest instrument of the kind in the
world. Monsieur Nicolini would start
it of an evening, and the wonderful
contrivance would “discourse most
eloquent music” from a repertoire of
one hundred and sixteen pieces, including
arias from grand operas, military
marches, and simple ballads. Music is
the one charm that Madame Patti cannot
resist. The simplest melody stirs
her to song. In the far corner from
the orchestrion she will sit, in an enticing
easy-chair, and hum the air that is
rolling from the organ-pipes, keeping
time with her dainty feet, or moving
her head as the air grows livelier. Now
and again she sends forth some lark-like
troll, and then she will urge the
young people to a dance, or a chorus,
and when every one is tuned to the full
pitch of melody and merriment she will
join in the fun as heartily as the rest.
I used to sit and watch her play the
castanets, or hear her snatch an air
or two from “Martha,” “Lucia,” or
“Traviata.”

One night the younger fry of us
were chanting negro melodies, and
Patti came into the room, warbling as
if possessed by an ecstasy. “I love
those darky songs,” said she, and
straightway she sang to us, with that
inimitable purity and tenderness which
are hers alone, “Way Down Upon the
Swanee River,” and “Massa’s in the
Cold, Cold Ground,” and after that
“Home, Sweet Home,” while all of us
listeners felt the tears rising, or the
lumps swelling in our throats.

THE FRENCH BILLIARD-ROOM.

Guests at Craig-y-Nos are the most510
fortunate of mortals. If the guest be
a gentleman, a valet is told off to attend
upon him; if the guest be a lady,
a handmaid is placed at her service.
Breakfast is served in one’s room at
any hour one may choose. Patti never
comes down before high noon. She
rises at half-past eight, but remains
until twelve in her apartments, going
through her correspondence with
her secretary, and practising a little
music. At half-past twelve an elaborate
déjeuner is served in the glass pavilion.
Until that hour a guest is free to
follow his own devices. He may go
shooting, fishing, riding, walking, or he
may stroll about the lovely demesne,
and see what manner of heavenly
nook nature and Patti have made for
themselves among the hills of Wales.
Patti’s castle is in every sense a palatial
dwelling. She saw it fifteen years ago,
fell in love with it, purchased it, and
has subsequently expended at least
half a million dollars in enlarging and
equipping it. The castellated mansion,
with the theatre at one end and
the pavilion and winter garden at the
other, shows a frontage of fully a thousand
feet along the terraced banks of
the Tawe. But the place has been so
often described that it is unnecessary
for me to repeat the oft-told story, or
to give details of the gasworks, the
electric-lighting station, the ice-plant
and cold-storage rooms, the steam-laundry,
the French and English kitchens,
the stables, the carriage-houses,
the fifty servants, the watchfulness of
Caroline Baumeister, the superintending
zeal of William Heck. These matters
are a part of the folk-lore of
England and America. But I would
like to say something of Patti’s little
theatre. It is her special and particular
delight. She gets more pleasure
from it than from any other of the
many possessions of Craig-y-Nos. It
is a gem of a place, well-proportioned
and exquisitely decorated. Not only
can the sloping floor be quickly raised,
so that the auditorium may be transformed
into a ballroom, but the appurtenances
of the stage are the most
elaborate and perfect extant. For
this statement I have the authority of511
an assistant stage-manager of the
Royal Opera House at Covent Garden.
This expert was supervising some alterations
at the Patti theatre while I was
at Craig-y-Nos, and he told me that the
pretty house contained every accessory
for the production of forty operas.

Occasionally Patti sings at concerts
in her theatre. All her life she has
treasured her voice for the public; she
has never exhausted it by devising an
excess of entertainment for her personal
friends. So most of the performances
in the little theatre are pantomimic.
Although Patti seemed to me
always to be humming and singing
while I was at the castle, yet there was
nothing of the “performing” order in
what she did. She merely went singing
softly about the house, or joining
in our choruses, like a happy girl.

I remember that one morning, while
a dozen of us were sitting in the shade
of the terrace, the ladies with their
fancy work, the gentlemen with their
books and cigars, we heard from the
open windows above us a burst of song,
full-throated like a bird’s. It was for
all the world like the notes of an English
lark, which always sings in a kind
of glorious ecstasy, as it mounts and
mounts in the air, the merrier as it
climbs the higher, until it pours from
its invisible height a shower of joyous
song. No one among us stirred. La
Diva thought us far away up the valley,
where we had planned an excursion,
but we had postponed the project to a
cooler day. We were afraid of disturbing
Madame, so we kept silent and
listened. Our unseen entertainer seemed
to be bustling about her boudoir, singing
as she flitted, snatching a bar or two
from this opera and that, revelling in the
fragment of a ballad, and trilling a few
scales like my friend the lark. Presently
she ceased, and we were about to
stir, when she began to sing “Comin’
Thro’ the Rye.” She was alone in her
room, but she was singing as gloriously
as if to an audience of ten thousand
persons in the Albert Hall. The unsuspected
group of listeners on the
terrace slipped from their own control
and took to vigorous hand-smiting and
cries of delight.

THE ENGLISH BILLIARD-ROOM.

“Oh, oh, oh!” said the bird-like
voice above.

We looked up, and saw Patti leaning
out at the casement.

“Oh,” said she, “I couldn’t help it,
really I could not. I am so happy!”

At luncheon Madame proposed an
entertainment in the theatre for the
evening. We were to have “Camille”
in pantomime.

She persuaded Monsieur Nicolini to
be the Armand Duval. Nicolini had
never cared to act in the little theatre,
but now he consented to make his
début as a pantomimist, and he proved
to be a master of the art. He had
learned it, in fact, at the
Conservatoire, when,
as a young man, he had
studied for the stage.
“In those days,” says
he, “the study of pantomime
was part of an
actor’s training. Pity
it is not so now.”

The preparations for
the pantomime went on
apace. Among the
guests were several
capable amateurs. The
performance began a
little after ten on the
evening of the following
day. Some musicians
were brought
from Swansea. A
dozen gentlefolk hastily512
summoned from the valley, those of
us among the guests who were not enrolled
for the pantomime, and a gallery
full of peasantry and servants, made
up the audience. We had “Camille”
in five acts of pantomime, and altogether
it was a capital performance, and
a memorable one. Of course, Madame
Patti and her husband carried off the
honors. There was a supper after the
play, and the sunlight crept into the
Swansea Valley within two hours after
we had retired.

SIGNOR NICOLINI.

I said to Patti after the pantomime,
“You do not seem to believe that
change of occupation is the best possible
rest. You appear to me to work
as hard at rehearsing and acting in
your little theatre as if you were ‘on
tour.’”

“Not quite. Besides, it isn’t work,
it is play,” replied the miraculous little
woman. “I love the theatre. And,
then, there is always something to
learn about acting. I find these pantomime
performances very useful as well
as very pleasant.”

Every afternoon about three o’clock
Patti and her guests go for a drive, a
small procession of landaus and brakes
rattling along the smooth country roads.
You can see at once that this is Patti-land.
The cottagers come to their
doors and salute her Melodious Majesty,
and all the children of the country-side
run out and throw kisses. “Oh!
the dears,” exclaimed the kind-hearted
cantatrice as we were driving toward
the village of Ystradgynlais (they call
it “Ist-rag-dun-las”), one afternoon,513
“I should like to build another
castle and put all those mites
into it, and let them live there
amid music and flowers!”
And I believe that she would
have given orders for such a
castle straightway, had there
been a builder within sight.

A BIT IN THE PARK. THE SUSPENSION BRIDGE.

On the way home Patti
promised me “a surprise” for
the evening. I wondered what
it might be, and when the non-appearance
of the ladies kept
the gentlemen waiting in the
drawing-room at dinner-time
I was the more puzzled. Nicolini,
to pass the time, showed
us some of Madame’s trophies.
It would be impossible to enumerate
them, because Craig-y-Nos
Castle is like another
South Kensington Museum in
the treasures it holds. Every
shelf, table, and cabinet is
packed with gifts which Madame
Patti has received from all
parts of the earth, from monarchs
and millionaires, princes
and peasants, old friends and
strangers. There is Marie Antoinette’s
watch, to begin with,
and there are the new portraits
of the Prince and Princess of
Wales, to end with. There is a remarkable
collection of portraits of royal
personages, presented to Madame Patti
by the distinguished originals on
the occasion of her marriage to M.
Nicolini. Photographs of the Grand
Old Man of Politics and the Grand
Old Man of Music rest side by side, on
a little table presented by some potentate.
Gladstone’s likeness bears his
autograph, and the inscription: “Con
tanti e tanti complimenti;” Verdi’s, his
autograph, and a fervid tribute written
in Milan a year ago. There are crowns
and wreaths and rare china; there
are paintings and plate and I know
not what, wherever one looks. If one
were to make Patti a gift, and he had
a king’s ransom to purchase it withal,
he would find it difficult to give her
anything that would be a novelty, or
that would be unique, in her eyes.
She has everything now. For my part,
I would pluck a rose from her garden,
or gather a nosegay from a hedgerow,
and it would please her as truly as if
it were a priceless diadem. She values
the thought that prompts the giving,
rather than the gift itself. She never
forgets even the smallest act of kindness
that is done for her sake. And
she is always doing kindnesses for
others. I have heard from the Welsh
folk many tales of her generous charities.
And to her friends she is the
most open-handed of women. There
was one dank, drizzly day while I was
at Craig-y-Nos. To the men this did
not matter. The wet did not interfere
with their projected amusements. But
every lady wore some precious jewel
which Patti had given her that morning—a
ring, a brooch, a bracelet, as
the case might be. For the generous
creature thought her fair friends
would be disappointed because they
could not get out of doors that day.
How could she know that every one
in the castle welcomed the rain because514
it meant a few hours more with
Patti?

The “surprise” she had spoken of
was soon apparent. The ladies came
trooping into the drawing-room attired
in the gowns and jewels of Patti’s
operatic rôles. Patti herself came
last, in “Leonora’s” white and jewels.
What a dinner party we had that night—we
men, in the prim black and white
of “evening dress,” sitting there with
“Leonora,” and “Desdemona,” and
“Marguerite,” and “Rachel,” and
“Lucia,” and “Carmen,” and “Dinorah,”
and I know not how many
more! Nobody but Patti would have
thought of such merry masquerading,
or, having thought of it, would
have gone to the trouble of providing
it.

Of course, we talked of her favorite
characters in opera, and then of singers
she has known. She said it would
give her real pleasure to hear Mario
and Grisi again, or, coming to later
days, Scalchi and Annie Louise Cary.
The latter being an American and a
friend, I was glad to hear this appreciation
of her from the Queen of Song.
“Cary and Scalchi were the two greatest
contraltos I have ever known; and
I have sung with both of them. I remember
Annie Louise Cary as a superb
artist, and a sweet and noble woman.”
I said “Hear, hear,” in the parliamentary
manner, and then Patti added:
“Now we will go into the theatre again.
There is to be another entertainment.”
It was, of all unexpected things, a
magic-lantern show. Patti’s magic-lantern
is like everything else at Craig-y-Nos,
from her piano to her pet parrot,
the only one of its kind. It is
capable of giving, with all sorts of
“mechanical effects,” a two-hours’ entertainment
every night for two months
without repeating a scene. Patti invited
me to sit beside her and watch
the dissolving views. It seemed to me
that it would be like this to sit by the
queen during a “state performance”
at Windsor. Here was Patti Imperatrice,
dressed like a queen, wearing
a crown of diamonds, and attended by
her retinue of brilliantly attired women
and attentive gentlemen of the court.
And it was so like her to cause the
entertainment to begin with a series of
American views, and to hum softly a
verse of “Home, Sweet Home,” as we
looked out upon New York harbor
from an imaginary steamship inward
bound.

THE PROSCENIUM OF CRAIG-Y-NOS THEATER.

The next morning I started from
Craig-y-Nos for America. As the dog-cart
was tugged slowly up the mountain-side
the Stars and Stripes saluted
me from the castle tower, waving farewell
as I withdrew from my peep at
paradise.

515

ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER.

By “Q.”

Early last fall there died in
Troy an old man and his
wife. The woman went
first, and the husband took
a chill at her grave’s edge,
when he stood bareheaded
in a lashing shower.
The loose earth crumbled
under his feet,
trickling over, and
dropped on her coffin-lid.
Through two
long nights he lay on
his bed without
sleeping, and listened
to this sound.
At first it ran in his ears perpetually,
but afterwards he heard it at intervals
only, in the pauses of
acute suffering. On the
seventh day he died, of
pleuro-pneumonia; and
on the tenth (a Sunday)
they buried him. For
just fifty years the dead
man had been minister
of the Independent
chapel on the hill, and
had laid down his pastorate
two years before,
on his golden wedding
day. Consequently there
was a funeral sermon,
and the young man, his
successor, chose II. Samuel,
i. 23, for his text:
“Lovely and pleasant in
their lives, and in their
death they were not divided.”
Himself a newly
married man, he
waxed dithyrambic on
the sustained affection
and accord of the departed couple.
“Truly,” he wound up, “such marriages
as theirs were made in heaven.”
And could they have heard, the two
bodies in the cemetery had not denied
it; but the woman, after the fashion
of women, would have qualified the
young minister’s assertion in her secret
heart.

When, at the close of the year 1839,
Reverend Samuel Bax visited Troy for
the first time, to preach his trial sermon
at Salem chapel, he arrived by
Bontigo’s van, late on a Saturday night,
and departed again for Plymouth at
seven o’clock on Monday morning. He
had just turned twenty-one, and looked
younger, and the zeal of his calling was
strong upon him. Moreover, he was
shaken with nervous anxiety for the
success of his sermon; so that it is no
marvel if he carried away but blurred
and misty impressions of the little port,
and the congregation that sat beneath
him that morning, ostensibly
reverent, but actually
on the lookout for
heresy or any sign of
weakness. Their impressions,
at any rate,
were sharp enough.
They counted his
thumps upon the desk,
noted his one reference
to “the original Greek,”
saw and remembered the
flush of his young face
and the glow in his eye
as he hammered the doctrine
of the redemption
out of original sin. The
deacons fixed the subject
of these trial sermons,
and had chosen
original sin, on the
ground that a good beginning
was half the
battle. The maids in
the congregation knew
beforehand that he was unmarried,
and came out of the chapel knowing
also that his eyes were brown,
that his hair had a reddish tinge in
certain lights, that one of his cuffs was
frayed slightly, but his black coat had516
scarcely been worn a dozen times,
with other trifles. They loitered by
the chapel door until he came out, in
company with Deacon Snowden, who
was conveying him off to dinner. The
deacon, on week days, was harbor-master
of the port, and on Sundays
afforded himself roasted duck for
dinner. Lizzie Snowden walked at her
father’s right hand. She was a slightly
bloodless blonde, tall, with a pretty
complexion, and hair upon which it
was rumored she could sit if she were
so minded. The girls watched the
young preacher and his entertainers as
they moved down the hill, the deacon
talking, and his daughter turning her
head aside as if it were merely in the
section of the world situated on her
right hand that she took the least interest.

