McClure’s Magazine

August, 1893.

Vol. I. No. 3

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

Table of Contents

Illustrations

One afternoon quite
recently two men
sat in an attic study
in one of the most
interesting homes
in the city of
Chicago. A home
that was a museum
of old books, rare books, Indian relics,
dramatic souvenirs and bric-a-brac
indescribable, but each piece with a
history.

It was a beautiful June day, and the
study window looked out upon a lawn
of large trees where children were rioting.
It was a part of Chicago which
the traveler never sees, green and restful
and dignified, the lake not far
off.

The host was a tall, thin-haired man
with a New England face of the Scotch
type, rugged, smoothly shaven, and
generally very solemn—suspiciously
solemn in expression. His infrequent
smile curled his wide, expressive mouth
in fantastic grimaces which seemed not
to affect the steady gravity of the blue-gray
eyes. He was stripped to his
shirt-sleeves and sat with feet on a
small stand. He chewed reflectively
upon a cigar during the opening of the
talk. His voice was deep but rather
dry in quality.

The other man was a rather heavily
built man with brown hair and beard
cut rather close. He listened, mainly,
going off into gusts of laughter occasionally
as the other man gave a quaint
turn to some very frank phrase. The
tall host was Eugene Field, the interviewer
a Western writer by the name of
Garland.

“Well now, brother Field,” said Garland,
interrupting his host as he was
about to open another case of rare
books. “You remember I’m to interview
you to-day.”

Field scowled savagely.

“O say, Garland, can’t we put that
thing off?”

“No. Must be did,” replied his
friend decisively. “Now there are two
ways to do this thing. We can be as
literary and as deliciously select in our
dialogue as Mr. Howells and Professor
Boyesen were, or we can be wild and
woolly. How would it do to be as wild
and woolly as those Eastern fellers expect
us to be?”

“All right,” said Field, taking his
seat well upon the small of his back.
“What does it all mean anyway?
What you goin’ to do?”

“I’m goin’ to take notes while we
talk, and I’m goin’ to put this thing
down pretty close to the fact, now, you
196
bet,” said Garland, sharpening a pencil.

“Where you wan’to begin?”

“Oh, we’ll have to begin with your
ancestry, though it’s a good deal like
the introductory chapter to the old-fashioned
novels. We’ll start early,
with your birth for instance.”

“Well, I was born in St. Louis.”

“Is that so?” the interviewer showed
an unprofessional surprise. “Why, I
thought you were born in Massachusetts?”

“No,” said Field, reflectively. “No,
I’m sorry of course, but I was born in
St. Louis; but my parents were Vermont
people.” He mentioned this as an
extenuating circumstance, evidently.
“My father was a lawyer. He was a
precocious boy,—graduated from Middlebury
College when he was fifteen,
and when he was nineteen was made
States-Attorney by special act of the
legislature; without that he would have
had to wait till he was twenty-one.
He married and came West, and I was
born in 1850.”

“So you’re forty-three? Where does
the New England life come in?”

“When I was seven years old my
mother died, and father packed us boys
right off to Massachusetts and put us
under the care of a maiden cousin, a
Miss French,—she was a fine woman
too.”

Garland looked up from his scratchpad
to ask, “This was at Amherst?”

“Yes. I stayed there until I was
nineteen, and they were the sweetest
and finest days of my life. I like old
Amherst.” He paused a
moment, and his long face
slowly lightened up. “By
the way, here’s something
you’ll like. When I was
nine years old father sent
us up to Fayetteville, Vermont,
to the old homestead
where my grandmother
lived. We stayed there
seven months,” he said with
a grim curl of his lips, “and
the old lady got all the
grandson she wanted. She
didn’t want the visit repeated.”

He sat a moment in silence,
and his face softened and his
eyes grew tender. “I tell you, Garland,
a man’s got to have a layer of
country experience somewhere in him.
My love for nature dates from that
visit, because I had never lived in the
country before. Sooner or later a man
rots if he lives too far away from the
grass and the trees.”

“You’re right there, Field, only I
didn’t know you felt it so deeply. I
supposed you hated farm life.”

“I do, but farm life is not nature.
I’d like to live in the country without
the effects of work and dirt and flies.”

The word “flies” started him off on
a side-track. “Say! You should see
my boys. I go up to a farm near Fox
Lake and stay a week every year, suffering
all sorts of tortures, in order to
give my boys a chance to see farm life.
I sit there nights trying to read by a
vile-smelling old kerosene lamp, the
flies trooping in so that you can’t keep
the window down, you know, and those
boys lying there all the time on a hot
husk bed, faces spattered with mosquito
bites and sweating like pigs—and happy
as angels. The roar of the flies
and mosquitoes is sweetest lullaby to a
tired boy.”

“Well, now, going back to that
visit,” said the interviewer with persistency
to his plan.

“Oh, yes. Well, my grandmother
was a regular old New England Congregationalist.
Say, I’ve got a sermon
I wrote when I was nine. The old
lady used to give me ten cents for
every sermon I’d write. Like to see it?”

“Well, I should say. A sermon at
nine years! Field, you started in
well.”

“Didn’t I?” he replied, while getting
the book. “And you bet it’s a
corker.” He produced the volume,
which was a small bundle of note-paper
bound beautifully. It was written in
a boy’s formal hand. He sat down to
read it:

“I would remark secondly that conscience
makes the way of transgressors hard; for every
act of pleasure, every act of Guilt his conscience
smites him. The last of his stay on earth will
appear horrible to the beholder. Some times,
however, he will be stayed in his guilt. A death
in a family of some favorite object or be attacked
by Some disease himself is brought to the
portals of the grave. Then for a little time
perhaps he is stayed in his wickedness, but before
long he returns to his worldly lust. Oh, it is
indeed bad for sinners to go down into perdition
over all the obstacles which God has placed in
his path. But many I am afraid do go down
into perdition, for wide gate and broad is the
way that leadeth to destruction and many there
be that go in thereat.”

He stopped occasionally to look at
Garland gravely, as he read some particularly
comical phrase: “‘I secondly
remark’—ain’t that great?—‘that the
wise man remembers even how near he
is to the portals of death.’ ‘Portals of
death’ is good. ‘One should strive to
walk the narrow way and not the one
which leads to perdition.’ I was heavy
on quotations, you notice.”

“Is this the first and last of your
sermons?” queried Garland, with an
amused smile.

“The first and last. Grandmother
soon gave me up as bad material for a
preacher. She paid me five dollars for
learning the Ten Commandments. I
used to be very slow at ‘committing to
memory.’ I recall that while I was
thus committing the book of Acts,
my brother committed that book and
the Gospel of Matthew, part of John,
the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians
and the Westminster Catechism.
I would not now exchange for any
amount of money the acquaintance
with the Bible that was drummed into
me when I was a boy. At learning
‘pieces to speak’ I was, however, unusually
quick, and my favorites were:
‘Marco Bozzaris,’ ‘Psalm of Life,’
Drake’s ‘American Flag,’ Longfellow’s
‘Launching of the Ship,’ Webster’s
‘Action,’ Shakspeare’s ‘Clarence’s
Dream’ (Richard III.), and ‘Wolsey
to Cromwell,’ ‘Death of Virginia,’
‘Horatius at the Bridge,’ ‘Hymn of
the Moravian Nuns,’ ‘Absalom,’ ‘Lochiel’s
Warning,’ ‘Maclean’s Revenge,’
Bulwer’s translation of Schiller’s ‘The
Diver,’ ‘Landing of the Pilgrims,’ Bryant’s
‘Melancholy Days,’ ‘Burial of
Sir John Moore,’ and ‘Hohenlinden.’”

“I remember when I was thirteen,
our cousin said she’d give us a Christmas
tree. So we went down into Patrick’s
swamp—I suppose the names are
all changed now—and dug up a little
198
pine tree, about as tall as we were, and
planted it in a tub. On the night of
Christmas Day, just when we were
dancing around the tree, making merry
and having a high-old-jinks of a time,
the way children will, grandma came
in and looked at us. ‘Will this popery
never cease?’ was all she said, and out
she flounced.”

“Yes, that was the old Puritan idea
of it. But did live——”

“Now hold on,” he interrupted. “I
want to finish. We planted that tree
near the corner of Sunset
Avenue and Amity Street,
and it’s there now, a magnificent
tree. Sometime
when I’m East I’m going to
go up there with my brother
and put a tablet on it—‘Pause,
busy traveller, and
give a thought to the happy
days of two Western boys
who lived in old New England,
and make resolve to
render the boyhood near you
happier and brighter,’ or
something like that.”

“That’s a pretty idea,”
Garland agreed. He felt
something fine and tender
in the man’s voice which was
generally hard and dry but
wonderfully expressive.

“Now, this sermon I had
bound just for the sake of
old times. If I didn’t have
it right here, I wouldn’t
believe I ever wrote such
stuff. I tell you, a boy’s a
queer combination,” he
ended, referring to the book
again.

“You’ll see that I signed my name,
those days, ‘E. P. Field.’ The ‘P.’
stands for Phillips.

“As I grew old enough to realize it,
I was much chagrined to find I had no
middle name like the rest of the boys,
so I took the name of Phillips. I was
a great admirer of Wendell Phillips,
am yet, though I’m not a reformer.
You’ll see here,”—he pointed at the top
of the pages,—“I wrote the word ‘sensual.’
Evidently I was struck with the
word, and was seeking a chance to ring
it in somewhere, but failed.” They
both laughed over the matter while
Field put the book back.

“Are you a college man?” asked
Garland. “I’ve noticed your deplorable
tendency toward the classics.”

“I fitted for college when I was sixteen.
My health was bad, or I should
have entered right off. I had pretty
nearly everything that was going in the
way of diseases,” this was said with a
comical twist voice, “so I didn’t get
to Williams till I was eighteen. My
health improved right along, but I’m
sorry to say that of the college did
not.” He smiled again, a smile that
meant a very great deal.

“What happened then?”

“Well, my father died, and I returned
West. I went to live with my guardian,
Professor Burgess, of Knox College.
This college is situated at Galesburg,
Illinois. This is the college that
has lately conferred A. M. upon me.
The Professor’s guardianship was
merely nominal, however. I did about
as I pleased.

“I next went to the State University
199
at Columbia, Missouri. It was an old
slave-holding town, but I liked it. I’ve
got a streak of Southern feeling in me.”
He said abruptly, “I’m an aristocrat.
I’m looking for a Mæcenas. I have
mighty little in common with most of
the wealthy, but I like the idea of
wealth in the abstract.” He failed to
make the distinction quite clear, but
he went on as if realizing that this
might be a thin spot of ice.

“At twenty-one, I came into sixty
thousand dollars, and I went to Europe,
taking a friend, a young fellow of
about my own age, with me. I had a
lovely time!” he added, and again
the smile conveyed vast meaning.

Garland looked up from his pad.

“You must have had. Did you
‘blow in the whole business’?”

“Pretty near. I swatted the money
around. Just think of it!” he exclaimed,
warming with the recollection.
“A boy of twenty-one, without father
or mother, and sixty thousand dollars.
Oh, it was a lovely combination! I saw
more things and did more things than
are dreamt of in your philosophy,
Horatio,” he paraphrased, looking at
his friend with a strange expression of
amusement, and pleasure, and regret.
“I had money. I paid it out for experience—it
was plenty. Experience
was laying around loose.”

“Came home when the money gave
out, I reckon?”

“Yes. Came back to St. Louis, and
went to work on the ‘Journal,’ I had
previously tried to ‘enter journalism’
as I called it then. About the time
I was twenty-one, I went to Stilson
Hutchins, and told him who I was,
and he said:

“‘All right. I’ll give you a chance,
but we don’t pay much.’ Of course, I
told him pay didn’t matter.

“‘Well!’ he said, ‘go down to the
Olympia, and write up the play there
to-night,’ I went down, and I brought
most of my critical acumen to bear
upon an actor by the name of Charley
Pope, who was playing Mercutio for
Mrs. D. P. Bowers. His wig didn’t fit,
and all my best writing centred about
that wig. I sent the critique in, blame
fine as I thought, with illuminated initial
letters, and all that. Oh, it was
lovely! and the next morning I was
deeply pained and disgusted to find it
mutilated,—all that about the wig, the
choicest part, was cut out. I thought
I’d quit journalism forever. I don’t
suppose Hutchins connects Eugene
Field with the —— fool
that wrote that critique. I
don’t myself,” he added with a
quick half-smile, lifting again
the corner of his solemn mouth.
It was like a ripple on a still
pool.

“Well, when did you really
get into the work?” his friend
asked, for he seemed about to
go off into another by-path.

“Oh, after I came back from
Europe I was busted, and had
to go to work. I met Stanley
Waterloo about that time, and
his talk induced me to go to
work for the ‘Journal’ as a
200
reporter. I soon got to be city editor,
but I didn’t like it. I liked to have fun
with people. I liked to have my fun as I
went along. About this time I married
the sister of the friend who went with
me to Europe, and feeling my new
responsibilities, I went up to St. Joseph
as city editor.” He mused for a moment
in silence. “It was terrific hard
work, but I wouldn’t give a good deal
for those two years.”

“Have you ever drawn upon them
for material?” asked Garland with a
novelist’s perception of their possibilities.

“No, but I may some time. Things
have to get pretty misty before I can
use ’em. I’m not like you fellows,” he
said, referring to the realists. “I got
thirty dollars a week; wasn’t that
princely?”

“Nothing else, but you earned it, no
doubt.”

“Earned it? Why, Great Scott! I
did the whole business except turning
the handle of the press.

“Well, in 1877 I was called back to
the ‘Journal’ in St. Louis, as editorial
writer of paragraphs. That was the
beginning of my own line of work.”

“When did you do your first work in
verse?” asked Garland.

The tall man brought his feet down
to the floor with a bang and thrust his
hand out toward his friend. “There!
I’m glad you said verse. For heaven’s
sake don’t ever say I call my stuff
poetry. I never do. I don’t pass judgment
on it like that.” After a little he
resumed. “The first that I wrote was
‘Christmas Treasures.’ I wrote that
one night to fill in a chink in the
paper.”

“Give me a touch of it?” asked his
friend.

He chewed his cigar in the effort to
remember. “I don’t read it much.
I put it with the collection for the
sake of old times.” He read a few
lines of it, and read it extremely well,
before returning to his history.

CHRISTMAS TREASURES.

“I went next to the Kansas City
‘Times’ as managing editor. I wrote
there that ‘Little Peach,’ which still
chases me round the country.”

THE LITTLE PEACH.

“I went to the ‘Denver Tribune’
next, and stayed there till 1883. The
most conspicuous thing I did there,
was the burlesque primer series. ‘See
the po-lice-man. Has he a club? Yes
he has a club,’ etc. These were so
widely copied and pirated that I put
them into a little book which is very
rare, thank heaven. I hope I have the
only copy of it. The other thing which
rose above the level of my ordinary
work was a bit of verse, ‘The Wanderer,’
which I credited to Modjeska, and
which has given her no little annoyance.”

THE WANDERER.

“That brings you up to Chicago,
doesn’t it?”

“In 1883 Melville Stone asked me
to join him on the ‘News,’ and I did.
Since then my life has been uneventful.”

“I might not think so. Did you
establish the column ‘Sharps and Flats’
at once?”

“Yes. I told Stone I’d write a good
deal of musical matter, and the name
seemed appropriate. We tried to
change it several times, but no go.”

“I first saw your work in the ‘News.’
I was attracted by your satirical studies
of Chicago. I don’t always like what
you write, but I liked your war against
sham.”

Field became serious at once, and
leaned towards the other man in an
attitude of great earnestness. The
deepest note in the man’s voice came
out. “I hate a sham or a fraud; not
so much a fraud, for a fraud means
brains very often, but a sham makes
me mad clear through,” he said
savagely. His fighting quality came
out in the thrust of the chin. Here
was the man whom the frauds and
shams fear.

“That is evident. But I don’t think
the people make the broadest application
of your satires. They apply
them to Chicago. There is quite a
feeling. I suppose you know about
this. They say you’ve hurt Chicago
art.”

“I hope I have, so far as the bogus
art and imitation culture of my city is
concerned. As a matter of fact the
same kind of thing exists in Boston
and New York, only they’re used to it
there. I’ve jumped on that crowd of
faddists, I’ll admit, as hard as I could,
but I don’t think anyone can say I’ve
ever willingly done a real man or
woman an injury. If I have, I’ve
always tried to square the thing up.”
Here was the man’s fairness, kindliness
of heart, coming to the surface in good
simple way.

The other man was visibly impressed
with his friend’s earnestness, but he
pursued his course. “You’ve had
offers to go East, according to the
papers.”

“Yes, but I’m not going—why
should I? I’m in my element here.
They haven’t any element there.
They’ve got atmosphere there, and it’s
pretty thin sometimes, I call it.” He
uttered “atmosphere” with a drawling
attenuated nasal to express his contempt.
“I don’t want literary atmosphere.
I want to be in an element where
I can tumble around and yell without
falling in a fit for lack of breath.”

The interviewer was scratching away
like mad—this was his chance.

Field’s mind took a sudden turn now,
and he said emphatically: “Garland,
I’m a newspaper man. I don’t claim
to be anything else. I’ve never written
a thing for the magazines, and I never
was asked to, till about four years ago.
I never have put a high estimate upon
my verse. That it’s popular is because
my sympathies and the public’s happen
to run on parallel lines just now.
That’s all. Not much of it will live.”

“I don’t know about that, brother
Field,” said Garland, pausing to rest.
“I think you underestimate some of
that work. Your reminiscent boy-life
poems and your songs of children are
thoroughly American, and fine and
tender. They’ll take care of themselves.”

“Yes, but my best work has been
along lines of satire. I’ve consistently
made war upon shams. I’ve stood
always in my work for decency and
manliness and honesty. I think that’ll
remain true, you’ll find. I’m not much
physically, but morally I’m not a coward.”

“No, I don’t think anybody will rise
up to charge you with time-serving.
By the way, what a rare chance you
have in the attitude of the Chicago
people toward the Spanish princess!”

The tall man straightened up. His
whole nature roused at this point, and
his face grew square. His Puritan
grandfather looked from his indignant
eyes and set jaw as he said:

“I don’t know what’s coming upon
us.”

“Aha!” Garland exulted, “even
you are bitten with the same.”

He flung his hand out in quick deprecation.

“Oh, I don’t pretend to be a reformer.
I leave that to others. I hate
logarithms. I like speculative astronomy.
I am naturally a lover of romance.
My mind turns toward the far
past or future. I like to illustrate the
foolery of these society folks by stories
which I invent. The present don’t
interest me—at least not taken as it is.
Possibilities interest me.”

“That’s a good way to put it,” said
the other man. “It’s a question of the
impossible, the possible, and the probable.
I like the probable. I like the
near-at-hand. I feel the most vital
interest in the average fact.”

“I know you do, and I like it after
you get through with it, but I don’t
care to deal with the raw material myself.
I like the archaic.”

“Yet some of your finest things, I
repeat, are your reminiscent verses of
boy-life,” pursued Garland, who called
himself a veritist and enjoyed getting
his friend as nearly on his ground as
possible.

“Yes, that’s so, but that’s in the far
past,” Field admitted. Garland took
the thought up.

“Time helps you then. Time is a
romancer. He halves the fact, but we
veritists find the present fact haloed,
with significance if not beauty.”

Field dodged the point.

“Yes, I like to do those boy-life
verses. I like to live over the joys
and tragedies—because we had our
tragedies.”

“Didn’t we! Weeding the onion-bed
on circus day, for example.”

“Yes, or gettin’ a terrible strappin’
for goin’ swimming without permission.
Oh, it all comes back to me, all sweet
and fine somehow. I’ve forgotten all
the unpleasant things. I remember
only the best of it all. I like boy-life.
I like children. I like young men. I like
the buoyancy of youth and its freshness.
It’s a God’s pity that every young child
can’t get a taste of country life at some
time. It’s a fund of inspiration to a
man.” Again the finer quality in the
man came out in his face and voice.

“Your life in New England and the
South, and also in the West, has been
of great help to you, I think.”

“Yes, and a big disadvantage. When
I go East, Stedman calls me a typical
Westerner, and when I come West they
call me a Yankee—so there I am!”

“There’s no doubt of your being a
Westerner.”

“I hope not. I believe in the West.
I tell you, brother Garland, the West
is the coming country. We ought to
have a big magazine to develop the
West. It’s absurd to suppose we’re
going on always being tributary to the
East!”

Garland laid down his pad and lifted
his big fist in the air like a maul. His
enthusiasm rose like a flood.

“Now you touch a great theme.
You’re right, Field. The next ten years
will see literary horizons change mightily.
The West is dead sure to be in the
game from this time on. A man can’t
be out here a week without feeling the
thrill of latent powers. The West is
coming to its manhood. The West is
the place for enthusiasm. Her history
is making.”

Field took up the note. “I’ve got
faith in it. I love New England for
her heritage to you. I like her old
stone walls and meadows, but when I
get back West—well, I’m home, that’s
all. My love for the West has got
blood in it.”

Garland laughed in sudden perception
of their earnestness. “We’re both
talking like a couple of boomers. It
might be characteristic, however, to
apply the methods of the boomers of
town lots to the development of art and
literature. What say?”

“It can be done. It will come in the
course of events.”

“In our enthusiasm we have skated
away from the subject. You are forty-three,
then—you realize there’s a lot of
work before you, I hope.”

“Yes, yes, my serious work is just
begun. I’m a man of slow development.
I feel that. I know my faults
and my weaknesses. I’m getting myself
in hand. Now, Garland, I’m with you
in your purposes, but I go a different
way. You go into things direct. I’m
naturally allusive. My work is almost
always allusive, if you’ve noticed.”

“Do you write rapidly?”

“I write my verse easily, but my
prose I sweat over. Don’t you?”

“I toil in revision even when I have
what the other fellows call an inspiration.”

“I tell you, Garland, genius is not in
it. It’s work and patience, and staying
with a thing. Inspiration is all
right and pretty and a suggestion, but
it’s when a man gets a pen in his hand
and sweats blood, that inspiration begins
to enter in.”

“Well, what are your plans for the future—your
readers want to know that?”

His face glowed as he replied, “I’m
going to write a sentimental life of
Horace. We know mighty little of him,
but what I don’t know I’ll make up.
I’ll write such a life as he must have
lived. The life we all live when boys.”

The younger man put up his notes,
and they walked down and out under
the trees with the gibbous moon shining
through the gently moving leaves.
They passed a couple of young people
walking slow—his voice a murmur,
hers a whisper.

“There they go. Youth! Youth!”
said Field.

Note.—A series of portraits of Mr. Field at different ages will be printed among the
“Human Documents” in the September number.

It was in the days when France’s
power was already broken upon the
seas, and when more of her three-deckers
lay rotting in the Medway than
were to be found in Brest Harbor. But
her frigates and corvettes still scoured
the ocean, closely followed ever by
those of her rival. At the uttermost
ends of the earth these dainty vessels,
with sweet names of girls or of flowers,
mangled and shattered each other for
the honor of the four yards of bunting
that flapped from their gaffs.

It had blown hard in the night, but
the wind had dropped with the dawning,
and now the rising sun tinted the
fringe of the storm wrack as it dwindled
into the west, and glinted on the
endless crests of the long green waves.
To north and south and west lay a sky-line
which was unbroken, save by the
spout of foam when two of the great
Atlantic seas dashed each other into
spray. To the east was a rocky island,
jutting out into craggy points, with a
few scattered clumps of palm-trees, and
a pennant of mist streaming out from
the bare conical hill which capped it.
A heavy surf beat upon the shore, and
at a safe distance from it the British
32-gun frigate “Leda,” Captain A. P.
Johnson, raised her black, glistening
side upon the crest of a wave, or
swooped down into an emerald valley,
dipping away to the nor’ard under
easy sail. On her snow-white quarter-deck
stood a stiff, little, brown-faced
man, who swept the horizon with his
glass.

“Mr. Wharton,” he cried, with a voice
like a rusty hinge.

A thin, knock-kneed officer shambled
across the poop to him.

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve opened the sealed orders, Mr.
Wharton.”

A glimmer of curiosity shone upon
the meagre features of the first lieutenant.
The “Leda” had sailed with
her consort the “Dido” from Antigua
the week before, and the admiral’s orders
had been contained in a sealed
envelope.

“We were to open them on reaching
the deserted island of Sombriero, lying
in north latitude eighteen, thirty-six,
west longitude sixty-three, twenty-eight.
Sombriero bore four miles to
the northeast from our port bow when
the gale cleared, Mr. Wharton.”

