McClure’s Magazine

CONTENTS

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

Edited by Ida M. Tarbell.

II.

LIFE IN INDIANA.—REMOVAL TO ILLINOIS.—LINCOLN STARTS
OUT IN LIFE FOR HIMSELF AT TWENTY-ONE.—THE BUILDING OF THE
FLATBOAT AND THE TRIP TO NEW ORLEANS.—LINCOLN HIRES OUT AS A
GROCERY CLERK IN NEW SALEM.—HIS FIRST VOTE.

INDIANA REMINISCENCES OF LINCOLN.

Abraham Lincoln grew to
manhood in Southern Indiana. When he reached Spencer County in
1816, he was seven years of age; when he left in 1830, he had
passed his twenty-first birthday. This period of a life shows
usually the natural bent of the character, and we have found in
these fourteen years of Lincoln’s life signs of the qualities of
greatness which distinguished him. We have seen that, in spite of
the fact that he had no wise direction, that he was brought up by a
father with no settled purpose, and that he lived in a pioneer
community, where a young man’s life at best is but a series of
makeshifts, he had developed a determination to make something out
of himself, and a desire to know, which led him to neglect no
opportunity to learn.

The only unbroken outside influence which directed and
stimulated him in his ambitions was that coming first from his
mother, then from his step-mother. It should never be forgotten
that these two women, both of them of unusual earnestness and
sweetness of spirit, were one or the other of them at the boy’s
side throughout this period. The ideal they held before him was the
simple ideal of the early American, that if a boy is upright and
industrious he may aspire to any place within the gift of the
country. The boy’s nature told him they were right. Everything he
read confirmed their teachings, and he cultivated, in every way
open to him, his passion to know and to be something.

REV. ALLEN BROONER.

A neighbor of Thomas Lincoln, still living near Gentryville. Mr.
Brooner’s wife was a friend of Nancy Hanks Lincoln. The two women
died within a few days of each other, and were buried side by side.
When the tombstone was placed at Mrs. Lincoln’s grave, no one could
state positively which was Mrs. Brooner’s and which Mrs. Lincoln’s
grave. Mr. Allen Brooner gave his opinion, and the stone was
placed; but the iron fence incloses both graves, which lie in a
half-acre tract of land owned by the United States government. Mr.
Allen Brooner, after his wife’s death, became a minister of the
United Brethren Church, and moved to Illinois. He received his mail
at New Salem when Abraham Lincoln was the postmaster at that place.
Mr. Brooner confirms Dr. Holland’s story that “Abe” once walked
three miles after his day’s work, to make right a
six-and-a-quarter-cents mistake he had made in a trade with a
woman. Like all of the old settlers of Gentryville, he remembers
the departure of the Lincolns for Illinois. “When the Lincolns were
getting ready to leave,” says Mr. Brooner, “Abraham and his
stepbrother, John Johnston, came over to our house to swap a horse
for a yoke of oxen. ‘Abe’ was always a quiet fellow. John did all
the talking, and seemed to be the smartest of the two. If any one
had been asked that day which would make the greatest success in
life, I think the answer would have been John Johnston.”

There are many proofs that young Lincoln’s characteristics were
recognized at this period by his associates, that his determination
to excel, if not appreciated, yet made its imprint. In 1865,
thirty-five years after he left Gentryville, Mr. Herndon, anxious
to save all that was known of Lincoln in Indiana, went among his
old associates, and with a sincerity and thoroughness worthy of
great respect, interviewed them. At that time there were still
living numbers of the people with whom he had been brought up. They
all remembered something of him. It is curious to note that all of
these people tell of his doing something different from what other
boys did, something sufficiently superior to have made a keen
impression upon them. In almost every case the person had his own
special reason for admiring young Lincoln. His facility for making
[pg 4]
rhymes and writing essays was the admiration of many who considered
it the more remarkable because “essays and poetry were not taught
in school,” and “Abe took it up on his own account.”

Many others were struck by the clever use he made of his gift
for writing. The wit he showed in taking revenge for a social
slight by a satire on the Grigsbys, who had failed to invite him to
a wedding, made a lasting impression in Gentryville. That he was
able to write so well that he could humiliate his enemies more
deeply than if he had resorted to the method of taking revenge
current in the country—that is, thrashing them—seemed
to his friends a mark of surprising superiority.

JOHN W. LAMAR.

Mr. Lamar was one of the “small boys” of Spencer County when
Lincoln left Indiana, but old enough to have seen much of him and
to have known his characteristics and his reputation in the county.
He is still living near his old home, and gave our representative
in Indiana interesting reminiscences which are incorporated into
the present article.

Others remembered his quick-wittedness in helping his
friends.

“We are indebted to Kate Roby,” says Mr. Herndon, “for an
incident which illustrates alike his proficiency in orthography and
his natural inclination to help another out of the mire. The word
‘defied’ had been given out by Schoolmaster Crawford, but had been
misspelled several times when it came Miss Roby’s turn. ‘Abe stood
on the opposite side of the room,’ related Miss Roby to me in 1865,
‘and was watching me. I began d-e-f—, and then I stopped,
hesitating whether to proceed with an i or a y. Looking up, I
beheld Abe, a grin covering his face, and pointing with his index
finger to his eye. I took the hint, spelled the word with an i, and
it went through all right.'”

This same Miss Roby it was who said of Lincoln, “He was better
read then than the world knows or is likely to know exactly…. He
often and often commented or talked to me about what he had
read—seemed to read it out of the book as he went
along—did so to others. He was the learned boy among us
unlearned folks.He took great pains to explain; could do it so
simply. He was diffident then, too.”

LINCOLN IN 1860.

From an ambrotype in the possession of Mr. Marcus L. Ward of
Newark, New Jersey. This portrait of Mr. Lincoln was made in
Springfield, Illinois, on May 20, 1860, for the late Hon. Marcus L.
Ward, Governor of New Jersey. Mr. Ward had gone down to Springfield
to see Mr. Lincoln, and while there asked him for his picture. The
President-elect replied that he had no picture which was
satisfactory, but would gladly sit for one. The two gentlemen went
out immediately, and in Mr. Ward’s presence Mr. Lincoln had the
above picture taken.

One man was impressed by the character of the sentences he had
given him for a copy. “It was considered at that time,” said he,
“that Abe was the best penman in the neighborhood. One day, while
he was on a visit at my mother’s, I asked him to write some copies
for me. He very willingly consented. He wrote several of them, but
one of them I have never forgotten, although a boy at that time. It
was this:

WILLIAM JONES.

The store in Gentryville, in which Lincoln first made his
reputation as a debater and story-teller, was owned by Mr. Jones.
The year before the Lincolns moved to Illinois Abraham clerked in
the store, and it is said that when he left Indiana, Mr. Jones sold
him a pack of goods which he peddled on his journey. Mr. Jones was
the representative from Spencer County in the State legislature
from 1838 to 1841. He is no longer living. His son, Captain William
Jones, is still in Gentryville.

All of his comrades remembered his stories and his clearness in
argument. “When he appeared in company,” says Nat Grigsby, “the
boys would gather and cluster around him to hear him talk. Mr.
Lincoln was figurative in his speech, talks, and conversation. He
argued much from analogy, and explained things hard for us to
[pg 6]
understand by stories, maxims, tales, and figures. He would almost
always point his lesson or idea by some story that was plain and
near us, that we might instantly see the force and bearing of what
he said.”

There is one other testimony to his character as a boy which
should not be omitted. It is that of his step-mother:

“Abe was a good boy, and I can say, what scarcely one
woman—a mother—can say in a thousand, Abe never gave me
a cross word or look, and never refused, in fact or appearance, to
do anything I requested him. I never gave him a cross word in all
my life…. His mind and mine—what little I had—seemed
to run together. He was here after he was elected President. He was
a dutiful son to me always. I think he loved me truly. I had a son,
John, who was raised with Abe. Both were good boys; but I must say,
both now being dead, that Abe was the best boy I ever saw, or
expect to see.”

PIGEON CREEK CHURCH.

From a photograph loaned by W.W. Admire of Chicago. This little
log church or “meetin’ house” is where the Lincolns attended
services in Indiana. The pulpit is said to have been made by Thomas
Lincoln. The building was razed about fifteen years ago, after
having been used for several years as a tobacco barn.

These are impressions of Mr. Lincoln gathered in Indiana thirty
years ago, when his companions were alive. To-day there are people
living in Spencer County who were small boys when he was a large
one, and who preserve curiously interesting impressions of him. A
representative of McCLURE’S MAGAZINE who has recently gone in
[pg 7]
detail over the ground of Lincoln’s early life, says: “The people
who live in Spencer County are interested in any one who is
interested in Abraham Lincoln.” They showed her the flooring he
whip-sawed, the mantles, doors, and window-casings he helped make,
the rails he split, the cabinets he and his father made, and scores
of relics cut from planks and rails he handled. They told what they
remembered of his rhymes and how he would walk miles to hear a
speech or sermon, and, returning, would repeat the whole in “putty
good imitation.” Many remembered his coming evenings to sit around
the fireplace with their older brothers and sisters, and the
stories he told and the pranks he played there until ordered home
by the elders of the household.

Captain John Lamar who was a very small boy in one of the
families where Lincoln was well known, has many interesting
reminiscences which he is fond of repeating. “He told me of riding
to mill with his father one very hot day. As they drove along the
hot road they saw a boy sitting on the top rail of an old-fashioned
stake-and-rider worm fence. When they came close they saw that the
boy was reading, and had not noticed their approach. His father,
turning to him, said: ‘John, look at that boy yonder, and mark my
words, he will make a smart man out of himself. I may not see it,
but you’ll see if my words don’t come true.’ The boy was Abraham
Lincoln.”

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

From a photograph in the collection of T.H. Bartlett, of Boston,
Massachusetts.¹ Mr. Bartlett regards this as his
earliest portrait of Mr. Lincoln, but does not know when or where
it was taken. This portrait is also in the Oldroyd Collection at
Washington, D.C., and is dated 1856.

Captain Lamar tells many good stories about the early days:
“Uncle Jimmy Larkins, as everybody called him, was a great hero in
my childish eyes. Why, I cannot now say, without it was his
manners. There had been a big fox chase, and Uncle Jimmy was
telling about it. Of course he was the hero. I was only a little
shaver, and I stood in front of Uncle Jimmy, looking up into his
eyes, but he never noticed me. He looked at Abraham Lincoln, and
‘Abe, I’ve got the best horse in the world—he won the race
and never drew a long breath;’ but Abe paid no attention to Uncle
Jimmy, and I got mad at the big, overgrown fellow, and wanted him
to listen to my hero’s story. Uncle Jimmy was determined that Abe
should hear, and repeated the story. ‘I say, Abe, I have the best
horse in the world; after all that running he never drew a long
breath.’ Then Abe, looking down at my little dancing hero, said,
‘Well, Larkins, why don’t you tell us how many short breaths he
drew?’ This raised a laugh on Uncle Jimmy, and he got mad, and
declared he’d fight Abe if he wasn’t so big. He jumped around until
Abe quietly said: ‘Now, Larkins, if you don’t shut up I’ll throw
you in that water.’ I was very uneasy and angry at the way my hero
was treated, but I lived to change my views about
heroes.”

GREEN B. TAYLOR.

Son of Mr. James Taylor, for whom Lincoln ran the ferry-boat at
the mouth of Anderson Creek. Mr. Taylor, now in his eighty-second
year, lives in South Dakota. He remembers Mr. Lincoln perfectly,
and wrote our Indiana correspondent that it was true that his
father hired Abraham Lincoln for one year, at six dollars a month,
and that he was “well pleased with the boy.”

THE LINCOLNS DECIDE TO LEAVE INDIANA.

Abraham was twenty-one years old when Thomas Lincoln decided to
leave Indiana in the spring of 1830. The reason Dennis Hanks gives
for this removal was a disease called the “milk-sick.” Abraham
Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, and several of their
relatives who had followed them from Kentucky, had died of it. The
cattle had been carried off by it. Neither brute nor human life
seemed to be safe. As Dennis Hanks says: “This was reason enough
(ain’t it?) for leaving.”

The place chosen for their new home was the Sangamon country in
central Illinois. It was a country of great renown in the West, the
name meaning “The land where there is plenty to eat.” One of the
family—John Hanks, a cousin of Dennis—was already
there, and sent them inviting reports.

Gentryville saw young Lincoln depart with real regret, and his
friends gave him a score of rude proofs that he would not be
forgotten. Our representative in Indiana found that almost every
family who remembered the Lincolns retained some impression of
their leaving.

“Neighbors seemed, in those days,” she writes, “like relatives.
The entire Lincoln family stayed the last night before starting on
their journey with Mr. Gentry. He was loath to part with Lincoln,
so ‘accompanied the movers along the road a spell.’ They stopped on
a hill which overlooks Buckthorn Valley, and looked their ‘good-by’
to their old home and to the home of Sarah Lincoln Grigsby, to the
grave of the mother and wife, to all their neighbors and friends.
Buckthorn Valley held many dear recollections to the movers.”

After they were gone James Gentry planted the cedar tree which
now marks the site of the Lincoln home.² “The folks
who come lookin’ around have taken twigs until you can’t reach any
more very handy,” those who point out the tree say.

THE HILL NEAR GENTRYVILLE FROM WHICH THE LINCOLNS TOOK THEIR
LAST LOOK AT THEIR INDIANA HOME.

SAMUEL CRAWFORD.

Only living son of Josiah Crawford, who lent Lincoln the Weems’s
“Life of Washington.” To our representative in Indiana, who secured
this picture of Mr. Crawford, he said, when asked if he remembered
the Lincolns: “Oh, yes; I remember them, although I was not
Abraham’s age. He was twelve years older than I. One day I ran in,
calling out, ‘Mother! mother! Aaron Grigsby is sparking Sally
Lincoln; I saw him kiss her!’ Mother scolded me, and told me I must
stop watching Sally, or I wouldn’t get to the wedding. [It will be
remembered that Sally Lincoln was ‘help’ in the Crawford family,
and that she afterwards married Aaron Grigsby.] Neighbors thought
lots more of each other then than now, and it seems like everybody
liked the Lincolns. We were well acquainted, for Mr. Thomas Lincoln
was a good carpenter, and made the cupboard, mantels, doors, and
sashes in our old home that was burned down.”

Lincoln himself felt keenly the parting from his friends, and he
certainly never forgot his years in the Hoosier State. One of the
most touching experiences he relates in all his published letters
is his emotion at visiting his old Indiana home fourteen years
after he had left it. So strongly was he moved by the scenes of his
first conscious sorrows, efforts, joys, ambitions, that he put into
verse the feelings they awakened.³

SANGAMON TOWN IN 1831.

Drawn by J. McCan Davis with the aid of Mr. John
E. Roll, a former resident.

JOHN E. ROLL.

Born in Green Village, New Jersey, June 4, 1814. He went to
Illinois in 1830, the same year that Mr. Lincoln went, settling in
Sangamon town, where he had relatives. It was here he met Lincoln,
and made the “pins” for the flatboat. Later Mr. Roll went to
Springfield, where he bought large quantities of land and built
many houses. A quarter of the city is now known as “Roll’s
addition.” Mr. Roll was well acquainted with Lincoln, and when the
President left Springfield he gave Mr. Roll his dog, Fido. Mr. Roll
knew Stephen A. Douglas well, and carries a watch which once
belonged to the “Little Giant.”

While he never attempted to conceal the poverty and hardship of
these days, and would speak humorously of the “pretty pinching
times” he saw, he never regarded his life at this time as mean or
pitiable.

Frequently he talked to his friends in later years of his
boyhood, and always with apparent pleasure. “Mr. Lincoln told this
story” (of his youth), says Leonard Swett, “as the story of a happy
childhood. There was nothing sad or pinched, and nothing of want,
and no allusion to want in any part of it. His own description of
his youth was that of a joyous, happy boyhood. It was told with
mirth and glee, and illustrated by pointed anecdote, often
interrupted by his jocund laugh.”

And he was right. There was nothing ignoble or mean in this
Indiana pioneer life. It was rude, but it was only the rudeness
which the ambitious are willing to endure in order to push on to a
better condition than they otherwise could know. These people did
not accept their hardships apathetically. They did not regard them
as permanent. They were only the temporary deprivations necessary
in order to accomplish what they had come into the country to do.
For this reason they could endure hopefully all that was hard. It
is worth notice, too, that there was nothing belittling in their
life, there was no pauperism, no shirking. Each family provided for
its own simple wants, and had the conscious dignity which comes
from being equal to a situation.

FROM INDIANA TO ILLINOIS.

The company which emigrated to Illinois included the families of
Thomas Lincoln, Dennis Hanks—married to one of Lincoln’s
step-sisters—and Levi Hall, thirteen persons in all. They
sold land, cattle, and grain, and much of their household goods,
and were ready in March of 1830 for their journey. All the
possessions which the three families had to take with them were
packed into a big wagon—the first one Thomas Lincoln had ever
owned, it is said—to which four oxen were attached, and the
caravan started. The weather was still cold, the streams were
swollen, and the roads were muddy, but the party started out
bravely. Inured to hardships, alive to all the new sights on their
route, every day brought them amusement and adventures, and
especially to young Lincoln the journey must have been of keen
[pg
11] interest. He drove the oxen on this trip, he tells us,
and, according to a story current in Gentryville, he succeeded in
doing a fair peddler’s business on the route. Captain William
Jones, in whose father’s store Lincoln had spent so many hours in
discussion and in story-telling, and for whom he had worked the
last winter he was in Indiana, says that before leaving the State
Abraham invested all his money, some thirty-odd dollars, in
notions. Though the country through which they expected to pass was
but sparsely settled, he believed he could dispose of them. “A set
of knives and forks was the largest item entered on the bill,” says
Mr. Jones; “the other items were needles, pins, thread, buttons,
and other little domestic necessities. When the Lincolns reached
their new home, near Decatur, Illinois, Abraham wrote back to my
father, stating that he had doubled his money on his purchases by
selling them along the road. Unfortunately we did not keep that
letter, not thinking how highly we would have prized it years
afterwards.”

LINCOLN, OFFUTT, AND GREEN ON THE FLATBOAT AT NEW SALEM

From a painting in the State Capitol, Springfield, Illinois.
This picture is crude and, from a historic point of view,
inaccurate. The celebrated flatboat built by Lincoln and by him
piloted to New Orleans, was a much larger and better craft than the
one here portrayed. The little structure over the dam is meant for
the Rutledge and Cameron mill, but the real mill was a far more
pretentious affair. There was not only a grist-mill, but also a
saw-mill which furnished lumber to the settlers for many miles
around. The mill was built in 1829. March 5, 1830, we find John
Overstreet appearing before the County Commissioners’ Court at
Springfield and averring upon oath “that he is informed and
believes that John Cameron and James Rutledge have erected a
mill-dam on the Sangamon River which obstructs the navigation of
said river;” and the Commissioners issued a notice to Cameron and
Rutledge to alter the dam so as to restore the “safe navigation” of
the river. James M. Rutledge, of Petersburg, a nephew of the
mill-owner, helped build the mill, and says of it: “The mill was a
frame structure, and was solidly built. They used to grind corn
mostly, though some flour was made. At times they would run day and
night. The saw-mill had an old-fashioned upright saw, and stood on
the bank.” For a time this mill was operated by Denton Offutt, and
was under the immediate supervision of Lincoln. A few heavy stakes,
a part of the old dam, still show themselves at low
water.—Note prepared by J. McCan Davis.

The pioneers were a fortnight on their journey. The route they
took we do not exactly know, though we may suppose that it would be
that by which they would avoid the most watercourses. We know from
Mr. H.C. Whitney that the travellers reached Macon County from the
south, for once when he was in Decatur with Mr. Lincoln the two
strolled out for a walk, and when they came to the court-house,
“Lincoln,” says Mr. Whitney, “walked out a few feet in front, and
after shifting his position two or three times, said, as he looked
up at the building, partly to himself and partly to me: ‘Here is
the exact spot where I stood by our wagon when we moved from
Indiana twenty-six years ago; this isn’t six feet from the exact
spot.’… I asked him if he, at that time, had expected to be a
lawyer and practise law in that court-house; to which he replied:
‘No; I didn’t know I had sense enough to be a lawyer then.’ He then
told me he had frequently thereafter tried to locate the route by
which they had come; and that he had decided that it was near to
the line of the main line of the Illinois Central Railroad.”

LINCOLN’S AXE.

This broad-axe is said to have been owned originally by Abram
Bales, of New Salem; and, according to tradition, it was bought
from him by Lincoln. After Lincoln forsook the woods, he sold the
axe to one Mr. Irvin. Mr. L.W. Bishop, of Petersburg, now has the
axe, having gotten it directly from Mr. Irvin. There are a number
of affidavits attesting its genuineness. The axe has evidently seen
hard usage, and is now covered with a thick coat of rust.

A NEW HOME.

The party settled some ten miles west of Decatur, in Macon
County. Here John Hanks had the logs already cut for their new
home, and Lincoln, Dennis Hanks, and Hall soon had a cabin erected.
Mr. Lincoln himself (though writing in the third person) says:
“Here they built a log cabin, into which they removed, and made
sufficient of rails to fence ten acres of ground, fenced and broke
the ground, and raised a crop of sown corn upon it the same year.
These are, or are supposed to be, the rails about which so much is
being said just now, though these are far from being the first or
only rails ever made by Abraham.”⁴

MODEL OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S DEVICE FOR LIFTING VESSELS OVER
SHOALS.

The inscription above this model, which is shown to all visitors
to the Model Hall of the Patent Office, reads: “6469 Abraham
Lincoln, Springfield, Ill. Improvement in method of lifting vessels
over shoals. Patented May 22, 1849.” The apparatus consists of a
bellows, placed in each side of the hull of the craft, just below
the water-line, and worked by an odd but simple system of ropes and
pulleys. When the keel of the vessel grates against the sand or
obstruction, the bellows is filled with air; and, thus buoyed up,
the vessel is expected to float over the shoal. The model is about
eighteen or twenty inches long, and looks as if it had been
whittled with a knife out of a shingle and a cigar box. There is no
elaboration in the apparatus beyond that necessary to show the
operation of buoying the vessel over the obstructions.

If they were far from being his “first and only rails,” they
certainly were the most famous ones he or anybody else ever split.
This was the last work he did for his father, for in the summer of
that year (1830) he exercised the right of majority and started out
to shift for himself. When he left his home to start life for
himself, he went empty-handed. He was already some months over
[pg
13] twenty-one years of age, but he had nothing in the
world, not even a suit of respectable clothes; and one of the first
pieces of work he did was “to split four hundred rails for every
yard of brown jeans dyed with white walnut bark that would be
necessary to make him a pair of trousers.” He had no trade, no
profession, no spot of land, no patron, no influence. Two things
recommended him to his neighbors—he was strong, and he was a
good fellow.

LINCOLN IN 1857.

From a photograph loaned by H.W. Fay of De Kalb, Illinois. The
original was taken early in 1857 by Alex. Hesler of Chicago. Mr.
Fay writes of the picture: “I have a letter from Mr. Hesler stating
that one of the lawyers came in and made arrangements for the
sitting so that the members of the bar could get prints. Lincoln
said at the time that he did not know why the boys wanted such a
homely face.” Mr. Joseph Medill of Chicago went with Mr. Lincoln to
have the picture taken. He says that the photographer insisted on
smoothing down Lincoln’s hair, but Lincoln did not like the result,
and ran his fingers through it before sitting. The original
negative was burned in the Chicago fire.

His strength made him a valuable laborer. Not that he was fond
of hard labor. Mrs. Crawford says: “Abe was no hand to pitch into
work like killing snakes;” but when he did work, it was with an
ease and effectiveness which compensated his employer for the time
he spent in practical jokes and extemporaneous speeches. He would
lift as much as three ordinary men, and “My, how he would chop!”
[pg
14] says Dennis Hanks. “His axe would flash and bite into a
sugar-tree or sycamore, and down it would come. If you heard him
fellin’ trees in a clearin’, you would say there was three men at
work by the way the trees fell.” Standing six feet four, he could
out-lift, out-work, and out-wrestle any man he came in contact
with. Friends and employers were proud of his strength, and boasted
of it, never failing to pit him against any hero whose strength
they heard vaunted. He himself was proud of it, and throughout his
life was fond of comparing himself with tall and strong men. When
the committee called on him in Springfield, in 1860, to notify him
of his nomination as President, Governor Morgan of New York was of
the number, a man of great height and brawn. “Pray, Governor, how
tall may you be?” was Mr. Lincoln’s first question. There is a
story told of a poor man seeking a favor from him once at the White
House. He was overpowered by the idea that he was in the presence
of the President, and, his errand done, was edging shyly out, when
Mr. Lincoln stopped him, insisting that he measure with him.
The man was the taller, as Mr. Lincoln had thought; and he went
away evidently more abashed at the idea that he dared be taller
than the President of the United States than that he had dared to
venture into his presence.

NEW SALEM.

From a painting in the State Capitol, Springfield, Illinois. New
Salem, which is described in the body of this article, was founded
by James Rutledge and John Cameron in 1829. In that year they built
a dam across the Sangamon River, and erected a mill. Under date of
October 23, 1829, Reuben Harrison, surveyor, certifies that “at the
request of John Cameron one of the proprietors I did survey the
town of New Salem.” The town within two years contained a dozen or
fifteen houses, nearly all of them built of logs. New Salem’s
population probably never exceeded a hundred persons. Its
inhabitants, and those of the surrounding country were mostly
Southerners—natives of Kentucky and Tennessee—though
there was an occasional Yankee among them. Soon after Lincoln left
the place, in the spring of 1837, it began to decline. Petersburg
had sprung up two miles down the river, and rapidly absorbed its
population and business. By 1840 New Salem was almost deserted. The
Rutledge tavern the first house erected, was the last to succumb.
It stood for many years, but at last crumbled away. Salem hill is
now only a green cow pasture.—Note prepared by J. McCan
Davis.

Governor Hoyt tells an excellent story illustrating Lincoln’s
interest in muscle and his involuntary comparison of himself with
any man who showed great strength. It was in 1859, after Lincoln
had delivered a speech at the State Agricultural Fair of Wisconsin
in Milwaukee. The two men were making the rounds of the exhibits,
and went into a tent to see a “strong man” perform. He went through
the ordinary exercises with huge iron balls, tossing them in the
air and catching them, and rolling them on his arms and back; and
Mr. Lincoln, who evidently had never before seen such a thing,
watched him with intense interest, ejaculating under his breath
every now and then, “By George! By George!” When the performance
was over, Governor Hoyt, seeing Mr. Lincoln’s interest, asked him
to go up and be introduced to the athlete. He did so; and, as he
stood looking down musingly on the fellow, who was very short, and
evidently wondering that a man so much shorter than he could be so
[pg
15] much stronger, he suddenly broke out with one of his
quaint speeches. “Why,” he said, “why, I could lick salt off the
top of your hat.”

THE NEW SALEM MILL TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO

The Rutledge and Cameron mill, of which Lincoln at one time had
charge, stood on the same spot as the mill in the picture, and had
the same foundation. From the map on page 18 it will be seen that
the mill was below the bluff and east of the town.

His strength won him popularity, but his good-nature, his wit,
his skill in debate, his stories, were still more efficient in
gaining him good-will. People liked to have him around, and voted
him a good fellow to work with. Yet such were the conditions of his
life at this time that, in spite of his popularity, nothing was
open to him but hard manual labor. To take the first “job” which he
happened upon—rail-splitting, ploughing, lumbering, boating,
store-keeping—and make the most of it, thankful if thereby he
earned his bed and board and yearly suit of jeans, was apparently
all there was before Abraham Lincoln in 1830 when he started out
for himself.

FIRST INDEPENDENT WORK.

Through the summer and fall of 1830 and the early winter of
1831, Mr. Lincoln worked in the vicinity of his father’s new home,
usually as a farm-hand and rail-splitter. Most of his work was done
in company with John Hanks. Before the end of the winter he secured
employment which he has given an account of himself (writing again
in the third person):⁵

“During that winter Abraham, together with his stepmother’s son,
John D. Johnston, and John Hanks, yet residing in Macon County,
hired themselves to Denton Offutt to take a flat-boat from
Beardstown, Illinois, to New Orleans, and for that purpose were to
join him—Offutt—at Springfield, Illinois, so soon as
the snow should go off. When it did go off, which was about March
1, 1831, the country was so flooded as to make travelling by land
impracticable; to obviate which difficulty they purchased a large
canoe and came down the Sangamon River in it from where they were
all living (near Decatur). This is the time and manner of Abraham’s
first entrance into Sangamon County. They found Offutt at
Springfield, but learned from him that he had failed in getting a
boat at Beardstown. This led to their hiring themselves to him for
twelve dollars per month each, and getting the timber out of the
trees, and building a boat at old Sangamon town on the Sangamon
River, seven miles northwest of Springfield, which boat they took
to New Orleans, substantially on the old contract.”

PRESENT SITE OF NEW SALEM.

Sangamon town, where Mr. Lincoln built the flatboat, has, since
his day, completely disappeared from the earth; but then it was one
of the flourishing settlements on the river of that name. Lincoln
and his friends on arriving there in March immediately began work.
[pg
16] There is still living in Springfield, Illinois, a man
who helped Lincoln at the raft-building—Mr. John Roll, a
well-known citizen, and one who has been prominent in the material
advancement of the city. Mr. Roll remembers distinctly Lincoln’s
first appearance in Sangamon town. To a representative of this
MAGAZINE who talked with him recently in Springfield he described
Lincoln’s looks when he first came to town. “He was a tall, gaunt
young man,” Mr. Roll said, “dressed in a suit of blue homespun
jeans, consisting of a roundabout jacket, waistcoat, and breeches
which came to within about four inches of his feet. The latter were
encased in raw-hide boots, into the top of which, most of the time,
his pantaloons were stuffed. He wore a soft felt hat which had at
one time been black, but now, as its owner dryly remarked, ‘it had
been sunburned until it was a combine of colors.'”

Mr. Roll’s relation to the newcomer soon became something more
than that of a critical observer; he hired out to him, and says
with pride, “I made every pin which went into that boat.”

LINCOLN’S POPULARITY IN SANGAMON.

It took some four weeks to build the raft, and in that period
Lincoln succeeded in captivating the entire village by his
story-telling. It was the custom in Sangamon for the “men-folks” to
gather at noon and in the evening, when resting, in a convenient
lane near the mill. They had rolled out a long peeled log on which
they lounged while they whittled and talked. After Mr. Lincoln came
to town the men would start him to story-telling as soon as he
appeared at the assembly ground. So irresistibly droll were his
“yarns” that, says Mr. Roll, “whenever he’d end up in his
unexpected way the boys on the log would whoop and roll off.” The
result of the rolling off was to polish the log like a mirror. Long
after Lincoln had disappeared from Sangamon “Abe’s log” remained,
and until it had rotted away people pointed it out, and repeated
the droll stories of the stranger.

AN EXCITING ADVENTURE.

The flatboat was done in about a month, and Lincoln and his
friends prepared to leave Sangamon. Before he started, however, he
was the hero of an adventure so thrilling that he won new laurels
in the community. Mr. Roll, who was a witness to the whole exciting
[pg
17] scene, tells the story as follows:

A MATRON OF NEW SALEM IN 1832.

This costume, worn by Mrs. Lucy M. Bennett of Petersburg,
Illinois, has been a familiar attraction at old settlers’
gatherings in Menard County, for years. The dress was made by Mrs.
Hill, of New Salem, and the reticule or workbag will be readily
recognized by those who have any recollection of the early days.
The bonnet occupied a place in the store of Samuel Hill at New
Salem. It was taken from the store by Mrs. Hill, worn for a time by
her, and has been carefully preserved to this day. It is an
imported bonnet—a genuine Leghorn—and of a kind so
costly that Mr. Hill made only an occasional sale of one. Its
price, in fact, was $25.

“It was the spring following the winter of the deep snow.⁶ Walter Carman, John Seamon, myself,
and at times others of the Carman boys, had helped Abe in building
the boat, and when he had finished we went to work to make a
dug-out, or canoe, to be used as a small boat with the flat. We
found a suitable log about an eighth of a mile up the river, and
with our axes went to work under Lincoln’s direction. The river was
very high, fairly ‘booming.’ After the dug-out was ready to launch
we took it to the edge of the water, and made ready to ‘let her
go,’ when Walter Carman and John Seamon jumped in as the boat
struck the water, each one anxious to be the first to get a ride.
As they shot out from the shore they found they were unable to make
any headway against the strong current. Carman had the paddle, and
Seamon was in the stern of the boat. Lincoln shouted to them to
‘head upstream’ and ‘work back to shore,’ but they found themselves
powerless against the stream. At last they began to pull for the
wreck of an old flatboat, the first ever built on the Sangamon,
which had sunk and gone to pieces, leaving one of the stanchions
sticking above the water. Just as they reached it Seamon made a
grab, and caught hold of the stanchion, when the canoe capsized,
leaving Seamon clinging to the old timber, and throwing Carman into
the stream. It carried him down with the speed of a mill-race,
Lincoln raised his voice above the roar of the flood, and yelled to
Carman to swim for an elm-tree which stood almost in the channel,
which the action of the high water changed. Carman, being a good
swimmer, succeeded in catching a branch, and pulled himself up out
of the water, which was very cold, and had almost chilled him to
death; and there he sat, shivering and chattering in the tree.
Lincoln, seeing Carman safe, called out to Seamon to let go the
stanchion and swim for the tree. With some hesitation he obeyed,
and struck out, while Lincoln cheered, and directed him from the
bank. As Seamon neared the tree he made one grab for a branch, and,
missing it, went under the water. Another desperate lunge was
successful, and he climbed up beside Carman. Things were pretty
exciting now, for there were two men in the tree, and the boat was
gone.

