McClure’s Magazine

October, 1893.

Vol. I. No. 5

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

Table of Contents

Illustrations

It was at a dinner in Washington
that I had the good fortune to
find myself seated next to Thomas B.
Reed, of Maine. It was a brilliant
occasion, for around the table sat well-known
statesmen, scientists, jurists,
economists, and literary men, besides
two or three who had gained eminence
in the medical profession. Mr. Reed
was at his best, “better than the best
champagne.” His conversation, sparkling
with good-nature, was not only
exhilarating to his immediate neighbors,
but at times to the entire table.
Being among friends, among the sort
of men he really liked, he let himself
out as it were.

Before the conversation had gone
beyond the serious point I remember
asking the ex-Speaker how he felt at
the time when the entire Democratic
press of the country had pounced upon
him; when he was being held up as
“The Czar”—a man whose iron heels
were crushing out American popular
government. “Oh,” he promptly replied,
“you mean what were my feelings
while the uproar about the rules
of the Fifty-first Congress was going
on, and while the question was in
doubt? Well, I had no feeling except
that of entire serenity, and the reason
was simple. I knew just what I was
going to do if the House did not sustain
me;” and raising his eyes, with a
typical twist of his mouth which those
who have seen it don’t easily forget,
he added, “when a man has decided
upon a plan of action for either contingency
there is no need for him to be
disturbed, you know.”

“And may I ask what you determined
to do if the House decided
adversely?”

“I should simply have left the Chair,
resigning the Speakership, and left the
House, resigning my seat in Congress.
There were things that could be done,
you know, outside of political life, and
for my own part I had made up my
mind that if political life consisted in
sitting helplessly in the Speaker’s
chair, and seeing the majority powerless
to pass legislation, I had had
enough of it, and was ready to step
down and out.”

After a moment’s pause he turned,
and, looking me full in the face with a
half smile, continued: “Did it ever
occur to you that it is a very soothing
thing to know exactly what you are
going to do, if things do not go your
way? You have then made yourself
equal to the worst, and have only to
wait and find out what was ordained
before the foundation of the world.”

“You never had a doubt in your
own mind that the position taken was
376
in perfect accordance with justice and
common sense?” I ventured.

“Never for a moment. Men, you
see, being creatures of use and wont,
are naturally bound up in old traditions.
While every court which had
ever considered the question had decided
one way, we had been used to
the other. Fortunately for the country,
there was no wavering in our
ranks.”

“But how did you feel,” said I,
“when the uproar was at its worst,
when the members of the minority
were raging on the floor together?”

“Just as you would feel,” was the
reply, “if a big creature were jumping
at you, and you knew the exact length
and strength of his chain, and were
quite sure of the weapon you had in
your hands.”

This conversation gives a clear insight
into the character of Thomas B.
Reed. It shows his chief characteristics:
manly aggressiveness, an iron
will—qualities which friend and foe
alike have recognized in him—with a
certain serenity of temper, a broadness,
a bigness of horizon which only the
men who have been brought into personal
contact with him fully appreciate.

Standing, as he does, in the foremost
rank of public men, one of the leaders
of his party, the public has certainly a
right to know something of the man.
First of all, one thing about him has
to be emphasized; he lacks one of the
traits that popular leaders too often
possess. He cannot be all things to
all men. He is bound to be true to his
personal convictions, and he is not the
man to vote for a measure he detests,
because his constituents clamor for it.
Every one knows how public men have
at times voted against their earnest convictions,
and then gone into the cloak
room and apologized for it; but it
would be difficult to imagine a man of
Mr. Reed’s composition in this rôle.

To judge a man well, to know his
best side, it is necessary to see him at
home, and I cull from notes made
several weeks ago, during a visit to
Mr. Reed in Portland.

I found Mr. Reed in a three-story
corner brick house, on one of the most
sightly spots in town. Over the western
walls of that modern, substantial
New England home there clambers a
mass of Japanese ivy, which, relieving
the straightness of the architectural
lines, gives a pleasing something,
an artistic touch, to the ensemble. Its
owner having shown his pride in that
beautiful ivy, straightway took me to
the roof of the house, to admire the superb
view of Casco Bay and the picturesque
expanse of country around Portland.

The stamp of the man’s character
is plain everywhere in that house.
The rooms are large, airy, and unpretentiously
furnished, yet with solidity
and that certain winning grace of domestic
appointments in old New England.
Much of Mr. Reed’s work is
done at his desk in a wee bit of a room
on the second floor, where crowded
book-shelves reach to the ceiling. His
library long ago overflowed the confines
of his den, and books are scattered
through the rooms on every floor;
books, bought not for binding nor editions,
but for the contents, ranging
from miscellaneous novels to the dryest
historical treatises, from poetry to
philosophy.

The library,[1] on the ground floor,
where callers are usually received, has
among the inevitable book-shelves a
few photographs of masterpieces.
Over the mantelpiece a painting of
Weeks’s shows that the sympathies of
the owner extend beyond that sphere
to which the great public is inclined to
confine him.

Of the favorite haunts of Mr. Reed,
the place of all to study his social side
is at his club, The Cumberland.

“You see,” said Mr. Reed, “a club
of this kind is only possible in a conservative
town like Portland, a staid,
old place which grows slowly, at the
rate of about five or six hundred a
year, where the one hundred club members,
while belonging to opposite political
parties, unite to a man in celebrating
the victory of any of their fellow-members.
Most of them, friends from
boyhood, have gone to school together,
and are known to one another but by
377
their Christian names.” There the
ex-Czar is always called “Tom,” or
“Thomas, old boy,” and there reigns
supreme a fine spirit of equality, or unpretentious
“give and take” sort of
intercourse, which is really the ideal
object of a club.

“Indeed, there is no place like it,”
said Reed. “It is the most home-like
club one can imagine; too small to
have coteries, and with lots of bright,
sensible boys, quick at repartee. People
talk of my wit, but, I tell you, it’s hard
work to hold my own there; and then
no one can try to pose among us, or
attempt to make a fool of himself, but
he is properly sat upon. Intercourse
with your fellow-men in such a milieu
is the best discipline I know of for a
man—except that of political life,” he
added, with his droll smile.

Of course Mr. Reed is interested in
the welfare of Portland, and he cherishes
the idea that some day the city
of his birth will become one of the
great cities of the continent. “Portland
harbor is one of the finest on the
Atlantic coast. It is at least two days
nearer Europe than New York, and
one day nearer Europe than Boston.
The annexation of Canada to the
United States, or the union of the two
countries, one of which is bound to
come in the course of time, will surely
bring to Portland the great prosperity
that should be hers by reason of her
admirable harbor and her geographical
position. And,” he added, “while I
like the life in Washington, especially
when the session is active and there is
plenty of work to do, it has never yet
been the case that I have left Portland
without regret, or gone back to it without
pleasure.”

The frame house in which he was
born still stands, shaded by two elms
of obvious age. Henry W. Longfellow
was born just around the corner from
it, in a dwelling that marks the spot
where, in 1632, one George Cleeve
built the first white man’s habitation
ever erected in the territory now included
in Portland’s boundaries. The
settlement was called, in tender remembrance
of an English field, “Stogumnor,”
and its founder’s life was one of
almost ceaseless conflict, now with the
redskins and now with the white neighbors
of other settlements, so that Cleeve
left behind him the impress of a bold,
vigorous fellow. His daughter married
Michael Mitten, whose two daughters
in turn married two brothers named
Brackett. One of the Brackett
378
daughters married a fisherman named
Reed, whose descendant, Thomas
Brackett Reed, has exhibited, in a different
way and under vastly different
circumstances, much of the nerve and
daring that animated his stern old fighting
settler-ancestor, George Cleeve.

At nine Mr. Reed entered the grammar
school, at eleven the high school.
He was sixteen years old when he
completed his course in the latter.
His boyhood friends say he was fond
of fun, though the amount of knowledge
he absorbed would indicate that
he was also fond of books; yet Mr.
Reed himself confesses that literature
in general, and old romances in particular,
attracted him more than text-books.
He still remembers his first
schoolmaster, a spare young man, “the
best disciplinarian I ever knew,” who
had the art of holding a turbulent
school by finding out what was the
particular spring he could touch to
control every one of his lawless boys.

“He had the pull on me,” says Mr.
Reed, “by simply holding over me in
critical moments the penalty of dismissal.
You know, I had a sort of inborn
idea that the school was a great thing
for me, and I knew that my parents
were too poor to afford to send me
anywhere else, so I kept straight along,
doing my duty. It was the master’s
custom to allow each boy who had no
demerits to ring his bell before leaving
the class, and once for three days in
succession I did not ring that bell. I
can see now the master coming to me,
and saying: ‘Tom, is it an inadvertence?’
‘No, sir.’ ‘Did you break the
rules?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because
they were too hard.’ ‘Well, boy, you
know what you can do if the rules are
too hard; you can leave school.’ I
hung my head, and he went away, after
a few moments of, to me, terrible silence,
saying: ‘Never let me hear of
this again, Tom.’ And I replied: ‘No,
sir.’ And meant it.”

On entering Bowdoin College in 1856,
young Reed had a half-formed desire
of becoming a minister, which he relinquished,
however, long before his
graduation. His life struggle began
in earnest with that first year at college,
379
for he had to earn enough to pay
his way as he went along. His attendance
at class recitations during
the first term of his freshman year was
regular, but he found it necessary to
drop out the next two terms and earn
some money by teaching. He kept up
his studies, however, without an instructor.
All through the first part of
his college course young Reed devoted
a great deal of time to literature, to the
neglect of his studies. While in the
high school, a garret in the house of
one of his mother’s relations had become
his Mecca. It was packed full
of books, especially novels, and there
he was wont to journey twice a week,
loading himself with volumes, over
which he spent his days and the best
part of his nights. Mr. Reed says
that it was mostly trashy, imaginative
stuff, but that it also was full of delight,
and in some ways full of information
for him. To that omnivorous
reading he attributes in large part his
knowledge of words, and it was also, no
doubt, an apprenticeship from which
he naturally stepped into higher literature.

Graduation was but little more than
a year off, when, the contents of the
garret being exhausted, the young man
realized to his consternation that his
class standing was very low. His
place at the end of the college course
depended on his average class standing
all through. He had received
none of the sixteen junior parts which
were given out during the junior year,
and to his dismay the English orations,
corresponding to the junior parts at
the end of the course, were reduced to
twelve. There was but one course
open to the ambitious, spirited boy—to
offset the low average of his earlier
terms by an exceptionally high average
during his last. Romances and poems
were laid aside, and from that time
forward until Commencement he was
up at five in the morning, and by nine
o’clock every night he was in bed, and
tired enough to drop asleep at once.
Mr. Reed says very frankly that he
did not relish this regimen, for by
nature he is indolent. Apropos of
this, it was a common saying among
his comrades that Reed would be somebody
some day, if he were not so
lazy.

The consequences of his three years
of novel-reading were such a serious
matter to him that he was afraid to go
and hear the result of the final examinations
but remained in his room until
a friend came to tell him that he was
one of the first five in his class in his
average for the entire course. This is
the other side of Reed, “the lazy.”

Besides this success, his oration on
“The Fear of Death” won the first
prize for English composition. It was
in delivering it that Mr. Reed felt the
first emotions of the orator, when every
eye in the audience was riveted upon
him, and when the profound silence
that prevailed told the deep interest
which his words aroused. Of the year’s
work which won for him the privilege
of delivering it on that Commencement
Day, thirty-three years ago, Mr.
Reed says that it was the hardest of
his life, and the only time he has forced
himself up to his full limit for so long
a period.

