None of the European exhibitions we have sketched partook of
the nature of an anniversary or was designed to commemorate an
historical event. Some idea of celebrating the close of the
calendar half-century may have helped to determine the choice
of 1851 as the year for holding the first London fair; but if
so, it was only with reference to the general progress during
this period, and not to any notable fact at its commencement.
Still less did the later exhibitions owe any portion of their
significance and interest to their connection with a date. They
afforded occasion for comparison and rivalry, but no shape
loomed up out of the past claiming to preside over the
festival, to have its toils and achievements remembered, and to
[pg 394] be credited with a share in
the production of the harvests garnered by its
successors.

In our case it is very different. Here was the birth-year of
the Union coming apace. It forced itself upon our
contemplation. It appealed not merely to the average passion of
grown-up boys for hurrahs, gun-firing, bell-ringing, and
rockets sulphureous and oratorical. It addressed us in a much
more sober tone and assumed a far more didactic aspect. Looking
from its throne of clouds o’er half the (New) World—and
indeed, as we have shown, constructively over the Old as
well—it summoned us to the wholesome moral exercise of
pausing a moment in our rapid career to revert to first
principles, moral, social and political, and to explore the
germs of our marvelous material progress. Nor could we assume
this office as exclusively for our own benefit. The rest of
Christendom silently assigned it to the youngest born for the
common good. Circumstances had placed in our hands the
measuring-rod of Humanity’s growth, and all stood willing to
gather upon our soil for its application, so far as that could
be made by the method devised and perfected within the past
quarter of a century. It was here, a thousand leagues away from
the scene of the first enterprise of the kind, that the
culminating experiment was to be tried.

GIRARD AVENUE BRIDGE—ONE OF THE APPROACHES TO THE
EXHIBITION GROUNDS.

To what point on a continent as broad as the Atlantic were
they to come? The [pg 395] European fairs were
hampered with no question of locality. That Austria should
hold hers at Vienna, France at Paris, and Britain at London,
were foregone conclusions. But the United States have a
plurality of capitals, political, commercial, historical and
State. Washington, measured by house-room and not by
magnificent distances, was too small. New York, acting with
characteristic haste, had already indulged in an exposition,
and it lacked, moreover, the rich cluster of associations
that might have hallowed its claims as the “commercial
metropolis.” Among the State capitals Boston alone had the
needed historical eminence, but, besides the obvious
drawback of its situation, its capacity and its commissariat
resources, except for a host of disembodied intellects, must
prove insufficient. There remained the central city of the
past, the seat of the Continental Congress, of the
Convention and of the first administrations under the
Constitution which it framed—the halfway-house between
North and South of the early warriors and statesmen, and the
workshop in which the political machinery that has since
been industriously filed at home and more or less closely
copied abroad was originally forged. Where else could the
two ends of the century be so fitly brought together? Here
was the Hall of 1776; the other hall that nearly two years
earlier received the first assemblage of “that hallowed name
that freed the Atlantic;” the modest building in a
bed-chamber of which the Declaration of Independence was
penned; and other localities rich with memories of the men
of our heroic age.

The space of a few blocks covered the council-ground of the
Union. Those few acres afforded room enough for the beating of
its political heart for twenty-five years, from the embryonic
period to that of maturity—from the meeting of a
consulting committee of subject colonists to the establishment
of unchallenged and symmetrical autonomy.

The growth of Philadelphia from this contracted germ was
only less remarkable than that of the government. The capital
of the provincial rebels had expanded into one fit for an
empire, comparable to Vienna as a site for a World’s Exposition
and a caravanserai for those who should attend it. Such
advantages would have caused its selection had the question
been submitted in the first instance to the unbiased vote of
various quarters of the Union, all expected and all prepared to
contribute an equal quota, according to population and means,
of the cost. But the enterprise of the community itself
anticipated such decision. Its own citizens hastened to
appropriate the idea and shoulder the responsibility. They felt
that the standpoint wherefrom they were able to address their
countrymen was a commanding one, and they lost no time in
lifting up their voice. Aware that those who take the
initiative have always to carry more than their share of the
burden, they were very moderate in their calls for aid; and the
demand for that they rested chiefly upon the same ground which
naturally sustained part of their own calculations of
reimbursement in some shape, direct or indirect—local
self-interest. The dislike to the entire loss of a large outlay
on an uncertain event is not peculiar to this commercial age.
Appeals on the side of patriotism and of public enthusiasm over
the jubilee of a century would be at least as effective with
the American people as with any other in the world; but they
could not be expected to be all-powerful, and to need no
assistance from the argument of immediate and palpable
advantage. In default of subscriptions to the main fund from
distant towns and States, these were invited to provide for the
cost of collecting, transporting and arranging their individual
shares of the display. This they have generally, and in many
cases most liberally, done, in addition to direct subscriptions
greater in amount than the provinces of either Austria, France
or England made to their respective expositions. Withal, it
could surprise no one that Pennsylvania and her chief city
would have to be the main capitalists of an undertaking located
on their own soil.

These came forward with a promptness that at once raised the
movement [pg 396] above the status of a
project. The city with a million and a half, and the State
with a million, replenished the exchequer of the association
after a fashion that ensured in every quarter confidence in
its success, and at the same time extinguished what little
disposition may have been manifested elsewhere to cavil at
the choice of location. These large subventions very
properly contemplated something more than the encouragement
of a transient display, and were for the most part devoted
to the erection of structures of a permanent character, such
as the Art-Gallery or Memorial Hall and the Horticultural
Building. To endowments of this description, called forth by
the occasion, we might add the Girard Avenue Bridge, the
finest in the country, erected by the city at the cost of a
million and a half, and leading direct to the exhibition
grounds. The concession of two hundred and sixty acres of
the front of Fairmount Park, with the obliteration of costly
embellishments that occupied the ground taken for the new
exposition buildings, may be viewed in the light of another
contribution.

MAIN BUILDING.

A treasury meant to accommodate seven millions of
dollars—three millions less than the Vienna
outlay—still showed an aching void, which was but
partially satisfied by the individual subscriptions of
Philadelphians. It became necessary to sound the financial
tocsin in the ears of all the Union. Congress, States, cities,
counties, schools, churches, citizens and children were
appealed to for subscriptions. The shares were fixed at the
convenient size of ten dollars each, hardly the market-value of
the stock-certificate, “twenty-four by twenty inches on the
best bank-note paper,” which became the property of each
fortunate shareholder on the instant of payment. But these
seductive pictures belonged to a class of art with which the
moneyed public had become since ’73 unhappily too familiar.
They had to jostle, in the gallery of the stock-market, a vast
and various collection exhaustive of the whole field of
allegory, mythological and technical, and framed in the most
bewitching aureoles of blue, red and green printer’s
[pg 397] ink. It seemed in ’72 much
more probable that the Coon Swamp and Byzantium
Trans-Continental Railway would be able, the year after
completion, to pay eight per cent. on fifty thousand dollars
of bonds to the mile, sold at seventy in the hundred, than
it did in ’75 that ten millions of fifty-cent tickets could
be disposed of in six months at any point on the Continent.
Thus it happened that the exchange of Mr. Spinner’s twenty
square inches of allegory for the three square feet of
Messrs. Ferris & Darley’s went on slowly, and it became
painfully obvious that the walls of but an imperceptible
minority of American homes would have the patriotic faith
and fervor of their occupants attested a century hence by
these capacious engravings, as that of a hundred years ago
is by rusty muskets and Cincinnati diplomas.

Still, the stock did not altogether go a-begging. The
adjacent State of New Jersey signed for the sum of $100,000,
more remote New Hampshire and Connecticut for $10,000 each, and
little Delaware for the same. Kansas gave $25,000. Five
thousand were voted by the city of Wilmington, and a thin
fusillade of ten-dollar notes played slowly from all points of
the compass. This was kept up to the last, and with some
increase of activity, but it was a mere affair of pickets, that
could not be decisive.

Undismayed, the managers fought their way through fiscal
brake and brier, the open becoming more discernible with each
effort, till in February, 1876, Congress rounded off their
strong box with the neat capping of a million and a half. The
entire cost of administration and construction was thus
covered, and the association distinguished from all its
predecessors by the assurance of being able on the opening day
to invite its thousands of guests to floors laden with the
wealth of the world, but with not an ounce of debt.

The assistance extended in another and indirect form by the
States collectively and individually was valuable. Congress
appropriated $505,000 for the erection of a building and the
collection therein of whatever the different Federal
departments could command of the curious and instructive.
Massachusetts gave for a building of her own, and for aiding
the contribution of objects by her citizens, $50,000; New York
for a like purpose, $25,000; New Hampshire, Nevada and West
Virginia, $20,000 each; Ohio, $13,000; Illinois, $10,000; and
other States less sums. The States in all, and in both forms of
contribution, have given over four hundred thousand
dollars—not a fourth, strange to say, of the sums
appropriated by foreign governments in securing an adequate
display of the resources, energy and ingenuity of their
peoples. It does not approach the donation of Japan, and little
more than doubles that of Spain. In explanation, it may be
alleged that our exhibitors, being less remote, will encounter
less expense, and a larger proportion of them will be able to
face their own expenses.

Great as is the value to a country of a free and facile
interchange of commodities and ideas between its different
parts, of not less—under many circumstances far
greater—importance is its wide and complete intercourse
with foreign lands. Provincial differences are never so marked
as national. The latter are those of distinct
idiosyncrasies—the former, but modifications of one and
the same. To study members of our own family is only somewhat
to vary the study of ourselves. Really to learn we must go
outside of that circle. Hence the tremendous effect of the
world-searching commerce of modern times in the enlightenment
and enrichment of the race.

For the best fruits of the exposition its projectors and all
concerned in its success looked abroad. In this estimate of
highest results they had the example of Europe. It was
remembered that British exports rose from one hundred and
thirty-one millions sterling in 1850 to two hundred and
fourteen in 1853—an increase equal to our average annual
export at present, and double what it was at that time. The
declared satisfaction of Austria with her apparent net loss of
seven millions of dollars by the exhibition of 1873, in view of
the offset she claimed in the stimulus it gave to her domestic
[pg 398] industry and the extended
market it earned for her foreign trade, was also eloquent.
We must therefore address the world in the way most likely
to ensure its attention and attendance. The chief essential
to that end was that it should be official. Government must
address government.

MACHINERY HALL.

Naturally, this necessity was apparent from the beginning.
Congress was addressed betimes, and the consequence was a
sufficiently sonorous act of date March 3, 1871, assuming in
the title to “provide for celebrating the one hundredth
anniversary of American independence.” It made, however, no
provision at all for that purpose financially. On the contrary,
it provided very stringently that the Federal treasury should
not be a cent the worse for anything contained in the bill. It
furnished, however, the stamp wanted. It “created” the United
States Centennial Commission, and it directed the President, as
soon as the private corporators should have perfected their
work, to address foreign nations, through their diplomatic
representatives and our own, in its behalf. A commissioner and
alternate were appointed by the President, on the nomination of
the respective governors, from each State and Territory, who
should have “exclusive control” of the exhibition.

Subsequently, an act of June 1, 1872, established a
Centennial Board of Finance, as a body corporate, to manage the
fisc of the exhibition, provide ways and means for the
construction of the buildings according to the plans adopted by
the commission, and after the close of the exhibition to
convert its property into cash and divide the same, after
paying debts, pro rata among the stockholders. This was
to be done under the supervision of the commission, which was
to wind up the board, audit its accounts, and make report to
the President of the financial outcome of the affair. An inroad
on the terms of this act is made by the law of last winter,
which makes preferred stock of the million and a half then
subscribed by the Federal government—a provision,
however, the literal enforcement of which, by the covering back
of so much money [pg 399] into the treasury of the
United States, is, in our opinion, not probable. It will
doubtless be made a permanent appropriation, in some form,
for the promotion of the arts of industry and taste.

Ten millions of dollars was the authorized capital of the
new board. Events have proved the amplitude of this
estimate.

As early as the third day of July, 1873, the President was
enabled, by the notification of the governor of Pennsylvania,
to make formal proclamation that provision had been made for
the completion of the exposition structures by the time
contemplated. Nearly three years was thus allotted for
preparation to home and foreign exhibitors. A year later (June
5, 1874) an act of a single sentence requested the President
“to extend, in the name of the United States, a respectful and
cordial invitation to the governments of other nations to be
represented and take part in” the exposition; “Provided,
however, that the United States shall not be liable,
directly or indirectly, for any expenses attending such
exposition, or by reason of the same.” The abundant caution of
this italically emphatic reservation will scarcely
preclude the extension to the representatives of foreign
governments of such measure of hospitality, on occasion, as
they may have in the like case offered our own.

Acts permitting the Centennial medals to be struck at the
mint, and admitting free of duty articles designed for
exhibition, were passed in June, 1874. The Secretary of the
Treasury gave effect to the latter by a clear and satisfactory
schedule of regulations. Under its operation foreign exhibitors
have all their troubles at home; their goods, once on board
ship, reaching the interior of the building with more facility
and less of red tape than they generally meet with in attaining
the point of embarkation.

The answers of the nations were all that could be desired,
and largely beyond any anticipation. Their government
appropriations will exceed an aggregate of two millions in our
currency. Great Britain, with Australia and Canada, gives for
the expenses of her share of the display $250,000 in gold;
France, $120,000; Germany, $171,000; Austria, $75,000;
Italy, $38,000 from the government direct, and the same sum
from the Chamber of Commerce, which is better, as indicating
enlightenment and energy among her business-men; Spain, amid
all her distractions, $150,000; Japan, an unknown quantity in
the calculations of 1851, no less than $600,000; Sweden,
$125,000; Norway, $44,000; Ecuador, $10,000; the Argentine
Confederation, $60,000; and many others make ample provision
not yet brought to figures, among them Egypt, China, Brazil,
Chili, Venezuela, and that strange political cousin of ours at
the antipodes, begotten and sturdily nurtured by the
Knickerbockers, the Orange Free State. In all, we may reckon at
forty the governments which have made the affair a matter of
public concern, and have ranked with the ordinary and regular
cares of administration the interest of their people in being
adequately represented at Philadelphia. Many other states will
be represented by considerable displays sent at private
expense. It results that we shall have twenty-one acres under
roof of the best products of the outer world—more than
the entire area of the London exposition of 1851. A Muscovite
journal, the Golos, expresses a wide popular sentiment
in declaring that our exposition “will have immense political
importance in the way of international relations.” The people
suspect they have found what they have long needed—a
great commercial, industrial and political ‘change to aid in
regulating and equalizing the market of ideas and making a
common fund of that article of trade, circulating freely and
interchangeable everywhere at sight. Practically, the territory
of the United States is an island like Great Britain.
Everything that comes to Philadelphia, save a little from
Canada, will traverse the sea. We are assuming the metropolitan
character, whereto isolation is a step. All the imperial
centres, old and new, have been seated on islands or
promontories. Look at England, Holland, Venice, Carthage,
Syracuse, Tyre, Rome and Athens. Shall we add New York and San
Francisco—little wards as they are of a continental
metropolis?

[pg 400]

A unanimous, graceful and cordial bow of acceptance having
thus swept round the globe in response to the invitation of the
youngest member of the family, let us glance at the
preparations made for the comfortable entertainment of so
august an assemblage. An impression that its host was not yet
fully out of the woods, that the chestnut-burs were still
sticking in his hair, and that the wolf, the buffalo and the
Indian were among his intimate daily chums, may have tended to
modify its anticipations of a stylish reception. The rough but
hearty ways of a country cousin who wished to retaliate for
city hospitalities probably limited the calculations of the
expectant world. This afforded the cousin aforesaid opportunity
for a new surprise, of which he fully determined to avail
himself. It is not his habit to aim too low, and that was not
his failing in the present instance.

HON. JOSEPH R. HAWLEY, PRESIDENT OF THE CENTENNIAL
COMMISSION.

The edifices, according to the original plan, were to excel
their European exemplars not less in elegance and elaboration
than in completeness for their practical purposes, in
adaptation and in capacity. The uncertainty, however, of
success in raising the necessary funds in time enforced the
abandonment of much that was merely ornate—a circumstance
which was proved fortunate by the excess in the demands of
exhibitors over all calculations, since the means it was at
first proposed to bestow upon the artistic finish of the
buildings were needed to provide additional space. As it is,
the architectural results actually attained are above the
average of such structures in general effect. The Main Building
strikes the eye, at an angle of vision proper to its extent,
more pleasingly than either of the English or French
structures; while for the massiveness and dignity unattainable
by glass and iron Memorial Hall has no rival among them, and
its façade is inferior chiefly in richness of detail to
the main entrance at Vienna. Were it otherwise, some
shortcoming in point of external beauty might be pardoned in
erections which are meant to stand but for a few months, and
which can have no pretensions to the monumental character
belonging to true architecture. Suitability to their transient
purpose is the great thing to be considered; and their merit in
that regard is amply established. Mr. P. Cunliffe Owen,
familiar with all the minutiæ of previous expositions,
declares them supreme “in thoroughness of plan and energy of
construction”—a judgment designed to coyer the whole
conception and administration of the exhibition, and one which,
coming from a disinterested and competent foreign observer, may
be cited as an amply expressive tribute to the zeal and
fidelity of those in control. Ex-Governor Hawley of
Connecticut, president of the commission, is a native of North
Carolina, and brings to the cause a combination of Southern
ardor with Northern tenacity. The secretary of the commission,
Mr. [pg 401] John L. Campbell of
Indiana, was a good second in that bureaucratic branch of
the management. The trying charge of supervising the work
generally, conducting negotiations and correspondence, and
leading as one harmonious body to the objective point of
success an army of artists, contractors, superintendents,
clerks, exhibitors, railroad companies and State and
national commissioners, fell to General A.T. Goshorn of
Ohio, director-general. We do not know that anything more
eloquent can be said of him than simply thus to name what he
had to do and point to what he has done. The duties of
procuring the ways and means and controlling their
expenditure devolved upon the Centennial Board of Finance.
Of this body Mr. John Welsh is Chairman; Mr. Frederick
Fraley, Treasurer; and Mr. Thomas Cochran, Chief of the
Building Committee. Their office was fixed upon the grounds
at an early stage of the proceedings. Mr. Welsh, more
fortunate than Wren, has been able while yet in the flesh to
point to his monument, and see it rising around him from day
to day.

The exposition is peculiarly fortunate in its site. Had
historical associations determined the choice of the ground,
the array of them in Fairmount Park would have sufficed to
justify that which has been made. Its eminences are dotted with
the country-houses of the Revolutionary statesmen and with
trees under which they held converse. On one of them Robert
Morris, our American Beaumarchais, enjoyed his financial zenith
and fell to its nadir. To another the wit and geniality of
Peters were wont to summon for relaxation the staid Washington,
the meditative Jefferson, Rittenhouse the man of mathematics,
the gay La Fayette with enthusiasm as yet undamped by
Olmütz, and his fellow-émigrés of two
other stamps, Talleyrand and the citizen-king that was to be.
The house of one of the Penns looked down into a secluded dell
which he aptly dubbed Solitude, but which is now the populous
abode of monkeys, bears and a variety of other animals, more
handsomely housed than any similar collection in America.

GENERAL ALFRED T. GOSHORN, DIRECTOR-GENERAL OF THE
CENTENNIAL COMMISSION.

Knolls not appropriated by the villas of the old time, or
from which they have disappeared, offered admirable locations
for some of the buildings of the exposition, and a broad and
smooth plateau, situated precisely where it was wanted, at the
point nearest the city, offered itself for the largest two, the
Main Building and Machinery Hall, with room additional for the
Art Building. The amphitheatrical depression flanked on the
east by this long wall of granite and glass, and spreading
northward to the heights occupied by Horticultural Hall and the
Agricultural Building, was assigned to the mushroom city to be
formed of the various State and foreign head-quarters,
restaurants, the Women’s Pavilion, the United States Government
Building, that of the press,
[pg 402] a monster dairy, a ditto
brewery, and a medley of other outcroppings of public and
private spirit. To this motley and incoherent assemblage a
quiet lakelet nearly in the centre would supply a
sorely-wanted feature of repose, were it not to be vexed by
a fountain, giving us over bound and helpless to the
hurly-burly. But that is what every one will come for. When
each member of the congregated world “tries its own
expressive power,” madness not inappropriately rules the
hour. Once in a hundred years a six months’ carnival is
allowable to so ponderous a body. Civilization here aims to
see itself not simply as in a glass, but in a multitude of
glasses. To steer its optics through the architectural
muddle in the basin before us it will need the retina that
lies behind the facets of a fly.

JOHN WELSH, ESQ., PRESIDENT OF THE CENTENNIAL BOARD OF
FINANCE.

Eighteen hundred and eighty feet long, four hundred and
sixty-four wide, forty-eight to the cornice and seventy to the
roof-tree, are figures as familiar by this time to every living
being in the United States as pictures of the Main Building. At
each corner a square tower runs up to a level with the roof,
and four more are clustered in the centre of the edifice and
rise to the height of a hundred and twenty feet from a base of
forty-eight feet square. These flank a central dome one hundred
and twenty feet square at base and springing on iron trusses of
delicate and graceful design to an apex ninety-six feet above
the pavement—the exact elevation of the interior of the
old Capitol rotunda. The transept, the intersection of which
with the nave forms this pavilion, is four hundred and sixteen
feet long. On each side of it is another of the same length and
one hundred feet in width, with aisles of forty-eight feet
each. Longitudinally, the divisions of the interior correspond
with these transverse lines. A nave one hundred and twenty feet
wide and eighteen hundred and thirty-two feet long—said
to be unique for combined length and width—is accompanied
by two side avenues a hundred feet wide, and as many aisles
forty-eight feet wide. An exterior aisle twenty-four feet wide,
and as many high to a half-roof or clerestory, passes round the
whole building except where interrupted by the main entrances
in the centres of the sides and ends and a number of minor ones
between.

The iron columns which support the central nave and transept
are forty-five feet high, the roof between rising to seventy.
Those of the side avenues and transepts are of the same height,
with a roof-elevation of sixty-five feet. The columns of the
centre space are seventy-two feet high. In all, the columns
number six hundred and seventy-two. They stand twenty-two feet
apart upon foundations of solid masonry. Being of rolled iron,
bolted together in segments, they can, like the other
constituents of the building, be taken apart and erected
elsewhere when the gentlemen of the commission, their good work
done and [pg 403] the century duly honored,
shall fold their tents like the Arabs, though not so
silently.

A breadth of thirty feet will be left to the main promenades
along and athwart, of fifteen feet to the principal ones on
either side, and of ten feet to all the others. Narrow highways
these for traversing the kingdoms of the world, but, combined,
they nearly equal the bottom depth of the Suez Canal, very far
exceed the five feet of the Panama Railway, and still farther
the camel-track that sufficed a few centuries ago to link our
ancestors to the Indies. The berths of the nations run
athwartship, or north and south as the great ark is anchored.
The classes of objects are separated by lines running in the
opposite direction. Noah may be supposed to have followed some
such arrangement in his storage of zoological zones and
families. He had the additional aid of decks; which our
assemblers of the universe decline, small balconies of
observation being the only galleries of the Main Building.
Those at the different stages of the central towers will be
highly attractive to students who prefer the general to the
particular, or who, exhausted for the time, retire to clear
their brains from the dust of detail and muster their faculties
for another charge on the vast army of art. From this perch one
may survey mankind from China to Peru through “long-drawn
aisles” flooded with mellow light, the subdued tones of the
small surface that glass leaves open to the paint-brush
relieved with a few touches of positive color to destroy
monotony. These are assisted by the colored glass louvres,
which have no other artistic merit, but serve, where they are
placed over the side-entrances, to indicate the nation to whose
department belongs that particular vomitorium.

Four miles of water- and drainage-pipe underlie the
twenty-one and a half acres of plank floor in this building.
The pillars and trusses contain thirty-six hundred tons of
iron. The contract for it was awarded in July, 1874, and it was
completed in eighteen months, being ready for the reception of
goods early in January last. The cost was $1,420,000, and in
mechanical execution the iron-, glass- and wood-work is
pronounced fully equal to either of the British structures and
superior to those of the Continent. In economy of material for
producing a given result it is probable that the iron trusses
and supports of the English buildings are as much excelled as
the iron bridges of this country surpass those of Great Britain
in the combination of lightness with strength. Our metal is
better, and its greater cost has united with the scarcity of
labor which so stimulated ingenuity in other departments of
industry to enforce tenuity of form. Foreign engineers wonder
that our viaducts stand, but somehow they do stand.

The turrets and eagles of galvanized sheet iron, not being
intended to support anything but jokes, need not be criticized
as part of the construction. The tiled pavements of the
vestibules, designed to sustain, besides criticism of the
he-who-walks-may-read order, the impact of the feet of all
nations, are more important. Their pattern is very
fair—their solidity will doubtless stand the test. The
turf and shrubbery meant to brighten the entourage,
especially at the carriage concourse on the east front, we can
hardly hope will fare so well. The defence of their native
soil, to prevent its being rent from them by the heedless tread
of millions and scattered abroad in the shape of dust, will
demand the most untiring struggles of the guardian patriots in
the Centennial police service.

Shall we step northward from the middle of this building to
Memorial Hall, or thread the great nave to the western portal
and enter the twin tabernacle sacred to Vulcan? The answer
readily suggests itself: substantials before
dessert—Mulciber before the Muses. Let us get the film of
coal-smoke, the dissonance of clanking iron and the
unloveliness of cog-wheels from off our senses before offering
them to the beautiful, pure and simple. We come from the domain
of finished products, complete to the last polish, silently
self-asserting and wooing the almighty dollar with all their
simpers. We pass to their noisy hatching- and training-ground,
where all the processes [pg 404] of their creation from
embryo to maturity are to be rehearsed for our edification.
We shall here become learned in the biography of everything
a machine can create, from an iron-clad to a penknife or a
pocket-handkerchief. In the centre of the immense hall,
fourteen hundred and two by three hundred and sixty feet and
covering fourteen acres, the demiurges of this nest of
Titans, an engine—which if really of fourteen hundred
horse-power must be the largest hitherto known—is
getting together its bones of cast and thews of wrought
iron, and seems already like the first lion “pawing to be
free.” Its first throb one would fancy inevitably fatal to
the shell of timber and glass that surrounds it.

AGRICULTURAL
BUILDING.

Before it is brought to the test let us explore that shell.
To our eye, its external appearance is more pleasing than that
of the building we just left. The one central and four terminal
towers, with their open, kiosk-like tops, are really graceful,
and the slender spires which surmount them are preferable to
the sham of sheet-iron turrets. Thanks, too, to the necessity
of projecting an annex for hydraulic engines from one side of
the middle, the building is distinguished by the possession of
a front. The main cornice is forty feet in height upon the
outside; the interior height being seventy feet in the two main
longitudinal avenues and forty feet in the one central and two
side aisles. The avenues are each ninety feet in width, and the
aisles sixty, with a space of fifteen feet for free passage in
the former and ten in the latter. A transept ninety feet broad
crosses the main building into that for hydraulics, bringing up
against a tank sixty by one hundred and sixty feet, whereinto
the water-works are to precipitate, Versailles fashion, a
cataract thirty-five feet high by-forty wide.

The substitution of timber for iron demands a closer placing
of the pillars. They are consequently but sixteen feet apart
“in the row,” the spans being correspondingly more contracted.
This has the compensating advantage, æsthetically
speaking, of offering more surface for decorative effect, and
the opportunity has been fairly availed of. The coloring of the
roof, tie-rods and piers expands over the turmoil below the
cooling calm of blue and silver. To this the eye, distracted
with the dance of bobbins and the whirl of shafts, can turn for
relief, even as Tubal Cain, pausing to wipe his brow, lifted
his wearied gaze to the welkin.

Machinery Hall has illustrated, from its earliest days, the
process of development by gemmation. Southward, toward the sun,
it has shot forth several lusty sprouts. The hydraulic avenue
which [pg 405] we have mentioned covers an
acre, being two hundred and eight by two hundred and ten
feet. Cheek by jowl with water is its neighbor fire, safe
behind bars in the boiler-house of the big engine; and next
branches out, over another acre and more, or forty-eight
thousand square feet, the domain of shoes and leather under
a roof of its own.

Including galleries and the leather, fire and water suburbs,
this structure affords more than fifteen acres of space. Over
that area it rose like an exhalation in the spring and early
summer of 1875. At the close of winter it existed only in the
drawings of Messrs. Pettit & Wilson. Under the hands of Mr.
Philip Quigley it was ready to shelter a great Fourth of July
demonstration. This matches the rapidity of growth of its
neighbor before described. The Main Building, designed by the
same firm, had its foundations laid by Mr. R.J. Dobbins,
contractor, in the fall of 1874, but nothing further could be
done till the following spring. The first column was erected,
an iron Maypole, on the first day of the month of flowers, and
the last on the 27th of October. Three weeks later the last
girder was in place. All had been done with the precision of
machinery, no pillar varying half an inch from its line.
Machinery, indeed, rolled the quadrant-shaped sections of each
column and riveted their flanges together with hydraulic
hammers; great steam-derricks dropped each on its appointed
seat; and the main tasks of manual labor in either building
were painting, glazing, floor-laying and erecting the
ground-wall of masonry, from five to seven feet high, that
fills in the outer columns all round to a level with the heads
of theorists who, holding that la propriété
c’est le vol, assert the propriety of theft.

Following Belmont Avenue, the Appian Way of the Centennial,
to the north-west, we penetrate a mob of edifices, fountains,
restaurants, government offices, etc., and reach the
Agricultural Building—the palace of the farmer. The hard
fate of which he habitually complains—that of being
thrust into a corner save when he is wanted for tax-paying
purposes—does not forsake him here. The commission does
not tax him, however, and the boreal region whereto he and his
belongings are consigned is in no other way objectionable than
as not being nearer the front. The building is worthy of a
Centennial agricultural fair. Five hundred and forty by eight
hundred and twenty feet, with ten acres and a quarter under
roof, it equals the halls of a dozen State cattle-shows, The
style is Gothic, the three transepts looking like those of as
many cathedrals stripped of the roof, the extrados taking its
place. The nave that spits them is a hundred and twenty-five
feet wide, with an elevation of seventy-five feet. An
ecclesiastical aspect is imparted by the great oriel over the
main entrance, and the resemblance is aided by a central tower
that suggests the “cymbals glorious swinging uproarious” in
honor of the apotheosis of the plough. The materials of this
bucolic temple are wood and glass. The contract price was
$250,000. Its contents will be more cosmopolitan than could
have been anticipated when it was planned. Germany claims five
thousand feet and Spain six thousand. Among other countries,
tropical America is fully represented.

Besides this indoor portion of the world’s farm-steading, a
barnyard of correspondent magnitude is close at hand, where all
domestic animals will be accommodated, and the Weirs, Landseers
and Bonheurs will find many novelties for the portfolio. A
race-track, too, is an addendum of course. What would our
Pan-Athenaic games be without it?

From this exhibition of man’s power over the fruits of the
earth and the beasts of the field we cross a ravine where the
forest is allowed to disport itself in ignorance of his yoke,
and ascend another eminence where floral beauty, gathered from
all quarters of the globe, is fed in imprisonment on its native
soil and breathes its native climate. We predict that woman
will seek her home among the flowers on the hill rather than in
the atelier specially prepared for her in the valley we have
passed. Her tremendous struggles through the mud, while yet the
grounds were all chaos, to get sight of
[pg 406] the first plants that
appeared in the Horticultural Building, left no doubt of
this in our mind.

HORTICULTURAL HALL.

No site could have been more happily chosen for this
beautiful congress-hall of flowers. It occupies a bluff that
overlooks the Schuylkill a hundred feet below to the eastward,
and is bounded by the deep channels of a pair of brooks
equidistant on the north and south sides. Up the banks of these
clamber the sturdy arboreal natives as though to shelter in
warm embrace their delicate kindred from abroad. Broad walks
and terraces prevent their too close approach and the
consequent exclusion of sunlight.

For the expression of its purpose, with all the solidity and
grace consistent with that, the Moresque structure before us is
not excelled by any within the grounds. The curved roofs of the
forcing-houses would have the effect upon the eye of weakening
the base, but that, being of glass and showing the greenery
within, their object explains itself at once, and we realize
the strong wall rising behind them and supporting the lofty
range of iron arches and fretwork that springs seventy-two feet
to the central lantern. The design of the side portals and
corner towers may be thought somewhat feeble. They and the base
in its whole circuit might with advantage have been a little
more emphasized by masonry. The porticoes or narrow verandahs
above them on the second story are in fine taste. The eruption
of flag-poles is, of course, a transient disease, peculiar to
the season. They have no abiding-place on a permanent structure
like this, and will disappear with the exposition.

Entering from the side by a neat flight of steps in dark
marble, we find ourselves in a gayly-tiled vestibule thirty
feet square, between forcing-houses each a hundred by thirty
feet. Advancing, we enter the great conservatory, two hundred
and thirty by eighty feet, and fifty-five high, much the
largest in this country, and but a trifle inferior in height to
the palm-houses of Chatsworth and Kew. A gallery twenty feet
from the floor will carry us up among the dates and cocoanuts
that are to be. The decorations of this hall are in keeping
with the external design. The woodwork looks out of place amid
so much of harder material; but there is not much of it.

Outside promenades, four in number and each a hundred feet
long, lead along the roofs of the forcing-houses, and
contribute to the portfolio of lovely views that enriches the
Park. Other prospects are offered by the upper floors of the
east [pg 407] and west fronts; the
aërial terrace embracing in all seventeen thousand
square feet. The extreme dimensions of the building are
three hundred and eighty by one hundred and ninety-three
feet. Restaurants, reception-rooms and offices occupy the
two ends. The contractor who has performed his work so
satisfactorily is Mr. John Rice.

A few years hence this winter-garden will, with one
exception to which we next proceed, be the main attraction at
the Park. It will by that time be effectively supplemented by
thirty-five surrounding acres of out-door horticulture, to
which the soil of decomposed gneiss is well suited.

Passing from the bloom of Nature, we complete our circuit
with that which springs from the pencil, the chisel and the
burin. Here we alight upon another instance of inadequate
calculation. That the art-section of the exposition would fill
a building three hundred and sixty-five by two hundred and ten
feet, affording eighty-nine thousand square feet of
wall-surface for pictures, must, when first proposed, have
struck the most imaginative of the projectors as a dream. The
actual result is that it proved indispensably necessary to
provide an additional building of very nearly equal dimensions,
or three hundred and forty-nine by a hundred and eighty-six
feet, to receive the contributions offered; and this after the
promulgation of a strict requirement that “all works of art
must be of a high order of merit.” Half the space in the
extension had been claimed by Great Britain, Germany, France,
Belgium, Austria and Italy before ground was broken for its
foundation; and recent demands at home have rendered necessary
a further projection of the wings, with the effect of giving to
the building the form of a Greek cross.

This building is on the rear, or north side, of Memorial
Hall, and is the first portion of the fine-art department that
meets the eye of one coming from Horticultural Hall. It is of
comparatively temporary character, being built of brick instead
of the solid granite that composes the pile in front of it. Its
architectural pretensions are of course inferior. It is the
youngest of all the exposition buildings, the present spring
witnessing its commencement and completion. The drying of such
green walls in such manner as to render them safe for valuable
pictures has been compassed by the use of “asbestos” brick,
which is said to be fire- as well as water-proof. Failure in
this regard would be of the less moment, inasmuch as a great
proportion of the contents will be drawings and engravings. In
interior plan the extension will closely imitate the main
building.

Memorial Hall, as its name implies, contemplates indefinite
durability. What Virginia and Massachusetts granite, in
alliance with Pennsylvania iron, on a basis of a million and a
half of dollars, can effect in that direction, seems to have
been done. The façade, designed by Mr. Schwarzmann, is
in ultra-Renaissance; the arch and balustrade and open arcade
quite overpowering pillar and pediment. The square central
tower, or what under a circular dome would be the drum, is
quite in harmony with the main front so tar as proportion and
outline are concerned; but there is too much blank surface on
the sides to match the more “noisy” details below it. This
apart, the unity of the building is very striking. That its
object, of supplying the best light for pictures and statuary,
is not lost sight of, is evidenced by the fact that
three-fourths of the interior space is lighted from above, and
the residue has an ample supply from lofty windows. The figures
of America, Art, Science, etc. which stud the dome and parapet
were built on the spot, and will do very well for the present.
The eagles are too large in proportion, and could easily fly
away with the allegorical damsels at their side.

The eight arched windows of the corner towers, twelve and a
half by thirty-four feet, are utilized for art-display. Munich
fills two with stained glass: England also claims a place in
them. The iron doors of the front are inlaid with bronze panels
bearing the insignia of the States; the artist prudently
limiting himself to that modest range of subjects in
recognition of the impossibility
[pg 408] of eclipsing Ghiberti at
six months’ notice. Thirty years is not too much time to
devote to completing the ornamentation of this building.
Five, seven or ten millions of people will pass through it
in the course of its first year, and among them will be some
capable of making sound suggestions for its finish. The
wisdom that comes from a multitude of counsels will remain
to be sifted. Then will remain the creation of the artists
who are to carry the counsels into execution. We shall be
fortunate if the next three decades bring us men thoroughly
equal to the task.

MEMORIAL
HALL, WITH EXTENSION.

It would be an unpardonable neglect of the maxim which
enjoins gratitude to the bridge that carries us safely over
were we to complete our tour of the exposition structures
without a glance at the graceful erections, diverse in
magnitude and design, which overleap the depressions so
attractive to the student of the picturesque and so trying to
the pedestrian. The æsthetic capabilities of bridge
architecture are very great, and a fine field is here offered
for their display. The flat expanses of Hyde Park, the Champs
de Mars and the Prater could afford no such exhibition. The
ground and the buildings became, perforce, two sharply distinct
things; and the blending into unity of landscape and
architecture could be but imperfectly attained. Here the case
is very different. With the aid of an art that embraces in its
province alike the fairy trellis and the monumental arch and
pilaster, the lines of Memorial Hall and other permanent
edifices may be led over the three hundred acres appropriated
to the exposition. From the foundation of a bridge-pier to the
crowning statue of America, the artist finds an uninterrupted
range.

The work of his foster-brother, the artisan, has certainly
been well done. The structures we have been traversing are, in
their way, works of art—very worthy, if not the choicest
conceivable, blossoms of our century-plant. For fitness, the
quality that underlies beauty throughout Nature from the plume
to the tendril and the petal, they have not been surpassed in
their kind. Every flange, bolt, sheet and abutment has been
well thought out. Whatever the purpose, to bind or to brace, to
lift or to support, everything
tells.

[pg 409]

SKETCHES OF INDIA.

IV.—CONCLUSION.

The Koutab Minar, which I had first viewed nine miles off
from one of the little kiosquelets crowning the minarets of the
Jammah Masjid, improved upon closer acquaintance. One
recognizes in the word “minaret” the diminutive of “minar,” the
latter being to the former as a tower to a turret. This minar
of Koutab’s—it was erected by the Mussulman general
Koutab-Oudeen-Eibeg in the year 1200 to commemorate his success
over the Rajpút emperor Pirthi-Raj—is two hundred
and twenty feet high, and the cunning architect who designed it
managed to greatly intensify its suggestion of loftiness by its
peculiar shape. Instead of erecting a shaft with unbroken
lines, he placed five truncated cones one upon another in such
a way that the impression of their successively lessening
diameters should be lengthened by the four balconies which
result from the projection of each lower cone beyond the
narrower base of the cone placed on it—thus borrowing, as
it were, the perspective effects of five shafts and
concentrating them upon one. The lower portion, too, shows the
near color of red—it is built of the universal red
sandstone with which the traveler becomes so
familiar—while the upper part reveals the farther color
of white from its marble casing. Each cone, finally, is carved
into reeds, like a bundle of buttresses supporting a weight
enormous not by reason of massiveness, but of pure height.

The group of ruins about the Koutab Minar was also very
fascinating to me. The Gate of Aladdin, a veritable fairy
portal, with its bewildering wealth of arabesques and flowing
traceries in white marble inlaid upon red stone; the Tomb of
Altamsh; the Mosque of Koutab,—all these, lying in a
singular oasis of trees and greenery that forms a unique spot
in the arid and stony ruin-plain of Delhi, drew me with great
power. I declared to Bhima Gandharva that it was not often in a
lifetime that we could get so many centuries together to talk
with at once, and wrought upon him to spend several days with
me, unattended by servants, in this tranquil society of the
dead ages, which still live by sheer force of the beautiful
that was in them.

“Very pretty,” said my companion, “but not by force of the
beautiful alone. Do you see that iron pillar?” We were walking
in the court of the Mosque of Koutab, and Bhima pointed, as he
spoke, to a plain iron shaft about a foot in diameter rising in
the centre of the enclosed space to a height of something over
twenty feet. “Its base is sunken deeper in the ground than the
upper part is high. It is in truth a gigantic nail, which,
according to popular tradition, was constructed by an ancient
king who desired to play Jael to a certain Sisera that was in
his way. It is related that King Anang Pal was not satisfied
with having conquered the whole of Northern India, and that a
certain Brahman, artfully seizing upon the moment when his mind
was foolish with the fumes of conquest, informed him there was
but one obstacle to his acquisition of eternal power. ‘What is
that?’ said King Anang Pal.—’It is,’ said the Brahman,
‘the serpent Sechnaga, who lies under the earth and stops it,
and who at the same time has charge of Change and
Revolution.—’Well, and what then?’ said King Anang
Pal.—’If the serpent were dead there would be no change,’
said the Brahman.—’Well, and what then?’ said King Anang
Pal.—’If you should cause to be constructed a great nail
of iron, I will show you a spot where it shall be driven so as
to pierce the head of the serpent.’ It was done; and the
nail—being this column which you now
contemplate—was duly driven. Then the Brahman departed
from the court. Soon the king’s mind began to work, to
question, to doubt, to harass itself with a thousand
[pg 410] speculations, until his
curiosity was inflamed to such a degree that he ordered the
nail to be drawn out. With great trouble and outlay this was
done: slowly the heavy mass rose, while the anxious king
regarded it. At last the lower end came to his view. Rama!
it was covered with blood. ‘Down with it again!’ cries the
joyful king: ‘perhaps the serpent is not yet dead, and is
escaping [pg 411] even now.’ But, alas! it
would not remain stable in any position, pack and shove
howsoever they might. Then the wise Brahman returned. ‘O
king,’ said he, in reply to the monarch’s interrogatories,
‘your curiosity has cost you your kingdom: the serpent has
escaped. Nothing in the world can again give stability to
the pillar or to your reign.’ And it was true. Change still
lived, and King Anang Pal, being up, quickly went down. It
is from this pillar that yon same city gets its name. In the
tongue of these people dilha is, being interpreted,
‘tottering;’ and hence Dilhi or Delhi. It must be confessed,
however, that this is not the account which the iron pillar
gives of itself, for the inscription there declares it to
have been erected as a monument of victory by King Dhara in
the year 317, and it is known as the Lâth (or pillar)
of Dhara.”

INDIGO-FACTORY NEAR ALLAHABAD.

Next day we took train for Agra, which might be called Shah
Jehan’s “other city,” for it was only after building the lovely
monument to his queen—the Taj Mahal—which has made
Agra famous all over the world, that he removed to Delhi, or
that part of it known as Shahjehanabad. Agra, in fact, first
attained its grandeur under Akbar, and is still known among the
natives as Akbarabad.

“But I am all for Shah Jehan,” I said as, after wandering
about the great citadel and palace at the south of the city, we
came out on the bank of the Jumna and started along the road
which runs by the river to the Taj Mahal. “A prince in whose
reign and under whose direct superintendence was fostered the
style of architecture which produced that little Mouti Masjid
(Pearl Mosque) which we saw a moment ago—not to speak of
the Jammah Masjid of Delhi which we saw there, or of the Taj
which we are now going to see—must have been a
spacious-souled man, with frank and pure elevations of temper
within him, like that exquisite white marble superstructure of
the Mouti Masjid which rises from a terrace of rose, as if the
glow of crude passion had thus lifted itself into the pure
white of tried virtue.”

A walk of a mile—during which my companion reviewed
the uglinesses as well as the beauties of the great Mogol reign
with a wise and impartial calmness that amounted to an
affectionate rebuke of my inconsiderate
effusiveness—brought us to the main gate of the long red
stone enclosure about the Taj. This is itself a work of
art—in red stone banded with white marble, surmounted by
kiosques, and ornamented with mosaics in onyx and agate. But I
stayed not to look at these, nor at the long sweep of the
enclosure, crenellated and pavilioned. Hastening through the
gate, and moving down a noble alley paved with freestone,
surrounded on both sides with trees, rare plants and flowers,
and having a basin running down its length studded with
water-jets, I quickly found myself in front of that
bewilderment of incrustations upon white marble which
constitutes the visitor’s first impression of this loveliest of
Love’s memorials.

I will not describe the Taj. This is not self-denial: the
Taj cannot be described. One can, it is true, inform
one’s friends that the red stone platform upon which the white
marble mausoleum stands runs some nine hundred and sixty feet
east and west by three hundred and twenty north and south; that
the dome is two hundred and seventy feet high; that the
incrustations with which the whole superstructure is covered
without and within are of rock-crystal, chalcedony, turquoise,
lapis-lazuli, agate, carnaline, garnet, oynx, sapphire, coral,
Pannah diamonds, jasper, and conglomerates, brought
respectively from Malwa, Asia Minor, Thibet, Ceylon, Temen,
Broach, Bundelcund, Persia, Colombo, Arabia, Pannah, the
Panjab, and Jessalmir; that there are, besides the mausoleum,
two exquisite mosques occupying angles of the enclosure, the
one built because it is the Moslem custom to have a house of
prayer near the tomb, the other because the architect’s passion
for symmetry demanded another to answer to the first, whence it
is called Jawab (“the answer”); that out of a great
convention of all the architects of the East one Isa (Jesus)
Mohammed was chosen to build this monument, and that its
erection [pg 412] employed twenty thousand
men from 1630 to 1647, at a total cost of twelve millions of
dollars; and, finally, that the remains of the beautiful
queen variously known as Mumtazi Mahal, Mumtazi Zemani and
Taj Bibi, as well as those of her royal husband, Shah Jehan,
who built this tomb to her memory, repose here.

MUSSULMAN
SCHOOL AT ALLAHABAD.

But this is not description. The only
[pg 413] way to get an idea of the
Taj Mahal is—to go and see it.

“But it is ten thousand miles!” you say.

“But it is the Taj Mahal,” I reply with calmness. And no one
who has seen the Taj will regard this answer as aught but
conclusive.

But we had to leave it finally—it and Agra—and
after a railway journey of some twelve hours, as we were
nearing Allahabad my companion began, in accordance with his
custom, to give me a little preliminary view of the
peculiarities of the town.

“We are now approaching,” he said, “a city which
distinguishes itself from those which you have seen by the fact
that besides a very rich past it has also a very bright future.
It is situated at the southern point of the Lower Doab, whose
fertile and richly-cultivated plains you have been looking at
to-day. These plains, with their wealth, converge to a point at
Allahabad, narrowing with the approach of the two
rivers,—the Ganges and the Jumna—that enclose them.
The Doab, in fact, derives its name from do, “two,” and
ab, “rivers.” But Allahabad, besides being situated at
the junction of the two great water-ways of India—for
here the Jumna unites with the Ganges—is also equally
distant from the great extremes of Bombay, Calcutta, and
Lahore, and here centres the railway system which unites these
widely-separated points. Add to this singular union of
commercial advantages the circumstance—so important in an
India controlled by Englishmen—that the climate, though
warm, is perfectly wholesome, and you will see that Allahabad
must soon be a great emporium of trade.”