“That’s to show ’en the big plait,”
commented one of the group behind.
“He can’t turn his head hes way, but
it stares ’en in the face.”

“An’ her features look best from the
left side, as everybody knows.”

“I reckon, if he’s chosen minister,
that Lizzie’ll have
’en,” said a tall,
lanky girl. She was
apprenticed to a
dressmaker and engaged
to a young
tinsmith. Having
laid aside ambition
on her own account,
she flung in this remark
as an apple of
discord.

“Tenifer Hosken
has a chance. He’s
fair-skinned hissel’,
and Lizzie’s too near
his own color.
Black’s mate is white,
as they say.”

“There’s Sue Tregraine.
She’ll
have more money
than either, when
her father dies.”

“What, marry one
o’ Ruan!” the speaker
tittered, despitefully.

“Why not?”

The only answer was a shrug. Ruan
is a small town that faces Troy across
the diminutive harbor, or, perhaps, I
should say that Troy looks down upon
it at this slight distance. When a
Trojan speaks of it he says, “Across
the water,” with as much implied contempt
as though he meant Botany
Bay. There is no cogent reason for
this, except that the poorer class at
Ruan earns its livelihood by fishing. In
the eyes of its neighbors the shadow
of this lonely calling is cast upwards
upon its wealthier inhabitants. Troy
depends on commerce, and employs
these wealthier men of Ruan to build
ships for it. Further it will hardly
condescend. In the days of which I
write intermarriage between the towns
was almost unheard-of, and even now
it is rare. Yet they are connected by
a penny ferry.

“Her father’s a shipbuilder,” urged
Sue Tregraine’s supporter.

“He might so well keep crab-pots,
for all the chance she’ll have.”

Now there was a Ruan girl standing
just outside this group, and she heard
what was said. Her
name was Nance
Trewartha, and her
father was a fisherman,
who did, in fact,
keep crab-pots.
Moreover, she was
his only child, and
helped him at his
trade. She could
handle a boat as well
as a man, she knew
every sea-mark up
and down the coast
for forty miles, she
could cut up bait, and
her hands were horny
with handling ropes
from her childhood.
But on Sundays she
wore gloves, and came
across the ferry to
chapel, and was as
wise as any of her
sex. She had known
before coming out of
her pew that the
young minister had
a well-shaped back517
to his head, and a gold ring on his little
finger with somebody’s hair in the collet,
under a crystal. She was dark,
straight, and lissome of figure, with ripe
lips and eyes as black as sloes, and she
hoped that the hair in the minister’s ring
was his mother’s. She was well aware
of her social inferiority; but—the truth
may be told—she chose to forget it that
morning, and to wonder what this
young man would be like as a husband.
She had looked up into his face during
sermon time, devouring his boyish
features, noticing his refined accent,
marking every gesture. Certainly,
he was comely and desirable. As
he walked down the hill by Deacon
Snowden’s side, she was perfectly
conscious of the longing in her heart,
but prepared to put a stop to it, and
go home to dinner as soon as he had
turned the corner and passed out of
sight. Then came that unhappy remark
about the crab-pots. She bit her
lip for a moment, turned, and walked
slowly off towards the ferry, full of
thought.

Three weeks later Reverend Samuel
Bax received his call.

He arrived, to assume his duties, in
the waning light of a soft January
day. Bontigo’s van set him down, with
a carpet-bag, bandbox, and chest
of books, at the door of the lodgings
which Deacon Snowden had
taken for him. The house stood
in the North Street, as it is called.
It was a small, yellow-washed
building, containing just half a
dozen rooms, and of these the
two set apart for the minister
looked straight upon the harbor.
Under his sitting-room window
was a little garden, and at the
end of the garden a low wall,
with a stretch of water beyond
it and a bark that lay at anchor
but a stone’s throw away, as it
seemed, its masts overtopping
the misty hillside that closed
the view. A green painted door
was let into the garden wall—a
door with two flaps, the upper
of which stood open; and
through this opening he caught
another glimpse of gray water.

The landlady, who showed
him into this room and at once
began to explain that the furniture
was better than it looked,
was hardly prepared for the
rapture with which he stared out
of the window. His boyhood
had been spent in a sooty Lancashire
town, and to him the
green garden, the quay door,
the bark, and the stilly water
seemed to fall little short of Paradise.

“I reckoned you’d like it,” she said.
“An’, to be sure, ’tis a blessing you
do.”

He turned his stare upon her for a
moment. She was a benign-looking
woman of about fifty, in a short-skirted
gray gown and widow’s cap.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because, leavin’ out the kitchen,
there’s but four rooms, two for you an’
two for me; two facin’ the harbor, an’518
two facin’ the street. Now, if you’d
took a dislike to this look-out I must
ha’ put you over the street an’ moved
in here mysel’. I do like the street, too,
there’s so much more doin’.”

“I think this arrangement will be
better in every way,” said the young
minister.

“I’m main glad. Iss, there’s no
denyin’ that I’m main glad. From upstairs
you can see right down the harbor,
which is prettier again. Would’ee
like to see it now? O’ course you
would—an’ it’ll be so much handier
for answerin’ the door, too. There’s a
back door at the end o’ the passage.
You’ve only to slip a bolt an’ you’m
out in the garden—out to your boat,
if you choose to keep one. But the
garden’s a tidy little spot to walk up
an’ down in an’ make up your sermons,
wi’ nobody to overlook you but the
folk next door, an’ they’m churchgoers.”

After supper that evening the young
minister unpacked his books and was
about to arrange them, but drifted to
the window instead. He paused for a
minute or two, with his face close to
the pane, and then flung up the sash.
A faint north wind breathed down the
harbor, scarcely ruffling the water.
Around and above him the frosty sky
flashed with innumerable stars, and behind
the bark’s masts, behind the
long chine of the eastern hill, a soft
radiance heralded the rising moon. It
was the new moon, and while he waited,
her thin horn pushed up, as it were,
through the furze brake on
the hill’s summit, and she
mounted into the free heaven.
With upturned eyes the young
minister followed her course
for twenty minutes, not consciously
observant, for he was
thinking over his ambitions,
and at his time of life these
are apt to soar with the moon.519
Though possessed with zeal for good
work in this small seaside town, he intended
that Troy should be but a stepping-stone
in his journey. He meant to
go far. And while he meditated his
future, forgetting the chill in the night
air, it was being decided for him by
a stronger will than his own. More
than this, that will had already passed
into action. His destiny was actually
launched on the full spring tide that
sucked the crevices of the gray wall at
the garden’s end.

A slight sound drew the minister’s
gaze down from the moon to the quay-door.
Its upper flap still stood open,
allowing a square of moonlight to
pierce the straight black shadow of the
garden wall.

In this square of moonlight were
now framed the head and shoulders of
a human being.

The young man felt a slight chill
run down his spine. He leaned forward
out of the window and challenged
the apparition, bating his tone, as all
people bate it at that hour.

“Who are you?” he demanded, “and
what is your business here?”

There was no reply for a moment,
though he felt sure his voice must have
carried to the quay-door. The figure
paused for a second or two, then unbarred
the lower flap of the door and
advanced across the wall’s shadow to
the centre of the bright grassplot under
the window. It was the figure of a
young woman. Her head was bare and
her sleeves turned up to the elbows.
She wore no cloak or wrap, to cover
her from the night air, and her short-skirted,
coarse frock was open at the
neck. As she turned up her face to
the window, the minister could see
by the moon’s rays that it was well-favored.

“Be you the new preacher?” she
asked, resting a hand on her hip and
speaking softly up to him.

“I am the new Independent minister.”

“Then I’ve come for you.”

“Come for me?”

“Iss; my name’s Nance Trewartha,
an’ you ’en wanted across the water,
quick as possible. Old Mrs. Slade’s
a-dyin’ to-night, over yonder.”

“She wants me?”

“She’s one o’ your congregation, an’
can’t die easy till you’ve seen her. I
reckon she’s got something ’pon her
mind; an’ I was to fetch you over,
quick as I could.”

As she spoke the church clock down
in the town chimed out the hour, and
immediately after, ten strokes sounded
on the clear air.

The minister consulted his own
watch, and seemed to be considering.

“Very well,” said he, after a pause.
“I’ll come. I suppose I must cross by
the ferry.”

“Ferry’s closed this two hours, an’
you needn’t wake up any in the house.
I’ve brought father’s boat to the ladder
below, an’ I’ll bring you back again.
You’ve only to step out here by the
back door. An’ wrap yourself up, for
’tis a brave distance.”

“Very well. I suppose it’s really
serious.”

“Mortal. I’m glad you’ll come,”
she added, simply.

The young man nodded down in a
friendly manner, and going back into
the room, slipped on his overcoat,
picked up his hat, and turned the
lamp down carefully. Then he struck
a match, found his way to the back
door, and unbarred it. The girl was
waiting for him, still in the centre of
the grassplot.

“I’m glad you’ve come,” she repeated,
but this time there was something
like constraint in her voice. As
he pulled to the door softly, she
moved and led the way down to the
water side.

From the quay-door a long ladder
ran down to the water. At low water
one had to descend twenty feet and
more; but now the high tide left but
three of its rungs uncovered. At the
young minister’s feet a small fishing-boat
lay ready, moored by a short
painter to the ladder. The girl stepped
lightly down and held up her hand.

“Thank you,” said the young man,
with dignity, “but I do not want help.”

She made no answer to this; but, as
he stepped down, went forward and unmoored
the painter. Then she pushed
gently away from the ladder, hoisted
the small foresail, and, returning to520
her companion, stood beside him for a
moment with her hand on the tiller.

“Better make fast the foresheet,”
she said, suddenly.

The young man looked helplessly at
her. He had not the slightest idea of
her meaning, did not, in fact, know the
difference between a foresheet and a
mainsail. And it was just to find out
the depth of his ignorance that she had
spoken.

“Never mind,” she said, “I’ll do it
myself.”

She made the rope fast and took hold
of the tiller again. The sails shook,
and filled softly as they glided out from
under the wall. The soft breeze blew
straight behind them, the tide was just
beginning to ebb. She slackened the
mainsheet a little, and the water hissed
as they spun down under the gray town
towards the harbor’s mouth.

A dozen vessels lay at anchor below
the town quay, their lamps showing a
strange orange-yellow in the moonlight;
between them the minister saw
the cottages of Ruan glimmering on
the eastern shore, and above them the
coastguard station, with its flagstaff, a
clear white upon the black hillside. It
seemed to him that they were not
shaping their course for the little town.

“I thought you told me,” he said at
length, “that Mrs.—the dying woman—lived
across there.”

The girl shook her head. “Not in
Ruan itsel’—Ruan parish. We’ll have
to go round the point.”

She was leaning back and gazing
straight before her, towards the harbor’s
mouth. The boat was one of the class
that serves along that coast for hook
and line as well as drift-net fishing,
clinker built, about twenty-seven feet
in the keel and nine in the beam. It
had no deck beyond a small cuddy forward,
on top of which a light hoarfrost
was gathering as they moved. The
minister stood beside the girl, and withdrew
his eyes from this cuddy roof to
contemplate her.

“Do you mean to say,” he asked,
“that you don’t take cold wearing no
wrap or bonnet on frosty nights like
this?”

She let the tiller go for a moment,
took his hand by the wrist and laid it
on her own bare arm. He felt the flesh,
but it was firm and warm. Then he
withdrew his hand hastily, without finding
anything to say. His eyes avoided
hers. When, after half a minute, he
looked at her again, her gaze was fixed
straight ahead upon the misty stretch
of sea beyond the harbor’s mouth.

In a minute or two they were sweeping
between the tall cliff and the reef
of rocks that guard this entrance on
either side. On the reef stood a wooden
cross, painted white, warning vessels
to give it a wide berth; on the cliff a
gray castle, with a battery before it,
under the guns of which they spun seaward,
still with the wind astern.

Outside the sea lay as smooth as
within the harbor. The wind blew
steadily off the shore, so that, close-hauled,
one might fetch up or down
channel with equal ease. The girl began
to flatten the sails, and asked her
companion to bear a hand. Their
hands met over a rope, and the man
noted with surprise that the girl’s was
feverishly hot. Then she brought the
boat’s nose round to the eastward, and,
heeling gently over the dark water,521
they began to skirt the misty coast,
with the breeze on their left cheeks.

“How much farther?” asked the
minister.

She nodded towards the first point in
the direction of Plymouth. He turned
his coat-collar up about his ears, and
wondered if his duty would often take
him on such journeys as this. Also he
felt thankful that the sea was smooth.
He might, or might not, be given to
seasickness; but somehow he was sincerely
glad that he had not to be put
to the test for the first time in this girl’s
presence.

They passed the small headland, and
still the boat held on its way.

“I had no idea you were going to
take me this distance. Didn’t you
tell me the house lay beyond the point
we’ve just passed?”

To his amazement the girl drew herself
up, looked him straight in the face,
and said:

“There’s no such place.”

“What?”

“There’s no such place. There’s nobody
ill at all. I told you a lie.”

“You told me a lie—then why in the
name of common sense am I here?”

“Because, young minister—because,
sir, I’m sick o’ love for you, an’ I
want ’ee to marry me.”

“Great heaven!” the young minister
muttered, recoiling, “is the girl
mad?”

“Ah, but look at me, sir.” She
seemed to grow still taller as she stood
there, resting one hand on the tiller
and looking at him with perfectly serious
eyes. “Look at me well before
your fancy lights ’pon some other o’
the girls. To-morrow they’ll be all
after ’ee, an’ this’ll be my
only chance; for my father’s
no better’n a plain fisherman,
an’ they’re all above
me in money an’ rank. I be
but a common Ruan girl, an’
my family is counted for
naught. But look at me
well; there’s none stronger
nor comelier, nor that’ll love
thee so dear!”

The young man positively
gasped. “Set me ashore at
once!” he commanded,
stamping his foot.