Graduation from college was not by
any means the end of the struggle for
the young man. Money was still lacking,
and to get it he engaged in school-teaching,
an occupation which he had
already followed during two terms, and
in vacation times. He taught at first
for twenty dollars a month, “boarding
round,” and the highest pay he ever
received as a teacher was forty-five
dollars a month. His old comrades
delight in telling an incident of his
school-teaching days. He once found
it necessary to chastise a boy who was
about his own age, although he had
been cautioned against whipping, by
the members of the committee of the
district, unless he first referred the case
to them. But Reed was Reed even in
those days. The committee having
failed to sustain him in the past, in
this instance he decided that some
one must be master at school, and that
he would be that some one. Accordingly,
the refractory young man was
thrashed, after an exciting quarter of
an hour—a close victory, which one
pound more avoirdupois might have
decided against the teacher.

Mr. Reed soon gave up school-teaching,
380
and, thinking that a young man
would have a better chance out West,
he went to California. Judge Wallace,
afterwards Chief Justice of California,
examined Reed for admission
to the bar. It was in ’63, during
the civil war, when the Legal Tender
Act was much discussed in California,
where a gold basis was still maintained,
that Wallace, whose office adjoined the
one where Reed was studying, happened
in one day and said, “Mr. Reed,
I understand you want to be admitted
to the bar. Have you studied law?”
“Yes, sir, I studied law in Maine while
teaching.” “Well,” said Wallace, “I
have one question to ask. Is the Legal
Tender Act constitutional?” “Yes,”
said Reed. “You shall be admitted to
the bar,” said Wallace. “Tom Bodley
[a deputy sheriff, who had legal aspirations]
was asked the same question,
and he said ‘no.’ We will admit you
both, for anybody who can answer off-hand
a question like that ought to practise
law in this country.”

Reed’s sojourn on the Pacific coast
was short. In ’64 he was made Assistant
Paymaster in the United States
Navy, and served in that capacity until
his honorable discharge a year or so
after. His admission to practise before
the Supreme Court of the State of
Maine followed on his return to the
East. Cases came to the young lawyer
slowly. The first ones were in the
minor municipal courts. Gradually he
secured a certain run of commercial
and admiralty cases which began to
yield something tangible in the shape
of fees. Yet the goal of success
seemed a long way off, when it happened
that in one of those minor cases
he cross-examined a refractory witness
in such a manner as to completely
overturn the testimony given, and
381
thereby won the case for his client.
The unexpected result was that the
witness who had been upset by the
young lawyer’s skill conceived a great
admiration for him, and became influential
in sending him many cases.

That he made his mark in his modest
position is shown by the fact that after
two years, in 1867, Mr. Reed was nominated
for the State Legislature. Judge
Nathan Webb, then County Attorney,
who had known Reed simply as his
opponent in a number of cases, had
proposed his name, and, after six ballots,
had succeeded in nominating him.
The first thing Reed knew about it was
when reading the papers the next morning,
and his first impulse was to decline.
When Webb came in he urged him to
accept, saying that a winter’s legislative
experience would broaden and be
in every respect valuable to him. Mr.
Reed accepted, and after serving two
terms in the House he was elected to
the State Senate. Then he was made
Attorney-General and afterwards City
Solicitor of Portland, and in 1876 he
was for the first time nominated to
represent his district in the House of
Representatives in Washington.

At the very moment when Reed,
escorted by one of his colleagues, took
a seat at the first convenient desk, on
the day when he began his life as a
congressman, Mr. Reed’s massive figure,
suggestive of physical strength;
the easy and yet not offensive assurance
with which he took his seat and
glanced with quizzical eye about the
chamber; the unaffected way with
which he accepted congratulations
from the New England members who
knew him, and the reputation he had
already won as a master of wit and the
possessor of a tongue which could be
eloquent with sarcasm, all of these
things so impressed Mr. S. S. Cox that
he turned to Mr. William T. Frye,
then a member for Maine, and said:
“Well, Frye, I see your State has sent
another intellectual and physical giant
who is a youngster here.” “Whom do
you mean?” asked Frye. “This man
Reed, who must be even now cracking
a joke, for I see they are all laughing
about him.”

But to maintain the reputation which
his State had secured for committing
its interests to master men, Mr. Reed
had a hard task before him. Blaine,
who had just passed from the House to
the Senate, had made Maine of preëminent
influence by reason of his
formidable canvass for the presidential
nomination. Eugene Hale and Mr.
William T. Frye represented in part the
State in the House.
Hannibal Hamlin
was a member of
the Senate, and
the tradition of
the remarkable intellectual
achievements
of William
Pitt Fessenden, so
long a senator
from Maine, was
still so fresh in
the minds of many
members of Congress
that it was
common to hear
Mr. Fessenden
spoken of as perhaps
the ablest
senator since the
days of Webster,
Clay, and Calhoun.
But, unlike the
stories that are
382
told of the débuts of many statesmen,
Mr. Reed’s first speech was not a failure.
On the contrary, it was a success.
A success all the more brilliant because
won under trying circumstances.

A bill was under consideration to
pay the College of William and Mary,
in Virginia, damages for the occupancy
of its buildings by United States
troops during the war. It was one of
an almost innumerable class of similar
claims in the South, and its payment
would have established a precedent
that would at that time have opened
the door to the appropriation of millions
of dollars. It had been put forward
as being the most meritorious of
these southern war claims, in the hope
that the sympathy which could be
aroused in behalf of the venerable institution
of learning making the claim
(it dating back to Washington’s time,
and being of a religious and eleemosynary
as well as educational character)
would stir up a sentimental feeling
by means of which the other claims
could be slipped through the House.

Doctor Loring, a Republican member
from Massachusetts, one of the
most polished and eloquent speakers
in the House, had made a strong and
touching appeal, full of pathos and
sentiment, in favor of the bill. At the
conclusion of his speech spontaneous
applause burst from all sides; Republicans
and Democrats thronged to the
desk of the orator to congratulate and
shake him by the hand. The scene was
a memorable one. Cries of “Vote,”
“Vote,” rose from all parts of the
House, and it seemed inevitable that
the bill would pass by an almost unanimous
vote.

At this juncture Mr. Reed arose.
He has told that he would at that
moment have sold his opportunity to
speak for a very insignificant sum.
He stood motionless for ten minutes,
unable to utter a word. Knowing that
his only chance was to dominate the
383
turmoil, he at last raised his voice,
and, after five minutes, he felt that
he would have a hearing. Slowly the
excitement and noise quieted down,
and for forty minutes he was given
the closest attention. The speech was
so clear, forcible, and convincing that,
in spite of some break in the Republican
ranks, it recalled members of both
parties from their temporary emotional
lapse and turned the tide against these
dangerous claims.

In ’77 he was made a member of
what was known as “The Potter Committee,”
appointed to investigate the
operations of the returning boards in
the South. Committee work was essentially
congenial to Mr. Reed. He
delighted in cross-examinations, and
his power of sarcasm and of insinuating
inquiry furnished the committee
and the public with the most dramatic
scenes which occurred at any of its
sessions. In cross-examining a clever
scoundrel, one Anderson, for instance,
for two whole days, he at last compelled
him to admit that he was a forger.
“Who is this man Reed,” every
one began to ask, and the young congressman
found himself, perhaps more
in his legal capacity than as a legislator,
famous.

It is not the purpose of this article
to describe Mr. Reed’s public career,
further than to say that there came a
day when, upon the departure of Mr.
Frye from the House to the Senate, and
the election of General Garfield to the
presidency, Mr. Reed passed, by common
agreement and without questioning,
to the leadership of his party in the
House, and that, in the logical course
of events, he was naturally indicated
as the candidate for the Speakership,
when, in 1889, after six years of minority,
his party became a majority.
What a magnificent combination of assaults
and eulogies his career as Speaker
brought forth is too vividly impressed
upon the popular mind to need more
than mention.

During his public career Mr. Reed
has manifested in a score or more of
verbal hand-to-hand conflicts his ability
to meet an emergency to the best
advantage of his side. Always upon
his feet when he scents danger, he
is as quick to scent it as any politician
who ever occupied a seat upon that
floor. He is at all times as truly the
master of all his resources as ever Mr.
Blaine was in that same tempestuous
arena of the House.

From the first he has shown himself
384
that rara avis, a born debater—aggressive
and cautious, able to strike
the nail right on the head at critical
moments, to condense a whole argument
with epigrammatic brevity. He
has shown, to my judgment, better
than any parliamentarian living, how
the turbulent battlings of great legislative
bodies, so chaotic in appearance,
are not chaos at all to one who has the
capacity to think with clearness and
precision upon his feet. Such a man assimilates
the substance of every speech
and judges its relative bearing upon the
question. At the beginning it is hard
to tell where a discussion will hinge, but
gradually, as the debate goes on, the
two or three points which are the key
of the situation become clear to the
true debater. As I understand the art of
the debater, it is as if logs were heaped
in confusion before him, and the thing
to do was to single out the one log
which, when removed, starts all the
others flying down stream—an easier
thing to conceive than to accomplish,
and which demands an alliance of
widely diverse qualities. I remember
telling Mr. Reed once that it seemed
to me as if there must be in the temperament
of the debater something of
the artist’s nature—a little of the same
instinct to inspire and guide him. And
I added: “Don’t you, like the artist,
draw for material everywhere, from
friend and foe alike, from things bearing
directly upon your subject as well
as from things that are apparently more
removed from it? Don’t you have
something akin to inspiration?”

“Well, perhaps so,” Mr. Reed answered,
“and an anecdote occurs to
my mind which you may think fits your
theory. An obscure chap got up once
and went for me in what was evidently
a six months’ laboriously prepared invective.
I hardly realized what he was
about, except that I had an impression
of the man using words in the same
frantic fashion a windmill uses its arms
in a blow. All the same, when he had
finished pitching into me, I could not
but get up and return the compliment.
I had no more idea of what I was going
to say than he had, when, by a hazard,
my eye caught in the sea of heads before
me the face of another representative
from his State—a man who was
one of the leaders of his party—and instantly
the answer flashed in my mind.
I had begun with something like ‘This
is only another echo of the minority of
the Fifty-first Congress, whose echoes
are dying, not musically, but dying.
Gentlemen,’ I continued, ‘it is too
much glory for a State to furnish us
with two such eminent representatives,
the one to lead the House, the other to
bring up the rear.’

“But I want to tell you, while we are
on this subject of the artist and the
orator,” Mr. Reed continued, “that I
believe there is as much of a rhythm
in prose as there is in poetry, and if a
man has not the intuitive feeling of
that subtile thing, rhythm, he can never
amount to anything as an orator.
Certain books of George William Curtis—‘Prue
and I,’ especially—have
helped me as much as anything to realize
how delightful a quality rhythm is.”

There is a side to Mr. Reed which
few people suspect. He is a lover of
good novels, especially such novels as
those of Balzac and Thackeray, which
present human nature in a rugged,
truthful manner. I should think that
Mr. Reed would have about as much
respect for a namby-pamby novel as
he has for a wishy-washy politician.