The lieutenant bowed stiffly. He and
the captain had been bosom friends
from childhood. They had gone to
school together, joined the navy together,
fought again and again together, and
married into each other’s families; but
as long as their feet were on the poop
the iron discipline of the service struck
all that was human out of them, and
left only the superior and the subordinate.
Captain Johnson took a blue
paper from his pocket, which crackled
as he unfolded it.

“The 32-gun frigates, ‘Leda’ and ‘Dido’
(Captains A. P. Johnson and James Munro), are
to cruise from the point at which these instructions
are read to the mouth of the Caribbean
Sea, in the hope of encountering the French
frigate ‘La Gloire’ (48), which has recently harassed
our merchant ships in that quarter. H. M.
frigates are also directed to hunt down the piratical
craft known sometimes as the ‘Slapping
Sal’ and sometimes as the ‘Hairy Hudson,’
which has plundered the British ships as per
margin, inflicting barbarities upon their crews.
She is a small brig carrying ten light guns, with
one twenty-four pound carronade forward. She
was last seen upon the 23d ult., to the northeast
of the island of Sombriero.”

(Signed)

James Montgomery,

Rear-Admiral.

H. M. S. “Colossus,” Antigua.

“We appear to have lost our consort,”
said Captain Johnson, folding
up his instructions and again sweeping
the horizon with his glass. “She
drew away after we reefed down. It
would be a pity if we met this heavy
Frenchman without the ‘Dido,’ Mr.
Wharton, eh?”

The lieutenant twinkled and smiled.

“She has eighteen-pounders on the
main and twelves on the poop, sir,”
said the captain. “She carries four
hundred to our two hundred and thirty-one.
Captain de Milon is the smartest
man in the French service. O Bobby,
boy, I’d give my hopes of my flag to
rub my side up against her!” He
turned on his heel, ashamed of his momentary
lapse. “Mr. Wharton,” said he,
looking back sternly over his shoulder,
“get those square sails shaken out, and
bear away a point more to the west.”

“A brig on the port bow,” came a
voice from the forecastle.

“A brig on the port bow,” said the
lieutenant.

The captain sprang up on the bulwarks,
and held on by the mizzen
shrouds, a strange little figure with flying
skirts and puckered eyes. The lean
lieutenant craned his neck and whispered
to Smeaton, the second, while
officers and men came popping up from
below and clustered along the weather-rail,
shading their eyes with their hands,
for the tropical sun was already clear
of the palm trees. The strange brig
lay at anchor in the throat of a curving
estuary, and it was already obvious
that she could not get out without
passing under the guns of the frigate.
A long rocky point to the north of her
held her in.

“Keep her as she goes, Mr. Wharton,”
said the captain. “Hardly worth
while clearing for action, Mr. Smeaton,
but the men can stand by the guns in
case she tries to pass us. Cast loose
the bowchasers, and send the small arm
men on to the forecastle.”

A British crew went to its quarters
in those days with the quiet serenity
of men on their daily routine. In a
208
few minutes, without fuss or sound, the
sailors were knotted round their guns,
the marines were drawn up and leaning
on their muskets, and the frigate’s
bowsprit pointed straight for her little
victim.

“Is it the ‘Slapping Sal,’ sir?”

“I have no doubt of it, Mr. Wharton.”

“They don’t seem to like the look
of us, sir. They’ve cut their cable and
are clapping on sail.”

It was evident that the brig meant
struggling for her freedom. One little
patch of canvas fluttered out above another,
and her people could be seen
working like mad men in the rigging.
She made no attempt to pass her antagonist,
but headed up the estuary.
The captain rubbed his hands.

“She’s making for shoal water, Mr.
Wharton, and we shall have to cut her
out, sir. She’s a footy little brig, but
I should have thought a fore-and-after
would have been more handy.”

“It was a mutiny, sir.”

“Ah, indeed!”

“Yes, sir, I heard of it at Manilla—a
bad business, sir. Captain and two
mates murdered. This Hudson, or
Hairy Hudson, as they call him, led
the mutiny. He’s a Londoner, sir, but
a cruel villain as ever walked.”

“His next walk will be to Execution
Dock, Mr. Wharton. She seems
heavily manned. I wish I could take
twenty topmen out of her, but they
would be enough to corrupt the crew
of the ark, Mr. Wharton.”

Both officers were looking through
their glasses at the brig. Suddenly
the lieutenant showed his teeth in a
grin, while the captain flushed to a
deeper red.

“That’s Hairy Hudson on the afterrail,
sir.”

“The low, impertinent blackguard!
He’ll play some other antics before we
are done with him. Could you reach
him with the long eighteen, Mr. Smeaton?”

“Another cable length will do it, sir.”

The brig yawed as they spoke, and
as she came round, a spurt of smoke
whiffed out from her quarter. It was
a pure piece of bravado, for the gun
could scarce carry half way. Then
with a jaunty swing the little ship
came into the wind again and shot
round a fresh curve of the winding
channel.

“The water’s shoaling rapidly, sir,”
reported the second lieutenant.

“There’s six fathoms, by the chart.”

“Four, by the lead, sir.”

“When we clear this point we shall
see how we lie. Ha! I thought as
much! Lay her to, Mr. Wharton.
Now we have got her at our mercy.”

The frigate was quite out of sight of
the sea now, at the head of this river-like
estuary. As she came round the
curve the two shores were seen to converge
at a point about a mile distant.
In the angle, as near shore as she
could get, the brig was lying with her
broadside towards her pursuer, and a
wisp of black cloth streaming from her
mizzen. The lean lieutenant, who had
reappeared upon deck with a cutlass
strapped to his side and two pistols
rammed into his belt, peered curiously
at the ensign.

“Is it the ‘Jolly Roger,’ sir?” he
asked.

But the captain was furious. “He
may hang where his breeches are hanging
before I have done with him,”
said he. “What boats will you want,
Mr. Wharton?”

“We should do it with the launch
and the jolly-boat.”

“Take four and make a clean job of
it. Pipe away the crews at once, and
I’ll work her in and help you with the
long eighteens.”

With a rattle of ropes and a creaking
of blocks the four boats splashed
into the water. Their crews clustered
thickly into them—bare-footed sailors,
stolid marines, laughing middies, and
in the sheets of each the senior officers
with their stern, schoolmaster
faces. The captain, his elbows on
the binnacle, still watched the distant
brig. Her crew were tricing up the
boarding netting, dragging round the
starboard guns, knocking new portholes
for them, and making every
preparation for a desperate resistance.
In the thick of it all a huge
man, bearded to the eyes, with a red
night-cap upon his head, was straining
and stooping and hauling. The captain
209
watched him with a sour smile,
and then snapping up his glass he
turned upon his heel. For an instant
he stood staring.

“Call back the boats!” he cried, in
his thin, creaking voice. “Clear away
for action there! Cast loose those
main-deck guns. Brace back the
yards, Mr. Smeaton, and stand by to
go about when she has weigh enough.”

Round the curve of the estuary was
coming a huge vessel. Her great yellow
bowsprit and white-winged figure-head
were jutting out from the cluster
of palm-trees, while high above them
towered three immense masts, with the
tricolor flag floating superbly from the
mizzen. Round she came, the deep-blue
water creaming under her fore-foot,
until her long, curving, black
side, her line of shining copper beneath,
and of snow-white hammocks
above, and the thick clusters of men
who peered over her bulwarks were all
in full view.

Her lower yards were slung, her
ports triced up, and her guns run out
all ready for action. Lying behind
one of the promontories of the island
the look-out men of the “Gloire” upon
the shore had seen the cul-de-sac into
which the British frigate had headed,
so that Captain de Milon had observed
the “Leda” as Captain Johnson had
the “Slapping Sal.”

But the splendid discipline of the
British service was at its best in such
a crisis. The boats flew back, their
crews clustered aboard, they were
swung up at the davits, and the fall-ropes
made fast. Hammocks were
brought up and stowed, bulkheads sent
down, ports and magazines opened,
the fires put out in the galley, and
the drums beat to quarters. Swarms
of men set the head-sails and brought
the frigate round, while the gun-crews
threw off their jackets and shirts,
tightened their belts, and ran out their
eighteen-pounders, peering through
210
the open portholes at the stately
Frenchman. The wind was very light.
Hardly a ripple showed itself upon the
clear blue water, but the sails blew
gently out as the breeze came over
the wooded banks. The Frenchman
had gone about also, and both ships
were now heading slowly for the sea
under fore-and-aft canvas, the “Gloire”
a hundred yards in advance. She luffed
up to cross the “Leda’s” bows, but
the British ship came round also, and
the two rippled slowly on in such a
silence that the ringing of the ramrods,
as the French marines drove home
their charges, clanged quite loudly
upon the ear.

“Not much sea room, Mr. Wharton,”
remarked the captain.

“I have fought actions in less, sir.”

“We must keep our distance, and
trust to our gunnery. She is very
heavily manned, and if she got alongside
we might find ourselves in trouble.”

“I see the shakoes of soldiers
aboard of her—two companies of light
infantry from Martinique. Now we
have her! Hard a port, and let her
have it as we cross her stern!”

The keen eye of the little commander
had seen the surface ripple which
told of a passing breeze. He had used
it to dart across behind the big Frenchman
and to rake her with every gun as
he passed. But, once past her, the “Leda”
had to come back into the wind
to keep out of shoal water. The manœuvre
brought her on the starboard
side of the Frenchman, and the trim
little frigate seemed to heel right over
under the crashing broadside which
burst from the gaping ports. A moment
later her topmen were swarming
aloft to set her topsails and royals,
and she strove to cross the “Gloire’s”
bows and rake her again. The French
captain, however, brought his frigate’s
head round, and the two rode side by
side within easy pistol shot, pouring
broadsides into each other in one of
those murderous duels which, could
they all be recorded, would mottle our
charts with blood.

In that heavy tropical air, with so
faint a breeze, the smoke formed a
thick bank round the two vessels, from
which the topmasts only protruded.
Neither could see anything of its enemy
save the throbs of fire in the darkness,
and the guns were sponged and
trained and fired into a dense wall of
vapor. On the poop and the forecastle
the marines, in two little red lines, were
pouring in their volleys, but neither
they nor the seamen-gunners could see
what effect their fire was having. Nor,
indeed, could they tell how far they
211
were suffering themselves, for standing
at a gun one could but hazily see that
upon the right and left. But above
the roar of the cannon came the sharper
sound of the piping shot, the crashing
of riven planks, and the occasional
heavy thud as spar or block came
hurtling onto the deck. The lieutenants
paced up and down behind the
line of guns, while Captain Johnson
fanned the smoke away with his cocked
hat, and peered eagerly out.

“This is rare, Bobby,” said he, as
the lieutenant joined him. Then, suddenly
restraining himself, “What have
we lost, Mr. Wharton?”

“Our main-topsail yard and our gaff,
sir.”

“Where’s the flag?”

“Gone overboard, sir.”

“They’ll think we’ve struck. Lash
a boat’s ensign on the starboard arm
of the mizzen cross jack-yard.”

“Yes, sir.”

A round shot dashed the binnacle
to pieces between them. A second
knocked two marines into a bloody,
palpitating mass. For a moment the
smoke rose, and the English captain
saw that his adversary’s heavier metal
was producing a horrible effect. The
“Leda” was a shattered wreck. Her
deck was strewed with corpses. Several
of her portholes were knocked
into one, and one of her eighteen-pounder
guns had been thrown right
back onto her breech, and pointed
straight up to the sky. The thin line
of marines still loaded and fired, but
half the guns were silent, and their
crews were piled thickly around
them.

“Stand by to repel boarders!” yelled
the captain.

“Cutlasses, lads, cutlasses!” roared
Wharton.

“Hold your volley till they touch!”
cried the captain of marines.

The huge loom of the Frenchman
was seen bursting through the smoke.
Thick clusters of boarders hung upon
her sides and shrouds. A final broadside
leapt from her ports, and the mainmast
of the “Leda,” snapping short off
a few feet above the deck, spun into the
air and crashed down upon the port
guns, killing ten men and putting the
whole battery out of action. An instant
later the two ships scraped together,
and the starboard bower anchor
of the “Gloire” caught the mizzen
chains of the “Leda” upon the port
side. With a yell the black swarm of
boarders steadied themselves for a
spring.

But their feet were never to reach
that blood-stained deck. From somewhere
there came a well-aimed whiff
of grape, and another, and another.
The English marines and seamen, waiting
with cutlass and musket behind the
silent guns, saw with amazement the
dark masses thinning and shredding
away. At the same time the port
broadside of the Frenchman burst into
a roar.

“Clear away the wreck!” roared the
captain. “What the devil are they
firing at?”

“Get the guns clear!” panted the
lieutenant. “We’ll do them yet, boys!”

The wreckage was torn and hacked
and splintered until first one gun and
then another roared into action again.
The Frenchman’s anchor had been cut
away, and the “Leda” had worked
herself free from that fatal hug. But
now suddenly there was a scurry up
the shrouds of the “Gloire,” and a
hundred Englishmen were shouting
themselves hoarse.

“They’re running! They’re running!
They’re running!”

And it was true. The Frenchman
had ceased to fire, and was intent only
upon clapping on every sail that she
could carry.

But that shouting hundred could not
claim it all as their own. As the smoke
cleared, it was not difficult to see the
reason. The ships had gained the
mouth of the estuary during the fight,
and there, about four miles out to sea,
was the “Leda’s” consort bearing down
under full sail to the sound of the guns.
Captain de Milon had done his part
for one day, and presently the “Gloire”
was drawing off swiftly to the north,
while the “Dido” was bowling along
at her skirts, rattling away with her
bowchasers, until a headland hid them
both from view.

But the “Leda” lay sorely stricken,
with her mainmast gone, her bulwarks
212
shattered, her mizzen topmast and gaff
shot away, her sails like a beggar’s rags,
and a hundred of her crew dead and
wounded. Close beside her a mass of
wreckage floated upon the waves. It
was the stern post of a mangled vessel,
and across it, in white letters on a black
ground, was printed “The Slapping
Sal.”

“By the Lord, it was the brig that
saved us!” cried Mr. Wharton. “Hudson
brought her into action with the
Frenchman, and was blown out of the
water by a broadside.”

The little captain turned on his heel
and paced up and down the deck. Already
his crew were plugging the shot-holes,
knotting and splicing and mending.
When he came back the lieutenant
saw a softening of the stern lines about
his mouth and eyes.

“Are they all gone?”

“Every man. They must have sunk
with the wreck.”

The two officers looked down at the
sinister name and at the stump of wreckage
which floated in the discolored
water. Something black washed to
and fro beside a splintered gaff and a
tangle of halyards. It was the outrageous
ensign, and near it a scarlet
cap was floating.

“He was a villain, but he was a
Briton,” said the captain at last. “He
lived like a dog, but, by God, he died
like a man!”

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES.

Oliver Wendell Holmes was born eighty-four
years ago on the 29th of August, 1809. He
was educated at the Phillips Andover Academy,
and graduated at Harvard in 1829, and was one
of the founders of the
ΦΒΚ
Society of that
university. His first general reception as a
poet was gained by his successful lyrical effort
to save the old frigate, “The Constitution,”
from being broken up. He graduated in medicine
in 1836 (after studying law in the Cambridge
Law School), and in the same year published
his first volume of verse. In 1839 he
was made Professor of Anatomy and Physiology
at Dartmouth, and in 1847 he filled the
same position at Harvard. He has published
several volumes of poems, and the famous books
known, respectively, as “The Autocrat,” “The
Poet,” and the “Professor at the Breakfast
Table.” He has written many medical works,
and of his novels, “Elsie Venner” and “The
Guardian Angel” are best known.

John James Ingalls was born in Middleton,
Massachusetts, on December 29th, 1833.
He graduated at Williams College in 1855. He
then studied law, and was admitted to the bar
in 1857. Going to Atchison, Kansas, in the
following year, he there practised his profession,
and from that time to the present has been
closely connected with the development of his
adopted State and that of the country. In 1862
he was elected a Senator in the State of Kansas,
and in 1863 and 1864 was defeated for the
Lieut.-Governorship. For some years he was
editor of the Atchison “Champion.” In 1873
he was chosen United States Senator, and
served without interruption until 1889.

Jules Verne was born at Nantes in France
on February 8, 1828, and was educated there.
After leaving school he studied law in Paris,
but, while still very young, he became known
as a popular writer of dramas, comedies and
burlesques for the Parisian theatres. “Les
Pailles Rompues” was produced at the Gymnase
Theatre in 1850, when Jules was but twenty-two
years old, and “Onze Jours de Siége”
shortly afterwards. He first became known
as a writer of highly imaginative stories with a
strong current of science in them in 1863, when
his “Five Weeks in a Balloon” made a great
success. Since then he has produced more than
sixty novels of the same class, the most noted
of which are “The Voyage to the Moon,”
“20,000 Leagues under the Sea,” and “Michael
Strogoff.” Many of his works have been
successfully dramatized, and he has been translated
into almost every modern language, including
Arabic and Japanese.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

J. J. INGALLS.

JULES VERNE.

As Karl Hagenbeck
stood with me,
in his Hamburg
Wild Beast Emporium,
before
the great cage
of the boa constrictors
and
pythons, he naturally
fell to relating
some of
the curious adventures
that
have befallen
him with snakes
and other brutes.

There was a
great ugly looking
boa constrictor
coiled up in
a corner by itself, a most
repulsive looking animal.

“He’s a beauty, isn’t
he?” said Mr. Hagenbeck,
looking fondly on him.
“He swallowed four whole sheep in
one day, and only nine days after
that he got another, and seemed to
enjoy it as much as if he had been
fasting for months. Come and look at
this cage, where you can see a revengeful
member of the species. He once
had a companion, but now he’s alone
through his own fault. He and his
companion were peculiarly fond of rabbits,
and we threw one into their cage
one day. They both darted for it, and,
while the poor little shivering animal
crept into a corner in a fright, the
snakes quarrelled as to whose ‘bonne
bouche’ the rabbit was to be. The
smaller one won, and this great wretch
retired to a corner and watched his
foe devour the rabbit, and then lie
down in that state of repleteness
which it is the highest ambition of these
great snakes to attain. The big fellow
then, seeing his rival’s helpless condition,
roused himself, and a moment
afterwards he vigorously attacked the
creature that lay gorged in the corner.
We all rushed to see what would happen,
and I declare to you, that in a very
short time the big snake had swallowed
the small snake, rabbit and all.”

“Would you like to see them in action?”
said Mr. Hagenbeck to me, and,
as he spoke, he opened a cage door and
boldly stepped in amongst a number
of big sleepy reptiles. He coolly began
lifting them up by their enormous coils,
just as one would lift up great coils of
rope, and there was soon a mighty stirring
amongst the previously inert masses.
They writhed to and fro, their
scales glittering in the pale light of the
winter sun, and with a great hissing, an
irritated rearing back of their heads
and a constant projection of their long
forked tongues, they began to move
about the cage—a hideous, mixed-up
mass of repulsive life, that made one
involuntarily step back from their bars.

“You don’t like the look of them,”
said Mr. Hagenbeck, with a smile, as
he stepped out and rejoined me. “They
are queer fellows, certainly, and gave
me a big fright once.”

“I should have imagined more than
once,” I said, as we turned from the
ugly mass of twisted snakes.

“Well, perhaps,” said Mr. Hagenbeck,
“but this particular once was
something to remember. In one cage
I had eight full-grown pythons, which I
wanted to put into one huge box to
send them off to a menagerie. I
handled the first six all right enough,
220
catching them, as is usual, by the back
of the neck and dropping them into the
box. Then I went for number seven,
but as soon as I entered the cage she,
the lady of the flock, flew at me with
open mouth. Seeing her coming I took
off my hat and thrust it at her. She bit
her teeth into it. I then seized her with
the right hand at the back of her neck,
and I dragged her down into the lower
partition of the cage. Just when I was
going to fetch her out she reared her
head to attack me again. I then made
a cautious movement forward, and at
the same moment she darted her head
at me. I met the second attack with
my hat in the same way that I had the
first. With a quick dart I grabbed her
by the back of the neck, only to find, to
my horror, that I couldn’t let her go if
I wanted to, as she had coiled herself
firmly round my legs. One of my assistants,
standing near, heard me yell,
and he came rushing up to me with all
the speed he could, for I fancy my
shout told everybody within hearing
that I had to do with a matter of life
and death. I managed, however, to
retain my nerve, and gave the order to
the helper to try and uncoil the serpent,
which with great difficulty and my assistance
he at last managed to do.”

Mr. Hagenbeck laughed a little as
he recalled the experience, but I confess
I didn’t feel like laughing much.
The horror of having those massive
coils pressing tightly on your legs and
bruising your muscles with irresistible
strength seemed very real to me.

“I wasn’t done even then,” Mr.
Hagenbeck resumed, “for just as I
thought that I
could get the big
snake safely in the
cage, another python,
and really an
enormous fellow,
attacked me. I
had just time to
shout to my man
to throw a blanket
over it, and this he
luckily managed to
do. At the same
moment I moved
backwards out of
the cage and got
free of it altogether, and then I had a
little rest. My men tried to dissuade
me from going back, each of them saying
he would do it. I felt very exhausted,
but my temper was fairly up,
and I determined I wouldn’t be beaten.
So, after a few moments, I stepped
again into the cage, caught them both
round the backs of their necks, dragged
them as quickly as I could to the edge
of the cage, and then, all helping, we
flung them into the box waiting for
them. Had not my assistant been near
me, nothing could
have saved me from
being squeezed to
death.”

The wild-beast
tamer then motioned
me away from the serpent
cages, and we
went to those of their
cousins, the crocodiles
and alligators. We
passed by an aviary of very great size,
where parrots and other beautifully
plumed birds chattered, laughed, quarrelled,
and made love in a long, ear-piercing
enjoyment of their captivity;
and further on we came to a large tank,
in which were slowly paddling round
some spiteful-looking alligators—huge-jawed,
soulless-eyed, each one a
waiting, watching destroyer of life.

We looked at them for a little while,
and then Mr. Hagenbeck said: “Once
I had to pack sixteen of these fellows
up for the Düsseldorf Zoölogical Gardens.
I grappled hold of the first one
and was pulling him ashore, when he
gave me a frightful blow with his tail
221
and knocked me into the tank, where,
for a brief moment, I was alone with
fifteen alligators. Those who were
standing by told me that as soon as I
splashed in a number of them made a
rush, but I was
out again like an
India-rubber ball.
The swirl of the
water and the
open jaws of the
disappointed
beasts told me
that I had not
been one second
too smart. This
was a very narrow
escape, as, if one
of the crocodiles
had happened to
get hold of me, all
the rest would
have attacked me,
snapping and biting
at me at one
and the same
moment, until
there would have
been little, if anything,
left of me at all.
They are the most determined
fighters even
amongst themselves. Six
of them, each about fourteen
feet long, had a fight
amongst themselves once,
and so desperately did
they set to, that within
fourteen days they were
all dead. Three of them
had their jaws broken,
and in some cases their
legs were torn right out
of their bodies. This occurred
at night, and one
of the keepers, happening
to hear the frightful noise
which was made by the
clashing of their jaws,
rushed off to tell me what
was happening. We lit
our lanterns and hurried to the scene
of action, but, beyond trying to separate
them with long poles, it was little
we could do. When we managed to
part them for a time they only renewed
the fight with greater fierceness than
ever, and so terribly were they wounded,
that, as I said, they were all dead
in a fortnight. Nowadays, when I get
a new consignment of alligators I
always muzzle them for four days with
a rope. They then
calm down, and I
cut the rope off;
otherwise, if I did
not do that they
would begin fighting
as soon as
they came out of
the box, for the
first sight of day-light
after the
long journey always
seems to excite
them. A
fight amongst the
snakes, also, is a
terrible thing. I
had once five big
pythons in one
cage. One of the
keepers flung a
dead rabbit
amongst them,
and two of them,
being very hungry, attacked
it at once. At the
same moment the other
four flew for the prey,
and in one moment all
the six were in one big
writhing lump. The
keepers fetched me, and
I at once attempted to
uncoil them. I succeeded,
but hardly had I done
so when the fight began
again between the first
two. The larger one
threw his tail round the
small one’s neck and
squeezed it with such
force against the wall
that it lost all power.
Then the bigger snake
got hold of the rabbit
and swallowed it, after
which it gradually loosened its hold of
the smaller snake. The little one then
sought revenge, and flew at the big
python, which was rendered almost
helpless by its huge meal, bit it in
the back, coiled round and round it,
222
and squeezed it till it could hardly
breathe, although it screamed as I had
never heard any living creature scream
before. The funny thing was that
when I went to see them next morning
they were all right and perfectly good
friends.