“Nay, that I will not till
thou promise, an’ that’s flat.
Dear lad, listen—an’ consent,
consent—an’ I swear to thee
thou’ll never be sorry for’t.”

“I never heard such awful
impropriety in my life. Turn
back; I order you to steer
back to the harbor at once!”

She shook her head. “No,
lad, I won’t. An’ what’s
more, you don’t know how
to handle a boat, an’ couldn’t
get back by yoursel’, not in
a month.”

“This is stark madness.
You—you abandoned woman, how long
do you mean to keep me here?”

“Till thou give in to me. We’m goin’
straight t’wards Plymouth now, an’ if
th’ wind holds—as ’twill—we’ll be off
the Rame in two hours. If you haven’t
said me yes by that, maybe we’ll go on;
or perhaps we’ll run across to the coast
o’ France——”

522

“Girl, do you know that if I’m not
back by daybreak I’m ruined?”

“And oh, man, man! can’t ’ee see
that I’m ruined, too, if I turn back
without your word? How shall I
show my face in Troy streets again,
tell me?”

At this sudden transference of responsibility
the minister staggered.

“You should have thought of that
before,” he said, employing the one
obvious answer.

“O’ course I thought of it. But for
love o’ you I made up my mind to risk
it. An’ now there’s no goin’ back.”
She paused a moment and then added,
as a thought struck her, “Why, lad,
doesn’t that prove I love ’ee uncommon?”

“I prefer not to consider the question.
Once more—will you go back?”

“I can’t.”

He bit his lips and moved forward
to the cuddy, on the roof of which he
seated himself sulkily. The girl tossed
him an end of rope.

“Dear, better coil that up an’ sit
upon it. The frost’ll strike a chill into
thee.”

With this she resumed her old attitude
by the tiller. Her eyes were fixed
ahead, her gaze passing just over the
minister’s hat. When he glanced up
he saw the rime twinkling on her
shoulders and the starshine in her dark
eyes. Around them the firmament
blazed with constellations, up to its
coping. Never had the minister seen
them so multitudinous or so resplendent.
Never before had heaven seemed so
alive to him. He could almost hear
it breathe. And beneath it the little
boat raced eastward, with the reef-points
pattering on its tan sails.

Neither spoke. For the most part
the minister avoided the girl’s eyes, and
sat nursing his wrath. The whole
affair was ludicrous; but it meant the
sudden ruin of his good name, at
the very start of his career. This was
the word he kept grinding between his
teeth: “ruin,” “ruin.” Whenever it
pleased this madwoman to set him
ashore he must write to Deacon Snowden
for his boxes and resign all connection
with Troy. But would he ever
get rid of the scandal? Could he ever
be sure that, to whatever distance he
might flee, it would not follow him?
Had he not better abandon his calling
once and for all? It was hard!

A star shot down from the Milky
Way and disappeared in darkness behind
the girl’s shoulder. His eyes, following
it, encountered hers. She left the tiller
and came slowly forward.

“In three minutes we’ll open Plymouth
Sound,” she said, quietly; and
then, with a sharp gesture, flung both
arms out towards him. “Oh, lad, think
better o’t, an’ turn back wi’ me. Say
you’ll marry me, for I’m perishin’ o’
love.”

The moonshine fell on her throat
and extended arms. Her lips were
parted, her head was thrown back a
little, and for the first time the young
minister saw that she was a beautiful
woman.

“Ay, look, look at me,” she pleaded.
“That’s what I’ve wanted ’ee to do all
along. Take my hands; they’m shapely
to look at and strong to work for ’ee.”

Hardly knowing what he did, the
young man took them; then in a moment
he let them go—but too late;
they were about his neck.

With that he sealed his fate for good
or ill. He bent forward a little, and
their lips met.

So steady was the wind that the boat
still held on her course; but no sooner
had the girl received the kiss that she
knew to be a binding promise than
she dropped her arms, walked off, and
shifted the helm.

“Unfasten the sheet here,” she commanded,
“and duck your head clear o’
the boom.”

As soon as their faces were set for
home, the minister walked back to the
cuddy roof and sat down to reflect.
Not a word was spoken till they
reached the harbor’s mouth again, and
then he pulled out his watch. It was
half-past four in the morning.

Outside the battery point the girl
hauled down the sails and got out the
sweeps; and together they pulled up
under the still sleeping town to the
minister’s quay-door. He was clumsy
at this work, but she instructed him in
whispers, and they managed to reach
the ladder as the clocks were striking523
five. The tide was far down by this
time, and she held the boat close to
the ladder while he prepared to climb.
With his foot on the first round he
turned. She was white as a ghost, and
trembling from top to toe.

“Nance—did you say your name
was Nance?”

She nodded.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’ll—I’ll let you off if you want to
be let off.”

“I’m not sure that I do,” he said,
and stealing softly up the ladder stood
at the top and watched her boat as she
steered it back to Ruan.

Three months after they were married,
to the indignant amazement of
the minister’s congregation. It almost
cost him his pulpit, but he held on and
triumphed. There is no reason to believe
that he ever repented of his choice,
or, rather, of Nance’s. To be sure, she
had kidnapped him by a lie; but perhaps
she had wiped it out by fifty years
of honest affection. On that point,
however, I, who tell the tale, will not
dogmatize.

SONG.

By Thomas Lovell Beddoes.

524

FOUR HUNDRED DEGREES BELOW ZERO.
AN INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR JAMES DEWAR.

By Henry J. W. Dam.

The science of chemistry, like that
of geography, has its undiscovered
North Pole. Four hundred and
sixty-one degrees below the freezing
point of the Fahrenheit thermometer
(−274° C.) lies a mysterious, specially
indicated degree of cold which science
has long been gazing toward and striving
to attain, wondering meanwhile
what may be the conditions of matter
at this unexplored point. Its existence
has long been indicated and its position
established in two different ways,
viz., the regularly diminishing volumes
of gases, and the steady falling off in
the resistance made by pure metals to
the passage through them of electricity
under increasing degrees of cold.
This point, to which both these processes
tend as an ultimate, is called the
zero of absolute temperature. By
more than one eminent observer it is
supposed to be the temperature of
inter-stellar space, the normal temperature
of the universe. Whether or not
this supposition be correct, the efforts
which have been made and are still in
progress to reach this degree of cold
have been many, diverse, and ingenious;
the equipment of the explorer
being not boats, condensed foods, and
the general machinery of ice exploration,
but all the varied resources of
mechanics and of chemistry which can
be combined to compass the extremest
degrees of cold.

All the world has heard of Professor
James Dewar, and of his late great
triumphs in the liquefaction of oxygen
gas and the solidification of nitrogen
and air. The sensation caused by his
extraordinary results won him at once
the congratulations of many scientific
men, the profuse encomiums of the
press, and the flattering recognition of
appreciative royal personages. This
was largely due to the fact that in the
search for this unknown and mysterious
point he had plunged much deeper
than any chemist before him into the
regions of low temperature, and had
arrived within sixty degrees Centigrade
of the point itself. This exciting and
not uneventful journey downward did
not take him beyond the confines of
his own laboratory, but his description
of it, as well as of the properties of
matter under extreme cold, has something
of the fascination, to the mind
possessed of ordinary chemical curiosity,
of the story of a Stanley, a Nansen,
or a Peary, describing the peculiarities
of countries in which they, of
all men, have been the first to set their
feet.

Professor Dewar, who was born in
Kincardine-on-Forth in 1842, was educated
at the University of Edinburgh,
where his natural and special gifts as
a chemist were developed by Sir Lyon
Playfair, at that time Professor of
Chemistry in the university. The perspicacity
and tenacity of purpose which
are characteristic of so many Scotchmen
were eminently the inheritance of
Sir Lyon’s young assistant, and between
that period and the present a
long series of original investigations in
all departments of chemistry have won
for Professor Dewar at his prime the
Jacksonian Professorship of Natural
Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge
University, the Fullerian Professorship
of Chemistry at the Royal Institution,
the Fellowship of the Royal Society,
the degree of Doctor of Laws, and
other dignities, which make great
alphabetical richness after his name
upon scientific occasions of state.
Personally, he is of middle height and
strong build, with a clearly cut face,
full of character. His speech, faintly525
flavored with the accent of Scotia, is
exact and emphatic; and his manner,
whether he is concentrated upon a
scientific demonstration in his laboratory
or traversing the speculative questions
of the hour in ordinary conversation
in his drawing-room, has the
earnestness of the profound scientist,
very agreeably tempered by the polish
of the traveller and cosmopolitan man
of the world. His absorption in scientific
pursuits has not denied him a very
marked esthetic development, and his
residential suite of apartments at the
Royal Institution is filled with treasures,
rare tapestries, bronzes, and carvings,
picked up at continental dépôts
or purchased at the sales of great collections,
which would make a highly
interesting article in themselves. To
her husband’s scientific sense of the
value of age in wines, Mrs. Dewar adds
her original researches in the matter of
choice teas, and it is averred by the
eminent membership of the Royal Institution
that the degree of domestic
civilization which prevails on the third
floor of the building is quite as high
and more potentially attractive than
the stage of scientific civilization which
rules in the theatre, the libraries, and
the laboratories of the floors below.
Like most Scotchmen, however, Professor
Dewar is simple in his tastes,
and is more deeply stirred by a frozen
gas or an antique bronze than anything
in the way of bisques or suprêmes.
His heart, which shows no
signs of low temperature, is mainly in
his laboratory, and he leads the way
there, down a flight of stone steps to
the basement, with a readiness that
very clearly exhibits his latent enthusiasm.

THE LABORATORY OF DAVY AND FARADAY AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION.

Moreover, it is a laboratory eminently
calculated to excite the enthusiasm of
anybody, being, in fact, the most famous
laboratory known to chemical science.
The workshop of Sir Humphry Davy,
Michael Faraday, and Doctor Thomas
Young, to say nothing of lesser and
still famous men, it is a nest in which526
more great discoveries have been
hatched than any other of its kind on
earth. Here it was that Young conducted
the experiments which gave us
the undulatory theory of light. Here
Davy, covering, nearly a hundred
years ago, almost the whole field of
chemistry and electricity, made clear
those principles which science and applied
science since his time have developed
to the marvellous degrees of
to-day. A little room leading to the
right of the main laboratory was the
scene of all Faraday’s experiments in
magnetism, and a cellar on its south
side is known to this day as “Davy’s
Froggery,” from the fact that Davy
kept in it hundreds of live frogs for
use in his experiments. Professor
Dewar, whose sense of the inspiration
of his surroundings is clearly deep,
dwells upon them with interest, and
tells how on one occasion a barrel of
live frogs, imported by Davy from
France, burst at the docks, causing
astonishment there and consternation
in the laboratory when Davy learned
of his loss. It was in this laboratory
that Faraday first liquefied chlorine
gas, sending thereupon that famously
curt note to Dr. Paris, the biographer
of Davy, in 1823:

All of Faraday’s work in the liquefaction
of gases, the discovery of new
hydrocarbons, the study of the changes
of steel through the slight admixture
of other metals, the improvement of
optical glass, and the long list of results
which are to-day represented in
millions of tons of products from thousands
of factories, were obtained within
these four walls. And nothing could
better illustrate the earnestness and
modesty of the great chemist than a
little anecdote which Professor Dewar,
standing in the centre of the room,
calls to mind. “I never met Faraday,”
says he, “but Tyndall told me
this story of him. The first time Tyndall
entered this laboratory, Faraday
led him to this point and said: ‘Tyndall,
this is a sacred spot. This is the
spot on which Davy separated sodium
and potassium.’”

The laboratory of to-day, however,
looks very little like a scene of chemical
industry. It has more the air of
a machine shop, equipped with power
and mechanical appliances of a very
heavy kind. Instead of bottles and
multi-colored liquids, all is metal and
steam. The room is about thirty feet
wide and fifty deep, the north front
consisting entirely of glass windows
opening on a well-lighted interior
court. In the left-hand corner, at the
back, is a large steam-engine, while a
smaller one occupies the corner diagonally
across. Shafts, wheels, and belting
run to two large air-pumps and
three steel compressors, each about the
size and shape of a small travelling
trunk, and used respectively for compressing
oxygen, nitrous oxide, and
ethylene. A fourth compressor, or
double compressing chamber, is cylindrical
in form, and is wrapped in thick
white flannel. This is the source of the
liquefied oxygen. The system which
Professor Dewar has followed is not
novel in its general principles, as he
explains. Specifically, however, it contains
many new inventions which he
does not wish made public. They are
mainly in the nature of stop-cocks and
valves, which it took long study to invent,
and which became perfect only
after many failures and costly experiments.
To liquefy oxygen, he simply
used pressure at low temperatures; but
as, up to 1878, both oxygen and nitrogen
after repeated trials were looked
upon as permanent gases, it may be
imagined that the attainment of temperatures
low enough was a problem
which required an extraordinary command
of mechanics as well as of chemistry
to practically solve.

PROFESSOR DEWAR IN THE LABORATORY OF THE ROYAL INSTITUTION. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN FOR M’CLURE’S
MAGAZINE BY FRADELLE AND YOUNG, LONDON.

“The process of liquefying oxygen,
briefly speaking,” says the professor,
“is this. Into the outer chamber of
that double compressor I introduce,
through a pipe, liquid nitrous oxide
gas, under a pressure of about 1,400
pounds to the square inch. I then
allow it to evaporate rapidly, and thus
obtain a temperature around the inner
chamber of −90° C. (−130° F.). Into
this cooled inner chamber I introduce527
liquid ethylene, which is a gas at ordinary
temperatures, under a pressure of
1,800 pounds to the square inch. When
the inner chamber is full of ethylene,
its rapid evaporation under exhaustion
reduces the temperature to −145° C.
(−229° F.). Running through this
inner chamber is a tube containing
oxygen gas under a pressure of 750
pounds to the square inch. The ‘critical
point’ of oxygen gas, that is, the
point above which no amount of pressure
will reduce it to a liquid, is −115° C.,
but this pressure, at the temperature528
of −145° C., is amply sufficient to cause
it to liquefy rapidly. In drawing off
the liquid under this pressure, I lose
nine-tenths of it by evaporation, and I
have not yet seen how to diminish that
loss. Every pint of it which I collect
therefore represents ten pints manufactured.
In all, I have thus far collected
and used about fifty gallons, and
the cost of machinery and experiments,
very generously met by subscription
among members of the Royal Institution
and others, has been about five
thousand pounds sterling.” It should
be here stated that one of the most
generous contributors to the fund has
been Professor Dewar himself, a large
fraction of the sum having come out
of his own pocket.