Of the English novelists he likes
Thackeray by far the best. “Pendennis,”
“The Adventures of Philip,”
and “The Virginians” he esteems as
his most interesting works, though
Thackeray reached high-water mark, in
Mr. Reed’s opinion, in “Vanity Fair.”
Charles Reade, too, has found in him
an assiduous reader. He thinks “The
Cloister and the Hearth” the finest
and truest picture that has been made
of life in the fifteenth century, and that
Charles Reade is the best story-teller
that ever wrote English.

In poetry his preference is for Tennyson,
but he is a constant reader of
Browning, Holmes, Longfellow, and
Whittier also. “Would you mind,” said
Mr. Reed, while talking of poets, “if
I descend from the great names and
say that I have a great liking for the
rhymes of a Kansas lawyer, Eugene F.
Ware, who writes over the nom-de-plume
of ‘Ironquill’? They are so
385
direct; they present a moral in so
few and so strikingly well chosen
words; and then they have just enough
of that quality of language which is always
attractive because it is language
in the making. How do you like this
example of Mr. Ware’s sturdy popular
muse?

Mr. Reed, who learned French after
he was forty years old, enjoys the
masterpieces of French fiction and
French verse in the original. He reads
and rereads Horace, or, rather, certain
parts of Horace which appeal strongly
to him. But his one great admiration
is Balzac. “Yes, I like to read Balzac,”
Mr. Reed often says. “His
closeness to nature and life hold you
in spite of yourself. There is hardly
a book of his which is not sad beyond
tears. ‘Eugénie Grandet’ is a most
powerful delineation of the absorbing
grasp which love of money has on a
strong man, and the power which love
has over an untutored spirit, but sadness
permeates everything. That wonderful
love story of the ‘Duchess de
Langais’ is like no other love story ever
written. Could anything be more sad
than her life at the convent, and her
lover’s long search for her hiding-place?
unless it be that lover’s discovery,
when he scaled the convent walls, that
death had been stronger than love, and
that, after a life of wasted devotion,
nothing could be said of her beautiful
form as it sank into the ocean except
the mournful words, ‘She was a woman;
now she is nothing.’ And what
an extraordinary picture that is in the
‘Peau de Chagrin’ of the controlling
power of society over a fashionable
woman! And again, in ‘Père Goriot.’
How sad they all are, and the
sadness of a life that toils not nor
spins! Verily, to be happy we must
take no note of the flying hours, and
live outside of ourselves. Is not the
condition of joyous life to forget that
we are living? Here most of the characters
are so entirely selfish that one
sometimes thinks there is not one single
friendly heart in the entire story. All
are so conscious of living—even those
in the higher sphere—and so anxious
to appear other than they are, that
their entire lives are only ignoble struggles,
with nothing of serene repose.
When the strife is not for gold or position
it is for love, which is thus degraded!”

I was talking the other day to that
brilliant orator, Benjamin Butterworth,
of Ohio, and the conversation turned
to Tom Reed, as Butterworth affectionately
called him. Said Butterworth:
“The way Reed’s constituents
have stood by him is one of the most
gratifying things to me in American
politics. During one of his campaigns,
in which I spoke for him, I met some
Democrats in his district. I said,
‘Gentlemen, I do not know anything
about your politics, but you have a
man of sterling qualities to represent
you.’ ‘Yes,’ they replied, ‘he is an
intense Republican and has peculiarities,
but we like him because he represents
the best thought of the district,
and we vote for him on the sly.’”

That plain-speaking man, whose chief
characteristic is to be true to his own
convictions, is a pretty good specimen
of the Puritan. Had he been in Cromwell’s
army he either would not have
prayed at all or he would have prayed
just as long as Cromwell did. In either
case he would have fought for what he
believed to be the right, all the time,
and given no quarter.

Apropos of what might be called
his blunt frankness, I recall an incident
386
told me by a member who had
charge of what was known as the
Whiskey Bill. Mr. Reed had baffled
the attempts of the whiskey men to
get it up, but in his temporary absence,
through the inadvertence or
incapacity of a member, the bill was
forced on the House. Reed ran down
to the fellow, and vented his feelings
in the remark, “You are too big a fool
to lead, and haven’t got sense enough
to follow.”

If his bits of speeches flung about in
the heat of debate, either in retort or
in attack, were gathered, they would
make a mighty interesting book. No
other man has like him the power to
condense a whole argument in a few
striking words. His epigrams are
worthy of the literary artist in that
they are perfect in form. Though
struck out on the spur of the moment
you cannot take a word from nor recast
them. They have for solid basis a
most profound knowledge of human
nature, of life, and they exhibit to a
luminous degree the possession in their
author of that prime quality of a true
man—horse sense. I remember this
fragment of a speech of last session:
“Gentlemen, everybody has an opinion
about silver, except those who have
talked so much about it that they have
ceased to think.”

There are many people who believe
that Mr. Reed himself disproves one of
his epigrams, that “a statesman is a
successful politician who is dead.” As
for me, I venture to say that Mr. Reed
is right, but he has there formulated a
rule to which he is one of the rare
exceptions.

Thomas Brackett Reed was born in Portland,
Me., October 18, 1839. He graduated
at Bowdoin College in 1860, and then commenced
to study law. In 1864 he suspended
his studies and joined the navy as Acting
Assistant Paymaster, serving until his honorable
discharge at the close of the war. Resuming
his legal studies, he was admitted to
the bar and began to practise in his native town.
He soon took an active part in politics, and
was a member of the Maine State Legislature
from 1868 to 1869. In 1870 he sat in the
State Senate. From that year until 1872 he
was State Attorney-General, and in 1874-77 he
served as solicitor for the city of Portland. He
was sent to Congress in 1876 and has been continuously
re-elected since. When the Republican
party came into power in 1888, he was
elected Speaker of the House of Representatives.
He is a powerful debater, an energetic
politician, and a leading authority upon parliamentary
procedure.

Frances Elizabeth Willard was born in
Churchville, N.Y., September 28, 1839. She
graduated at Northwestern Female College,
Evanston, Ill., in 1859. She became Professor
of Natural Science there in 1862, and Principal
of Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in 1866. After
two years of travel and study in Europe and the
Holy Land, she became Professor of Esthetics
in Northwestern University, and, as Dean of the
Women’s College there, developed her system of
self-government, now generally adopted. In
1874 Miss Willard identified herself with the
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. As
secretary of the Union she organized the Home
Protection movement, and in 1879 was elected
president. She took a leading part in the establishment
of the Prohibition party, and in 1887
was elected President of the Women’s Council
of the United States. She also accepted the
leadership of the White Cross movement, which
has been successful in obtaining enactments in
many States for the protection of women. Besides
being a director of the Women’s Temperance
Publishing House, Miss Willard is chief
contributor to “The Union Signal” (Chicago)
and associate editor of “Our Day” (Boston).
Her chief literary works are “Nineteen Beautiful
Years,” “Woman and Temperance,” “How
to Win,” “Woman in the Pulpit,” and
“Glimpses of Fifty Years.”

Edgar Wilson Nye, who has become famous
as a humorist under the pen name of “Bill
Nye,” was born in Shirley, Piscataqua County,
Maine, August 25, 1850. His family removed
to Wisconsin shortly afterwards, and the boy
was educated at River Falls, in that State. Early
in the seventies he went to Wyoming Territory;
he there studied law, and was admitted to the
bar in 1876. While in Wyoming he served in
several public capacities, as postmaster of Laramie
and as a member of the legislature. He
had early begun to furnish humorous sketches
to the newspapers, and for some time was connected
with the press as correspondent. He
returned to Wisconsin in 1883. In 1886 he was
connected with the New York “World,” and
since then has been a weekly contributor to
numerous papers. As a lecturer and reader from
his own books Mr. Nye has been very successful.
In 1891 he produced a play, “The Cadi,”
at a New York theatre. His best-known books
are “Bill Nye and the Boomerang,” “The
Forty Liars,” “Baled Hay,” and “Remarks.”
Mr. Nye has resided, for some time past, near
Asheville, N.C.

George W. Cable was born in New Orleans
in 1844. He obtained an ordinary public-school
education. His early life was spent as a
clerk in a commercial office, varied by successful
contributions to “The New Orleans Picayune”
under the signature of “Drop-Shot.” In 1863
he joined the Confederate Army, and served
in the Fourth Regiment Mississippi Cavalry,
until the end of the civil war. His first literary
work to attract general attention was a short
story, “Sieur George,” published in the old
“Scribner’s Monthly.” To that periodical he
contributed numerous other sketches of creole
life, which were published in book form in 1879.
Other stories and articles followed, and Mr.
Cable, after working up to a leading position in
the mercantile world, from that of an errand boy,
devoted himself to literature as a profession.
“The Grandissimes,” in 1880, “Madame
Delphine,” 1881, “The Creoles of Louisiana”
and “Dr. Sevier,” 1884, established him in
a high place amongst modern authors. His
knowledge of the South, and his studies among
the creoles and negroes, made him an authority
upon the questions relating to the past and
future of the negro and the southern States,
and involved him in numerous and heated discussions.
“The Silent South,” 1885, and
“The Negro Question,” 1890, are the most
prominent of his works on this subject. As a
lecturer and reader he is widely known.

THOMAS B. REED.

FRANCES E. WILLARD.

EDGAR WILSON NYE.

GEORGE W. CABLE.

“Now, we won’t be
selfish with our
telephone, will
we, dear? We
will let a few friends
use it occasionally—it
will be such a
pleasure and a convenience,”
and Mrs.
Jones stood off and
looked admiringly
at the new telephone.

“By all means. It is
here and it may as well
be doing some one a
service as to stand idle—and I like
to feel that a friend isn’t afraid to ask
a favor of me now and then. Yes, I
suppose that telephone will save us
many a car-fare during the year. You
can use it to do your marketing, instead
of tiring yourself out and wasting half
a day three or four times a week; and
days when I forget things, think how
easy it will be to telephone and remind
me. Why, it will entirely do away with
the need for strings to tie around my
fingers.”

“Of course it will. I’m sure that
what we’ll save on strings and car-fare
will pay the rent of the instrument,”
joyously responded Mrs. Jones, who
had no great head for figures.

Thus hope and kindly intentions presided
at the inauguration of the Joneses’
telephone.

Three months passed, and the great
invention had carried much information—useful
and otherwise—not only to its
owners, but to the entire neighborhood
as well. There were even days when
the Joneses questioned whether they
were not running a public telephone,
so often did the bell ring. It is true, it
had not quite paid for itself in the anticipated
saving of car-fares and finger
strings; still, it had certainly been a
great comfort, and “Well, we’ll just
face the music and call it a luxury,”
said Jones, as he put away the receipt
for his first quarter’s rent; “especially
for our friends,” he added, with just a
touch of bitterness.

Scarce twenty-four hours after this
philosophical stand was taken, Mrs.
Jones, who was rather a light sleeper,
was aroused by a violent and prolonged
ringing. It was six o’clock and Sunday
morning—a day and hour usually
dedicated to undisturbed slumber.
After a brief debate in her own mind as
to whether the house was on fire or
the milkman was ringing, she realized
that it was the telephone bell. She
hastily donned slippers and gown and
ran down-stairs. In reply to her interrogative
“Yes?” (Mrs. Jones could
never bring herself to say “Hello!”)
came the following, in measured and
clerical tones:

“It is Mr. Brown—Reverend Mr.
Brown, speaking.”

“Oh, yes?” instinctively covering
her half-clad feet in the folds of her
gown.

“I believe you live near the Reverend
Mr. Smith, and are a member of
his church.”

“Yes.”

