LIPPINCOTT’S MAGAZINE

OF

POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.

FEBRUARY, 1873.
Vol. XI., No. 23.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

The Cones of
Patabamba.

“Pepe Garcia,
Who Marched Ahead, Announced the Print Of A South American
Tiger.”

“Napoleon-like,
They Washed Their Dirty Linen in The Family”

“Aragon and his
Men Fell Upon the Deserters Without Mercy.”

“They Greeted
These Indian Relics As Crusoe Did The Footprints of the
Savages.”

“Another Savage
Had Found a Pair of Linen Pantaloons.”

View of the
Acropolis and The Columns Of The Temple Of Jupiter
Olympus.

Theatre of
Dionysus (Bacchus).

Victory Untying
Her Sandals.

Temple of
Victory.

The
Parthenon.

Bas Relief of
the Gods (Frieze Of The Parthenon).

Porch of the
Caryatides.

Monument of
Lysicrates.

SEARCHING FOR THE QUININE-PLANT IN
PERU.

CONCLUDING PAPER.

Early on a brilliant morning, with baggage repacked, and the
lessening amount of provisions more firmly strapped on the
shoulders of the Indians, the explorers left their pleasant
site on the banks of the Maniri. The repose allowed to the bulk
of the party during the absence of their Bolivian companions
had been wholesome and refreshing. The success of the
bark-hunters in their search for cinchonas had cheered all
hearts, and the luxurious supper of dried mutton and chuno
arranged for them on their return gave a reminiscence of
splendor to the thatched hut on the banks of the stream. This
edifice, the last of civilized construction they expected to
see, had the effect of a home in the wilderness. The bivouac
there had been enjoyed with a sentiment of tranquil
carelessness. Little did the travelers think that savage eyes
had been peeping through the forest upon their fancied
security, and that the wild people of the valleys who were to
work them all kinds of mischief were upon their track from this
station forth.

The enormous fire kindled for breakfast mingled with the
stain of sunrise to cast a glow upon their departure. Across
the vale of the Cconi, as though a pair of sturdy porters had
arisen to celebrate their leavetaking, the cones of Patabamba
caught the first rays of the sun and held them aloft like
hospitable torches. These huge forms, soldered together at the
waist like Chang and Eng, and clothed with shaggy woods up to
the top, had been the guardian watchers over their days in the
ajoupa at Maniri. The sun just rising empurpled their double
cones, while the base and the surrounding landscape were washed
with the neutral tints of twilight.

After passing the narrow affluent after which the
camping-ground of Maniri was named, the party pursued the
course of the Cconi through a more level tract of country. The
stones and precipices became more rare, but in revenge the
sandy banks soon began to reflect a heat that was hardly
bearable. As the implacable sun neared its zenith the party
walked with bent heads and blinded eyes, now dashing through
great plains of bamboos, now following the hatchets of the
peons through thickets of heated shrubbery.

Whenever the country became more wooded in its character,
the bark-hunters, whose quest obliged them to stray in short
flights around the wings of the column, redoubled their mazes.
The careless air of these Bolivian retrievers, their voluntary
doublings through the most difficult jungles, and their easy
way of walking over everything with their noses in the air,
proved well their indifference to the obstacles which were
almost insurmountable to the rest.

The Cones of
Patabamba

Nothing could be more singular and interesting than to see
them consulting one by one the indications scattered around
them, and deciding on their probabilities or promises. Where
the height and thickness of the foliage prevented them from
seeing the sky, or even the shade of the surrounding green,
they walked bent toward the ground, stirring up the rubbish,
and choosing among the dead foliage certain leaves, of which
they carefully examined the two sides and the stem. When by
accident they found themselves near enough to speak to each
other—a rare chance, for each peon undertook a separate
line of search—they asked their friends, showing the
leaves they had found, whether their discoveries appertained to
the neighboring trees or whether the wind had brought the
pieces from a distance. This kind of investigation, pursued by
men who had prowled through forests all their lives, might seem
slightly puerile if the reader does not understand that it is
often difficult, or even impossible, to recognize the growing
tree by its bark, covered as it is from base to branches with
parasitic vegetation of every sort. In those forests whatever
has a stout stem is used without scruple by the bignonias and
air-plants, which race over the trunk, plant their root-claws
in the cracks, leap over the whole tree at a single jet, or
strangle it with multiplied knots, all the while adorning it
with a superb mantle of leaves and blossoms. This is a
difficulty which the most experienced cascarilleros are
not able to overcome. As an instance, the history is cited of a
practico or speculator who led an exploration for these
trees in the valley of Apolobamba. After having caused to be
felled, barked, measured, dried and trimmed all the cinchonas
of one of those natural thickets called manchas—an
operation which had occupied four months—he was about to
abandon the spot and pursue the exploration elsewhere, when
accident led him to discover, in the enormous trunk buried in
creepers against which he had built his cabin, a Cinchona
nitida, the forefather of all the trees he had
stripped.

In this kind of search the caravan pursued the borders of
the river, sometimes on this side and sometimes on that, now
passing the two-headed mountain Camanti, now sighting the
tufted peak of Basiri, now crossing the torrent called the
Garote. In the latter, where the dam and hydraulic works of an
old Spanish gold-hunter were still visible in a state of ruin,
the sacred golden thirst of Colonel Perez once more attacked
him. Two or three pins’ heads of the insane metal were actually
unearthed by the colonel and displayed in a pie-dish; but the
business of the party was one which made even the finding of
gold insignificant, and they pursued their way.

The flanks of these mountains, however, were really of
importance to the botanical motive of the expedition. Along the
side of the Camanti, where the yellow Garote leaked downward in
a rocky ravine, the Bolivians were again successful. They
brought to Marcoy specimens of half a dozen cinchonas, for him
to sketch, analyze and decorate with Latin names. The colors of
two or three of these barks promised well, but the pearl of the
collection was a specimen of the genuine Calisaya, with
its silver-gray envelope and leaf ribbed with carmine. This
proud discovery was a boon for science and for commerce. It
threw a new light upon the geographical locality of the most
precious species of cinchona. It was incontestably the plant,
and the Bolivians appeared amazed rather than pleased to have
discovered outside of their own country a kind of bark proper
only to Bolivia, and hardly known to overpass the northern
extremity of the valley of Apolobamba. This discovery would
rehabilitate, in the European market, the quinine-plants of
Lower Peru, heretofore considered as inferior to those of Upper
Peru and Bolivia. The latter country has for some time secured
the most favorable reputation for its barks—a reputation
ably sustained by the efforts of the company De la Paz, to whom
the government has long granted a monopoly. This reputation is
based on the abundance in that country of two species, the
Cinchona calisaya and Boliviana, the best known
and most valued in the market. But for two valuable cinchonas
possessed by Bolivia, Peru can show twenty, many of them
excellent in quality, and awaiting only the enterprise of the
government and the natural exhaustion of the forests to the
south.

This magnificent bit of luck, the finding of the calisaya,
awakened in the susceptible bosom of Mr. Marcoy an ardent
desire to explore for himself the site of its discovery. But
Eusebio, the chief of the cascarilleros, assuming a mysterious
and warning expression, informed the traveler that the place
was quite inaccessible for a white man, and that he had risked
his own neck a score of times in descending the ravine which
separated the route from the hillside where the fortunate
plants were growing. He promised, however, to point out the
locality from afar, and to show, by a certain changeable gloss
proper to the leaf, the precise stratum of the calisaya amongst
the belts of the forest. This promise he forgot to execute more
particularly, but it appeared that the locality would never be
excessively hard to find, marked as it was by Nature with the
gigantic finger-post of Mount Camanti. Placing, then, in
security these precious specimens among their baggage, the
explorers continued their advance along the valley.

The footing was level and easy. Rocks and precipices were
left behind, and were displaced by a soft, slippery sort of
sand, where from space to space were planted, like so many
oases in a desert, clumps of giant reeds. By a strange but
natural caprice these beds of rustling verdure were cut in an
infinity of well-defined geometric forms. Seen from an eminence
and at a distance, this arrangement gave a singular effect. In
the midst of these native garden-beds were cut distinct and
narrow alleys, where the drifting sands were packed like
artificial paths. It is unnecessary to add that the soft
footways, notwithstanding their advertisement of verdure and
shade, proved to be of African temperature.

The last hours of daylight surprised the travelers among the
labyrinths of these strange gardens. A suitable spot was chosen
for the halt. As the porters were preparing to throw down their
packs, Pepe Garcia, who marched ahead, announced the print of a
South American tiger. The first care of the Indians, on hearing
this news, was to send forth a horrible cry and to throng
around the marks. The footprints disappeared at the thickest
part of the jungle. After an examination of the traces, which
resembled a large trefoil, they precipitated themselves on the
interpreter-in-chief, representing how impossible it was to
camp out in the neighborhood of the dreaded animal. But Pepe
Garcia, accustomed as he was by profession to try his strength
with the ferocious bear and the wily boar, was not the man to
be afraid of a tiger, even of a genuine tiger from Bengal. To
prove to the porters how slight was the estimation he placed on
the supposed enemy, and also to drill them in the case of
similar rencounters, he pushed the whole troop pellmell into
the thickest part of the reeds, with the surly order to cut
down the canes for sheds. Drawing his own knife, he slashed
right and left among the stems, which the Indians, trembling
with fear, were obliged to make into sheaves on the spot and
transport to the beach selected for the bivouac. Double rows of
these arundos, driven into the sand, formed the
partitions of the cabins, for which their interwoven leaves
made an appropriate thatch. The green halls with matted vaults
were picturesque enough; each peon, seeing how easily they were
constructed, chose to have a house for himself; and the Tiger’s
Beach quickly presented the appearance of a camp disposed in a
long straight line, of which the timorous Indians occupied the
extremity nearest the river.

No “tiger” appeared to justify the apprehensions of the
porters; but what was lacking to their fears from beasts with
four feet was made up to them by beasts with wings. The night
closed in dry and serene. Since leaving Maniri, whether because
of the broadening of the valley, the rarity of the
water-courses or the decreasing altitude of the hills, the
adventurers had been little troubled with fogs at night. The
fauna of the region, too, had offered nothing of an alarming
complexion, except the footprints of the tiger in question: an
occasional tapir or peccary from the woods, and otters and fish
from the streams, had attracted the shots of the party, but
merely as welcome additions to their game-bags, not as food for
their fears. To-night, however, the veritable bugbear of the
tropical forest paid them a visit, and left a real souvenir of
his presence. As the Indian servants stretched themselves out
in slumber under the bright stars and in the partial shelter of
their ajoupas, a bat of the vampire species, attracted by the
emanations of their bodies, came sailing over them, and
emboldened by the silence reigning everywhere, selected a
victim for attack. Hovering over the fellow’s exposed foot, he
bit the great toe, and fanning his prey in the traditional yet
inevitable manner by the natural movement of his wings, he
gorged himself with blood without disturbing the mozo. The
latter, on awakening in the morning, observed a slight swelling
in the perforated part, and on examination discovered a round
hole large enough to admit a pea. Without rising, the man
summoned his companions, who formed a group around him for the
purpose of furnishing a certain natural remedy in the shape of
a secretion which each one drew out of his ears. With this the
patient made himself a plaster for his wound, and appeared to
think but little of it. Questioned as to his sensations by the
white travelers, who found themselves a good deal more
disturbed with the idea of the vampire than they had been by
any indications of tigers or wild-boars, the fellow explained
that he had felt no sensation, unless it might have been an
agreeable coolness of his sand-baked feet. The incident seemed
so disagreeable and so likely of recurrence that Colonel Perez
ever afterward slept with his feet rolled up in a variety of
fantastic draperies, while Mr. Marcoy for several nights
retained his boots.

‘Pepe Garcia, Who Marched Ahead, Announced the Print
Of A South American Tiger.’

The path along the river-sands would have been voluntarily
followed by all the more irresponsible portion of the party,
notwithstanding the blinding heats, on account of its smoother
footing. The cascarilleros, however, objected that its tufts of
canes and passifloras offered no promise for their researches.
A compromise was effected. The porters, under the command of
Juan of Aragon, were allowed to follow the shore, and were
armed with a supply of fish-hooks to induce them to add from
time to time to the alarmingly diminished supply of provisions.
The grandees of the party followed the Bolivians, whose
specialty entitled them to control practically the direction of
the route, and plunged into the woods to botanize, to explore
and to search for game. A system of conversation by means of
shouts and pistol-shots was established between the two
divisions. The next night proved the wisdom of this
bifurcation. The united booty of earth, air and water, under
the form of a squirrel, a pair of toucans and a variety of
fish, afforded a meal which the porters described as comida
opipara or a sumptuous festival. Lulled and comforted by
the sensation which a contented stomach wafts toward the brain,
the explorers, after washing their hands and rinsing their
mouths at the riverside, betook themselves to a cheerful repose
sub jove, the locality offering no reeds of the
articulated species with which to construct a shelter.

The party, then, betook themselves to slumber with unusual
contentment, repeating the splendid supper in their dreams,
with the addition of every famous wine that Oporto and Rheims
could dispense, when they were awakened by a sudden and
terrible storm. A waterspout stooped over the forest and sucked
up a mass of crackling branches. The camp-fire hissed and went
out in a fume of smoke. A continuity of thunder, far off at
first, but approaching nearer and nearer, kept up a constant
and increasing fusillade, to whose reports was soon added the
voice of the Cconi, lashed in its bed and bellowing like the
sea. The surprising tumult went on in a crescendo. The
hardly-interrupted charges of the lightning gave to the eye a
strange vision of flying woods and soaring branches. Startled,
trembling and sitting bolt upright, the adventurers asked if
their last hour were come. The rain undertook to answer in
spinning down upon their heads drops that were like bullets,
and which for some time were taken for hail. Fearing to be
maimed or blinded as they sat, the party crowded together,
placing themselves back to back; and, unable to lay their heads
under their wings like the birds, sheltered them upon their
knees under the protection of their crossed arms. The fearful
deluge of heated shot lasted until morning. Then, as if in
laughter, the sun came radiantly out, the landscape readjusted
its disheveled beauties, and the ground, covered with boughs
distributed by the whirlwind, greedily drank in the waters from
heaven. Soon there remained nothing of the memorable tempest
but the diamonds falling in measured cadence from the refreshed
and stiffened leaves.

Up to sunrise the unfortunates rested stoically silent,
their knees in their mouths, and receiving the visitation like
a group of statuary. The rain ceasing with the same promptitude
with which it had risen, they raised their heads and looked
each other in the face, like the enemies over the fire in
Byron’s Dream. Each countenance was blue, and decorated
with long flat locks of adhesive hair. The teeth of the whole
party were chattering like a concert of castanets. The sun,
like a practical joker, laughed ironically at the general
picture.

The first hours of morning were consecrated to a general
examination of the stores, especially the precious specimens of
cinchona. Bundles were restrapped, the damp provisions laid out
in the sun, and the clothing of the party, even to the most
intimate garment, was taken down to the river to be refreshed
and furbished up. A common disaster had created a common cause
amongst the whole troop, and with one accord
everybody—peons, mozos, interpreters, bark-strippers and
gentlemen—set in motion a grand cleaning-up day.
Napoleon-like, they washed their dirty linen in the family.
Whoever had seen the strangers coming and going from the beach
to the woods, clothed in most abbreviated fashion, and seeming
as familiar to the uniform as if they had always worn it under
the charitable mantle of the woods, would have taken them for a
savage tribe in the midst of its encampment. It is probable
they were so seen.

Thanks to the intense heat of the sun-shine, the garments
and baggage of the expedition were quickly dried. The first
were donned, the last was loaded on the porters, and the line
of march was taken up. Up to noon the road lay along the
blazing sands under a sun of fire. All the members of the party
felt fresh and hardy after the involuntary bath, except one of
the Indians, who was affected with a kind of ophthalmia. This
attack, which Mr. Marcoy attributed partly to the glare, partly
to the wet, and partly to a singular hobby peculiar to the
individual of sleeping with his eyes wide open, was of no long
duration. The pain which he complained of disappeared with a
few hours of exercise and with the determination he showed in
staring straight at the god of day, who, as if in memory of the
worship formerly extended toward him in the country, deigned to
serve as oculist for the sufferer. A little before sunset halt
was made for the night-camp in the centre of a beach protected
by clumps of reeds in three quarters of the wind. The Indian
porters, despatched for fish and firewood, returned suddenly
with a frightened mien to say that they had fallen into the
midst of a camp of savages. The white men quickly rejoined them
at the spot indicated, where they found a single hut in ruins,
made of reeds which appeared to have been cut for the
construction some fortnight before, and strewn with
fire-brands, banana skins and the tail of a large fish. Pepe
Garcia, consulted on these indications, explained that it was
in reality the camping-place of some of the savage Siriniris,
but that the narrowness of the hut seemed to indicate that not
more than two of the Indians, probably a man and woman, had
resided there during a short fishing-excursion.

This discovery cast a shade over the countenances of the
porters. After having collected the provisions necessary for a
slender supper, they drew apart, and, while cooking was going
on, began to converse with each other in a low voice. No notice
was taken of their behavior, however, though it would have
required little imagination to guess the subject of their
parliament. The tired eyes of the explorers were already
closed, while their ears, more alert, could hear the confused
murmur proceeding from the Indians’ quarter, where the
disposition seemed to be to prolong the watch
indefinitely.

‘Napoleon-like, They Washed Their Dirty Linen in The
Family’

The dark hours filed past, and jocund day, according to
Shakespeare and Romeo, stood tiptoe on the mountain-tops of
Camanti and Basiri, when the travelers were awakened by a
fierce and terrible cry. Lifting their heads in astonishment,
they perceived the faithful Pepe Garcia, his face disfigured
with rage, and his fist shaking vigorously in the direction of
the Indians, who sat lowering and sullen in their places.
Aragon and the cascarilleros, collected around the chief
interpreter, far from trying to calm his anger, appeared to
feed it by their suggestions. An explanation of the scene was
demanded. Eight of the bearers, it appeared, had deserted,
leaving to their comrades the pleasure of watching over the
packages of cinchona, but assuming for their part the charge of
a good fraction of the provisions, which they had disappeared
with for the relief of their fellow-porters. This copious
bleeding of the larder drew from Colonel Perez a terrible oath,
and occasioned a more vivid sentiment in the entrails of Marcoy
than the defection of the men. If the evil was grand, the
remedy was correspondingly difficult. Indolent or mercurial at
pleasure, the Indians had doubtless threaded the woods with
winged feet, and were now far away. Mr. Marcoy proposed
therefore to continue the march without them, but to set down a
heavy account of bastinadoes to their credit when they should
turn up again at Marcapata. This proposition, as it erred on
the side of mercy, was unanimously rejected, and a
scouting-party was ordered in pursuit, consisting of the
bark-hunters and Juan of Aragon, to whom for the occasion Pepe
Garcia confided his remarkable
fowling-piece.

‘Aragon and his Men Fell Upon the Deserters Without
Mercy.’

In the afternoon the extemporized police reappeared. The
fugitives had been found tranquilly sitting on the banks of the
river, distending their abdomens with the stolen preserves and
chocolate. Aragon and his men fell upon the deserters without
mercy. The former, battering away at them with the stock of his
gun, and the latter, exercising upon their shoulders whatever
they possessed in the way of lassoes, axe-handles and
sabre-blades, maintained the argument effectually for some time
in this way, and did not descend to questions until muscular
fatigue caused them to desist. The catechism subsequently put
to the porters elicited the reply, from the spokesman of the
recusants, that they were tired of being afraid of the wild
Indians; that they objected to marching into the dens of
tigers; that, perceiving their rations diminished from day to
day, they had imagined the time not far distant when the same
would be withdrawn altogether. It was curious, as it seemed to
Marcoy when the argument was rehearsed to him presently, that
the fellows made no complaint of being footsore, overcharged
with burdens or conducted into paths too difficult for them. A
lurking admiration for the vigor with which, after all, they
played their crushing part of beasts of burden, procured them
immunity from further punishment after their return. Their
bivouacs were simply watched on the succeeding nights by
Bolivian sentinels.

After a few minutes allowed the strayed sheep to rub their
bruises, the march was continued. The afternoon afforded a
succession of the same sandy riverbanks, dressed with reeds,
false maize, calceolarias and purple passion-flowers, and
yielding for sole booty a brace of wild black ducks, and an
opossum holding in her pouch five saucy and scolding little
ones. The natural civet employed as a cosmetic by this animal
forbade the notion of using it for food, and it was thrown with
its family into the river, after being deprived of its glossy
skin.

As evening approached, and as all eyes were exploring the
banks for a suitable camping-ground, a spacious and even beach
was fixed upon as offering all the requisite conveniences. It
was agreed to halt there. Attaining the locality, however, they
were amazed to find all the traces of a previous occupation.
Several sheds, formed of bamboo hurdles set up against the
ground with sticks, like traps, were grouped together. Under
each was a hearth, a simple excavation, two feet across and a
few inches deep, and filled with ashes. A few arrows, feathers
and rude pieces of pottery were scattered around. They greeted
these Indian relics as Crusoe did the footprints of the
savages. Nor was it more reassuring to observe, among other
callers like themselves who had left their visiting-cards at
the doors since the departure of the proprietors, the
sign-manual of jaguars and tapirs, whose footprints were
plainly visible on the gravel.

A close examination was made of every detail pertaining to
the huts and their accessories, and the interpreters were asked
if it would be prudent to encamp in a spot thus leased in
advance. Pepe Garcia and Aragon were of opinion that it would
be better to pass the night there, assuring their employers
that there would be no danger in sleeping among the teraphim of
the savages, provided that nothing was touched or displaced.
Their motion was promptly adopted, to the great discomfiture of
the porters, who were poised on one foot ready for flight. A
salute of five shots was fired, with a vague intention of
giving any listeners the highest possible opinion of the white
explorers as a military power. An enormous fire was kindled,
sentinels were posted, and the party turned in, taking care,
however, during the whole night to close but one eye at a
time.

‘They Greeted These Indian Relics As Crusoe Did The
Footprints of the Savages.’

Day commenced to blush, when all ears were assaulted by a
concerted howl, proceeding from behind a bed of canes on the
other side of the river. “Alerta! los Chunchos!” cried
the sentinel. The three words produced a startling effect: the
porters sprang up like frightened deer; Mr. Marcoy grasped a
sheaf of pencils and a box of water-colors with a warlike air,
and the colonel’s lips were crisped into a singular smile,
indicative of lively emotions. Hardly were the travelers
clothed and armed when the reeds parted with a rattling noise,
and three nude Indians, sepia-colored and crowned with tufts of
hair like horses’ tails, leaped out like jacks-in-the-box. At
sight of the party standing to receive them they redoubled
their clamor, then, flourishing their arms and legs and turning
continually round, they gradually revolved into the presence of
the explorers. They selected as chiefs and sachems of the party
such as bore weapons, being the colonel, Marcoy and the two
interpreters. These they clasped in a warm, fulsome embrace:
they were smeared from head to foot with rocoa (crude arnotta),
and their passage through the river having dissolved this
pigment, they printed themselves off, in this act of amity,
upon the persons and clothing of their hosts. While the white
men, with a very bad grace, were cleaning off these tokens of
natural affection, the new-comers went on to present their
civilities all around. Two of the porters they recognized at
once, with their eagle eyesight, from having relieved them of
their shirts while the latter were working out some penalty at
the governor’s farm of Sausipata, and proceeded to claim a warm
acquaintance on that basis; but the bearers, with equally
lively memories of the affront, responded simply with a frown
and the epithet of Sua-sua—double thief.

Pepe Garcia undertook a colloquy, and Aragon, not to be
behindhand, flashed a few words across the conversation, right
and left as it were, his expressions appearing to be in a
different tongue from those used by the chief interpreter, and
both utterly without perceptible resemblance to the rolling
consonants and gutturals of the savages. Marcoy imbibed a
strong impression that the only terms understood in common were
the words of Spanish with which the palaver was thickly
interlarded. This was the first time the interpreters were put
on their mettle in a strictly professional sense, and the test
was not altogether triumphant. However, by a careful raising of
the voice in all difficult passages, and a wild, expressive
pantomime, an understanding was arrived at.

The visitors belonged to the tribe of Siriniris, inhabiting
the space comprised between the valleys of Ocongate and
Ollachea, and extending eastwardly as far as the twelfth
degree. They lived at peace with their neighbors, the
Huat-chipayris and the Pukiris. For several days the reports of
the Christian guns (tasa-tasa) had advertised them of
the presence of white men in the valley, and, curious to judge
of their numbers, they had approached. They had formed a
cunning escort to the party, always faithful but never seen,
since the encampment at Maniri: every camping-ground since that
particular bivouac they faithfully described. They were, of
course, in particular and direful need of sirutas and
bambas (knives and hatchets), but their fears of the
tasa-tasa, or guns, was still stronger than their
desires, and their courage had not, until they saw the
strangers domiciled as guests in their own habitations,
attained the firmness and consistency necessary for a personal
approach. The three dancing ambassadors were ministers
plenipotentiary on the part of their tribe, located in a bamboo
metropolis five miles off.

The white men could not well avoid laying down their
tasa-tasa and disbursing sirutas and
bambas. The savages, after this triumph of diplomacy,
suddenly turned, and, thrusting their fingers in their mouths,
emitted a shrill note, which had the effect of enchanting the
forest of rushes across the river, and causing it to give birth
to a whole ballet of naked coryphei. Nine men, seven women and
three dogs composed the spectacle, of which the masculine part,
the human and the canine, proceeded to swim the stream and
fraternize with the strangers. The women rested on the bank
like river-nymphs: their costume was somewhat less prudish than
that of the men, the coat of rocoa being confined to their
faces, which were further decorated with joints of reed thrust
through the nose and ears. A glance of curiosity darted across
the water by the colonel was surprised in its flight by the
ambassadors, who addressed a hasty word or two to their ladies:
the latter, with one quick and cat-like gesture, whipped off
each a branch of the nearest foliage, and were dressed in a
single instant.

To reward all these vociferous mendicants with the
invaluable cutlery was hardly prudent. Seeing the hesitation of
their visitors, the savages adopted other tactics. Hurling
themselves across the river, they quickly reappeared, armed
with all the temptations they could think of to induce the
strangers to barter. The scene of these savages coming to
market was a picturesque one. Entering the water, provided with
their objects of exchange, which they held high above their
heads, and swimming with the right arm only, they began to cut
the river diagonally. The lifting of the waves and the dash of
spray almost concealed the file of dusky heads. Nothing could
be plainly seen but the left arms, standing out of the water as
stiff and inflexible as so many bars of bronze, relieved
against the silvery brightness of the water. These advancing
arms were adorned with the material of traffic—bird-skins
of variegated colors, bows and arrows, and live tamed parrots
standing upon perches of bamboo. The white spectators could not
but admire the native vigor, elegance and promptitude of their
motions as they rose from the water like Tritons, and, throwing
their treasures down in a heap, bounded forward to give their
visitors the conventional signals of friendship. A rapid
bargain was concluded, in which the sylvan booty of the wild
men (not forgetting the prudent exaction of their weapons) was
entirely made over to the custody of the explorers in exchange
for a few Birmingham knives worth fourpence each.

However curious and amicable might be their new relations
with the savages, the party were desirous to put an end to them
as soon as possible. Pepe Garcia announced that the pale
chiefs, wishing to resume their march, were about to separate
from them. This decision appeared to be unpleasant or
distressful in their estimation, and they tried to reverse it
by all sorts of arguments. No answer being volunteered, they
shouted to their women to await them, and betook themselves to
walking with the party. One of the three ambassadors, a
graceful rogue of twenty-five, marked all over with rocoa and
lote, so as to earn for himself the nickname of “the Panther,”
gamboled and caracoled in front of the procession as if to give
it an entertainment. His two comrades had garroted with their
arms the neck of the chief interpreter: another held Juan of
Aragon by the skirt of his blouse, and regulated his steps by
those of the youth. This accord of barbarism and civilization
had in it something decidedly graceful, and rather pathetic: if
ever the language natural to man was found, the medium in
circulation before our sickly machinery of speech came to be
invented, it was in this concert of persuasive action and
tender cooing notes. The main body of the Siriniris marched
pellmell along with the porters, whom this vicinage made
exceedingly uncomfortable, and who were perspiring in great
drops.

At the commencement of a wood the whites embraced the
occasion to take formal leave of their new acquaintances. As
they endeavored to turn their backs upon them they were at once
surrounded by the whole band, crying and gesticulating, and
opposing their departure with a sort of determined
playfulness.

At the same time a word often repeated, the word
Huatinmio, began to enter largely into their
conversation, and piqued the curiosity of the historiographer.
Marcoy begged the interpreter to procure him the explanation of
this perpetual shibboleth. Half by signs, half in the polyglot
jargon which he had been employing with the Siriniris, Garcia
managed to understand that the word in question was the name of
their village, situated at a small distance and in a direction
which they indicated. In this retreat, they said, no
inhabitants remained but women, children and old men, the rest
of the braves being absent on a chase. They proposed a visit to
their capital, where the strangers, they said, honored and
cherished by the tribe, might pass many enviable days.

The proposed excursion, which would cause a loss of
considerable time and a deflection from the intended route, was
declined in courteous terms by Marcoy through the
interpretation of Pepe Garcia. Among civilized folk this urbane
refusal would have sufficed, but the savages, taking such a
reply as a challenge to verbal warfare, returned to the charge
with increased tenacity. It were hard to say what natural logic
they put in practice or what sylvan persuasions they wrought
by, but their peculiar mode of stroking the white men’s backs
with their hands, and the softer and still softer inflections
which they introduced into their voices, would have melted
hearts of marble. In brief, the civilized portion adopted the
more weakly part and allowed themselves to be led by the savage
portion.

The colonel and Pepe Garcia were still more easily persuaded
than Mr. Marcoy, and only awaited his adhesion. When it was
finally announced the Siriniris renewed their gambols and
uttered shouts of delight. They then took the head of the
excursion. A singularity in their guides, which quickly
attracted the notice of the explorers, was the perfect
indifference with which they took either the clearings or the
thickets in their path. Where the strangers were afraid of
tearing their garments, these unprotected savages had no care
whatever for their skins. It is true that their ingenuity in
gliding through the labyrinth resembled magic. However the
forest might bristle with undergrowth, they never thought of
breaking down obstacles or of cutting them, as the equally
practiced Bolivians did, with a knife. They contented
themselves with putting aside with one hand the tufts of
foliage as if they had been curtains or draperies, and that
with an easy decision of gesture and an elegance of attitude
which are hardly found outside of certain natural tribes.

The city of Huatinmio proved to be a group of seven large
sheds perched among plaintains and bananas, divided into
stalls, and affording shelter for a hundred individuals. The
most sordid destitution—if ignorance of comfort can be
called destitution—reigned everywhere around. The women
were especially hideous, and on receipt of presents of small
bells and large needles became additionally disagreeable in
their antics of gratitude. The bells were quickly inserted in
their ears, and soon the whole village was in
tintinnabulation.

A night was passed in the hospitality of these barbarians,
who vacated their largest cabin for their guests. A repast was
served, consisting of stewed monkey: no salt was used in the
cookery, but on the other hand a dose of pimento was thrown in,
which brought tears to the eyes of the strangers and made them
run to the water-jar as if to save their lives. The evening was
spent in a general conversation with the Siriniris, who were
completely mystified by the form and properties of a candle
which Mr. Marcoy drew from his baggage and ignited. The wild
men passed it from hand to hand, examining it, and singeing
themselves in turn. Still another marvel was the sheet of paper
on which the artist essayed a portrait of one of his hosts. The
finished sketch did not appear to attract them at all, or to
raise in their minds the faintest association with the human
form, but the texture and whiteness of the sheet excited their
lively admiration, and they passed it from one to another with
many exclamations of wonder. Meantime, a number of questions
were suggested and proposed through the interpreter.

The formality of marriage among the Siriniris was found to
be quite unknown; the most rudimentary idea of divine worship
could not be discovered; the treatment of the aged was shown to
be contemptuous and neglectful in the extreme; and the lines of
demarcation with the beasts seemed to be but feebly traced.
Finally, Mr. Marcoy begged the interpreter to propound the
delicate inquiry whether, among the viands with which they
nourished or had formerly nourished themselves, human flesh had
found a place. Garcia hesitated, and at first declined to push
the interrogation, but after some persuasion consented. The
Siriniris were not in the least shocked at the question, and
answered that the flesh of man, especially in infancy, was a
delicious food, far better than the monkey, the tapir or the
peccary; that their nation, in the days of its power,
frequently used it at the great feasts; but that the difficulty
of procuring such a rarity had increased until they were now
forced to strike it from their bill of fare.

The night passed without disturbance, and the next day’s
parting was accompanied by reiterated requests for a repetition
of the visit. The Panther, who since their arrival had
oppressed the travelers with a multitude of officious
attentions, escorted them into the woods, and there took leave
of them with a gesture of his hand, relieving their eyes of his
slippery, snake-like robe of spots. A knife from their stores,
slung round his neck like a locket, smote his breast at each
step as he danced backward, and a couple of large fish-hooks
glanced in his ears.

With a feeling of relief and satisfied curiosity the
exploring party left behind them the traces of these children
of Nature, and returned toward the river. The cascarilleros,
all for their business, had regretted the waste of time, and
now betook themselves to an examination of the woods with all
their energy. After several hours of march their efforts were
crowned with success. Eusebio presently rejoined his employers,
showing leaves and berries of the Cinchona scrobiculata
and pubescens: the peons, on their side, had discovered
isolated specimens of the Calisaya, which, joined with
those found on Mount Camanti, indicated an extended belt of
that precious species. This was not the best. A veritable
treasure which they had unearthed, worth all the others put
together, was a line of those violet cinchonas which the native
exporters call Cascarilla morada, and the botanists
Cinchona Boliviana. The trees of this kind were grouped
in threes and fours, and extended for half a mile. This
repeated proof that the most valuable of all the cinchonas,
together with nearly every one of the others, were to be
discovered in a small radius along the valley of the Cconi,
filled the explorers with triumph, and demonstrated beyond a
doubt the sagacity of Don Santo Domingo in organizing the
expedition.

The purpose and intention of the journey was now abundantly
fulfilled. Had the travelers rested satisfied with the liberal
indications they had found, and consented to place themselves
between the haunts of the savages and the abodes of
civilization, with a tendency and determination toward the
latter, they might have returned with safety as with glory. The
estimate made by Eusebio, however, of the trend or direction of
the calisaya groves, induced him to forsake the bed of the
Cconi, and strike south-eastwardly, so as to cross the Ollachea
and the Ayapata.

“But the mountains are disappearing,” hazarded Mr. Marcoy.
“Will not the cinchonas disappear with them?”

“Oh,” answered the majordomo, like a pedagogue to a
confident school-boy, “the señor knows better how to put
ink or color on a sheet of paper than how to judge of these
things. The plain, the campo llano, is far enough to the
east. Before we should see the disappearance of the mountains,
we should have to cross as many hills and ravines as we have
left behind us.”

“What do you think of doing, then?” naturally demanded
Marcoy, who had long since begun to feel that the expedition
had but one chief, and that was the sepia-colored cascarillero
from Bolivia,

“Everything and nothing,” answered Eusebio.

These enigmas always carry the day. The apparatus of march
was once more set in motion toward the adjacent water-sheds.
After a considerable journey—rewarded, it must be said,
with a succession of cinchona discoveries—they halted
near a clearing in the forest, where large heaps of stones and
pebbles, arranged in semicircles, attracted their attention.
The cascarilleros explained this appearance as due to former
arrangements for gold-washing in an old river-bed, the San
Gavan or the Ayapata, that had now changed its locality.

While examining the unusual appearance an abominable clamor
burst from the woods around, and a band of Siriniris appeared,
led by a lusty ruffian crowned with oriole feathers, whom the
travelers recognized as having been among their previous
acquaintances.

The encounter was very disagreeable, but the strangers
determined to make the best of it. The manner of this band of
Indians was somewhat different from that of the others. They
brought nothing for barter, and had an indescribably coarse and
hardy style of behavior.

The travelers determined to buy a little information, if
nothing better, with their knives and fish-hooks. Garcia was
accordingly instructed to demand the meaning of the heaps and
causeways of stones. The savages laughed at first, but finally
informed the visitors that the constructions which puzzled them
so had been made by people of their own race many years ago,
for the purpose of gathering gold from the river which used to
run along there, but which now flowed seven miles off.

This information was dear to the historic instinct of
Marcoy. He spoke, by his usual proxy, to the Indian of the
oriole, commanding him not to begin every explanation by
laughing, as he had been doing, but to answer intelligently,
promising a reward of several knives. The savage exchanged a
rapid glance with his fellows, and then he and they stood up as
stiff and mute as the trees. Marcoy then asked him if he had
never heard his father or his grandfather speak of the great
city of San Gavan, built hereabouts formerly by the Spanish
chevaliers, and which the Caranga and Suchimani Indians from
the Inambari River had destroyed by fire.

The evident recognition of this legend by the savages, and
their rapid exchange among themselves of the words sacapa
huayris Ipaños, induced Marcoy to ask if they could
guide them to the site of the former city. They answered that a
day’s march would be sufficient, and pointed with their arms in
the direction of north-north-west.

The temptation to see the place whose golden renown, after
having made the tour of the American continent, had reached
Spain and the world at large, was too strong to be resisted.
Colonel Perez, besides the magic attraction which the mention
of gold had for him, felt his national pride touched by the
idea of a place where his compatriots had added such
magnificence to the Spanish name, and gained so many ingots of
gold by paddling in the streams. The cascarilleros were
delighted to extend their journey, in hopes of yet larger
discoveries. As for the porters, since the manifestations of
the savages they clung to the party with as much anxiety as
they had ever shown to escape from it.

In 1767 the city of San Gavan, remaining intact amid the
ruin of all its neighbors, was the sole disburser of the riches
of the Caravaya Valley. The gold-dust, collected throughout the
whole territory on a government monopoly, was brought thither
upon the backs of Indians, melted into ingots, and distributed
to Lima and the world at large. On the night of the 15th and
16th of December in that year the wealthy city was fired by the
Carangas and the Suchimanis, and all the inhabitants slain with
arrows or clubs. The first lords of the soil had resumed their
rights.

When the news of the event was brought to Lima, the viceroy
of the period, Antonio Amat, swore on a piece of the true cross
to exterminate every Indian in Peru. It is to the persuasions
of his favorite, Mariquita Gallegas, that the preservation of
the native tribes from a bloody extirpation is due. This woman,
La Perichola, whose caricatured likeness we see in the
most agreeable of Offenbach’s operas, and whose deeds of mercy
and edifying end in a convent entitle her to some charitable
consideration, persuaded her royal lover to operate on the
natives with missionaries and teachers rather than with fire
and sword. Antonio Amat yielded, and the Indians have
survived.

‘Another Savage Had Found a Pair of Linen Pantaloons.’

Let no traveler go to South America and cross the Andes with
the idea of unearthing a Nineveh or a Babylon on the site of
San Gavan. The emissaries of Don Santo Domingo were quickly
standing, among the grinning and amused Indians, on the
locality of the Golden Depot of San Gavan. But Nature had
thoroughly reclaimed her own, and the place, indicated again
and again by the savages with absolute unanimity, showed
nothing but mounds of fern and moss under canopies of forest
trees.

A day’s rest and a sketch or two were consecrated by Marcoy
to this historic spot, the grave of a civilization. It had been
well if he had restrained his feelings of romance, and betaken
himself with his companions to the homeward track.