“It was a cold, raw April day, and there was great danger of the
men becoming benumbed and falling back into the water. Lincoln
called out to them to keep their spirits up and he would save them.
The village had been alarmed by this time, and many people had come
down to the bank. Lincoln procured a rope, and tied it to a log. He
called all hands to come and help roll the log into the water, and
after this had been done, he, with the assistance of several
others, towed it some distance up the stream. A daring young fellow
by the name of ‘Jim’ Dorrell then took his seat on the end of the
log, and it was pushed out into the current, with the expectation
that it would be carried downstream against the tree where Seamon
and Carman were. The log was well directed, and went straight to
the tree; but Jim, in his impatience to help his friends, fell a
victim to his good intentions. Making a frantic grab at a branch,
he raised himself off the log, and [pg 18] it was swept from under him
by the raging water, and he soon joined the other two victims upon
their forlorn perch. The excitement on shore increased, and almost
the whole population of the village gathered on the river bank.
Lincoln had the log pulled up the stream, and securing another
piece of rope, called to the men in the tree to catch it if they
could when he should reach the tree. He then straddled the log
himself, and gave the word to push out into the stream. When he
dashed into the tree, he threw the rope over the stump of a broken
limb, and let it play until he broke the speed of the log, and
gradually drew it back to the tree, holding it there until the
[pg
19] three now nearly frozen men had climbed down and seated
themselves astride. He then gave orders to the people on the shore
to hold fast to the end of the rope which was tied to the log, and
leaving his rope in the tree he turned the log adrift, and the
force of the current acting against the taut rope swung the log
around against the bank, and all ‘on board’ were saved. The excited
people, who had watched the dangerous experiment with alternate
hope and fear, now broke into cheers for Abe Lincoln and praises
for his brave act. This adventure made quite a hero of him along
the Sangamon, and the people never tired of telling of the
exploit.”

MAP OF NEW SALEM.

Map made by J. McCan Davis, aided by surviving inhabitants of
New Salem. Dr. John Allen was the leading physician of New Salem.
He was a Yankee, and was at first looked upon with suspicion, but
he was soon running a Sunday-school and temperance society, though
strongly opposed by the conservative church people. Dr. Allen
attended Ann Rutledge in her last illness. He was thrifty, and
moving to Petersburg in 1840, became wealthy. He died in 1860. Dr.
Francis Regnier was a rival physician and a respected citizen.
Samuel Hill and John McNeill (whose real name subsequently proved
to be McNamar) operated a general store next to Berry &
Lincoln’s grocery. Mr. Hill also owned the carding-machine. He
moved his store to Petersburg in 1839, and engaged in business
there, dying quite wealthy. Jack Kelso followed a variety of
callings, being occasionally a school-teacher, now and then a
grocery clerk, and always a fisher and hunter. He was a man of some
culture, and, when warmed by liquor, quoted Shakespeare and Burns
profusely, a habit which won for him the close friendship of
Lincoln. Joshua Miller was a blacksmith, and lived in the same
house with Kelso—a double house. He is said to be still
living, somewhere in Nebraska. Miller and Kelso were brothers-in
law. Philemon Morris was a tinner. Henry Onstott was a cooper by
trade. He was an elder in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, and
meetings were often held at his house. Rev. John Berry, father of
Lincoln’s partner, frequently preached there. Robert Johnson was a
wheelwright, and his wife took in weaving. Martin Waddell was a
hatter. He was the best-natured man in town, Lincoln possibly
excepted. The Trent brothers, who succeeded Berry & Lincoln as
proprietors of the store, worked in his shop for a time. William
Clary, one of the first settlers of New Salem, was one of a
numerous family, most of whom lived in the vicinity of “Clary’s
Grove.” Isaac Burner was the father of Daniel Green Burner, Berry
& Lincoln’s clerk. Alexander Ferguson worked at odd jobs. He
had two brothers, John and Elijah. Isaac Gollaher lived in a house
belonging to John Ferguson. “Row” Herndon, at whose house Lincoln
boarded for a year or more after going to New Salem, moved to the
country after selling his store to Berry & Lincoln. John
Cameron, one of the founders of the town, was a Presbyterian
preacher and a highly esteemed citizen.—Note prepared by
J. McCan Davis.

A SECOND ADVENTURE.

The flatboat built and loaded, the party started for New Orleans
about the middle of April. They had gone but a few miles when they
met with another adventure. At the village of New Salem there was a
mill-dam. On it the boat stuck, and here for nearly twenty-four
hours it hung, the bow in the air and the stern in the water, the
cargo slowly setting backward—shipwreck almost certain. The
village of New Salem turned out in a body to see what the strangers
would do in their predicament. They shouted, suggested, and advised
for a time, but finally discovered that one big fellow in the crew
was ignoring them and working out a plan of relief. Having unloaded
the cargo into a neighboring boat, Lincoln had succeeded in tilting
his craft. By boring a hole in the end extending over the dam the
water was let out. This done, the boat was easily shoved over and
reloaded. The ingenuity which he had exercised in saving his boat
made a deep impression on the crowd on the bank. It was talked over
for many a day, and the general verdict was that the “bow-hand” was
a “strapper.” The proprietor of boat and cargo was even more
enthusiastic than the spectators, and vowed he would build a
steamboat for the Sangamon and make Lincoln the captain. Lincoln
himself was interested in what he had done, and nearly twenty years
later he embodied his reflections on this adventure in a curious
invention for getting boats over shoals.

WILLIAM G. GREENE.

William G. Greene was one of the earliest friends of Lincoln at
New Salem. He stood on the bank of the Sangamon River on the 19th
of April, 1831, and watched Lincoln bore a hole in the bottom of
the flatboat, which had lodged on the mill-dam, so that the water
might run out. A few months later he and Lincoln were both employed
by the enterprising Denton Offutt, as clerks in the store and
managers of the mill which had been leased by Offutt. It was
William G. Greene who, returning home from college at Jacksonville
on a vacation, brought Richard Yates with him, and introduced him
to Lincoln, the latter being found stretched out on the cellar door
of Bowling Green’s cabin reading a book. Mr. Greene was born in
Tennessee in 1812, and went to Illinois in 1822. After the
disappearance of New Salem he removed to Tallula, a few miles away,
where in after years he engaged in the banking business. He died in
1894, after amassing a fortune.

NEW ORLEANS IN 1831.

The raft over the New Salem dam, the party went on to New
Orleans without trouble, reaching there in May, 1831, and remaining
a month. It must have been a month of intense intellectual activity
for Lincoln. New Orleans was entering then on her “flush times.”
Commerce was increasing at a rate which dazzled merchants and
speculators, and drew them in shoals from all over the United
States. From 1830 to 1840 no other American city increased in such
a ratio; exports and imports, which in 1831 amounted to
$26,000,000, in 1835 had more than doubled. The Creole population
had held the sway so far in the city; but now it came into
competition and often into contest with a pushing, ambitious, and
frequently unscrupulous native American party. To these two
predominating elements were added Germans, French, Spanish, negroes
and Indians. Cosmopolitan in its make-up, the city was even more
cosmopolitan in its life. Everything was to be seen in New Orleans
in those days, from the idle luxury of the wealthy Creole to the
organization of filibustering juntas. The pirates still plied their
[pg
20] trade in the Gulf, and the Mississippi River brought
down hundreds of river boatmen—one of the wildest, wickedest
sets of men that ever existed in any city.

Lincoln and his companions probably tied their boat up beside
thousands of others. It was the custom then to tie up such craft
along the river front where St. Mary’s Market now stands, and one
could walk a mile, it is said, over the tops of these boats without
going ashore. No doubt Lincoln went, too, to live in the boatmen’s
rendezvous, called the “Swamp,” a wild, rough quarter, where
roulette, whiskey, and the flint-lock pistol ruled.

All of the picturesque life, the violent contrasts of the city,
he would see as he wandered about; and he would carry away the
sharp impressions which are produced when mind and heart are alert,
sincere, and healthy.

In this month spent in New Orleans Lincoln must have seen much
of slavery. At that time the city was full of slaves, and the
number was constantly increasing; indeed, one-third of the New
Orleans increase in population between 1830 and 1840 was in
negroes. One of the saddest features of the institution was to be
seen there in its most aggravated form—the slave market. The
great mass of slave-holders of the South, who looked on the
institution as patriarchal, and who guarded their slaves with
conscientious care, knew little, it should be said, of this
terrible traffic. Their transfer of slaves was humane, but in the
open markets of the city it was attended by shocking cruelty and
degradation. Lincoln witnessed in New Orleans for the first time
the revolting sight of men and women sold like animals Mr. Herndon
says that he often heard Mr. Lincoln refer to this experience: “In
New Orleans for the first time,” he writes, “Lincoln beheld the
true horrors of human slavery. He saw ‘negroes in
chains—whipped and scourged.’ Against this inhumanity his
sense of right and justice rebelled, and his mind and conscience
were awakened to a realization of what he had often heard and read.
No doubt, as one of his companions has said, ‘slavery ran the iron
into him then and there.’ One morning in their rambles over the
city the trio passed a slave auction. A vigorous and comely mulatto
girl was being sold. She underwent a thorough examination at the
hands of the bidders; they pinched her flesh, and made her trot up
and down the room like a horse, to show how she moved, and in
order, as the auctioneer said, that ‘bidders might satisfy
themselves’ whether the article they were offering to buy was sound
or not. The whole thing was so revolting that Lincoln moved away
from the scene with a deep feeling of ‘unconquerable hate.’ Bidding
his companions follow him, he said, ‘Boys, let’s get away from
this. If ever I get a chance to hit that thing’ (meaning slavery),
‘I’ll hit it hard.'”

MENTOR GRAHAM.

Mentor Graham was the New Salem school-master. He it was who
assisted Lincoln in mastering Kirkham’s grammar, and later gave him
valuable assistance when Lincoln was learning the theory of
surveying. He taught in a little log school-house on a hill south
of the village, just across Green’s Rocky Branch. Among his pupils
was Ann Rutledge, and the school was often visited by Lincoln. In
1845, Mentor Graham was defendant in a lawsuit in which Lincoln and
Herndon were attorneys for the plaintiff, Nancy Green. It appears
from the declaration, written by Lincoln’s own hand, that on
October 28, 1844, Mentor Graham gave his note to Nancy Green for
one hundred dollars, with John Owens and Andrew Beerup as sureties,
payable twelve months after date. The note not being paid when due,
suit was brought. That Lincoln, even as an attorney, should sue
Mentor Graham may seem strange; but it is no surprise when it is
explained that the plaintiff was the widow of Bowling
Green—the woman who, with her husband, had comforted Lincoln
in an hour of grief. Justice, too, in this case, was clearly on her
side. The lawsuit seems never to have disturbed the friendly
relations between Lincoln and Mentor Graham. The latter’s
admiration for the former was unbounded to the day of his death.
Mentor Graham lived on his farm near the ruins of New Salem until
1860, when he removed to Petersburg. There he lived until 1885,
when he removed to Greenview, Illinois. Later he went to South
Dakota, where he died about 1892, at the ripe old age of ninety-odd
years.

Mr. Herndon gives John Hanks as his authority for this
statement. But this is plainly an error, for, according to Mr.
[pg
21] Lincoln himself, Hanks did not go on to New Orleans, but
having a family and being likely to be detained from home longer
than at first expected, turned back at St. Louis. Though there is
reason for believing that Lincoln was deeply impressed on this trip
by something he saw in a New Orleans slave market, and that he
often referred to it, the story told above probably grew to its
present proportions by much telling.⁷

LINCOLN SETTLES IN NEW SALEM.

The month in New Orleans passed swiftly, and in June, 1831,
Lincoln and his companions took passage up the river. He did not
return, however, in the usual way of the river boatman “out of a
job.” According to his own way of putting it, “during this
boat-enterprise acquaintance with Offutt, who was previously an
entire stranger, he conceived a liking for Abraham, and believing
he could turn him to account, he contracted with him to act as a
clerk for him on his return from New Orleans, in charge of a store
and mill at New Salem.”⁸

The store and mill were, however, so far only in Offutt’s
imagination, and Lincoln had to drift about until his employer was
ready for him. He made a short visit to his father and mother, now
in Coles County, near Charleston (fever and ague had driven the
Lincolns from their first home in Macon County), and then, in July,
1831, he drifted over to New Salem, where, as he says, he “stopped
indefinitely and for the first time, as it were, by himself.”

VIEW FROM THE HILL ABOVE SANGAMON RIVER, LOOKING TOWARD THE
SITE OF NEW SALEM.

“The village of New Salem, the scene of Lincoln’s mercantile
career,” writes one of our correspondents who has studied the
history of the town and visited the spot where it once stood, “was
one of the many little towns which, in the pioneer days, sprang up
along the Sangamon River, a stream then looked upon as navigable
and as destined to be counted among the highways of commerce.
Twenty miles northwest of Springfield, strung along the left bank
of the Sangamon, parted by hollows and ravines, is a row of high
hills. On one of these—a long, narrow ridge, beginning with a
[pg
22] sharp and sloping point near the river, running south,
and parallel with the stream a little way, and then, reaching its
highest point, making a sudden turn to the west, and gradually
widening until lost in the prairie—stood this frontier
village. The crooked river for a short distance comes from the
east, and, seeming surprised at meeting the bluff, abruptly changes
its course, and flows to the north. Across the river the bottom
stretches out, reaching half a mile back to the highlands. New
Salem, founded in 1829 by James Rutledge and John Cameron, and a
dozen years later a deserted village, is rescued from oblivion only
by the fact that Lincoln was once one of its inhabitants. His first
sight of the town had been in April, 1831, when the flatboat he had
built and its little crew were detained in getting their boat over
the Rutledge and Cameron mill-dam, on which it lodged. When Lincoln
walked into New Salem, three months later, he was not altogether a
stranger, for the people remembered him as the ingenious
flatboat-man who, a little while before, had freed his boat from
water (and thus enabled it to [pg 23] get over the dam) by
resorting to the miraculous expedient of boring a hole in the
bottom.”⁹ Offutt’s goods had not arrived when
Mr. Lincoln reached New Salem; and he “loafed” about, so those who
remember his arrival say, good-naturedly taking a hand in whatever
he could find to do, and in his droll way making friends of
everybody. By chance, a bit of work fell to him almost at once,
which introduced him generally and gave him an opportunity to make
a name in the neighborhood. It was election day. The village
school-master, Mentor Graham by name, was clerk, but the assistant
was ill. Looking about for some one to help him, Mr. Graham saw a
tall stranger loitering around the polling place, and called to
him, “Can you write?” “Yes,” said the stranger, “I can make a few
rabbit tracks.” Mr. Graham evidently was satisfied with the answer,
for he promptly initiated him; and he filled his place not only to
the satisfaction of his employer, but also to the delectation of
the loiterers about the polls, for whenever things dragged he
immediately began “to spin out a stock of Indiana yarns.” So droll
were they that years afterward men who listened to Lincoln that day
repeated them to their friends. He had made a hit in New Salem, to
start with, and here, as in Sangamon town, it was by means of his
story-telling.

LINCOLN’S FIRST VOTE.

Photographed from the original poll-book, now on file in the
county clerk’s office, Springfield, Illinois. Lincoln’s first vote
was cast at New Salem, “in the Clary’s Grove precinct,” August 1,
1831. At this election he aided Mr. Graham, who was one of the
clerks. In the early days in Illinois, elections were conducted by
the viva voce method. The people did try voting by ballot,
but the experiment was unpopular. It required too much “book
larnin,” and in 1829 the viva voce method of voting was
restored. The judges and clerks sat at a table with the poll-book
before them. The voter walked up, and announced the candidate of
his choice, and it was recorded in his presence. There was no
ticket peddling, and ballot-box stuffing was impossible. To this
simple system we are indebted for the record of Lincoln’s first
vote. As will be seen from the fac-simile, Lincoln voted for James
Turney for Congressman, Bowling Green and Edmund Greer for
Magistrates, and John Armstrong and Henry Sinco for Constables. Of
these five men three were elected. Turney was defeated for
Congressman by Joseph Duncan. Turney lived in Greene County. He was
not then a conspicuous figure in the politics of the State, but was
a follower of Henry Clay, and was well thought of in his own
district. He and Lincoln, in 1834, served their first terms
together in the lower house of the legislature, and later he was a
State senator. Joseph Duncan, the successful candidate, was already
in Congress. He was a politician of influence. In 1834 he was a
strong “Jackson man;” but after his election as Governor he created
consternation among the followers of “Old Hickory” by becoming a
Whig. Sidney Breese, who received only two votes in the Clary’s
Grove precinct, afterward became the most conspicuous of the five
candidates. Eleven years later he defeated Stephen A. Douglas for
the United States Senate, and for twenty-five years he was on the
bench of the Supreme Court of Illinois, serving under each of the
three constitutions. For the office of Magistrate Bowling Green was
elected, but Greer was beaten. Both of Lincoln’s candidates for
Constable were elected. John Armstrong was the man with whom, a
short time afterward, Lincoln had the celebrated wrestling match.
Henry Sinco was the keeper of a store at New Salem. Lincoln’s first
vote for President was not cast until the next year (November 5,
1832), when he voted for Henry Clay.—Note furnished by J.
McCan Davis.

(To be continued.)

Footnote 1: (return)

The collection of Lincoln portraits owned by Mr. T.H. Bartlett,
the sculptor, is the most complete and the most intelligently
arranged which we have examined. Mr. Bartlett began collecting
fully twenty years ago, his aim being to secure data for a study of
Mr. Lincoln from a physiognomical point of view. He has probably
the earliest portrait which exists, the one here given, excepting
the one used as a frontispiece in our November number. He has a
large number of the Illinois pictures made from 1858 to 1860, such
as the Gilmer picture, which we use as a frontispiece in the
present number, a large collection of Brady photographs, the masks,
Volk’s bust, and other interesting portraits. These he has studied
from a sculptor’s point of view, comparing them carefully with the
portraiture of other men, as Webster and Emerson. Mr. Bartlett has
embodied his study of Mr. Lincoln in an illustrated lecture which
is a model of what such a lecture should be, suggestive, human,
delightful. All his fine collection of Lincoln portraits Mr.
Bartlett has put freely at our disposal, an act of courtesy and
generosity for which the readers of McCLURE’S MAGAZINE, as well as
its editors, cannot fail to be deeply grateful.

Footnote 2: (return)

See November number of McCLURE’S MAGAZINE, page 502.

Footnote 3: (return)

Letter to —— Johnston, April 18, 1846. “Abraham
Lincoln. Complete Works.” Edited by John G. Nicolay and John Hay.
Volume I., pages 86, 87. The Century Co.

Footnote 4: (return)

Short autobiography written in 1860 for use in preparing a
campaign biography. “Abraham Lincoln. Complete Works.” Edited by
John G. Nicolay and John Hay. The Century Co. Volume I., page
639.

Footnote 5: (return)

Short autobiography written for use in preparing a campaign
biography. “Abraham Lincoln. Complete Works.” Edited by John G.
Nicolay and John Hay. Volume I., page 639. The Century Co.

Footnote 6: (return)

1830-1831. “The winter of the deep snow” is the date which is
the starting point in all calculations of time for the early
settlers of Illinois, and the circumstance from which the old
settlers of Sangamon County receive the name by which they are
generally known, “Snowbirds.”

Footnote 7: (return)

“No doubt the young Kentuckian was disgusted [with what he saw
in the New Orleans slave auction]; but there is no proof that this
was his first object lesson in human slavery, or that, as so often
has been asserted, he turned to his companion and said, ‘If I ever
get a chance to hit slavery, I will hit it hard.’ Such an
expression from a flatboat-man would have been
absurd.”—Personal Reminiscences of 1840-1890, by L.E.
Chittenden.

Footnote 8: (return)

“Abraham Lincoln. Complete Works.” Edited by John G. Nicolay and
John, Hay. Volume I.

Footnote 9: (return)

New Salem plays so prominent a part in the life of Lincoln that
the MAGAZINE engaged Mr. J. McCan Davis, of Springfield, Illinois,
who had already made a special study of this period of Mr.
Lincoln’s life, to go in detail over the ground to secure a
perfectly accurate sequence of events, to collect new and
unpublished pictures and documents, and to interview all of the old
acquaintances of Mr. Lincoln who remain in the neighborhood. Mr.
Davis has secured some new facts about Mr. Lincoln’s life in this
period; he has unearthed in the official files of the county
several new documents, and he has secured several unpublished
portraits of interest. His matter will be incorporated into our
next two articles.

THE LOVE OF THE PRINCE OF GLOTTENBERG.

By Anthony Hope,

Author of “The Prisoner of Zenda,” “The Dolly
Dialogues,” etc.

I.

It was in the spring of the year that Ludwig, Prince of
Glottenberg, came courting the Princess Osra; for his father had
sought the most beautiful lady of a royal house in Europe, and had
found none to equal Osra. Therefore the prince came to Strelsau
with a great retinue, and was lodged in the White Palace, which
stood on the outskirts of the city, where the public gardens now
are (for the palace itself was sacked and burnt by the people in
the rising of 1848). Here Ludwig stayed many days, coming every day
to the king’s palace to pay his respects to the king and queen, and
to make his court to the princess. King Rudolf had received him
with the utmost friendship, and was, for reasons of state then of
great moment, but now of vanished interest, as eager for the match
as was the King of Glottenberg himself; and he grew very impatient
with his sister when she hesitated to accept Ludwig’s hand,
alleging that she felt for him no more than a kindly esteem, and,
what was as much to the purpose, that he felt no more for her. For
although the prince possessed most courteous and winning manners,
and was very accomplished both in learning and in exercises, yet he
was a grave and pensive young man, rather stately than jovial, and
seemed, in the princess’s eyes (accustomed as they were to catch
and check ardent glances), to perform his wooing more as a duty of
his station than on the impulse of any passion. Finding in herself,
also, no such sweet ashamed emotions as had before now crossed her
heart on account of lesser men, she grew grave and troubled; and
she said to the king:

“Brother, is this love? For I had as lief he were away as here;
and when he is here he kisses my hand as though it were a statue’s
hand; and—and I feel as though it were. They say you know
what love is. Is this love?”

“There are many forms of love,” smiled the king. “This is such
love as a prince and a princess may most properly feel.”

“I do not call it love at all,” said Osra, with a pout.

When Prince Ludwig came next day to see her, and told her, with
grave courtesy, that his pleasure lay in doing her will, she broke
out:

“I had rather it lay in watching my face;” and then, ashamed,
she turned away from him.

He seemed grieved and hurt at her words, and it was with a sigh
that he said: “My life shall be given to giving you joy.”

She turned round on him with flushed cheek and trembling
lips:

“Yes, but I had rather it were spent in getting joy from
me.”

He cast down his eyes a moment, and then, taking her hand,
kissed it, but she drew it away sharply; and so that afternoon they
parted, he back to his palace, she to her chamber, where she sat,
asking again: “Is this love?” and crying: “He does not know love;”
and pausing, now and again, before her mirror, to ask her pictured
face why it would not unlock the door of love.

On another day she would be merry, or feign merriment, rallying
him on his sombre air and formal compliments, professing that for
her part she soon grew weary of such wooing, and loved to be easy
and merry; for thus she hoped to sting him, so that he would either
disclose more warmth, or forsake altogether his pursuit. But he
made many apologies, blaming nature that had made him grave, but
assuring her of his deep affection and respect.

“Affection and respect!” murmured Osra, with a little toss of
her head. “Oh, that I had not been born a princess!” And yet,
though she did not love him, she thought him a very noble
gentleman, and trusted to his honor and sincerity in everything.
Therefore, when he still persisted, and Rudolf and the queen urged
her, telling her (the king mockingly, the queen with a touch of
sadness) that she must not look to find in the world such love as
romantic girls dreamt of, at last she yielded, and she told her
brother that she would marry Prince Ludwig, yet for a little while
she would not have the news proclaimed. So Rudolf went, alone and
privately, to the White Palace, and said to Ludwig:

“Cousin, you have won the fairest lady in the world. Behold, her
brother says it!”

Prince Ludwig bowed low, and, taking the king’s hand, pressed
it, thanking him for his help and approval, and expressing himself
as most grateful for the boon of the princess’s favor.

“And will you not come with me and find her?” cried the king,
with a merry look.

“I have urgent business now,” answered Ludwig. “Beg the princess
to forgive me. This afternoon I will crave the honor of waiting on
her with my humble gratitude.”

King Rudolf looked at him, a smile curling on his lips; and he
said, in one of his gusts of impatience:

“By heaven! is there another man in the world who would talk
about gratitude, and business, and the afternoon, when Osra of
Strelsau sat waiting for him?”

“I mean no discourtesy,” protested Ludwig, taking the king’s arm
and glancing at him with most friendly eyes. “Indeed, dear friend,
I am rejoiced and honored. But this business of mine will not
wait.”

So the king, frowning and grumbling and laughing, went back
alone, and told the princess that the happy wooer was most
grateful, and would come, after his business was transacted, that
afternoon. But Osra, having given her hand, would now admit no
fault in the man she had chosen, and thanked the king for the
message, with great dignity. Then the king came to her, and,
sitting down by her, stroked her hair, saying softly:

“You have had many lovers, sister Osra, and now comes a
husband.”

“Yes, now a husband,” she murmured, catching swiftly at his
hand; and her voice was half caught in a sudden sob.

“So goes the world—our world,” said the king, knitting his
brows and seeming to fall for a moment into a sad reverie.

“I am frightened,” she whispered. “Should I be frightened if I
loved him?”

“I have been told so,” said the king, smiling again. “But the
fear has a way of being mastered then.” And he drew her to him, and
gave her a hearty brother’s kiss, telling her to take heart.
“You’ll thaw the fellow yet,” said the king, “though I grant you he
is icy enough.” For the king himself had been by no means what he
called an icy man.

But Osra was not satisfied, and sought to assuage the pain of
her heart by adorning herself most carefully for the prince’s
coming, hoping to fire him to love. For she thought that if he
loved she might, although since he did not she could not. And
surely he did not, or all the tales of love were false! Thus she
came to receive him very magnificently arrayed. There was a flush
on her cheek, and an uncertain, expectant, fearful look in her
eyes; and thus she stood before him, as he fell on his knee and
kissed her hand. Then he rose, and declared his thanks, and
promised his devotion; but as he spoke the flush faded, and the
light died from her eyes; and when at last he drew near to her, and
offered to kiss her cheek, her eyes were dead, and her face pale
[pg
25] and cold as she suffered him to touch it. He was content
to touch it but once, and seemed not to know how cold it was; and
so, after more talk of his father’s pleasure and his pride, he took
his leave, promising to come again the next day. She ran to the
window when the door was closed on him, and thence watched him
mount his horse and ride away slowly, with his head bent and his
eyes downcast; yet he was a noble gentleman, stately and handsome,
kind and true. The tears came suddenly into her eyes and blurred
her sight as she leant watching from behind the hanging curtains of
the window. Though she dashed them angrily away, they came again,
and ran down her pale, cold cheeks, mourning the golden vision that
seemed gone without fulfilment.

That evening there came a gentleman from the Prince of
Glottenberg, carrying most humble excuses from his master, who (so
he said) was prevented from waiting on the princess the next day by
a certain very urgent affair that took him from Strelsau, and would
keep him absent from the city all day long; and the gentleman
delivered to Osra a letter from the prince, full of graceful and
profound apologies, and pleading an engagement that his honor would
not let him break; for nothing short of that, said he, should have
kept him from her side. There followed some lover’s phrases,
scantily worded, and frigid in an assumed passion. But Osra smiled
graciously, and sent back a message, readily accepting all that the
prince urged in excuse. And she told what had passed to the king,
with her head high in the air, and a careless haughtiness, so that
even the king did not rally her, nor yet venture to comfort her,
but urged her to spend the next day in riding with the queen and
him; for they were setting out for Zenda, where the king was to
hunt in the forest, and she could ride some part of the way with
them, and return in the evening. And she, wishing that she had sent
first to the prince, to bid him not come, agreed to go with her
brother; it was better far to go than to wait at home for a lover
who would not come.

Thus, the next morning, they rode out, the king and queen with
their retinue, the princess attended by one of her guard, named
Christian Hantz, who was greatly attached to her, and most jealous
in praise and admiration of her. This fellow had taken on himself
to be very angry with Prince Ludwig’s coldness, but dared say
nothing of it. Yet, impelled by his anger, he had set himself to
watch the prince very closely; and thus he had, as he conceived,
[pg
26] discovered something that brought a twinkle into his eye
and a triumphant smile to his lips as he rode behind the princess.
Some fifteen miles she accompanied her brother, and then, turning
with Christian, took another road back to the city. Alone she rode,
her mind full of sad thoughts; while Christian, behind, still wore
his malicious smile. But, presently, although she had not commanded
him, he quickened his pace, and came up to her side, relying on the
favor which she always showed him, for excuse.

“Well, Christian,” said she, “have you something to say to
me?”

For answer he pointed to a small house that stood among the
trees, some way from the road, and he said:

“If I were Ludwig and not Christian, yet I would be here where
Christian is, and not there where Ludwig is.” And he pointed still
at the house.

She faced round on him in anger at his daring to speak to her of
the prince, but he was a bold fellow, and would not be silenced now
that he had begun to speak. He knew also that she would bear much
from him; so he leant over towards her, saying:

“By your bounty, madam, I have money, and he who has money can
get knowledge. So I know that the prince is there. For fifty pounds
I gained a servant of his, and he told me.”

“I do not know why you should spy on the prince,” said Osra,
“and I do not care to know where the prince is.” And she touched
her horse with the spur, and cantered fast forward, leaving the
little house behind. But Christian persisted, partly in a foolish
grudge against any man who should win what was above his reach,
partly in an honest anger that she whom his worshipped should be
treated lightly by another; and he forced her to hear what he had
learnt from the gossip of the prince’s groom, telling it to her in
hints and half-spoken sentences, yet so plainly that she could not
miss the drift of it. She rode the faster towards Strelsau, at
first answering nothing; but at last she turned upon him fiercely,
saying that he told a lie, and that she knew it was a lie, since
she knew where the prince was and what business had taken him away;
and she commanded Christian to be silent, and to speak neither to
her nor to any one else of his false suspicions; and she bade him,
very harshly, to fall back and ride behind her again, which he did,
sullen, yet satisfied; for he knew that his arrow had gone home. On
she rode, with her cheeks aflame and her heart beating, until she
came to Strelsau, and having arrived at the palace, ran to her own
bedroom and flung herself on the bed.

Here for an hour she lay; then, it being about six o’clock, she
sat up, pushing her disordered hair back from her hot, aching brow.
For an agony of humiliation came upon her, and a fury of resentment
against the prince, whose coldness seemed now to need no more
explanation. Yet she could hardly believe what she had been told of
him; for, though she had not loved him, she had accorded to him her
full trust. Rising, she paced in pain about the room. She could not
rest, and she cried out in longing that her brother were there to
aid her, and find out the truth for her. But he was away, and she
had none to whom she could turn. So she strove to master her anger
and endure her suspense till the next day; but they were too strong
for her, and she cried: “I will go myself. I cannot sleep till I
know. But I cannot go alone. Who will go with me?” And she knew of
none, for she would not take Christian with her, and she shrank
from speaking of the matter to any of the gentlemen of the court.
And yet she must know. But at last she sprang up from the chair
into which she had sunk despondently, exclaiming:

“He is a gentleman and my friend. He will go with me.” And she
sent hastily for the Bishop of Modenstein, who was then in
Strelsau, bidding him come dressed for riding, and with a sword,
and the best horse in his stable. And the bishop came equipped as
she bade him and in very great wonder. But when she told him what
she wanted, and what Christian had made known to her, he grew
grave, saying that they must wait and consult the king when he
returned.

“I will not wait an hour,” she cried. “I cannot wait an
hour.”

“Then I will ride, and bring you word. You must not go,” he
urged.

“Nay; if I go alone, I will go,” said she. “Yes, I will go, and
myself fling his falseness in his teeth.”

Finding her thus resolved, the bishop knew that he could not
turn her; so, leaving her to prepare herself, he sought Christian
Hantz, and charged him to bring three horses to the most private
gate of the palace, that opened in a little by-street. Here
Christian waited for them with the horses, and they came presently,
the bishop wearing a great slouched hat, and swaggering like a
roystering trooper, while Osra was closely veiled. The bishop again
imposed secrecy on Christian, and then, they both being mounted,
said to Osra: “If you will, then, madam, come;” and thus they rode
[pg
27] secretly out of the city, about seven o’clock in the
evening, the gate-wardens opening the gates at sight of the royal
arms on Osra’s ring, which she gave to the bishop in order that he
might show it.

In silence they rode a long way, going at a great speed. Osra’s
face was set and rigid, for she felt now no shame at herself for
going, nor any fear of what she might find. But the injury to her
pride swallowed every other feeling, and at last she said, in
short, sharp words, to the Bishop of Modenstein, having suddenly
thrown the veil back from her face:

“He shall not live, if it prove true.”

The bishop shook his head. His profession was peace; yet his
blood, also, was hot against the man who had put a slight on
Princess Osra.

“The king must know of it,” he said.

“The king? The king is not here tonight,” said Osra; and she
pricked her horse, and set him at a gallop. The moon, breaking
suddenly in brightness from behind a cloud, showed the bishop her
face. Then she put out her hand, and caught him by the arm,
whispering: “Are you my friend?”

“Yes, madam,” said he. She knew well that he was her friend.

“Kill him for me, then! Kill him for me!”

“I cannot kill him,” said the bishop. “I pray God it may prove
untrue.”

“You are not my friend if you will not kill him,” said Osra; and
she turned her face away, and rode yet more quickly.

“KILL HIM FOR ME, THEN! KILL HIM FOR ME!”

At last they came in sight of the little house that stood back
from the road, and there was a light in one of the upper windows.
The bishop heard a short gasp break from Osra’s lips, and she
pointed with her whip to the window. Now his own breath came quick
and fast, and he prayed to God that he might remember his sacred
character and his vows, and not be led into great and deadly sin at
the bidding of that proud, bitter face; and he clenched his left
hand, and struck his brow with it.

Thus, then, they came to the gate of the avenue of trees that
led to the house. Here, having dismounted, and tied their horses to
the gatepost, they stood an instant, and Osra again veiled her
face.

“Let me go alone, madam,” he implored.

“Give me your sword, and I will go alone,” she answered.

“Here, then, is the path,” said the bishop; and he led the way
[pg
28] by the moonlight that broke fitfully here and there
through the trees.

“He swore that all his life should be mine,” she whispered. “Yet
I knew that he did not love me.”

The bishop made her no answer; she looked for none, and did not
know that she spoke the bitterness of her heart in words that he
could hear. He bowed his head, and prayed again for her and for
himself; for he had found his hand gripping the hilt of his sword.
And thus, side by side now, they came to the door of the house, and
saw a gentleman standing in front of the door, still but watchful.
And Osra knew that he was the prince’s chamberlain.