“Will you be good enough to send
to him, and ask if he can spare his
curate to take Mr. Brown’s early service
for him, as he is called away. I would
be glad if you would send immediately,
as I must have his answer within fifteen
minutes. Thank you. Please call up
1001,” and snap
went the telephone.

Mrs. Jones looked
at her raiment and
reflected that her
one servant was at
mass and would not
be back for an hour.
She went slowly up-stairs.

“Tom, Tom dear,
wake up.”

“What is it?”

“The Reverend
Brown has telephoned
to know
whether the Reverend
Smith can
send his curate to
take his early service.”

“Well, what in
the world have I
got to do with the
peddling out of
early services?”
snapped Jones, as he turned and shook
up his pillows.

“He has to have an answer to his
message within fifteen minutes.”

“Well, let Susan take it,” settling
back comfortably.

“But Susan has gone to mass.”

“And I suppose that means that I
am to be turned out of my bed at daybreak,
and canter half a mile!” cried
Jones, in a high and excited voice, as he
bounced from his bed and began to
grope sleepily for his clothes. His
toilet was made amidst grumblings of
“Confound their early services, why
can’t they stay in bed like Christians,
instead of prowling about, and sending
men out in the chilly morning air,” etc.,
etc.

Jones’s temper was soured for the
day, and that night, as he was winding
his watch, he said severely, “Jane, I’m
going to draw the line at delivering
messages. Tom, Dick, and Harry can
come here and bellow into the telephone
until they are hoarse, but I’ll be
switched if I’ll be messenger boy any
longer.”

But messages continued to come and
go, increasing rather than decreasing
in frequency. People in the neighborhood
fell into
the habit of saying
to friends in distant
parts of the city,
when leaving a
question open:
“Just telephone me
when you make up
your mind. I haven’t
a telephone myself,
but the Joneses
have, and they are
very obliging about
letting me use it.”

So the fact that
a telephone was
owned by an obliging
family circulated
almost as rapidly
as if it had been
a lie.

There were times
when Mrs. Jones
hadn’t the face to
ask Susan to stop
her work and carry
these messages, so she carried them herself—trying
to keep up her self-respect
by combining an errand of her own in
the same direction. There were a few
messages, however, which remained forever
indignantly shut within the telephone;
as, for instance, that of the little
girl, which came in a shrill, piping
voice:

“Mrs. Jones, will you send your
servant over to Mrs. Graham’s to ask
Milly where she got that perfectly delicious
delight she gave me the other
day, and tell her to be quick about it,
please, for I’m waiting.”

And another which came in chuffy,
distorted, conversational English—regular
396
“chappie” English, very hard
to understand, but which she finally
straightened out into: “I say there—aw—oh—is
that you, Mrs. Jones? Sorry
to trouble you, but would you be
so awfully good as to send word to
Mrs. Bruce—aw—that I’m awfully cut
up about it, but I won’t be able to
dine there to-night. Aw—I wouldn’t
trouble you, but it’s so awfully hot
I can’t go round to explain to her—you
know. Thanks, awfully.” The
telephone was closed, and the awfully-cut-up
young man, whose sole claim
on Mrs. Jones was that they had once
met at a party, was left to be healed
by time.

He had for company in his fate the
enthusiastic tennis-player, who, in the
midst of “a little summer shower,”
summoned Mrs. Jones.

“I want to speak to Flannigan, the
gardener.”

“This is not Flannigan’s telephone.”

“And who is speaking?”

“Mrs. Jones.”

“Oh, well, Mrs. Jones, I can give
my message to you just as well. I
want you to tell Flannigan to come
and roll the tennis ground at once.
He will understand. Tell him right
away, please.”

“Flannigan does not live here.”

“Well, you can send him word, I
suppose,” in a surprised and offended
voice, “to oblige a lady. It is Miss
Mortimer who is speaking,” and there
was an impressive silence. Mrs. Jones
remembered Miss Mortimer as a high-stepping
young woman whom she had
met at a friend’s house, and who had
given her the impression of taking an
inventory of her. So Mrs. Jones took
pleasure in replying, “Miss Mortimer
probably does not know that she is
addressing a private telephone. Good
day.”

But it was Jones, the luckless Jones,
who seemed set aside for the cruel
buffeting of the telephoning public.
One night, which he will ever point to
as the wildest and wettest night he has
known, he had settled himself into his
most comfortable chair, with a pile of
new magazines beside him, when he
was disturbed by a summons from the
telephone. He responded with readiness,
for he was rather expecting a call
from his partner, and to his cheerful
“Hello, old fellow, I’m here,” came,
in a sputtering and wind-tossed voice,
“Will you please tell Mrs. Goodson
that as it is so stormy her daughter
will not go home to-night?”

Jones turned and confronted his
wife, and for a time words refused to
come.

“Well, this is a little too much!
Now think of an unknown voice barking
at me to go out into a storm like this and
tell the Goodsons that their daughter
will not be at home to-night!”

The Goodsons lived just six squares
away.

“And what will you do, dear? Why
didn’t you say plainly that you would
not and could not go out into a storm
like this—that they must send a messenger?”

“They shut me off without giving
me time to answer.”

“Well, call them up. Call them up
at once.”

“Jane, please have some sense.
How do I know where Miss Goodson
has gadded off to? How do I know
what number to call up?”

“Well, I just wouldn’t go.”

“Oh, I’ll have to. They are friends,
and if they are expecting that girl of
theirs home to-night and she doesn’t
come Mrs. Goodson will go out of her
mind.”

So Jones drove himself forth, clad
in righteous indignation and a waterproof
coat. The cold rain lashed him
and the wind belabored his umbrella,
and he was more than once obliged to
pause under friendly porches to get
his breath. At last the home of the
Goodsons was reached, and spent and
weary he staggered up the steps. Goodson
himself opened the door.

“Hello, Jones, you’re no fair weather
friend indeed. Come in, come in.”

“No, I’m too wet,” he answered,
pointedly (and he felt like adding
“and too mad”). “I only came to
tell you that Miss Goodson won’t be
at home to-night.”

“My daughter! She is at home.
Don’t you hear her playing on the
piano now? Come into the vestibule,
anyway.”

Jones walked in, with the rain streaming
from his coat.

“Katey!” called Mr. Goodson to
his wife. “Here is Jones come to say
that Julia won’t be home to-night.”

“What?” demanded Mrs. Goodson,
appearing in the hall and regarding
Jones as if he were a mild sort of
lunatic; “Julia is at home.”

“Well, I don’t understand it,” said
Jones, plaintively. “I was rung up
half an hour ago, and asked to come
and tell you that your daughter wouldn’t
be at home on account of the storm.”

“And do you mean to say that you
stand ready to turn out at all hours and
deliver messages free of cost?” cried
Goodson.

“It looks that way.”

“Well, you are an ass!”

“Don’t compliment me too freely,
Goodson, I can’t take in much more;
I’m soaked as it is.”

Mrs. Goodson stood thinking. “Who
could have been meant? Oh, I’ve just
thought! It must be that Mrs. Goodson
who sews for Mrs. Jones and me.
And she has a daughter—a typewriter
down town—and she has friends living
in the suburbs. She has doubtless
gone there to dinner and concluded
to stay all night. But she lives just
around the corner from you.”

Goodson laughed loudly and brutally.
“A bonny sort of a night for a respectable
family man like you, Jones, to be
skylarking around carrying messages
for typewriting maidens!”

“Oh, come now, that’s a little too
much!”

“Well, old man, I’ll show my gratitude
for your friendly intentions toward
me by going round to the telephone
people the first thing in the morning,
and complaining of you. You’ve no
right to be running opposition to the
public telephones in this way.”

“If you only would!” and Jones
wrung his friend’s hand while tears of
thankfulness welled up to his eyes.

Once in the street, he longed for
a contemptuous enemy to kick him
briskly to the door of the Widow Goodson.
The latter was evidently about to
retire, as it was a long time before she
responded to his ring. When, finally,
she did come, she heard him calmly
through and then answered languidly:
“Yes, I didn’t much expect Bella home
to-night, for she said if it come on to
rain she thought she’d stay with her
cousins. Good night. Quite drizzly,
isn’t it?” peering out into the darkness.

Full of bitterness, Jones turned homeward.
It seemed to him that his cup
was full; and so it was, for it refused to
hold more. As he entered his home,
chilled without but hot within, he was
greeted by an unfamiliar voice coming
from the regions of the telephone.

“Give me Blair’s,” it said. “Is that
Blair’s? Is that—Blair’s—B-l-a-i-r-’s,
do you understand? Oh, yes, it is you,
is it, Mrs. Blair? Well, say I want to
speak to Miss McCrea—Oh—pshaw!
you must know her—she’s the young
lady that works for you. Oh, she’s out,
is she? Well, when she comes in, tell
her Miss Doolan told you to say that
398
Mr. Brennan has broke his leg—she’ll
know, he drives Judson’s horses—and
me and Mrs. Judson want to know
whether he’s to go to the hospital or
to his friends. You can send your
answer to No. 999. They’ll let me
know. Give Miss McCrea my love and
tell her not to worry about Mr. Brennan.
Good-by.”

Jones confronted a stately creature
as she stepped into the hall.

“Look here, young woman, who are
you?”

“I’m Miss Doolan, and I’m stopping
at Judson’s—as housemaid,” she
answered, so taken aback that for
the moment her self-possession failed
her.

“And to whom have you been telephoning?”

“To Blair’s—Judge Blair’s, over on
the avenue—a friend of mine stops
there.”

“And are you in the habit of calling
up ladies in that fashion?”

“It’s a very good fashion, for all I
can see,” she retorted impudently.

“And what business have you to
order an answer sent here for me to
carry on a night like this?”

“Mrs. Judson and me took you for a
gentleman, sor, and we thought you
wouldn’t mind obliging ladies.”

“Nor do I, but I don’t know either
Mrs. Judson or you, and
I don’t propose running
errands for you.”

“Oh, then don’t bother
yourself, sor—we can
hire a boy,” she flung
back with a scornful
laugh as she bounced
out.

“Now, Jane, I want
you to distinctly understand
that the last message
has been carried
from this house. I have
probably to-night sown
the seeds of pleurisy and
pneumonia broadcast
in my system; I have
walked twelve squares
to deliver a message to
the wrong person; we
have had a baggage
here using our telephone as if it were
her own, and we have been at the beck
and call of the unpaying public for the
last six months. Now, if the telephone
people are not here by noon to-morrow,
to threaten legal proceedings against
me (Goodson has promised to complain
of me) for undermining their
business, I shall have that wretched
instrument dragged away, body and
soul, and we will try some other form
of economy in the future.”

Editor’s Note.—The illustrations of this article are from photographs, specially taken for the Harvard
University Exhibit at the World’s Fair.

What do they do there?

What do they expect to come
out of it?

The notion of a mental laboratory is
still a mystery to most persons. They
ask themselves the above questions,
and many feel as they do so an uncanny
shiver. They cannot realize that the
study of the mind is already an established
natural science, here, at sober
Harvard, in all the leading universities,
and free of spooks and mediums.

Yet a psychological laboratory looks
much like any other modern laboratory.
Around the rooms run glass-cases filled
with fine instruments. Shelves line up,
row after row, of specimen-jars and
bottles. Charts cover the remainder
of the walls. The tables and floors are
crowded with working apparatus. Two
large rooms and one small one are now
occupied at Harvard. Four more rooms
will be added to these this summer.