“Talking of fights, I was once
turned out of bed at one o’clock in the
morning by one of my keepers, who
came in with the news that the big
kangaroo had jumped a six-foot fence
into the next stable, in which there was
a large hippopotamus. When I came
down there was the queerest kind of a
duel going on. The kangaroo stood
up to his belly in water, whilst the
hippopotamus, with wide-open jaws,
snapped at him right and left. However,
the kangaroo managed to ‘get
in’ a good right and left with
his front legs, and scratched
the hippopotamus in the face
tremendously. When the amphibian
came to close quarters,
the kangaroo jumped up,
gave him a tremendous blow
with his hind legs, and then
managed to get on to dry
land. I caught the kangaroo
with a big net, and after all
the fighting there wasn’t so
very much harm done.”

Just as Mr. Hagenbeck finished
talking, the Polar bear
at our rear began growling.
Mr. Hagenbeck went up to
soothe and pet him. Then he
said:

“I expect I am pretty well
the only man in the world who
can say that he ever cut the
toe nails of a Polar bear. It was this
very beast, and I will tell you how it all
happened. The poor beast’s nails had
grown into its foot, causing it a great
deal of pain. We tried to get the feet
into a sling and pull them through the
bars, but this proved to be too awkward
an arrangement. So I got him
into a narrow cage which had an iron
barred front, and this I turned upside
down so that the bear had to stand on
the bars of the cage, which we lifted up
about four feet above the ground. I
went underneath with a sharp pair of
pincers, and, as he stood there with his
toes pressed through the bars, I managed
to pull the nails out. Then I
stood him in water to wash and cool
his wounds, and in a few days he was
all right. On yet another occasion a
223
royal Bengal tiger was suffering very
much from toothache, so two of my
men held him by the collar and, whilst
one of my attendants opened his mouth,
my brother-in-law and I took some pincers
and pulled out the teeth which had
been giving him so much pain, and
which, indeed, had grown so badly that
they had hindered him from biting his
food properly.

“The most risky thing, however, that
ever occurred to me happened in
Munich during the Centennial Fête in
1888. I was passing in the long procession
with eight elephants, and the
streets were very much crammed. It
chanced that we had to pass a great big
iron dragon, which, by some mechanical
contrivance, began to spit fire as soon
as we got near it. Four of the elephants
at once took fright and ran
away, which was only natural, and the
other four followed suit. The people
rushed after them with sticks and loud
cries, which of course only made matters
worse. I managed to get between
two of them, and caught hold of them,
but it was of no use, as they ran with
me for at least a mile. I was badly
hurled from side to side and, indeed, at
one moment I was very nearly crushed
to death by them against the walls of
a house. At last two other elephants
came up, and I managed to persuade
the lot of them to stand still; just as I
had done so the stupid crowd again
came rushing up, and away the elephants
went again. I was too tired to
do anything more. All four of them
rushed into a house; the bottom gave
way and the excited creatures fell into
the cellar. A new house has now been
built there which is called to this day
‘The four wild elephants.’ A lot of
people were hurt, some indeed were
killed, but, as the Police President had
seen all that had happened, I was held
free of blame. That was, however, the
worst trouble with my captive friends
I ever have had, and how I escaped
being crushed to death then I cannot
understand to this day.”

It was very tiresome
riding on the cars all
day, with the same
monotonous stretch
of prairie to be seen
from the window; so
I am sure it was pardonable
in me to listen
to the conversation of my fellow-passengers.

Just in front of me (their bundles
on a seat before them) sat two elderly
women, old friends, it seemed,
who had chanced to meet in their
journeying; and it was a sentence
or two of their talk that caught my
attention, and presently I became so
interested that I no longer felt my
weariness.

“And so,” said one, “you say they
are livin’ all alone in that big house of
their’n! I knowed the girls was all
married an’ gone, but I heerd Jim had
tuk a wife home to live with the old
folks, and I said to Simon, says I, ‘Well,
it’ll take more’n a mortal woman to
live with Mary Ann Curtis onless she’s
mightily changed sence I use ter know
her,’ says I.”

“Well,” said the other voice, and a
sweet, patient-sounding voice it was—so
sweet, indeed, that I glanced over
to look at its owner. She was a little,
quaint old woman, with soft brown eyes
and a pathetic, lovable face. I fell in
love with her at once. Her companion
was a younger woman, with shrewd,
black, observing eyes and sharp nose
225
and chin. From appearances and manner,
I judged both were wives of well-to-do
farmers.

“Well,” said the sweet voice, “Jim
did marry a mortal woman, but Mary
Ann soon made a angel out of her. I
knowed Jim Curtis’s wife as well as if
she’d ben my own child; and no wonder,
seein’ as she boarded with me and
Jonathan nigh on to a year. You see,
she was left an orphan, and her uncle
that raised her, not bein’ well off, give
her what schoolin’ he could, an’ then
when she was about sixteen year old
he got her first the summer school in
our deestric, and then, as she suited the
folks, the d’rectors they let her have it
fur the winter. I was sort o’ feared for
her to tackle the winter school, seein’
as some of the big boys, and girls, too,
for that matter, ’s
pritty obstreperous;
but Rhody she
laughed and tossed
her head an’ said,
‘I’ll get along, Aunt
Nancy!’ (You know
everybody in the
neighborhood calls
me Aunt Nancy, and
Rhody she picked it
up as natral as could
be.)

“Well, she did
manage somehow,
an’ never had a bit
of trouble. An’ I
use ter watch o’ evenin’s
for her to come,
allus smilin’, and
with somethin’ funny
to tell about the
scholars. I declare
to you, Mis’ Johnson,
if she’d ben our own,
Jonathan an’ me
couldn’t a sot more
by her. Why, whenever
it was rainy or
snowy the ole man
would saddle a horse
an’ go for her, an’ she’d look that cute,
settin’ behin’ on ole Molly an’ holdin’
on to the ole man!

“One cold evenin’ (it was a Friday
evenin’, too—I’ll never forgit it), jist
as Jonathan got the saddle on the mare,
we heard sleigh-bells, for I was out at
the fence talkin’ to the ole man, an’ who
should come sailin’ up the road, large
as life, but Jim Curtis in his new sleigh,
with our Rhody, smilin’ and rosy, beside
him. ‘There, ole man,’ says I,
‘your cake’s dough.’ And I declare
fur it, ef he warn’t that cut up he could
scarce be civil to the youngsters.

“Of course you know how it was
after that—no needcessity fur the ole
man botherin’ any more; not ’at it was
bother, for he allus liked goin’ fur
Rhody; but laws! Jim was allus on
hand, no matter how the weather was,
an’ he tuk her to her uncle’s two or
three times, an’ to meetin’ Sundays,
an’ I up an’ tole her one day that I
b’lieved I’d ask Jim to board with us,
an’ her face got mighty red, an’ she
stepped up an’ put both arms roun’ my
neck, she was such a lovin’ leetle critter,
an’ she says, ‘You aint mad, Aunt
Nancy, are you? You like Jim, don’t
you?’

“‘Well,’ says I, ‘ef I don’t, somebody
226
else does; but I’d like to know what
this deestric’s goin’ to do fur a teacher.’

“‘Oh,’ she says, blushin’ more ’an
ever, ‘I am goin’ to teach my school
out.’

“‘An’ then what?’ says I.

“‘Then I’ll tell you,’ she says, and
run off laughin’.

“So I says to the ole man that night,
after we’d gone to bed, says I, ‘Jonathan,
Rhody is goin’ to marry Jim Curtis,
an’ I dunno whether to be glad or
sorry.’

“An’ he laughed till the bed shuk,
an’ says he, ‘Why, whot on ’arth is
ther’ to be sorry ’bout?’ says he; ‘ther’
aint a likelier feller’n the neighborhood
than Jim, an’ as for Rhody,
pshaw! she’s good enough an’ purty
’nough for anybody.’

“‘Oh,’ says I, ‘’tain’t that—they’re
both well ’nough; but how’s our little
girl goin’ to git along with Mis’ Curtis?’”

“Yes,” interrupted Mrs. Johnson,
appreciatively, “that was a question.
What did you let ’em go there to live
for? That’s what I want to know,
Nancy Riley.”

“Well,” sighed Aunt Nancy, “I did
try to prevent it. I talked to Rhody,
but she thought she could surely git
along with Jim’s mother—said she
loved her already, pore thing! Then I
tuk Jim to task, an’ he said the ole
folks weren’t willin’ fur him to leave
’em; his father was gittin’ old, an’
ther’ were lots ’o rooms in the house,
an’ his mother was glad he was goin’
to marry an’ bring his wife there, she
was so lonesome now all her girls was
gone, an’ a heap more sich stuff.”

“Lonesome, indeed!” snapped Mrs.
Johnson. “She was glad to git rid of
her girls, so she was! Laws! don’t I
mind what times them poor girls had
to git decent clothes? She jist
grudged ’em everything, an’ kep’ ’em
workin’ like—I was goin’ to say
darkys, but no darky ever worked
like old Mis’ Curtis made her girls. No
wonder they up an’ tuk the first feller
’at came along an’ asked ’em. But I
stopped you, Aunt Nancy—excuse me—for
I knowed Mis’ Curtis so well.
The idea of her a-bein’ lonesome! She
wanted somebody to help with the
work, she did. Her own girls got
227
away soon’s they could. That Jim must
’a’ been a fool!”

“Oh, no, he wasn’t,” went on the
soft voice. “It’s mighty little a young
feller like him knows about housework,
an’ his mother’s work never bothered
him. So as soon as Rhody’s school
was out in the spring they was married.
You see, her uncle thought for a pore
girl she was doin’ purty well, an’ I ’low
she was ef she had been jes’ marryin’
Jim Curtis, but she warn’t—she was a
tyin’ of herself to his mother.”

“More fool Jim!” snarled Mrs.
Johnson.

“Now, Mis’ Johnson,” said Aunt
Nancy, “Jim meant well, an’ he worshipped
the very ground Rhody walked
on; but, you see, old Mis’ Curtis she
didn’t believe in young folks makin’
simpletons of theirselves, and when she
see Jim slip his arm ’roun’ Rhody, or
her run her hand through his curly
hair, she’d snap out something sort o’
hateful; so Rhody she got afraid of
her, an’ there’s where the trouble begun,
in my ’pinion, fur if my pore child
had let Jim see how she was imposed
on, he certingly’d have made a change,
but to keep peace she jist made believe
she was happy ’nough. I use’ ter go
over sometimes, though I knowed Mis’
Curtis set no store by my comin’, but
Rhody was allus that glad, and I tell
you it riled me to see how she was
treated. It was: ‘Rhody, bring the
milk out of the suller’; ‘Rhody, fetch
some wood’; ‘Rhody, set the table,’ till
I wondered she didn’t drop.

“One awful hot day I was there, an’
228
Rhody she was ironin’ in the back porch,
an’ Mis’ Curtis she was makin’ pies;
she was a master-hand at cookin’; you’ll
’low that, Mis’ Johnson.”

“Oh, yes,” snapped Mrs. Johnson,
“Mary Ann Curtis was a master at anything
she put her hand to.”

“As I was sayin’,” went on Aunt
Nancy meekly, “Rhody was ironin’;
and sich a pile of clothes!—white winder-curtains
starched like boards, an’
table-cloths, let alone shirts and other
things—an’ I was thinkin’ how pale she
was, an’ peaked-lookin’, when Mis’ Curtis
calls out, ‘Rhody, the fire’s goin’
down. I wonder if you ’spect to iron
with cold irons. Ef you do, you kin
quit, for I don’t have my ironin’ done
that way, if some folks does.’

“Rhody never said a word, but jist
went to the wood-pile for more wood,
an’ I says to Mis’ Curtis, says I, ‘Ef I
was you, I’d hev some of the men-folks
bring in the wood. Rhody don’t look
well.’

“You oughter seen her look at me;
her eyes fairly scared me. ‘Our men-folks,’
says she, ‘’s tired enough when
they come in, ’thout havin’ women’s
work to do. Ef they was shiftless as
some I knows, that’s all they’d be fit
fur.’

“I tell you, that sort o’ riled me,”
went on the gentle voice; “but Rhody
came in with a big armful of wood, so
I didn’t say anything.”

“As if you would have said anything,
you good soul!” said Mrs. Johnson.

“You don’t know me,” said Aunt
Nancy. “Jonathan says I am right
smart when I get riled—scares him;”
and a mellow laugh rippled over her
thin lips, which sounded so sweet that
more than one passenger turned to see
the laugher. Mrs. Johnson joined in
the merriment, and I smiled too—the
idea of that voice scolding was so absurd.
And now it went on again:

“I thought I’d say something to Jim
about Rhody, for I felt oneasy about
her; an’ so when he was helpin’ me on
my horse in the evenin’ (Rhody couldn’t
come to the fence, ’cause Mis’ Curtis
called her back when she started), I
says to him, ‘Jim,’ says I, ‘Rhody looks
mighty bad; I’m feered she’s doin’ too
much this hot weather.’ You see, it
was September, an’ you know what
tirin’ weather we sometimes have in
September.

“‘Oh, she’s all right,’ says Jim.

“‘No, she ain’t,’ says I.

“Jim laughed, and his face reddened
up, and says I,

“‘You better take good care of her,
Jim; she’s not a strong woman like
your mother; she can’t stand everything,’
an’ no more she couldn’t, pore
little thing.

“Well, the very nex’ Sunday, here
came Jim and Rhody to see us. An’ I
tell you the ole man an’ me was that
glad he would have Rhody sing for us,
an’ she sang some of the songs he
liked, but not many; she said she
hadn’t sung any fur so long it tired
her.

“‘Why don’t you sing, Rhody?’ says
the ole man; ‘you used to sing like a
bird.’

“‘I guess I’m not like a bird any
more, Uncle Jonathan,’ she says. An’
then she sighed, but catchin’ Jim lookin’
at her, she lightened up and says,
‘I am an old married woman now.’

“After a while Jim an’ the ole man
they went out to the stable, and then
the pore little darlin’ says,

“‘Oh, Aunt Nancy, I’d be the happiest
woman in the world if Jim and
me was livin’ by ourselves! Mother
Curtis is a good woman, but somehow
I can’t please her, an’ I try so hard.
Sometimes I’m so tired I can’t sleep or
eat, an’ she thinks I’m puttin’ on airs,
she calls it, an’ she’s allus saying she
pities a man with a do-nothin’, whiny
wife.’

“‘It’s a shame!’ says I; ‘why don’t
you tell Jim, and coax him to get another
place?’

“‘Oh, Aunt Nancy,’ she says, wipin’
her purty eyes, ‘I can’t bear to make
trouble, and what would Pap Curtis
do? He’s awful good to us. He brings
me candy and sometimes oranges from
town, and gives ’em to me when she
don’t see him, and he often helps
me, too; gets wood and water and
milks the cows—but there’s Jim with
the buggy,’ and off she went.

“I made up my mind to have another
talk with Jim Curtis, but laws!
we never can tell. The ole man he
229
took the bed with rheumatiks
in October, and
I never seen anybody
much fur three months,
and then our Sarah’s baby
was born, and I was over
there awhile, an’ my own
worriments drove other
people’s clean out of my
head, till one day ’long
the last of February Jonathan
came in (he’d be’n
to town for somethin’ or
other), an’ says he,

“‘Nancy, Rhody’s got
a boy!’

“Laws! I was jist as
s’prised as ef I’d never
thought of sich a thing,
an’ says I, ‘Who tole
you?’

“‘Ole man Curtis,’
says he, ‘an’ he’s that sot
up he wants you to come
right over.’

“‘An’ so I will,’ says I.
‘The blessed darlin’; an’
it’s a boy, an’ our Sarah’s
is a boy, too. Well, that
beats me.’ An’ I ’low
’twas odd, Mis’ Johnson;”
and Mrs. Johnson
“’lowed” it was, too,
and the story went on:

“In a day or two I managed to go
over to the Curtis place, an’ though
Mary Ann Curtis didn’t seem over-pleased
to see me, I’ll say that for her,
she treated me well enough, and asked
me right up stairs to see Rhody and
the baby. My! but my girl was glad
to see me!

“‘Aunt Nancy,’ she says, ‘is Sarah’s
baby bigger’n mine?’ and she turned
down the kiver and showed me the
littlest mite of a boy, with such a
wrinkled old face! I wonder what
does make a pore weakly baby look so
much like old folks, anyhow. Did you
ever notice it, Mis’ Johnson?”

“Oh, yes, often,” said Mrs. Johnson.
“There was my Silas, looked just like
his Grandfather Johnson when he was
born. But was her baby weakly?”

“I saw it was in a minute,” said Aunt
Nancy, “but I never let on. I looked
at the baby an’ praised it all I could—said
it wasn’t as big as Sary’s, but size
was nothin’.

“Mis’ Curtis she sniffed sort o’ scornful,
an’ says she, ‘The child might have
been bigger ef its mother’d knowed
how to take keer of herself;’ an’ then
she says, ‘Well, I ain’t no time to be
a-foolin’. I must go to work.’

“‘I suppose you’ve got a girl?’
says I.

“‘No, I ain’t,’ says she; ‘an’ what’s
more, I don’t want one. I never seen
one yet that they didn’t eat an’ waste
more than their work came to, let alone
their wages;’ an’ off she went down-stairs.

“Rhody said nothing for a minute,
an’ I didn’t, either. We just looked at
the baby, an’ it begun to pucker its face
and cry a little, ’bout as loud as a young
kitten. I thought of Sary’s squaller of
a boy, but I didn’t say anything, and
when it was quiet Rhody says:

“‘Aunt Nancy, is my baby like Sary’s
230
baby?’ and she looked so pitiful I felt
as if I could cry.

“‘Well,’ I says, ‘Sary’s is bigger.
Why do you ask that?’

“Her lips quivered, an’ she says:

“‘Everybody ’at sees it says, “What
an old-fashioned baby! Poor little
thing! Re’ly it’s so odd-looking.” Is
it odd, Aunt Nancy? An’ is there fashions
in babies? I thought babies were
all alike;’ an’ she tried to smile while
tears rolled down her white face.

“I tried to cheer her up. She was a
baby herself—only a little over eighteen,
you know; an’ I went down and
made her some toast and tea, and then
fed the baby and got it to sleep, an’
left her feelin’ pretty cheerful.

“After that I went over as often as
ever I could, and sometimes carried a
little somethin’ I cooked to Rhody, but
I saw Mis’ Curtis didn’t thank me.
Once she’s good as said so—said her
victuals was good ’nough for anybody.
Says I, ‘Sick folks like strange
cookin’ sometimes, Mis’ Curtis, an’
Rhody allus liked my ways.’ Which
was an unfortunate thing for me to
say, fur Mis’ Curtis she flew all to
pieces, and said I put mischief in
Rhody’s head.

“‘Here,’ she says, ‘is her baby three
weeks old, an’ her barely settin’ up.
Your Sary was at work afore her baby
was that old, an’ I know it; an’ if Mis’
Rhody can’t wait on herself now, she
can go ’thout waitin’ on for all of me,’
she says.

“‘Mis’ Curtis,’ says I, ‘my Sary’s a
different woman from Rhody.’

“‘I guess she is,’ says Mis’ Curtis,
mad as fire.

“‘An,’ says I, ‘Jim ought to get
somebody to help wait on Rhody and
take care of the baby,’ says I, ‘or else
it’s my ’pinion he won’t have ’em long;
fur,’ says I, ‘Rhody’s gettin’ weaker
instead of stronger, and she ain’t got
milk fur that pore baby.’

“Then Mis’ Curtis she jes’ let loose,
an’ I ketched it. She said it was all
my doin’s that Jim married that pore
no-’count, stuck-up school-mistress, an’
brought her there to be waited on, an’
she knowed it all along, and now I
needn’t come a-tryin’ to make out as
Rhody wasn’t treated well, fur she had
wore herself out trottin’ up and down
231
stairs, an’ she didn’t mean to do it any
longer.

“Just then the kitchen door was
opened, and old Mr. Curtis came in.

“‘Why, howdy, Aunt Nancy?’ says
he as cheerful, though I knowed he
must have seen somethin’ was up.”

“Yes,” interrupted Mrs. Johnson angrily,
“that’s the way people do, and
call it keepin’ peace. I despise sich
ways. Why didn’t he make her behave
herself? Suppose there was a fuss; ef
she’d found he was goin’ to be boss,
she’d soon give up.”

“I guess not, Mis’ Johnson,” said the
other; “she had sich a temper.”

“As if I didn’t know that! an’ I
know when folks give up to sich tempers
they make ’em worse. Wouldn’t
it been better if ole man Curtis had jes’
let her see from the first that he didn’t
care for her temper? Why, she jesso
natrally drove her girls to marry; and
think of poor Molly tied to that
drunken, shiftless Ned Pelton, and Betsy
married to a old widower with seven or
eight children, and him nearly as old
as her father! I tell you, Aunt Nancy,
Curtis is to blame.”

“Well,” said the old lady gently,
“I went up-stairs and found Rhody
looking better’n I expected, with that
midget of a baby with its eyes wide
open on her lap. She was glad to see
me.

“‘O Aunt Nancy!’ she cried before
I got my bunnit off, ‘Jim has rented
the old Duncan place, and as soon as I
am able we are going there to live. He
is over there now, fixing up.’

“‘Aha!’ thought I, ‘that’s what’s
up!’ but I said I was glad, and that I
had brought her some sponge cake and
other things; an’ I ’mused the baby
while she et a little—a mighty little, I
was sorry to see; but she went on to
tell me Jim had been to the doctor
about her, an’ he said she needed tonics,
and he sent her some, an’ she was
goin’ to take the med’cin’ an’ would
soon be well and strong, an’ so happy!
‘But, Aunt Nancy,’ she says, ‘baby
don’t grow a bit. I’m afraid he is too
old-fashioned. Mother Curtis says I
don’t stir ’round enough to get an appetite.
Do you think that’s it—that
baby don’t get enough to make him
grow because I can’t eat?’ She looked
so weak and pitiful.

“I says, ‘Well, it ain’t your fault; I
reckon you can’t make yourself eat.’

“She laughed a little. ‘You are such
a comfort, auntie!’ she says; ‘but that
wonderful tonic’ll set me up again.’

“An’ so I left her an’ went home,
promising to be back in a day or two
an’ take her home with me for a little
visit if she was strong enough. You’d
jes’ oughter to seen her face when I
said that; it jes’ lit up.

“‘Mother Curtis?’ she whispered.

“‘Oh,’ says I, ‘she’ll be glad to get
rid of you for a while,’ an’ I went off
plannin’ how I’d see Jim and make him
bring her over. But it did seem as if
there was a spite to be worked out agin
me, for that very evenin’ it set in to
rain, an’ that stiffened the ole man up
bad, an’ for days he could not move
hisself, an’ I was kep’ close at home
for three weeks, hearin’ from the neighbors
every once in a while that Rhody
was gainin’ slowly, but the baby wasn’t
right somehow.

“Well, Jonathan got able to hobble
round again, an’ a purty spell of weather
sot in, but there was garden to make, an’
soap to bile, an’ another week slipped
away, an’ I says to Jonathan, says I,
‘As sure as I live I am going to see
Rhody to-morrer ef old Mis’ Curtis’ll
let me in;’ an’ the words wasn’t hardly
out of my mouth when somebody
knocked at the door. ‘Come in,’ says
I, and who was it but old man Curtis,
looking like a ghost. ‘What’s the
matter?’ says I. He r’al’y couldn’t
speak for a minit, an’ then he got out
somethin’ ’bout Rhody an’ the baby,
and comin’, but I sensed it all, an’ in
less’n a minit I was ready an’ in the
buggy with him.

“From what I could make out as we
druv as fast as we could, Jim had been
away from home over to the Duncan
place from airly in the mornin’ till
about five o’clock that afternoon. When
he got home he run right up to Rhody’s
room, an’ found her a-settin’ there with
the baby in her arms, asleep he thought,
but when he spoke to Rhody she began
to scream, so that he was scared
an’ tuk hold of the baby an’ it was
dead.