When the chamberlain saw them he started violently, and clapped
a hand to his sword; but Osra flung her veil on the ground, and the
bishop gripped his arm as with a vise. The chamberlain looked at
Osra and at the bishop, and half drew his sword.

“This matter is too great for you, sir,” said the bishop. “It is
a quarrel of princes. Stand aside!” And before the chamberlain
could make up his mind what to do, Osra had passed by him, and the
bishop had followed her.

Finding themselves in a narrow passage, they made out, by the
dim light of a lamp, a flight of stairs that rose from the farthest
end of it. The bishop tried to pass the princess, but she motioned
him back, and walked swiftly to the stairs. In silent speed they
mounted till they had reached the top of the first stage; and
facing them, eight or ten steps farther up, was a door. By the door
stood a groom. This was the man who had treacherously told
Christian of his master’s doings; but when he saw, suddenly, what
had come of his disloyal chattering, the fellow went white as a
ghost, and came tottering in stealthy silence down the stairs, his
finger on his lips. Neither of them spoke to him, nor he to them.
They gave no thought to him; his only thought was to escape as soon
as he might; so he passed them, and, going on, passed also the
chamberlain, who stood dazed at the house door, and so disappeared,
intent on saving the life that he had justly forfeited. Thus the
rogue vanished, and what became of him no one knew nor cared. He
showed his face no more at Glottenberg or Strelsau.

“Hark! there are voices,” whispered Osra to the bishop, raising
her hand above her head, as they two stood motionless.

The voices came from the door that faced them, the voice of a
man and the voice of a woman. Osra’s glance at her companion told
him that she knew as well as he whose the man’s voice was.

“It is true, then,” she breathed from between her teeth. “My
God, it is true!”

The woman’s voice spoke now, but the words were not audible.
Then came the prince’s: “Forever, in life or death, apart or
together, forever.” But the woman’s answer came no more in words,
but in deep, low, passionate sobs, that struck their ears like the
distant cry of some brute creature in pain that it cannot
understand. Yet Osra’s face was stern and cold, and her lips curled
scornfully when she saw the bishop’s look of pity.

“Come, let us end it,” said she; and with a firm step she began
to mount the stairs that lay between them and the door.

Yet once again they paused outside the door, for it seemed as
though the princess could not choose but listen to the passionate
words of love that pierced her ears like knives. Yet they were all
sad, speaking of renunciation, not happiness. But at last she heard
her own name; then, with a sudden start, she caught the bishop’s
hands, for she could not listen longer. And she staggered and
reeled as she whispered to him: “The door, the door—open the
door!”

The bishop, his right hand being across his body and resting on
the hilt of his sword, laid his left upon the handle of the door
and turned it. Then he flung the door wide open; and at that
instant Osra sprang past him, her eyes gleaming like flames from
her dead-white face. And she stood rigid on the threshold of the
room, with the bishop by her side.

“IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM STOOD THE PRINCE OF GLOTTENBERG; AND
… CLINGING TO HIM … WAS A GIRL OF SLIGHT AND SLENDER
FIGURE.”

In the middle of the room stood the Prince of Glottenberg; and
strained in a close embrace, clinging to him, supported by his
arms, with head buried in his breast, was a girl of slight and
slender figure, graceful, though not tall; and her body was still
shaken by continual, struggling sobs. The prince held her there as
though against the world, but raised his head, and looked at the
intruders with a grave, sad air. There was no shame on his face,
and hardly surprise. Presently he took one arm from about the lady,
and, raising it, motioned to them to be still. Osra took one step
forward toward where the pair stood; the bishop caught her sleeve,
but she shook him off. The lady looked up into the prince’s face;
with a sudden, startled cry clutched him closer, and turned a
terrified face over her shoulder. Then she moaned in great fear,
and, reeling, fell against the prince, and would have sunk to the
[pg
29] ground if he had not upheld her; and her eyes closed and
her lips dropped as she swooned away. But the princess smiled, and,
drawing herself to her full height, stood watching while Ludwig
bore the lady to a couch and laid her there. Then, when he came
back and faced her, she asked coldly and slowly:

“Who is this woman, sir? Or is she one of those that have no
names?”

The prince sprang forward, a sudden anger in his eyes; he raised
his hand as if he would have pressed it across her scornful mouth,
and kept back her bitter words. But she did not flinch; and,
pointing at him with her finger, she cried to the bishop, in a
ringing voice:

“Kill him, my lord, kill him!”

And the sword of the Bishop of Modenstein was half-way out of
the scabbard.

II.

“I would to God, my lord,” said the prince in low, sad tones,
“that God would suffer you to kill me, and me to take death at your
hands. But neither for you nor for me is the blow lawful. Let me
speak to the princess.”

The bishop still grasped his sword; for Osra’s face and hand
still commanded him. But at the instant of his hesitation, while
the temptation was hot in him, there came from the couch where the
lady lay a low moan of great pain. She flung her arms out, and
turned, groaning, again on her back, and her head lay limply over
the side of the couch. The bishop’s eyes met Ludwig’s; and with a
“God forgive me!” he let the sword slip back, and, springing across
the room, fell on his knees beside the couch. He broke the gold
chain round his neck, and grasped the crucifix which he carried in
one hand, while with the other he raised the lady’s head, praying
her to open her eyes, before whose closed lids he held the sacred
image; and he, who had come so near to great sin, now prayed
softly, but fervently, for her life and God’s pity on her, for the
frailty her slight form showed could not withstand the shock of
this trial.

“Who is she?” asked the princess.

But Ludwig’s eyes had wandered back to the couch, and he
answered only:

“My God, it will kill her!”

“I care not,” said Osra. But then came another low moan. “I care
not,” said the princess again. “Ah, she is in great suffering!” And
her eyes followed the prince’s.

There was silence, save for the lady’s low moans and the
whispered prayers of the Bishop of Modenstein. But the lady opened
her eyes, and in an instant, answering the summons, the prince was
by her side, kneeling, and holding her hand very tenderly, and he
met a glance from the bishop across her prostrate body. The prince
bowed his head, and one sob burst from him.

“Leave me alone with her for a little, sir,” said the bishop;
and the prince, obeying, rose and withdrew into the bay of the
window, while Osra stood alone near the door by which she had
entered.

A few minutes passed, then Osra saw the prince return to where
the lady was, and kneel again beside her; and she saw that the
bishop was preparing to perform his most sacred and sublime office.
The lady’s eyes dwelt on him now in peace and restfulness, and held
Prince Ludwig’s hand in her small hand. But Osra would not kneel;
she stood upright, still and cold, as though she neither saw nor
heard anything of what passed; she would not pity nor forgive the
woman even if, as they seemed to think, she lay dying. But she
spoke once, asking in a harsh voice:

“Is there no physician in the house or near?”

“None, madam,” said the prince.

The bishop began the office, and Osra stood, dimly hearing the
words of comfort, peace, and hope; dimly seeing the smile on the
lady’s face, for gradually her eyes clouded with tears. Now her
ears seemed to hear nothing save the sad and piteous sobs that had
shaken the girl as she hung about Ludwig’s neck. But she strove to
drive away her softer thoughts, fanning her fury when it burnt low,
and telling herself again of the insult that she had suffered. Thus
she rested till the bishop had performed the office. But when he
had finished it he rose from his knees, and came to where Osra
was.

“It was your duty,” she said. “But it is none of mine.”

“She will not live an hour,” said he. “For she had an affection
of the heart, and this shock has killed her. Indeed, I think she
was half dead from grief before we came.”

“Who is she?” broke again from Osra’s lips.

“Come and hear,” said he; and she followed him obediently, yet
unwillingly, to the couch, and looked down at the lady. The lady
looked at her with wondering eyes, and then she smiled faintly,
pressing the prince’s hand and whispering:

“Yet she is so beautiful.” And she seemed now wonderfully happy,
so that the three all watched her, and were envious, although they
were to live and she to die.

“Now God pardon her sin,” said the Princess Osra suddenly, and
she fell on her knees beside the couch, crying: “Surely God has
pardoned her.”

“Sin she had none, save what clings even to the purest in this
world,” said the bishop. “For what she has said to me I know to be
true.”

Osra answered nothing, but gazed in questioning at the prince,
and he, still holding the lady’s hand, began to speak in a gentle
voice.

“Do not ask her name, madam. But from the first hour that we
knew the meaning of love we have loved one another. And had the
issue rested in my hands I would have thrown to the winds all that
kept me from her. I remember when first I met her—ah, my
sweet! do you remember? And from that day to this, in soul she has
been mine, and I hers in all my life. But more could not be. Madam,
you have asked what love is. Here is love. Yet fate is stronger.
Thus I came here to woo, and she, left alone, resolved to give
herself to God.”

“How comes she here, then?” whispered Osra. And she laid one
hand timidly on the couch near the lady, yet not so as to touch
even her garments.

“She came here,” he began—but suddenly, to their
amazement, the lady, who had seemed dead, with an effort raised
herself on her elbow, and spoke in a quick, eager whisper, as if
she feared time and strength would fail.

“He is a great prince,” she said; “he must be a great king. God
means him for greatness. God forbid that I should be his ruin! Oh,
what a sweet dream he painted! But praise be to the blessed saints
that kept me strong. Yet, at the last I was weak. I could not live
without another sight of his face, and so—so I came. Next
week I am—I was to take the veil, and I came here to see him
once again—God pardon me for it—but I could not help
it. Ah, madam, I know you, and I see now your beauty. Have you
known love?”

“No,” said Osra; and she moved her hand near to the lady’s
hand.

“And when he found me here he prayed me again to do what he
asked, and I was half killed in denying it. But I prevailed, and we
were even then parting when you came. Why, why did I come?” And for
a moment her voice died away in a low, soft moan. But she made one
more effort. Clasping Osra’s hand in her delicate fingers, she
whispered: “I am going. Be his wife.”

“No, no, no!” whispered Osra, her face now close to the lady’s.
“You must live you must live and be happy.” And then she kissed the
lady’s lips. The lady put out her arms, and clasped them round
Osra’s neck; and again she whispered softly in Osra’s ear. Neither
Ludwig nor the bishop heard what she said, but they heard only that
Osra sobbed. Presently the lady’s arms relaxed a little in their
hold, and Osra, having kissed her again, rose, and signed to Ludwig
to come nearer; while she, turning, gave her hand to the bishop,
and he led her from the room, and finding another room near, took
her in there, where she sat silent and pale.

Thus half an hour passed; then the bishop stole softly out, and
presently returned, saying:

“God has spared her the long, painful path, and has taken her
straight to his rest.”

Osra heard him, half in a trance, and as if she did not hear;
she did not know whither he went, nor what he did, nor anything
that passed, until, as it seemed, after a long while, she looked
up, and saw Prince Ludwig standing before her. He was composed and
calm, but it seemed as if half the life had gone out of his face.
Osra rose slowly to her feet, supporting herself on an arm of the
chair on which she had sat, and when she had seen his face she
suddenly threw herself on the floor at his feet, crying:

“Forgive me! Forgive me!”

“The guilt is mine,” said he; “for I did not trust you, and did
by stealth what your nobility would have suffered openly. The guilt
is mine.” And he offered to raise her, but she rose unaided, asking
with choking voice:

“Is she dead?”

“She is dead,” said the prince; and Osra, hearing it, covered
her face with her hands, and blindly groped her way back to the
chair, where she sat, panting and exhausted.

“To her I have said farewell, and now, madam, to you. Yet do not
think that I am a man without eyes for your beauty, or a heart to
know your worth. I seemed to you a fool and a churl. I grieved most
bitterly, and I wronged you bitterly; my excuse for all is now
known. For though you are more beautiful than she, yet true love is
no wanderer; it gives a beauty that it does not find, and weaves a
chain no other charms can break. Madam, farewell.”

“OSRA … SUDDENLY THREW HERSELF ON THE FLOOR AT HIS FEET,
CRYING, ‘FORGIVE ME! FORGIVE ME!'”

She looked at him and saw the sad joy in his eyes, an exultation
over what had been that what was could not destroy; and she knew
that the vision was still with him, though his love was dead.
Suddenly he seemed to her a man she also might love, and for whom
she also, if need be, might gladly die. Yet not because she loved
him, for she was asking still in wonder: “What is this love?”

“Madam, farewell,” said he again; and, kneeling before her, he
kissed her hand.

“I carry the body of my love,” he went on, “back with me to my
home, there to mourn for her; and I shall come no more to
Strelsau.”

Osra bent her eyes on his face as he knelt, and presently she
said to him in a whisper that was low for awe, not shame:

“You heard what she bade me do?”

“Yes, madam, I know her wish.”

“And you would do it?” she asked.

“Madam, my struggle was fought before she died. But now you know
that my love was not yours.”

“That also I knew before, sir;” and a slight, bitter smile came
on her face. But she grew grave again, and sat there, seeming to be
pondering, and Prince Ludwig waited on his knees. Then she suddenly
leant forward and said:

“If I loved I would wait for you to love. Now what is the love
that I cannot feel?”

And then she sat again silent, but at last raised her eyes again
to his, saying in a voice that even in the stillness of the room he
hardly heard:

“Now I do dearly love you, for I have seen your love, and know
that you can love; and I think that love must breed love, so that
she who loves must in God’s time be loved. Yet”—she paused
here, and for a moment hid her face with her hand—”yet I
cannot,” she went on. “Is it our Lord Christ who bids us take the
lower place? I cannot take it He does not so reign in my heart. For
to my proud heart—ah, my heart so proud!—she would be
ever between us. I could not bear it. Even though she is dead, I
could not bear it. Yet I believe now that with you I might one day
find happiness.”

The prince, though in that hour he could not think of love, was
yet very much moved by her new tenderness, and felt that what had
passed rather drew them together than made any separation between
them. And it seemed to him that the dead lady’s blessing was on his
suit, so he said:

“Madam, I would most faithfully serve you, and you would be the
nearest and dearest to me of all living women.”

She waited a while, then she sighed heavily, and looked in his
face with an air of wistful longing, and she knit her brows as
though she were puzzled. But at last, shaking her head, she
said:

“It is not enough.”

And with this she rose and took him by the hand, and they two
went back together to where the Bishop of Modenstein still prayed
beside the body of the lady.

Osra stood on one side of the body, and stretched her hand out
to the prince, who stood on the other side.

“See,” said she, “she must be between us.” And having kissed the
dead face once, she left the prince there by the side of his love,
and herself went out, and turning her head, saw that the prince
knelt again by the corpse of his love.

“He does not think of me,” she said to the bishop.

“His thoughts are still with her, madam,” he answered.

It was late night now, and they rode swiftly and silently along
the road to Strelsau. And on all the way they spoke to one another
only a few words, being both sunk deep in thought. But once Osra
spoke, as they were already near to Strelsau. For she turned
suddenly to the bishop, saying:

“My lord, what is it? Do you know it?”

“Yes, madam, I have known it,” answered the bishop.

“Yet you are a churchman!”

“True, madam,” said he, and he smiled sadly.

She seemed to consider, fixing her eyes on his; but he turned
his aside.

“Could you not make me understand?” she asked.

“Your lover, when he comes, will do that, madam,” said he, and
still he kept his eyes averted. And Osra wondered why he kept his
eyes turned away; yet presently a faint smile curved her lips, and
she said:

“It may be you might feel it, if you were not a churchman. But I
do not. Many men have said they loved me, and I have felt something
in my heart—but not this!”

“It will come,” said the bishop.

“Does it come, then, to every one?”

“To most,” he answered.

“Heigho, will it ever come to me?” she sighed.

And so they were at home. And Osra was for a long time very
sorrowful for the fate of the lady whom the Prince of Glottenberg
had loved; but since she saw Ludwig no more, and the joy of youth
conquered her sadness, she ceased to mourn; and as she walked along
she would wonder more and more what it might be, this great love
that she did not feel.

“For none will tell me, not even the Bishop of Modenstein,” said
she.

P.A.J. DAGNAN-BOUVERET, A LIVING FRENCH PAINTER.

MADONNA AND CHILD IN ART.

By Will H. Low.

When shepherds watched their flocks by night, and the angel
appeared, bringing the tidings of good-will, a new vocation, until
then unknown, was given to men. Tradition has it that one of the
earliest of the followers of the Child born that night was a
painter, and in the pictures of the primitive Dutch and Italian
schools a not uncommon subject is St. Luke painting the Virgin and
Child, while in more than one church in Europe the original(?)
picture may be seen. Perhaps the most notable of these is the
beautiful though quaint picture by Rogier van der Weyden, now in
the Old Pinakothek, in Munich. And the tradition is a pleasant one,
showing how early the services of the painters were enlisted in
spreading abroad the new gospel of peace on earth.

When we consider that, even stripped of divinity, the birth of a
child, its first dawning intelligence, its flower-like tenderness
of aspect, are one and all motives which excite the best that is in
man, there is little wonder that the Christ-child should have been
and should still be the best subject that a painter could demand.
In many forms, in fact, do we of a later day and of less fervent
faith celebrate the beauty of mother and child. How much more
ardently, therefore, in the days when faith and the painter’s craft
were so intimately linked, have the painters approached their task.
Almost transfigured to divinity is the woman with the child at her
breast that shines upon us in so many galleries; quite divine in
the devout painter’s thought it was as he wrought.

sings Rossetti; and the “highest painter,” pious monk, as in the
[pg
34] case of Fra Angelico, and stately courtier, as was Peter
Paul Rubens, meet, extremes though they are, on the same ground
when they approach this sacred subject. The pictures reproduced
here, it may safely be said, are all celebrated, and yet they
represent but a small part of the pictures of the same subject
which are known to be by men of importance, and of which every
museum in the world has a goodly number. If we add to these the
pictures in private collections, and then take into account the
tens of thousands of pictures of the same subject which, everywhere
throughout the world, especially in Europe, are to be found in the
churches, it is safe to say that no other subject has so often
given its inspiration to the painter.

MOTHER AND CHILD. TITIAN (ITALIAN: BORN 1477; DIED 1576).

Nor in any other case has a subject given such variety of
inspiration. The elements are few and simple, and though
occasionally there are accessory figures, the concentration of
interest, the reason for the existence of the picture, is centred
on the Mother and Child. A survey of these pages will suffice to
show that of these two principal elements a great variety of
pictorial effect, of expression, of sentiment, of composition of
line, and of light and shade, is possible. We can go back to the
splendid Byzantine churches, with their wealth of mosaic, their
subdued splendor of dulled gold covering arch and pillar as a
background for the glow of color with which the artists of
Constantine worked,—in a rigid convention as to form which
gives their figures an impressive air, but which is ill-suited to
the representation of the divine Mother and Child. Hence, in this,
the earliest manifestation of Christian art, it is the remembrance
of the majesty of a prophet, of the benign dignity of the mature
Christ, that I we carry away with us. Giotto, however, had no
sooner freed himself from the hampering conditions under which his
predecessors worked, than we begin to feel the human element enter
into art. Down through the centuries until to-day, the long
procession of artists comes to us: those of Italy first of all,
birthplace of modern art, land where time has touched everything
with so reverent a hand that all has been rendered beautiful.

MADONNA AND CHILD. MURILLO (SPANISH: BORN 1618?; DIED
1682).

This legion of valiant painters enlisted in the service of “that
most noble Lady and her Son, our Lord and Seigneur,” have names
which sound sweet to the ear, as their work is goodly to the sight.
[pg
35] Giotto, Era Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Gentile da
Fabriano, Ghirlandajo, names like the beads of a rosary, commence
the list, to which Botticelli, Perugino, Raffaello Santi, Leonardo
da Vinci, Andrea del Sarto, Correggio, Tiziano, Veronese, and, last
of all, with a name like the blast of a trumpet, the mighty Michael
the Archangel, add their syllabic charm. Then the painters of more
northern lands bring the tribute of their name and work; names less
pleasing to the ear, as their work has less beauty to the sight,
but rich, both in name and work, with honest intent and simple
devotion.

MOTHER AND CHILD, MURILLO (SPANISH: BORN 1618?; DIED
1682).

First come the men whose names are those of their works or of
their birthplace: Master William of Cologne, Master of the Death of
Mary, Master of the Holy Companionship. Then the Van Eycks, Hubert
and Jan, Rogier van der Weyden, Hugo van der Goes, Hans Memling,
Quentin Massys, Lucas van Leyden, the two Hans Holbein, elder and
younger, Burgkmair, Wolgemut, and then, master of them all,
Albrecht Dürer. Something of their honesty of purpose must
have been mixed with their pigments, for the works of these
fortunate painters of the early Dutch and German schools shine on
us to-day from the gallery walls with undiminished splendor; and
brave with vivid reds, with blues as rich and deep as an organ
chord, and yellows rich as the gold with which they embroidered
their Virgin’s robes, their pictures show, with touching lapses in
some of the details, a large technical mastery, coupled with an
intensity of sentiment which has remained unapproachable.

HOLY FAMILY. NICOLAS POUSSIN (FRENCH: BORN 1594; DIED
1665).

MOTHER AND CHILD. LANDELLE. A LIVING FRENCH PAINTER.

MOTHER AND CHILD. UNKNOWN EARLY FLEMISH PAINTER.

THE MADONNA WITH THE DIADEM. RAPHAEL (ITALIAN: BORN 1483; DIED
1520).

MOTHER AND CHILD. RUBENS (FLEMISH: BORN 1577; DIED 1640).

VIRGIN, INFANT JESUS, AND ST. JOHN. BOTTICELLI (ITALIAN: BORN
1447; DIED 1515).

THE REPOSE OF THE HOLY FAMILY. CANTARINI (ITALIAN: BORN 1612;
DIED 1648).

The next of these northern painters who can claim the first rank
is he who is in some respects the greatest of all from a painter’s
standpoint, Rembrandt van Ryn. There is little of the primitive
Italian here, little of the painter who worships his Madonna
through the medium of his craft as some great lady, “empress of
heaven and of earth.” Rembrandt’s picture, lacking this mysticism,
gains, however, in humanity; and however far even from our modern
point of view it may be as a creation embodying the divine
Motherhood, it throbs with tenderness. The homely interior, the
good mother, the almost pathetic abandon of the sleeping
child—surely no painter ever wrought better, nor, we may be
sure, more devoutly!

MOTHER AND CHILD. P.A.J. DAGNAN-BOUVERET, A LIVING FRENCH
PAINTER.

MOTHER AND CHILD. N. BARABINO, A LIVING ITALIAN PAINTER.

Then the giant Peter Paul Rubens, with his facile brush, his
acres of canvas, covered with the virile arabesque by which he has
transmitted to us the record of a temperament so full of life that
it needs no great effort of imagination, before one of his crowded
canvases, to imagine the doughty Fleming back in our midst, and
taking his place as Jupiter upon his painted Olympus, reawakened to
life. Yet, when he in turn approaches this natal subject, his pagan
[pg
40] brush touches the canvas lightly, and all its deftness
is given to the praise of Our Lady and Our Lord. With him, as with
the painters of all and differing nationalities, both Mother and
Child bear the strong impress of the painter’s surroundings. It is
as though the miraculous birth had, by some mysterious
dispensation, taken place in each of the countries of the world,
the better to insure the comprehension of the message of divine
love to all peoples.

HOLY FAMILY. SIR ANTHONY VAN DYCK (FLEMISH: BORN 1599; DIED
1641).

MOTHER AND CHILD. CARLO DOLCI (ITALIAN: BORN 1616; DIED
1686).

HOLY FAMILY. BONIFAZIO (ITALIAN: BORN 1494; DIED 1563).

MOTHER AND CHILD. N. BARABINO, A LIVING ITALIAN PAINTER.

With Van Dyck, a little later, the Child is a young patrician;
the quality of the painter’s imagination, influenced by his
frequentation of the princes of the earth, making him conceive the
young Christ as a magnificent man-child, fit to be called later to
the high places of the world, a serene and noble leader.

Somewhat differently did the Italians of the great epoch of
painting, Raphael, Titian, Veronese, even Bellini, who was earlier,
conceive their subject. While both Mother and Child with them were
merely what painters call a “bit” of painting, directly founded on
close study of a living woman and child, there was always present a
religious feeling, different, but almost as intense as that of the
primitive Italian painters. Throughout the many Madonnas on which
the fame of Raphael is founded we feel that, through a certain
variety of type, the research was always the same—a desire to
realize the maid-mother, and to presage, in the lineaments of the
child, his future character. This sentiment, everywhere present, is
approached reverently, and the too short-lived painter in his work
at least utters a constant prayer. With Bellini, with Titian, and
with Veronese the effort is not dissimilar, though something of the
sumptuosity of Venetian life has crept in, and it is to a queen of
earth as much as of heaven, and to a prince of the church temporal,
that their service is rendered.

In the Spanish pictures, particularly those of earlier date than
any Spanish picture reproduced here, we feel the strong impress of
the Church. In the picture by Alonso Cano there looks out from the
eyes of the Mother the sentiment of the cloistered nun; and though,
with the Murillos, we catch a glimpse of Spain outside of the
Church, even with him there is a sense of subjection from which the
memories of the Inquisition are not altogether absent.

LA VIERGE AU COUSSIN VERT—MADONNA OF THE GREEN CUSHION.
ANDREA DA SOLARIO (ITALIAN: BORN 1458; DIED 1530).

LA VIERGE AUX CERISES—MADONNA OF THE CHERRIES. ANNIBALE
CARRACCI (ITALIAN: BORN 1560; DIED 1609).

JESUS ASLEEP. L. DESCHAMPS, A LIVING FRENCH PAINTER.

MOTHER AND CHILD. S.H. LYBAERT, A LIVING GERMAN PAINTER.

Our modern art has become so complex, the demands on the modern
painter are so different from those which the older masters met,
that our latter-day painting offers fewer examples of the Mother
and Child. Dagnan-Bouveret, in France, however, has treated the
subject in such a way as to show that there yet remains new
presentations of the world-old theme. To-day the painter has to
retain the sentiment of his subject through a network of technical
difficulties, and the gracious virginal figure which Monsieur
Dagnan-Bouveret has painted does this measurably well; while he has
triumphed technically in painting a figure in white, lit by
reflected light filtered through a network of green leaves. Another
picture of the Virgin and Child, where the outline of the Child is
seen through the cloak by which his mother shelters him, was
exhibited not long ago in New York, and is reproduced here.

MOTHER AND CHILD. E. VAN HOVE, A LIVING FRENCH PAINTER.

THE HOLY NIGHT. F. ROEBER, A LIVING GERMAN PAINTER.

MOTHER AND CHILD. ITALIAN SCHOOL OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY;
ARTIST UNKNOWN.

THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI. SPAGNOLETTO (SPANISH: BORN 1588;
DIED 1656).

THE MADONNA OF THE TEMPI FAMILY. RAPHAEL (ITALIAN: BORN 1483;
DIED 1520).

In Italy, sadly fallen from her former greatness in art, many
painters render their service to the Church and to their ancient
faith, and there are numerous pictures of the divine Mother and
Child. The best of these, however, are characterized by novel
arrangement of the figures rather than by any sentiment in keeping
with theme—a criticism applicable also to most the modern
French examples. Modern Germany gains in sentiment while losing
decidedly in pictorial value, and it is a question whether it is
possible, in these times, to avoid a mere repetition of what has
already been so well done, and produce more than a picture which,
with pictorial and technical qualities, is laboring in the messages
of “peace on earth, good-will to men.”

HOLY FAMILY. REMBRANDT (DUTCH: BORN 1607; DIED 1669).

MADONNA, INFANT JESUS, AND ST. JOHN. VOUET (FRENCH: BORN 1590;
DIED 1649).

LA VIERGE À LA GRAPPE—MADONNA OF THE GRAPES.
PIERRE MIGNARD (FRENCH: BORN 1610; DIED 1695).

LA VIERGE AU LAPIN—MADONNA OF THE RABBIT. TITIAN
(ITALIAN: BORN 1477; DIED 1576).

THE FOND MOTHER. GABRIEL GUAY, A LIVING FRENCH PAINTER.

ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS.

From a photograph by Mr. Benjamin Kimball, Boston.

CHAPTERS FROM A LIFE.

I.

By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,

Author of “The Gates Ajar,” “The Madonna of the
Tubs,” etc.

Has it not been said that once in a lifetime most of us succumb
to the particular situation against which we have cultivated the
strongest principles? If there be one such, among the possibilities
to which a truly civilized career is liable, more than another
objectionable to the writer of these words, the creation of
autobiography has long been that one.

Yet, for that offence, once criminal to my taste, I find myself
hereby about to become indictable; and do set my hand and seal, on
this day of the recall of my dearest literary oath, in this year of
eminent autobiographical examples, one thousand eight hundred and
ninety-five.

“There is ——, who has written a charming series of
personal reminiscences, and —— ——, and
——.

“You might meet your natural shrinking by allowing yourself to
treat especially of your literary life; including, of course,
whatever went to form and sustain it.”

“I suppose I might,” I sigh. The answer is faint; but the
deed is decreed. Shall I be sorry for it?

It is a gray day, on gray Cape Ann, as I write these words. The
fog is breathing over the downs. The outside steamers shriek from
off the Point, as they feel their way at live of noon, groping as
though it were dead of night, and stars and coast-lights all were
smitten dark, and every pilot were a stranger to his chart.

A stranger to my chart, I, doubtful, put about, and make the
untried coast.

At such a moment, one thinks wistfully of that fair, misty world
which is all one’s own, yet on the outside of which one stands so
humbly, and so gently. One thinks of the unseen faces, of the
unknown friends who have read one’s tales of other people’s lives,
and cared to read, and told one so, and made one believe in their
kindness, and affection and fidelity for thirty years. And the
hesitating heart calls out to them: Will you let me be
sorry? Thirty years! It is a good while that you and I have kept
step together. Shall we miss it now? If you will care to
hear such chapters as may select themselves from the story of the
story-teller,—you have the oldest right to choose, and I, the
happy will to please you if I can.

The lives of the makers of books are very much like other
people’s in most respects, but especially in this: that they are
either rebels to, or subjects of, their ancestry. The lives of some
literary persons begin a good while after they are born. Others
begin a good while before.

Of this latter kind is mine.

It has sometimes occurred to me to find myself the possessor of
a sort of unholy envy of writers concerning whom our stout American
phrase says that they have “made themselves.” What delight to be
aware that one has not only created one’s work, but the worker!
What elation in the remembrance of the battle against a commercial,
or a scientific, or a worldly and superficial heredity; in the
recollection of the tug with habit and education, and the overthrow
of impulses setting in other directions than the chosen movement of
one’s own soul!

What pleasure in the proud knowledge that all one’s success is
one’s own doing, and the sum of it cast up to one’s credit upon the
long ledger of life! To this exhilarating self-content I can lay no
claim. For whatever measure of what is called success has fallen to
my lot, I can ask no credit. I find myself in the chastened
position of one whose literary abilities all belong to one’s
ancestors.

It is humbling—I do not deny that it may be morally
invigorating—to feel that whatever is “worth mentioning” in
my life is no affair of mine, but falls under the beautiful and
terrible law by which the dead men and women whose blood bounds in
our being control our destinies.

Yet, with the notable exception of my father, I have less than
the usual store of personal acquaintance with the “people who most
influenced me.” Of my grandfather, Moses Stuart, I have but two
recollections; and these, taken together, may not be quite devoid
of interest, as showing how the law of selection works in the mind
of an imaginative child.

I remember seeing the Professor of Sacred Literature come into
his dining-room one morning in his old house on Andover Hill which
was built for him, and marked the creation of his department in the
early days of the seminary history. He looked very tall and
imposing. He had a mug in his hand, and his face smiled like the
silver of which it was made.

The mug was full of milk, and he handed it ceremoniously to the
year-old baby, his namesake and grandson, my first brother, whose
high-chair stood at the table.

Then, I remember—it must have been a little more than a
year after that—seeing the professor in his coffin in the
front hall; that he looked taller than he did before, but still
imposing; that he had his best coat on—the one, I think, in
which he preached; and that he was the first dead person I had ever
seen.

Whenever the gray-headed men who knew him used to sit about,
relating anecdotes of him—as, how many commentaries he
published, or how he introduced the first German lexicon into this
country (as if a girl in short dresses would be absorbingly
interested in her grandfather’s dictionaries!)—I saw the
silver mug and the coffin.

Gradually the German lexicon in a hazy condition got melted in
between them. Sometimes the baby’s mug sat upon the dictionary.
Sometimes the dictionary lay upon the coffin. Sometimes the baby
spilled the milk out of the mug upon the dictionary. But for my
personal uses, the Andover grandfather’s memoirs began and ended
with the mug and the coffin.

The other grandfather was not distinguished as a scholar; he was
but an orthodox minister of ability and originality, and with a
vivacious personal history. Of him I knew something. From his own
lips came thrilling stories of his connection with the underground
railway of slavery days; how he sent the sharpest carving-knife in
the house, concealed in a basket of food, to a hidden fugitive
slave who had vowed never to be taken alive, and whose master had
come North in search of him. It was a fine thing, that throbbing
humanity, which could in those days burst the reformer out of the
evangelical husk, and I learned my lesson from it. (“Where
did she get it?” conservative friends used to wail, whenever
I was seen to have tumbled into the last new and unfashionable
reform.)

From his own lips, too, I heard the accounts of that
extraordinary case of house-possession of which (like Wesley) this
innocent and unimaginative country minister, who had no more faith
in “spooks” than he had in Universalists, was made the astonished
victim.

Night upon night I have crept gasping to bed, and shivered for
hours with my head under the clothes, after an evening spent in
listening to this authentic and fantastic family tale. How the
candlesticks walked out into the air from the mantelpiece, and back
again; how the chairs of skeptical visitors collected from all
parts of the country to study what one had hardly then begun to
call the “phenomena” at the parsonage at Stratford, Connecticut,
hopped after the guests when they crossed the room; how the dishes
at the table leaped, and the silver forks were bent by unseen
hands, and cold turnips dropped from the solid ceiling; and ghastly
images were found, composed of underclothing proved to have been
locked at the time in drawers of which the only key lay all the
while in Dr. Phelps’s pocket; and how the mysterious agencies,
purporting by alphabetical raps upon bed-head or on table to be in
torments of the nether world, being asked what their host could do
to relieve them, demanded a piece of squash pie.

From the old man’s own calm hands, within a year or two of his
death, I received the legacy of the written journal of these
phenomena, as recorded by the victim from day to day, during the
seven months that this mysterious misfortune dwelt within his
house.