As the explorers were breakfasting in the morning on a
squirrel and a couple of birds shot among the vanished streets
of San Gavan, a disagreeable incident supervened. The wild
Indians had disappeared over-night. But now, seemingly born
instantaneously from the trees, a throng of Siriniris burst
upon the scene, rushing up to the travelers, straining them
repeatedly in a rude embrace, then leaving them, then
assaulting them again, and accompanying every contact with the
eternal cry, Siruta inta menea—”Give me a knife.”
Each member of the troop had now six savages at his heels, and
they were not those of the day before, but a new and rougher
band. The chiefs of the party rushed together and brandished
their muskets. This forced the savages to retire, but gave to
the rencounter that hostile air which, in consideration of the
disparity of numbers, ought at all hazards to have been
avoided. The wild men quickly formed a circle around the
artillery. The latter, fearing for their porters and the
precious baggage, leaped through this circle and joined their
servants, making believe to cock their fire-arms. Upon this the
Indians, half afraid of the guns, vanished into the woods,
first picking up whatever clothing and utensils they could lay
their hands on. In an instant they were showing these trophies
to their rightful owners from a safe distance, laughing as if
they would split their sides. One of the naked rascals had
seized a flannel undershirt of the colonel’s, which was drying
on a branch. His efforts to introduce his great feet into the
sleeves were excruciating. Another savage had found a pair of
linen pantaloons, which he was endeavoring to put on like a
coat, appearing much embarrassed with the posterior portion,
which completely masked his face. Aragon had seen a young
reprobate of his own age make off with a pair of socks of his
property. Detecting the rogue half hidden by a tree, the mozo
made a sortie, seized the Indian, and by a violent shake
brought the property out of his mouth, where it had been
concealed as in a natural pocket.

The travelers immediately threw themselves into marching
order and took up their line of route. The savages followed. At
the first obstacle, a mass of matted trees, they easily
rejoined the party of whites.

Then, for the first time, the idea of their power seemed to
strike them, and they precipitated themselves upon the porters,
who took to flight, rolling from under their packs like animals
of burden. In a moment every article of baggage, every knife
and weapon, was seized, and the red-skins, singing and howling,
were making off through the woods. Among them was now seen the
Siriniri with orioles’ feathers, who must have guided them to
their prey.

The expedition was pillaged, and pillaged as a joke. The
thieves were heard laughing as they scampered off like deer
through the woods.

It was hard to realize at once the gravity of the
misfortune. No one was hurt, no one was insulted. But
provisions, clothing, articles of exchange and weapons were all
gone, except such arms and ammunition as the travelers carried
on their persons. A collection of cinchonas was in possession
of one of the Bolivians, though it represented but a fraction
of the species discovered. The besiegers, however, had
disappeared, and a westerly march was taken up. Good time was
made that day, and a heavy night’s sleep was the consequence.
With the morning light came the well-remembered and hateful
cry, and the little army found itself surrounded by a throng of
merry naked demons, among whom were some who had not profited
by the distribution of the spoils. At the magic word
siruta all these new-comers rushed in a mass upon the
white men. Marcoy managed to slip his fine ivory-handled
machete within his trowser leg, but every other cutting tool
disappeared as if by magic from the possession of the
explorers. The shooting-utensils the savages, believing them
haunted, would not touch. Then, half irritated at the
exhaustion of the booty, the amiable children of Nature burst
out into open derision. The artists of the tribe, filling their
palms with rocoa, and moistening the same with saliva, went up
to their late patrons and began to decorate their faces. The
latter, judging patience their best policy, sat in silence
while the delicate fancy of the savages expended itself in
arabesques and flourishes. Perez and Aragon had their eyes
surrounded with red spectacles. The face of Marcoy, covered
with a heavy beard, only allowed room for a “W” on the
forehead, and Pepe Garcia was quit for a set of interfacings
like a checkerboard. Having thus signed their marks upon their
visitors, the aborigines retired, catching up here and there a
stray ball of cord or a strip of beef, saluting with the hand,
and vanishing into the woods with the repeated compliment,
Eminiki—”I am off.”

The victims rested motionless for fifteen minutes: then
pellmell, through the thickest of the brush and down the
steepest of the hill, blotted out under gigantic ferns and
covered by umbrageous vines, stealing along water-courses and
skirting the sides of the mountains, they rushed precipitately
westward.

Two months after the priest of Marcapata had dismissed with
his benediction the party of confident and enthusiastic
explorers, he received again his strayed flock, but this time
in rags, armed with ammunitionless guns and one poor knife,
wasted by hunger, baked by the sun, and tattooed like
Polynesians by the briers and insects. The good man could not
repress a tear. “Ah, my son,” said he as he clasped Marcoy’s
hand, “see what it costs to go hunting the cascarilla in the
land of the infidels!”

The explorations started by Don Juan Sanz de Santo Domingo
came to profitable result, but not to his advantage. Three
weeks after the pioneers arrived again in Cuzco, Don Juan
started another expedition, on a much larger scale, to
accomplish the working of the cinchona valleys, under charge of
the same Bolivians, who could make like a bee for every tree
they had discovered. A detachment of soldiers was to protect
the party, and the working force was more than double. Finally,
the night before the intended start, the Bolivian
cascarilleros, with their examinador, disappeared together. It
is probable that Don Juan’s scheme, nursed, according to
custom, with too much publicity, had attracted the attention of
the merchants of Cuzco, who had found it profitable to buy off
the bark-searchers for their own interest.

The crash of this immense enterprise was too much for Don
Juan. Threatened with creditors, Jews, escribanos and
the police, he retired to a silver-mine he was opening in the
province of Abancay. This mine, in successful operation, he
depended on for satisfying his creditors. He found it choked
up, destroyed with a blast of powder by some enemy. Unable to
bear the disappointment, Don Juan blew out his brains in the
office belonging to his mine. A month afterward, Don Eugenic
Mendoza y Jara, the bishop of Cuzco, sent a couple of Indians
for the body, with instructions to throw it into a ditch: the
men attached a rope to the feet and dragged it to a ravine,
where dogs and vultures disposed of the unhallowed
remains.

A GLANCE AT THE SITE AND ANTIQUITIES OF ATHENS.

The day is a happy one to the student-traveler from the
Western World in which he first looks upon the lovely plain of
Athens. Rounding the point where Hymettus thrusts his huge
length into the sea, the long, featureless mountain-wall of
Southern Attica suddenly breaks down, and gives place to a
broad expanse of fertile, and well-cultivated soil, sloping
gently back with ever-narrowing bounds until it reaches the
foot-hills of lofty Pentelicus. The wooded heights of Parnes
enclose it on the north, while bald Hymettus rears an
impassable barrier along the south. In front of the gently
recurved shore stretch the smooth waters of the Gulf of
Salamis, while beyond rises range upon range of lofty
mountain-peaks with strikingly varied outline, terminating on
the one hand in the towering cone of Egina, and on the other in
the pyramidal, fir-clad summit of Cithaeron. Upon the plain, at
the distance of three or four miles from the sea, are several
small rocky hills of picturesque appearance, isolated and
seemingly independent, but really parts of a low range parallel
to Hymettus. Upon one of the most considerable of these, whose
precipitous sides make it a natural fortress, stood the
Acropolis, and upon the group of lesser heights around and in
the valleys between clustered the dwellings of ancient
Athens.

View of the Acropolis and The Columns Of The Temple Of
Jupiter Olympus.

It was a fitting site for the capital of a people keenly
sensitive to beauty, and destined to become the leaders of the
world in matters of taste, especially in the important
department of the Fine Arts. Nowhere are there more charming
contrasts of mountain, sea and plain—nowhere a more
perfect harmony of picturesque effect. The sea is not a dreary
waste of waters without bounds, but a smiling gulf mirroring
its mountain-walls and winding about embosomed isles, yet ever
broadening as it recedes, and suggesting the mighty flood
beyond from which it springs. The plain is not an illimitable
expanse over which the weary eye ranges in vain in quest of
some resting-place, but is so small as to be embraced in its
whole contour in a single view, while its separate
features—the broad, dense belt of olives which marks the
bed of its principal stream, the ancient Cephissus, the
vineyards, the grain-fields and the sunny hillside
pastures—are made to produce their full impression. The
mountains are not near enough to be obtrusive, much less
oppressive; neither are they so distant as to be indistinct or
to seem insignificant. Seen through the clear air, their naked
summits are so sharply defined and so individual in appearance
as to seem almost like sculptured forms chiseled out of the
hard rock.

The city which rose upon this favored spot was worthy of its
surroundings. The home of a free and enterprising race endowed
with rare gifts of intellect and sensibility, and ever on the
alert for improvement, it became the nurse of letters and of
arts, while the luxury begotten of prosperity awakened a taste
for adornment, and the wealth acquired by an extended commerce
furnished the means of gratifying it. The age of Pericles was
the period of the highest national development. At that time
were reared the celebrated structures in honor of the
virgin-goddess who was the patron of Athens—the
Parthenon, the Propylaea, the Erechtheum—which crowned
the Acropolis, and were the glory of the city as they were the
masterpieces of Grecian architecture. During the preceding half
century many works of utility and of splendor had been
constructed, and the city now became renowned not only in
Greece, but throughout the ancient world, for the magnificence
of its public buildings. Thucydides, writing about this time,
says that should Athens be destroyed, posterity would infer
from its ruins that the city had been twice as populous as it
actually was. Demosthenes speaks of the strangers who came to
visit its attractions. But the changes of twenty-three
centuries have passed upon this splendor—a sad story of
violence and neglect—and the queenly city has long been
in the condition of ruin imagined by Thucydides. Still, the
spell of her influence is not broken, and the charm which once
drew so many visitors to her shrines still acts powerfully on
the hearts of scholars in all lands, who, having looked up to
her poets, orators and philosophers as teachers and loved them
as friends, long to visit their haunts, to stand where they
stood, to behold the scenes which they were wont to view, and
to gaze upon what may remain of the great works of art upon
which their admiration was bestowed.

So the student-pilgrim from the Western World with native
ardor strains his sight to catch the first glimpse of the
Athenian plain and city. He is fresh from his studies, and
familiar with what books teach of the geography of Greece and
the topography of Athens. He needs not to be informed which
mountain-range is Parnes, and which Pentelicus—which
island is Salamis, and which Egina. Yet much of what he sees is
a revelation to him. The mountains are higher, more varied and
more beautiful than he had supposed, Lycabettus and the
Acropolis more imposing, Pentelicus farther away, and the plain
larger, the gulf narrower, and Egina nearer and more
mountainous, than he had fancied. He is astonished at the
smallness of the harbor at Peiraeus, having insensibly formed
his conception of its size from the notices of the mighty
fleets which sailed from it in the palmy days when Athens was
mistress of the seas. He is not prepared to see the southern
shore of Salamis so near to the Peiraeus, though it explains
the close connection between that island and Athens, and throws
some light upon the great naval defeat of the Persians. In
short, while every object is recognized as it presents itself,
yet a more correct conception is formed of its relative
position and aspect from a single glance of the eye than had
been acquired from books during years of study.

Arrived at the city, his experience is the same. He needs no
guide to conduct him to its antiquities, nor cicerone to
explain in bad French or worse English their names and history.
Still, unexpected appearances present themselves not
unfrequently. Hastening toward the Acropolis, he will first
inspect the remains of the great theatre of Dionysus, so
familiar to him as the place where, in the presence of all the
people and many strangers, were acted the plays of his favorite
poets, Eschylus and Sophocles, and where they won many prizes.
Hurrying over the eastern brow of the hill, he comes suddenly
upon the spot, enters at the summit, as many an Athenian did in
the olden time, and is smitten with amazement at the first
glance, and led to question whether this be indeed the site of
the ancient theatre. He finds, it is true, the topmost seats
cut in the solid rock, row above row, stripped now of their
marble lining and weather-worn, but yet the genuine ancient
seats of the upper tier. These he expected to find. But whence
are those fresh seats which fill the lower part of the hollow,
arranged as neatly as if intended for immediate use? and whence
the massive stage beyond? He bethinks himself that he has heard
of recent excavations under the patronage of the government,
and closer inspection shows that these are actually the lower
seats of the theatre in the time of the emperor Hadrian, whose
favorite residence was Athens, and who did so much to embellish
the city. The front seats consist of massive stone chairs, each
inscribed with the name of its occupant, generally the
priestess of some one of the numerous gods worshiped by that
people so given to idolatry. In the centre of the second row is
an elevated throne inscribed with the name of Hadrian. The
stage is seen to be the ancient Greek stage enlarged to the
Roman size to suit the demands of a later style of theatrical
representation.

Theatre of
Dionysus (Bacchus).

After looking in vain for the seat occupied by the priestess
of the Unknown God, our traveler passes on and enters with a
beating heart the charmed precincts of the Acropolis itself.
The Propylaea, which he has been accustomed to regard too
exclusively as a mere entrance-gate to the glories beyond,
impresses him with its size and grandeur, and the little temple
of Victory by its side with its elegance.¹
But the steepness of the ascent perplexes him. It seems
impracticable for horses, yet he knows by unexceptionable
testimony that the Athenian youth prided themselves upon
driving their matched steeds in the great Panathenaic
procession which once every four years wound up the hill,
bearing the sacred peplus to the temple of the goddess. A
closer examination reveals the transverse creases of the
pavement designed to give a footing to the beasts, as well
as the marks of the chariot-wheels. Nevertheless, the ascent
(and much more the descent) must have been a perilous
undertaking, unless the teams were better broken than the
various accounts of chariot-races furnished by the poets
would indicate. Entering beneath the great gate, a little
distance forward to the left may readily be found the site
of the colossal bronze statue of the warrior-goddess in
complete armor, formed by Phidias out of the spoils taken at
Marathon. The square base, partly sunk in the uneven rock,
is as perfect as if just put in readiness to receive the
pedestal of that famous work. A road bending to the right
and slightly hollowed out of the rock leads to the
Parthenon. The outer platform which sustains this celebrated
temple is partly cut from the rock of the hill and partly
built up of common limestone. The inner one of three
courses, as well as the whole superstructure, is formed of
Pentelic marble of a compact crystalline structure and of
dazzling whiteness. Long exposure has not availed to destroy
its lustre, but only to soften its tone. The visitor,
planting himself at the western front, is in a position to
gain some adequate idea of the perfection of the noble
building. The interior and central parts suffered the
principal injury from the explosion of the Turkish powder
magazine in 1687. The western front remains nearly entire.
It has been despoiled, indeed, of its movable ornaments. The
statues which filled the pediment are gone, with the
exception of a fragment or two. The sculptured slabs have
been removed from the spaces between the triglyphs, and the
gilded shields which hung beneath have been taken down. Of
the magnificent frieze, representing the procession of the
great quadrennial festival, only the portion surrounding the
western vestibule is still in place.²

Victory
Untying Her Sandals.

Temple of Victory

The Parthenon.

Still, as these were strictly decorations, and wholly
subordinate to the organic parts of the structure, their
presence, while it would doubtless greatly enhance the effect
of the whole, is not felt to be essential to its completeness.
The whole Doric columns still bear the massive entablature
sheltered by the covering roof. The simple greatness of the
conception, the just proportion of the several parts, together
with the elaborate finishing of the whole work, invest it with
a charm such as the works of man seldom possess—the pure
and lasting pleasure which flows from apparent perfection
Entering the principal apartment of the building, traces are
seen of the stucco and pictures with which the walls were
covered when it was fitted up as a Christian church in the
Byzantine period. Near the centre of the marble pavement is a
rectangular space laid with dark stone from the Peirseus or
from Eleusis. It marks the probable site of the colossal
precious statue of the goddess in gold and ivory—one of
the most celebrated works of Phidias. The smaller apartment
beyond, accessible only from the opposite front of the temple,
was used by the state as a place of deposit and safekeeping for
bullion and other valuables in the care of the state
treasurer.

Bas Relief of the Gods (Frieze Of The Parthenon).

Having examined the great temple, and tested the curvature
of its seemingly horizontal lines by sighting along the
unencumbered platform, and having stopped at several points of
the grand portico to admire the fine views of the city and
surrounding country, the traveler picks his way northward,
across a thick layer of fragments of columns, statues and
blocks of marble, toward the low-placed, irregular but elegant
Erechtheum, the temple of the most ancient worship and statue
of the patron-goddess of the city. This building sits close by
the northern as the Parthenon does by the southern wall of the
enclosure. It has suffered equally with the other from the
ravages of time, and its ruins, though less grand, are more
beautiful. Most of the graceful Ionic columns are still
standing, but large portions of the roof and entablature have
fallen. Fragments of decorated cornice strew the ground, some
of them of considerable length, and afford a near view of that
delicate ornamentation and exquisite finish so rare outside the
limits of Greece. The elevated porch of the Caryatides, lately
restored by the substitution of a new figure in place of the
missing statue now in the British Museum, attracts attention as
a unique specimen of Greek art, and also as showing how far a
skillful treatment will overcome the inherent difficulties of a
subject. The row of fair maidens looking out toward the
Parthenon do not seem much oppressed by the burden which rests
upon them, while their graceful forms lend a pleasing variety
to the scene. Passing out by the northern wing of the
Propylaea, a survey is had of the numerous fragments of
sculpture discovered among the ruins upon the hill, and
temporarily placed in the ancient Pinacotheca. The eye rests
upon sweet infant faces and upon rugged manly ones. Sometimes a
single feature only remains, which, touched by the finger of
genius, awakens admiration. A naked arm severed from the trunk,
of feminine cast, but with muscles tightly strained and hand
clenched as in agony, will arrest attention and dwell in the
memory.

North-west of the Acropolis, across a narrow chasm, lies the
low, rocky height of the Areopagus, accessible at the southeast
angle by a narrow flight of sixteen rudely-cut steps, which
lead to a small rectangular excavation on the summit, which
faces the Acropolis, and is surrounded upon three sides by a
double tier of benches hewn out of the rock. Here undoubtedly
the most venerable court of justice at Athens had its seat and
tried its cases in the open air. Here too, without doubt, stood
the great apostle when, with bold spirit and weighty words, he
declared unto the men of Athens that God of whom they confessed
their ignorance; who was not to be represented by gold or
silver or stone graven by art and man’s device; who dwelt not
in temples made with hands, and needed not to be worshiped with
men’s hands. In no other place can one feel so sure that he
comes upon the very footsteps of the apostle, and on no other
spot can one better appreciate his high gifts as an orator or
the noble devotion of his whole soul to the work of the Master.
How poor in comparison with his life-work appear the
performances of the greatest of the Athenian thinkers or
doers!

A little more than a quarter of a mile west of the Acropolis
is another rocky hill—the Pnyx—celebrated as the
place where the assembly of all the citizens met to transact
the business of the state. A large semicircular area was
formed, partly by excavation, partly by building up from
beneath, the bounds of which can be distinctly traced.
Considerable remains of the terrace-wall at the foot of the
slope exist—huge stones twelve or fourteen feet in length
by eight or ten in breadth. The chord of the semicircle is near
the top of the hill, formed by the perpendicular face of the
excavated rock, and is about four hundred feet in length by
twenty in depth. Projecting from it at the centre, and hewn out
of the same rock, is the bema or stone platform from which the
great orators from the time of Themistocles and Aristides, and
perhaps of Solon, down to the age of Demosthenes and the Attic
Ten, addressed the mass of their fellow-citizens. It is a
massive cubic block, with a linear edge of eleven feet,
standing upon a graduated base of nearly equal height, and is
mounted on either side by a flight of nine stone steps. From
its connection with the most celebrated efforts of some of the
greatest orators our race has yet seen, it is one of the most
interesting relics in the world, and its solid structure will
cause it to endure as long as the world itself shall stand,
unless, as there is some reason to apprehend will be the case,
it is knocked to pieces and carried off in the carpet-bags of
travelers. No traces of the Agora, which occupied the shallow
valley between the Pnyx and the Acropolis, remain. It was the
heart of the city, and was adorned with numerous public
buildings, porticoes, temples and statues. It was often
thronged with citizens gathered for purposes of trade,
discussion, or to hear and tell some new
thing.

Porch of the
Caryatides.

Half a mile or more to the south-east, on the banks of the
Ilissus, stood a magnificent structure dedicated to Olympian
Zeus—one of the four largest temples of Greece, ranking
with that of Demeter at Eleusis and that of Diana at Ephesus.
Its foundations remain, and sixteen of the huge Corinthian
columns belonging to its majestic triple colonnade. One of
these is fallen. Breaking up into the numerous disks of which
it was composed—six and a half feet in diameter by two or
more in thickness—and stretching out to a length of over
sixty feet, it gives an impressive conception of the size of
these columns, said to be the largest standing in Europe. The
level area of the temple is now used as a training-ground for
soldiers. Close by, and almost in the bed of the stream, which
is dry the larger part of the year, issues from beneath a ledge
of rock the copious fountain of sweet waters known to the
ancients as Calirrhoe. It furnished the only good
drinking-water of the city, and was used in all the sacrifices
to the gods. A little way above, on the opposite bank of the
Ilissus, is the site of the Panathenaic stadium, whose shape is
perfectly preserved in the smooth grass-grown hollow with
semicircular extremity which here lies at right angles to the
stream, between parallel ridges partly artificial.

Northward from the Acropolis, on a slight elevation, is the
best-preserved and one of the most ancient structures of
Athens—the temple of Theseus, built under the
administration of Cimon by the generation preceding Pericles
and the Parthenon. It is of the Doric order, and shaped like
the Parthenon, but considerably inferior to it in size as well
as in execution. It has been roofed with wood in modern times,
and was long used as a church, but is now a place of deposit
for the numerous statues and sculptured stones of various
kinds—mostly sepulchral monuments—which have been
recently discovered in and about the city. They are for the
most part unimportant as works of art, though many are
interesting from their antiquity or historic associations.
Among these is the stone which once crowned the burial-mound on
the plain of Marathon. It bears a single figure, said to
represent the messenger who brought the tidings of victory to
his countrymen.

Near the Theseium was the double gate (Dipylum) in the
ancient wall of the city whence issued the Sacred Way leading
to Eleusis, and bordered, like the Appian Way at Rome, with
tombs, many of them cenotaphs of persons who died in the public
service and were deemed worthy of a monument in the public
burying-ground. Within a few years an excavation has been made
through an artificial mound of ashes, pottery and other refuse
emptied out of the city, and a section of a few rods of this
celebrated road has been laid bare. The sepulchral monuments
are ranged on one side rather thickly, and crowd somewhat
closely upon the narrow pavement. They are, for the most part,
simple, thick slabs of white marble, with a triangular or
pediment-shaped top, beneath which is sculptured in low relief
the closing scene of the person commemorated, followed by a
short inscription. The work is done in an artistic style worthy
of the publicity its location gave it. On one of these slabs
you recognize the familiar full-length figure of Demosthenes,
standing with two companions and clasping in a parting grasp
the hand of a woman, who is reclining upon her deathbed. The
inscription is, Collyrion, wife of Agathon. On another
stone of larger size is a more imposing piece of sculpture. A
horseman fully armed is thrusting his spear into the body of
his fallen foe—a hoplite. The inscription relates that
the unhappy foot-soldier fell at Corinth by reason of those
five words of his!—a record intelligible enough,
doubtless, to his contemporaries, but sufficiently obscure and
provocative of curiosity to later generations.

There are other noted structures at Athens, such as the
Choragic Monument of Lysicrates—the highest type of the
Corinthian order of architecture, as the Erechtheum is of the
Ionic and the Parthenon of the Doric—but want of space
forbids any further description of them. Let the American
traveler visit Athens with the expectation of finding a city
occupying the most charming of sites, and containing by far the
most interesting and important monuments of antiquity, in their
original position, to be found in the whole world.

J.L.T. PHILLIPS.

Monument of
Lysicrates.

COMMONPLACE.

CONSTANCE FENIMORE
WOOLSON.

PROBATIONER LEONHARD;
OR,
THREE NIGHTS IN THE HAPPY VALLEY.

CHAPTER IV.

THE TEST—WITH MENTAL RESERVATIONS.

Elise went out to gather willow-twigs, as her mother had
said when her father asked for her.

A little later in the afternoon, Mr. Albert Spener walked
swiftly down the street toward the house occupied by the Rev.
Mr. Wenck. While he was yet at a distance Elise saw him
approaching, and possibly she thought, “He has seen me and
comes to meet me;” and many a pleasant stroll on many an
afternoon would have justified the thought.

But it was not until he had, as it were, stumbled upon Elise
that he noticed her. He carried in his hand a letter, and when
suddenly he stopped upon the sidewalk and looked at her, the
changeful aspects of his face were marvelous to behold.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I was going home,” she answered, not a little surprised by
the abrupt and authoritative manner of his address.

“I want to talk with you,” said he. “Is it to-day that I am
to begin to leave off loving you, Elise?”

“That you are—What do you say, Albert?” she asked.

“Have you not seen Brother Wenck’s letter to your father,
Elise?”

She shook her head.

“The lot—the lot—” he repeated, but his voice
refused to help him tell the tale.

“Albert, may I see the letter?” Father and Mother Loretz
might have rejoiced in their daughter could they have seen and
heard her in those trying moments. Her gentleness and her
serene dignity said for her that she would not be over-thrown
by the storm which had burst upon her in a moment, unlocked for
as tempest and whirlwind out of a clear sky.

Spener thrust into her hands the letter addressed to him
that morning by the minister. It contained an announcement of
the decision rendered by the lot, couched in terms more brief,
perhaps, than those which conveyed the same intelligence to the
father of Elise.

She gave it back to him without a word.

“If Brother Wenck is going to stand by it,” said he,
“there’ll be no room for him in this place. I was just going to
his house to tell him so. Will you go with me? I should like to
have a witness. I’ll make short work of it.”

“No,” said Elise, shrinking back amazed from her companion.
“I will not go with you to insult that good man.”

“You will go with me—not to his house, then!
Come, Elise, we must talk about this. You must help me untie
this knot. I cannot imagine how I ever permitted things to take
their chance. I have never heard of a sillier superstition than
I seem to have encouraged. Talk about faith! Let a man act up
to light and take the consequences. I can see clear enough now.
You never looked for this to happen, Elise?”

She shook her head. Indeed, she never had—no, not for
a moment.

“To think I should have permitted it to go on!”

“But you did let it go on—and I—consented. Do
not let me forget that,” she exclaimed. “I will go home,
Albert.”

“Ha, Elise! I wish I could feel more confidence in your
teachers when you get there.”

“I need no one to tell me what my duty is just here,” she
answered.

“Have you ever loved me, child? Child! I am talking
to a rock. You do not yield to this?” He waved the letter
aloft, and as if he would dash it from him. Elise looked at
him, and did not speak. “Sister Benigna will of course feel
called upon to bless the Lord,” said he. “But Wenck shall find
a way out of this difficulty. Then we will have done with them
both, my own.”

“Am I to have no voice in this matter?” she asked. “What if
I say—”

Spener grasped her hand so suddenly that, as if in her
surprise she had forgotten what she was about to say, Elise
added, “Sister Benigna is my best friend. She knows nothing
about the lot.”

“Does not?”

“I told you, Albert, that it was to be so. And—you do
not mean to threaten Mr. Wenck?”

“I mean to have him find a way out of this difficulty. He
ought to have said to your father that this lot business
belongs to a period gone by. He did hint at it. I supposed, of
course, that he would see the thing came out right, since he
let it go on.”

“Did you then believe it was only a play or a trick?”
exclaimed Elise indignantly.

“Not quite, but I did not suppose that we were a company who
would stand by an adverse decision. You know, if you are the
Elise I have loved so long, that I must love you
always—that I am not going to give you up. Your father
was bent on the test, but look at him and tell me if he
expected this turn. He is twenty years older than he was
yesterday. Folks used to resort to the lot in deciding about
marriages, and it was all well enough if they didn’t care how
it turned out, or hadn’t faith to believe in their own ability
to choose. A pretty way of doing business, though! Suppose I
had tried it on this place! I have always asked for God’s
blessing, and tried to act so that I need not blush when I
asked it; but a man must know his own mind, he must act with
decision. I say again, I don’t like your teachers, Elise.
Between Sister Benigna and Mr. Wenck, now, what would be my
chances if I could submit to such a pair?”

“You and I have no quarrel,” said Elise gently. “I suppose
that you acted in good faith. You know how much I
care—how humiliated I shall feel if you attack in any way
a man so good as Mr. Wenck. You do not understand Sister
Benigna.”

It was well that she had these to speak of, and that she
need not confine herself to the main thought before them, for
Albert could do anything he attempted. Had not her father
always said, “Let Spener alone for getting what he wants: he’ll
have it, but he’s above-board and honest;” and what hopes,
heaven-cleaving, had spread wing the instant her eyes met
his!

“It is easy to say that I do not understand,” said he. “One
has only to assume that another is so excellent and virtuous a
character as to be beyond your comprehension, and then your
mouth is stopped.”

“Ah, how bitter you are!” exclaimed Elise. Her voice was
full of pain.

Spener silently reproached himself, and said, with a
tenderness that was irresistible, “You don’t know what
temptations beset a man in business and everywhere, Elise. It
would be easier far to lie down and die, I have thought
sometimes, than to stand up and meet the enemy like a man. You
will never convince me that my duty is to let you go, to give
you up. I can think of nothing so wicked.”

These words, which had a joyful sound to which she could not
seal her ears, made Elise stop suddenly, afraid of Albert,
afraid of herself. “I think,” she said after a moment, “we had
best not walk together any longer. There is nothing we can say
that will satisfy ourselves or ought to satisfy each
other.”

“Do you mean that you accept this decision?” said he.

“I promised, Albert. So did you.”

“We will not talk about it. But we can at least walk
together, Elise. You need not speak. What you confessed just
now is true—you cannot say anything to the purpose.”

So they walked on together. Silently, past all Spenersberg’s
dwelling-places they walked, till they came to the cemetery,
and ascending the hill they strolled about that pleasant place
among the graves, and thought, perhaps, How blessed are the
dead! and oh to be lying there in a dreamless sleep beneath the
blooming wild roses, and where dirges were sounding through the
cedars day and night! Elise might have thought thus, but not
her companion. He was the last man to wish to pass from the
scene of his successes merely because a great failure
threatened him. Looking upon the slight young figure beside him
and her grave sweet face, a wrathful contempt was aroused
within him that he should have allowed himself to be placed in
a situation so absurd. As they walked down the hill again, he
startled his companion by a merry outbreak. “Tell me you are
not mine!” he said: “there never was a joke like it!”

CHAPTER V.

SISTER BENIGNA.

On her return home Elise found Sister Benigna seated at the
piano, attuning herself, as she said, after her work among the
restive children of her school.

When she looked upon her friend and recalled the bitter
words Albert had spoken against her, Elise felt their
injustice. It was true, as she had told him, he did not
understand Sister Benigna.

Sitting down beside the window, Elise began to busy herself
over the dainty basket she was elaborately decorating. After a
few moments Sister Benigna left the piano and stood looking at
Elise and her work. She had something to say, but how should
she say it? how approach the heart which had wrapped itself up
in sorrow and surrounded itself with the guards of silence?

Presently Elise looked at her, but not until she had so long
resisted the inclination to do so that there was something like
violence in the effort. When her eyes met the gaze of Sister
Benigna the warm blood rushed to her cheeks, and she looked
quickly down again. Did Sister Benigna know yet about the
letter Mr. Wenck had written?

A sad smile appeared on Benigna’s face. She shook her head.
If she did not know what had happened, she no doubt understood
that some kind of trouble had entered the house.

Drawing a roll of needlework from her pocket, she quietly
occupied herself with it until Elise, unable to endure the
silence longer, said, “Oh, Sister Benigna, is it not time we
did something about the Sisters’ House? I have been reading
about one: I forget where it is. What a beautiful Home you and
I could make for poor people, and sick girls not able to work,
and old women! We ought to have such a Home in Spenersberg. I
have been thinking all day it is what we must have, and it is
time we set about it.”

“I do not agree with you,” was the quiet answer. “There is
no real need for it here, and perhaps there never will be. Work
that is so unnecessary might better be avoided. In Spenersberg
it is better that the poor and the old and the sick should be
cared for in their homes, by their own households: there is no
want here.”

“Will you read what I have been reading?” said Elise,
hesitating, not willing yet to give up the project which looked
so full of promise.

“I know all about Sisters’ Houses, and they are excellent
institutions, but if you will go from house to house here you
will find that you would probably keep house by yourself a long
time if you opened such an establishment. No, no: you have your
work all prepared for you, and I certainly have mine. There is
a good deal to be done yet for the festival. Tomorrow, after
five, come to the schoolroom and we will practice a while. And
we might do something here tonight. The children surprise me: I
seem to be surrounded by a little company of angels while they
sing.”

“Oh, Sister Benigna,” exclaimed Elise throwing down her work
in despair, “I don’t in the least care about the festival. I
should be glad to know it was all given up. I cannot sing at
it. I think I have lost my voice: I do, indeed. I tried it this
afternoon, and I croaked worse than anything you ever
heard.”

“Croaked? We must see to that,” said Sister Benigna; but,
though her voice was so cheerful, she closed her eyes as she
spoke, and passed her hands over them, and in spite of herself
a look of pain was for an instant visible on her always pale
face. She rose quickly and walked across the room, and crossed
it twice before she came again to the window.

“You don’t understand me to-day,” said Elise impetuously;
“and I don’t want you to.” But Elise would not have spoken at
all had she looked at Sister Benigna.

A silence of many seconds, which seemed much longer to
Elise, followed her words. She did not dare to go on. What was
Sister Benigna thinking? Would she never speak? Had she nothing
to say? Elise was about to rise also, because to sit still in
that silence or to break it by words had become equally
impossible, when Sister Benigna, approaching gently, laid her
hand upon her and said, “Wait one moment: I have something to
tell you, Elise.”

And so Elise sat down. She could not summon the strength to
go with that voice in her ear and the touch of that hand
arresting her.

“I once had a friend as young as you are, of whom you often
remind me,” said Benigna. “She had a lover, and their faith led
them to seek a knowledge of the Lord’s will concerning their
marriage. It was inquired for them, and it was found against
the union. You often remind me of her, I said, but your
fortunes are not at all like hers.”

“Sister Benigna, why do you tell me this?” asked Elise
quickly, in a voice hardly audible. She was afraid to listen.
She recalled Albert’s words. She did not know if she might
trust the friendly voice that spoke.

“Because I have always thought that some time it would be
well for you to hear it; but if you do not wish to hear it, I
will go no farther.”

Elise looked at Benigna—not trust her! “Please go on,”
she said.

“I knew the poor child very well. She had grown up in an
unhappy home, and had never known what it was to have comfort
and peace in the house, or even plenty to eat and to wear. She
was expected to go out and earn her living as soon as she had
learned the use of her hands and feet. Poor child! she felt her
fortune was a hard one, but God always cared for her. In one
way and another she in time picked up enough knowledge of music
to teach beginners. The first real friend she had was the
friend who became so dear to her that—I need not try to
find words to tell you how dear he was.

“She was soon skilled enough to be able to take more
intelligent and advanced pupils, and in the church-music she
had the leading parts. By and by the music was put into her
hands for festivals and the great days, Christmas and Easter,
as it has been put into mine here in Spenersberg. One day
he said to her, ‘It seems to us the best thing in life
to be near each other. Would it might be God’s will that we
should never part!’ She responded to that prayer from the
depths of her heart, and a great gulf seemed to open before
her, for she thought what would her life be worth if they were
destined to part? Then he said, ‘Let us inquire the will of our
Lord;’ and she said, ‘Let it be so;’ and they had faith that
would enable them to abide by the decision. The lot pronounced
against them. I do not believe that it had entered the heart of
either of them to understand how necessary they had become to
each other, and when they saw that all was over it was a sad
awaking. For a little while it was with both as if they had
madly thrown a birthright away; for, though they had faith,
they were not yet perfect in it. Not soon did either see that
this life had a blessing for them every day—new every
morning, fresh every evening—and that from everlasting to
everlasting are the mercies of God. But at last he said, ‘I am
afraid, my darling'” (Elise started at this word of endearment.
It was like a revelation to think that there had been lovers in
the world before her time), “‘it will go harder with me than
with you. I cannot stay here and go on with my work. I must go
among new people, and begin again.’ And so he went away, and at
last, when by the grace of God they met again—surely,
surely by no seeking of their own—they were no less true
friends because they had for their lifetime been led into
separate paths. Their faith saved them.”

Low though the voice was in which these last words were
spoken, there was a strength and inspiration in them which
Elise felt. She looked at Sister Benigna with steady, wondering
eyes. Such a story from her lips, and told so, and told now!
And her countenance! what divine beauty glowed in it! The
moment had a vision that could never be forgotten.

Elise did not speak, but neither, having heard this tale,
did she now rise to depart. She folded her hands and bowed her
head upon them, and so they sat silent until the first chords
of the “Pastoral Symphony” drew the souls of both away up into
a realm which is entered only by the pure in heart.

About this time it was that Leonhard Marten, while passing,
heard that recitative of a soprano voice which so amazed him.
Dropping quickly into the shade of the trees opposite Loretz’s
house, he listened to the announcement, “There were shepherds
abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by
night,” and there remained until he saw two men advancing
toward the house, one of them evidently approaching his
home.

Through the sleepless night Elise’s thoughts were constantly
going over the simple incidents of the story Sister Benigna had
told her. But they had not by morning yielded all the
consolations which the teller of the tale perceived among their
possibilities, for the reason, perhaps, that Elise’s sympathies
had been more powerfully excited by the tale than her faith. It
was not upon the final result of the severance effected by the
lot that her mind rested dismayed: her heart was full of pain,
thinking of that poor girl’s early life, and that at last, when
all the recollection of it was put far from her by the joy
which shone upon her as the sun out of darkness, she must look
forward and by its light behold a future so dreary. “How
fearful!” she moaned once; and her closed eyes did not see the
face that turned toward her full of pain, full of love.

Of all doubts that could afflict the soul of Sister Benigna,
none more distracting than this was conceivable: Had she proved
the best instructor to this child of her spirit? Had she even
been capable of teaching her truest truth? Was it the
truth or herself to which Elise was always deferring? Was
obedience a duty when not impelled and sanctified by faith? In
what did the prime virtue of resignation consist? Would not
obedience without faith be merely a debasing superstitious
submission to the will of the believing? Her reflections were
not suggested by a shrewd guess. She knew that the lot had been
resorted to, and that the letters had been written to Elise and
Albert which acquainted them with the result; and the peace of
her prayerful soul was rent by the thought that a joyless
surrender of human will to a higher was, perhaps, no better
than the poor helpless slave’s extorted sacrifice. The
happiness of the household seemed to Benigna in her keeping. If
they had gone lightly seeking the oracle of God, as they would
have sought a fortune-teller, was not the Most High dishonored?
She could not say this to Elise, but could she say it to Albert
Spener? Ought she not to say it to him? There was no other to
whom it could be said. Had the coming day any duty so
imperative as this? She arose to perform it, but Spener, as we
know, had gone away the day before.

CHAPTER VI.

THE MEN OF SPENERSBERG.

This Spenersberg, about which Leonhard was not a little
eager to know more when he shut the door of the apartment into
which his host had ushered him—for he must remain all
night—what was it?

A colony, or a brotherhood, or a community, six years old.
Such a fact does not lie ready for observation every
day—such a place does not lie in the hand of a man at his
bidding. What, then, was its history? We need not wait to find
out until morning, when Leonhard will proceed to discover. He
is satisfied when he lies down upon the bed, which awaited him,
it seems, as he came hither on the way-train—quite
satisfied that Spener of Spenersberg must be a man worth
seeing. Breathing beings possessed of ideas and homes here must
have been handled with power by a master mind to have brought
about this community, if so it is to be called, in six short
years, thinks Leonhard. He recalls his own past six years, and
turns uneasily on his bed, and finds no rest until he reminds
himself of the criticism he has been enabled to pass on Miss
Elise’s rendering of “He is a righteous Saviour,” and the
suggestion he made concerning the pitch of “Ye shall find rest
for your souls.” The recollection acts upon him somewhat as the
advancing wave acts on the sand-line made by the wave
preceding. When he made the first suggestion, Sister Benigna
stood for a moment looking at him, surprised by his remark;
but, less than a second taken up with a thought of him, she had
passed instantly on to say, “Try it so, Elise: ‘He is a
righteous Saviour.’ We will make it a slower movement. Ah! how
impressive! how beautiful! It is the composer’s very thought!
Again—slow: it is perfect!”