Also, the spirit that reigns in these
rooms is the same that is found in other
laboratories of exact science. This is
the important thing. The minds of
these workers are not wandering in
dialectics and vagrant hypotheses.
Reverence has opened her eyes. Hypotheses
they have, and must have.
Often they hold conflicting opinions.
But the referee is always present—Nature
herself. To experiment, to show the
400
fact, is always the method of debate.
This is the great advantage of the
modern way of studying psychology
over the old.

The American public is so practical
that I feel I can alone satisfy its “whats
and wherefores” by explicitly describing
some of the investigations being
carried on here.

EFFECT OF ELEMENTARY SENSATIONS
ON ONE ANOTHER.

Here is a lantern throwing a steady
light through a large tube. (See illustration
below, the right hand group.)
By transparent slides of colored glass
or gelatine, the light may be made of
any color. At the end of the tube is
a box, like a camera. The operator
covers his head with a cloth, and observes
the color of the light as it shines
from the tube through, or on, a tiny
hole in the dark box. The size of the
hole can be varied by moving slides,
worked by micrometer screws so fine
that they measure the dimensions of the
hole to the four-hundredth of an inch.

The first step is to discover the
“threshold” of each separate color.
That means the smallest-sized hole
through which each color can be distinguished.
This varies for different
colors. But now comes the interesting
point. The size of the hole, for any
given color seen, varies according to the
nature of any sound heard at the same
time. For instance, in order to distinguish
a given red, the hole must be
larger or smaller, in proportion as the
pitch of a musical tone is lower or
higher, fainter or stronger.

The above experiment is one in a
system of investigations, intended to
discover the laws by which the simplest
sensations modify each other under the
simplest conditions. These are laws
as fixed as the laws of gravity, and,
once determined, we may move on to
study the combination of these elements
into the higher thought processes.

EFFECTS OF ATTENTION.

Another experiment will further illustrate
this method of study. An apparatus
is so contrived that a colored disk
can be made darker or brighter by the
operator, and a measure of the change
be recorded. (See illustration on opposite
page, rear
group.) The persons
operated on
do not know what
change is made,
or whether any
will be made or
not. They first
look at the disk
for ten seconds,
taking good note
of its color.
Next, the operator changes the shade
(or not) as he sees fit. Then for another
ten seconds the subject judges the
shade of color, but this time performs
meanwhile a sum in addition as the
operator calls to him simple numbers.

The experiment is to determine how
the appearance of the color changes, by
reason of dividing the attention between
observing the disk and performing
the addition. Do the colors of a
rival’s bonnet really grow more glaring
the harder they are looked at? To
explain this is to touch on a social as
well as an esthetic problem.

Diversion of attention changes the
appearance of distances as well as of
colors. A large frame covered with
black cloth stands vertical. Two tiny
white disks are held in place on the
cloth by invisible threads manipulated
behind the frame by the operator.
When the disks are set a given distance
apart they rest close upon the smooth
black ground.
The eye sees but
two white spots
in a free field,
and may judge
the distance between
them without
complication.
This is
done for ten seconds,
as with the
color disks. Then
the spots are covered, and their distance
apart slightly changed (or not) by the operator.
Again they are shown, and now
judged for ten seconds while adding figures.
The mental process of addition
changes the judgment of the distance.

You will say it is a familiar experience
that the road seems longer or
shorter as the mind is busy or not.
But it is not a familiar thing to determine
the law of such lengthening and
shortening for definite distances, and
under precise mental condition, as in
the above experiment.

JUDGMENTS OF TIME.

Every woman knows that color has
an effect on the apparent size of
objects; that of her dress on her
figure.[2] It is not as well known that
color affects our judgments of time.
Our next experiment examines this
matter.

Upon a cylinder, slowly revolving
by fine clockwork, strips of different
colored cardboard are fastened, and
observed through a hole in a screen.
(See illustration on the preceding
page.) The time of each rotation is
measured precisely. By observation it
is found that the period of rotation
seems to vary with the colors on the
cylinder. By combining colors differently
through a long and tedious series
of investigations on many people, it
is being determined what part this
sort of influence plays in mental processes.
“When things look gay, time
seems short.” Psychology seeks the
laws of such happenings.

LOCALIZATION OF SOUNDS.

They are the most familiar things
which in our science become the
strangest. Not to know where you
are when seasick, still less where your
mind is, is common enough. Our next
experiment will trace our power to
know where sounds are to the same
origin as seasickness.

Seasickness starts in the ear. In its
cavity are three small tubes, each bent
in a circle, and filled with fluid. The
three sit at right angles to each other,
like the three sides at the corner of a
room or a box. Consequently, in whatever
direction the head is moved, the
fluid in some one of the tubes is given
403
a circular motion. Hanging out into
the tubes, from their sides, are hairs or
cilia, which connect with nerve cells
and fibres that branch off from the
auditory nerve. When the head moves
the fluid moves, the hairs move, the
cells are “fired off,” a nervous current
is sent up to the brain, and a feeling
of the head’s peculiar motion is consequent.

As for seasickness: this nerve current,
on its way to the brain, at one
point runs beside the spot or “centre”
where the nerve governing the stomach
has its origin. When the rocking of
the head is abnormally violent and
prolonged, the stimulus is so great that
the current leaks over into this adjoining
“centre,” and so excites the
nerve running to the stomach as to
cause wretchedness and retching.
Deaf mutes, whose ear “canals” are
affected, are never seasick.

But normally the amount of ear-feeling
which we get by reason of
moving our head in a particular direction
comes in a curious way to be a
measure of the direction of sound.
The feelings we get from our skin and
muscles in turning the head play a
similar rôle. We turn our ear to catch
a sound. We do this so frequently for
every point, that in time we learn to
judge the direction of the sound by
the way we would have to turn the
head in order to hear the sound best.
Thereafter we do not have to turn the
head to get the direction, for we now
remember the proper feeling and know
it. This memory of the old feeling is
our idea of the present direction. If
we never moved our heads we never
could have any such notion of the
location of sounds as at present—perhaps
none whatever.

MENTAL ORIGIN OF NUMBERS.

Number! surely there can be nothing
mysterious here; no “law” to be
discovered about one, two, three?
Well, the next time you shake hands,
ask the man what he feels. A hand.
Then ask further and he will feel five
fingers. Now ask rightly and he will
feel any number of distinct spots of
pressure. But the real pressures were
practically the same all through. Why,
then, did he feel first one, then five,
then eight, ten, or a dozen? So with
the objects we become acquainted with
through any of our senses! Why does
the same bit of nature now stand
before us “one tree,” and now a myriad
of leaves and branches? Why do the
same outer groupings fall into such
different inner groupings? Why does
not the result of each little nerve of
the millions continually played on in
eye, ear, and skin stand out by itself,
and we have so many million feelings?

To explain this: the first time a
child opens his eyes he sees, as Professor
James says, but “one big, blooming,
buzzing confusion.” Not till some
“whole” (knife) be broken up into parts
(blade, handle) and each part be mentally
perceived in immediate succession
the one after the other can the idea of
“twoness” ever be possible to that
child. The “twoness” is a feeling of
distinct nature apart from the two
terms (blade, handle). It rises from
the “shock of succession.” It is one of
the “modified states” wrought by one
element on another, which we studied
in our first experiment. Once lodged
in the mind, the feeling may be remembered
and reawakened, like any
other. Thereafter the two parts or
terms may come before the mind,
awaken this feeling of twoness, and now
stand side by side, simultaneously and
numerically separate.

These are the primary laws of number
perception. Our experiments illustrate
and prove them. Though the
nerves lying under a needle point are
really several in number, the pressure
on them is commonly felt as “one
prick.” The area is so small that
usually, through life, all the nerves
have been pressed together. They
have not been split up and pressed
enough times in succession among
themselves for a memory of “twoness”
to have been developed among them.
But, by proper manipulation, not unlike
some of the processes of hypnotism,
yet perfectly normal, the “twoness”
of some other group of nerves
can be yoked to the feeling resulting
from the pressure of a particular needle
point. Thereupon the one needle
404
will feel like two, as distinctly and
clearly as any real two.

MENTAL ORIGIN OF DISTANCES AND
SPACE.

By similar manipulations the simple
needle may be made to feel like three
or like four; now standing in a line,
now in a triangle, and again in the
corners of a square. But, since there
is but one needle, what about the apparent
distance between these several
points that are clearly felt? This is
the most curious thing of all, and from
the light it throws on the formation of
our “ideas” both of number and of
space, is the most important.

To explain this: our notion of distance
results out of “series” of sensations,
in the same way as our notions
of number. To have any idea of “distance”
aroused between any two points
of skin, the line of nerves lying between
those points must, some time during
life, have been previously stimulated in
a line of succession, such as would result
from a pencil drawn along between
them. A card edge would give no
idea of “distance” until such a series
had some time been previously experienced.
The memory of the “series”
is the idea of the distance.

Within small areas of the skin, so
few “series” have been experienced
that no “distance memories” have
been developed. Consequently pin-point
areas commonly awaken no notion
of distance. For some regions
of the body these “limit areas” are
larger than for others; at some places
are quite large. On the back, spaces
three inches apart may fail to give any
idea of number or of distance. Every
region has such a limit distance.

Now it is this limit distance, the smallest
405
distance for which a “series” memory
has been developed for a given region,
that always shoves itself in, as the apparent
distance between the several fictitious
points felt from the single needle in our experiment.
On the back the one needle feels
like two set three inches apart; on the forehead
like two half an inch apart; on the
tongue one-sixteenth of an inch; and so on.

The upshot, then, of this matter is
to show that our whole mind—our notions
of space, number, time, and all
else—is but a bundle of lawful habits,
formed in relation with the things and
occurrences around us. Ordinarily we
have right ideas, because on the whole
our mind has formed right habits. We
have the right idea of an inch of skin,
because the proper idea of an “inch
long” has become habitually joined to
each inch of skin, or in so far as this
has been done. When a wrong idea
gets joined, then we have an illusion;
that is, the stretch of skin, or, as well,
the pin-point of skin, seems a fraction
of an inch in length; or, again,
like three inches.

“TIME REACTIONS:” METHODS OF
MEASURING THE TIME REQUIRED
FOR PERFORMING VARIOUS MENTAL
ACTS.

A sketch like this would be incomplete
without a word about time reactions—a
subject that historically was
almost the first in the field, and has occupied
more workers than any
other. A generation ago
“as quick as thought” was
our extreme limit of expression.
It outran “quicker
than lightning.” The
great physiologist, Johannes
Müller, wrote, in 1844:

“We shall probably never secure
the means of ascertaining the
speed of nerve activities, because
we lack the comparative distances
from which the speed of a movement,
in this respect analogous to
light, could be calculated.”

We now know that sensory
processes travel along
the nerves on an average
only about one hundred and
ten feet per second, and
often less than twenty-six feet. While
you are performing the commonest
judgment, electricity or light would
have shot from continent to continent.
The time-measurement of different
mental processes is now one of the chief
means which the psychologist uses for
getting at mental laws. When certain
measures are once determined, he uses
these as the chemist does his familiar
reagents, to dissolve the unfamiliar and
more complicated combinations.