“Provided,” I suggested, “Benares yonder—Benares is
too close by to feel uninterested—will let it be so.”

“Oh! Benares is the holy city. Benares is the blind
Teiresias of India: it has beheld the Divine Form, and in this
eternal grace its eyes have even lost the power of seeing those
practical advancements which usually allure the endeavors of
large cities. Allahabad, although antique and holy also, has
never become so wrapped up in religious absorption.”

On the day after our arrival my companion and I were driven
by an English friend engaged in the cultivation of indigo to an
indigo-factory near the town, in compliance with a desire I had
expressed to witness the process of preparing the dye for
market.

“Not long ago,” I said to our friend as we were rolling out
of the city, “I was wandering along the banks of that great
lagoon of Florida which is called the Indian River, and my
attention was often attracted to the evidences of extensive
cultivation which everywhere abounded. Great ditches, growths
of young forests upon what had evidently been well-ploughed
fields within a century past, and various remains of
settlements constantly revealed themselves. On inquiry I
learned that these were the remains of those great proprietary
indigo-plantations which were cultivated here by English
grantees soon after Florida first came under English
protection, and which were afterward mournfully abandoned to
ruin upon the sudden recession of Florida by the English
government.”

“They are ruins of interest to me,” said our English friend,
“for one of them—perhaps some one that you
beheld—represents the wreck of my
great-great-grandfather’s fortune. He could not bear to stay
among the dreadful Spaniards and Indians; and so, there being
nobody to sell to, he simply abandoned homestead, plantations
and all, and returned to England, and, finding soon afterward
that the East India Company was earnestly bent upon fostering
the indigo-culture of India, he came here and recommenced
planting. Since then we’ve all been
indigo-planters—genuine ‘blue blood,’ we call
ourselves.”

Indigo itself had a very arduous series of toils to
encounter before it could manage to assert itself in the world.
The ardent advocates of its azure rival, woad, struggled long
before they would allow its adoption. In 1577 the German
government officially prohibited the use of indigo, denouncing
it as that pernicious, deceitful and corrosive substance, the
Devil’s dye. It had, indeed, a worse fate in England, where
hard names were [pg 414] supplemented by harsh acts,
for in 1581 it was not only pronounced anathema
maranatha by act of Parliament, but the people were
authorized to institute search for it in their neighbors’
dye-houses, and were empowered to destroy it wherever found.
Not more than two hundred years have passed since this law
was still in force. It was only after a determined effort,
which involved steady losses for
[pg 415] many years, that the East
India Company succeeded in re-establishing the culture of
indigo in Bengal. The Spanish and French in Central America
and the West Indies had come to be large growers, and the
production of St. Domingo was very large. But the revolt in
the latter island, the Florida disasters and the continual
unsettlement of Mexico, all worked favorably for the
planters of India, who may now be called the
indigo-producers of the world.

MÂLERS AND
SONTALS.

The seed is usually sown in the latter part of October in
Bengal, as soon as the annual deposit of the streams has been
reduced by drainage to a practicable consistency, though the
sowing-season lasts quite on to the end of November. On dry
ground the plough is used, the ryots, or native
farm-laborers, usually planting under directions proceeding
from the factory. There are two processes of extracting the
dye, known as the method “from fresh leaves” and that “from dry
leaves.” I found them here manufacturing by the former process.
The vats or cisterns of stone were in pairs, the bottom of the
upper one of each couple being about on a level with the top of
the lower, so as to allow the liquid contents of the former to
run freely into the latter. The upper is the fermenting vat, or
“steeper,” and is about twenty feet square by three deep. The
lower is the “beater,” and is of much the same dimensions with
the upper, except that its length is five or six feet greater.
As the twigs and leaves of the plants are brought in from the
fields the cuttings are placed in layers in the steeper, logs
of wood secured by bamboo withes are placed upon the surface to
prevent overswelling, and water is then pumped on or poured
from buckets to within a few inches of the top. Fermentation
now commences, and continues for fourteen or fifteen hours,
varying with the temperature of the air, the wind, the nature
of the water used and the ripeness of the plants. When the
agitation of the mass has begun to subside the liquor is racked
off into the lower vat, the “beater,” and ten men set to work
lustily beating it with paddles (busquets), though this
is sometimes done by wheels armed with paddle-like appendages.
Meanwhile, the upper vat is cleaned out, and the refuse mass of
cuttings stored up to be used as fuel or as fertilizing
material. After an hour and a half’s vigorous beating the
liquor becomes flocculent. The precipitation is sometimes
hastened by lime-water. The liquor is then drained off the dye
by the use of filtering-cloths, heat being also employed to
drain off the yellow matter and to deepen the color. Then the
residuum is pressed in bags, cut into three-inch cubes, dried
in the drying-house and sent to market.

The dry-leaf process depends also upon maceration, the
leaves being cropped from the ripe plant, and dried in the hot
sunshine during two days, from nine in the morning until four
in the afternoon.

On the next day, at an early hour in the morning, my
companion and I betook us to the Plain of Alms. I have before
mentioned that Allahabad, the ancient city of Prayaga, is
doubly sanctified because it is at the junction of the Jumna
and the Gauges, and these two streams are affluents of its
sanctity as well as of its trade. The great plain of white sand
which is enclosed between the blue lake-like expanses of the
two meeting rivers is the Plain of Alms. In truth, there are
three rivers which unite here—the Ganges, the Jumna and
the Saravasti—and this thrice-hallowed spot is known in
the Hindu mythologic system as the Triveni.

“But where is the third?” I asked as we stood gazing across
the unearthly-looking reaches of white sand far down the blue
sweep of the mysterious waters.

“Thereby hangs a tale,” replied my companion. “It is
invisible here, but I will show you what remains of it
presently when we get into the fort. Here is a crowd of
pilgrims coming to bathe in the purifying waters of the
confluence: let us follow them.”

As they reached the shore a Brahman left his position under
a great parasol and placed himself in front of the troop of
believers, who, without regard to sex,
[pg 416] immediately divested
themselves of all clothing except a narrow cloth about the
loins, and followed him into the water. Here they proceeded
to imitate his motions, just as pupils in a calisthenic
class follow the movements of their teacher, until the
ceremonies of purification were all accomplished.

GRAIN-AND-FLOUR MERCHANT OF PATNA.

“A most villainous-faced penitent!” I exclaimed as one of
their number came [pg 417] out, and, as if wearied by
his exertions, lay down near us on the sand.

Bhima Gandharva showed his teeth: “He is what your American
soldiers called in the late war a substitute. Some rich Hindu,
off somewhere in India, has found the burden of his sins
pressing heavily upon him, while at the same time the cares of
this world, or maybe bodily infirmities, prevent him from
visiting the Triveni. Hence, by the most natural arrangement in
the world, he has hired this man to come in his place and
accomplish his absolution for him.”

Striking off to the westward from the Plain of Alms, we soon
entered the citadel of Akbar, which he built so as to command
the junction of the two streams. Passing the Lâth
(pillar) of Asoka, my companion led me down into the old
subterranean Buddhistic temple of Patal Pouri and showed me the
ancient Achaya Bat, or sacred tree-trunk, which its custodians
declare to be still living, although more than two thousand
years old. Presently we came to a spot under one of the citadel
towers where a feeble ooze of water appeared.

“Behold,” said my friend, “the third of the Triveni rivers!
This is the river Saravasti. You must know that once upon a
time, Saravasti, goddess of learning, was tripping along fresh
from the hills to the west of Yamuna (the Jumna), bearing in
her hand a book. Presently she entered the sandy country, when
on a sudden a great press of frightful demons uprose, and so
terrified her that in the absence of other refuge she sank into
the earth. Here she reappears. So the Hindus fable.”

On our return to our quarters we passed a verandah where an
old pedagogue was teaching a lot of young Mussulmans the
accidence of Oordoo, a process which he accomplished much as
the “singing geography” man used to impart instruction in the
olden days when I was a boy—to wit, by causing the pupils
to sing in unison the A, B, C. Occasionally, too, the little,
queer-looking chaps squatted tailor-wise on the floor would
take a turn at writing the Arabic character on their slates. A
friendly hookah in the midst of the group betrayed the manner
in which the wise man solaced the labors of education.

On the next day, as our indigo-planter came to drive us to
the Gardens of Chusru, he said, “An English friend of mine who
is living in the Moffussil—the Moffussil is anywhere
not in Calcutta, Bombay or Madras—not far from
Patna has just written me that word has been brought from one
of the Sontal villages concerning the depredations of a tiger
from which the inhabitants have recently suffered, and that a
grand hunt, elephant-back, has been organized through the
combined contributions of the English and native
elephant-owners. He presses me to come, and as an affair of
this sort is by no means common—for it is no easy matter
to get together and support a dozen elephants and the army of
retainers considered necessary in a great hunt—I thought
perhaps you would be glad to accompany me.”

Of course I was; and Bhima Gandharva, though he would not
take any active part in the hunt, insisted upon going along in
order to see that no harm came to me.

On the next day, therefore, we all took train and fared
south-eastward toward Calcutta, as far as to Bhagalpur, where
we left the railway, sending our baggage on to Calcutta, and
took private conveyance to a certain spot among the Rajmahal
Mountains, where the camp had been fixed by retainers on the
day before. It was near a village of the Sontals, which we
passed before reaching it, and which was a singular-enough
spectacle with its round roofed huts and a platform at its
entrance, upon which, and under which, were ghastly heaps of
the skulls of animals slain by the villagers. These Sontals
reminded me of the Gónds whom I had seen, though they
seemed to be far manlier representatives of the autochthonal
races of India than the former. They are said to number about a
million, and inhabit a belt of country some four hundred miles
long by one hundred broad, including the Rajmahal Mountains,
and extending from near the Bay of Bengal to the edge of Behar.
So [pg 418] little have they been known
that when in the year 1855 word was brought to Calcutta that
the Sontals had risen and were murdering the Europeans, many
of the English are said to have asked not only Who
are the Sontals? but What are the Sontals?

The more inaccessible tops of the same mountains, the
Rajmahal, are occupied by a much ruder set of people, the
Mâlers, who appear to have been pushed up here by the
Sontals, as the Sontals were themselves pressed by the incoming
Aryans.

A TIGER-HUNT,
ELEPHANT-BACK.

As we arrived at the camp I realized the words of our
English friend concerning the magnitude of the preparations for
a tiger-hunt undertaken on the present scale. The tents of the
sportsmen, among whom were several English army officers and
civil officials, besides a native rajah, were pitched in a
beautiful glade canopied by large trees, and near these were
the cooking-tents and the lodging-places of the servants, of
whom there was the liberal allowance which is customary in
India. Through the great tree-trunks I could see elephants,
camels and horses tethered about the outskirts of the camp,
while the carts, elephant-pads and other impedimenta
lying about gave the whole the appearance of an army at
bivouac. Indeed, it was not an inconsiderable force that we
could have mustered. There were fifteen or twenty elephants in
the party. Every elephant had two men, the mahaut and
his assistant; every two camels, one man; every cart, two men;
besides whom were the kholassies (tent-pitchers), the
chikarries (native huntsmen to mark down and flush the
tiger), letter-carriers for the official personages, and
finally the personal servants of the party, amounting in all to
something like a hundred and fifty souls. The commissary
arrangements of such a body of men and beasts were no light
matter, and had on this occasion been placed by contract in the
hands of a flour-and-grain merchant from Patna. As night drew
on the scene became striking in the extreme, and I do not think
I felt the fact of India more keenly at any time than while
Bhima [pg 419] Gandharva and I, slipping
away from a party who were making merry over vast allowances
of pale ale and cheroots, went wandering about under the
stars and green leaves, picking our way among the huge forms
of the mild-countenanced elephants and the bizarre figures
of the camels.

BENGAL
WATER-CARRIERS.

On the next day, after a leisurely breakfast at
eight—the hunt was to begin at midday—my kind host
assigned me an elephant, and his servants proceeded to equip me
for the hunt, placing in my howdah brandy, cold tea, cheroots,
a rifle, a smooth-bore, ammunition, an umbrella, and finally a
blanket.

“And what is the blanket for?” I asked.

“For the wild-bees; and if your elephant happens to stir up
a nest of them, the very best thing in the world you can do is
to throw it incontinently over your head,” added my host,
laughing.

The tiger had been marked down in a spot some three miles
from camp, and when our battle-array, which had at first taken
up the line of march in a very cozy and gentleman-militia sort
of independence, had arrived within a mile of our destination
the leader who had been selected to direct our movements caused
us all to assume more systematic dispositions, issued orders
forbidding a shot to be fired at any sort of game, no matter
how tempting, less than the royal object of our chase, and then
led the way down the glade, which now began to spread out into
lower and wetter ground covered by tall grasses and thickets.
The hunt now began in earnest. Hot, flushed, scratched as to
the face by the tall reeds, rolling on my ungainly animal’s
back as if I were hunting in an open boat on a chopping sea, I
had the additional nervous distraction of seeing many sorts of
game—deer, wild-hogs, peafowl, partridges—careering
about in the most exasperating manner immediately under my
gun-muzzle. To add to my dissatisfaction, presently I saw a
wild-hog dash out of a thicket with her young litter
immediately across our path, and as my elephant stepped
excitedly along one of his big fore feet crunched directly down
on a beautiful little pig, bringing a quickly-smothered squeak
which made me quite cower before the
[pg 420] eye of Bhima Gandharva as
he stood looking calmly forward beside me. So we tramped on
through the thickets and grasses. An hour passed; the
deployed huntsmen had again drawn in together, somewhat
bored; we were all red-faced and twig-tattooed; no tiger was
to be found; we gathered into a sort of circle and were
looking at each other with that half-foolish, half-mad
disconsolateness [pg 421] which men’s faces show when
they are unsuccessfully engaged in a matter which does not
amount to much even after it is successfully
achieved,—when suddenly my elephant flourished his
trunk, uttered a shrill trumpeting sound, and dashed
violently to one side, just as I saw a grand tiger, whose
coat seemed to be all alive with throbbing spots, flying
through the air past me to the haunches of the less wary
elephant beside which mine had been walking. Instantly the
whole party was in commotion. “Bagh! bagh!” yelled
the mahauts and attendants: the elephants trumpeted and
charged hither and thither. The tiger seemed to become
fairly insane under the fusillade which greeted him; he
leapt so desperately from one side to the other as to appear
for a few moments almost ubiquitous, while at every
discharge the frantic natives screamed “Lugga!
lugga!” without in the least knowing whether he
was hit (lugga) or not, till presently, when I
supposed he must have received at least forty shots in his
body, he fell back from a desperate attempt to scale the
back of the rajah’s elephant, and lay quite still.

BRAHMANS OF BENGAL.

“I thought that last shot of mine would finish him,” said
one of the English civil officials as we all crowded around the
magnificent beast.

“Whether it did or not, I distinctly saw him cringe at
my shot,” hotly said another. “There’s always a peculiar
look a tiger has when he gets his death-wound: it’s
unmistakable when you once know it.”

“And I’ll engage to eat him,” interjected a third, “if I
didn’t blow off the whole side of his face with my smooth-bore
when he stuck his muzzle up into my howdah.”

“Gentlemen,” said our leader, a cool and model old hunter,
“the shortest way to settle who is the owner of this tiger-skin
is to examine the perforations in it.”

Which we all accordingly fell to doing.

“B——, I’m afraid you’ve a heavy meal ahead of
you: his muzzle is as guiltless of harm as a baby’s,” said one
of the claimants.

“Well,” retorted B——, “but I don’t see any sign
of that big bore of yours, either.”

“By Jove!” said the leader in some astonishment as our
search proceeded unsuccessfully, “has anybody hit him?
Maybe he died of fright.”

At this moment Bhima Gandharva calmly advanced, lifted up
the great fore leg of the tiger and showed us a small blue hole
just underneath it: at the same time he felt along the tiger’s
skin on the opposite side to the hole, rolled the bullet about
under the cuticle where it had lodged after passing through the
animal, and deftly making an incision with his knife drew it
forth betwixt his thumb and finger. He handed it to the
gentleman whose guests we were, and to whom the rifle belonged
which had been placed in our howdah, and then modestly withdrew
from the circle.

“There isn’t another rifle in camp that carries so small a
bullet,” said our host, holding up the ball, “and there can’t
be the least doubt that the Hindu is the man who killed
him.”

Not another bullet-hole was to be found.

“When did you do it?” I asked of Bhima. “I knew not
that you had fired at all.”

“When he made his first leap from the thicket,” he said
quietly. “I feared he was going to land directly on you. The
shot turned him.”

At this the three discomfited claimants of the tiger-skin
(which belongs to him who kills) with the heartiest English
good-nature burst into roars of laughter, each at himself as
well as the others, and warmly shook Bhima’s hand amid a
general outbreak of applause from the whole company.

Then amid a thousand jokes the tiffin-baskets were brought
out, and we had a royal lunch while the tiger was
“padded”—i.e., placed on one of the unoccupied elephants;
and finally we got us back to camp, where the rest of the day
was devoted to dinner and cheroots.

From the tiger to the town, from the cries of jackals to
those of street-venders,—this is an easy transition in
India; and it was only the late afternoon of the
[pg 422] second day after the
tiger-hunt when my companion and I were strolling along the
magnificent Esplanade of Calcutta, having cut across the
mountains, elephant-back, early in the morning to a station
where we caught the down-train.

BENGALESE OF LOW
CASTE.

Solidity, wealth, trade, ponderous ledgers, capacious ships’
bottoms, merchandise transformed to magnificence, an
ample-stomached bourgeoisie,—this is what comes to
one’s mind as one faces the broad walk in front of Fort William
and looks across the open space to the palaces, the domes, the
columns of modern and English Calcutta; or again as one wanders
along the strand in the evening when the aristocrats of
commerce do congregate, and, as it were, gazette the lengths of
their bank-balances in the glitter of their equipages and
appointments; or again as one strolls about the great public
gardens or the amplitudes of Tank Square, whose great tank of
water suggests the luxury of the dwellers hereabout; or the
numerous other paths of comfort which are kept so by constant
lustrations from the skins of the water-bearers. The whole
situation seems that of ease and indulgence. The very circular
verandahs of the rich men’s dwellings expand like the ample
vests of trustees and directors after dinner. The city extends
some four and a half miles along the left bank of the Hooghly,
and its breadth between the “Circular Road” and the river is
about a mile and a half. If one cuts off from this space that
part which lies south of a line drawn eastward from the Beebee
Ross Ghât to the Upper Circular Road—the northern
portion thus segregated being the native town—one has a
veritable city of palaces; and when to these one adds the
magnificent suburbs lying beyond the old circumvallation of the
“Mahratta Ditch”—Chitpore, Nundenbagh, Bobar, Simla,
Sealdah, Entally, Ballygunge, Bhovaneepore, Allypore,
Kidderpore—together with the riverward-sloping lawns and
stately mansions of “Garden Reach” on the sea-side of town, and
the great dockyards and warehouses of the right bank of the
river opposite the city, one has enclosed a space which may
probably [pg 423] vie with any similar one in
the world for the appearances and the realities of wealth
within it.

But if one should allow this first impression of
Calcutta—an impression in which good eating and the
general pampering of the flesh seem to be the most prominent
features—to lead one into the belief that here is nothing
but money-making and grossness, one would commit a serious
mistake. It is among the rich babous, or commercial natives, of
Calcutta that the remarkable reformatory movement known as
“Young India” has had its origin, and it would really seem that
the very same qualities of patience, of prudence, of foresight
and of good sense which have helped these babous to accumulate
their wealth are now about being applied to the nobler and far
more difficult work of lifting their countrymen out of the
degradations of old outworn customs and faiths upon some higher
plane of reasonable behavior.

“In truth,” said Bhima Gandharva to me one day as were
taking our customary stroll along the Esplanade, “you have now
been from the west of this country to the east of it. You have
seen the Past of India: I wish that you may have at least a
glimpse of its Future. Here comes a young babou of my
acquaintance, to whom I will make you known. He is an
enthusiastic member of ‘Young India:’ he has received a liberal
education at one of the numerous schools which his order has so
liberally founded in modern years, and you will, I am
convinced, be pleased with the wisdom and moderation of his
sentiments.”

Just as I was reaching out my hand to take that of the
babou, in compliance with Bhima’s introduction, an enormous
adjutant—one of the great pouched cranes
(arghilahs) that stalk about Calcutta under protection
of the law, and do much of the scavenger-work of the
city—walked directly between us, eyeing each of us with
his red round eyes in a manner so ludicrous that we all broke
forth in a fit of laughter that lasted for several minutes,
while the ungainly bird stalked away with much the stolid air
of one who has seen something whereof he thinks but little.

The babou addressed me in excellent English, and after some
preliminary inquiries as to my stay in Calcutta, accompanied by
hospitable invitations, he gradually began, in response to my
evident desire, to talk of the hopes and fears of the new
party.

“It is our great misfortune,” said he, “that we have here to
do with that portion of my countrymen which is perhaps most
deeply sunk in the mire of ancient custom. We have begun by
unhesitatingly leading in the front ourselves whenever any
disagreeable consequences are to be borne by reason of our
infringement of the old customs. Take, for example, the problem
of the peculiar position of women among the Hindus.
Perhaps”—and here the babou’s voice grew very grave and
earnest—”the human imagination is incapable of conceiving
a lot more wretched than that of the Hindu widow. By immemorial
tradition she could escape it only through the flames of the
satti, the funeral-pile upon which she could burn
herself with the dead body of her husband. But the satti
is now prohibited by the English law, and the poor woman who
loses her husband is, according to custom, stripped of her
clothing, arrayed in coarse garments and doomed thenceforth to
perform the most menial offices of the family for the remainder
of her life, as one accursed beyond redemption. To marry again
is impossible: the man who marries a widow suffers punishments
which no one who has not lived under the traditions of caste
can possibly comprehend. The wretched widow has not even the
consolations which come from books: the decent Hindu woman does
not know how to read or write. There was still one avenue of
escape from this life. She might have become a nautchni.
What wonder that there are so many of these? How, then, to deal
with this fatal superstition, or rather conglomerate of
superstitions, which seems to suffer no more from attack than a
shadow? We have begun the revolution by marrying widows just as
girls are married, and by
[pg 424] showing that the loss of
caste—which indeed we have quite abolished among
ourselves—entails necessarily none of those miserable
consequences which the priests have denounced; and we strike
still more deeply at the root of the trouble by instituting
schools where our own daughters, and all others whom we can
prevail upon to send, are educated with the utmost care. In
our religion we [pg 425] retain Brahma—by whom
we mean the one supreme God of all—and abolish all
notions of the saving efficacy of merely ceremonial
observances, holding that God has given to man the choice of
right and wrong, and the dignity of exercising his powers in
such accordance with his convictions as shall secure his
eternal happiness. To these cardinal principles we subjoin
the most unlimited toleration for other religions,
recognizing in its fullest extent the law of the adaptation
of the forms of relief to the varying moulds of character
resulting from race, climate and all those great conditions
of existence which differentiate men one from another.”

CHARIOT OF THE PROCESSION OF THE RATTJATTRA, AT
JAGHERNÂTH.

“How,” I asked, “do the efforts of the Christian
missionaries comport with your own sect’s?”

“Substantially, we work together. With the sincerest good
wishes for their success—for every sensible man must hail
any influence which instills a single new idea into the
wretched Bengalee of low condition—I am yet free to
acknowledge that I do not expect the missionaries to make many
converts satisfactory to themselves, for I am inclined to think
them not fully aware of the fact that in importing Christianity
among the Hindus they have not only brought the doctrine, but
they have brought the Western form of it, and I fear
that they do not recognize how much of the nature of substance
this matter of form becomes when one is attempting to put new
wine into old bottles. Nevertheless, God speed them! I say. We
are all full of hope. Signs of the day meet us everywhere. It
is true that still, if you put yourself on the route to Orissa,
you will meet thousands of pilgrims who are going to the temple
at Jaghernâth (what your Sunday-school books call
Juggernaut) for the purpose of worshiping the hideous idols
which it contains; and although the English policemen accompany
the procession of the Rattjattra—when the idol is drawn
on the monstrous car by the frenzied crowd of
fanatics—and enforce the law which now forbids the poor
insane devotees from casting themselves beneath the fatal
wheels, still, it cannot be denied that the devotees are
there, nor that Jaghernâth is still the Mecca of
millions of debased worshipers. It is also true that the
pretended exhibitions of the tooth of Buddha can still inspire
an ignorant multitude of people to place themselves in adoring
procession and to debase themselves with the absurd rites of
frenzy and unreason. Nor do I forget the fact that my
countrymen are broken up into hundreds of sects, and their
language frittered into hundreds of dialects. Yet, as I said,
we are full of hope, and there can be no man so bold as to
limit the capabilities of that blood which flows in English
veins as well as in Hindu. Somehow or other, India is now not
so gloomy a topic to read of or to talk of as it used to be.
The recent investigations of Indian religion and philosophy
have set many European minds upon trains of thought which are
full of novelty and of promise. India is not the only
land—you who are from America know it full
well—where the current orthodoxy has become wholly
unsatisfactory to many of the soberest and most practically
earnest men; and I please myself with believing that it is now
not wholly extravagant to speak of a time when these two
hundred millions of industrious, patient, mild-hearted, yet
mistaken Hindus may be found leaping joyfully forward out of
their old shackles toward the larger purposes which reveal
themselves in the light of progress.”

At the close of our conversation, which was long and to me
intensely interesting, the babou informed us that he had
recently become interested with a company of Englishmen in
reclaiming one of the numerous and hitherto wholly unused
islands in the Sunderbunds for the purpose of devoting it to
the culture of rice and sugar-cane, and that if we cared to
penetrate some of the wildest and most picturesque portions of
that strange region he would be glad to place at our disposal
one of the boats of the company, which we would find lying at
Port Canning. I eagerly accepted the proposition; and on the
next day, taking the short railway which connects Calcutta and
Port Canning, we quickly arrived at the latter
[pg 426] point, and proceeded to
bestow ourselves comfortably in the boat for a lazy voyage
along the winding streams and canals which intersect the
great marshes. It was not long after leaving Port Canning
ere we were in the midst of the aquatic plants, the
adjutants, the herons, the thousand sorts of water-birds,
the crocodiles, which here abound.

THE PORT OF
CALCUTTA.

The Sunderbunds—as the natives term
[pg 427] that alluvial region which
terminates the delta of the Ganges—can scarcely be
considered either land or sea, but rather a multitudinous
reticulation of streams, the meshes of which are represented
by islands in all the various stages of consistency between
water and dry land. Sometimes we floated along the lovely
curves of canals which flowed underneath ravishing arches
formed by the meeting overhead of great trees which leaned
to each other from either bank; while again our course led
us between shores which were mere plaits and interweavings
of the long stems and broad leaves of gigantic water-plants.
The islands were but little inhabited, and the few denizens
we saw were engaged either in fishing or in the manufacture
of salt from the brackish water. Once we landed at a
collection of huts where were quartered the laborers of
another company which had been successfully engaged in
prosecuting the same experiment of rice-culture which our
friend had just undertaken. It was just at the time when the
laborers were coming in from the fields. The wife of the one
to whose hut my curiosity led me had prepared his evening
meal of rice and curry, and he was just sitting down to it
as I approached. With incredible deftness he mingled the
curry and the rice together—he had no knife, fork or
spoon—by using the end-joints of his thumb and
fingers: then, when he had sufficiently amalgamated the
mass, he rolled up a little ball of it, placed the ball upon
his crooked thumb as a boy does a marble, and shot it into
his mouth without losing a grain. Thus he despatched his
meal, and I could not but marvel at the neatness and
dexterity which he displayed, with scarcely more need of a
finger-bowl at the end than the most delicate feeder you
shall see at Delmonico’s.

The crops raised upon the rich alluvium of these islands
were enormous, and if the other difficulties attending
cultivation in such a region could be surmounted, there seemed
to be no doubt of our friend the babou’s success in his
venture. But it was a wild and lonesome region, and as we
floated along, after leaving the island, up a canal which
flamed in the sunset like a great illuminated baldric slanting
across the enormous shoulder of the world, a little air came
breathing over me as if it had just blown from the mysterious
regions where space and time are not, or are in different forms
from those we know. A sense of the crudity of these great
expanses of sea-becoming-land took possession of me; the
horizon stretched away like a mere endless continuation of
marshes and streams; the face of my companion was turned off
sea-ward with an expression of ineffably mellow tranquillity; a
glamour came about as if the world were again formless and
void, and as if the marshes were chaos. I shivered with a
certain eager expectation of beholding the shadowy outline of a
great and beautiful spirit moving over the face of the waters
to create a new world. I drew my gaze with difficulty from the
heavens and turned toward my companion.

He was gone. The sailors also had disappeared.

And there, as I sat in that open boat, midst of the
Sunderbunds, at my domestic antipodes, happened to me the most
wondrous transformation which the tricksy stage-carpenters and
scene-shifters of the brain have ever devised. For this same
far-stretching horizon, which had just been alluring my soul
into the depths of the creative period, suddenly contracted
itself four-square into the somewhat yellowed walls of a
certain apartment which I need not now further designate, and
the sun and his flaming clouds became no more nor less than a
certain half dozen of commonplace pictures upon these same
yellowish walls; and the boat wherefrom I was about to view the
birth of continents degraded itself into a certain—or, I
had more accurately said, a very uncertain—cane chair,
wherein I sit writing these lines and mourning for my lost
Bhima Gandharva.

[pg 428]

THE COLLEGE STUDENT.

The most marked trait in American college life is its spirit
of caste. This same spirit, it is true, manifests itself in
other lands—in England, France and Germany. In fact, it
reached its extreme development in the last-named country: the
very term Philistia is of German coinage. The causes
that originated and kept alive this spirit in Europe are
obvious. During the Middle Ages students enjoyed privileges
such as made them, in the strictest legal sense, a distinct
class. Thus, they had the right to wear side-arms, and had
their own courts of justice. Some of these privileges have
survived, in England and Germany at least, to the present day.
Yet even in Germany the old student spirit is evidently on the
wane, and is doomed to extinction at a day not far distant. In
America, on the contrary, where like causes have never
operated, the spirit exists in force. It is due to peculiar
causes—to college life, to locality and to the mode of
teaching.

The tendency to monkish seclusion lingers in England and
America, the lands that have led the van in political and
social progress. The motives that urged the monks of the olden
time to turn their backs upon the world and bury themselves in
cloisters were praiseworthy: but for such havens of peace,
letters might have perished. When the Reformation was carried
out in England, and the sequestration of Church property left
immense convents idle, it was only natural that the
newly-established colleges and halls should convert the
buildings to their own uses. The dormitory system of Oxford and
Cambridge, accordingly, has an historic right of being; and,
growing by natural laws, it has become so rooted in the
national life that nothing short of a political revolution,
greater even than that of the seventeenth century, could
eradicate it. The founders of our earliest colleges were
governed by the desire to make them conform as closely as might
be to the English model. There is scarcely the trace of a
disposition to look to the institutions of continental Europe
for guidance. This was a matter of course. The founders of our
colleges and the men whom they selected to be teachers were
Englishmen by descent or by education, trained after the
English fashion—seeking freedom in America, yet at heart
sympathizing with English thought, English habits and English
prejudices. Hence the establishment of our dormitory
system—not at once nor in all the fullness of a system.
The colleges were at first little more than schools. The
scholars boarded with the professors: there were no funds for
the erection of separate buildings. But soon we see the
evidences of a persistent effort to make each college an
embryonic Oxford or Cambridge. Harvard, Yale and Princeton
before completing the first half century of existence were
committed to the dormitory system. Other colleges have followed
the example thus set. The exceptions are too few to need
enumeration.

The mildest judgment that can be passed upon the system is
that it has cost us dear. Were all the figures accurately
ascertained and summed up, were we able to see at a glance all
the money that has been expended for land and brick and mortar
by the hundreds of colleges between Maine and California, even
such an aggregate, startling enough in itself, would fail to
reveal the whole truth. We should have to go behind the
figures—to consider what might have been effected by a
more judicious investment of those millions—how many
professorships might have been permanently established, how
many small colleges, now dragging out a sickly existence, too
poor to live, too good to die, might have become vigorous
branches in the tree of knowledge. What have we in return for
the outlay? A series of structures concerning which
[pg 429] the most ardent friend of
the system cannot but admit that they are inelegant,
uninspiring and unpractical. Some of the newer dormitories
at Harvard and Yale, it is true, are decided improvements.
They are well built and supplied with many conveniences that
will serve to make student life less heathenish. But they
can scarcely be called beautiful, and they certainly are not
inspiring. The heart of the student or the visitor at Oxford
swells within him at the sight of the grand architecture,
the brilliant windows, the velvet turf. It is pardonable in
us to wish for ourselves a like refining beauty. But is it
not becoming in us to confess, without repining, that we
cannot realize the wish? Oxford is not merely the growth of
ages: it is the product of certain peculiar ages which have
gone. Men build now for practical purposes, not for the
glorification of architecture. The spirit of the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance will probably never return, or, if it
should, it will come as a folk-spirit, neither springing
from nor governed by the colleges, but carrying them along
with it. Hence, our colleges may content themselves with
playing a less ostentatious part, and the most zealous
alumnus need not think less of his alma mater for observing
her limitations.

We are not concerned with the dormitory system in all its
bearings, but only in so far as it directly affects the
student. The fact is significant that a large majority of our
collegians pass their term of four years, vacations excepted,
in practical seclusion. They are gathered in large numbers in
dingy and untidy caravanseries, where the youthful spirit is
unchecked by the usual obligations to respect private property
and individual quiet. President Porter, in his work on The
American Colleges, endeavors to prove that the dormitory
system is, upon the whole, favorable to discipline. The facts
are against his argument. The evils of student life are
two—vice and disorder. So far as the former is concerned,
no system has succeeded, or will ever succeed, in extirpating
it. Vice may be punished, but it is too deeply rooted in human
nature to be wholly cured. Its predominating forms are drinking
and gambling, neither of which is checked by the dormitory
system. At Oxford, for instance, both these vices prevail
despite the most elaborate system of gates and night-patrols.
Our college faculties must perforce content themselves with
detecting vice, and punishing it when detected. The most
satisfactory and appropriate means of detection is to watch
closely the way in which the student performs his college
duties. No man can waste his time over cards or the bottle
without betraying his dissipation in the recitation-room. Here,
and not in the dormitory, is the professor’s hold upon the
student. The dormitory system, so far from restraining, rather
tends to diffuse vice and render its practice easy.

Disorder is different from vice. The latter, the doing of
things wrong in themselves or made wrong by force of opinion,
shuns observation: the former courts it. The disorderly act is
in many instances harmless enough in itself, and the evil lies
in doing it in an improper place and at an improper time. Hence
it is that good students, who would scorn to stoop to vice, so
often suffer themselves to be led to the commission of an act
of disorder. We may even go to the extent of admitting that
occasionally college disorder is not without a certain color of
reason. It is the youthful way of resenting a real or an
imaginary grievance. When a class discovers that it or some of
its members have been treated too severely, according to its
standard, by a certain professor, what more natural than to
create a disturbance in the recitation-room or in public? In
itself considered, the act is a youthful ebullition, and we
might be tempted at first to look upon it as something venial
and pass it by in silence. Reflection, however, should lead us
to the opposite conclusion. There is nothing that a college
faculty cannot afford to pardon sooner than disorder. The
reason is almost self-evident. There is nothing that ruins so
effectually the general tone of the college and demoralizes all
the students, good and bad. Vice moves in
[pg 430] rather narrow
circles—much more narrow than those in authority are
apt to perceive. It does not affect the great body of
students, who are filled with robust life, and whose very
faults are conceits and extravagances rather than misdeeds.
But disorder spreads from one to another: originating with
the morally perverse, it gathers sufficient volume and
momentum to overpower at times even the very best. To
protect the better class of students, then, were there no
other reason, the faculty is bound to interfere
energetically and in season. Its position is not unlike that
of the commander of a regiment. The colonel will not
unfrequently wink at a certain amount of dissipation among
the officers, and even among the privates. He may say to
himself that the offence is one hard to prove, that perhaps
it will wear itself out in time, that perhaps it is best not
to draw the reigns too tightly. But no commanding officer
can afford to tolerate for an instant the slightest movement
of insubordination. He must put it down on the spot, without
regard to consequences, and without stopping to inquire into
abstract questions of right and wrong. No one, of course,
will assert that the head of a college is to act according
to the military code. The differences between soldier life
and college life are fundamental. Yet there are certain
resemblances which prompt and justify the wish that a touch
at least of the military spirit might be infused into our
colleges. The spirit, be it carefully observed, and not the
forms, for the incompatibility between the military and the
literary-scientific methods has been demonstrated
repeatedly, the most recent evidence being furnished by
those colleges that have attempted to combine, under the
terms of the Congressional land-grant, agriculture, the
mechanic arts, classical studies and military tactics. But a
touch of the military spirit would be possible and
beneficial in many ways. It would make the relationship
between professor and student more tolerable for both
parties. The mental drill and substantial information
acquired through the college course are undoubtedly great.
Still greater is the formative influence exercised by the
body of students upon the individual member. But the
greatest lesson of the course—and the one which seems
to have escaped the otherwise close observation of President
Porter—should be the lesson of deference to position
and authority. This deference to one’s superiors in age and
position, this respect due to the professor simply because
he is a professor, and aside from any consideration of his
personal character or attainments, should be the first thing
to impress itself upon the student’s mind, the last to
forsake it. For it is a high moral gain, a controlling
principle that will stand the graduate in good stead through
all the vicissitudes of after-life. Unless it be acquired we
may say with propriety that the college course has fallen
short of its highest aim. For the acquisition of this spirit
of respect, military training is superior to civil. One
officer salutes another, the private salutes his officer,
simply because the person saluted is an officer. It may be
that he is disagreeable or boorish in manners, or even
notoriously incompetent. This matters not: so long as he
wears the epaulettes he is entitled to an officer’s salute.
Honor is shown, not to the transient owner of the title, but
to the title itself.

The inculcation of a kindred spirit in all our colleges is
devoutly to be wished. It exists already in some of the older
ones, especially in the New England States, and in not a few of
the very recently-established ones. But even where it does
exist it has not full sway: it does not set, as it should set,
the keynote to college life in all its variations. And in very
many colleges it is unable to establish itself because of gross
disorder. Should this opinion seem harsh and sweeping, the
reader, if a student or a graduate, has only to recall to mind
the instances that he himself must have observed of discontent
and disorder growing out of trifling causes and culminating
perhaps in a “class-strike.” Let him consider the waste of
time, the ill-temper, the censorious, invidious spirit
engendered by this fermentation, the loss of faith in the
conduct, and even [pg 431] the honesty, of the
faculty. Can he conceive of anything more likely to
frustrate all the aims of college study? Yet in nine-tenths
of the cases of public disorder it will be safe to assume
that the dormitory system lies at the base of the evil.
Where it does not occasion the grievance, it furnishes at
least the machinery for carrying matters to a direct issue.
Community of life suggests of itself community of action.
The inmates of a dormitory acquire insensibly the habit of
standing by one another. This is so evident that it needs no
proof. But an illustration of the workings of the dormitory
system and its opposite in one and the same place will not
come amiss. When the Cornell University was founded, some of
the trustees opposed the erection of dormitories. Others,
assuming that the people of Ithaca, to whom a college was a
novelty, could not or would not furnish sufficient
accommodation, argued that dormitories were an absolute
necessity. They carried the point: the Cascadilla was
converted into a large boarding-house for both professors
and students, and the greater part of South University was
laid out in student-rooms. Both buildings were full. This
state of affairs lasted during the first year and part of
the second. Disturbances of various kinds were not
infrequent; and although no one of them was very serious,
yet in the aggregate they were a severe tax upon the
faculty’s time and patience. But before the end of the
second year many of the students discovered that life in
town was more comfortable, and accordingly they gave up
their university rooms. At the opening of the academic year
1870-1871 perhaps three-fourths, certainly two-thirds, were
lodged in town. The change was significant. During the
entire year, although individual students were disciplined
for individual offences, the faculty was not once forced to
punish public disorder. This phenomenon will appear still
more remarkable when we consider that meanwhile the
so-called “class-feeling” had sprung up, and that students
admitted from other colleges had endeavored to introduce
certain traditional practices. The year 1870-1871 was
perhaps too good to be repeated. The next year witnessed at
least one discouraging exhibition of student-manners, and
since then there have been explosions from time to time. For
all that, the general tone at Cornell is excellent. The
transitory disturbances seem to leave behind them no abiding
ill-will, and there is certainly less friction between
faculty and students than at any like institution. Nowhere
in this country is college life more free from petty
annoyance, dislike and mistrust, and hereditary prejudices.
It should be added, that those students who now reside in
the university buildings belong almost exclusively to what
is known as the working corps. They are type-setters in the
printing-office, or are engaged upon the university farm, or
in the workshops connected with the department of the
mechanic arts. Their time is too valuable to them to be
wasted. The experience of the Sheffield Scientific School
resembles that of Cornell. In one respect it is even better.
This school has never had a dormitory system. Its managers,
imbued thoroughly with the German and French spirit of
study, have resisted successfully from the outset every
inducement to follow the usual college system. Although
growing up in the shadow of one of the oldest colleges in
the country, and exposed to formidable competition, and
still more formidable criticism, the Sheffield Scientific
has adhered strictly to its self-appointed mission. It has
regarded instruction in science as its sole object. Whatever
tended to this object has been adopted: everything else has
been rejected as irrelevant. We are not concerned in this
place with the general reputation of the Sheffield
Scientific at home and abroad. Singling out only one of its
many merits, we can point to it with pride as the first
institution to solve effectually the knotty problem of
discipline. The means of its success are anything but
occult. It has made its pupils feel from the moment of
entrance that they were young men, and must act as such. It
has refused to encumber itself with expensive and useless
dormitories, and the faculty has in the main left the
students to themselves.
[pg 432] But whenever interference
became necessary, it has acted promptly, without undue haste
or severity, and also without vacillation. Here, at least,
we do not find the ruinous practice of suspending a student
one week, only to take him back the next. The mere
existence, then, of the Sheffield Scientific—to say
nothing of its success—by the side of the powerful
corporation of Yale College is fatal to every argument in
favor of the dormitory system.

Most of our colleges are situated in small towns. To this
circumstance, more than to any other, perhaps, is due the
exclusiveness which, in its exaggerated manifestations, is so
puzzling to the city visitor. Petty items of life and
character, intrigues, quarrels and social jealousies have an
importance which the world outside cannot understand. They
affect the college more or less directly. The professor finds
it doubly hard to exercise his vocation in a place where the
details of his home life are known and exposed to comment. The
student’s power for mischief is increased. He has only too much
reason for believing that he is indispensable from the business
point of view. Besides, as every one knows, close contact in
narrow circles has a tendency to cramp the mind. Trifling
annoyances, real or imaginary, are apt to rankle in the spirit
unless they be brushed away by the quick, firm touch of the
great world. Kleinstädtisches Leben, despite its
many advantages, fails to develop the burgher in every
direction. It leaves him one-sided, if not exactly
narrow-minded. Professor C.K. Adams, in his admirable essay
upon “State Universities,”¹
has touched upon this point with reference to studies. His
words should be carefully weighed: “If the best education
consisted simply of making perfect recitations and keeping
out of mischief, the smallest college would be incomparably
the best college. But the best education is far more than
that. Perhaps it is correct to say that it is an inspiration
rather than an acquisition. It comes not simply from
industry and steady habits, but far more largely from that
kindling and glowing zeal which is best begotten by familiar
contact with large libraries and museums and enthusiastic
specialists…. It is the stir, the enthusiasm, the
unceasing activity, and, above all, the constant intercourse
with men of the same pursuits and the same ambitions, that
develop the greatest energies and secure the highest
successes.”

Professor Adams, it will be observed, is contrasting small
colleges with larger ones. We are not bound by his concessions
in favor of the former. And we may also take the liberty of
advancing his comparison a step by claiming for large cities,
no less than for large colleges, the superiority over small
ones. Without intending disrespect, we may even put the direct
question, Would not your own university, for whose advantages
you are contending, be better off to-day had it been placed in
Detroit instead of Ann Arbor? Is there not something dwarfing
in the atmosphere of a small country town, where character is
undiversified and life uneventful? Were books the sole source
of knowledge, were the acquisition of ideas and principles the
sole aim, we could wish for our professors and students nothing
better than monotony of life. But success, whether in
professional or scholarly pursuits, depends largely upon temper
and practical judgment—qualities which are developed by
contact with the busy world. Whoever has had the experience,
knows that life in large cities is both stimulating and
sobering. It enlarges one’s range of ideas and sympathies: it
also keeps idiosyncrasies within proper bounds. The individual
does not lose his individuality, but rather intensifies it: he
loses only the exaggerated sense of his own importance. We must
regard it, then, as unfortunate that so many of our seats of
learning are out of the world, so to speak. Our professors
would probably do their work better—that is to say, with
greater freshness of spirit—and would exert a wider
influence, were they thrown more in the company of men of the
world. In like manner, our colleges would play a more direct
part in the affairs of the country. The history of the German
universities suggests a lesson. Is it a mere accident that the
[pg 433] oldest and the youngest
German universities are in large cities? In the Middle Ages,
before the political organization of the country had fairly
entered upon its morbid process of disintegration, we find
Vienna, Prague ²
and Leipsic heading the list. Subsequently, each petty duke
and count, moved by the sense of his autonomy, sought to
establish a university of his own. The Reformation increased
the spirit of rivalry. Most of these second- and third-rate
universities have passed away or have been merged in others.
The three youngest, Berlin, Munich and Strasburg, are all in
large cities, and are all three the direct offspring of
political and educational reorganization. As Germany is now
constituted, it would be impossible to found a new
university in a small town. Such places as Jena, Erlangen,
Greifswald, Rostock, Marburg and Giessen barely hold their
own against the strong movement in favor of
concentration.

The wholesome influence of large surroundings upon students
is perhaps even more marked than upon professors. History
teaches us with singular clearness that small towns are
precisely the ones in which student character is distorted out
of all proportion. No better example can be found than the
University of Jena. From the time of its foundation down to the
present century the name of Jena stood for all that was wild,
absurd, and outrageous. In a village whose permanent population
did not exceed four thousand, students were crowded by hundreds
and thousands. To speak without exaggeration, they ruled
Philistia with a rod of iron, in defiance of law and order, and
not infrequently of decency itself. On this point we have an
eye-witness of unquestionable veracity. In 1798, Steffens, a
young Dane brimful of enthusiastic admiration for German
learning, arrived in the course of his travels at Jena. He
gives the following account of his first impressions of German
student manners:³
“I looked out into the neighborhood so strange to me, and a
restless suspicion of what was to come ran through my mind.
Then we heard in I the distance a loud shouting like the
voices of a number of men, and nearer and nearer they seemed
to come. Lights had been brought shortly before, and, as the
uproar was close upon us, a servant burst in to warn us to
extinguish them. We asked with curiosity why, and what the
shouting mob wanted. We suspected, indeed, that it was
students. The servant told us that they were on their way to
the house of Professor A——, who was unpopular
with them—I knew not why—to salute him with
their Pereat, or college damnation. The cry of some hundred
students grew plainer and plainer. ‘Out with lights!’ was
called, and just then we heard the panes of glass clatter
when the warning was not quickly enough complied with. I
confess that this circumstance, occurring so soon after my
arrival, filled me with a kind of gloom. It was not such
things as this that had called me to Jena: these were not
the voices which I had wished and expected to hear, and my
first night was a sad one.”