“‘Then he hollered,’ said the old
man, ‘an’ me an’ Mary Ann an’ Tom
(that’s the hired man) ran up there, fur
we was jes’ settin’ down to supper, an’
when we saw what it was Tom went for
the doctor and I came for you.’

“An’ oh, Mis’ Johnson, I never want
to see such sights agin! The baby was
dead, sure enough, poor little thing,
an’ out of its misery, but Rhody, she
jes’ went out o’
one faint into
another till the
doctor came, an’
then we worked
over her a long
time, an’ when
she quit faintin’
she was ravin’ in
a high fever.
Dangerous, the
doctor said, an’
turned everybody
but Jim an’
me out o’ the
room. Such an
awful time!
Rhody would
scream, ‘Oh, do
come, Mother!
Mother! Mother!
Baby’s
dyin’!’ till she
couldn’t scream
any more, an’
then she’d ask
for the baby, an’
lie still, waitin’
like, an’ then
scream again.

“It was midnight
before the
doctor got her
quiet, and then
she lay in a
stupor like, with Jim settin’ watchin’
her. Then I thought of the pore baby
an’ went to see about it, but some of
the other neighbors hed come in, an’ I
found they had it laid out nice in the
parlor.

“Mis’ Curtis was settin’ by the kitchen
stove, fur it was a cool evenin’, an’ I
says to her, ‘Mary Ann,’ says I, ‘what
ailed the child? It was tuk suddent,
wasn’t it?’

“She looked at me. I knowed she
was mad as well as feelin’ bad, but she
didn’t want to show it then, an’ she
says,

“‘Yes, I reckon you might say it was,
’though I never spected the child to
live from the first. What’d Jim marry
that no-’count spindly girl fur? He
might ’a ’knowed.’

“‘Mis’ Curtis,’ says I, ‘Rhody’ll
not trouble you long; and it’s my belief,’
says I,
‘you’ve hurried
her into her
grave.’

“‘It’s no sich
thing,’ says she.
‘I waited on her
as good as if she
was my own; but
I had lots to do
to-day, an’ I tole
her this mornin’
I was done packin’
victuals up
stairs for a lazy
trollop like her,
an’ she could
come down to
dinner if she
wanted any.
She’s plenty able
to, Nancy Riley,
an’ it’s my ’pinion
she didn’t
take half care of
that baby. An’
she set Jim agin
me. He’s fixin’
to go off to live
by hisself.’

“I jes’ turned
round and left
her, an’ she
bounced up an’
says to one of
the women, ‘I spect you’re all hungry,
an’ I’ll get supper’; an’ in spite of all
they could do, to work she went.”

“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Johnson, “the
madder she got the harder she’d work,
an’ a mighty good worker, too, she
was; but how did that poor Rhody get
along?”

“Well, she lay quiet all that mornin’,
but about the middle of the afternoon
she roused up and seemed to know me
an’ Jim, an’ asked for the baby.

“‘It’s down stairs, Rhody,’ says I.

“She looked at me so queer.

“‘Is it?’ she said. ‘Mother was
mad, Jim, an’ wouldn’t come up stairs;
an’ baby was so sick, an’ I tried to call
her, an’ I couldn’t make her hear, an’
then I tried to go down stairs an’ I
couldn’t, an’ baby got so stiff and cold,
an’ I couldn’t get him warm.’ An’ then,
O Mis’ Johnson, she began to scream
again. It was awful, but after a while
she was still again for several hours,
an’ I tried to get Jim to lay down, but
he wouldn’t leave her; an’ his mother
come up for him to get him to go down
an’ eat somethin’, but he jes’ looked at
her, an’ she went an’ left him.

“It was night when Rhody roused
up agin’, an’ she looked so much better
out of her eyes that I felt sort a cheered.

“‘Jim,’ she says, whispering, ‘is that
Aunt Nancy?’

“‘Yes, dear,’ he says.

“‘An’ has she got the baby?’ she
went on.

“Well, Jim didn’t say nothin’, pore
feller, an’ she says,

“‘Aunt Nancy, when Jim an’ me’s
keepin’ house you’ll come an’ see
us?’

“‘Yes, dear,’ I says. ‘Now go to
sleep, like a good girl.’

“‘All right,’ she says, ‘you keep the
baby, an’, Jim, kiss me good night. I
love you—Jim. We’ll be—so happy—by—ourselves.’

“The last words were a long time
comin’, an’ Jim, after he kissed her,
looked at me an’ whispered, ‘Send for
the doctor.’ I hurried out, but before
the doctor came he was not
needed. Rhody had said her last good
night.”

“How did Mary Ann take it?” said
Mrs. Johnson, wiping her eyes.

“Laws, she tuk on like all possessed,
234
cried and hollered till I thought she’d
go inter fits; but somehow I felt sorrier
for the ole man. He’d stan’ an’
look at the pore thing after she was
laid out, an’ the big tears’d run down
his wrinkled face, an’ he says to me,
‘She’s too good fur this world, Nancy,
Rhody was.’”

Just then the brakeman shouted the
name of the town at which I was
to stop, and I must gather up my
traps. I leaned over and whispered to
“Aunt Nancy,” “What did poor Jim
do?”

The old lady’s face flushed. “Was
you a-listenin’?” says she.

“I couldn’t help it,” I said. “Poor
Rhoda! But what about Jim, Aunt
Nancy?”

“This way, Madam,” said the conductor
briskly. “Let me have your
valise.”

“Jim?” she whispered excitedly, “he
like to went wild, but he was mighty
quiet, an’ soon’s the funeral was over
he sold everything he had and went
to Californy.”

“Did he forgive his mother?” I
asked, but the conductor took my arm
and marched me out, and to this day I
am wondering about “Jim” and his
mother and “ole man Curtis.” If I
knew where “Aunt Nancy” lived, I
would write to her.

The mistress of Hawarden Castle
is something more than the devoted
wife of the great statesman who
sways the destinies of Great Britain.
She has a notable personality of her
own, worthy in its energy and sagacity
of him with whom her life is linked.
While the husband’s career has always
been interwoven with the highest
affairs of state, the wife has shown her
genius for administration by the charitable
enterprises in which she has taken
so active a part. Most things come
about naturally as the effect of growth;
and it is interesting to go back to the
childhood of Mrs. Gladstone to trace
the influences which directed her mind
to deeds of beneficence. Things have
changed since Mrs. Gladstone was a
little girl, living with her sister and
brothers at Hawarden Castle, nearly
eighty years ago.

Mrs. Gladstone’s father, Sir Stephen
Glynne, died young, when his eldest
daughter Catherine (Mrs. Gladstone)
was scarcely five years old. Tradition
remembers him as a very handsome,
lively-minded man, and it is said that
Catherine Glynne grew up very like her
father. One of Mrs. Gladstone’s first
vivid impressions is of the fright she
got by seeing the “mutes,” then the
fashion at important funerals, standing
about the castle while her dead father
lay in state. It gave her a life-long
horror of elaborate and expensive
funerals. Her father was succeeded
in the baronetcy and estates by his
eldest son, Stephen Richard, then but
a little boy of eight. Lady Glynne, a
daughter of Lord Brabrooke, was left
with the sole charge of the property
and the children. She was a beautiful
woman of strong character. Fortunately
about this time her brother, the
Honorable George Neville, came to
be rector of Hawarden parish. The
castle and rectory were within a quarter
hour’s walk of each other, and it was
a precious boon for Lady Glynne to
have her brother’s judicious help in the
management of the large estates, and
in the education of her two boys and
her two girls.

This was about the year 1813. At
that date Hawarden, in common with a
village in Cheshire, had the deserved
reputation of being the most wicked
place in all the country round. Mr.
Neville, with Lady Glynne’s consent,
closed the worst of the public houses,
and inaugurated a system of education
for the parish, setting up schools in
Hawarden village and in the districts
round.

MRS. GLADSTONE’S EARLY TRAINING.

It was a serious problem at the outset
to obtain either teachers or scholars.
It was necessary to employ bribery to
get the mothers to send their children
to school, and the aid of Lady Glynne
and her young girls was brought to
bear, in the first place, to talk the
mothers over; and, secondly, to prepare
a store of frocks, coats, cloaks,
and other useful garments. These were
given away as Christmas prizes, to
recompense the mothers for remitting
the services of their little girls, and
the pence which the boys could pick
up at scaring crows and such like juvenile
occupations.

It was a matter of still greater
difficulty to find teachers who knew
anything of the art of instruction;
this was long before the day of colleges
for elementary teachers. An old
woman at Hawarden boasted to me
that she had received for many years
a Christmas prize for regular attendance
at school. Naturally the question
was asked: “How was it, then, Mrs.
Catheral, you never learned either to
read or write?”

“Oh, I never wanted to,” said she.
“I never tried. But I liked the pretty
frock or warm cloak the Miss Glynnes
always gave us for prizes at Christmas
time, if we went to school regular.”
Then she added, “Bless you! you
should have seen the prizes in those
days! They were worth looking at;
none of your books and rubbish, like
what children get in these days.” In
such an atmosphere did the children of
Lady Glynne grow up, systematically
trained to assist their mother and uncle
in everything they projected for the
parish good. Then came the full tide
of the Oxford movement, which swept
like a wave of light and heat through
the sluggish heart of English religious
and social reform, though it landed
some of its brightest lights afterwards
in Romanism. The names of Pusey,
Keble, Manning, and Newman were
household words at Hawarden Castle.
Catherine’s brothers were then at
Christ Church, Oxford; and, in the
midst of it all, intimate with the leaders
of the movement, amongst whom
were young Gladstone and many other
brilliant young men, destined to be
friends through life of those two
bright and beautiful young girls at
Hawarden.

Thus a happy childhood matured
into womanhood, under revolutionary
influences. The breezes of intellectual
and spiritual awakening stirred the air.
Theirs never was a life of mere social
excitement which so often plunges the
débutante into a whirl of pleasure without
feeding the better life. They entered,
it is true, into all the pleasures
of London seasons, their beauty and
bright minds fitting them to enjoy these
to the full. But behind and above it
all was the intelligence which kept
them in touch with the movement of
their day—a movement which, when
turned into practical channels, brought
about, for example, the great work of
Florence Nightingale, who re-created
the hospital-nursing service. The same
potency inspired the establishment of
237
homes and refuges and many of the
philanthropic schemes which have made
the last forty years so notable. Certain
it is that Catherine Glynne came
under the influence of the Oxford movement,
and was predisposed by it to take
a leading part in the philanthropic
work of the
day.

MARRIAGE AND PHILANTHROPY.

In 1839 she married
William Ewart Gladstone,
whose great genius already
foreshadowed his
future eminence. The
same day her younger sister
married Lord Lyttleton.
Those who were eye-witnesses
of that double
wedding, and all the wonderful
festivities in the village, are becoming
few, indeed. In her married
life Mrs. Gladstone found occupation
to the full. She was always the true
and careful mother who would not give
over her duties to another, even to the
best of nurses. She was devoted to
her husband in his incessant political
toils. She did not need to look around
her for work. Still her assistance was
from the first prompt to the furtherance
of any schemes where a helping
hand was needed.

Mrs. Gladstone soon became a centre
for philanthropic
work of all kinds.
She and Mr. Gladstone
started Newport
Market Refuge,
which is now
carried on at
Westminster, with
an industrial
school attached.
Begun in Soho in
1863, it was Mr.
Gladstone’s idea,
for he saw many
friendless wanderers
as he went at night between the
House of Commons and his home.
Mrs. Gladstone threw herself into his
scheme, and the work was started with
an efficient committee. From the beginning
Mr. Gladstone has been president
and his wife a regular visitor.
The object of the refuge is to give
shelter to persons out of work and in
temporary distress, to enable them to
tide over their difficulties, and to find
fresh employment. It
does not take in the practised
casual, or loafer, but
weary, sore-footed travellers,
who have walked far
in search of work and
found none. Such are always
admitted as far as
room permits, and have
the assurance of a week’s
lodging free, with the
prospect of an extension
of time if the committee
see a reasonable chance
of their getting work.

In the course of a single
year about thirteen thousand
nights’ lodgings and thirty thousand
rations have been granted, and
three hundred and nine men and women
have obtained employment, or else have
been sent home to their friends.

It need scarcely be said to those
who have kept pace with recent events
that the most vital feature of General
Booth’s great work in London follows
closely the model set by the Gladstone
institution.

It was soon found advisable to add
a Boys’ Industrial School to the work
of the Refuge. Many lads in distress
were constantly
being discovered,
who would certainly
drift into a
life of idleness
and dishonesty if
not taken in hand.
So the managers
of the Refuge determined
to try
this novel combination—refuge
and
school—which,
hazardous as it was
at its commencement,
has proved an entire success.

In 1866 a sharp epidemic of cholera
reached England, and the East End of
London was severely attacked. Mrs.
Gladstone came in contact with it, in
238
her regular visits to the London hospital.
Whole families were brought in
together, some to die, others to recover.
Parents dying left their children
behind them, friendless and helpless.
Mrs. Gladstone carried away
many of the poor little wretches virtually
in her arms. They were naked,
for their only clothing had to be
burned, but she found cloaks and blankets
to wrap them in, and took them
with her to her own house or to lodgings
which she had provided.

She induced her friends to furnish
fresh garments without delay, and she
rented an empty house at Clapton,
wherein to lodge her orphans. She
set about raising money to provide for
their needs and those of other cholera
patients. She wrote a letter to the
“Times,” asking subscriptions for this
object, and speedily five thousand
pounds rolled in. With this she was
able to keep her little cholera orphans
in comfort. One who saw the sight,
when she accompanied Mrs. Gladstone
to Clapton, says she can never forget it.
As soon as the door was opened she
was surrounded by the little ones, who
clung to her and almost overwhelmed
her in their eagerness to obtain a caress
from the one they loved so dearly.

VARIED ENTERPRISES OF AN ACTIVE
LIFE.

Her Free Convalescent Home had
its genesis in the necessities of the sick
poor, brought to light by this cholera
epidemic. It was forced upon her
notice that many, who had passed
safely through the dangers of acute
disease, relapsed into serious, and
sometimes fatal, illness for lack of
that timely change of air, wholesome
food and comfortable lodging which
they were unable to find at home.
There were convalescent establishments
in operation, but it was found
that they were already full, or else
admission was hampered by such conditions
of privileged tickets, weekly payments,
and distance, that, before these
could be complied with, the evils
sought to be averted had actually
occurred.

Mrs. Gladstone determined to establish
a Convalescent Home, where
admission could be quickly arranged,
free of cost. She called to her aid a
committee of ladies and gentlemen,
qualified by business experience, professional
knowledge, or familiarity with
the needs of the poor, to coöperate
with her. Such confidence did she
inspire, that a beginning was quickly
made in a house at Snaresbrook, the
remainder of the lease being made
over to Mrs. Gladstone and her committee.
When the lease came to an
end, the convalescents were transferred
for a short time to the houses
which Mrs. Gladstone had at Clapton,
but in 1868 a freehold property, known
as Woodsford Hall, most healthily situated
in Essex, was bought by the
committee. Here this good work has
been carried on ever since. It is a
charming house close to the forest, surrounded
by lawns and trees and flowers.
In fine weather the house is
nearly empty all day long. The invalids
from the squalid city lanes spend
their time in the forest, gathering wild
flowers, and drinking in the perfumed
air which pours rich draughts of health
and strength into their wasted bodies.

When in London, Mrs. Gladstone has
for nearly a quarter of a century gone
down to the London Hospital every
Monday morning, to examine into the
circumstances of those who apply to
go down to Woodsford. The clergy
and ministers of all denominations in
the parishes around the London Hospital
have a right to send their sick
poor with a note of recommendation,
but those who are recovering in the
London Hospital have the special
claim. The business is carefully supervised
by Mrs. Gladstone and her assistants,
even to the day of going, and
the train. Attention is always directed
to the express object of the home—as
a resort solely for those who have been
ill, are slowly recovering, and require,
for complete restoration to health,
change of air, good food, rest, and
kindly treatment.

Every year more than a thousand
men, women, and children enjoy the
benefit of this retreat. One report
gives the numbers at six hundred and
thirty-nine men, three hundred and
239
sixty-nine women, seventy boys, and
forty girls. The large excess of men
and boys over women and girls has revealed
the fact that working men are
much more liable than are women, not
only to accidents, but to disease. This
holds good among the children, as more
sickness rages among the boys than
among the girls. In this great undertaking
Mrs. Gladstone has been ably
assisted by many friends, among whom
may be specially mentioned her niece,
Lady Frederick Cavendish, whose terribly
imposed sorrow has always found
relief in works of love and charity. It
is impossible, too, to say good-by to
the Free Convalescent Home at Woodsford
without mentioning Miss Simmons,
the superintendent for many years—an
ideal mother for such a home. To
see her play games with the patients
is something one remembers, for the
humor with which it is done and the
mirth it creates. Mrs. Gladstone herself
delights the patients on her visits
by playing dance music to them. Her
country dances and Sir Roger de Coverely
are special favorites.

Another prominent feature of her
charities is the orphanage at Hawarden,
which arose out of the American war
of 1862, and the subsequent cotton
famine in Lancashire.

Mrs. Gladstone’s brother, Sir Stephen
Glynne, was alive, and Mr. and Mrs.
Gladstone lived at Hawarden Castle
with him. When the distress was most
severe, Mr. Gladstone collected a number
of men who were idle in Lancashire,
and found them employment in cutting
240
foot-paths through the park and woods
of Hawarden—as he could not give
them work which would displace any of
the permanent laborers on the estates.
At the same time Mrs. Gladstone sent
for some of their young daughters,
and her brother, Sir Stephen, gave her
the use of a nice old house which stood
in the courtyard, formerly the dower
house belonging to the Ravenscrofts,
who in time past had owned Hawarden
Castle, then called “Broad Lane
Hall.” (The heiress of the Ravenscrofts
had married Mrs. Gladstone’s
great-grandfather, Sir John Glynne.)
This dower house Mrs. Gladstone
converted into a training home for
the girls, under the charge of a very
charming nurse of her own children,
who had lately married. The experiment
proved a great success. The girls
had all worked in the mills, but they
learned quickly something of domestic
work. Then Mrs. Gladstone found
them places amongst her own friends
in the neighborhood, whereupon she
was able to send for more girls to be
similarly assisted. Some of them were
lovely young women, and most of them
married extremely well while in service.

In the autumn of 1867 Mrs. Gladstone
brought down about a dozen of
her orphans from Clapton and lodged
them in another small house, which her
brother had lent to her. These she put
under the care of a widow with a little
boy of her own. There they dwelt
happily, going every day up to the village
to attend the infant school. When
the Lancashire distress was quite over,
and all need of the old dower house
at an end for the mill girls, Mrs. Gladstone
transferred her Clapton orphans
there, and added to their number other
children whose fathers and mothers had
died in the London Hospital. When
the orphanage was properly established
in the larger house, it accommodated
comfortably about thirty children. Experience
taught Mrs. Gladstone that
poor parents found it more difficult to
provide for and manage their boys
than their girls. So the Hawarden orphanage
has come to be filled by boys.
They attend the parish schools till they
are old enough to be apprenticed to
trades. There is now a whole army of
well-doing young men who have been
brought up in the Hawarden Castle orphanage.
It is still in full tide of the
241
work it has carried on for over twenty-five
years.

About 1880 a home for training young
women for service was opened at Notting
Hill, London, under the management
of a committee of ladies. The
object of the home was to take girls
under its protection who had bad homes,
and were therefore likely to be totally
neglected and to drift into a life of uselessness
and vice. Mrs. Gladstone was
asked to become the president, and
consented. It is organized on a small
scale, a fact much in favor of its purpose.
Not more than fifteen girls are
there at one time, and a few lady boarders
are taken in, as this works well
for training the girls in the various
branches of domestic service. The
proud characteristic of the school is
its determination never to despair of
any pupil, however discouraging she
may be in her first trial of service. The
reward seems great when a girl, who
has failed in several places, at last finds
a mistress who understands her and
draws out the best in her, when she receives
praise as a good servant instead
of the fault-finding hitherto her portion.
There are now numbers of respectable,
well-doing servants who have been
trained here, and the institution has
proved a boon to employers as well as
the employed.

A CROWN OF HONOR.

Mrs. Gladstone gives the girls who
are in service an annual treat every
summer down at the Convalescent
Home at Woodsford. About a year ago
a party of them enjoyed luncheon and
tea on the lawn there, under the shadow
of a rare kind of sycamore which their
hostess had brought
in a flower-pot, as a
little seedling, from an
old tree which spreads
its ample branches
close to her orphanage
at Hawarden. Mrs.
Gladstone told the
girls that, when she
planted it, she never
thought to live so
long as to see it large
enough to shelter a
party of forty in the shadow of its
foliage. Such works of beneficence as
have just been sketched are only a few
of those forming a crown of honor and
glory for the head of the great Premier’s
wife. She was in that early band
who began penitentiary work at Clewer
before it took shape under Mrs. Monsel’s
management. That must have
been soon after her marriage. To that
early time, too, belong the beginnings
of the House of Charity for distressed
persons in London, which is carried on
at Soho, and rejoices in its forty-sixth
annual report. This is to help persons
a little higher than the working-class,
who have fallen into temporary distress
from sickness or other vicissitudes.

As for the deeds of private kindness,
it can truly be said that Mrs. Gladstone
has sown them on all sides, and it is
characteristic of that noble woman’s
nature that she is loyal to the last to
those who need her help, even if it be
for a lifetime.

There is an island
in Big Asquam
Lake,
New Hampshire,
lying almost
under the shadow
of Mount Chocorua,
and on it there are
many buildings, rough
but weather-tight;
paths which have been
carefully built to
grade; a boat-yard,
with ways leading to
the water; a long wharf projecting
out toward a swimming raft which
is floating where there is depth for
diving; a sea wall of heavy stone,
against which the ice is powerless.
Down by the water’s edge, and squatting
on a wooden stage within easy
reach, a group of boys are washing
dishes. From time to time one of
them, who while working as hard as
any, keeps his eye on the others, gives
a short order which is instantly obeyed.
Other boys are sitting on the porch,
polishing lantern and lamps, while yet
others are sweeping up the litter which
disfigures the open space. There are
buildings to the right and left, there
are canvas canoes and boats floating
near the wharf, and a great flat boat—somewhat
rudely made—is moored in
front of the sea wall. With each group
of boys is a young man, busily employed
in the same work, but it is
noticeable that he gives no orders.

From the island itself the view is
exquisitely beautiful. To the north
the White Mountains rest like a mighty
barrier, walling in the valley at their
feet. The lake itself lies smiling
under the sunlight of the perfect day,
or darkening under the shadow of the
drifting cloud. The breeze is barely
enough to fill the sails of the white
canoe outside there, while the scarlet
cap of the boy sailing it makes a patch
of color. There are other islands with
long vistas of water between them,
relieving the vivid green of the trees
which cover them with foliage, and
coming toward the wharf is a boat
filled with girls; in the stillness their
gay laughter sounds pleasantly. Everywhere
is the beauty of the mountains
and the lake, and the voices of the
boys at work fill the very air with life.

Big Asquam Lake was more picturesque
during the summers from 1881
to 1889, because Camp Chocorua was
there, than it has been since. The camp
was founded by Mr. Ernest Berkeley
Balch as a summer camp for boys, in
which they could have plenty of outdoor
sport, a reasonable amount of
work, and abundant opportunity to
enjoy themselves in their own way.
Starting with five boys and a small
243
frame shanty in 1881, it grew into one
of the oddest institutions that may be
imagined. It was different in many
ways from anything else of the kind,
and its great success was due to the
fact that it was modelled on real life
as men see it. The motive underlying
all of its pleasant features and most
quaint customs was twofold: first, responsibility,
personally and for others;
and, second, work—not only the work
which each one must do for himself,
but also that extra work which brings
with it a tangible reward. The boys
were encouraged in everything that
would tend to develop them physically,
to make them strong and healthy, but
they also found themselves members
of a little world that had a high standard
of honor, a world in which the laws
governing the conflicting interests of
men were recognized and obeyed. How
this was done, how Camp Chocorua was
governed and run, and why the boys
who were there still look on it so affectionately
is not an uninteresting story.