Was this kind of praise worth the taking? a source of praise
worth the seeking? Leonhard had said ungrateful things about
his prize-credentials to Miss Marion Ayres, and I do believe
that these very prizes, awarded for his various drawings, were
never so valued by him as the look with which priestly Benigna
seemed to admit him at least so far as into the fellowship of
the Gentiles’ Court.

He would have fallen asleep just here with a pleasant
thought but for the recollection of Wilberforce’s letter, which
startled him hardly less than the apparition of his friend in
the moonlight streaming through his half-curtained window would
have done. Is it always so pleasant a thought that for ever and
ever a man shall bear his own company?

But this Spenersberg? Seven years ago, on the day when he
came of age, Albert Spener, then a young clerk in a fancy-goods
store, went to look at the estate which his grandfather had
bequeathed to him the year preceding. Not ten years ago the old
man made his will and gave the property, on which he had not
quite starved, to his only grandson, and here was this
worthless gorge which stretched between the fields more
productive than many a famous gold-mine.

The youth had seen at once that if he should deal with the
land as his predecessors had done, he would be able to draw no
more from the stingy acres than they. He had shown the bent of
his mind and the nature of his talent by the promptness with
which he put things remote together, and by the directness with
which he reached his conclusions.

He had left his town-lodgings, having obtained of his
employer leave of absence for one week, and within twenty-four
hours had come to his conclusion and returned to his post. Of
that estate which he had inherited but a portion, and a very
small portion, offered to the cultivator the least
encouragement. The land had long ago been stripped of its
forest trees, and, thus defrauded of its natural fertilizers,
lay now, after successive seasons of drain and waste, as barren
as a desert, with the exception of that narrow strip between
the hills which apparently bent low that inland might look upon
river.

Along the banks of the stream, which flowed, a current of
considerable depth and swiftness, toward its outlet, the river,
willows were growing. Albert’s employer was an importer to a
small extent, and fancy willow-ware formed a very considerable
share of his importations. The conclusion he had reached while
surveying his land was an answer to the question he had asked
himself: Why should not this land be made to bring forth the
kind of willow used by basket-weavers, and why should not
basket-weavers be induced to gather into a community of some
sort, and so importers be beaten in the market by domestic
productions? The aim thus clearly defined Spener had
accomplished. His Moravians furnished him with a willow-ware
which was always quoted at a high figure, and the patriotic
pride the manufacturer felt in the enterprise was abundantly
rewarded: no foreign mark was ever found on his home-made
goods.

But his Moravians: where did these people come from,
and how came they to be known as his?

The question brings us to Frederick Loretz. In those days he
was a porter in the establishment where Spener was a clerk. He
had filled this situation only one month, however, when he was
attacked with a fever which was scourging the neighborhood, and
taken to the hospital. Albert followed him thither with kindly
words and care, for the poor fellow was a stranger in the town,
and he had already told Spener his dismal story. Afar from wife
and child, among strangers and a pauper, his doom, he believed,
was to die. How he bemoaned his wasted life then, and the husks
which he had eaten!

In his delirium Loretz would have put an end to his life.
Spener talked him out of this horror of himself, and showed him
that there was always opportunity, while life lasted, for
wanderers to seek again the fold they had strayed from; for
when the delirium passed the man’s conscience remained, and he
confessed that he had lived away from the brethren of his
faith, and was an outcast. Oh, if he could but be transported
to Herrnhut and set down there a well man in that sanctuary of
Moravianism, how devoutly would he return to the faith and
practice of his fathers!

When Spener returned from his trip of investigation he
hastened immediately to the hospital, sought out poor half-dead
Loretz, laid his hand on his shoulder, and said, “Come, get up:
I want you.” And he explained his project: “I will build a
house for you, send for your wife and child, put you all
together, and start you in life. I am going into the basket
business, and I want you to look after my willows. After they
are pretty well grown you shall get in some
families—Simon-Pure Moravians, you know—and we will
have a village of our own. D’ye hear me?”

The poor fellow did hear: he struggled up in his bed, threw
his arms around Spener’s neck, tried to kiss him, and
fainted.

“This is a good beginning,” said Spener to himself as he
laid the senseless head upon the pillow and felt for the
beating heart. The beating heart was there. In a few moments
Loretz was looking, with eyes that shone with loving gratitude
and wondering admiration, on the young man who had saved his
life.

“I have no money,” said this youth in further explanation of
his project—for he wanted his companion to understand his
circumstances from the outset—”but I shall borrow five
thousand dollars. I can pay the interest on that sum out of my
salary. Perhaps I shall sell a few lots on the river, if I can
turn attention to the region. It will all come out right,
anyhow. Now, how soon can you be ready? I will write to your
wife to-day if you say so, and tell her to come on with the
little girl.”

“Wait a week,” said Loretz in a whisper; and all that night
and the following day his chances for this world and the next
seemed about equal.

But after that he rallied, and his recovery was certain. It
was slow, however, hastened though it was by the hope and
expectation which had opened to him when he had reached the
lowest depth of despair and covered himself with the ashes of
repentance.

The letter for the wife and little girl was written, and
money sent to bring them from the place where Loretz had left
them when he set out in search of occupation, to find
employment as a porter, and the fever, and Albert Spener.

During the first year of co-working Loretz devoted himself
to the culture of the willow, and then, as time passed on and
hands were needed, he brought one family after another to the
place—Moravians all—until now there were at least
five hundred inhabitants in Spenersberg, a large factory and a
church, whereof Spener himself was a member “in good and
regular standing.”

Seven years of incessant labor, directed by a wise
foresight, which looked almost like inspiration and miracle,
had resulted in all this real prosperity. Loretz never stopped
wondering at it, and yet he could have told you every step of
the process. All that had been done he had had a hand
in, but the devising brain was Spener’s; and no wonder that, in
spite of his familiarity with the details, the sum-total of the
activities put forth in that valley should have seemed to
Loretz marvelous, magical.

He had many things to rejoice over besides his own
prosperity. His daughter was in all respects a perfect being,
to his thinking. For six years now she had been under the
instruction of Sister Benigna, not only in music, but in all
things that Sister Benigna, a well-instructed woman, could
teach. She sang, as Leonhard Marten would have told you,
“divinely,” she was beautiful to look upon, and Albert Spener
desired to marry her.

Surely the Lord had blessed him, and remembered no more
those years of wanderings when, alienated from the brethren, he
sought out his own ways and came close upon destruction. What
should he return to the beneficent Giver for all these
benefits?

Poor Loretz! In his prosperity he thought that he should
never be moved, but he would not basely use that conviction and
forget the source of all his satisfaction. He remembered that
it was when he repented of his misdeeds that Spener came to him
and drew him from the pit. He could never look upon Albert as
other than a divine agent; and when Spener joined himself to
the Moravians, led partly by his admiration of them, partly by
religious impulse, and partly because of his conviction that to
be wholly successful he and his people must form a unit, his
joy was complete.

The proposal for Elise’s hand had an effect upon her father
which any one who knew him well might have looked for and
directed. The pride of his life was satisfied. He remembered
that he and his Anna, in seeking to know the will of the Lord
in respect to their marriage, had been answered favorably by
the lot. He desired the signal demonstration of heavenly will
in regard to the nuptials proposed. Not a shadow of a doubt
visited his mind as to the result, and the influence of his
faith upon Spener was such that he acquiesced in the measure,
though not without remonstrance and misgiving and mental
reservation.

To find his way up into the region of faith, and quiet
himself there when the result of the seeking was known, was
almost impossible for Loretz. He could fear the Judge who had
decreed, but could he trust in Him? He began to grope back
among his follies of the past, seeking a crime he had not
repented, as the cause of this domestic calamity. But ah! to
reap such a harvest as this for any youthful folly! Poor soul!
little he knew of vengeance and retribution. He was at his
wit’s end, incapable alike of advancing, retreating or of
peaceful surrender.

It was pleasant to him to think, in the night-watches, of
the young man who occupied the room next to his. He did not
see—at least had not yet seen—in Leonhard a
messenger sent to the house, as did his wife; but the presence
of the young stranger spoke favorable things in his behalf; and
then, as there was really nothing to be done about this
decision, anything that gave a diversion to sombre thoughts was
welcome. Sister Benigna had spoken very kindly to Leonhard in
the evening, and he had pointed out a place in one of Elise’s
solos where by taking a higher key in a single passage a
marvelous effect could be produced. That showed knowledge; and
he said that he had taught music. Perhaps he would like to
remain until after the congregation festival had taken
place.

CHAPTER VII.

THE BOOK.

In the morning the master of the house rapped on Leonhard’s
door and said: “When you come down I have something to show
you.” The voice of Mr. Loretz had almost its accustomed
cheerfulness of tone, and he ended his remark with a brief “Ha!
ha!” peculiar to him, which not only expressed his own
good-humor, but also invited good-humored response.

Leonhard answered cheerily, and in a few moments he had
descended the steep uncovered stair to the music-room.

“Now for the book,” Loretz called out as Leonhard
entered.

How handsome our young friend looked as he stood there
shaking hands with the elderly man, whose broad, florid face
now actually shone with hospitable feeling!

“Is father going to claim you as one of us, Mr. Marten?”
asked the wife of Loretz, who answered her husband’s call by
coming into the room and bringing with her a large volume
wrapped in chamois skin.

“What shall I be, then?” asked Leonhard. “A wiser and a
better man, I do not doubt.”

“What! you do not know?” the good woman stayed to say. “Has
nobody told you where you are, my young friend?”

“I never before found myself in a place I should like to
stay in always; so what does the rest signify?” answered
Leonhard. “What’s in a name?”

“Not much perhaps, yet something,” said Loretz. “We are all
Moravians here. I was going to look in this book here for the
names of your ancestors. I thought perhaps you knew about
Spenersberg.”

“I am as new to it all as Christopher Columbus was to the
West India islands. If you find the names of my kinsmen down in
your book, sir, it—it will be a marvelous, happy sight
for me,” said Leonhard.

“I’ll try my hand at it,” said Loretz. “Ha! ha!” and he
opened the volume, which was bound in black leather, the leaves
yellowed with years. “This book,” he continued, “is one hundred
and fifty years old. You will find recorded in it the names of
all my grandfather’s friends, and all my father’s. See, it is
our way. There are all the dates. Where they lived, see, and
where they died. It is all down. A man cannot feel himself cut
off from his kind as long as he has a volume like that in his
library. I have added a few names of my own friends, and their
birthdays. Here, you see, is Sister Benigna’s, written with her
own hand. A most remarkable woman, sir. True as
steel—always the same. But”—he paused a moment and
looked at Leonhard with his head inclined to one side, and an
expression of perplexity upon his face—”there’s something
out of the way here in this country. I have not more than one
name down to a dozen in my father’s record, and twenty in my
grandfather’s. We do not make friends, and we do not keep them,
as they did in old time. We don’t trust each other as men ought
to. Half the time we find ourselves wondering whether the folks
we’re dealing with are honest. Now think of that!”

“Are men any worse than they were in the old time?” asked
Leonhard, evidently not entering into the conversation with the
keenest enjoyment.

“I do not know how it is,” said Loretz with a sigh,
continuing to turn the leaves of the book as he spoke.

“Perhaps we have less imagination, and don’t look at every
new-comer as a friend until we have tried him,” suggested
Leonhard. “We decide that everybody shall be tested before we
accept him. And isn’t it the best way? Better than to be
disappointed, when we have set our heart on a man—or a
woman.”

“I do not know—I cannot account for it,” said Mr.
Loretz. Then with a sudden start he laid his right hand on the
page before him, and with a great pleased smile in his
deep-set, small blue eyes he said: “Here is your name. I felt
sure I should find it: I felt certain it was down. See here, on
my grandfather’s page—Leonhard Marten, Herrnhut,
1770. How do you like that?”

“I like it well,” said Leonhard, bending over the book and
examining the close-fisted autograph set down strongly in
unfading ink. Had he found an ancestor at last? What could have
amazed him as much?

“What have you found?” asked Mrs. Loretz, who had heard
these remarks in the next room, where she was actively making
preparations for the breakfast, which already sent forth its
odorous invitations.

“We have found the name,” answered her husband. “Come and
see. I have read it, I dare say, a hundred times: that was what
made me feel that an old friend had come.”

“That means,” said the good woman, hastening in at her
husband’s call, and reading the name with a pleased
smile—”that means that you belong to us. I thought you
did. I am glad.”

Were these folk so intent on securing a convert that in
these various ways they made the young stranger feel that he
was not among strangers in this unknown Spenersberg? Nothing
was farther from their thought: they only gave to their kindly
feeling hearty utterance, and perhaps spoke with a little extra
emphasis because the constraint they secretly felt in
consequence of their household trouble made them unanimous in
the effort to put it out of sight—not out of this
stranger’s sight, but out of their own.

“Perhaps you will stop with us a while, and maybe write your
name on my page before you go,” said Loretz, afraid that his
wife had gone a little too far.

“Without a single test?” Leonhard answered. “Haven’t we just
agreed that we wise men don’t take each other on trust, as they
did in our grandfathers’ day?”

“A man living in Herrnhut in 1770 would not have for a
descendant a—a man I could not trust,” said Loretz,
closing the book and placing it in its chamois covering again.
“Breakfast, mother, did you say?”

“Have you wanted ink?” asked Sister Benigna, entering at
that instant. “Are we writing in the sacred birthday book?”

“Not yet,” said Leonhard hastily, the color rising to his
face in a way to suggest forked lightning somewhere beyond
sight.

“You have wanted ink, and are too kind to let me know,” she
said. “I emptied the bottle copying music for the children
yesterday.”

“The ink was put to a better use then than I could have
found for it this morning,” said Leonhard.

And Mrs. Loretz, who looked into the room just then, said to
herself, as her eyes fell on him, “Poor soul! he is in
trouble.”

In fact, this thought was in Leonhard’s mind as he went into
breakfast with the family: “A deuced good friend I have
proved—to Wilberforce! Isn’t there anybody here
clear-eyed enough to see that it would be like forgery to write
my name down in a book of friendship?”

The morning meal was enlivened by much more than the usual
amount of talk. Leonhard was curious to know about Herrnhut,
that old home of Moravianism, and the interest which he
manifested in the history Loretz was so eager to communicate
made him in turn an object of almost affectionate attention.
That he had no facts of private biography to communicate in
turn did net attract notice, because, however many such facts
he might have ready to produce, by the time Loretz had done
talking it was necessary that the day’s work should
begin.

CHAPTER VIII.

CONFERENCE MEETING.

The school-room was a large apartment in the basement of the
factory which had been used as a drying-room until it became
necessary to find for the increasing numbers of the little
flock more spacious accommodations. The basement was entered by
a door at the end of the building opposite that by which the
operatives entered the factory, and the hours were so timed
that the children went and came without disturbance to
themselves or others. The path that led to the basement door
was neatly bordered with flowering plants and bushes, and
sunlight was always to be found there, if anywhere in the
valley, from eight o’clock till two.

Leonhard walked to the factory with Sister Benigna, to whose
conduct Loretz had consigned him when called away by the tower
bell.

At the door of the basement Mr. Wenck was standing with a
printed copy of Handel’s sacred oratorio of The Messiah
in his hand. Evidently he was waiting for Sister Benigna.

But when she had said to Leonhard, “Pass on to the other end
of the building and you will find the entrance, and Mr.
Spener’s office in the corner as you enter,” and Leonhard had
thanked her, and bowed and passed on, and she turned to Mr.
Wenck, it was very little indeed that he said or had to say
about the music which he held in his hand.

“I have no doubt that all the preparation necessary for
to-morrow evening is being made,” he said. “You may need this
book. But I did not come to talk about it. Sister Benigna,” he
continued in a different tone, and a voice not quite under his
control, “is it not unreasonable to have passed a sleepless
night thinking of Albert and Elise?”

“Very unreasonable.” But he had not charged her, as she
supposed, with that folly, as his next words showed.

“It is, and yet I have done it—only because all this
might have been so easily avoided.”

“And yet it was unavoidable,” said she, looking toward the
school-room door as one who had no time to waste in idle
talk.

“Not that I question the wisdom of the resort if all were of
one mind,” said Mr. Wenck, who had the dreary all-day before
him, and was not in the least pressed for time. “But I can see
that even on the part of Brother Loretz the act was not a
genuine act of faith.”

Startled by the expression the minister was giving to her
secret thoughts, Benigna exclaimed, “And yet what can be
done?”

“Nothing,” he answered. “If Loretz should yield to Spener,
and if I should—do you not see he has had everything his
own way here?—he would feel that nothing could stand in
opposition to him. If he were a different man! And they are
both so young!”

“I know that Elise has a conscience that will hold her fast
to duty,” said Benigna, but she did not speak hopefully: she
spoke deliberately, however, thinking that these words
conscience and duty might arrest the minister’s
attention, and that he would perhaps, by some means, throw
light upon questions which were constantly becoming more
perplexing to her. Was conscience an unfailing guide? Was one
person’s duty to be pronounced upon by another without scruple,
and defined with unfaltering exactness? But the words had not
arrested the minister’s attention.

“If they could only see that there is nothing to be done!”
said he. “Oh, they will, Benigna! Had they only the faith,
Benigna!”

“Yet how vain their sacrifice, for they have it not!” said
she. And as if she would not prolong an interview which must be
full of pain, because no light could proceed from any words
that would be given them to speak, Sister Benigna turned
abruptly toward the basement door when she had said this, and
entered it without bestowing a parting glance even on the
minister.

He walked away after an instant’s hesitation: indeed there
was nothing further to be said, and she did well to go.

Going homeward by a path which led along the hillside above
the village street, he must pass the small house separated from
all others—the house which was the appointed
resting-place of all who lived in Spenersberg to die
there—known as the Corpse-house. To it the bodies of
deceased persons were always taken after death, and there they
remained until the hour when they were carried forth for
burial.

As Mr. Wenck approached he saw that the door stood open: a
few steps farther, and this fact was accounted for. A bent and
wrinkled old woman stood there with a broom in her hand, which
she had been using in a plain, straight-forward manner.

“Ah, Mary,” he said, “what does this mean, my good
woman?”

“It is the minister,” she answered in a low voice,
curtseying. “I was moved to come here this morning, sir, and
see to things. It was time to be brushing up a little, I
thought. It is a month now since the last.”

“I will take down the old boughs then, and garnish the walls
with new ones. And have you looked at the lamp too, Mary?”

“It is trimmed, sir,” said the woman; and the minister’s
readiness to assist her drew forth the confession: “I was
thinking on my bed in the night-watches that it must be done.
There will one be going home soon. And it may be myself, sir. I
could not have been easy if I had not come up to tidy the
house.”

Having finished her task, which was a short one and easily
performed, the woman now waited to watch the minister as he
selected cedar boughs and wove them into wreaths, and suspended
them from the walls and rafters of the little room; and it
comforted the simple soul when, standing in the doorway, the
good man lifted his eyes toward heaven and said in the words of
the church litany:

and devoutly she joined in with him in the solemn responsive
cry.

It was very evident that the minister’s work that day was
not to be performed in his silent home among his books.

On the brightest day let the sun become eclipsed, and how
the earth will pine! What melancholy will pervade the busy
streets, the pleasant fields and woods! How disconsolately the
birds will seek their mates and their nests!

The children came together, but many a half hour passed
during which the shadow of an Unknown seemed to come between
them and their teacher. The bright soul, was she too suffering
from an eclipse? Does it happen that all souls, even the most
valiant, most loving, least selfish, come in time to passes so
difficult that, shrinking back, they say, “Why should I
struggle to gain the other side? What is there worth seeking?
Better to end all here. This life is not worth enduring”? And
yet, does it also come to pass as certainly that these valiant,
unselfish, loving ones will struggle, fight, climb, wade, creep
on, on while the breath of life remains in them, and never
surrender? It seemed as if Sister Benigna had arrived at a
place where her baffled spirit stood still and felt its
helplessness. Could she do nothing for Elise, the dear child
for whose happiness she would cheerfully give her life, and not
think the price too dear?

By and by the children were aware that Sister Benigna had
come again among them: the humblest little flower lifted up its
head, and the smallest bird began to chirp and move about and
smooth its wings.

Sister Benigna! what had she recollected?—that but a
single day perhaps was hers to live, and here were all these
children! As she turned with ardent zeal to her
work—which indeed had not failed of accustomed conduct so
far as routine went—tell me what do you find in those
lovely eyes if not the heavenliest assurances? Let who will
call the scene of this life’s operations a vale of tears, a
world of misery, a prison-house of the spirit, here is one who
asks for herself nothing of honors or riches or pleasures, and
who can bless the Lord God for the glory of the earth he has
created, and for those everlasting purposes of his which
mortals can but trust in, and which are past finding out.
Children, let us do our best to-day, and wait until to-morrow
for to-morrow’s gifts. This exhortation was in the eyes, mien,
conduct of the teacher, and so she led them on until, when they
came to practice their hymns for the festival, every little
heart and voice was in tune, and she praised them with voice so
cheerful, how should they guess that it had ever been choked by
anguish or had ever fainted in despair?

O young eyes saddening over what is to you a painful,
insoluble problem! yet a little while and you shall see the
mists of morning breaking everywhere, and the great conquering
sun will enfold you too in its warm embrace: the humble laurels
of the mountain’s side, even as the great pines and cedars of
the mountain’s crest, have but to receive and use what the
sterile rock and the blinding cloud, the wintry tempest and the
rain and the summer’s heat bestow, and lo! the heights are
alive with glory. But it is not in a day.

CHAPTER IX.

WILL THE ARCHITECT HAVE EMPLOYMENT?

On entering the factory, Leonhard met Loretz near the door
talking with Albert Spener. When he saw Leonhard, Loretz said,
“I was just saying to Mr. Spener that I expected you, sir, and
how he might recognize you; but you shall speak for yourself.
If you will spend a little time looking about, I shall be back
soon: perhaps Mr. Spener—”

“Mr. Leonhard Marten, I believe,” said Mr. Albert Spener
with a little exaggeration of his natural stiffness. Perhaps he
did not suspect that all the morning he had been manifesting
considerable loftiness toward Loretz, and that he spoke in a
way that made Leonhard feel that his departure from Spenersberg
would probably take place within something less than
twenty-four hours.

Yet within half an hour the young men were walking up and
down the factory, examining machinery and work, and talking as
freely as if they had known each other six months. They were
not in everything as unlike as they were in person. Spener was
a tall, spare man, who conveyed an impression of mental
strength and physical activity. He could turn his hand to
anything, and attempt anything that was to be done by
skillful handicraft; and whether he could use his wits well in
shaping men, let Spenersberg answer. His square-shaped head was
covered with bright brown hair, which had a reddish tinge, and
his moustache was of no stinted growth: his black eyes
penetrated and flashed, and could glow and glare in a way to
make weakness and feebleness tremble. His quick speech did not
spare: right and left he used his swords of thought and will.
Fall in! or, Out of the way! were the commands laid down by him
since the foundations of Spenersberg were laid. In the
fancy-goods line he might have made of himself a spectacle,
supposing he could have remained in the trade; but set apart
here in this vale, the centre of a sphere of his own creation,
where there was something at stake vast enough to justify the
exercise of energy and authority, he had a field for the fair
play of all that was within him—the worst and the best.
The worst that he could be he was—a tyrant; and the best
that he could be he was—a lover. Hitherto his tyrannies
had brought about good results only, but it was well that the
girl he loved had not only spirit and courage enough to love
him, but also faith enough to remove mountains.

If Leonhard had determined that he would make a friend of
Spener before he entered the factory, he could not have
proceeded more wisely than he did. First, he was interested in
the works, and intent on being told about the manufacture of
articles of furniture from a product ostensibly of such small
account as the willow; then he was interested in the designs
and surprised at the ingenious variety, and curious to learn
their source, and amazed to hear that Mr. Spener had himself
originated more than half of them. Then presently he began to
suggest designs, and at the end of an hour he found himself at
a table in Spener’s office drawing shapes for baskets and
chairs and tables and ornamental devices, and making Spener
laugh so at some remark as to be heard all over the
building.

“You say you are an architect,” he said after Leonhard had
covered a sheet of paper with suggestions written and outlined
for him, which he looked at with swiftly-comprehending and
satisfied eyes. “What do you say to doing a job for me?”

“With all my heart,” answered Leonhard, “if it can be done
at once.”

These words were in the highest degree satisfactory. Here
was a man who knew the worth of a minute. He was the man for
Spener. “Come with me,” he said, “and I’ll show you a
building-site or two worth putting money on;” and so they
walked together out of the factory, crossed a rustic
foot-bridge to the opposite side, ascended a sunny half-cleared
slope and passed across a field; and there beneath them, far
below, rolled the grand river which had among its notable ports
this little Spenersberg.

“What do you think of a house on this site, sir?” asked
Spener, looking with no small degree of satisfaction around him
and down the rocky steep.

“I think I should like to be commissioned to build a castle
with towers and gates of this very granite which you could hew
out by the thousand cord from the quarry yonder. What a perfect
gray for building!”

“I have always thought I would use the material on the
ground—the best compliment I could pay this place which I
have raised my fortune out of,” said Spener.

“There’s no better material on the earth,” said
Leonhard.

“But I don’t want a castle: I want a house with room enough
in it—high ceilings, wide halls, and a piazza fifteen or
twenty feet wide all around it.”

“Must I give up the castle? There isn’t a better site on the
Rhine than this.”

“But I’m not a baron, and I live at peace with my
neighbors—at least with outsiders.” That last remark was
an unfortunate one, for it brought the speaker back consciously
to confront the images which were constantly lurking round
him—only hid when he commanded them out of sight in the
manfulness of a spirit that would not be interfered with in its
work. He sat looking at Leonhard opposite to him, who had
already taken a note-book and pencil from his pocket, and,
planting his left foot firmly against one of the great rocks of
the cliff, he said, “Loretz tells me you stayed all night at
his house.”

“Yes, he invited me in when I inquired my way to the
inn.”

“Sister Benigna was there?”

“She wasn’t anywhere else,” said Leonhard, looking up and
smiling. “Excuse the slang. If you are where she is, you may
feel very certain about her being there.”

“Not at all,” said Albert, evidently nettled into argument
by the theme he had introduced. “She is one of those persons
who can be in several places at the same time. You heard them
sing, I suppose. They are preparing for the congregation
festival. It is six years since we started here, but we only
built our church last year: this year we have the first
celebration in the edifice, and of course there is great
preparation.”

“I have been wondering how I could go away before it takes
place ever since I heard of it.”

“If you wonder less how you can stay, remain of course,”
said Spener with no great cordiality: he owed this stranger
nothing, after all.

“It will only be to prove that I am really music-mad, as
they have been telling me ever since I was born. If that is the
case, from the evidences I have had since I came here I think I
shall recover.”

“What do you mean?” asked Spener.

“I mean that I see how little I really know about the
science. I never heard anything to equal the musical knowledge
and execution of Loretz’s daughter and this Sister Benigna you
speak of.”

“Ah! I am not a musician. I tried the trombone, but lacked
the patience. I am satisfied to admire. And so you liked the
singers? Which best?”

“Both.”

“Come, come—what was the difference?”

“The difference?” repeated Leonhard reflecting.

Spener also seemed to reflect on his question, and was so
absorbed in his thinking that he seemed to be startled when
Leonhard, from his studies of the square house with the wide
halls and the large rooms with high ceilings, turned to him and
said, “The difference, sir, is between two women.”

“No difference at all, do you mean? Do you mean they are
alike? They are not alike.”

“Not so alike that I have seen anything like either of
them.”

“Ah! neither have I. For that reason I shall marry one of
them, while the other I would not marry—no, not if she
were the only woman on the continent.”

“You are a fortunate man,” said Leonhard.

“I intend to prove that. Nothing more is necessary than the
girl’s consent—is there?—if you have made up your
mind that you must have her.”

“I should think you might say that, sir.”

“But you don’t hazard an opinion as to which, sir.”

“Not I.”

“Why not?”

“It might be Miss Elise, if—”

“If what?”

“I am not accustomed to see young ladies in their homes. I
have only fancied sometimes what a pretty girl might be in her
father’s house.”

“Well, sir?” said Spener impatiently.

“A young lady like Miss Elise would have a great deal to
say, I should suppose.”

“Is she dumb? I thought she could talk. I should have said
so.”

“I should have guessed, too, that she would always be
singing about the house.”

“And if not—what then?”

“Something must be going wrong somewhere. So you see it
can’t be Miss Elise, according to my judgment.”

Spener laughed when this conclusion was reached.

“Come here again within a month and see if she can talk and
sing,” said he with eyes flashing. “Perhaps you have found that
it is as easy to frighten a bugbear out of the way as to be
frightened by one. I never found, sir, that I couldn’t put a
stumbling-block out of my path. We have one little man here who
is going to prove himself a nuisance, I’m afraid. He is a good
little fellow, too. I always liked him until he undertook to
manage my affairs. I don’t propose to give up the reins yet a
while, and until I do, you see, he has no chance. I am sorry
about it, for I considered him quite like a friend; but a
friend, sir, with a flaw in him is worse than an enemy. I know
where to find my enemies, but I can’t keep track of a man who
pretends to be a friend and serves me ill. But pshaw! let me
see what you are doing.”

Leonhard was glad when the man ceased from discoursing on
friendship—a favorite theme among Spenersbergers, he
began to think—and glad to break away from his work, for
he held his pencil less firmly than he should have done.

Spener studied the portion completed, and seemed surprised
as well as pleased. “You know your business,” said he. “Be so
good as to finish the design.”

Then returning the book to Leonhard, he looked at his watch.
“It is time I went to dinner,” he said. “Come with me. Loretz
knows you are with me, and will expect you to be my guest
to-day.” So they walked across the field, but did not descend
by the path along which they had ascended. They went farther to
the east, and Spener led the way down the rough hillside until
he came to a point whence the descent was less steep and
difficult. There he paused. A beautiful view was spread before
them. Little Spenersberg lay on the slope opposite: between ran
the stream, which widened farther toward the east and narrowed
toward the west, where it emptied into the river. Eastward the
valley also widened, and there the willows grew, and looked
like a great garden, beautiful in every shade of green.

“I should not have the river from this point,” said Spener,
“but I should have a great deal more, and be nearer the people:
I do not think it would be the thing to appear even to separate
myself from them. I have done a great deal not so agreeable to
me, I assure you, in order to bring myself near to them. One
must make sacrifices to obtain his ends: it is only to count
the cost and then be ready to put down the money. Suppose you
plant a house just here.”

“How could it be done?”

“You an architect and ask me!”

“Things can be planted anywhere,” answered Leonhard, “but
whether the cost of production will not be greater than the
fruit is worth, is the question. You can have a platform built
here as broad as that the temple stood on if you are willing to
pay for the foundations.”

“That is the talk!” said Spener. “Take a square look, and
let me know what you can do toward a house on the hillside. You
see there is no end of raw material for building, and it is a
perfect prospect. But come now to dinner.”

CAROLINE CHESEBRO.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

COUNTRY-HOUSE LIFE IN ENGLAND.

The love for country life is, if possible, stronger in
England now than at any previous period in her history. There
is no other country where this taste has prevailed to the same
extent. It arose originally from causes mainly political. In
France a similar condition of things existed down to the
sixteenth century, and was mainly brought to an end by the
policy of ministers, who dreaded the increasing power of petty
princes in remote provinces becoming in combination formidable
to the central power. It was specially the object of Richelieu
and Mazarin to check this sort of baronial imperium in
imperio, and it became in the time of Louis XIV the
keystone of that monarch’s domestic policy. This tended to
encourage the “hanging on” of grands seigneurs about the
court, where many of the chief of them, after having exhausted
their resources in gambling or riotous living, became dependent
for place or pension on the Crown, and were in fact the
creatures of the king and his minister. Of course this did not
apply to all. Here and there in the broad area of France were
to be found magnificent châteaux—a few of which,
especially in Central France, still survive—where the
marquis or count reigned over his people an almost absolute
monarch.

There is a passage in one of Horace Walpole’s letters in
which that virtuoso expresses his regret, after a visit to the
ancestral “hôtels” of Paris, whose contents had afforded
him such intense gratification, that the nobility of England,
like that of France, had not concentrated their treasures of
art, etc. in London houses. Had he lived a few years longer he
would probably have altered his views, which were such as his
sagacious and manly father, who dearly loved his Norfolk home,
Houghton, would never have held.

In England, from the time that anything like social life, as
we understand the phrase, became known, the power of the Crown
was so well established that no necessity for resorting to a
policy such as Richelieu’s for diminishing the influence of the
noblesse existed.

In fact, a course distinctly the reverse came to be adopted
from the time of Elizabeth down to even a later period than the
reign of Charles II.

In the reign of Elizabeth an act was passed, which is to
this hour probably on the statute book, restricting building in
or near the metropolis. James I appears to have been in a
chronic panic on this subject, and never lost an opportunity of
dilating upon it. In one of his proclamations he refers to
those swarms of gentry “who, through the instigation of their
wives, or to new model and fashion their daughters who, if they
were unmarried, marred their reputations, and if married, lost
them—did neglect their country hospitality and cumber the
city, a general nuisance to the kingdom.” He desired the Star
Chamber “to regulate the exorbitancy of the new buildings about
the city, which were but a shelter for those who, when they had
spent their estates in coaches, lacqueys and fine clothes like
Frenchmen, lived miserably in their houses like Italians; but
the honor of the English nobility and gentry is to be
hospitable among their tenants.

“Gentlemen resident on their estates,” said he, very
sensibly, “were like ships in port: their value and magnitude
were felt and acknowledged; but when at a distance, as their
size seemed insignificant, so their worth and importance were
not duly estimated.”

Charles I., with characteristic arbitrariness, carried
matters with a still higher hand. His Star Chamber caused
buildings to be actually razed, and fined truants heavily. One
case which is reported displays the grim and costly humor of
the illegal tribunal which dealt with such cases. Poor Mr.
Palmer of Sussex, a gay bachelor, being called upon to show
cause why he had been residing in London, pleaded in
extenuation that he had no house, his mansion having been
destroyed by fire two years before. This, however, was held
rather an aggravation of the offence, inasmuch as he had failed
to rebuild it; and Mr. Palmer paid a penalty of one thousand
pounds—equivalent to at least twenty thousand dollars
now.

A document which especially serves to show the manner of
life of the ancient noblesse is the earl of Northumberland’s
“Household Book” in the early part of the sixteenth century. By
this we see the great magnificence of the old nobility, who,
seated in their castles, lived in a state of splendor scarcely
inferior to that of the court. As the king had his privy
council, so the earl of Northumberland had his council,
composed of his principal officers, by whose advice and
assistance he established his code of economic laws. As the
king had his lords and grooms of the chamber, who waited in
their respective turns, so the earl was attended by the
constables of his several castles, who entered into waiting in
regular succession. Among other instances of magnificence it
may be remarked that not fewer than eleven priests were kept in
the household, presided over by a doctor or bachelor of
divinity as dean of the chapel.

An account of how the earl of Worcester lived at Ragland
Castle before the civil wars which began in 1641 also exhibits
his manner of life in great detail: “At eleven o’clock the
Castle Gates were shut and the tables laid: two in the
dining-room; three in the hall; one in Mrs. Watson’s
appartment, where the chaplains eat; two in the housekeeper’s
room for my ladie’s women. The Earl came into the Dining Room
attended by his gentlemen. As soon as he was seated, Sir Ralph
Blackstone, Steward of the House, retired. The Comptroller, Mr.
Holland, attended with his staff; as did the Sewer, Mr.
Blackburn, and the daily waiters with many gentlemen’s sons,
from two to seven hundred pounds a year, bred up in the Castle;
my ladie’s Gentleman Usher, Mr. Harcourt; my lord’s Gentlemen
of the Chamber, Mr. Morgan and Mr. Fox.

“At the first table sat the noble family and such of the
nobility as came there. At the second table in the Dining-room
sat Knights and honorable gentlemen attended by footmen.

“In the hall at the first table sat Sir R. Blackstone,
Steward, the Comptroller, Secretary, Master of the Horse,
Master of the Fishponds, my Lord Herbert’s Preceptor, with such
gentlemen as came there under the degree of knight, attended by
footmen and plentifully served with wine.

“At the third table in the hall sate the Clerk of the
Kitchen, with the Yeomen, officers of the House, two Grooms of
the Chamber, etc.

“Other officers of the Household were the Chief Auditor,
Clerk of Accounts, Purveyor of the Castle, Usher of the Hall,
Closet Keeper, Gentleman of the Chapel, Keeper of the Records,
Master of the Wardrobe, Master of the Armoury, Master Groom of
the Stable for the 12 War-horses, Master of the Hounds, Master
Falconer, Porter and his men, two Butchers, two Keepers of the
Home Park, two Keepers of the Red Deer Park, Footmen, Grooms
and other Menial Servants to the number of 150. Some of the
footmen were Brewers and Bakers.

“Out offices.—Steward of Ragland, Governor of
Chepstow Castle, Housekeeper of Worcester House in London,
thirteen Bailiffs, two Counsel for the Bailiffs—who
looked after the estate—to have recourse to, and a
Solicitor.”

In a delicious old volume now rarely to be met with, called
The Olio, published eighty years ago, Francis Grose the
antiquary thus describes certain characters typical of the
country life of the earlier half of the seventeenth century:
“When I was a young man there existed in the families of most
unmarried men or widowers of the rank of gentlemen, resident in
the country, a certain antiquated female, either maiden or
widow, commonly an aunt or cousin. Her dress I have now before
me: it consisted of a stiff-starched cap and hood, a little
hoop, a rich silk damask gown with large flowers. She leant on
an ivory-headed crutch-cane, and was followed by a fat
phthisicky dog of the pug kind, who commonly reposed on a
cushion, and enjoyed the privilege of snarling at the servants,
and occasionally biting their heels, with impunity. By the side
of this old lady jingled a bunch of keys, securing in different
closets and corner-cupboards all sorts of cordial waters,
cherry and raspberry brandy, washes for the complexion, Daffy’s
elixir, a rich seed-cake, a number of pots of currant jelly and
raspberry jam, with a range of gallipots and phials and purges
for the use of poorer neighbors. The daily business of this
good lady was to scold the maids, collect eggs, feed the
turkeys and assist at all lyings-in that happened within the
parish. Alas! this being is no more seen, and the race is, like
that of her pug dog and the black rat, totally extinct.

“Another character, now worn out and gone, was the country
squire: I mean the little, independent country gentleman of
three hundred pounds a year, who commonly appeared in a plain
drab or plush coat, large silver buttons, a jockey cap, and
rarely without boots. His travels never exceeded the distance
to the county-town, and that only at assize- and session-time,
or to attend an election. Once a week he commonly dined at the
next market-town with the attorneys and justices. This man went
to church regularly, read the weekly journal, settled the
parochial disputes between the parish officers at the vestry,
and afterward adjourned to the neighboring ale-house, where he
usually got drunk for the good of his country. He never played
at cards but at Christmas, when a family pack was produced from
the mantelpiece. He was commonly followed by a couple of
greyhounds and a pointer, and announced his arrival at a
friend’s house by cracking his whip or giving the view-halloo.
His drink was generally ale, except on Christmas, the Fifth of
November or some other gala-day, when he would make a bowl of
strong brandy punch, garnished with a toast and nutmeg. A
journey to London was by one of these men reckoned as great an
undertaking as is at present a voyage to the East Indies, and
undertaken with scarcely less precaution and preparation. The
mansion of one of these squires was of plaster striped with
timber, not unaptly called calimanco-work, or of red brick;
large casemented bow-windows, a porch with seats in it, and
over it a study, the eaves of the house well inhabited by
swallows, and the court set round with hollyhocks. The hall was
furnished with flitches of bacon, and the mantelpiece with guns
and fishing-rods of different dimensions, accompanied by the
broadsword, partisan and dagger borne by his ancestors in the
Civil Wars. The vacant spaces were occupied by stags’ horns.
Against the wall was posted King Charles’s Golden Rules,
Vincent Wing’s Almanack and a portrait of the duke of
Marlborough: in his window lay Baker’s Chronicle, Fox’s
Book of Martyrs, Glanvil on Apparitions,
Quincey’s Dispensatory, the Complete Justice and
a Book of Farriery. In the corner, by the fireside,
stood a large wooden two-armed chair with a cushion; and within
the chimney-corner were a couple of seats. Here, at Christmas,
he entertained his tenants assembled round a glowing fire made
of the roots of trees and other great logs, and told and heard
the traditionary tales of the village respecting ghosts and
witches till fear made them afraid to move. In the mean time
the jorum of ale was in continual circulation. The best parlor,
which was never opened but on particular occasions, was
furnished with Turk-worked chairs, and hung round with
portraits of his ancestors—the men, some in the character
of shepherds with their crooks, dressed in full suits and huge
full-bottomed perukes, and others in complete armor or
buff-coats; the females, likewise as shepherdesses with the
lamb and crook, all habited in high heads and flowing robes.
Alas! these men and these houses are no more! The luxury of the
times has obliged them to quit the country and become humble
dependants on great men, to solicit a place or commission, to
live in London, to rack their tenants and draw their rents
before due. The venerable mansion is in the mean time suffered
to tumble down or is partly upheld as a farm-house, till after
a few years the estate is conveyed to the steward of the
neighboring lord, or else to some nabob, contractor or limb of
the law.”