Jena, be it said in her praise, is no longer what she was:
her students no longer break window-panes or perform the
Gänsemarsch or elect their beer-duke of
Lichtenhain. The great herd has scattered, and the few who are
left dwell with their professors in peace. But has the spirit
of brutality passed wholly away? Perhaps loving parents who
have placed their sons under the “protecting” influence of some
quiet country town believe so. It is almost a pity to disturb
their faith. Yet truth is uncompromising. Let us record and
ponder the fact—epithets are superfluous—that in
the year of grace 1874, in a small college town not one hundred
miles distant from the City of Brotherly Love, students
supposed to be guided and restrained by influences more
distinctively “Christian” than any that ever mitigated the
barbarism of Jena, could become utterly lost to all
recollection of father and mother, brother and
[pg 434] sister, could forget their
own manhood, could steal under cover of night to the house
of an unpopular professor and bombard the windows, to the
peril of his wife and mother, and of his child in the
cradle.

Truly, we have been surfeited with mistaken praise of small
colleges and rural virtue. We have a right to demand that our
colleges, whatever they may undertake or omit, shall teach at
least the first lesson of life—manliness. This lesson is
not best learned by withdrawing one’s self from the world,
burying one’s self in an obscure and unrefined village,
foregoing social intercourse with amiable men and women, and
wrapping one’s self in a mantle of traditional prejudice.
President Porter, although a staunch defender of the existing
college system, concedes its weakness. He says (p. 168): “It is
no paradox to say that the first essay of the student’s
independence [i.e., the independence of college as contrasted
with school] is often an act of prostrate subserviency to the
opinion of the college community. This opinion he has little
share in forming: he does little else than yield himself to the
sentiment which he finds already formed…. It [this community]
is eminently a law unto itself, making and enforcing such laws
as no other community would recognize or understand—laws
which are often strangely incongruous with the usually received
commandments of God and man…. No community is swayed more
completely by the force of public opinion. In none does public
opinion solidify itself into so compact and homogeneous a
force. Before its power the settled judgments of individual
opinion are often abandoned or overborne, the sacred
associations of childhood are relaxed, the plainest dictates of
truth and honor are misinterpreted or defied.”

It may surprise us to find the author contending, only a few
pages farther on, for “the civilizing and culturing influences
which spring from college residence and college associations.”
The truth is that the case has two sides to it. No friend of
education could wish to see student opinion or student
sentiment banished wholly from student life—to reduce
study to a mere intellectual process without any trace of
esprit de corps. Some such spirit is not only good in
itself, but is natural and unavoidable. Three hundred or four
hundred young men cannot associate freely day by day for years
in succession, pursuing the same studies under the guidance of
the same teachers, without establishing a certain community of
sentiment and action, from which the student’s intellectual
efforts must derive a great share of their nourishment. Yet,
admitting the principle, we cannot justify or palliate the
excess to which it has been carried. We insist upon the
observance of certain limits, which no man, whether old or
young, learned or unlearned, is at liberty to transgress. And
when these limits are transgressed we have a right to regard
the offenders as all the more culpable because of their
advantages. The circumstance that they come of a “good stock,”
as it is called, and are pursuing liberal studies, is only an
aggravation of the offence. We expect youthful extravagances,
waste of time, neglect of opportunities, exaggerated
self-importance, a supercilious way of looking down upon the
outside world—these are all phases of growth, and are
usually short-lived—but we cannot tolerate any violation
of the rights of property, any overawing of individual
conscience, any breach of public order, any disregard of public
decency. Such offences we must resent and punish, not only for
the sake of those injured, but in the best interests of the
offenders themselves. We cannot afford to let the most
promising class of our young men entertain even for the brief
period of four years false and pernicious views of the
fundamental principles of life. It is the duty of every
community to suppress error en voie de fait, wherever it
may occur. And if it is our duty to suppress, it is no less our
duty to prevent. Common sense and experience teach us that
danger must arise from gathering large numbers of young men in
places too small to hold them in check. Are we not at liberty
to borrow an example from the history of President Porter’s own
[pg 435] college? In the days when
the president was a young professor, Yale was a small
college and New Haven was a small town. The name of the
college then was, to speak mildly, notorious. The Yale of
thirty or forty years ago seemed to personify everything
that was obnoxious and lawless in our college life: in no
other place did the conflict between “town” and “gown”
assume such dimensions and lead to such deplorable results.
Yet the Yale of to-day, although the number of students has
trebled, will compare favorably with any college or
university. The students, without having lost a particle of
true manliness and independence, riot less and learn more:
they show in every way that they are better students and
better citizens. Wherein, then, lies the secret of the
change? Evidently, in the circumstance that the city has
outgrown the college. New Haven is no longer an
insignificant town, but has become the seat of a large local
trade and the centre of heavy manufacturing and railroad
interests. Like other cities, it has established a paid fire
department and a strong police force for the protection of
all its residents, the college included. It is no longer
overshadowed, much less over-awed, by the college. On the
contrary, the observation forces itself upon the visitor in
New Haven that the college, notwithstanding its numerous
staff of able professors, notwithstanding its great body of
students, its libraries and scientific collections, is far
from playing the leading part in municipal matters. It is
only one among many factors. Life and its relations are on
an ampler scale: the wealth and refinement of the permanent
population are great, and are growing unceasingly. In a few
years more New Haven will be fairly within the vortex of New
York. This change, which has come about so gradually that
those living in it perhaps fail to perceive it readily, has
affected the college in many ways. It has made the life of
the professors more agreeable, more generous, so to speak,
and it has toned down the student spirit of caste. The young
man who enters Yale feels, from the moment of matriculation,
that he is indeed in a large city, and must conform to its
regulations—that there are such beings as policemen
and magistrates, whom he cannot provoke with impunity. Even
were this all, it would be gain enough. But there is another
gain of a far higher nature. The student perceives that
outside his college world lies a larger world that he cannot
overlook—a world whose society is worth cultivating,
whose opinions are backed by wealth and prestige. It does
not follow from this that he ceases to be a student.
Companions and study make him feel that he is leading a
peculiar life, that he is a member of an independent
organization. But he does not feel—and this is the
main point—that he has retired from the world or that
he can set himself up against the world.

In this connection we have to be on our guard against the
opposite extreme—namely, the inference that the larger a
city the better for the college. The very largest cities are
perhaps not favorable to the growth of institutions of
learning. Even in Germany, where the university system rests
upon a different basis and adapts itself more readily to
circumstances, the leading capitals, Berlin and Vienna, are at
a disadvantage. The expenses of living are so great as to deter
all but the wealthy or the very ambitious, and the pomp and
pageantry of court and nobility, the numerous personnel
of the several departments of state, finance, war and justice
throw the less ostentatious votaries of science and letters
into the shade. Nevertheless, the universities of Berlin and
Vienna can scarcely be said to be threatened with permanent
decline. The governments of Prussia and Austria recognize the
necessity of a great university in a great capital to give tone
to the administrative departments and to resist the spread of
the spirit of materialism. Besides, the resident population of
each of these cities is entitled to a university, and would be
sufficient of itself to support one. We may rest assured,
therefore, that the Prussian government will act in the future
as it has done in the past, by sparing no efforts to make the
Frederico-Gulielma the head of the
[pg 436] Prussian system in fact as
well as in name. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the
present hard times and the unsettled state of society in
Berlin tend to restrict the number of students. The
remarkable contrast presented in the sudden growth of the
Leipsic University shows how even matters of education are
influenced by social and economic laws. This Saxon city
seems marked out by Nature for a seat of learning. It
combines almost all attractions and advantages. It is
accessible from every quarter, the climate is good for North
Germany, and the neighborhood is pleasant, although anything
but picturesque. The newer houses are well built, rooms and
board are not expensive. The inhabitants are wealthy and
highly cultured, the book-trade is enormous, and the
banking-business considerable. Yet trade does not move with
the fever-heat of speculation: the life of the city is quiet
and regular. Amusements of a high order are within the reach
of every one. These minor attractions, combined with the
more important ones offered by the university itself, will
explain to us how it is that Leipsic has taken the foremost
rank. Students who are used to city ways, and who would have
chosen Berlin ten or twenty years ago, now come here because
of the cheapness of living. Others, tired of the monotony of
the smaller university towns, come to get a foretaste of the
world that awaits them after the completion of their
studies. The temper of the students is admirable. Rarely if
ever do they betray any traces of the hectoring spirit which
still lingers at Heidelberg, for instance. But for the
display of corps-caps and cannon boots and an occasional
swagger in the street, one might pass an entire semester in
Leipsic without realizing that the city contains three
thousand students. Undoubtedly, the young men perceive, like
their colleagues of Yale, that their surroundings are too
much for them.

Another prolific source of trouble is the class system.
Whether this system is to be maintained as it is, or to be
modified, or to be abandoned for another more in accordance
with the needs of the age, are questions which must be kept in
abeyance. The answer will depend upon the view which we take of
higher education in the main. Meanwhile, let us consider the
system in its operations during the past and at the present
day. Here, as so often before, Germany affords us a warning
example of the dangers consequent upon the recognition of class
distinctions. The comparatively harmless practice of
Deposition—a burlesque student-initiation which
sprang up in the sixteenth century and obtained a quasi
sanction from no less a person than Luther—degenerated in
the seventeenth century into Pennalisimus.
Newly-matriculated students, called Pennalists (the modern term
is Füchse), were maltreated by the elder ones, the
Schorists, and were pillaged and forced to perform menial
services “such as a sensible master would hesitate to exact of
his servant ⁴.”
The Schorists considered themselves a licensed corporation.
To give an idea of their deportment, not merely toward the
younger students, but even toward the university itself, it
will suffice to state that they conducted their orgies at
times in the public streets without fear or shame. In 1660,
during the student insurrection at Jena, they assaulted and
dispersed the Academic Senate in session. The governmental
rescripts of those days are taken up with accounts of the
evil and the means proposed for curing it. The matter was
even brought before the Imperial Diet. Pennalismus was not
suppressed until the close of the century, after the various
governments had resorted to the most stringent measures.
Such excesses have, of course, never been committed in
America; yet we observe the same spirit of insubordination
to superiors and domination over inferiors betraying itself
in the New World. When we hear of “rushing,” “hazing,”
“smoking-out” and the like, we must admit to ourselves that
the animus is the same, although the form be only ludicrous.
And what shall we say to performances such as the explosion
[pg 437] of nitro-glycerine? Much
may be urged in extenuation of the offences of the German
students in the seventeenth century. Their sensibilities
were blunted by the horrors of a Thirty Years’ War; they had
been born and reared amid bloodshed and rapine; some of them
must have served in the campaigns of Banér,
Torstenson and Wrangel, where human life went for nothing,
and honor for less than nothing. Some of them, perhaps,
could not name their parents. They were waifs of the camp,
their only education the crumbs of knowledge picked up in
the camp-school mentioned by Schiller in his
Wallenstein. Our students, on the contrary, are
anxiously shielded against temptation and are carefully
trained for their work. Why, then, should they be the only
set of persons to disobey, as a set, the rules of public
order? The answer suggests itself: Because they have
acquired the habit of joint action without the sense of
individual responsibility.

The advantages of the present system of instruction by
classes are not to be overlooked. Yet they are attended with
one serious evil. The members of a class, reciting day by day,
term after term, upon the same subjects, acquire the notion of
a certain average of work. The class, as a unit, has only so
much to learn, and the professor is not to exceed this maximum.
Furthermore, each class gauges its work by the work of its
predecessors. The Sophomore class of this year, for instance,
is not willing to do more than the Sophomore class of last
year. To introduce more difficult text-books, or to increase
the number of hours, or to lengthen the lessons, is injustice.
The notion of unity extends itself to social relations. Each
member considers himself identified with his comrades.
Tradition—everywhere a power, and especially powerful in
college—establishes nice distinctions. It lays down the
rule that one class shall not wear beaver hats or carry
canes—that another class shall steal the town-gates on a
particular night of the year or publish scurrilous pamphlets.
Each member of the class must do certain things or must refrain
from them, not because he wishes to, but because he is a member
of the class. The strength of this community of feeling and
interests can be estimated only by one who has experienced it.
Were its operations confined to the relations among students,
they would be less formidable. We might perhaps shrug our
shoulders and leave the young men “to fight it out among
themselves.” The case becomes quite different, however, when a
class arrays itself in opposition to its professor or to the
entire faculty. Then we see plainly the dangers of
insubordination. The immature and inexperienced set themselves
above their elders: they arrogate to themselves the right of
deciding what they shall learn, how much they shall learn, how
they shall learn it. And, being a class, they stand or fall as
a class. They exhibit tenacity of purpose and an unscrupulous
use of improper means. Many a professor has learned to his cost
what it is to be defied by his class.

An example will be more instructive than vague generalities.
About seven years ago a gentleman was engaged by one of our
colleges to take charge of a new department until a permanent
appointee might be found. The resident faculty committed one
blunder after another. It added the new study outright without
adjusting it to the previous studies. It also fixed upon
Saturday as the day for beginning. Thus, the students were
prejudiced against their new instructor before they had even
seen him. Besides, they regarded the innovation as an
“interloper.” The victim to student rule may now tell his own
story: “I took the 6 A.M. train Saturday morning from the city.
After breakfast I was directed by the president to go to a
certain room, unaccompanied, to meet the Sophomore class. One
hundred hyenas! My entrance was greeted with groans, ‘Ahas!’
‘Hums!’ I spent half an hour in the vain attempt to explain the
subject. Before I was half through I had made up my mind to
return to the city by the first train. On leaving the room I
met Professor ——, who comprehended the situation at
a glance. He [pg 438] said that he had been
through it all himself—that it had taken him two years
to get control of his classes. I learned afterward that this
is the usual time allowed for such purpose. The president on
meeting me, said in his usual abrupt, nervous brogue, ‘It’s
nothing against the men, sir! It would be just the same if
it were anybody else, sir! (!!!). Just go on, sir.’ I
finally decided ‘to go on, sir,’ but I hardly retain my
self-respect when I remember how I submitted for three
months to a series of petty annoyances unworthy the lowest
gamins of New York. Students purposely made mistakes
to give others an opportunity to groan. The Sophomore class
was divided into two sections after the third week. By dint
of strict watching, which so absorbed my attention that I
could do little in the way of instruction, I succeeded in
obtaining tolerable order. Usually, a painful silence was
observed, every one knowing that there was a hand-to-hand
fight going on for the mastery. The Junior class could not
be divided because of other studies. Their recitations (?)
continued to be a bedlam, a pandemonium. I afterward learned
that some students, who already had some knowledge of the
subject, remained on purpose to create disturbance. One of
them, a son of a trustee, I caught blowing snuff through the
room. It was a favorite trick of the class to drop a bundle
of snuff in the stove. Each one of the fifteen recitations
that I had with this class was spoiled by some disturbance.
On two occasions some of them stole the keys of the room and
locked me in with part of the class. Fortunately, I was able
to drive back the bolt. The president was less lucky. Twice
he and his entire class were obliged to climb down from the
window by a ladder. There is no use in multiplying words.
The treatment to which I was subjected was shameful. What
made it even worse was, that the authorities permitted such
conduct toward one whom they had invited to take the
initiative in beginning a new study. It was a
perfectly-understood thing that I had accepted the temporary
appointment more to relieve the college than for my own
benefit.”

The writer of the above is now one of the leading professors
in another college. His name and reputation are among the best
in the land. He writes concerning his present position: “We
have here two hundred and fifty students, all told. The utmost
courtesy prevails, both in the recitation-room and in the
streets. During the five years that we have been in existence
as a college I do not remember that a single rude act has been
committed toward any professor. I attribute this to a variety
of circumstances. We began with a small body of students, who
gave tone to the subsequent ones. We have no dormitories. The
college is in a city too large to be controlled by students.
Nothing could be pleasanter than the intercourse between town
and college. Not a gate has been carried off, no loud shouting
is heard. If there are night-revels, nobody ever hears of them.
We have no prizes, no honors, no marking system. We hold rigid
examinations, and watch the tendency to negligence if it shows
itself.”

One circumstance may lead us to take a more hopeful view of
the situation. The colleges—and consequently the
classes—are growing larger. At Yale and Harvard, for
instance, the classes exceed two hundred on entrance. It is
clear that so large a body cannot cohere very firmly. The sense
of homogeneousness is lost. Furthermore, the class is divided
into sections and sub-sections. The occasions on which the
student can see his entire class together are becoming
comparatively few. The so-called elective studies will also
help to keep down the class spirit. In many colleges the
curriculum is no longer an inflexible routine. On reaching a
certain standing the student, although not entirely free to
select his studies, has at least an option. He may take German
instead of Greek, French in place of Latin, advanced
mathematics or the natural sciences in place of both. Whatever
estimate we may set upon the intrinsic value of such options,
we can scarcely doubt their efficacy in the matter of
discipline. [pg 439] The class
which branches out on different lines of study has already
ceased to be a class. The results of the system of free
selection established at the Cornell University are very
instructive. We find here three or four courses of study, now
running parallel, now overlapping one another, and outside of
them the elective students who follow partial courses or
specialties. The university has scrupulously refrained from the
official use of the terms Senior, Junior, Sophomore and
Freshman, and arranges the students’ names in the index in
alphabetical order. The sections in certain departments,
especially in the modern languages and history, are made up of
students of all four years. Even the courses themselves are not
inflexible. The policy of accepting bonâ fide
equivalents has been adopted, and has given satisfaction to
both teachers and pupils. There are probably not twenty
students in the university at this moment who have recited side
by side on exactly the same subjects and in the same order for
three years. Hence the absence of any strong class feeling.
Although those who have attended the university the same number
of years may try hard at times to convince themselves and
others that they are a class in the ordinary sense, they meet
with little success. Individual freedom of opinion and conduct
is the rule, and such a thing as class coercion is an
impossibility. At one time it was argued by the adversaries of
the university that this laxity must result in lowering the
standard of scholarship. But recent events lead us to the
opposite conclusion. The Saratoga regatta last summer proved
that the Cornell students are not wanting in muscle, and the
inter-collegiate contest of this winter shows still more
conclusively that they are not wanting in brains. Cornell
entered in four of the six contests, and won four
prizes—one second and three firsts. Two of these first
prizes, be it observed, far outrank the others as tests of
scholarship—namely, those in Greek and in mathematics. No
shallow theory of luck will explain this sudden and remarkable
success. The older colleges will do well to inquire into
causes, and to ask themselves if their young rival is not
possessed of a new power—if sturdiness of character and
independence of thought are not more efficient than mere
routine. After all, is it surprising that the institution which
is most liberal should attract to itself the most progressive
minds?

JAMES MORGAN HART.

Footnote 1:
(return)
North American Review, Oct., 1875.

Footnote 2:
(return)
Heidelberg comes between Vienna and Leipsic, but
Heidelberg was then a much more important town than at
present.

Footnote 3:
(return)
German Universities. Translated by W.L. Gage.
Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1874. Steffens
little imagined at the time that he was destined to become
a German professor.

Footnote 4:
(return)
The words of the decree of the Imperial Diet, 1654. See
Von Raumer, Geschichte. der Pedagogik, iv. 45.

SONNET.

I saw a garden-bed on which there grew,

Low down amid gay grass, a violet,

With flame of poppy flickering over
it,

And many gaudy spikes and blossoms new,

Round which the wind with amorous whispers blew.

There came a maid, gold-haired and lithe and
strong,

With limbs whereof the delicate perfumed
flesh

Was like a babe’s. She broke the
flowering mesh

Of flaunting weeds, and plucked the
modest bloom

To wear it on her bosom all day long.

So in pure breasts pure things find
welcomest room,

And poppied epics, flushed with blood and wrong,

Are crushed to reach love’s violets of song.

MAURICE
THOMPSON.

[pg 440]

THE HOUSE THAT SUSAN BUILT.

Susan—Susan Summerhaze—was twenty-nine, and had
never had a lover. You smile. You people have a way of smiling
at the mention of a maiden lady who has never had a lover, as
though there was a very good joke in the matter. You ought to
be ashamed to smile. You have a tear for the girl at the grave
of her lover, and for the bride of a month in her widow’s cap,
and even for her who mourns a lover changed. But in each of
these cases the woman has had her romance: her spirit has
thrilled to enchanted music; there is a consecrated something
in her nature; a tender memory is hers for ever.

Nothing is so pathetic as the insignificant. Than a dead
blank, better a path marked by—well, anything, perhaps,
except dishonor. The colorless, commonplace life was especially
dreary to my Susan, because of a streak of romance—and a
broad streak it was—that ran from end to end of her
nature.

It’s another provoking way you people have of laughing at
romantic young women. Sentimental, you call them. I tell you
it’s the most womanly thing in the world to be sentimental. A
woman’s affections reaching out toward a man’s heart is as much
a part of Nature, and just as pretty a thing in Nature, as the
morning-glory—or let us take the old and oft-used yet
good illustration of the ivy and the oak. When the woman’s
reaching affections attain the sought heart, everybody cries
out, “How sweet and tender and graceful!” But if they miss of
the hold, then there is derision. Here, as everywhere else,
there are cheers for success and no pity for failure.

Well, however you may receive it, the truth must be
acknowledged: my Susan was sentimental. She had had her
longings and dreams, and an abundance of those great vague
heartaches which only sentimental people can have. She had gone
through with the whole—the sweet hopes, the yearning
expectancy, the vague anxiety, the brooding doubt, the slow
giving up—the reluctant acceptance of her fading life.
Her romance died hard. Very gradually, and with many a protest,
the woman of heartaches and sentiment glided into the practical
and commonplace maiden lady who served on all sorts of
committees and watched with sick people.

At an early age, when she was barely sixteen, the suggestion
had been forced on Susan that it was her duty to spread her
wings and leave the paternal nest to earn her living. Of course
she went to teaching. That’s what such people as Susan always
do in like circumstances. At first her earnings went into the
family fund to buy bread for little mouths that were not to
blame for being hungry, and shoes for little feet that did not
know wherefore they had been set to travel life’s road. But
after a while a portion of Susan’s salary came to be deposited
in bank as her very own money, to have and to hold. She had now
reached the giving-up period of her life, when the heartaches
were dulling, and the nameless longings were being resolved
into occasional lookings back to the time when there had been
hopes of deliverance from the commonplace. Having tasted the
sweets of being a capitalist, Susan came in process of time to
be eager at money-getting and at money-saving and at
speculating. The day arrived when my sentimental Susan had
United States bonds and railroad stocks, and owned a half acre
in city lots in a great, teeming, tempestuous State
metropolis.

It was at this period in her affairs that Susan received a
gift of fifteen hundred dollars from her bachelor uncle
Adolphus, “as a token,” so the letter of transmission read, “of
my approval of your industry and of your business ability and
successes, and as a mark of my gratitude for your kindness to
me twenty-one years ago when I was sick at your father’s house.
[pg 441] You were the only one of my
brother’s children that showed me any consideration.”

“Twenty-one years ago!” exclaimed Gertrude, Susan’s younger
sister, when she had read the letter through. “Why, that was
before I was born! How in the world could I show him
consideration? I wish to goodness he’d come here now and get
sick. I’d show him consideration: I’d tend him like an own
mother.”

“Susie didn’t tend him like an own mother,” said Brother
Tom, who was two years younger than Susan. “I remember all
about it. All she did for him was to keep the flies off with an
apple-tree limb, and she was for ever letting it drop on his
face.”

“I recollect all about it,” said Susan: “I pity myself now
when I remember how tired and sleepy I used to get. The room
was always so quiet—not a sound in it but the buzzing of
the lazy flies and poor uncle’s hard breathing. I used to feel
as though I were in prison or all alone at a funeral.”

“But self-abnegation has its reward, Susie,” said Brother
Tom, lifting his eyebrows and shrugging his shoulders.

“Oh, I’m free to acknowledge that I performed the duties at
that bedside very reluctantly,” Susan answered. “I had many a
cry over my hard fate. Indeed, I believe I always had to wash
off the tear-stains before going to the task. I can recall now
just how the little red-eyed girl looked standing before the
glass with towel and brush. But still, I did keep the flies
off, and I did bring uncle fresh water from the well, and
perhaps I deserve a reward all the more because the work was
distasteful.”

“Mother used to try to make me do it,” said Brother Tom. “I
remember how I used to slip away from the table while she was
pouring out father’s fourth cup of coffee, and put for the
playground, to escape that fly-brush. I wasn’t a good boy,
alas! or I might now be a happy man with all my debts paid. I
wish my mother had trounced me and made me keep those flies off
Uncle Adolphus.”

Brother Tom was one of those people who are always trying to
say and look funny things. Sometimes he succeeded, and
sometimes he didn’t.

“Anyhow, I think it’s a shame,” Gertrude said,
pouting—”downright mean for Uncle Adolphus to give you
all that money, and never give me a cent.”

“Very likely.” Susan replied dryly.

“Well, it is, Susie. You’ve got lots more money now than you
know what to do with: you don’t need that money at all.”

“Don’t I?”

“No, you don’t, Susie: you know you don’t. You never go into
society, and you wear your dresses the same way all the time,
just as Grandma Summerhaze does. But I’m just making my
début“—and Gertrude flushed and tossed her
head with a pretty confusion, because she was conscious of
having made a sounding speech—”and I need lots of things,
such as the rest of the girls have.”

“My dear Gertrude,” began Brother Tom, “‘beauty
unadorned’—”

“Oh, do, pray, Tom, have mercy upon us!” Gertrude said
testily. “Unfortunately, I happen not to be a beauty, so I need
some adorning. Moreover, I don’t admit that beauty can do
without adorning. There’s Minnie Lathrop: she’s a beauty, but
she wouldn’t improve herself by leaving off flowers and ribbons
and laces, and dressing herself like a nun. Dear me! she does
have the loveliest things! Mine are so shabby beside them. I’m
about the tag-end of our set, anyhow, in matters of dress. I
think, Susie, you might give me a hundred or two dollars.”

“To waste in ribbons and bonnets?” asked business-woman
Susan.

“Why, Susie, how you do talk! A body would think you had
never worn a ribbon, and that you’d gone bareheaded all the
days of your life. But you needn’t talk: it’s not so long ago
but I can remember when you were as fond of dress as any girl
in the city. I remember how you used to tease mamma for pretty
things.”

“Which I never got, even though I was earning them over and
over.” Susan spoke half sadly, half bitterly.

“Well, you ought to have had nice
[pg 442] things, Susie, when you
were in society,” Gertrude insisted. “Girls can’t get
married if they’re shabby and old-fashioned.”

“That’s true,” said Susan gravely.

“I think,” continued her sister, “it’s the meanest feeling,
the sheep-ish-est”—Gertrude syllabled the word to make
sure of her hold on it—”in this world to know that the
gentlemen are ashamed to show you attention. Now, I’m cleverer
and better-looking than lots of girls in our set—Delia
Spaulding, for instance—but I don’t have half the
attention she receives, just on account of her fixings and
furbelows.”

“And Miss Spaulding always manages to keep ahead in those
sublimities,” said Brother Tom.

“Yes,” assented Gertrude briskly. “No matter what on earth
the rest of us girls get, Delia Spaulding manages to have
something to cast us into the shade. It makes me so mad! Now,
last week at Mrs. Gildersleeve’s, when I dressed for the party
I thought I looked really nice. I felt a complacency toward
myself, as Margaret Pillsbury would say. But when I got to the
party, there was Delia Spaulding prinked out with such lights
and shades and lustres that I looked plain as a Quaker in
comparison with her—or with any of the other girls, for
that matter. Do you know, Susie, what the feeling is to be
always behind in dress?”

“Yes,” Susan answered, a piteous shadow coming into her face
as memories of the heart-burning days were evoked, “but I am
glad to have done with all the vanity and heartache that comes
of it.”

“But yet, Susie, you ought to know how to feel for me.”

“I do know how,” Susan answered.

“Then why don’t you help me across some of the
heartache?”

“I might help you into a worse heartache by my meddling,”
Susan suggested.

“You don’t want anybody to marry you because you dress well
and are stylish?” said Brother Tom, undertaking to explain
Susan’s meaning.

“I don’t know that I want anybody to marry me for any
reason,” Gertrude flashed out, her cheeks flushing, “but I like
to go, once in a while, to young people’s gatherings, and then
I like to be dressed so that gentlemen are not ashamed to be
seen with me.”

“A fellow ought to have pluck enough to stand up for the
merit of a young lady, no matter how she’s dressed.”

“Now, Tom, for pity’s sake, don’t talk heroics,” said
Gertrude. “I’ve seen you at parties shying around the
poorly-dressed girls and picking out the pretty-plumaged birds.
I know all about your heroism. I’m not blaming you, you
understand: I don’t like to dance or promenade with a gentleman
not well dressed. Next to looking well yourself, you wish your
partner to look well. That’s nature.—But what are you
going to do with your fifteen hundred dollars, anyhow,
Susie?”

“I shall add something to it and build a house on one of my
lots.”

“‘Pon my soul!” said Brother Tom, laughing.

“How perfectly absurd!” exclaimed Gertrude. “Suppose your
house should burn down as soon as it’s finished, as the First
Congregational church did?”

“I’d get the insurance on it, as the Congregational church
didn’t.”

“What in the world do you want with a house? Are you going
to live in it yourself? Are you going to get married?” asked
Brother Tom.

“I have two objects in building the house,” Susan explained.
“One is to secure a good investment for my money: the other is
to exercise my ingenuity in planning a model house.”

“And in the mean time I am to keep on being Miss Nobody,”
Gertrude said warmly, “and lose all the chances of fortune. I
wouldn’t have believed, Susie, that you could be so
hard-hearted;” and tears began to gather in Miss Gertrude’s
pretty eyes. “It must be that you want an old-maid sister for
company,” she added with some spite.’

Tom went out of the room whistling. He was apt to run if he
perceived a fight waxing. He had a soft place in his silly
heart for his pretty young sister. He wished Susan would do
something for Gertrude: he thought she might.
[pg 443] He’d feel considerably more
comfortable in escorting Gertrude to parties if she ranked
higher in the dress-circle. He’d help her if he could, but
he was already behind at his tailor’s and at Hunsaker’s
cigar-shop.

“I’m invited to Mrs. Alderson’s next week,” Gertrude
continued, “and I’ve nothing on earth to wear but that
everlasting old white muslin that I’ve worn five times
hand-running.”

“I heard you say that Amanda Stewart had worn one dress to
all the parties of this season,” Susan remarked.

“Amanda Stewart can afford to wear one dress: her father’s
worth millions, and everybody knows it. Everybody knows she can
have a dozen new dresses for every day of the year. But we poor
folks have got to give ocular demonstration of our ability to
have new dresses, or nobody will ever believe that we can.
Everybody knows that I wear that white muslin because I can’t
afford any other, I do wish I could have a new dress for Mrs.
Alderson’s: it will be a dreadfully select party. I’ve rung all
the changes possible on that white muslin: I’ve worn pink
trimmings, and white trimmings, and blue trimmings, and I’ve
worn flowers; and now I’m at my wit’s end.”

“I wish I were able to advise you,” Susan said.

“Advise me?” Gertrude exclaimed impatiently. “What good
would advice do? It takes money to get up changes in evening
dresses.”

“You poor little goose!” said Susan with a grave smile, “I
suppose I was once just as foolish. Well, here are twenty-five
dollars you may have. It is really all I can spare, for I mean
to go at building my house immediately.”

“Susie, you’re a duck!” cried the delighted Gertrude,
eagerly taking the bills. “I can get along nicely with
twenty-five dollars for this time, but, oh dear! the next
time!”

But Susan did not heed her sister’s foreboding cry. Getting
pencil and paper, she was soon engaged in sketching the
ground-floor of a cottage house. It was to cost about
twenty-six hundred dollars. This was years before the day of
high prices, when a very cozy house could be compassed for
twenty-six hundred.

The following three weeks were very busy weeks for Susan,
though all she did was to work at the plan of her house. Her
mother grumbled. Brother Tom made his jokes, and Gertrude
“feazed,” to use her own word. The neighbors came and went, and
still Susan continued to sit with drawing-tools at her desk,
sketching plan after plan, and rejecting one after another.

“I declare, Susie,” said her sister, “I don’t believe
Christopher Wren gave as much thought to the planning of St.
Paul’s as you have to that cottage you’re going to build. I
believe in my heart you’ve made a thousand diagrams.”

“Well,” Susan retorted, “I don’t suppose anybody’s been hurt
by them.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you had to clear up the library
every morning as I have to. Those sketches of yours are
everywhere, lying around loose. I have picked them up and
picked them up, till they’ve tired me out. ‘Parlor,
dining-room, kitchen, pantry:’ I’ve read this and read it, till
it runs in my head all day, like ‘rich man, poor man,
beggar-man, thief.’ I’ve marked off the figures on all the
papering in this house into ‘parlor, dining-room, kitchen,
pantry.”

“I don’t see a mite of reason in Susan’s being so particular
about that house,” said the mother, “seein’ she’s going to rent
it. Now, if she was going to live in it herself, or any of the
rest of the family, it would be different, Anyway, these plans
all look to me like first-rate ones,” she continued, glancing
from one to another of half a dozen under her
spectacles—”plenty good enough for renting-houses. Now,
this one is right pretty, ‘pears to me, and right
handy.—What’s the reason this one won’t do, Susan?”

“Why, mother, don’t you see the fault?” Susan replied.
“There’s no way of getting to the dining-room except through
the kitchen.”

“To be sure!” said the mother. “Of course that would never
do, for, of all things, I do despise to have folks stalking
[pg 444] through my kitchen when the
pots and kittles are all in a muss, as they’re always like
to be at meal-times. What ever did you draw it this way for,
Susan?”

“Well, I didn’t see how it was coming out till it was
finished.”

“To be sure! Well, now, what’s the matter with this one?”
and the mother singled out another sketch. “This one seems to
be about right.”

“Why, yes, I think it’s splendid,” said Gertrude, leaning
over her mother’s shoulder and studying the plan under
consideration. “There’s the cellar-way opening from the pantry,
and there’s a movable slide between dining-room and pantry,
right over the sink.—Why, Susie, I think this is
wonderfully nice. Why don’t you adopt this plan?”

“The objection to it is that the pantry has no window: it
would be as dark as a pocket. Don’t you see there can’t be a
window?”

“So there can’t,” said Gertrude.

“That spoils the whole thing,” said the mother. “If there’s
anything I do despise, it’s this thing of fumblin’ ’round in a
dark pantry; and, before everything else, I want my
mouldin’-board so I can see what goes into my bread. Now, I
never noticed about that window, and I s’pose would never have
minded about it till the house was built an’ I’d gone in to mix
my bread. Then wouldn’t I have been in a pretty pickle? Clean
beat! Well, I suppose there’s something or other the matter
with all these plans?”

“Yes,” said Susan, “they’re all faulty.”

“I don’t see any fault in this one, Susie,” said
Gertrude.

“That one has the kitchen chimney in the pantry,” Susan
explained.

“Dear me! that would never do,” said the mother. “Of all
things, I dote on a cool pantry. What with the baking and the
laundry-work, that chimney would keep the pantry all the while
het up. It would be handy for canned fruits and jellies in the
winter, though—so many of ours froze and bursted last
winter.”

“Now, this one,” said Gertrude—”I’m sure this is all
right, Susie. I can’t see anything wrong about this one.”

“Why, don’t you see? That kitchen hasn’t a door in it except
the cellar-door,” said Susan.

“Well, I declare!” Gertrude said. “What ridiculous plans you
do make, Susie! The idea of planning a kitchen without a
door!”

“Why, that would never do, Susan,” the mother objected.
“Folks never could take all the victuals and things down
through the cellar.”

“I warrant I could plan a house, and a model house, the
first time,” Gertrude boasted.

“Try it,” replied Susan quietly.

“I know I can,” Gertrude insisted, settling herself with
paper and pencil.

“I believe I’ll try my hand,” said the mother. “I’ve
housekept so long I likely know what are the belongings of a
handy house;” and she too settled herself with paper and pencil
and spectacles.

There was silence for a few minutes as the three drew lines
and rubbed them out.

Presently Brother Tom came in. “Well, for ever!” he
exclaimed, with the inevitable laugh. “What are you people all
about? Have you all gone house-mad? Are you, too, going to
build a house, Gert?”

“No, I’m just helping Susie: she can’t get any plan to suit
her.”

“Why don’t you call on me, Susie? Let me have a pencil and a
scrap of paper: I can plan a house in the half of no time.”

“Here,” Susan answered, furnishing the required materials,
and enjoying, meanwhile, the thought of the discomfiture which,
as she felt sure, awaited these volunteer architects.

“Do see mother’s plan!” laughed Gertrude after a while,
peeping over that lady’s shoulder. “Her kitchen is large enough
for a prosperous livery-stable, and it has ten windows; and
here’s the parlor—nothing but a goods-box; and she hasn’t
any way of gettin; to the second floor.”

“Put in an elevator,” said Brother Tom.

This drew Gertrude’s attention to Tom’s sketch, so she went
across, and looked it over. Man-like, he had left
[pg 445] out of his plan everything
in the way of a pantry or closet, though he had a handsome
smoking-room and a billiard-hall.

Not at all disconcerted by the criticisms of his plan, Tom
proceeded with wonderful contrivance to run a partition with
his pencil across one end of his roomy smoking apartment for
pantry and ladies’ clothes-presses.

“That’s just like a man,” Gertrude said. “He’d have all the
dishes and all the ladies’ dresses toted through the
smoking-room.”

“Well, see here,” Tom said: “I can take closets off this
bedroom;” and the division-line was quickly run.

“And, pray, whose bedroom is that supposed to be?” Gertrude
asked. “It might answer for a retired bachelor who has nothing
to store but an extra shirt: it wouldn’t do for a young lady
with such hoops as they wear these days. She couldn’t squeeze
in between the bed and washstand to save her flounces. You
ain’t an architect, Tom: that’s certain.”

“Well, now, let’s see your plan,” challenged the gentleman;
and he began to read from Gertrude’s paper: “‘Parlor,
sewing-room—’ Now that’s extravagant, Gert. I think your
women-folks might get along without a special sewing-room. Why
can’t they sew in the dining-room?”

“That’s handsome, and very gallant,” answered Gertrude.
“Your men can have a billiard-room and a smoking-room, while my
poor women can’t even have a comfortable place for darning the
men’s stockings and sewing on their shirt-buttons. Oh, men are
such selfish creatures!”

“Well, now,” said Brother Tom, “I’ll leave it to Susie if
those tenants of hers can afford to have a special
sewing-room.”

“And I’ll leave it to Susie if—”

But Susan interrupted her: “You and Tom must settle your
disputes without my help. There, now! I think I have my plan
decided upon at last. After a hundred and one trials I believe
I have a faultless sketch.”

“Let’s see it,” said one and another, all gathering about
the speaker.

Susan explained her plan. The only objection to it came from
the mother. She was afraid if things were made so dreadful
handy the folks would get to be lazy; and, anyhow, there wasn’t
any use in having things so nice in a rented house: they’d get
put out of kilter right away.

But Susan had set out to build a perfect house, and she was
not to be frightened from her object. So in process of time
there were delivered into the owner’s hands the keys of the
house that Susan had built.

Three lines in a morning paper inviting a tenant brought a
throng of applicants. Susan, like the generality of landlords,
had her face set against tenants with certain encumbrances, so
a score or more of applicants had been refused the house before
the close of the first day.

Toward evening a gentleman called to see Miss Summerhaze,
announcing himself as Mr. Falconer. When Susan entered the
parlor she found a heavy-set, rather short man, who had bright
gray eyes, a broad full forehead, and was altogether a very
good-looking person.

“I have called,” he said immediately, “to inquire about the
house you have advertised for rent on North Jefferson
street.”

“I am ready to answer your inquiries,” said Susan, like the
business-woman she was.

After the questions usual in such circumstances, by which
Mr. Falconer satisfied himself that the house would probably
answer his purpose, it became Susan’s turn to satisfy herself
that he was such a tenant as she desired for her model house.
“Before going to look at the house,” she said, “I ought to ask
you some questions, for I feel particular about who goes into
it.”

Susan had occasion at a later day to remember the shade of
uneasiness that came into Mr. Falconer’s face at this point. “I
trust I shall be able to answer all your questions to your
satisfaction,” he said.

“Do you keep dogs?” This is the first question Susan
asked.

Mr. Falconer smiled, and looked as
[pg 446] though he wondered what
that had to do with the matter.

“I ask,” Susan hastened to explain, “because dogs often tear
up the grounds.”

“Well, no, I don’t keep dogs,” Mr. Falconer answered.

“Have you boys?”

Mr. Falconer smiled quietly, and replied, “No, I haven’t any
boys.”

“Three or four rough boys will ruin a house in a few
months,” Susan said in her justification. “Have you any
children?—a large family?”

“What do people do who have large families and who must rent
houses?” Mr. Falconer asked.

“Why, go to people more anxious to rent than I am.”

“No,” said Mr. Falconer, returning to the question: “I am
unfortunately a bachelor.”

“Do you propose keeping bachelor’s hall?” Susan asked in
quick concern. “Excuse me, but I could not think of renting the
house to a bachelor or bachelors. It is a rare man who is a
house-keeper. Things would soon be at sixes and sevens with a
set of men in the house.”

“I do not wish to rent the house for myself, but for a
friend.”

“Well, I propose the same questions in reference to your
friend that I have asked concerning yourself.”

“Well, then,” Mr. Falconer replied, still smiling, “my
friend does not keep dogs; she has no boys; she has one little
girl.”

“Your friend is a lady—a widow?”

“No—yes, I mean to say.”

“Do I understand that she is a widow?”

“Yes, of course.”

There was a confusion in Mr. Falconer’s manner that Susan
remembered afterward.

“Can you give me references, Mr. Falconer?” and Susan looked
him straight in the eye.

“Well, yes. Mr. Hamilton of the Hamilton Block I know, and
Mr. Dorsheimer of the Metropolitan Hotel. I am also acquainted
with Andrew Richardson, banker, and with John Y. Martindale,
M.C.”

“Those references are sufficient,” Susan said, her
confidence restored. “I will make inquiries, and if everything
is right, as I have no doubt it is, you can have the house if
you should find that it suits you. Will you go over now and
look at it? It is scarcely a half block from here.”

“Yes, if you please: I should like the matter settled as
soon as possible.”

So Susan put on her bonnet and brought a bunch of keys, and
walked away with Mr. Falconer to show the house which she had
built. And a proud woman was Susan as she did this, and a
perfect right had Susan to be a proud woman. She had, indeed,
built a model house as far as twenty-six hundred dollars could
do this. That amount was never, perhaps, put into brick and
mortar in better shape. So Mr. Falconer thought, and so he said
very cordially.

“Oh,” sighed our poor Susan when she was again at home, “how
good it seems to have such appreciation!”

Susan made inquiries of Mr. Hamilton of the Hamilton Block
concerning Mr. Falconer.

“Very nice man—very nice man, indeed!” Mr. Hamilton
answered briskly: “deals on the square, and always up to
time.”

So the papers were drawn up, and Mr. Falconer paid the first
month’s rent—forty dollars.

“Here, Gertrude,” Susan said, handing her sister a roll of
bills: “half the rent of my house I shall allow you. Make
yourself as pretty as you can with it.”

“Oh, you blessed darling angel!” Gertrude cried in a
transport. “You’re the best sister that ever lived, Susie: you
really are. Make myself pretty! I tell you I mean to shine like
a star with this money. Twenty dollars a month! Delia Spaulding
spends five times as much, I suppose. But never mind. I have an
eye and I have fingers: I’ll make my money do wonders.”

This Gertrude indeed did. She knew instinctively what colors
and what shapes would suit her form and face and harmonize with
her general wardrobe. So
[pg 447] she wasted nothing in
experiments or in articles to be discarded because
unbecoming or inharmonious. If Gertrude’s toilets were less
expensive than Delia Spaulding’s, they were more unique and
more picturesque. Indeed, there was not in her set a more
prettily-dressed girl than Gertrude, and scarcely a prettier
girl. Her society among the gentlemen was soon quoted at
par, and then rose to a premium.

Promptly on the first day of the second month Mr. Falconer
called to pay Susan’s rent.

“How does your friend like the house?” she asked with a
pardonable desire to hear her house praised.

“Very much indeed. She says it is the most complete house of
its kind that she ever saw. Who was your architect, Miss
Summerhaze? I ask because the question has been asked of me by
a gentleman who contemplates building an inexpensive
residence.”

“I planned the house,” Susan answered, a light coming into
her face.

“Indeed! In all its details?”

“Yes, I planned everything.”

“Have you studied architecture?”

“Not until I undertook to plan that house.”

“That is your first effort? You never planned a house
before?”

“No.”

“You ought to turn builder: you ought to open an architect’s
office.”

Susan laughed at the novel suggestion, for that was before
the days when women were showing their heads in all the walks
of life.

“‘Miss Summerhaze, Architect:’ that would make a very unique
card. It would get abundant advertising free of expense, for
everybody would talk about it. There is no reason,” continued
Mr. Falconer, “why women should not be architects: they have
the taste, and they are the best judges as to household
conveniences—the only proper judges, indeed.”

This has now a very commonplace sound, but for the period it
was fresh and original, and seemed so to Susan. Indeed, the
idea was fascinating: she thought Mr. Falconer a wonderfully
bright and suggestive man.

“I wish there were other things women could do besides
teaching and taking in sewing,” Susan said.

“Well, why don’t you put yourself in the lead in this
matter, Miss Summerhaze? Somebody or bodies must step to the
front. A revolution in these matters is bound to come. Why
shouldn’t you become an architect? Why shouldn’t you go into a
work for which you have evidently remarkable talent? Why
shouldn’t you become a builder?”

“Well,” said Susan, smiling, “there is no pressing call for
me to earn money. I have had my work-day, and have sufficient
means to meet my simple wants. Besides, I am not pining or
rusting in idleness. The management of my little means gives me
employment. I happen to be one of those exceptional women who
‘want but little here below,’ especially in the way of ribbons
and new bonnets. As you perceive, I give myself little concern
about matters of dress.”

“And why shouldn’t you give yourself concern about matters
of dress, Miss Summerhaze? Pardon me, but I think it your duty
to look as well as you can. You cannot do this without
bestowing thought on matters of dress.”

“Why,” said Susan, laughing, “what possible difference can
it make to anybody how I look?”

“It makes a difference to every person whom you encounter,”
Mr. Falconer replied incisively.

“To you?” Susan challenged laughingly.

“Yes, a good deal of difference to me,” the gentleman
replied promptly. “The sight of a woman artistically dressed
affects me like fine music or a fine painting.”

“But have you no commendation for the woman who is
independent enough to rise above the vanities of fashion?”
Susan asked with some warmth.

“Most certainly I have. I admire the woman who rises above
vanities of whatever nature. By all means throw the vanities of
dress overboard, but don’t let sense and taste go with them.
But I am [pg 448] making a lengthy call: I
had forgotten myself. Excuse me. Good-morning;” and Mr.
Falconer went out, and left Susan standing in the parlor
just opposite an oil-painting over the mantel.

She lifted her eyes to the picture. A simple little
landscape it was, where cows stood in a brook which wound in
and out among drooping willows. Susan always liked to look at
this picture, because she knew it was well painted. The cows
had a look of quiet enjoyment in their shapely figures. A
coolness was painted in the brook and a soft wind in the
willow-branches. She stood there before it this morning
thinking how sweet it would be to move some man’s soul as a
fine painting might move it. Then she sighed, and went to
divide her month’s rent with her sister.