It may be prudent to say, just here, that it will be quite
useless to make any further inquiries of me upon the subject, or to
ask of me—a request which has been repeated till I am fain to
put an end to it—for either loan or copy of these records for
the benefit of either personal or scientific curiosity. Both
loaning and copying are now impossible, and have been made so by
family wishes which will be sacredly respected. The phenomena
themselves have long been too widely known to be ignored, and I
have no hesitation in making reference to them.

ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS, HER MOTHER, AND HER INFANT BROTHER.
AFTERWARDS PROFESSOR M. STUART PHELPS.

Perhaps it is partly on account of the traditions respecting
this bit of family history that I am so often asked if I am a
spiritualist. I am sometimes tempted to reply in grammar
comprehensible to the writers of certain letters which I receive
upon the subject:

“No; nor none of our folks!”

How the Connecticut parson on whom this mysterious infliction
fell ever came out of it not a spiritualist, who can tell?
That the phenomena were facts, and facts explicable by no known
natural law, he was forced, like others in similar positions, to
believe and admit. That he should study the subject of spiritualism
carefully from then until the end of his life, was inevitable.

But, as nearly as I can make it out, on the whole, he liked his
Bible better.

Things like these did not happen on Andover Hill; and my talks
with this very interesting grandfather gave me my first vivid
sensation of the possibilities of life.

With what thrills of hope and fear I listened for thumps on the
head of my bed, or watched anxiously to see my candlestick walk out
into the air!

But not a thump! Not a rap! Never a snap of the weakest
proportions (not explicable by natural laws) has, from that day to
this, visited my personal career. Not a candlestick ever walked an
inch for me. I have never been able to induce a chair to hop after
me. No turnip has consented to drop from the ceiling for me.
Planchette, in her day, wrote hundreds of lines for me, but never
one that was of the slightest possible significance to me, or to
the universe at large. Never did a medium tell me anything that
ever came to pass; though one of them once made a whole winter
miserable by prophesying a death which did not occur.

Being destitute of objections to belief in the usefulness of
spiritualistic mystery,—in fact, by temperament, perhaps
inclining to hope that such phenomena may be tamed and yoked, and
made to work for human happiness,—yet there seems to be
something about me which these agencies do not find congenial.
Though I have gone longing for a sign, no sign has been given me.
Though I have been always ready to believe all other people’s
mysteries, no inexplicable facts have honored my experience.

The only personal prophecy ever strictly fulfilled in my life
was—I am not certain whether I ought to feel embarrassed in
[pg
52] alluding to it—made by a gipsy fortune-teller. She
was young and pretty, the seventh child of a seventh child, and she
lived in a Massachusetts shoe-town by the name of Lynn. And what
was it? Oh, but you must excuse me.

The grandfather to whom these marvels happened was not, as I
say, a literary man; yet even he did write a little book—a
religious tale, or tract, after the manner of his day and
profession; and it took to itself a circulation of two hundred
thousand copies. I remember how Mr. James T. Fields laughed when he
heard of it—that merry laugh peculiar to himself.

“You can’t help it,” the publisher said; “you come of a family
of large circulations.”

One day I was at school with my brother,—a little, private
school, down by what were called the English dormitories in
Andover.

I was eight years old. Some one came in and whispered to the
teacher. Her face turned very grave, and she came up to us quietly,
and called us out into the entry, and gently put on our things.

“You are to go home,” she said; “your mother is dead.” I took my
little brother’s hand without a word, and we trudged off. I do not
think we spoke—I am sure we did not cry—on the way
home. I remember perfectly that we were very gayly dressed. Our
mother liked bright, almost barbaric colors on children. The little
boy’s coat was of red broadcloth, and my cape of a canary yellow,
dyed at home in white-oak dye. The two colors flared before my eyes
as we shuffled along and crushed the crisp, dead leaves that were
tossing in the autumn wind all over Andover Hill.

When we got home they told us it was a mistake; she was not
dead; and we were sent back to school. But, in a few weeks after
that, one day we were told we need not go to school at all; the red
and yellow coats came off, and little black ones took their places.
The new baby, in his haggard father’s arms, was baptized at his
mother’s funeral; and we looked on, and wondered what it all meant,
and what became of children whose mother was obliged to go to
heaven when she seemed so necessary in Andover.

At eight years of age a child cannot be expected to know her
mother intimately, and it is hard for me always to distinguish
between the effect produced upon me by her literary success as I
have since understood it, and that left by her own truly
extraordinary personality upon the annals of the nursery.

PROFESSOR PHELPS’S HOUSE AT ANDOVER, MASSACHUSETTS, THE HOUSE
IN WHICH ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS WAS REARED.

My mother, whose name I am proud to wear, was the eldest
daughter of Professor Stuart, and inherited his intellectuality. At
the time of her death she was at the first blossom of her very
positive and widely-promising success as a writer of the simple
home stories which took such a hold upon the popular heart. Her
“Sunnyside” had already reached a circulation of one hundred
thousand copies, and she was following it fast—too
fast—by other books for which the critics and the publishers
clamored. Her last book and her last baby came together, and killed
her. She lived one of those rich and piteous lives such as only
gifted women know; torn by the civil war of the dual nature which
can be given to women only. It was as natural for her daughter to
write as to breathe; but it was impossible for her daughter to
forget that a woman of intellectual power could be the most
successful of mothers.

PROFESSOR AUSTIN PHELPS, FATHER OF ELIZABETH STUART
PHELPS.

From an early photograph.

“Everybody’s mother is a remarkable woman,” my father used to
say when he read overdrawn memoirs indited by devout children; and
yet I have sometimes felt as if even the generation that knows her
not would feel a certain degree of interest in the tact and power
by which this unusual woman achieved the difficult reconciliation
between genius and domestic life.

In our times and to our women such a problem is practical,
indeed. One need not possess genius to understand it now. A career
is enough.

The author of “Sunnyside,” “The Angel on the Right Shoulder,”
and “Peep at Number Five,” lived before women had careers and
public sympathy in them. Her nature was drawn against the grain of
her times and of her circumstances; and where our feet find easy
walking, hers were hedged. A child’s memories go for something by
way of tribute to the achievement of one of those rare women of the
elder time whose gifts forced her out, but whose heart held her
in.

I can remember no time when I did not understand that my mother
must write books because people would have and read them; but I
[pg
54] cannot remember one hour in which her children needed
her and did not find her.

My first distinct vision of this kind of a mother gives her by
the nursery lamp, reading to us her own stories, written for
ourselves, never meant to go beyond that little public of two, and
illustrated in colored crayons by her own pencil. For her gift in
this direction was of an original quality, and had she not been a
writer she must have achieved something as an artist.

Perhaps it was to keep the standards up, and a little girl’s
filial adoration down, that these readings ended with some
classic—Wordsworth, I remember most often—”We are
Seven,” or “Lucy Gray.”

ELM ARCH, ANDOVER, MASSACHUSETTS.

It is certain that I very early had the conviction that a mother
was a being of power and importance to the world; but that the
world had no business with her when we wanted her. In a word, she
was a strong and lovely symmetry—a woman whose heart had not
enfeebled her head, but whose head could never freeze her
heart.

I hardly know which of those charming ways in which I learned to
spell the word motherhood impressed me most. All seemed to go on
together side by side and step by step. Now she sits correcting
proof-sheets, and now she is painting apostles for the baby’s first
Bible lesson. Now she is writing her new book, and now she is
dyeing things canary-yellow in the white-oak dye—for the
professor’s salary is small, and a crushing economy was in those
days one of the conditions of faculty life on Andover Hill.
Now—for her practical ingenuity was unlimited—she is
whittling little wooden feet to stretch the children’s stockings
on, to save them from shrinking; and now she is reading to us from
the old, red copy of Hazlitt’s “British Poets,” by the register,
upon a winter night. Now she is a popular writer, incredulous of
her first success, with her future flashing before her; and now she
is a tired, tender mother, crooning to a sick child, while the MS.
lies unprinted on the table, and the publishers are wishing their
professor’s wife were a free woman, childless and solitary, able to
send copy as fast as it is wanted. The struggle killed her, but she
fought till she fell.

In these different days, when,

THE REV. DR. E. PHELPS, GRANDFATHER OF ELIZABETH STUART
PHELPS.

I have sometimes been glad, as my time came to face the long
question which life puts to-day to all women who think and feel,
and who care for other women and are loyal to them, that I had
those early visions of my own to look upon.

When I was learning why the sun rose and the moon set, how the
flowers grew and the rain fell, that God and heaven and art and
letters existed, that it was intelligent to say one’s prayers, and
that well-bred children never told a lie, I learned that a mother
can be strong and still be sweet, and sweet although she is strong;
and that she whom the world and her children both have need of, is
of more value to each, for this very reason.

I said it was impossible to be her daughter and not to write.
Rather, I should say, impossible to be their daughter and
not to have something to say, and a pen to say it.

The comparatively recent close of my father’s life has not left
him yet forgotten, and it can hardly be necessary for me to do more
than to refer to the name of Austin Phelps to recall to that part
of our public which knew and loved him the quality of his work.

“The Still Hour” is yet read, and there are enough who remember
how widely this book has been known and loved, and how marked was
the literary gift in all the professor’s work.

It has fallen to me otherwise to say so much of my peculiar
indebtedness to my father, that I shall forbid myself, and spare my
[pg
56] reader, too much repetition of a loving credit which it
would not be possible altogether to omit from this chapter.

He who becomes father and mother in one to motherless children,
bears a burden which men shirk or stagger under; and there was not
a shirking cell in his brain or heart.

As I have elsewhere said: “There was hardly a chapter in my life
of which he was not in some sense, whether revealed or concealed,
the hero.”

“If I am asked to sum in a few words the vivid points of his
influence, I find it as hard to give definite form to my
indebtedness to the Christian scholar whose daughter it is my honor
to be, as to specify the particulars in which one responds to
sunshine or oxygen. He was my climate. As soon as I began to think,
I began to reverence thought and study and the hard work of a man
devoted to the high ends of a scholar’s life. His department was
that of rhetoric, and his appreciation of the uses and graces of
language very early descended like a mantle upon me. I learned to
read and to love reading, not because I was made to, but because I
could not help it. It was the atmosphere I breathed.”

“Day after day the watchful girl observed the life of a
student—its scholarly tastes, its high ideals, its scorn of
worldliness and paltry aims or petty indulgences, and forever its
magnificent habits of work.”

“At sixteen, I remember, there came to me a distinct arousing or
awakening to the intellectual life. As I look back, I see it in a
flash-light. Most of the important phases or crises of our lives
can be traced to some one influence or event, and this one I
connect directly with the reading to me by my father of the
writings of De Quincey and the poems of Wordsworth. Every one who
has ever heard him preach or lecture remembers the rare quality of
Professor Phelps’s voice. As a pulpit orator he was one of the few,
and to hear him read in his own study was an absorbing experience.
To this day I cannot put myself outside of certain pages of the
laureate or the essayist. I do not read; I listen. The great lines
beginning:

the great passage which opens: ‘Then like a chorus the passion
deepened,’ and which rises to the aching cry: ‘Everlasting
farewells!… Everlasting farewells!’ ring in my ears as they left
his lips.”

For my first effort to sail the sea of letters, it occurs to me
that I ought to say that my father’s literary reputation cannot be
held responsible.

I had reached (to take a step backwards in the story) the mature
age of thirteen. I was a little girl in low-necked gingham dresses,
I know, because I remember I had on one (of a purple shade, and
incredibly unbecoming to a half-grown, brunette girl) one evening
when my first gentleman caller came to see me.

I felt that the fact that he was my Sunday-school teacher
detracted from the importance of the occasion, but did not
extinguish it.

It was perhaps half-past eight, and, obediently to law and
gospel, I had gone upstairs.

The actual troubles of life have never dulled my sense of
mortification at overhearing from my little room at the head of the
stairs, where I was struggling to get into that gingham gown and
present a tardy appearance, a voice distinctly excusing me on the
ground that it was past her usual bedtime, and she had gone to
bed.

Whether the anguish of that occasion so far aged me that it had
anything to do with my first literary undertaking, I cannot say;
but I am sure about the low-necked gingham dress, and that it was
during this particular year that I determined to become an
individual and contribute to the “Youth’s Companion.”

I did so. My contribution was accepted and paid for by the
appearance in my father’s post-office box of the paper for a year;
and my impression is that I wore high-necked dresses pretty soon
thereafter, and was allowed to sit up till nine o’clock. At any
rate, these memorable events are distinctly intertwined in my
mind.

This was in the days when even the “Companion,” that oldest and
most delightful of children’s journals, printed things like
these:

“Why Julia B. loved the Country.

“Julia B. loved the country because whenever she
walked out she could see God in the face of Nature.”

I really think that the semi-column which I sent to that
distinguished paper was a tone or two above this. But I can
remember nothing about it, except that there was a sister who
neglected her little brothers, and hence defeated the first object
of existence in a woman-child. It was very proper, and very pious,
and very much like what well-brought-up little girls were taught to
[pg
57] do, to be, to suffer, or to write in those days. I have
often intended to ask Mr. Ford if the staff discovered any signs of
literary promise in that funny little performance.

At all events, my literary ambitions, with this solitary
exercise, came to a sudden suspension. I have no recollection of
having written or of having wanted to write anything more for a
long time.

I was not in the least a precocious young person, and very much
of a tomboy into the bargain. I think I was far more likely to have
been found on the top of an apple-tree or walking the length of the
seminary fence than writing rhymes or reading “solid reading.” I
know that I was once told by a queer old man in the street that
little girls should not walk fences, and that I stood still and
looked at him, transfixed with contempt. I do not think I
vouchsafed him any answer at all. But this must have been while I
was still in the little gingham gowns.

Perhaps this is the place, if anywhere, to mention the next
experiment at helping along the literature of my native land of
which I have any recollection. There was another little
contribution—a pious little contribution, like the first.
Where it was written, or what it was about, or where it was
printed, it is impossible to remember; but I know that it appeared
in some extremely orthodox young people’s periodical—I think,
one with a missionary predilection. The point of interest I find to
have been that I was paid for it.

With the exception of some private capital amassed by abstaining
from butter (a method of creating a fortune of whose wisdom, I must
say, I had the same doubts then that I have now), this was the
first money I had ever earned. The sum was two dollars and a half.
It became my immediate purpose not to squander this wealth. I had
no spending money in particular that I recall. Three cents a week
was, I believe, for years the limit of my personal income, and I am
compelled to own that this sum was not expended at book-stalls, or
for the benefit of the heathen who appealed to the generosity of
professors’ daughters through the treasurer of the chapel
Sunday-school; but went solidly for cream cakes and apple turnovers
alternately, one each week.

VIEW FROM THE WESTERN WINDOW OF THE STUDY IN PROFESSOR AUSTIN
PHELPS’S HOUSE, ANDOVER, MASSACHUSETTS.

Two dollars and a half represented to me a standard of
munificent possession which it would be difficult to make most
girls in their first teens, and socially situated today as I was
then, understand. To waste this fortune in riotous living was
impossible. From the hour that I received that check for
“two-fifty,” cream cakes began to wear a juvenile air, and
turnovers seemed unworthy of my position in life. I remember
[pg
58] begging to be allowed to invest the sum “in pictures,”
and that my father, gently diverting my selection from a frowsy and
popular “Hope” at whose memory I shudder even yet, induced me to
find that I preferred some excellent photographs of Thorwaldsen’s
“Night” and “Morning,” which he framed for me, and which hang in
our rooms to-day.

It is impossible to forget the sense of dignity which marks the
hour when one becomes a wage-earner. The humorous side of it is the
least of it—or was in my case. I felt that I had suddenly
acquired value—to myself, to my family, and to the world.

Probably all people who write “for a living” would agree with me
in recalling the first check as the largest and most luxurious of
life.

THE UNDERSTUDY.

By Robert Barr,

Author of “In the Midst of Alarms,” “A
Typewritten Letter,” etc.

The monarch in the Arabian story had an ointment which, put upon
his right eye, enabled him to see through the walls of houses. If
the Arabian despot had passed along a narrow street leading into a
main thoroughfare of London one night, just before the clock struck
twelve, he would have beheld, in a dingy back room of a large
building, a very strange sight. He would have seen King Charles the
First seated in friendly converse with none other than Oliver
Cromwell.

The room in which these two noted people sat had no carpet and
but few chairs. A shelf extended along one side of the apartment,
and it was covered with mugs containing paint and grease. Brushes
were littered about, and a wig lay in a corner. Two mirrors stood
at each end of the shelf, and beside them flared two gas jets
protected by wire baskets. Hanging from nails driven in the walls
were coats, waistcoats, and trousers of more modern cut than the
costumes worn by the two men.

King Charles, with his pointed beard and his ruffles of lace,
leaned picturesquely back in his chair, which rested against the
wall. He was smoking a very black briar-root pipe, and perhaps his
Majesty enjoyed the weed all the more that there was just above his
head, tacked to the wall, a large placard containing the words, “No
smoking allowed in this room, or in any other part of the
theatre.”

Cromwell, in more sober garments, had an even jauntier attitude
than the king; for he sat astride the chair, with his chin resting
on the back of it, smoking a cigarette in a meerschaum holder.

“I’m too old, my boy,” said the king, “and too fond of my
comfort. Besides, I have no longer any ambition. When an actor once
realizes that he will never be a Charles Kean or a Macready, then
comes peace and the enjoyment of life. Now, with you it is
different; you are, if I may say so in deep affection, young and
foolish. Your project is a most hair-brained scheme. You are
throwing away all you have already won.”

“Good gracious!” cried Cromwell, impatiently, “what have I
won?”

“You have certainly won something,” resumed the elder, calmly,
“when a person of your excitable nature can play so well the
sombre, taciturn character of Cromwell. You have mounted several
rounds, and the whole ladder lifts itself up before you. You have
mastered several languages, while I know but one, and that
imperfectly. You have studied the foreign drama, while I have not
even read all the plays of Shakespeare. I can do a hundred parts
conventionally well. You will, some day, do a great part as no
other man on earth will do it, and then fame will come to you. Now
you propose recklessly to throw all this away and go into the wilds
of Africa.”

“The particular ladder you offer to me,” said Cromwell, “I have
no desire to climb; I am sick of the smell of the footlights and
the whole atmosphere of the theatre. I am tired of the unreality of
the life we lead. Why not be a hero, instead of mimicking one?”

“But, my dear boy,” said the king, filling his pipe again, “look
at the practical side of things. It costs a fortune to fit out an
African expedition. Where are you to get the money?”

This question sounded more natural from the lips of the king
than did the answer from the lips of Cromwell.

“There has been too much force and too much expenditure about
African travel. I do not intend to cross the continent with arms
and the munitions of war. As you remarked a while ago, I know
several European languages, and if you will forgive what sounds
like boasting, I may say that I have a gift for picking up tongues.
I have money enough to fit myself out with some necessary
scientific instruments, and to pay my passage to the coast. Once
there, I will win my way across the continent through love and not
through fear.”

IT WAS A YEAR AFTER THE DISAPPEARANCE THAT A WAN LIVING
SKELETON STAGGERED OUT OF THE WILDERNESS IN AFRICA.

“You will lose your head,” said King Charles; “they don’t
understand that sort of thing out there, and, besides, the idea is
not original. Didn’t Livingstone try that tack?”

“Yes, but people have forgotten Livingstone and his methods. It
is now the explosive bullet and the elephant gun. I intend to learn
the language of the different native tribes I meet, and if a chief
opposes me, and will not allow me to pass through his territory,
and if I find I cannot win him over to my side by persuasive talk,
then I will go around.”

“And what is to be the outcome of it all?” cried Charles. “What
is your object?”

“Fame, my boy, fame,” cried Cromwell enthusiastically, flinging
the chair from under him and pacing the narrow room.

“If I can get from coast to coast without taking the life of a
single native, won’t that be something greater to have done than
all the play-acting from now till doomsday?”

“I suppose it will,” said the king gloomily; “but you must
remember you are the only friend I have, and I have reached an age
when a man does not pick up friends readily.”

Cromwell stopped in his walk, and grasped the king by the arm.
“And are not you the only friend I have?” he said. “And why can you
not abandon this ghastly sham and come with me, as I asked you to
at first? How can you hesitate when you think of the glorious
freedom of the African forest, and compare it with this cribbed,
and cabined, and confined business we are now at?”

The king shook his head slowly, and knocked the ashes from his
pipe. He seemed to have some trouble in keeping it alight, probably
because of the prohibition on the wall.

“As I said before,” replied the king, “I am too old. There are
no ‘pubs’ in the African forest where a man can get a glass of beer
[pg
60] when he wants it. No, Ormond, African travel is not for
me. If you are resolved to go—go, and God bless you; I will
stay at home and carefully nurse your fame. I will from time to
time drop appetizing little paragraphs into the papers about your
wanderings, and when you are ready to come back to England, all
England will be ready to listen to you. You know how interest is
worked up in the theatrical business by judicious puffing in the
papers, and I imagine African exploration requires much the same
treatment. If it were not for the press, my boy, you could explore
Africa till you were blind and nobody would hear a word about it;
so I will be your advance agent, and make ready for your home
coming.”

At this point in the conversation between these two historical
characters, the janitor of the theatre put his head into the room
and reminded the celebrities that it was very late; whereupon both
king and commoner rose with some reluctance and washed
themselves—the king becoming, when he put on the ordinary
dress of an Englishman, Mr. James Spence, while Cromwell, after a
similar transformation, became Mr. Sidney Ormond; and thus, with
nothing of royalty or dictatorship about them, the two strolled up
the narrow street into the main thoroughfare, and entered their
favorite midnight restaurant, where, over a belated meal, they
continued the discussion of the African project, which Spence
persisted in looking upon as one of the maddest expeditions that
had ever come to his knowledge. But the talk was futile—as
most talk is—and within a month from that time Ormond was on
the ocean, headed for Africa.

Another man took Ormond’s place at the theatre, and Spence
continued to play his part, as the papers said, in his usual
acceptable manner. He heard from his friend, in due course, when he
landed. Then at intervals came one or two letters showing how he
had surmounted the unusual difficulties he had to contend with.
After a long interval came a letter from the interior of Africa,
sent to the coast by messenger. Although at the beginning of this
letter Ormond said he had but faint hope of reaching his
destination, he nevertheless gave a very complete account of his
wanderings and his dealings with the natives; and up to that point
his journey seemed to be most satisfactory. He enclosed several
photographs, mostly very bad ones, which he had managed to develop
and print in the wilderness. One, however, of himself was easily
recognizable, and Spence had it copied and enlarged, hanging the
framed enlargement in whatever dressing-room fate assigned to him,
for Spence never had a long engagement at any one theatre. He was a
useful man who could take any part, but had no specialty, and
London was full of such.

For a long time he heard nothing from his friend; and the
newspaper men to whom Spence indefatigably furnished interesting
items about the lone explorer began to look upon Ormond as an
African Mrs. Harris, and the paragraphs, to Spence’s deep regret,
failed to appear. The journalists, who were a flippant lot, used to
accost Spence with, “Well, Jimmy, how’s your African friend?” and
the more he tried to convince them the less they believed in the
peace-loving traveller.

At last there came a final letter from Africa, a letter that
filled the tender middle-aged heart of Spence with the deepest
grief he had ever known. It was written in a shaky hand, and the
writer began by saying that he knew neither the date nor his
locality. He had been ill and delirious with fever, and was now at
last in his right mind, but felt the grip of death upon him. The
natives had told him that no one ever recovered from the malady he
had caught in the swamp, and his own feelings led him to believe
that his case was hopeless. The natives had been very kind to him
throughout, and his followers had promised to bring his boxes to
the coast. The boxes contained the collections he had made and also
his complete journal, which he had written up to the day he became
ill.

Ormond begged his friend to hand over his belongings to the
Geographical Society, and to arrange for the publication of his
journal, if possible. It might secure for him the fame he had died
to achieve, or it might not; but, he added, he left the whole
conduct of the affair unreservedly to his friend, on whom he
bestowed that love and confidence which a man gives to another man
but once in his life, and then when he is young. The tears were in
Jimmy’s eyes long before he had finished the letter.

He turned to another letter he had received by the same mail as
Ormond’s and which also bore the South African stamp upon it.
Hoping to find some news of his friend, he broke the seal, but it
was merely an intimation from the steamship company that half a
dozen boxes remained at the southern terminus of the line addressed
to him; but, they said, until they were assured the freight upon
them to Southampton would be paid, they would not be forwarded.

A day or two after, the London papers announced in large type,
[pg
61] “Mysterious Disappearance of an Actor.” The well-known
actor, Mr. James Spence, had left the theatre in which he had been
playing the part of Joseph to a great actor’s Richelieu, and had
not since been heard of. The janitor remembered him leaving that
night, for he had not returned his salutation, which was most
unusual. His friends had noticed that for a few days previous to
his disappearance he had been apparently in deep dejection, and
fears were entertained. One journalist said jestingly that probably
Jimmy had gone to see what had become of his African friend; but
the joke, such as it was, was not favorably received, for when a
man is called Jimmy until late in life it shows that people have an
affection for him, and every one who knew Spence was sorry that he
had disappeared, and hoped that no evil had overtaken him.

It was a year after the disappearance that a wan living skeleton
staggered out of the wilderness in Africa, and blindly groped his
way to the coast, as a man might who had lived long in darkness,
and found the light too strong for his eyes. He managed to reach a
port, and there took steamer homeward-bound for Southampton. The
sea-breezes revived him somewhat, but it was evident to all the
passengers that he had passed through a desperate illness. It was
just a toss-up whether he could live until he saw England again. It
was impossible to guess at his age, so heavy a hand had disease
laid upon him; and he did not seem to care to make acquaintances,
but kept much to himself, sitting wrapped up in his chair, gazing
with a tired-out look at the green ocean.

A young girl often sat in the chair beside him, ostensibly
reading, but more often glancing sympathetically at the wan figure
beside her. Frequently she seemed about to speak to him, but
apparently hesitated about doing so, for the man took no notice of
his fellow-passengers. At length, however, she mustered up courage
to address him, and said: “There is a good story in this
magazine—perhaps you would like to read it.”

He turned his eyes from the sea, and rested them vacantly upon
her face for a moment. His dark mustache added to the pallor of his
face, but did not conceal the faint smile that came to his lips; he
had heard her but had not understood.

“What did you say?” he asked gently.

“I said there was a good story here entitled ‘Author, Author!’
and I thought you might like to read it;” and the girl blushed very
prettily as she said this, for the man looked younger than he had
before he smiled.

“I am not sure,” said the man slowly, “that I have not forgotten
how to read. It is a long time since I have seen a book or a
magazine. Won’t you tell me the story? I would much rather hear it
from you than make the attempt to read it myself in the
magazine.”

“Oh,” she cried breathlessly, “I’m not sure that I could tell
it—at any rate, not as well as the author tells it; but I
will read it to you if you like.”

The story was about a man who had written a play, and who
thought, as every playwright thinks, that it was a great addition
to the drama, and would bring him fame and fortune. He took this
play to a London manager, but heard nothing from it for a long
time, and at last it was returned to him. Then, on going to a first
night at the theatre to see a new tragedy which this manager called
his own, he was amazed to see his rejected play, with certain
changes, produced upon the stage; and when the cry arose for
“Author, Author!” he rose in his place; but illness and privation
had done their work, and he died proclaiming himself the author of
the play.

“Ah,” said the man when the reading was finished, “I cannot tell
you how much the story has interested me. I once was an actor
myself, and anything pertaining to the stage interests me, although
it is years since I saw a theatre. It must be hard luck to work for
fame and then be cheated out of it, as was the man in the tale; but
I suppose it sometimes happens—although, for the honesty of
human nature, I hope not very often.”

“Did you act under your own name, or did you follow the fashion
so many of the profession adopt?” asked the girl, evidently
interested when he spoke of the theatre.

The young man laughed, for perhaps the first time on the voyage.
“Oh,” he answered, “I was not at all noted. I acted only in minor
parts and always under my own name, which, doubtless, you have
never heard; it is Sidney Ormond.”

“What!” cried the girl in amazement, “not Sidney Ormond, the
African traveller?”

The young man turned his wan face and large, melancholy eyes
upon his questioner.

“I am certainly Sidney Ormond, an African traveller, but I don’t
think I deserve the ‘the,’ you know. I don’t imagine any one
[pg
62] has heard of me through my travelling any more than
through my acting.”

“The Sidney Ormond I mean,” she said, “went through Africa
without firing a shot; his book, ‘A Mission of Peace,’ has been
such a success both in England and America. But of course you
cannot be he, for I remember that Sidney Ormond is now lecturing in
England to tremendous audiences all over the country. The Royal
Geographical Society has given him medals or degrees, or something
of that sort—but I believe it was Oxford that gave the
degree. I am sorry I haven’t his book with me; it would be sure to
interest you. But some one on board is almost certain to have it,
and I will try to get it for you. I gave mine to a friend in Cape
Town. What a funny thing it is that the two names should be exactly
the same!”

“It is very strange,” said Ormond gloomily; and his eyes again
sought the horizon, and he seemed to relapse into his usual
melancholy.

The girl left her seat, saying she would try to find the book,
and left him there meditating. When she came back after the lapse
of half an hour or so she found him sitting just as she had left
him, with his sad eyes on the sad sea. The girl had a volume in her
hand. “There,” she said, “I knew there would be a copy on board,
but I am more bewildered than ever; the frontispiece is an exact
portrait of you, only you are dressed differently and do not
look”—the girl hesitated—”so ill as when you came on
board.”

Ormond looked up at the girl with a smile, and said:

“You might say with truth, so ill as I look now.”

“Oh, the voyage has done you good. You look ever so much better
than when you came on board.”

“Yes, I think that is so,” said Ormond, reaching for the volume
she held in her hand. He opened it at the frontispiece, and gazed
long at the picture.

The girl sat down beside him, and watched his face, glancing
from it to the book.

“It seems to me,” she said at last, “that the coincidence is
becoming more and more striking. Have you ever seen that portrait
before?”

“Yes,” said Ormond, slowly, “I recognize it as a portrait I took
of myself in the interior of Africa, which I sent to a very dear
friend of mine—in fact, the only friend I had in England. I
think I wrote him about getting together a book out of the
materials I sent him, but I am not sure. I was very ill at the time
I wrote him my last letter. I thought I was going to die, and told
him so. I feel somewhat bewildered, and don’t quite understand it
all.”

“I understand it!” cried the girl, her face blazing with
indignation. “Your friend is a traitor. He is reaping the reward
that should have been yours, and so poses as the African traveller,
the real Ormond. You must put a stop to it when you reach England,
and expose his treachery to the whole country.”

Ormond shook his head slowly and said:

“I cannot imagine Jimmy Spence a traitor. If it were only the
book, that could be, I think, easily explained, for I sent him all
my notes of travel and materials; but I cannot understand his
taking of the medals or degrees.”

The girl made a quick gesture of impatience.

“Such things,” she said, “cannot be explained. You must confront
him, and expose him.”

“No,” said Ormond, “I shall not confront him. I must think over
the matter deeply for a time. I am not quick at thinking, at least
just now, in the face of this difficulty. Every thing seemed plain
and simple before; but if Jimmy Spence has stepped into my shoes,
he is welcome to them. Ever since I came out of Africa, I seem to
have lost all ambition. Nothing appears to be worth while now.”

“Oh!” cried the girl, “that is because you are in ill health.
You will be yourself again when you reach England. Don’t let this
worry you now; there is plenty of time to think it all out before
we arrive. I am sorry I spoke about it, but you see I was taken by
surprise when you mentioned your name.”

“I am very glad you spoke to me,” said Ormond, in a more
cheerful voice. “The mere fact that you have spoken to me has
encouraged me wonderfully. I cannot tell how much this conversation
has been to me. I am a lone man, with only one friend in the world;
I am afraid I must add now, without even one friend in the world. I
am grateful for your interest in me, even though it was only
compassion for a wreck, for a derelict, floating about on the sea
of life.”

There were tears in the girl’s eyes, and she did not speak for a
moment. Then she laid her hand softly on Ormond’s arm, and said:
“You are not a wreck—far from it. You sit alone too much, and
I am afraid that what I have thoughtlessly said has added to your
troubles.” The girl paused in her talk, but after a moment added:
[pg
63] “Don’t you think you could walk the deck for a
little?”

“I don’t know about walking,” said Ormond, with a little laugh;
“but I’ll come with you if you don’t mind an incumbrance.”

He rose somewhat unsteadily, and she took his arm.

“You must look upon me as your physician,” she said, cheerfully,
“and I shall insist that my orders are obeyed.”

“I shall be delighted to be under your charge,” said Ormond,
“but may I not know my physician’s name?”

The girl blushed deeply as she realized that she had had such a
long conversation with one to whom she had never been introduced.
She had regarded him as an invalid who needed a few words of
cheerful encouragement; but as he stood up she saw that he was much
younger than his face and appearance had led her to suppose.

“My name is Mary Radford,” she said.

“Miss Mary Radford?” inquired Ormond.

“Miss Mary Radford.”

That walk on the deck was the first of many, and it soon became
evident to Ormond that he was rapidly becoming his old self again.
If he had lost a friend in England he had certainly found another
on shipboard, to whom he was getting more and more attached as time
went on. The only point of disagreement between them was in regard
to the confronting of Jimmy Spence. Ormond was determined in his
resolve not to interfere with Jimmy and his ill-gotten fame.

As the voyage was nearing its end Ormond and Miss Radford stood
together, leaning over the rail, conversing quietly. They had
become very great friends indeed.

“But if you do not intend to expose this man,” said Miss
Radford, “what then do you propose to do when you land? Are you
going back to the stage again?”

“I don’t think so,” replied Ormond. “I will try to get something
to do, and live quietly for awhile.”

“Oh,” answered the girl, “I have no patience with you.”

“I am sorry for that, Mary,” said Ormond, “for if I could have
made a living I intended to have asked you to be my wife.”

“Oh!” cried the girl breathlessly, turning her head away.

“Do you think I would have any chance?” asked Ormond.

“Of making a living?” inquired the girl, after a moment’s
silence.

“No. I am sure of making a living, for I have always done so.
Therefore, answer my question: Mary, do you think I would have any
chance?” And he placed his hand softly over hers, which lay on the
ship’s rail.

The girl did not answer, but she did not withdraw her hand; she
gazed down at the bright green water with its tinge of foam.

“I suppose you know,” she said at length, “that you have every
chance, and that you are merely pretending ignorance to make it
easier for me, because I have simply flung myself at your head ever
since we began the voyage.”