THE LECTURE-ROOM OF THE ROYAL INSTITUTION.

Going more into detail, he makes
clear some of the mechanical and chemical
difficulties which beset him in the
work. “The secret of my success,”
he continues, “has been the mechanical
arrangements combined with the
use of ethylene. This is a volatile
hydrocarbon, and is the chief illuminating
constituent of coal gas. The only
means of keeping it liquid for any
length of time is to surround it with
solid carbonic acid. Faraday was the
first to call attention to the properties
of ethylene, and we manufacture it by
heating sulphuric acid in a glass retort
protected by an iron cover to 160° C.
Alcohol heated to 160° C. is allowed to
drip into it and ethylene results, passing
off as a gas, which is stored, after being
purified. It is then compressed by two
pumps, the first with a six-inch plunger
and six-inch stroke, and the second a
two-inch plunger and six-inch stroke.
This liquefies it under the pressure
stated. It is nasty stuff to handle, as,
whenever it becomes mixed, by leakage
or otherwise, with nitrous oxide or air,
an explosion is imminent, and we have
had not a few explosions in the course
of the work. It liquefies at −103° C.
(−152.4° F.), and when boiled in a partial
vacuum absorbs a large amount of
latent heat. The failure of preceding
attempts to liquefy oxygen is due to
lack of knowledge of its ‘critical point,’
and the law which that phrase describes.
As long ago as 1851, Natterer subjected
oxygen to a pressure of 2,800
atmospheres, or over thirty tons to the
square inch. He obtained no result,
because, as I have said, no amount of
pressure will affect it above −115° C. I
liquefy it at −145° C. for two reasons.529
The lower the temperature at which it
is liquefied, the less is the pressure required
upon the oxygen and the greater
is the amount of latent heat which it
absorbs in evaporating. By evaporating,
under exhaustion, oxygen liquefied
at −145° C., I get as low as −200° C.,
which I could not do were it liquefied
at a higher temperature.

PROFESSOR DEWAR’S LECTURE-TABLE. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN OF PROFESSOR DEWAR’S FIRST LECTURE
ON THE LIQUEFACTION OF OXYGEN.

“Having obtained the liquid oxygen,”
he continues, turning to the long
table below the windows, “the question
was how to store it for working
purposes, with the least possible loss
by evaporation. After various trials
and experiments, we devised a set of
vacuum vessels, each consisting of a
tube or bottle for the liquid oxygen,
sealed at the neck in a second tube or
bottle, from which the air had been
exhausted. I found the cheapest and
best method of getting a vacuum to
be the old Torricellian one of driving
out the air with mercury vapor and
then condensing the vapor. This had
a further advantage. The tube containing
the liquid oxygen was so cold
that it froze the mercury vapor, and
coated itself with a perfect metallic
mirror, which by its reflection still further
diminished the loss by radiated
heat from the outside.” Without more
ado, he lifted from a small frame one of
the vacuum vessels referred to. It was
a white glass jar, inside of which was
what seemed to be a round metallic ball.
Open at the neck, this ball was a bottle
nearly filled with liquid oxygen, and by
the light which reached it through the
neck of the bottle it was a very clear
pale blue liquid, which was evaporating
quietly in a single thread of tiny bubbles,
like a glass of champagne which
has become nearly still.

It was one of those moments which
Faraday would doubtless have regarded
as solemn. To behold, for the first
time, a liquid which your professors
of chemistry have assured you was a
gas and always would be a gas, is an
experience which does not occur many
times in a lifetime. After that, a sight
of perpetual motion or the square of
the circle would leave you calm. To
know, furthermore, that this strange
gas, which is the prime agent of all
life, which is eight-ninths of all water
and three-fourths of the entire earth,
has been laid captive by science, reduced
to a form which cannot fail to
shed a flood of light on any number
of abstruse problems in chemistry and
mechanics, excites a deeper feeling.
The pale blue liquid, which is strangely
lustrous, seems truly magical. Moreover,
it is a great surprise to see the
liquid, which you expect to find under
great pressure and ready to blow
its containing vessel to pieces, evaporating
quietly in the air, protected from
heat by a vacuum on one side and its
own cold vapor on the other. And so
you can do nothing but stare at it in
amazement, and gently shake the bottle,
and turn from it to its discoverer with a
feeling which is not entirely dissociated530
from awe. It has lost
all its impressiveness to
the professor, however,
for he is busy preparing
to illustrate some of its
properties—an interesting
introduction in
themselves to the conditions
which prevail
twice as far below the
freezing point of water
as its boiling point lies
above.

EARLY AND LATEST FORMS OF VESSELS FOR HOLDING LIQUEFIED OXYGEN.

He begins by pouring
some of the oxygen
into a test tube, white
fumes appearing as he
does so from the freezing
of the moisture in
the surrounding air.
Then he drops into the
liquid oxygen in the
test tube a bit of phosphorus.
Despite the
flaming energy with
which these two combine
at ordinary temperatures,
there is no
action. The phosphorus
is as unaffected as a chip of wood in
water. He takes it out and pours in some
pure alcohol, whose freezing point is
much below that of mercury. It freezes
with a slight sputter into what you can
only call alcohol ice. He takes out the
ice and holds a match to it. There is no
sign of combustion. Placed on a glass
dish the alcohol ice melts into a thick,
oily liquid, which also declines to burn.
In a few seconds, however, it warms
to its ordinary thinness and burns as
hungrily as ever. Then comes an exhibition
of the “spheroidal state.” A
drop of water thrown towards a red-hot
stove does not touch the stove, because
the evaporation is so rapid that the
forming gas lifts the water and keeps
it moving about. Precisely the same
thing occurs when the oxygen is
dropped over a flat glass dish at the
temperature of the air, which is red-hot
to the oxygen, comparatively
speaking. It dances about, shaking
and boiling furiously. As he pours it,
a tiny drop splashes on the professor’s
hand, and he flings it off with a quick
jerk. “It makes a sore worse than a
burn,” he explains, “if it ever touches
the skin.” Then he drops some of it
into water. It floats quietly, and as
it boils off into gas, freezes a cup of
water around it, floating about comfortably
in its own boat. Then came
curious evidence of its magnetic properties.
Pouring a little into a flat cup
of rock salt, he placed the cup between
the poles of an electro-magnet, the one
which Faraday used. The boiling
liquid, the moment that the circuit
was completed, flew to the two terminals
en masse and clung there, still boiling
away rapidly on the two points.
A piece of cotton wool soaked in the
liquid was held closely to one of the
points, until all the oxygen had been
sucked out of it, when it hung suspended
between them. Liquid oxygen
has a magnetic property, he said, which
is about 1,000 as compared with 1,000,000,
the magnetic property of iron. It
is a non-conductor of electricity, and a
spark one-tenth of a millimetre long
from a coil machine, which would give
a long spark in the air, would not pass
through the liquid. It gave a flash531
now and then as a bubble of oxygen
vapor came between the terminals.
Liquid oxygen is, in fact, a high insulator.

Liquid oxygen at atmospheric pressure
boils at −184° C. (−229.2° F.). By
evaporating it under a diminished
pressure, he gets much higher degrees
of cold, and these have enabled him to
both liquefy and solidify nitrogen and
air. The experiment illustrating this
was not only interesting; it was difficult
to believe. In a double vacuum
vessel the centre of which was an open
test tube, and the second compartment
a reservoir of liquid oxygen connected
with an exhaust pump, he so lowered
the pressure that the oxygen boiled
tumultuously. As it did so, drops of
clear liquid began to form on the sides
of the test tube and gather at the
bottom. It was liquid air, the oxygen
and nitrogen of the atmosphere liquefying
together at a temperature of
−197.2° (−322.9° F.). He poured some
of the liquid air into a second tube, and
then showed how the nitrogen, which
liquefies at a temperature fourteen
degrees below oxygen, boiled off first.
A smouldering splinter of wood held
at the mouth of the tube was extinguished.
A few moments later when
it was again held there, it burst into
brilliant flame. The nitrogen had all
evaporated, and the oxygen was coming
off. He explained that air became
solid under pressure at −207° C.
(−340.6° F.). It was a structureless
glass, and he had not determined
whether or not the oxygen in it was
solid or was held suspended as a jelly.
Nitrogen solidified under pressure at
−210° C. (−346° F.). It was a white
crystalline substance. He had no
knowledge as yet whether oxygen
crystallized in solidifying, but his belief
was that it would not.

THE “COMPRESSORS.”

Concerning hydrogen, most elusive
of all the gases, he had no present expectation
of attaining liquefaction. Its
critical point was below −210° C., and
its boiling point −250° C. He had no
means as yet of attacking the problem.
In fact, the only thermometer he was
able to use at these low temperatures
was one which used hydrogen expansion
as a measure of temperature. His
main reliance in measuring low temperatures
was a thermo-electric junction.
Deeply interesting also was his
description of liquid ozone, that strange
form of oxygen which though identical
with it in constitution is different in
molecular arrangement. He obtains
twenty per cent. of ozone from liquid
oxygen by electrical stimulation, the
ozone being of a very dark blue color,
as dark as concentrated indigo. It is
highly unstable, a beam of light having
caused it to explode on one occasion,
and its study even in small quantities
requires all the delicacy of manipulation
which is one of the
special directions in which
Professor Dewar as a chemist
occupies the foremost
rank.

Through all these explanations,
and others too elaborate
and too technical for
these pages, he had spoken
in the clear, emphatic way
which is characteristic of
men who deal with abstruse
subjects, and desire, from long habit, to
present them with the maximum of
clearness and the minimum of words.
His speech is incisive, the utterances of
an energetic and concentrated mind.
Over a cup of tea upstairs, however, he
spoke more slowly and dwelt with interest
upon some of the many strange
results which have already met his eyes
in the region of −200° Centigrade.

“As we approach the zero point of
absolute temperature,” said he, “we532
seem to be nearing what I can only
call the death of matter. Pure metals
undergo molecular changes which cannot
yet be defined, but which entirely
alter their characteristics as we know
them. Tensile strength, electrical resistance,
in fact, the whole character
of the metal as we are acquainted with
it, appears to change. At −200°, for
instance, iron becomes as good an electrical
conductor as copper, while it is
more than probable that at the zero
of absolute temperature, if not before,
the electrical resistance of all metals
reaches its zero point. The alloys do
not follow the same rule, being much
less affected. Carbon is a strange exception,
its electrical resistance increasing
with cold and decreasing with heat.
The effect upon colors is also remarkable,
and opens up a wide field for experiment
and investigation. In fact,
the most marked and immediate effect
of my experiments will appear, I think,
in the field of magneto-optics. You
have seen a red oxide of mercury turn
yellow when cooled to the temperature
of liquid oxygen, and regain its original
color upon returning to the temperature
of the air. In the same way, sulphur
becomes white. Bichromate of potash
becomes also white. A solution of
iodine in alcohol becomes colorless, as
does ferric chloride, a deep red at the
temperature of the air. They all regain
their colors upon returning to the
ordinary temperature. At these low
temperatures chemical action ceases,
as you have seen. I supposed the rule
was invariable, but found that a photographic
plate placed in liquid oxygen
was still acted upon by energy from
the outside, and at even −200° C. was
sensitive to light.

“The effect upon bacterial life is also
not what one would expect. Though
it is destroyed by boiling in water, a
temperature of 100° C., it can still endure
unaffected a degree of cold much
greater in proportion. I have submitted
putrefying blood, milk, seeds,
etc., for the space of an hour, to a
temperature of −182° C., but found that
they afterwards went on putrefying or
germinating as the case happened to
be. This is interesting in one way, as
it gives color to Lord Kelvin’s suggestion
that the first life might have
been brought to this planet by a seed-bearing
meteorite, though it does not
explain,” he added with a smile, “how
the meteorite was originally equipped
with seeds. It shows, however, that
spores may live upon a planet through
long periods of low temperature. In
the phenomena of diminishing electrical
resistance and its final disappearance,
I look for much new light
upon the mystery of electricity itself.
The changes in the characteristics of
metals already observed enlock lessons
whose scope we have not yet
begun to measure. In fact,” said he,
“for a long time to come I shall
confine myself to the many fields of
research which the temperatures already
attained have opened up.”

Concerning the zero of absolute
temperature, Professor Dewar was disinclined
to theorize. As to its being
the temperature of inter-stellar space,
he has not yet come to any final conclusion,
though he expressed the view
that the strange white and shining
night clouds which have puzzled the
astronomers were composed of carbonic
acid gas frozen solid. Nor does
he yet, despite the temperatures
reached, see how the zero is to be
attained. He, like the Arctic explorers
of the past, has reached a point beyond
which no appliances of modern science
can carry him. The mysteries which
cluster about this point are so many,
however, that the efforts to reach it
will be untiring from this time forth.
That its discovery will be a key to
many unsolved problems in electricity,
in matter, in light, and the great inscrutable
mystery of life itself, is not
to be doubted. This is an age of constant
change in scientific conceptions
and traditions, every marked advance
in any one science tending to cause
more or less of a readjustment of existing
views in every other. Science
has long been editing the Book of
Genesis with an unsparing pen, and
with the attainment of the zero of absolute
temperature the command “Let
there be light” may take on a meaning
which the profoundest philosopher or
scientist of the present time cannot
remotely conceive.

533

THE HOUSE WITH THE TALL PORCH.

By Gilbert Parker.

No one ever visited at it except
the little chemist, the avocat
and Medallion; and Medallion, though
merely an auctioneer, was the only one
on terms of intimacy with its owner, an
old seigneur who for many years had
never stirred beyond the limits of his
little garden. At rare intervals he
might be seen sitting in the large
stone porch which gave overweighted
dignity to the house, itself not very
large. An air of mystery surrounded
the place: in summer the grass was
rank, the trees seemed huddled together
in gloom about the house, the vines
appeared to ooze on the walls, and at
one end, where the window-shutters
were always closed and barred, a great
willow drooped and shivered; in winter
the stone walls showed naked and
grim among the gaunt trees and furtive
shrubs.