“Gertrude,” she said, “do I look very old-fashioned?”

“Of course you do,” said Gertrude. “You look fully as
old-fashioned as grandma does—more old-fashioned than
mother does. I do wish, Susie, you would dress better. You make
me feel terribly sheepish sometimes. You can afford to dress
well.”

“I have decided to get a new dress,” said Susan. “What shall
it be? and how shall it be made? Something for the street.”

“Oh, I know exactly what you ought to have,” Gertrude said
with enthusiasm. “A dark-blue merino, a shade lighter than a
navy, with blue velvet bretelles. You would look superb in it,
Susie: you’d be made over new.”

“I never looked superb in anything,” said Susan with a smile
through which one saw a heartache.

“Because you never had pretty things to wear,
Susie—because you never dressed becomingly.” The tears
were actually in Gertrude’s eyes, so keen was her sympathy with
any woman who didn’t wear pretty things. “Mayn’t I go and
select your dress this afternoon? Please let me: I know the
exact shade you ought to have.”

Susan gave her consent, and away sailed Gertrude to the
shops, brimming with interest.

Through the enterprising management of this exuberant lady
the new blue dress soon arrived from the dressmaker’s, bearing
at its throat a white favor in the shape of a good-sized bill.
But then the dress was handsome and stylish, and Susan when
duly arrayed in it did indeed seem made over.

“Susie, you look really handsome,” Gertrude said when she
had wound her sister’s abundant chestnut hair into a stylish
coil, and had arranged with artistic touches the inevitable
laces and ribbons. “Just come to the glass and look at
yourself.”

To the mirror went Susan—poor Susan who had always
thought herself plain—and there, sure enough, was a
handsome face looking into hers, growing momently handsomer
with surprise and pleasure kindling in the eye and spreading
over cheek and brow.

Susan, be it understood, was by no means an ill-favored
woman even in her old-fashioned dress. She had a very good
complexion, blue eyes, large and dark and warm; and a mouth of
some character, with mobile lips and bright even teeth. But
nobody had ever called her handsome till to-day, neither had
anybody called her plain. She had simply passed unmarked. But
what she had all along needed was somebody to develop her
resources, somebody to do just what had been done
to-day—to get her into a dress that would bring out her
clear complexion, that would harmonize with the shade of her
earnest eyes; to take her hair out of that hard twist at the
back of the head, and lay it tiara-like, a bright mass, above
the brow; to substitute soft lace for stiff, glazed linen, and
a graceful knot of ribbon for that rectangular piece of gold
with a faded ambrotype in it called a breastpin. And, too, she
needed that walk she took in the crisp air to bring the glow
into her cheek; and then she needed that meeting with Mr.
Falconer, which chanced in that walk, to heighten the glow and
to brighten her already pleased eyes. The meeting took place at
the door of her house. It was an arrested, lingering look which
he gave her, and doubtless it was the character of this
[pg 449] look, conscious and
significant, that deepened the glow in her face,

“I wonder if I affected him like a fine picture or a fine
strain of music?” Susan asked herself in passing him.

“Miss Summerhaze must be acting on the hint I gave her,”
thought Mr. Falconer; and he went on with a little smile about
his mouth. It pleased him to think he had influenced her.

Thus it was that this man and this woman came to think of
each other. And now you are guessing that this thinking of each
other advanced into a warmer interest—that these two
people fell in love if they were not too far gone in years for
such nonsense. Well for us all that there are hearts that are
never too old for the sweet nonsense—the nonsense that is
more sensible than half the philosophy of the sages. Your guess
is so good that I should feel chagrined if I were one of those
writers who delight in mysteries and in surprising the reader.
But my highest aim is to tell a straight-forward story, so I
acknowledge the guess correct, so far, at least, as my Susan is
concerned. I have said that the romance in her nature died
hard; but it never died at all. This man, this almost stranger,
was rousing it as warmth and light stir the sleeping asphodels
of spring. The foolish Susan came to think of Mr. Falconer
whenever she made her toilet—to thrill at every sight of
him and at his lightest word. But this was not till after many
other meetings and interviews than those this story has
recorded. As Mr. Falconer was frequently at the house which
Susan built, and as this was less than a block removed from the
one she occupied, there naturally occurred many a chance
meeting, when some significant glance or word would send
Susan’s heart searching for its meaning.

And these chance meetings were not all.

“Who was it that called, Susie?” Gertrude asked one evening
when her sister came up from a half-hour’s interview with some
one in the parlor.

“The gentleman who rents my house,” Susan replied, her face
turned from Gertrude.

“What is he for ever coming here for?”

“He came to tell me that there were some screws loose in a
door-hinge,” Susan answered.

“For pity’s sake!” exclaimed Gertrude. “That’s a great thing
to come bothering about! Why didn’t he get a screw-driver and
screw up the screws?”

“It’s my place to keep the house in order,” said Susan.

“The report of things out of order usually sets landlords in
a feaze, but you keep as serene as the moon with your tenant’s
complaints. He’s always finding something out of order, which
seems strange, considering that the house is brand-new.”

Not many days after Gertrude had occasion to repeat her
question to Susan: “Who was it called?”

She received the reply she was expecting: “The man who rents
my house.”

“Indeed! What’s the matter now? another screw loose?”
Gertrude asked.

“He wanted to suggest an alteration in the pantry.”

“Why, he’s for ever wanting alterations made! I don’t see
how you can be so patient with his criticisms: we all know you
are house-proud. I wouldn’t listen to that man: he’ll ruin your
house with his improvements. I don’t know, anyhow, what he can
mean by saying in one breath that it is a perfect house, and in
the next asking for an alteration.”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Susan; and then her heart went
into a happy wondering as to what Mr. Falconer could mean.

“What is it this time?” Gertrude asked about three days
after in reference to “the man who rents my house,” as
described by Susan. “Does he want another story put on your
house?”

“No, he simply wanted to say that it would suit him to pay
the rent semi-monthly, instead of monthly,” Susan answered
somewhat warmly.

“And, pray, what’s his notion for that?” Gertrude asked.

“I didn’t inquire,” replied Susan shortly, resenting the
evident criticism in her sister’s
tone.

[pg 450]

But Susan did inquire why it was—inquired not of Mr.
Falconer, but of her own heart.

“I don’t see any reason for his making two errands to do a
thing that could be done in one call. Instead of putting off
pay-day, after the manner of most men, he proposes to
anticipate it. Well, perhaps you and he understand it: I
don’t.”

Why was this? Was it because it would double his visits to
her? Was Susan vain or foolish that she thus questioned
herself?

It was perhaps a little singular that Mr. Falconer’s name
had never passed between these two sisters; neither had
Gertrude ever seen the gentleman who made these frequent
business-calls on Susan.

“The man who rents my house:” this reply told
something—all that Gertrude cared to know on the subject;
whereas the reply, “Mr. Falconer,” would have conveyed no
information. And because the name had never been mentioned
Susan was startled one morning after one of Gertrude’s fine
parties. She was sitting at the window with a new magazine
while the young people talked over the party.

“I liked him so much,” said Gertrude. “He says such bright,
sensible things: he’s so original. Some men are good to dance,
and some are good to talk: he’s good for both.”

“I heard him when he asked for an introduction to you,” said
Brother Tom. “He designated you as the young lady in the blonde
dress: then he said, ‘Her dress is exquisite—just the
color of golden hair. I never saw a more beautiful
toilette.'”

“Isn’t that delightful?” cried Gertrude in a transport. “You
precious old Tom, to hear that! I’ll give you a kiss for
it.”

“I wonder,” said Brother Tom, recovering, “if he can be the
same Falconer I’ve heard the boys talk about?”

Susan had been hearing in an indolent way the talk between
Tom and Gertrude, but now her heart was bounding, and she was
listening intently.

“They tell about a Falconer who holds rather suspicious
relations with a handsome woman somewhere in the city. He rents
a house for her where she lives all alone, except that there’s
a baby and a servant-girl.”

Alas for Susan! she knew but too well that this was her Mr.
Falconer.

Tom continued: “The fellows have quizzed him about his lady,
and have tried to find out who she is, and how he’s connected
with her, but he’s close as a clam about the matter.”

“Perhaps it’s a widowed sister,” Gertrude suggested.

“Then why doesn’t he say so? and why doesn’t he go there and
live with her, instead of boarding at a hotel? and why doesn’t
she ever go out with him? They say she never goes out at all,
but keeps hid away there like a criminal.”

“I’d like to know how the fellows, as you call them, could
have found all this out unless they employ spies?” Gertrude
spoke testily, feeling a strong inclination to stand up for the
man who had paid her a handsome compliment. “There probably are
two Falconers. I know there’s nothing wrong about my Mr.
Falconer, otherwise Mr. Richmond wouldn’t have introduced him
to me.”

“I wish I had thought to inquire if he’s the man, but till
this moment I’ve not thought of that talk of the boys since I
heard it. It takes women to remember scandal and repeat it,”
said Brother Tom sagely. “But I’ll inquire about it, Gerty.
Don’t go to dreaming about Mr. Falconer till I find out.”

“Hold your tongue, you great idjiot!” said Gertrude,
wrapping with lazy grace a bright shawl about her and settling
herself on a sofa to nap off the party drowsiness. “Go on down
town and find out,” she continued, her heavily-lashed lids
dropping over the sleepy eyes: “go along!”

So Tom went down town, Gertrude went to sleep, and Susan was
left to her thoughts. What had these thoughts been about all
these weeks that the question had never arisen as to the
connection between Mr. Falconer and the woman who occupied her
house, “Who is she?” Now, indeed, Susan asked the question with
a burning at her heart. [pg 451] If she was simply a friend
or a sister, why this reticence and mystery of which Tom had
spoken? If she was his wife, why any reticence or mystery?
Besides, Mr. Falconer had said he was a bachelor.

Susan could contrive no answers to these questions that
brought any relief to her vexed heart. She had no courage to
make inquiries of others, lest the character of her interest
might be discovered. Guilt made her cowardly.

She was yet turning the matter over and over when Brother
Tom returned. She scanned his face with a keen scrutiny, eager
to get at what he had learned, yet not daring to ask a
question.

When Tom had pinched Gertrude’s drowsy ear into
consciousness he poured into it this unwelcome information:
“I’ve found out that your Mr. Falconer is the man. But who the
lady is I have not been able to discover. She is an inscrutable
mystery—a good heroine for Wilkie Collins.”

“Who told you?” Gertrude demanded in a challenging tone.

“Jack Sidmore: he knows your Mr. Falconer well. Why,
Falconer’s no new man: he’s an old resident here. He’s of the
firm of Falconer, Trowbridge & Co., grain-dealers on Canal
street. You know Phil Trowbridge?”

“I’m sure there’s nothing wrong about Mr. Falconer, or he
wouldn’t have been at Minnie Lathrop’s party.” said Gertrude
resolutely.

“Well, Jack Sidmore knows the gentleman, and he says there
is no doubt he has suspicious relations with Miss or Madam
The-Lord-knows-who. So, you see, you’re to drop Mr. Falconer
like a hot potato—to give him the cut direct.”

“It would be a shame to if he’s all right, and I feel
certain he is,” said Gertrude, still showing fight.

“Now, look here, Gert: don’t be foolish. It won’t do to
compromise yourself. Be advised by me: I’m your guardian angel,
you know. You can spare Mr. Falconer: your train will be long
enough with him cut off.”

“He’s the most interesting acquaintance I’ve made this
winter,” said Gertrude persistently.

“Don’t you say so, Sue? Oughtn’t Gertrude to cut him? You’ve
heard what we’ve been talking about, haven’t you?”

“Please don’t appeal to me,” Susan managed to say without
lifting her eyes from the blurred page before her.

She had been more than once on the point of telling Gertrude
and Tom what she knew about Mr. Falconer—that it was her
house he had rented for his friend, etc. But everything about
the matter was so indefinite. She was fearful of exposing her
unhappy heart, and she had withal some vague hope of unsnarling
the tangled skein when she should find opportunity to think. So
she allowed them to finish up their discussion and to leave the
room without a hint of the facts in her knowledge.

When they had gone the set, statuesque features relaxed. A
stricken look settled like a shadow over them. You would have
said, “It will never depart: that face can never brighten
again.”

The thing in Susan’s heart was not despair. There was the
suffering that comes from the blight of a sweet hope, from the
rude dispossession of a good long withheld. But overriding
everything else was humiliation—a feeling of degradation,
such as some deed of shame would engender. Her spirit was in
the dust, for she knew now that she had given her love unasked.
Was not this enough, after all the years of longing and dreary
waiting and sickening commonplace? Could not the Fates have let
her off from this cup, so bitter to a proud woman’s lips? Why
should she be delivered over to an unworthy love? Why should
they exact this uttermost farthing of anguish her heart could
pay? But is he unworthy? is this proved? asked the sweet voice
of Hope. Then the face which you were sure could never
brighten, did brighten, but, alas! so little; for there was
another voice, a voice that dismayed: “Why otherwise the
silence, the mystery?” Persistently the question was repeated,
till Mrs. Summerhaze came in and asked Susan to do some
marketing for dinner.

“You look all fagged, anyway: the fresh air ‘ll be good for
you.”

[pg 452]

So Susan put on her bonnet and went out, feeling there was
nothing could do her any good. She drew her veil down, the
better to shut away her suffering from people, and a little way
from home turned into a meat-market. She was in the centre of
the shop before she discovered Mr. Falconer a few yards away,
his back turned to her. She involuntarily caught at her veil to
make sure it was closely drawn. She held it securely down, and
hurried away at random to the remotest part of the shop, though
her ear was all the while strained to hear what Mr. Falconer
was saying.

He was ordering sundry packages to be sent to No. 649 North
Jefferson street—Susan’s house. In her remote corner,
from behind her veil, with eager eyes Susan looked at the face
that to her had been so noble, at the form which had seemed
full of graceful strength. She would have yielded up her life
there to have had that face and form now as it had been to her.
He went out of the shop, and she went about making her
purchases in a dazed kind of way that caused the shopman to
stare. Then she wandered up the street past her home to 649
North Jefferson street, to the house she had built with such
abounding pride and pleasure. How changed it now seemed! It had
become a haunted house—haunted by the ghosts of her faith
and peace.

For three days Susan as much as possible kept away from the
family, and appeared very much engaged with Prescott’s
Conquest of Peru. But at the breakfast-table on the
third day she received a start. Gertrude and Tom had been at a
party the evening before. (They averaged some four parties a
week.) Tom looked surly and Gertrude defiant.

“Why, Tom, what’s the matter with you?” the mother asked.
“‘Pears to me I never did see you so pouty as you be this
morning. What’s gone crooked?”

“Perhaps Gertrude can inform you,” Tom answered
severely.

Gertrude flushed with annoyance, but tossed her head.

“Why, what’s happened, Gertrude?”

“Nothing for Tom to make such a fuss about. He’s mad at me
because I won’t insult a gentleman who is invited to the best
houses, and who is received by the most particular young ladies
of my acquaintance.”

“At any rate,” retorted Tom, “I heard Jack Sidmore tell his
sister that she was not to recognize Mr. Falconer. I have
warned Gertrude that a great many people believe him to be a
suspicious character, and some know him to be such, so far as
women are concerned, and yet last night Gertrude accepted his
company home.”

“Hadn’t you gone home with Delia Spaulding? Was I to come
trapesing home alone?” said Gertrude by way of
justification.

“Now, Gert, be fair: didn’t I tell you that I’d be back
immediately?”

“Yes, but I knew something about the length of your
‘immediatelies’ when Delia Spaulding was concerned.”

“You might have had Phil Trowbridge as an escort.”

“Phil Trowbridge! I hate him!” said Gertrude with such
vehemence that the very line which parted her hair was
crimsoned.

“Well, what’s that other man done?” asked the mother, who
had not lost her interest in the original question. “What do
folks have against him?”

“Why, he’s rented a house and set up a woman in it, and
nobody knows who she is, and he won’t let out a word about her.
If she’s an honest wife or his sister or a reputable friend,
why the deuce doesn’t he say so? Jack Sidmore says there isn’t
any doubt but that the woman is Falconer’s mistress, to speak
in plain English. Hang it! Gertrude can’t take a hint.”

“Falconer! Why, Susan, ain’t that the name of the man who
rented your house?” cried the mother.

Susan felt all their eyes turned on her, and knew that she
was cornered. So she said “Yes,” and raised her coffee-cup to
her lips, but set it down quickly, as she felt her hand
trembling.

“And did he rent it for a lady friend?” Tom asked,
putting a significant stress on the last two
words.

[pg 453]

“He did,” Susan answered.

“And is there living in your house, right here beside us, a
mysterious woman with a baby?” Gertrude asked eagerly.

“There’s a woman living in my house, and she has a little
girl,” said Susan on the defensive.

“And does Mr. Falconer visit her?”

“Perhaps so: I have no spies out.”

“Why, Susie! how strange! You never told me a word about it.
I never dreamed that Mr. Falconer was the man who had rented
your house, and who has been running here so much,” Gertrude
said.

“Well, I’d get that woman out of my house as quick as ever I
could if I was you, Susan,” said Mrs. Summerhaze. “Like as not
the house will get a bad name, so you’ll have trouble renting
it.”

“I’m more concerned about Gertrude’s name,” Tom said.

Gertrude’s eyes flashed daggers at Tom.

“Of course Gertrude mustn’t keep company with Mr. Falconer,”
said the mother. “Young girls can’t be too particular who they
‘sociate with.”

Susan said nothing on the subject, though by far the most
concerned of the party on her sister’s account. It was
significant and alarming, the warmth and persistence with which
Gertrude defended Mr. Falconer. It was evident that her
interest was in some way enlisted. Was it sympathy she felt, or
was hers a generous stand against a possible injustice?
Whatever the feeling, there was danger in this young and ardent
girl becoming the partisan of an interesting man. Yet how could
she, the involved, bewildered Susan, dare warn Gertrude? How
could she ever do it? Would it not seem even to her own heart
that she was acting selfishly? How could she satisfy her own
conscience that she was not moved by jealousy? Besides, what
could she say? Gertrude knew all that she could tell her of Mr.
Falconer and his relations—knew everything except that
she, Susan, had loved—and, alas! did yet love
unasked—this unworthy man.

Ought she, as her mother had advised, demand possession of
her house? She shrunk from striking at a man—above all,
this man—whom so many were assaulting. No. She would
leave God to deal with him. Besides, there might be nothing
wrong. All might yet be explained, all might yet be set to
rights, all—unless, unless Gertrude—Oh, why should
there arise this new and terrible complication? Gertrude with
her youth and beauty and enthusiasm—why must she be drawn
into the wretchedness?

For days, feverish, haunted days, Susan went over and over
these questions and speculations. In the mean time, Tom entered
another complaint against Gertrude. “She gave the greater part
of last evening to the fellow,” he said.

“The party was stiff and stupid: Margaret Pillsbury’s
parties always are—no dancing, no cards. Mr. Falconer was
the only man there who could say anything.” This was Gertrude’s
defence, given with some confusion, and with more of doggedness
than defiance in her tone.

“I told you, Gertrude, you had ought to stop keeping company
with Mr. Falconer,” said her mother.

“If she doesn’t stop, she will force me to insult the
gentleman,” said Brother Tom resolutely.

Gertrude looked at the speaker as though she would like to
bite him with all her might.

“Now, don’t go to getting into a fuss,” the mother said to
Tom. “Gertrude must stop, or else she’ll have to stop going to
parties and stay to home.”

Gertrude did not speak, but Susan, glancing up, saw a set
look in the young face that struck a terror to her heart. She
believed that she could interpret her sister’s every look and
mood—that she knew Gertrude by heart.

“By their opposition they are only strengthening her
interest:” this was Susan’s conclusion.

In the mean time, Mr. Falconer’s next pay-day was
approaching. With a dreadful kind of fascination Susan counted
the hours that must bring the interview with him. She longed
yet dreaded to meet [pg 454] him. Would he look changed
to her? would she seem changed to him? How should she
behave? how would he behave? Would she be able to maintain a
calm coldness, or would her conscious manner betray her
mistrust, her wounded heart? So great, at times, grew her
dread of the meeting that she was tempted to absent herself,
and to ask her mother or Tom to see Mr. Falconer and receive
the rent-money. But she did not dare trust either of these.
Tom might take that opportunity of conveying the insult with
which he had threatened Mr. Falconer, while the plain-spoken
mother would be certain to forbid him Gertrude’s society,
and probably give him notice to vacate Susan’s house. No,
she must stay at home and abide the meeting; and, after all,
what would she not rather do and suffer than miss it?

But an interview with Mr. Falconer came sooner than Susan
had anticipated. It was in the early evening, immediately after
tea, that the servant brought her Mr. Falconer’s card, on which
was written, “An emergency! May I see you immediately?”

Susan hid the card in her dress-pocket, and went wondering
and blundering down stairs and into the parlor.

Mr. Falconer rose and came quickly forward. His manner was
nervous and hurried; “I thank you for this prompt response to
my appeal, Miss Summerhaze. You can do a great kindness for me;
and not for me only—you can serve a woman who is in sore
need of a friend.”

Susan’s heart was ready to leap from her bosom. Was she to
be asked to befriend this woman toward whom people’s eyes were
turning in mistrust, and about whom their lips were
whispering?

“May I depend on you?” Mr. Falconer asked.

“Go on,” said Susan vaguely.

“But may I depend upon you? upon your secresy?”

“In all that is honest you may depend upon me,” she
replied.

“Briefly, then. The lady for whom I rented your house is my
sister. I could never tell you her story: it ought never to be
told. But the man she married betrayed all her trust, and made
her life one long nightmare of horrors. At length, in a drunken
fury one wretched autumn night, in the rain and sleet, he
turned her and her baby into the street at midnight, and bolted
the doors against them. Then she resolved to fly from him and
be rid of him for ever. A train was about leaving the
dépôt, some three blocks distant. Without bonnet
or shawl, the damp ice in her hair and on her garments, she
entered the car, the only woman in it. She came to me. Thank
God! she had me to come to!”

Mr. Falconer was crying; so was Susan.

“The beneficent law gives the child to the father,” Mr.
Falconer continued. “The father is now in the city seeking the
child. He has his detectives at work, and I have mine. In his
very camp there is a man in my service. Fortunately, I
out-money him. Now, my sister knows of Patterson’s being here.
(The man’s name is Patterson.) She has grown pitifully nervous,
and is full of apprehension. She is very lonely. I must get her
away from that house, and yet I must keep her here with me: she
has no one else to look to. I don’t know, Miss Summerhaze, why
I should come to you for help when there are hundreds of others
here whom I have known so much longer. I am following an
impulse.”

He paused and looked at Susan, as if waiting for her reply.
Happy Susan! Eager, trembling, her face glowing with a tender
enthusiasm, a tearful ecstasy, feeling that it would be sweet
to die in the service of this man whom her thoughts had so
wronged, she gave her answer: “I am so glad you have come to
me! Anything on earth I can do to aid you I will do with all my
heart—as for myself. Let your sister come here if that
will suit you.”

It was what he wanted.

“I am sorry I have not made your sister’s acquaintance:
would it be convenient for me to go with you this evening and
get acquainted with her?”

“Perfectly convenient, and I should be glad to have you
go.”

[pg 455]

“I will bring my bonnet and shawl, and we will go at
once.”

“If you please.”

Susan quickly crossed the parlor, but stopped at the door:
“Perhaps your sister would feel more secure and more at peace
to come to us right away—to-night. Sha’n’t I bring her
away to-night?”

“It would be a great mercy if you would do so, Miss
Summerhaze,” Mr. Falconer replied with an earnest thankfulness
in his voice.

“Then please wait a few minutes till I explain things a
little to my mother;” and with a quick, light step Susan
hurried away.

Great were the surprise and interest awakened in the
household by the revelation she made in the next ten
minutes.

“Have her come right along to-night, poor thing!” the mother
said, overflowing with sympathy.

Gertrude was triumphant. There was a warm glow on her cheek,
and such a happy light in her eyes as Susan afterward
remembered with a pang. “She had better have my room: it is so
much more cheerful than the guest-chamber,” Gertrude said.

Even Brother Tom, though demonstrated to have been on the
wrong side, was pleased, for he was good-natured and generous
in his light manner.

So Susan went back to Mr. Falconer, feeling that she had
wings and could soar to the heavens. And she was happier yet as
she walked that half block, her arm in his, feeling its warmth
and strength. It is all very well to speculate in stocks and to
build houses, but for such hearts as Susan’s there is perhaps
something better.

Too soon for one of them their brief walk was ended, and
Susan sat in the neat, plainly-furnished parlor waiting the
return of Mr. Falconer, who had gone to seek his sister. When
at length the door opened, Susan sat forgetful, her gaze intent
on the rare face that appeared by Mr. Falconer’s side. It was
not that the face was beautiful, though perhaps it was, or had
been. It was picturesque, made so in great measure by a
stricken look it had, and a strange still whiteness. It was one
of those haunting faces that will not let themselves be
forgotten—a face that solemnized, because it indexed the
mortal agony of a human soul.

“Miss Summerhaze, this is my sister, Mrs. Patterson.” said
Mr. Falconer,

With a sweet cordiality of manner the lady held out her
hand: “My brother has often told me about you: I am very glad
to make your acquaintance.”

Susan was greatly interested. “And I am very glad too,” she
said, a tremor in her voice. She wanted to run away and cry off
the great flood of sympathy that was choking her. “Dear lady,
may I kiss you?” she wanted to say. “Poor dear! she needs
brooding.” This Susan thought, and she wished she dared put out
her arms and draw the sad face to her bosom, the sad heart
against her own.

They talked over their plans, and then Mrs. Patterson and
the little girl went home with Susan.

During Mrs. Patterson’s stay with the Summerhazes, Mr.
Falconer made frequent calls, though his movements were marked
by great caution, lest they might betray the pursued wife to
her husband. These calls were of a general character, designed
for the household, and not exclusively for Mrs. Patterson. And
they were continued after the lady had returned to No. 649. But
they were to Susan tortures. They were but opportunities for
noting the interest between Mr. Falconer and Gertrude. This was
evident not alone to Susan, or she might have had some chance
of charging it to the invention of her jealousy. Tom and Mrs.
Summerhaze had both remarked it.

“He’s well to do, Tom says, and stands respectable with the
business-men,” the mother commented to Susan; “and Gertrude
‘pears fond of him, and he does of her; so I can’t see any good
reason why they shouldn’t marry if they want one another.
Anyhow, it’s better for girls to marry and settle down and
learn to housekeep—”

“Yes, yes,” cried Susan’s heart with pathetic impatience,
“it’s better, but—”

“Instead of going to parties in thin
[pg 456] shoes and cobweb frocks: I
wonder they don’t all take the dipthery. And then they set
up till morning. I couldn’t ever stand that: I’d be laid up
with sick headache every time. Besides, they eat them
unhealthy oysters and Charlotte rooshes, and such like: no
wonder so many people get the dyspepsy. Yes, I think
Gertrude had better take Mr. Falconer if he wants her to.
Ain’t that your mind about it, Susan?”

“She had better accept him if—if—they love each
other.” Then Susan grew faint and soul-sick, and something in
her heart seemed to die, as though she had spoken the fatal
words that made them each other’s for ever—that cut her
loose from her sweet romance and sent her drifting into the
gloom.

That evening Mr. Falconer called. Susan said she was not
well, and kept her room. Gertrude had planned to go to the
opera with Tom, but she decided to remain at home. Long after
Tom had gone out Susan in her chamber above could hear from the
parlor the murmur of voices—Mr. Falconer’s and
Gertrude’s. They were low and deep: the topic between them was
evidently no light one. While she listened her imagination was
busy concerning their subject, their attitudes, their looks,
and even their words. And every imagining was such a pain that
she tried to close her ear against their voices. Then she went
to her mother’s room. Here, being forced to reply to
commonplaces when all her thought was strained to the parlor,
she was soon driven back to her own chamber. She turned the gas
low and lay on a lounge, her face buried in the cushion,
abandoned to a wrecked feeling.

After a time she heard some one enter her room. She sat up,
and saw Gertrude standing beside her, the gas turned high. She
wished her sister would go away: she hated the sight of that
beautiful, glad face. She turned her eyes away from it, and
then, ashamed to begrudge the young thing her happiness, she
lifted her stained lids, to Gertrude’s face and smiled all she
possibly could. She tried in that moment to feel glad that the
disappointment and grief had come to her instead of Gertrude.
Her heart was inured to a hard lot, but Gertrude’s had always
been sheltered. It would be a pity to have it turned out into
the cold: her own had long been used to chill and to
hunger.

“Susie, won’t you go with us sleigh-riding to-morrow
evening?” Gertrude asked. “Mr. Falconer and I have planned a
sleighing-party for to-morrow evening. They say the sleighing
is perfectly superb.”

“Is that what you’ve been doing?” Susan asked, feeling
somehow that there would be a relief in hearing that it was
all.

“That’s a part of what we’ve been doing.” A rosy glow came
into Gertrude’s cheek, and the old mean, jealous feeling came
back into Susan’s heart. “Mr. Falconer wants you to go,” said
Gertrude.

“He does not,” Susan returned in a fierce tone. She was
forgetting herself: her heart was giddy and blind with the
sudden wave of bitterness that came pouring over it. “He wants
you: nobody wants me. Go away!”

“Of course I’ll go away if you want me to,” Gertrude
replied, pouting and looking injured, but yet lingering at
Susan’s side. She had come to tell something, and she didn’t
wish to be defrauded of the pleasure. “I guess you’re asleep
yet, Susie. Wake up and look at this;” and Gertrude held her
beautiful white hand before Susan’s eyes, and pointed to a
superb solitaire diamond that blazed like a star on her finger.
She sat down beside her sister. “I’m engaged, Susie, and I came
up here to ask your blessing, and you’re so cross to me;” and
Gertrude put her head on Susan’s shoulder and shed a few
tears.

Susan could have cried out with frantic pain. “But,” she
thought, “I knew it was coming. After all, I am glad to have
the suspense ended—to be brought to face the matter
squarely.”

In response to Gertrude’s reproach Susan said in a low tone
that was almost a whisper, “I congratulate you: I think you are
doing well.”

“Of course I’m doing well,” Gertrude said, lifting her head
and speaking with [pg 457]
triumphant animation. “He’s wealthy and handsome, and half the
girls in our set are dying for him. But we’ve been about the
same as engaged for months. But about two weeks ago we had an
awful quarrel, all about nothing. But we were both so spunky I
don’t believe we ever would have made up in the wide world if
it hadn’t been for Mr. Falconer. He just went back and forth
between us until I agreed to grant Phil an interview. So Phil
came round to-night; and don’t you believe the conceited thing
brought the ring along!”

Susan was listening with wide-opened, staring eyes, like one
in a trance. It wasn’t Mr. Falconer, then; and who in the world
was Phil? Was she awake? Had she heard aright? Yes, there was
the ring and there was Gertrude, and she was still speaking:
“I’ve already picked out my bridesmaids, I’m going to have
Nellie Trowbridge—Phil’s sister, you know—she’s
going to stand with Tom; and you’re going to stand with Mr.
Falconer, because he’s the senior partner in Phil’s firm: and
then I’m going to have Delia Spaulding and Minnie Lathrop,
because they’ll make a good exhibition, they’re so
stylish.”

On and on Gertrude went, talking of white satin and tulle
and lace and bridal veils and receptions. And Susan sat and
listened with a happy light in her eyes, and now and then
laughed a little glad laugh or spoke some sweet word of
sympathy.

At a late hour in the night Susan put her arms around her
sister and kissed the happy young face once, twice, three
times, and said, in no whisper now, “God bless you, dear!” Then
Gertrude went away to happy dreams, and left Susan to happy
thoughts—at last.

No, not at last. The “at last” did not come till the next
evening, when by Mr. Falconer’s side, warm and snug under the
great wolf-robe, Susan heard something. With the something
there came at length to the tired, hungry, waiting heart the
thrill, the transport, the enchanted music that makes this
earth a changed world.

SARAH WINTER KELLOGG.

AFTER A YEAR.

Dear! since they laid thee underneath the snow

But one brief year with all its days hath
past.

Methought its hurrying moments flew too
fast:

I would have had them lingering, move more slow;

For of the past one happy thing I know,

That thou wert of it; but these swift
days flee,

And bear me to a future void of thee.

Yet still I feel that ever as I go

I know thee better, and I love thee more.

As one withdraws from a tall mountain’s
base

To see its summit, bright, remote and
high,

So hath my heart through distance learnt its
lore,

The knowledge of thy soul’s most secret
grace—

Those silent heights that lose themselves
in sky.

KATE
HILLARD.

[pg 458]

THE BERKSHIRE LADY.

To the Editor of Lippincot’s Magazine:
SIR: There are few pleasanter ways of passing a
desultory hour than haphazard reading amongst old numbers
of a good magazine. I say advisedly “a desultory hour,” for
when it comes to more than that the habit is apt to become
demoralizing. And, excellent as many English magazines are,
I must own that for this particular purpose I give the
preference to our American cousins. It would not be easy to
say precisely why, but so it is. One feels lighter after
them than one does after the same time given to their
English confrères. It may be that there is more
abandon, more tumbling in them—much more of that
borderland writing (if one may use the phrase) so good, as
I think, for magazine purposes, which you skim with a kind
of titillating doubt in your mind whether it is jest or
earnest—whether you are to take seriously, or the
writer intended you to take seriously, what he is telling
you; and so you may drop into a sort of dreamy
Alice-in-Wonderland state, prepared to accept
whatever comes next in a purely receptive condition, and
without any desire to ask questions.
It was in such a frame of mind, and with considerable
satisfaction, that I found myself some time since sitting
in a friend’s house with a spare corner of time on my
hands, in a comfortable armchair, and a number of old
Lippincotts on the table by my side, the odds and
ends of the collection of a young countrywoman of mine of
literary and Transatlantic tastes. I glanced through some
half dozen numbers taken up at hazard, recognizing here and
there an old friend—for I have been an on-and-off
reader in these pages for years—and getting just
pleasantly pricked with a number of new ideas, as to which
I felt no responsibility—no need of ticketing or
labeling or packing them—when I came suddenly upon a
paper which sharply roused me from my mood of laisser
aller. It was by your accomplished and amusing
contributor Lady Blanche Murphy, and the subject just such
a one as one would wish to happen on under the
circumstances—Slains Castle, one of the oldest and
most romantic of the grim palace-keeps which are dotted
over Scotland, round which legends cluster so thick that
there is not one of their towers, scarcely a slender old
mullioned window, which is not specially connected with
some stirring tale of love, war or crime. But Slains stands
pre-eminent among Scotch castles on other grounds, and has
an interest which the doings of the earls of Errol, its
lords, could never have won for it. The Wizard of the North
has thrown his spell over it, and, whether Sir Walter Scott
intended it or not, Slains is accepted now as the Elangowan
Castle in Guy Mannering.
Now, with all these rich stores to work on, these
exceeding many flocks and herds of Northern legend and
glamour, Lady Blanche should surely have been content, and
not have descended into the South of England, upon a quiet
country-house in Berkshire, to seize its one ewe lamb and
claim that the heroine of the story which I hope to tell
before I get to the end of my paper was none other than the
termagant Countess Mary, hereditary lord high constable of
Scotland, and the owner of Slains Castle at the beginning
of last century.
Sir, I am bound to admit that this audacious claim
spoilt my wanderings up and down the pages of your
excellent magazine, and I resolved that whenever I should
find time I would write to you to revindicate the claims of
the “Berkshire Lady” to be native born and entirely
unconnected with the Countess Mary or Slains Castle. I can
scarcely remember the time when I did not know the story,
which indeed all Berkshire boys—or at any rate all
Bath-road Berkshire boys—took as regularly as measles
[pg 459] in early youth. But let
me explain to New-World readers what I mean by a
Bath-road Berkshire boy. Our royal county of Berks is in
shape somewhat like a highlow or ancle-jack boot with
the toe toward London, and at the tip of the toe Windsor
Castle, which, as we all know, looks down on the Thames
as it finally leaves the county, of which it has formed
the northern boundary for more than one hundred miles.
The sweet river—for in spite of all pollution it
is still sweet at Windsor—has run all along the
top of the boot and down the instep, and along the toes,
taking Oxford, Abingdon, Wallingford, Henley, Reading
and Maidenhead in its way, with other places
historically interesting in a small way over here, but
which would scarcely be known by name even in the
best-drilled classes of your public schools. Along the
sole of the boot, from the heel at Hungerford, but
sloping gently upward till it joins the Thames at
Reading, runs another stream (a river we call it in
little England)—
The Kennet swift, for silver eels renowned.
Now, before the Great Western Railway had opened up the
county the only main line of road which passed through it
was the great Bath road, which entered near the toe at
Windsor and ran along the sole for the greater part of the
way by the side of the Kennet to the extreme heel at
Hungerford. All the northern part of the county—the
Thames valley and Vale of White Horse, and the
hill-district which separates these from the Vale of
Kennet—was at that time pierced only by cross-country
roads, and remained during the pre-railroad era one of the
most primitive districts of the West of England. Its
inhabitants retained their broad drawling speech, very
slightly modified from Tudor times, and looked with a
mixture of distrust and envy even on their fellow county
brethren in the Kennet Valley, who were being demoralized
by their daily intercourse with London through the
constantly growing traffic of the Bath road. Along that
thoroughfare, besides strings of post-chaises, vans and
wagons, ran daily more than one hundred coaches most of
which started from Bristol, and made the journey to London
in the day. The best of them did their ten miles an hour,
and so punctually that many of the inhabitants preferred
setting their watches by the “York House.” the “Tantivy” or
the “Bristol Mail” rather than by the village clock. It
were much to be desired that their gigantic successor would
follow their excellent example more faithfully in this
matter.
Notwithstanding the distrust with which we of the back
country were bred to regard the metropolitan varnish which
was thus undermining the ancient Berkshire habits and
speech along our one great artery, it was always, I am
bound to admit, a high day for the dweller in uncorrupted
Berkshire when business or pleasure drew him from his home
in the downs or rich pastures of the primitive northern
half of the county by devious parish ways to the nearest
point on the great Bath road, where he was to meet the
coach which would carry him in a few hours “in amongst the
tide of men.” I can still vividly recall the pleasing
thrill of excitement which ran through us when we caught
the first faint clink of hoof and roll of wheels, which
told of the approach of the coach before the leaders
appeared over the brow of the gentle slope some two hundred
yards from the cross-roads, where, recently deposited from
the family phaeton (dog-carts not having been yet
invented), we had been waiting with our trunk beside us in
joyful expectation. Thrice happy if, as the coach pulled up
to take us on board, we heard the inspiring words “room in
front,” and proceeded to scramble up and take our seats
behind the box, waving a cheerful adieu to the sober family
servant as he turned his horse’s head slowly homeward, his
mission discharged.
The habit of our family, and of most others, was to
attach ourselves to one particular coach or coachman on the
road, as thus special attention was secured for ladies or
children traveling alone, and preference as to places
should there happen to be a glut of
[pg 460] would-be passengers. I
cannot honestly say that the old Bath-road coachman was,
as a rule, an attractive member of society, though the
mellowing effects of time and the traditions of the road
(helped largely by the immortal sayings and doings of
Mr. Tony Weller) have done much for his class. He was
often a silent, short-tempered fellow, with a very keen
eye for half-crowns, and no information to speak of as
to the country which passed daily under his eyes. But
there were plenty of exceptions to the rule, of whom Bob
Naylor was perhaps the most remarkable example. He had
no doubt been selected as our guardian on the road for
his kindly and genial nature and great love of children,
and for his repute as one of the safest of whips. But,
besides these sterling qualities, he was gifted with
irrepressible spirits, a good voice and ear, and a
special delight in the exercise of them. To county
magnate or parson or stranger seated by him on the box
he could be as decorous as a churchwarden, and talk of
politics or cattle or county business with all due
solemnity. But he was only at his best when “the front”
was occupied by boys, or at any rate with a strong
sprinkling of boys, amongst whom he was quite at his
ease, and who were even more eager to hear than he to
sing and talk. And of both songs and talk he had a
curious and ample store. Of songs his own special
favorites, I remember, were a long ballad in which a
faithful soldier is informed on his return to his native
village that his own true love “lives with her own
granny dear,” which he, his mind running in military
grooves, takes for “grenadier,” with temporarily
distressing results—though all comes right at
last—and a lyrical description of an upset of his
coach, the only one he ever had, written by a gifted
hostler. But on call he could give “The Tight Little
Island,” “Rule Britannia” or any one of a dozen other
insular melodies.
Then his talk was racy of his beloved road, of which he
would recount the glories even in the days of its decline,
when the cormorant iron way was already swallowing stage
after stage of the best of it. He would narrate to us the
doings and feats of mighty whips—notably of a
never-to-be-forgotten dinner at the Pelican Inn, Newbury,
to which were gathered the élite of the
Bath-road cracksmen. At that great repast we heard how “for
wittles there was trout, speckled like a dane dog, weal as
wite as allablaster, sherry-wite-wine, red-port, and
everything in season. Then for company there was Sir Pay
(Sir H. Peyton), Squire Willy boys (Vielbois), Cherry Bob,
Long Dick, and I; and where would you go to find
five sech along any road out of London?” But his crowning
story, which he never missed as he cracked his four bays
along on the first stage west out of Reading, was that of
the Berkshire Lady, which, alas! my gifted countrywoman has
now laid covetous hands on and claimed for that dour Lady
Mary Hay, hereditary lord high constable of Scotland,
The “Berkshire Lady” is so bound up in my mind with my
early friend of the road, from whom I first heard it, that
I have let Memory fairly run away with me. But now, if your
readers will pardon me for this gossip, I will promise to
stick to my text.
At the beginning of the last century the fortune of one
of the last of the “Great Clothiers of the West,” John
Kendrick, was inherited by a young lady, his granddaughter,
who thus became the mistress of Calcott Park, past which
the Bath road runs, three miles to the west of Reading. The
house stands some three hundred yards from the road, facing
due south, with a background of noble timber behind it, and
in front a gentle slope of fine green turf, on which the
deer seem to delight in grouping themselves at the most
picturesque points. Miss Kendrick is said to have been
beautiful and accomplished, and it is certain that she was
an eccentric young person, who turned a deaf ear to the
suits of many wooers, for, as the ballad quoted by your
contributor says—
Many noble persons courted
This young lady, ’tis reported;
But their labor was in vain:
They could not her love obtain.
[pg 461]
This metrical version of the story is, I fear, lost
except the fragments which I shall quote; at least I have
sought for it in vain in all likely quarters since reading
Lady Blanche’s article.
So Miss Kendrick lived a lonely and stately life in
Calcott Park.
Now, at this time there was a young gentleman of the
name of Benjamin Child, a barrister of the Temple,
belonging to the western circuit, of which Reading is the
first assize-town. He came of a family which had seen
better days, but his ancestors had suffered in the civil
war, and he had no fortune but his good looks. His practice
was as slender as his means, but nevertheless he managed to
ride the western circuit after the judges of assize. The
arrival of the judges in a county-town in those days was a
signal for hospitalities and festivities in which the
circuit barristers were welcome guests, and one spring
assizes Benjamin Child found himself at a wedding and ball,
where no doubt he carried himself as a young gentleman of
good birth and town breeding should.
Next morning he received at his lodgings a written
challenge, which alleged that he had grievously injured the
writer at the entertainments on the previous day, and
appointed a meeting in Calcott Park on the following
morning to settle the affair in mortal combat. In those
days no gentleman could refuse such an invitation, and
accordingly Child appeared at the appointed time and place,
accompanied by another young barrister as his second. The
rendezvous was at a spot near the present lodge, and the
young men on arriving found the lawn occupied by two women
in masks, while a carriage was drawn up under some trees
hard by. They were naturally in some embarrassment, from
which they were scarcely relieved when the ladies advanced
to meet them, and Child learned that one of them was his
challenger, the mortal offence being that he had won her
heart at the Reading ball, and that she had come there to
demand satisfaction.
So, now take your choice, says she—
Either fight or marry me.
Said he, Madam, pray, what mean ye?
In my life I ne’er have seen ye,
Pray, unmask, your visage show,
Then I’ll tell you, ay or no.
Lady. I shall not my face uncover
Till the marriage rites are over.
Therefore, take you which you will—
Wed me, sir, or try your skill.
Benjamin Child retires to consult with his friend, who
advises him—
If my judgment may be trusted,
Wed her, man: you can’t be worsted.
If she’s rich, you rise in fame;
If she’s poor, you are the same.
This advice, coupled perhaps with the figure and
appearance of his challenger, and the family coach in the
background, prevails, and the two young men and the masked
ladies drive to Tilchurst parish church, where the priest
is waiting. After the ceremony the bride,
With a courteous, kind behavior,
Did present his friend a favor:
Then she did dismiss him straight,
That he might no longer wait.
They then drive, the bride still masked, to Calcott
House, where he is left alone in a fair parlor for two
hours, till
He began to grieve at last,
For he had not broke his fast.
Then the steward appears and asks his business, and
There was peeping, laughing, jeering,
All within the lawyer’s hearing;
But his bride he could not see.
“Would I were at home!” said he.
At last the dénouement comes. The lady of the
house appears and addresses him:
Lady. Sir, my servants have related
That some hours you have waited
In my parlor. Tell me who
In this house you ever knew?
Gentleman. Madam, if I have offended
It is more than I intended.
A young lady brought me here.
“That is true,” said she, “my dear.”
His challenger was the heiress of Calcott, where he
lived with her for many years; and
Now he’s clothed in rich attire,
Not inferior to a squire.
Beauty, honor, riches, store!
What can man desire more?
They had two daughters, through one of whom the property
has descended to the Blagraves, the present owners.
And so ends the story of “The Berkshire
[pg 462] Lady,” and if it
should meet the eye of your accomplished contributor I
trust she will for ever hereafter give up all claim on
behalf of Lady Mary Hay.
Perhaps, too, some of your readers may be led to visit
the scene of these doings if they ever come to wander about
the old country. Reading is only an hour from London
now-a-days, and I will promise them that they will not
easily find a fairer corner in all England. The Bath road,
it is true, is now comparatively deserted, and no
well-appointed coaches flash by in front of Calcott Park.
But it is an easy three miles’ walk or ride from Reading
Station, and by missing one train the pilgrim may get a
glimpse of English country-life under its most favorable
aspects, while at the same time, if skeptical as to this
“strange yet true narration,” as the metrical chronicler
calls it, he may at any rate satisfy himself as to the
marriage of B. Child and the Berkshire Lady, and the birth
of their two daughters, by inspecting the parish register
at Tilchurst church for the years 1710 to 1713.

THOMAS HUGHES.

THE SABBATH OF THE
LOST.¹

Mid homes eternal of the blessed

Erewhile beheld in trance of prayer,

A secret wish the saint possessed

To see the regions of despair.

The Power in whose omniscient ken

The thoughts of every heart abide

Sent him to those lost souls of men,

A splendid spirit for his
guide—

Michael, the warrior, the prince

Of those before the throne who dwell,

The brightest of archangels since,

Eclipsed, the son of morning fell.

Down through the voids of light they sped

Till Heaven’s anthems faintly rung

Through darkening space, and overhead

Earth’s planets dim and dwindled
hung.

Still downward into lurid gloom

The saint and angel took their way,

Moving within a clear cool room,

The light benign of heavenly day.