“I am not pretending, Mary,” he said. “What I feared was that
your interest was only that of a nurse in a somewhat backward
patient. I was afraid that I had your sympathy, but not your love.
Perhaps that was the case at first.”

“Perhaps that was the case—at first—but it is far
from being the truth now—Sidney.”

The young man made a motion to approach nearer to her, but the
girl drew away, whispering:

“There are other people besides ourselves on deck,
remember.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Ormond, gazing fondly at her. “I can
see no one but you. I believe we are floating alone on the ocean
together and that there is no one else in the wide world but our
two selves. I thought I went to Africa for fame, but I see I really
went to find you. What I sought seems poor compared to what I have
found.”

“Perhaps,” said the girl, looking shyly at him, “fame is waiting
as anxiously for you to woo her as—as another person waited.
Fame is a shameless huzzy, you know.”

The young man shook his head.

“No. Fame has jilted me once. I won’t give her another
chance.”

So those who were twain sailed gently into Southampton docks
resolved to be one when the gods were willing.

Miss Mary Radford’s people were there to meet her, and Ormond
went up to London alone, beginning his short railway journey with a
return of the melancholy that had oppressed him during the first
part of his long voyage. He felt once more alone in the world, now
that the bright presence of his sweetheart was missing, and he was
saddened by the thought that the telegram he had hoped to send to
Jimmy Spence, exultingly announcing his arrival, would never be
sent. In a newspaper he bought at the station he saw that the
African traveller Sidney Ormond was to be received by the mayor and
corporation of a midland town and presented with the freedom of the
city. The traveller was to lecture on his exploits in the town so
[pg
64] honoring him, that day week. Ormond put down the paper
with a sigh, and turned his thoughts to the girl from whom he had
so lately parted. A true sweetheart is a pleasanter subject for
meditation than a false friend.

Mary also saw the announcement in the paper, and anger tightened
her lips and brought additional color to her cheeks. Seeing how
adverse her lover was to taking any action against his former
friend, she had ceased to urge him, but she had quietly made up her
own mind to be herself the goddess of the machine.

On the night the bogus African traveller was to lecture in the
midland town, Mary Radford was a unit in the very large audience
that greeted him. When he came on the platform she was so amazed at
his personal appearance that she cried out, but fortunately her
exclamation was lost in the applause that greeted the lecturer. The
man was the exact duplicate of her betrothed. She listened to the
lecture in a daze; it seemed to her that even the tones of the
lecturer’s voice were those of her lover. She paid little heed to
the matter of his discourse, but allowed her mind to dwell more on
the coming interview, wondering what excuses the fraudulent
traveller would make for his perfidy. When the lecture was over,
and the usual vote of thanks had been tendered and accepted, Mary
Radford still sat there while the rest of the audience slowly
filtered out of the large hall. She rose at last, nerving herself
for the coming meeting, and went to the side door, where she told
the man on duty that she wished to see the lecturer. The man said
that it was impossible for Mr. Ormond to see any one at that
moment; there was to be a big dinner, and he was to meet the mayor
and corporation; an address was to be presented, and so the
lecturer had said that he could see no one.

“Will you take a note to him if I write it?” asked the girl.

“I will send it in to him, but it’s no use—he won’t see
you. He refused to see even the reporters,” said the doorkeeper, as
if that were final, and a man who would deny himself to the
reporters would not admit royalty itself.

Mary wrote on a slip of paper the words, “The affianced wife of
the real Sidney Ormond would like to see you for a few moments,”
and this brief note was taken in to the lecturer.

The doorkeeper’s faith in the consistency of public men was
rudely shaken a few minutes later, when the messenger returned with
orders that the lady was to be admitted at once.

When Mary entered the green-room of the lecture-hall she saw the
double of her lover standing near the fire, her note in his hand
and a look of incredulity on his face.

The girl barely entered the room, and, closing the door, stood
with her back against it. He was the first to speak.

“I thought Sidney had told me everything. I never knew he was
acquainted with a young lady, much less engaged to her.”

“You admit, then, that you are not the true Sidney Ormond?”

“I admit it to you, of course, if you were to have been his
wife.”

“I am to be his wife, I hope.”

“But Sidney, poor fellow, is dead—dead in the wilds of
Africa.”

“You will be shocked to learn that such is not the case, and
that your imposture must come to an end. Perhaps you counted on his
friendship for you, and thought that, even if he did return, he
would not expose you. In that you were quite right, but you did not
count on me. Sidney Ormond is at this moment in London, Mr.
Spence.”

Jimmy Spence, paying no attention to the accusations of the
girl, gave the war-whoop which had formerly been so effective in
the second act of “Pocahontas”—in which Jimmy had enacted the
noble savage—and then he danced a jig that had done service
in “Colleen Bawn.” While the amazed girl watched these antics,
Jimmy suddenly swooped down upon her, caught her round the waist,
and whirled her wildly around the room. Setting her down in a
corner, Jimmy became himself again, and dabbing his heated brow
with his handkerchief carefully, so as not to disturb the
make-up—

“Sidney in England again? That’s too good news to be true. Say
it again, my girl; I can hardly believe it. Why didn’t he come with
you? Is he ill?”

“He has been very ill.”

“Ah, that’s it, poor fellow! I knew nothing else would have kept
him. And then when he telegraphed to me at the old address on
landing, of course there was no reply, because, you see, I had
disappeared. But Sid wouldn’t know anything about that, and so he
must be wondering what has become of me. I’ll have a great story to
tell him when we meet, almost as good as his own African
experiences. We’ll go right up to London to-night as soon as this
confounded dinner is over. And what is your name, my girl?”

“Mary Radford.”

“And you’re engaged to old Sid, eh? Well! well! well! well! This
is great news. You mustn’t mind my capers, Mary, my dear; you see,
I’m the only friend Sid has, and I’m old enough to be your father.
I look young now, but you wait till the paint comes off. Have you
any money? I mean to live on when you’re married, because I know
Sidney never had much.”

“I haven’t very much either,” said Mary, with a sigh.

Jimmy jumped up and paced the room in great glee, laughing and
slapping his thigh.

“That’s first rate,” he cried. “Why, Mary, I’ve got over twenty
thousand pounds in the bank saved up for you two. The book and the
lectures, you know. I don’t believe Sid himself could have done as
well, for he always was careless with money; he’s often lent me the
last penny he had, and never kept any account of it. And I never
thought of paying it back either until he was gone, and then it
worried me.”

The messenger put his head into the room, and said the mayor and
the corporation were waiting.

“Oh, hang the mayor and the corporation,” cried Jimmy; then,
suddenly recollecting himself, he added hastily: “No, don’t do
that. Just give them Jimmy—I mean Sidney Ormond’s
compliments, and tell his Worship that I have just had some very
important news from Africa, but will be with them directly.”

When the messenger was gone Jimmy continued, in high feather:
“What a time we will have in London! We’ll all three go to the old
familiar theatre. Yes, and, by Jove, we’ll pay for our seats;
that will be a novelty. Then we will have supper where Sid
and I used to eat. Sidney will talk, and you and I will listen;
then I’ll talk, and you and Sid will listen. You see, my dear, I’ve
been to Africa too. When I got Sidney’s letter saying he was dying,
I just moped about and was of no use to anybody. Then I made up my
mind what to do. Sid had died for fame, and it wasn’t just he
shouldn’t get what he paid so dearly for. I gathered together what
money I could, and went to Africa steerage. I found I couldn’t do
anything there about searching for Sid, so I resolved to be his
understudy and bring fame to him, if it was possible. I sank my own
identity, and made up as Sidney Ormond, took his boxes, and sailed
for Southampton. I have been his understudy ever since; for, after
all, I always had a hope he would come back some day, and then
everything would be ready for him to take the principal role, and
let the old understudy go back to the boards again, and resume
competing with the reputation of Macready. If Sid hadn’t come back
in another year, I was going to take a lecturing trip in America;
and when that was done, I intended to set out in great state for
Africa, disappear into the forest as Sidney Ormond, wash the paint
off, and come out as Jimmy Spence. Then Sidney Ormond’s fame would
have been secure, for they would be always sending out relief
expeditions after him, and not finding him, while I would be
growing old on the boards, and bragging what a great man my friend
Sidney Ormond was.”

There were tears in the girl’s eyes as she rose and took Jimmy’s
hand.

“No man has ever been so true a friend to his friend as you have
been,” she said.

“Oh, bless you, yes,” cried Jimmy jauntily; “Sid would have done
the same for me. But he is luckier in having you than in having his
friend, although I don’t deny I’ve been a good friend to him. Yes,
my dear, he is lucky in having a plucky girl like you. I missed
that somehow when I was young, having my head full of Macready
nonsense, and I missed being a Macready too. I’ve always been a
sort of understudy; so you see the part comes easy to me. Now I
must be off to that confounded mayor and corporation. I had almost
forgotten them, but I must keep up the character for Sidney’s sake.
But this is the last act, my dear. To-morrow I’ll turn over the
part of explorer to the real actor,—to the star.”

THE HEROINE OF A FAMOUS SONG.

THE TRUE STORY OF “ANNIE LAURIE.”

By Frank Pope Humphrey.

Most people suppose “Annie Laurie” to be a creation of the
songwriter’s fancy, or perhaps some Scotch peasant girl, like
Highland Mary and most of the heroines of Robert Burns. In either
case they are mistaken.

Annie Laurie was “born in the purple,” so to speak, at Maxwelton
House, in the beautiful glen of the Cairn—Glencairn. Her home
was in the heart of the most pastorally lovely of Scottish
shires—that of Dumfries. Her birth is thus set down by her
father, in what is called the “Barjorg MS.”:

“At the pleasure of the Almighty God, my daughter Anna Laurie
was borne upon the 16th day of December 1682 years, about six
o’clock in the morning, and was baptized by Mr.
George—minister of Glencairn,”

Her father was Sir Robert Laurie, first baronet, and her mother
was Jean Riddell.

MAXWELTON HOUSE, ANNIE LAURIE’S BIRTHPLACE.

Maxwelton House was originally the castle of the earls of
Glencairn. It was bought in 1611 by Stephen Laurie, the founder of
[pg
67] the Laurie family. Stephen was a Dumfries merchant. The
castle was a turreted building. In it Annie Laurie was born.

ANNIE LAURIE.

From a painting now preserved at Maxwelton House.

This castle was partially burned in the last century, but not
all of it. The great tower is incorporated in the new house, and
also a considerable portion of the old walls was built in. The
foundations are those of the castle. The picture shows the double
windows of the tower. In places its walls are twelve feet thick.
The lower room is the “gun-room,” and the little room above, that
in the next story, is always spoken of in the family as “Annie
Laurie’s room,” or “boudoir.” This room of Annie’s has been opened
into the drawing-room by taking down the wall, and it forms a
charming alcove. Its stone ceiling shows its great age.

In the dining-room, a fine, large apartment, we come again upon
the old walls, six feet thick, which gives very deep window
recesses. In this room hang the portraits of Annie Laurie and her
husband, Alexander Ferguson. They are half-lengths, life-size.

Annie’s hair is dark brown, and she has full dark eyes—it
is difficult to say whether brown or deep hazel. I incline to the
latter. Whoever doctored the second verse of the original
song—I heard it credited to “Mrs. Grundy” by a grandnephew of
Burns—whoever it was, he had apparently no knowledge of this
portrait, for you all know he has given Annie a “dark blue
e’e.”

ALEXANDER FERGUSON, ANNIE LAURIE’S HUSBAND.

From a painting now preserved at Maxwelton House.

The nose is long and straight; the under lip full, as though
“some bee had stung it newly,” like that of Suckling’s bride. A
true Scotch face, of a type to be met any day in Edinburgh, or any
other Scotch town. She is in evening dress of white satin, and she
wears no jewels but the pearls in her hair.

Alexander Ferguson, the husband of Annie Laurie, has a handsome,
youthful face, with dark eyes and curling hair. His coat is brown,
and his waistcoat blue, embroidered with gold, and he wears
abundant lace in the charming old fashion.

It was at Maxwelton House, Annie’s birthplace, that I came
across the missing link in the chain of evidence that fixes the
authorship of the song upon Douglas of Fingland. Fingland is in the
parish of Dalry, in the adjacent shire of Kirkcudbright, and
Douglas was a somewhat near neighbor of Annie.

The present proprietor of Maxwelton House is Sir Emilius Laurie,
formerly rector of St. John’s, Paddington, when he was known as Sir
Emilius Bayley. He took the name of Laurie when he succeeded to the
family estates. Sir Emilius is a descendant of Sir Walter, third
baronet and brother of Annie.

Sir Emilius placed in my hands a letter of which he said I might
make what use I liked, and this letter contained the missing link.
While the song has been generally credited to Douglas of Fingland,
it has always been a matter of tradition rather than of ascertained
fact.

But to the important letter.

It was written in 1889, by a friend, to Sir Emilius, and relates
an incident which took place in 1854. At that time the writer, whom
we will call Mr. B., was on a visit with his wife to some friends
in Yorkshire. Mrs. B. was a somewhat famous singer of ballads. A
few friends were invited to meet them one evening, and, after the
ladies had retired to the drawing-room, their hostess asked Mrs. B.
to sing; and she sang “Annie Laurie,” in the modern revision, just
as we all sing it.

Among the guests was a lady in her ninety-seventh year. She gave
close attention to the singing of the ballad, and when Mrs. B. had
finished, she spoke up: “Thank you, thank you very much! But
they’re na the words my grandfather wrote.” Then she
repeated the first stanza as she knew it.

The next day Mr. and Mrs. B. called upon her, and in the
meantime she had had the original first stanza written out,
dictating it to a grandniece. She had signed it with her own shaky
hand. Not being satisfied with the signature, she had signed it a
second time.

She explained that her grandfather, Douglas of Fingland, was
[pg
69] desperately in love with Annie Laurie when he wrote the
song. “But,” she added, “he did na get her after a’.”

She was not quite sure as to Annie’s fate, she said. Some folks
had said she died unmarried, while some had said she married
Ferguson of Craigdarrock, and she rather thought that was
the truth.

Questioned as to the authenticity of the lines she had given,
she said:

“Oh, I mind them fine. I have remembered them a’ my life.
My father often repeated them to me.” And here is the stanza signed
with her name:

“I mind na mair.

[Signed] “Clark Douglas.

“August 30, 1854.”

In the common version this stanza reads:

In the original song there were but two stanzas, and this is the
second:

As I have said, the “rolling e’e” has been changed, and wrongly,
into one of “dark blue.”

Who added the third stanza is not known; but no lover of the
song would willingly dispense with it:

The music of the song is modern, and was composed by Lady John
Scott, aunt by marriage of the present Duke of Buccleuch. The
composer was only guessed at for many years, but somewhat recently
she has acknowledged the authorship.

Maxwelton House sits high upon its “braes.” It is “harled”
without and painted white, and is built around three sides of a
sunny court. Ivy clambers thriftily about it. Over the entrance
door of the tower, and above a window in the opposite wing, are
inserted two marriage stones; the former that of Annie’s father and
mother, the latter of her grandfather and grandmother. These
marriage stones are about two feet square. The initials of the
bride and bridegroom, and the date of the marriage, are cut upon
them, together with the family coat of arms, which bears, among
other heraldic devices, two laurel leaves and the motto, Virtus
semper viridis. Below the grandfather’s marriage stone is cut
in the lintel the following:

Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain who build
it.

Looking up the glen from Maxwelton, the chimneys of Craigdarrock
House are seen.

It is distant about five miles, and Annie had not far to remove
from her father’s house to that of her husband. She was
twenty-eight at the time of her marriage.

The Fergusons are a much older family, as families are reckoned,
than the Lauries. Fergusons of Craigdarrock were attached to the
courts of William the Lion and Alexander the II. (1214-1249).

Craigdarrock House stands near the foot of one of the three
glens whose waters unite to form the Cairn. The hills draw together
here, and give an air of seclusion to the house and grounds. The
house, large and substantial, lacks the picturesqueness of
Maxwelton. It is pale pink in tone with window-casings and copings
of French gray. The delicate cotoneaster vine clings to the stones
of it. There are pretty reaches of lawns and abundant shrubberies,
and in one place Craigdarrock Water has been diverted to form a
lake, spanned in one part by a high bridge. Sheep feed upon the
hills topped with green pastures, at the south, and shaggy Highland
cattle in the meadows below. A heavy wood overhangs to the north.
There is plenty of fine timber on the grounds, beeches, and great
silver firs and, especially to be named, ancient larches with knees
and elbows like old oaks, given to the proprietor by George II.,
when the larch was first introduced into Scotland.

The present proprietor of Craigdarrock is Captain Robert
Ferguson, of the fourth generation in direct descent from Annie
Laurie.

Religion has always been a burning question in Scotland, and
about Annie’s time the flames raged with peculiar ferocity. Her
father, Sir Robert Laurie, was a bitter enemy of the Covenantry,
and his name finds a somewhat unenviable fame in mortuary verses of
this sort cut upon gravestones:

“Douglas of Stenhouse, Laurie of Maxwelton, Caused Count
Baillie give me martyrdom.”

But the Fergusons were staunch Covenanters, and Annie, if we may
judge from her marriage with one of that party, must have favored
“compromise.” Without doubt she must have worshipped with her
husband in the old parish kirk, which was burned about fifty years
since. The two end gables, ivy-shrouded, are still standing.

Against the east gable is the burial-ground of the Lauries, and
against the west that of the Fergusons. A ponderous monument marks
the grave of Annie’s grandfather, cut with those hideous emblems
which former generations seemed to delight in. But the burial-place
of the Fergusons is singularly lacking in early monuments, and no
stone marks the place of Annie’s rest. It is a sweet, secluded
spot, and Cock-Robin—it was September—was chanting his
cheerful noonday song over the sleepers when I was there.

At Craigdarrock House is kept Annie’s will, a copy of which I
give. As a will, simply, it is of no special value. As Annie
Laurie’s, it will be read with interest.

“I, Anna Laurie, spouse to Alexr. Fergusone of Craigdarrock.
Forasmuch as I considering it a devotie upon everie persone whyle
they are in health and sound judgement so to settle yr. worldly
affairs that yrby all animosities betwixt friend and relatives may
obviat and also for the singular love and respect I have for the
said Alex. Fergusone, in case he survive me I do heirby make my
letter will as follows:

“First, I recommend my soule to God, hopeing by the meritorious
righteousness of Jesus Christ to be saved; secondly, I recommend my
body to be decently and orderly interred; and in the third plaice
nominate and appoynt the sd. Alexr. Fergusone to be my sole and
only executor, Legator and universall intromettor with my hail
goods, gear, debts, and soams off money that shall pertain and
belong to me the tyme of my decease, or shall be dew to me by bill,
bond, or oyrway; with power to him to obtain himself confirmed and
decreed exr. to me and to do everie thing for fixing and
establishing the right off my spouse in his person as law reqaires;
in witness whereof their putts (written by John Wilsone off Chapell
in Dumfries) are subd. by me at Craigdarrock the twenty eight day
of Apryle Jajvij and eleven (1711) years, before the witnesses the
sd. John Wilsone and John Nicholsone his servitor.

“Ann. Laurie,
“Jo. Wilson, Witness.
“John Hoat, Witness.”

If our dates are correct, this will was written the year after
her marriage. And it is pleasant to see that she had such entire
trust in Alexander Ferguson. Evidently she cherished no lingering
regrets for Douglas of Fingland.

In following up the “fairy” footsteps of Annie Laurie I came
upon others wholly different, but of equal interest—those of
Robert Burns.

At Craigdarrock House is kept “the whistle” of his poem of that
name. Burns tells the story of it in a note. It was brought into
Scotland by a doughty Dane in the train of Anne, queen of James VI.
He had won it in a drinking bout. It was a “challenge whistle,” to
use a modern term. The man who gave the last whistle upon it,
before tumbling under the table dead drunk, won it.

After various vicissitudes, the whistle came into possession of
Laurie of Maxwelton, and then passed into the hands of a Riddell of
the same connection. Finally came the last drinking skirmish in
which it was to appear, and which is chronicled by Burns. This
final drinking bout took place October 16, 1790. The three
champions were Sir Robert Laurie of Maxwelton, Alexander Ferguson
of Craigdarrock—an eminent lawyer, and who must, I think,
have been a grandson of Annie Laurie—and Captain Riddell of
Friar’s Carse, antiquary and friend of Burns. The contest took
place at Friar’s Carse, and Alexander Ferguson gave the last faint
whistle before going under the table, and won the prize, which ever
since has been kept at Craigdarrock.

The whistle is large, of dark brown wood, and is set in a silver
cup upon which is engraved the fact that it is “Burns’s whistle,”
together with the date of the contest. A silver chain is attached
to it; but it reposes on velvet, under glass. It is too precious to
use.

A POINT OF KNUCKLIN’ DOWN.

By Ella Higginson,

Author of “The Takin’ in of Old Mis’ Lane” and
other stories.

It was the day before Christmas—an Oregon Christmas. It
had rained mistily at dawn; but at ten o’clock the clouds had
parted and moved away reluctantly. There was a blue and dazzling
sky overhead. The rain-drops still sparkled on the windows and on
the green grass, and the last roses and chrysanthemums hung their
beautiful heads heavily beneath them; but there was to be no more
rain. Oregon City’s mighty barometer—the Falls of the
Willamette—was declaring to her people by her softened roar
that the morrow was to be fair.

Mrs. Orville Palmer was in the large kitchen making preparations
for the Christmas dinner. She was a picture of dainty loveliness in
a lavender gingham dress, made with a full skirt and a shirred
waist and big leg-o’-mutton sleeves. A white apron was tied neatly
around her waist.

Her husband came in, and paused to put his arm around her and
kiss her. She was stirring something on the stove, holding her
dress aside with one hand.

“It’s goin’ to be a fine Christmas, Emarine,” he said, and
sighed unconsciously. There was a wistful and careworn look on his
face.

“Beautiful!” said Emarine vivaciously. “Goin’ down-town,
Orville?”

“Yes.” Want anything?”

“Why, the cranberries ain’t come yet. I’m so uneasy about ’em.
They’d ought to ‘a’ b’en stooed long ago. I like ’em cooked down
an’ strained to a jell. I don’t see what ails them groc’rymen!
Sh’u’d think they c’u’d get around some time before doomsday! Then
I want—here, you’d best set it down.” She took a pencil and a
slip of paper from a shelf over the table and gave them to him.
“Now, let me see.” She commenced stirring again, with two little
wrinkles between her brows. “A ha’f a pound o’ citron; a ha’f a
pound o’ candied peel; two pounds o’ cur’nts; two pounds o’
raisins—git ’em stunned, Orville; a pound o’ sooet—make
’em give you some that ain’t all strings! A box o’ Norther’ Spy
apples; a ha’f a dozen lemons; four-bits’ worth o’ walnuts or
a’monds, whichever’s freshest; a pint o’ Puget Sound oysters fer
the dressin’, an’ a bunch o’ cel’ry. You stop by an’ see about the
turkey, Orville; an’ I wish you’d run in ‘s you go by mother’s, an’
tell her to come up as soon as she can. She’d ought to be here
now.”

Her husband smiled as he finished the list. “You’re a wonderful
housekeeper, Emarine,” he said.

Then his face grew grave. “Got a present for your mother yet,
Emarine?”

“Oh, yes, long ago. I got ‘er a black shawl down t’ Charman’s.
She’s b’en wantin’ one.”

He shuffled his feet about a little. “Unh-hunh. Yuh—that
is—I reckon yuh ain’t picked out any present fer—fer my
mother, have yuh, Emarine?”

“No,” she replied, with cold distinctness. “I ain’t.”

There was a silence. Emarine stirred briskly. The lines grew
deeper between her brows. Two red spots came into her cheeks. “I
hope the rain ain’t spoilt the chrysyanthums,” she said then, with
an air of ridding herself of a disagreeable subject.

Orville made no answer. He moved his feet again uneasily.
Presently he said: “I expect my mother needs a black shawl, too.
Seemed to me her’n looked kind o’ rusty at church Sunday. Notice
it, Emarine?”

“No,” said Emarine.

“Seemed to me she was gittin’ to look offul old.
Emarine”—his voice broke; he came a step nearer—”it’ll
be the first Christmas dinner I ever eat without my mother.”

She drew back and looked at him. He knew the look that flashed
into her eyes, and shrank from it.

“You don’t have to eat this ‘n’ without ‘er, Orville Parmer! You
go an’ eat your dinner with your mother ‘f you want! I can get
along alone. Are you goin’ to order them things? If you ain’t, just
say so, an’ I’ll go an’ do ‘t myself!”

He put on his hat and went without a word.

Mrs. Palmer took the saucepan from the stove and set it on the
[pg
72] hearth. Then she sat down and leaned her cheek in the
palm of her hand, and looked steadily out the window. Her eyelids
trembled closer together. Her eyes held a far-sighted look. She saw
a picture; but it was not the picture of the blue reaches of sky,
and the green valley cleft by its silver-blue river. She saw a
kitchen, shabby compared to her own, scantily furnished, and in it
an old, white-haired woman sitting down to eat her Christmas dinner
alone.

After a while she arose with an impatient sigh. “Well, I can’t
help it!” she exclaimed. “If I knuckled down to her this time, I’d
have to do ‘t ag’in. She might just as well get ust to ‘t first as
last. I wish she hadn’t got to lookin’ so old an’ pitiful, though,
a-settin’ there in front o’ us in church Sunday after Sunday. The
cords stand out in her neck like well-rope, an’ her chin keeps
a-quiv’rin’ so! I can see Orville a-watchin’ her—”

The door opened suddenly and her mother entered. She was
bristling with curiosity. “Say, Emarine!” She lowered her voice,
although there was no one to hear. “Where d’ you s’pose the
undertaker’s a-goin’ up by here? Have you hear of
anybody—”

“No,” said Emarine. “Did Orville stop by an’ tell you to hurry
up?”

“Yes. What’s the matter of him? Is he sick?”

“Not as I know of. Why?”

“He looks so. Oh, I wonder if it’s one o’ the Peterson children
where the undertaker’s a-goin’! They’ve all got the quinsy sore
throat.”

“How does he look? I don’t see ‘s he looks so turrable.”

“Why, Emarine Parmer! Ev’rybody in town says he looks so!
I only hope they don’t know what ails him!”

“What does ail him?” cried out Emarine, fiercely. “What
are you hintin’ at?”

“Well, if you don’t know what ails him, you’d ort to; so I’ll
tell you. He’s dyin’ by inches ever sence you turned his mother out
o’ doors.”

Emarine turned white. Sheet lightning played in her eyes.

“Oh, you’d ought to talk about my turnin’ her put!” she burst
out, furiously. “After you a-settin’ here a-quar’l’n’ with her in
this very kitchen, an’ eggin’ me on! Wa’n’t she goin’ to turn you
out o’ your own daughter’s home? Wa’n’t that what I turned her out
fer? I didn’t turn her out, anyhow! I only told Orville this house
wa’n’t big enough fer his mother an’ me, an’ that neither o’ us
‘u’d knuckle down, so he’d best take his choice. You’d ought to
talk!”

“Well, if I egged you on, I’m sorry fer ‘t,” said Mrs. Endey,
solemnly. “Ever sence that fit o’ sickness I had a month ago, I’ve
feel kind o’ old an’ no account myself, as if I’d like to let all
holts go, an’ jest rest. I don’t spunk up like I ust to. No, he
didn’t go to Peterson’s—he’s gawn right on. My land! I wonder
‘f it ain’t old gran’ma Eliot: she had a bad spell—no, he
didn’t turn that corner. I can’t think where he’s goin’ to!”

She sat down with a sigh of defeat.

A smile glimmered palely across Emarine’s face and was gone.
“Maybe if you’d go up in the antic you could see better,” she
suggested, dryly.

“Oh, Emarine, here comes old gran’ma Eliot herself! Run an’ open
the door fer ‘er. She’s limpin’ worse ‘n usual.”

Emarine flew to the door. Grandma Eliot was one of the few
people she loved. She was large and motherly. She wore a black
dress and shawl and a funny bonnet, with a frill of white lace
around her brow.

Emarine’s face softened when she kissed her. “I’m so glad to see
you,” she said, and her voice was tender.

Even Mrs. Endey’s face underwent a change. Usually it wore a
look of doubt, if not of positive suspicion, but now it fairly
beamed. She shook hands cordially with the guest and led her to a
comfortable chair.

“I know your rheumatiz is worse,” she said, cheerfully, “because
you’re limpin’ so. Oh, did you see the undertaker go up by here? We
can’t think where he’s goin’ to. D’ you happen to know?”

“No, I don’t; an’ I don’t want to neither.” Mrs. Eliot laughed
comfortably. “Mis’ Endey, you don’t ketch me foolin’ with
undertakers till I have to.” She sat down and removed her black
cotton gloves. “I’m gettin’ to that age when I don’t care much
where undertakers go to so long ‘s they let me alone. Fixin’
fer Christmas dinner, Emarine dear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Emarine in her very gentlest tone. Her mother
had never said “dear” to her, and the sound of it on this old
lady’s lips was sweet. “Won’t you come an’ take dinner with
us?”

The old lady laughed merrily. “Oh, dearie me, dearie me! You
don’t guess my son’s folks could spare me now, do you? I spend
ev’ry Christmas there. They most carry me on two chips. My son’s
wife, Sidonie, she nearly runs her feet off waitin’ on me. She
can’t do enough fer me. My, Mrs. Endey, you don’t know what a
[pg
73] comfort a daughter-in-law is when you get old an’
feeble!”

Emarine’s face turned red. She went to the table and stood with
her back to the older women; but her mother’s sharp eyes observed
that her ears grew scarlet.

“An’ I never will,” said Mrs. Endey, grimly.

“You’ve got a son-in-law, though, who’s worth a whole townful of
most son-in-laws. He was such a good son, too; jest worshipped his
mother; couldn’t bear her out o’ his sight. He humored her high an’
low. That’s jest the way Sidonie does with me. I’m gettin’ cranky
‘s I get older, an’ sometimes I’m reel cross an’ sassy to her; but
she jest laffs at me, an’ then comes an’ kisses me, an’ I’m all
right ag’in. It’s a blessin’ right from God to have a
daughter-in-law like that.”

The knife in Emarine’s hand slipped, and she uttered a little
cry.

“Hurt you?” demanded her mother, sternly.

Emarine was silent, and did not turn.

“Cut you, Emarine? Why don’t you answer me? Aigh?”

“A little,” said Emarine. She went into the pantry, and
presently returned with a narrow strip of muslin which she wound
around her finger.

“Well, I never see! You never will learn any gumption! Why don’t
you look what you’re about? Now, go around Christmas with your
finger all tied up!”

“Oh, that’ll be all right by to-morrow,” said Mrs. Eliot,
cheerfully. “Won’t it, Emarine? Never cry over spilt milk, Mrs.
Endey; it makes a body get wrinkles too fast. O’ course Orville’s
mother’s comin’ to take dinner with you, Emarine.”

“Dear me!” exclaimed Emarine, in a sudden flutter. “I don’t see
why them cranberries don’t come! I told Orville to hurry ’em up.
I’d best make the floatin’ island while I wait.”

“I stopped at Orville’s mother’s as I come along, Emarine.”

“How?” Emarine turned in a startled way from the table.

“I say I stopped at Orville’s mother’s as I come along.”

“Oh!”

“She well?” asked Mrs. Endey.

“No, she ain’t; shakin’ like she had the Saint Vitus dance.
She’s failed harrable lately. She’d b’en cryin’; her eyes was all
swelled up.”

There was quite a silence. Then Mrs. Endey said, “What she b’en
cryin’ about?”

“Why, when I asked her she jest laffed kind o’ pitiful, an’
said: ‘Oh, only my tom-foolishness, o’ course.’ Said she always got
to thinkin’ about other Christmases. But I cheered her up. I told
her what a good time I always had at my son’s, an’ how Sidonie jest
couldn’t do enough fer me. An’ I told her to think what a nice time
she’d have here ‘t Emarine’s to-morrow.”

Mrs. Endey smiled. “What she say to that?”

“She didn’t say much. I could see she was thankful, though, she
had a son’s to go to. She said she pitied all poor wretches that
had to set out their Christmas alone. Poor old lady! she ain’t got
much spunk left. She’s all broke down. But I cheered her up some.
Sech a wishful look took holt o’ her when I pictchered her
dinner over here at Emarine’s. I can’t seem to forget it. Goodness!
I must go. I’m on my way to Sidonie’s, an’ she’ll be comin’ after
me if I ain’t on time.”

When Mrs. Eliot had gone limping down the path, Mrs. Endey said:
“You got your front room red up, Emarine?”

“No; I ain’t had time to red up anything.”

“Well, I’ll do it. Where’s your duster at?”

“Behind the org’n. You can get out the wax cross again. Mis’
Dillon was here with all her childern, an’ I had to hide up
ev’rything. I never see childern like her’n. She lets ’em handle
things so!”

Mrs. Endey went into the “front room” and began to dust the
organ. She was something of a diplomat, and she wished to be alone
for a few minutes. “You have to manage Emarine by contrairies,” she
reflected. It did not occur to her that this was a family trait.
“I’m offul sorry I ever egged her on to turnin’ Orville’s mother
out o’ doors, but who’d ‘a’ thought it ‘u’d break her down so? She
ain’t told a soul either. I reckoned she’d talk somethin’ offul
about us, but she ain’t told a soul. She’s kep’ a stiff upper lip
an’ told folks she al’ays expected to live alone when Orville got
married. Emarine’s all worked up. I believe the Lord hisself must
‘a’ sent gran’ma Eliot here to talk like an angel unawares. I bet
she’d go an’ ask Mis’ Parmer over here to dinner if she wa’n’t
afraid I’d laff at her fer knucklin’ down. I’ll have to aggravate
her.’

She finished dusting, and returned to the kitchen. “I wonder
what gran’ma Eliot ‘u’d say if she knew you’d turned Orville’s
mother out, Emarine?”

There was no reply. Emarine was at the table making tarts. Her
back was to mother.

“I didn’t mean what I said about bein’ sorry I egged you on,
Emarine. I’m glad you turned her out. She’d ort to be turned
out.”

Emarine dropped a quivering ruby of jelly into a golden ring of
pastry and laid it carefully on a plate.

“Gran’ma Eliot can go talkin’ about her daughter-‘n-law Sidonie
all she wants, Emarine. You keep a stiff upper lip.”