None who ever saw the seigneur
could forget him—a tall figure with
stooping shoulders; a pale, deeply-lined,
clean-shaven face; and a forehead painfully
white, with blue veins showing;
the eyes handsome, penetrative, brooding,
and made indescribably sorrowful
by the dark skin around them. There
were those in Pontiac, such as the curé,
who remembered when the seigneur
was constantly to be seen in the village;
and then another person was with him
always, a young, tall youth, his son.
They were fond and proud of each
other, and were religious and good
citizens in a high-bred, punctilious way.
Then the seigneur was all health and
stalwart strength. But one day a
rumor went abroad that the seigneur
had quarrelled with his son because of
the wife of Farette the miller. No
one outside knew if the thing was
true, but Julie, the miller’s wife, seemed
rather to plume herself that she had
made a stir in her little world. Yet
the curious habitants came to know
that the young man had gone, and
after a good many years his having
once lived there was almost a tradition.
But the little chemist remembered
whenever he set foot inside the tall
porch; the avocat was kept in mind
by papers which he was called upon to
read and alter from time to time; the
curé never forgot, because when the
young man went he lost not one of his
flock, but two; and Medallion, knowing
something of the story, had it
before him with gradually increasing
frequency; besides, he had wormed a
deal of truth out of the miller’s wife.
He knew that the closed, barred rooms
were the young man’s; and he knew,
also, that the old man was waiting,
waiting, in a hope which he never even
named to himself.

One day the silent old housekeeper
came rapping at Medallion’s door, and
simply said to him, “Come—the seigneur!”
Medallion went, and for hours
sat beside the seigneur’s chair, while
the little chemist watched and sighed
softly in a corner, now and again rising
to feel the sick man’s pulse and to
prepare a draught. The housekeeper
hovered behind the high-backed chair,
and when the seigneur dropped his
handkerchief—now, as always, of the
exquisite fashion of a past century—put
it gently in his hand, and he would
incline his head ever so gently, and
wipe his pale, dry lips with it.

Once when the little chemist touched
his wrist, his dark eyes rested on him
with inquiry, and he said: “How
long?”

It was useless trying to shirk the
persistency of that look. “Ten hours,
perhaps, sir,” he said with painful shyness.

The seigneur seemed to draw himself
up a little, and his hand grasped
his handkerchief tightly for an instant;
then he said: “So long? Thank you.”534
Then, after a little, his eyes turned
to Medallion, and he seemed about to
speak, but still kept silent. His chin
dropped on his breast, and for a time
he was motionless and shrunken; but
still there was a strange little curl of
pride—or disdain—to his lips. At last
he drew up his head, his shoulders
heavily came erect to the carved back
of the chair, where, strange to say, the
stations of the cross were figured, and
he said with a cold, ironical voice: “The
angel of patience has lied.”

The evening wore on, and there was
no sound save the ticking of the clock,
the beat of rain upon the windows, and
the deep breathing of the seigneur.
Presently he started, his eyes opened
wide, and his whole body seemed to
listen. “I heard a voice,” he said.

“No one spoke, my master,” said the
housekeeper.

“It was a voice without,” he said.

“Monsieur,” said the little chemist,
“it was the wind in the eaves.”

His face was almost painfully eager
and sensitively alert. “Hush,” he said,
“I hear a voice in the tall porch.”

“Sir,” said Medallion, laying a hand
respectfully on his arm, “it is nothing.”

With a light on his face and a proud,
trembling energy, he got to his feet.
“It is the voice of my son,” he said.
“Go, go, and bring him in.”

No one moved. But he was not to
be disobeyed. His ears had been growing
keener as he neared the subtle atmosphere
of that brink where a man
strips himself to the soul for a lonely
voyaging, and he waved the woman to
the door. “Wait,” he said, as her hand
fluttered at the handle, “take him to
another room. Prepare a supper such
as we used to have. When it is ready
I will come. But listen, and obey me.
Do not tell him that I have but half a
dozen hours of life. Go, and bring
him in.”

It was as he said. She found the
son, weak and fainting, fallen within
the porch, a worn, bearded man, returned
from failure and suffering and
the husks of evil. They clothed him
and cared for him, and strengthened
him with wine, while the woman wept
over him, and at last set him at the
loaded, well-lighted table. Then the
seigneur came in, leaning his arm very
lightly on that of Medallion, with a
kingly air, and, greeting his son before
them all as if they had parted yesterday,
sat down. For two hours they
sat there, and the seigneur talked gayly,
with a color, and his fine eyes glowing;
at last he rose, lifted his glass,
and said: “The angel of patience is
wise: I drink to my son.” He was
about to say something more, but a
sudden whiteness passed over his face.
He drank off the wine and, as he put
the glass down, shivered, and fell back
in his chair. “Three hours short,
chemist,” he said, and smiled, and was
still—forever.

535

STRANGER THAN FICTION.

THE BRONTËS AL FRESCO. THE BRONTËS AND THE GHOSTS.
THE DEVIL AND THE POTATO BLIGHT. THE GREAT
BRONTË FIGHT.

By Doctor William Wright.

I.

THE BRONTËS AL FRESCO.

I proceed with this chapter in the
first person, though the story came
to me at second-hand. My tutor, the
Reverend W. McAllister, narrated it
to me, in the words in which he had
heard it from a youthful cousin, and I
am able to give it almost in the same
words and in the form in which I wrote
it out as an exercise in composition.

The scene described does not, however,
rest on the authority of Mr.
McAllister or his friend, but on the
testimony of all who knew the Brontës
in their home life. The same scene
has been described to me by old men
whose memory extended back to matters
in the last century, and quite recently,
when visiting the place, an aged
neighbor pointed out the exact spot
where he himself had witnessed the
Brontës engaged in their amusements.
The story is so characteristic that I
give it in extenso, and with all details,
as I got it:

“In 1824 I made my first great
journey out into the big world, accompanied
by my elder brother. I was
then very young. The nature of our
business obliged us to go on foot, and
the distance traversed was two or
three miles.

“Our errand brought us into the
midst of the Brontës, and as we had to
remain there six or seven hours, I had
an opportunity of seeing, under various
aspects, that extraordinary and unique
family, whose genius came to be revealed
a few years later by three little
girls, on English soil.

“I first saw a group of the Brontë
brothers together. I think there were
six of them, and they were marching,
in step, across a field towards a level
road. Their style of marching, and
whole appearance, arrested my attention.
They were dressed alike, in
home-spun and home-knitted garments,
that fitted them closely, and showed
off to perfection their large, lithe, and
muscular forms. They were all over
six feet high, but, with their close-fitting
apparel and erect bearing, they
appeared to me to be men of gigantic
stature. They bounded lightly over
all the fences that stood in their way,
all springing from the ground and
alighting together, and they continued
to march in step without an apparent
effort, until they reached the public
road, and then they began, in a business-like
way, to settle conditions, in
preparation for a serious contest.

“A few men and boys watched the
little group of Brontës timorously,
from a distance, but curiosity drew my
brother and myself close up to where
they were assembled. They did not
seem to notice us, or know that we
were present, but proceeded with a
match of rolling a large metal ball
along the road. The ball seemed to
be about six pounds weight, and the
one who could make it roll furthest
along the road would be declared the
winner.

“The contest was to them an earnest
business. Every ounce of elastic force
in the great, muscular frames was
called into action, and there was a
profusion of strange, strong language
that literally made my flesh to creep,
and my hair to stand on end. The536
forms of expression which they used
were as far from commonplace as anything
ever written by the gifted nieces;
and as the uncles’ lives were on a lower
plane of civilization, and their scant
education had not reduced their tongues
to the conventional forms of speech,
they gave utterance to their thoughts
with a pent-up and concentrated energy
never equalled in rugged force
by the novelists.

“I had never seen men like the
Brontës, and I had never heard language
like theirs. The quaint conceptions
and glowing thoughts and
ferocious epithets that struggled for
utterance, at the unlettered lips of the
Irish Brontës, revealed the original
quarry from which the vicar’s daughters
chiselled the stones for their artistic
castle-building, and disclosed the original
fountain from which they drew
their pathos and passion. Similar
fierce originality and power are felt to
be present in everything produced by
the English Brontës, but in their case
the intensity of energy is held in check
by the Branwell temperament, and
kept under restraint by education and
culture.

“The match over, and the sweep-stakes
secured, the brothers returned
to their harvest labor as they went,
clearing, like greyhounds, every fence
that stood in their way. At that time
no fame attached to the Brontë name,
but the men that I had come upon
were so different from the local gentry,
farmers, flax-dressers, and such like
people, who lived around them, that I
became, all at once, deeply interested
in them.

“From a distance I watched their
shining sickles flashing among the
golden grain, and caught snatches of
song, which I afterwards found to be
from Robert Burns. My interest, however,
in the Brontës was shared by no
one. They were then neither prophets
nor heroes in their own country, and
they were regarded with a kind of
superstitious dread by their neighbors,
rather than with interest or curiosity.

“Young as I then was, I persevered
with my inquiries, and my curiosity
was rewarded. I learned that the
Brontës had a brother a clergyman in
England, ‘a fine gentleman,’ then on a
visit with them, and that the Brontë
family were in the habit of holding an
open-air concert every favorable afternoon
in a secluded glen below their
house. I remember wondering if the
clergyman ever broke out in the vigorous
vernacular of his kith and kin, but
I was especially interested in the open-air
concert.

“My brother and I, by the nature of
our errand, could not return home till
late in the evening, and as we were at
leisure we made up our minds to assist
at the concert. On pretence of gathering
blackberries we explored the glen
and discovered the place. No one
would accompany us, and we were
told, with looks of terror, that it would
be at our peril if we went to the concert,
as the brothers had ‘the black
art,’ and were, above all men, to be
avoided. We resolved notwithstanding
to go as spectators, and waited
with impatience till the day’s work
should be over.

“About six o’clock a horn was blown,
and the reapers suddenly dropped their
sickles and strolled down leisurely to
the concert glen. We had already preceded
them, and taken our places on
a high ridge bordering the glen, in a
thicket of low brushwood.

“Three sisters were the first to arrive
on the scene. They brought a spinning-wheel,
a supply of oat-bread and
buttermilk, and a green satchel which
contained a violin. The men sat astride
the trunk of a prostrate tree, and disposed
of their afternoon collation in
an incredibly short space of time, one
wooden bowl, or noggin, supplying milk
to each.

“Scarcely had the frugal meal been
ended when one of the brothers began
to thrum the fiddle, and quick as lightning
two of the sisters and the other
brothers were whirling and spinning
airily over the grass. The other sister
was busily plying her spinning-wheel
and watching the moving scene. In
turns each of the sisters took her place
at the wheel, and the one relieved instantly
plunged into the mazes of the
dance.

“The girls were tall, like their
brothers, and picturesque in their red537
tippets. Like their brothers, they were
handsome and graceful. They were
mature maidens, but they had not lost
their elegant figures, or their fresh
white and red complexions. Their
homemade dresses, though of plain
woollen material and simply made,
fitted them well, and were in perfect
harmony with their rustic surroundings.
Their hair hung in ringlets
round their shoulders, and they moved
with unconscious gracefulness, whirling
over the greensward as if they
scarcely touched it, or mazing through
a ‘country dance’ or an ‘eight-part
reel,’ or waltzing round and round in
a manner to make the onlooker giddy.

“There was nothing in the whole
performance suggestive of the rough
peasant, or the country clown. All
was exquisite grace and courtesy. The
musician was also relieved from time
to time, each of the brothers taking his
turn at the violin.

“The scene was of the most weird
and romantic character. The place
selected for the family dance was in a
secluded widening of the glen, down
which flows a little stream that makes
a murmuring noise as it tumbles over
stones, and among the roots of alder
and willow. It was wide enough to
give full scope for extended galops,
and sufficient for all the exigencies of
Sir Roger de Coverley. The ground
was thickly carpeted with grass, and
surrounded by large trees with overhanging
branches. The trees were
festooned with ivy and honeysuckle.
Sweetbrier and wild roses overflowed
the hedges in great profusion, and
‘Flowering Sally,’ in pink bunches,
fringed the brook.

“The sun was sinking in the west,
throwing dark shadows down the sides
of the Newry mountains, and shedding
a pale glory on Slieve Donard and
the other lofty peaks of the Mourne
range. Close by stood the Knock
Hill, generally sombre and unpicturesque,
but on that occasion it glowed
in the parting rays. The little valley,
as it dipped downward, opened out to
the west, and through the opening the
setting sun poured a rich flood of light
on the animated groups, mating each
dancer with a long, dark shadow, and
doubling the number of figures that
tripped lightly over the grass.

“As the sun dropped behind the ridge
of Armagh the concert came to an
end, after a long bout of Scotch jigs, in
which two and two in a row danced
opposite to each other, chased by their
tall, unearthly shadows. The closing
scene was a great effort of endurance,
but none seemed to weary, and with a
few skips into the air, the arms raised
in curves above the head, and the fingers
being made to crack, all was still.

“There were four spectators of this
wonderful family gathering—my
brother and myself, a goat that was
quietly barking a tree beside us, and
pausing occasionally to look at the
frantic display, and, on the other side
of the valley from where we were,
the clergyman brother, who walked to
and fro, in solemn black, apparently in
meditation, and taking no notice of
the gleeful recreation of his brothers
and sisters.

“There was no dawdling when the
dance was over. Each of the brothers
bowed with an air of gallantry to each
of the sisters, and then one of the
brothers caught up the spinning-wheel,
and, poising it on his shoulder, strode
up the homeward side of the glen. All
followed smartly and disappeared, in
company with the sober figure in black.

“We slipped out of the bower where
we had sat entranced, and hurried
homeward, with feelings of uncertainty
as to the reality of things, in the gathering
darkness.”

This is the most complete account I
have ever heard of the summer-evening
concerts held by the Brontës. Others
had often seen these large-limbed,
sinewy children of Anak dancing on
the green with their flying shadows;
but they had failed to appreciate the
sylphlike motions of the maidens, or
the stately curvetting of the gigantic
brothers, and looked on the whole exhibition
as something uncanny, and as
tending to confirm the popular belief
that the Brontës had dealings with the
powers of the nether world.

The unique forms and forceful language
of the Brontës were lost on their
commonplace neighbors, who looked on
them as strange and dangerous people.538
In fact, they were not regarded with
much favor by the people of the district,
from whom they carefully held
aloof; and the belief that they were in
league with the devil received a certain
amount of confirmation, as we shall
see by and by.

When I first began to take an interest
in the Brontës I was admonished,
in a mysterious manner, to have nothing
to do with such people. I was advised
to keep out of their way, lest I should
hear their odious language, and it was
even hinted that they might in some
Satanic way do me bodily harm.