The wretched thronged on every side.

“Have mercy on us, radiant twain!

O Paul! beloved of God!” they cried,

“Pray Heaven for surcease of our
pain.”

“Weep, weep, unhappy ones, bewail!

We too our prayers and tears will
lend:

Our supplication may prevail,

And haply God some respite
send.”

[pg 463]

Then upward from the lost there swept

Entreaty multitudinous,

As every wave of ocean wept:

“O Christ! have mercy upon us!”

And as their clamor rose on high

Beyond the pathway of the sun,

Heav’n’s happy legions joined the cry,

Their voices melting into one.

The saint, up-gazing through the dew

Of pity brimming o’er his eyes,

Discerned in Heav’n’s remotest blue

The Son of God lean from the skies.

Then through their agonies were heard

The tones which still’d the angry
sea,

The voice of the Eternal Word:

“And do ye ask repose of me?

“Me whom ye pierced with curse and jeer,

Whose mortal thirst ye quenched with
gall?

I died for your immortal cheer:

What profit have I of you all?

“Liars, traducers, proud in thought,

Misers! no offering of psalms

Or prayer or thanks ye ever brought—

No deed of penitence or alms.”

Michael and Paul at that dread speech,

With all the myriads of Heaven,

Fell on their faces to beseech

Peace for the lost one day in seven.

The Son of God, who hearkens prayer,

In mercy to those souls forlorn

Bade that their torments should forbear

From Sabbath eve to Monday morn.

The torments swarmed forth at the gate—

Hell’s solemn guardians let them
pass:

Those awful cherubim who wait

All sorrowful surveyed the mass.

But from the lost a single cry,

Which rang rejoicing through the
spheres:

“O blessed Son of God most high!

Two nights, a day, no pain or tears?”

“O Son of God, for ever blessed!

Praise and give thanks, all spirits
sad:

A day, two nights of perfect rest?

So much on earth we never had!”

Footnote 1:
(return)
See Fauriel, Hist. de la Poésie
provençale, tom. i. ch. 8.

[pg 464]

THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS.

BY MRS. E. LYNN LINTON, AUTHOR OF “PATRICIA KEMBALL.”

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE FRIEND OF THE FUTURE.

Instead of going home when she left Steel’s Corner, Leam
turned up into the wood, making for the old hiding-place where
she and Alick had so often sat in the first days of her
desolation and when he had been her sole comforter. She was
very sorrowful, and oppressed with doubts and self-reproaches.
As she climbed the steep wood-path, her eyes fixed on the
ground, her empty basket in her hand, and her heart as void of
hope or joy as was this of flowers, she thought over the last
hour as she might have thought over a death. How sorry she was
that Alick had said those words! how grieved that he loved her
like this, when she did not love him, when she could never have
loved him if even she had not been a Spaniard and her mother’s
daughter!

But she did not wish that he was different from what he was,
so that she might have been able to return his love. Leam had
none of that shifting uncertainty, that want of a central
determination, which makes so many women transact their lives
by an If. She knew what she did not feel, and she did not care
to regret the impossible, to tamper with the indefinite. She
knew that she neither loved Alick nor, wished to love him.
Whether she had unwittingly deceived him in the first place,
and in the second ought to sacrifice herself for him, unloving,
was each a question on which she pondered full of those doubts
and self-reproaches that so grievously beset her.

As she was wandering drearily onward Mr. Gryce saw her from
a side path. He struck off to meet her, smiling, for he had
taken a strong affection for this strange and beautiful young
creature, which he justified to himself as interest in her
history.

This acute, suspicious and inquisitive old heathen had some
queer notions packed away in his wallet of biological
speculations—notions which supplemented the fruits of his
natural gifts, and which he always managed to harmonize with
what he already knew by more commonplace means. He had been
long in the East, whence he had brought a cargo of
half-scientific, half-superstitious fancies—belief in
astrology, mesmerism, spiritualism, and cheiromancy the most
prominent. He could cast a horoscope, summon departed spirits,
heal the sick and read the reticent by mesmeric force, and
explain the past as well as prophesy the future by the lines in
the hand.

So at least he said; and people were bound to believe that
he believed in himself when he said so. He had once looked at
Leam’s hand, and had seen something there which, translated by
his rules, had helped him on the road that he had already
opened for himself by private inquiry based on the likelihood
of things. Crime, love, sorrow—it was no ordinary history
that was printed in the lines of her feverish little palm, as
it was no ordinary character that looked out from her intense
pathetic face. There was something almost as interesting here
as a meditation on the mystic Nirvana or a discourse on that
persistent residuum of all myths—Maya, delusion.

It was to follow up the line thus opened to him that he had
attached himself with so much zeal to his landlord,
unsympathetic as such a man as Sebastian Dundas must needs be
to a metaphysical and superstitious student of humanity, a born
detective, shrewd, inquisitive and suspicious. But he attached
himself for the sake of Leam and her future, saying often to
himself, “By and by. She will come to me by and by, when I can
be useful to her.”

Meanwhile, Leam received his cares with the characteristic
indifference of youth for the attentions of age. She
[pg 465] was not at the back of the
motives which prompted him, and thought him tiresome with
his mild way of getting to know so many things that were no
concern of his. The shrewd guesses which he was making, and
the terrible mosaic that he was piecing together out of such
stray fragments as he could pick up—and he was always
picking them up—were hidden from her; and she
understood nothing of the mingled surmise and certainty
which made his interest in her partly retrospective and
partly prophetic, as he fitted in bit by bit that hidden
thing in the past or foresaw the discovery that must come in
the future. She only thought him tiresome and inquisitive,
and wished that he would not come so often to see papa.

It did not take a large amount of that faculty of
thought-reading which Mr. Gryce claimed as so peculiarly his
own to see that something unusual had happened to disturb poor
Leam to-day. As she came on, so wrapped in the sorrow of her
thoughts that the world around her was as a world that is
dead—taking no heed of the flowers, the birds, the sweet
spring scents, the glory of the deep-blue sky, while the
flickering shadows of the budding branches played over her like
the shadow of the net in which she had entangled
herself—she looked the very embodiment of despair. Her
face, never joyous, was now infinitely tragic. Her dark eyes
were bright with the tears that lay behind them; her proud
mouth had drooped at the corners; she was walking as one who
neither knows where she is nor sees what is before her, as one
for whom there is no sun by day and no stars for the
night—lost to all sense but the one faculty of suffering.
She did not even see that some one stood straight in the path
before her, till “Whither and whence?” asked Mr. Gryce, barring
her way.

Then she started and looked up. Evidently she had not heard
him. He repeated the question with a difference. “Ah!
good-morning to you, Miss Dundas. Where are you going? where
have you been?” he said in his soft, low-pitched, lisping
voice, with the provincial accent struggling through its patent
affectation.

“I am going to the yew tree and I have been to Steel’s
Corner,” she answered slowly, in her odd, almost mathematically
exact manner of reply.

“From Steel’s Corner! And how is that excellent young man,
our deputy shepherd?” he asked.

“Better,” she said with even more than her usual curtness,
and she was never prolix.

“He has been fearfully ill, poor fellow!” said Mr. Gryce, in
the manner of an ejaculation.

She looked at the flowers with which the wood was golden and
azure. “Yes,” was her not too eloquent assent.

“And you have been sorry?”

“Every one has been sorry,” said Leam evasively.

“Yes, you have been sorry,” he repeated: “I have read it in
your face.”

He had done nothing of the kind: he had guessed it from the
fact of her daily visits, and he had surmised a special
interest from that other group of facts which had first set him
thinking—namely, that Steel’s Corner owned a
laboratory—two, for the matter of that; that old Dr.
Corfield was a clever toxicologist; that Leam had stayed there
during her father’s honeymoon; and that her stepmother had died
on the night of her arrival. “And your average Englishman calls
himself a creature with brains and inductive powers!” was his
unspoken commentary on the finding of the coroner’s jury and
the verdict of the coroner. “Bull is a fool,” the old heathen
used to think, hugging his own superior sagacity as a gift
beyond those which Nature had allowed to Bull in the
abstract.

“I have known him since I was a child. Of course, I have
been sorry,” said Leam coldly.

She disliked being questioned as much as being touched. The
two, indeed, were correlative.

“Early friendships are very dear,” said Mr. Gryce, watching
her. He was opening the vein of another idea which he had long
wanted to work.

She was silent.

[pg 466]

“Don’t you think so?” he asked.

“They may be,” was her reluctant answer.

“No, they are—believe me, they are. The happiest fate
that man or woman can have is to marry the early
friend—transform the playmate of childhood into the lover
of maturity, the companion of age.”

Leam made no reply. She was afraid of this soft-voiced,
large-eyed, benevolent old man who seemed able to read the
hidden things of life at will. It disturbed her that he should
speak at this moment of the happiness lying in the fulfillment
of youthful friendship by the way of mature love; and, proud
and self-restrained as her bearing was, Mr. Gryce saw through
the calmer surface into the disturbance beneath.

“Don’t you think so?” he asked for the second time.

“How should I know?” Leam answered, raising her eyes, but
not looking into her companion’s face—looking an inch or
two above his head. “I have seen too little to say which is
best.”

“True, my child, I had forgotten that,” he said kindly.
“Will you take my word for it, then, in lieu of your own
experience?”

“That depends,” said Leam. “What is good for one is not good
for all.”

“But safety is always good,” returned Mr. Gryce, meaning to
fall back on the safety of love and happiness if he had made a
bad shot by his aim at safety from the detection of crime.

A scared look passed over Leam’s face. It was a look that
meant a cry. She pressed her hands together and involuntarily
drew back a step, cowering. She felt as if some strong hand had
struck her a heavy blow, and that it had made her reel. “You
are cruel to say that. Why should I marry—?” She began in
a defiant tone, and then she stopped. Was she not betraying
herself for the very fear of discovery?

“Alick Corfield, for instance?” put in Mr. Gryce, at a
venture. “He may serve for an illustration as well as any one
else,” he added with a soothing kind of indifference, troubled
by the intense terror that came for one moment into her face.
How soon he had startled her from her poor little hiding-place!
How easy the assumption of extraordinary, powers based on the
clever use of ordinary faculties! Your true magician is, after
all, only your quiet and accurate observer. “You are not vexed
that I speak of him when I want a name?” he asked, after a
pause to give Leam time to regain her self-possession, to
readjust the screen, to fasten once more the mask.

“Why should I be vexed?” she said in a low voice.

“He is not disagreeable to you?”

“No, he is my friend,” she answered.

“And a good fellow,” said Mr. Gryce, lisping over a maple
twig. “Don’t you think so?”

“He is good,” responded Leam like a dry and lifeless
echo.

“An admirable son.”

“Yes.”

“A devoted friend—a friend to be trusted to the death;
a man without his price, incorruptible, with whom a secret,
say, would be as safe as if buried in the grave. He would not
give it even to the wind, and no reed on his land would whisper
‘Midas has ass’s ears.'”

“He is good,” she repeated with a shiver. Yet the sun was
shining and the spring-tide air was sweet and warm.

“And he would make the most faithful and indulgent
husband.”

There was no answer.

“Do you not agree with me?”

“How should I know?” she answered; and she said no more,
though she still shivered.

“Be sure of it—take my word for it,” he said again,
earnestly.

“It is nothing to me. And I hate your word
indulgent!” cried Leam with a flash of her mother’s
fierceness.

Mr. Gryce, still watching her, smiled softly to himself. His
love of knowledge, as he euphemistically termed his curiosity,
was roused to the utmost, and he was like a hunter who has
struck an obscure trail. He wished to follow this thing to the
end, and to know in what relations she and her old friend stood
together—if Alick knew what he, Mr.
[pg 467] Gryce, knew now, and had
offered to marry her notwithstanding; and whether, if he had
offered, Leam had refused or accepted. Observation and
induction were hurrying him very near the point. Her
changing color, her averted eyes, her effort to maintain the
pride and coldness which were as a rule maintained without
effort, the spasm of terror that had crossed her face when
he had spoken of Alick’s fidelity, all confirmed him in his
belief that he was on the right track, and that the lines in
her hand coincided with the facts of her tragic life. Tragic
indeed—one of those lives fated from the beginning,
doomed to sorrow and to crime like the Orestes, the Oedipus,
of old.

But if he was curious, he was compassionate: if he tortured
her now, it was that he might care for her hereafter. That
hereafter would come—he knew that—and then he would
make himself her salvation.

He thought all this as he still watched her, Leam standing
there like a creature fascinated, longing to break the spell
and escape, and unable.

“Tell me,” then said Mr. Gryce in a soft and crooning kind
of voice, coming nearer to her, “what do you think of
gratitude?”

“Gratitude is good,” said Leam slowly, in the manner of one
whose answer is a completed thesis.

“But how far?”

“I do not know what you mean,” she answered with a weary
sigh.

Again he smiled: it was a soft, sleepy, soothing kind of
smile, that was almost an opiate.

“You are not good at metaphysics?” he said, coming still
nearer and passing his short thick hands over her head
carressingly.

“I am not good at anything,” she answered dreamily.

“Yes, at many things—to answer me for one—but
bad at dialectics.”

“I do not understand your hard words,” said Leam, her sense
of injury at being addressed in an unknown tongue rousing her
from the torpor creeping over her.

How much she wished that he would release her! She had no
power to leave him of her own free-will. A certain compelling
something in Mr. Gryce always forced her to do just as he
wished—to answer his questions, stay when he stopped,
follow when he beckoned. She resented in feeling, but she
obeyed in fact; and he valued her obedience more than he
regretted her resentment.

“How far would you go to prove your gratitude?” he
continued.

“I do not know,” said Leam, the weary sigh repeated.

“Would you marry for gratitude where you did not love?”

“No,” she answered in a low voice.

“Would you marry for fear, then, if not for gratitude or
love? If you were in the power of a man, would you marry that
man to save yourself from all chance of betrayal? I have known
women who would. Are you one of them?”

Again he passed his hands over her head and across and down
her face. His voice sounded sweet and soft as honey: it was
like a cradle-song to a tired child. Leam’s eyes drooped
heavily. A mist seemed stealing up before her through which
everything was transformed—by which the sunshine became
as a golden web wherein she was entangled, and the shadows as
lines of the net that held her—where the songs of the
birds melted into distant harmonies echoing the sleepy
sweetness of that soft compelling voice, and where the earth
was no longer solid, but a billowy cloud whereon she floated
rather than stood. A strange sense of isolation possessed her.
It was as if she were alone in the universe, with some
all-powerful spirit who was questioning her of the secret
things of life, and whose questions she must answer. Mr. Gryce
was not the tenant of Lionnet, as the world knew him, but a
mild yet awful god, in whose presence she stood revealed, and
who was reading her soul, like her past, through and through.
She was before him there as a criminal before a
judge—discovered, powerless—and all attempt at
concealment was at an end.

“Tell me what you know,” said the soft and honeyed voice,
ever sweeter, [pg 468] ever more soothing, more
deadening to her senses.

Leam’s whole form drooped, yielded, submitted. In another
moment she would have made full confession, when suddenly the
harsh cry of a frightened bird near at hand broke up the sleepy
harmonies and scattered the compelling charm. Leam started,
flung back her head, opened her eyes wide and fixed them full
on her inquisitor. Then she stiffened herself as if for a
personal resistance, passed her hands over her face as if she
were brushing it from cobwebs, and said in a natural voice,
offended, haughty, cold, “I did not hear what you said. I was
nearly asleep.”

“Wake, then,” said Mr. Gryce, making a movement as if he too
were brushing away cobwebs from her face. After a pause he took
both her hands in his. “Child,” he said, speaking naturally,
without a lisp and with a broader provincial accent than
usual—speaking, too, with ill-concealed
emotion—”some day you will need a friend. When that day
dawns come to me. Promise me this. I know your life and what
lies in the past. Do not start—no, nor cover your face,
my child. I am safe, and so are you. You must feel this, that I
may be of use to you when you want me; for you will want me
some day, and I shall be the only one who can save you.”

“What do you know?” asked Leam, making one supreme effort
over herself and confronting him.

“Everything,” said Mr. Gryce solemnly.

“Then I am lost,” she answered in a low voice.

“You are saved,” he said with tenderness. “Do not be afraid
of me: rather thank God that He has given you into my care. You
have two friends now instead of one, and the latest the most
powerful. Good-bye, my poor misguided and bewildered child. A
greater than you or I once said, ‘Her sins, which are many, are
forgiven her, because she loved much.’ Cannot you take that to
yourself? If not now, nor yet when remorse is your chief
thought, you will later. Till then, trust and hope.”

He turned to leave her, tears in his eyes.

“Stay!” cried Leam, but he only shook his head and waved his
hand.

“Not now,” he said, smiling as he broke through the wood,
leaving her with the impression that a chasm had suddenly
opened at her feet, into which sooner or later she must
fall.

She stood a few moments where the old philosopher and born
detective had left her, then went up the path to the
hiding-place where she had so often before found the healing to
be had from Nature and solitude—to the old dark-spreading
yew, which somehow seemed to be more her friend than any human
being could be or was—more than even Alick in his
devotedness or Mr. Gryce in his protection. And there, sitting
on the lowest branch, and sitting so still that the birds came
close to her and were not afraid, she dreamed herself back to
the desolate days of her innocent youth—those days which
were before she had committed a crime or gained friend or
lover.

She had been miserable enough then—one alone in the
world and one against the world. But how gladly she would have
exchanged her present state for the worst of her days then! How
she wished that she had died with mamma, or, living, had not
taken it as her duty to avenge those wrongs which the saints
allowed! Oh, what a tangled dream it all was! she so hideously
guilty in fact, and yet that thought of hers, if unreal and
insane, that had not been a sin.

But she must wake to the reality of the present, not sit
here dreaming over the past and its mystery of loving crime.
She must go on as if life were a mere holiday-time of peace
with her, where no avenging Furies followed her, lurking in the
shadows, no sorrows threatened her, looking out with scared,
scarred faces from the distance. She must carry her burden to
the end, remembering that it was one of her own making, and for
self-respect must be borne with that courage of despair which
lets no one see what is suffered. Of what good to dream, to
lament? She must live with dignity
[pg 469] while she chose to live.
When her grief had grown too great for her strength, then
she could take counsel with herself whether the fire of life
was worth the trouble of keeping alight, or might not rather
be put out without more ado.

CHAPTER XXX.

MAYA—DELUSION.

Leam was not dedicated to peace to-day. As she turned out of
the road she came upon the rectory pony-carriage—Adelaide
driving Josephine and little Fina—just as it had halted
in the highway for Josephine to speak to her brother.

Adelaide was looking very pretty. Her delicate pink cheeks
were rather more flushed and her blue eyes darker and fuller of
expression than usual. Change of air had done her good, and
Edgar’s evident admiration was even a better stimulant. She and
her mother had ended their absence from North Aston by a visit
to the lord lieutenant of the county, and she was not sorry to
be able to speak familiarly of certain great personages met
there as her co-guests—the prime minister for one and an
archbishop for another. And as Edgar was, she knew, influenced
by the philosophy of fitness more than most men, she thought
the prime minister and the archbishop good cards to play at
this moment.

Edgar was listening to her, pleased, smiling, thinking how
pretty she looked, and taking her social well-being and
roll-call of grand friendships as gems that enriched him
too—flowers in his path as well as roses in her hand, and
as a sunny sky overarching both alike. She really was a very
charming girl—just the wife for an English country
gentleman—just the mistress for a place like the Hill,
the heart of the man owning the Hill not counting.

But when Leam turned from the wood-path into the road, Edgar
felt like a man who has allowed himself to be made enthusiastic
over but an inferior bit of art, knowing better. Her beautiful
face, with its glorious eyes so full of latent passion,
dreaming thought, capacity for sorrow—all that most
excites yet most softens the heart of a man; her exquisite
figure, so fine in its lines, so graceful yet not weak, so
tender yet not sensual; as she stood there in the sunlight the
gleam of dusky gold showing on the edges of her dark hair; her
very attitude and action as she held a basket full of
wild-flowers which with unconscious hypocrisy she had picked to
give herself the color of an excuse for her long hiding in the
yew tree,—all dwarfed, eclipsed Adelaide into a mere
milk-and-roses beauty of a type to be seen by hundreds in a
day; while Leam—who was like this peerless Leam? Neither
Spain nor England could show such a one as she. Ah, where was
the philosophy of fitness now, when this exquisite creation,
more splendid than fit, came to the front?

Edgar went forward to meet her, that look of love surprised
out of concealment which told so much on his face. Adelaide saw
it, and Josephine saw it, and the eyes of the latter grew
moist, but the lips of the other only closed more tightly. She
accepted the challenge, and she meant to conquer in the
fight.

Wearied by her emotions, saddened both by the love that had
been confessed and the friendship that had been offered, this
meeting with Edgar Harrowby seemed to Leam like home and rest
to one very tired and long lost. The bright spring day, which
until now had been as gray as winter, suddenly broke upon her
with a sense of warmth and beauty, and her sad face reflected
in its tender, evanescent smile the delight of which she had
become thus suddenly conscious. She laid her hand in his
frankly: he had never seen her so frankly glad to meet him; and
a look, a gesture, from Leam—grave, proud, reticent
Leam—meant as much as cries of joy and caresses from
others.

“Good-morning, Miss Dundas: where have you been?” said
Edgar, his accent of familiar affection, which meant “Beloved
Leam,” in nowise overlaid by the formality of the spoken “Miss
Dundas.”

“Into the wood,” said Leam, her hand, as if for proof
thereof, stirring the flowers.

“It is a new phase to see you given to
[pg 470] rural delights and
wild-flowers, Leam,” said Adelaide with a little laugh.

“But how pleasant that our dear Leam should have found such
a nice amusement!” said Josephine.

“As picking primroses and bluebells, Joseph?” And Adelaide
laughed again.

Somehow, her laugh, which was not unmusical, was never
pleasant. It did not seem to come from the heart, and was the
farthest in the world removed from mirth.

Leam looked at her coldly. “I like flowers,” she said,
carrying her head high.

“So do I,” said Edgar with the intention of taking her part.
“What are these things?” holding up a few cuckoo-flowers that
were half hidden like delicate shadows among the primroses.

“You certainly show your liking by your knowledge. I thought
every schoolboy knew the cuckoo-flower!” cried Adelaide, trying
to seem natural and not bitter in her banter, and not
succeeding.

“I can learn. Never too late to mend, you know. And Miss
Dundas shall teach me,” said Edgar.

“I do not know enough: I cannot teach you,” Leam answered,
taking him literally.

“My dear Leam, how frightfully literal you are!” said
Adelaide. “Do you think it looks pretty? Do you really believe
that Major Harrowby was in earnest about your giving him
botanical lessons?”

“I believe people I respect,” returned Leam gravely.

“Thanks,” said Edgar warmly, his face flushing.

Adelaide’s face flushed too. “Are you going through life
taking as gospel all the unmeaning badinage which gentlemen
permit themselves to talk to ladies?” she asked from the
heights of her superior wisdom. “Remember, Leam, at your age
girls cannot be too discreet.”

“I do not understand you,” said Leam, fixing her eyes on the
fair face that strove so hard to conceal the self within from
the world without, and to make impersonal and aphoristic what
was in reality passionate disturbance.

“A girl who has been four years at a London boarding-school
not to understand such a self-evident little speech as that!”
cried Adelaide, with well-acted surprise. “How can you be
insincere? I must say I have no faith, myself, in Bayswater
ingénues: have you, Edgar?” with the most
graceful little movement of her head, her favorite action, and
one that generally made its mark.

“I do not understand you,” said Leam again. “I only know
that you are rude: you always are.”

She spoke in her most imperturbable manner and with her
quietest face. Nothing roused in her so much the old Leam of
pride and disdain as these encounters with Adelaide Birkett.
The two were like the hereditary foes of old-time romance,
consecrated to hate from their birth upward.

“Come, come, fair lady, you are rather hard on our young
friend,” said Edgar with a strange expression in his
eyes—angry, intense, and yet uncertain. He wanted to
protect Leam, yet he did not want to offend Adelaide; and
though he was angry with this last, he did not wish her to see
that he was.

“Dear Leam! I am sure she is very sweet and nice,” breathed
Josephine; but little Fina, playing with Josephine’s
chatelaine, said in her childish treble, “No, no, she is not
nice: she is cross, and never laughs, and she has big eyes.
They frighten me at night, and then I scream. Your are far
nicer, Missy Joseph.”

Adelaide laughed outright; Josephine was embarrassed between
the weak good-nature that could not resist even a child’s
caressing words and her constitutional pain at giving pain;
Edgar tried to smile at the little one’s pertness as a thing
below the value of serious notice, while feeling all that a man
does feel when the woman whom he loves is in trouble and he
cannot defend her; but Leam herself said to the child, gravely
and without bitterness, “I am not cross, Fina, and laughing is
not everything.”

“Right, Miss Dundas!” said Edgar warmly. “If the little puss
were older she would understand you better. You
[pg 471] unconscionable little
sinner! what do you mean? hey?” good-humoredly taking Fina
by the shoulders.

“Oh, pray don’t try and make the child a hypocrite,” said
Adelaide. “You, of all people in the world, Edgar, objecting to
her naïve truth!—you, who so hate and despise
deception!”

While she had spoken Fina had crawled over Josephine’s lap
to the side where Edgar was standing. She put up her fresh
little face to be kissed. “I don’t like Learn, and I do like
you,” she said, stroking his beard.

And Edgar, being a man, was therefore open to female
flattery, whether it was the frank flattery of an infant Venus
hugging a waxen Cupid or the more subtle overtures of a
withered Ninon taking God for her latest lover—with
interludes.

“But you should like Leam too,” he said, fondling her, “I
want you to love me, but you should love her as well.”

“Oh, any one can get the love of children who is kind to
them,” said Adelaide. “You know you are a very kind man,
Edgar,” in a quiet, matter-of-fact way. “All animals and
children love you. It is a gift you have, but it is only
because you are kind.”

The context stood without any need of an interpreter to make
it evident.

“But I am sure that Leam is kind to Fina,” blundered
Josephine.

“And the child dislikes her so much?” was Adelaide’s reply,
made in the form of an interrogation and with arched
eyebrows.

“Fina is like the discontented little squirrel who was never
happy,” said Josephine, patting the plump little hand that
still meandered through the depths of Edgar’s beard.

“I am happy with you, Missy Joseph,” pouted Fina; “and you,”
to Edgar, whom she again lifted up her face to kiss, kisses and
sweeties being her twin circumstances of Paradise.

“And with sister Leam: say ‘With Leam,’ else I will not kiss
you,” said Edgar, holding her off.

She struggled, half laughing, half minded to cry. “I want to
kiss you,” she cried.

“Say ‘With Leam,’ and then I will,” said Edgar.

The child’s face flushed a deeper crimson, her struggles
became more earnest, more vicious, and her laugh lost itself in
the puckered preface of tears.

“Don’t make her cry because she will not tell a falsehood,”
remonstrated Adelaide quietly.

“She does not like me. Saying that she does would not be
true, and would not make her,” added Leam just as quietly and
with a kind of hopeless acceptance of undeserved obloquy.

On which Edgar, not wishing to prolong a scene that began to
be undignified, released the child, who scrambled back to
Josephine’s lap and hid her flushed and disordered little face
on the comfortable bosom made by Nature for the special service
of discomposed childhood.

“She is right to like you best,” said Leam, associating
Edgar as the brother with Josephine’s generous substitution of
maternity.

“I don’t think so. You are the one she should love—who
deserves her love,” he answered emphatically.

“Come, Joseph,” cried Adelaide. “If these two are going to
bandy compliments, you and I are not wanted.”

“Don’t go, Adelaide: I have worlds yet to say to you,” said
Edgar.

“Thanks! another time. I do not like to see things of which
I disapprove,” was her answer, touching her ponies gently and
moving away slowly.

When she had drawn off out of earshot she beckoned Edgar
with her whip. It was impolitic, but she was too deeply moved
to make accurate calculations. “Dear Edgar, do not be offended
with me,” she said in her noblest, most sisterly manner. “Of
course I do not wish to interfere, and it is no business of
mine, but is it right to fool that unhappy girl as you are
doing? I put it to you, as one woman anxious for the happiness
and reputation of another—as an old friend who values you
too much to see you make the mistake you are making now without
a word of warning. It can be no business of mine, outside the
purest regard and [pg 472] consideration for you as
well as for her. I do not like her, but I do not want to see
her in a false position and with a damaged character through
you.”

Had they been alone, Edgar would probably have accepted this
remonstrance amicably enough. He might even have gone a long
way in proving it needless. But in the presence of Josephine
his pride took the alarm, and the weapon intended for Leam cut
Adelaide’s fingers instead.

He listened patiently till she ended, then he drew himself
up. “Thanks!” he drawled affectedly. “You are very kind both to
Miss Dundas and myself. All the world knows that the most
vigilant overseer a pretty girl can have is a pretty woman.
When the reputation of Miss Dundas is endangered by me, it will
then be time for her father to interfere. Meanwhile, thanks! I
like her quite well enough to take care of her.”

“Now, Adelaide, you have vexed him,” said Josephine in
dismay as Edgar strode back to where Leam remained waiting for
him.

“I have done my duty,” said Adelaide, drawing her lips into
a thin line and lowering her eyebrows; and her friend knew her
moods and respected them.

On this point of warning Edgar against an entanglement with
Leam she did really think that she had done her duty. She knew
that she wished to marry him herself—in fact, meant to
marry him—and that she would probably have been his wife
before now had it not been for this girl and her untimely
witcheries; but though, naturally enough, she was not disposed
to love Leam any the more because she had come between her and
her intended husband, she thought that she would have borne the
disappointment with becoming magnanimity if she had been of the
right kind for Edgar’s wife. With Adelaide, as with so many
among us, conventional harmony was a religion in itself, and he
who despised its ritual was a blasphemer. And surely that
harmony was not be found in the marriage of an English
gentleman of good degree with the daughter of a dreadful
low-class Spanish woman—a girl who at fifteen years of
age had prayed to the saints, used her knife as a whanger, and
maintained that the sun went round the earth because mamma said
so, and mamma knew! No, if Edgar married any one but herself,
let him at least marry some one as well fitted for him as
herself, not one like Leam Dundas.

For the sake of the neighborhood at large the mistress of
the Hill ought to be a certain kind of person—they all
knew of what kind—and a queer, unconformable creature
like Leam set up there as the Mrs. Harrowby of the period would
throw all things into confusion. Whatever happened, that must
be prevented if possible, for Edgar’s own sake and for the sake
of the society of the place.

All of which thoughts strengthened Adelaide in her
conviction that she had done what she ought to have done in
warning Edgar against Leam, and that she was bound to be
faithful in her course so long as he was persistent in his.

Meanwhile, Edgar returned to Leam, who had remained standing
in the middle of the road waiting for him. Nothing belonged
less to Leam than forwardness or flattery to men; and it was
just one of those odd coincidences which sometimes happen that
as Edgar had not wished her good-bye, she felt herself bound to
wait his return. But it had the look of either a nearer
intimacy than existed between them, or of Leam’s laying herself
out to win the master of the Hill as she would not have laid
herself out to win the king of Spain. In either case it added
fuel to the fire, and confirmed Adelaide more and more in the
course she had taken. “Look there!” she said to Josephine,
pointing with her whip across the field, the winding way having
brought them in a straight line with the pair left on the
road.

“Very bold, I must say,” said Josephine; “but Leam is such a
child!—she does not understand things as we do,” she
added by way of apology and defence.

“Think not?” was Adelaide’s reply; and then she whipped her
ponies and said no
more.

[pg 473]

“Why does Miss Birkett hate me?” asked Leam when Edgar came
back.

“Because—Shall I tell you?” he answered with a look
which she could not read.

“Yes, tell me.”

“Because you are more beautiful than she is, and she is
jealous of you. She is very good in her own way, but she does
not like rivals near her throne; and you are her rival without
knowing it.”

Leam had looked straight at Edgar when he began to speak,
but now she dropped her eyes. For the first time in her life
she did not disclaim his praise, nor feel it a thing that she
ought to resent. On the contrary, it made her heart beat with a
sudden throb that almost frightened her with its violence, and
that seemed to break down her old self in its proud reticence
and cold control, leaving her soft, subdued, timid,
humble—childlike, and yet not a child. Her face was pale;
her eyelids seemed weighted over her eyes, so that she could
not raise them; her breath came with so much difficulty that
she was forced to unclose her lips for air; she trembled as if
with a sudden chill, and yet her veins seemed running with
fire; and she felt as if the earth moved under her feet. What
malady was this that had overtaken her so suddenly? What did it
all mean? It was something like that strange sensation which
she had had a few hours back in the wood, when Mr. Gryce had
seemed to her like some compelling spirit questioning her of
her life, while she was his victim, forced to reveal all. And
yet it was the same, with a difference. That had been torture
covered down by an anodyne: this was in its essence ecstasy, if
on the outside pain.

“Look at me, Leam,” half whispered Edgar, bending over
her.

She raised her eyes with shame and difficulty—very
slowly, for their lids were so strangely heavy; very shyly, for
there was something in them, she herself did not know what,
which she did not wish him to see. Nevertheless, she raised
them because he bade her. How sweet and strange it was to obey
him against her own desire! Did he know that she looked at him
because he told her to do so? and that she would have rather
kept her eyes to the ground? Yes, she raised them and met
his.

Veiled, humid, yearning, those eyes of hers told
all—all that she herself did not know, all that Edgar had
now hoped, now feared, as passion or prudence had swayed him,
as love or fitness had seemed the best circumstance of
life.

“Leam!” he said in an altered voice: she scarcely recognized
it as his. He took her hand in his, when suddenly there came
two voices on the air, and Mr. Gryce and Sebastian Dundas,
disputing hotly on the limits of the Unknowable, turned the
corner and came upon them.

Then the moment and its meaning passed, the enchanted vision
faded, and all that remained of that brief foretaste of
Paradise before the serpent had entered or the forbidden fruit
been tasted was the bald, prosaic fact of Major Harrowby
bidding Miss Dundas good-day, too much pressed for time to stop
and talk on the Unknowable.

“Disappointed, baulked, ill-used!” were Edgar’s first angry
thoughts as he strode along the road: his second, those that
were deepest and truest to his real self, came with a heavy
sigh. “Saved just in time from making a fool of myself,” he
said below his breath, his eyes turned in the direction of the
Hill. “It must be a warning for the future. I must be more on
my guard, unless indeed I make up my mind to tempt fortune and
take the plunge—for happiness such as few men have, or
for the ruin of everything.”

Meanwhile, pending this determination, Edgar kept himself
out of Leam’s way, and days passed before they met again. And
when they did next meet it was in the churchyard, in the
presence of the assembled congregation, with Alick Corfield as
the centre of congratulation on his first resumption of duty,
and Leam and Edgar separated by the crowd and stiffened by
conventionality into coldness.

Maya—delusion! That strange trouble, sweet and
thrilling, which disturbed
[pg 474] Leam’s whole being; Edgar’s
unfathomable eyes, which seemed almost to burn as she looked
at them; his altered voice, scarcely recognizable it was so
changed—all a mere phantasy born of a dream—all,
what is so much in this life of ours, a mockery, a mistake,
a vague hope without roots, a shadowy heaven that had no
place in fact, the cold residuum of enthralling and
bewitching myths—all Maya, delusion!

CHAPTER XXXI.

BY THE BROAD.

After that scene in the pony-carriage Leam began to take it
to heart that little Fina did not love her. Hitherto,
solicitous only to do her duty unrelated to sentiment, she had
not cared to win the child’s rootless and unmeaning affection:
now she longed to hear her say to Major Harrowby, “I love
Leam.” She did not care about her saying it to any one else,
but she thought it would be pleasant to see Edgar smile on her
as he had smiled at Josephine when Fina had crawled on to her
lap that day of Maya, and said, “You are far nicer, Missy
Joseph.”

She would like to have Edgar’s good opinion. Indeed, that
was only proper gratitude to a friend, not unwomanly submission
to the great young man of the place. He was invariably kind to
her, and he had done much to make her cheerless life less
dreary. He had lent her books to read, and had shown her pretty
places in the district which she would never have seen but for
him: he talked to her as if he liked talking to her, and he had
defended her when Adelaide was rude. It was right, then, that
she should wish to please him and show him that she deserved
his respect.

Hence she put out her strength to win Fina’s love that she
might hear her say, when next Major Harrowby asked her, “Yes, I
love Leam.”

But who ever gained by conscious endeavor the love that was
not given by the free sympathies of Nature? Hearts have been
broken and lives ruined before now for the want of a spell
strong enough to turn the natural course of feeling; and Leam’s
success with Fina was no exception to the common experience.
The more she sought to please her the less she succeeded; and,
save that the child grew disobedient in proportion to the new
indulgences granted, no change was effected.

How should there be a change? Leam could not romp, was not
fond of kissing, knew no childish games, could not enter into
childish nonsense, was entirely incapable of making believe,
never seemed to be thinking of what she was about, and had big
serious eyes that oppressed the little one with a sense of awe
not conducive to love, and of which she dreamed with terrifying
adjuncts when she had had too much cake too late at night. What
there was of sterling in Leam had no charm for, because no
point of contact with, Fina. Thus, all her efforts went astray,
and the child loved her no better for being coaxed by methods
that did not amuse her. At the end of all she still said with
her pretty pout that Leam was cross—she would not talk to
her about mamma.

One day Learn took Fina for a walk to the Broad. It was the
most unselfish thing she could do, for her solitary rambles,
her unaccompanied rides, were her greatest pleasures; save,
indeed, when the solitude of these last was interrupted by
Major Harrowby. This, however, had not been nearly so often
since the return of the families as before; for Adelaide’s
pony-carriage was wellnigh ubiquitous, and Edgar did not care
that the rector’s sarcastic daughter should see him escorting
Leam in lonely places three or four times a week. Thus, the
girl had fallen back into her old habits of solitude, and to
take the child with her was a sacrifice of which she herself
only knew the extent.

But, if blindly and with uncertain feet, stumbling often and
straying wide, Leam did desire to find the narrow way and walk
in it—to know the better thing and do it. At the present
moment she knew nothing better than to give nurse a holiday and
burden herself with an uncongenial
[pg 475] little girl as her charge
and companion when she would rather have been alone. So this
was how it came about that on this special day the two set
out for the Broad, where Fina had a fancy to go.

The walk was pleasant enough, Leam was not called on to rack
her brains—those non-inventive brains of hers, which
could not imagine things that never happened—for stories
wherewith to while away the time, as Fina ran alone, happy in
picking the spring flowers growing thick on the banks and
hedgerows. Thus the one was amused and the other was left to
herself undisturbed; which was an arrangement that kept Leam’s
good intentions intact, but prevented the penance which they
included from becoming too burdensome. Indeed, her penance was
so light that she thought it not so great a hardship, after
all, to make little Fina her companion in her rambles if she
would but run on alone and content herself with picking flowers
that neither scratched nor stung, and where therefore neither
the surgery of needles nor the dressing of dock-leaves was
required, nor yet the supplementary soothing of kisses and
caresses for her tearful, sobbing, angry pain.

The Broad, always one of the prettiest points in the
landscape, was to-day in one of its most interesting phases.
The sloping banks were golden with globe-flowers and marsh
“mary-buds,” and round the margin, was a broad belt of silver
where the starry white ranunculus grew. All sorts of the
beautiful aquatic plants of spring were flowering—some
near the edges, apparently just within reach, tempting and
perilous, and some farther off and manifestly hopeless: the
leaves of the water-lilies, which later would be set like
bosses of silver and gold on the shimmering blue, had risen to
the surface in broad, green, shining platters, and the
low-lying branches of the trees at the edge dipped in the water
and swayed with the running stream.

It was the loveliest bit of death and danger to be found for
miles round—so lovely that it might well have tempted the
sorrowful to take their rest for ever in a grave so sweet, so
eloquent of eternal peace. Even Leam, with all the unspoken
yearnings, the formless hopes, of youth stirring in her heart,
thought how pleasant it would be to go to sleep among the
flowers and wake up only when she had found mamma in heaven;
while Fina, dazzled by the rank luxuriance before her, ran
forward to the water’s edge with a shrill cry of delight.

Leam called to her to stand back, to come away from the
water and the bank, which, shelving abruptly, was a dangerous
place for a child. The footing was insecure and the soil
treacherous—by no means a proper playground for the rash,
uncertain feet of six. Twice or thrice Leam called, but Fina
would not hear, and began gathering the flowers with the bold
haste of a child disobeying orders and resolved to make the
most of her opportunity before the time came of her inevitable
capture.

Thus Leam, walking fast, came up to her and took her by the
arm in high displeasure. “Fina, did you not hear me? You must
not stand here,” she said,

“Don’t, Leam, you hurt me—you are cross: leave me
alone,” screamed Fina, twisting her little body to free herself
from her step-sister’s hand.

“Be quiet. You will fall into the river and be drowned if
you go on like this,” said Leam, tightening her hold; and those
small nervous hands of hers had an iron grasp when she chose to
put out her strength.

“Leave me alone. You hurt me—oh, you hurt me so much!”
screamed Fina, still struggling.

“Come with me, then. Do as you are bid and come away,”
returned Leam, slightly relaxing her grasp. Though she was
angry with the child, she did not want to hurt her.

“I shan’t. Leave me alone. You are a cross, ugly thing, and
I hate you,” was Fina’s sobbing reply.

With a sudden wrench she tore herself from the girl’s hands,
slipped, staggered, shrieked, and the next moment was in the
water, floating downward with the current and struggling vainly
to get [pg 476] out; while Leam, scarcely
understanding what she saw, stood paralyzed and motionless
on the bank.

Fortunately, at this instant Josephine drove up. She was
alone, driving her gray ponies in the basket phaeton, and saw
the child struggling in the stream, with Learn standing silent,
helpless, struck to stone as it seemed, watching her without
making an effort to save her. “Leam! Fina! save her! save her!”
cried Josephine, who herself had enough to do to hold her
ponies, in their turn startled by her own sudden cries. “Leam,
save her!” she repeated; and then breaking down into helpless
dismay she began to sob and scream with short, sharp hysterical
shrieks as her contribution to the misery of the moment. Poor
Josephine! it was all that she could do, frightened as she was
at her own prancing ponies, distracted at the sight of Fina’s
danger, horrified at Leam’s apparent apathy.

As things turned out, it was the best that she could have
done, for her voice roused Leam’s faculties into active life
again, and broke the spell of torpor into which horror had
thrown them. “Holy St. Jago, help me!” she said, instinctively
turning back to first traditions and making the sign of the
cross, which she did not often make now, and only when
surprised out of conscious into automatic action.

Running down and along the bank, with one hand she seized
the branch of an oak that swept into the water, then plunged in
up to her shoulders to catch the child drifting down among the
white ranunculus. Fortunately, Fina was still near enough to
the shore to be caught as she drifted by without absolute
danger of drowning to Leam, who waded back to land, drawing the
child with her, not much the worse for her dangerous moment
save for the fright which she had suffered and the cold of her
dripping clothes; in both of which conditions Leam was her
companion.

So soon as she was safe on shore the child began to scream
and cry piteously, as was perhaps but natural, and when she saw
Josephine she tore herself away from Leam and ran up to her as
if for protection. “Take me home to nurse,” she sobbed,
climbing into the little low phaeton and clinging to Josephine,
who was also weeping and trembling hysterically. “Leam pushed
me in: take me away from her.”

“You say what is not true, Fina,” said Leam gravely,
trembling as much as Josephine, though her eyes were dry and
she did not sob. “You fell in because you would not let me hold
you.”

“You pushed me in, and I hate you,” reiterated Fina,
cowering close to the bosom of her warm, soft friend.

“Do you believe this?” asked Leam, turning to Josephine and
speaking with all her old pride of voice and bearing.
Nevertheless, she was as white as those flowers on the water.
It was madame’s child who accused her of attempting to kill
her, and it was the child whom she had so earnestly desired to
win who now said, “I hate her,” to the sister of the man to
whom she longed to hear her say, “I love Leam.”

“Believe that you pushed her in—that you wanted to
drown dear little Fina? No!” cried Josephine in broken
sentences through her tears. “She mistakes.—You must not
say such dreadful things, my darling,” to Fina. “Dear sister
Leam would not hurt a hair of your head, I am sure.”

“She did: she pushed me in on purpose,” persisted the
shivering child, beginning to cry afresh.

On which, a little common sense dawning on Josephine’s
distracted mind, she did her best to stop her own hysterical
sympathy, remembering that to go home, change their wet
clothes, have something warm to drink and be put to bed would
be more to the purpose for both at this moment than to stand
there crying, shivering and recriminating, with herself as the
weak and loving judge, inclining to both equally, to settle the
vexed question of accident or malice.

“Good gracious! why are we waiting here?” she cried, drying
her eyes quickly and ceasing to sob. “You will both get your
deaths from cold if you stand here in your wet
clothes.—Come in, dear Leam, and I will drive you home at
once.—Fina, [pg 477] my darling, leave off
crying, that’s my little angel. I will take you to papa, and
you will be all right directly. I cannot bear to see you cry
so much, dear Fina: don’t, my pet.”

Which only made the little one weep I and sob the more,
children, like women, liking nothing better than to be
commiserated because of distress which they could; control
without difficulty if they would.

Seating the child at the bottom of the carriage and covering
her with the rug, Josephine flicked her ponies, which were glad
enough to be off and doing something to which they were
accustomed, and soon brought her dripping charge to Ford House,
where they found Mr. Dundas in the porch drawing on his gloves,
his horse standing at the door.

“Good heavens! what is all this about?” he cried, rushing
forward to receive the disconsolate cargo, unloading one by one
the whole group dank and dismal—Josephine’s scared face
swollen with tears, white and red in the wrong places; Leam’s
set like a mask, blanched, rigid, tragic; Fina’s now flushed
and angry, now pale and frightened, with a child’s
swift-varying emotions; and the garments of the last two
clinging like cerements and dripping small pools on the
gravel.

“Learn pushed me into the river,” said Fina, beginning to
cry afresh, and holding on by Josephine, who now kissed and
coaxed her, and said, “Fina, my darling, don’t say such a
wicked thing of poor Leam: it is so naughty, so very naughty,”
and then took to hugging her again, as the mood of the instant
swayed her toward the child or the girl, but always full of
womanly weakness and kindness to each, and only troubled that
she had to make distinctions, as it were, between them.

“What is it you say, Fina?” asked Mr. Dundas
slowly—”Leam pushed you into the river?”

“Yes,” sobbed Fina.

“I did not, papa. And I went in myself to save her,” said
Leam, holding her head very straight and high.

Mr. Dundas looked at her keenly, sternly. “Well, no, Leam,”
he answered, with, as it seemed to her, marked coldness and in
a strange voice: “with all your unpleasant temper I do not like
to suppose you could be guilty of the crime of murder.”

The girl shuddered visibly. Her proud little head drooped,
her fixed and fearless eyes sank shamed to the ground. “I have
always taken care of Fina,” she said in a humbled voice, as if
it was a plea for pardon that she was putting forward.

“You pushed me in, and you did it on purpose,” repeated
Fina; and Mr. Dundas was shocked at himself to find that he
speculated for a moment on the amount of truth there might be
in the child’s statement.

Cold, trembling, distressed, Leam turned away. Would that
sin of hers always thus meet her face to face? Should she never
be free from its shadow? Go where she would, it followed her,
ineffaceable, irreparable—the shame of it never suffered
to die out, its remorse never quenched, the sword always above
her head, to fall she knew not when, but to fall some day: yes,
that she did know.