“I can ‘tend to my own affairs,” said Emarine, fiercely.

“Well, don’t flare up so. Here comes Orviile. Land, but he does
look peakid!”

After supper, when her mother had gone home for the night,
Emarine put on her hat and shawl.

Her husband was sitting by the fireplace, looking thoughtfully
at the bed of coals.

“I’m goin’ out,” she said briefly. “You keep the fire up.”

“Why, Emarine, it’s dark. Don’t choo want I sh’u’d go
along?”

“No; you keep the fire up.”

He looked at her anxiously, but he knew from the way she set her
heels down that remonstrance would be useless.

“Don’t stay long,” he said, in a tone of habitual tenderness. He
loved her passionately, in spite of the lasting hurt she had given
him when she parted him from his mother. It was a hurt that had
sunk deeper than even he realized. It lay heavy on his heart day
and night. It took the blue out of the sky, and the green out of
the grass, and the gold out of the sunlight; it took the exaltation
and the rapture out of his tenderest moments of love.

He never reproached her, he never really blamed her; certainly
he never pitied himself. But he carried a heavy heart around with
him, and his few smiles were joyless things.

For the trouble he blamed only himself. He had promised Emarine
solemnly before he married her, that if there were any “knuckling
down” to be done, his mother should be the one to do it. He had
made the promise deliberately, and he could no more have broken it
than he could have changed the color of his eyes. When bitter
feeling arises between two relatives by marriage, it is the one who
stands between them—the one who is bound by the tenderest
ties to both—who has the real suffering to bear, who is torn
and tortured until life holds nothing worth the having.

Orville Palmer was the one who stood between. He had built his
own cross, and he took it up and bore it without a word.

Emarine hurried through the early winter dark until she came to
the small and poor house where her husband’s mother lived. It was
off the main-travelled street.

There was a dim light in the kitchen; the curtain had not been
drawn. Emarine paused and looked in. The sash was lifted six
inches, for the night was warm, and the sound of voices came to her
at once. Mrs. Palmer had company.

“It’s Miss Presly,” said Emarine, resentfully, under her breath.
“Old gossip!”

“—goin’ to have a fine dinner, I hear,” Miss Presly was
saying. “Turkey with oyster dressin’, an’ cranberries, an’ mince
an’ pun’kin pie, an’ reel plum puddin’ with brandy poured over ‘t
an’ set afire, an’ wine dip, an’ nuts an’ raisins, an’ wine itself
to wind up on. Emarine’s a fine cook. She knows how to git up a
dinner that makes your mouth water to think about. You goin’ to
have a spread, Mis’ Parmer?”

“Not much of a one,” said Orville’s mother. “I expected to, but
I c’u’dn’t git them fall patatas sold off. I’ll have to keep ’em
till spring to git any kind o’ price. I don’t care much about
Christmas, though”—her chin was trembling, but she lifted it
high. “It’s silly for anybody but children to build so much on
Christmas.”

Emarine opened the door and walked in. Mrs. Palmer arose slowly,
grasping the back of her chair. “Orville’s dead?” she said
solemnly.

Emarine laughed, but there was the tenderness of near tears in
her voice. “Oh, my, no!” she said, sitting down. “I run over to ask
you to come to Christmas dinner. I was too busy all day to come
sooner. I’m goin’ to have a great dinner, an’ I’ve cooked ev’ry
single thing of it myself! I want to show you what a fine Christmas
dinner your daughter-‘n-law can get up. Dinner’s at two, an’ I want
you to come at eleven. Will you?”

Mrs. Palmer had sat down, weakly. Trembling was not the word to
describe the feeling that had taken possession of her. She was
shivering. She wanted to fall down on her knees and put her arms
around her son’s wife, and sob out all her loneliness and
heartache. But life is a stage; and Miss Presly was an audience not
to be ignored. So Mrs. Palmer said: “Well, I’ll be reel glad to
come, Emarine. It’s offul kind o’ yuh to think of ‘t. It ‘u’d ‘a’
be’n lonesome eatin’ here all by myself, I expect.”

Emarine stood up. Her heart was like a thistle-down. Her eyes
were shining. “All right,” she said; “an’ I want that you sh’u’d
[pg
75] come just at eleven. I must run right back now.
Good-night.”

“Well, I declare!” said Miss Presly. “That girl gits prettier
ev’ry day o’ her life. Why, she just looked full o’ glame
to-night!”

Orville was not at home when his mother arrived in her rusty
best dress and shawl. Mrs. Endey saw her coming. She gasped out,
“Why, good grieve! Here’s Mis’ Parmer, Emarine!”

“Yes, I know,” said Emarine, calmly. “I ast her to dinner.”

She opened the door, and shook hands with her mother-in-law,
giving her mother a look of defiance that almost upset that lady’s
gravity.

“You set right down, Mother Parmer, an’ let me take your things.
Orville don’t know you’re comin’, an’ I just want to see his face
when he comes in. Here’s a new black shawl fer your Christmas. I
got mother one just like it. See what nice long fringe it’s got.
Oh, my! don’t go to cryin’! Here comes Orville.”

She stepped aside quickly. When her husband entered his eyes
fell instantly on his mother, weeping childishly over the new
shawl. She was in the old splint rocking-chair with the high back.
“Mother!” he cried; then he gave a frightened, tortured
glance at his wife. Emarine smiled at him, but it was through
tears.

“Emarine ast me, Orville—she ast me to dinner o’ herself!
An’ she give me this shawl.
I’m—cryin’—fer—joy—”

“I ast her to dinner,” said Emarine, “but she ain’t ever goin’
back again. She’s goin’ to stay. I expect we’ve both had
enough of a lesson to do us.”

Orville did not speak. He fell on his knees and laid his head,
like a boy, in his mother’s lap, and reached one strong but
trembling arm up to his wife’s waist, drawing her down to him.

Mrs. Endey got up and went to rattling things around on the
table vigorously. “Well, I never see sech a pack o’ loonatics!” she
exclaimed. “Go an’ burn all your Christmas dinner up, if I don’t
look after it! Turncoats! I expect they’ll both be fallin’ over
theirselves to knuckle down to each other from now on! I never
see!”

But there was something in her eyes, too, that made them
beautiful.

THE SUN’S HEAT.

By Sir Robert Ball,

Lowndean Professor of Astronomy and Geometry at
Cambridge, England; formerly Royal Astronomer of Ireland.

There is a story told of a well-intentioned missionary who tried
to induce a Persian fire-worshipper to abandon the creed of his
ancestors. “Is it not,” urged the Christian minister, “a sad and
deplorable superstition for an intelligent person like you to
worship an inanimate object like the sun?” “My friend,” said the
old Persian, “you come from England; now tell me, have you ever
seen the sun?” The retort was a just one; for the fact is, that
those of us whose lot requires them to live beneath the clouds and
in the gloom which so frequently brood over our Northern latitudes,
have but little conception of the surpassing glory of the great orb
of day as it appears to those who know it in the clear Eastern
skies. The Persian recognizes in the sun not only the great source
of light and of warmth, but even of life itself. Indeed, the
advances of modern science ever tend to bring before us with more
and more significance the surpassing glory with which Milton tells
us the sun is crowned. I shall endeavor to give in this article a
brief sketch of what has recently been learned as to the actual
warmth which the sun possesses and of the prodigality with which it
pours forth its radiant treasures.

I number among my acquaintances an intelligent gardener who is
fond of speculating about things in the heavens as well as about
things on the earth. One day he told me that he felt certain it was
quite a mistake to believe, as most of us do believe, that the sun
up there is a hot, glowing body. “No,” he said; “the sun cannot be
a source of heat, and I will prove it. If the sun were a source of
heat,” said the rural philosopher, “then the closer you approached
the sun the warmer you would find yourself. But this is not the
[pg
76] case, for when you are climbing up a mountain you are
approaching nearer to the sun all the time; but, as everybody
knows, instead of feeling hotter and hotter as you ascend, you are
becoming steadily colder and colder. In fact, when you reach a
certain height, you will find yourself surrounded by perpetual ice
and snow, and you may not improbably be frozen to death when you
have got as near to the sun as you can. Therefore,” concluded my
friend, triumphantly, “it is all nonsense to tell me the sun is a
scorching hot fire.”

THE SUN: FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN BY LEWIS M. RUTHERFURD IN NEW
YORK, SEPTEMBER 22, 1870.

Professor C. A. Young, writing to the editor of McCLURE’S MAGAZINE,
pronounces this “still the best photograph of the entire sun” with
which he is acquainted.

I thought the best way to explain the little delusion under
which the worthy gardener labored was to refer him to what takes
place in his own domain. I asked him wherein lies the advantage of
putting his tender plants into his greenhouse in November. How does
that preserve them through the winter? How is it that even without
artificial heat the mere shelter of the glass will often protect
plants from frost? I explained to him that the glass acts as a
veritable trap for the sunbeams; it lets them pass in, but it will
not let them escape. The temperature within the greenhouse is
consequently raised, and thus the necessary warmth is maintained.
The dwellers on this earth live in what is equivalent, in this
respect, to a greenhouse. There is a copious atmosphere above our
heads, and that atmosphere extends to us the same protection which
the glass does to the plants in the greenhouse. The air lets the
sunbeams through to the earth’s surface, and then keeps their heat
down here to make us comfortable. When you climb to the top of a
high mountain you pass through a large part of the air. This is the
reason why you feel warmer on the surface of the earth than you do
on the top of a high mountain. If, however, it were possible to go
very much closer to the sun; if, for example, the earth were to
approach within half its present distance, it is certain that the
heat would be so intense that all life would be immediately
scorched away.

It will be remembered that when Nebuchadnezzar condemned the
unhappy Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to be cast into the burning
fiery furnace, he commanded in his fury that the furnace should be
heated seven times hotter than it was wont to be heated. Let us
think of the hottest furnace which the minions of Nebuchadnezzar
[pg
77] could ever have kindled with all the resources of
Babylon; let us think indeed of one of the most perfect of modern
furnaces, in which even a substance so refractory as steel, having
first attained a dazzling brilliance, can be melted so as to run
like water; let us imagine the heat-dispensing power of that
glittering liquid to be multiplied sevenfold; let us go beyond
Nebuchadnezzar’s frenzied command, and imagine the efficiency of
our furnace to be ten or twelve times as great as that which he
commanded—we shall then obtain a notion of a heat-giving
power corresponding to that which would be found in the wonderful
celestial furnace, the great sun in heaven.

SIR ROBERT BALL.

From a photograph by Russel & Sons, London.

Ponder also upon the stupendous size of that orb, which glows at
every point of its surface with the astonishing fervor I have
indicated. The earth on which we stand is no doubt a mighty globe,
measuring as it does eight thousand miles in diameter; yet what are
its dimensions in comparison with those of the sun? If the earth be
represented by a grain of mustard seed, then on the same scale the
sun should be represented by a cocoanut. Perhaps, however, a more
impressive conception of the dimensions of the great orb of day may
be obtained in this way. Think of the moon, the queen of the night,
which circles monthly around our heavens, pursuing, as she does, a
majestic track, at a distance of two hundred and forty thousand
miles from the earth. Yet the sun is so vast that if it were a
hollow ball, and if the earth were placed at the centre of that
ball, the moon could revolve in the orbit which it now follows, and
still be entirely enclosed within the sun’s interior.

For every acre on the surface of our globe there are more than
ten thousand acres on the surface of the great luminary. Every
portion of this illimitable desert of flame is pouring forth
torrents of heat. It has indeed been estimated that if the heat
which is incessantly flowing through any single square foot of the
sun’s exterior could be collected and applied beneath the boilers
of an Atlantic liner, it would suffice to produce steam enough to
sustain in continuous movement those engines of twenty thousand
horse-power which enable a superb ship to break the record between
Ireland and America.

The solar heat is shot forth into space in every direction, with
a prodigality which seems well-nigh inexhaustible. No doubt the
earth does intercept a fair supply of sunbeams for conversion to
our many needs; but the share of sun-heat that the dwelling-place
of mankind is able to capture and employ forms only an
infinitesimal fraction of what the sun actually pours forth. It
would seem, indeed, very presumptuous for us to assume that the
great sun has come into existence solely for the benefit of poor
humanity. The heat and light daily lavished by that orb of
incomparable splendor would suffice to warm and illuminate, quite
as efficiently as the earth is warmed and lighted, more than two
thousand million globes each as large as the earth. If it has
indeed been the scheme of nature to call into existence the solar
arrangements on their present scale for the solitary purpose of
[pg
78] cherishing this immediate world of ours, then all we can
say is that nature carries on its business in the most outrageously
wasteful manner.

What should we think of the prudence of a man who, having been
endowed with a splendid fortune of not less than twenty million
dollars, spent one cent of that vast sum usefully and dissipated
every other cent and every other dollar of his gigantic wealth in
mere aimless extravagance? This would, however, appear to be the
way in which the sun manages its affairs, if we are to suppose that
all the solar heat is wasted save that minute fraction which is
received by the earth. Out of every twenty million dollars’ worth
of heat issuing from the glorious orb of day, we on this earth
barely secure the value of one single cent; and all but that
insignificant trifle seems to be utterly squandered. We may say it
certainly is squandered so far as humanity is concerned. No doubt
there are certain other planets besides the earth, and they will
receive quantities of heat to the extent of a few cents more. It
must, however, be said that the stupendous volume of solar
radiation passes off substantially untaxed into space, and what may
actually there become of it science is unable to tell.

And now for the great question as to how the supply of heat is
sustained so as to permit the orb of day to continue in its career
of such unparalleled prodigality. Every child knows that the fire
on the domestic hearth will go out unless the necessary supplies of
wood or coal can be duly provided. The workman knows that the
devouring blast furnace requires to be incessantly stoked with
fresh fuel. How, then, comes it that a furnace so much more
stupendous than any terrestrial furnace can continue to pour forth
in perennial abundance its amazing stores of heat without being
nourished by continual supplies of some kind? Professor Langley,
who has done so much to extend our knowledge of the great orb of
heaven, has suggested a method of illustrating the quantity of fuel
which would be required, if indeed it were by successive additions
of fuel that the sun’s heat had to be sustained. Suppose that all
the coal seams which underlie America were made to yield up their
stores. Suppose that all the coal fields of England and Scotland,
Australia, China, and elsewhere were compelled to contribute every
combustible particle they contained. Suppose, in fact, that we
extracted from this earth every ton of coal it possesses, in every
island and in every continent. Suppose that this vast store of
fuel, which is adequate to supply the wants of this earth for
centuries, were to be accumulated in one stupendous pile. Suppose
that an army of stokers, arrayed in numbers which we need not now
pause to calculate, were employed to throw this coal into the great
solar furnace. How long, think you, would so gigantic a mass of
fuel maintain the sun’s expenditure at its present rate? I am but
uttering a deliberate scientific fact when I say that a
conflagration which destroyed every particle of coal contained in
this earth would not generate so much heat as the sun lavishes
abroad to ungrateful space in the tenth part of every single
second. During the few minutes that the reader has been occupied
over these lines, a quantity of heat which is many thousands of
times as great as, the heat which could be produced by the ignition
of all the coal in every coal-pit in the globe has been dispersed
and totally lost to the sun.

But we have still one further conception to introduce before we
shall have fully grasped the significance of the sun’s extravagance
in the matter of heat. As the sun shines to-day on this earth, so
it shone yesterday, so it shone a hundred years ago, a thousand
years ago; so it shone in the earliest dawn of history; so it shone
during those still remoter periods when great animals flourished
which have now vanished forever; so it shone during that remarkable
period in earth’s history when the great coal forests flourished;
so it shone in those remote ages many millions of years ago when
life began to dawn on an earth which was still young. There is
every reason to believe that throughout these illimitable periods
which the imagination strives in vain to realize, the sun has
dispensed its radiant treasures of light and warmth with just the
same prodigality as that which now characterizes it.

We all know the consequences of wanton extravagance. We know it
spells bankruptcy and ruin. The expenditure of heat by the sun is
the most magnificent extravagance of which human knowledge gives us
any conception. How have the consequences of such awful prodigality
been hitherto averted? How is it that the sun is still able to draw
on its heat reserves from second to second, from century to
century, from eon to eon, ever squandering two thousand million
times as much heat as that which genially warms our temperate
regions, as that which draws forth the exuberant vegetation of the
tropics, or which rages in the Desert of Sahara? This is indeed a
great problem.

It was Helmholtz who discovered that the continual maintenance
of the sun’s temperature is due to the fact that the sun is neither
solid nor liquid, but is to a great extent gaseous. His theory of
the subject has gained universal acceptance. Those who have taken
the trouble to become acquainted with it are compelled to admit
that the doctrine set forth by this great philosopher embodies a
profound truth.

A TYPICAL SUN-SPOT

. By permission of Longmans, Green & Co., from “Old and New
Astronomy,” by Richard A. Proctor.

Even the great sun cannot escape the application of a certain
law which affects every terrestrial object, and whose province is
wide as the universe itself. Nature has not one law for the rich
and another for the poor. The sun is shedding forth heat, and
therefore, affirms this law, the sun must be shrinking in size. We
have learned the rate at which this contraction proceeds; for among
the many triumphs which mathematicians have accomplished must be
reckoned that of having put a pair of callipers on the sun so as to
measure its diameter. We thus find that the width of the great
luminary is ten inches smaller to-day than it was yesterday. Year
in and year out the glorious orb of heaven is steadily diminishing
at the same rate. For hundreds of years, aye, for hundreds of
thousands of years, this incessant shrinking has gone on at about
the same rate as it goes on at present. For hundreds of years, aye,
for hundreds of thousands of years, the shrinking still will go on.
As a sponge exudes moisture by continuous squeezing, so the sun
pours forth heat by continuous shrinking. So long as the sun
remains practically gaseous, so long will the great luminary
continue to shrink, and thus continue its gracious beneficence.
Hence it is that for incalculable ages yet to come the sun will
pour forth its unspeakable benefits; and thence it is that, for a
period compared with which the time of man upon this earth is but a
day, summer and winter, heat and cold, seedtime and harvest, in
their due succession, will never be wanting to this earth.

HALL CAINE.

STORY OF HIS LIFE AND WORK, DERIVED FROM CONVERSATIONS.

By Robert Harborough Sherard.

Extreme dignity is the leading characteristic of Thomas Henry
Hall Caine as a man, just as extreme conscientiousness is his
leading characteristic as a writer. He possesses in a high degree
the sense of the responsibility which an author owes to the public
and to himself. It is on account of these facts that the story of
his uneventful life and brilliant literary career is a highly
interesting one. It shows how, by firmness of principle and a high
respect of the public and himself, a man of undoubted genius has
been enabled to raise himself to a position in the English-speaking
worlds to which few men of letters have ever attained—a
position which may be compared to that of a vates amongst
the Romans, of a prophet in Israel.

Hall Caine, as his double name implies, comes of the mixed Norse
and Celtic race which constitutes the population of the Isle of
Man. Hall, his mother’s name, is Norse, and is common to this day
in Iceland, from which the Norsemen came to Manxland. Caine, which
means “a fighter with clubs,” is Celtic. Hall Caine himself, with
his ruddy beard and hair and distinctive features, has inherited
rather the physical characteristics of his maternal ancestors, the
Norsemen.

BALLAVOLLEY COTTAGE, BALLAUGH, ISLE OF MAN, WHERE HALL CAINE
LIVED AS A LITTLE BOY.

He comes of a stock of crofters, or small farmers, who for
centuries had supported themselves by tilling the soil and fishing
the sea. He is the first of all his line who ever worked his brain
for a living. His grandfather, who had a farm of sixty acres in the
beautiful parish of Ballaugh, which lies between Peel and Ramsey,
was a wastrel, fond of the amusements and dissipations to be found
in Douglas, and alienated his small property, so that, at the age
of eighteen, his son, Hall Caine’s father, was for a living obliged
to apprentice himself to a blacksmith at Ramsey. When he had
learned his trade he removed, in the hopes of finding more
[pg
81] remunerative employment, to Liverpool. Here, however, he
found it so hard to support himself as a blacksmith that he set to
work to learn the trade of ship’s smith—a remunerative one in
those days, when Liverpool was the centre of the ship-building
trade. He became a skilled worker, and at the time of his marriage
was able to command a wage of thirty-six shillings a week, in
addition to what he was able to earn by piece work. It was whilst
engaged on a [pg 82] piece of work on a ship at Runcorn, in
Cheshire, that on May 14, 1853, the child was born—his second
son—to whom he gave the names of Thomas Henry Hall. Runcorn
can thus claim to be the birthplace of the famous writer, although
his birth there was a mere accident, and not more than ten days of
his life were spent there.

From a photograph by Barraud, London.

FACSIMILE OF HALL CAINE’S MANUSCRIPT, FROM “THE MANXMAN.” AN
ADDITION MADE IN REVISING PROOFS.

Hall Caine has no remembrance of the first years which he spent
in Liverpool, and his earliest recollections are of life in his
grandmother’s cottage of Ballavolley, Ballaugh, in the Isle of Man,
a house set in a wooded plain surrounded by high mountains which
glow, here yellow with the gorse, there purple with the heather. In
the foreground is the beautiful old church of Ballaugh, in the
cemetery of which many generations of Caines lie at rest; and
between the old church and the village lies the curragh land, full
of wild flowers and musical with the notes of every bird that
uplifts its voice to heaven. Far off can be descried, across the
[pg
83] sea, the Mull of Galloway. It is in its rare beauty a
spot than which, for a poet’s childhood, no fitter could be
found.

MRS. HALL CAINE.

From a photograph by Alfred Ellis, London.

CHILDHOOD IN A MANX COTTAGE.

The Ballavolley cottage was a typical Manx cottage. On one side
of the porch was the parlor, which also served as a dairy, redolent
of milk and bright with rare old Derby china. On the other side was
the living-room, with its undulating floor of stamped earth and
grateless hearthstone in the ingle, to the right and left of which
were seats. Here in the ingle-nook the little boy would sit
watching his aunts cooking the oaten cake on the griddle, over a
fire of turf from the curragh and gorse from the hills, or the
bubbling cooking-pot slung on the slowrie. One of his earliest
recollections is of his old grandmother, seated on her three-legged
stool, bending over the fire, tongs in hand, renewing the fuel of
gorse under the griddle. The walls of this room were covered with
blue crockery ware, and through the open rafters of the unplastered
ceiling could be seen the flooring of the bedrooms above. These
were very low dormer rooms, with the bed in the angle where the
roof was lowest. One had to crawl into bed and lie just under the
whitewashed “scraa” or turf roofing, which smelt deliciously with
an odor that at times still haunts the cottage lad in statelier
homes.

HALL CAINE’S LIBRARY.

From a photograph by Barton.

Hall Caine’s impressions of his life at Ballavolley are
vivid—the old preacher at the church, the drinking-bouts of
“jough”-beer by the gallon amongst the villagers, the donkey rides
upon the curragh. But what it best pleases him to remember are the
times when, seated in the ingle-nook, he used to listen to his
grandmother telling fairy stories, as she sat at her black oak
spinning-wheel, bending low over the whirling yarn.
“Hommybeg”—it was a pet name she had given to
him—”Hommybeg,” she would say, “I will tell you of the
fairies.” And the story that he liked best to listen to, though it
so frightened him that he would run and hide his face in the folds
of the blue Spanish cloak which Manx women have worn since two
ships of the Great Armada were wrecked upon the island, was the
story of how his grandmother, when a lass, had seen the fairies
with her own eyes. That was many years before. She had been out one
night to meet her sweetheart, and as she was returning in the
[pg
84] moonlight she was overtaken by a multitude of little
men, tiny little fellows in velvet coats and cocked hats and
pointed shoes, who ran after her, swarmed over her, and clambered
up her streaming hair.

GREEBA CASTLE, ISLE OF MAN, WHERE MR. CAINE WROTE MOST OF “THE
MANXMAN.”

From a photograph by Abel Lewis, Douglas, Isle of Man.

He was a precocious lad, and knew no greater delight than to
read. The first book that he remembers reading was a bulky tome on
the German Reformation, about Luther and Melancthon, which he had
found. He spent weeks over it, and, staggering under its weight,
would carry it out into the hayfield, where, truant to the harvest,
he would lie behind the stacks and read and read. One night,
indeed, his interest in this book led him to break the rules of his
thrifty home—where children went to bed when it was dark, so
that candles should not be burned—and light the candles and
read on about Luther. He was found thus by one of his aunts as,
pails in hand, she returned home from milking the cows. Her anger
was great. “Candles lit!” she cried. “What’s to do? Candles!
Wasting candles on reading, on mere reading!” He was beaten and
sent to bed, bursting with indignation at such injustice, for he
felt that candles were nothing compared to knowledge. He was a
bookish boy, wanting in boyishness, and never played games, but
spent his time in reading, not boyish books, indeed, but books in
which never boy before took interest—histories, theological
works, and, in preference, parliamentary speeches of the great
orators, which he would afterwards rewrite from memory. At a very
early age he showed a great passion for poetry and was a great
reader of Shakespeare. His talent for reading passages of
Shakespeare aloud was such that at the school at Liverpool, where
he was educated, his schoolmaster, George Gill, used to make him
read aloud before all the boys. This caused him great nervous
agony, he says, and he suffered horribly. He was a favorite pupil,
and, in a school where corporal punishment was inflicted with great
severity, was never once beaten. He left school at the age of
[pg
85] fifteen and was apprenticed by his father to John
Murray, architect and land-surveyor. The lad had no special
faculties for architecture beyond possessing a fair knowledge of
drawing. When only thirteen he drew the map of England which
appeared in the first edition of “Gill’s Geography.” At this time
he had shown no bent for authorship beyond making the
transcriptions from memory of the speeches he had read, and
writing, for a school competition, a “Life of Joseph,” which was
not even read by the arbitrator, because it was much too long. It
is noticeable, however, that on this “Life of Joseph” he had worked
with the same conscientiousness which has distinguished his
literary activity through all his career. “I read everything on the
subject that I could lay my hands upon,” he says, “and spent day
and night in working at it.” To-day, as then, when Hall Caine has a
book to write, he reads every book bearing on his theme which he
can obtain—”a whole library for each chapter”—and will
work at his subject day and night, all-absorbed, wrapped up,
concentrated.

PEEL CASTLE, ISLE OF MAN.

John Murray was agent for the Lancashire estates of W.E.
Gladstone, and it was in this way that Hall Caine first became
known to the statesman, who from the first has been amongst his
keenest admirers. One of the first occasions on which he attracted
Mr. Gladstone’s attention was one day when he was superintending
the surveying of Seaforth, Gladstone’s estate. Gladstone was
surprised to see so small a lad in charge of the chainmen, and
began to talk with him. He must have been impressed by the lad’s
conversation, for he patted his head and told him he would be a
fine man yet. Mr. Gladstone has never forgotten this incident. Some
time later, John Murray having failed in the meanwhile, an offer
was made to Hall Caine, from the Gladstones, of the stewardship of
the Seaforth estate at a salary of one hundred and twenty pound a
year. “Although the thought of so much wealth,” he relates,
“overwhelmed me, I did not see in this offer the prospect of any
career—indeed this had been pointed out to me—and I
[pg
86] determined to continue in the architect’s office.” He
accordingly attached himself as pupil or apprentice to Richard
Owens, the architect.

PEEL, ISLE OF MAN, WHERE MR. CAINE FINISHED “THE MANXMAN.” THE
LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, IN THE ROW FRONTING ON THE WATER AT THE
LEFT OF THE PICTURE, IS THE ONE MR. CAINE OCCUPIED.

FIRST WRITINGS FOR THE PUBLIC.

Hall Caine’s first writings for the public were done in the Isle
of Man, at the age of sixteen, when he had come over to recruit his
health at the house of his uncle, the schoolmaster at Kirk
Maughold. At that time the island was divided by a discussion as to
the maintenance or abolition of Manx political institutions, and
the boy threw himself into this discussion with characteristic
ardor. His vehement articles in favor of the maintenance of the
political independence, published each week in “Mona’s Herald,”
were full of force. They attracted, however, little notice beyond
that of James Teare, Caine’s uncle, the great temperance reformer,
who admired them justly. He encouraged the boy to write, and told
his skeptical relations that if Hall Caine failed as an architect
he would certainly be able to make a living with his pen.

A visit to Kirk Maughold will afford to the observer the best
insight into Hall Caine’s literary temperament. The spirit of the
place expounds his spirit; its genius seems to have entered into
him. There are seasons when this headland height lies serene and
calm, wrapped in such loveliness of light on sea and land that the
heart melts for very ecstasy at the beauty of all things around,
the glowing hills, the flowers that are everywhere, the sea beyond,
the tenderness, the color, the native poetry of it all. There are
seasons, too, of strife and hurricane, of titanic forces battling
in the air, when vehement and irresistible winds burst forth to
make howling havoc on the bleakest heights—so they seem
then—that man’s foot ever trod. There are times when not one
harebell nods its head in the calm air, not one seed falls from the
feathered grass, in the tender serenity of a quiet world; and there
are times, too, when Nature aroused puts forth her terrible
strength, so that man ventures abroad at his great peril, and ropes
must be stretched along the roads by which the unwary wanderer may
[pg
87] drag his storm-tossed body home. In Hall Caine’s work we
also find these extremes of tenderness and its calm, of passion and
its riot.

On his return to Liverpool, encouraged by what James Teare had
said, Hall Caine continued to write. No longer, however, on
political questions, but on the subjects with which his profession
had familiarized him. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty this
boy wrote learned leading articles on building, land-surveying, and
architecture for “The Builder.” George Godwin, the editor of this
leading periodical, could not believe his eyes when he first met
his contributor. Hall Caine was then nineteen. “I felt terribly
ashamed of being so young,” he says, in speaking of this
interview.

R.E. MORRISON.   R.H.SHERARD.  HALL
CAINE.

From a photograph taken specially for McCLURE’S MAGAZINE, by
George B. Cowen, Ramsey, Isle of Man. Mr. Morrison is an artist who
has lately painted a portrait of Mr. Caine.

It was about this time that he returned to the Isle of Man,
tired of architecture. His uncle died, and there was no
schoolmaster at Kirk Maughold school. So Hall Caine became
schoolmaster, and for about six months kept a mixed school on the
bleak headland. He is still remembered as a schoolmaster, and last
year, when “The Manxman” was appearing in serial publication, his
grown-up scholars used to gather at a farm near Kirk Maughold
school and listen to the schoolmaster reading the story as each
instalment came out.

The six months of his schoolmastership were a period of great
activity. It was the time of the Paris Commune, and, a rabid
Communist, Hall Caine read Communist and socialistic literature
with avidity. He contributed violent propagandist articles to
“Mona’s Herald,” in which three years previously he had preached
the virtues of conservatism, and attracted the attention of John
Ruskin by his eulogies of Ruskin’s work with his recently founded
Guild of St. George. His leisure was spent in his workshop, and
during this period he not only carved a tombstone for his uncle’s
grave, but built a house—Phoenix cottage—both of which
are still standing and may be seen. It was a happy time, a time of
inspiration; and it may be, from the sympathy between the man and
the place, that Hall Caine would have stayed on at Kirk Maughold
had not a most imperative letter from Richard Owens, which said
that it was deplorable that he should be throwing his life away in
such occupations, recalled him to Liverpool. To Liverpool
accordingly he returned, to work as a draughtsman, and fired withal
with a double ambition—for one thing to win fame as a poet,
for another to succeed as a dramatist. Already in 1870 he had
written a long poem, which was published in 1874 anonymously by an
enterprising Liverpool publisher. About this poem George Gilfillan,
to whom Hall Caine sent it in 1876, wrote that there was much in it
that he admired, that it had the ring of genius, but that in parts
it was spoiled by affectations of language which could, however, be
remedied. Of the same poem, Rossetti, to whom it was also sent,
wrote that it contained passages of genius. As a dramatist, Hall
Caine wrote, at this period in his career, a play called “Alton
[pg
88] Locke.” founded on Kingsley’s story. It was shown to
Rousby, the actor-manager, who liked “the promise that it showed”
and asked Hall Caine to write a play to his order. At that time he
looked upon himself as a dramatist, and indeed still hopes to
achieve as such—when he shall have tired of the novel as a
vehicle and shall have learned, the present object of his closest
study, the technicalities of the stage—a success as great as
that which has attended his novels. Many of his friends, indeed,
hope for even better things from him as a dramatist; and Blackmore,
for instance, hardly ever writes to him without repeating that,
great as has been his success as a novelist, it will be nothing to
his success when he gets possession of the stage.

SIR W.L. DRINKWATER, THE PRESENT FIRST DREMSTER OF THE ISLE OF
MAN.

From a photograph by J. E. Bruton, Douglas, Isle of Man.

CAINE’S ASSOCIATION WITH ROSSETTI.

Till the age of twenty-four he remained in Liverpool, earning
his living in a builder’s office, lecturing, starting societies,
working as secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient
Buildings, and writing for the papers. His lectures on Shakespeare
attracted the attention of Lord Houghton, who expressed a desire to
meet him. A meeting was arranged at the house of Henry Bright (the
H.A.B, of Hawthorne); and the first thing that Lord Houghton, the
biographer of Keats, said when Hall Caine came into the room was:
“You have the head of Keats.” He predicted that the young author
would become a great critic. Another of Hall Caine’s lectures,
delivered during this period, “The Supernatural in Poetry,” brought
a long letter of eulogy from Matthew Arnold. His lecture on
Rossetti won him the friendship of this great man, a correspondence
ensued, and when Caine was twenty-five years old, Rossetti wrote
and asked him to come up to London to see him. Caine went and was
received most cordially.

“He met me on the threshold of his house,” he relates, “with
both hands outstretched, and drew me into his studio. That night he
read me ‘The King’s Tragedy.'”

During the evening Rossetti asked him to remove to London and
invited him to his house; at the same time—it may be to
prepare him for their common life—he showed him, to Caine’s
horror, what a slave he had become to the chloral habit.

BISHOP’S COURT, WHERE DAN MYLREA IN “THE DREMSTER” WAS
REARED.