It is unquestionably owing to the love of country life
amongst the higher classes that England so early attained in
many respects what may be termed an even civilization. In
almost all other countries the traveler beyond the confines of
a few great cities finds himself in a region of comparative
semi-barbarism. But no one familiar with English country life
can say that this is the case in the rural districts of
England, whilst it is most unquestionably so in Ireland, simply
because she has through absenteeism been deprived of those
influences which have done so much for her wealthy sister. Go
where you will in England to-day, and you will find within five
miles of you a good turnpike road, leading to an inn hard by,
where you may get a clean and comfortable though simple dinner,
good bread, good butter, and a carriage—”fly” is the term
now, as in the days of Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck—to convey you
where you will. And this was the case long before railways came
into vogue.

The influence of the great house has very wide
ramifications, and extends far beyond the radius of park,
village and estate. It greatly affects the prosperity of the
country and county towns. Go into Exeter or Shrewsbury on a
market-day in the autumn months, and you will find the streets
crowded with carriages. If a local herald be with you, he will
tell you all about their owners by glancing at the liveries and
panels. They belong, half of them, to the old county gentry,
who have shopped here—always at the same shops, according
as their proprietors are Whigs or Tories—for generations.
It may well be imagined what a difference the custom of twenty
gentlemen spending on an average twenty-five thousand dollars a
year makes to a grocer or draper. Besides, this class of
customer demands a first-rate article, and consequently it is
worth while to keep it in stock. The fishmonger knows that
twenty great houses within ten miles require their handsome
dish of fish for dinner as regularly as their bread and butter.
It becomes worth his while therefore to secure a steady supply.
In this way smaller people profit, and country life becomes
pleasant to them too, inasmuch as the demands of the rich
contribute to the comfort of those in moderate
circumstances.

Let us pass to the daily routine of an affluent country
home. The breakfast hour is from nine to eleven, except where
hunting-men or enthusiasts in shooting are concerned. The
former are often in the saddle before six, and young
partridge-slayers may, during the first fortnight of
September—after that their ardor abates a bit—be
found in the stubbles at any hour after sunrise.

A country-house breakfast in the house of a gentlemen with
from three thousand a year upward, when several guests are in
the house, is a very attractive meal. Of course its degree of
excellence varies, but we will take an average case in the
house of a squire living on his paternal acres with five
thousand pounds a year and knowing how to live.

It is 10 A.M. in October: family prayers, usual in nine
country-houses out of ten, which a guest can attend or not as
he pleases, are over. The company is gradually gathering in the
breakfast-room. It is an ample apartment, paneled with oak and
hung with family pictures. If you have any appreciation for
fine plate—and you are to be pitied if you have
not—you will mark the charming shape and exquisite
chasing of the antique urn and other silver vessels, which
shine as brilliantly as on the day they left the silversmiths
to Her Majesty, Queen Anne. No “Brummagem” patterns will you
find here.

On the table at equidistant points stand two tiny tables or
dumb-waiters, which are made to revolve. On these are placed
sugar, cream, butter, preserves, salt, pepper, mustard, etc.,
so that every one can help himself without troubling
others—a great desideratum, for many people are of the
same mind on this point as a well-known English family, of whom
it was once observed that they were very nice people, but
didn’t like being bored to pass the mustard.

On the sideboard are three beautiful silver dishes with
spirit-lamps beneath them. Let us look under their covers.
Broiled chicken, fresh mushrooms on toast, and stewed kidney.
On a larger dish is fish, and ranged behind these hot viands
are cold ham, tongue, pheasant and game-pie. On huge platters
of wood, with knives to correspond, are farm-house brown bread
and white bread, whilst on the breakfast-table itself you will
find hot rolls, toast—of which two or three fresh relays
are brought in during breakfast—buttered toast, muffins
and the freshest of eggs. The hot dishes at breakfast are
varied almost every morning, and where there is a good cook a
variety of some twenty dishes is made.

Marmalade (Marie Malade) of oranges—said to have been
originally prepared for Mary queen of Scots when ill, and
introduced by her into Scotland—and “jams” of apricot and
other fruit always form a part of an English or Scotch
breakfast. The living is just as good—often
better—among the five-thousand-pounds-a-year gentry as
among the very wealthy: the only difference lies in the number
of servants and guests.

The luncheon-hour is from one to two. At luncheon there will
be a roast leg of mutton or some such pièce de
résistance, and a made dish, such as minced
veal—a dish, by the way, not the least understood in this
country, where it is horribly mangled—two hot dishes of
meat and several cold, and various sorts of pastry. These, with
bread, butter, fruit, cheese, sherry, port, claret and beer,
complete the meal.

Few of the men of the party are present at this meal, and
those who are eat but little, reserving their forces until
dinner. All is placed on the table at once, and not, as at
dinner, in courses. The servants leave the room when they have
placed everything on the table, and people wait on themselves.
Dumb-waiters with clean plates, glasses, etc. stand at each
corner of the table, so that there is very little need to get
up for what you want.

The afternoon is usually passed by the ladies alone or with
only one or two gentlemen who don’t care to shoot, etc., and is
spent in riding, driving and walking. Englishwomen are great
walkers. With their skirts conveniently looped up, and boots
well adapted to defy the mud, they brave all sorts of weather.
“Oh it rains! what a bore! We can’t go out,” said a young lady,
standing at the breakfast-room window at a house in Ireland; to
which her host rejoined, “If you don’t go out here when it
rains, you don’t go out at all;” which is pretty much the
truth.

About five o’clock, as you sit over your book in the
library, you hear a rapid firing off of guns, which apprises
you that the men have returned from shooting. They linger a
while in the gun-room talking over their sport and seeing the
record of the killed entered in the game-book. Then some,
doffing the shooting-gear for a free-and-easy but scrupulously
neat attire, repair to the ladies’ sitting-room or the library
for “kettledrum.”

On a low table is placed the tea equipage, and tea in
beautiful little cups is being dispensed by fair hands. This is
a very pleasant time in many houses, and particularly favorable
to fun and flirtation. In houses where there are children, the
cousins of the house and others very intimate adjourn to the
school-room, where, when the party is further reinforced by
three or four boys home for the holidays, a scene of fun and
frolic, which it requires all the energies of the staid
governess to prevent going too far, ensues.

So time speeds on until the dressing-bell rings at seven
o’clock, summoning all to prepare for the great event of the
day—dinner. Every one dons evening-attire for this meal;
and so strong a feeling obtains on this point that if, in case
of his luggage going wrong or other accident, a man is
compelled to join the party in morning-clothes, he feels
painfully “fish-out-of-waterish.” We know, indeed, of a case in
which a guest absurdly sensitive would not come down to dinner
until the arrival of his things, which did not make their
appearance for a week.

Ladies’ dress in country-houses depends altogether upon the
occasion. If it be a quiet party of intimate friends, their
attire is of the simplest, but in many fashionable houses the
amount of dressing is fully as great as in London. English
ladies do not dress nearly as expensively or with so much taste
as Americans, but, on the other hand, they have the subject
much less in their thoughts; which is perhaps even more
desirable.

There is a degree of pomp and ceremony, which, however, is
far from being unpleasant, at dinner in a large country-house.
The party is frequently joined by the rector and his wife, a
neighboring squire or two, and a stray parson, so that it
frequently reaches twenty. Of course in this case the
pleasantness of the prandial period depends largely upon whom
you have the luck to get next to; but there’s this advantage in
the situation over a similar one in London—that you have,
at all events, a something of local topics in common, having
picked up a little knowledge of places and people during your
stay, or if you are quite a new-comer, you can easily set your
neighbor a-going by questions about surroundings. Generally
there is some acquaintance between most of the people staying
in a house, as hosts make up their parties with the view of
accommodating persons wishing to meet others whom they like.
Young men will thus frequently get a good-natured hostess to
ask some young lady whose society they especially affect, and
thus country-houses become proverbially adapted for
match-making.

There are few houses now-a-days in which the gentlemen
linger in the dining-room long after the ladies have left it.
Habits of hard drinking are now almost entirely confined to
young men in the army and the lower classes. The evenings are
spent chiefly in conversation: sometimes a rubber of whist is
made up, or, if there are a number of young people, there is
dancing.

A rather surprising step which occasioned something of a
scandalous sensation in the social world was resorted to some
years ago at a country-house in Devonshire. Two or three fast
young ladies, finding the evening somewhat heavy, and lamenting
a dearth of dancing men, rang the bell, and in five minutes the
lady of the house, who was in another room, was aghast at
seeing them whirling round in their Jeames’s arms. It was
understood that the ringleader in this enterprise, the daughter
of an Irish earl, was not likely to be asked to repeat her
visit.

About eleven wine and water and biscuits are brought into
the drawing-room, and a few minutes later the ladies retire.
The wine and water, with the addition of other stimulants, are
then transferred to the billiard- and smoking-rooms, to which
the gentlemen adjourn so soon as they have changed their black
coats for dressing-gowns or lounging suits, in which great
latitude is given to the caprice of individual fancy.

The sittings in these apartments are protracted until any
hour, as the servants usually go to bed when they have provided
every one with his flat candle-stick—that emblem of
gentility which always so prominently recurred to the mind of
Mrs. Micawber when recalling the happy days when she “lived at
home with papa and mamma.” In some fast houses pretty high play
takes place at such times.

It not unfrequently happens that the master of the house
takes but a very limited share in the recreations of his
guests, being much engrossed by the various avocations which
fall to the lot of a country proprietor. After breakfast in the
morning he will make it his business to see that each gentleman
is provided with such recreation as he likes for the day. This
man will shoot, that one will fish; Brown will like to have a
horse and go over to see some London friends who are staying
ten miles off; Jones has heaps of letters which must be written
in the morning, but will ride with the ladies in the afternoon;
and when all these arrangements are completed the squire will
drive off with his old confidential groom in the dog-cart, with
that fast-trotting bay, to attend the county meeting in the
nearest cathedral town or dispense justice from the bench at
Pottleton; and when eight o’clock brings all together at dinner
an agreeable diversity is given to conversation by each man’s
varied experiences during the day.

Of course some houses are desperately dull, whilst others
are always agreeable. Haddo House, during the lifetime of Lord
Aberdeen, the prime minister, had an exceptional reputation for
the former quality. It was said to be the most silent house in
England; and silence in this instance was regarded as quite the
reverse of golden. The family scarcely ever spoke, and the
guest, finding that his efforts brought no response, became
alarmed at the echoes of his own voice. Lord Aberdeen and his
son, Lord Haddo—an amiable but weak and eccentric man,
father of the young earl who dropped his title and was drowned
whilst working as mate of a merchantman—did not get on
well together, and saw very little of each other for some
years. At length a reconciliation was effected, and the son was
invited to Haddo. Anxious to be pleasant and conciliatory, he
faltered out admiringly, “The place looks nice, the trees are
very green.” “Did you expect to see ’em blue, then?” was the
encouraging paternal rejoinder.

The degree of luxury in many of these great houses is less
remarkable than its completeness. Everything is in keeping,
thus presenting a remarkable contrast to most of our rich men’s
attempts at the same. The dinner, cooked by a cordon
bleu of the cuisine³—whose
resources in the way of “hot plates” and other accessories
for furnishing a superlative dinner are unrivaled—is
often served on glittering plate, or china almost equally
valuable, by men six feet high, of splendid figure, and
dressed with the most scrupulous neatness and cleanliness.
Gloves are never worn by servants in first-rate English
houses, but they carry a tiny napkin in their hands which
they place between their fingers and the plates. Nearly all
country gentlemen are hospitable, and it very rarely happens
that guests are not staying in the house. A county ball or
some other such gathering fills it from garret to
cellar.

The best guest-rooms are always reserved for the married:
bachelors are stowed away comparatively “anywhere.” In winter
fires are always lit in the bedrooms about five o’clock, so
that they may be warm at dressing-time; and shortly before the
dressing-bell rings the servant deputed to attend upon a guest
who does not bring a valet with him goes to his room, lays out
his evening-toilette, puts shirt, socks, etc. to air before the
fire, places a capacious pitcher of boiling water on the
washing-stand, and having lit the candles, drawn the easy-chair
to the fire, just ready on provocation to burst into a blaze,
lights the wax candles on the dressing-table and withdraws.

In winter the guest is asked whether he likes a fire to get
up by, and in that event a housemaid enters early with as
little noise as possible and lights it. On rising in the
morning you find all your clothes carefully brushed and put in
order, and every appliance for ample ablutions at hand.

A guest gives the servant who attends him a tip of from a
dollar and a quarter to five dollars, according to the length
of his stay. If he shoots, a couple of sovereigns for a week’s
sport is a usual fee to a keeper. Some people give absurdly
large sums, but the habit of giving them has long been on the
decline. The keeper supplies powder and shot, and sends in an
account for them. Immense expense is involved in these shooting
establishments. The late Sir Richard Sutton, a great celebrity
in the sporting world, who had the finest shooting in England,
and therefore probably in the world, used to say that every
pheasant he killed cost him a guinea. On some estates the sale
of the game is in some degree a set-off to the cost of
maintaining it, just as the sale of the fruit decreases the
cost of pineries, etc. Nothing but the fact that the possession
of land becomes more and more vested in those who regard it as
luxury could have enabled this sacrifice of farming to sport to
continue so long. It is the source of continual complaint and
resentment on the part of the farmers, who are only pacified by
allowance being made to them out of their rent for damage done
by game.

The expense of keeping up large places becomes heavier every
year, owing to the constantly-increasing rates of wages, etc.,
and in some cases imposes a grievous burden, eating heavily
into income and leaving men with thousands of acres very poor
balances at their bankers to meet the Christmas bills. Those
who have large families to provide for, and get seriously
behindhand, usually shut up or let their places—which
latter is easily done if they be near London or in a good
shooting country—and recoup on the Continent; but of late
years prices there have risen so enormously that this plan of
restoring the equilibrium between income and expenditure is far
less satisfactory than it was forty years ago. The encumbrances
on many estates are very heavy. A nobleman who twenty years ago
succeeded to an entailed estate, with a house almost gutted,
through having had an execution put in it, and a heavy
debt—some of which, though not legally bound to
liquidate, he thought it his duty to settle—acted in a
very spirited manner which few of his order have the courage to
imitate. He dropped his title, went abroad and lived for some
years on about three thousand dollars a year. He has now paid
off all his encumbrances, and has a clear income, steadily
increasing, of a hundred thousand dollars a year. In another
case a gentleman accomplished a similar feat by living in a
corner of his vast mansion and maintaining only a couple of
servants.

In Ireland, owing to the lower rates of wages and far
greater—in the remoter parts—cheapness of
provisions, large places can be maintained at considerably less
cost, but they are usually far less well kept, partly owing to
their being on an absurdly large scale as compared with the
means of the proprietors, and partly from the slovenly habits
of the country. And in some cases people who could afford it
will not spend the money. There are, however, notable
exceptions. Powerscourt in Wicklow, the seat of Viscount
Powerscourt, and Woodstock in Kilkenny, the beautiful demesne
of Mr. Tighe, are probably in as perfect order as any seats in
England. A countryman was sent over to the latter one day with
a message from another county. “Well, Jerry,” said the master
on his return, “what did you think of Woodstock?” “Shure, your
honor,” was the reply, “I niver seed such a power of girls
a-swaping up the leaves.”

Country-house life in Ireland and Scotland is almost
identical with that in England, except that, in the former
especially, there is generally less money. Scotland has of late
years become so much the fashion, land has risen so enormously
in value, and properties are so very large, that some of the
establishments, such as those at Drumlanrig, Dunrobin, Gordon
Castle and Floors, the seats respectively of the dukes of
Buccleuch, Sutherland, Richmond and Roxburghe, are on a
princely scale. The number of wealthy squires is far fewer than
in England. It is a curious feature in the Scottish character
that notwithstanding the radical politics of the
country—for scarcely a Conservative is returned by
it—the people cling fondly to primogeniture and their
great lords, who, probably to a far greater extent than in
England, hold the soil. The duke of Sutherland possesses nearly
the whole of the county from which he derives his title, whilst
the duke of Buccleuch owns the greater part of four.

Horses are such a very expensive item that a large stable is
seldom found unless there is a very large income, for otherwise
the rest of the establishment must be cut down to a low figure.
Hunting millionaires keep from ten to twenty, or even thirty,
hacks and hunters, besides four or five carriage-horses. Three
or four riding-horses, three carriage-horses and a pony or two
is about the usual number in the stable of a country gentleman
with from five to six thousand pounds a year. The stable-staff
would be coachman, groom and two helpers. The number of
servants in country-houses varies from seven or eight to
eighty, but probably there are not ten houses in the country
where it reaches so high a figure as the last: from fifteen to
twenty would be a common number.

There are many popular bachelors and old maids who live
about half the year in the country-houses of their friends. A
gentleman of this sort will have his chambers in London and his
valet, whilst the lady will have her lodgings and maid. In
London they will live cheaply and comfortably, he at his club
and dining out with rich friends, she in her snug little room
and passing half her time in friends’ houses. There is not the
slightest surrender of independence about these people. They
would not stay a day in a house which they did not like, but
their pleasant manners and company make them acceptable, and
friends are charmed to have them.

One of the special recommendations of a great country-house
is that you need not see too much of any one. There is no
necessary meeting except at meals—in many houses then
even only at dinner—and in the evening. Many sit a great
deal in their own rooms if they have writing or work to do;
some will be in the billiard-room, others in the library,
others in the drawing-room: the host’s great friend will be
with him in his own private room, whilst the hostess’s will
pass most of the time in that lady’s
boudoir.⁴

In some respects railroads have had a very injurious effect
on the sociability of English country life. They have rendered
people in great houses too apt to draw their supplies of
society exclusively from town. English trains run so fast that
this can even be done in places quite remote from London. The
journey from London to Rugby, for instance, eighty miles, is
almost invariably accomplished in two hours. Leaving at five in
the afternoon, a man reaches that station at 7.10: his friend’s
well-appointed dog-cart is there to meet him, and that
exquisitely neat young groom, with his immaculate buckskins and
boots in which you may see yourself, will make the thoroughbred
do the four miles to the hall in time to enable you to dress
for dinner by 7.45. Returning on Tuesday morning—and all
the lines are most accommodating about return tickets—the
barrister, guardsman, government clerk can easily be at his
post in town by eleven o’clock. Thus the actual “country
people” get to be held rather cheap, and come off badly,
because Londoners, being more in the way of hearing, seeing and
observing what is going on in society, are naturally more
congenial to fine people in country-houses who live in the
metropolis half the year.

It is evident from the following amusing squib, which
appeared in one of the Annuals for 1832, how far more dependent
the country gentleman was upon his country neighbors in those
days, when only idle men could run down from town:

“Mr. J., having frequently witnessed with regret country
gentlemen, in their country-houses, reduced to the dullness of
a domestic circle, and nearly led to commit suicide in the
month of November, or, what is more melancholy, to invite the
ancient and neighboring families of the Tags, the Rags and the
Bobtails, has opened an office in Spring Gardens for the
purpose of furnishing country gentlemen in their country-houses
with company and guests on the most moderate terms. It will
appear from the catalogue that Mr. J. has a choice and elegant
assortment of six hundred and seventeen guests, ready to start
at a moment’s warning to any country gentleman at any house.
Among them will be found three Scotch peers, several ditto
Irish, fifteen decayed baronets, eight yellow admirals,
forty-seven major-generals on half pay (who narrate the whole
Peninsular War), twenty-seven dowagers, one hundred and
eighty-seven old maids on small annuities, and several
unbeneficed clergymen, who play a little on the fiddle. All the
above play at cards, and usually with success if partners. No
objection to cards on Sunday evenings or rainy mornings. The
country gentleman to allow the guests four feeds a day, and to
produce claret if a Scotch or Irish peer be present.”

A country village very often has no inhabitants except the
parson holding the rank of gentry. The majority of ladies in
moderate or narrow circumstances live in county-towns, such as
Exeter, Salisbury, etc., or in watering-places, which abound
and are of all degrees of fashion and expense. County-town and
watering-place society is a thing per se, and has very
little to do with “county” society, which means that of the
landed gentry living in their country-houses. Thus, noblemen
and gentlemen within a radius of five miles of such
watering-places as Bath, Tonbridge Wells and Weymouth would not
have a dozen visiting acquaintances resident in those
towns.

To get into “county” society is by no means easy to persons
without advantages of position or connection, even with ample
means, and to the wealthy manufacturer or merchant is often a
business of years. The upper class of Englishmen, and more
especially women, are accustomed to find throughout their
acquaintance an almost identical style and set of manners.
Anything which differs from this they are apt to regard as
“ungentlemanlike or unladylike,” and shun accordingly. The
dislike to traders and manufacturers, which is very strong in
those counties, such as Cheshire and Warwickshire, which
environ great commercial centres, arises not from the folly of
thinking commerce a low occupation, but because the county
gentry have different tastes, habits and modes of thought from
men who have worked their way up from the counting-room, and do
not, as the phrase goes, “get on” with them, any more than a
Wall street broker ordinarily gets on with a well-read,
accomplished member of the Bar.

A result of this is that a large number of wealthy
commercial men, in despair of ever entering the charmed circle
of county society, take up their abode in or near the
fashionable watering-places, where, after the manner of those
at our own Newport, they build palaces in paddocks, have acres
of glass, rear the most marvelous of pines and peaches, and
have model farms which cost them thousands of pounds a year. To
this class is owing in a great degree the extraordinary
increase of Leamington, Torquay, Tonbridge Wells,
etc.—places which have made the fortunes of the lucky
people who chanced to own them.

English ladies, as a rule, take a great deal of interest in
the poor around them, and really know a great deal of them. The
village near the hall is almost always well attended to, but it
unfortunately happens that outlying properties sometimes come
off far less well. The classes which see nothing of each other
in English rural life are the wives and daughters of the gentry
and those of the wealthier farmers and tradesmen: between these
sections a huge gulf intervenes, which has not as yet been in
the least degree bridged over. In former days very great people
used to have once or twice in the year what were called “public
days,” when it was open house for all who chose to come, with a
sort of tacit understanding that none below the class of
substantial yeomen or tradesmen would make their appearance.
This custom has now fallen into disuse, but was maintained to
the last by the Hon. Doctor Vernon-Harcourt, who was for more
than half a century archbishop of York, and is yet retained by
Earl Fitzwilliam at Wentworth House, his princely seat in
Yorkshire. There, once or twice a year, a great gathering takes
place. Dinner is provided for hundreds of guests, and care is
taken to place a member of the family at every table to do his
or her part toward dispensing hospitality to high and low.

During the summer and early autumn croquet and archery offer
good excuses for bringing young people together, and reunions
of this kind palliate the miseries of those who cannot afford
to partake of the expensive gayeties of the London season. The
archery meetings are often exceedingly pretty fêtes.
Somtimes they are held in grounds specially devoted to the
purpose, as is the case at St. Leonard’s, near Hastings, where
the archery-ground will well repay a visit. The shooting takes
place in a deep and vast excavation covered with the smoothest
turf, and from the high ground above is a glorious view of the
old castle of Hastings and the ocean. In Devonshire these
meetings have an exceptional interest from the fact that they
are held in the park of Powderham Castle, the ancestral seat of
the celebrated family of Courtenay. All the county flocks to
them, some persons coming fifty miles for this purpose. Apropos
of one of these meetings, we shall venture to interpolate an
anecdote which deserves to be recorded for the sublimity of
impudence which it displays. The railway from London to
Plymouth skirts the park of Powderham, running so close beside
it that each train sends a herd of deer scampering down the
velvety glades. One afternoon a bouncing young lady, who
belonged to a family which had lately emerged from the class of
yeoman into that of gentry, and whose “manners had not the
repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere,” found herself
in a carriage with two fashionably-attired persons of her own
sex. As the train ran by the park, one of these latter
exclaimed to her companion, “Oh look, there’s Powderham! Don’t
you remember that archery-party we went to there two years
ago?” “To be sure,” was the rejoinder. “I’m not likely to
forget it, there were some such queer people. Who were those
vulgarians whom we thought so particularly objectionable? I
can’t remember.” “Oh, H——: H—— of
P——! That was the name.” Upon this the other young
lady in the carriage bounced to her feet with the words, “Allow
me to tell you, madam, that I am Miss H—— of
P——!” Neither of those she addressed deigned to
utter a word in reply to this announcement, nor did it appear
in the least to disconcert them. One slowly drew out a gold
double eye-glass, leisurely surveyed Miss H—— of
P—— from head to foot, and then proceeded to talk
to her companion in French. Perhaps the best part of the joke
was that Miss H—— made a round of visits in the
course of the week, and detailed the disgusting treatment to
which she had been subjected to a numerous acquaintance, who,
it is needless to say, appeared during the narration as
indignant and sympathetic as she could have wished, but who are
declared by some ill-natured persons to have been precisely
those who in secret chuckled over the insult with the greatest
glee.

English gentlemen experience an almost painful sensation as
they journey through our land and observe the utter
indifference of its wealthier classes to the charms of such a
magnificent country. “Pearls before swine,” they say in their
hearts. “God made the country and man made the town.” “Yes, and
how obviously the American prefers the work of man to the work
of the Almighty!” These and similar reflections no doubt fill
the minds of many a thoughtful English traveler as the train
speeds over hill and dale, field and forest. What sites are
here! he thinks. What a perfect park might be made out of that
wild ground! what cover-shooting there ought to be in that
woodland! what fishing and boating on that lake! And then he
groans in spirit as the cars enter a forest where tree leans
against tree, and neglect reigns on all sides, and he thinks of
the glorious oaks and beeches so carefully cared for in his own
country, where trees and flowery are loved and petted as much
as dogs and horses. And if anything can increase the contempt
he feels for those who “don’t care a rap” for country and
country life, it is a visit to such resorts as Newport and
Saratoga. There he finds men whose only notion of country life
is what he would hold to be utterly destitute of all its
ingredients. They build palaces in paddocks, take actually no
exercise, play at cards for three hours in the forenoon, dine,
and then drive out “just like ladies,” we heard a young Oxonian
exclaim—”got up” in the style that an Englishman adopts
only in Hyde Park or Piccadilly.

When an American went to stay with Lord Palmerston at
Broadlands, the great minister ordered horses for a ride in the
delicious glades of the New Forest. When they came to the door
his guest was obliged to confess himself no horseman. The
premier, with ready courtesy, said, “Oh, then, we’ll walk: it’s
all the same to me;” but it wasn’t quite the same. The incident
was just one of those which separate the Englishman of a
certain rank from the American.

There is of course a certain class of Americans, more
especially among the jeunesse dorée of New York,
who greatly affect sport: they “run” horses and shoot pigeons,
but these are not persons who commend themselves to real
gentlemen, English or American. They belong to the bad style of
“fast men,” and are as thoroughly distasteful to a Devonshire
or Cheshire squire as to one who merits “the grand old
name”—which they conspicuously defame—in their own
country.

The English country-loving gentleman to whom we have been
referring is, for the most part, of a widely different
mould—a man of first-rate education, frequently of high
attainments, and often one whose ends and aims in life are for
far higher things than pleasure, even of the most innocent
kind, but who, when he takes it, derives it chiefly from the
country. Many of this kind will instantly occur to those
acquainted with English worthies: to mention two—John
Evelyn and Sir Fowell Buxton.

REGINALD WYNFORD.

THE FOREST OF ARDEN.

A girl of seventeen—a girl with a “missish” name, with
a “missish” face as well, soft skin, bright eyes, dark hair,
medium height and a certain amount of coquetry in her attire.
This completes the “visible” of Nellie Archer. And the
invisible? With an exterior such as this, what thoughts or
ideas are possible within? Surely none worth the trouble of
searching after. It is a case of the rind being the better part
of the fruit, the shell excelling the kernel; and with a slight
effort we can imagine her acquirements. Some scraps of
geography, mixed up with the topography of an embroidery
pattern; some grammar, of much use in parsing the imperfect
phrases of celebrated authors, to the neglect of her own; some
romanticism, finding expression in the arrangement of a spray
of artificial flowers on a spring bonnet; some idea of duty,
resulting in the manufacture of sweet cake or “seeing after”
the dessert for dinner; and a conception of “woman’s mission”
gained from Tennyson—

No! no! no! not so fast, please. In spite of Nellie’s name,
of her face, of her attire, that little head is filled quite
otherwise. It is not her fault that this is so: is it her
misfortune? But to give the history of this being entire, it is
necessary to begin seventeen years back, at the very beginning
of her life, for in our human nature, as in the inanimate
world, a phenomenon is better understood when we know its
producing causes.

Nellie’s father was a business-man of a type common in
America—one whose affairs led him here, there and
everywhere. Never quiet while awake, and scarcely at rest
during slumber, he resembled Bedreddin Hassan in frequently
going to sleep in one town, to awake in another far distant,
but without the benighted Oriental’s surprise at the transfer,
the afrit who performed this prodigy being a steam-engine, and
the magician it obeyed the human mind.

In these rapid peregrinations it would not have been easy
for Mr. Archer to carry an infant with him; so, when his wife
died and left Nellie to his sole care at six months old, he
speedily cast about in his mind to rid himself of the
encumbrance.

Having heard that country air is good for children, he sent
the little one to the interior, and quite admired himself for
giving her such an advantage: then, too, the house in the city
could be sold.

But to whom did he entrust his child? For a while this had
been the great difficulty. In vain he thought over the years he
had lived, to find a friend: he had been too busy to make
friends. For an honest person he had traversed the world too
hurriedly to perceive the deeper, better part of mankind; he
had floated on the surface with the scum and froth, and could
recall no one whom he could trust. At last, away back in the
years of his childhood, he saw a face—that of a young but
motherly Irishwoman, who had lived in his father’s family as a
faithful servant, and had been a fond partisan of his in his
fickle troubles when a boy.

He sought and found her in his need. She had married, borne
children and grown old: her offspring, after much struggling
and little help from the parent birds, had learned to fly
alone, and had left the home-nest to try their own fortunes. It
was not hard for Mr. Archer to persuade Nurse Bridget and her
husband to inhabit his house in the country and take charge of
the baby. In a short time the arrangements were complete, and
the three were installed in comfort, for the busy man did not
grudge money.

If in the long years that followed a thought of the
neglected little one did at times reproach him, he dismissed it
with the resolution of doing something for her when she should
be grown up; but at what date this event was to take place, or
what it was that he intended to do, he did not definitely
settle.

The mansion in the country was an old rambling house, in
which there were enough deserted rooms to furnish half a dozen
ghosts with desirable lodgings, without inconvenience to the
living dwellers. The front approach was through an avenue of
hemlocks, dark and untrimmed. Under the closed windows lay a
tangled garden, where flowers grew rank, shadowed by high ash
and leafy oak, outposts of the forest behind—a forest
jealous of cultivation, stealthily drawing nearer each year,
and threatening to reconquer its own.

There was an unused well in a corner that looked like the
habitation of a fairy—of a good fairy, I am sure, because
the grass grew greenest and best about the worn curb, and the
tender mosses and little plants that could not support the heat
in summer found a refuge within its cool circle and flourished
there.

On the other side of the house, and dividing it from level
fields, were the kitchen-garden and orchard. In springtime you
might have imagined the latter to be a grove of singing trees,
bearing song for fruit: in autumn, had you seen it when the sun
was low, glinting through leaves and gilding apples and stem,
you would have been reminded of the garden of the
Hesperides.

Below the fields lay a broad river—in summer, languid
and clear; in winter, turbid and full. The child often wondered
(as soon as she could wonder) if, when it was lying so tranquil
under the summer clouds, it was thinking of the frolic it would
have with the great blocks of ice in the winter; whether it
loved best the rush and struggle of the floods or the quiet of
low water; and, above all, whither it was going.

The homely faces and bent, ungainly forms of the old nurse
and her husband harmonized well with the mellow gloom about
them; and the infant Nellie completed the scene, like the spot
of sunlight in the foreground of a picture by Rembrandt.

Now, Nellie inherited her father’s active disposition, and,
left to her own amusement, her occupations were many and
various. At three years of age she was turned loose in the
orchard, with three blind puppies in lieu of toys. Day by day
she augmented her store, until she had two kittens, one little
white pig with a curly tail, half a dozen soft piepies, one
kid, and many inanimate articles, such as broken bottles,
dishes, looking-glass and gay bits of calico. When the little
thing became sleepy she would toddle through the long grass to
a corner, whence the river could be heard fretting against its
banks, and lie there: she said the water sang to her. Finding
that this was her favorite spot, the old nurse placed there a
bright quilt for her to rest on, and in case she should awake
hungry there stood a tin of milk hard by. This was all the
attention she received, unless the fairy of the well took her
under her protection, but for that I cannot vouch. Sometimes
the puppies drank her milk before she awoke; then she went
contentedly and ate green apples or ripe cherries. Thus she
lived and grew.

By the time Nellie was seven she had seen whole generations
of pets pass away. It was wonderful what knowledge she gained
in this golden orchard. She knew that piepies became
chickens—that they were killed and eaten; so death came
into her world. She knew that the kid grew into a big goat, and
became very wicked, for he ran at her one day, throwing her to
the ground and hurting her severely; so sin came into her
world. She saw innate depravity exemplified in the conduct of
her innocent white pig, that would take to puddles and filth in
spite of her gentle endeavors to restrain its wayward impulses.
Her puppies too bit each other, would quarrel over a bone,
growl and get generally unmanageable. None of her animals
fulfilled the promise of their youth, and her care was returned
with base ingratitude. Even the little wrens bickered with the
blue-birds, and showed their selfishness and jealousy in
chasing them from the crumbs she impartially spread for all in
common.

So at seven she was a wise little woman, and said to her
nurse one day, “I do not care for pets any more: they all grow
up nasty.”

Was Solomon’s “All is vanity” truer?

With so much experience Nellie felt old, for life is not
counted by years alone: it is the loss of hope, the mistrust of
appearance, the vanishing of illusion, that brings age. A
hopeful heart is young at seventy, and youth is past when hope
is dead. But, in spite of all, hope was not dead in the heart
of the little maid, and though deceived she was quite ready to
be deceived a second time, as was Solomon, and as we are
all.

It was now that the girl began to be fond of flowers. She
made herself a bed for them in a sunny corner of the
kitchen-garden, and transplanted daisy roots and
spring-beauties, with other wood- and field-plants as they
blossomed. She watched the ferns unroll their worm-like fronds,
made plays with the nodding violets, and ornamented her head
with dandelion curls. This was indeed a happy summer. Her
rambles were unlimited, and each day she was rewarded by new
discoveries and delightful secrets—how the May-apple is
good to eat, that sassafras root makes tea, that birch bark is
very like candy, though not so sweet, and slippery elm a
feast.

Her new playmates were as lovely and perfect as she could
desire. They did not “grow up nasty,” but in the autumn,
alas! they died.

One day at the end of the Indian summer, after having
wandered for hours searching for her favorites, she found them
all withered. The trees also looked forlorn, shivering in the
chill air, with scarce a leaf to cover them: the wind moaned,
and the sky was gray instead of the bright summer blue. The
little one, tired and disappointed, touched by this mighty
lesson of decay, threw herself on a friendly bank and wept.

It is true the beautiful face of Nature had grown sad each
winter, and her flowers and lovely things had yearly passed
away, but Nellie had not then loved them.

Here she was found by a boy rosy-cheeked and bright, who all
his life had been loved and caressed to the same extent that
Nellie had been neglected. He lived beyond the forest, and had
come this afternoon to look for walnuts. Seeing the girl
unhappy, he essayed some of the blandishing arts his mother had
often lavished on him, speaking to her in a kindly tone and
asking her why she cried.

The child looked up at the sound of this new voice, and her
astonishment stopped her tears. After gazing at him for some
time with her eyes wide open, she remarked, wonderingly, “You
are little, like me.”

“I am not very small,” replied the boy, straightening
himself.

“Oh, but you are young and little,” she insisted.

“I am young, but not little. Come stand up beside me. See!
you don’t more than reach my shoulder.”

“Shall you ever get bigger?”

“Of course I shall.”

“Shall you grow up nasty?” she continued, trying to bring
her stock of experience to bear on this new phenomenon.

“No, I sha’n’t!” he answered very decidedly.

“Shall you die?”

“No, not until I am old, old, old.”

“I am very glad: I will take you for a pet, All my little
animals get nasty, and my flowers have died, but I don’t care,
now that you have come: I think I shall like you best.”

“But I won’t be your pet,” said the boy, offended.

“Why not?” she asked, looking at him beseechingly. “I should
be very good to you;” and she smoothed his sleeve with her
brown hand as if it were the fur of one of her late
darlings.

“Who are you?” he demanded inquisitively.

“I am myself,” she innocently replied.

“What is your name?”

“I am Nellie. Have you a name?” she eagerly went on. “If you
haven’t, I’ll give you a pretty one. Let me see: I will call
you—”

“You need not trouble yourself, thank you: I have a name of
my own, Miss Nellie. I am Danby Overbeck.”

“Dan—by—o—ver—beck!” she repeated
slowly. “Why, you have an awful long name, Beck, for such a
little fellow.”

“I am not little, and I will not have you call me Beck: that
is no name.”

“I forgot all but the last. Don’t get nasty, please;” and
she patted his arm soothingly. “What does your nurse call
you?”

“I am no baby to have a nurse,” he said disdainfully.

“You have no nurse? Poor thing! What do you do? who feeds
you?”

“I feed myself.”

“Where do you live,” she asked, looking about curiously, as
if she thought he had some kind of a nest near at hand.

“Oh, far away—at the other side of the woods.”

“Won’t you come and live with me? Do!”

“No indeed, gypsy: I must go home. See, the sun is almost
down. You had better go too: your mother will be anxious.”

“I have no mother, and my flowers are all dead. I wish you
would be my pet—I wish you would come with me;” and her
lip trembled.

“My gracious, child! what would the old lady at home say?
Why, there would be an awful row.”

“Never mind, come,” she answered coaxingly, rubbing her head
against his sleeve like a kitten. “Come, I will love you so
much.”

“You go home,” he said, patting her head, “and I will come
again some day, and will bring you flowers.”

“The flowers are all dead,” she replied, shaking her
head.

“I can make some grow. Go now, run away: let me see you
off.”

She looked for a moment at this superior being, who could
make flowers grow and could live without the care of a nurse,
and then, obeying the stronger intelligence, she trotted off
toward home.