I am bound to say that matters in
this respect have not altered much
since for the better. My attempts,
recently, to get accurate information
on special points, regarding the Brontës
and their ways, have been looked upon
as a kind of craze, out of which, I have
been assured, I was never likely to
reap much credit. And even educated
people, when replying to my inquiries
on matters of fact, have sometimes felt
called on to remind me that I was taking
much pains with regard to a dangerous
and outlandish family.

In fact, the Brontës paid the penalty
for being a little cleverer than the people
with whom they came in contact,
and with whom they never associated.
The Brontës looked down on the people
of their own rank in life, and permitted
no familiarities of any kind; and the
only person who ever joined in their
dances, as far as is known, was Farmer
Burns. As they held aloof from everybody,
they were only known by their
strange language and odd ways. Imagination
filled up the unknown, and
gossips, as usual, made the most of
every little circumstance. The fact
that Mrs. Brontë had once been a Catholic
prejudiced in no small degree the
minds of Protestants against the children.

The clergyman’s presence in no way
restrained the mirthful exuberance of
the dancers. Before he left home he
was always one of the party, and on
his visits from college and from his living
he often joined in their mirth, as
formerly. But on the occasion referred
to by Mr. McAllister he seemed uninterested
in the familiar scene.

He was probably thinking of his precocious
little women, Maria and Elizabeth,
whom he had left at Cowan Bridge
school a month before; or his heart
may have been in the Haworth vicarage
with the motherless little girls,
Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, who were
under the care of their prim maiden
aunt. Even then the children were
wise beyond their years, though, in
their narrow world, they had scarcely
begun to accumulate the experience
which enabled them to give local form
and color to their father’s stories.

II.

THE DEVIL AND THE POTATO BLIGHT.

The concert glen and romantic brook
witnessed very different ceremonies
from that just described. At one period
an awful drama took the place of lissome
glee, when Hugh Brontë, “the giant,”
in wild passion, sought to come into
actual bodily conflict with the devil.

The potato blight fell as a crushing
blow on the hopes of the Brontës, and
proved the turning-point of their fortunes.
They were growing in prosperity,
and had enlarged their farm by the
savings of many years. Through industry
and frugality they had added
field to field until their material success
seemed to be assured; but while they
were rejoicing in the position to which
they had attained, the potato crop
blackened, and melted away before
their eyes.

Ireland at that period had two kinds
of tenant farmers. One resembled the
drowsy oriental, who basks in the sun,
and seems content, not to live, but to
exist.

In Ireland a large number of people
on the land simply existed in those
days. They knew that if they drained
or improved their farms the landlords
would raise their rents, so as to sweep
away the entire profits arising from
their improvements. They were well
aware that any enlargement or brightening
of their homesteads would cause
the agent to scent superfluous money,
and put on the screw; for a tenant539
would be more likely to make an effort
to hold on to a comfortable house than
to an uncomfortable one. Every staple
of thatch put upon the leaky roof, or
bucket of whitewash brushed on to the
sooty walls of the cabin, gave the landlord
a new hold on the tenant, and supplied
the agent with a new pretext for
increasing the rent for his master, or
securing a present for himself. And
there were agents so kindly disposed
towards the miserable tenants that
they preferred one pound as a present
to themselves to two pounds added to
the landlord’s rent-roll.

Under these circumstances tenants
of the indolent type did not drain their
lands or improve the appearance of
their houses; and if they had thriving
cattle they kept them concealed in remote
fields when the agent was about;
and when they were obliged to meet
either agent or landlord, they decked
themselves out like Jebusites, in ragged
and squalid garments. It thus happened
that landlords and land agents never
saw their tenantry except in rags, and
thus the tenants contrived to order
themselves lowly and reverently to
their betters.

The land of the thriftless brought
forth potatoes in plenty. A little lime
and dike scourings, mixed together,
sufficed for manure. The potato seed
was planted on the lea-sod, and covered
up in ridges four or five feet wide. The
elaborate preparation for planting potatoes
in drills was then unheard of.
Cabbage plants were dibbled into the
edges of the ridges, and the potatoes
and cabbages grew together. Abundant
supplies of West-reds and Yellow-legs
and Copper-duns, with large Savoy and
Drumhead cabbages, only needed to be
dug and gathered, to maintain existence.

Oats, following the potato crop, provided
rough, wholesome bread, and
little yellow rats of Kerry cows supplied
milk. Great stalwart men and
women lived on potatoes three times a
day, with bread and buttermilk and an
occasional egg. Sometimes, in the autumn,
a lean and venerable cow would
be fed for a few weeks on the after
grass (flesh put on in a hurry being
considered more tender) and then killed,
salted, and hung up to the black back
in the kitchen for family use. This
pièce de résistance was the only flesh-meat
ever known in the homes of such
people.

Two pigs, fattened yearly on potatoes,
and a few lambs, taken from the
early clover, met the demands of the
landlord. The wool of the sheep, spun,
knitted, or woven at home, supplied
scant, but sufficient, wardrobes. For
fuel they had whins, or furze, cut from
the fences, and turf from the bogs.
The fire was preserved by raking a half-burned
turf every night in the ashes, but
a coal to light the fire was occasionally
borrowed from more provident neighbors,
and carried by a pair of tongs
from house to house. Matches were
unknown in those days.

The men broke stones by the roadsides,
on warm days, for pocket-money
or tobacco, and the women obtained
their little extras by the produce of
their surplus eggs, which they carried
to market in little osier hand-baskets.

Existence in such homes flowed
smoothly, one year being exactly like
another. The people had no prospects,
no hopes, no ambitions. They lived
from hand to mouth, and, while all
went well, the fulness of each day was
sufficient for their simple wants. In
their diurnal rounds they gathered their
creels of potatoes, and drove their
Kerry cows to the fields, golden with
tufted ragweeds and purple with
prickly thistles.

Such people seldom had their rents
raised or their improvements confiscated,
for the simple reason that they
never made improvements, and never
sought, through sustained effort, to
better their conditions. They had no
margin beyond the bare necessaries of
life, no resources to fall back upon, in
case of calamity. With barely enough
to supply their daily wants, they lived
on the verge of starvation, and when
the famine came they starved.

The Brontës were people of a different
fibre. They would not succumb
without a struggle. They had advanced
from the Emdale cabin to the
Lisnacreedy cottage, and thence to the
house and farm in Ballynaskeagh.
The primitive corn-kiln, with its insignificant540
and precarious profits, had
been abandoned for the lucrative occupation
of macadamizing roads, and
cultivating the land.

The Brontës worked hard, and were
frugal as well as industrious. They
had hoarded the savings of many years,
and invested all in a new farm, and
they felt that they had a right to look
forward to a condition of prosperity
and independence.

The class to which the Brontës belonged
differed widely from the inert
and feckless farmers that encumbered
many a bankrupt estate. They did
not live from hand to mouth, spending
each day’s efforts on each day’s wants,
and passing the summer in an easy
doze. No people on earth slaved and
saved as they did. They worked late
and early. Their wives and daughters
and little children rose with the sun,
and labored the live-long day. Every
good thing raised on the farm went to
market, to meet the landlord’s exactions,
and to add to the little store.
Butter, bacon, fowl, eggs, and such
like, raised by the laborious housewife,
were sacred to the landlord, and to the
hoard accumulated against the rainy
day.

For such slaves there was little
recreation except a half holiday on
Christmas Day, with a party display
on the Twelfth of July or the Seventeenth
of March. No toil, however,
could crush out of them the desire to
better their lot, but their moiling and
saving seldom resulted in anything
more brilliant than a five-pound note
to pay a son’s passage to America, or
a twenty-pound portion for the daughter.

The industry of the Brontës was not
in vain. They lived under the best
landlords that Ireland has ever produced.
“The Sharman estate,” now
known as “the Sharman-Crawford
property,” has been blessed by a succession
of Christian landlords, who
recognized that landed property had
duties as well as privileges, and who
have made it their life work to propagate
their doctrines by peaceful persuasion.

On the Sharman estate the Brontës
had a fair field for their industries.
They worked in absolute harmony, as
far as appeared to the outside world.
They were a loving family in their
way, but without the shows of love.
Their home was all the world to them,
and they clung to it, in early life, with
something of the affectionate attachment
that Emily Brontë and her sisters
afterwards manifested towards the
sombre parsonage at Haworth. They
were healthful, hopeful and happy in
their farm, with the growing signs of
plenty around them.

At this juncture the potato blight,
which cracked the framework of Ireland’s
economic arrangements, blasted
the Brontë paradise. The affection of
the farmer towards his growing crops
is in proportion to the solicitude with
which he has watched over them; but
the Brontës only learned fully what a
treasure the potato crop had been to
them when it was taken away. Never
had their farm seemed so beautiful,
or the potatoes appeared so bountiful,
but, in a night, the fields were smitten
black, and the stench of rotting leaves
filled the air. The tubers became rotten
and repulsive, instead of being
white and floury.

Many theories were advanced to
account for the calamity. Pamphlets
were published and sermons preached,
to show that national disaster had followed
on the heels of national wrongdoing.
Seasons for humiliation and
fasting and prayer were set apart, to
supplicate Almighty God to take away
the awful judgment.

The Brontë mind never ran smoothly
with the common current. To them
the evil appeared to be simply the
work of the devil. The Brontës held
the simple old Zoroastrian creed that
everything beneficent was the work of
God, and everything maleficent the
work of the Evil One.

Such opinions were not confined to
the Brontës. As children we were
given to understand that frosted blackberries
were clubbed by the devil,
who had blown his breath upon them
as he passed by; and of course we all
knew that the old Enemy, with the
club foot, lurked in the blackberry
bushes.

Servants and common laborers held541
to the belief, no doubt prompted and
fortified by the action of the Brontës,
that the devil went bodily from potato
field to potato field, in his work of
destruction; and many reports got
into circulation, that he had been
actually seen among the potatoes, in
the form of a black dog or black bull,
but that he always vanished in a flash
of lurid light when challenged.

Hugh Brontë no more doubted that
the devil, in bodily form, had destroyed
the potato crop than he doubted his
own existence. He saw the prop struck
from under the family by a malignant
enemy, and he would not tamely submit
to the personal injury. It was both
cruel and unjust that the devil, who
never did any work, should pollute the
fruits of their toil. He would shame
the fiend out of his foul work; and for
this purpose he would go deliberately
to the field, and gather a basketful of
rotten potatoes. These he would carry
solemnly to the brink of the glen, and,
standing on the edge of a precipice,
call on the fiend to behold his foul and
filthy work; and then, with great violence,
dash them down as a feast for
the fetid destroyer. This ceremony of
feasting the fiend on the proceeds of
his own foul work was often repeated,
with fierce and desperate energy; and
the Devil’s Dining-room is still pointed
out by the neighbors.

I knew a man who witnessed one
of these scenes. He spoke of Hugh
Brontë’s address to the devil as being
sublime in its ferocity. With bare, outstretched
arms, the veins in his neck
and forehead standing out like hempen
cords, and his voice choking with concentrated
passion, he would apostrophize
Beelzebub, as the bloated fly, and
call upon him to partake of the filthy
repast he had provided. The address
ended with wild, scornful laughter as
Brontë hurled the rotten potatoes down
the bank.

The dramatic power of the ceremony
was so real, and the spell of Brontë’s
earnestness was so contagious, that my
informant, who was not a superstitious
man, declared that for a few seconds
after the challenge was given he
watched in terror, expecting the fiend
to appear.

III.
THE GREAT BRONTË FIGHT.

The fight between Welsh Brontë and
Sam Clarke of Ballynaskeagh was an
era-making event. The contest took
place long before my time, but I had a
precise and full account of the battle
from two eye-witnesses. No encounter
of the kind in County Down ever made
such a noise, or left such a lasting impression.
Like the flight of Mahomet
or the founding of Rome, it became a
fixed point around which other events
ranged themselves.

Women would speak of their children
as born, or their daughters married, so
many years before or after the fight;
and old men, in referring to their ages,
would tell how they had been present
when Welsh Brontë licked Sam Clarke,
and that they must have been of such
an age at the time. It was one of those
famous encounters which only required
the pen of Pindar to give it immortality
in epic form.

The history of the affair which I
here submit embodies the conclusions
at which I have arrived, after comparing
twenty or thirty versions; but I am
specially indebted to the late Mr. John
Todd of Croan, who was present at
the battle with his brother James, and
who narrated the incidents of the contest,
with many picturesque details. I
should add, however, that the Todds
were friends of the Brontës, and told
the story with the warmth of partisans.

Welsh Brontë had a sweetheart
called Peggy Campbell, and she had a
little, delicate, deformed brother who
used to go to Ballynafern school on
crutches. Some of the big healthy
boys thoughtlessly amused themselves
by tormenting the little cripple. He
often arrived home with his clothes torn
and daubed with mud, and sometimes
showing in his person the signs of ill-treatment.
After the manner of school-boys,
he would never tell on his tormentors.
Welsh’s sweetheart, however,
had discovered the cowardly and cruel
treatment to which her little brother
had been subjected, and appealed to
Welsh to protect him.

Welsh had, no doubt, often heard the542
story of his father’s wrongs, when a
child, and, at a hint from Peggy, constituted
himself the champion of the
injured boy. He went to Sam Clarke,
who was a near relative of the chief
offenders, and begged him to interfere.

Clarke, who was said to be something
of a bully, advised Brontë to mind his
own business, and Brontë replied that
that was the exact thing he was doing;
and then he added, as a threat, that
unless Clarke restrained his brutal relatives
he would chastise them himself.
Hot words ensued, and Brontë and
Clarke parted with expressions of mutual
defiance.

Welsh Brontë’s blood was up. His
sense of justice was roused on behalf
of an ill-used child, and his feelings of
chivalry impelled him to become the
champion of his sweetheart’s brother.

Meanwhile the boys were meditating
vengeance on their victim, who, in addition
to the crime of meek endurance,
had, they believed, proved a sneak, by
telling of their misdeeds.

Welsh Brontë resolved to watch the
children on their way home from school
on the following day. He took up his
position in a clump of trees somewhere
near the glen. He waited long, but
the school-children did not appear,
and, thinking that perhaps they had
returned home by another path, he
left his ambush to resume his work.
Suddenly he heard hilarious cheering
and piteous cries, and hurrying towards
the spot from which the noise came,
he found the school engaged in the
ceremony of “ducking the clash beg,” or
tale-bearer.