It was not until many months later that Hall Caine determined to
accept Rossetti’s invitation, and went to share his monastic
seclusion in his gloomy London house. In the meanwhile, and in this
Rossetti had helped him by correspondence, he had edited for Elliot
Stock an anthology of English sonnets, which was published under
the title of “Sonnets of Three Centuries.” For his work in
[pg
89] connection with this volume Hall Caine received no
remuneration. Indeed, at this period in his career the earnings of
the writer who can to-day command the highest prices in the market,
were very small indeed. His average income was two hundred and
sixty pounds (thirteen hundred dollars), and of this two hundred
pounds was earned as a draughtsman. When he went to live with
Rossetti he had about fifty pounds (two hundred and fifty dollars)
of money saved, to which he was afterwards able to add a sum of one
hundred pounds, which Rossetti insisted on his accepting as his
commission on the sale of Rossetti’s picture, “Dante’s Dream.” It
may be mentioned, to dispel certain misstatements, that this was
the only financial transaction which took place between the two
friends. His life in Rossetti’s house was the life of a monk,
seeing nobody except Burne-Jones (whom, as Ruskin will have it, he
resembles closely), going nowhere and doing little. “I used to get
up at noon,” he says, “and usually spent my afternoon in walking
about in the garden. I did not see Rossetti till dinner-time, but
from that hour till three or four in the morning we were
inseparable.” It has been stated that Caine owed much of his
success in literature to Rossetti. This is only partly true. His
introduction to literary society in London under Rossetti’s wing
was harmful rather than advantageous to him, for it prejudiced
people against him; and his connection with Rossetti, which was
that of a spiritual son with a spiritual father, was
misrepresented. He was spoken of as Rossetti’s secretary, even as
Rossetti’s valet. On the other hand, so young a man could not but
derive benefit from the society of so refined an artist, who had no
thought nor ambition outside his art. And, in a practical way,
Rossetti also benefited him. When he first came to Rossetti’s house
he was under an engagement to deliver twenty-four lectures on
“Prose Fiction” in Liverpool, and in preparation of these lectures
began studying the English novelists.

KIRK MAUGHOLD, WHICH FIGURES IN “THE BONDMAN” AND “THE
MANXMAN.”

“One day Rossetti suggested that, instead of reading these
novels alone, I should read them aloud to him. From that day on,
night after night, for months and months, I used to read to him. I
read Fielding and Smollett, Richardson, Radcliffe, ‘Monk’ Lewis,
Thackeray, and Dickens, under a running fire of comment and
criticism from Rossetti. It was terrible labor, this reading for
hours night after night, till dawn came and I could drag myself
wearily upstairs to bed. But it was a very useful study, and this
is indeed the debt which I owe to Rossetti.”

Rossetti died on Easter Day, 1882, at the seashore, near
Margate, in Hall Caine’s arms. It shows the extent of their
friendship that, the bungalow being crowded that night, Caine
readily offered to sleep in the death-chamber. “It is Rossetti,” he
said.

HALL CAINE’S FIRST NOVEL.

Hall Caine then returned to London, and whilst continuing to
contribute to various papers, and notably to the “Liverpool
Mercury,” to which he was attached for years, he wrote his
“Recollections of Rossetti,” which brought him forty pounds (two
hundred dollars) and attracted some attention in literary circles,
without, however, enhancing his reputation with the general public.
This was followed by “Cobwebs of Criticism,” the title he gave to a
collection of critical essays, originally delivered as lectures.
This book did nothing for him in any way. All this while he had
[pg
90] been hankering after novel-writing, and, though Rossetti
had always urged him to become a dramatist, he had also encouraged
him to write novels, advising him to become the novelist of
Manxland. “There is a career there,” he used to say, “for nothing
is known about this land.” The two friends had discussed Hall
Caine’s plot of “The Shadow of a Crime,” which Rossetti had found
“immensely powerful but unsympathetic,” and it was with this novel
that Hall Caine began his career as a writer of fiction. He had
married in the meanwhile, and with forty pounds (two hundred
dollars) in the bank and an assured income of a hundred (five
hundred dollars) a year from the “Liverpool Mercury,” he went with
his wife to live in a small house in the Isle of Wight, to write
his book. “I labored over it fearfully,” he says, “but not so much
as I do now over my books. At that time I only wanted to write a
thrilling tale. Now what I want in my novels is a spiritual intent,
a problem of life.” “The Shadow of a Crime” appeared first in
serial form in the “Liverpool Mercury,” and was published in book
form by Chatto & Windus in 1885. For the book rights Hall Caine
received seventy-five pounds (three hundred and seventy-five
dollars), which, with the one hundred pounds (five hundred dollars)
from the “Liverpool Mercury,” is all that he has ever received from
a book which is now in its seventeenth edition. “It had a
distinguished reception,” he says. “Indeed, it was received with a
burst of eulogy from the press; but at the time it produced no
popular success, and made no difference in my market value.”

There is no man living, perhaps, who has more contempt for money
than Hall Caine, revealing himself in this also a true artist; yet
to exemplify to a confrère the practical value of
what he calls the “literary statesmanship” which he has practised
throughout his career, he will sometimes show the little book in
which are entered the receipts from his various works. No more
striking argument in favor of conscientiousness and literary
dignity could be found than that afforded by a comparison between
the first page of this account book and the last.

LEZAYRE CHURCH, WHERE PETE AND KATE WERE MARRIED IN “THE
MANXMAN.”

BEATING THE STREETS OF LONDON IN SEARCH OF WORK.

A time of need followed, during which Hall Caine beat the
streets of London in search of work. He offered himself as a
publisher’s reader in various houses, and was roughly turned away.
He suffered slights and humiliations; but these only strengthened
his resolve. In this respect he reminds one of Zola, whom slights
and humiliations only strengthened also; and in this connection it
may be mentioned that there hangs in Hall Caine’s drawing-room, in
Peel, a pen-and-ink portrait which one mistakes for that of Emile
Zola, till one is told that it is the picture of Hall Caine.

The reverses, which it now pleases him to remember, in no wise
daunted him. There was his wife and “Sunlocks,” his little son, to
be provided for; and with fine determination he set to work. In the
year 1886 he wrote a “Life of Coleridge” and finished his second
novel, “A Son of Hagar.” On the fly-leaf of his copy of the “Life
of Coleridge” are written the words: “N.B—This book was begun
October 8, 1886. It was not touched after that date until October
15th or 16th, and was finished down to last two chapters by
November 1st. Completed December 4th to 8th—about three weeks
in all. H.C.” It is an excellent piece of work, but Caine regrets
now that he threw away on a book of this kind all his knowledge of
[pg
91] his subject. “I could have written the
Life of Coleridge,” he says.

“A Son of Hagar” produced three hundred pounds (fifteen hundred
dollars), and has now achieved an immense success, but its
reception at the time was a feeble one. Hall Caine ground his teeth
and clenched his fist and said: “I will write one more book; I will
put into it all the work that is in me, and if the world still
remains indifferent and contemptuous, I will never write another.”
In the meanwhile he had decided to follow Rossetti’s advice, to
write a Manx novel; and having thought out the plot of “The
Deemster,” went to the Isle of Man to write it. It was written in
six months, in one of the lodging-houses on the Esplanade at
Douglas, in a fever of wounded pride. “I worked over it like a
galley-slave; I poured all my memories into it,” he says. In the
meanwhile he maintained his family by journalism, being now
connected with the best papers in London. “The Deemster” was sold
for one hundred and fifty pounds (six hundred dollars), the serial
rights having produced four hundred pounds (two thousand dollars).
He would be glad to-day to purchase the copyright back for one
thousand pounds. He had great faith in this book.

“Long after we are both dead,” he said to his publisher, when
they were discussing terms, “this book will be alive.” “I was
indifferent to its reception,” he relates; “I said, that if the
public did not take it, that would only prove its damnable folly,”
Its reception was immense, and “then began for me something like
fame.”

THE BEGINNING OF PROSPERITY.

INTERIOR OF “THE COTTAGE BY THE WATER-TROUGH,” KIRKNEO, NEAR
RAMSEY, ISLE OF MAN, WHERE LIVED “BLACK TOM,” THE GRANDFATHER OF
PETE, IN “THE MANXMAN.”

Offers came in from all sides; the little house in Kent, where
he was then living, became the pilgrimage of the publishers. Irving
read the book in America, and seeing that there was here material
for a splendid play, with himself in the part of the Bishop,
hesitated about cabling to the author. In the meanwhile Wilson
Barrett had also read the book, and had telegraphed to Kent to ask
Hall Caine to come up to London to discuss its dramatization. Hall
Caine started, but was forced to leave the train at Derby because a
terrible fog rendered travelling impossible. He spent the next ten
days in the Isaac Walton Inn, at Dovedale, near Derby, waiting for
the fog to lift, and whilst so waiting wrote the first draft of the
[pg
92] play, which he entitled “Ben-my-Chree,” Barrett was
enthusiastic about it, and “Ben-my-Chree” was duly produced for the
first time at the Princess Theatre, on May 14, 1888, before a
packed house, in which every literary celebrity in London was
present. “The reception was enthusiastic; the next day I was a
famous man.” Notwithstanding its great success on the first night
and the splendid eulogies of the press, “Ben-my-Chree” failed to
draw in London, and after running for one hundred nights, at a
great loss to the management, was withdrawn. It was then taken to
the provinces, and was very successful, both there and in America,
holding the stage for seven years. It was afterwards reproduced,
with some success, in London. This play brought Hall Caine in a sum
of one thousand pounds (five thousand dollars), and out of this he
bought himself a house in Keswick, where he remained in residence
for four years. Having now given up journalism, he devoted himself
entirely to fiction and play-writing.

THE ORIGINAL OF KATE IN “THE MANXMAN.”

In 1889, he went with his wife to Iceland and spent two months
there, for the purpose of studying certain scenes which he wished
to introduce into “The Bondman,” on which he was then working.
Documentation is as much Hall Caine’s care in his novels as it is
Emile Zola’s. “The Bondman,” which had been begun in March, 1889,
at Aberleigh Lodge, Bexley Heath, Kent, a house of sinister
memory—for Caine narrowly escaped being murdered there one
night—was finished in October, at Castlerigg Cottage,
Keswick, and was published by Heinemann in 1890, with a success
which is far from being exhausted even to-day. In this year Hall
Caine experienced a great disappointment. He had been commissioned
by Sir Henry Irving to write a play on “Mahornet,” and had written
three acts of it, when such an outcry was made in the press against
Irving’s proposal to put “Mahomet” on the stage, to the certain
offence of British Mohammedans, that Sir Henry telegraphed to him
to say that the plan could not be carried out. He offered to
compensate Hall Caine for his labor. “I refused, however, to accept
one penny,” says Caine, “and after relieving my feelings by
spitting on my antagonists in an angry article in ‘The Speaker,’ I
finished the play.” It was accepted by Willard for production in
America, but has not yet been played. “This was a great
disappointment,” says Caine, “and I had little heart for much work
in 1890. I did nothing in that year beyond a hasty ‘Life of
Christ,’ which has never been printed. I had read Renan’s ‘Life of
Christ,’ and had been deeply impressed by it, and I had said that
there was a splendid chance for a ‘Life of Christ’ as vivid and as
personal from the point of belief as Renan’s was from the point of
unbelief.” This book he wrote, but was not satisfied with it, and
has refused to publish it, although only last year a firm of
publishers offered him three thousand pounds (fifteen thousand
dollars) for the manuscript. “No, I was not satisfied, though I had
brought to bear on it faculties which I had never used in my
novels. It was human, it was most dramatic, but it fell far short
of what I had hoped to do, and I put it away in my cupboard. I hope
to rewrite it some day.”

In 1891 Hall Caine began to work on “The Scapegoat,” and in the
spring of that year went to Morocco to fit the scenes to his idea.
He suffered there from very bad health, from severe neurosthenia.
[pg
93] “I was a ‘degenerate,’ he says, “à la Nordau.” No
sooner had “The Scapegoat” been published, than the chief rabbi
wrote to him to ask him to go to Russia, to write about the
persecutions of the Jews in that country, and in 1892 he started on
this mission, which he fulfilled entirely at his own expense,
declining all the offers of subsidies made to him by the Jewish
Committee. He carried with him for protection against the Russian
authorities, a letter from Lord Salisbury to H. M.’s Minister at
St. Petersburg, to be delivered only in case of need; and as an
introduction to the possibly hostile Jewish Communities, a letter
in Hebrew to be presented to the rabbis in the various towns.
Lord’s Salisbury’s letter was never used, but the chief rabbi’s
introduction secured him everywhere a most hospitable
reception.

“BLACK TOM” BEFORE “THE COTTAGE BY THE WATER-TROUGH.”

“I went through the pale of settlement,” he relates, “and saw as
much of frontier life amongst the Jews as possible and found them
like hunted dogs. I, however, got no further than the frontier
towns, for cholera had broken out, numerous deaths took place every
day, my own health was getting queer, and, to speak plainly, I was
frightened. So we turned our faces back and returned home. On my
[pg
94] return to London I delivered a lecture before the Jewish
Workmen’s Club in the East End, in a hall crammed to suffocation. I
shall never forget the enthusiasm of the audience, the tears, the
laughter, the applause, the wild embraces to which I was
subjected.”

This was the only use that Hall Caine ever made of all his
experiences of his tour in Russia in 1892, which had lasted many
months, for when he returned to Cumberland to write the story which
was to be called “The Jew,” he found the task impossible. “I worked
very hard at it, I turned it over in every direction in my mind,
but I felt I could not do it. I wanted the experience of a life; I
could not enter into competition in their own field with the great
Russian novelists. I found it could not be done.”

THE WRITING OF “THE MANXMAN.”

In the meanwhile, circumstances had obliged him to give up
Castlerigg Cottage in disgust, and he accordingly removed to the
Isle of Man, with the determination of fixing his residence there
definitely. For the first six months he lived at Greeba Castle, a
very pretty but very lonely house, about half-way between Peel and
Douglas, on the Douglas road—and it was there that most of
“The Manxman” was written.

“I turned my Jewish story into a Manx story, and ‘The Jew’
became ‘The Manxman.’ In my original scheme, Philip was to be a
Christian, governor of his province in Russia; Pete, Cregeen, and
Kate were to be Jews. I thought that the racial difference between
the two rivals would afford greater dramatic contrast than the
class difference, and it was only reluctantly that I altered the
scheme of my story.”

Hall Caine, in speaking of the genesis of “The Manxman,” may be
induced to show his little pocket-diary for 1893. Against each day
during the whole of January and part of February are written the
words: “The Jew.”

“That means,” he will explain, “that all those days I was
working at my story in my head.”

“The Manxman” was finished at the house in Marine Parade in Peel
where Hall Caine is now temporarily residing—a large brick
house, which was built for a boarding-house and is certainly not
the house for an artist. As he has determined to make his home in
the island, he is at present hesitating whether to purchase Greeba
Castle, or to build himself a house on the Creg Malin headland at
Peel, than which no more wondrous site for a poet’s home could be
found in the Queen’s dominions, overlooking the bay, with the
rugged pile of Peel Castle, memory haunted, beyond.

He loves the Manx and they love him. At first “society” in the
island objected to his disregard of the conventions. Now he is as
popular at Government House, or at the Deemster’s, as he is in
Black Tom’s cottage. But his warmest friends are amongst the
peasants and fishermen, from one end of the island to the other.
“They are such good fellows,” he says, “and such excellent subjects
for study for my books. They are current coin for me.” So he asks
them to supper, and visits them in their houses, and has taught
himself their language and their strange intonations as they
speak.

In June and July of 1894, whilst in London, Hall Caine wrote a
dramatic version of “The Manxman” and offered it to Tree, who,
however, refused it, as unlikely to appeal to the sympathies of the
fashionable audiences of the Haymarket Theatre. In this version
Philip was the central figure. The version which has been played
with much success both in America and in the provinces, was written
by Wilson Barrett, with Pete as the central figure. It was
originally produced in Leeds, on August 20, 1894, and has met with
a good reception everywhere except in Manchester and New York. The
critics in the latter city wrote that it was a disgrace to the
book.

For some years past, Hall Caine has devoted himself to literary
public affairs. He is Sir Walter Resant’s best supporter in his
noble efforts to protect authors and to advance their interests.
His ability as a public speaker and a politician of letters is
great, and in recognition of this he was asked—a most
distinguished honor—in November of last year to open the
Edinburgh Literary and Philosophical Institution for the winter
session, his predecessors having been John Morley and Mr. Goschen.
He is at this writing in America on behalf of the Authors’ Society,
in connection with the Canadian copyright difficulty. He possesses
in a marked degree that sense of solidarity amongst men of letters
in which most successful authors are so singularly lacking, and the
great power with which his world-wide popularity has vested him is
used by him rather in the general interest of the craft than to own
advantage.

His life in his home in Peel, in the midst of his
family—the old parents, the pretty young wife, and the two
bonny lads—is noble in its simplicity, a life of high
[pg
95] thinking, when, his success and personal popularity
being what they are, he has many temptations to worldliness.

He attributes his success in part to the fact that he has always
been a great reader of the Bible.

“I think,” he says, “that I know my Bible as few literary men
know it. There is no book in the world like it, and the finest
novels ever written fall far short in interest of the stories it
tells. Whatever strong situations I have in my books are not of my
creation, but are taken from the Bible. ‘The Deemster’ is the story
of the prodigal son. ‘The Bondman’ is the story of Esau and Jacob,
though in my version sympathy attaches to Esau. ‘The Scapegoat’ is
the story of Eli and his sons, but with Samuel as a little girl.
‘The Manxman’ is the story of David and Uriah. My new book also
comes out of the Bible, from a perfectly startling source.”

Hall Caine does not begin his books with a character or group of
characters, like Dickens or Scott, nor with a plot, like Wilkie
Collins, nor with a scene, like Black, but with an idea, a
spiritual intent. In all his books the central motive is always the
same. “It is,” he says, “the idea of justice, the idea of a Divine
Justice, the idea that righteousness always works itself out, that
out of hatred and malice comes Love. My theory is that a novel, a
piece of imaginative writing, must end with a sense of justice,
must leave the impression that justice is inevitable. My theory is
also—on the matters which divide novelists into realists and
idealists—that the highest form of art is produced by the
artist who is so far an idealist that he wants to say something and
so far a realist that he copies nature as closely as he can in
saying it.”

His methods of work are particular to himself. It is difficult
for a visitor in Hall Caine’s house to find pens or ink. As a
matter of fact, his writing is done with a stylograph pen, which he
always carries in his pocket.

“I don’t think,” he says, “that I have sat down to a desk to
write for years. I write in my head to begin with, and the actual
writing, which is from memory, is done on any scrap of paper that
may come to hand; and I always write on my knee. My work is as
follows: I first get my idea, my central moral; and this usually
takes me a very long time. The incidents come very quickly, for the
invention of incidents is a very easy matter to me. I then labor
like mad in getting knowledge. I visit the places I propose to
describe. I read every book I can get bearing on my subject. It is
elaborate, laborious, but very delightful. I then make voluminous
notes. Then begins the agony. Each day it besets me, winter or
summer, from five in the morning till breakfast time. I awake at
five and lie in bed, thinking out the chapter that is to be written
that day, composing it word for word. That usually takes me up till
seven. From seven till eight I am engaged in mental revision of the
chapter. I then get up and write it down from memory, as fast as
ever the pen will flow. The rest of the morning I spend in lounging
about, thinking, thinking, thinking of my book. For when I am
working on a new book I think of nothing else; everything else
comes to a standstill. In the afternoon I walk or ride, thinking,
thinking. In the evenings, when it is dark, I walk up and down my
room constructing my story. It is then that I am happiest. I do not
write every day—sometimes I take a long rest, as I am doing
at present—and when I do write, I never exceed fifteen
hundred words a day. I do not greatly revise the manuscript for
serial publication, but I labor greatly over the proofs of the
book, making important changes, taking out, putting in, recasting.
Thus, after ‘The Scapegoat’ had passed through four editions and
everybody was praising the book, I felt uneasy because I felt I had
not done justice to my subject; so I spent two months in rewriting
it and had the book reset and brought out again. The public feeling
was that the book had not been improved, but I felt that I had
lifted it up fifty per cent.”

“I am convinced,” he continued, “that my system of writing the
book in my head first is a good one. It shows me exactly what I
want to say. The mental strain is, of course, immense, and that
forces you to go straight to your point; for the mind is not strong
enough to indulge in flirtations, in excursions at a tangent, as
the pen is apt to do.”

Hall Caine was accused, when he began writing, of obscurity, of
a predilection for tortuous phrases. “I think that now I have
almost gone too far in the other direction,” he says; “the critics
blame me for a neglect of style. But—you remember the story
of Gough and his diamond ring—I am determined not to let any
diamond ring get between me and my audience. Writing should not get
between the reader and the picture. I take a great joy in sheer
lucidity, and if any sentence of mine does not at the very first
sight express my meaning, I rewrite it. Obscurity of style
indicates that the writer is not entirely master of what he has to
say.”

NEIGHBOR KING.

By Collins Shackelford.

When my husband, Micah Pyncheon, died he left me alone with our
baby girl, the farm, an’ the grasshoppers. It happened in Kansas,
in ’76.

You don’t mind my crying now, do you? ‘t seems as though I’d
never get the tears all out of me. The time ain’t so far away, nor
me so old, but that those days spread out before me like a
panorama, nat’ral as life. I can feel that hot summer sun, not a
cloud in the sky, an’ the smell of the bakin’ earth movin’ all the
time in waves of heat until you got dizzy with the motion an’ the
scent. An’ the grasshoppers! You can’t know how they came a-flyin’
by day an’ by night in great brown clouds; how they crept an’
crawled an’ squirmed through the wheat an’ the corn an’ the grass,
bitin’ an’ chewin’ every green thing, leavin’ nothin’ but black an’
dry shreds, an’ the earth more desolate than if a fire had swept
over it. They were everywhere out-of-doors; they came into the
house—down the chimney when they couldn’t get in through the
door—an’ I’ve picked their bony bodies out of my pockets many
a time, an’ knocked ’em off the table so as I might put down a
dish. If you killed one, a thousand came to the funeral. All day
an’ all night you heard the click, click, click of their bodies as
they walked about, jumped here an’ there, or rubbed against one
another. An’ poor Micah’s body under the blanket—they were
all about it, an’ I havin’ to brush ’em away. Anybody would ‘a’
cried if they’d been in my place, such a dreary day was
that—me an’ baby all alone, with the village ten miles off,
an’ not a soul nearer than neighbor King, three miles away.

Seems to me I don’t know how Micah died, it was all so sudden
like. All day he’d been out in the sun a-fightin’ the hoppers, an’
tryin’ to work when he wasn’t fightin’; an’ he came in with his
head a hangin’ forward an’ not a smile on his lips as he put up his
hat an’ rolled down his sleeves.

“I’m downright discouraged, Miranda,” he said at last, lookin’
out of the window. “There’s no use in standin’ up agin natur an’
the hoppers. They eat faster’n I can kill ’em, an’ in a week the
crops ‘ull be about all gone. It looks as though when winter comes
we won’t have anythin’ to eat. I b’lieve I’ve killed ten thousand
of those creatures to-day, an’ yet they came faster’n drops in a
rain-storm.”

Then he picked up little Hannah an’ lay down on the bed with her
in his arms, sayin’ no more. I bustled ’round—speakin’
nothing, an’ as quiet as possible, knowin’ how tired in mind an’
body the poor man was—an’ fixed up a nice supper. When the
table was all set, an’ the food on it, an’ everything as cheerful
an’ encouragin’ as the hoppers would let me make it, I called
Micah. But he didn’t answer; so I stepped across the room an’ put
my hand on his face, so as to wake him gently, as I was used to
doin’.

Oh, dear! Oh, dear! The loved face was cold and white, an’ I
give one scream an’ fell beside him, knowin’ nothin’. Yes, Micah
[pg
97] was dead—gone to sleep never to waken, passed from
life with little Hannah snuggled in his arms.

No wonder I cry when I remember that lonesome night, holdin’ the
little one in my arms an’ watchin’ the still face on the bed,
knowin’ that nevermore those eyes would look into mine, nevermore
those cold lips would speak to me. An’ when the mornin’ came, gray
an’ hopeless, there was no one but me an’ the baby an’ poor Micah’s
body; an’ the hoppers a-creepin’ an’ a-crawlin’ all through the
house as if they were a-buyin’ of it at auction, a-rustlin’ their
wings an’ a-hustlin’ their bodies until I thought theie was a cool
wind instead of a hot, breathless mornin’. I covered up the dear
face, an’, kneelin’ by his side, prayed an’ cried, an’ cried an’
prayed. It was all I could do for my husband of three years. I
don’t know what else I did, what else I thought. I saw nothin’,
heard nothin’, until somebody’s hand fell upon my shoulder.

“Why, Mrs. Pyncheon!” was the cry, an’ lookin’ up through my
tears I saw neighbor King a-standin’ by me. “I was goin’ up the
road,” he said, “an’ thought I’d stop an’ say good-mornin’. Where’s
Micah? In the field, an’ you a-cryin’ for lonesomeness?”

I answered nothin’; but put up my hand an’ pulled back the sheet
from the dear dead face.

“My God!” was all he said, an’ he staggered back to a chair an’
sat in it for five minutes without a word, his face in his
hands.

“Madam, forgive me! I never dreamed of such a thing,” he cried
at last, recoverin’ himself; “an’ when an’ how did it happen?”

I told him the story between sobs, breakin’ down every few
words. Thank Heaven! it wasn’t a long story, or I should have gone
crazy before it was told. He was silent for quite a spell, as if he
was a-meditatin’ over the situation, lookin’ mostly at poor Micah
as if drawin’ ideas from the cold lips.

“Now, Mrs. Pyncheon!” he said finally, in his solemn voice an’
grave, slow way of talkin’,—”now, Mrs. Pyncheon, you must
trust everythin’ to me. You’re beat out. I’ve no women folks in my
house, as you know; but I’ll ride to town an’ get an old lady, a
friend of mine, to come out an’ help you through. I’ll see, too,
that poor Micah has a coffin an’ a minister. Be the brave little
woman, Mrs. Pyncheon, that Micah would tell you to be, if he could
speak. By sun-down I’ll have somebody you can talk to an’ who’ll
cheer you up better than I can. To-morrow—to-morrow we’ll
bury the poor man!”

When he said this it set me to cryin’. Then it was so still that
I looked up an’ found myself alone. A-down the road was a line of
dust, an’ I heard the muffled footfalls of neighbor King’s horse on
his way to the village.

An’ “to-morrow we’ll bury him” were words that all that long,
lonesome, hot day kept soundin’ in my ears as if some one was
callin’ ’em out with the tickin’ of the clock. “Bury him”—an’
Micah dead only a few hours! I couldn’t believe it, an’ would stop
an’ listen for his whistle at the barn, his talk to the horses, his
rattle at the pump, his footfall at the door, until, crazy with
waitin,’ I’d go over to the bed, pull back the sheet, an’ in the
still face read why I should never hear those happy sounds
again—never again.

Ah, well! The sun went down at last; the long, dreary day was
ended, an’ in the twilight came back my good neighbor with motherly
Mrs. Challen—an’—an’—it hurts me even now to tell
it—the coffin for. Micah. In it those two good people softly
placed him, an’ all that night I watched its shape between me an’
the window.

“MRS. CHALLEN HELD ME IN HER ARMS.”

The next day, in the mornin’, under the trees in the little
grove across from the house, my Micah was laid to rest
forever—placed so that when I looked out of the window or the
door I could see the mound of earth between the fence of tree limbs
[pg
98] woven around it, an’ seem’ it, know that in that spot
was buried one who in my young life was more to me than earth or
heaven. I never understood how I got through those two terrible
days. I can’t remember distinctly. It’s all dream-like, as if in a
thin, grayish fog. I know that Mrs. Challen held me in her
arms—for I was a fragile, girlish thing—like a mother;
that the minister said words I never heard; that the strange faces
of a few farm people from miles away looked at me; that the
grasshoppers were under foot an’ in the air an’ even on the coffin;
but, above all else, I recall, movin’ among the other people like
somebody from another world, the tall, straight form and sad face
of neighbor King. It was neighbor King who managed everything from
the minute his hand fell upon my shoulder that mornin’ until the
last limb was knit into the rough fence around the lonely grave.
What would have happened to me without him?

I’m only a woman—one of the weak ones, I s’pose—for
I broke down entirely the night after poor Micah was buried, Mrs.
Challen said I went crazy; that I’d kneel down at the side of the
bed an’ cry as if my heart would break; that again an’ again I went
to the front door an’ looked up an’ down the lonely, treeless road,
an’ then to the back door, where I would call “Micah!”
“Micah!”—just as I’d been used to callin’ him to his meals,
an’ I’d listen, with my hand to my ear, to hear him answer. Last of
all, worst of all, she said, I went staggerin’ across the street,
an’, pushin’ through the rough fence, threw myself upon the grave
an’ begged of the Great Father to give me back the dead that had
been so much to me when he was living. I don’t wonder at my losing
my head. Micah an’ I were both so young, an’ we had loved each
other so much, as common folks often do, that to lose him was
robbin’ my life of all its brightness an’ sweetness.

The mornin’ after the funeral neighbor King was round bright an’
early, findin’ me red-eyed an’ weakly.

“Well! well! Mrs. Pyncheon,” he began, in what was for him a
cheery voice, “what are we a-goin’ to do now besides summin’ up a
little? Are we goin’ to our relations?”

“No, Mr. King,” I answered, havin’ thought over the matter a
little, “no, I’m goin’ to stay here. I have no relation I want to
bother. Here’s the place for me an’ Hannah. The farm is paid for,
an’ all I have is here an’—an’ over there,” turnin’ my face
to the spot where Micah lay. “If the grasshoppers ‘ull let me, I
stay.”

“THE MORNIN’ AFTER THE FUNERAL NEIGHBOR KING WAS ROUND BRIGHT
AN’ EARLY.”

“Quite right, madam. Very sensible. But, of course, while you
can do a good deal, you can’t work the farm all alone. That’s
impossible. I’ve been givin’ the matter some thought, an’ intend to
[pg
99] help you out, if you’ll let me. Suppose we work it on
shares? You name my share, ma’am, an’ I’ll take care that my men
look after the hard work for you. The hoppers won’t leave much for
this year; but what there is you shall have, an’ I’ll get my share
for this year out of next year’s crops. I’m glad that suits you.
Now, you must not live here alone. One of my men has a sister in
the village, a stout, healthy, willin’ girl, who wants a home.
She’ll be glad to come here. I’ll try to superintend affairs for
you, if you’re willin’, an’ make the best of everything. Oh, we’ll
keep you in good shape, never fear; but you mustn’t mind my askin’
questions, so that I can get a knowledge of affairs. Now, don’t
thank me. I’d rather you wouldn’t. Just keep cheerful, an’ as long
as we’ve got to live, let’s make the best of life.”

“THERE WAS HARDLY A DAY HE DID NOT RIDE OVER THE LITTLE FARM TO
SEE HOW THINGS WERE GOIN’.”

This was very good from neighbor King—somethin’ you
wouldn’t expect from such a sad or solemn-lookin’ man, a man so
quiet, so reserved, appearin’ always as if he had some grief of his
own, so that he could sympathize with others in misery. He must
have been forty years old, for his dark brown hair was showin’ gray
around the temples, an’ there were deep wrinkles around the corners
of his mouth, an’ lots of little ones around his deep, sunken brown
eyes. It always seemed to me as if he’d been constructed for a
minister or a lawyer, an’ stopped half way as a farmer. He was no
half-acre farmer, but a worker of hundreds of acres; an’ my little
homestead was only a potato patch alongside of his. The queerest
thing about his place was that there wasn’t a woman on it. All the
work, cookin’ an’ everything was done by men. Well, girls was
scarce in those days an’ those parts, an’ perhaps that was the
reason. Maybe, again, he was afraid of women, an’ didn’t want ’em
bossin’ around his work. I didn’t know an’ didn’t care. It was no
concern of mine. I only knew he was mighty good to me in my
affliction—the truest, steadiest, most unselfish friend a
forlorn woman could have; an’ every night I prayed for that same
neighbor King, askin’ the Lord to bless him for the goodness an’
kindness he had shown to me.

True enough, the grasshoppers didn’t leave me much that year,
just enough to keep soul and body together, with economy. The pesky
things eat everything from pussly to leaves. I b’lieve they’d ‘a’
eaten the green out of the sky if they could ‘a’ got at it. Why,
the earth looked as if the devil had gone over it with a brush of
brown paint, missin’ a spot here an’ there that come up green after
the critters had got away. There was only one thing they didn’t
eat, an’ that was themselves—more’s the pity!

Neighbor King (his other name was Horace, I found out
[pg
100] afterwards) watched my farm matters pretty closely the
second year. He tended to my interests before his own, because, as
he said, I was a widow an’ must not suffer. There was hardly a day
he did not ride over the little farm to see how things were goin’,
always stopping at the door to have a cheerful talk, or to give me,
when comin’ from the village, a crumb or two of news of the big
world so far away; an’ often he left a newspaper, that I might read
myself what was a-goin’ on. This man did everything, in his grave,
soothin’ way, to smooth down my sorrow—not to lead me to
forget, for that was impossible—an’ make the roadway of my
life as pleasant as a country lane hedged in with sweet-smellin’
flowers an’ alive with birds nestlin’ and twitterin’ among the buds
and blossoms. In this quiet, restful, peaceful way neighbor King
came, in three years, to build his life into mine, until, thinkin’
matters over, I realized that he was necessary to make that life
pleasant. I didn’t forget poor Micah—how could I? At the same
time I felt that I could not go on alone the balance of my life
with the hunger in my heart for some one to love an’ to love me.
An’ he? Well, not a word out of line had been spoken; but I read
the change in his eyes, his looks, his manners, in the tones of his
voice. Women read where there’s neither print nor writin’. I
couldn’t tell why he should love me, though as women go I was
young—fifteen years younger than he, an’ fair lookin’, an’ a
worker. I was companionable an’ in sympathy with him. Put yourself
in my place an’ be the lonesome, forlorn creature I was, an’ see if
you wouldn’t love the man who put aside the dark clouds an’ gave
you sunshine to drown despair, an’ a cheerful voice instead of
silence. Neither of us spoke. It wasn’t necessary. We understood.
An’ because of that to me the skies were brighter, an’ the earth
more beautiful, the days fuller of nature’s music, an’ there was
hope an’ quiet joy everywhere.

“HE DIDN’T STOP, AS WAS HIS HABIT, BUT CANTERED BY, HEAD DOWN
AND REINS LOOSE.”