And now life contained new pleasure for Nellie, for the boy
was large-hearted and kind, coming almost daily to take her
with him on his excursions. Indeed, he was as lonely as the
child, companions being difficult to find in that
out-of-the-way neighborhood, and the odd little thing amused
him. She would trudge bravely by his side when he went to fish,
or carry his bag when he went gunning; and his promise of
flowers was redeemed with gifts from the conservatory, which
enhanced her opinion of this divinity, seeing that they were
even more beautiful than those of her own fields. Often, when
tired of sport, Danby would read to her, sitting in the shade
of forest trees, stories of pirates and robbers or of wonderful
adventures: these were the afternoons she enjoyed the most.

One day, seeing her lips grow bright and her eyes dark from
her intense interest in the story, he offered her the book as
he was preparing to go, saying, “Take it home, Nellie, and read
it.”

She took the volume in her hand eagerly, looked at the page
a little while, a puzzled expression gradually passing over her
face, until finally she turned to him open-eyed and
disappointed, saying simply, “I can’t.”

“Oh try!”

“How shall I try?”

“It begins there: now go on, it is easy.
There” he repeated, pointing to the word, “go on,” he
added impatiently.

“Where shall I go?”

“Why read, Stupid! Look at it.”

She bent over and gazed earnestly where the end of his
finger touched the book. “I look and look,” she said, shaking
her head, “but I do not see the pretty stories that you do.
They seem quite gone away, and nothing is left but little
crooked marks.”

“I do believe you can’t read.”

“I do believe it too,” said Nellie.

“But you must try; such a big girl as you are getting to
be!”

“I try and I look, but it don’t come to me.”

“You must learn.”

“Yes.”

“Do you intend to do it?”

“Why should I? You can read to me.”

“You will never know anything,” exclaimed the boy severely.
“How do you spend your time in the morning, when I am not
here?”

“I do nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“That is, I wait until you come,” in an explanatory
tone.

“What do you do while you are waiting?”

“I think about you, and wonder how soon you will be here;
and I walk about, or lie on the grass and look at the
clouds.”

“Well, did I ever hear of such an idle girl? I shall not
come again if you don’t learn to read.” Nellie was not much
given to laughter or tears. She had lived too much alone for
such outward appeals for sympathy. Why laugh when there is no
one near to smile in return? Why weep when there is no one to
give comfort? She only regarded him with a world of reproach in
her large eyes.

“Nellie,” he said, in reply to her eyes, “you ought to learn
to read, and you must. Did no one ever try to teach
you?”

She shook her head.

“Have you no books?”

Again a negative shake.

“Just come along with me to the house. I’ll see about this
thing: it must be stopped.” And Danby rose and walked off with
a determined air, while the girl, abashed and wondering,
followed him. When they arrived he plunged into the subject at
once: “Nurse Bridget, can you read?”

“An’ I raly don’t know, as I niver tried.”

“Fiddlesticks! Of course Maurice is too blind, and very
likely he never tried either. Are there no books in the
house?”

“An’ there is, then—a whole room full of them, Master
Danby. We are not people of no larnin’ here, I can tell you.
There is big books, an’ little books, an’ some awful purty
books, an’ some,” she added doubtfully, “as is not so
purty.”

“You know a great deal about books!” said the boy
sarcastically.

“An’ sure I do. Haven’t I dusted them once ivery year since
I came to this blessed place? And tired enough they made me,
too. I ain’t likely to forgit them.”

“Well, let us see them.”

“Sure they’re locked.”

“Open them,” said the impatient boy.

“Do open them,” added Nellie timidly.

But it required much coaxing to accomplish their design, and
after nurse did consent time was lost in looking for the keys,
which were at last found under a china bowl in the cupboard.
Then the old woman led the way with much importance, opening
door after door of the unused part of the house, until she came
to the library. It was a large, sober-looking room, with worn
furniture and carpet, but rich in literature, and even art, for
several fine pictures hung on the walls. The ancestor from whom
the house had descended must have been a learned man in his
day, and a wise, for he had gathered about him treasures. Danby
shouted with delight, and Nellie’s eyes sparkled as she saw his
pleasure.

“Open all the windows, nurse, please, and then leave us.
Why, Nellie, there is enough learning here to make you the most
wonderful woman in the world! Do you think you can get all
these books into your head?” he asked mischievously, “because
that is what I expect of you. We will take a big one to begin
with.” The girl looked on while he, with mock ceremony, took
down the largest volume within reach and laid it open on a
reading-desk near. “Now sit;” and he drew a chair for her
before the open book, and another for himself. “It is nice big
print. Do you see this word?” and he pointed to one of the
first at the top of the page.

She nodded her head gravely.

“It is love: say it.”

She repeated the word after him.

“Now find it all over the page whereever it occurs.”

With some mistakes she finally succeeded in recognizing the
word again.

“Don’t you forget it.”

“Yes.”

“No, you must not.”

“I mean I won’t.”

“All right! Here is another: it is called the. Now
find it.”

Many times she went through the same process. In his pride
of teaching Danby did not let his pupil flag. When he was going
she asked timidly, “Shall you come again?”

“Of course I shall, Ignoramus, but don’t you forget your
lesson.”

“No, no,” she answered brightening. “I will think of it all
the time I am asleep.”

“That is a good girl,” he said patronizingly, and bade her
good-bye.

It was thus she learned to read, not remarkably well, but
well enough to content Danby, which was sufficient to content
Nellie also; and the ambitious boy was not satisfied until she
could write as well.

An end came to this peaceful life when the youth left home
for college. The girl’s eyes seemed to grow larger from intense
gazing at him during the last few weeks that preceded his
departure, but that was her only expression of feeling. The
morning after he left, the nurse, not finding her appear at her
usual time, went to her chamber to look for her. She lay on the
bed, as she had been lying all the night, sleepless, with pale
face and red lips. Nurse asked her what was the matter.

“Nothing,” was the reply.

“Come get up, Beauty,” coaxed the nurse.

But Nellie turned her face to the wall and did not answer.
She lay thus for a week, scarcely eating or sleeping, sick in
mind and body, struggling with a grief that she hardly knew was
grief. At the end of that time she tottered from the bed, and,
clothing herself with difficulty, crept to the library.

The instinct that sends a sick animal to the plant that will
cure it seemed to teach Nellie where to find comfort. Danby was
gone, but memory remained, and the place where he had been was
to her made holy and possessed healing power, as does the
shrine of a saint for a believer. Her shrine was the
reading-desk, and the chair on which he had sat during those
happy lessons. To make all complete, she lifted the heavy book
from the shelf and opened it at the page from which she had
first learned. She put herself in his chair and caressed the
words with her thin hand, her fingers trembling over the place
that his had touched, then dropping her head on the desk where
his arm had lain, she smiling slept.

She awoke with the nurse looking down on her, saying,
“Beauty, you are better.”

And so she was: she drank the broth and ate the bread and
grapes that had been brought her, and from that day grew
stronger. But the shadow in her eyes was deeper now, and the
veins in her temples were bluer, as if the blood had throbbed
and pained there. Every morning found her at her post: she had
no need to roam the woods and fields now—her world lay
within her. It was sad for one so young to live on memory.

For many days her page and these few words were sufficient
to content her, and to recall them one after another, as Danby
had taught, was her only occupation. But by and by the words
themselves began to interest her, then the context, and finally
the sense dawned upon her—dawned not less surely that it
came slowly, and that she was now and then compelled to stop
and think out a word.

And what did she learn? Near the top of the large page the
first word, “love.” It ended a sentence and stood conspicuous,
which was the reason it had caught the eye of the eager boy
when he began to teach. What did it mean? What went before?
What after? It was a long time before she asked herself these
questions, for her understanding had not formed the habit of
being curious. Previously her eyes alone had sight, now her
intellect commenced seeing. What was the web of which this word
was the woof, knitting together, underlying, now appearing, now
hidden, but always there? She turned the leaves and counted
where it recurred again and again, like a bird repeating one
sweet note, of which it never tires. Then the larger type in
the middle of each page drew her attention: she read, As You
Like It. “What do I like? This story is perhaps as I like
it. I wonder what it is about? I don’t care now for pirates and
robbers: I liked them when he read to me, but not now.”
Her thoughts then wandered off to Danby, and she read no more
that day.

However, Nellie had plenty of time before her, and when her
thinking was ended she would return to her text. I do not know
how long a time it required for her to connect the sentence
that followed the word “love;” but it became clear to her
finally, just as a difficult puzzle will sometimes resolve
itself as you are idly regarding it. And this is what she saw:
“Love! But it cannot be sounded: my affection hath an unknown
bottom, like the bay of Portugal.” The phrase struck her as if
it was her own, and for the first time in her life she blushed.
She did not know much about the bay of Portugal, it is true,
but she understood the rest. From that time forth the book
possessed a strange interest for her. Much that she did not
comprehend she passed by. Often for several days she would not
find a passage that pleased her, but when such a one was
discovered her slow perusal of it and long dwelling on it gave
a beauty and power to the sentiment that more expert students
might have lost. I cannot describe the almost feverish effect
upon her of that poetical quartette beginning with—

How she hung over it, smiled at it, brightening into delight
at the echo of her own feelings! In the raillery of Rosalind
her heart found words to speak; and her sense and wit were
awakened by the sarcasm of the same character. “Pray you, no
more of this: ’tis like the howling of Irish wolves against the
moon,” came like a healthy tonic after a week of ecstasy spent
over the preceding lines.

Her mind grew in such companionship. She lived no more
alone: she had found friends who sympathized with her. Smiles
and tears became frequent on her face, making it more
beautiful. As You Like It was just as she liked it. The
forest of Arden was her forest. Rosalind’s banished father was
her father: that busy man she had never seen. With the book for
interpreter she fell in love with her world over again. Sunset
and dawn possessed new charms; the little flowers seemed
dignified; moonlight and fairy-land unveiled their mysteries;
nothing was forgotten. It appeared as if all the knowledge of
the world was contained in those magic pages, and the
master-key to this treasure, the dominant of this harmony, was
love—the word that Danby had taught her. The word?
The feeling as well, and with the feeling—all.

Circling from this passion as from a pole-star, all those
great constellations of thought revolved. With Lear’s madness
was Cordelia’s affection; with the inhumanity of Shylock was
Jessica’s trust; with the Moor’s jealousy was Desdemona’s
devotion. The sweet and bitter of life, religion, poetry and
philosophy, ambition, revenge and superstition, controlled,
created or destroyed by that little word. And how they
loved—Perdita, Juliet, Miranda—quickly and
entirely, without shame, as she had loved Danby—as buds
bloom and birds warble. Oh it was sweet, sweet, sweet! Amid
friends like these she became gay, moved briskly, grew rosy and
sang. This was her favorite song, to a melody she had caught
from the river:

Four years passed by—not all spent with one book,
however. Nellie’s desire for study grew with what it fed on.
This book opened the way for many. Reading led to reflection;
reflection, to observation; observation, to Nature; and thus in
an endless round.

About this time her busy father remembered he possessed a
“baby,” laid away somewhere, like an old parchment, and he
concluded he would “look her up.” His surprise was great when
he saw the child a woman—still greater when he observed
her self-possession, her intelligence, and a certain quaint way
she had of expressing herself that was charming in connection
with her fresh young face. She was neither diffident nor
awkward, knowing too little of the world to fear, and having
naturally that simplicity of manner which touches nearly upon
high breeding. But Mr. Archer being one of those men who think
that “beauty should go beautifully,” her toilette shocked him.
Under the influence of her presence he felt that he had
neglected her. The whole house reproached him: the few rooms
that had been furnished were dilapidated and worn.

“I did not know things looked so badly down here,” he said
apologetically. “I am sure I must have had everything properly
arranged when Nurse Bridget came. Your cradle was comfortable,
was it not?”

“I scarcely remember,” answered his daughter demurely.

“Oh! ah! yes! It is some time ago, I believe?”

“Seventeen years.”

“Y-e-s: I had forgotten.”

He had an idea, this man of a hundred schemes, that his
“baby” was laughing at him, and, singularly enough, it raised
her in his estimation. He even asked her to come and live with
him in the city, but she refused, and he did not insist.

Then he set about making a change, which was soon
accomplished. He sent for furniture and carpets, and cleared
the rubbish from without and within. Under his decided orders a
complete outfit “suitable for his daughter” soon arrived, and
with it a maid. Nellie, whose ideas of maids were taken from
Lucetta, was much disappointed in the actual being, and the
modern Lucetta was also disappointed when she saw the “howling
wilderness” to which she had been inveigled; so the two parted
speedily. But Mr. Archer remained: he was one of those men who
do things thoroughly which they have once undertaken. When he
was satisfied with Nellie’s appearance he took her to call on
all the neighboring families within reach.

Among others, they went to see Mrs. Overbeck, Danby’s
mother, whom Mr. Archer had known in his youth. Nellie wore her
brave trappings bravely, and acted her part nicely until Mrs.
Overbeck gave her a motherly kiss at parting, when she grew
pale and trembled. Why should she? Her hostess thought it was
from the heat, and insisted on her taking a glass of wine.

In the autumn of this year Danby graduated and returned
home. Nellie had not seen him during all this interval: he had
spent his vacations abroad, and had become quite a traveled
man. While she retained her affection for him unchanged, he
scarcely remembered the funny little girl who had been so
devoted to him in the years gone by. A few days after he
arrived, his mother, in giving him the local news, mentioned
the charming acquaintance she had made of a young lady who
lived in the neighborhood. On hearing her name the young man
exclaimed, “Why, that must be Nellie!”

“Do you know her?” asked his mother in surprise.

“Of course I do, and many a jolly time I have had with her.
Odd little thing, ain’t she?”

“I should not call her odd,” remarked his mother.

“You do not know her as I do.”

“Perhaps not. I suppose you will go with me when I return
her visit.”

“Certainly I will—just in for that sort of thing. A
man feels the need of some relaxation after a four years’ bore,
and there is nothing like the society of the weaker sex to give
the mind repose.”

“Shocking boy!” said the fond mother with a smile.

In a short time the projected call was made.

“You will frighten her with all that finery, my handsome
mother,” remarked Danby as they walked to the carriage.

“I think she will survive it, but I shall not answer for the
effect of those brilliant kids of yours.”

“The feminine eye is caught by display,” said her son
sententiously.

They chatted as they drove rapidly through the forest to the
old house, entered the front gate and rolled up the broad
avenue.

“I had no idea the place looked so well,” remarked Danby,
en connaisseur, as they approached. “I always entered by
the back way;” and he gave his moustache a final twirl.

After a loud knock from a vigorous hand the door was opened
by a small servant, much resembling Nellie some four years
before. Danby was going to speak to her, but recalling the time
that had elapsed, he knew it could not be she. All within was
altered. Three rooms en suite, the last of which was the
library, had been carefully refurnished. He looked about him.
Could this be the place in which he had passed so many days?
But he forgot all in the figure that advanced to receive them.
With a pretty grace she gave her hand to his mother and
welcomed “Mr. Overbeck.” How she talked—talked like a
babbling brook! It was now his turn to open big eyes and be
silent. He tried to recall the girl he had left. Vain endeavor!
This bright creature, grave and gay, silent but ready,
respectful yet confident, how could he follow her? The visit
came to an end, but was repeated again and again by Danby, and
each time with new astonishment, new delight. She had the
coquetry of a dozen women, yet her eyes looked so true. She was
a perfect elf for pranks and jokes, yet demure as a nun. When
he tried to awe her with his learning, she was saucy; if he was
serious, she was gay; if he wished to teach, she rebelled. She
was self-willed as a changeling, refractory yet gentle,
seditious but just,—only waiting to strike her colors and
proclaim him conqueror; but this he did not know, for she kept
well hid in her heart what “woman’s fear” she had. She was all
her favorite heroines in turn, with herself added to the
galaxy.

One day he penetrated into the library, notwithstanding some
very serious efforts on her part to prevent him: by this time
he would occasionally assert himself. The furniture there was
not much altered. A few worn things had been replaced, but the
room looked so much the same that the scene of that first
reading-lesson came vividly to his mind. He turned to the side
where the desk had stood. It was still there, with the two
chairs before it, and on it was the book. She would not for the
world have had it moved, but it was, as it were, glorified. Mr.
Archer had wished “these old things cleared away,” but Nellie
had besought him so earnestly that he allowed them to stay,
stipulating, however, that they should be upholstered anew. To
this she assented, saying, “Send me the best of everything and
I will cover them—the very best, mind;” and her
father, willing to please her, did as she desired.

So the old desk became smart in brocade and gold-lace, the
book received a cushion all bullion and embroidery, and the
chairs emulated the splendor. It required a poet or a girl in
love to clothe a fancy so beautifully, and Nellie was both. It
was her shrine: why should she not adorn it?

I cannot follow the process of thought in Danby’s mind as he
looked at this and at Nellie—Nellie blushing with the
sudden guiltiness that even the discovery of a harmless action
will bring when we wish to conceal it. Sometimes a moment
reveals much.

“Nellie”—it was the first time he had called her so
since his return—”I must give you a reading-lesson: come,
sit here.”

Mechanically she obeyed him, all the rebel fading away: she
looked like the Nellie of other days. She felt she had laid
bare her soul, but in proportion as her confusion overcame her
did he become decided. It is the slaves that make tyrants, it
is said.

Under the impulse of his hand the book opened at the
well-worn page.

“Read!”

For a little while she sat with downcast eyes. Well she knew
the passage to which he was pointing: “Love! But it cannot be
sounded: my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the bay of
Portugal.”

The sentence seemed to dance and grow till it covered the
page—grow till in her sight it assumed the size of a
placard, and then it took life and became her
accuser—told in big letters the story of her devotion to
the mocking boy beside her.

“There is good advice on the preceding page,” he whispered
smiling. “Orlando says he would kiss before he spoke: may
I?”

She started up and looked at his triumphant face a moment,
her mouth quivering, her eyes full of tears. “How can
you—” she began.

But before she could finish he was by her side: “Because I
love you—love you, all that the book says, and a thousand
times more. Because if you love me we will live our own
romance, and I doubt if we cannot make our old woods as
romantic as the forest of Arden. Will you not say,” he asked
tenderly, “that there will be at least one pair of true lovers
there?”

I could not hear Nellie’s answer: her head was so near
his—on his shoulder, in fact—that she whispered it
in his ear. But a moment after, pushing him from her with the
old mischief sparkling from her eyes, she said, “‘Til frown and
be perverse, and say thee nay, so thou wilt woo,'” and looked a
saucy challenge in his face.

“Naughty sprite!” he exclaimed, catching her in his arms and
shutting her mouth with kisses.

It was not long after, perhaps a year, that a happy bride
and groom might have been seen walking up the hemlock avenue
arm in arm.

“Do you remember,” she asked, smiling thoughtfully—”do
you remember the time I begged you to come home with me and be
my pet?”

The young husband leaned down and said something the
narrator did not catch, but from the expression of his face it
must have been very spoony: with a bride such as that charming
Nellie, how could he help it?

Yes, she had brought him home. Mr. Archer had given the
house with its broad acres as a dowry to his daughter, and
Nellie had desired that the honeymoon should be spent in her
“forest of Arden.”

ITA ANIOL PROKOP.

JACK, THE REGULAR.

THOMAS DUNN ENGLISH.

OBSERVATIONS AND ADVENTURES IN SUBMARINE DIVING.

Did you ever pause before a calm, bright little pool in the
woods, and look steadily at the picture it presents, without
feeling as if you had peeped into another world? Every outline
is preserved, every tint is freshened and purified, in the
cool, glimmering reflection. There is a grace and a softness in
the prismatic lymph that give a new form and color to the
common and familiar objects it has printed in its still,
pellucid depths. Every little basin of clear water by the
roadside is a magic mirror, and transforms all that it
encloses. There is a vastness of depth, too, in that concave
hemisphere, through which the vision sinks like a falling star,
that excites and fills the imagination. What it shows is only a
shadow, but all things seen are mere shadows painted on the
retina, and you have, at such times, a realistic sense of the
beautiful and bold imagery which calls a favorite fountain of
the East the Eye of the Desert.

The alluring softness of this mimic world increases to
sublimity when, instead of some rocky basin, dripping with
mossy emeralds and coral berries, you look upon the deep
crystalline sea. Each mates to its kind. This does not gather
its imagery from gray, mossy rock or pendent leaf or flower,
but draws into its enfolding arms the wide vault of the
cerulean sky. The richness of the majestic azure is deepened by
that magnificent marriage. The pale blue is darkened to violet.
Far through the ever-varying surface of the curious gelatinous
liquid breaks the phosphorescence, sprinkled into innumerable
lights and cross-lights. As you look upon those endless
pastures thought is quickened with the conception of their
innumerable phases of vitality. The floating weed, whose meshes
measure the spaces of continents and archipelagoes, is
everywhere instinct with animal and vegetable life. The builder
coral, glimmering in its softer parts with delicate hues and
tints, throws up its stony barrier through a thousand miles of
length and a third as much in breadth, fringing the continents
with bays and sounds and atoll islands like fairy rings of the
sea. Animate flowers—sea-nettles, sea anemones,
plumularia, campanularia, hydropores, confervae, oscillatoria,
bryozoa—people the great waters. Sea-urchins, star-fish,
sea-eggs, combative gymnoti, polypes, struggle and thrive with
ever-renewing change of color; gelatinous worms that shine like
stars cling to every weed; glimmering animalcules,
phosphorescent medusae, the very deep itself is vivid with
sparkle and corruscation of electric fire. So through every
scale, from the zoophyte to the warm-blooded whale, the sea
teems with life, out of which fewer links have been dropped
than from sub-aërial life. It is a matter for curious
speculation that the missing species belong not to the lower
subsidiary genera, as in terrene animals, but to the highest
types of marine life. In the quarries of Lyme Regis, among the
accumulations of a sea of the Liassic period, lay the huge
skeleton of the Ichthyosaurus, a warm-blooded marine existence,
with huge saucer eyes of singular telescopic power, that
gleamed radiant “with the eyelids of the morning,” “by whose
neesings alight doth shine”—the true leviathan of Job. In
the same extinct sea is found the skeleton of the Plesiosaurus,
a marine lizard of equal size, and warm-blooded, whose
swan-like neck and body graced the serene seas of the
pre-adamite world. Another was that of the Pterodactyl, the
antique aragon, a winged fish. The task of sustaining these
existences was too great for old Ocean, and the monsters
dropped from the upper end of the chain into the encrusting
mud, the petrified symbols of failure. So one day man may drop
into the limbo of vanities, among the abandoned tools in the
Creator’s workshop.

But, however high or low the degree in the scale, one
distinguishing feature marks the vital creation in vegetable or
animal—an intelligence capable of adjusting itself to the
elements about it, and electing its food. The sunflower, even,
does not follow the sun by a mechanical law, but, growing by a
fair, bright sheet of water, looks as constantly at that
shining surface for the beloved light as ever did the fabled
Greek boy at his own image in the fountain. The tendrils of the
vine seek and choose their own support, and the thirsty
spongioles of the root find the nourishing veins of water.
Growth, says a naturalist, is the conscious motion of vegetable
life. But this theory of kinship, imperfect in the plant,
becomes plain and distinct in the animate creation. However far
removed, the wild dolphin at play and the painted bird in the
air are cousins of man, with a responsive chord of sympathy
connecting them.

It is this feeling that sends an exhilarating thrill through
the submarine explorer when a school of porpoises frisk by with
undulating grace, the marine type of a group of frolicking
children. It is the instinctive perception that it is a pure
enjoyment to the fish, the healthy glow and laugh of submarine
existence. But for that sense of sympathetic nature the
flying-fish, reeling porpoise and dolphin would be no more to
him than the skipping shuttle in a weaver’s loom, the dull
impetus of senseless machinery. Self-generated motion is the
outward and visible sign of vitality—its wanton exercise
the symbol and expression of enjoyment. The poor philosopher
who distinguished humanity as singular in the exhibition of
humor had surely never heard a mocking-bird sing, watched a
roguish crow or admired a school of fish.

This keen appreciation of a kindred life in the sea has
thrown its charm over the poetry and religion of all races.
Ocean us leaves the o’erarching floods and rocky grottoes at
the call of bound Prometheus; Cyrene, with her nymphs, sits in
the cool Peneus, where comes Aristaeus mourning for his stolen
bees; the Druid washed his hedge-hyssop in the sacred water,
and priestesses lived on coral reefs visited by remote lovers
in their sundown seas; Schiller’s diver goes into the purpling
deep and sees the Sea-Horror reaching out its hundred arms; the
beautiful Undine is the vivid poetry of the sea. Every fountain
has its guardian saint or nymph, and to this day not only the
German peasant and benighted English boor thrill at the sight
of some nymph-guarded well, but the New Mexican Indian offers
his rude pottery in propitiation of the animate existence, the
deity of the purling spring.

“Der Taucher,” for all the rhythm and music that clothes his
luckless plunge, was but a caitiff knight to some of our
submarine adventurers. A diver during the bay-fight in Mobile
harbor had reason to apprehend a more desperate encounter. A
huge cuttle-fish, the marine monster of Pliny and Victor Hugo,
had been seen in the water. His tough, sinuous, spidery arms,
five fathoms long, wavered visibly in the blue transparent
gulf,

A harpoon was driven into the leathery, pulpy body of the
monster, but with no other effect than the sudden snapping of
the inch line like thread. It was subsequent to this that, as
the diver stayed his steps in the unsteady current, his staff
was seized below. The water was murky with the river-silt above
the salt brine, and he could see nothing, but after an effort
the staff was rescued or released. Curious to know what it was,
he probed again, and the stick was wrenched from his hand. With
a thrill he recognized in such power the monster of the sea,
the devil-fish. He returned anxious, doubtful, but resolute.
Few like to be driven from a duty by brute force. He armed
himself, and descended to renew the hazardous encounter in the
gloomy solitude of the sea-bottom. I would I had the wit to
describe that tournament beneath the sea; the stab, thrust,
curvet, plunge—the conquest and capture of the unknown
combatant. A special chance preserves the mediaeval character
of the contest, saving it from the sulphurous associations of
modern warfare that might be suggested by the name of
devil-fish. No: the antagonist wore a coat-of-mail and arms of
proof, as became a good knight of the sea, and was besides
succulent, digestible—a veritable prize for the
conqueror. It was a monstrous crab.

The constant encounter of strange and unforeseen perils
enables the professional diver to meet them with the same
coolness with which ordinary and familiar dangers are
confronted on land. On one occasion a party of such men were
driven out into the Gulf by a fierce “norther,” were tossed
about like chips for three days in the vexed element, scant of
food, their compass out of order, and the horizon darkened with
prevailing storm. At another time a party wandered out in the
shallows of one of the keys that fringe the Gulf coast. They
amused themselves with wading into the water, broken into
dazzling brilliance. A few sharks were seen occasionally, which
gradually and unobserved increased to, a squadron. The waders
meanwhile continued their sport until the evening waned away.
Far over the dusk violet Night spread her vaporous shadows:

At last they turned their steps homeward, crossing the
little sandy key, between which and the beach lay a channel
shoulder-deep, its translucent waves now glimmering with
phosphorescence. But here they were met by an unexpected
obstacle. The fleet of sharks, with a strategical cunning
worthy of admiration, had flanked the little island, and now in
the deeper water formed in ranks and squadrons, and, with their
great goggle eyes like port-fires burning, lay ready to dispute
the passage. Armed with such weapons as they could clutch, the
men dashed into the water with paeans and shouts and the broken
pitchers of fallen Jericho. The violet phosphorescence lighted
them on their way, and tracked with luminous curve and star
every move of the enemy. The gashed water at every stroke of
club or swish of tail or fin bled in blue and red fire, as if
the very sea was wounded. The enemy’s line of battle was broken
and scattered, but not until more than one of the assailants
had looked point-blank into the angry eyes of a shark and
beaten it off with actual blows. It was the Thermopylae of
sharkdom, with numbers reversed—a Red Sea passage
resonant with psalms of victory.

There are novel difficulties as well as dangers to be
encountered. The native courage of the man must be tempered,
ground and polished. On land it is the massing of numbers that
accomplishes the result—the accumulation of vital forces
and intelligence upon the objective point. The innumerable
threads of individual enterprise, like the twist of a Manton
barrel, give the toughest tensile power. Under the sea,
however, it is often the strength of the single thread, the wit
of the individual pitted against the solid impregnability of
the elements, the vis inertiae of the sea. It looks as
if uneducated Nature built her rude fastnesses and rocky
battlements with a special I view to resistance, making the
fickle and I unstable her strongest barricade. An example of
the skill and address necessary to conquer obstacles of the
latter kind was illustrated in Mobile Bay. There lay about a
sunken vessel an impenetrable mail of quicksand. It became
necessary to sink piles into this material. The obstacle does
not lie in its fickle, unstable character, but its elastic
tension. It swallows a nail or a beam by slow, serpent-like
deglutition. It is hungry, insatiable, impenetrable. Try to
force it, to drive down a pile by direct force: it resists. The
mallet is struck back by reverberating elasticity with an equal
force, and the huge pointed stake rebounds. Brute force beats
and beats in vain. The fickle sand will not be driven—no,
not an inch.

Wit comes in where weight breaks down. A force-pump, a
common old-style fire-engine, was rigged up, the nozzle and
hose bound to a huge pile,

The pump was set to work. The water tore through the
nostril-pipe, boring a hole with such rapidity that the tall
beam dropped into the socket with startling suddenness. Still
breathing torrents, the pipe was withdrawn: the clutching sand
seized, grappled the stake. It is cemented in.

but—you can never pull it out.

Perhaps the most singular and venturesome exploit ever
performed in submarine diving was that of searching the sunken
monitor Milwaukee during the bay-fight in Mobile harbor. This
sea-going fortress was a huge double-turreted monitor, with a
ponderous, crushing projectile force in her. Her battery of
four fifteen-inch guns, and the tough, insensible solidity of
her huge wrought-iron turrets and heavy plated hulk, burdened
the sleepy waters of the bay. Upon a time she braced her iron
jacket about her, girded her huge sides with fifteen-inch
pistolry, and went rolling her clumsy volume down the bay to
mash Fort Taylor to rubbish and débacle. The sea
staggered under her ponderous gliding and groaned about her
massive bulk as she wended her awkward course toward the
bay-shore over against the fort. She sighted her blunderbusses,
and, rolling, grunting, wheezing in her revolving towers like a
Falstaff ill at ease, spat her gobbets of flame and death. The
poor little water-spaniel fort ran down to the shore and barked
at her of course. Cui bono or malo? Why, like
Job’s mates, fill its poor belly with the east wind, or try to
draw out leviathan with a hook, or his tongue with a cord thou
lettest down? Yet who treads of the fight between invulnerable
Achilles and heroic Hector, and admires Achilles? The admiral
of the American fleet, sick of the premature pother, signaled
the lazy solidity to return. The loathly monster, slowly, like
a bull-dog wrenched from his victim, rolled snarling, lazily,
leisurely down the bay, not obeying and yet not disobeying the
signal.

All along the sunny coast, like flowers springing up in a
battle-field, were rows of little white cottages, tenanted by
women and children—love, life and peace in the midst of
ruin and sudden death. At the offending spectacle of homely
peace among its enemies the unglutted monster eased its huge
wrath. Tumbling and bursting among the poor little pasteboard
shells of cottages, where children played and women gossiped of
the war, and prayed for its end, no matter how, fell the huge
globes and cones of murder. Shrieks and cries, slain babes and
wounded women on shore; surly, half-mutinous officers and crew
on that iron hulk, shocked at the fell work they were set to
do; and the glimmer and wash of the bay-water below—that
sweet, tranquil, half-transparent liquid, with idle weeds and
chips upon it, empty crates and boxes of dead merchandise,
sacked of their life and substance by the war, as one might
swallow an oyster; the soft veils of shadowy ships and the
distant city spires; umbrageous fires and slips of shining sand
all mirrored in the soft and quiet sea, while this devilish
pother went on. There is a buoy adrift! No, it is a sodden
cask, perhaps of spoiling meat, while the people in the town
yonder are starving; and still the huge iron, gluttonous
monster bursts its foam of blood and death, while the surly
crew curse and think of mothers and babes at home. Better to
look at the bay, the idle, pleasing summer water, with chips
and corks and weeds upon it; better to look at the bubbling
cask yonder—much better, captain, if you only knew it!
But the reluctant, heavy iron turret groans and wheezes on its
pivotal round, and it will be a minute or half a minute before
the throated hell speaks again. But it will speak:
machinery is fatally accurate to time and place. Can nothing
stay it, or stop the trembling of those bursting iron spheres
among yon pretty print-like homes? No: look at the buoy,
wish-wash, rolling lazily, bobbing in the water, a lazy, idle
cask, with nothing in the world to do on this day of busy
mischief. What hands coopered it in the new West? what farmer
filled it? There is the grunting of swine, lowing of cattle, in
the look of the staves. But the turret groans and wheezes and
goes around, whether you look at it or not. What cottage this
time? The soft lap-lap of the water goes on, and the tedious
cask gets nearer: it will slide by the counter. You have a
curious interest in that. No: it grates under the bow;
it—Thunder and wreck and ruin! Has the bay burst open and
swallowed us? The huge, invulnerable iron monster—not
invulnerable after all—has met its master in the idle
cask. It is blind, imprisoned Samson pulling down the pillars
of the temple. The tough iron plates at the bow are rent and
torn and twisted like wet paper. A terrible hole is gashed in
the hull. The monster wobbles, rolls, gasps, and drinks huge
gulps of water like a wounded man—desperately wounded,
and dying in his thirsty veins and arteries. The swallowed
torrent rushes aft, hissing and quenching the fires; beats
against the stern, and comes forward with the rush of that
repulse to meet the incoming wave. Into the boats, the
water—anywhere but here. She reels again and groans; and
then, as a desperate hero dies, she slopes her huge warlike
beak at the hostile water and rushes to her own ruin with a
surge and convulsion. The victorious sea sweeps over it and
hides it, laughing at her work. She will keep it safely. That
is the unsung epic of the Milwaukee, without which I should
have little to say of the submarine diving during the
bay-fight.

The harbor of Mobile is shaped like a rude Innuit boot. At
the top, Tensaw and Mobile Rivers, in their deltas, make,
respectively, two and three looplike bands, like the straps.
The toe is Bonsecour Bay, pointing east. The heel rests on
Dauphin Island, while the main channel flows into the hollow of
the foot between Fort Morgan and Dauphin Island. In the
north-west angle, obscured by the foliage, lay the devoted
city, suffering no less from artificial famine, made
unnecessarily, than the ligatures that stopped the vital
current of trade. Tons of meat were found putrefying while the
citizens, and even the garrison, had been starving on scanty
rations. Food could be purchased, but at exorbitant rates, and
the medium of exchange, Confederate notes, all gone to water
and waste paper. The true story of the Lost Cause has yet to be
written. North of Mobile, in the Trans-Mississippi department,
thousands whose every throb was devoted to the enterprise,
welcomed the Northern invaders, not as destroyers of a hope
already dead by the act of a few entrusted with its defence,
but as something better than the anarchy that was not Southern
independence or anything else human.

Such were the condition, period and place—the people
crushed between the upper and nether millstones of two hostile
and contending civilizations—when native thrift evoked a
new element, that set in sharp contrast the heroism of life and
the heroism of death, the courage that incurs danger to save
against the courage that accepts danger to destroy. The work
was the saving of the valuable arms—costing the
government thirty thousand dollars per gun—and the
machinery of the sunken Milwaukee.⁵
By a curious circumstance this party of divers was composed
partly, if not principally or entirely, of mechanics and
engineers who were exempt from military service under the
economic laws of the Confederacy, yet who in heart and soul
sympathized with the rebellion. They had worked to save for
the South: now they were to work and save for the North. It
was a service of superadded danger. All the peril incurred
from missile weapons was increased by the hidden danger of
the secret under-sea and the presence of the terrible
torpedoes. These floated everywhere, in all innocent,
unsuspicious shapes. One monster, made of boiler iron, a
huge cross, is popularly believed to be still hidden in the
bay. The person possessing the chart wherein the masked
battery’s place was set down is said to have destroyed it
and fled. Let us hope, however, that this is an error.

Keep in mind, in reading this account, the contrasted
picture of peace in Nature and war in man—the calm blue
sky; the soft hazy outlines of woods and bay-shore dropping
their soft veils in the water; the cottages, suggesting
industry and love; the distant city; the delicate and graceful
spars of the Hartford; the busy despatch-steamers plying to and
fro; the bursting forts and huge ugly monitors; the starry
arches of flying shells by night and flying cloud by day; the
soft lap of the water; the sensuous, sweet beauty of that
latitude of eternal spring; and the soft dark violet of the
outer sea, glassing itself in calm or broken into millioned
frets of blue, red and starry fire; the danger above and the
danger below; the dark mysterious caverns of the sea, rich with
coral grots and grove and abounding marine life; the
impenetrable gloom of the ship’s hold, whose unimaginable
darkness and labyrinthine intricacy of machinery set obstacles
at every turn and move and step; the darkness; the fury; the
hues and shape, all that art can make or Nature fashion, gild
or color wrought into one grand tablature of splendor and
magnificence. War and peaceful industry met there in novel
rivalry, and each claimed its privileges. The captain of the
Search said to the officers, while crowding his men behind the
turret, with sly, dry humor, “Come, you are all paid to
be shot at: my men are not.”

More than once the accuracy of the enemy’s fire drove the
little party to shelter. Though the diver was shielded by the
impenetrable fickle element that gave Achilles invulnerability,
the air-pump above was exposed, and thus the diver might be
slain by indirection. There lay Achilles’ heel, the exposed
vulnerable part that Mother Thetis’s baptism neglected.

The work below was arduous: the hulk crowded with the
entangling machinery of sixteen engines, cuddies, ports, spars,
levers, hatches, stancheons, floating trunks, bibulous boxes
heavy with drink, and the awful, mysterious gloom of the water,
which is not night or darkness, but the absence of any ray to
touch the sensitive optic nerve. The sense of touch the only
reliance, and the life-line his guide.

But the peril incurred can be better understood through an
illustrative example of a perilous adventure and a poor return.
Officers and men of the unfortunate monitor asked for the
rescue of their property, allowing a stipulated sum in lieu of
salvage. Among these was a petty officer, anxious for the
recovery of his chest. It involved peculiar hazards, since it
carried the diver below the familiar turret-chamber, through
the inextricabilis error of entangling machinery in the
engine-room, groping among floating and sunken objects, into a
remote state-room, the Acheron of the cavernous hold. He was to
find by touch a seaman’s chest; handle it in that thickening
gloom; carry it, push it, move it through that labyrinthine
obscurity to a point from which it could be raised. To add
immeasurably to the intricacy of this undertaking, there was
the need of carrying his life-line and air-hose through all
that entanglement and obscurity. Three times in that horror of
thick darkness like wool the line tangled in the web of
machinery, and three times he had, by tedious endeavor, to
follow it up, find the knot and release it. Then the door of
the little state-room, the throat of exit, was shut to, and
around and around the dense chamber he groped as if in a dream,
and could find no vent. All was alike—a smooth, slimy
wall, glutinous with that gelatinous liquid, the sea-water. The
tangled line became a blind guide and fruitful source of error;
the hours were ebbing away, drowning life and vital air in that
horrible watery pit;

or, a worse enemy than the subtle Greek’s, death from the
suspended air-current. Speed, nimbleness, strength and activity
were worthless: with tedious fingers he must follow the
life-line, find its entanglements and slowly loosen them,
carefully taking up the slack, and so follow the straightened
cord to the door. Then the chest: he must not forget that.
Slowly he heaves and pushes, now at this, now at the life-line
hitching on knob, handle, lever or projecting peg—on
anything or nothing in that maze of machinery; by involution
and evolution, like the unknown quantity in a cubic equation,
through all the twists, turns, assumptions and substitutions,
and always with that unmanageable, indivisible coefficient the
box, until he reaches the upper air.

In Aesop’s fable, when the crane claimed the reward of the
wolf for using his long neck and bill as a forceps in
extracting a bone from the latter’s oesophagus, Lupus suggests
that for the crane to have had his head down in the lupine
throat and not get it snapped off was reward enough for
any reasonable fowl. The petty officer was sufficiently learned
in the Lyceum to administer a like return. The stipulated
salvage was never paid or offered.⁶

The monitors had small square hatches or man-ports let into
the deck, admitting one person conveniently.