They had taken the poor little cripple’s
crutches from him, and had placed
him in the middle of a pond of water,
up to his neck, and then, having taken
hands, they danced round the pond,
chanting, “Clash beg!” “Clash beg!”
“Clash beg!”

Welsh Brontë took in the situation at
a glance, and captured the two biggest
Clarkes before they knew he was near.
He then compelled them to wade into
the pond, and support gently to the
edge their victim. When they had
placed him on the dry ground, he was
so exhausted that he could neither stand
nor support himself on his crutches,
and Brontë obliged the Clarkes to
carry him home on their backs, time
about, the water dripping down their
clothes. They did as Brontë directed
them, but only after considerable chastisement.

The other children had fled home in
alarm, and had given a highly colored
description of the inhuman manner in
which Brontë was treating the Clarkes.
Some of them reported that he had actually
drowned them in the pond. On
that night a challenge from Sam Clarke
reached Welsh Brontë, and was instantly
accepted.

The time for angry words had gone,
and all preliminary formalities were
carried out according to rule, and with
perfect courtesy. “Seconds” were appointed,
the day was fixed, and a professional
pugilist, who resided at Newry,
was engaged to act as referee. Both
men went into close training, and the
event was awaited with the most intense
excitement for ten miles round.

The day, a charming summer day, at
last arrived. A crowd numbering ten
thousand—some estimated the number
at from thirty to fifty thousand—assembled.
They came together from
Newry, Banbridge, Rathfriland, Dromore,
Hilltown, Warrenpoint, Loughbrickland,
and other towns and districts.
Such an assemblage of the scoundrelism
of that region had never been drawn
together before. But they were not all
scoundrels, for public opinion had not,
at that time, affixed the stamp of infamy
indelibly to the brutal exhibitions
of the ring; and it was said that
a number of sporting clergymen and
country gentlemen were present, undisguised
and unashamed.

Many circumstances rendered the
field famous. The mothers of the combatants
had fed their sons for the fray
like gamecocks; oat-bread and new
milk were the staple food which was
supposed to give muscle, strength, and
endurance.

Shortly before the fight Clarke’s
mother, when giving him his last meal
before the encounter, said to him,
“Sam, my son, may you never get bit
or sup from me more, if you do not lick
the mongrel.”

543

This Spartan speech spread through
the field like wildfire, and such was the
code of honor, on that occasion, that
the exhortation was much blamed, and
led to a strong current of popularity in
favor of Brontë. The word “mongrel,”
referring to the fact that her
son’s antagonist had had a Catholic
mother, was considered unfitting to
be used in connection with the noble
encounter that was about to take
place.

The ring was roped off in the hollow
of a green field; the multitude
stood on the rising ground around, and
all could see the entire ring. Three or
four hundred men were enrolled as
“special order preservers,” and stood
in a circle round the ring, two or three
deep. The seconds and referee and
umpire were in their places at the opposite
sides of the ring.

The hour fixed to begin was twelve
o’clock, and prompt to the minute the
two combatants strode down leisurely
through the crowd, each with his sweetheart
leaning on his arm; their mothers
already occupied seats of honor outside
the ring.

Clarke was an older and maturer
man than Brontë, and much bigger.
Beside him, Brontë, in his tight-fitting
homespun, looked slender and youthful
and overmatched.

In consequence of the ungenerous
and unguarded words spoken by
Clarke’s mother, sympathy, as we have
seen, was already on Brontë’s side, and
this was greatly increased by the
natural feeling that prompts the generous
to take the weak side.

As far as I have been able to ascertain,
the original cause of the quarrel
was wholly lost sight of before the
fight began. No one seemed to give a
thought to the circumstance that Brontë
had got into the affair by espousing
the cause of a helpless boy. After
listening to an account of the fight,
from some old man who had witnessed
it, I have often asked what it was
about, and I have generally got for
answer, “Oh, it was just a fight,” my
question being evidently deemed irrelevant,
and somewhat silly.

The champions stepped into the ring,
and their sweethearts with them. As
each stripped he handed his clothes to
his future wife, and these two women
stood, each with her lover’s garments
on her arm, till the matter was decided.

Time was not accurately kept, but
the battle was said to have lasted three
or four hours. At first Clarke had the
advantage in strength and weight, but
Brontë, who had long arms, was lithe
and active and wiry, and did not seem
to weary as the day wore on. On the
contrary, Clarke began to show signs
of fatigue, but the spectators thought
he was simply husbanding his strength.
Throughout the whole contest not a
word was heard. Suddenly, Miss
Campbell’s voice rang out clear in
the silence: “Welsh, my boy, go in
and avenge my brother, and the mongrel.”

Peggy Campbell, by her woman’s
instinct, discerned that the hour for
the final effort and victory had come.
Welsh responded like a lightning flash.
A few awful moments followed. The
spectators held their breaths and some
fainted, others covered their eyes with
their hands, or averted their faces.
Terrific crushing and crashing blows
were heard all over the field, and when
the blows ceased to resound, Sam
Clarke was lying a motionless heap in
the ring.

The crowd, after the long suspense
and hushed silence, lost all control of
themselves, and wanted to rush in and
chair the victor, but the “special order
preservers” held the ring, and the sea
of human beings surged against them
in vain.

Welsh Brontë declined to receive
congratulations until he had deposited
his antagonist safely at home in bed.
The fight was followed by no evil consequences,
and Sam Clarke and Welsh
Brontë became fast friends from that
day forth.

All were agreed as to the closing
scene. During the last few seconds
the fight became so fierce and furious
that the blood of the spectators ran
cold. Nothing like it for wild fury
and Titanic ferocity had ever been witnessed,
and no such battle has ever,
since or before, been fought in County
Down.

544

IV.
THE BRONTËS AND THE GHOSTS.

The glen, on the edge of which the
Brontës lived, lay secluded among the
hills, remote from the more frequented
thoroughfares of the country. It was
a beautiful and romantic spot by day,
but lonesome and desolate at night.
For miles round it had the reputation
of being haunted, and few passed that
way after dark. Those who were obliged
to do so heard unnatural splashes
in the stream, and rustlings among
the bracken, and strange moanings
and sobbings among the trees, when
there was not a breath of air stirring.

Strange and fitful cries were said to
be heard in the glen, and doleful wailings,
as of some one in agony.

Long ago, according to tradition, a
woman had been murdered in the glen
by her false lover and betrayer. Hugh
Brontë had told the story, with minute
details and local color, till everybody
who frequented the gatherings at the
kiln knew it by heart.

The villain had enticed his victim to
Rathfriland fair, on pretence of getting
the wedding ring. He had there attempted
to strangle her, but she had
escaped from his grasp, and was making
her way home to her mother,
through fields and byways, when, according
to one of Patrick Brontë’s unpublished
songs:

He waylaid her in the lonely glen, and
murdered her under circumstances of
great atrocity. On that night the
ghost of the murdered woman rushed
upon the assassin, and, with a wild
scream, dragged him from his bed and
through the window of his cabin, and
down, down, down, with unearthly
yells, to the bottomless pit. The whole
story was told in verse, I believe, by
Patrick Brontë, and sung to a sad air
at local gatherings. It ran partly thus:

The punishment was, according to
local sentiment, well deserved; but
both were doomed to walk the earth
for a thousand years. They had made
their abode in the glen, hence the doleful
and dismal voices.

Another circumstance added to the
horror with which the glen was regarded
at night. It was said that, at a
remote period, a man who had been
robbed committed suicide, at a crossing
of the brook. He was still living
when found with his throat cut, and
up to his last breath he continued to
moan, with a gurgling sound, “There
were ten tenpennies in my pocket at
the river.”

I believe the story was founded on
fact. A man had committed suicide
under the circumstances narrated, but
in quite a different part of the country.
The deed, however, had come to be
located in the Brontë glen, and increased
the superstitious awe with
which the place was then regarded.
A snipe frequented the spot at night,
and as people attempted to cross, it
would start with a sudden screech from
almost beneath their feet. The bird
with the unearthly yell was supposed
to be the spirit of the unfortunate man.

On one occasion Hugh Brontë was
riding home with a neighbor. When
they had reached the glen a headless
man appeared on the road in front of
them. The neighbor’s horse stood
shivering, as if rooted to the ground,
but Brontë’s horse, without any appearance
of fear, walked up to the
dreadful object, and Brontë, unmoved,
and without pause or word, simply
cracked his whip at it, and it disappeared
in a flash of light.

Ghost baiting became a passion with
the Brontës, and though they were too
proud to associate much with their
neighbors, they were not averse to
being stared at and talked of by them.

The mill at the lower end of the
glen, where now stand Mr. Ratcliffe’s
dwelling-house and offices, was haunted.
Lights flitted through it at night, and
no one would go near it after sunset.545
When the terror was at its height Hugh
Brontë armed himself with a sword
and a Bible, and went alone to encounter
the ghost or devil, or whatever
it might be.

The neighbors, who saw Brontë
marching to his doom, stood afar off in
the darkness, and awaited the result.
Unearthly noises were heard, and it
was clear that a serious contest was
proceeding. After a long delay Brontë
returned, bruised and battered and
greatly exhausted, but he would give
no account of what had transpired.

His secrecy regarding his adventure
increased the terror of the superstitious,
for it was given out and believed that
Brontë, having been worsted in the encounter,
saved his life by making some
compact with the fiend or ghost. And
some even believed that he was ever
after in league with the powers of darkness.

This fearsome theory seemed to be
confirmed by Hugh Brontë’s subsequent
action. One dark and dismal night, the
ghost in the glen began to wail like
a child in distress. The people barred
their doors, covered their heads in
bed with their blankets, and stopped
their ears, to keep out the unearthly
sounds; but Hugh Brontë went down
quietly to the glen, and soothed the
ghost until by little and little its moaning
died away.

On several occasions it was believed
that Hugh was actually seen in the
glen, standing with his hand on the
mane of a magnificent black horse, but
when any neighbor drew near, the
black horse dwindled into a great black
cat, which kept purring around Brontë,
and rubbing itself against his legs. As
soon as the neighbor withdrew, the cat
would again develop into the large
black horse, and Brontë was often seen
riding up and down upon it, near precipices
and ravines where there was no
path!

There was also supposed to be a
white-sheeted figure that used to frequent
the glen, carrying a little child
in her arms. It was said that she was
in the habit of asking for a night’s
lodging, but never seemed disposed to
accept it. She generally kept her face
covered, or averted, but when it was
exposed it proved to be a toothless,
grinning skull, with a light shining
from each eyeless socket.

One of the Brontë sisters and her
daughter lived in a house near by, in
which a man called Fraser had hanged
himself. The house was declared to
be haunted. Apparitions appeared in
it, both by day and night, but especially
at night. Noises were heard in
the rooms during the hours of darkness.
When the inmates slept at night,
something like a huge frog with claws
used to rush up the clothes from the
foot of the bed, settle on their chests,
and almost suffocate them.

Hugh went to his sister’s house one
night, taking his gun with him. He upbraided
Fraser for his ungallant and
mean conduct in frightening lone women,
and then called on him to come
out like a man and face him. But nothing
appeared, the ghost evidently declining
to face a loaded musket.

Brontë was importunate in his challenge,
taunting Fraser’s ghost with all
kinds of sarcastic gibes and accusations,
that he might irritate it into appearing,
but the ghost would not be
drawn. Then he fired off his gun, and
challenged the ghost to meet him face
to face, using every scornful and reproachful
epithet to drive it into a passion,
but all in vain.

On the following night Hugh returned
to the haunted house with a
fiddle, and tried to coax the ghost to
appear in response to the music. The
ghost, however, remained obdurate, regardless
alike of threats, reproaches,
and blandishments. Brontë returned
home that night in a state of wild excitement.
All the way he incessantly
called on Fraser to come and shake
hands with him, and make up their
quarrel.

He retired to bed in a delirium of
frenzy, and during the night the ghost
appeared to him, and gave him a terrific
squeeze, from which he never recovered.
He died shortly after in great suffering,
upbraiding Fraser for his heartless
cruelty and cowardice, and he declared,
dying, that when he reached the land
of shadows he would take measures to
prevent Fraser from haunting his sister
and niece. After Hugh’s death the546
rumblings and apparitions ceased to
trouble his sister’s house.

The great horror, however, of the
haunted glen was the Headless Horseman.
The phantom generally made its
appearance among thickets of tangled
bushes, which no horse could penetrate,
and glided silently over uneven and
broken ground, where no horse could
have gone.

It always appeared to be ridden and
guided by a man in flowing robes, whose
feet were firmly in the stirrups and
whose hands held the bridle, but whose
head had been chopped off, leaving
only a red and jagged stump.

The ghastly spectacle was so minutely
described by the Brontës that
others carried the picture of it in their
imaginations, and it is not to be wondered
at if many thought they saw the
spectre among the shimmering shadows
of the trees.

A neighbor of the Brontës, Kaly Nesbit,
a very old and, I believe, a very
good man, once gave to a number of
us a vivid account of the apparition.
He told the story with great earnestness,
and with apparent conviction as
to its truth. I give his account as
nearly as I can in his own quaint language:

“I heerd the horse nichering in the
glen. It was not the voice of a horse
but of a fiend, for it came out of the
bowels of the earth, and shook the hills,
and made the trees quake. Besides,
there was no room for a horse on the
steep bank, and among the bushes and
brablack.

”I had just had a drap of whiskey,
about a noggin, and I wasn’t a bit
afeard of witch or warlock, ghost or
devil, and so I stepped into the glen
to see for myself whatever was to be
seen.

“At first I could not see any inkling
of a horse, but I heerd the branches
swishing along his sides, at the lower
end of the glen. Then I saw a large
dark object as big as a haystack coming
nixt me, and walking straight through
trees and bushes as if they were mere
shadows.

“I juked down behind a hedge of
broom, and as I hunkered in the shadow
he came on in the slightly dusk light.
The horse was as big as four horses,
and at a distance I thought the rider
was a huge blackavised man; but when
he came fornenst me the moon fell full
upon him through a break in the trees,
and then I saw that he was crulged up
on the saddle, and that only a red and
ghastly stump stuck up between his
shoulders, where his head should have
been.

”I escaped unseen, but just as the
terrible thing passed me it nichered
again horribly, and I saw sparks of fire
darting out of its mouth.

“It then turned and cut triangle
across the valley, passing over the cockpit,
and walking upon the air, as it
emerged into the moonlight. It walked
up straight against the steep edge of the
quarry-pit, and vanished into the bank.
I saw it vanishing by degrees, like a
shadow, at first black, but growing
lighter and lighter, till it entirely disappeared,
and there was nothing on the
high bank where it stopped but the
bright moonlight.”