“The Camp,” as it is always called
by those who were there, took in all of
the space on the island. In 1889, the
last year, the buildings included the
office; the big dormitory—in the upper
story of which was the library, with a
large room below, having at one end
the great fireplace, where the camp-fire
blazed and burned; the dining-house—an
open shed; the cook-house, with
the ice-house at its back; the store-house
and faculty quarters—the upper
story of this was the hospital; and the
carpenter’s shop, down by the boat-yard.
There were many paths built
carefully to grade, and one of these
led to the grove of silver birches, in the
midst of which was the chapel. I think
this was one of the prettiest places I
ever saw. The walls were the living
trees, the seats were rustic benches, and
the reading-desk was a rock, oddly
fashioned, of the stone of the Granite
State, into the form of a lectern. Every
Sunday afternoon when it was fair
weather the service was held here.

It is not, however, in the buildings,
on the island, nor in the trees that one
can find the interest of Camp Chocorua.
It was in the life led by the boys, in
their customs and laws, in their courts
and contracts, that this resides.

One of the fundamental rules of the
place was that every boy or man there
should do his own work and his share
of the common work of the camp.
Many of the boys who came had never
in their lives done anything for themselves,
and the first thing demanded of
them, that they should make up their
244
own beds and take care of their own
clothes, came very hard. The boy was
careless, he lost his waterproof, he could
not put on his shoes, or could not remember
to put away his clothes. There
was no punishment for his fault; he
was simply ranked as an “Incapable.”
An Incapable was a boy who did no
work of any kind, who belonged to no
crew, who had no part
in the busy life of the
camp except that of a
spectator. More than
this, an Incapable was
forbidden to refuse assistance
from any member
of a crew, and as
it speedily became the
fashion to help an Incapable,
he had no lack
of such assistance. Any
one who can remember
the scorn a boy feels for
another who, he thinks,
is less manly than himself
will understand the
sort of blistering sore
applied to an Incapable.
It was not without a pathetic side, the
way in which these little chaps would
work to learn how to dress themselves
and lace their own shoes, and the anxiety
they showed to keep their clothes
and bed in order; and as an Incapable
had the right to an examination, by a
member of the faculty, at any time, as
to his capability, few there were who
were not assigned to a crew within two
weeks.

The supreme power in Camp Chocorua
resided in the founder, although
he could not, except in extreme cases,
traverse one of the customs of the
camp, for these were, in fact, unwritten
laws. Associated with him were the
members of the faculty, generally four
in number, and it was their duty to
oversee and watch the boys. One of
the faculty was always with a crew,
and he had the right to give general
orders and to inspect the work done,
as a whole. He had no power, however,
over the individual
members of that
crew, for this resided
wholly in the stroke, or,
in his absence, in the
sub-stroke. To compare
one thing with another,
the member of
the faculty was the general
commanding the
brigade, and the stroke
was the colonel in command
of a regiment. The
general could give his
orders and comment on
how they were carried
out, but it was the colonel
who decided on details.
The member of the faculty
with a crew worked as they worked,
taking such part of the labor as he saw
fit, or doing that which the stroke asked
him to. The boys in the camp were
divided into four crews, and at the beginning
of the camp year the strokes
were appointed by the faculty. As
soon as a stroke was named, he had
the power of appointing his sub-stroke,
or second in command of the crew, on
the principle that as he was responsible
for all the sub-stroke did, it was
but fair he should have his choice.

The crews did all the routine work
of the camp, three being on duty every
245
day and one off. These three were the
kitchen crew, which supplied the cook’s
boy to prepare vegetables and run errands,
and which cleaned all the pots,
pans, and kitchen utensils; the police
crew, which cleaned the lamps, swept
the rooms, and removed all litter from
the grounds; and the dish crew, which
washed all the larger dishes used on
the table, as well as the plate, cup,
knife, fork, and spoon of any guest for
the first three days of his stay on the
island. After that the guest did his
own work. The dish crew supplied
the inspector of dishes—generally the
sub-stroke—and visitors, I remember,
got useful lessons on what constituted
cleanliness as they stood meekly before
him. It was safe to say that any article
passing inspection was in a condition
to be used again. Each crew in
turn became kitchen, police, and dish,
during three days, and on the fourth,
the off crew. This was expected to do
any work outside of the regular duties
of the day, such as manning a boat for
visitors, handling express matter or
supplies, or, in short, anything not
done by the others. The milk boat
was manned by the kitchen crew, and
the mail boat by the police. Practically
speaking, each crew worked about
five hours a day.

It was a cardinal principle in Camp
Chocorua that the boys should govern
the boys. The strokes were to all intents
and purposes supreme over their
crews, and under no circumstances did
a member of the faculty give an order
to a member of a crew. The order was
given to the stroke or sub-stroke in
command, and he carried it out as he
saw fit. The stroke was expected not
only to rule his crew and see they did
the work, he must also set them an
example by doing as much or more
than any one of them. In point of fact,
the stroke and sub-stroke were generally
the two most efficient boys in a
crew. But in such a system as this,
that a member of a crew might be disobedient,
or a stroke might be tyrannical,
was not lost sight of. The
stroke had no power to punish, but he
could, were his orders disobeyed, direct
a boy to report to the faculty. On the
other hand, although the presence of
a member of the faculty prevented any
open bullying, it was within the power
of a stroke to “work” a boy, and that
boy had an appeal to the faculty. As
in Camp Chocorua in proportion to the
power was the responsibility, the appeal
was a much more serious thing
than the report. When the latter was
made by order of a stroke, the boy
might be reprimanded, given a good
talking, or be shifted into another crew.
In extreme cases he might be declared
an Incapable—than which nothing was
246
more detested. If it were found that
a boy could not get along with any
stroke he might be sent home, because
this meant he refused to submit to the
discipline of the camp.

The position of stroke was the most
sought for in Camp Chocorua. It was
understood the stroke had to get the
work done perfectly, rule his crew
justly and without friction, and personally
be a model of a camp boy. If he
failed in either of these, the inference
was obvious—he was unfit for the
position; the faculty had made a mistake
in putting him into it. If a complaint
of tyranny was proved, there
was but one thing to do—the stroke was
reduced in rank. He lost all the privileges
of his position, and in the eyes
of all, men and boys alike, he was disgraced;
he was officially declared to be
unfit to govern others. It is difficult to
find among the possible experiences of
men anything equal in severity, and
the boys in the camp dreaded such
punishment as they dreaded nothing
else. It was bad enough when a sub-stroke
was reduced, but to a stroke
it was terrible. The system, however,
was in itself almost enough to prevent
this punishment. A stroke was expected
to keep his crew happy and contented,
and there were keen eyes watching
him all the while, and kindly men
ready to give a hint.

Under its curious double government
by faculty and boys, Camp Chocorua
prospered
and grew. The
personal and
routine work
was done, the
boys played
baseball or tennis,
they swam
and dived, and
went sailing,
rowing and paddling.
No ambition
was greater
in the mind of a
camp boy than
that of owning
a canoe, and as
many of them
were not rich
enough to buy,
the boat-yard was established in the
cove. Here was the carpenter shop,
with a full set of tools and a bench, and
outside its open door were the ways on
which the canoes were built. At one
time the yard was full of the pretty little
boats in all stages, from the keel
with its newly joined ribs to the completed
canoe on whose canvas cover
the paint was slowly drying. Exceedingly
good canoe builders some of the
boys turned out to be, and their models
were not only fast but safe. Here, too,
was the floor on which they cut their
sails, or sat and talked as they stitched
in the leach lines or fastened the reef
points in place. Many of the canoes
were the work of their owners’ hands in
every part—hull, paddle, sails, and rigging.
When the fleet came in, paddling
in open order, I never saw anything
prettier in my life than the white
hulls gliding so easily over the placid
water, the boys singing and keeping
stroke, while beyond lay the green
islands, casting the long shadows from
their trees under the setting sun. It
was in this yard that the great flatboat
was built in which the whole camp
moved about the lake, ten oars on a
side, and every boy tugging for all he
knew. An unwieldy craft, in which one
earned his passage. It was in this
yard, too, that the best canoe designers
earned much money from their less
skilful comrades.

The financial system of Camp Chocorua
247
was as odd, when one
thinks of it as applied to boys
from eight to fourteen years,
as were many other things
about the place. Each boy
had an allowance of twenty-five
cents a week paid by the
camp, and no boy, no matter
what the wealth of his parents,
was allowed to bring
money given him to the camp.
His outfit might include fishing-tackle,
but a canoe was
barred. If, as was generally
the case, he wanted more
money than his allowance, he could
get it by working during his own
time. While the boys did the routine
work of the camp as a part of their
duty, they had nothing to do with permanent
improvements, yet there were
many of these made during the nine
years. These were paid for by the
camp, and it was a cardinal principle
that when work of this kind was to be
done, the boys should earn the money
if they chose. Out of this rose the
system of contracts. The work to be
done was announced beforehand, and
then sold to the lowest bidder, who was
required to sign a contract. This was
printed in legal form, with the camp as
party of the first part, and the contractor
as party of the second, the price to
be paid and the time being duly entered.
The book of contracts is one of the
most curious things to study. One of
the pages reads “building one yard on
the chapel path to grade,” price five
cents, and time one week. “Removing
a stump in front of the office and filling
the hole,” is another, price twenty-five
cents. Some of the contracts were
taken by firms and others by companies.
“The Goodwill Contract
Company” takes a contract to do the
washing of the camp, and the president’s
signature is affixed. If a contract was
performed, the price was credited to the
contractor in the bank. It might be
that, owing to circumstances, the time
was extended, or the contract might be
forfeited for non-performance. In the
latter case it was sold again to the
248
lowest bidder, and the difference—if
any—between the original contract
price and the sum charged to finish
the work was charged to the contractor.
It was very rarely that an old camp boy
either underestimated the amount of
work necessary or the time required,
and the forfeitures were for the most
part among the new boys. They
learned quickly, however. Under this
contract system the paths were made,
the wharf built, and, in fact, the majority
of the permanent improvements carried
out. The contracts were not always
with the camp. The boys made them
with each other, as in the building of
canoes, and as the boys had no power
to put up a forfeited contract at auction,
the courts became necessary. The
camp, the men or the boys were all
alike subordinate to the courts; either
could sue or be sued, and each was
bound by the result.

In the court of first instance one
of the faculty presided as judge, and
there might or might not be a jury. The
parties to the cause could argue their
own cases, or they could appear by
counsel chosen from the boys or the
faculty. In case plaintiff or defendant
chose, he could appeal from the decision,
providing he deposited a check
for the full amount of damages and
costs. The Appellate Court consisted
of a majority of the members of the
faculty—not less than three—and in
this there was no jury. It must be
acknowledged that in appeal cases the
judges took cognizance of the facts as
well as the law. But the law of the
camp was so well known to every boy
there, and it was so simple, that no
boy could fail to see the justice of the
decision. It must be remembered when
these courts are considered that to
the boys they were very real. It cost
five cents to bring a suit, and fifteen
for an appeal, and the sums sued for
were lost or won in reality. The costs
went to the officers
of the court,
excluding the
judges, who
served for honor.
If counsel were
employed they
had to be paid,
unless they volunteered,
and it
came to be naturally
understood
that a plaintiff
or defendant in
the wrong could
not get volunteer
counsel. The
verdict—when
there was a jury—was
that of the
boys themselves;
they condemned
249
or approved of what other boys had
done. As the boys were trusted to rule
each other, so they were the guardians
of each other’s rights, while the power
of appeal made it impossible that any
wave of temporary unpopularity should
bring injustice to any boy. Camp
Chocorua was builded on this idea of
the boys managing themselves, but
there was ever present the superior
authority to prevent wrong being done,
and the very existence of this authority
made it rarely called on.

The keenness in business of these
boys is well illustrated by the story of
the Soda-Water Trust. Whenever the
boys went to the store in Holderness
they generally bought soda-water.
This went on until some one suggested
the apparatus could be bought and the
soda-water made in the camp. Two
firms—one of three boys and the other
of two—each firm having a bank account
large enough to purchase the
apparatus and supplies, were formed
at once. But the privileges or monopolies
in the camp were always sold
for the benefit of the Charity Fund,
250
and it was promptly announced the
soda-water franchise would be put up
at auction. The two firms were rich,
but they were not willing to enter a
contest of this kind. The members
got together and talked matters over
at length, finally resolving to form a
trust. When the time came the trust
bid one cent for the franchise, and
there being no other bid it was sold at
this price. When their apparatus came
the trust did a rushing business.

In the Camp Chocorua bank, each
man and boy had an account. Payments
of all kinds were made by check.
The allowance was added to the account
each week, and as the boys made
money the credits grew larger. At the
end of the camp season the depositor
could either draw out his balance or
have it carried over to the next summer.
During the winter he was allowed
to earn money by work, provided he
received no more for it than would
have been paid to anyone else, and
this money could be added to the bank
account. One boy brought nine dollars
and seventy-five cents as the result
of shovelling snow, but the canoe his
father gave him could only be kept
when he showed himself able to pay
for it. This he could only do by borrowing
from the bank the necessary
balance; but his credit was good, and
the summer was not half over before
he had paid back the loan. I have
often laughed when I have thought of
the feeling with which that father must
have looked on his son’s check, and
realized what it meant. If the boys in
Camp Chocorua learned anything, they
learned not to be ashamed of labor in
any form. The dignity of work was
silently taught them, even as they were
taught to expect the tangible rewards.

It was towards the middle of the
second term of the camp that the
sports took place. For days before,
the boys were at work cleaning the
camp up, and the cooks—two of the
251
boys—were busy getting the lunch
ready. To the sports all the friends
and relations of the boys were invited,
and there were usually many grown
people present. There was a game at
baseball, some sets at tennis; there
were sailing, rowing, and paddling
matches, swimming and diving contests,
foot races, and the like. The
prizes were simple enough, bits of ribbons
with the name of the camp, the
contest, and the date painted on, yet
they were valued very highly. Splendid
work the boys did in these sports,
and conclusive was the evidence of
their thorough training during the
summer. Those who attended the
sports once were always glad to come
again, for long as the days were, they
were filled with fun and frolic. In the
evening the boys and their visitors
gathered around the great fireplace in
the dormitory building, and there, in
the light of the camp fire, joined in the
camp songs. The last song of all was
“The Battle Hymn of the Republic,”
the verses being sung as a solo, and the
chorus by everyone present; and it was
with the grand old melody still ringing
in their ears that the guests took the
boats which carried them home.

There was one prize awarded at the
sports which might come to any boy.
This was the “C. C.” pin in silver.
Those who won it were the boys who
had in their own way shown themselves
to have got the greatest good
out of the camp, and who had done the
most good to others. The pins were
not common; two or three, perhaps,
were given in a summer, and sometimes
none at all. It is most difficult
to define the conditions under which
the pin was given; it came as the result
of a unanimous feeling in the faculty
that it had been won, rather than
as the result of rules obeyed. A conscious
effort to win it was enough to
prevent success. The boy had to show
the manliness, justice, truth, conscientiousness
in him, not for reward, but
because he had them in him; and then
the reward, or rather the recognition,
came. Intrinsically these little pins
252
are worth nothing; but those who
have them value them as they value
few things, and they are right.

The cruise which marked the end
of the summer’s camp life was one of
the most picturesque things imaginable.
An ox-cart with four oxen carried the
blankets, dishes, and stores; Porgus,
the great, slobbering bloodhound, was
fastened to the rear axle, the Infant—the
youngest boy in camp—mounted
the donkey, and with faculty and boys
on foot, the camp set out. The routes
taken during the nine cruises included
all the best known roads in the White
Mountains. Generally, those boys
who wished to made up a separate party,
and climbed some one of the great
peaks, while the rest confined themselves
to lower levels. At night they
all slept in some barn. The routine
work of the cooks and crews went on
as usual, and the whole thing was pick-nicking
on a grand scale. Sometimes
the ox-cart would stall, or the oxen be
unable to haul it up a hill, and then the
rope was fastened on, and the whole
camp toiled on and pulled. It was an
experience to pass them at this time, to
listen to the orders of the strokes, to
hear the chaff flying back and forward,
and to watch the crowd, all clad in
gray knickerbockers and jackets, gray
stockings and flannel shirts, and wearing
the scarlet knit Scotch caps which
completed the camp uniform.

There is a story about Porgus, the
big bloodhound, which is worth telling.
When they first got him everyone supposed
he was exceedingly fierce, and,
lest he should bite, he was tied up on
another island, and his food taken to
him twice a day. Suddenly, one day,
Porgus was seen swimming towards
Chocorua, and, the alarm being given,
everyone except the man who knew
him took refuge in the house. The
dog was taken back and tied up, but
as he could gain nothing by howling
he broke away once more. The fact
of the matter was, that Porgus was
lonely, and that so far from being
253
fierce, he was one of the most good-natured
beasts in the world. This
having been found out, he was added
to the list of camp pets. These at
various times included a flying squirrel
that had a habit of jumping on your
shoulder as you passed his tree; a black
sheep called Billy, who learned to butt
anyone in the neighborhood; the donkey,
and the kyuse—the latter a mustang
pony. All of these in their time
were important members of the camp.
Old Captain Cairns, too, a man who
lived alone in a most curious house on
one of the islands, was one of the
greatest friends of the boys, and always
came to the sports. The captain was
a curiosity in his way, and he never
got tired of telling yarns about the
places he had been to or the people he
had seen.

The story of Camp Chocorua, of the
healthy, open-air life, of the high standards
so rigidly lived up to, of the fun
they had, of the work they did, and of
the lessons in manliness they so unconsciously
learned, is really written in the
memories of the boys who, during those
nine summers, spent their time on that
little island. This article is but a brief
account of the methods through which
so much was done. The place now belongs
to the founder, and a custodian is
kept there to look after it. The buildings
are open to the old camp boys,
and many of them spend their vacation
time there. For the most part, they
are men in the world now, but none
the less do they look back at the camp
with pleasant memories, feeling and
realizing, as they never did then, all that
254
the camp life meant to them. Everything
is ready for them; they have but
to hang up the great Chinese gong on
which the hours were struck, and the
camp is open. They can sail, row, and
swim, and at night, sitting before the
“camp fire,” they can bring back the
days when they were boys; they can
tell their stories of the contracts and
the trials, the sports and the cruises;
they can laugh over half-forgotten
jokes, or speak in lower tones of the
boys who are now dead. For although
Camp Chocorua has ceased to be, Camp
Chocorua lives in the memories of the
camp boys.

The Friday before Booth was taken
ill, I spent two or three hours with
him in his rooms at the Players’ Club,
and while there it occurred to me that a
picture, not of the actor merely, but of
the man whom I had known for more
than thirty years, in the glow of youth
and the prime of manhood, down to the
weary invalid, stricken before his time,
in the characters that were not assumed—of
husband, father, brother,
son, and friend—would have an interest
far beyond any critical analysis of
his performances or historical account
of his engagements. He did not object
to my painting him as I had known
him in the most intimate relations of
his life—an actor is always used to
being described and criticised—and he
gave me incidents and information, all
that I sought. Thus in what I have to
say there will be nothing second-hand,
nothing that he has not himself told
me at one time or another, or that I
have not observed in the friendship
of a lifetime.

I first met him when he was twenty-three,
and I only twenty-five years
old, and from that time till his marriage
and my own entrance into the
army we were as intimate as it is possible
for two young men to be. I have
the right, therefore, to tell what I shall
unfold, for he gave it to me, and I have
a further right in the certainty that
nothing I can tell will depreciate his
fame. If I portray all that I know, no
one who reads will fail to think more
highly and tenderly of the nature that
was cloaked under Richard and Iago,
suggested perhaps by points in Othello
and Lear, but only really indicated
in Hamlet, the melancholy, moody,
dreamy, filial, tender Dane.

He was born in 1833, in the night of
the historical meteoric display—the
“star-shower,” he always called it.
His father was a famous actor in the
parts which the son so often played.
I never saw the elder, but others assured
me he possessed a tragic genius
perhaps at times even more tremendous
than that of the Booth I knew. He
was an Englishman, and the rival of
Edmund Kean. The family tradition
is that he was driven from London by
a cabal of Kean’s admirers, and came
to America in 1821, almost immediately
after his marriage.

Junius Brutus Booth must have been
an extraordinary person off the stage;
erratic almost to insanity, gloomy,
given to fits of passion, but full of
warm affections; a man with a temper
almost uncontrollable, yet more often
morose than violent, who refused to
play, even when announced, unless he
was in the vein, and walked the streets
for hours after acting, and sometimes
before. His wife for years accompanied
him to the theatre, acting as dresser,
and Edwin was taken with them. He
thus received his first impressions of
the stage when he was three or four
years old. The wife remained in the
dressing-room during the play, and
when the child grew sleepy he was put
to bed in a chest of drawers that held
his father’s wardrobe. If he wakened
he had the theatrical wigs and paint-pots
for his toys. A few years later he
took his mother’s place and dressed
his father for the stage.

There were several children, and three
257
of the sons became actors. I asked
him whether he was the favorite, but
he said no: his father always preferred
John Wilkes. Yet Edwin had the
greatest influence with the tragedian
when the gloomy fits came on, and followed
him many a night through the
streets to see that he got no harm. He
could prevail on him to act when no
other could, and often told me of his
attempts to direct their wanderings so
that they might reach the stage-door
in time. He himself was melancholy
and moody, and lived very much in the
imagination. It must have been a
strange spectacle—this erratic genius
and his anxious child, both slightly
formed, with the same wonderful piercing
eyes, stumbling about the streets
at dark, the boy trying to persuade the
father, sometimes succeeding, sometimes
failing altogether.

The story of Edwin’s first appearance
on any stage has often been told. It
was as Tressel to his father’s Richard
III. He was not yet sixteen and received
no encouragement nor sign of
approval from his strangely constituted
parent, but a little later the two were
walking in Broadway, when they met a
Mr. Conway, an English actor well
known to play-goers of the last generation.
Booth stopped to talk, and
Conway, who was pompous in speech,
inquired rather elaborately:

“Upon which of your sons do you
intend to confer your mantle?”

The great player did not reply in
words, but laid his hand on Edwin’s
head with a sort of solemnity, perhaps
suggested by Conway’s tone. The lad
attached little significance to the action
at the moment, but afterward felt certain
that his father meant all that the
gesture implied. I asked him how old
he was when this occurred. “Only a
stripling,” he said, “about as high as
the top of that candle,” and he pointed
to the mantelpiece.

“Why,” I exclaimed, “you are not
as high as that now.”

“Ah! but I wore a hat,” he replied;
“and my father had to reach up to
put his hand on me. I was taller than
he.”

He first played Richard III. at the
old Chatham Street Theatre in New
York, as a substitute for his father,
who either could not be found or refused
to act. When the manager
learned this fact he said to Edwin:
“Then you must play Richard.”
The lad, just seventeen, was naturally
unwilling, but he knew the text from
having heard his father so often in the
part, and their figures were not unlike.
The assistants dressed him in his
father’s clothes, and he made up his
face as like as possible to the great
actor in Richard III. The audience
was surprised when he appeared, but
allowed him to go on, and he must
have played with a certain degree of
power, for he was called out at the end
of the first act, and went through the
entire exacting tragedy. When the
play was over he hastened home and
found his father, who offered neither
comment nor inquiry. In this way the
strange pair went on, leading a life as
curious as any of the mimic ones they
portrayed on the stage; for Edwin
now played at times, even in prominent
parts, but made no especial mark,
being dwarfed, of course, by his father’s
superlative ability.

In 1852 they went to California, but
the wayward elder remained only a few
months, then suddenly returned to the
Atlantic States, leaving Edwin behind
with his brother Junius, also an actor
of some prominence. The brothers
played together occasionally, but the
times were rough and their success was
small. Edwin was soon reduced to the
hard straits of a strolling player’s
life: borrowing a few dollars now and
then, walking hungry through mountain
snows, living sometimes in a
ranch, sometimes on the pittance of
a stock-actor’s salary, but sometimes
making a hit, drawing crowded houses
and filling his purse for a while.

In November, 1852, he got word of
the death of his father, a terrible blow
to him, whose relations with the great
actor were so peculiar. Throughout
his life he retained the liveliest memories
of his father’s character and presence.
He liked to talk of him, and
spent hours with me describing the
peculiarities that left so profound an
impression on him. But though he saw
their strangeness, the reverent tone in
258
which he told of them was always
marked.