A swinging ladder, whose foot was clear of the floor, led
down into the recesses. A diver, having completed his task,
ascended the treacherous staircase to escape, and found the
hatch blocked up. A floating chest or box had drifted into the
opening, and, fitting closely, had firmly corked the man up in
that dungeon, tight as a fly in a bottle. From his doubtful
perch on the ladder he endeavored to push the obstacle from its
insertion. Two or more equal difficulties made this impossible.
The box had no handle, and it was slippery with the ooze and
mucus of the sea. The leverage of pushing only wedged it faster
in the orifice. The inconstant ladder swayed from it as a
fulcrum. Again and again by art and endeavor and angle of push
he essayed, and the ladder made sport of it. It was deadly
sport, that swing and seesaw on the slippery rungs in the
immeasurable loneliness of the silent, shrouded cabin. It was
no rush of air, sending life tingling in the blood made
brilliant with carmine of oxidation, but the dense, mephitic
sough of the thick wool of water. He descended and sat upon the
floor to think. Feasible methods had failed, and the sands of
his life were running out like the old physician’s. Now to try
the impracticable. There are heaps of wisdom in the wrong way
sometimes, which, I suppose, is the reason some of us like it.
The box was out of his reach, choked in the gullet of that
life-hole. No spring or leap from floor or ladder could reach
its slippery side or bear it from its fixture. The sea had
caught him prowling in its mysteries, and blocked him up, as
cruel lords of ancient days walled up the intruder on their
domestic privacy. Wit after brute force: man and Nature were
pitted against each other in the uncongenial gloom—life
the stake.

He groped about his prison, glutinous with infusoriae and
the oily consistence of the sea. Here a nail, there a block or
lever, shaped out mentally by the touch, theorized, studied
upon and thrown down. Now a hatchet, monkey-wrench,
monkey’s-tail, or gliding fish or wriggling eel, companions of
his imprisonment. At last the cold touch of iron: the hand
encloses and lifts it; its weight betrays its length; he feels
it to the end—blunt, square, useless. He tries the other
end—an edge or spike. That will do. Standing under the
hatch, guided by the ladder to the position, and with a strong
swinging, upward blow, the new tool is driven into the soft,
fibrous and adhesive pine bottom of the box. On the principle
on which your butler’s practiced elbow draws the twisted screw
sunk into the cobwebbed seal of your ’48 port, he uncorks
himself. The box pulled out of the hatch, the sea-gods threw up
the sponge, that zoophyte being handy.

These few incidents, strung together at random, and
embracing only limited experiences out of many in one
enterprise, are illustrative, in their variety and character,
of this hardy pursuit, and the fascination of danger which is
the school of native hardihood. But they give the reader a very
imperfect idea of the nature and appearance of the new element
into which man has pushed his industry. The havoc and spoil,
the continued danger and contention, darken the gloom of the
submarine world as a flash of lightning leaves blacker the
shadow of the night and storm.

The first invention to promote subaqueous search was the
diving-bell, a clumsy vessel which isolates the diver. It is
embarrassing, if not dangerous, where there is a strong current
or if it rests upon a slant deck. It limits the vision, and in
one instance it is supposed the wretched diver was taken from
the bell by a shark. It permits an assistant, however, and a
bold diver will plunge from the deck above and ascend in the
vessel, to the invariable surprise of his companion. An example
of one of its perils, settling in the mud, occurred, I think,
in the port of New York. A party of amateurs, supported by
champagne flasks and a reporter, went down. The bell settled
and stuck like a boy’s sucker. One of the party proposed
shaking or rocking the bell, and doing so, the water was forced
under and the bell lifted from the ooze.

But a descent in submarine armor is the true way to visit
the world under water. The first sensation in descending is the
sudden bursting roar of furious, Niagarac cascades in the ears.
It thunders and booms upon the startled nerve with the rush and
storm of an avalanche. The sense quivers with it. But it is not
air shaken by reflected blows: it is the cascades driven into
the enclosing helmet by the force-pump. As the flexile hose has
to be stiffly distended to bear an aqueous gravity of
twenty-five to fifty pounds to the square inch, the force of
the current can be estimated. The tympanum of the ear yields to
the fierce external pressure. The brain feels and multiplies
the intolerable tension as if the interior was clamped in a
vice, and that tumultuous, thunderous torrent pours on.
Involuntarily the mouth opens: the air rushes in the Eustachian
tube, and with sudden velocity strikes the intruded tension of
the drum, which snaps back to its normal state with a sharp,
pistol-like crack. The strain is momently relieved to be
renewed again, and again relieved by the same attending
salutes.

In your curious dress you must appear monstrous, even to
that marine world, familiar with abnormal creations. The whale
looks from eyes on the top of his head; the flat-fish, sole,
halibut have both eyes on the same side; and certain Crustacea
place the organ on a foot-stalk, as if one were to hold up his
eye in his hand to include a wider horizon. But the monster
which the fish now sees differs from all these. It has four
great goggle eyes arranged symmetrically around its head.
Peering through these plate-glass optics, the diver sees the
curious, strange beauty of the world around him, not as the
bather sees it, blurred and indistinct, but in the calm
splendor of its own thallassphere. The first thought is one of
unspeakable admiration of the miraculous beauty of everything
around him—a glory and a splendor of refraction,
interference and reflection that puts to shame the Arabian
story of the kingdom of the Blue Fish. Above him is that pure
golden canopy with its rare glimmering
lustrousness—something like the soft, dewy effulgence
that comes with sun-breaks through showery afternoons. The soft
delicacy of that pure straw-yellow that prevails everywhere is
crossed and lighted by tints and glimmering hues of accidental
and complementary color indescribably elegant. The floor of the
sea rises like a golden carpet in gentle incline to the
surface; but this incline, experience soon teaches, is an
ocular deception, the effect of refraction, such as a tumbler
of water and a spoon can exhibit in petty. It is perhaps the
first observable warning that you are in a new medium, and that
your familiar friend, the light, comes to you altered in its
nature; and it is as well to remember this and “make a note on
it.”

Raising your eyes to the horizontal and looking straight
forward, a new and beautiful wealth of color is developed. It
is at first a delicate blue, as if an accidental color of the
prevailing yellow. But soon it deepens into a rich violet. You
feel as if you had never before appreciated the loveliness of
that rich tint. As your eye dwells upon it the rich lustrous
violet darkens to indigo, and sinking into deeper hues becomes
a majestic threat of color. It is ominous, vivid
blue-black—solid, adamantine, a crystal wall of amethyst.
It is all around you. You are cased, dungeoned in the solid
masonry of the waters. It is beauty indeed, but the sombre and
awful beauty of the night and storm. The eye turns for relief
and reassurance to the paly-golden lustrous roof, and watches
that tender penciling which brightens every object it touches.
The hull of the sunken ship, lying slant and open to the sun,
has been long enough submerged to be crusted with barnacles,
hydropores, crustacea and the labored constructions of the
microscopic existences and vegetation that fill the sea. The
song of Ariel becomes vivid and realistic in its rich
word-power:

The transfiguration of familiar objects is indeed curious
and wonderful. The hulk, once gaudy with paint and gilding, has
come under the skill of the lapidary and sea-artist. It is
crusted with emerald and flossy mosses, and glimmers with
diamond, jacinth, ruby, topaz, sapphire and gold. Every
jewel-shape in leaf, spore, coral or plume, lying on a greenish
crystalline ground, is fringed with a soft radiance of silver
fire, and every point is tipped in minute ciliate flames of
faint steely purple. It is spotted with soft velvety black
wherever a shadow falls, that mingles and varies the wonderful
display of color. It is brilliant, vivid, changeable with the
interferences of light from the fluctuating surface above,
which transmogrifies everything—touches the coarsest
objects with its pencil, and they become radiant and spiritual.
A pile of brick, dumped carelessly on the deck, has become a
huge hill of crystal jewelry, lively with brilliant prismatic
radiance. Where the light falls on the steps of the staircase
it shows a ladder of silver crusted with emeralds. The
round-house, spars, masts, every spot where a peak or angle
catches the light, have flushed into liquid, jeweled beauty;
and each point, a prism and mirror, catches, multiplies and
reflects the other splendor. A rainbow, a fleecy mist over the
lake, made prismal by the sunlight, a bunch of sub-aqueous
moss, a soap-bubble, are all examples in our daily experience
of that transforming power of water in the display of color.
The prevailing tone is that soft, golden effulgence which, like
the grace of a cheerful and loving heart, blends all into one
harmonious whole.

But observation warns the spectator of the delusive
character of all that splendor of color. He lifts a box from
the ooze: he appears to have uncorked the world. The hold is a
bottomless chasm. Every indentation, every acclivity that casts
a shadow, gives the impression of that soundless depth. The
bottom of the sea seems loopholed with cavities that pierce the
solid globe and the dark abysses of space beyond. The diver is
surrounded by pitfalls, real and imaginary. There is no
graduation. The shallow concave of a hand-basin is as the
shadow of the bottomless well.

If the exploration takes place in the delta of a great
river, the light is affected by the various densities of the
double refracting media. At the proper depth one can see
clearly the line where these two meet, clean cut and as sharply
defined as the bottom of a green glass tumbler through the pure
water it contains. The salt brine or gelatinous sea-water sinks
weighted to the bottom, and over it flows the fresh
river-water. If the latter is darkened with sediment, it
obscures the silent depths with a heavy, gloomy cloud. In
seasons of freshet this becomes a total darkness.

But even on a bright, sunshiny day, under clear water, the
shadow of any object in the sea is unlike any shade in the
upper atmosphere. It draws a black curtain over everything
under it, completely obscuring it. Nor is this peculiarity lost
when the explorer enters the shadow; but, as one looking into a
tunnel from without can see nothing therein, though the open
country beyond is plainly visible, so, standing in that
submarine shadow, all around is dark, though beyond the sable
curtain of the shadow the view is clear. Apply this optical
fact to the ghastly story of a diver’s alleged experience in
the cabin of a sunken ship. It is narrated that there was
revealed to his appalled sight the spectacle of the drowned
passengers in various attitudes of alarm or devotion when the
dreadful suffocation came. The story is told with great effect
and power, but unless a voltaic lantern is included in the
stage furniture, the ghastly tableaux must sink into the limbo
of incredibilities.

The cabin of a sunken vessel is dark beyond any supernal
conception of darkness. Even a cabin window does not alter this
law, though it may be itself visible, with objects on its
surface, as in a child’s magic-lantern. As the rays of light
pass through an object flatwise, like the blade of a knife
through the leaves of a book, and may be admitted through
another of like character in the plane of the first, so a ray
of light can penetrate with deflection through air and water.
But becoming polarized, the interposition of a third medium
ordinarily transparent will stop it altogether. Hence the
plate-glass window under water admits no light into the
interior of a cabin. The distrust of sight grows with the
diver’s experience. The eye brings its habit of estimating
proportion and distance from an attenuated atmosphere into
another and denser medium, and the seer is continually deceived
by the change. He hesitates, halts, and is observant of the
pitfalls about him. A gang-plank slightly above the surface of
the deck is bordered, where its shadow falls, by dismal
trenches. There is a range of hills crossing the deck before
him. As he approaches he estimates the difficulty of the
ascent. At its apparent foot he reaches to clamber the steep
sides, and the sierra is still a step beyond his reach. Drawing
still nearer, he prepares to crawl up; his hand touches the
top; it is less than shoulder-high.

But perhaps the strongest illustration of the differing
densities of these two media is furnished by an attempt to
drive a nail under water. By an absolute law such an effort, if
guided by sight independent of calculation, must fail. Habit
and experience, tested in atmospheric light, will control the
muscles, and direct the blow at the very point where the
nail-head is not. For this reason the ingenious expedient of a
voltaic lantern under water has proved to be impracticable. It
is not the light alone which is wanted, but that sweet familiar
atmosphere through which we are habituated to look. The
submarine diver learns to rely wholly on the truer sense of
touch, and guided by that he engages in tasks requiring labor
and skill with the easy assurance of a blind man in the crowded
street.

The conveyance of sound through the inelastic medium of
water is so difficult that it has been called the world of
silence. This is only comparatively true. The fish has an
auditory cavity, which, though simple in itself, certifies the
ordinary conviction of sound, but it is dull and imperfect; and
perhaps all marine creatures have other means of communication.
There is an instance, however, of musical sounds produced by
marine animals, which seems to show an appreciation of harmony.
In one of the lakes of Ceylon, Sir Emerson Tennent heard soft
musical sounds, like the first faint notes of the aeolian harp
or the faint vibrations of a wineglass when its rim is rubbed
by a wet finger. This curious harmony is supposed to be
produced by a species of testaceous mollusk. A similar
intonation is heard at times along the Florida coast.

Interesting as this may be, as indicating an appreciation of
that systematic order in arrangement which in music is harmony,
it does not alter the fact that to the ears of the diver, save
the cascade of the air through the life-hose, it is a sea of
silence. No shout or spoken word reaches him. Even a
cannon-shot comes to him dull and muffled, or if distant it is
unheard. But a sharp, quick sound, that appears to break the
air, like ice, into sharp radii, can be heard, especially if
struck against anything on the water. The sound of driving a
nail on the ship above, for example, or a sharp tap on the
diving-bell below, is distinctly and reciprocally audible.
Conversation below the surface by ordinary methods is out of
the question, but it can be sustained by placing the metal
helmets of the interlocutors together, thus providing a medium
of conveyance.

The effort to clothe with intelligence subaqueous life must
have been greatly strengthened among primitive nations by the
musical sounds to which I have referred. Those mysterious
breathings were associated with a human will, and gave
forebodings from their very sweetness. Everywhere they are
associated with a passionate or pathetic mystery, and the
widely-spread area over which their island home is portrayed as
existing strengthens the conclusion that the strange music of
the sea belongs not to Ceylon or Florida or the Mediterranean
alone. It affords us another instance, by that common enjoyment
of sweet sounds, of the chain of sympathy between all
intelligent creatures, and better prepares us for familiar
acquaintance with the beings which people the sea. We have
prejudices and preconceived ideas to get rid of, whose strength
has crystallized into aphorisms. “Cold as a fish” and
“fish-eyed” are ordinary expressions. Then the touch of a fish,
cold, slippery, serpent-like, causes an involuntary
shrinking.

But the submarine diver has a new revelation of piscine
character and beauty, and perhaps can better understand the
enticings of a siren or fantastic Lurlei than the classical
scholar. In the flush of aureal light tinging their pearly
glimmering armor are the radiant, graceful, frolicsome
inhabitants of the sea. The glutinous or oily exudation that
covers them is a brilliant varnish. Their lustrous colors,
variety of crystalline tints and beautiful markings and spots,
attract the eye of the artist even in the fish-market; but when
glowing with full life, lively, nimble, playful, surely the
most graceful living creatures of earth, air or sea, the soul
must be blind indeed that can look upon them unmoved.

The dull optic seen glazing in the death-throes upon the
market-stall, with coarse vulgar surroundings, becomes, in its
native element, full of intelligence and light. In even the
smaller fry the round orb glitters like a diamond star. One
cannot see the fish without seeing its eye. It is positive,
persistent, prevalent, the whole animate existence expressed in
it. As far as the fish can be seen its eye is visible. The
glimmer of scales, the grace of perfect motion, the rare golden
pavilion with its jeweled floor and heavy violet curtains,
complete a scene whose harmony of color, radiance and animal
life is perfect. The minnow and sun-perch are the pages of the
tourney on the cloth of gold. There is a fearless familiarity
in these playful little things, a social, frank intimacy with
their novel visitor, that astonishes while it pleases. They
crowd about him, curiously touch him, and regard all his
movements with a frank, lively interest. Nor are the larger
fish shy. The sheeps-head, red and black groper, sea-trout and
other, familiar fish of the sportsman, receive him with frank
bonhommie or fearless curiosity. In their large round beautiful
eyes the diver reads evidence of intelligence and curious
wonder that sometimes startles him with its entirely human
expression. There is a look of interest mixed with curiosity,
leading to the irresistible conclusion of a kindred nature. No
faithful hound or pet doe could express a franker interest in
its eyes. Curiosity, which I take to be expressly destructive
of the now-exploded theory of instinct, is expressed not only
by the eye, but by the movements. As in man there is an eager
passion to handle that which is novel, so these curious
denizens of the sea are persistent in their efforts to touch
the diver. An instance of this occurred, attended with
disagreeable results to one of the parties, and that not the
fish. The Eve of this investigation was a large catfish. These
fish are the true rovers of the water. They have a large round
black eye, full of intelligence and fire: their warlike spines
and gaff-topsails give them the true buccaneer build. One of
these, while the diver was engaged, incited by its fearless
curiosity, slipped up and touched him with its cold nose. The
man involuntarily threw back his hand, and the soft palm
striking the sharp gaff, it was driven into the flesh. There
was an instant’s struggle before the fish wrenched itself loose
from the bleeding member, and then it only swung off a little,
staring with its bold black eyes at the intruder, as if it
wished to stay for further question. It is hard to translate
the expression of that look of curious wonder and surprise
without appearing to exaggerate, but the impression produced
was that if the fish did not speak to him, it was from no lack
of intelligent emotions to be expressed in language.

A prolonged stay in one place gave a diver an opportunity to
test this intelligence further, and to observe the trustful
familiarity of this variety of marine life. He was continually
surrounded at his work by a school of gropers, averaging a foot
in length. An accident having identified one of them, he
observed it was a daily visitor. After the first curiosity the
gropers apparently settled into the belief that the novel
monster was harmless and clumsy, but useful in assisting them
to their food. The species feed on Crustacea and marine worms,
which shelter under rocks, mosses and sunken objects at the
sea-bottom. In raising anything out of the ooze a dozen of
these fish would thrust their heads into the hollow for their
food before the diver’s hand was removed. They would follow him
about, eyeing his motions, dashing in advance or around in
sport, and evidently with a liking for their new-found friend.
Pleased with such an unexpected familiarity, the man would
bring them food and feed them from his hand, as one feeds a
flock of chickens. The resemblance, in their familiarity and
some of their ways, to poultry was, in fact, very striking. As
a little chick will sometimes seize a large crumb and scurry
off, followed by the flock, so a fish would sometimes snatch a
morsel and fly, followed by the school. If he dropped it or
stopped to enjoy his bonne bouche, his mates would be
upon him. Sometimes two would get the same morsel, and there
would be a trial of strength, accompanied with much flash and
glitter of shining scales. But no matter how called off, their
interest and curiosity remained with the diver. They would
return, pushing their noses about him, caressingly in
appearance if not intent, and bob into the treasures of worm
and shell-fish his labor exposed. He became convinced that they
were sportive, indulging in dash and play for the fun of it,
rather than for any grosser object to be attained.

This curious intimacy was continued for weeks: the fish,
unless driven away by some rover of prey of their kind, were in
regular attendance during his hours of work. Perhaps the
solitude and silence of that curious submarine world
strengthened the impression of recognition and intimacy, but by
every criterion we usually accept in terrestrial creation these
little creatures had an interest and a friendly feeling for one
who furnished them food, and who was always careful to avoid
injuring them or giving them any unnecessary alarm. He could
not, of course, take up a fish in his hand, any more than a
chicken will submit to handling; but as to the comparative
tameness of the two, the fish is more approachable than the
chicken. That they knew and expected the diver at the usual
hour was a conclusion impossible to deny, as also that they
grew into familiarity with him, and were actuated by an
intelligent recognition of his service to them. It would be
hard to convince this gentleman that a school of fish cannot be
as readily and completely tamed as a flock of chickens.

Why not? The fear of man is no instinctive feeling in the
invertebrate creation. The pioneer who penetrates into the
uninhabited wilds of our Western frontier finds bird and beast
fearless and familiar. Man’s cruelty is a lesson of experience.
The timid and fearful of the lower creation belong to creatures
of prey. The shark, for example, is as cowardly as the
wolf.

I thought to speak of other marine creations with which the
diver grows acquainted, finding in them only a repetition of
the same degree of life he has seen in the upper world. But let
it be enough to state the conclusion—as yet only an
impression, and perhaps never to be more—that in marine
existence there is to be found the counterpart always of some
animate existence on earth, invertebrate or radiate, in
corresponding animals or insects, between whose habits and
modes of existence strong analogies are found. The shrimps that
hang in clusters on your hand under the water are but winged
insects of the air in another frame that have annoyed you on
the land.

Let me dismiss the subject with the brief account of a diver
caught in a trap.

In the passion of blind destruction that followed and
attended the breaking out of hostilities between the North and
the South, as a child breaks his rival’s playthings, the
barbarism of war destroyed the useful improvements of
civilization. Among the things destroyed by this iconoclastic
fury was the valuable dry-dock in Pensacola Bay. It was burned
to the water’s edge, and sunk. A company was subsequently
organized to rescue the wreck, and in the course of the
submarine labor occurred the incident to which I refer.

The dry-dock was built in compartments, to ensure it against
sinking, but the ingenuity which was to keep it above water now
served effectually to keep it down. Each one of these small
water-tight compartments held the vessel fast to the bottom, as
Gulliver was bound by innumerable threads to the ground of
Lilliput. It was necessary to break severally into the lower
side of each of these chambers, and allow the water to flow
evenly in all. The interior of the hull was checkered by these
boxes. Huge beams and cross-ties intersected each other at
right angles, forming the frame for this honeycombed interior,
pigeon-holed like a merchant’s desk. It was necessary to tear
off the skin and penetrate from one to the other in order to
effect this.

It was a difficult and tedious job under water. The net of
intersecting beams lay so close together that the passage
between was exceedingly narrow and compressed, barely admitting
the diver’s body. The pens, so framed by intersecting beams,
were narrowed and straitened, embarrassing attempts at labor in
them, which the cold, slippery, serpent-like touch of the
sea-water was not likely to make pleasanter. It folded the
shuddering body in its coils, and a most ancient and fish-like
smell did not improve the situation. The toil was multiplied by
the innumerable pigeon-holes, as if they fitted into one
another like a Chinese puzzle, with the unlucky diver in the
middle box. It was a nightmare of the sea, the furniture of a
dream solidified in woody fibre.

Into one of these crowding holes the diver crawled. There
was the tedious work of tearing off the casing to occupy an
hour or more, and when it was accomplished he endeavored to
back out of his situation. He was stopped fast and tight in his
regression. The arrangement of the armor about the head and
shoulders, making a cone whose apex was the helmet, prevented
his exit. It was like the barb of a harpoon, and caught him
fast in the wood. Such a danger is not sudden in its
revelation. There is at first only a feeling of impatience at
the embarrassment, a disposition to “tear things.” In vain
attempts at doubling and other gymnastic feats the diver wasted
several hours, until his companions above became alarmed at the
delay. They renewed and increased their labors at the
force-pump, and the impetuous torrent came surging about the
diver’s ears. It served to complete his danger. It sprung the
trap in which he lay enclosed. The inflated armor swelled and
filled up the crowded spaces. It stiffened out the casing of
the helmet to equal the burden of fifty pounds to the square
inch, and made it as hard as iron. He was caught like the
gluttonous fox. The bulky volume of included air made exit
impossible. It was no longer a labyrinth as before, where
freedom of motion incited courage: he was in the fetters of
wind and water, bound fast to the floor of his dungeon den. He
signaled for the pump to stop. It was the only alternative. He
might die without that life-giving air, but he would certainly
die if its volume was not reduced. The cock at the back of the
helmet for discharging the vessel was out of his reach. The
invention never contemplated a case in which the diver would
perish from the presence of air.

As the armor worn was made tight at the sleeves with elastic
wristbands, his remedy was to insert his fingers under it, and
slowly and tediously allow the bubbling air to escape. In this
he persevered steadily, encouraged by the prospect of escape.
The way was long and difficult, but release certain with the
reduction of that huge bulk.

But a new and subtler danger attacked him—the very wit
of Nature brought to bear upon his force and ingenuity. It was
as if the mysterious sirens of the sea saw in that intellectual
force the real strength of their prisoner, and sought to steal
it from him while they lulled him to indifference. Inhaling and
reinhaling the reduced volume of air, it became carbonized and
foul, not with the warning of sudden oppression, but

The senses, intoxicated by the new companion sent them by
the lungs, began to sport with it, as ignorant children with a
loaded shell, forgetful of duty and the critical condition of
the man. They began to wander in vagaries and delusions. A soft
chime of distant bells rang in his ears with the sweet sleepy
service of a Sabbath afternoon; the sound of hymns and the
organ mingled with the melody and the chant of the sirens of
the sea.

The sensuous beauty, the infinite luxury of repose sung by
the poet, filled and steeped his senses. The desire to sleep
was intoxicating, delicious, irresistible; and with it ran
delicious, restful thrills through all his limbs, the narcotism
of the blood. It was partly, no doubt, the effect of inhaling
that pernicious air; partly that hibernation of the bear which
in the freezing man precedes dissolution; and possibly more
than that, something more than any mere physical
cause—life perhaps preparing to lay this tired body down,
its future usefulness destroyed.

This delicious enervation had to be constantly resisted and
dominated by a superior will. One more strenuous effort to
relieve that straitened garrison, to release that imprisoned
and fettered body, and then, if that failed, an unconditional
surrender to the armies of eternal steep. But it did not fail.
That constant, persevering tugging of the fingers at the
wristbands, pursued mechanically in that strange condition of
pleasing stupor, had reduced the exaggerated distensions of the
bulbous head-gear. A stout, energetic push set the diver free,
and he was drawn to the surface dazed, drowsy, and only half
conscious of the peril undergone. But with the rush of fresh,
untainted air to the lungs came an emotion of gratitude to the
Giver of life and the full consciousness of escape.

And this sums up my sketch illustrative of the peculiar
character of marine life, and the hazards of submarine
adventure, hitherto known to few, for—well, for
divers reasons.

WILL WALLACE HARNEY.

CONFIDENTIAL.

My ear has ever been considered public property for private
usage. I cannot call to mind the time when I was not somebody’s
confidante, the business beginning as far back as the winter I
ran down to Aunt Rally’s to receive my birthday-party of sweet
or bitter sixteen, as will appear.

Ralph Romer was the first to spread the news of my arrival
in the village among the girls of my own age. Ralph Romer it
was who had braved the dangers of “brier and brake” to find the
bright holly berries with which Aunt Hally had decorated the
cheery little parlor for the occasion; and it was with Ralph
Romer I danced the oftenest on that famous night.

“Wouldn’t I just step out on the porch a short little
minute,” he whispered as he came around in the rear of Aunt
Hally to bid me good-night, ending the whisper, according to
the style of all boy-lovers, “I’ve got something to tell
you.”

The door stood open and conveniently near, and I suppose I
wanted to see how high the snow had drifted since dark; and, a
better reason still, I couldn’t afford to let Ralph take my
hand off with him; and so I had to go out on the porch just
long enough to get it back, while he said: “Ettie Moore says
she loves me, and we are going to correspond when I go back to
college; and as you know all lovers and their sweethearts must
have a confidante to smuggle letters and valentines across the
lines, we have both chosen you for ours. Oh, I was so afraid
you wouldn’t come!”

I found the snow had drifted—-well, I don’t believe I
knew how many inches.

I have not promised a recital of all my auricular
experiences. Enough to say, that in time I settled down into
the conviction that it was my special mission to be the
receptacle of other people’s secrets; and they seemed
determined to convince me that they thought so too.

So, when Mr. Tennent Tremont happened along and became a
candidate for auricular favors, like a tradesman who has gained
the self-sustaining ground which has made him indifferent as to
custom-seeking, I could afford to be entirely independent about
giving a previous promise to keep his secrets for him; and so,
dear reader, they are as much yours as mine.

When my brother introduced him into our family circle we
took him to be a Northern college-chum, met with during his
just-returned-from-trip to Washington; for it was in those days
when Southern hospitality was as much appreciated as it was
liberally bestowed. It was a good time for a modest stranger to
come among new faces. We were in the flutter and bustle which a
wedding in the family makes, and it gave him an opportunity to
get used to us, and left us none to observe him unpleasantly
much.

But when the wedding was over, and I had made up my week of
lost sleep, and he and my brother had kept themselves out of
the way on a camp-hunt, for my mother to do up her week of
house-cleaning,—it is here that our story proper
begins.

As we were leaving the breakfast-table one morning my
brother caught my dress-sleeve, and, dropping in the rear of
Mr. Tennent Tremont, allowed him to find the verandah: “Really,
sis, I don’t think you are doing the clever thing, quite.”

“How?”

“Why, in not helping me to entertain my friend.”

“Getting tired of him?”

“No, he isn’t one of that kind; but, to tell the truth, I am
too busy just now to give him the whole of my time.”

“Too busy turning your own cakes. Yes, I see.”

“Which is no more than my sister is doing; which reminds me
to say that J.B. will call this morning, he desired me to
inform you. But, dear sis, we must not be so absorbed in our
own love-matters as to give my friend only a moiety of our
attention, for, poor fellow! he has one of his own.”

“So I am to bore him for the sake of relieving you? Is that
my role?”

“Now stop! He simply wants a lady confidante.”

I broke away from my brother’s hold, and ran up to my room
to see if all was right for my expected caller, giving my right
ear a pull, by way of saying to that victimized organ, “You are
needed.”

And what think you I did next? Got out my
embroidery-material bag, and put it in order for action at a
moment’s warning. I was prepared for a reasonable amount of
martyrdom pertaining to my profession, but I was always an
economist of time, and not another unemployed hour would I
yield to the selfish demands of my forthcoming job.

The next day was one of November drizzle, the house
confinement of which, my adroit brother declared, could only be
mitigated by my presence in the sitting-room until the improved
state of the weather allowed their escape from it.

I was in the habit of appropriating such weather to my
piano, and I had not touched it for a month. Whether Mr.
Tennent Tremont’s nerves were in a sound state or not, I was
determined to practice until twelve. But when he came in from
the library and assisted me in opening the instrument, I was
obliged to ask him what he would have. They were my first
direct words to him, our three weeks’ guest.

“Oh, ‘Summer Night’ is a favorite,” he said.

I gave him the song, and then executed the long variations;
then, dropping my tired hands in my lap, inquired whether he
liked vocal or instrumental best.

“Not any more of either, just now, thanking you kindly for
what you have given me,” he said. “Have you ever been a
confidante, Miss ——?”

“That is my vocation, Mr. Tremont,” I replied, grasping my
bag.

“Which? your embroidery or—”

“Both combined,” I tried to say pleasantly, “as on this
occasion. I am at Mr. Tremont’s service;” and I threaded my
tapestry-needle.

Without a prefatory word he began: “Years before your young
heart was awakened to ‘the sweetest joy, the wildest woe,’ I
loved.”

“And single yet!” I exclaimed as I let my hands drop and
glanced up at his brown hair, to see if all those years had
left their silver footprints there.

“And single yet,” he repeated slowly, “and still worshiping
at the same shrine; and to no other will I ever bow until this
head is silvered o’er, and this strong arm palsied with the
infirmities of age—if a long life is indeed to be
mine.”

His ardor startled me, but I managed to stitch away
composedly, and he went on:

“I know it is in the highest degree selfish to inflict on
you a recital of what may not interest you; but I have tried to
keep my secret buried from human eyes, from all but
hers, and you are now the only being on earth to whom I
have ever said, ‘I love.’ As intimate as I have been
with your brother, if he knows it, it is by his penetration,
for no word of acknowledgment has ever passed my lips before.
May I go on?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” I answered, taken by surprise. “I suppose so. It
is a relief to talk, and to listen, I have told you, is my
vocation.”

“How long can you listen?” he questioned in delighted
eagerness.

I fancied he would have to be allowanced, and I held up my
paper pattern before me: “This bouquet of flowers is to be
transferred. I will give you all the time it will take to do
it. Remember, the catastrophe must be reached by that time.
Some one else will probably want my ear.”

“But,” said he, “listening is not the only duty of a
confidante: you must aid me by your counsel. Only a woman may
say how a woman may be won.”

“You have my sympathies, Mr. Tremont, on the score of your
being a very dear brother’s friend. I know nothing of
her—next to nothing of you. I can neither counsel nor aid
you.”

“That brother is familiar with every page of my outward
life-history. It was in our family he spent his vacation, while
you and your father were traveling in Europe.”

“Well, then, that will do about yourself. Now about
her?”

The door-bell was rung: the waiter announced—well, my
obliging brother has already given enough of his
name—”Mr. J.B.” My confessor withdrew.

The next morning, as I was bringing the freshened
flower-vases into the sitting-room, he brought me my bag,
saying, “Now about her.”

I opened the piano, repeated his favorite, kept my seat and
cultivated my roses vigorously.

“Miss —— ,” he began, “I would not knowingly
give pain to a human creature. Yesterday, when your visitor
found me by your side, I observed a frown on his face. I detest
obtrusiveness, but if there is anything in the relation in
which you stand to each other which will make my attentions
objectionable to either of you, they shall cease this moment.
You are at perfect liberty to repeat to him every word I have
said to you.”

“I thank you sincerely for your considerateness,” I said. “I
am under no obligations of the kind to him or any other
gentleman.”

He introduced his topic by saying: “I am glad that I shall
have to say little more of myself. Oh, what a strange joy it is
to be able to speak unreservedly of her, and of the long
pent-up hopes and fears of the past years! And now, if you will
assist me in interpreting her conduct toward me—if you
will inspire me with even faint hope of success—if you
will advise me as you would a brother how to
proceed,—gratitude will be too weak a word for my feeling
toward you for the remainder of my life.”

“I have not yet sufficient light on her part of the affair
to aid you by advice,” I answered. “In these slowly-developing
love-affairs there is usually but one great hindering cause. Do
you know,” I said, laughing as much as I dared, looking into
his woebegone face, “that you have not told me what has passed
between you?”

His moment or two of death silence made me almost regret my
last words.

“In the first of our acquaintance I was ever tortured by her
indifference. My first attentions were quietly received, never
encouraged. Then came the still more torturing fear—agony
let me call it—lest she was pre-engaged. Thank God! that
burden was lifted from my poor heart, but only, it seemed, to
make room for the very one of all in the catalogue of causes by
which a lover’s hope dies beyond the possibility of a
resurrection. It is the rock—no, I fear the placid waters
of friendship into which my freighted bark is now
drifting—which may lie between it and the bright isle of
love, the safe harbor” (he shuddered), “not the blissful
possession.”

Reader, the roses were not growing under my needle: my
sympathies were at last fully enlisted.

“You have well said,” I answered. “Friendship is the ‘nine
notch’ in which a lover makes ‘no count’ in the game of hearts.
But steer bravely past these dark gulfs of despair. Have you
ever had recourse to jealousy in your desperation?” I
queried.

“I scorn such a base ally. Your brother can tell you I am
here partly because I would avoid increasing an affection in
another which I cannot return.”

“Does she know of that?” I asked, not at all prepared in my
own mind to yield the potency of the ally in my sincere desire
to aid him by this test of a woman’s affection.

“Yes: I have no reason, however, for thinking that the fact
has raised her estimate of the article,” he said, making a poor
attempt to smile.

I felt ashamed of my suggestion, and said quickly, “You
correspond, of course: how are her letters?” Now I was sure of
my safest clue in finding her out.

“It was through the medium of her letters that I first
obtained my knowledge of her mind, her temperament, her
disposition, her admirable domestic virtues; for they were
written without reserve. They excited my highest admiration;
they stimulated my desire to know more of her; but they contain
no word of love for me.”

His want of boldness almost excited my contempt. My skill
was baffled on every side, and, not caring much to conceal my
impatience, I said, “You have asked me to advise you as I would
my brother. She is cold and selfish: give her up.”

“Give her up!” he said with measured and emphatic
slowness—”give her up, when I have sought her beneath
every clime on which the sun shines—not for months, but
for years? Give her up, when her presence gives me all I have
ever known of happiness? Give her up!” and he leaned his head
on the back of his chair and closed his eyes.

I had imagined him gifted with wonderful self-control, but
when I looked up from my work all color had faded from his
cheeks, the lips seemed ready to yield the little blood left
there by the clinch of the white-teeth upon them, while every
muscle of the face quivered with spasmodic effort to control
emotion. When the eyes were opened and fixed on the ceiling, I
saw no trace in them of anger, revenge, or even of wounded
pride. They were full of tears, ready to gush in one last
flood-tide of feeling over a subdued, chastened, but breaking
heart.

It was very evident that my treatment was not adding much
comfort to my patient, however salutary it might prove in the
end. I knew of his intention to leave the next day: there was
little time left me to aid him, and I had come to regard the
unknown woman’s mysterious nature or strategic warfare as
pitted against my superior penetration. That he might be
victorious she must be vanquished. She was, then, my
antagonist.

The deepening twilight was producing chilliness. I flooded
the room with brilliant light, stirred the grate into glowing
warmth, and invited him to a seat near the fire.

“You will not leave me, will you? This may be—it
will be—my last demand on you as a confidante. How is
the bouquet progressing?” he asked.

“See,” I said, holding my embroidery up before me: “we must
hurry. I have but one more tendril to add.”

“Tendrils are clinging things, like hope, are they not?” he
said pensively.

But sentimentalizing was not the business of the hour, and I
intimated as much to him. “Yes,” I replied, “but hope must now
give place to effort. I see you are not going to take my
‘give-her-up’ advice.”

“No—only from her who has the right to give it.”

I now considered my patient out of danger.

“Then why do you torture yourself longer with doubts?
Perhaps your irresolution has caused a want of confidence in
the strength of your affection. At least give her an
opportunity to define her true position toward you. Beard the
lions of indifference and friendship in their dens, and do not
yield to unmanly cowardice. Strange that I have given you the
counsel last which should have been given first! But do not, I
beseech you, lose any time in seeking her. Assure her of your
long and unwavering devotion. Constancy is the most valued word
in a true woman’s vocabulary. You have staked too much
happiness to lose: you must win.”

“And if I lose,” he said—holding up something before
him which I took to be a picture, though it was in the shape of
a heart—”and if I lose, then perish all of earth to me.
But leave me only this, and should I hold you thus, and gaze on
what I have first and last and only loved until this perishable
material on which I have placed you turn to dust, still will
you be graven on a heart whose deathless love can know no
death; for a thing so holy as the love I bear you was not made
to die.”

My work—now my completed work—dropped beneath my
fingers, for the last stitch was taken.

If I could not prevent his self-torture, he should not, at
least, torture me longer; and snatching the thing from his
grasp, I exclaimed as I closed my hands over it, “Now, before I
return it, you must, you shall, promise me that you will
take the last advice I gave you; or will you allow me to look
at it, and then unseal the silent lips and give you the
prophetic little ‘yes’ or ‘no’ which a professed physiognomist
like your confidante can always read in the eye?”

“I would rather you did the last,” he said; and I rose,
leaned my elbow on the corner of the mantel nearest the
gaslight, rested my head on my empty hand, so as to shade my
eyes from the intensity of the brilliant burner near me, and
with the awe creeping over me with which the old astrologers
read the horoscope of the midnight stars, I looked, and
saw—only a wonderfully faithful copy of the portrait
hanging just over me, of which Mr. Tennent Tremont’s confidante
was the original. I threw it from me, and burst into tears. He
stood quite near me. I thought I hated him, but my obtuse,
blundering, idiotic self more than him. I waved my hand in
token either of his silence or withdrawal, for in all my life
long I, with a whole dictionary in my mind of abusive epithets,
was never more at a loss for a word. My token was unheeded.

He only murmured softly,

When you snatched my picture from me a moment ago I saw a
glistening tear of sympathy in your eye; but what are
these?”

“So cruel! so ungenerous! so unfair!” I said, still pressing
my hands tightly over my eyes. “How can I ever forgive
you?”