“But you must go up stairs now,” said Josephine with a
creditable effort after practicality: “we shall have you both
seriously ill unless you get your clothes changed at once.”

Mr. Dundas looked at her kindly. “How wise and good you
are!” he said with almost enthusiasm; and Josephine, her eyes
humid with glad tears, her cheeks flushed with palpitating joy,
sank in soul to him again, as so often before, and offered the
petition of her humble love, which wanted only his royal
signature to make an eternal bond.

“I love little Fina,” she said tremulously. It was as if she
had said, “I love you.”

Then she turned into the house and indulged her maternal
instinct by watching nurse as she undressed the child, put her
in a warm bath, gave her some hot elderberry wine and water,
laid her in her little bed, and with many kisses bade her go to
sleep and forget all about everything till tea-time. And the
keen relish with which she followed all these nursery details
marked her fitness for [pg 478] the post of pro-mother so
distinctly that it made nurse look at her more than once,
and think—also made her say, as a feeler—”Law,
miss! what a pity you’ve not had one of your own!”

Her tenderness of voice and action with the child when
soothing her at the door had also made Sebastian think, and the
child’s fondness for this soft-faced, weak and kindly woman was
setting a mark on the man’s mind, well into middle age as she
was. He began to ask himself whether the blighted tree could
ever put forth leaves again? whether there was balm in Gilead
yet for him, and nepenthe for the past in the happiness of the
future. He thought there might be, and that he had sat long
enough now by the open grave of his dead love. It was time to
close it, and leave what it held to the keeping of a dormant
memory only—a memory that would never die, but that was
serene, passive and at rest.

So he pondered as he rode, and told Josephine’s virtues as
golden beads between his fingers, to which his acceptance would
give their due value, wanting until now—their due value,
merited if not won. And for himself, would she make him happy?
On the whole he thought that she would. She worshiped him,
perhaps, as he had worshiped that other, and it was pleasant to
Sebastian Dundas to be worshiped. He might do worse, if also he
might do better; but at least in taking Josephine he knew what
he was about, and Fina would not be made unhappy. He forgot
Leam. Yes, he would take Josephine for his wife by and by, when
the fitting moment came, and in doing so he would begin life
anew and be once more made free of joy.

He was one of those men resilient if shallow, and resilient
perhaps because shallow, who, persecuted by an evil fortune,
are practically unconquerable—men who, after they have
been prostrated by a blow severe enough to shatter the
strongest heart, come back to their old mental place after a
time smiling, in nowise crushed or mutilated, and as ready to
hope and love and believe and plan as before—men who are
never ennobled by sorrow, never made more serious in their
thoughts, more earnest in their aims, though, as Sebastian had
been, they may be fretful enough while the sore is
open—men who seem to be the unresisting sport of the
unseen powers, buffeted, tortured as we see helpless things on
earth—dogs beaten and horses lashed—for the mere
pleasure of the stronger in inflicting pain, and for no
ultimate good to be attained by the chastening. The souls of
such men are like those weighted tumblers of pith: knocked down
twenty times, on the twenty-first they stand upright, and
nothing short of absolute destruction robs them of their
elasticity. As now when Sebastian planned the base-lines of his
new home with Josephine, and built thereon a pretty little
temple of friendship armed like love.

His heart was broken, he said to himself, but Josephine held
the fragments, and he would make himself tolerably content with
the rivet. Still, it was broken all the same; which simply
meant that of the two he loved madame the better, and would
have chosen her before the other could she have come back; but
that failing, this other would do, even Josephine’s love being
better than no love at all. Besides, she had her own charms, if
of a sober kind. She was a sweet-tempered, soft-hearted
creature, with the aroma of remembrance round her when she was
young and pretty and unattainable: consequently, being
unattainable, held as the moral pot of gold under the rainbow,
which, could it have been caught, would have made all life
glad. The sentimental rest which she and her people had
afforded during the turbulent times of that volcanic Pepita had
also its sweet savor of association that did not make her less
delightful in the present; and when he looked at her now, faded
as she was, he used to try and conjure back her image, such as
it had been when she was a pretty, blushing, affectionate young
girl, who loved him as flowers love the sun, innocently,
unconsciously, and without the power of repulsion.

Also, she had the aroma of remembrance about her from
another side—remembrance when she had been
[pg 479] madame’s chosen friend and
favorite, and the unconscious chaperon, poor dear! who had
made his daily visits to Lionnet possible and respectable.
He pitied her a little now when he thought of how he had
used her as Virginie’s hood and his own mask then; and he
pitied her so much that he took it on his conscience, as a
duty which he owed her and the right, to make her happy at
last. Yes, it was manifestly his duty—unquestionably
the right thing to do. The petition must be signed, the
suppliant raised; Ahasuerus must exalt his Esther, his
loving, faithful, humble Esther; and when inclination models
itself as duty the decision is not far off.

CHAPTER XXXII.

PALMAM QUI NON MERUIT.

All North Aston rang with the story of little Fina’s peril,
Josephine’s admirable devotion and Leam’s shameful
neglect—so shameful as to be almost criminal. It was the
apportionment of judgment usual with the world. The one who had
incurred no kind of risk, and had done only what was pleasant
to her, received unbounded praise, while the one who was of
practical use got for her personal peril and discomfort
universal blame. They said she had allowed the child to run
into danger by her own carelessness, and then had done nothing
to save her: and they wondered beneath their breath if she had
really wished the little one to be drowned. She was an odd
girl, you know, they whispered from each to each—moody,
uncomfortable, and unlike any one else; and though she had
certainly behaved admirably to little Fina, so far as they
could see, yet it was not quite out of the nature of things
that she should wish to get rid of the child, who, after all,
was the child of no one knows whom, and very likely spoilt and
tiresome enough.

But no one said this aloud. They only whispered it to each
other, their comments making no more noise than the gliding of
snakes through the evening grass.

As for Fina, she suffered mainly from a fit of indigestion
consequent on the shower of sweetmeats which fell on her from
all hands as the best consolation for her willful little
ducking known to sane men and women presumably acquainted with
the elements of physiology. She was made restless, too, from
excitement by reason of the multiplicity of toys which every
one thought it incumbent on him and her to bestow; for it was
quite a matter for public rejoicing that she had not been
drowned, and Josephine, as her reputed savior, leapt at a bound
to the highest pinnacle of popular favor.

It made not the slightest difference in the estimation of
these clumsy thinkers that the thing for which Josephine was
praised was a pure fiction, just as the thing for which Leam
was condemned was a pure fiction. Society at North Aston had
the need of hero-worship on it at this moment, and a mythic
heroine did quite as well for the occasion as a real one.

No one was so lavish of her praise as Adelaide. It was
really delightful to note the generosity with which she
eulogized her friend Joseph, and the pleasure that she had in
dwelling on her heroism; Josephine deprecating her praises in
that weak, conscious, and blushing way which seems to accept
while disclaiming.

She invariably said, “No, Adelaide, I do not deserve the
credit of it: it was Leam who saved the child;” but she said it
in that voice and manner which every one takes to mean more
modesty than truth, and which therefore no one believes as it
is given; the upshot being that it simply brings additional
grist to the mill whence popularity is ground out.

Her disclaimers were put down to her good-natured desire to
screen Leam: she had always been good to that extraordinary
young person, they said. But then Josephine Harrowby was good
to every one, and if she had a fault it was the generalized
character of her benevolence, which made her praise of no
value, you see, because she praised every one alike, and took
all that glittered for gold. Hence, her assurances that Leam
had really and truly put herself into (the
[pg 480] appearance of) actual
danger to save Fina from drowning, while she herself had
done nothing more heroic than take the dripping pair of them
home when all was over—she forgot to add, sit in the
carriage and scream—went for nothing, and the popular
delusion for all. She was still the heroine of the day, and
>palmam qui non meruit the motto which the
unconscious satirists bestowed on her.

She did not mean it to be so—quite the
contrary—but wrong comes about from good intentions to
the full as often as from evil ones. Her design was simply to
be truthful, as so much conscientious self-respect, in the
first instance, and to do justice to Leam in the second; but
between her good-natured advocacy and Adelaide’s undisguised
hostility maybe the former did Leam the most harm.

The child’s past danger was quite sufficient reason why
Josephine should come more frequently than usual to Ford House.
It was only natural that she should wish to know how the little
one went on. The cold, sore throat, rheumatic fever, measles
that never came, might yet be always on the way, and the
woman’s fond fears were only to be quieted by the comforting
assurance of her daily observation. Leam did get a cold, and a
severe one, but then Leam was grown up and could take care of
herself. Fina was the natural charge of universal womanhood,
and no one who was a woman at all could fail to be interested
in such a pretty, caressing little creature. And then Sebastian
Dundas loved best the child which was not his own; and that,
too, had its weight with Josephine, who somehow seemed to have
forgotten by now that little Fina was madame’s
child—false and faithless madame—and was not part
and parcel of the man she loved, as also in some strange sense
her own. Madame’s initial dedication had touched her deeply
both at the time and ever after; the likeness of name was again
another tie; and that subtle resemblance to herself which every
one saw and spoke of seemed to round off all into an harmonious
whole, and give her a right which even Mrs. Birkett did not
possess.

It was about a week after the accident when Josephine went
one morning, as usual, to ask after Fina, and be convinced by
personal inspection that the pretty little featherhead, the
child of many loves, was well. She was met in the drawing-room
by Mr. Dundas, who when he greeted her took both her hands in
his in a more effusive manner than he had ever permitted
himself to show since Pepita’s death, save once before he had
decided on madame and when Josephine had one day touched an old
chord tenderly.

Holding her thus, he led her to the sofa with a certain look
of purpose in his face, of loving proprietorship in his
bearing, that made poor fond Josephine’s foolish heart knock
loudly against her ribs.

Was it then coming at last, that reward of constancy for
which she had borne so much suspense, so many delays, such long
dull days and tearful nights? Was the rickety idol of her whole
life’s worship really about to bless her with his smiles?

She cast down her eyes, trembling, blushing. She was
thirty-five years of age, but she was only a great girl still,
and her love had the freshness which belongs to the cherished
sentiment of girlhood ripened into the confessed, patient,
unchanging love of maturity.

“You have been always good to me, Josephine,” began Mr.
Dundas, still holding her hand.

Josephine did not answer, save through the crimson of her
telltale cheeks and the smile akin to tears about her quivering
mouth.

“I think you have always liked me,” he went on to say,
looking down into her face.

Josephine closed her hand over his more warmly and glanced
up swiftly, bashfully. Was there much doubt of it? had there
ever been any doubt of it?

“And I have always liked you,” he added; and then he
paused.

She looked up again, this time a certain tender reproach and
surprise lying behind her evident delight and love.

“Had not my darling Virginie come
[pg 481] between us you would have
been my wife long ago,” said Mr. Dundas, the certainty of
her acceptance at any time of their acquaintance as positive
to him as that the famished hound would accept food, the
closed pimpernel expand in the sunlight. “I was always fond
of you, even in poor Pepita’s time, though of course, as a
man of honor, I could neither encourage nor show my
affection. But Virginie—she took me away from the
whole world, and I lost you, as well as herself, for that
one brief month of happiness.”

His eyes filled up with tears. Though he was wooing his
third bride, he did not conceal his regret for his second.

By an effort of maidenly reserve over feminine sympathy
Josephine refrained from throwing her arms round his neck and
weeping on his shoulder for pity at his past sorrow. She had
none of the vice of jealousy, and she could honestly and
tenderly pity the man whom she loved for his grief at the loss
of the woman whom he had preferred to herself. She did,
however, refrain, and Sebastian could only guess at her
impulse. But he made a tolerably accurate guess, though he
seemed to see nothing. He knew that his way was smooth before
him, and that he need not give himself a moment’s trouble about
the ending. And though, as a rule, a man likes the excitement
of doubt and the sentiment of difficulties to be overcome,
still there are times when, if he is either very weary or too
self-complacent to care to strive, he is glad to be assured
that he has won before he has wooed, and has only to claim the
love that is waiting for him. Which was what Mr. Dundas felt
now when he noted the simplicity with which Josephine showed
her heart while believing she was hiding it so absolutely, and
knew that he had only to speak to have the whole thing
concluded.

“And now I have only half a heart to offer you,” he said
plaintively: “the other half is in the grave with my beloved.
But if you care to ally yourself to one who has been the sport
of sorrow as I have, if you care to make the last years of my
life happy, and will be content with the ashes rather than the
fires, I will do my best to make you feel that you have not
sacrificed yourself in vain. Will it be a sacrifice,
Josephine?” he asked in a lower tone, and with the exquisite
sweetness which love and pleading give to even a commonplace
voice.

“I have loved you all my life,” said Josephine simply; and
then dissolving into happy tears she hid her face in his breast
and felt that heaven was sometimes very near to earth.

Sebastian passed his arms round her ample comely form and
pressed her to his heart, tenderly and without affectation. It
was pleasant to him to see her devotion, to feel her love; and
though he disliked tears, as a man should, still tears of joy
were a tribute which he did not despise in essence if the
method might have been more congenial.

“Dear Josephine!” he said. “I always knew what a good soul
you were.”

This was the way in which Sebastian Dundas wooed and won an
honest-hearted English lady who loved him, and who, virtue for
virtue, was infinitely his superior—a wooing in striking
contrast with the methods which he had employed to gain the
person of a low-class, half-savage Spanish girl, whom he had
loved for her beauty and who took him for her pleasure; also in
striking contrast with those he employed to gain Madame de
Montfort, a clever adventuress, who balanced him, in hand,
against her bird in the bush, and decided that to make sure of
the less was better than to wait for the chance of the greater.
But Josephine felt nothing humiliating in his lordliness. She
loved him, she was a woman devoid of self-esteem; hence
humiliation from his hand was impossible.

Just then pretty little Fina came running to the window from
the garden, where she was playing.

“Come here, poppet,” said Mr. Dundas, holding out his left
hand, his right round comely Josephine.

She came through the open window and ran up to him. “Nice
papa!” she lisped, stroking his hand.

He took her on his knee, “I have I given you a new mamma,
Fina,” he said, [pg 482] kissing her; and then he
kissed Josephine for emphasis. “Will you be good to her and
love her very much? This is your mamma.”.

“Will you love me, little Fina?” asked Josephine in a voice
full of emotion, taking the child’s fair head between her
hands. “Will you like me to be your mamma?”

“Yes,” cried Fina, clapping her hands. “I shall like a nice
new mamma instead of Learn. I hate Leam: she is cross and has
big eyes.”

“Oh, we must not hate poor Leam,” remonstrated Josephine
tenderly.

“I cannot understand the child’s aversion,” said Mr. Dundas
in a half-musing, half-suspicious way. “Leam seems to be all
that is good and kind to her, but nothing that she does can
soften the little creature’s dislike. It must be natural
instinct,” he added in a lower voice.

“Yes, perhaps it is,” assented Josephine, who would have
answered, “Yes, perhaps it is,” to anything else that her lover
might have said.

“Where is Leam, my little Fina? Do you know?” asked
Sebastian of the child.

“In the garden. She is coming in,” answered Fina; and at the
word Leam passed before the window as Fina had done.

“Leam, my child, come in: I want to speak to you,” said her
father, with unwonted kindness; and Leam, too, as Fina had done
before her, passed through the open window and came in.

The two middle-aged lovers were still sitting side by side
and close together on the sofa. Fina was on her stepfather’s
knee, caressing his hand and Josephine’s, which were clasped
together on her little lap, while his other arm encircled the
substantial waist of his promised bride, whose disengaged hand
rested on his shoulder.

“Leam,” said the father, “I have given you—”

He stopped. The name which he was about to utter, with all
its passionate memories, was left unsaid. He remembered in time
Leam’s former renunciation of the new mamma whom he had once
before proposed.

“I have asked Josephine Harrowby to be my wife,” he said
after a short pause. “She has consented, and made me very
happy. Let me hope that it will make you happy too.”

He spoke with forced calmness and something of sternness
under his apparent serenity. In heart he was troubled,
remembering the past and half fearing the future. How would she
bear herself? Would she accept his relations pleasantly, or
defy and reject as before?

Leam looked at the triad gravely. It was a family group with
which she felt that she had no concern. She was outside
it—as much alone as in a strange country. She knew in
that deepest self which does not palm and lie to us that all
her efforts to put herself in harmony with her life were in
vain. Race, education and that fearful memory stood between her
and her surroundings, and she never lost the perception of her
loneliness save when she was with Edgar. At this moment she
looked on as at a picture of love and gladness with which she
had nothing in common; nevertheless, she accepted what she saw,
and if not expansive—which was not her way—was, as
her father said afterward, “perfectly satisfactory.” She went
up to the sofa slowly and held out her hand. “You are welcome,”
she said gravely to Josephine, but the contempt which she had
always had for her father, though she had tried so hard of late
to wear it down, surged up afresh, and she could not turn her
eyes his way. What a despicable thing that must be, she
thought—that thing he called his heart—to shift
from one to the other so easily! To her, the keynote of whose
character was single-hearted devotion, this facile, fluid love,
which could be poured out with equal warmth on every one alike,
was no love at all. It was a degraded kind of self-indulgence
for which she had no respect; and though she did not feel for
Josephine as she had felt for madame—as her mother’s
enemy—she despised her father even more now than
before.

Also a rapid thought crossed her mind, bringing with it a
deadly trouble. “If Josephine was her stepmother, would
[pg 483] Major Harrowby be her
stepfather?” They were brother and sister, and she had an
idea that the family followed the relations of its members.
She did not know why, but she would rather not have Major
Harrowby for her stepfather or for any relation by law. She
preferred that he should be wholly unconnected with
her—just her friend unrelated: that was all.

“Thank you, dear Leam!” said Josephine gratefully; and Leam,
looking at her with large mournful eyes, said in a soft but
surprised tone of voice, “Thank me!—why?”

“That you accept me as your stepmother so sweetly, and do
not hate me for it,” said Josephine.

Leam glanced with a pained look at Fina. “I have done with
hate,” she answered. “It is not my business what papa likes to
do.”

“Sensible at last!” cried Mr. Dundas with a half-mocking,
half-kindly triumph in his voice.

Leam turned pale. “But you must not think that I
forget mamma as you do,” she said with emphasis, her lip
quivering.

“No, dear Leam, I would be the last to wish that you should
forget your own mamma for me,” said Josephine humbly. “Only try
to love me a little for myself, as your friend, and I will be
satisfied. Love always your own mamma, but me too a
little.”

“You are good,” said Leam softly, her eyes filling with
tears. “I do like you very much; but mamma—there is only
one mother for me. None of papa’s wives could ever be mamma to
me.”

“But friend?” said Josephine, half sobbing.

“Friend? yes,” returned Leam; and for the first time in her
life she bent her proud little head and kissed Josephine on her
cheek. “And I will be good to you,” she said quietly, “for you
are good.” She did not add, “And Edgar’s sister.”

The families approved of this marriage. Every one said it
was what ought to have been when Pepita died, and that Mr.
Dundas had missed his way and lost his time by taking that
doubtful madame meanwhile. Adelaide and her mother were
especially congratulatory; but, though the rector said he was
glad for the sake of poor Josephine, who had always been a
favorite of his, yet he could not find terms of too great
severity for Sebastian. For a man to marry three times—it
was scarcely moral; and he wondered at the Harrowbys for
allowing one of their own to be the third venture. And then,
though Josephine was a good girl enough, she was but a weak
sister at the best; and to think of any man in his senses
taking her as the successor of that delightful and superior
madame!

Mrs. Birkett dissented from these views, and said it would
keep the house together and be such a nice thing for Fina and
Leam: both would be the better for a woman’s influence and
superintendence, and Josephine was very good.

“Yes,” said the rector with his martial air—”good
enough, I admit, but confoundedly slow.”

To Edgar, Adelaide expressed herself with delightful
enthusiasm. She was not often stirred to such a display of
feeling. “It is the marriage of the county,” she said
with her prettiest smile—”the very thing for every
one.”

“Think so?” was his reply, made by no means
enthusiastically. “If Joseph likes it, that is all that need be
said; but it is a marvel to me how she can—such an
unmanly creature as he is! such a muff all through!”

“Well, I own he would not have been my choice exactly,” said
Adelaide with a nice little look. “I like something stronger
and more decided in a man; but it is just as well that we all
do not like the same person; and then, you see, there are Leam
and the child to be considered. Lean is such an utterly unfit
person to bring up Fina: she is ruining her, indeed, as it is,
with her capricious temper and variable moods; and dear
Josephine’s quiet amiability and good sense will be so valuable
among them. I think we ought to be glad, as Christians, that
such a chance is offered them.”

“Whatever else you may be, at least
[pg 484] you are no hypocrite,” said
Edgar with a forced smile that did not look much like
approbation.

She chose to accept it simply. “No,” she answered quite
tranquilly, “I am not a hypocrite.”

“At all events, you do not disguise your dislike to Leam
Dundas,” he said.

“No: why should I? I confess it honestly, I do not like her.
The daughter of such a woman as her mother was; up to fifteen
years of age a perfect savage; a heathen with a temper that
makes me shudder when I think of it; capable of any crime. No,
don’t look shocked, Edgar: I am sure of it. That girl could
commit murder; and I verily believe that she did push Fina into
the water, as the child says, and that if Josephine had not got
there in time she would have let her drown. And if I think all
this, how can I like her?”

“No, if you think all this, as you say, you cannot like
her,” replied Edgar coldly. “I don’t happen to agree with you,
however, and I think your assumptions monstrous.”

“You are not the first man blinded by a pair of dark eyes,
Edgar,” said Adelaide with becoming mournfulness. “It makes me
sorry to see such a mind as yours dazzled out of its better
sense, but you will perhaps come right in time. At all events,
Josephine’s marriage with Mr. Dundas will give you a kind of
fatherly relation with Leam that may show you the truth of what
I say.”

“Fatherly relation! what rubbish!” cried Edgar, irritated
out of his politeness.

Adelaide smiled. “Well, you would be rather a young father
for her,” she answered. “Still, the character of the relation
will be, as I say, fatherly.”

Edgar laughed impatiently.

“Society will accept it in that light,” said Adelaide
gravely, glad to erect even this barrier of shadows between the
man of her choice and the girl whom she both dreaded and
disliked.

And she was right in her supposition. Brother and sister
marrying daughter and father would not be well received in a
narrow society like North Aston, where the restrictions of law
and elemental morality were supplemented by an adventitious
code of denial which put Nature into a strait waistcoat and
shackled freedom of action and opinion with chains and bands of
iron. Perhaps it was some such thought as this on his own part
that made Edgar profess himself disgusted with this marriage,
and declare loudly that Sebastian Dundas was not worthy of such
a girl as Josephine. His hearers smiled in their sleeves when
he said so, and thought that Josephine Harrowby, thirty-five
years of age, fat and freckled, was not so far out in her
running to have got at last—they always put in “at
last”—the owner of Ford House. It was more than she might
have expected, looking at things all round; and Edgar was as
unreasonable as proud men always are. With the redundancy of
women as we have it in England, happy the head of the house who
can get rid of his superfluous petticoats anyhow in honor and
sufficiency. This was the verdict of society on the
affair—the two extremities of the line wherefrom the same
fact was viewed.

As for Josephine herself, dear soul! she was supremely
happy. It was almost worth while to have waited so long, she
thought, to have such an exquisite reward at last. She went
back ten years in her life, and grew quite girlish and
fresh-looking, and what was wanting in romance on Sebastian’s
part was made up in devotion and adoration on hers.

Sebastian himself took pleasure in her happiness, her
adoration, the supreme content of her rewarded love. It made
him glad to think that he had given so good a creature so much
happiness; and he warmed his soul at his rekindled ashes as a
philosophic widower generally knows how.

Only Leam began to look pitifully mournful and desolate, and
to shrink back into a solitude which Edgar never invaded, and
whence even Alick was banished; and Edgar was irritable,
unpleasant, moody, would take no interest in the approaching
marriage, and, save that his settlements on Josephine were
liberal, seemed to hold himself personally
[pg 485] aggrieved by her choice,
and conducted himself altogether as if he had been injured
somehow thereby, and his wishes disregarded.

He was very disagreeable, and caused Joseph many bitter
hours, till at last he took a sudden resolution, and to the
relief of every one at the Hill went off to London, promising
to be back in time for “that little fool’s wedding with her
sentimental muff,” as he disrespectfully called his sister and
Sebastian Dundas, but giving no reason why he went, and taking
leave of no one—not even of Adelaide, nor yet of
Leam.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

THE SING-SONG OF MALY
COE.¹

In he city of Whampo’

Live Joss-pidgin-man ²
name Coe:

Mister Coe he missionaly,³

Catchee one cow-chilo ⁴,
Maly.

Father-man he leadee ⁵
book,

Maly talkee with the cook:

Good olo ⁶
father talkee Josh,⁷

But China-woman talkee bosh.

Bym’by Maly gettee so

She only Pidgin-English know,⁸

And father-man he solly ⁹
see

She thinkee leason ¹⁰
like Chinee.

One day some flin ¹¹
flom ¹²
Boston come

And askee, “Mister Coe at home?”

He servant go to opee door,

But Maly lun ¹³
chop-chop ¹⁴
before.

An’ stlanger ¹⁵
say when in he come,

“Is Mister Coe, my dear, at home?”

And Maly answer velly tlue,

“My thinkee this tim no can
do.”¹⁶

He olo father, still as mouse,

Chin-chin Joss topsidey house:¹⁷

Allo tim he make Joss-pidgin,¹⁸

What you Fan-kwai ¹⁹
callee
‘ligion.

[pg 486]

He gentleum much stare galow ²⁰

To hearee girley talkee so;

And say, “Dear child, may I inquire

Which form of faith you most admire?”

And Maly answer he request:

“My like Chinee Joss-pidgin best:

My love Kwan-wán ²¹
with chilo neat,

And Joss-stick ²²
smellee velly sweet.”

“Afóng, our olo cook down stairs,

Make teachee Maly Chinee
players:²³

Say, if my chin-chin Fô ²⁴—oh
joy!—

Nex time my born, my bornee
boy!”²⁵

“An’ then my gettee nicey-new

A ittle dacket ²⁶—towsers
too—And

And lun about with allo ²⁷
boys,

In bu’ful boots that makee noise.”

Tear come in he gentleum eyes,

And then he anger ‘gin to lise:²⁸

He wailo ²⁹
scoldee Mister Coe

For ‘glectin’ little Maly so.

An’ Mister Coe feel velly sore,

So go an’ scoldy comprador;

An’ comprador, with hollor ³⁰
shook,

Lun ³¹
downy stairs and beatee cook.

And worsey állo-állo pain,

Maly go Boston homo ‘gain:

No filee-clackers ³²
any more,

Nor talk with cook and comprador.

MORAL PIDGIN.

If Boston girley be let go,

She sartin sure to b’lieve in Fô,

And the next piecee of her plan

Is to lun lound ³³
and act like man.

So, little chilos,³⁴
mind you look,

And nevee talkee with the cook:

You make so-fashion, first you know

You catchee sclape,³⁵
like Maly Coe.

CHARLES G. LELAND.

Footnote 1:
(return)
“The Ballad of Mary Coe.”

Footnote 2:
(return)
Joss-pidgin-man, clergyman.

Footnote 3:
(return)
Missionary.

Footnote 4:
(return)
Had a female child.

Footnote 5:
(return)
Leadee or leedee, read.

Footnote 6:
(return)
Olo, old.

Footnote 7:
(return)
Talkee Josh (or Joss), converses on religion.

Footnote 8:
(return)
Pidgin-English, the
patois spoken in China, meaning business-English,
pigeon being the ordinary Chinese pronunciation of
English.

Footnote 9:
(return)
Solly, sorry.

Footnote 10:
(return)
Leason, reason.

Footnote 11:
(return)
Flin, friend.

Footnote 12:
(return)
Flom, from.

Footnote 13:
(return)
Lun, run.

Footnote 14:
(return)
Chop-chop, fast.

Footnote 15:
(return)
Stlanger, stranger.

Footnote 16:
(return)
“I think it can’t be done”—i.e., “You cannot see
him.”

Footnote 17:
(return)
Chin-chin Joss top-sidey house, he is praying up
stairs.

Footnote 18:
(return)
Devotion.

Footnote 19:
(return)
Fan-kwai, foreigner; lit. “foreign devil.”

Footnote 20:
(return)
Galów, galáw or galá,
a meaningless word, but much used.

Footnote 21:
(return)
Kwan-wán, a Chinese female divinity
represented with a babe in her arms.

Footnote 22:
(return)
Joss-stick, a stick composed of fragrant gum,
etc., burnt as incense.

Footnote 23:
(return)
Prayers.

Footnote 24:
(return)
Chin-chin Fô, worship Buddha.

Footnote 25:
(return)
Chinese women believe that by frequent repetition of a
prayer to Fô they can secure the privilege of being
born again as males.

Footnote 26:
(return)
Dacket, jacket.

Footnote 27:
(return)
Allo, all.

Footnote 28:
(return)
Lise, rise.

Footnote 29:
(return)
Wailo, run, go.

Footnote 30:
(return)
Horror.

Footnote 31:
(return)
Run.

Footnote 32:
(return)
Fire-crackers.

Footnote 33:
(return)
Run round.

Footnote 34:
(return)
Children.

Footnote 35:
(return)
Scrape.

[pg 487]

LETTERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA.

BY LADY BARKER.