The following table shows in decimals
of a second about the average
length of time which our commonest
judgments occupy:

SECONDS

Such then, are a few out of the many
problems which have been experimented
upon in the Harvard Laboratory
during the last year—problems
in perception, association, attention,
“reaction times,” psycho-physic law,
kinesthetics, esthetics, memory, will,
and so on, covering nearly the whole
range of mental phenomena. I have
selected these few for presentation
here, not for their importance over
others, but because they could be simply
described in these pages. The
general aim of all the work is, however,
very simple. As in the other
sciences, it seeks to establish fact
after fact, in orderly manner, along
the whole line of mental nature; and
by unifying these to work ever to a
larger knowledge of the whole.

FACILITIES FOR TEACHING.

But the university laboratory is for
teaching as well as for discovering.
It is equipped for the undergraduate,
as well as for the advanced investigator.
The elementary or demonstrational
courses are designed to impress
upon the student the facts, the
methods, and the spirit of his science.
There is now furnished for these, at
Harvard, nearly every kind of apparatus
commonly used in physical and
physiological laboratories, for the
study of neurology, optics, acoustics,
kinesthetics, esthetics, anthropology,
and so on. The electrical department
is a miniature laboratory in itself. And
the various models in wax, wire, and
plaster—of eyes, ears, brains, fishes,
reptiles, monkeys, children, adults,
idiots, insane people, and people of
genius—is a veritable museum.[3]

The laboratory workshop is provided with the common implements
and facilities required for working in
wood, glass, and metal. Both for original
research and for demonstration,
this laboratory is the most unique,
the richest, and the most complete in
any country; and in witness of the
fame and genius of its present director,
and of the rapidly spreading
interest in experimental psychology,
particularly in America, there are already
gathered here, under Professor
Münsterberg’s administration, a larger
number of students specially devoted
to mental science than ever previously
studied together in any one
place.

THE FUTURE AND INFLUENCE OF THE
NEW SCIENCE.

So much for the place and what is
done there. Now, what is expected to
come from this new psychology? “Do
you fellows expect to invent patent
ways of thinking?” was once asked
me. Who can tell? Who, before Galileo,
would have prophesied that man
should weigh the stars or know their
chemistry? Yet there is much ground
for comparison between the position
of physical science then and that of
mental science now. The popular
opinion of to-day is perhaps even less
awake to the fact that the world of
mental phenomena is a world of laws,
susceptible to scientific experimentation,
than was the day of Galileo to
the similar conception regarding physical
phenomena. Have the physical
sciences changed aught for man since
the sixteenth century? Then we must
not forget how slow was the growth,
and how long it took to arrive at the
laws of gravity and of conservation,
407
not to mention those of evolution.
Experimental psychology, as a systematic
science, is almost younger than
its youngest students. The mental laws
are as fixed and as determinable as the
laws of physics. Who then shall say
what man shall come to know of mental
composition, of the great mental
universe, and of ourselves, its wandering
planets, since minds may be known
as well as stars!

But psychology will not have to wait
till its greater laws shall be wholly established
before she becomes of practical
influence in common affairs. He
who reads most thoughtfully to-day
will most appreciate this truth. He
who reads at all,
reads of “individualism”
as opposed
to “socialism.”
The Pope of Rome
has declared that
the “preoccupying”
problem for
active Christianity
must now be the industrial
problem.
Every important
treatise on the subject,
appearing at
present, admits that
the crucial question
of the industrial
problem is an
ethical problem,
and every ethical
treatise, that every
ethical problem is a
psychological problem. Two years ago
the Roman Catholic Church established
a psychological laboratory in its leading
American college.

The Presbyterians the coming year
will follow with a laboratory at Princeton.
Psychology is no longer feared by
religion, but is accepted, though in
places yet too timidly, as a source of its
further and unending revelation.

But psychology is coming close to
affairs of church and state in more
than one way. One of the greatest
crimes of modern society is its conception
of criminal jurisprudence. Between
the fœtal period and adult life
man passes through, in abridged series,
all the degrees of evolution that have
led up through the lower animal stages
to his own. In early infancy, and even
in childhood, he is not yet wholly man;
not yet safely over the brute period of
his lineal development. If the domestic
calf and chicken spend their first
days wild in the woods, this pre-domestic
environment will seize upon
and develop their pre-domestic traits;
and these once set, no amount of
domestic training will, thereafter, make
calf or chicken anything else than a
wild, untamable creature. The early
instinctive periods of man’s progeny
are more prolonged, more delicate, and
more susceptible than those of lower
animals, yet are of the same nature. If
left to evil environment
in early years
the latent brute
within him will
surely lay hold of
its own, and ripen
the yet innocent
child to a creature
bearing the same relation
to the moral
and civilized man
that the wild wolf
does to the house-dog.

On the other
hand, the wolf
whose first lair is
the hunter’s hearth,
grows to share it
lovingly with the
hunter’s children.
The government
that ignores the hordes of children
which crowd to-day the criminal quarters
of its great cities, and abandons
them to ripen their pre-civilized propensities
under such evil influences, becomes
itself the foster-father of its own
crimes; nurses its own children to fill
its poorhouses, and raises its own
youths to fill its prisons. Psychology,
if on mere ground of financial economy
alone, will yet force criminal
jurisprudence to begin its work before,
rather than after, this early period of
“unalterable penalty.”

The benefits of a psychological training
to the medical man are now so
obvious as to make a knowledge of
psychology imperative for every first-class
408
physician. The nervous activities
are the regulating activities of
every part of the body; and the brain
embodies an ever-meddling three-fourths
of the body’s whole neural
energy. The mind is a play-house
wherein the skilful physician now looks
to observe the condition of the general
system, and with growing precision
even to read the working of such
specific organs as the heart, the stomach,
the bladder, and the liver.

The relation of our science to
modern education has long passed
from novelty to a recognized principle.
A chair of psychology and a chair of
pedagogy, side by side and hand in
hand, is now the requisite of every institution
of advanced learning. “To
get up more ‘fads’? More patent
methods?” It is only the ignorant
now who ask these questions. Galton
has shown that some men do their
thinking in visual pictures—in memories
of what they see; others, in
memories of what they hear; others,
in the memories of their own speaking.
There is reason to suspect that the
lightning-calculator’s speed is largely
due to peculiar “image processes” used
in his thinking, and that these could be
taught if science could but catch his
unconscious secrets. This in time will
be done, and is but an instance of innumerable
things that are sure to be accomplished.
In the face of all present
pedagogical fads and blunders we may
yet say with confidence, of the mind,
the instincts, the emotions, the conduct
of man, individual and social, all is
lawful; and the laws may be discovered.
They are difficult—more difficult
than all the physical laws achieved
from Ptolemy to Darwin. But they
can be scientifically determined and
mastered, and modern methods, swift
with gathering impetus, shall make of
this no lingering matter.

HISTORY OF MENTAL LABORATORIES.

The psychological laboratory sprang
first from no single mind; not wholly
from science nor yet from philosophy,
but from an age. In 1860 Gustave
Theodore Fechner, the godfather of
experimental psychology, published
his famous Law. Fechner was as much
a mystic as a scientist. His Law was,
perhaps, the first great impetus to active
psycho-physical experimentation.
The prospects now are, however, that
this Law will stand, a halfway truth,
beside Newton’s erroneous theory of
409
light, rather than, as was at first claimed
for it, beside the Law of Gravity, a
great primary law of nature.

The spirit of Fechner, of evolution,
and of our times joined to fall upon
Wilhelm Wundt, who founded at Leipsic,
in 1878, the first laboratory in the
world for regular scientific mental
experimentation. Professor Wundt is
the greatest psychologist now living
in Europe, and a majority of the noted
psychological experts, both of Germany
and of America, have been his
pupils.

One of these pupils, G. Stanley Hall,
now President of Clark University,
opened the first American laboratory
at Johns Hopkins in 1883, and the
larger laboratory at Worcester in 1889.
To him must be credited the founding
of experimental psychology in
this country, and an eminent share of
its present successful growth.

A foremost figure in modern psychology
is Professor William James, of
Harvard, whose great text-book, the
product of twelve years of labor, appeared
in 1890. In 1891 he opened
the present Harvard Laboratory, or,
at least, expanded a previously slow
growth to important dimensions.

In 1892 Harvard established a new
chair of Experimental Psychology, and
elected to the same, and to direct its
new laboratory, Professor Hugo Münsterberg,
previously Professor of Philosophy
at Freyburg, Germany. Professor
Münsterberg was at one time
a pupil of Wundt, but is much more a
man of original inspiration; and in his
genius the hopes and destiny of experimental
psychology at Harvard are
now centred.

Some twenty laboratories are now
actively at work in America, and about
half that number in Europe. The
twentieth century will be to mental
what the sixteenth century was to
physical science, and the central field
of its development is likely to be
America.

Harvard University, July, 1893.

“It needs but a steady
head and a clear
conscience and the
thing is done.”
Those were old
Jacob’s words.

“The clear conscience
is not lacking,
thank God! but all these weeks
of watching by a sick bed, and the
scanty meals, have made the head anything
but steady. If it were but three
months ago, my courage would not
fail me, but now——”

The boy broke off abruptly, and,
stepping back several feet, stood looking
up at the stately spire that towered
above him. Fair and shapely it rose,
with gradually receding buttress and
arch, until it terminated at a point over
four hundred feet from the pavement.

All day long little groups of men
had straggled across the Platz and
gathered in front of the great cathedral,
elbowing one another, and stretching
upon tiptoe to read the notice
nailed to the massive door. Many
were the jests passed around.

“Does the old sexton think men are
flies, to creep along yonder dizzy
height?” asked one.

“The prize is indeed worth winning,”
said another, “but”—he turned away
with an expressive shrug of the
shoulder—“life is sweet.”

“When I try to reach heaven ’twill
be by some less steep and dangerous
way,” laughed a third, with an upward
glance at the spire.

“It makes a strong man feel a bit
queer to go up inside as far as the
great bell and look up at the network
of crossing ladders; but to stand outside
and wave a flag!—why, the mere
thought of it is enough to make one’s
head swim,” said the first speaker.

“Jacob Wirtig is the only man in all
Vienna who has the nerve for such a
part.”

“But he served a good apprenticeship!
He learned the knack of keeping
a steady head during his early
days of chamois-hunting in the Tyrol.
But why does he seek to draw others
into danger? For so much gold many
a man would risk his life.”

“I can understand it, Caspar.
Twice before, on some grand occasion,
has old Jacob stood on the spire and
waved a flag as the emperor passed in
the streets below. And now, after all
the fighting and the victory, when
there is to be a triumphal entry into
the city and a grand review, and such
rejoicing as was never known before,
he feels in honor bound to supply the
customary salute from the cathedral.
And since this miserable fever, which
has stricken down so many in the city,
has left him too weak to attempt it, he
is trying, as you see by this notice, to
get some one to take his place. He
offers all the money which the emperor
never fails to send as a reward,
to say nothing of the glory. I’ll
wager a florin that he’ll offer in vain!
But come, let us be going. There’s
too much work to be done, to be
loitering here.”

Twice before on that day, once in
the early morning, and again at noon,
had the boy stood as if spellbound,
with his eyes riveted on the beautiful
spire. And now the setting of the sun
had found him a third time at his post.
The Platz was deserted, but the streets
beyond were thronged with people
hurrying to their homes. Was it fear,
or the chill of the night air, that sent
a shiver over the slender figure of the
boy as he stood, letting his eyes slowly
wander from the top of the spire to the
base of the tower beneath, as if measuring
the frightful distance? But as he
411
turned away with a little gesture of
despair, there rose before him the
vision of a wan and weary face, as
white as the pillow against which it
rested, and he heard the physician’s
voice as he gently replaced the wasted
hand on the coverlet: “The fever
has gone, my boy, and all that your
mother needs now to make her well
and strong is good care and plenty of
nourishing food.” The money offered
by old Jacob would do all that, and
much more. It would mean comfort
for two or three years for both mother
and son, with their simple way of living.