Ah, me! I didn’t know it; but behind this sunny life, back of
this bit of heaven that came down all around me, was a big, black
cloud full of storm. I remember well the evenin’ it first began to
show itself. I saw neighbor King comin’ down the road from the
village, on his pony. He didn’t stop, as was his habit, but
cantered by, head down and reins loose. Then, as if he’d forgotten
somethin’, he wheeled the horse sharp around, trotted back, threw
the bridle over a fence-post, an’ came in. I saw somethin’ was the
matter from the absent-minded way he talked an’ by his lookin’
mostly at the floor.

Strange, too, he began about crops an’ prices; then he had
somethin’ to say about the village, and from that to livin’ in big
cities, an’ how such places changes people’s natures, makin’ women
different creatures—more bold, more forgetful of friends,
less kindly to their sex, than those of the country; an’ he said it
all as slowly an’ softly an’ solemnly as those ministers pray who
don’t think the Lord’s deaf. He seemed to be tryin’ to get at
somethin’ by goin’ round it; an’ I thought that somethin’ was
me.

“Neighbor King,” I said finally, “you always speak so kindly of
women folks that it seems odd to me that you never have a woman on
your farm; an’ odder still that you’ve never married.”

“Mrs. Pyncheon,” his face lightin’ up like the sky just before
sunrise, “you an’ I are old an’ tried friends, an’ I know you’ll
respect an’ keep secret what I’m going to tell you, an’ what, to be
[pg
101] plain, I came to tell you. I knew, an’ I didn’t wonder,
that you thought it strange I’d never married. The Lord only knows
how I hunger for a woman’s love, a woman’s talk, a woman’s presence
where I can see her. I would give all I am worth if I could take a
good woman by the hand as my wife, an’ go forth even to begin life
over again. Hunger an’ thirst are terrible; but they are easily
borne in comparison with the hunger an’ thirst for a woman’s love
that I have endured for years. No one can realize my lonesomeness,
Mrs. Pyncheon;” an’ reachin’ out he caught my hands in his. “I’ve
been your friend for years. You know it. I believe you’ve been
mine. Will you continue such when I keep from you a truth I dare
not tell, an’ give you in its place a fact that you must know? I
know you to be brave an’ strong. You’ll be so now, an’ secret,
too—for no one here knows what I’m goin’ to tell you. Mrs.
Pyncheon, I am a married man.”

I couldn’t help it; but the news was so sudden an’ so startlin’
that my hands came away from his with a wrench, an’ I drew away,
feelin’ hurt an’ shamed, if not guilty; an’ I felt a flush of anger
burnin’ my cheeks.

“There! there! don’t misjudge me, Mrs. Pyncheon. Pity me,
instead. I’ve made no attempt to deceive you. I’ve been silent,
because I could not talk about a matter that was sad an’ sacred.
Yes, I’m married; but”—an’ great tears came into his
eyes—”my wife has been hopelessly insane for ten years. You
buried Micah an’ mourned for him, knowin’ he was dead; I buried my
wife alive, God knows whether I’ve grieved for her. She is in an
insane asylum. For years I could not break away an’ leave her; it
seemed so heartless to desert one who had been the joy an’ pride of
my youth. But the doctor told me that it was death for me if I
stayed; that I could not last more than a year goin’ on as I’d been
livin’. Now you can understand why I am here, solitary an’
hopeless, without a friend—unless I can call you one?”

“You never had a truer one, neighbor King,” my heart speakin’
out its gratitude. “When I think of what you’ve done for me, an’
how you’ve thought of me, all when the world was the
darkest,—why, it seems as if my life was too short in which
to say all my prayers for you.”

Perhaps I spoke particularly quick an’ spirited, an’ perhaps my
eyes showed more’n I spoke; for he looked very queerly at me for a
minute, his face lightin’ up in a way it was unused to, an’ then he
said, “Thank you, Mrs. Pyncheon; I think I understand. I shall not
forget this meetin’. Good-by.” An’, before I knew what he meant to
do, he stooped an’ kissed my forehead, an’ was out of the house
before I could speak.

I wasn’t angry; I wasn’t hurt. If the truth was given, I was
delighted; for I, too, was hungry an’ thirsty for a little love. I
was woman enough to know what that kiss meant. At the same time I
grieved for the poor man, chained, so to speak, to a crazy person,
bearin’ his unseen burden so uncomplainingly, an’ doin’ God-like
[pg
102] work all the year round. But the more I thought over
that kiss, the more I realized that between neighbor King an’
myself had been suddenly put up a high wall, he on one side, I on
the other; an’ that in the future I should see him very seldom.

It happened as I thought. Days passed, an’ neighbor King came
not. The thumpety-thump of his pony no longer sounded along the
road. Mornin’s and evenin’s came an’ went, an’ not a “howdy-do” in
his pleasant voice. I wasn’t surprised; I expected as much for a
time. Finally, one of the hired men said he’d gone away. Then I put
my lips together in a dogged way an’ settled down to a lonesome
life, cheered a little by the prattle of little Hannah, an’ kept
from rustin’ by the farm work. I was lonesome, very lonesome, when
the evenin’ shadows crept over the ground, an’ the crickets began
to sing, the katydids to scold, an’ the hoot owl to give his
mournful cry over in the grove where Micah lay.

“ONE OF HIS MEN BROUGHT ME A LETTER—THE FIRST I’D HAD FOR
YEARS”.

There was daybreak at last, though nearly a month after neighbor
King had gone. One of his men brought me a letter—the first
I’d had for years—an’ I looked at it a long time before I
opened it, wondering what strange news it had for me to know, why I
should have it, an’ what I should do with it now it had come. I
knew the writin’. It was neighbor King’s. Was it good news, or news
to shrivel my heart up as with fire? I tore off an end an’ pulled
out the sheet. It didn’t take long to read it.

Chicago, August 17, 187-.

Mrs. Pyncheon: I find that my
wife has been dead a year.

Horace King.

The letter dropped from my hand. It was the heart-breaking end
of a love story—the closin’ up of one of those little
tragedies which the world seldom hears about. Such love stories are
happening all the while among poor people, an’ so are too common
for the way-up world; yet they are full of heartaches, an’ hot,
droppin’ tears, an’ great sobs that are like moans. An’ so my
neighbor King had come to the end of his tragedy; had found the
idol of his young life an’ love put away in her grave, an’ the
waitin’ an’ hopin’ was at an end. What that good man must have
suffered durin’ those ten long years, nobody but himself could
know. Now that he was free, possibly he would sell his farm an’ go
back to the city to live, an’ I, to whom he had been so good an’
grand, would soon be forgotten. Ah! that was a bitin’ thought. It
almost crazed me, now that I knew how much I loved him, to think of
being left alone to grow old an’ wrinkled an’ withered, an’ no
words of comfort to cheer me up along the path walked by nobody but
myself. I knew he was too great a man to plough his talents into
the soil or to hide the light of his intellect in the jungles of
his fields of wheat or corn. That letter made me feel, somehow,
that everything was suddenly changed; that my little world was not
the same as it had been ten minutes before. The tears came into my
eyes, an’ I’m not sure but I was sobbin’ under a forlorn, lonesome
feelin’, when I heard a step behind me, an’ before I could put away
the letter or wipe my eyes, a hand was softly laid upon my
shoulder. I sprang to my feet, too frightened to speak. Instantly
there was an arm around my neck an’ a kiss upon my cheek, an’ I
heard neighbor King say, with a happy laugh, “It’s only me,
Miranda. I find I’m here as soon as my letter.”

“I thought, you might not be comin’ back,” I whispered, with
quiverin’ lips.

“Why, my darling, I’ve come back for you,” he said, bendin’ over
an’ kissin’ me again. “Didn’t you understand me when I was here
last?”

“I thought I did, but wasn’t sure. The kiss was a sort of
mystery. But it’s all plain now, an’ I’m so happy;” an’ like a
little fool was off to cryin’ again, this time for gladness, an’ he
a-holdin’ me close in his arms.

This may not read like much of a love story, yet it was a bitter
story for me, all in all, during the years from Micah’s death to
the golden mornin’ that brought such sweet relief an’ rest. The
thought troubles me now an’ then, but I don’t believe that Micah,
if he sees from the other world what I’ve done, blames me for the
change. He knows I can’t forget him, an’ would not if I could.

Through months an’ years of loneliness, of heartaches, of hopin’
an’ expectin’, of draggin’ along for no particular purpose, save to
keep body an’ soul together; with few joys, an’ but little else
than sighin’; an’ the great world made no more for me than a little
farm, a little house, an’ a voiceless sky above me—what
blame, then, have I, if I brightened an’ happified my life an’ his
by makin’ neighbor King my husband?

THROUGH THE DARDANELLES.

by Cy Warman,

Author of “A Thousand-mile Ride on the Engine of
a ‘Flyer.'”

Constantinople may be considered as the end of the railway
system of the earth. Here, if you wish to see more of the Orient,
you must take to the sea. There is, to be sure, a projected railway
out of the Sultan’s city into the interior, but only completed to
Angora, three hundred and sixty-five miles. The intention of the
projectors was to continue the road down to Bagdad, on the river
Tigris, through which they could reach the Persian Gulf.

SACRED DOGS, CONSTANTINOPLE.

I had arranged to go to Angora, but found a ten-days’ quarantine
five miles out of Constantinople, and backed into town, and then
made an effort to secure from the office of the titled German who
stands for the railway company, some idea of the road, its
prospects, probable cost, and estimated earnings, but had my
letters returned without a line.

To show them that I was acting in good faith, and willing to pay
for what I got, I went with Vincent, the guide (the only guide I
ever had), and asked them for some printed matter or photographs,
or anything that would throw a little light along the line of their
plague-stricken railway; but they still refused to talk. No wonder
it has taken these dreamers ten years to build three hundred and
sixty miles of very cheap railroad.

It was my misfortune to fall into a little old Austrian-Lloyd
steamer called the “Daphne.” Before we lifted anchor in the Golden
Horn I learned that her boilers had not been overhauled for ten
years; and before we reached the Dardanelles I concluded that the
sand had not been changed in the pillows for a quarter of a
century. I have slept in the American Desert for a period of thirty
nights, between the earth and the heavens, and found a better bed
than was made by the ossified mattress and petrified pillows of the
“Daphne.” It was bad enough to breathe the foul air that came up
from the camping pilgrims on the main deck; but the first day out
we learned that these ugly Armenians, greasy Greeks, and buggy
Bedouins would be allowed to come up on the promenade deck and
mingle with those who had paid for first-class passage. Poorly
clad, half-starved, poverty-stricken people, headed for the Holy
Land, came and rubbed elbows with American and European women and
[pg
104] children. Of course one sympathizes with these poor,
miserable people, but one does not want their secrets.

THE RAILROAD STATION AT CONSTANTINOPLE.

We left the Bosporus at twilight, crossed the Sea of Marmora
during the night, and the next morning were at Gallipoli, where the
bird-seeds come from. The day broke beautifully, and the little sea
was as calm as a summer lake. By ten o’clock we were drifting down
the Dardanelles, which resembles a great river, for the land is
always near on either side.

The ship’s doctor, who was my guide, at every landing-place
kindly pointed out the many points of interest.

“Those pyramids over there,” he would say, “were erected by the
Turks, to commemorate a victory. Here is where Byron swam the sea
from Europe to Asia; and over there is where King Midas lived,
whose touch turned piastres to napoleons, and flounders to
goldfish. Here, to the left, on that hill, stood ancient Troy.”

All things seemed to work together to make the day a most
enjoyable one, and just at nightfall the doctor came to me and
said:

“See that island over there? That was the home of Sappho.”

An hour later we anchored in a little natural harbor, and five
of us went ashore. Besides the ship’s doctor (whose uniform was a
sufficient passport for all), there were in our party a Pole and a
Frenchman—both inspectors of revenue for the Turkish
government, and splendid fellows—a Belgian, and the writer.
We entered a café concert, where one man and five or
six girls sat in a sort of balcony at one end of the building and
played at “fiddle.” The main hall was filled with small tables, at
which were Greeks, Arabs, Armenians, Turks, and negroes as black as
a hole in the night. Between acts the girls were expected to come
down, distribute themselves about, and consume beer and other fluid
at the expense of the frequenters.

The girls were nearly all Germans, plain, honest, tired-looking
creatures, who seemed half embarrassed at seeing what they call
Europeans. One very pretty girl, with peachy checks, who, as we
learned, had for several evenings been in the habit of drinking
beer with a Greek, sat this evening with a dark Egyptian, almost
jet-black. The Greek—a hollow-chested, long-haired
fellow—came in, and, the moment he saw the girl with the
chalk-eyed Egyptian, turned red, then white, and then whipping out
a pistol levelled it at the girl. Nearly all the lights went out,
and the girl dropped from the chair. When the smoke and excitement
cleared away, it was found that the bullet had only parted the
girl’s hair, and she was able to take her fiddle and beer when time
was called.

At midnight we were rowed back to the boat, with all the poetry
knocked out of the isle of Sappho, hoisted anchor, and steamed
away. On the whole, however, the day had been most delightful. To
[pg
105] me there are no fairer stretches of water for a
glorious day’s sail than the Dardanelles.

When we dropped anchor again, ten hours later, it was at Smyrna,
the garden of Asia Minor. Here I went ashore with my faithful guide
the doctor, and found a real railway.

THE FIRST RAILROAD IN ASIA MINOR.

The Ottoman Railway, whose headquarters are at Smyrna, was the
first in Asia Minor, and was begun by the English company which
continues to do business, thirty-six years ago. William Shotton,
the locomotive superintendent, showed us through the shops and
buildings. One does not need to be told that this property is
managed by an English company. I saw here the neatest, cleanest
shops that I have ever seen in any country. There were in the car
shops some carriages just completed, designed and built by native
workmen who had learned the business with the company, and I have
not seen such artistic cars in England or France.

Mr. Shotton explained to me that they found it necessary to ask
an applicant his religion before employing him, so as to keep the
Greeks and Catholics about equally divided; otherwise, the faction
in the majority would lord it over the weaker band to the detriment
of the service. An occasional Mohammedan made no difference, but
the Greeks and Catholics have it “in” for each other.

The Ottoman Railway Company has three hundred and fifty miles of
good railroad, and hope some day to be able to continue across to
Bagdad, though it is hinted by people not interested that the
Sultan’s government favors the sleepy German company, to the
embarrassment of the Smyrna people, who have done so much for the
development of this marvellously blessed section.

We spent a pleasant day at Smyrna, with its watermelons, Turkish
coffee, and camels, and twenty-four hours later we were at the Isle
of Rhodes, where the great Colossus was. It was a dark, dreary,
windy night, and the Turks fought hard for the ship’s ladder; for
we had on board a wise old priest from Paris, with a string of six
or eight young priests, who were to unload at Rhodes. Despite the
cold, raw wind and rain, men came aboard with canes, beads, and
slippers made of native wood—for there is a prison,
here—and offered them for sale at very low prices.

For the next forty-eight hours our little old ship was walloped
about in a boisterous sea, and when we stopped again it was at
Mersina, where a little railway runs up to Tarsus. As we arrived at
this place after sunset, which ends the Turkish day, we were
obliged to lie here twenty-four hours to get landing. An hour
before sunset it is twenty-three o’clock, an hour after it is one.
That’s the way the Turks tell time.

JAFFA FROM THE HARBOR.

On the morning of the second day after our arrival at this
struggling little port, our anchor touched bottom in the beautiful
bay of Alexandretta. Here they show you the quiet nook where the
whale “shook” Jonah. That was a sad and lasting lesson for the
[pg
106] whale, for not one of his kind has been seen in the
Mediterranean since. All day we watched them hoist crying sheep and
mild-eyed cattle, with a derrick, from row-boats, up over the deck,
by the feet, and drop them down into the ship just as carelessly as
a boy would drop a string of squirrels from his hand to the ground.
The next morning we rode into the only harbor on the Syrian coast,
and anchored in front of the beautiful city of Beyrout.

It would take too long to describe this place, even if I had the
power. To tell of the road to Damascus, the drives to the hills of
Lebanon, through the silk farms; the genial and obliging American
consul, and the American college. Here, after nine days and nights,
we said “good-by” to the obliging crew of the poor old
“Daphne.”

A CREW OF JAFFA BOATMEN.

For nearly a week the steamers had been passing Jaffa without
landing, and the result was that Beyrout and Port Saïd were
filled with passengers and pilgrims for the Holy Land. All day the
Russian steamer, which we were to take, had been loading with deck
or steerage passengers, poorer and sicker and hungrier, if
possible, than those on the “Daphne.” It was dark when they had
finished, and when we steamed out of the harbor we had seven
hundred patches of poverty piled up on the deck.

It began to rain shortly, that cold, damp rain that seems to go
with a rough sea just as naturally as red liquor goes with crime.
For a week or more these miserable, misguided beggars had been
carried by Jaffa, from Beyrout to Port Saïd, then from Port
Saïd to Beyrout, unable to land. The good captain caused a
canvas to be stretched over the shivering, suffering mob that
covered the deck, but the pitiless rain beat in, and the wind
moaned the rigging, and the ship rolled and pitched and ploughed
through the black sea, and the poor pilgrims regretted the trip, in
each other’s laps. All night, and till nearly noon the next day,
they lay there, more dead than alive, and the hardest part of their
pilgrimage was yet before them.

If you have ever seen a flock of hungry gulls around a floating
biscuit, you can form a very faint idea of a mob of native boatmen
storming a ship at Jaffa. Of course, the ladders are filled first,
then those who have missed the ladders drive bang against the ship,
[pg
107] grab a rope or cable, or anything they can grasp, and
run up the iron, slippery side of the ship as a squirrel runs up a
tree.

A STREET SCENE IN JERUSALEM.

From the top of the ship they began to fire the bags, bundles,
and boxes of the deck passengers down into the broad boats that lay
so thick at the ship’s side as to hide the sea entirely. When they
had thrown everything overboard that was loose at one end, they
began on the poor pilgrims.

Women, old and young, who were scarcely able to stand up, were
dragged to the ladders and down to the last step. Here they were
supposed to wait for the boat into which the Arabs were preparing
to pitch them, for the sea was still very rough. Now the bottom
step of the ladder was in the water, now six feet above, but what
did these poor ignorant Russians know about gymnastics? When the
rolling sea brought the row-boats up, the pilgrim usually
hesitated, while the bare-armed and bare-legged boatmen yelled and
wrenched her hands from the chains. By the time the Mohammedans had
shaken her loose, and the victim had crossed herself, the ladder
was six or eight feet from the small boat; but it was too late to
stay her now, even if the Arabs had wished to, but they did not.
When she made the sign of the cross, that decided them, and they
let her drop. Some waiting Turks made a feeble attempt to catch the
sprawling woman, but not much. Sometimes, before one could rise,
another woman—for they were nearly all women—would drop
upon her bent back. Sometimes, when the first boat was filled, an
Arab would catch the pilgrim on his neck, and she could then be
seen riding him away, as a woman rides a bicycle. From one boat to
another he would leap with his helpless victim, and finally pitch
her forward, over his own head, into an empty boat, where she would
lie limp and helpless, and regret it some more.

I saw one poor girl, with great heavy boots on her feet, with
horse-shoe nails in the heels, fall into the bottom of a boat, and,
before she could get up, three large women were dropped in her lap.
Just then the boat, being full, pulled off, and I saw her faint;
her head fell back, and her deathlike face showed how she suffered.
It was rare sport for the Mohammedans.

“Jump,” they would say to the Christians; “don’t be afraid;
Christ will save you!”

It was four P.M. when the last of these miserable people, who
ought to have been at home hoeing potatoes, left the ship. An hour
later a long dark line of smoke was stretching out across the plain
of Sharon, behind a locomotive drawing a train of stock cars. These
cars held the seven hundred pilgrims bound for Jerusalem. It will
be midnight when they arrive at the Holy City, and they will have
no money and no place to sleep. Ah, I forgot. They will go to the
Russian hospice, where they will find free board and lodging. It is
kind and thoughtful in the Russian church people to care for those
[pg
108] poor pilgrims, now that they are here, but it is not
right nor kind to encourage them to come. It will be strangely
interesting to them at first, but when they have seen it all, there
will be nothing for them but idleness. Nothing to do but walk,
walk, up the valley of Jehoshaphat and down the road to
Bethlehem.

JERUSALEM.

Nearly all the “places of interest” in and about Jerusalem have
been collected together, and are now exhibited under one roof, in
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Most travellers go there first,
but they should not. One should go first to the Mount of Olives,
survey, and try to understand the country. It is easy to believe
that this is the original mount. There, at your feet, is the Garden
of Gethsemane, and beyond the gulch of Jehoshaphat (for it is not a
valley) is the dome of the marvellous Mosque of Omar. It is easy to
believe, also, that the dome of this mosque covers the rock where
Abraham was about to offer up his son, for it is surely the highest
point on Mount Moriah.

Looking along the wall you can see the Golden Gate, with the
decay of which, the Mohammedans say, will come the fall of Islam,
just as the Sultan’s power shall pass away when the last sacred dog
dies. Looking down the cañon you see the old King’s Garden,
the pool of Siloam, the Virgin’s Well, and, farther down, some poor
houses where the lepers live. Still farther, fourteen miles away,
and four thousand feet below you, lies the deep Dead Sea, beyond
which are the hills of Moab. If you have been lucky enough to come
up here without a guide or dragoman with a bosom full of
ivory-handled revolvers and long knives, you will sit for hours
spellbound. The guide tries too hard to give you your money’s
worth. He will not allow you to muse over these things, which are
reasonably real and true, but will tell you the most marvellous
stories, which you cannot believe. He will show you the grave of
Moses, and I am told that the Scriptures say, “No man knoweth where
his grave is;” yet, if you doubt, the guide feels hurt. He will ask
you to harken to the “going in the mulberries,” and if you say you
don’t hear he is surprised.

LEPERS IN JERUSALEM.

I made no notes of Jerusalem, for I did not and do not intend to
write of it. It was well done long ago by a man equally innocent
and more abroad, and has not changed much since. The Turks are
still on guard at the cradle and the grave of Christ, to try and
keep the devout Christians from spattering up the walls with each
other’s blood. The lamps have been carefully and nearly equally
divided between the Greeks, Catholics, and Armenians, as well as
the space around and the time for worship.

What strikes the traveller most forcibly on seeing Jerusalem for
the first time is the littleness of everything. The Mount of Olives
is a little mound; Mount Moriah is a scarcely perceptible rise of
ground; Mount Zion is a gentle hill; the valley of Jehoshaphat is a
deep, ugly gulch, with scarcely enough water in it to wet a postage
stamp: and the Tyropoeon Valley is an alley. Then you look at the
unspeakable poverty, the dreariness, the miles of piles of hueless
rocks, and are interested. The desert is interesting because it is
desolate, but it is an awful interest. The people—the beggars
that hound you—are as poor, as dwarfed and deformed as the
gnarled trees that try to live on the naked rocks.

One day in a narrow street we met two women who nearly blocked
the way.

“They are lepers!” cried the guide, pushing me by them. I
started to run, for never had the voice of man thrilled and filled
me with such fear; but, remembering my photographic machine, I had
the guide throw them some coin, and made a picture, but not a good
one. I was surprised that the poor beggar near whose feet the money
fell made no effort to pick it up, but continued to pray to us, and
waited for her companion. Then I saw that there were no fingers on
her hands.

THE EARLIEST PORTRAIT OF LINCOLN

LETTERS IN REGARD TO THE FRONTISPIECE OF THE NOVEMBER
McCLURE’S.

FROM THE HON. THOMAS M. COOLEY, for many years Chief Justice of
the Supreme Court of Michigan, and the first Chairman of the
Inter-State Commerce Commission.

ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN, October 24, 1895.

MR. S.S. McCLURE, New York City.

Dear Sir: I have received the
daguerreotype likeness you sent me on the 19th inst., and which you
understand to be the first ever taken of Mr. Lincoln. I am
delighted to have the opportunity to see and inspect it. I think it
a charming likeness; more attractive than any other I have seen,
principally perhaps because of the age at which it was taken. The
same characteristics are seen in it which are found in all
subsequent likenesses—the same pleasant and kindly eyes,
through which you feel, as you look into them, that you are looking
into a great heart. The same just purposes are also there; and, as
I think, the same unflinching determination to pursue to final
success the course once deliberately entered upon. And what
particularly pleases me is that there is nothing about the picture
to indicate the low vulgarity that some persons who knew Mr.
Lincoln in his early career would have us believe belonged to him
at that time. The face is very far from being a coarse or brutal or
sensual face. It is as refined in appearance as it is kindly. It
seems almost impossible to conceive of this as the face of a man to
be at the head of affairs when one of the greatest wars known to
history was in progress, and who could push unflinchingly the
measures necessary to bring that war to a successful end. Had it
been merely a war of conquest, I think we can see in this face
qualities that would have been entirely inconsistent with such a
course, and that would have rendered it to this man wholly
impossible. It is not the face of a bloodthirsty man, or of a man
ambitious to be successful as a mere ruler of men; but if a war
should come involving issues of the very highest importance to our
common humanity, and that appealed from the oppression and
degradation of the human race to the higher instincts of our
nature, we almost feel, as we look at this youthful picture of the
great leader, that we can see in it as plainly as we saw in his
administration of the government when it came to his hands that
here was likely to be neither flinching nor shadow of turning until
success should come.

Very respectfully yours,

THOMAS M. COOLEY.

FROM HERBERT B. ADAMS, Professor of History in Johns Hopkins
University.

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, BALTIMORE, MARYLAND,
October 24, 1895.

S.S. McCLURE, ESQ., 30 Lafayette Place, New York
City.

My Dear Mr. McClure: I thank you for a
copy of the new portrait of Abraham Lincoln, which I shall promptly
have framed and exhibited to my historical students. Indeed, I
called it to their attention this morning, and they are all greatly
interested in this remarkable likeness of the Saviour of his
Country. The portrait indicates the natural character, strength,
insight, and humor of the man before the burdens of office and the
sins of his people began to weigh upon him. The prospect of a new
life of Lincoln, revealing the Man as well as the Statesman, is
most pleasing. From the previous work of Miss Tarbell on Napoleon,
and from her preliminary sketches of Lincoln’s boyhood, I am
confident that this new series which you have undertaken to publish
[pg 110] will have unique interest for
the American people, and prove an unqualified success. The
illustrations of the first number are worthy of the subject-matter.
You have secured a wonderful combination of literary skill and
artistic excellence in the presentation of Lincoln’s life.

Very sincerely yours,

H.B. ADAMS.

FROM HENRY C. WHITNEY, an associate of Lincoln’s on the circuit
in Illinois, whose unpublished notes have saved from oblivion the
great “lost speech” made by Lincoln at Bloomington in 1856, at the
first meeting for organizing the Republican party in Illinois. Mr.
Whitney’s account of this speech will appear later in this
Magazine.

BEACHMONT, MASSACHUSETTS, October 24,
1895.

My Dear Sir: I am greatly obliged for
your early picture of Abraham Lincoln, which I regard as an
important contribution to history. It is without doubt authentic
and accurate; and dispels the illusion so common (but never shared
by me) that Mr. Lincoln was an ugly-looking man. In point of fact,
Mr. Lincoln was always a noble-looking—always a highly
intellectual looking man—not handsome, but no one of any
force ever thought of that. All pictures, as well as the living
man, show manliness in its highest tension—this as
emphatically as the rest. This picture was a surprise and pleasure
to me. I doubt not it is its first appearance. It will be hailed
with pleasure by friends of Mr. Lincoln. You ought to put his
latest picture (the one I told Miss Tarbell about) with it.
This picture was probably taken between December, 1847, and March,
1849, while he was in Congress. I never saw him with his hair
combed before.

Yours,

HENRY C. WHITNEY.

FROM THE HON. HENRY B. BROWN, Associate Justice of the Supreme
Court of the United States.

WASHINGTON, October 23, 1895.

S.S. McCLURE, New York.

Dear Sir: Accept my thanks for the
engraving of the earliest picture of Mr. Lincoln. I recognized it
at once, though I never saw Mr. Lincoln, and know him only from
photographs of him while he was President. I think you were
fortunate in securing the daguerreotype from which this was
engraved, and it will form a very interesting contribution to the
literature connected with this remarkable man. From its resemblance
to his later pictures I should judge the likeness must be an
excellent one.

Very truly yours,

H.B. BROWN.

FROM MAJOR J.W. POWELL, of the United States Geological
Survey.

WASHINGTON, October 24, 1895.

My Dear McCLURE: I am delighted with the
proof of the portrait of Lincoln from a daguerreotype. His pictures
have never quite pleased me, and I now know why. I remember Lincoln
as I saw him when I was a boy; after he became a public man I saw
him but few times. This portrait is Lincoln as I knew him best: his
sad, dreamy eye, his pensive smile, his sad and delicate face, his
pyramidal shoulders, are the characteristics which I best remember;
and I can never think of him as wrinkled with care, so plainly
shown in his later portraits. This is the Lincoln of Springfield,
Decatur, Jacksonville, and Bloomington.

Yours cordially,

J.W. POWELL.

FROM MR. JOHN C. ROPES, author of “The First Napoleon” and “The
Story of the Civil War.”

99 MOUNT VERNON STREET, BOSTON, October 24,
1895.

S.S. McCLURE, ESQ.

My Dear Sir: I thank you for the
engraving of the daguerreotype portrait of Mr. Lincoln. It is
assuredly a most interesting portrait. The expression, though
serious and earnest, is devoid of the sadness which characterizes
the later likenesses. There is an appearance of strength and
self-confidence in this face, and an evident sense of humor. This
picture is a great addition to our portraits of Mr. Lincoln.

With renewed thanks, I am,

Very truly yours,

J.C. ROPES.

FROM WOODROW WILSON, Professor of Finance and Political Economy
at Princeton.

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY, October 23,
1895.

MR. S. S. McCLURE.

My Dear Mr. McCLURE: I thank you very
much for the portrait of Lincoln you were kind enough to send me,
reproduced from an early daguerreotype. It seems to me both
striking and singular. The fine brows and forehead, and the pensive
sweetness of the clear eyes, give to the noble face a peculiar
charm. There is in the expression the dreaminess of the familiar
face without its later sadness. I shall treasure it as a notable
picture.

Very sincerely yours,

WOODROW WILSON.

FROM C. R. MILLER, editor of the New York “Times.”

NEW YORK, October 24, 1895.

S. S. McCLURE, ESQ., City.

Dear Mr. McCLURE: I thank you for the
privilege you have given me of looking over some of the text and
illustrations of your new Life of Lincoln. The portraits are of
extraordinary interest, especially the “earliest” portrait, which I
have never seen before. It is surprising that a portrait of such
personal and historic interest could so long remain
unpublished.

Yours very truly,

C. R. MILLER.

FROM THE HON. DAVID J. BREWER, Associate Justice of the Supreme
Court of the United States.

WASHINGTON, October 24, 1895.

S. S. McCLURE, ESQ., New York.

My Dear Sir: I have yours of 19th inst.,
accompanied by an engraving of an early picture of Abraham Lincoln.
Please accept my thanks for your kindness. The picture, if a
likeness, must have been taken many years before I saw him and he
became the central figure in our country’s life. Indeed, I find it
difficult to see in that face the features with which we are all so
familiar. It certainly is a valuable contribution to any biography
of Mr. Lincoln, and I wish that in some way the date at which it
was taken could be accurately determined.

Yours truly,

DAVID J. BREWER.

FROM MURAT HALSTEAD, for many years editor of the Cincinnati
“Commercial Gazette,” and now editor of the Brooklyn
“Standard-Union.”

BROOKLYN STANDARD-UNION, October 23,
1895.

S. S. McCLURE.

My Dear Sir: I am under obligations to
you for the artist’s proof of the engraving of Abraham Lincoln as a
young man. It is a surprising good fortune that you have this most
interesting and admirable portrait. It is the one thing needed to
tell the world the truth about Lincoln. The old daguerreotype was,
after all, the best likeness, in the right light, ever made. This
is incredibly fine. It shows Lincoln to have been in his youth very
handsome, and the stamp of a manhood of noble promise is in this.
There is manifest, too, intellectuality. The head is grand, the
mouth is tender, the expression composed and pathetic. One sees the
possibility of poetry and romance in it. The dress is not careless,
but neat and elegant. The elaborate tie of the cravat is most
becoming. The chin is magnificent. The length of neck is shaded
away by the collars and the voluminous necktie. This young man
might do anything important. I cannot understand how this wonderful
picture should have been private property so long. It is at once
the first and last chapter of the life of Lincoln. The young face
of Lincoln, thus far unknown to the world, will be the most famous
of all his portraits. It will be multiplied by the million, and be
found in every house inhabited by civilized men.

MURAT HALSTEAD.

FROM GENERAL FRANCIS A. WALKER, President of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.

BOSTON, October 24, 1895.

S. S. McCLURE, ESQ., 30 Lafayette Place, New York
City.

Dear Mr. McCLURE: I am in receipt of your
picture of Lincoln. Having seen Mr. Lincoln in the war time, I have
not been so dependent upon photographs and engravings as have most
of the men of my generation for an impression of Mr. Lincoln’s
personality. I can, however, say that the present picture has
distinctly helped me to understand the relation between Mr.
Lincoln’s face and his mind and character, as shown in his life’s
work. It is, far away, the most interesting presentation of the man
I have ever seen. To my eye it explains Mr. Lincoln far more
than the most elaborate line-engraving which has been produced.

Very truly yours,

FRANCIS A. WALKER.

FROM CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.

HARTFORD, October 24, 1895.

My Dear Mr. McCLURE: The engraving you
sent me of an authentic picture of Abraham Lincoln is of very great
interest and value. I wish the date could be ascertained. The
change from the Lincoln of this portrait to the Lincoln of history
is very marked, and shows a remarkable development of character and
expression. It must be very early. The deep-set eyes and mouth
belong to the historical Lincoln, and are recognizable as his
features when we know that this is a portrait of him. But I confess
that I should not have recognized the likeness. I was familiar with
his face as long ago as 1857, ’58, ’59. I used often to see him in
the United States Court room in Chicago, and hear him, sitting with
other lawyers, talk and tell stories. He looked then essentially as
he looked when I heard him open in Chicago the great debate with
Douglas, and when he was nominated. But the change from the Lincoln
of this picture to the Lincoln of national fame is almost radical
in character, and decidedly radical in expression.

For the study of the man’s development, I think this new old
portrait has a peculiar value.

Yours sincerely,

CHAS. DUDLEY WARNER.