Doubtless he inherited the dramatic
genius and some of the temperament
of his parent. He was not so wildly
passionate on the stage, and his temper
was never so uncontrollable, but his
brooding melancholy, the sensitiveness
of his nature, the depth of his affections,
the quaint humor so strange in a
tragic actor, his vivid imagination—many,
indeed, of his especial gifts
and faults—were unquestionably transmitted
with his blood by him who was
at once the author of his physical being
and the begetter of his genius. The
likeness extended to feature and gesture.
I have a picture of the father
given me by the son, which might easily
be taken for one of Edwin in Richard
III.; and older play-goers always declared
that in the great tragic scenes
the son recalled, in tone and look and
power, the peculiar magnetic quality
that made the elder so remarkable. I
have thought sometimes that the awful
bursts of passion of his younger days
were more effective even than the elaborate
manner of his later art. He
told me more than once that his life-long
friend and comrade, Joseph Jefferson,
often warned him against refining
away his power, and thought
the classic finish hardly compensated
for the natural intensity which it replaced.

His feeling for his father certainly
added to the power of his performance
of Hamlet. His greatest scenes
in this tragedy were those with the
ghost, and when Booth addressed the
shade, and exclaimed:

there was a pathos in the word
“father” which those who ever heard
him utter it must recall. He dropped
on one knee as he spoke it, and
bowed his head, not in terror, but in
awe and love, and tender memory of
the past; he had a feeling that he was
actually in the presence of that weird
shade whom he had known on earth,
and he was not afraid.

The fatherless son remained in California,
playing with varied success,
sometimes as leading-man with Miss
Heron, Laura Keene, or Mrs. Forrest
Sinclair, sometimes as a star, sometimes
in the stock company of those
days, taking any part to which he was
assigned. The experience was doubtless
valuable to him, and he acknowledged
that he owed to it much of his
ease on the stage, his familiarity with
the business, his self-possession under
all circumstances, and his readiness in
emergencies.

During his stay on the Pacific Coast
he once visited the Sandwich Islands,
and with an impromptu company gave
a few performances. He had great
trouble in announcing his plays, for
the boys who were employed to post
the bills ate up all the paste; but the
houses were full, and the audience included
the king. The court, however,
was in mourning, and His Majesty
could not be seen in front, so a chair
was draped with theatrical robes behind
the scenes, and there the real
king applauded the mimic one in “Richard
III.” The throne was needed for
the coronation scene, and Kamehameha
kindly abdicated for that occasion.
In 1851 young Booth, as he was now
called, returned to the Eastern States
and played in Baltimore, Richmond,
Boston—everywhere with great success.
He was at once recognized as
the dramatic descendant of his father,
and the future head of the American
stage.

In May, 1857, he entered upon his
first engagement in New York, and on
one of the earlier nights I strolled into
the theatre while he was playing
Richard III. I had seen his name in
the bills, but he was heralded as the
“Hope of the Living Drama,” and I
had no great expectations from such
an announcement. But I was struck
at once with his dramatic fire, his
grace, his expressive eye and mobile
mouth, his natural elocution, and the
decided genius he displayed. I remember
even now, after the lapse of
thirty-six years, the prodigious effect
in the fourth act, when Richard exclaims:

His whole face and form were ablaze
with expression—literally transfigured;
and his voice embodied a majestic terrible
rage that electrified the listeners.
Men rose in all parts of the house and
shouted with delight. I had seen Rachel
and Forrest and Cushman and
Grisi then, and I have seen Bernhardt
and Irving and Salvini and Ristori
since, but I never saw or heard on the
stage anything more tremendous than
the picture he presented and the passion
he portrayed in his youth in
Richard III.

I went the next night and the next,
and found the fascination increase. I
saw him in Petruchio, Brutus, Hamlet,
Richelieu, Lear, Iago, Claude Melnotte,
Sir Giles Overreach, Romeo,
and Pescara. He was uneven and fitful
in everything, but in every part he
played he did something that no other
actor could rival. His youth, too, had
a charm; the very crudeness of his
acting gave a certain interest—it left
room for anticipation. I was very
much attracted by the stage at that
time, so I called on young Booth and
told him what I thought of his acting.
He had plenty of admirers, but my
enthusiasm seemed to touch him, and
we struck up a friendship at once. At
the end of a week he consented to
spend Sunday with me; and from that
time dated a peculiar intimacy. I had
a good deal of leisure and could pass
my days as well as nights in his company,
and I knew no greater pleasure
than he gave me, either on or off the
stage. He was not then a finished
scholar, nor by any means the great
artist that he afterward became, and I
was anxious that he should be both.
I used to hunt up books and pictures
about the stage, the finest criticisms,
the works that illustrated his scenes,
the biographies of great actors, and we
studied them together. We visited the
Astor Library and the Society Library
to verify costumes, and every picture
or picture-gallery in New York, public
or private, that was accessible. He
discussed his parts with me, and with
the conceit of youth I often ventured
to differ with him on points in his art
where he should have been an authority.
Often we quarrelled all day
about an interpretation or a rendering,
and I went to the theatre at night to
be convinced that he was right and I
was wrong. Sometimes he gave me a
private box, and I took notes of the
performance, and of the criticisms or
changes that occurred to me. Next
day we went over them together, and
at night he would play Richard or
Iago according to my suggestions—perhaps
as much to gratify me as because
he thought my judgment correct.

Oftener I went to his dressing-room.
It was very fascinating to watch the
face of the character he was to play
grow and vary beneath his hand.
The character itself seemed to grow at
the same time. When we entered at
the stage door he was my friend—“Ned,”
I always called him; but as
the paint and the cotton eyebrows, the
wig and the tights, were put on, the
stage personage appeared; and when
Hamlet or Romeo was ready his manner
assumed all the grace and dignity
of the Prince or the Montagu. After
he had played a scene or two the
transformation was complete, and
lasted till the stage clothes were taken
off.

How completely he personated the
characters that he assumed I can testify
from comparison with what may
be called his originals, the actual Hotspurs
and Hamlets, the soldiers and
princes, of the real world. One night
in Louisiana before a battle I was with
General T. W. Sherman while he was
giving orders to his officers and aides-de-camp.
It was nearly midnight, and
there was to be an attack at dawn.
First came in one messenger, then another,
next the leader of the advance,
last the captain of the reserves. The
night was warm and the tent was
thrown open; a candle burned on a
table within, while the general paced
up and down in the darkness outside.
There was a hush and a bustle combined,
a subdued intensity and a dramatic
haste, as the commander gave his
different orders and received his successive
subordinates, that brought to
my mind at the moment the tent scene
in “Richard III.” I thought, just then,
“How like all this is to what I have
260
seen on the stage.” Yet Booth had
never witnessed actual war.

In the same way in Europe: I often
thought of him when princes and sovereigns
were holding levees or processions,
receiving homage or conferring
honors; no Guelph or Bourbon of
them all went through his part with
greater dignity or grace than the young
American who had never been at court;
and sometimes the magic of genius
arrayed him in a majesty which all the
reality of their grandeur could not
inspire.

There was one character, however,
that he could not play—the lover.
He was the poorest of Romeos, and
he knew it. He looked the part, of
course, in his youth; the women always
wanted to see him play it, and
the actresses all wanted to be Juliet;
but there was a lack of tenderness in
his eye, and of ardor in his tone; even
the gestures were tame. He was not
anxious or persuasive enough; he was
too confident, or too indifferent. The
only point in the play where he rose
to his usual level was in the fight with
Tybalt; but then there was killing to
be done, and this was passion of a different
sort—this was tragedy. Then
he became inspired, and looked for
a moment like one of the demi-gods
in Homer’s battles. But in the scenes
with the friar and with Juliet, even in
the balcony scene, he was comparatively
spiritless. Whether he was not
actually a good lover, or whether he
felt a certain delicacy about love-making
in public, the fact remains that he
was always more effective in parts that
represent harsh or violent emotions
than in tender ones with women.

So, too, though he had a keen sense
of humor, and was full of jokes and
funny stories off the stage, and told
them with a genuine comic power, he
could not act a comic part. I once
saw him in “Little Toddlekins,” in
white trousers and a high hat, and I
never wanted to see him in farce again.
Even in high comedy he was not so
interesting as in tragedy. Benedick
himself was not to his taste, and his
nearest approach to success in comedy
was as Don Cæsar de Bazan; but
there the fascination was in his superb
appearance and irresistible grace quite
as much as in dramatic power. His
Don Cæsar, however, was a wonderful
picture, an embodied romance. He
delighted in the caustic speeches of
Shylock or Hamlet, or the irony of
Iago, but these can hardly be called
comedy. His Petruchio was a game of
romps; but it was Donatello romping
with Miriam, or Bacchus with Ariadne.

Yet, I repeat, he was bubbling over
with a grim sort of humor in real life,
like that which Shakespeare sprinkles
over his tragedies. Behind the scenes
he would mock and gibe at himself,
had odd remarks to make about his
face or his costume, and was alive with
waggeries and witticisms. I once pulled
aside his robes in Richelieu as he
sat smoking between the acts, and he
shrank back and screamed, “How dare
you, sir?” in a shrill tone, exactly like
a woman. The next moment he was
the stately cardinal again.

I was very anxious that Booth should
receive a social recognition. Thirty
years ago actors had not overleaped
the barriers which had existed for centuries,
to anything like the extent we
know at present, and I wanted him to
meet people of distinction, to hold the
position which Garrick once occupied
in England; but he hardly shared my
ambition for him. If people wanted
him they had to seek him, and even
then were not sure of getting him.
Social attentions sometimes gratified,
but quite as often bored him. But
his genius was so positive and so attractive,
that the most prominent people
all over the country courted his
society. I had the pleasure of putting
up his name at the Century Club, where
he was more than cordially welcomed.
The wits, the scholars, artists, authors,
all were glad to know the man who
had given them so refined a pleasure.
Bancroft, Bryant, Curtis, and their families,
Sumner, Mrs. Ward Howe, men
and women of the first social position,
as well as cultivation, were his personal
friends, even at that early day. But
he seemed indifferent to his fame.

He had no trace of personal vanity.
He said to me once he only cared for
his good looks as the tools of his trade.
Hundreds of women flung themselves
261
at him in those days; they sent him
notes in verse and prose, flowers, presents
of jewels, shawls, feathers, to wear
on the stage; they asked for appointments;
they invited him to their
houses, they offered to go to his; but
he cared nothing for any of them.
Sometimes they amused, but more often
disgusted him. More than once he
saved some foolish child from what
might have been disgrace, and sent her
home to her family. And he never injured
a pure woman in his life. Off the
stage he had no care for his looks;
even in his youth his dress was more
than plain; he was positively indifferent
to his appearance.

He always continued to have fits of
sadness and silence; a feeling that evil
was hanging over him, that he could
not come to good. These moods would
pass, but would return. Still, when he
inclined to talk he was profoundly interesting.
He had a wonderful fund
of stories, and recollected the most
minute and the most salient circumstances,
showing the actor’s power of
observation. He studied character incessantly;
not deliberately, but because
he could not help seeing peculiar
traits of character or peculiar circumstances.
He acted all his stories, comic
or tragic, without meaning to do it,
and often just as well off as on the
stage. I used to get him to make the
faces he did on the stage, to look like
Richelieu in the “curse of Rome,” or
Richard in “What do they in the
North?” But it was only when he was
in a very good humor that he would do
this. Once or twice he painted his
face to assume his father’s appearance.

But he hated to act off the stage,
and even at rehearsal seldom raised
his voice above the conversational
tone, or struck an attitude. I often
went to rehearsal with him and wondered
at the calmness of his tones when
he struck down Iago, or smothered
Desdemona. One morning in Buffalo
I missed him when we started, and
followed him to the theatre; I entered
at the stage door and went to the
wings, looking for him. It was a minute
or two before I recognized him,
with a high hat and a cane, reciting
passages from “Macbeth.” But that
night he was more tremendous than
ever. His first entrance in the play
he made by leaping from the rocks, as
he exclaimed, “So foul and fair a day
I have not seen”; and it was the very
Highland thane that came upon the
scene—full of his future dignity and
oppressed by the feeling of Fate that
fills this tragedy as it does the plays
of Euripides. That feeling, indeed,
almost illustrates the depression that
settled over his nature at intervals, and
seemed a premonition of some awful
future. It was appalling to witness,
and must have been still more appalling
to endure. Doubtless he inherited it
from his father. It was like a veil
that shrouded him from other mortals,
and he walked behind it, apart. He
strove to describe his emotions at such
times to me, for he wanted me to know
all he felt; but the effort was like those
sad ones of his later days, when he
attempted to utter words and gave
only inarticulate sounds. I cannot
portray him unless I make this sadness
apparent; it was so strange and
weird.

And yet this introspective, distant
man, so old when he was young, so
cold though gifted with every personal
charm—was a warmly affectionate son,
devoted to his mother, and generous to
his family; he lived with his mother
and sister for years, and provided
for them after his marriage; he lent
money not only to his brothers, but to
hosts of friends, actors and others,
for his profession brought him in
large sums, and he gave away much
in charity, especially to actors. His
friendships, though steadfast, were not
usually ardent or demonstrative. He
who was gifted with such wonderful
power to express the emotions of
others was often unable or unwilling
to give utterance to his own. When
he was called out after the play, the
man who had just enthralled an
audience as Richard or Othello, or
hurled the imprecations of Richelieu
or Lear, stood modest and shrinking,
only able to stammer a few words of
thanks in his own person, on the very
boards where he was most at home.

He was not a good hater; when he
was injured he felt it keenly, and I am
262
not sure that he ever forgave a wrong,
but the memory of it was not always
keen, and I doubt if he ever revenged
himself—he relented when it came to
inflicting pain. In his business relations
he more than once fell into foul hands,
and he had himself little business
faculty; but he was slow in making
reprisals, even if opportunity offered.
For he had a noble, gentle nature; I
never knew him do a mean or vulgar
thing. He was no backbiter; he refrained,
even with me, from hostile
criticism of other actors. I sometimes
drew out opinions that were not favorable,
but he never offered them, and
always seemed to utter them unwillingly,
as if he would not refuse to tell
me what he thought, and yet was loath
to speak severely of a brother artist.

No one ever charged him with desertion
of a friend or backwardness in
time of need; and I have known of
sacrifices that he made for others,
greater than most men are capable of.
He submitted to much from some
members of his family, because he
deemed it his duty, or from affectionate
pity, and endured even cruel wrongs
rather than resent them publicly. He
was most averse to bringing his private
affairs before the world, and disliked to
extend the publicity of the stage to his
every-day life. His friendships in his
youth were almost confined to members
of his own profession. Joseph Jefferson,
and John Sleeper Clarke, who married
his sister, were always very close to him,
and in later years, Barrett. In time,
however, he had many associates among
artists and cultivated men, who naturally
sought his company, and some of
these he regarded as personal friends.[1]

I once visited with him the place
where he was born. It was a farmhouse
twenty-five or thirty miles from
Baltimore. We drove out in a one-horse
vehicle, and he was Phaëton.
The house was partly furnished but
unoccupied, and an old negro in an
outbuilding gave us the keys. His
father’s library remained, and a part
of his stage wardrobe, and we spent
hours ransacking them both, studying
old play-bills, even English ones of
his father, examining rare copies of
Shakespeare, and trying on trappings
of Shylock or Lear. I made him put
on a wig and act the parts for a single
auditor. He was very complaisant
that day, or night rather, for we sat
up till late into the morning, and then
made beds out of Cæsar’s mantle and
Macbeth’s robes. He picked out three
volumes of Shakespeare which he had
used in playing, full of his own stage
directions written in, and variations of
the text, and gave them to me as a
memento of the visit, inscribing some
lines from one of the sonnets. It
was Verplanck’s illustrated edition,
and some of the plates were marked:
“Form this picture.” I remember
afterward noticing that he made the
picture on the stage.

Many a night in those days we sat
together till morning, for he had the
actor’s habit of turning night into day.
Playing till nearly midnight, and supping
still later, the excitement of the
stage kept him awake afterward, and
he never wanted to go to bed. He
was never more animated in thought
and look and gesture than after acting.
Of course, he rose late, and during an
engagement his only leisure hours were
one or two in the afternoon; for in
those early days he went regularly to
rehearsal. That was before the era of
long runs, and he played a range of
parts in each engagement, changing
them nearly every night. He sometimes
slept after his early dinner, so as
to be refreshed and ready for evening.

Then there were the painters and
sculptors and photographers, always
one or two in every town, who wanted
to take him, either in a popular part, or
“in his habit as he lived.” He never
dined out while he was playing, except
on Sundays, and a walk or a drive was
almost his only exercise or amusement;
there was not time for more; he had
to reserve himself for the night. For
he had to work when other men played;
his work was their amusement. It was
a life utterly unlike that of other men,
and it is not strange that his character
was unlike theirs. He was exposed to
263
the temptations of youth, and he had
his peculiar faults, but no gross vices,
and he did no harm or wrong to man
or woman—ever, that I knew. Of how
many can this be said?

In 1860 he married Miss Mary Devlin,
a young actress, who retired from
the stage as soon as she became engaged
to him. She was a sweet gentle
woman, of great natural refinement, and
every way fit to be his wife. A year
before he had told me he meant to
marry, and I encouraged this intention.
I thought he would be happier, that he
needed the constant companionship and
solace of a wife’s society, though I
knew that marriage must, to a certain
extent, disturb the intimacy which I
valued and enjoyed so highly. No
man could be so intimate with two
people at once as he had been with me.
They were married at the clergyman’s
house on the afternoon of July 7. He
and I went together to the simple ceremony;
there were no other witnesses
except his wife’s sister and her husband
and John Wilkes Booth. After
it was over, Wilkes threw his arms
about Edwin’s neck and kissed him.

In a week Booth wrote to me and
wanted me to join them at Niagara.
They had a cottage on the Canada
side, and there I spent two weeks of
his honeymoon with my friend. He
was most anxious to show me that his
marriage had made no difference in his
feeling toward me, and his wife was
quite as anxious that I should perceive
none. In the autumn Booth played in
New York, and I was with him almost
as much as ever. We sat up late into
the night as of old, and Mrs. Booth was
often so good as to leave us together.
I had the pleasure of accompanying
them to distinguished houses, for Mrs.
Booth was much invited, as well as
he, and bore herself with quiet grace
and modest dignity, as “to the manner
born.” We continued our studies, too.
Mrs. Booth was as anxious as I for the
artistic success of her husband; she
and I went to the play together and
discussed his performances. Their
union was complete and their happiness
unalloyed.

But the currents of our lives ran different
ways. In 1861 I entered the
army and Booth went to England.
His success in London at this time was
not marked; he could not obtain the
theatre he wanted, and English feeling
just then was hostile to Americans.
He played only a short engagement,
and it was not until the second or third
week that he made any impression.
Then his Richelieu created a sensation,
but it was late in the season, and
he only acted a few nights afterward.
In December his only child, Edwina,
was born at Fulham, England.

He returned to America early in
1862, and in September I was passing
through New York and went to see
them. I found the same dear friend I
had known of old, with a sweet tender
woman by his side, and a child of nine
months playing on the floor. Mrs.
Booth made me remark that the little
one, creeping in its play, fell instinctively
into the attitude of Richard
III. in the terrible fight with Richmond;
and the likeness was laughable.
I left the same day for New
Orleans, happy for this glimpse at their
domestic happiness.

They took a house in Boston, and
the next year, in February, 1863, Booth
was playing in New York, having left
his wife at home because of her delicate
health. During a performance at
the Winter Garden a despatch was
handed him, summoning him to her
side. He left at the close of the play,
but before he could reach her the
dearest thing on earth to him was gone
forever. The shock almost unbalanced
his mind. His wife had been all that
a perfect wife could be to a man of his
peculiar temperament and needs. She
sustained him, encouraged him, soothed
him when the sad moods came on, and
exorcised the evil spirit absolutely. She
inspired his work, and comforted him
in weariness, trouble, or physical pain.
He wrote me, at once, the saddest letter
I ever received. He was crushed, and
saw no hope, no reason for living. The
black cloud that she had lifted was lowered
again; not even his child at first
could interest or distract him. But
he turned to me in his bereavement,
for I had known her, and I did what I
could to comfort him; at least, I could
grieve with him.

The young wife was buried at Mount
Auburn, near Boston, at a spot which
they had selected together. He built
a tomb in which both were to lie; it
was lined with brick, and when her remains
were transferred, before the coffin
was lowered Booth jumped into the
grave as Hamlet did into Ophelia’s.
He joined her there last June, after
thirty years.

In May, 1863, I was seriously wounded,
and it was his turn to solace me.
I lay in hospital for many weeks, and
he wrote me constantly. In July I
was taken to New York, and arrived
just before the riots of that year. I was
carried to Booth’s house. He and his
brother Wilkes bore me to Edwin’s
bed, which he gave up for me, and
there I was left alone with my distracted
friend. I may not disclose all
that he said in his grief, but, with his
unusual nature, it can be imagined.
He was inclined to think the spirit
near him of her who had been so much
to him in life, and I said nothing to
disturb the impression. I remained at
his house until it was possible to remove
me to the country; both he and
his brother dressed my wounds, and
tended me with the greatest care.

I saw much of him during the months
of my convalescence, and early in 1865,
when I was again taken to New York
after an attack of camp fever; Wilkes
Booth was once more at his brother’s
house. He was excessively handsome,
even physically finer than Edwin, but
less intellectual in his manliness. I
never saw him on the stage, but under
Edwin’s roof I thought him very captivating,
though not so thoroughly distinguished
as his greater brother.

Two months later came the terrible
event which plunged the nation, and
especially the Booth family, into such
awful sorrow. Edwin was playing in
Boston, but at once gave up his engagement
and returned to his home in
New York. Numbers of the most
eminent people hastened to assure him
of their sympathy and their belief
in his loyalty. He had indeed been
stanch for the Union, and the only
vote he ever cast was for Lincoln in
1864. But he was overwhelmed by
this fresh misfortune, this new cloud
that had settled on his house. His
brother Junius and his brother-in-law
were thrown into prison in Washington,
and he felt himself an object of
suspicion. I had returned to the field,
and was in Richmond when the news
reached me. I wrote to him at once,
but my letter was withheld. All letters
to him for awhile were kept back,
and I suppose especially any from
Richmond. I could not leave my post
immediately, and it was a month or
more before I reached New York,
where I went, of course, direct to him.
The first shock was over, but the old
gloom was greater than ever.

He told me he had seen nothing in
his brother to excite suspicion, and I
have always believed that the awful
act was the result of a disturbed brain.
It was so theatrical in plan and performance;
the conspiracy, the dagger,
the selection of a theatre, the brandishing
of the weapon, the cry “Sic Semper
Tyrannis” to the audience—all was
exactly what a madman brought up in
a theatre might have been expected to
conceive; a man, too, of this peculiar
family, the son of Junius Brutus Booth,
used all his life to acting tragedies.
He had not only nursed me tenderly,
a soldier wounded for the cause he
should have hated, but in all the exciting
period of the riot he said no word
that indicated sympathy with the
South. He went out daily to inquire
the news, and was indignant at the
outrages he reported; he even assisted
to shield my negro servant who remained
hidden in the cellar for nearly
a week. Two months before the end
of the war he wished me well when I
set out to rejoin Grant.

After a few months Booth returned
to the stage, and was welcomed back
with an enthusiasm which showed that
not only his genius but his nobility of
character, his elevation of thought, his
refinement of manner had all been appreciated.
In 1869 he remarried—this
time a Miss McVicker, an actress of
Chicago, whom I never saw. She left
the stage upon her marriage. In the
same year he opened Booth’s Theatre.
His pecuniary success had been very
brilliant, and he had long been ambitious
to build and control a theatre
265
where the most elevating influences of
the drama should be exemplified. It
was a beautiful tribute to his art.
Everything was done that taste and
study and care and elaborate expenditure
could accomplish, to produce the
greatest plays in the most admirable
manner; but Booth had no business
talent, and some of those with whom
he was brought into contact had a
large share of this talent, and used it
to injure or betray his interests. He
lost largely, and finally was obliged to
declare himself a bankrupt. He gave
up all he had in the world, his personal
and private property, his theatre, his
library and theatrical wardrobe, and
many treasures of his profession, and
became once more a travelling star.
His performances, however, proved
more attractive than ever; he was
soon able to repay all his creditors,
and afterward remained a man of
fortune.

Meanwhile the vicissitudes of life
had drifted us far apart. I was in
Europe officially for many years, but
in 1880 had a leave of absence. During
the month of June a public breakfast
was offered Booth at Delmonico’s by
many of the most eminent men in New
York, and I then met him for the first
time since 1867. After the breakfast I
went to his rooms, and he put his arms
around me and begged that we should
be to each other all we had ever been.
Each promised, and each kept his
word.