Kaly Nesbit had the reputation of
being a very good man. I knew
him pretty well, especially as a near
relative of his had been my kind old
nurse, who imparted to me much Brontë
lore. I am sure he believed the fascinating
story he told; but a noggin of
whiskey is a rather indefinite quantity,
and Kaly Nesbit, on that night, may
have had his faculties for hearing and
seeing in a rather sensitive condition.

However that may have been, his
sober and earnest account of the monstrous
spectre, confirming, as it did, the
wildest stories of the Brontës, created
a profound impression.

547

THE HYPNOTIC EXPERIMENTS OF DOCTOR
LUYS.

By R. H. Sherard.

(Illustrated with photographs of Doctor Luys’s patients, taken at the Charity Hospital in Paris.)

The scientific world is greatly interested
in the dispute between the
believers in the value of hypnotic experiments
for purposes of therapeutics and
psychology, and those who stigmatize
the wonderful results which the former
claim to have obtained, as the mere
outcome of delusion or fraud.

DOCTOR LUYS.

Ever since the possibility of producing
phenomena by the effect of animal
magnetism was established, and their
medical value asserted, by Frederick
Anthony Mesmer, in his theory of mesmeric
cures, the most violent hostility
has been provoked. Volumes of controversy
have been written, the most
ardent of the writers being Nees Von
Esenbeck, Kieser, Enemoser, Carus
and Kluge amongst
the Germans, and
Deleaze and Foissac
among the
French.

The report made
by the commission
appointed by the
French Academy of
Sciences, the principal
members of
which were Benjamin
Franklin, Lavoisier,
Bailly, and
Guillotin, pronounced
the whole
theory of Mesmer
charlatanry, asserting
that “there is
no proof of the existence
of the animal
magnetic fluid;
that this fluid, having
no existence, is
consequently without
utility; and
that the violent effects
to be observed
are due to the manipulations,
to the
excitement of the
imagination, and to
that sort of mechanical
imitation
which leads us
to repeat anything548
which produces an impression on the
senses.”

The consensus of opinion among scientists
was opposed to the soundness
of the theory of hypnotism. Yet such
men as Laplace, Agassiz, Hufeland, Sir
William Hamilton, and Doctor William
Carpenter were always among its
stanch supporters, so far as the fundamental
facts were concerned.

THE NEW MESMERISM.

The novel development of the subject
on sharply defined lines of scientific
method owes itself to J. Braid, a
surgeon of Manchester, England, who
first published the results of his studies
in 1840. But it was many years before
his studies became widely known and
had their due weight. He now shines
primus inter pares among those who
have shed most light on a perplexing
problem. But just as the modern
French art school built itself upon the
work of the Englishman Constable, so
it took the genius and enthusiasm of
such investigators as Doctors Charcot
and Luys, and of Colonel Rochas
d’Aiglun to carry on Braid’s beginnings.
These three scientists of recognized
worth never proclaimed that the secrets
of hypnotism have been solved,
or that its possibilities have been more
than foreshadowed; they simply asserted
that the results already obtained,
many being practical in an eminent degree,
give encouragement to pursue
their investigations.

PLEASING EFFECT OF THE NORTH POLE OF A MAGNET.

It is my purpose to simply set forth
that which has come under my personal
observation at the Charité Hospital,
whose doctor-in-chief, Doctor
Luys, is to-day the most enthusiastic
believer in experiments on the hypnotic
phenomena.

METHODS OF LA CHARITÉ HOSPITAL.

The hypnotic experiments practised
by the doctor-in-chief of the Charité
Hospital, may be roughly divided into
two classes. The first are experiments
of a speculative kind, that is to say,
such as do not produce practical effects.
The second class includes such as often
produce such results. These last experiments
are mainly the diagnosis of
patients by subjects in the hypnotic
state, the cure of nervous disorders
by the transfer of the same from patients
to subjects in the hypnotic
state, and the cure of moral and physical549
maladies by the power of suggestion.

The hypnotic state is divided by
Doctor Luys into five phases of intensity:
somnambulism, fascination,
catalepsy, lethargy, and hypo-lethargy,
with various intermediary phases which
have not yet been tabulated. The hypnotic
state in one or other of its phases
is produced in the subject or patient
in two ways; by word of command or
by the use of the rotative mirror. The
rotative mirror is often used where
hypnotic influence is first applied to
an individual. This mirror much resembles
that used by bird catchers
for snaring larks. It is composed of
four arms, overlaid with bright, polished
metal. The arms revolve by
clockwork on a pivot, at a tremendous
rate of speed. The patient is seated
in a high-backed chair with his back
to the light, which shines full on the
mirror, and is bidden to keep his eyes
fixed upon it, and simultaneously to
desire to be sent to sleep. The clockwork
sets the mirror in rotary motion
with a dazzling effect. Sleep is not invariably
produced. Many persons are
refractory; but, as a rule, in about
twenty per cent. of the cases the operation
is successful, and after a period
varying from five to twenty minutes
the patient is seen to drop to sleep.

REPULSIVE EFFECT OF THE SOUTH POLE OF A MAGNET.

“The eyes,” says a writer on the subject,
“are first attracted by the rays of
light which flash from the wings of the
mirror, then little by little, and at the
end of a period which varies according
to the temperament of the patient, a
kind of fascination is produced, the
lids get tired and imperceptibly close,
the head falls back, and the patient
sleeps a sleep which seems natural, but
which is really one of the first phases
of the hypnotic sleep.” In other
cases, that is to say, in the case of
patients who are more predisposed, a
slight shock is manifested during the
state of fascination, due, no doubt, to
the sudden contraction of some muscle
or system of muscles, and the patient
falls into a deep sleep, breathing hard.
He is then completely insensible, and
apt for the reception of suggestion,
having passed quickly through the
several stages of the hypnotic sleep,
sometimes to the last. In most cases,
however, where the doctor has to do
with subjects who have often been
hypnotized, the simple word of command,
without passes or gestures of550
any kind, suffices. With these he has
but to say, “Go to sleep,” and they
fall at once into a hypnotic state of
greater or lesser profundity. Doctor
Luys is, however, the sole possessor of
hypnotism I have seen who has this
power; and both Charcot and his assistant,
Doctor Encausse, as well as Colonel
Rachas, are obliged to enforce their
commands with certain gestures of the
hands and influence of the eyes.

THE DANGER OF
HYPNOTISM.

Doctor Luys
says: “From the
social point of view,
these new states of
instantaneous loss
of consciousness
into which hypnotic
or merely fascinated
subjects may be
made to pass deserve
to be considered
with lively interest.
As I shall
have to explain to
you later, the individual
in these
novel conditions no
longer belongs to
himself; he is surrendered,
an inert
being, to the enterprise
of those who
surround him. He
may be induced to
become a homicide,
an incendiary or suicide, and all these
impulses deposited in his brain during
sleep become forces stored up silently,
which will then burst forth at a given
moment, causing acts like those performed
by the really insane. All these
are real facts which you may meet with
this very day in ordinary life.”

This is, indeed, one of the most dangerous
features of hypnotism, that a
being, apparently in perfect possession
of himself, may be forced to do things
by the potency of a command given to
him in a trance, a fatal edict which he
does not in the least remember, but
is constrained mechanically to obey.
Doctor Luys and his confrères insist
that, unjust as it may appear, the plea
of having acted irresponsibly under the
effect of a hypnotic suggestion cannot,
when the safety of society is involved,
be admitted as an excuse any more than
drunkenness. This justifies the French
law that none but licensed physicians
should practise hypnotic experiments.

ESTHER, DOCTOR LUYS’ SUBJECT.

Fortunately for the science of hypnotism
the same energy towards useful
acts can be stimulated, and it is just
this entire obedience
of which the
professors take advantage
for the
practice of their
healing art. Thus
the confirmed
drunkard, the man
of vicious habits,
the lazy child, the
kleptomaniac, the
suicidal or homicidal
maniac can be
cured. More wonderful
things have
been achieved.
The patient’s willpower
can be so intensified
as to enable
him to resume
mastery of parts of
the body which, as
the result of such
nervous disorders
as paralysis, he may
have entirely lost.
Cases of ague, tic
nerveux, neuralgia,
and analogous disorders
have been cured by repeatedly
enjoining the patient, while in the hypnotic
state, to conquer his trouble.

HOW CURATIVE PROCESSES ARE PURSUED.

These cures may be divided into two
classes, the first effected by auto-suggestion,
that is to say, by inspiring
the patient with the determination to
get the better of his disorder; and,
second, those effected by the transfer
of the disorder from the patient in his
ordinary state to a subject in the hypnotic
state.

In the same class may be named551
numerous cases of persons to whom
hypnotism has been administered, just
as chloroform is in other cases, as an
anæsthetic: as, for instance, the case of
a girl who came to the hospital maddened
with toothache, and who, once in
the hypnotic state, into which she was
thrown by the influence of the revolving
mirrors, allowed two molar teeth,
which till then had caused her the most
excruciating agony, to be removed
without a sign of discomfort.

ESTHER IN THE LETHARGIC STATE.

The second class of cures are, however,
by far the most interesting and
the most wonderful. These are the
“direct cures,” which are called cures
by transfer. This is the method used.
One of the subjects attached to Doctor
Luys’ clinic—such subjects being persons
who have proved themselves very
susceptible—is sent to sleep by a word
of command from the doctor, and in
this state grasps the hands of the patient
who desires to be cured. In some
cases the hands of the subject are laid
upon the patient’s head. The subject
is now described as “tapping” the
patient of the nervous disorder that
affects him. During the process of
the transfer an assistant passes a magnetized
iron bar over the arms and
bodies of both patient and subject.
The transfer usually lasts about three
minutes. During this period the subject,
or the person in the hypnotic
state, assumes the individuality of the
patient for the nonce, and can answer
the doctor’s questions as to the patient’s
state and progress. Thus it is
the former and not the latter whom
the doctor will question how the case
is progressing and what ameliorations
may be felt, and the subject will
answer. In the cases which I saw,
the patient in every case described
what the subject had said about his
state, symptoms, and progress as absolutely
true and exact. It is further
stated that no injury whatever is
wrought on the substitute. While relieving
the patient from whom the
transfer is made, this vicarious agent
is considerably benefited.

ATTRACTION OF THE HAND IN THE LETHARGIC STATE.

The detection of imposture on the
part of the subject has invariably resulted
in immediate dismissal.

EXTRAORDINARY PHENOMENA.

All the experiments described above
are, if genuine (but scientific camps
are divided on the question of their552
genuineness), of practical value. The
same thing may be said of another series
of test studies, which are also being
pursued, though the value is less in
degree. Doctor Luys says that the
subject in the hypnotic state has an intensely
increased visual faculty. Indeed,
one of the symptoms of this state
is a very noticeable alteration of the
appearance of the eye. It is stated by
the doctor, and the experiments publicly
made may be considered as
convincing, that, thanks to this increased
visual faculty, the hypnotic
subject is able to see in the human
face what is entirely hidden to ordinary
sight.

THE ACTION OF WATER; THE HANDS ARE CLENCHED AND
THE JAW SET; THE SUBJECT CAN NEITHER SWALLOW
NOR SPEAK.

For some time past the doctor had
established that when a magnet is presented
to a hypnotic subject in one of
the phases of trance, the effect produced
varies, according as the north
or south pole, that is to say, the negative
or the positive end of the magnet,
is offered. The north pole in all cases
produces a state of intense delight, expressed
by gestures and outcries of
pleasure. The subjects in this case
declare that they see at the end of the
magnet emanations of a beautiful blue
light. When the bar is reversed the
greatest horror and disgust at once
affect the subject. If asked what it is
that causes this dismay the subject will
answer that it is the sight of a fearful
red light playing around the end of the
magnet.

EXPRESSION OF PLEASURE CAUSED BY PEPPER PRESENTED
TO THE LEFT SIDE.

Investigating further in this direction
the doctor has discovered that the
same subjects can detect in the human
face emanations corresponding to those
seen at the ends of the magnetic bar.
Thus from the left eye and left ear and
left corner of the mouth in persons in
a good state of health, blue emanations
can be seen by the hypnotized person,
according to the declarations of such
subjects.

In cases of persons, however, suffering
from nervous disorders, or from the
results of diseases or accidents, the colors
vary. Thus, according to one of
the subjects, the red light proceeding
from the right eye of a person affected
with shortsightedness and fatigue of
the organ was largely spotted with violet.
Violet is the characteristic color
in all cases of great nervous fatigue.
Black, green, and multi-colored flames
have been described by the subjects as553
showing from persons suffering with
various forms of nervous disorder. A
man who had been wounded in the eye
with a rapier was characterized, at an
interval of three months, by two different
subjects, who, according to Doctor
Luys, had had no means of inter-communication,
as emitting a green light
from the injured organ.

EXPRESSION OF ANXIETY CAUSED BY PEPPER PRESENTED
TO THE RIGHT SIDE.

If it can be established that certain
diseases produce in those suffering from
them a variation in the color of the
emanations, which are perceptible to
the hypnotic subject, the existence and
nature of the disease will be certified
by the tint.

Amongst the experiments which have
been classified as of a speculative kind,
and distinct from those of practical
worth, none are more interesting than
those that involve the presentation to
subjects in the hypnotic state, of various
substances and medicines contained
in hermetically sealed tubes. The manifestations,
according as the tube is
presented on the right or the left side
of the subject, indicate emotions of
a diametrically opposite nature. Thus,
when a tube containing ordinary red
pepper was offered to the left, or, as the
doctor calls it, the blue side, of a girl
subject in the hypnotic state, symptoms
of keen pleasure were discernible,
which changed suddenly to an expression
of violent disgust when the tube
was carried to the red or right side.
According to the doctor, the human
being is double, and does not feel the
same on his red as on his blue side.
Thyme presented to one patient produced
terrifying hallucinations; in another
it called forth an expression of
calm delight. Singularly, in the application
of thyme there was a physiological
effect, also, on the thyroid
gland of the throat, the size of the
neck being increased from thirty to
thirty-three centimetres, or somewhat
more than an inch. Morphine in one
patient bred fancies of an evidently terrifying
nature; in another, an intense
drowsiness. The effect of frankincense
presented to the left of the neck was
an emotion of terror. Some water in a
tube, held near the left side of a hypnotic
subject’s head, caused a series of
spasms resembling those usual to patients
suffering from hydrophobia.