MARITZBURG. November, 1875.
The weather at the beginning of this month was lovely
and the climate perfection, but now (I am writing on its
last day) it is getting very hot and trying. If ever people
might stand excused for talking about the weather when they
meet, it is we Natalians, for, especially at this time of
year, it varies from hour to hour. All along the coast one
hears of terrible buffeting and knocking about among the
shipping in the open roadsteads which have to do duty for
harbors in these parts; and it was only a few days ago that
the lifeboat, with the English mail on board, capsized in
crossing the bar at D’Urban. The telegram was—as
telegrams always are—terrifying in its vagueness, and
spoke of the mail-bags as “floating about.” When one
remembers the vast size of the breakers on which this
floating would take place, it sounded hopeless for our
letters. They turned up, however, a few days later—in
a pulpy state, it is true, but quite readable, though the
envelopes were curiously blended and engrafted upon the
letters inside—so much so that they required to be
taken together, for it was impossible to separate them. I
had recourse to the expedient of spreading my letters on a
dry towel and draining them before attempting to dissever
the leaves. Still, we were all only too thankful to get our
correspondence in any shape or form, for precious beyond
the power of words to express are home-letters to us, so
far away from home.
But to return to our weather. At first it was simply
perfect. Bright hot days—not too hot, for a light
breeze tempered even the midday heat—and crisp,
bracing nights succeeded each other during the first
fortnight. The country looked exquisitely green in its
luxuriant spring tints over hill and dale, and the rich red
clay soil made a splendid contrast on road and track with
the brilliant green on either hand. Still, people looked
anxiously for more rain, declaring that not half enough had
fallen to fill tanks or “shuits” (as the ditches are
called), and it took four days of continuous downpour to
satisfy these thirsty souls even for the moment. Toward the
middle of the month the atmosphere became more oppressive
and clouds began to come up in thick masses all round the
horizon, and gradually spread themselves over the whole
sky. The day before the heaviest rain, though not
particularly oppressive, was remarkable for the way in
which all manner of animals tried to get under shelter at
nightfall. The verandah was full of big frogs: if a door
remained open for a moment they hopped in, and then cried
like trapped birds when they found themselves in a corner.
As for the winged creatures, it was something wonderful the
numbers in which they flew in at the windows wherever a
light attracted them. I was busy writing English letters
that evening: I declare the cockroaches fairly drove me
away from the table by the mad way in which they flung
themselves into my ink-bottle, whilst the smell of singed
moths at the other lamp was quite overpowering. Well, after
this came rain indeed—not rain according to English
ideas, but a tropical deluge, as many inches falling in a
few hours as would fill your rain-gauges for months. I
believe my conduct was very absurd that first rainy night.
The little house had just been newly papered, and as the
ceiling was not one to inspire confidence, consisting as it
did merely of boards roughly joined together and painted
white, through which and through the tiles beyond the sky
could be seen quite plainly, I suffered the gravest doubts
about the water getting in and spoiling my pretty new
paper. Accordingly, whenever any burst of rain came heavier
than its immediate predecessor, I jumped out of bed in a
perfect agony of mind,
[pg 488] and roamed, candle in
hand, all over the house to see if I could not detect a
leak anywhere. But the unpromising-looking roof and
ceiling stood the test bravely, and not a drop of all
that descending downpour found its way to my new
walls.
By the way, I must describe the house to you, remarking,
first of all, that architecture, so far as my observation
extends, is at its lowest ebb in South Africa. I have not
seen a single pretty building of any sort or kind since I
arrived, although in these small houses it would be so easy
to break by gable and porch the severe simplicity of the
unvarying straight line in which they are built.
Whitewashed outer walls with a zinc roof are not uncommon,
and they make a bald and hideous combination until kindly,
luxuriant Nature has had time to step in and cover up man’s
ugly handiwork with her festoons of roses and
passion-flowers. Most of the houses have, fortunately,
red-tiled roofs, which are not so ugly, and mine is among
the number. It is so squat and square, however, that, as
our landlord happens to be the chief baker of Maritzburg,
it has been proposed to christen it “Cottage Loaf,” but
this idea requires consideration on account of the baker’s
feelings. In the mean time, it is known briefly as
“Smith’s,” that being the landlord’s name. It has, as all
the houses here have, a broad projecting roof extending
over a wide verandah. Within are four small rooms, two on
either side of a narrow passage which runs from one end to
the other. By a happy afterthought, a kitchen has been
added beyond this extremely simple ground-plan, and on the
opposite side a corresponding projection which closely
resembles a packing-case, and which has been painted a
bright blue inside and out. This is the dining-room, and
evidently requires to be severely handled before its
present crude and glaring tints can be at all toned down.
At a little distance stands the stable, saddle-room, etc.,
and a good bedroom for English servants, and beyond that,
again, among large clumps of rose-bushes, a native hut. It
came up here half built—that is, the frame was partly
put together elsewhere—and it resembled a huge
crinoline more than anything else in its original state.
Since that, however, it has been made more secure by extra
pales of bamboo, each tied in its place with infinite
trouble and patience by a knot every inch or two. The final
stage consisted of careful thatching with thick bundles of
grass laid on the framework, and secured by long ropes of
grass binding the whole together. The door is the very
smallest opening imaginable, and inside it is of course
pitch dark. All this labor was performed by stalwart Kafir
women, one of whom, a fearfully repulsive female, informed
my cook that she had just been bought back by her original
husband. Stress of circumstances had obliged him to sell
her, and she had been bought by three other husband-masters
since then, but was now resold, a bargain, to her first
owner, whom, she declared, she preferred to any of the
others. But few as are these rooms, they yet are
watertight—which is a great point out here—and
the house, being built of large, awkward blocks of stone,
is cool and shady. When I have arranged things a little, it
will be quite comfortable and pretty; and I defy any one to
wish for a more exquisite view than can be seen from any
corner of the verandah. We are on the brow of a hill which
slopes gently down to the hollow wherein nestles the
picturesque little town, or rather village, of Maritzburg.
The intervening distance of a mile or so conceals the real
ugliness and monotony of its straight streets, and hides
all architectural shortcomings. The clock-tower, for
instance, is quite a feature in the landscape, and from
here one cannot perceive that the clock does not go.
Nothing can be prettier than the effect of the red-tiled
roofs and white walls peeping out from among thick clumps
of trees, whilst beyond the ground rises again to low hills
with deep purple fissures and clefts in their green sides.
It is only a couple of years since this little house was
built and the garden laid out, and yet the shrubs and trees
are as big as if half a dozen years had passed over their
leafy heads. As for the roses, I never saw anything like
[pg 489] the way they flourish
at their own sweet will. Scarcely a leaf is to be seen
on the ugly straggling tree—nothing but masses of
roses of every tint and kind and old-fashioned variety.
The utmost I can do in the way of gathering daily
basketsful appears only in the light of judicious
pruning, and next day a dozen blossoms have burst forth
to supply the place of each theft of mine. And there is
such a variety of trees! Oaks and bamboos, blue gums and
deodars, seem to flourish equally well within a yard or
two of each other, and the more distant flower-beds are
filled with an odd mixture of dahlias and daturas, white
fleur-de-lis and bushy geraniums, scarlet euphorbias and
verbenas. But the weeds! They are a chronic eyesore and
grief to every gardener. On path and grass-plat,
flower-bed and border, they flaunt and flourish. “Jack,”
the Zulu refugee, wages a feeble and totally inadequate
warfare against them with a crooked hoe, but he is only
a quarter in earnest, and stops to groan and take snuff
so often that the result is that our garden is precisely
in the condition of the garden of the sluggard, gate and
all. This hingeless condition of the gate, however, is,
I must in fairness state, neither Jack’s nor our fault.
It is a new gate, but no one will come out from the town
to hang it. That is my standing grievance. Because we
live about a mile from the town it is next to impossible
to get anything done. The town itself is one of the
shabbiest assemblages of dwellings I have ever seen in a
colony. It is not to be named on the same day with
Christchurch, the capital of Canterbury, New Zealand,
which ten years ago was decently paved and well lighted
by gas. Poor sleepy Maritzburg consists now, at more
than forty years of age (Christchurch is not twenty-five
yet), of a few straight, wide, grass-grown streets,
which are only picturesque at a little distance on
account of their having trees on each side. On
particularly dark nights a dozen oil-lamps standing at
long intervals apart are lighted, but when it is even
moderately starlight these aids to finding one’s way
about are prudently dispensed with. There is not a
single handsome and hardly a decent building in the
whole place. The streets, as I saw them after rain, are
veritable sloughs of despond, but they are capable of
being changed by dry weather into deserts of dust. It is
true, I have only been as yet twice down to the town,
but on both visits it reminded me more of the sleepy
villages in Washington Irving’s stories than of a smart,
modern, go-ahead colonial “city.” There are some fairly
good shops, but they make no show outside, and within
the prices of most of the articles sold are nearly
double the same things would bring either at Melbourne
or at Christchurch. As D’Urban is barely a month away
from London in point of communication, and New Zealand
(when I knew it) nearly treble the distance and time,
this is a great puzzle to me.
A certain air of quaint interest and life is given to
the otherwise desolate streets by the groups of Kafirs and
the teams of wagons which bring fuel and forage into the
town every day. Twenty bullocks drag these ponderous
contrivances—bullocks so lean that one wonders how
they have strength to carry their wide-spreading horns
aloft; bullocks of a stupidity and obstinacy unparalleled
in the natural history of horned beasts. At their head
walks a Kafir lad called a “forelooper,” who tugs at a rope
fastened to the horns of the leading oxen, and in moments
of general confusion invariably seems to pull the wrong
string and get the whole team into an inextricable tangle
of horns and yokes. Sometimes of a quiet Sunday morning
these teams and wagons I see “out-spanned” on the green
slopes around Maritzburg, making a picturesque addition to
the sylvan scenery. Near each wagon a light wreath of smoke
steals up into the summer air, marking where some
preparation of “mealies” is on foot, and the groups of
grazing oxen—”spans,” as each team is
called—give the animation of animal life which I miss
so sadly at every turn in this part of the world.
In Maritzburg itself I only noticed two buildings which
made the least effect. One is the government house,
standing [pg 490] in a nice garden and
boasting of a rather pretty porch, but otherwise
reminding one—except for the sentinel on
duty—of a quiet country rectory: the other is a
small block comprising the public offices. The original
idea of this square building must have come from a model
dairy. But the crowning absurdity of the place is the
office of the colonial secretary, which stands nearly
opposite. I am told that inside it is tolerably
comfortable, being the remains of an old Dutch building:
outside, it can only be compared to a dilapidated barn
on a bankrupt farm, and when it was first pointed out to
me I had great difficulty, remembering similar buildings
in other colonies, in believing it was a public
office.
The native police look very smart and shiny in their
white suits, and must be objects of envy to their black
brethren on account of their “knobkerries,” the knobbed
sticks which they alone are permitted to carry officially
in their hands. The native loves a stick, and as he is
forbidden to carry either an assegai—which is a very
formidable weapon indeed—or even a knobkerry, only
one degree less dangerous, he consoles himself with a wand
or switch in case of coming across a snake. You never see a
Kafir without something of the sort in his hand: if he is
not twirling a light stick, then he has a sort of rude reed
pipe from which he extracts sharp and tuneless sounds. As a
race, the Kafirs make the effect of possessing a fine
physique: they walk with an erect bearing and a
light step, but in true leisurely savage fashion. I have
seen the black race in four different quarters of the
globe, and I never saw one single individual move quickly
of his own free will. We must bear in mind, however, that
it is a new and altogether revolutionary idea to a Kafir
that he should do any work at all. Work is for
women—war or idleness for men; consequently, their
fixed idea is to do as little as they can; and no Kafir
will work after he has earned money enough to buy a
sufficient number of wives who will work for him.
“Charlie,” our groom—who is, by the way, a very fine
gentleman and speaks “Ingeliss” after a strange fashion of
his own—only condescends to work until he can
purchase a wife. Unfortunately, the damsel whom he prefers
is a costly article, and her parents demand a cow, a kettle
and a native hut as the price of her hand—or hands,
rather—so Charlie grunts and groans through about as
much daily work as an English boy of twelve years old could
manage easily. He is a very amusing character, being
exceedingly proud, and will only obey his own master, whom
he calls his great inkosi or chief. He is always lamenting
the advent of the inkosi-casa, or chieftainess, and the
piccaninnies and their following, especially the “vaiter,”
whom he detests. In his way, Charlie is a wag, and it is as
good as a play to see his pretence of stupidity when the
“vaiter” or French butler desires him to go and eat “sa
paniche.” Charlie understands perfectly that he is told to
go and get his breakfast of mealy porridge, but he won’t
admit that it is to be called “paniche,” preferring his own
word “scoff;” so he shakes his head violently and says,
“Nay, nay, paniche.” Then, with many nods, “Scoff, ja;” and
so in this strange gibberish of three languages he and the
Frenchman carry on quite a pretty quarrel. Charlie also
“mocks himself” of the other servants, I am informed, and
asserts that he is the “indema” or headman. He freely boxes
the ears of Jack, the Zulu refugee—poor Jack, who
fled from his own country, next door, the other day, and
arrived here clad in only a short flap made of three bucks’
tails. That is only a month ago, and “Jack” is already
quite a petit maître about his clothes. He
ordinarily wears a suit of knickerbockers and a shirt of
blue check bound with red, and a string of beads round his
neck, but he cries like a baby if he tears his clothes, or
still worse if the color of the red braid washes out. At
first he hated civilized garments, even when they were only
two in number, and begged to be allowed to assume a sack
with holes for the arms, which is the Kafir compromise when
near a town between clothes and flaps made of the tails of
wild beasts or strips of hide. But he soon came to delight
in [pg 491] them, and is now always
begging for “something to wear.”
I confess I am sorry for Jack. He is the kitchen-boy,
and is learning with much pains and difficulty the wrong
language. My cook is also French, and, naturally, all
that Jack learns is French, and not English. Imagine poor
Jack’s dismay when, after his three years’ apprenticeship
to us is ended, he seeks perhaps to better himself, and
finds that no one except madame can understand him! Most of
their dialogues are carried on by pantomime and the
incessant use, in differing tones of voice, of the word
“Ja.” Jack is a big, loutish young man, but very ugly and
feeble, and apparently under the impression that he is
perpetually “wanted” to answer for the little indiscretion,
whatever it was, on account of which he was forced to flee
over the border. He is timid and scared to the last degree,
and abjectly anxious to please if it does not entail too
much exertion. He is, as it were, apprenticed to us for
three years. We are bound to feed and clothe and doctor
him, and he is to work for us, in his own lazy fashion, for
small wages. The first time Jack broke a plate his terror
and despair were quite edifying to behold. Madame called
him a “maladroit” on the spot. Jack learned this word, and
after his work was over seated himself gravely on the
ground with the fragments of the plate, which he tried to
join together, but gave up the attempt at last, announcing
in his own tongue that it was “dead.” After a little
consideration he said slowly, several times, “Maldraw, ja,”
and hit himself a good thump at each “ja.” Now, I
grieve to say, Jack breaks plates, dishes and cups with a
perfectly easy and unembarrassed conscience, and is already
far too civilized to care in the least for his misfortunes
in that line. Whenever a fowl is killed—and I came
upon Jack slowly putting one to death the other day with a
pair of nail-scissors—he possesses himself of a small
store of feathers, which he wears tastefully placed over
his left ear. A gay ribbon, worn like a bandeau across the
forehead, is what he really loves. Jack is very proud of a
tawdry ribbon of many colors with a golden ground which I
found for him the other day, only he never can make up his
mind where to wear it; and I often come upon him sitting in
the shade with the ribbon in his hands, gravely considering
the question.
The Pickle and plague of the establishment, however, is
the boy Tom, a grinning young savage fresh from his kraal,
up to any amount of mischief, who in an evil hour has been
engaged as the baby’s body-servant. I cannot trust him with
the child out of my sight for a moment, for he “snuffs”
enormously, and smokes coarse tobacco out of a cow’s horn,
and is anxious to teach the baby both these
accomplishments. Tom wears his snuff-box—which is a
brass cylinder a couple of inches long—in either ear
impartially, there being huge slits in the cartilage for
the purpose, and the baby never rests till he gets
possession of it and sneezes himself nearly into fits. Tom
likes nursing Baby immensely, and croons to him in a
strange buzzing way which lulls him to sleep invariably. He
is very anxious, however, to acquire some words of English,
and I was much startled the other day to hear in the
verandah my own voice saying, “What is it, dear?” over and
over again. This phrase proceeded from Tom, who kept on
repeating it, parrot-fashion—an exact imitation, but
with no idea of its meaning. I had heard the baby
whimpering a little time before, and Tom had remarked that
these four words produced the happiest effect in restoring
good-humor; so he learned them, accent and all, on the
spot, and used them as a spell or charm on the next
opportunity. I think even the poor baby was puzzled. But
one cannot feel sure of what Tom will do next. A few
evenings ago I trusted him to wheel the perambulator about
the garden-paths, but, becoming anxious in a very few
minutes to know what he was about, I went to look for him.
I found him grinning in high glee, watching the baby’s
efforts at cutting his teeth on a live young bird. Master
Tom had spied a nest, climbed the tree, and brought down
the poor little bird, which he presented to the child, who
instantly [pg 492] put it into his mouth.
When I arrived on the scene Baby’s mouth was full of
feathers, over which he was making a very disgusted
face, and the unhappy bird was nearly dead of fright and
squeezing, whilst Tom was in such convulsions of
laughter that I nearly boxed his ears. He showed me by
signs how Baby insisted on sucking the bird’s head, and
conveyed his intense amusement at the idea. I made
Master Tom climb the tree instantly and put the poor
little half-dead creature back into its nest, and sent
for Charlie to explain to him he should have no
sugar—the only punishment Tom cares
about—for two days. I often think, however, that I
must try and find another penalty, for when Tom’s
allowance of sugar is stopped he “requisitions” that of
every one else, and so gets rather more than usual. He
is immensely proud of the brass chin-strap of an old
artillery bushy which has been given to him. He used to
wear it across his forehead in the favorite Kafir
fashion, but as the baby always made it his first
business to pull this shining strap down over Tom’s
eyes, and eventually over Tom’s mouth, it has been
transferred to his neck.
These Kafir-lads make excellent nurse-boys generally,
and English children are very fond of them. Nurse-girls are
rare, as the Kafir women begin their lives of toil so early
that they are never very handy or gentle in a house, and
boys are easier to train as servants. I heard to-day,
however, of an excellent Kafir nurse-maid who was the
daughter of a chief, and whose only drawback was the size
of her family. She was actually and truly one of
eighty brothers and sisters, her father being a rich
man with twenty-five wives. That simply means that he had
twenty-five devoted slaves, who worked morning, noon and
night for him in field and mealy-patch without wages. Jack
the Zulu wanted to be nurse-boy dreadfully, and used to
follow Nurse about with a towel rolled up into a bundle,
and another towel arranged as drapery, dandling an
imaginary baby on his arm, saying plaintively, “Piccaninny,
piccaninny!” This Nurse translated to mean that he was an
experienced nurse-boy, and had taken care of a baby in his
own country, but as I had no confidence in maladroit Jack,
who chanced to be very deaf besides, he was ruthlessly
relegated to his pots and pans.
It is very curious to see the cast-off clothes of all
the armies of Europe finding their way hither. The natives
of South Africa prefer an old uniform coat or tunic to any
other covering, and the effect of a short scarlet garment
when worn with bare legs is irresistibly droll. The
apparently inexhaustible supply of old-fashioned English
coatees with their worsted epaulettes is just coming to an
end, and being succeeded by ragged red tunics,
franc-tireurs’ brownish-green jackets and much-worn
Prussian gray coats. Kafir-Land may be looked upon as the
old-clothes shop of all the fighting world, for sooner or
later every cast-off scrap of soldier’s clothing drifts
toward it. Charlie prides himself much upon the possession
of an old gray great-coat, so patched and faded that it may
well have been one of those which toiled up the slopes of
Inkerman that rainy Sunday morning twenty years ago; whilst
scampish Tom got well chaffed the other day for suddenly
making his appearance clad in a stained red tunic with buff
collar and cuffs, and the number of the old “dirty
Half-hundred” in tarnished metal on the shoulder-scales.
“Sir Garnet,” cried Charlie the witty, whilst Jack affected
to prostrate himself before the grinning imp, exclaiming,
“O great inkosi!”
Charlie is angry with me just now, and looks most
reproachfully my way on all occasions. The cause is that he
was sweeping away sundry huge spiders’ webs from the roof
of the verandah (the work of a single night) when I heard
him coughing frightfully. I gave him some lozenges, saying,
“Do your cough good, Charlie.” Charlie received them in
both hands held like a cup, the highest form of Kafir
gratitude, and gulped them all down on the spot. Next day I
heard the same dreadful cough, and told F—— to
give him some more lozenges. But Charlie would have none of
them, alleging he “eats plenty to-morrow’s yesterday, and
dey no good [pg 493] at all;” and he
evidently despises me and my remedies.
If only there were no hot winds! But the constant
changes are so trying and so sudden. Sometimes we have a
hot, scorching gale all day, drying and parching one’s very
skin up, and shriveling one’s lovely roses like the blast
from a furnace: then in the afternoon a dark cloud sails
suddenly up from behind the hills to the west. It is over
the house before one knows it is coming: a loud clap of
thunder shakes the very ground beneath one’s feet, others
follow rapidly, and a thunderstorm bewilders one for some
ten minutes or so. A few drops of cold rain fall to the
sound of the distant thunder, now rolling away eastward,
which yet “struggles and howls at fits.” It is not always
distant, but we have not yet seen a real thunderstorm; only
a few of these short, sudden electrical disturbances, which
come and go more like explosions than anything else. A few
days ago there was a duststorm which had a very curious
effect as we looked down upon it from this hill. All along
the roads one could watch the dust being caught up, as it
were, and whirled along in dense clouds, whilst the poor
little town itself was absolutely blotted out by the
blinding masses of fine powder. For half an hour or so we
could afford to watch and smile at our neighbors’ plight,
but soon we had to flee for shelter ourselves within the
house, for a furious hot gale drove heavily up behind the
dust and nearly blew us away altogether. Still, there was
no thunderstorm, though we quite wished for one to cool the
air and refresh the parched and burnt-up grass and flowers.
Such afternoons are generally pretty sure to be succeeded
by a cold night, and perhaps a cold, damp morning; and one
can already understand that these alternations during the
summer months are apt to produce dysentery among young
children. I hear just now of a good many such cases among
babies.
I have been so exceedingly busy this month packing,
arranging and settling that there has been but little time
for going about and seeing the rather pretty environs of
Maritzburg; besides which, the weather is dead against
excursions, changing as it does to rain or threatening
thunderstorms nearly every afternoon. One evening we
ventured out for a walk in spite of growlings and spittings
up above among the crass-looking clouds. Natal is not a
nice country, for women at all events, to walk in. You have
to keep religiously to the road or track, for woe betide
the rash person who ventures on the grass, though from
repeated burnings all about these hills it is quite short.
There is a risk of your treading on a snake, and a
certainty of your treading on a frog. You will soon find
your legs covered with small and pertinacious ticks, who
have apparently taken a “header” into your flesh and made
up their minds to die sooner than let go. They must be the
bull-dogs of the insect tribe, these ticks, for a sharp
needle will scarcely dislodge them. At the last extremity
of extraction they only burrow their heads deeper into the
skin, and will lose this important part of their tiny
bodies sooner than yield to the gentlest leverage. Then
there are myriads of burs which cling to you in green and
brown scales of roughness, and fringe your petticoats with
their sticky little lumps. As for the poor petticoats
themselves, however short you may kilt them, you bring them
back from a walk deeply flounced with the red clay of the
roads; and as the people who wash do not seem to consider
this a disadvantage, and take but little pains to remove
the earth-stains, one’s garments gradually acquire, even
when clean, a uniform bordering of dingy red. All the water
at this time of year is red too, as the rivers are stirred
up by the heavy summer rains, and resemble angry muddy
ditches more than fresh-water streams. I miss at every turn
the abundance of clear, clean, sparkling water in the
creeks and rivers of my dear New Zealand, and it is only
after heavy rain, when every bath and large vessel has been
turned into a receptacle during the downpour, that one can
compass the luxury of an inviting-looking bath or glass of
drinking-water. Of course this turbid water renders it
pretty difficult to get one’s
[pg 494] clothes properly
washed, and the substitute for a mangle is an active
Kafir, who makes the roughly-dried clothes up into a
neat parcel, places them on a stone and dances up and
down upon them for as long or short a time as he
pleases. Fuel is so enormously dear that the cost of
having clothes ironed is something astounding, and
altogether washing is one of the many costly items of
Natalian housekeeping. When I remember the frantic state
of indignation and alarm we were all in in England three
years ago when coals rose to £2 10s. a ton, and
think how cheap I should consider that price for fuel
here, I can’t help a melancholy smile. Nine solid
sovereigns purchase you a tolerable-sized load of wood,
about equal for cooking purposes to a ton of coal; but
whereas the coal is at all events some comfort and
convenience to use, the wood is only a source of
additional trouble and expense. It has to be cut up and
dried, and finally coaxed and cajoled by incessant use
of the bellows into burning. Besides the price of fuel,
provisions of all sorts seem to me to be dear and bad.
Milk is sold by the quart bottle: it is now fourpence
per bottle, but rises to sixpence during the winter.
Meat is eightpence a pound, but it is so thin and bony,
and of such indifferent quality, that there is very
little saving in that respect. I have not tasted any
really good butter since we arrived, and we pay two
shillings a pound for cheesy, rancid stuff. I hear that
“mealies,” the crushed maize, are also very dear, and so
is forage for the horses. Instead of the horses being
left out on the run night and day, summer and winter, as
they used to be in New Zealand, with an occasional feed
of oats for a treat, they need to be carefully housed at
night and well fed with oaten straw and mealies to give
them a chance against the mysterious and fatal
“horse-sickness,” which kills them in a few hours.
Altogether, so far as my very limited
experience—of only a few weeks,
remember—goes, I should say that Natal was an
expensive place to live in, owing to the scarcity and
dearness of the necessaries of life. I am told that far
up in the country food and fuel are cheap and good, and
that it is the dearness and difficulty of transport
which forces Maritzburg to depend for its supplies
entirely on what is grown in its own immediate vicinity,
where there is not very much land under cultivation; so
we must look to the coming railway to remedy all
that.
If only one could eat flowers, or if wheat and other
cereals grew as freely and luxuriously as flowers grow, how
nice it would be! On the open grassy downs about here the
blossoms are lovely—beautiful lilies in scarlet and
white clusters, several sorts of periwinkles, heaths,
cinnerarias, both purple and white, and golden bushes of
citisus or Cape broom, load the air with fragrance. By the
side of every “spruit” or brook one sees clumps of tall
arum lilies filling every little water-washed hollow in the
brook, and the ferns which make each ditch and water-course
green and plumy have a separate shady beauty of their own.
This is all in Nature’s own free, open garden, and when the
least cultivation or care is added to her bounteous
luxuriance a magnificent garden for fruit, vegetables and
flowers is the result; always supposing you are fortunate
enough to be able to induce these lazy Kafirs to dig the
ground for you.
About a fortnight ago I braved the dirt and
disagreeables of a cross-country walk in showery
weather—for we have not been able to meet with a
horse to suit us yet—and went to see a beautiful
garden a couple of miles away. It was approached by a long
double avenue of blue gum trees, planted only nine years
ago, but tall and stately as though a century had passed
over their lofty, pointed heads, and with a broad red clay
road running between the parallel lines of trees. The
ordinary practice of clearing away the grass as much as
possible round a house strikes an English eye as bare and
odd, but when one hears that it is done to avoid snakes, it
becomes a necessary and harmonious adjunct to the rest of
the scene. In this instance I found these broad smooth
walks, with their deep rich red color, a very beautiful
contrast to the glow of brilliant blossoms in the enormous
[pg 495] flower-beds. For this
garden was not at all like an ordinary garden, still
less like a prim English parterre. The beds were as
large as small fields, slightly raised and bordered by a
thick line of violets. Large shrubs of beautiful
semitropical plants made tangled heaps of purple,
scarlet and white blossoms on every side; the large
creamy bells of the datura drooped toward the reddish
earth; thorny shrubs of that odd bluish-green peculiar
to Australian foliage grew side by side with the
sombre-leaved myrtle. Every plant grew in the most
liberal fashion; green things which we are accustomed to
see in England in small pots shoot up here to the height
of laurel bushes; a screen of scarlet euphorbia made a
brilliant line against a background formed by a hedge of
shell-like cluster-roses, and each pillar of the
verandah of the little house had its own magnificent
creeper. Up one standard an ipomea twined closely;
another pillar was hidden by the luxuriance of a
trumpet-honeysuckle; whilst a third was thickly covered
by an immense passion-flower. In shady, damp places grew
many varieties of ferns and blue hydrangeas, whilst
other beds were filled by gay patches of verbenas of
every hue and shade. The sweet-scented verbena is one of
the commonest and most successful shrubs in a Natal
garden, and just now the large bushes of it which one
sees in every direction are covered by tapering spikes
of its tiny white blossoms. But the feature of this
garden was roses—roses on each side whichever way
you turned, and I should think of at least a hundred
different sorts. Not the stiff standard rose tree of an
English garden, with its few precious blossoms, to be
looked at from a distance and admired with respectful
gravity. No: in this garden the roses grow as they might
have grown in Eden—untrained, unpruned, in
enormous bushes covered entirely by magnificent
blossoms, each bloom of which would have won a prize at
a rose-show. There was one cloth-of-gold rose bush that
I shall never forget—its size, its fragrance, its
wealth of creamy-yellowish blossoms. A few yards off
stood a still bigger and more luxuriant pyramid, some
ten feet high, covered with the large, delicate and
regular pink bloom of the souvenir de Malmaison. When I
talk of a bush I only mean one especial bush
which caught my eye. I suppose there were fifty
cloth-of-gold and fifty souvenir rose bushes in that
garden. Red roses, white roses, tea roses, blush-roses,
moss roses, and, last not least, the dear old-fashioned,
homely cabbage rose, sweetest and most sturdy of all.
You could wander for acres and acres among fruit trees
and plantations of oaks and willows and other trees, but
you never got away from the roses. There they were,
beautiful, delicious things at every turn—hedges
of them, screens of them and giant bushes of them on
either hand. As I have said before, though kept free
from weeds by some half dozen scantily-clad but stalwart
Kafirs with their awkward hoes, it was not a bit like a
trim English garden. It was like a garden in which Lalla
Rookh might have wandered by moonlight talking
sentimental philosophy with her minstrel prince under
old Fadladeen’s chaperonage, or a garden that Boccaccio
might have peopled with his Arcadian fine ladies and
gentlemen. It was emphatically a poet’s or a painter’s
garden, not a gardener’s garden. Then, as though nothing
should be wanting to make the scene lovely, one could
hear through the fragrant silence the tinkling of the
little “spruit” or brook at the bottom of the garden,
and the sweet song of the Cape canary, the same sort of
greenish finch which is the parent stock of all our
canaries, and whose acquaintance I first made in
Madeira. A very sweet warbler it is, and the clear,
flute-like notes sounded prettily among the roses. From
blossom to blossom lovely butterflies flitted, perching
quite fearlessly on the red clay walk just before me,
folding and unfolding their big painted wings. Every day
I see a new kind of butterfly, and the moths which one
comes upon hidden away under the leaves of the creepers
during the bright noisy day are lovely beyond the power
of words. One little fellow is a great pet of mine. He
wears pure white wings,
[pg 496] with vermilion stripes
drawn in regular horizontal lines across his back, and
between the lines are shorter, broken streaks of black,
which is at once neat and uncommon; but he is always in
the last stage of sleepiness when I see him.
I am so glad little G—— is not old enough to
want to catch them all and impale them upon corks in a
glass case; so the pretty creatures live out their brief
and happy life in the sunshine, without let or hinderance
from him.
The subject of which my mind is most full just now is
the purchase of a horse. F—— has a fairly good
chestnut cob of his own; G—— has become
possessed, to his intense delight, of an aged and
long-suffering Basuto pony, whom he fidgets to death during
the day by driving him all over the place, declaring he is
“only showing him where the nicest grass grows;” and I want
a steed to draw my pony-carriage and to carry me.
F—— and I are at dagger’s drawn on this
question. He wants to buy me a young, handsome, showy horse
of whom his admirers predict that “he will steady down
presently,” whilst my affections are firmly fixed on an
aged screw who would not turn his head if an Armstrong gun
were fired behind him. His owner says Scotsman is “rising
eleven:” F—— declares Scotsman will never see
his twentieth birthday again. F—— points out to
me that Scotsman has had rough times of it, apparently, in
his distant youth, and that he is strangely battered about
the head, and has a large notch out of one ear. I retaliate
by reminding him how sagely the old horse picked his way,
with a precision of judgment which only years can give,
through the morass which lies at the foot of the hill, and
which must be crossed every time I go into town (and there
is nowhere else to go). That morass is a bog in summer and
a honey-comb of deep ruts and holes in winter, which, you
must bear in mind, is the dry season here. Besides his tact
in the matter of the morass, did I not drive Scotsman the
other day to the park, and did he not comport himself in
the most delightfully sedate fashion? You require
experience to be on the lookout for the perils of
Maritzburg streets, it seems, for all their sleepy,
deserted, tumble-down air. First of all, there are the
transport-wagons, with their long span of oxen straggling
all across the road, and a nervous bullock precipitating
himself under your horse’s nose. The driver, too,
invariably takes the opportunity of a lady passing him to
crack his whip violently, enough to startle any horse
except Scotsman. Then when you have passed the place where
the wagons most do congregate, and think you are tolerably
safe and need only look out for ruts and holes in the
street, lo! a furious galloping behind you, and some half
dozen of the “gilded youth” of Maritzburg dash past you,
stop, wheel round and gallop past again, until you are
almost blinded with dust or smothered with mud, according
to the season. This peril occurred several times during my
drive to and from the park, and I can only remark that dear
old Scotsman kept his temper better than I did: perhaps he
was more accustomed to Maritzburg manners.
When the park was reached at last, across a frail and
uncertain wooden bridge shaded by large weeping willows, I
found it the most creditable thing I had yet seen. It is
admirably laid out, the natural undulations of the ground
being made the most of, and exceedingly well kept. This in
itself is a difficult matter where all vegetation runs up
like Jack’s famous beanstalk, and where the old proverb
about the steed starving whilst his grass is growing falls
completely to the ground. There are numerous drives, made
level by a coating of smooth black shale, and bordered by a
double line of syringas and oaks, with hedges of myrtle or
pomegranate. In some places the roads run alongside the
little river—a very muddy torrent when I saw
it—and then the oaks give way to great drooping
willows, beneath whose trailing branches the river swirled
angrily. On fine Saturday afternoons the band of the
regiment stationed here plays on a clear space under some
shady trees—for you can never sit or stand on the
grass in Natal, and even [pg
497] croquet is played on bare leveled
earth—and everybody rides or walks or drives about.
When I saw the park there was not a living creature in it,
for it was, as most of our summer afternoons are, wet and
cold and drizzling; but, considering that there was no
thunderstorm likely to break over our heads that day, I
felt that I could afford to despise a silent Scotch mist.
We varied our afternoon weather last week by a hailstorm,
of which the stones were as big as large marbles. I was
scoffed at for remarking this, and assured it was “nothing,
absolutely nothing,” to the great hailstorm of two
years ago, which broke nearly every tile and pane of glass
in Maritzburg, and left the town looking precisely as
though it had been bombarded. I have seen photographs of
some of the ruined houses, and it is certainly difficult to
believe that hail could have done so much mischief. Then,
again, stories reach me of a certain thunderstorm one
Sunday evening just before I arrived in which the lightning
struck a room in which a family was assembled at evening
prayers, killing the poor old father with the Bible in his
hand, and knocking over every member of the little
congregation. My informant said, “I assure you it seemed as
though the lightning were poured out of heaven in a jug.
There were no distinct flashes: the heavens appeared to
split open and pour down a flood of blazing violet light.”
I have seen nothing like this yet, but can quite realize
what such a storm must be like, for I have observed already
how different the color of the lightning is. The flashes I
have seen were exactly of the lilac color he described, and
they followed each other with a rapidity of succession
unknown in less electric regions. And yet my last English
letters were full of complaints of the wet weather in
London, and much self-pity for the long imprisonment
in-doors. Why, those very people don’t know what weather
inconveniences are. If London streets are muddy, at all
events there are no dangerous morasses in them. No matter
how much it rains, people get their comfortable meals three
times a day. Here, rain means a risk of starvation
(if the little wooden bridge between us and the town were
to be swept away) and a certainty of short commons. A wet
morning means damp bread for breakfast and a thousand other
disagreeables. No, I have no patience with the pampered
Londoners, who want perpetual sunshine in addition to their
other blessings, for saying one word about discomfort. They
are all much too civilized and luxurious, and their lives
are made altogether too smooth for them. Let them come out
here and try to keep house on the top of a hill with
servants whose language they don’t understand, a couple of
noisy children and a small income, and then, as dear Mark
Twain says, “they’ll know something about woe.”

DINNER IN A STATE PRISON.

An invitation to take dinner with a friend in the State’s
prison was something new and exciting to a quiet little body
like me, and I re-read Ruth Denham’s kindly-worded note to that
effect, and thought how odd it was that we should meet again in
this way after ten years’ separation and all the changes that
had intervened in both our lives. We had parted last on the
night of our grand closing-school party, after having been
friends and fellow-pupils for five years. She was then fifteen,
and the prettiest, brightest and cleverest girl at Lynnhope. I
was younger, and felt distinguished by her friendship, and
heart-broken at the idea of losing her, for she was going
abroad with her family, while
[pg 498] I remained to complete my
studies at the institute.

I had plenty of letters the first year, but then her father
died, and with him went his reputed fortune. A painful change
occurred in the position of the Welfords in consequence, and
Ruth became a teacher, as I heard, until she met and married a
young man from the West, whither she returned with him
immediately after the ceremony. She had written to me once
after becoming Ruth Denham, and her letter was kind and cordial
as her old self, but the correspondence thus renewed soon
ceased. I was also an orphan, but a close attendant at the
couch of my invalid aunt; and Ruth’s new strange life was too
crowded with pressing duties to permit her to write regularly
to her girlhood’s companion, whom she had not seen for years.
My aunt had now recovered so far as to indulge a taste for
travel. We were on our way by the great railroad to the Pacific
coast, and we stopped at the small capital of one of the newest
States to discover that Ruth Denham was a resident there, the
wife of the lieutenant-governor, who was consequently the
warden of the State prison. The note I held in my hand was in
answer to one I had despatched to her an hour before by the
hands of a Chinaman from the hotel, and it was as glad and
affectionate as I could wish:

“My husband is quite ill with sciatica, which completely
lames him, as well as causing him intense pain. I am his
only attendant, or I would fly to you at once, my dearest
Jenny. I am so sorry you leave by the midnight train for
San Francisco to-morrow, but must be content to see you as
much of the day as you can spare us, and hope for a longer
visit on your return. We dine at four: may I not send the
carriage for you as early as two o’clock?
“Your loving friend,
“RUTH DENHAM.”

I had my aunt’s permission to leave her, and was ready at
the appointed hour to find the carriage there to the minute;
and a very comfortable, easy conveyance it proved over one of
the worst roads I ever traveled on.

The prison was about a mile from the outskirts of the
straggling town, which boasted two or three fine State
buildings, in strong contrast with its scattering and mostly
mean and shambling dwellings. Some hot springs had been
discovered near the site, and over them had been erected a
wooden hotel and baths of the simplest order of architecture
and on the barest possible plan of ornament or comfort. Just
beyond this edifice was the prison, situated at the rise of one
hill and under the shadow of another and more considerable one.
It was built of a softish, light-colored stone dug from a
neighboring quarry, as the driver told me, and looking even at
a cursory glance too destructible and crumbling to secure such
desperate and determined inmates.

“They used to keep ’em in a sort o’ wooden shed,” said my
driver, alluding to the prisoners, “until they got this shebang
fixed up. Pretty smart lot of chaps they were, for they built
it themselves mostly, and made good time on it, too.”

It was surrounded by a high wooden fence, within which a
stone wall of the same material as the building was in course
of construction.

“If it wasn’t Sunday,” said my companion as we drove through
the guarded gate, “you could see ’em at work, for they’re
putting up their defences, and doing it first-rate, too.”

I had only time for a glance at the inside of the enclosure.
We were already at the principal entrance, which was a wide
door opening into a hall, with a staircase leading up to the
second floor. On the right hand was a strongly-grated iron door
opening into the main corridor between the cells: the other
side seemed to be devoted to offices and quarters for the
guards. I saw knots of men about, but only the two at the
entrance appeared to be armed, and they had that lounging, easy
air, that belongs to security and the absence of thought. It
was in every respect opposite to my preconceived idea of a
penitentiary, and all recollection of its first design fled
when I saw Ruth’s cheery face, bright and handsome
[pg 499] as ever, beaming on me from
the first landing, and felt her warm, firm arms clasping me
in an embrace of affectionate welcome. It was my friend’s
home, and nothing else, from that moment, and a very pretty,
daintily-ordered home it was. She had five rooms on the
second floor, with a kitchen below: this was her parlor in
front, a bright, well-furnished room, tastefully ornamented
with pictures, some of which I recognized as her own
paintings in our school-days; and here was her dining-room
to the left, with a small guest-chamber that she hoped I
would occupy when I returned. The other rooms on the west of
the parlor were hers and Nellie’s—Oh, I had not seen
Nellie, her five-year-old, nor her dear husband, who was so
much better to-day, though he could not rise without
difficulty; and would I therefore come and see him?

As Ruth gave me thus a passing glance at her household
arrangements, I saw through the open door of an apartment back
of the dining-room a light shower of plaster fall to the
ground, marking the oilcloth that covered the floor, and for
one instant sending out into the hall a puff of whitish
dust.

“Oh, that is one of the effects of our terribly dry
climate,” said Ruth, following my glance and noticing the dust:
“every little while portions of our walls crumble and fall in
like that. There is no doubt a sad litter in Mr. Foster the
clerk’s room, where that shower occurred: he has gone to the
city for the day, however, and it can be cleared before his
return. Here is my husband, Jenny.”

In a recess by the parlor window, on a lounge, Mr. Denham
was trying to disguise the necessity for keeping his tortured
limb extended by an appearance of smiling ease. He was a
handsome, frank-faced man, with a firm, fearless eye and a
gentle, kindly mouth, and I could readily understand my
friend’s look of sweet content when I saw him and her child
Nellie, who was hanging over her papa with the fond protecting
air of a precocious nurse. I sat down quickly beside them to
prevent my host’s attempting to rise, and the hour that elapsed
before dinner flew by in interesting conversation.

“I am so sorry I had to go for a little while,” said Ruth,
returning to announce that meal, “but my good Wang-Ho is sick
to-day, and I had to help him a little.”

“Where is Lester, Ruth?” asked her husband.

“Oh, he is kind and helpful as ever, but he does not
understand making dessert, you know, Edward.”

“That’s true, and Miss Jane will excuse you, I am sure, for
she and I have been reviewing the principal features of
pioneer-life, and she professes herself rather in love with it
than otherwise.”

“It is all so fresh and enjoyable, despite its discomforts
and inconveniences,” I said; “and need I quote a stronger
argument in its favor than yourself, my dear Ruth? You seem
perfectly happy, and I really cannot see why you should not be
so.”

She had her golden-haired little girl in one arm, and she
laid the other hand caressingly on her husband’s shoulder,
“There is none: I am happy,” she said in a low, earnest
tone; and then added laughingly, “or I shall be as soon as
Edward gets well of sciatica and Wang-Ho recovers from his
chills.”

Mr. Denham begged us to go before him, and his wife led the
way to the dining-room.

“Poor fellow!” she whispered, “he suffers horribly when he
moves, and I tried to persuade him to have his dinner sent into
the parlor, but in honor of your presence he will come, and he
doesn’t want us to see him wince and writhe under the
effort.”

Just as we entered the dining-room a young man came in by
another door, carrying a tray with dishes. I had seen plenty of
Chinamen, but this was not one, nor could I reconcile his
appearance with the position of a servant. He was tall,
well-made, and his face, though unnaturally pale, was decidedly
good-looking. He wore a pair of coarse gray pantaloons with a
remarkable stripe down one leg, but had on a beautifully clean
and fine, white shirt fastened at the throat
[pg 500] with a diamond button. The
weather was warm, and he was without coat or vest, and had a
sash of red knitted silk, such as Mexicans wear, round his
middle.

Ruth took the dishes from him and placed them on the table.
“Please tell Wang-Ho about the coffee, Lester,” she said as he
retired.

“Is that man a servant, Ruth?” I asked in an astonished
whisper.

“No,” she replied in the same low tone: “he is a murderer
condemned for life.”

Mr. Denham hobbled in and slid down upon a seat. I
appreciated his gallant attention, but it was painful to see
the effort it cost: besides, much as I had seen, and familiar
as I was becoming with pioneer life, to be waited on at dinner
by a young and handsome murderer condemned to prison for life
was a sensation new and startling, and I was full of curiosity
as to the nature of his crime and the peculiar administration
of the Western penal code that made house-servants of convicts.
Seeing my perturbation, Ruth evidently intended to relieve it
by the explanatory remark of “He is a ‘trusty,’ Jenny dear,”
but really threw no light whatever on the subject.

It was a very nice dinner, served tastefully and with a home
comfort about everything connected with the table that seemed
most unlike a prison. Mr. Denham’s intelligence and
cheerfulness added to the delusion that I was enjoying the
hospitalities of a cultivated Eastern home. He and his wife had
kept themselves thoroughly familiar with all topics of general
interest through the medium of periodicals, and had much to ask
about the actual progress of improvements they had read of and
the changes occurring among dear and familiar Eastern
scenes.

Lester came in again with the empty tray, and quietly
gathered the plates from the table preparatory to placing
dessert. I wanted to look at him—indeed, a fascination I
could not resist drew my eyes to his face like a
magnet—yet, somehow, I dared not keep them there: the
consciousness of meeting his glance, and feeling that I should
then be ashamed of my curiosity, made them drop uneasily every
time he turned; and once when I found his gaze rest on me an
instant, I felt myself color violently under the quiet look of
his steel-gray eyes.

One thing was very observable in the little group: the child
Nellie was intensely fond of the man, and he himself seemed to
entertain and constantly endeavor to express an exalted
admiration for Mr. Denham. While the latter was speaking
Lester’s animated looks followed every word and gesture: he
anticipated his unexpressed wishes, and watched to save him the
trouble of moving or asking for anything.

“No, no, Nellie, stay and finish your dinner: Lester is not
quite ready for you yet.” Her mother said this in reference to
the child’s eagerness to follow the trusty attendant from the
room, and her neglect of her meal in consequence. “Nellie is in
the habit of carrying up the sugar and cream for the coffee,
and she thinks Lester cannot possibly get on if she does not
assist,” said Ruth in smiling explanation as Nellie hastened
after him.

The next instant there was the mingled sound of a heavy fall
or succession of falls outside, and one quick, stifled scream
from the child.

“The dumb-waiter, quick! It has broken from its weights and
scalded Nell with the hot coffee,” cried Ruth, making a spring
toward the door by which Lester had gone out.

Her husband, forgetting his lameness, was instantly at her
side, but some force held the door against them both, and
abandoning it after the first effort, the father turned
hurriedly to the one leading into the hall. I sat nearest that,
and in the excitement I had moved quickly aside, so that when
it was flung violently open the moment before my host the
governor of the prison reached it, I was thrust back against
the wall, from which place, half dead with fright, I saw the
hall crowded with convicts, the foremost of whom held a pistol
directly toward Mr. Denham’s head.

It snapped with a sharp report, and when the smoke cleared I
found Mr. Denham had dodged the fire and was
[pg 501] closed in a scuffle with
the villain for the weapon. A dozen more seemed to spring on
him from the threshold; I heard his wife’s cry of agony; and
then the door at the other side burst in, and Lester, with
his gray eyes gleaming like a flame, bounded over the body
of a bloody convict that fell from his grasp as he broke
into the room. Quick as thought he caught up one of the
heavy chairs in his hands, and bringing it down with
desperate force on the heads of the governor’s assailants,
felled one, while the other staggered back and dropped his
pistol. Mr. Denham caught it like a flash, and fired it in
the face of a wretch who was aiming at Lester’s heart. The
convicts fell back, and over their bodies the governor and
his aid sprang into the crowded hall.

“The child! the child! O God! my little daughter!” It was
Ruth’s voice in tones of such anguish and terror as I never
before heard uttered by human voice.

She was looking from the window into the yard below, and
there she beheld Nellie lifted up as a shield against the guns
of the guards by a party of the escaping convicts. The little
creature was deadly white and perfectly silent: her great blue
eyes were wide and frozen with fright, and her little hands
were clasped in entreating agony and stretched toward her
mother.

“Stand behind me and shoot them down, governor,” cried
Lester, dealing steady blows with the now broken chair, and
trying to make his own body a shield for Mr. Denham. The
governor continued to fire on the convicts, who were pouring in
a steady stream down the stairs from out of the room where I
had seen the shower of dust, and through the ceiling of which,
as it was afterward, proved, they had cut a hole, and so
escaped from the upper corridor of the prison.

I tried to hold Ruth in my arms, for in her frenzy to reach
her child she had flung up the window and endeavored to drop
from it at the risk of her life. “They will not dare to hurt
her: God will protect her innocent life,” was all I could say,
when a random ball from below struck the window-frame, and,
glancing off, stunned without wounding the wretched mother. She
fell, jarred by the shock, and I drew her as well as I could
behind the door, on the other side of which lay the two
bleeding prisoners who had tried to take her husband’s
life.

Groans, shouts, curses, yells and pistol-shots sounded in
the hall and on the stairs; only the back of the chair remained
in Lester’s grasp, but heaps of men felled by its weight and
crushed by their struggling fellows had tumbled down and been
kicked over the broken balustrade to the hall below.

The guards had rallied from their surprise, and sparing the
escaped for the sake of the precious shield they bore, turned
their fire upon the escaping, cutting them off until the whole
corridor below was blocked with wounded, dead and dying. One
more man appeared at the clerk’s door: he was a powerful fellow
with a horse-pistol and a stone-hammer. Lester had staggered
back from a flying iron bar aimed at his head by a villain he
struck at without reaching, and who had bounded down the stairs
to receive his death from the guard’s musket at the door. The
prisoner with the horse-pistol saw his advantage, and, cursing
the governor in blasphemous rage, aimed at him as he fled.
Recovering himself, Lester struck for his arm, but not soon
enough to stop the fire: the charge reached its object, but not
his heart, as it was meant to do. It glanced aside, and Mr.
Denham’s pistol dropped: his right arm fell maimed at his side;
but the field was clear, and Lester, catching the fallen
pistol, went down the stairs over the bodies in a series of
flying leaps.

“Where’s my wife?” exclaimed Mr. Denham, turning round
dizzily and trying to steady his head with his uninjured hand.
“Tell her I’ve gone for Nellie;” and he made an effort to rush
after Lester, but, reaching the top of the stairs, dropped
suddenly upon a convict’s body stretched there by his own
pistol. Then I saw by the reddish hole in his trousers just
below the knee that he had been wounded before, though he did
not know it, and was now streaming with
blood.

[pg 502]

“Where’s Nell? where’s Edward?” asked Ruth, sitting up with
a ghastly face, and looking at me in a bewildered stare.

“All right, all safe, tell the lady,” cried a clear,
exulting voice from below: “here’s sweet little Miss Nellie,
without a scratch on her.”

It was Lester’s shout from the yard, and it rang through all
the building.

“Do you hear, Ruth? do you hear?” I screamed, beside myself
with joy and thankfulness. “He has saved your husband a dozen
times, that hero, and now he brings back your child to you. Oh,
what a noble fellow! how I envy him his feelings!”

He was in the room by this time with Nellie in his arms: he
heard me and gave me just one look. I never saw him again, but
I never shall forget it, for it revealed the long agony of a
blighted life that moment struggling into hope again through
expiation. He did not wait for Ruth’s broken cry of gratitude,
but was gone as soon as the child was in her arms.

“Come, boys,” I heard him cry cheerily outside, “lend a hand
to help the governor to his room: he’s got a scratch or two,
and the doctor’s coming to dress them. He will be all right
again before we can get things set straight round here.”

Governor Denham’s wounds were not so slight as Lester hoped,
but they were not dangerous, and when, to prevent my aunt’s
alarm for my safety (for the news of “the break” spread rapidly
through the town), I parted from my friends before nightfall
and rode back to the hotel as I had come, I left three of the
most excitedly grateful and happy people behind me I had ever
seen.

“I suppose it is no use to urge it further, Ruth darling,”
said her husband as we parted, “but I really wish you would go
to San Francisco with our friend and let Nellie have a chance
to forget the shock she has endured. You need the change too,
if you would ever think of yourself.”

“It is because I do think of myself that I prefer to remain
where I am happiest,” said Ruth decidedly. “As for Nell, she is
a pioneer child, and will soon be as merry and fearless as
ever. But, Jenny dear, we owe you an apology for the novel
dinner-party we have given you. When you come back it will seem
like a frightful dream, and not a reality, we shall all be so
quiet and orderly again.” As we stood alone in the hall, from
which every sign of the late terrible conflict had been removed
save the bloodstains that had sunk into the stone beyond the
power of a hasty washing to obliterate, Ruth said in a low
whispering tone that was full of pent-up feeling, “I told you
that Lester was a murderer condemned for life, Jenny, but there
were extenuating circumstances in connection with his crime.
That is not his name we call him by: I do not even know his
real one, but I am convinced that he belongs to educated and
reputable people, and that he suffers the keenest remorse for
the wild life that led him so terribly astray. He became
desperately attached to a Spanish girl, who was married as a
child to a brutal fellow who deserted her, and she thought him
dead. She and Lester were to be married, I believe, when the
missing husband reappeared and tormented them both. The girl he
treated shockingly, and it was in a fit of rage at his abuse of
her that Lester killed him; but appearances were all against
the deed, and he was convicted of murder in the second degree
and sentenced for life. Edward is kind and discriminating, and
he pitied him. Lester told his story freely, and my husband
gained his lasting gratitude by taking care of the wretched
girl and paying her passage in a vessel bound for her native
town in Mexico. The only favor we could show him here was to
separate him from the wretches in the common prison by making
him a ‘trusty’ or prison-servant. He understood our motive in
doing so, and was very thankful and most reliable. What we owe
him to-day you know: he makes light of it, protesting that he
only picked up Nell from the gulch where the escaped convicts
had dropped her on their way to the hills; but he cannot lessen
the debt: it is too great to be calculated
even.”

[pg 503]

The subsequent report proved that twenty-eight prisoners had
conspired to effect the break, and by secreting the tools they
wrought with in their sleeves passed in on Saturday from the
wall-building to cut an entrance through the ceiling of their
own corridor into the loft above Mr. Foster’s room, through
which they dropped while the family were at dinner, choosing
that hour so as to produce a surprise and secure the child, who
always went below with Lester to help carry up the coffee. Of
the whole number, five were killed outright and six wounded:
twelve escaped uninjured, but were nearly all afterward
retaken; and five repented their share in the movement or
lacked courage to carry it out, and so remained in the prison.
The most interesting item of the whole came to me at San
Francisco in my friend’s letter. It said: “We are looking
forward with great delight to your visit, and planning every
pleasure our sterile life can yield to make it enjoyable. But
you will not see Lester: he is gone. His pardon, full and
entire in view of his courage and fidelity, and the manly stand
he took against the murderous plotters, came on Monday last,
and at nightfall he left the prison to go by the stage to meet
the midnight train. ‘To Mexico!’ were his last words to us.
Heaven bless him, and grant him wisdom and courage to retrieve
the past and open a fair bright future!”

MARGARET HOSMER.

FAREWELL.

[From Friederich Bodenstedt’s Aus dem Nachlasse
Mirza-Schaffys.]

Aloft the moon in heaven’s dome.

Sultry the night, tempests
foretelling:

For the last time before I roam

I see the surf in splendor swelling.

A ship glides by, a shadowy form,

Faint roseate lights around me
sparkle,

A gathering mist precedes the storm,

And far-off forest tree-tops darkle.

The silver-crested waves are lashing

The pebbly shore tumultuously:

Absorbed I watch their ceaseless dashing,

Myself as still as bush or tree.

Within arise fond memories

Of moonlight evenings long since
vanished,

Once full of life as waves and breeze,

From this familiar shore now
banished.

Hushed in the grove is the birds’ song,

Spring’s blossoms tempests caused to
perish;

Yet what through eye and ear did throng

The heart for evermore will cherish.

AUBER
FORESTIER.

[pg 504]

THE INSTRUCTION OF DEAF MUTES.

While I was a teacher in the Illinois Institution for the
Deaf and Dumb the following letters were written by some of the
pupils. The first was written the day after Thanksgiving, and
ran thus:

“DEAR MOTHER: We had Thanks be unto God, no school
yesterday, Turkey mince-pies, and many other kinds of
fruits.”

The day after Christmas a boy wrote: “We had Glory to God in
the highest, no school yesterday, and a fine time.” What he
really meant to say was, that they had a motto in evergreens of
“Glory to God in the Highest,” and they had also a holiday.

This motto, by the way, got up by the pupils themselves, was
striking. It was placed over one of the dining-room doors, and
the ceiling being very low it was necessarily put just under
it. A single glance sufficed to show the utter impossibility of
getting the “Glory” any higher.

The younger pupils write in almost every letter, “There are
—— pupils in this institution, —— boys
and —— girls. All of the pupils are well, but some
are sick.” This is English pretty badly broken.

These letters serve to illustrate a remark which Principal
Peet of the New York institution made to me not long ago: “The
great difficulty in instructing deaf mutes is in teaching them
the English language.” In this, of course, he had reference to
the deaf mutes of our own country, and his statement appears,
on its face, paradoxical. That American children should learn
at least to read the English language, even when they cannot
speak it, seems quite a matter of course. The fact is, however,
different. The first disadvantage under which the deaf mute
labors is the limited extent to which his mental powers have
been developed. This deficiency is attributable to two
causes—his deprivation of the immense amount of
information to be gained by the sense of hearing, and his want
of language. Before an infant, one possessed of all its
faculties, has acquired at least an understanding of articulate
language, it has but vague and feeble ideas. No clear, distinct
conception is shaped in its mind. “Ideas,” says M. Marcel in
his essay on the Study of Languages, “are not innate:
they must be received before they can be communicated. This is
so true that native curiosity impels us to listen long before
we can speak…. Impression … must therefore precede
expression.” Real thought, therefore, it will be seen, grows
with the child’s acquisition of language—an acquisition
which is obtained in the earlier years entirely through the
organ of hearing. This principal avenue to the mind is closed
to the deaf mute. It is evident, therefore, that, lacking these
two fundamental sources of all knowledge, his mental growth is
incredibly slower than that of the hearing child. All that can
be learned by means of the other senses is, however, learned
rapidly, these being quickened and stimulated by the absence of
one. Hence, the deaf-mute child of eight or ten years of age
often appears as bright and intelligent as his more favored
playmate. The latter, however, has a store of knowledge and a
fund of thought wholly unknown to the deaf mute.

But it is the want of written language, and the obstacles in
the way of its acquirement, which constitute the chief
disability of the deaf mute in the attempt to gain an
education. If you set a child of seven years of age to learn
Greek, requiring him to receive and express his ideas wholly in
that language, you would not hope for any very clear expression
of those ideas with less than a year’s instruction, nor would
you expect him to appreciate the delicate beauties of the
Odyssey in that length of time. The progress of the deaf
mute in any [pg 505] language, even the most
simply constructed, is greatly slower than that of the
hearing child. The latter is assisted at every step by his
previous knowledge of his vernacular. The former does not
think in words, as you have done from your earliest
recollection. Undertake to do your thinking in a foreign
tongue, of which you have but a limited knowledge: the
attempt is discouraging. The deaf mute thinks in signs.
This, his only vehicle of thought, is a hindrance instead of
a help in learning written language, there being no analogy
whatever between the two methods of expressing ideas.

With these tremendous odds against him the deaf-mute child
is set to the task of acquiring a knowledge of written
language. His ideas (in signs) shape themselves in this wise:
“Horses, two, run fast.” Of course he does not think these
words. The idea of a horse, its shape and color, is probably
imaged in his mind, or if the horse be not present to his
sight, the sign which he uses for that animal comes into his
thought. He next touches or grasps or holds up two of his
fingers, which he uses on all occasions to express number. Then
the idea of running by means of its sign, and lastly that of
speed, suggest themselves, the last two, however, being
probably closely connected, as in our own minds.

Observe, here, that the order in which the thoughts arrange
themselves is different from the manner of those who think by
means of words. The main idea is “horse,” and he gives it the
preference, as the older and more simply constructed languages
always did. It is reserved for our cultured and perfected
language to describe an object before telling what that object
is. Who will say that it is according to philosophical
principles that we say, “A fine large red apple,” instead of
“An apple, fine, red, large”? A deaf-mute boy tells me that he
saw two dogs fighting yesterday. He explains it in signs in
this manner: “Dogs, two, fight; first, second ear bit, blood
much. Second ran, hid; saw yesterday, I.” Thus the fact is
arranged in his mind. Let him attempt to translate—for it
is nothing but translation—this simple statement into
English. The perplexity which first seizes the hapless
school-boy over his “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres” is
nothing to it. Like him, he must go hunting, as if for a needle
in a haystack, for the word to put first. It is the last idea
in his sign-sentence. Then he slowly learns to pick out the
words and arrange them in English order—an order, as I
said before, not founded on philosophical principles, but in
most instances wholly arbitrary. This is by no means an easy
task. Years of training do not ensure him against ludicrous
lapses. A fair percentage of the whole number educated learn to
construct sentences with tolerable accuracy; a smaller
percentage of these acquire fluency, precision and, in some
rare instances, grace of expression; but a large proportion
never become good English scholars.

The method of beginning their instruction is by means of
simple familiar objects, or, where these cannot be obtained,
illustrations of them. A picture of a horse is placed, at one
end of the teacher’s blackboard. Instantly two fingers of each
hand go up to the top of each little head. If it were a picture
of an animal with longer ears, each would make an ass of
himself. So far so good, only they do not know the name of this
animal, familiar as they are with him. The teacher writes the
name under the picture. The article “A” is also written, which,
though it puzzles them, they must take on trust. It cannot be
explained at this stage. The teacher then holds up an ear of
corn. Of course they know that very well, and make the sign for
it, shelling the fore finger. It is then laid upon the opposite
end of the blackboard, and its name written under it. A short
pause, with a glance first at the horse and then at the corn,
soon brings out the sign for “eats,” which is written in its
proper place, and the sentence is complete. The little
“ignorants,” as they are dubbed by the older pupils, are then
plunged head and ears into the task of learning to form the
written characters as well as the construction of sentences.
[pg 506] It is setting foot in an
unexplored wilderness. No ray of light penetrates the
darkness of that wilderness save the tiny torch just placed
in their hands.

Mr. Isaac Lewis Peet, principal of the New York institution,
before referred to in this paper, has lately been preparing a
textbook for the use of deaf-mute instructors, which promises
to be of great value. It reduces the whole of the earlier
stages of instruction to a perfected system, by which each part
of speech, with the various moods and tenses of the verbs, the
different cases of nouns, etc., is brought out in successive
stages entirely by means of sentences. A few illustrations will
suffice to show the scope of the work, which promises to be of
much value also in the ordinary school-room, for which it is
likewise designed by the author. An object, such as a pitcher,
is placed on the teacher’s desk. A pupil is required to come
forward and touch it. The teacher then asks the question,
writing it upon the blackboard or spelling it upon his fingers,
“What did John do?” Answer, “He touched the pitcher.” A change
from a boy to a girl brings out another pronoun; a change of
objects, another noun; a change of actions, another verb.

In this way, by gradual, systematic stages, the language is
taught by actual and constant use, the teacher doing away
entirely with signs in the school-room. This is an end
constantly aimed at in deaf-mute instruction, as it forces the
pupils to use language instead of signs to express their
thoughts. By constant effort at first, and constant practice,
words gradually take the place of signs in their modes of
thought, though not perhaps entirely.

Objective ideas are readily acquired by deaf mutes, their
perceptive faculties being usually keen and quick. Abstract
subjects are less readily apprehended, and sometimes cause
great surprise. One Sunday morning Dr. Gillett, principal of
the Illinois institution, had for the Scripture lesson in the
chapel the “Resurrection.” When he had made it plain and simple
for the comprehension of the new pupils, some of the ideas,
brought out by the lesson caused great astonishment, and even
consternation among them. The little fellows shook their heads
in utter skepticism at the thought of themselves dying.

“I’m not going to die,” said one. “Sick people die: I’m well
and strong;” standing on his feet and shaking his arms in
attestation of the fact.

“But you will be sick some time,” said Dr. G., “and you will
have to die.”

But they did not believe him in the least. The next morning
one little fellow met the principal and said, “You said
yesterday I was going to die: well, here I am, and I ain’t dead
yet.”

On Monday morning, when they assembled in school, they were
still full of the new ideas. “Dr. Gillett had said they all had
to die: would they, truly?” they asked me. I could only confirm
the statement. Whereupon they all began drawing graves,
tombstones, weeping willows, and all such funereal
paraphernalia upon the blackboards. It was a solemn scene, save
for my own irrepressible laughter, which they thought very
unaccountable when they learned that I must suffer a like fate.
I explained as cheerfully as I could the delights of going to
heaven, whereupon one boy burst into tears, saying he did not
want to go to heaven: he would rather go home and see his
mother.