But he started for England a few
days afterward, and it was not till the
next year that I returned there. Then
I saw much of him. He played this
time with great success, at Irving’s
theatre. The great English actor
gave him every facility; relinquished
his house to him for a while, and treated
him with a distinguished courtesy
worthy of his own position as head of
the British stage. Irving had been in
the stock company that supported
Booth during his first English engagement,
but now they were equals, and
played on alternate nights, and sometimes
together, in Othello and Iago.
Booth’s houses were crowded with the
most cultivated and important people
in England; and his acting, despite a
certain national jealousy, was by many
pronounced superior to that of the
Englishman. Invitations came to him
from aristocratic quarters, in which
his daughter was included; but his
wife was in miserable health and unable
to go at all into the world, or even
to receive any one but her own family.
This marred the gratification at his
success, and in 1881, after lingering in
great suffering, both for herself and
those about her, the second wife of
Edwin Booth also died. I had returned
from Europe and passed the
night after her funeral in his rooms at
New York. His mother and sister also
passed away, and his daughter married,
so that he was left, in a great
degree, alone.

His profession, however, remained
to him. It was about this time that
he began those remarkable dramatic
tours with Barrett which were more
successful from a pecuniary point of
view than any other of his enterprises.
It is even said, by those competent to
pronounce, that the financial results
surpassed any known in the history of
the stage. Everywhere he was recognized
as the head of the American
theatre. His acting was ripened and
chastened by study and long experience,
by the development of his own
powers, and the opportunities he had
enjoyed of comparison with his greatest
foreign rivals. He was accepted
as the equal in America of what Garrick
had been in his palmiest days—the
peer and companion of whatever
was best in American society.

It is four or five years since he conceived
the idea of founding the Players’
Club, and, having become a man
of more than ordinary means, he was
able to gratify this ambition. He
bought and rebuilt a fine house in a
desirable position in New York, and
filled it with choice books and pictures
and relics of the stage, and then invited
men of distinction and culture to
meet actors of character and ability on
an equal footing. The club has been
eminently successful, and for several
years Booth, its founder and president,
made it his home. He had a suite
of rooms, modestly but tastefully furnished,
and among his friends and books
266
and pictures passed the last days of his
life. When he wrote the extracts from
the Shakespearian sonnets in the volume
he gave me thirty years ago, I think
he felt some consciousness of the ban
that the world then put upon his profession,
but he could not have retained
the feeling, for there was no ban applied
to him. Exclusive English aristocrats
invited him and his daughter,
and visited them in return; and Edwin
Booth voted to admit Grover
Cleveland to the Century Club, and
invited General Sherman to become a
member of the Players’.

I was very much struck, on my return
from Europe in 1881, with the dignity
and composure which years of recognition
had given to his bearing. The
glowing beauty of his youth, of course,
was gone, his features bore traces of
his own sorrows and experiences, and
besides were worn and hardened by
those terrible passions of the stage
which were for the time so real to him.
I have indeed no doubt that it was the
intense strain on brain and nerve which
his acting demanded, and not any private
grief or anxiety, that broke him
down before his time.

Years, however, had enhanced his
innate nobility. He was always reverent
to religion, and had warm friends
among the clergy of various denominations.
A Catholic priest and the Protestant
Bishop of New York were among
the first to call after his paralysis was
known. I never heard him speak disrespectfully
of sacred themes or of good
women. His character in later years
took on a softer phase; his irritability
was rarer, indeed it almost disappeared,
while the range of his friendships was
wider.

When he received a foreign actor
who came to call on him, as they all
did, or welcomed some distinguished
visitor to his club, he did it with a calm
dignity and gracious courtesy that was
very natural and yet imposing, while
his more intimate bearing when we
were alone was inexpressibly confiding
and affectionate, though more subdued
than in the earlier days.

In his acting also there was something
of the same inevitable change
that time brings to all things and all
men; but to me he always remained the
most powerful and consummate tragedian
I have ever seen. Some of the old
force may have faded, but it flashed out
at intervals in every performance with
all its ancient brilliancy.

The last time that I saw him on the
stage,

was also the last night that Barrett
ever played. The piece was “Richelieu,”
and it seemed to me that Booth
excelled himself in the finish of the
earlier scenes and in the tempest of
passion at the climax. During this engagement
I went behind the scenes as I
had used to go a quarter of a century before,
and found all the old fascination
still, subdued and softened by his more
chastened dignity. But he played only
a few times after his friend Barrett was
stricken, and then his own ailings increased.

After this I never met him out of
his own rooms but once. I called just
as he was about to try to walk, and he
asked me to go with him. He had to
be assisted to the door, and when he
reached the street I offered him my
arm. He took it and leaned heavily.
He stumbled as he walked, and it took
us half an hour to move around the
block of buildings in which the club-house
stands. Then he was tired, and
wanted to go in, and I knew that my
friend would not recover.

In his rooms at the Players’ Club I
saw my last of him. For a year or two
he seldom left them except to visit his
daughter in town or country, or perhaps
to accompany her to a play. But
he spent many hours in her society and
that of her husband and children—his
greatest solace. I fortunately was near
him during this period, and we often
passed a morning talking of our early
manhood or his later career.

But there was something inexpressibly
painful in the spectacle of him,
whose physical faculties had been so
inextricably bound up with the intellectual,
whose bodily gifts had been
the incarnation of passion and romance
and poetry, his corporal charm the fit
267
embodiment of a noble soul—to see him
decay, his powers crumble and waste
away; to see him decrepit, weary, worn,
who had been alive with expression,
captivating in bearing, majestic, terrible,
tender, by turns. Only his eyes
retained their marvellous beauty, like
a lamp burning in a deserted temple,
or the soul looking out through the
windows of that body it was soon to
leave.

Farewell! beloved spirit! Thou
hast given tens, nay hundreds of thousands
pleasure by thy genius, expressed
for them the subtlest and most delicate
thoughts and sublimest conceptions of
the greatest of poets, elevated their imaginations,
refined their fancy, charmed
their taste, subdued their moods, and
soothed their weary hours; and never
once, in all thy art, suggested an impure
or vicious thought, never stimulated
an evil desire, nor insinuated a wanton
or vulgar feeling. Thou hast done
much to elevate the profession thou
hast adorned; hast assisted the needy,
hast stretched out a hand to aid the
worthy in arriving at thy own position,
and introduced thy brethren to the
company which sought and welcomed
thee. Thou hast been a loving son, a
reverent, filial admirer of him whose
mantle fell upon thee, a faithful, devoted
husband, a brother worthy of
the name, a tender, bountiful father, a
loyal, stanch, confiding friend. The
world has been happier and better for
thy passage across its stage.

As a usual
thing, when
they cracked
a crib, one of the
three remained
outside to warn
with a whistle, or
some other previously
concerted
signal, his companions
inside.
But on this occasion,
when Jim
Baxter opened the simple
catch that fastened the
woodshed door, and
thence gained access to
the interior of the house, Wilson
Graham and Harry Montgomery
followed softly after him. This
breach of burglarious custom
was probably due to the fact that the
Braithwait mansion was in the suburbs,
some distance from the road, and several
hundred yards from the nearest
house.

Once inside, Mr. Graham lighted the
gas, and it was then the work of a very
few minutes to open the sideboard and
subtract therefrom the family silver
and place it in a bag brought for that
purpose. While this operation was taking
place, Montgomery made a tour of
the upper rooms.

“I don’t exactly like to trust Harry
up-stairs,” remarked Baxter, in a surly
tone, after he had securely tied the
mouth of the bag. “He is too soft.
Like as not he’ll go and git sentimental
over a picture or somethin’, or maybe
git a-thinkin’ of his mother, and
leave half the ornyments.”

Graham, who had just opened a pearl
inlaid secretaire, and was possessing
himself of numerous valuable trinkets,
laughed softly, as he replied:

“I don’t think so, Jim. Only yesterday
I gave the boy a good talking to,
and he promised to attend strictly to
business in future. You must remember
he is young, and, unless we give
him a chance, how is he to learn? Of
course, if there was a young girl in
the house—but there isn’t,” he added
quickly, observing the wrathful frown
on his companion’s face. “I made certain
that the only people who sleep in
the house are Mr. Braithwait and the
housekeeper, who is rather old and
nearly deaf; the rest of the family are
in Florida for their health. If Braithwait
makes a disturbance I reckon
Harry can settle him without any sentimental
nonsense.”

“I’d settle him,” muttered Baxter,
surlily.

“You’re a savage, Jim,” said Graham,
reproachfully. “How often have
I told you that there is no virtue in
violence. Haven’t I convinced you
that the easy way is the safe way?”

“Yah! Don’t give me no more of
that!” said Baxter, contemptuously.
“I ain’t no missionary.”

At this juncture, when the argument
threatened to develop into a quarrel,
peace was restored by the reappearance
of the young burglar, carrying a considerable
quantity of jewelry, loose
and in boxes, while he softly whistled
“M’Appari.”

“Not a bad haul,” observed Graham,
turning over the plunder as it
lay on the table. “Two watches?”

“They’re them little tickers what
the girls carry,” said Baxter, scornfully.
“We won’t get two dollars apiece for
’em.”

“Won’t we, though!” said Graham,
smiling. “They are gold, and there is
an inscription on each; that means a
fancy reward, or I don’t know human
feminine nature. Two brooches, a
necklace—h’m—h’m—very good, indeed.”

“There was no money,” remarked
Harry, adjusting his necktie before the
mirror, and giving his small blonde
mustache a curl.

“I expected as much,” commented
Graham, storing away the trinkets in
his pockets. “Braithwait has a hundred
with him, I dare say, but it isn’t
worth the risk. If we kill a man in
the city it’s soon forgotten, but in the
suburbs it creates a regular panic. The
neighbors hire detectives and follow a
man all over creation, and you can’t
buy them off or compromise the matter—money
is no object. That’s why
I keep telling Jim—”

“Let up, will ye!” exclaimed Baxter,
roughly. “I ain’t killin’ nobody,
am I?”

“Certainly not; but I only say——”

“Say nothin’! where’s the feed
box?”

Mr. Graham groaned, and looked at
his young accomplice in comical alarm.

“I knew how it would be! Jim,
these luncheons will be the ruin of us
all some night.”

“Can’t help it,” retorted Baxter, doggedly.
“It’s a good four-mile walk
from the city and as much back, and
we hadn’t anything but a snack for
supper. A man’s got to eat, and when
I’m hungry——”

“Well, well,” said the other, with a
gesture of impatience, “if it must be,
it must. Harry, see to the wine, and
we will find the substantials. Now,
Jim, do be careful of the dishes, and
don’t grunt and puff while you’re eating.
It’s vulgar.”

Jim Baxter grunted and puffed at
this, but made no other reply as he
busied himself spreading the contents
of the refrigerator on the dining-room
table, while Harry from the sideboard
produced a decanter of whiskey and
three bottles of claret. There was a
nice piece of cold ham, some tongue,
cheese and pickles, bread and butter,
anchovies and sardines, a bottle of
olives, and the remains of an oyster
pie.

“Quite a lay-out,” remarked Baxter,
with a ravenous chuckle. “D’ye remember
the house at Barleytown
where there wasn’t nothin’ but graham
crackers and winegar in the box?”

“I should say so,” exclaimed Graham,
with a look of disgust.

“Some people are too mean to live,”
returned Baxter, savagely. “Come,
shove over that decanter, and let’s
pitch in. Fingers, gents, ’cause there
ain’t nothin’ but silver knives and
forks in this house, unless I take ’em
out of the bag, which I ain’t doin’.
Here’s luck!”

“Excellent claret, Wilson,” said the
young burglar, holding his glass up to
the light.

“Genuine Medoc,” returned Graham,
with the air of a connoisseur.
“That’s the worst of this business;
not one gentleman out of ten is a judge
of wine. Now, the whiskey——”

“The whiskey’s all right,” interrupted
Baxter, curtly. “All whiskey’s
270
good; some’s better’n others, but it’s
all good. Blow claret!”

“No style about Jim,” said Harry,
with a smile that was half a sneer.

“No, you bet there ain’t,” said Baxter,
stolidly. “You oughter call me
‘Old Business,’ ’cause that’s what I am.
Pass them pickles.”

It was a most interesting sight. At
the head of the table sat Graham, a
smooth-faced, well-fed man of forty,
who might have
passed for a prosperous
banker, or a
man living on an
annuity; to his
right reclined,
rather than sat,
young Montgomery,
a spruce and
slender fellow, with
soft blue eyes, tremulous
lips, and light
hair neatly brushed;
while opposite Graham
sat Baxter, a
coarse, shaggy,
grimy man of uncertain
age, with
small, shifty eyes,
a heavy beard, and
a general air of brutal
strength. Had
it not been for the
fact that each man
wore his hat, and
that the bag of
stolen goods lay on
one corner of the
table, it might have
been taken for a
small stag party,
Graham personating
the host to perfection.

The resemblance was lost, however,
a moment later. The door leading to
the back stairway, directly behind Jim
Baxter, opened and revealed a spare
man with long blonde whiskers, wearing
gold eye-glasses, and a flowered
dressing-gown.

Graham was the first to see the intruder,
and his exclamation of astonishment
caused Baxter to turn his
head. In an instant that worthy was
on his feet, with a pistol in his hand.
Graham was quicker, however, and
before his companion could raise the
weapon he seized his arm and pushed
him aside.

“No violence, Jim,” he said, sternly.

“I warn’t goin’ to shoot,” growled
Jim. “I was only goin’ to give him a
crack on the head.”

“I won’t have it,” returned Graham,
authoritatively. “Sit down.”

Baxter put up his pistol and sat
down. Graham
then turned to the
spare gentleman,
who had not moved
from the doorway
during this episode.

“Mr. Braithwait,
I presume?”

“That is my
name,” was the
composed reply.
“Burglars, I presume?”

“The presumption
is correct. Will
you take a seat?”

Mr. Braithwait
sat down opposite
young Montgomery,
to whom he
bowed gravely.
There was then a
moment of silence,
broken by Graham,
who had resumed
his place at the head
of the table.

“I am sorry,”
said he, “you have
made your appearance,
as we can’t
very well apologize
for our intrusion.”

“No, I suppose
not,” said Mr. Braithwait, smiling.
“Yet I am rather pleased that I did
come, since I always enjoy an unusual
experience.”

“Glad you enjoy it,” muttered Baxter;
but no one listened to him.

“I was aroused by the reflection of
the gaslight in the upper hall,” explained
Mr. Braithwait, “and I supposed
that the housekeeper had left it
burning—she has done so more than
once. I came down to extinguish it.
271
I heard voices in this room, and I entered.”

“At the risk of your life,” observed
Graham, with a significant glance at
Baxter, who had resumed eating.

“I did not think of that,” said Mr.
Braithwait, simply. “My life has been
threatened so often—you know I am a
railroad man—that I give little thought
to the risk of an undertaking. Professionals,
I suppose?”

He looked at Montgomery, who nodded
nonchalantly and lighted a cigarette.

Mr. Braithwait coughed.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” he said, deprecatingly.
“Apart from the looks, I
can’t bear cigarette-smoke. There’s a
box of very fine Conchas on the sideboard.
Thank you”—to Graham—“if
you will join me?—thank you
again.”

Graham laughed with genuine enjoyment,
yet without vulgarity.

“I like you,” he said, frankly, “and
I am sorry that, in the line of business——”
He waved his cigar at the
bag.

“Of course, yes, of course, I know
that can’t be helped,” said Mr. Braithwait,
smoking away easily, “and
that’s another reason why I’m glad I
came. I suppose you have in that
bag some trinkets belonging to my
wife and daughters that have a special
value as mementos. I hear that you
gentlemen are frequently forced to sell
your plunder at a simply ruinous sacrifice,
and it occurred to me that if we
could come to some arrangement—you
understand?”

“Perfectly,” answered Graham. “It
can be done, and I will open negotiations
at an early date. Provided, of
course,” he added, severely, “that you
play fair.”

“That is understood. As a business
man I accept the situation. My loss
is your gain.”

At this the youngest burglar broke
silence for the first time.

“You are a philosopher,” he said, in
a tone of admiration.

“What sensible man is not?” responded
Mr. Braithwait, cheerfully. “I
suppose it is capable of proof that the
accumulated wisdom of the ancients
amounts simply to the homely proverb:
‘What can’t be cured must be endured.’
My business is a sort of war, and I
have my defeats
as well as my victories.
I must
bear them both
with equanimity.”

“So is ours,”
said the youngest
burglar. “As
Horace says in his
‘Epistles’: ‘Cædimur,
et totidem
plagis consumimus
hostem.’”

“Permit me,”
returned Mr.
Braithwait, “to
reply with Catullus:
‘Nil mihi
tam valde placeat,
Rhamnusia virgo,
quod temere invitis
suscipiatur
heris.’”

Montgomery flushed slightly, and
Baxter growled an incoherent protest
against the use of foreign languages.

“Of course, I do not claim that I
enjoy being robbed,” continued Mr.
Braithwait, “but I realize that it is not
as bad as it might be. Last week you
would have caught me with two thousand
272
in cash in the house, and last
month you would have horribly scared
my wife and daughters.”

“Not for worlds,” murmured Mr.
Montgomery.

“Well, you might have done so—women
have such a detestation of
robbers, except when they are in jail.
The pleasure of your visit—I hinted
that I could extract pleasure from
adversity—lies in the fact that it
brings me in contact with a profession
I have previously known only
by hearsay. I suppose I may take
it for granted you gentlemen are experts?”

“We’ve been there before,” said
Baxter, coarsely.

“If an experience of fourteen years
is any guaranty, then I am an expert,”
said Graham, with a certain air of pride
in his tones. “Our friend there,”
nodding at Baxter, “has, I believe,
been in the profession since childhood;
while Mr.”—indicating Montgomery
with his cigar—“you’ll excuse my not
mentioning names?—is a beginner. A
skilled workman, I admit, but this is
only his second year.”

“I don’t wonder that he”—and Mr.
Braithwait glanced slightly at Baxter,—“remains
in the business, but that you
should follow the vocation for fourteen
years surprises me greatly.”

“Indeed?” queried Graham, with
perceptible stiffness. “Why?”

“Because you appear to be a sensible
man, and I should not think the
business would pay. What is your
annual income as a burglar?”

“On an average, I should say three
thousand a year.”

“And you are an expert! I receive
six thousand a year, and I am
only Assistant General Freight Agent,
and have been but twelve years in the
business. Then I may infer that these
two gentlemen make much less than
three thousand?”

“I’ve seen the week when I didn’t
make hod-carrier’s wages,” growled
Baxter, who had now finished eating,
and was preparing to smoke a black
wooden pipe.

“You’re not so sensible as I thought,”
rejoined Mr. Braithwait, frankly. “I
can easily imagine a man exposing
himself to dreadful dangers and cruel
privations when there is a great prize
in view. An explorer like Stanley, a
pioneer like Pike or Fremont, a conqueror
like Cortez, or a revolutionist
like Washington, could well brave hardship
and peril when success meant
wealth as well as the plaudits of their
fellow men. The early settlers of this
and every other country, the gold
hunters of ’49, the pirates who ravaged
the seas, all were actuated by the hope
of a fortune at one swoop; but to risk
prison, to say nothing of life itself, for
a day laborer’s wages!——”

“But,” spoke up Montgomery, quickly,
“there is fame, if not fortune.”

“Pardon me. In what way?”

“In the usual way. Who has not
heard of Hickey, the man who cracked
twenty banks before they tripped him
up; Peters, the New England cracksman;
Bronthers, the Chicago expert?”

“I hope,” said Mr. Braithwait, gently,
“I won’t offend you when I say I
never heard of those gentlemen.”

“Is it possible!”

“Honestly, I never did.”

“You have surely heard of Red
Leary?”

“I can’t recall his name.”

“George Post? Louis Ludlum? Pete
McCartney? Miles Ogle?”

“Don’t know them.”

“Perhaps,” sarcastically, “you don’t
read the papers?”

“Yes, I do, and I have a good
memory. I can say without boasting
that I have on my tongue’s end all the
professional, literary and artistic names
in America, and many in Europe. In
my library I have many biographies,
but none of which a burglar is the
theme, nor do I recall the name of a
celebrated criminal, unless,” pleasantly,
“he has been hanged.”

“Yet there are famous names in our
profession,” persisted the young burglar,
somewhat sullenly.

“Oh, yes,” admitted Mr. Braithwait,
taking a small drink of claret.
“Literature has preserved Claude Duval,
Jack Sheppard, Dick Turpin—all
hung—Fra Diavolo, who was shot, and
even our own James and Younger
boys; and I have heard vaguely of one
Billy the Kid somewhere out West.
In a general sense, literature and the
drama are saturated with bandits, brigands
and outlaws, sometimes comical,
sometimes heroic, but you will excuse
me if I maintain that you stand on
a different footing. Those fellows
always had a poetical backing; somebody
or something had driven them
to their illegal calling, but you can
scarcely make a similar claim.”

“I don’t know about that,” protested
Baxter, doggedly. “Who’d give
me a job?”

“Did you ever try?”

“No; nor I ain’t goin’ to!”

“As I supposed. Honest work is
plentiful, therefore you are absolutely
without excuse. No one has usurped
your name and fortune, stolen your
ancestral home or intended bride;
neither have you been outlawed for
your political or religious beliefs, or
unjustly accused of crime.”

The big burglar looked extremely
blank at this pointed address, and took
a grumbling drink of whiskey. Mr.
Graham promptly came to his companion’s
relief.

“You have made out a prima facie
case, as the lawyers say, but the fact
remains that there is a fascination in
the life we lead, and some romance.
274
There is mystery about it, for one
thing, and danger for another. Then
we certainly have the sympathy of a
certain class of society, when we are
prisoners.”

“Is not the sympathy to which you
allude confined to murderers, especially
those who kill their wives?”

“As a rule, yes,” admitted Graham;
“but the people, who have sympathy
for murderers, generally have such a
superabundance that they can spare
some for us. I have known burglars to
receive six bouquets in a single day,
and from real ladies, too.”

“I am afraid,” said Mr. Braithwait,
with a smile, “that the sympathy extended
with such small discretion has
little market value. But let us pass
that by and glance at the disagreeable
side of your profession. For instance,
this night you have walked from the
city, the nearest point of which is
three miles.”

“We come four,” growled Baxter.

“Well, four; and four back is eight.
It could not have been a pleasant
walk, as the night is cloudy and the
roads are heavy from recent rains.”

“There warn’t no choice,” said Baxter,
savagely. “We had to walk.”

“There it is,” said Mr. Braithwait,
triumphantly, “you had to walk. Now,
I don’t have to walk; I ride in the
train or my carriage at any hour of the
day or night. No honest man has to
walk, if he has money—and, of course,
you have.”

“The point,” admitted Mr. Graham,
reluctantly, “is well taken.”

“I feel certain of it. Nor is this the
only instance in which your pleasure is
marred by fear. The very fame for
which you strive is a constant bar to
your enjoyment. If you take lodging
at a hotel you are ejected; you may
be refused admittance to any respectable
theatre; in any place of entertainment,
except the very lowest, you
cannot make a new acquaintance for
fear he may be a detective plotting
your capture; you are compelled to
eat, drink, and sleep among vile associates
and vulgar surroundings; and
all for a pitiful three thousand a year!
By heaven! it is worth thirty!”

“You use strong language, sir,” exclaimed
the youngest burglar, rising
and pacing the floor in an agitated
way.

“I do,” admitted the master of the
house, “because my business sense is
outraged by your stupidity.”

“Stupidity!” echoed Graham,
sharply.

“That is the word,” returned Mr.
Braithwait, sternly. “Your profession
requires acuteness, courage, skill, caution,
and endurance. Gentlemen, these
are admirable traits, and with them
you might be anything but burglars.
The banking institutions, railways, private
and civic corporations, are eager
for such men; they pay them large
wages and grant them great privileges.
The governments, State and National,
want such men, and are looking for
them, while they are skulking through
city alleys or walking miry roads at
midnight. Gentlemen, with all your
qualifications, you lack the one essential
to success—common sense.”

“Permit me,” said Graham, leaning
over the table and speaking with much
force, “to call your attention to the
fact that we are bright enough to keep
society eternally on the defensive.”

“Granted,” said Mr. Braithwait.

“Small in numbers though we are,
we necessitate the employment of a
police force in every village, town, and
city in the Union, to say nothing of
special constables and private watchmen.
We force every bank and corporation
to sink thousands in costly
safes, locks, and other safeguards, and
no householder is ever free from apprehension
on our account. We are
one against many, so to speak, but we
make the many tremble! Could we
exercise this power without brains?”