With softer murmur than the last he repeated the words,

“Astounding presumption that!” I said, now giving him the
benefit of my full gaze—”to speak of pardon before making
a confession of your guilt! But before I give you time even for
that, the remaining mysteries which still hang around your tale
of woe shall be cleared up. Please to inform the court how the
original of your purloined sketch could have been the object of
years of devotion, when it has been only four weeks to-day
since you laid your mortal eyes on her?”

“Ah! you may well say mortal; but you know the soul too has
its visual organs. I saw and loved and worshiped my ideal in
those years, and sought her too—how
unceasingly!—and I said,

When I saw her just four weeks since, I knew her,

But the avenging demon of curiosity was not to be exorcised
by sentimental evasion: “Those letters, sir, of which you
spoke, they must have been of a real, tangible
form—not a part of the mythical phantasmagoria of your
idealistic vision.”

He laughed as a light-hearted child would, but knitted his
brow with a perplexed air as he said, “Why don’t the British
government send a woman to find the source of the Nile? I must
thank your unsophisticated brother’s pride in his sister’s
epistolary accomplishments for my privilege of perusal. What
next?”

I thought a moment. Before, I had fifty other queries to
propound, but now as I looked into the glowing anthracite
before me which gave us those pleasant Reveries, they very
naturally all resolved themselves into explained mysteries
without his aid.

He insists that the “prophetic little yes or no” never
came.

Upon my honor, dear reader, as a confidante, I still think
it the most unfair procedure which ever “disgraced the annals
of civilized warfare;” but I shall have abundant opportunity
for revenge, for we are to make the journey of life
together.

GLIMPSES OF JOHN CHINAMAN.

When John Marshall picked up the first golden nugget in
California, a call was sounded for the gathering of an immense
gold-seeking army made up of many nationalities; and among the
rest China sent a battalion some fifty thousand strong.

John Chinaman has remained with us ever since, despised and
abused, being neither a co-worshiper nor a co-sympathizer in
aught save the getting of gold. In dress, custom and language
his is still a nationality as distinct from ours as are the
waters of the Gulf Stream from those of the ocean.

It is possible that this may be but the second migration of
Tartars to the American shore. It is possible that the North
American Indian and the Chinaman may be identical in origin and
race. Close observers find among the aboriginal tribes resident
far up on the north-west American coast peculiar habits and
customs, having closely-allied types among the Chinese. The
features of the Aleuts, the natives of the Aleutian Islands,
are said to approximate closely to those of the Mongolians. The
unvarying long black hair, variously-shaded brown skin,
beardless face and shaven head are points, natural and
artificial, common to the Indian and Mongolian. There is a hint
of common custom between the Indian scalplock and Chinese
cue.

“John” has been a thorough gleaner of the mines. The
“superior race” allowed him to make no valuable discoveries. He
could buy their half-worked-out placers. The “river-bed” they
sold him when its chances of yielding were deemed desperate.
When the golden fruitage of the banks was reduced to a dollar
per day, they became “China diggings.” But wherever “John”
settled he worked steadily, patiently and systematically, no
matter whether his ten or twelve hours’ labor brought fifty
cents or fifty dollars; for his industry is of an untiring
mechanical character. In the earlier and flusher days of
California’s gold-harvest the white man worked spasmodically.
He was ever leaving the five-dollar diggings in hand for the
fifty- or hundred-dollar-per-day claims afar off in some
imaginary bush. These golden rumors were always on the wing.
The country was but half explored, and many localities were
rich in mystery. The white vanguard pushed north, south and
east, frequently enduring privation and suffering. “John,” in
comparative comfort, trotted patiently after, carrying his
snugly made-up bundle of provisions and blankets at one end of
a bamboo pole, his pick, shovel, pan and rocker at the other,
to work over the leavings. The leavings sometimes turned out
more gold than “new ground,” much to the chagrin of the
impatient Caucasian. But John, according to his own testimony,
never owned a rich claim. Ask him how much it yielded per day,
and he would tell you, “sometimes four, sometimes six bittee”
(four or six shillings). He had many inducements for
prevarication. Nearly every white man’s hand was against him.
If he found a bit of rich ground, “jumpers” were ready to drive
him from it: Mexicans waylaid him and robbed him of his dust.
In remote localities he enclosed his camp by strong stockades:
even these were sometimes forced and carried at night by bands
of desperadoes. Lastly came the foreign miner’s tax-collector,
with his demand of four dollars monthly per man for the
privilege of digging gold. There were hundreds and thousands of
other foreign laborers in the mines—English, German,
French, Italian and Portuguese—but they paid little or
none of this tax, for they might soon be entitled to a vote,
and the tax-collector was appointed by the sheriff of the
county, and the sheriff, like other officials, craved a
re-election. But John was never to be a voter, and so he
shouldered the whole of this load, and when he could not pay,
the official beat him and took away his tools. John often
fought this persecutor by strategy. In localities where no
white men would betray him he signalized his coming from afar.
From the crags of Red Mountain on the Tuolumne River I have
often seen the white flag waved as the dreaded collector came
down the steep trail to collect his monthly dues. That signal
or a puff of smoke told the Chinese for miles along the
river-valley to conceal themselves from the “license-man.”
Rockers, picks and shovels were hastily thrust into clumps of
chapparal, and their owners clambered up the hillsides into
artificial caves or leafy coverts. Out of companies of fifty
the collector finds but twenty men at work. These pay their
tax, the official rides on down the river, the hidden thirty
Mongolians emerge from cover; and more than once has a keen
collector “doubled on them” by coming back unexpectedly and
detecting the entire gang on their claim.

John has been invaluable to the California demagogue,
furnishing for him a sop of hatred and prejudice to throw
before “enlightened constituencies.” It needs but to mention
the “filthy Chinaman” to provoke an angry roar from the
mass-meeting. Yet the Chinaman is not entirely filthy. He
washes his entire person every day when practicable; he loves
clean clothes; his kitchen-utensils will bear inspection. When
the smallpox raged so severely in San Francisco a few years
since, there were very few deaths among his race. But John
is not nice about his house. He seems to have none of
our ideas concerning home comfort. Smoke has no terror for him;
soap he keeps entirely for his clothes and person; floor-and
wall-washing are things never hinted at; and the refuse of his
table is scarcely thrown out of doors. Privacy is not one of
his luxuries—he wants a house full: where there is room
for a bunk, there is room for a man. An anthill, a beehive, a
rabbit-warren are his models of domestic comfort: what is
stinted room for two Americans is spaciousness for a dozen
Chinese. Go into one of their cabins at night, and you are in
an oven full of opium- and lamp-smoke. Recumbent forms are
dimly seen lying on bunks above and below. The chattering is
incessant. Stay there ten minutes, and as your eye becomes
accustomed to the smoke you will dimly see blue bundles lying
on shelves aloft. Anon the bundles stir, talk and puff smoke.
Above is a loft six feet square: a ladder brings it in
communication with the ground floor. Mongolians are ever coming
down, but the gabble of tongues above shows that a host is
still left. Like an omnibus, a Chinese house is never full. Nor
is it ever quiet. At all hours of the night may be heard their
talk and the clatter of their wooden shoes. A Chinaman does not
retire like an American, intending to make a serious business
of his night’s sleeping. He merely “lops down” half dressed,
and is ready to arise at the least call of business or
pleasure.

While at work in his claim his fire is always kindled near
by, and over it a tea-pot. This is his beverage every half
hour. His tea must be hot, strong and without milk or sugar. He
also consumes a terrible mixture sold him by white traders,
called indiscriminately brandy, gin or whisky, yet an
intoxicated Chinaman is the rarest of rare sights. Rice he can
cook elegantly, every grain being steamed to its utmost degree
of distension. Soup he makes of no other meat than pork. The
poorest among his hordes must have a chicken or duck for his
holiday. He eats it merely parboiled. He will eat dog also,
providing it is not long past maturity.

The Chinese grocery-stores are museums to the American.
There are strange dried roots, strange dried fish, strange
dried land and marine plants, ducks and chickens, split,
pressed thin and smoked; dried shellfish; cakes newly made,
yellow, glutinous and fatty, stamped with tea-box characters;
and great earthen jars filled with rottenness. I speak
correctly if perhaps too forcibly, for when those imposing jars
are opened to serve a customer with some manner of vegetable
cut in long strips, the native-born American finds it expedient
to hold his nose. American storekeepers in the mines deal
largely in Chinese goods. They know the Mongolian names of the
articles inquired for, but of their character, their
composition, how they are cooked or how eaten, they can give no
information. It is heathenish “truck,” by whose sale they make
a profit. Only that and nothing more.

A Chinese miner’s house is generally a conglomeration of old
boards, mats, brush, canvas and stones. Rusty sheets of tin
sometimes help to form the edifice. Anything lying about loose
in the neighborhood is certain in time to form a part of the
Mongolian mansion.

When the white man abandons mining-ground he often leaves
behind very serviceable frame houses. John comes along to glean
the gold left by the Caucasian. He builds a cluster of
shapeless huts. The deserted white man’s house gradually
disappears. A clapboard is gone, and then another, and finally
all. The skeleton of the frame remains: months pass away; piece
by piece the joists disappear; some morning they are found
tumbled in a heap, and at last nothing is left save the cellar
and chimneys. Meantime, John’s clusters of huts swell their
rude proportions, but you must examine them narrowly to detect
any traces of your vanished house, for he revels in smoke, and
everything about him is soon colored to a hue much resembling
his own brownish-yellow countenance. Thus he picks the
domiciliary skeleton bare, and then carries off the bones. He
is a quiet but skillful plunderer. John No. 1 on his way home
from his mining-claim rips off a board; John No. 2 next day
drags it a few yards from the house. John No. 3 a week
afterward drags it home. In this manner the dissolution of your
house is protracted for months. In this manner he distributes
the responsibility of the theft over his entire community. I
have seen a large boarding-house disappear in this way, and
when the owner, after a year’s absence, revisited the spot to
look after his property, he found his real estate reduced to a
cellar.

John himself is a sort of museum in his character and
habits. We must be pardoned for giving details of these,
mingled promiscuously, rather after the museum style. His New
Year comes in February. For the Chinaman of limited means it
lasts a week, for the wealthy it may endure three. His
consumption of fire-crackers during that period is immense. He
burns strings a yard in length suspended from poles over his
balconies. The uproar and sputtering consequent on this
festivity in the Chinese quarter at San Francisco is
tremendous. The city authorities limit this Celestial
Pandemonium to a week.

He does not forsake the amusement of kite-flying even when
arrived at maturity. His artistic imitations of birds and
dragons float over our housetops. To these are often affixed
contrivances for producing hollow, mournful, buzzing sounds,
mystifying whole neighborhoods. His game of shuttlecock is to
keep a cork, one end being stuck with feathers, flying in the
air as long as possible, the impelling member being the foot,
the players standing in a circle and numbering from four to
twenty. Some show great dexterity in kicking with the heel. His
vocal music to our ears seems a monotonous caterwaul. His
violin has but one string: his execution is merely a modified
species of saw-filing.

He loves to gamble, especially in lotteries. He is a
diligent student of his own comfort. Traveling on foot during a
hot day, he protects himself with an umbrella and refreshes
himself with a fan. In place of prosaic signs on his
store-fronts, he often inscribes quotations from his favorite
authors.

He is a lover of flowers. His balconies and window-sills are
often thickly packed with shrubs and creepers in pots. He is
not a speedy and taciturn eater. His tea-table talks are full
of noisy jollity, and are often prolonged far into the
night.

He is a lover of the drama. A single play sometimes requires
months for representation, being, like a serial story,
“continued” night after night. He never dances. There is no
melody in the Mongolian foot. Dancing he regards as a species
of Caucasian insanity.

To make an oath binding he must swear by the head of a cock
cut off before him in open court. Chinese testimony is not
admissible in American courts. It is a legal California axiom
that a Chinaman cannot speak the truth. But cases have occurred
wherein, he being an eye-witness, the desire to hear what he
might tell as to what he had seen has proved stronger
than the prejudice against him; and the more effectually to
clinch the chances of his telling the truth, the above, his
national form of oath, has been resorted to. He has among us
some secret government of his own. Before his secret tribunals
more than one Mongolian has been hurried in Star-Chamber
fashion, and never seen afterward. The nature of the offences
thus visited by secret and bloody punishment is scarcely known
to Americans. He has two chief deities—a god and a devil.
Most of his prayers are offered to his devil. His god, he says,
being good and well-disposed, it is not necessary to propitiate
him. But his devil is ugly, and must be won over by offering
and petition. Once a year, wherever collected in any number, he
builds a flimsy sort of temple, decorates it with ornaments of
tinsel, lays piles of fruit, meats and sugared delicacies on an
altar, keeps up night and day a steady crash of gongs, and
installs therein some great, uncouth wooden idols. When this
period of worship is over the “josh-house” disappears, and the
idols are unceremoniously stowed away among other useless
lumber.

He shaves with an instrument resembling a butcher’s cleaver
in miniature. Nature generally denies him beard, so he shaves
what a sailor would term the fore and after part of his head.
He reaps his hirsute crop dry, using no lather. His cue is
pieced out by silken braid, so interwoven as gradually to taper
into a slim tassel, something like a Missouri mule-driver’s
“black snake” whip-lash. To lose this cue is to lose caste and
standing among his fellows. No misfortune for him can be
greater.

Coarse cowhide boots are the only articles of American wear
that he favors. He inclines to buy the largest sizes, thinking
he thereby gets the most for his money, and when his No. 7 feet
wobble and chafe in No. 12 boots he complains that they “fit
too much.”

He cultivates the vegetables of his native land in
California. They are curiosities like himself. One resembles
our string-bean, but is circular in shape and from two to three
feet in length. It is not in the least stringy, breaks off
short and crisp, boils tender very quickly and affords
excellent eating. He is a very careful cultivator, and will
spend hours picking off dead leaves and insects from the young
plants. When he finds a dead cat, rat, dog or chicken, he
throws it into a small vat of water, allows it to decompose,
and sprinkles the liquid fertilizer thus obtained over his
plantation. Watermelon and pumpkin seeds are for him dessert
delicacies. He consumes his garden products about half cooked
in an American culinary point of view, merely wilting them by
an immersion in boiling water.

There are about fifteen English words to be learned by a
Chinaman on arriving in California, and no more. With these he
expresses all his wants, and with this limited stock you must
learn to convey all that is needful to him. The practice thus
forced upon one in employing a Chinese servant is useful in
preventing a circumlocutory habit of speech. Many of our
letters the Mongolian mouth has no capacity for sounding.
R he invariably sounds like l, so that the word
“rice” he pronounces “lice”—a bit of information which
may prevent an unpleasant apprehension when you come to employ
a Chinese cook. He rejects the English personal pronoun I, and
uses the possessive “my” in its place; thus, “My go home,” in
place of “I go home.”

When he buries a countryman he throws from the hearse into
the air handfuls of brown tissue-paper slips, punctured with
Chinese characters. Sometimes, at his burial-processions, he
gives a small piece of money to every person met on the road.
Over the grave he beats gongs and sets off packs of
fire-crackers. On it he leaves cooked meats, drink, delicacies
and lighted wax tapers. Eventually the bones are disinterred
and shipped to his native land. In the remotest
mining-districts of California are found Chinese graves thus
opened and emptied of their inmates. I have in one instance
seen him, so far as he was permitted, render some of these
funeral honors to an American. The deceased had gained this
honor by treating the Chinese as though they were partners in
our common humanity. “Missa Tom,” as he was termed by them,
they knew they could trust. He acquired among them a reputation
as the one righteous American in their California Gomorrah.
Chinamen would come to him from distant localities, that he
might overlook their bills of sale and other documents used in
business intercourse with the white man. Their need of such, an
honest adviser was great. The descendants of the Pilgrim
Fathers often took advantage of their ignorance of the English
language, written or spoken. “Missa Tom” suddenly died. I had
occasion to visit his farm a few days after his death, and on
the first night of my stay there saw the array of meats, fruit,
wine and burning tapers on a table in front of the house, which
his Chinese friends told me was intended as an offering to
“Missa Tom’s” spirit.

We will dive for a moment into a Chinese wash-cellar. “John”
does three-fourths of the washing of California. His lavatories
are on every street. “Hip Tee, Washing and Ironing,” says the
sign, evidently the first production of an amateur in
lettering. Two doors above is the establishment of Tong
Wash—two below, that of Hi Sing. Hip Tee and five
assistants are busy ironing. The odor is a trinity of steam,
damp clothes and opium. More Mongolian tongues are heard from
smoky recesses in the rear. As we enter, Hip Tee is blowing a
shower of moisture from his mouth, “very like a whale.” This is
his method of dampening the linen preparatory to ironing. It is
a skilled performance. The fluid leaves his lips as fine as
mist. If we are on business we leave our bundles, and in return
receive a ticket covered with hieroglyphics. These indicate the
kind and number of the garments left to be cleansed, and some
distinguishing mark (supposing this to be our first patronage
of Hip Tee) by which we may be again identified. It may be by a
pug nose, a hare lip, red hair, no hair or squint eyes. They
never ask one’s name, for they can neither pronounce nor write
it when it is given. The ticket is an unintelligible tracery of
lines, curves, dots and dashes, made by a brush dipped in India
ink on a shred of flimsy Chinese paper. It may teem with abuse
and ridicule, but you must pocket all that, and produce it on
calling again, or your shirts and collars go into the Chinese
Circumlocution Wash-house Office. It is very difficult getting
one’s clothes back if the ticket be lost—very. Hip Tee
now dabs a duplicate of your ticket in a long book, and all is
over. You will call on Saturday night for your linen. You do
so. There is apparently the same cellar, the same smell of
steam, damp clothes and opium, the same sputter of sprinkling
water, and apparently the same Hip Tee and assistants with
brown shaven foreheads and long cues hanging straight down
behind or coiled in snake-like fashion about their craniums.
You present your ticket. Hip Tee examines it and shakes his
head. “No good—oder man,” he says, and points up the
street. You are now perplexed and somewhat alarmed. You say:
“John, I want my clothes. I left them here last Monday. You
gave me that ticket.” “No,” replies Hip Tee very decidedly,
“oder man;” and again he waves his arm upward. Then you are
wroth. You abuse, expostulate, entreat, and talk a great deal
of English, and some of it very strong English, which Hip Tee
does not understand; and Hip Tee talks a great deal of Chinese,
and perhaps strong Chinese, which you do not understand. You
commence sentences in broken Chinese and terminate them in
unbroken English. Hip Tee commences sentences in broken English
and terminates them in pure Chinese, from a like inability to
express his indignation in a foreign tongue. “What for you no
go oder man? No my ticket—tung sung lung, ya hip
kee—ping!” he cries; and all this time the
assistants are industriously ironing and spouting mist, and
leisurely making remarks in their sing-song unintelligibility
which you feel have uncomplimentary reference to yourself.
Suddenly a light breaks upon you. This is not Hip Tee’s cellar,
this is not Hip Tee. It is the establishment of Hi Sing. This
is Hi Sing himself who for the last half hour has been
endeavoring with his stock of fifteen English words to make you
understand that you are in the wrong house. But these Chinese,
as to faces and their wash-houses, and all the paraphernalia of
their wash-houses, are so much alike that this is an easy
mistake to make. You find the lavatory of Hip Tee, who
pronounces the hieroglyphics all correct, and delivers you your
lost and found shirts clean, with half the buttons broken, and
the bosoms pounded, scrubbed and frayed into an irregular sort
of embroidery.

“He can only dig, cook and wash,” said the American miner
contemptuously years ago: “he can’t work rock.” To work rock in
mining parlance is to be skillful in boring Earth’s stony husk
after mineral. It is to be proficient in sledging, drilling and
blasting. The Chinaman seemed to have no aptitude for this
labor. He was content to use his pick and shovel in the
gravel-banks: metallic veins of gold, silver or copper he left
entirely to the white man.

Yet it was a great mistake to suppose he could not “work
rock,” or do anything else required of him. John is a most apt
and intelligent labor-machine. Show him once your tactics in
any operation, and ever after he imitates them as accurately as
does the parrot its memorized sentences. So when the Pacific
Railroad was being bored through the hard granite of the
Sierras it was John who handled the drill and sledge as well as
the white laborer. He was hurled by thousands on that immense
work, and it was the tawny hand of China that hewed out
hundreds of miles for the transcontinental pathway. Nor is this
all. He is crowding into one avenue of employment after another
in California. He fills our woolen- and silk-mills; he makes
slippers and binds shoes; he is skilled in the use of the
sewing-machine; cellar after cellar in San Francisco is filled
with these Celestial brownies rolling cigars; his fishing-nets
are in every bay and inlet; he is employed in scores of the
lesser establishments for preserving fruit, grinding salt,
making matches, etc. He would quickly jump into the places of
the carpenter, mason and blacksmith were he allowed, for there
are numbers of them whose knowledge of these and other trades
is sufficient at least to render them useful as assistants. He
is handy on shipboard: the Panama steamers carry Chinese
foremast hands. He is preferred as a house-servant: the Chinese
boy of fourteen or sixteen learns quickly to cook and wash in
American fashion. He is neat in person, can be easily ruled,
does not set up an independent sovereignty in the kitchen, has
no followers, will not outshine his mistress in attire; and,
although not perfect, yet affords a refreshing change from our
Milesian tyrants of the roast and wash-tub. But when you catch
this Celestial domestic treasure, be sure that the first
culinary operations performed for his instruction are correctly
manipulated, for his imitativeness is of a cast-iron rigidity.
Once in the mould, it can only with great difficulty be
altered. Burn your toast or your pudding, and he is apt to
regard the accident as the rule.

The young Chinese, especially in San Francisco, are anxious
to acquire an English education. They may not attend the public
schools. A few years since certain Chinese mission-schools were
established by the joint efforts of several religious
denominations. Young ladies and gentlemen volunteered their
services on Sunday to teach these Chinese children to read.
They make eager, apt and docile pupils. Great is their pride on
mastering a few lines of English text. They become much
attached to their teachers, and it is possible, if the vote of
the latter were taken, it would evidence more liking for their
yellow, long-cued pupils than for any class of white children.
But while so assiduous to learn, it is rather doubtful whether
much real religious impression is made upon them. It is
possible that their home-training negatives that.

We have spoken entirely of the Chinaman. What of the
Chinawoman in America? In California the word “Chinawoman” is
synonymous with what is most vile and disgusting. Few, very
few, of a respectable class are in the State. The slums of
London and New York are as respectable thoroughfares compared
with the rows of “China alleys” in the heart of San Francisco.
These can hardly be termed “abandoned women.” They have had no
sense of virtue, propriety or decency to abandon. They are
ignorant of the disgrace of their calling: if the term may be
allowed, they pursue it innocently. Many are scarcely more than
children. They are mere commodities, being by their own
countrymen bought in China, shipped and consigned to factors in
California, and there sold for a term of years.

The Chinaman has bitter enemies in San Francisco: they
thirst to annihilate him. He is accustomed to blows and
brickbats; he is legitimate game for rowdies, both grown and
juvenile; and children supposed to be better trained can scarce
resist the temptation of snatching at his pig-tail as he passes
through their groups in front of the public schools. Even on
Sundays nice little boys coming from Sabbath-school, with their
catechisms tucked under their jackets, and texts enjoining
mercy and gentleness fresh upon their lips, will sometimes
salute the benighted heathen as he passes by with a volley of
stones. If he turns on his small assailants, he is apt to meet
larger ones. Men are not wanting, ready and panting, to take up
the quarrel thus wantonly commenced by the offspring of the
“superior race.” There are hundreds of families, who came over
the sea to seek in America the comfort and prosperity denied
them in the land of their birth, whose children from earliest
infancy are inculcated with the sentiment that the Chinaman is
a dog, a pest and a curse. On the occasion of William H.
Seward’s visit to a San Francisco theatre, two Chinese
merchants were hissed and hooted by the gallery mob from a box
which they had ventured to occupy. This assumption of style and
exclusiveness proved very offensive to the shirt-sleeved,
upper-tier representatives of the “superior race,” who had
assembled in large numbers to catch a glimpse of one of the
black man’s great champions. Ethiopia could have sat in that
box in perfect safety, but China in such a place was the red
rag rousing the ire of the Democratic bull. John has a story of
his own to carry back home from a Christian land.

For this prejudice and hostility there are provocative
causes, although they may not be urged in extenuation. The
Chinaman is a dangerous competitor for the white laborer; and
when the latter, with other and smaller mouths to feed, once
gets the idea implanted in his mind that the bread is being
taken from them by what he deems a semi-human heathen, whose
beliefs, habits, appearance and customs are distasteful to him,
there are all the conditions ready for a state of mind toward
the almond-eyed Oriental which leans far away from brotherly
love.

Brotherly love sometimes depends on circumstances. “Am I not
a man and brother?” cries John from his native shore.
“Certainly,” we respond. Pass round the hat—let us take
up a contribution for the conversion of the poor heathen. The
coins clink thickly in the bottom of the charitable chapeau. We
return home, feeling ourselves raised an inch higher
heavenward.

“Am I not a man and brother?” cries John in our midst,
digging our gold, setting up opposition laundries and wheeling
sand at half a dollar per day less wages. “No. Get out, ye
long-tailed baste! An’ wad ye put me on a livil with
that—that baboon?” Pass round the hat. The coins mass
themselves more thickly than ever. For what? To buy muskets,
powder and ball. Wherefore? Wait! More than once has the
demagogue cried, “Drive them into the sea!”

PRENTICE MULFORD.

A WINTER REVERIE.

MILLIE W. CARPENTER.

“PASSPORTS, GENTLEMEN!”

The close of July, 1870, found our party tarrying for a few
days at Geneva. We had left home with the intention of “doing”
Europe in less than four months. June and July were already
gone, but in that time, traveling as only Americans can, Great
Britain, Belgium, the Rhine country and portions of Switzerland
had been visited and admired. We were now pausing for a few
days to take breath and prepare for yet wider flights. Our
proposed route from Geneva would lead us through Northern
Germany, returning by way of Paris to London and Liverpool.

We had intentionally left Paris for the last, hoping that
the Communist disturbances would be completely quieted before
September. At this time their forces had been recently routed,
and the Versailles troops were occupying the capital. The
leaders of the Commune were scattered in every direction, and,
if newspaper accounts were to be believed, were being captured
in every city of France. Especially was this true of the
custom-house upon the Swiss frontier, where report said that
more than one leading Communist had been stopped by the
lynx-eyed officials, who would accept no substitute for the
signed and countersigned passport, and hold no parley until
such a passport had been presented.

In view of these facts, the American minister in Paris had
issued a circular letter to citizens of the United States
traveling abroad, requesting them to see that their passports
had the official visé before attempting to enter France,
thus saving themselves and friends a large amount of
unnecessary trouble and delay. Nothing was said of those who
might think proper to attempt an entrance without a
passport, such temerity being in official eyes beyond all
advice or protection. Influenced by this letter and several
facts which had come under our notice proving the uncertainty
of all things, and especially of travel in France, we saw that
our passports were made officially correct.

While at Geneva our party separated for a few days. My
friends proposed making an expedition up the lake, while I
arranged to spend a day and night at Aix-les-Bains, a small
town in the south of France. My object in visiting it was not
to enjoy the sulphur-baths for which it is famous, but to see
some friends who were spending the summer there. I had written,
telling them to expect me by the five o’clock train on
Wednesday afternoon. As my stay was to be so brief, I left my
valise at the hotel in Geneva, and found myself now, for the
first time, separated from that trusty sable friend which had
until this hour been my constant companion by day and
night.

The train was just leaving the station when a lady sitting
opposite to me, with her back to the locomotive, asked, in
French, if I would be willing to change seats. Catching her
meaning rather by her gestures than words, I inquired in
English if she would like my seat, and found by her reply that
I was traveling with an English lady.

I should here explain that although I had studied the French
language as part of my education, I found it impossible to
speak French with any fluency or understand it when spoken. My
newly-made friend, however (for friend she proved herself),
spoke French and English with equal fluency.

In the process of comparing notes (so familiar to all
travelers) mention was made of the recent war and the unwonted
strictness and severity of the custom-house officials. In an
instant my hand was upon my pocket-book, only to find that I
had neglected to take my passport from my valise.

The embarrassment of the situation flashed upon me, and my
troubled countenance revealed to my companion that something
unusual had occurred. I answered her inquiring look by saying
that I had left my passport in Geneva. Her immediate sympathy
was only equaled by her evident alarm. She said there was but
one thing to be done—return instantly for it. I fully
agreed with her, but found, to my dismay, upon consulting a
guide-book, that our train was an express, which did not stop
before reaching Belgarde, the frontier-town.

I would willingly have pulled the bell-rope had there been
any, and stopped the train at any cost, but it was impossible,
and nothing remained but to sit quietly while I was
relentlessly hurried into the very jaws of the French
officials. The misery of the situation was aggravated by the
fact that I could not command enough French to explain how I
came to be traveling without a passport. As a last resort, I
applied to my friend, begging her to explain to the officer at
the custom-house that I was a citizen of the United States, and
had left my passport in Geneva. This she readily promised to
do, although I could see that she had but little faith in the
result. After a ride of an hour, during which my reflections
were none of the pleasantest, we arrived at Belgarde. Here the
doors of the railway carriages were thrown open, and we were
politely requested to alight. We stepped out upon a platform
swarming with fierce gendarmes, whom I regarded attentively,
wondering which of them was destined to become my protector.
From the platform we were ushered into a large room
communicating by a narrow passage with a second room, into
which our baggage was being carried. One by one my
fellow-passengers approached the narrow and (to me) gloomy
passage and presented their passports. These were closely
scanned by the officer in charge, handed to an assistant to be
countersigned, and the holder, all being right, was passed into
the second room. Our turn soon came, and, accompanied by the
English lady, I approached my fate.

Her passport was declared to be official, and handing it
back the officer looked inquiringly at me. My friend then began
her explanation. As I stood attentively regarding the officer’s
face, I could see his puzzled look change into one of
comprehension, and then of amusement. To her inquiry he replied
that there would be no objection under the circumstances to my
returning to Geneva and procuring my passport. Encouraged by
the favorable turn my fortunes had taken, I asked, through my
friend, if it would be possible for me to go on without a
passport. An instantaneous change passed over his countenance,
and, shrugging his shoulders, he replied that it was
impossible: there was a second custom-house at Culoz, where I
should certainly be stopped, forced to explain how I had passed
Belgarde, and severely punished for attempting to enter without
a passport. I did not, however, wait for him to finish his
angry harangue, but passed on to the second room, where I was
soon joined by my interpreting friend, who explained to me in
full what I had already learned from the officer’s countenance
and gesture. She thought that I was fortunate in escaping so
easily, and advised an immediate return to Geneva. I again
consulted my guide-book, and found that there was no return
train for several hours, and consequently that I should arrive
in Geneva too late to start for Aix-les-Bains that night. This
would necessitate waiting until Thursday, and perhaps force me
to give up the trip, for our seats were engaged in the Chamouni
coach for Friday morning. I imagined my friends in vain
awaiting my arrival at Aix, and the smiles of our party when
they found me in Geneva upon their return from the lake. But,
more than all, the possibility of not reaching Aix at all
troubled me, for I was very anxious to see my friends there,
and had written home that I intended to see them.

I found by my guide-book that our train reached Culoz before
the Geneva return train; so on the instant I formed the
desperate resolve of running the blockade at Belgarde, and if I
found it impossible to pass the custom-house at Culoz,
there to take the return train for Geneva. I walked to
the platform as if merely accompanying my friend, stood for a
moment at the door of the carriage conversing with her, and
then, as the train started for Culoz, quickly stepped in and
shut the door. Her dismay was really pitiable: had I not been
somewhat troubled in mind myself, I should have laughed
outright. She saw nothing before me but certain destruction,
and I am free to confess that the prospect of a telegram
flashing over the wires at that moment from Belgarde to Culoz
was not reassuring. The die, however, had been cast, and now
nothing remained but to endure in silence the interminable hour
which must elapse ere we should reach Culoz. There we were to
change cars, the Geneva train going on to Paris, while we took
the train on the opposite platform for Aix-les-Bains. This
necessitated passing through the dépôt, and
passing through the dépôt was passing through the
custom-house. As our train stopped in front of the fatal door,
and one by one the passengers filed into it and were lost to
sight, I seemed to see written above the door, “All hope
abandon, ye who enter here!” It was simply rushing into the
jaws of fate: there was not the slightest possibility of my
being able to pass through that depot unchallenged. I should be
carried on to Paris if I remained in the train; I should be
arrested if I remained on the platform; I was discovered if I
entered the custom-house. Eagerly I glanced around for some
means of escape. Every instant the number of passengers on the
platform was decreasing, the danger of discovery rapidly
increasing.

I had feared lest some benevolent French officer, anxious
for my safety, would be found waiting to assist me in
alighting: I was thankful to find that I should be allowed to
assist myself, and that no one paid any particular attention to
me. As I stood there hesitating what course to pursue, and
feeling how much easier my mind at this moment would be were I
waiting on the Belgarde platform, I noticed a door standing
open a few steps to the left. Without any further hesitation I
walked directly in, to find myself in a railroad restaurant. It
proved to be a tower of refuge.

No one had noticed me. There were other passengers in the
room, waiting for the Paris train; so, joining myself to them,
I remained there until the custom-house doors were closed and
the guards had left the platform. The question now arose, How
should I reach the opposite platform? The train might start at
any moment: the only legitimate passage was closed. I knew that
the attempt would be fraught with danger, yet I felt that it
was now too late to draw back. If I remained any length of time
in the restaurant, I should be suspected and discovered; and as
I thought of that moment a terrific scene arose before my mind
in which an excited French official thundered at me in his
choicest French, while I stood silent, unable to explain who I
was, how I came there, whither I was going; I imagined myself
being searched for treasonable documents and none being found;
I seemed to see my captors consulting how they could best
compel me to tell what I knew. These scenes and others of like
nature entertained me while I waited for the coast—or
rather platform—to be cleared. When at length all the
immediate guards were gone, I started out to find my way, if
possible, to the train for Aix. I have read of travelers
cutting their way through trackless forests, of ice-bound
mariners anxiously seeking the North-west passage, and, worse
than all, of luckless countrymen wandering bewildered through
the streets of Boston; but I am confident that no traveler,
mariner or countryman ever sought his way with more
circumspection and diligence than I in my search for a passage
between those two platforms.

As I glanced cautiously up and down I saw a door standing
open at some little distance. Around that door all my hopes
were immediately centred. It might lead directly to the
custom-house; it might be the entrance to the barracks of the
guards; it might be—I knew not what; but it might afford
a passage to the other platform.

I walked quickly to the door, glanced in, saw no one and
entered. The room was a baggage-room, and at that moment
unoccupied. It instantly occurred to me that a baggage-room
ought to open on both platforms. I felt as though I
could have shouted “Eureka!” and I am confident that the joy of
Archimedes as he rushed through the streets of Syracuse was no
greater than mine as I felt that I had so unexpectedly
discovered the passage I was seeking. Passing through this
room, I found myself in a second, like the former unoccupied.
It had occurred to me that all the doors might be closed, and
the thought had considerably abated my rejoicing; but no! I saw
a door which stood invitingly open.

No guards were stationed on the platform; so I stepped out,
and before me stood the train for Aix, into which my
fellow-passengers were entering, some of them still holding
their passports in their hands. Taking my seat in one of the
carriages, in a few moments the train started and I was on my
way to Aix. The relief was unspeakably great. An instant before
it seemed as if nothing short of a miracle could save me from a
French guard-house, and now, by the simplest combination of
circumstances, in which a restaurant and baggage-room bore an
important part, I had passed unchallenged. I remember that I
enjoyed the scenery and views along the route from Culoz to Aix
more than while passing from Belgarde to Culoz.

My friends were found expecting me upon my arrival, and
joined in congratulating me upon my happy escape. A night and
day were passed very pleasantly, and then arose the question of
return.

I suggested telegraphing to Geneva for my passport, but that
was vetoed, and it was decided that I should return as I had
come—passportless. I confess that the attempt seemed
somewhat hazardous. If it was dangerous to attempt an entrance
into France, how much more so to attempt an exit, especially
when the custom-house force had been doubled with the sole
object that all possibility of escape might be precluded, and
that any one passing Culoz might be stopped at Belgarde! It was
urged, however, that our seats had been engaged in the
diligence for Friday morning, and to send for the passport
would consume considerable time—would certainly delay the
party until Saturday, and perhaps until Monday, which delay
would seriously affect all their plans, time being so limited
and so many places remaining to be visited. I had passed once,
why not again? Influenced by these facts, and thinking what a
triumph it would be once more to baffle French vigilance, I
determined to attempt the return. There was a train leaving Aix
about eight P.M., reaching Geneva at eleven: it was decided
that I should take this train. I had arranged a vague plan of
action, although I expected to depend rather upon the
suggestion of the moment.

It was quite dark when we reached Culoz. As the train
arrived at the platform, and we were obliged again to change
cars, I thought of the friendly restaurant; but no! the
restaurant was closed, and moreover a company of gendarmes was
present to see that every one entered the door leading to the
custom-house. There was no room for hesitation or delay. I
entered under protest, but still I entered.

In a moment I perceived the desperate situation. The room
had two doors—one opening upon the platform from which we
had just come, and now guarded by an officer; the other leading
to the opposite platform, and there stood the custom-house
officer receiving and inspecting the passports. It was indeed
Scylla and Charybdis. If I attempted to pass the officer
without a passport, I was undone; if I remained until all the
other passengers had passed out, I was undone. For an instant I
felt as if I had better give up the unequal contest. The forces
of the enemy were too many for me. I saw that I had been
captured: why fight against Fate? A moment’s reflection,
however, restored my courage. It was evident that one thing
alone remained to be done: that was to find my way out of the
door by which I had just entered, as speedily as possible. But
there stood the guard.

The train by which we had come was still before the
platform: an idea suggested itself. Acting as if I had left
some article in the train, I stepped hurriedly up to the guard,
who, catching my meaning, made way for me without a word. Once
upon the platform, I resolved never again to enter that door
except as a prisoner. The guard followed me with his eyes for a
moment, and then, seeing me open one of the carriage doors,
turned back to his post. As soon as I perceived that I was no
longer watched I glided off in the opposite direction under the
shadows of the platform. I was looking for a certain door which
I remembered well as a friend in need. I knew not in which
direction it lay, nor could I have recognized it if shut; but
hardly had I gone ten steps when the same door stood open
before me. It was the act of an instant to spring through it,
out of sight of the guard. Why this door and baggage-room
should have been left thus open and unguarded when such evident
and scrutinizing care was taken in every other quarter, I have
to this day been unable to understand. But for that fact I
should have found it utterly impossible to pass that
custom-house going or coming.

Once in the baggage-room, the way was familiar, and, passing
into the second room, I found the door open as on the day
previous, and in a moment stood undiscovered upon the platform.
Entering the waiting train, I was soon on the way to
Belgarde.

My only thought during the ride was, What shall I do when we
arrive at Belgarde? I expected to see the doors thrown open as
before, and hear again the polite invitation to enter the
custom-house. Was it not certain detection to refuse? was it
not equally dangerous to obey? The officer at Belgarde had seen
me the day before, and warned me not to go to Culoz. What
reception would he give me when he saw me attempting to return?
Or it might be he would not remember me, and then in the
darkness and confusion I should surely be taken for an escaping
Communist. That I had passed Culoz was no comfort when I
remembered that this would only aggravate my guilt in their
eyes.

The case did indeed seem desperate. Willingly would I have
jumped out and walked the entire distance to Geneva, if I might
only thus escape that terrible custom-house, which every moment
loomed up more terrifically. At length this troubled hour was
passed: we had arrived at Belgarde, and the moment for action
had come. I had determined to avoid the custom-house at all
hazards. When the doors were thrown open I expected to alight,
but not to enter. My plan was to find some sheltering door, or
even corner, where I could remain until the others had
presented their passports and were beginning to return, then
join them and take my seat as before. The dépôt at
Belgarde was brilliantly lighted, and the gendarmes pacing to
and fro in the gaslight seemed not only to have increased in
numbers, but to have acquired an additional ferocity since the
day previous.