When the lad again faced the cathedral
it was with an involuntary straightening
of the shrinking figure. “With
God’s help I will try,” he said aloud,
with a determined ring to his voice,
“and I must go at once to let Master
Wirtig know. Now that I have finally
decided, it is strange
how the fear has flown.
It is the hesitating
that takes the courage
out of one. After
all”—he paced back,
back, back, until he
was far enough from
the cathedral to get a
good view of the noble
structure—“who
knows? It may look
more difficult than it
really is. ’Tis but a
foothold of a few
inches, but ’tis enough.
If it were near the
ground I should feel
as safe as if I were
on the floor of the
great hall in the Stadt
Haus. Why, then,
should I fear up yonder?”

The flush in the
western sky suddenly
deepened to a vivid
crimson. The clouds
above the horizon,
which a moment before
had shone like
waves of gold, became
a sea of flame. The
ruddy glow illumined
the old cathedral, touching rich carving
and lace-like tracery with a new
splendor, while far over sculptured
dome and stately tower rose the lofty
spire, bathed from finial to base in the
radiant light.

The boy made a step forward, and,
slipping back the little cap from his
locks, stretched out his clasped hands
toward the sky. “O Mary, tender
mother!” he cried, “plead thou for
me in my time of need to-morrow!
O Jesu! be near to help and save!”

He replaced the cap, and hurried
across the Platz to the crowded
thoroughfare beyond. At the end of
three blocks he turned into a narrow
street, and stopped in front of a high
house with steep, tiled roof. The lamp
in the swinging iron bracket above the
door gave such a feeble light that he
was obliged to grope his way through
the hall to the stairs.

At the second landing
he paused for a moment,
fancying that he heard a
light footfall behind him,
but all was still, and he
hastened on to the next
floor. Again he stopped,
thinking that he caught
the sound of a stealthy,
cat-like tread on the
steps below. “Who’s
there?” he called out
boldly, but the lingering
412
echo of his own voice was the only
answer.

“How foolish I am!” he exclaimed.
“It is but the clatter of my shoes on
the stone stairs.” Up another flight
and down the long, narrow entry he
went, and still he could not shake off
the feeling that he was being followed.

At that moment a door opened and
a woman peered out, holding a candle
high above her head. “Is that you,
Franz?” she said. “My brother has
been expecting you this half hour.”
By the flickering light of the candle
Franz could see that there was no one
in the entry. He turned, impelled by
a strong desire to search the tall cupboard
near the stairs and see if any one
had concealed himself within, but the
dread of being laughed at kept him
back, and he followed the woman into
a room where a gray-haired man sat,
leaning wearily against the back of his
chair.

“You may go now, Katrina,” said
the man, motioning to an adjoining
room; and when the door closed he
turned to Franz, trembling with eagerness.
“Well, have you decided?”

“I will try, Master Wirtig.”

The old sexton wrung his thin hands
nervously. “But if you should fail?”

“In God is my trust,” answered the
boy, calmly. “But one ‘if’ is as good
as another. Why not say, if you succeed?
It sounds more cheery.”

“God grant it!” answered the man,
sinking back in his chair. “I had
thought that it would be some hardy
young sprig who should accept my
offer—some sailor or stone-mason,
whose calling had taught him to carry
a steady head. I never dreamed that
it would be a mere lad like thyself, and
worn out, too, with the care of thy sick
mother! Even now I feel I do thee
a grievous wrong to listen to thy entreaties.”

“Think not of me, Master Wirtig;
think rather of my mother. Shall we
let her die, when a few moments on
yonder spire would furnish the means
to make her well? The kind physician
who would have helped me was smitten
with the fever yesterday, and there is
no one to whom I can go.”

“Had I been as prudent as I ought,
I could have aided thee. But this lingering
illness has used up what I had
put aside. Here is a little for thy present
need—some broth for thy mother,
and a bite for thyself, for thy cheeks
look as pinched as if thou hadst not
eaten a good meal for a fortnight.”
He pulled out a covered basket from
under the table, and continued: “I
shall arrange with Nicholas—for he has
worked with me so long that he is as
familiar with the ladders as myself—to
go with thee up to the little sliding
window, and pass out the flag. Thou
must let thyself down outside the window
until thy toes touch the ledge
below. Then thou must creep cautiously
around to the opposite side of
the spire, and wave the flag. Look always
straight before thee or up at the
sky. Thy safety lies in not glancing below.
I believe in my heart thou wilt succeed.
How I wish that this graceless Nicholas,
this unruly nephew of mine, were
such an one as thou! Then should I
have some comfort. But with his evil
companions and bad ways, he brings
me naught but sorrow. Listen, Franz;
if all goes well, thou shalt have his
place in helping me with the care of
the cathedral. There is no longer any
dependence to be placed on him.”

In his excitement old Jacob’s voice
rang through the room. “What is it?”
he asked, as he saw Franz start and
look toward the door.

“I thought I heard a
rattling of the latch—as
if some one were outside.”

“It’s nothing but the
wind drawing through the
entry.”

Franz took up his basket
and bade the old sexton
good-night. After he
had passed into the street
a figure crept out from
the cupboard, and stole
softly down stairs. The
light by the door showed
a boy about seventeen
years old, with an evil
scowl on his face. “And
so thou art to take my
place, Franz Halle,” he
sneered. “That is nothing
new. Twice this year
has our master, the goldsmith,
preferred thy work
to mine, and has set thee
over me. Truly, I wish
thou mayst fall to-morrow
and break thy neck.”

When Franz reached
home the kind neighbor
who was watching by his
mother’s bed motioned for
him to be quiet. “The sick one is sleeping
well,” she said. “If I had but some
good broth to give her when she wakes.”
Franz pointed to the basket, and the
delighted woman began the preparations
for the evening meal. When the
invalid awoke they gave her a few
spoonfuls of the broth, and had the
satisfaction of seeing a faint color
come into the white cheeks as she
sank into a peaceful slumber.

“Do thou go to bed, Franz! I will
stay with thy mother to-night, and to-morrow
too, for that matter, so that
thou canst have the whole day to thyself.
Thou needest it after all thy
care and watching. I like not these
parades and these marches of triumph.
They remind me too much of my boy,
whose young life helped to purchase
the victory,” and the good frau wiped
away a tear.

The morning dawned with a bright
blue sky and a crisp breeze, which
shook out the folds of the triumphal
banners floating from every tower and
turret. The city was one
blaze of color. The gorgeous
festoons on column
and arch and façade were
matched by the rich tints
of the splendid costumes
in the streets below. On
every side the black
eagles of Austria stood
out distinctly from their
gleaming orange background.
The procession
was due at the cathedral
by the middle of the afternoon,
but owing to some
delay it was nearly sunset
when the salute from the
“Fort” told of the approach
of the troops. To
Franz, the hours had
dragged wearily on, and
he sprang up joyfully
when Nicholas finally appeared
in the little room
in the tower, with the
furled flag under his arm.
“Come,” he said gruffly,
“you have just time to
climb up and take your
stand on the spire.” Up
the boys went, as far as
the great bell, Franz close behind Nicholas.
Thus far the ascent had been
easy, but from this point the steps
dwindled to long, frail ladders terminating
in small platforms, and steadied by
iron bars.

Still they toiled upward, more slowly
and cautiously now, for the danger increased
with every turn. At last they
halted, side by side, on the little platform
under the sliding window. To
Nicholas’s surprise Franz stood there,
surveying it all without flinching. The
younger boy turned to his burly companion:
“Somehow, we’ve never been
very good friends. I don’t think the
fault was all on my side, because you
wouldn’t let me be your friend. And
we have had a good many quarrels.
Won’t you shake hands with me now
and wish me good luck? If—if”—and
there was just the suspicion of a
tremor in the winning voice—“I should
never see you again, I should like to feel
that we were friends at the last. You’re
very good to come up here with me.”

To his dying day Nicholas never
forgot the slight, almost girlish, figure,
standing there, with the wistful little
smile, and the pleading tenderness
shining in the blue eyes. He touched
the slender outstretched hand with
his own, but dropped it suddenly, as
if he had received an electric shock.
He tried to say “Good luck,” but his
tongue seemed glued to the roof of his
mouth.

“Look you, Franz,” he murmured
hoarsely, “when you
are safe outside I’ll
hand out the flag.
I’ll wait till you
reach the opposite
side of the spire and
call out, ‘All’s well,’
and then I’ll go
down and leave you
to make your way
back. And glad I
shall be to leave this
miserable trap in
mid air.”

Franz’s face was
deathly pale, but his
eyes shone like two
stars. He climbed
up nimbly through
the opening, let himself
carefully down
to the stone ledge
outside, and reached
up for the flag. A few
moments passed,
which seemed like
ages to the waiting
Nicholas. Then a
cheery “All’s well”
rang out, without a
quiver in the steady
voice. The older
boy’s face grew
black with rage.
“What nerve the pale, sickly little thing
has!” he muttered between his set teeth.
“I believe he’ll do it after all! And
so this baby gets not only the prizes at
the goldsmith’s, but the money and
the glory of this thing, to say nothing of
his taking my place in the cathedral.”

He raised his hand to the window,
and stood in front of it for a moment.
Then he began the descent as if some
demon were after him. The frail ladders
vibrated and swayed with the
dangerous strain, but down he went,
with reckless haste, until he reached
the second platform, when he raised
his hands with an agonized gesture to
his ears as if he was trying to shut out
the voice of conscience, that kept calling
to him, “Back! back! before it is
too late! Stain not thy young soul
with such a crime!”

Still he hurried down with flying
step to the landing near the great bell,
where he paused, and stood leaning
breathless against one of the cross-beams
of the tower. Into the fierce,
turbulent passions of the troubled face
stole a softened expression, lighting
up the swarthy lineaments like a gleam
of sunshine. “I will go back and
undo the horrid deed,” he cried, as if
in answer to the good angel pleading
within his breast. “I am coming,
Franz! God forgive me!”

He had turned to make the ascent,
and his hand was stretched out to
grasp the side of the ladder, when his
toe caught in a coil of rope on the
platform, and, missing his hold, he
plunged down, down, into the space
beneath.

In the meantime Franz had made
his way safely around the spire, and
stood quietly, with the end of the flagstaff
on the ledge beneath, waiting for
the signal. It came in a few moments;
the thunder of the great gun on the
Platz, and, bracing his feet firmly, he
unfurled the flag and slowly waved it
back and forth. From the answering
roar of artillery, and the cheer upon
cheer that floated up through the air,
he knew that his salute had been seen.

With a light heart he began to retrace
his steps, edging himself cautiously,
inch by inch, to the window. To his
surprise, the sliding wooden panel was
closed! With one hand he grasped the
iron ring fastened to the wall beneath
the window, and with the other pushed,
first gently, and then with all his might,
but the panel remained fast. He tried
to batter it with the flagstaff, but soon
found that, in his cramped position, it
only increased his danger. Again and
again he endeavored to force it open,
breaking his nails and bruising his
finger-tips in his frenzy, but to no purpose.
Suddenly the conviction dawned
upon him that the window was bolted
from the inside. With a despairing sob
he tottered backward, but his grasp on
the ring held, and with a supreme effort
he pulled himself up close to the wall,
and tried to collect his scattered wits.