“Ay! could we?” supplemented
Montgomery, with flashing eyes.

“Granted again,” said Mr. Braithwait,
cheerfully, “but quite foreign
to the point at issue. Society is terrorized
through its inertness, and when
society enters on an active warfare you
gentlemen cannot make a show of resistance.
And even under our present
policy of passive resistance there is
but one thing that will save a criminal
from the eventual clutch of the law,
and that is—death.”

The youngest burglar turned white
and Baxter cursed softly.

“You cannot, with all your brightness,
commit a crime without leaving
a trace,” went on Mr. Braithwait, impassively,
“and every modern appliance
is a stumbling-block
in your path.
The modern bank
safe, equipped with
time-locks, is impregnable;
the electric
light has made
our streets as safe
by night as day;
and the telegraph
has lengthened the
arm of justice until
it encircles the
globe.”

“And yet,” retorted
Graham,
with a slight sneer,
“you have been
robbed.”

“And yet I have
been robbed,” repeated
Mr. Braithwait,
calmly.
“Without interfering
sadly with my
comfort and ease, I
cannot make my
house a bank or
surround myself
with an army of
watchmen. And I
don’t like dogs. So I have been robbed.
Yet”—Mr. Braithwait looked Mr. Graham
quietly in the eye—“yet I am not
entirely defenceless.”

“Hello!” said Baxter, breathing
hard. “Have you been up to somethin’?”

“You shall judge whether I have
rightly accused you of
lack of common sense.
Before attacking this
house, did you make yourself
acquainted with the
surroundings?”

“I did,” answered Graham,
confidently.

“Do you know that I
am a railroad man?”

“Certainly.”

“Did you notice a wire
running through the woods at the rear
of my house?”

“No!” cried Graham, violently.

“A strange oversight on your part.
Very stupid. It is a telephone wire,
and leads from my chamber above to
my office in the city.
Now for the application
of my remarks.
From the
moment of your entrance
I was aware
of your movements,
and instantly explained
the situation
to the night
operator. He, of
course, notified the
police——”

“And while you
kept us engaged
in conversation—”
cried Graham, advancing
threateningly.

“The police were
coming on a special
train to my assistance,”
said Mr.
Braithwait, taking a
second cigar.

“Damn you!”
exclaimed Baxter,
threateningly.

“Stop!” cried
Graham, interposing.
“We have no
time for that. Let us run!”

“Don’t!” said the host, warningly.
“The house is surrounded, and you
will certainly be shot. Accept the situation,
as I did. You gentlemen have
been my guests this evening, and I have
been highly entertained. May I hope
that the pleasure has been mutual?”

Before anyone could answer, the door
leading to the woodshed was thrown
open, and four policemen appeared on
the threshold. Montgomery sank helplessly
into a chair. Baxter made a dash
for the door, while Graham remained
impassive, but all were alike handcuffed
expeditiously.

“Sir,” said Graham, taking a cigar
from the box, “our misfortune is directly
due to the uncontrollable appetite of
our companion, but none the less I congratulate
you upon your ingenuity.”

“Thanks,” said Mr. Braithwait.
“Did I not tell you that you were
stupid?”

Mr. Graham bowed.

“You have taught us a lesson,” he
said gravely. “I think it is time to
abandon the business.”

“Well, I’ll be——” Baxter gasped,
and could say no more.

“We are disgraced!” exclaimed the
youngest burglar, bitterly.

Mr. Braithwait waved his hand.

“I am sleepy,” he said, with a yawn.
“Gentlemen, good-night; I will see you
again—in court.”

INTRODUCTION.

The sources of
information regarding the
Brontë family
in England
have been studiously
investigated,
and
everything
known about
them there has been described with
great wealth of literary skill and ingenuity;
but the eager guesses and surmises
as to what lay beyond the English
boundaries have been mostly erroneous.

Mrs. Gaskell’s “Life of Charlotte
Brontë” is an exquisite tribute from a
gifted hand, but Mrs. Gaskell’s dreary
moorlands are as inadequate to account
for the Brontë genius, as the general
picture of suppressed sadness is unwarranted
by the Brontë letters, or by
the living testimony of Miss Ellen
Nussey, Charlotte’s life-long friend and
confidante.

Mr. Wemyss Reid has given us a picture
of this singular family in brighter,
truer colors; but his theory as to the
“disillusioning” of Charlotte at Brussels
is a pure assumption, and repudiated
with indignation by Miss Nussey.

Mr. Augustine Birrell’s brilliant “Life
of Charlotte Brontë” contains some
additional facts gleaned in England,
and deserves to be read, if only for the
generous indignation called forth by
the “Quarterly Reviewer,” who sought
to assassinate the reputation of the
author of “Jane Eyre.”

A feeling of dissatisfaction was felt
in some degree by each of these writers
in turn, but by none more clearly expressed
than by Mr. J. A. Erskine
Stuart in his most useful book, “The
Brontë Country.” He writes: “For our
own part, we desire a fuller biography
of the family than has yet been written,
and we trust, and are confident, that
such will yet appear, and that there
are many surprises yet in store for
students of this Celtic circle.”

I now proceed, but not without misgivings,
to justify the confidence thus
expressed, and to fulfill the prediction
implied, so far as regards the Brontës
in Ireland. I propose in the following
pages to supply the Irish straws of
Brontë history which I have been accumulating
for nearly half a century.
I have waited in hopes that some
more skillful hand might undertake the
task, but as no one else, since the
death of Captain Mayne Reid, has
the requisite information, the story of
the Irish Brontës must be told by me,
or remain untold.

My first classical teacher was the
Reverend William McAllister, of Ryans,
near Newry, a man of brilliant imagination,
who under favorable conditions
might have taken rank with John Bunyan
or William Blake. He had known
Patrick Brontë (Charlotte’s father), and
had often heard old Hugh, the grandfather,
narrate to a spell-bound audience,
the incidents which formed the
ground-work of “Wuthering Heights.”
He used to take me for long walks in
the fields, and tell me the story of
Hugh Brontë’s early life, or narrate
other Brontë adventures, which he
assured me were just as worthy to be
recounted as the wrath of Achilles or
the wanderings of Pius Æneas. It
thus happened that I wrote screeds of
the Brontë novels myself before a line
of them had been penned at Haworth.
I do not think that Branwell Brontë
278
really meant to deceive when he spoke
of having written “Wuthering Heights,”
for the story in outline must have been
common property at Haworth, and the
children of the vicarage were all
scribblers.

Through my teacher’s relatives, who
lived quite near to the Brontës, I was
able to verify facts and incidents, and
the pains thus taken has fixed them
indelibly upon my mind. At a later
period, I had still better opportunities
for forming a sound judgment concerning
the Irish Brontës, for the pleasantest
part of my undergraduate holidays
was spent at the manse of the Reverend
David McKee of Ballynaskeagh.
Mr. McKee was a great educationalist,
and prepared many students for college
who afterwards became famous.

This great and noble man, who stood
six feet six inches high, was the friend
of the Brontës, as well as their near
neighbor. He recognized the Brontë
genius, where others only saw what
was wild and unconventional. Mr.
McKee’s home was the center of mental
activity in that neighborhood, and
the early copies of the novels that
came to the “Uncle Brontë’s” were cut,
read, and criticised by Mr. McKee, and
his criticisms forwarded to the Haworth
nieces. Great was the joy of
those uncles and aunts when Mr.
McKee’s approval was enthusiastically
given.

There are also several other persons,
some of them still living, who knew
the Brontës, and have kindly communicated
to me the information they possessed,
so that I have had illumination
from various points on this many-sided
family.

CHAPTER I.

THE DARK FOUNDLING.

Hugh Brontë’s grandfather, the
great-great-grandfather of the English
novelist, formerly lived upon a farm
on the banks of the Boyne, above
Drogheda. He was a cattle-dealer, and
often crossed to Liverpool to dispose
of his stock. Once, when he was returning
therefrom, a strange child was
found in a bundle in the hold of the
vessel. It was very young, very black,
very dirty, and almost destitute of
clothing. No one knew whence it had
come, nor cared what became of it.
There was no doctor in the ship, and
no woman save Mrs. Brontë, who had
accompanied her husband. The child
was thrown on deck. Some one said,
“Toss it overboard,” but nobody would
touch it, and its cries were distressing.
From sheer pity Mrs. Brontë was
obliged to succor the abandoned infant.

On reaching Drogheda, it was taken
ashore for food and clothing, with the
intention of returning it to Liverpool;
but the captain refused to allow it to
be brought aboard of his ship again.
As no one in Drogheda had an interest
in the child, it was left in Mrs. Brontë’s
hands. To be sure, there was a vestry tax
at that time for the removal of illegitimate
children, but Mrs. Brontë found
it much easier to take the child home
than to Dublin, where it might possibly
be refused admission amongst the
authorized foundlings—there being no
hospital nearer than that point.

When the infant was carried up out
of the hold of the vessel, it was declared
to be a Welsh child on account
of its color. It might, doubtless, have
laid claim to a more Oriental descent,
but, when it became a Brontë, it was
called “Welsh.” The Brontës, who
were all golden-haired, exceedingly disliked
the swarthy infant, but “pity
melts the heart to love,” and Mrs.
Brontë brought it up amongst her own
children. Little Welsh was a weak,
delicate, and fretful thing, and being
generally despised and pushed aside
by the vigorous young Brontës, he
grew up morose, envious, and cunning.
He used secretly to play many
spiteful tricks upon the children, so
that they were continually chastising
him. On his part, he maintained a
moody, sullen silence, except when
Mr. Brontë was present to protect him.
With Mr. Brontë he became a favorite,
because he always ran to meet him on
his return home, as if glad to see him,
and anxious to render him any possible
assistance. He followed his master
about, while at home, with dog-like
fidelity, telling him everything he knew
to the other children’s disadvantage,
279
and thus succeeded in securing a permanent
place between them and their
father.

Old Brontë took Welsh with him to
fairs and markets, instead of his own
sons, as soon as he was able to go, and
found him of the greatest service. His
very insignificance added to his usefulness.
He would mingle with the
people from whom Brontë wished to
purchase cattle, and find out from their
conversation the lowest price they
would be willing to take, and then report
to his master. Brontë would then
offer the dealers a little less than he
knew they wanted, and secure the cattle
without the usual weary process of
bargaining. The same course was repeated
in Liverpool, and in the end
Brontë became a rich and prosperous
dealer. Welsh was now indispensable
to him, and followed him like a
shadow; but the more Brontë became
attached to Welsh, the more the children
hated the interloper. As time
went on, Brontë’s affairs passed more
and more into his assistant’s hands,
until at last he had the entire management.
They were returning from Liverpool
once, after selling the largest
drove of cattle that had ever crossed
the channel, when suddenly Brontë
died in mid-ocean. Welsh, who was
with him at the time of his death, professed
ignorance of his master’s money;
and, as all books and accounts had disappeared,
no one could tell what had
become of the cash received for the
cattle.

The young Brontës, who were now
almost men and women, had been
brought up in comparative luxury.
They were well educated, but they
understood neither farming nor dealing,
and the land had been so neglected
that it could not support a
family, even if the requisite capital for
its cultivation had not been lost. In
this emergency Welsh requested an interview
with the whole family. He
declared that he had a proposal to
make which would restore their fallen
fortunes. He had been forbidden the
house, but, as it was supposed that he
was going to give back the money
which he must have stolen, his request
was reluctantly granted.

Welsh appeared at the interview
dressed up in broadcloth, black and
shiny as his well-greased hair, and in
fine linen, white and glistening as his
prominent teeth. The effect was ludicrous
to those who had always known
the man. His sinister expression was
intensified by a smile of satisfaction
which gave emphasis to the cast in both
eyes, and to his jackal-like mouth.

He began at once, in the grand cattle-dealer
style, to express sympathy
with the family, and to declare that
upon one condition only would he continue
the dealing and supply their
wants. This condition was that Mary,
the youngest sister, should become his
wife—a proposal which was rejected
with indignant scorn. Many hot and
bitter words were exchanged, but as
Welsh was leaving the house, he turned
and said, “Mary shall yet be my wife,
and I will scatter the rest of you like
chaff from this house, which shall be
mine also.” With these words he
passed out into the darkness.

The interview had two immediate
results. It revealed the threatened
dangers, and roused the brothers to an
earnest effort to save their home.
Welsh had robbed them, but he must
not be permitted to ruin and disgrace
them. They had many friends, and in
a short time the three brothers were
employed in remunerative occupations,
two of them in England and one in
Ireland. They were thus able to send
home enough to pay the rent of the
farm, and to maintain the family in
comfort.

The landlord of Brontë’s farm was
an “absentee,” the estate being administered
by an agent. He was the great
man of the district, local magistrate,
grand juror, and “Pasha” in general.
A parliament of landlords had given
him despotic powers in the collection
of rent, and in all matters of property,
limb, and life. The agent of those
days was served by attorneys, bailiffs
and sub-agents. Welsh was appointed
to a vacancy as sub-agent, in return for
a large bribe paid to the agent.

The sub-agent’s business was to act
as buffer between the tenant and the
“Squire,” as the agent was called. He
was generally a man without heart,
280
conscience, or bowels. Selected from
the basest of the people, he had nominal
wages, never paid and never demanded;
but he managed to squeeze a
large amount out of the tenants, first
by alarming them, and then by promising
to stand their friend with the rapacious
agent. He cringed and grovelled
before the “Squire,” but at the same
time was the chief medium of information
concerning the condition of the
tenants, and their ability to pay their
rents. One of his duties was to mix
in their festivities, when whiskey had
opened their hearts and loosened their
tongues, and discover their ability to
pay an increased rent.

Welsh was the very man for this
post. He had lived by cunning and
treachery, and in his new occupation
had great scope for serving both himself
and his master. He seldom saw
his tenants without letting drop the
fatal word, “eviction.” But, while
serving the “Squire,” and recouping
himself from the tenants for the bribe
he had paid him, he never forgot for a
moment his double purpose of securing
his late master’s farm, and with it, the
person of Mary Brontë. He straightway
drew the agent’s attention to the
derelict condition of the farm, and to
the likelihood of the rent falling into
arrears, and declared himself willing to
undertake the burden of his late master’s
desolate homestead. The agent
promised Welsh that the farm should
be transferred to him, on payment of a
certain sum, in case the Brontës were
not able to pay the rent; but the rent
did not fall into arrears. The agent’s
demands were punctually met, and besides
this, considerable sums of money
were spent in improving the house and
the land. In consequence of this the
rent was raised, but the increased rent
was paid the day it fell due, and again
raised.

Finding himself foiled, Welsh changed
his tactics, and turned his attention to
the other object of his quest, Mary
Brontë.

In the neighborhood there lived a
female sub-agent called Meg, as base
and unprincipled as himself. Her
services were utilized in many ways;
in conveying bottles of whiskey to
farmers’ wives who were getting into
drinking habits, and in aiding farmers’
sons and daughters to dispose of eggs
and apples and meal purloined from
their parents in return for trinkets
which they wished to possess. She had
also great skill in furthering the wicked
designs of rich but immoral men. She
was the “spey-woman” who told fortunes
to servant-girls, and lured them
to their destruction. Like the male
sub-agents, such women were supposed
to have the black art, and to have sold
themselves to the devil.

Meg came often to tell the servants’
fortunes, and had many opportunities
of assuring Mary of Welsh’s love and
goodness. She told how he had restrained
the agent for several years
from evicting them, by the payment of
large sums. All of this seemed incredible
to the simple-minded girl, but the
harpy was able to show receipts for the
money thus expended.

After a time, Mary listened to the
vile woman’s tale. Welsh could not
be so bad as they believed him to be.
Flowers taken from tenants’ gardens
found their way to Mary’s room, and
trinkets wrung from the anguish-stricken,
in fear of eviction, were laid
on her dressing-table. At length, she
consented to meet Welsh in a lonely
part of the farm, in company with the
harpy, that she might express to him
her gratitude for protecting the dear
old home.

That meeting sealed Mary’s fate, and
she was forced to consent to marry
Welsh. The marriage was secretly
performed by one of the “buckle-beggars”
of the time, and then publicly
proclaimed. Welsh was now the husband
of one of the ladies on the farm,
and, for a substantial bribe, the agent
accepted him as tenant.

The brothers on hearing the news
hurried back to the old home, but
arrived too late. The agent received
them with great courtesy. They reminded
him that their ancestors had
reclaimed the place from mere bog and
wilderness; that their father had expended
large sums in building the
houses and draining the land; that
they themselves had paid exorbitant
rents without demur; and that now
281
their old home with all of these improvements
had been confiscated, without
cause or notice, by the man who
had robbed and degraded the family.

The agent seemed greatly pained,
but of course he was only an agent, and
obliged to do whatever the landlord
desired. Failing to get redress from
the agent, the brothers unfortunately
took the law into their own hands, and
were arrested for trespass and assault.
They were tried before the agent, and
sent to prison and hard labor.

Thus the man Welsh, who afterward
assumed the name Brontë, carried out
his purpose. His threat of vengeance
was also fulfilled. Mother, sisters,
were scattered abroad, and so effectively
that I have not been able, after much
searching, to find a single trace of any
of them save Hugh and his descendants.

CHAPTER II.

THE KIDNAPPING OF HUGH BRONTË.

Hugh Brontë first makes his appearance
as if he had just stepped out
of a Brontë novel. His father, a man
in prosperous circumstances, had a
large family, and resided somewhere
in the south of Ireland, in a comfortable
home, the exact locality being unknown.

Some time about the middle of the
last century, this entire family was
thrown into excitement by the arrival
of an uncle and aunt of whom they
had never heard. The children did
not like them at first, but, as they remained
guests for a considerable time,
these impressions wore off.

These newly discovered relatives
were the foundling Welsh and his wife,
Mary. Their visit occurred many years
subsequent to the events recorded in
the last chapter. In the meantime, the
house, from which the Brontës had been
driven by fraud, had been burnt to the
ground, thus destroying all of Welsh’s
ill-gotten riches, and leaving him a
poor and ruined man. But Welsh was
always able to subordinate his pride to
his interests, and, through his wife, he
opened up a correspondence with one
of her brothers, prosperously settled
in Ireland. Welsh expressed deep penitence
for all of his wrong-doing, and
declared his earnest desire, if forgiven,
to make amends.

He and Mary were then childless,
and getting on in years. They professed
to be troubled at the prospect
of the farm passing into the hands of
strangers for lack of an heir. They
offered, therefore, to adopt one of their
numerous nephews and to bring him up
as their own son. Conditions of adoption
were agreed upon, including education,
but a solemn oath was taken
by the father never to communicate
with his son in any way. Welsh and
Mary also bound themselves never to
let the child know where his father
lived.

The family oath in Ireland is regarded
with superstitious awe, and
binds like destiny. The man who
breaks it is perjured and abandoned
beyond all hope of salvation, here or
hereafter.

Hugh Brontë was about five or six
years old when Welsh and Mary made
the visit to his parents, and he soon
became a great favorite with the newcomers.

Many years later, the old man, when
“beeking” a cornkiln in County Down,
used to tell the simple incidents of that
night. He had waited with impatience
the local dressmaker, who had brought
him home late at night a special suit of
clothes to travel in. When they were
fitted on, he was raised into a chair to
give the dressmaker “beverage,” as
the first kiss in new clothes is called in
Ireland. It is a mark of especial favor,
and supposed to confer good luck.
Hugh’s sisters thronged around him for
“second beverage,” but the kiss and
squeeze of the dressmaker remained a
life-long memory. He always believed
that she had a presentiment of his fate,
for her voice choked and her eyes filled
with tears, as she turned away from
him.

His mother never seemed happy
about his going away, but her opposition
was always borne down. For the
few days previous, she had been accustomed
to take him on her lap, and, with
eyes full of tears, heap endearing epithets
upon him, such as, “My sweet
flower;” but he did not appreciate her
282
sympathy, and always broke away from
her. His father lifted him in his
arms, carried him out into the darkness,
and placed him gently between
his uncle and aunt, on a seat with a
raised back, which was laid across a
cart from side to side. Sitting aloft, on
this prototype of the Irish gig, little
Hugh Brontë, with a heart full of childish
anticipations, began his rough journey
out into the big world.

That Brontë covenant was indeed
faithfully kept, for even when Mary,
his aunt, visited Hugh in County Down
about the beginning of this century, she
could neither be coaxed nor compelled
to give him, either directly or indirectly,
the slightest clue by which he might
discover the home of his childhood. It
thus happened that Hugh Brontë was
never able to retrace his steps to his
father’s house, after the darkness had
closed around him, perched aloft on the
cross-seat of a country cart, between
his uncle and aunt. It was a cold night,
and the child crept close under his
aunt’s wing for warmth. Soon he began
to prattle in his childish way as he
had done with his new friends for days,
when suddenly a harsh torrent of corrosive
words burst from Welsh, commanding
him not to let another sound
pass his lips. For a moment the child
was stunned and bewildered, for the
angry order fell like a blow. The young
Brontë blood could not, however, rest
passively in such a crisis. Disentangling
himself from his aunt’s shawl, Hugh
drew towards his uncle and said, “Did
you speak those unkind words to me?”

“I’ll teach you to disobey me, you
magnificent whelp!” rasped out Welsh,
bringing his great hand down with a
sharp smack on the little fellow’s face.

Hurt and angry, little Brontë sprang
from the seat into the bottom of the
cart and, facing the cruel uncle,
shouted:

“I won’t go with you one step further!
I will go back and tell my father
what a bad old monster you are!” and
then clutching at the reins, screamed:
“Turn the horse around and take me
home!”

A heavy hand grasped him, and
choked the voice out of him. He was
shaken and knocked against the bottom
and sides of the cart, until he was
able neither to escape nor to speak.
Several hours later, he awoke and
found himself lying in damp straw, sick,
and sore, and hungry. Every jolt of
the springless cart pained him.

It was a moonlight night with occasional
showers. He turned upon
his side, and watched the two figures
perched upon the seat above him,
riding along in silence and caring nothing
for him. A few hours before he
had loved them passionately, and now
he hated them to loathing. He felt
the utter desolation of loneliness and
home-sickness.

That was the first night in his remembrance
when he had ever neglected
to say his prayers. He rose to his
knees, put up his little folded hands,
and said the only prayer he knew. A
sobbing sound escaped him and startled
his uncle. He turned suddenly,
and with his whip struck the kneeling
child and prostrated him. The blow
was followed by a hurricane of oaths
and threats.

The child was badly hurt, but he did
not cry nor let his uncle know that he
was suffering.

Seventy years afterwards Hugh
Brontë used to say, “I grew fast that
night. I was Christian child, ardent
lover, vindictive hater, enthusiast, misanthrope,
atheist, and philosopher, in
one cruel hour!”

The sun was shining hot in his face
when he awoke. The cart had been
drawn up close to a little thatched
cottage, in which there was a grocer’s
shop and a public house. He tried to
get out of the cart, but was unable to
do so. A blacksmith, whose smithy
stood on the other side of the road,
seeing his fruitless efforts, came and
lifted him down. Just as he was beginning
to recite the story of his
wrongs his aunt, who had approached
him from behind, caught his arms and
led him gently into the cottage, where
he had some potatoes and buttermilk.
He slept by the kitchen fire until late
in the afternoon without having been
permitted to speak to a soul. He was
still dreaming of home, when he was
roughly awakened to mount the cart
again. Heavy imprecations fell upon
283
his aunt for detaining him to wash the
blood-stains from his face. A penny
“bap” was given him, and he was allowed
to buy apples with the money
which had been put by his brothers
and sisters into the pockets of his new
clothes as “hansel.” “It was ten
years,” said old Brontë, “before I
fingered another penny that I could
call my own!”

As the shades of evening gathered,
the journey was continued in a drizzling
rain. A “bottle” of fresh straw
had been added to the hard bed on
which little Hugh was to spend the
night. He arranged the straw under
the cross-seat on which his uncle and
aunt sat, so as to be sheltered from
the rain, and, placing his heap of apples
and the “bap” beside him, he settled
down in comparative comfort for the
night.

The night was long, the rain incessant.
The horse stumbled and splashed
along, and the harsh uncle varied the
monotony by whipping the horse into
a trot, and swearing at it when it did
trot. By ten o’clock the next morning
a large village was reached, where was
an inn of considerable importance.
The child was carried, stiff and cold,
and put to bed in a little room in this
inn, no one but his aunt being allowed
to come near him. She placed some
bread and milk beside him, took away
his clothes, and locked the door of his
room.