One asked if we should go to heaven in the cars. I said I
had been told that we should go through the air, perhaps fly
there. A little girl immediately held up a wood-cut of a
vulture, saying, “Ugly thing! I don’t want to be one.” A boy
whose new skates lay spoiling for the ice in his trunk asked if
he could skate there. Not having quite the faith of the author
of Gates Ajar, I could not answer “Yes” unhesitatingly.
A girl asked if fishes went to heaven. I answered “No.” “Where,
then?” I replied that we ate the fishes, but was greatly
troubled afterward lest she should confound me with the
question, “What becomes of the snakes?”

In addition to the ordinary one-hand alphabet, the only one
commonly used by deaf mutes, there are five others.
[pg 507] One of these is the
two-hand alphabet, sometimes used by hearing children at
school. It is clumsy and inconvenient, however. A second is
made by the arms alone. Still a third is formed by means of
the body and arms also, in various positions, to represent
the different letters, and is used in signaling at a
distance. It is not often learned by deaf mutes, however. A
fourth is made entirely with the feet. But the most curious
of all is the facial or expression alphabet. Various
emotions and passions expressed on the face represent, by
means of their initial letters, the letters of the alphabet.
Thus, A is indicated by an expression of avarice, B by
boldness, C by curiosity, D by devotion, etc. This alphabet
is sometimes so admirably rendered that words can easily be
spelled by means of it by the spectators.

Deaf mutes also excel in pantomime. A large amount of
gesture and pantomime is naturally employed in their
conversation, and it thus becomes easy to train them to perform
pantomimic plays. I have seen one young man, a deaf mute, whose
narration in this manner of a hunter who made a pair of
buckskin breeches, hung them up during the summer, drew them on
when the rainy season came on, and found a hornet’s nest
within, was interpreted amid roars of laughter. Thus told, it
was far more vivid than words could have possibly made it, and
infinitely more amusing.

The sign-language, growing slowly from natural
signs—i.e., signs representing the shape, quality or use
of objects, or the action expressed by verbs—has at
length become a perfected system. This language is the same
throughout Europe and America, so that deaf mutes from any
country of Christendom who have acquired the regular system can
readily communicate with each other, however diverse their
nationality. Being formed from analogy, many of the signs are
exceedingly expressive. Thus, the sign for “headache” is made
by darting the two forefingers toward each other just in front
of the forehead. The sign for “summer” is drawing the curved
forefinger across the brow, as if wiping off the sweat. “Heat,”
or rather “hotness,” is expressed by blowing with open mouth
into the hand, and then shaking it suddenly as if burned.
“Flame” and “fire” are represented by a quivering, upward
motion of all the fingers. The memory of the ancient ruffled
shirt of our forefathers is perpetuated in the sign for
“genteel,” “gentility” or “fine.” It is the whole open hand,
with fingers pointing upward, shaken in front of the breast.
“Gentleman” and “lady” are expressed by the signs for “man”
(the hat-brim) and “woman” (the bonnet-string), followed by the
ruffled-shirt sign. The sign for “Jesus” is doubtless the most
tender and touching in the whole language. It is made by
touching the palm of each hand in succession with the middle
finger of the other. This represents the print of the nails.
The name “Jesus” itself does not convey so pathetic and
expressive a meaning as does this sign.

Hearing persons who understand the sign-language sometimes
find it exceedingly convenient as a means of communicating when
they wish to be private, I remember an amusing incident
occurring at a festival which I attended while teaching in the
Illinois institution. Another teacher and myself sat apart,
surrounded by entire strangers. Near by stood a lady in a
gorgeous green silk dress, with many gaudy accessories. My
companion remarked in signs to me upon her striking costume. I
replied in like manner, expressing my appreciation of so
magnificent a proportion of apple-green silk. There was a great
deal of lady, but a great deal more of dress.

“See them dummies, Jake,” she remarked to her husband at her
side, whose dazzling expanse of bright-figured velvet waistcoat
and massive gold chain was in admirable keeping with his wife’s
attire. It was a landscape, begging the word, after
Turner’s own heart. “Them’s two dummies from the asylum, I
know,” she continued. “Let’s watch ’em make signs.” And she
gazed upon us from the serene heights of green sward with an
amused, patronizing smile.

We dared not laugh. Dummies we had been dubbed, and dummies
we must [pg 508] remain to the end of the
scene. Were ever mortals in such a fix? We talked
them over well, however, while suffering tortures
from our pent-up emotions.

“That there one’s rayther good-looking,” ventured the
proprietor of the velvet and gold.

“Not so mighty, either,” said his wife, bridling. “Face is
too chalky-like, and the other one is too fat.” This was near
being the death of us both, as the two critics together would
have turned the scale at near five hundred. Consternation
seized us just then, however, as we saw a fellow-teacher
approaching us who would be sure to address us in spoken
language and reveal us as two cheats. Hastily retreating from
the scene, we made our way to an anteroom, where it was not
considered a sin to laugh.

The instruction of deaf mutes in articulate speech has of
late years attracted considerable attention in both Europe and
America. In some of the European schools, in the Clark
Institute at Northampton, Massachusetts, and in a few of our
State institutions it is brought to great perfection. There are
also special schools for this system of teaching in most of our
large cities. The majority of pupils in these schools converse
with ease, and understand readily what is said to them by means
of the motion of the lips. The Clark Institute at Northampton,
already referred to, under the conduct of Miss Harriet Rogers,
is the largest and most widely known of the schools for this
special method of instruction in this country. This is not a
State institution, but one endowed by the munificence of a
private gentleman, and consequently subject to none of the
restrictions imposed on the public institutions. Of course,
only the most promising pupils are sent there, and from these a
careful selection is made, by which means the highest possible
success is ensured. Some of the State institutions, however,
burdened as they are with a large and unassorted mass of
pupils, have made most encouraging progress in this direction.
Of these, one of the most successful is the Illinois
institution. In its last published report the correspondence
between the principal and the parents of those pupils who have
been taught by this method is given, showing the utmost
satisfaction at the progress made and results attained.

Deaf mutes are divided into two classes—viz., entire
mutes and semi-mutes. The first comprises those who either have
been born deaf or have become so at so early an age as to have
retained no knowledge of articulate speech. The second class
embraces those who have lost their hearing after attaining such
an age as still to be able to talk. Speech is more easily and
perfectly learned if the pupil has learned to read before the
loss of hearing. A knowledge of the sounds and powers of the
letters enables him to acquire the pronunciation of new words
with much greater facility than would be otherwise possible,
giving him a foundation on which to build his acquisition of
spoken language. To this last class, semi-mutes, articulation
is invaluable, enabling them to pursue their education with
less difficulty, and also to retain their power of
communication with the outside world. In regard to entire
mutes, the utility of the accomplishment is seriously
questioned by some experienced educators. The fact must be
admitted that, while a much larger number of entire mutes can
be taught to converse intelligently and agreeably than would be
imagined by those unacquainted with the results obtained, the
great mass of the deaf and dumb must still be instructed wholly
by means of written language. In most instances, to ensure
success, instruction should be begun at a very much earlier age
than it is possible to receive them into school, and constantly
practiced by all who hold communication with the pupil, doing
away entirely with the habit of using signs. It also requires
pupils of bright, quick mind, keen perceptive faculties, and an
amount of intelligence and perseverance on the part of the
parents not found in the average parent of deaf mutes; for it
is well known that a very large proportion of deaf mutes come
from the poorer and more illiterate classes. This is mainly
attributable to the fact that by far the larger number lose
their hearing in [pg 509] infancy or early childhood
through disease—scarlet fever, measles and diphtheria
being probably the most frequent causes of deafness. Among
those able to give skillful nursing and to obtain good
medical aid the number of cases resulting in deafness is
reduced to a minimum. Accidents, too, causing deafness,
occur more frequently among those unable to give their
children proper care. Congenital deafness is also probably
greater among the laboring classes, and is undoubtedly due
to similar causes.

The methods used in the teaching of articulation form a
subject of much interest. The system has materially changed
within the past few years. The first step to be taken is to
convey a knowledge of the powers of the consonants and sounds
of the vowels. Formerly, this was done by what was called the
“imitation method.” The letter H was usually the point of
attack, the aspirate being the simplest of all the powers of
the letters. The teacher, holding up the hand of the pupil,
makes the aspirate by breathing upon his palm. This is soon
imitated, and thus a starting-point is gained. The feeling
produced upon the hand is the method of giving him an idea of
the powers of the consonants. A later and better system is that
called “visible speech.” This is a system of symbols
representing positions of the mouth and tongue and all the
organs of speech, and if the pupil does what the symbols direct
he cannot help giving the powers of the letters correctly. By
this method a more distinct and perfect articulation is gained,
with one-half the labor of the other method. As fast as the
powers of the letters are learned, the spelling of words is
undertaken. Many words are pronounced perfectly after a few
trials: others, however, often defy the most strenuous and
persevering effort.

Entire mutes who undertake articulation are like hearing
children endeavoring to keep up the full curriculum of a modern
school and pursue the study of music in addition: the ordinary
studies demand all the energies of the child. Articulation
consumes much time and strength. Exceptional cases are of
course to be found which are indeed a triumph of culture, but
the great mass of the deaf and dumb must always be content with
written language.

Articulation is also exceedingly trying to the unused or
long-disused throat and lungs. In this the teachers are
likewise sufferers. The tax upon the vocal organs is
necessarily much greater than that in ordinary speaking
schools. But the disuse of the vocal organs in articulate
speech does not indicate that they are wholly unused. A lady
visiting an institution for the deaf and dumb a few years ago
poetically called the pupils the “children of silence.”
Considering the tremendous volume of noise they are able to
keep up with both feet and throat, the title is amusingly
inappropriate. A deaf-and-dumb institution is the noisiest
place in the world.

In summing up the results usually attained, let no
discontented taxpayer grumble at the large outlays annually
made in behalf of the deaf and dumb. If they learned absolutely
nothing in the school-room, the intelligence they gain by
contact with each other, by the lectures in signs, by
intercourse with teachers, and the regular and systematic
physical habits acquired, are of untold value. Add to this a
tolerable acquaintance with the common English branches, such
as reading, writing, arithmetic—one of their most useful
acquirements—geography and history, and we have an amount
of education which is of incalculable value.

JENNIE EGGLESTON
ZIMMERMAN.

[pg 510]

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

THE CITY OF VIOLETS.

Wartburg, with its pleasant memories of delightful
excursions during the previous summer, was covered with snow,
as if buried in slumber, when I dashed past it on the 25th of
March. A gray mantle of mist obscured the sky, and by all the
roadsides stood bushes loaded with green buds shivering in the
frosty air. The exquisite landscape, which I had last seen
glowing with such brilliant hues, now appeared robed in one
monotonous tint of gray, and the ancient towers and pointed
roofs of Weimar loomed with a melancholy aspect through the
dense fog. Only the welcome of my faithful friends, Gerhard
Rohlfs and his pretty, fair-haired wife, was blithe and gay.
The brave desert wanderer and bird of passage has now built
himself a little wigwam or nest near the railway-station: the
grand duke of Weimar gave him for the purpose a charming piece
of ground with a delightful view. On the 25th of March a light
veil of snow still rested on the ground, but two days later we
were listening to the notes of the lark and gathering violets
to take to Schiller’s house and adorn the table of the beloved
singer. Everything was illumined by the brilliant
sunlight—the narrow bedstead on which he died, and all
the numerous withered laurel-wreaths and bouquets of flowers
that filled it—while outside, in Schiller’s little
garden, in the bed where his bust is placed, violets nodded at
us between the leaves of the luxuriant ivy.

And we carried in our hands bouquets of violets when we
stood before Goethe’s house to pay our respects to the lady who
in these bustling days remains a revered memento of the times
of Carl Augustus and his poet-friend—Ottilie von Goethe.
The beloved daughter-in-law of the great master of song lives
in the poet’s house in the utmost seclusion: few strangers know
that she receives visitors. Only on rare occasions is the
classic little salon opened in the evening to a select
few—only now and then, when the health of the aged lady
permits it, a circle of faithful friends gather round her
listening eagerly to her vivid descriptions of long-past days.
The grand duke himself often knocks at this door, and the grand
duchess and princesses take pleasure in coming hither. With
deep emotion we crossed the threshold over which Goethe’s
coffin was borne, and with light step ascended the broad, easy
staircase of the house that we had so often heard described.
Half-effaced frescoes, which had gleamed over the head of the
king of poesy, looked down upon us, and our eyes wandered over
the bronze figures past which Goethe had walked day after
day.

On reaching the second story, Ottilie von Goethe came
forward to greet us, looking like an apparition from another
world. Her figure was small and fragile, but there was an
aristocratic repose in all her movements. A white lace cap
trimmed with dark-red velvet bows rested on her hair, which was
arranged over her temples in thick gray curls, framing her
face, from which a pair of brown eyes greeted us with a bright,
cordial glance. A white knit shawl covered her shoulders and a
black silk dress fell around her in ample folds. At her side
stood her younger sister, a canoness, who was paying her a few
days’ visit—an amiable lady with a very cheerful
temperament. Ottilie von Goethe shared the violets with her. An
easy conversation commenced. Frau von Goethe was very much
interested in Herr Rohlfs’ travels and Edward Vogel’s fate, and
said that one of her grandsons also cherished the same ardent,
restless longing to see foreign countries and people. Then she
spoke of her own journeys to Italy, “a long, long time ago,”
and of the charms of Venice and Verona. Underlying the words
was a slight tone of regret that she was now not only bound to
the spot, [pg 511] but also to the house, for
invalids cannot venture out of doors to enjoy the spring
until the first of May, and September drives them back into
their quiet cell. “How often one longs for a distant
horizon!” she sighed. My eyes wandered over the wilderness
of ancient roofs upon which the windows of Goethe’s house
looked out, and discovered a small spot where the blue
mountain-peaks appeared.

“Why, there is a distant horizon!” I involuntarily
exclaimed.

“Ah, but even that is so near!” replied Frau von Goethe,
smiling.

The room where we were, as well as the adjoining apartment
into which we were allowed to peep, was full of relics of all
kinds. Each article probably had its special history, from the
paintings and drawings on the walls and the old-fashioned
chests, chairs and tables, to the cups, vases, glasses,
coverlets, and cushions arranged in the neatest order, some
standing or lying around the apartment, others visible through
the glass doors of a cupboard. But the most interesting object
to me was the portrait of Goethe painted by Stieler. It has
been made familiar to all by copies, and represents the poet,
though at an advanced age, in the full possession of his
physical strength. He holds in his hand a letter, from which he
is in the act of looking up: the face is turned slightly aside.
It seems as if the glance was one of greeting to some friend
who is just entering. The colors are still wonderfully fresh
and the expression bewitching. The large eyes beam with the
fire of genius, Olympian majesty is enthroned upon the brow,
and the curve of the lips possesses unequaled grace and beauty.
A more aristocratic, noble mouth cannot be imagined. Who could
have resisted the eloquence of those lips?

“This picture is not in the least idealized: it is a perfect
likeness of my father-in-law,” observed Frau von Goethe, and
added that this portrait by Stieler was one of the best which
had ever been painted. Not far from the superb portrait of the
father appears the melancholy face of the son, August von
Goethe, but I sought in vain for a picture of the bud so early
broken, Goethe’s granddaughter, the lovely Alma, who died in
Vienna.

Fran von Goethe noticed with evident pleasure our eager
interest in her surroundings, and showed us many a relic. As
she spoke of the radiance of those long-past days which still
gilded her quiet life, she seemed to me like the venerable
figure in the tale of the “Seven Ravens,” who relates marvelous
stories to a listening group. Gradually a throng of shapes from
the dim past entered the small room and gathered round the
speaker, who suddenly became transfigured by the light of
youth. She was again the poet’s cheerful nurse, the fair flower
of the household, the happy mother, the intellectual woman, the
centre of a brilliant circle. I gazed as if at a buried world,
which suddenly became once more alive: its inhabitants, clad in
antique garments, walked past us, stared in astonishment, and
seemed to say, We too were happy and beloved, feted and
praised, the blue sky arched over us also, and we plucked
violets and rejoiced in their fragrance till the deep, heavy
sleep came.

Wait—only wait:

Soon thou too will rest.

It was a cold, feeble hand I respectfully kissed at parting,
and I remained under its spell, lingering in the strange world
conjured up by Ottilie von Goethe, till we stood before
Goethe’s pretty summer-house and the blue violets peeped at us
from the turf. The windows stood wide open, the mild breeze
swept gently in, and the sun also looked to see if everything
was in order in “der alte Herr’s” rooms. Far away between the
trees gleamed the white pillars of the house, and the ground at
our feet was covered with a blue carpet. It is said that
nowhere in North Germany are there so many violets as in the
vicinity of Weimar. And why? Because, as the people poetically
say, “der alte Herr,” whenever he went to walk, always filled
his pockets with violet-seeds, and scattered them everywhere
with lavish hands.

ELISE
POLKO.

[pg 512]

LA BEFANA.

Putting out of the question the Piazza of St. Peter’s with
Bernini’s encircling colonnades, which is a special thing and
unlike anything else in the world, the Piazza Navona is the
handsomest piazza in Rome. It is situated in the thickest and
busiest part of the city, far out of the usual haunts of the
foreign residents, and nearly in the centre of that portion of
the city which is enclosed between the Corso and the great
curving sweep of the Tiber. It is handsome, not only from its
great space and regular shape—a somewhat elongated double
cube—but from its three fountains richly ornamented with
statuary of no mean artistic excellence, and from the clean and
convenient pavement which, intended for foot-passengers only,
occupies all the space save a carriage-way close to the houses
encircling it. This large extent of pavement, well provided
with benches, and protected from the incursion of carriages,
which make almost every other part of Rome more or less unsafe
for all save the most wide-awake passengers, renders the Piazza
Navona a playground specially adapted for nurses and their
charges, who may generally be seen occupying it in considerable
numbers. But on the occasion on which I wish to call the
reader’s attention to it the scene it presents is a very
different and far more locally characteristic one.

We will suppose it to be about midnight on the fifth of
January, the day preceding the well-known revel, now come to be
mainly a children’s festival, which English people call Twelfth
Night and celebrate by the consumption of huge plumcakes and
the drawing of lots for the offices of king and queen of the
revels. The Italians call it the festival of the “Befana,” the
word being a readily-perceived corruption of “Epifania.” Of
course the sense and meaning of the original term have been
entirely forgotten, and the Befana of the Italian populace is a
sort of witch, mainly benevolent indeed, and especially
friendly to children, to whom in the course of the night she
brings presents, to be found by them in the morning in a
stocking or a shoe or any other such fantastic hiding-place.
But Italians are all more or less children of a larger growth,
and at Rome especially the populace of all ages, ever ready for
circenses in any form, make a point of “keeping” the
festival of the Befana, who holds her high court on her own
night in the Piazza Navona.

We will betake ourselves thither about midnight, as I have
said. It is a bitterly cold night, and the stars are shining
brilliantly in the clear, steely-looking sky—such a night
as Rome has still occasionally at this time of year, and as she
used to have more frequently when Horace spoke of incautious
early risers getting nipped by the cold. One of the first
things that strikes us as we make our way to the place of
general rendezvous muffled in our thickest and heaviest cloaks
and shawls is the apparent insensibility of this people to the
cold. One would have expected it to be just the reverse. But
whether it be that their organisms have stored up such a
quantity of sunshine during the summer as enables them to defy
the winter’s cold, or whether their Southern blood runs more
rapidly in their veins, it is certain that men, women and
children—and especially the women—will for
amusement’s sake expose themselves to a degree of cold and
inclement weather that a Northerner would shrink from.

For some days previously, in preparation for the annual
revel, a series of temporary booths have by special permission
of the municipality been erected around the piazza. In these
will be sold every kind of children’s toys—of the more
ordinary sorts, that is to say; for Roman children have never
yet been rendered fastidious in this respect by the artistic
inventions that have been provided for more civilized but
perhaps not happier childhood. There will also be a store of
masks, colored dominoes, harlequins’ dresses, monstrous and
outrageous pasteboard noses, and, especially and above all,
every kind of contrivance for making a noise. In this latter
kind the peculiar and characteristic specialty of the day are
straight tin trumpets some four or five feet in length. These
are in [pg 513] universal request among
young and old; and the general preference for them is
justified by the peculiarly painful character of the note
which they produce. It is a very loud and vibrating sound of
the harshest possible quality. One feels when hearing it as
if the French phrase of “skinning the ears” were not a
metaphorical but a literal description of the result of
listening to the sound. And when hundreds of blowers of
these are wandering about the streets in all parts of the
town, but especially in the neighborhood of the Piazza
Navona, making night hideous with their braying, it may be
imagined that those who go to their beds instead of doing
homage to the Befana have not a very good time of it
there.

It is a curious thing that the Italians, who are denizens of
“the land of song,” should take especial delight in mere
abundance of discordant noise. Yet such is unquestionably the
case. They are in their festive hours the most noisy people on
earth. And the farther southward you go the more pronounced and
marked is the propensity. You may hear boys and men imitating
the most inharmonious and vociferous street-cries solely for
the purpose of exercising their lungs and making a noise. The
criers of the newspapers in the streets must take an
enthusiastic delight in their trade; and I have heard boys in
the street who had no papers to sell, and nothing on earth to
do with the business, screaming out the names of the different
papers at the hour of their distribution at the utmost stretch
of their voices, and for no reason on earth save the pleasure
of doing it—just as one cock begins to crow when he hears
another.

The crowd on the piazza is so thick and close-packed that it
is a difficult matter to move in any direction when you are
once within it, but good-humor and courtesy are universal. An
Italian crowd is always the best-behaved crowd in the
world—partly, I take it, from the natural patience of the
people, and the fact that nobody is ever in a hurry to move
from the place in which he may happen to be; and partly as a
consequence of the general sobriety. Even on such a night of
saturnalia as this of the Befana very little drunkenness is to
be seen. Although the crowd is so dense that every one’s
shoulder is closely pressed against that of his neighbor, there
is a great deal of dancing going on. Here and there a ring is
formed, carved out, as it were, from the solid mass of human
beings, in which some half dozen couples are revolving more or
less in time to the braying of a bagpipe or scraping of a
fiddle, executing something which has more or less semblance to
a waltz. The mode in which these rings are formed is at once
simple and efficacious. Any couple who feel disposed to dance
link themselves together and begin to bump themselves against
their immediate neighbors. These accept the intimation with the
most perfect good-humor, and assist in shoving back those
behind them. A space is thus gained in the first instance
barely enough for the original couple to gyrate in. But by
violently and persistently dancing up against the foremost of
the little ring the area is gradually enlarged: first one other
couple and then another are moved to follow the example, and
they in their turn assist in bumping out the limits of the ring
till it has become some twenty feet or so in diameter. These
impromptu ball-rooms rarely much exceed that size, but dozens
of them may be found in the course of one’s peregrinations
around the large piazza. The occupants of some of them will be
found to consist of town-bred Romans, and those of others of
people from the country. There is no mistaking them one for the
other, and the two elements rarely mingle together. The
differences to be observed in the bearing and ways of the two
are not a little amusing, and often suggestive of
considerations not uninstructive to the sociologist. The
probabilities are that the music in the case of the first
mentioned of the above classes will be found to consist of a
fiddle—in that of the latter, of a bagpipe, the old
classical cornamusa, which has been the national
instrument of the hill-country around the Campagna for it would
be dangerous to say how [pg 514]
many generations. In either case there seems to be an intimate
connection between the music and the spirit of the public for
which it is provided. The peasant of the Campagna and of the
Latian, Alban and Sabine hills takes his pleasure, even that of
the dance, as an impertinent Frenchman said of us Anglo-Saxons,
moult tristement. That indescribable air of sadness
which, as so many observers have concurred in noting, broods
over the district which they inhabit seems to have communicated
itself to the inmost nature and character of the populations.
They are a stern, sad, sombre and silent race, for what I have
said above of a tendency to noisiness and vociferation must be
understood to apply to the town-populations only. Their dance
is generally much slower than that of the city-folk. In these
latter days increased communication has taught some of them to
assimilate their dancing with more or less successful imitation
to the waltz, but in many cases these parties of peasants may
still be seen practicing the old dances, now wholly unknown in
the city. But whether they are keeping to their old figures and
methods or endeavoring to follow new ones, the difference in
their bearing is equally striking. The dancing of peasants must
necessarily be for the most part heavy and awkward, but despite
this the men of the Campagna and the hills are frequently not
without a certain dignity of bearing, and the women often,
though perhaps not quite so frequently, far from devoid of
grace. Especially may the former quality be observed if, as is
likely, the dancers belong to the class of mounted herdsmen,
who pass their lives on horseback, and whose exclusive duty it
is to tend the herds of half-wild cattle that roam over the
plains around Rome. These are the “butteri” of whom I wrote on
a former occasion in these pages—the aristocracy of the
Campagna. And it is likely that dancers on the Piazza Navona on
a Befana night should belong to this class, for the Campagna
shepherd is probably too poor, too abject and too little
civilized to indulge in any such pastime.

Little of either grace or dignity will be observed in the
Terpsichorean efforts of the Roman plebs of the present
day. Lightness, brio, enjoyment and an infinite amount
of “go” may be seen, and plenty of laughter heard, and
“lazzi”—sallies more or less imbued with wit, or at least
fun, and more or less repeatable to ears polite. But there is a
continual tendency in the dancing to pass into horse-play and
romping which would not be observed among the peasantry. In a
word, there is a touch of blackguardism in the city circles,
which phase could not with any justice or propriety be applied
to the country parties.

But it is time to go home. The moon is waning: suadentque
cadentia sidera somnum, if only there were any hope of
being able to be persuaded by their reasonable suggestions. But
truly the town seems to afford little hope of it. We make our
way out of the crowd with some difficulty and more patience,
and are sensible of a colder nip in the January night-air as we
emerge from it into the neighboring streets. But even there,
though the racket gradually becomes less as we leave the piazza
behind us, there is in every street the braying of those
abominable tin trumpets, and we shall probably turn wearily in
our beds at three or four in the morning and thank Heaven that
the Befana visits us but once a year.

T.A.T.

ERNESTO ROSSI.

The stage of Paris has long been conceded to be the first in
the world. In France the player is not only born—he must
be made. Before the embryo performer achieves the honors of a
public début he has been trained in the classes of the
Conservatoire to declaim the verse of Racine and to lend due
point and piquancy to the prose of Molière. He is taught
to tread in the well-beaten path of French dramatic art, fenced
in and hedged around with sacred traditions. If he attempts to
embody any one of the characters of the classic drama, every
tone, every gesture, every peculiarity of make-up, every shade
and style in his costume, is prescribed to
[pg 515] him beforehand. Originality
of treatment and of conception is above all things to be
avoided. So spoke Molière, so looked Lekain, so
stepped Talma; therefore all the succeeding generations of
players must so speak and look and walk. Let us imagine the
process transferred to our English stage—the shades of
Burbage and Betterton prescribing how Hamlet and Richard
III. should be played—the manners of the seventeenth
century forcibly transferred to our modern stage. The
process would be intolerable. Worse still, it would have the
effect on our comparatively undramatic race of crushing out
every spark of originality and of wholly hindering the
development of histrionic talent. With the French such
results are happily, to a certain extent, impossible. There
is scarcely any French man or woman of ordinary intelligence
who does not possess sufficient capacity for acting to be
capable of being trained into a very fair performer. The
preponderance of beautiful women on the French stage above
those to be found in other stations of life may be accounted
for on the ground that any young girl of the lower classes
possessing extraordinary beauty and ordinary intelligence
can readily, from the bent of her national characteristics,
be trained into an actress. But while the high-comedy
theatres and those of the melodrama flourish, there can be
no doubt but that the highest type of acting finds no chance
for development in France. The actor who possesses one spark
of genius soon escapes from the galling fetters of
classicism and tradition, and takes refuge in comedy or in
melodrama. Thus did Frédéric Lemaître in
his prime, and thus, too, in later days, did the
accomplished and brilliant Lafontaine.

From these causes, or from others of a kindred nature, the
French tragic stage has within our generation possessed no
actor of commanding genius. One actress indeed adorned it for a
few brief years—the great Rachel. But she, strange and
unnatural production of unnatural art, was a phenomenon, and
one not likely to be soon reproduced. The art of the
Comédie Française is to-day inimitable. Like
Thalberg’s playing, it is the very apotheosis of the
mechanical. There talent is trained and cut and trimmed into
one set fashion, till the very magnitude of the work becomes
imposing, as the gardens of Le Nôtre in their grand
extent almost console the spectator for the absence of virgin
forests and of free-gushing streams. But could the forest be
brought side by side with the parterre, could Niagara pour its
emerald floods or Trenton its amber cascades side by side with
the Fountain of Latona or the Great Basin of Neptune, Nature,
terrible in her grandeur, would rule supreme. Such has been the
comparison afforded by the appearance of Ernesto Rossi on the
Parisian stage. It was Shakespeare and genius coming into
direct competition with perfectly-trained talent and with
Racine.

Early last October a modest announcement was made that
Signor Rossi would give two performances at the Salle
Ventadour, one of them to be for the benefit of the sufferers
by the Southern inundations. Othello was the play
selected for both occasions. The first night arrived. The
unlucky opera-house, shorn of its ancient popularity, was not
half filled. Public curiosity was not specially aroused. Nobody
cared particularly to see an Italian actor perform in a
translation of a play by an English dramatist. Of the scanty
audience present, fully one-half were Italians, and the rest
were mostly English, lured thither by the desire of comparing
the new actor with his great rival, Salvini. There was a
sprinkling of Americans and a scanty representation of the
Parisian public.

When Othello came upon the stage the foreign actor received
but a cool and unenthusiastic greeting. His appearance was a
disappointment to those familiar with the majestic bearing and
picturesque garb of Salvini. His dress was unbecoming, and the
dusky tint of his stage complexion accorded ill with his blue
eyes. Then, too, his conception of the character jarred on the
ideas of those who had seen the other great Italian actor. It
was hard to dethrone the majestic
[pg 516] and princely Moor, the
stately general of Salvini’s conception, to give place to
the frank, free-hearted soldier, intoxicated with the
gladness of successful wooing, that Rossi brings before us.
Certain melodramatic points, also, in the earlier acts, such
as the “Ha!” wherewith Rossi with upraised arms starts from
Desdemona when Brabantio reminds him

“She has deceived her father, and may thee,”

seemed exaggerated and out of place. In the scenes with Iago
he equaled Salvini, yet did not in any one point surpass him.
Nor did he in any way imitate him. The fury of the two Othellos
is widely different. Salvini is the fiercer, for Rossi’s rage
has a background of intensest suffering. One is an enraged
tiger, the other a wounded lion. Both are maddened—the
one with wrath, the other with pain. But in the last act, with
the unutterable anguish of its closing scenes—the swift
remorse, the unavailing agony of that noble nature, too late
undeceived, the wild, pathetic tenderness wherewith Othello
clasped the dead Desdemona to his heart, smoothing back her
loosened tresses with an inarticulate cry of almost superhuman
love and woe—the horror of the catastrophe was all
swallowed up in a sympathy whose pain was wellnigh too great to
be aroused by mimic despair. The fall of the curtain was
greeted with a tempest of applause. Men sprang to their feet
and wildly waved their hats in the air. Shouts of “Bravo,
Rossi!” and “Vive Rossi!” arose on all sides. Ladies stood up
in the boxes waving their handkerchiefs, and every hand and
throat joined in the universal uproar. Before noon the next day
every seat in the house was engaged for the second
representation. The great actors of the French stage came to
study the acting of this new genius who had so suddenly made
his appearance in their midst. To this sudden success succeeded
the announcement of a prolonged engagement, the failing health
of the younger Rossi having decided his father to relinquish
all immediate idea of an American tour.

The second character that Rossi assumed was Hamlet, and in
this he achieved the greatest success of his Parisian
engagement. The opera of Thomas had rendered the public
familiar with the personage of the hero, and the magnates of
the Grand Opera came to the Salle Ventadour to study this new
and forcible presentment of the baritone prince, who wails and
warbles through the operatic travesty of Shakespeare’s
masterpiece. That the impersonation will prove wholly
acceptable to all Shakespearian critics in England or America
is extremely doubtful. For the Hamlet of Rossi is
mad—undeniably, unmistakably mad—from the moment of
his interview with the Ghost. But once accept that view, and
the characterization stands unrivaled upon our modern stage.
Nothing can be imagined at once more powerful or more pathetic
than that picture of a “noble mind o’erthrown,” alternating
between crushed, hopeless misery and wild
excitement—thirsting for the rest and peace that only
death can bestow, yet shrinking from the fearful leap into the
dim unknown beyond the grave. The scene with the Queen is
inimitably grand. One feels that the entrance of the Ghost
comes only in time to stay the frenzied hand, and then follows
the swift revulsion when Hamlet, melting into tenderest pathos,
kneels at his mother’s feet to beseech her to repent—a
mood that changes anew to frenzy when his wild wandering
thoughts are turned toward the King. It is only in the last
scene of the play that the approach of death scatters the
clouds that have so long obscured the grief-tortured brain.
Nothing can be imagined finer or more picturesque than this
closing scene. On the raised daïs in the centre of the
stage, and on the throne from which the King has been hurled,
the dying prince, conqueror and sovereign in this last supreme
moment, dominates the scene of death and carnage, triumphant
over all, even in the clutches of his own relentless doom.

As the Hamlet of Rossi is unmistakably mad, so his Macbeth
is an undeniable craven and criminal. I can compare this
personation to nothing so [pg 517]
much as to that of a man haunted by a fiend. For the steps of
Macbeth are dogged ever by an unseen devil—namely, his
own evil yet coward nature. He is wicked and he is afraid. The
whole physique of Rossi in the scene in the first act where the
king heaps favors and commendations on his valiant warrior was
eloquent of conscious guilt: the constrained attitude, the
shifting, uneasy glance, told, louder than words, of a wicked
purpose and a stinging conscience. From the moment of the
murder the wretched thane lives in a perpetual atmosphere of
fear. He is afraid of everything—first of his own
unwashed hands, and next of the dead king; then of Banquo and
of Banquo’s ghost; and finally he is afraid of all the world.
It is only at the last that the mere physical courage of the
soldier reasserts itself, and Macbeth, driven to bay by Fate,
fights with the fierce energy of despair.

As to Rossi’s Lear, it is not to be criticised. Words fail
when the heartstrings are thrilled to trembling and to tears.
The pathos of Lear’s recognition of Cordelia was past the power
of words to describe. He stands at first gazing in vague
bewilderment at the face of his child, then into the darkened
and troubled gaze steals anew the light of reason and of
recognition: unutterable sorrow, inexpressible remorse, sweep
across the quivering features, and with an inarticulate sob
Lear would fain sink on his knees at his wronged daughter’s
feet to pray for pardon. That people rose and left the house in
a very passion of tears is the fittest criticism that can be
bestowed upon this personation.

The list of the Shakesperian characters closed with Romeo.
Rossi was the divinest of lovers, in spite of his forty years
and his stalwart proportions, and the balcony scene was an
exquisite love-duet that needed not the aid of music to lend it
sweetness. But in the Italian version the play was so cut and
garbled that there could be little pleasure in listening to it
for any one familiar with the original.

Outside of his Shakespearian répertoire, Rossi has
appeared in only two plays—the Kean of the elder
Dumas, and Nero, a tragedy by Signer Cosso, The first,
originally written for Lemaître, is an ill-constructed,
improbable melodrama. But it contains one grand
scene—namely, that where Kean, whilst playing Hamlet,
goes mad upon the stage; and this scene Rossi renders superbly.
As to Nero, it is marvelous to witness the complete eclipse of
the refined, accomplished gentleman and intellectual actor
behind the brutal physiognomy of the wicked emperor. It is
Hamlet transformed into a prize-fighter.

In person, Signor Rossi is less strikingly handsome than is
his rival, Salvini, but he possesses a singularly attractive
and pleasing countenance. He is a Piedmontese, blue-eyed and
fair-complexioned, with chestnut hair, the abundant locks of
which are just touched with gray. He is tall and finely
proportioned, with the chest of a Hercules and the hands and
feet of a duchess. Off the stage he is peculiarly pleasing in
manner, and is said to be a noble-hearted and generous
gentleman, as well as an amiable and genial companion,
singularly free from conceit and delighting in his art.

L.H.H.

BISHOP THIRLWALL’S PRECOCITY.

We do not remember to have seen in the various notices
relative to the late Bishop Connop Thirlwall, the well-known
historian, any mention of his precocity, which must have been
almost without a parallel. Thirlwall came of a long line of
clergymen. His father was chaplain to Dr. Percy (Percy’s
Reliques), bishop of Dromore, and in 1809 he published some
specimens of the early genius of his son under the title of
“Primitiæ; or, Essays and Poems on Various Subjects,
Religious, Moral and Entertaining. By Connop Thirlwall,
eleven years of age. Dedicated by permission to the Bishop of
Dromore.” In the preface it is stated that at three years old
Connop read English so well that he was taught Latin, and at
four read Greek with an ease and fluency that astonished all
who heard him. An accidental circumstance revealed his talent
for composition when he was seven. [pg
518] Mrs. Thirlwall told her elder son, in her husband’s
absence, to write out his thoughts on a certain subject. Connop
asked leave to do the same, and produced to her astonishment
the following: “How uncertain is life! for no man can tell in
what hour he shall leave the world. What numbers are snatched
away in the bloom of youth, and turn the fine expectation of
parents into sorrow! All the promising pleasures of this life
will fade, and we shall be buried in the dust. God takes away a
good prince from his subjects only to transplant him into
everlasting joy in heaven. A good man is not dispirited by
death, for it only takes him away that he may feel the
pleasures of a better world. Death comes unawares, but never
takes virtue with it. Edward VI. died in his minority, and
disappointed his subjects, to whom he had promised a happy
reign.” These reflections were probably suggested by some
sermon the boy had heard, but the composition is an
extraordinary piece of work at such an age.

His effusions are on various themes, and comprise quite a
pretty little poem, written when he was eleven, on Tintern
Abbey. But perhaps the most remarkable circumstance of all is
that this youthful prodigy lived to amply fulfill the promise
of his youth, and proved as sagacious and moderate in the use
of knowledge as he was marvelous in his powers of acquiring it.
There is a remarkable tribute to these powers in John Stuart
Mill’s Autobiography, where he says: “The speaker with
whom I was most struck, though I dissented from nearly every
word he said, was Thirlwall, the historian, since bishop of St.
David’s, then a chancery barrister, unknown except by a high
reputation for eloquence acquired at the Cambridge Union. His
speech was in answer to one of mine. Before he had uttered ten
sentences I set him down as the best speaker I had ever heard,
and I have never since heard any one whom I placed above
him.”

FREAKS OF KLEPTOMANIA.

A few months ago England, more especially the part thereof
contiguous to royal Windsor, was thrown into consternation by
the report that a box had been discovered, sunk just below
water-mark in the Thames, attached by a string to a tree, and
containing a number of keys, which were believed to belong to
doors leading to the royal jewel-coffers. The nine days’ wonder
which this intelligence, naturally enough, produced, has since
had a curious explanation. They were not keys of the royal
apartments at all, but Eton keys, the fruits of the kleptic
propensities of an unfortunate Eton boy, who—like a very
distinguished and noble member of Mr. Disraeli’s cabinet, who
is said even now not to be able to resist the temptation
offered at cabinet councils by “Dizzy’s” green kid
gloves—had already paid the penalty for similar offences
by being sent away. A most extraordinary instance of this
propensity occurred a few years ago at a very wealthy
nobleman’s house in the north of England. During a visit there
a lady’s diamonds disappeared. There was great and general
consternation, and the detective police were summoned from
London. The jewels were subsequently discovered in a closet
attached to the noble host’s
dressing-room.

[pg 519]

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Round my House: Notes of Rural Life in France in Peace and
War. By Philip Gilbert Hamerton. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

The time has at last come when Englishmen and Americans seem
disposed to study the character of the French people with some
care and to judge it with impartiality. The overthrow of its
military power did less to lower the nation in the eyes of
foreigners than its subsequent course has done to raise it; and
now that it is fairly entering on a new career in a mood and
under auspices that cannot but awaken the strongest hopes, we
have probably seen the last of the typical Frenchman of the
Anglo-Saxon imagination—a being capable of the most
frantic actions and incapable of a serious thought, a compound
of frivolity and ferocity, the fit subject and facile
instrument of a despotism that knew how to gratify his vanity
while restraining his mad ebullitions. Among the excuses that
might be offered for such misconceptions is the dearth of
information in the literature of France itself in regard to the
life and habits of the general mass of the population. In these
days it is to novels that we chiefly go for pictures of
character and manners, and French novels are almost exclusively
devoted to pictures of Parisian manners. Balzac, it is true,
has given us delineations of provincial life; but the
delineations of Balzac are often more enigmatical than the
problems of real life, and even if we could always accept the
portraitures they give us as undistorted, they generally
presuppose a knowledge on the part of the reader on those
points on which the foreigner is most apt to be ignorant. In
any case, we shall be best instructed by a writer who both
understands our lack and is able to supply it, and these
qualifications, with others scarcely less essential, Mr.
Hamerton has brought to his task. He has thoroughly
familiarized himself with French usages, but he has not lost
his sense of the difference between them and those of his own
land, and of the consequent necessity for explaining as well as
describing, and of tracing peculiarities to their source. If he
is free from the common prejudices of the foreign observer, he
has not adopted the passions or the partialities of the native.
He can write with fairness of different classes and factions,
and can discriminate between ordinary impulses and actions and
those that have their origin in strong excitement. Finally, he
neither overloads us with facts and statistics nor seeks to
amuse us with fancies or caricatures. He is always sober and
always agreeable.

The matter of this volume was collected during a fixed
residence of several years in one of the central provinces of
France. No doubt Mr. Hamerton had a previous acquaintance with
the country and with its language far exceeding that of the
mere tourist, and his wife, it appears, is a Frenchwoman, the
daughter of an ex-préfet. But he makes few allusions to
any former experiences, and draws no comparisons between the
conditions of life or the characteristics of the people in
different provinces. This is perhaps to be considered a defect
in the book, though it might not have possessed the same
attractiveness had its scope been wider. It is an advantage,
too, that the locality was not one which excites curiosity by
its strongly marked features or abnormal types. Travelers often
seem to imagine that they have only to tell us about Brittany
or Gascony to win our interest, whereas it is precisely such
regions that have the least novelty for us, just as the scenery
of the Scottish Highlands has been made more familiar to
Americans than that of almost any other part of Britain. Mr.
Hamerton’s house, as he gives us clearly to understand, though
he suppresses names, was in the neighborhood of Autun. The
situation was a strictly rural one, but with easy access to the
town and the feasibility of reaching Paris, Lyons or Geneva in
a night’s journey by rail. It had, he writes, “one very
valuable characteristic in great perfection—namely,
variety. There was nothing in it very striking at first sight,
but we had a little of everything.” It was in an elevated plain
about fifteen miles in diameter and nearly circular, girt by a
circus of hills rising fifteen hundred feet above the general
level. A trout stream ran through the property. There were
pretty estates around of about two hundred acres each, with
houses in general of modest dimensions and architecture, though
occasionally aspiring to the dignity of châteaux. Roman
and mediæval remains, with [pg
520] architecture of different periods, were to be found
in the city, as well as a public library and art-gallery,
cafés and the inevitable cercle. The flora, owing
to the diversities of elevation, was varied, and while
vineyards clothed the foot of the slopes and gigantic old
chestnuts looked down on them from above, the vegetation of the
hill-tops was that of Lancashire or Scotland. It follows, of
course, that the pursuits and habits of the population were
correspondingly various, and there was ample opportunity for
studying the different classes of society, from the noblesse to
the peasants. The results of this study are presented, not in
the form of labored analyses, but in easy and flowing sketches,
sometimes in the form of narrative, always full of illustrative
details, and winning without much discussion or argument a
ready assent to the author’s conclusions. Many statements in
the book will, of course, not be new to generally well-informed
readers, but it is not often that they come with the same force
and freshness from direct observation, and still more rarely is
their relation to each other or their bearing on the subject to
which they relate so clearly and correctly indicated. Among the
points on which Mr. Hamerton has thus thrown a stronger light
are the characteristics and position of French ladies, divided,
“in this part of the world,” he writes, “into two distinct
classes: the home women and the visiting women—les
femmes d’intérieur, and les femmes du monde;
the exact theory of the mariage de convenance, which is
popularly but wrongly considered as based on mere mercenary
motives; and the mental condition of the peasant, with his
natural quickness of intellect and his stupendous ignorance,
his adherence to tradition and ingrained superstitiousness, and
his suspicion of the nobles and tendency to emancipate himself
from clerical influence. It is France in a state of transition
that Mr. Hamerton paints, and his anticipations have already to
some extent been justified by events. “My hope for France is,”
he says, “that a system of regularly-working representative
government may be the final result of the long and eventful
revolution, and that this form of government may give the
country certain measures which it very greatly needs. A
thorough system of national education is one of them, a real
religious equality is another. These would never be conceded by
a French monarchy of any type with which past experience has
made the country familiar…. The only chance of real
representation lies in the Republic.”

Books Received.

Improved Diary, or Marginal Index-Book of Daily Record: a
Diary provided with Marginal Indices so arranged that any day
of the year may be referred to at once, and the various
subject-matters recorded in it may be arranged for ready
reference, together with Calendars, Interest Table, etc.
Devised and arranged by M.N. Lovell. Published exclusively by
the Erie Publishing Co., Erie, Pa.

The Review of Gen. Sherman’s Memoirs. Examined Chiefly in
the light of its own Evidence. By C.W. Moulton. Cincinnati:
Robert Clarke & Co.

The Chevalier Casse-Cou: The Search for Ancestors.
Translated from the French original. By Thomas Picton. New
York: R.M. De Witt.

Proceedings of American Association for the Cure of
Inebriates, held at Hartford, Conn., Sept. 28, 1875. Baltimore:
Wm. K. Boyle & Sons.

Brief Biographies. Vol. II. English Radical Leaders. By R.J.
Hinton. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Foot Notes; or, Walking as a Fine Art. By Alfred Barren.
Wallingford, Conn.: Wallingford Printing Co.

Circulars of Information of the Bureau of Education. No. 7.
Washington: Government Printing-office.

In Doors and Out; or, Views from the Chimney-corner. By
Oliver Optic. Boston: Lee & Shepard.

Among my Books. (Second Series.) By Jas. Russell Lowell.
Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.

The Reading Club and Handy Speaker, No. 3. By George M.
Baker. Boston: Lee & Shepard.

Her Dearest Foe. (Leisure-Hour Series.) By Mrs Alexander.
New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Pebbles from Old Pathways. By Minnie Ward Patterson.
Chicago: C.J. Burroughs & Co.

Bridge and Tunnel Centres. By John B. McMaster. New York: D.
Van Nostrand.

Safety Valves. By Richard H. Buel, C.E. New York: D. Van
Nostrand.

Guido and Lita. By the Marquis of Lorne. New York: Macmillan
& Co.

The Asbury Twins. By Sophie May. Boston: Lee &
Shepard.

Sea-Weed and Sand: Poems. By Ben Wood Davis.

LIPPINCOTT’S MAGAZINE

OF

POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.

APRIL, 1876. Vol. XVII, No. 100.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE CENTURY ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.

IV.—THE CENTENNIAL EXPOSITION UNDER ROOF.