As I looked but my spirit sank within me. I could only brace
myself for the coming crisis. For several moments nothing was
said or done. The doors remained shut, and no one seemed at all
concerned about our presence. Each minute appeared an hour as I
sat there awaiting my fate. The suspense was becoming too
great: I felt that my stock of self-possession was entirely
deserting me. At length I began to hope that they were
satisfied with the examination at Culoz, and would allow us to
pass unchallenged. Just at that moment, as hope was dawning
into certainty, the door opened and the custom-house officer
entered with a polite bow, while a body of gendarmes drew up
behind him upon the platform. He uttered two French words, and
I needed no interpreter to tell me that they were “Passports,
gentlemen!”

I shuddered as I saw him standing so near, within reach of
my arm. There were six persons besides myself in the carriage,
and I was occupying a seat beside the door farthest from the
platform. Any one who has seen a European railway-carriage will
understand me when I say that I sat next to the right-hand
door, while he had entered by the left. One by one the
passports were handed up to him until he held six in his
hand.

With the rest of the passengers I had taken out my
pocket-book and searched as if for my passport, but had handed
none to him, and now I sat awaiting developments. I saw that he
would read the six passports, and then turn to me for the
seventh.

The desperate thought flashed upon me of opening the door
and escaping into the darkness. The carriage itself was so
dimly lighted that I could barely see the face of my opposite
neighbor, and I therefore hoped to be able to slip out without
any one perceiving it. The attempt was desperate, but so was
the situation. The officer was buried in the passports, holding
them near his face to catch the dim light. The door was
fastened upon the outside, and so, watching him, I leaned far
out of the window until I was able to reach the catch and
unfasten the door. A slight push, and it swung noiselessly
open. I glanced at the officer: he was intently reading the
last passport. I had placed one foot upon the outside
step, and was about to glide out into the darkness, when he
laid the paper down and looked directly at me.

It would have been madness to attempt an escape with his
eyes upon me; so, assuming as nonchalant a look as my present
feelings would allow, I answered his inquiring glance with one
of confident assurance.

He saw my nonchalant expression. He saw the open pocket-book
in my hand. He had not counted the number of passports.
All the passengers were settling themselves to sleep. It must
be all right; so, with a polite “Bon soir, messieurs!” he bowed
and left the carriage. My sensation of relief may be better
imagined than described. Hardly had he left our carriage when
we heard the sound of voices and hurrying feet upon the
platform, and looking out saw some unfortunate individual
carried off under guard. I trembled as I thought how narrowly I
had escaped his fate. In a few moments, however, we were safely
on our way to Geneva, and as we sped on into the darkness,
while congratulating myself upon my fortunate escape, I firmly
resolved to be better prepared for the emergency the next time
I should hear those memorable words, “Passports,
gentlemen!”

A.H.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

THE CORNWALLIS FAMILY.

The death was lately announced of two of the last
survivors—only one of the name is now left—of a
family whose chief played a very conspicuous, and for himself
unfortunate, part in this country a century ago—the
marquis Cornwallis. His only son, who married a daughter of the
celebrated match-making duchess of Gordon, left no male issue,
but five daughters. Two of them, the countess of St.
Germans—wife of the earl who accompanied the prince of
Wales on his visit here—and Lady Braybrook, died some
years ago; and recently Lady Mary Ross, whose husband edited
the correspondence of the first marquis, and Lady Louisa, who
never married, have also gone to their graves.

The family of Cornwallis is very ancient, and can point to
many distinguished members. Its ancestral seat is at Brome, in
Suffolk. This is a fine old mansion, and the hall, which is
very lofty and open to the roof, is an excellent specimen of
the work of other days. The chapel contains capital oak
carving. In the village church there are monuments worth notice
of the family.

Following the fate of so many other places, Brome passed
after the death of the second marquis to a novus homo,
one Matthias Kerrison, who, having begun life as a carpenter,
contrived in various ways to acquire a colossal fortune. His
son rose to distinction in the army, obtained a seat in
Parliament, which he held for thirty years, and was created a
baronet.

He left at his death a son and three daughters. The former,
long married, is childless. The sisters are respectively the
wives of Earl Stanhope, the well-known historian; Lord
Henniker, a wealthy Suffolk proprietor; and Lord Bateman. It is
understood that under the late baronet’s will the son of the
last will, in the event of the present baronet dying childless,
succeed to the property. It will thus be observed that Brome,
after having been for four centuries in one family, is destined
to change hands repeatedly in a few years.

When the second Marquis Cornwallis died sonless, the
marquisate became extinct, but the earldom passed to his first
cousin. This nobleman, by no means an able or admirable person,
married twice. By his first marriage he had a daughter, who
married Charles Wykeham-Martin, Esq., M.P., whose father, by a
concatenation of chances, became the owner of Leeds Castle,
near Maidstone, in Kent—a splendid moated baronial pile,
dating from the thirteenth century, but added to and improved
in admirable taste. Leeds was formerly the property of the
Fairfax family, whose chief, the present lord, resides near
Washington. It came to them from the once famous family of
Colepepper.

Earl Cornwallis married a second time late in life, and had
an only daughter, Lady Julia. From that time his one idea
seemed to be to accumulate for this child, and accordingly at
his death she was the greatest heiress in England, her long
minority serving to add immensely to her father’s hoards. Of
course, when the time approached for her entering society under
the chaperonage of her cousins, the marquis’s daughters,
speculation was very rife in the London world as to whom she
would marry, and many a mamma of high degree cast sheep’s eyes
at the heiress, and thought how charmingly her accumulations
would serve to clear the encumbrances on certain acres. But
they were not kept long in suspense. One night during the
London season, when the ladies Cornwallis gave a grand ball, a
damper was cast over the proceedings, so far at least as
aspirants to the heiress’s money-bags were concerned, by the
announcement of her engagement. Said a lady to a gentleman in
the course of that evening, “Most extraordinary! There seem to
be no men in the room to-night.” “Why, of course not,” was the
rejoinder, “after this fatal news.” Lady Julia’s choice fell
upon a young officer in the Guards, Viscount Holmesdale, eldest
son of Earl Amherst. Lord Holmesdale was unexceptionable in
point of position, but his pecuniary position was such as to
make one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year a very
agreeable addition to his income. It may, however, be a
satisfaction to those less richly endowed with this world’s
goods than Lady Holmesdale to reflect that being an heiress
generally proves rather the reverse of a passport to
matrimonial bliss; and by all accounts she is no exception to
the usual fate in this respect. We can’t have everything in
this world.

Lady Holmesdale’s property was tied up by her old father
(whose whole thoughts were given to this end, and who was in
the habit of carrying his will on his person) to such a degree
that in the event of her death her husband can only derive a
very slight benefit from his wife’s property beyond the
insurances which may have been effected on her life. She is
childless, and has very precarious health. Her principal seat
is Linton Park, near Maidstone, Kent, in which county she is
the largest landowner. In the event of her dying without issue,
her estates pass to the son of Major Fiennes Cornwallis, who
was second son of the late Mr. Wykeham-Martin by Lady
Holmesdale’s elder half-sister.

A cousin of Lady Holmesdale, Miss Cornwallis, the last
representative of a third branch, died some years ago. This
lady, who possessed rare literary and social acquirements,
bequeathed her property to Major Wykeham-Martin, who thereupon
changed his name to Cornwallis. The major, a gallant officer,
one of those of whom Tennyson says,

only survived the Balaklava charge to die a few years later
through an accident in the hunting-field. “A fine, modest young
officer,” was Thackeray’s verdict about him, when, after dinner
at “Tom Phinn’s,” a noted bachelor barrister of eminence whose
little dinners were not the least agreeable in London, the
story of that famous ride had been coaxed out of the young
militaire, who, if left to himself, would never have let
you have a notion that he had seen such splendid service. The
only Cornwallis now left is Lady Elizabeth, granddaughter of
the first marquis.

NOVELTIES IN ETHNOLOGY.

Two savants of high reputation have lately undertaken to
seek out the origin of that German race which has just put
itself at the head of military Europe. One is Wilhelm
Obermüller, a German ethnologist, member of the Vienna
Geographical Society, whose startling theory nevertheless is
that the Germans are the direct descendants of Cain! The other
scholar, M. Quatrefages, a man of still greater reputation,
devotes himself to a proposition almost as
extraordinary—namely, that the Prussian pedigree is Finn
and Slav, with only a small pinch of Teuton, and hence, in an
ethnographical view, is anti-German!

That M. Quatrefages should maintain such a postulate, his
patriotism if not his scientific reputation might lead us to
expect; but that Obermüller should be so eager to trace
German origin back to the first murderer is rather more
suprising. Obermüller’s work embraces in its general scope
the origin of all European nations, but the most striking part
is that relating to Germany. He holds that, from the remotest
era, the Celto-Aryan race, starting from the plain of Tartary,
the probable cradle of mankind, split into two great
branches—one the Oriental Aryans, and the other the
Western Aryans, or Celts. The former—who, as he proceeds
to show, were no other than the descendants of
Cain—betook themselves to China, which land they found
inhabited by the Mongolians, another great primordial race; and
we are told that the Mongolians are indicated when mention is
made in Scripture of Cain’s marriage in the land of Nod. The
intermixture of Cainists and Mongolians produced the Turks,
while the pure Cainist tribes formed the German people, under
the name of Swabians (Chinese, Siampi), Goths
(Yeuten in Chinese) and Ases (Sachsons). Such, in
brief, is the curious theory of Obermüller.

The question next arises, How is it that we find the Germans
transplanted from the Hoang-Ho to the Rhine? We are told that,
being driven out of China by the Turks, they poured into the
European countries which the Celts or Western Aryans had
already occupied. These latter had in the mean time gone out
from the Asiatic cradle of the race, and following the course
of the Indus to Hindostan and Persia, had, under the name of
Chaldeans, overrun Armenia, Syria, Arabia, Egypt and North
Africa, which latter they found inhabited by certain negro
races, whereas in Egypt they discovered red-skins or
Atlantides; which latter, by the way, form also our own
aborigines. The intermixture of the Celts with these primitive
races just named produced the Jews and Semitic people. At the
time of the Celtic invasion Western Europe and Northern Africa
were occupied by the race of the Atlantides, while the
Mongolians, including also the Lapps, Finns and Huns, peopled
the north of Europe and of Asia. The Celts pushed in between
these two races, and only very much later the German people,
driven out of China by the Turks, as we have said, arrived in
Europe.

When, therefore, did these Cainist invasions of Germany take
place? Obermüller says that the date must have been toward
the epoch of the Roman conquests. Gallia was then inhabited in
the south by the primitive Atlantid race of Ligurians and by
the Greek colony of Massilia; in the centre by the Gaelags
(Celts) or Gauls, who, pouring northward from Spain, had
conquered it fifteen hundred years before the Christian era;
and in the north by the Belgic Cimbrians, who had come from
Germany, and who were designated under the name of Germans
(Ghermann) or border-men, and who, though called
Germani by Caesar and Tacitus, were yet not of the
Cainist stock, but Celts. However, these Germans, whom the
Romans encountered to their cost on the Rhine and Danube, were
of the genuine Oriental Cainist stock, and these, after
centuries of fierce struggle, they failed to conquer, though
the Celts of Britain, Gaul and Spain, as well as all the old
empires of the East, had fallen an easy prey to their
victorious eagles.

It only remains to add that this invasion of Germany by
Cain’s progeny was accomplished in three streams. The Ases
(Sachsons) directed themselves to the Elbe and Danube, and
thence to the north; the Suevi, or Swabians, chose the centre
and south of Germany; while the Goths did not rest till they
had overrun Italy, Southern France and Spain. But each of these
three main streams was composed of many tribes, whom the old
writers catalogue without system, mixing both Celtic and
Teutonic tribes under the general name of Germans; and it is
only in modern days that the careless enumeration of the
classic writers has been rejected, and a more scientific method
substituted. It will be seen, in fine, that in the main
Obermüller does not differ from accepted theories in
German ethnology, which have long carefully dissevered the
Celts from the Teutons, and assigned to each tribe with
approximate accuracy its earliest fixed abode in Europe. It is
the tracing back of the German race proper to the first-born of
Adam, according to scriptural genealogy, which makes this
theory curious and amusing.

To the work of M. Quatrefages we have only space to devote a
paragraph. Originally contributed to the Revue des Deux
Mondes, it bears the marks in its inferences, if not in its
facts, of being composed for an audience of sympathizing
countrymen, rather than for the world of science at large. M.
Quatrefages says that the first dwellers in Prussia were Finns,
who founded the stock, and were in turn overpowered by the
Slavs, who imposed their language and customs on the whole of
the Baltic region. The consequent mixture of Finns and Slavs
created a population wholly un-German; and what dash of genuine
Germanism Prussia now has was subsequently acquired in the
persons of sundry traders from Bremen, followed by a class of
roving nobility, who entered the half-civilized country with
their retainers in quest of spoils. Besides these elements,
Prussia, like England and America, received in modern times an
influx of French Huguenots; which M. Quatrefages naturally
considers a piece of great good fortune for Prussia. Briefly,
then, the French savant regards Prussia as German only in her
nobility and upper-middle classes, while the substratum of
population is a composition of Slav and Finn, and hence
thoroughly anti-German. As, according to the old saying, if you
scratch a Russian you will find a Tartar beneath, so, according
to M. Ouatrefages, we may suppose that scraping a Prussian
would disclose a Finn. The political inferences which he draws
are very fanciful. He traces shadowy analogies between the
tactics of Von Moltke’s veterans and the warlike customs of the
ancient Slavs, and suggests that the basic origin of the
Prussian population may lead it to cultivate a Russian alliance
rather than an Austrian, forgetting, apparently, that by his
own admission the ruling-classes of Prussia are German in
origin, ideas and sympathies.

L.S.

THE STEAM-WHISTLE.

While Mr. Ruskin was lately bewailing the bell-ringing
propensity of mankind, the English Parliament and several
American legislatures, city or State, were assaulting the
greater nuisance of the steam-whistle, and trying to substitute
bell-ringing for it. Mr. Ruskin’s particular grievance was,
that his own nerves were crispé by the incessant
ding-dong of the church-bells of Florence summoning the devout
to prayer, but he generalized his wrath. Possibly, he would
have been less sensitive and fastidious regarding the musical
carillons of the Italian city were he wont to dwell within
ear-shot of an American factory or railroad-station. Not that
Mr. Ruskin fails to appreciate—or, rather, to
depreciate—railways in their connection with Italian
landscapes; for, besides his series of complaints regarding the
Florence bells, he denounces the railway from Rome to Naples,
and the railway-tunnels under Monts Cenis and St. Gothard, and
the railway-bridge leading into Venice, as enemies of the
beautiful and picturesque in Nature. But it is the locomotive,
independent of the shriek, that is his abomination; whereas a
man less sensitive to sights, and (if possible) more sensitive
to sounds, might pardon the cutting up of the landscape were
his ear-drum spared from splitting.

Emerson asks, “What is so odious as noise?” But a
Saturday Reviewer once devoted an elaborate essay to the
eulogy of unmitigated noise, or rather to the keen enjoyment of
it by children. People with enviable nerves and unenviable
tastes often enjoy sounds in the ratio of their lack of
melody—say, such everyday thoroughfare music as the slap
and bang of coach-wheels on the cobble-stones; the creaking of
street-cars round a sharp curve, like Milton’s infernal doors
“grating harsh thunder;” the squeaking falsettos of the cries
by old-clothes’ men, itinerant glaziers, fishmongers,
fruiterers, tinkers and what not; the yells of rival coachmen
at the railway-stations, giving one an idea of Bedlam; the
street-fiddlers and violinists with horribly untuned
instruments; the Italian open-air singers hoarsely shouting,
“Shoo Fly” or “Viva Garibaldi! viva l’Italia!” the gongs beaten
on steamboats and by hotel-runners at stations on the arrival
of trains; the unearthly squeals and shrieks of new “musical
instruments” sold cheap by street-peddlers; the horrible
noise-producers which boys invent for the torture of nervous
people—such, for example, as this present season’s, which
is happily styled “the devil’s fiddle,” or “the chicken-box,”
whose simplest form is an emptied tomato-can, with a string
passed through the end and pulled with the rosined fingers.
Now, that a man may be pleased with a rattle, even if it be
only a car-rattle, is conceivable, but it is hard to understand
how he can retain a relish for the squeal of a
locomotive-whistle. The practice of summoning workmen to
factories by this shrill monitor, of using it to announce the
dinner-hour, the hour of resuming work after the nooning, and
the hour of quitting work for the night, ought to be abolished
everywhere. There is not the faintest excuse for it, because
clocks and bells will do the same work exactly as well. On the
other hand, the whistle causes perpetual irritation to the
nervous, feeble and sick, and frequent cases of horses running
away with fright at the sudden shriek, smashing property or
destroying life.

Let us give moral aid and comfort to the campaign,
Cisatlantic and Transatlantic, against the steam-whistle. In
the local councils of Philadelphia, Camden and other cities it
has been well opened in our country; in the House of Commons
has been introduced a bill providing that “no person shall use
or employ in any manufactory or any other place any
steam-whistle or steam-trumpet for the purpose of summoning or
dismissing workmen or persons employed, without the sanction of
the sanitary authorities.” They call this whistle, by the way,
it would seem, the “American devil,” for the Manchester
Examiner congratulates its readers that the “American
devil” has been taken by the throat, and ere long his yells
will be heard no more.

John Leech, it is said, was actually driven from house to
house in a vain effort to escape the nuisance of
organ-grinders, whom he has immortalized in Punch by many
exquisite sketches, showing that they know “the vally of peace
and quietness.” Some of his friends declare that this nuisance
so worked on his nerves that he may be said to have died of
organ-grinders. Holmes has immortalized the same guild of
wandering minstrels as a sort of “crusaders sent from infernal
clime to dock the ears of melody and break the legs of time.”
And yet the hand-organ, so often the subject of municipal
legislation, is dulcet music compared with the steam-whistle,
even when the latter instrument takes its most ambitiously
artistic form of the “Calliope.”

SIAMESE NEWS.

Letters recently received from Bangkok, Siam, bearing date
July 25, 1872, give the following interesting items.

His Majesty has just appointed an English tutor to his royal
brothers, associating with them some of the sons of the higher
nobles to the number of twenty. This certainly indicates
progress in liberal and enlarged views in a land where hitherto
no noble, however exalted his rank or worthy his character, was
considered a fit associate for the princes of the royal family,
who have always been trained to hold themselves entirely aloof
from those about them. The young king now on the throne has
changed all this, and says he wishes not only that his brothers
shall have the advantage of studying with others of their own
age, but that they should thus learn to know their people
better, and by mingling with them freely in their studies and
sports acquire more liberal views of men and things than their
ancestors had. He insists that his young brothers and their
classmates shall stand on precisely the same footing, and each
be treated by the teacher according to his merits. The king
intends to appoint yet other teachers in his family for both
boys and girls; and though perhaps the time may not yet have
come, it is certainly not far distant, when Siam will sustain
high schools and colleges, both literary and scientific.

The religious aspect of the nation is somewhat less
promising. Though the royal edict gives protection to all
religions, and permits every man to choose for himself in
matters of conscience, it can scarcely be said that the two
kings take any real interest in Christianity. They think less
of Booddhism, its mystic creed and imposing ceremonies, and
have made very many changes in the form of worship; but,
apparently, they are no more Christians than were their
respective fathers, the late first and second kings. They treat
Christianity with outward respect, because they esteem it
decorous to do so; and the same is true of the regent and prime
minister; but none of them even profess any real regard for the
worship of the true God. The concessions made thus far indicate
progress in civilization, not in piety; and while the kings and
their subjects are assuredly loosing their grasp on Booddhism,
they are not reaching out to lay hold on Christianity. It seems
rather as if the whole nation were swaying off into the frigid
regions of skepticism, and, influenced by the example of many
unworthy representatives of Christian countries, they live only
for the luxuries and laxities of the present life. Priestly
robes are much less frequently seen on the river and in the
streets than formerly; and many of the clergy no longer reside
at the temples, but with their families in their own houses;
thus relinquishing even the pretence of celibacy, which has
hitherto been one of the very strongest points of Booddhism,
giving it an appearance of sanctity and a hold on the
affections of the people that nothing else can do. With this
rapidly-increasing renunciation of priestly celibacy and the
daily-diminishing ranks of the clergy, Booddhism, the mammoth
religion of the world, seems tottering to ruin, and even the
present generation may see its utter demolition, at least so
far as Siam is concerned. Services at the temples are now held
in imitation of English morning and evening prayers; a moral
essay is read, at which the body-guards of the kings and the
government officers are generally required to be present, and
the remainder of the day they are excused from duty, instead of
being kept, as formerly, Sundays and week-days, in almost
perpetual attendance on His Majesty.

The supreme king is now in his twentieth year, and will take
the reins of government this year. He is tall and slight in
person, gentlemanlike in manners, perfectly well bred, and
always courteous to strangers, though even more modest and
unassuming than was his father, the priest-king, whose praises
are still fresh in every heart. His Majesty speaks English
quite creditably, wears the English dress most of the time, and
keeps himself well informed as to matters and things generally.
His reign, thus far, promises well for himself and his
kingdom.

The second king, still called King George Washington,
is now about thirty, and a most noble specimen of the courtly
Oriental gentleman. His tall, compact figure is admirably
developed both for strength and beauty, his face is full and
pleasing, and his head finely formed. He is affable in manner,
converses readily in English, and is fond of Europeans and
their customs. He keeps his father’s palace and steamboats in
excellent condition, and his body-guard under thorough drill.
On a recent visit of the American steamer Moreton he came out
on the battlements of his palace, and after watching her
progress for some time, he signaled her to lay to, which she
did just opposite his palace. He immediately went aboard, and
remained for an hour or so, chatting merrily with both ladies
and gentlemen, while the steamer puffed up the river a few
miles, and then returned for His Majesty to disembark at his
own palace. King George occasionally wears the full
English dress, either civil or military, but generally only the
hat, coat, linen and shoes, with the Siamese
pàh-nûng in lieu of pantaloons. The regent,
the minister of foreign affairs and many of the princes and
nobles have adopted this mongrel costume, and, to a greater or
less extent, our language, manner of living and forms of
etiquette. Visitors to the kings now sit on chairs, instead of
crouching on cushions before the throne, as formerly; while
native princes and ministers of state no longer prostrate
themselves with their faces in the dust in the royal presence,
but stand at the foot of the throne while holding an audience
with their Majesties, each being allowed full opportunity to
state his case or present any petition he may desire. The
sovereigns are no longer unknown, mysterious personages, whose
features their people have never been permitted to look upon;
but they may be seen any fine day taking their drives in their
own coaches or phaetons, and lifting their hats to passing
friends. Nor do they on ordinary occasions deem it necessary to
be surrounded by armed soldiers for protection, but go where
they list, with only their liveried coachmen and footmen, and
perhaps a single companion or secretary inside.

The city itself has correspondingly improved. Within the
walls have just been completed two new streets, meeting at
right angles near the mayor’s office, where is a public park of
circular form very handsomely laid out. The streets radiating
from this centre are broad, and lined with new brick houses of
two stories and tiled roofs. These are mostly private
dwellings, uniformly built; and with their broad sidewalks and
shade trees of luxuriant tropical growth present a very
picturesque appearance. One wide street, commencing at the
royal palace, extends six or seven miles through the city,
reaching the river near a little village called Pak-lat-bon.
This is the fashionable drive, where may be seen not
only their Majesties, the regent, the prime minister and other
high dignitaries lounging in stately equipages drawn by two or
four prancing steeds, but many private citizens of different
nations in their light pony-carriages, palanquins, etc.,
instead of the invariable barges and sampans of a few
years ago, when the river was the “Broadway” of the city and
the canals its cross-streets. Steamers of various dimensions
now busily ply the river: the kings own several, which they use
for pleasure-boats; eight or ten are fitted up as war-steamers,
and others are packets to Singapore, China and elsewhere,
carrying passengers and merchandise.

The regent, Pra-Nai-Wai, is a sedate, dignified,
courteous gentleman of sixty-five, who walks erect with firm
step and manly form, and with mental and physical powers still
unimpaired. His half-brother, who filled the post of minister
of foreign affairs at the commencement of the present reign,
died blind some little time back, after twice paying ten
thousand dollars to a Dutch oculist from Batavia to operate on
his eyes for cataract. His successor, the present minister, is
one of the finest specimens of a Siamese gentleman in the
country. He was first a provincial governor; then went on a
special embassy to England; last year attended the supreme king
on his visit to Singapore and Batavia; and recently accompanied
him again to India, whence the royal party have but just
returned. The regal convoy consisted of five or six
war-steamers, and His Majesty, besides his own officers, was
escorted also by the English consul at Bangkok, the
harbor-master and several European officers in the Siamese
service. The royal tourist visited Rangoon, Calcutta, Madras,
Bombay, Allahabad and Ceylon; and entered with great gusto into
the spirit of his travels, seeing everything, asking questions
and taking notes as he passed from point to point. The regent,
in conjunction with the second king, held the reins of
government during the absence of the first king; and in truth
the regent has for the most part governed the country since the
death of the late king, in 1868, the young heir being then but
fifteen years of age. The regent is decidedly a favorite with
both kings and people, and his rule has been popular and
prosperous.

MADISON AS A TEMPERANCE MAN.

Many years ago, when the temperance movement began in
Virginia, ex-President Madison lent the weight of his influence
to the cause. Case-bottles and decanters disappeared from the
sideboard at Montpelier—wine was no longer dispensed to
the many visitors at that hospitable mansion. Nor was this all.
Harvest began, but the customary barrel of whisky was not
purchased, and the song of the scythemen in the wheatfield
languished. In lieu of whisky, there was a beverage most
innocuous, unstimulating and unpalatable to the army of dusky
laborers.

The following morning, Mr. Madison called in his head-man to
make the usual inquiry, “Nelson, how comes on the crop?”

“Po’ly, Mars’ Jeems—monsus po’ly.”

“Why, what’s the matter?”

“Things is seyus.”

“What do you mean by serious?”

“We gwine los’ dat crap.”

“Lose the crop! Why should we lose it?”

“‘Cause dat ar crap ar heap too big a crap to be gethered
‘thout whisky. ‘Lasses-and-water nuver gethered no crap sence
de woil’ war’ made, ner ‘taint gwine to.”

Mr. Madison succumbed: the whisky was procured, the “crap”
was “gethered,” case-bottles and decanters reappeared, and the
ancient order was restored at Montpelier, never again to be
disturbed.

NOTES.

Amidst the recent hurly-burly of politics in France,
involving the fate of the Thiers government, if not of the
republic itself, a minor grievance of the artists has probably
been little noticed by the general public. Yet a grievance it
was, and one which caused men of taste and sentiment to cry out
loudly. The threatened act of vandalism against which they
protested was a proposal to fell part of the Forest of
Fontainebleau. The castle and forest have long belonged to the
state, but why the woods should now be cut down by the
government is not clear. The motive is probably to turn the
fine timber into cash, though a Paris wit, in pretended despair
of other explanation, jokingly alleged, at the time of Prince
Napoleon’s late expulsion from France, that the government was
afraid the prince, taking refuge in its dense recesses, might
there conceal himself (à la Charles II., we
presume) in one of its venerable oaks. At any rate, it was
arranged to level a part of the timber, and on hearing of this
threatened mutilation of a favorite resort the French artists
rallied to beg M. Thiers, like the character in General
Morris’s ballad, to “spare those trees.” And well may they
petition, for the forest contains nearly thirty-five thousand
acres, abounding in beautiful and picturesque scenery. It can
boast finer trees than any other French forest, while its
meadows, lawns and cliffs furnish specimens of almost every
plant and flower to be found in France. Now, when we add that
its views are exceedingly varied, its rocks, ravines, plateaus
and thickets each offering some entirely different and
admirable study to the landscape-painters who frequent it in
great numbers during the spring and autumn months (for it is
only fourteen or fifteen leagues out of Paris, on the high road
to Lyons), we have shown reason enough for the consentaneous
action on the part of the men and women of the brush and
pencil.

The traveled reader will hardly need to be told that good
judges consider the forest and castle to compose the finest
domain in France. But there are also numberless historic
reminiscences intertwined with Fontainebleau. And, by the way,
it was originally known as the Forêt de Bierre, until
some thirsty huntsmen, who found its spring deliciously
refreshing, rebaptized it as Fontaine Belle Eau. Such, at
least, is the old story. The first founding of a royal
residence there dates at least as far back as the twelfth
century, and possibly much farther, while the present
château was begun by Francis I. in the sixteenth. So many
famous historic events, indeed, have taken place within the
precincts of the forest that the committee of “Protection
Artistique” is pardonable in claiming that “Fontainebleau
Forest ought to be ranked with those national historic
monuments which must at all hazards be preserved for the
admiration of artists and tourists,” as well as of patriotic
Frenchmen. What illustrations shall we select from among the
events connected with it, about which a thousand volumes of
history, poetry, art, science and romance have been composed?
At Fontainebleau, Charles V. was royally feasted by Francis;
there the Edict of Nantes was revoked; there Condé died;
there the decree of divorce between Napoleon and Josephine was
pronounced; and there the emperor afterward signed his own
abdication. It is true that nobody proposes to demolish the
castle, and that is the historic centre; but the petitioners
claim that it is difficult and dangerous to attempt to divide
the domain into historic and non-historic, artistic and
non-artistic parts, with a view to its mutilation. There is
ground for hoping that a favorable response will be given to
the eloquent appeal of the artists and amateurs.

The vanity of Victor Hugo, though always “Olympian,” perhaps
never mounted to a sublimer height than in the reply he sent to
M. Catulle Mendes on receiving from him the news of Gautier’s
death. It contained but half a dozen lines, yet found space to
declare, “Of the men of 1830, I alone am left. It is now
my turn.” The profound egotism of “il ne reste plus que
moi” could not escape being vigorously lashed by V. Hugo’s
old comrades of the quill, dating back with him to 1830, and
now so loftily ignored. “See, even in his epistles of
condolence,” they cry, “the omnipresent moi of Hugo must
appear, to overshadow everything else!” One indignant writer
declares the poet to be a mere walking personal pronoun.
Another humorously pities those still extant contemporaries of
1830 who, after having for forty years dedicated their songs
and romances and dramas to Hugo, now learn from the selfsame
maw which has greedily gulped their praises that they
themselves do not exist, never did exist. One man of genius
slyly writes: “Some of us veterans will find ourselves
embarrassed—Michelet, G. Sand, Janin, Sandeau et un
pen moi. Is it possible that we died a long time ago, one
after the other, without knowing it? Was it a delusion on our
part to fancy ourselves existing, or was our existence only a
bad dream?” But to Victor Hugo even these complaints will
perhaps seem to smoke like fresh incense on the altar of
self-adulation which this great genius keeps ever lighted.

The reader may remember the story of that non-committal
editor who during the late canvass, desiring to propitiate all
his subscribers of both parties, hoisted the ticket of
“Gr—— and ——n” at the top of his
column, thus giving those who took the paper their choice of
interpretations between “Grant and Wilson” and “Grceley and
Brown.” A story turning on the same style of point (and
probably quite as apocryphal, though the author labels it
“historique“) is told of an army officers’ mess in
France. A brother-soldier from a neighboring detachment having
come in, and a champenoise having been uncorked in his
honor, “Gentlemen,” said the guest, raising his glass, “I am
about to propose a toast at once patriotic and political.” A
chorus of hasty ejaculations and of murmurs at once greeted
him. “Yes, gentlemen,” coolly proceeded the orator, “I drink to
a thing which—an object that—Bah! I will out with
it at once. It begins with an R and ends with an
e.”

“Capital!” whispers a young lieutenant of Bordeaux
promotion. “He proposes the Republique, without
offending the old fogies by saying the word.”

“Nonsense! He means the Radicale,” replies the other,
an old captain from Cassel.

“Upon my word,” says a third as he lifts his glass, “our
friend must mean la Royaute.”

“I see!” cries a one-legged veteran of Froschweiler: “we
drink to la Revanche.”

In fact, the whole party drank the toast heartily, each
interpreting it to his liking.

In the hands of a Swift even so trivial an incident might be
made to point a moral on the facility with which alike in
theology and politics—from Athanasian Creed to Cincinnati
or Philadelphia Platform—men comfortably interpret to
their own diverse likings some doctrine that “begins with an
R and ends with an e,” and swallow it with great
unanimity and enthusiasm.

Possibly the death of Mr. Greeley, after a prolonged
delirium induced in part by political excitement, may add for
Americans some fresh interest to the theory of a paper which
just previous to that pathetic event M. Lunier had read before
the Paris Academy of Medicine. The author confessed his
statistics to be incomplete, but regarded them as ample for the
decisive formulation of the proposition that great political
crises tend to increase the number of cases of mental
alienation. The leading point of his elaborate argument appears
to be the classification of fresh cases of insanity developed
since the beginning of the late French war. The strongest
comparison is one indicating an excess of seven per cent, in
the number of such cases, proportioned to the population in the
departments conquered and occupied by the Germans, over those
which they did not invade. Finally, M. Lunier reckons the cases
of mental alienation induced by the late political and military
events in France at from twelve hundred to fifteen hundred.
Politics without war may, it is considered, produce the same
results—results not at all surprising, of course, except
as to their extent. As to this last, if M. Lunier’s figures and
deductions be correct, the mental strain of exciting politics
is even more destructive than has been generally supposed.

LITERATURE OF THE
DAY.

Gareth and Lynette. By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L.,
Poet-Laureate. Boston: J.R. Osgood & Co.

“With this poem the author concludes the Idyls of the King.”
The occasion is a tempting one to review the long series of
Arthurian lays written by Tennyson, from the Mort d’
Arthur, and the pretty song about Lancelot and Guinevere,
and the first casting of “Elaine’s” legend in the form of
The Lady of Shallot, down to the present tale, flung
like a capricious field flower into a wreath complete enough
without it. The poet’s first adventure into the
subject—the mysterious, shadowy and elevated performance
called the Mort d’ Arthur—will probably be always
thought the best. Tennyson, when he wrote it, was just trying
the peculiarities of his style: he was testing the quality of
his cadences, the ring of his long sententious lines repeated
continually as refrains, and the trustworthiness of his artful,
much-sacrificing simplicity. He put as it were a spot or two of
pigment on the end of his painting-knife, and held it up into
the air of the vaporous traditions of the Round Table. It stood
the test, it had the color; but the artist, uncertain of his
style, his public and his own liking, made a number of other
tentatives before he could decide to go on in the manner he
commenced with. He tried the Guinevere, laughing and
galloping in its ballad-movement; he tried the Shallot,
with a triple rhyme and a short positive refrain, like a bell
rung in an incantation, and brought up every minute by a finger
pressed upon the edge. Either of these three—although the
metre of the first was the only one endurable by the ear in the
case of a long series of poems—either of these had, it
may be positively said, a general tone more suitable to the
ancient feeling, and more consistent with the duty of a modern
poet arranging for new ears the legends collected by Sir Thomas
Malory, than the general tone of the present Idyls. Those first
experiments, charged like a full sponge with the essence and
volume of primitive legend, went to their purpose without
retrospection or vacillation: each short tale, whether it
laughed or moaned, promulgated itself like an oracle. The
teller seemed to have been listening to the voice of Fate, and
whether, Guinevere swayed the bridle-rein, or Elaine’s web flew
out and floated wide, or Lancelot sang tirra-lirra by the
river, it was asserted with the positiveness of a Hebrew
chronicle, which we do not question because it is history. But
we hardly have such an illusion in reading the late Idyls. We
seem to be in the presence of a constructor who arranges
things, of a moralist turning ancient stories with a latent
purpose of decorum, of an official Englishman looking about for
old confirmations of modern sociology, of a salaried laureate
inventing a prototype of Prince Albert. The singleness of a
story-teller who has convinced himself that he tells a true
story is gone. That this diversion into the region of didactics
is accompanied, on our poet’s part, with every ingenuity of
ornament, and every grace of a style which people have learned
to like and which he has made his own, need not be said. The
Tennysonian beauties are all there. The work takes its place in
literature, obscuring the Arthurian work of Dryden, as Milton’s
achievement of Paradise Lost obscured the Italian work
on the same subject which preceded it. The story is told, and
the things of the Round Table can hardly be related again in
English, any more than the tale of Troy could be sung again in
Greek after the poem of Homer. But beauties do not necessarily
compose into perfect Beauty, and the achievement of a task
neatly done does not prevent the eye from wandering over the
work to see if the material has been used to the best
advantage. So, the reader who has allowed himself to rest long
in the simple magic evoked by Malory or in the Celtic air of
Villemarque’s legends, will be fain to ask whether a man of
Tennyson’s force could not have given to his century a
recasting which would have satisfied primitive credulity as
well as modern subtility. There is an antique bronze at Naples
that has been cleaned and set up in a splendid museum, and
perhaps looks more graceful than ever; but the pipe that used
to lead to the lips, and the passage that used to communicate
with the priest-chamber, are gone, and nothing can compensate
for them: it used to be a form and a voice, and now it is
nothing but a form.

We have just observed that in our opinion the first essays
made by the Laureate with his Arthurian material had the best
ring, or at least had some excellences lost to the later work.
Gareth and Lynette, however, by its fluency and
simplicity, and by not being overcharged with meaning, seems to
part company with some of this overweighted later performance,
and to attempt a recovery of the directness and spring of the
start. It is, however, far behind all of them in a momentous
particular; for in narrating them, the poet, while able
to keep up his immediate connection with the source of
tradition, and to narrate with the directness of belief, had
still some undercurrent of thought which he meant to convey,
and which he succeeded in keeping track of: Arthur and
Guinevere, in the little song, ride along like primeval beings
of the world—the situation seems the type of all
seduction; the Lady of Shallot is not alone the recluse who
sees life in a mirror, she is the cloistered Middle Age itself,
and when her mirror breaks we feel that a thousand glasses are
bursting, a thousand webs are parting, and that the times are
coming eye to eye with the actual. In those younger days,
Tennyson, possessed with a subject, and as it were floating in
it, could pour out a legend with the credulity of a child and
the clear convincing insight of a teacher: when he came in
mature life to apply himself to the rounded work, he had more
of a disposition to teach, and less of that imaginative reach
which is like belief; and now he is telling a story
again for the sake of the story, but without the deeper
meaning. Lynette is a supercilious damsel who asks redress of
the knights of the Round Table: Gareth, a male Cinderella,
starts from the kitchen to defend her, and after conquering her
prejudices by his bravery, assumes his place as a disguised
prince. It is a plain little comedy, not much in Tennyson’s
line: there are places where he tries to imitate the artless
disconnected speech of youth; and here, as with the little
nun’s babble in Guinevere, and with some other passages
of factitious simplicity, the poet makes rather queer work:

It may be questioned whether hap-hazard talk ever, in any
age of human speech, took a form like that, though it is just
like Tennyson in many a weary part of his poetry. The blank
verse, for its part, is broken with all the old skill, and
there are lines of beautiful license, like this:

or strengthened with the extra quantity, like this:

or imitating the motion described, as these:

but occasionally the effort to give variety leads into mere
puzzles and disagreeable fractures of metre, such as the
following quatrain:

The first line in this quotation, if it be not a misprint of
the American edition, can only be brought to any kind of rule
by accenting each polysyllable on the last, and is not, when
even that is done, a pleasant piece of caprice. There are
plenty of phrases that shock the attention sufficiently to keep
it from stagnating on the smooth surface of the verse; such
are—”ever-highering eagle-circles,” “there were none but
few goodlier than he,” “tipt with trenchant steel,” and the
expression, already famous, of “tip-tilted” for Lynette’s nose;
to which may be added the object of Gareth’s attention,
mentioned in the third line of the poem, when he “stared at the
spate.” But in the matter of descriptive power we do not
know that the Laureate has succeeded better for a long time
past in his touches of landscape-painting: the pictures of
halls, castles, rivers and woods are all felicitous. For
example, this in five lines, where the travelers saw