“It is no use to shout,” he said
aloud. “It is more than folly to attempt
to make myself heard from this
height, I might as well save my strength.
All that remains for me to do is to
wait patiently. Some one will be sure
to miss me and come to my relief. In
God is my trust!” and his courage rose
with the words.

The troops disbanded, and the people
hurried off to the brilliantly lighted cafés
and theatres, all unconscious of the
pale, silent boy clinging with desperate
grip to the spire, with but a narrow
shelf of stone between him and a horrible
death.

The sunset faded into the twilight,
and with a sudden wave darkness
drifted over the earth. The noise in
the streets grew fainter and fainter.
The minutes lengthened into hours, and
still the boy stood there, as the night
wore on, occasionally shifting his position
to ease his cramped and aching
limbs. The night wind pierced his
thin clothing, and his hands were benumbed
with the cold. One by one
the bright constellations rose and glittered
and dipped in the sky, and the
boy still managed to keep his foothold,
as rigid as the stone statues on the
dome below.

“Two, three, four,” pealed the bells
in their hoarse, deep tones, and when
the first glimmer of dawn tinged the
eastern horizon with pale yellow, the
haggard face lighted with expectancy,
and from the ashen lips, which had been
moving all night in prayer, came the
words, “In God is my trust.”

“What is the meaning of yonder
crowd?” asked one of two artisans,
who had met while hurrying across the
Platz to their work.

“What! have you not heard? All
Vienna is ringing with the news! It
was young Franz, the goldsmith’s apprentice,
who climbed out on the spire
416
yesterday and waved the flag. In some
way, the little window near the top
was fastened on the inside, and the
poor boy was forced to stay out all
night clinging to the spire. It is only
a short time ago that he was discovered
and brought fainting down the ladders.
After working over him a little while
he seemed all right, and was carried
to his home. And there’s another
strange thing. Nicholas, old Jacob
Wirtig’s nephew, was picked up, mangled
and bleeding, at the foot of the
tower stairs this morning. He has just
been taken to the hospital.”

The next day Franz received a summons
from the emperor. As he followed
the officer who had been sent
to conduct him to the palace, to his
surprise the marble steps and the corridor
beyond were lined on either sides
with the soldiers of the Imperial Guard,
and as the slender, boyish figure, with
its crown of golden hair, passed between
the files, each mailed and bearded
warrior reverently saluted.

On he went, through another chamber,
and into a spacious hall with marble
floors and hangings of rich tapestry.
On both sides were rows of courtiers
and officers, the rich costumes and
nodding plumes and splendid uniforms,
with their jewelled orders, contrasting
strangely with the lad’s plain, homespun
garments. “It is the emperor,”
whispered the guide as they drew near
a canopied throne, and Franz dropped
on one knee.

He felt the hand which was placed
on his bowed head tremble, and a kind
voice said, “Rise, my boy! kneel not
to me! It is I, thy emperor, who
should rather kneel to do thee homage
for thy filial piety. My brave lad, I
know thy story well! Ask of me a
place near my person, aid for thy sick
mother, what thou wilt, and it is
granted thee! And remember that as
long as the Emperor of Austria shall
live he will feel himself honored in
being known as thy friend!”

In a short time another summons
came, this time from the hospital. At
the end of a long row of beds lay
Nicholas, with his arm bandaged and
strips of plaster covering the gashes on
his forehead.

“Oh, Franz!” he groaned, “if God
has forgiven me, why cannot you?
And you will believe that I speak the
truth when I tell you that I was sorry
for what I had done, and I had turned
to go back and unbolt the door when
I tripped and fell.”

Franz bent over him with a bright
smile. “I forgive you everything,
Nicholas,” he said, sweetly, “so please
let us say no more about it. It wasn’t
a bad exchange. I lost an enemy but
I gained a friend,” and the hands of
the two boys met in a firm, loving
grasp.

This is the season
when the mountaineer
once more takes
down his Norfolk
jacket, his nailed
boots, and his ice-axe,
and prepares
to face the perils
that may lurk for him above the snowline.

Strictly speaking—from the point of
view of the expert who knows and does
everything that an expert ought to
know and do—mountaineering has two
dangers only. There is the danger of
bad weather, and there is the danger
of the falling stone. But every climber
is not an expert, and even of experts it
may be said that nemo horis omnibus
sapit. So that there are all sorts of
dangers to be reckoned with, and foremost
among them is the avalanche.

Everybody knows—vaguely, if not
precisely—what an avalanche is.
Masses of snow accumulate in winter
on the mountain slopes. In spring the
warmth loosens their coherence, and
they fall into the valleys, sweeping
away or burying everything in their
track. It is bad for the mountaineer,
if he happens to be in the way of one.

Says the editor of the volume devoted
to mountaineering, in the Badminton
Library: “The simple rule
with regard to all forms of avalanche
is to avoid their track, and all that is
necessary in the majority of instances
is to recognize the marks on the snow
surfaces that denote their cause, and
to steer clear of them.”

THE NARROW ESCAPE OF MR. TUCKETT.

Undoubtedly an admirable rule, if
only it could be always carried out.
But mistakes, unhappily, may be made
even by experts, as witness this story
of a thrilling adventure which befell F.
F. Tuckett, twenty-two years ago.

The season had been exceptionally
cold and wet. Snow lay thickly everywhere,
even on the Faulhorn, the Scheinige
Platte, and the Wengern Alp.
But in the early days of July an improvement
began to show itself, and
Mr. Tuckett, who for a whole month
had been able to make no big expedition,
resolved to make an attempt upon
the Eiger.

The members of the party were Mr.
Tuckett, Mr. Whitwell, J. H. Fox, and
the guides, Christian and Ulrich Lauener.
They got off between 3 and 4
A.M., and presently started to ascend
the Eiger glacier. The surface of it
was entirely concealed with snow, but,
for some reason, they neglected to put
on the rope. High up in front of them
were the disordered pillars and buttresses
of the ice-fall, and above the
ice-fall rested an enormous weight of
freshly fallen snow.

Instead of ascending the centre of
the glacier, the party, fortunately for
themselves, were keeping to the left,
towards the rocks of the Rothstock.
Of a sudden, a sort of crack was heard
high up above their heads, and every
eye was turned upon the hanging ice-cliff
from which it came. A large mass
of “sérac” was seen to break away,
mingled with a still larger contingent
of snow from the slopes above; and
the whole mass slid down like a cataract,
filling the “couloir” to its brim,
and dashing in clouds of frozen spray
over the rocky ridges in its path, towards
the travellers.

For a moment they did not realize
that they were in its track. But then
419
the knowledge flashed upon them all,
and they shouted to each other, “Run
for your lives,” and struggled desperately
through the deep, soft snow to
reach the rocks of the Rothstock, yet
with their faces turned to watch the
swift oncoming of the foe.

Let Mr. Tuckett himself describe
that thrilling race for life.

“I remember,” he writes, “being
struck with the idea that it seemed as
though, sure of its prey, it wished to
play with us for a while, at one moment
letting us imagine that we had gained
upon it, and were getting beyond the
line of its fire, and the next, with mere
wantonness of vindictive power, suddenly
rolling out on its right a vast
volume of grinding blocks and whirling
snow, as though to show that it
could outflank us at any moment if it
chose.

“Nearer and nearer it came, its front
like a mighty wave about to break.
Now it has traversed the whole width
of the glacier above us, taking a somewhat
diagonal direction; and now—run,
oh! run, if ever you did, for here it
comes straight at us, swift, deadly, and
implacable! The next instant we saw
no more; a wild confusion of whirling
snow and fragments of ice—a frozen
cloud—swept over us, entirely concealing
us from one another, and still we
were untouched—at least I knew that I
was—and still we ran. Another half-second
and the mist had passed, and
there lay the body of the monster,
whose head was still careering away at
lightning speed far below us, motionless,
rigid, and harmless.”

The danger was over, and the party
examined the avalanche at their leisure.
It had a length of three thousand
three hundred feet, an average breadth
of a thousand feet, and an average
depth of five feet. This is to say, its
bulk was six hundred and eleven thousand
cubic yards, and its weight, on a
moderate computation, about four hundred
and fifty thousand tons.

Accidents of this sort, happily, are
very rare, and the climber who is
carried away by the avalanche has, as
a rule, deliberately faced the risk out
of bravado, and the desire to go home
and boast that he had done hard
things. But there is another sort of
avalanche which is a much more frequent
source of danger. It consists of
a stratum of snow loosely adherent to
a slope of névé or ice. The snow
breaks away under the weight of the
party, and carries them down with it,
sometimes to a place of safety, sometimes
to a crevasse.

AN ADVENTURE OF PROFESSOR TYNDALL.

Experience, of course, has laid down
many rules for determining whether
snow of this sort is safe, but the best
men—guides as well as amateurs—may
sometimes be misled. Professor Tyndall,
for instance, was always a cautious
as well as a brilliant mountaineer; yet
there was a day when the professor’s
snow craft failed him, and he came very
near to paying for his blunder with his
life.

The place was the Piz Morteratsch,
in the Engadine, and the time the
month of July, 1864. Professor Tyndall’s
companions were Mr. Hutchinson
and Lee Warner, and the guides Jenni
and Walter. Jenni was at that time
the dictator of Pontresina, and he
seems to have set out with the deliberate
intention of showing his Herren
how great and brave a man he was.

The ascent was accomplished without
any incident of note. On the way
down the party reached a broad couloir,
or gully, filled with snow, which
had been melted and refrozen, so as to
expose a steeply sloping wall of ice.
The question arose whether it would
be better to descend this wall of ice,
or to keep to the steep rocks by the
side of it. Professor Tyndall preferred
the rocks; Jenni inclined towards the
slope, and started to lead the way upon
it.

There was a remonstrance from the
professor:

“Jenni,” he said, “do you know
where you are going? The slope is
pure ice.”

“I know it,” the guide replied, “but
the ice is quite bare for a few rods
only. Across this exposed portion I
will cut steps, and then the snow which
covers the ice will give us a footing.”

So they started, roped together,
Jenni in front, Mr. Tyndall next, followed
by Mr. Hutchinson, Mr. Lee
Warner, the one inexperienced member
of the party, and, last of all, the guide
Walter, ready to check on the instant
any false step that Mr. Lee Warner
might make.

After a few steps Jenni began to see
that the slope was less safe than he
had supposed. He stopped and turned
round to speak a word of warning to
the three men above him.

“Keep carefully in the steps, gentlemen,”
he said; “a
false step here might
start an avalanche.”

And, even as he
spoke, the false step
was made. There
was a sound of a fall
and a rush, and Professor
Tyndall saw
his friends and their
guide, all apparently
entangled, whirled
past him. He planted
himself to resist
the shock, but it
was irresistible; he,
too, was torn from
his foothold, and
Jenni followed him,
and all five found
themselves riding
downwards, with uncontrollable
speed,
on the back of an
avalanche, which a
single slip had
started.

“Turn on your
face, and grind the
point of your axe or
baton through the
moving snow into
the ice”—that is
the golden rule for
cases of the kind,
the only way in
which the faller can
do anything to arrest
his speed. But
it seldom avails
much, and in this
instance it availed
nothing.

“No time,” writes Professor Tyndall,
“was allowed for the break’s action;
for I had held it firmly thus for a few
seconds only, when I came into collision
with some obstacle and was rudely
tossed through the air, Jenni at the
same time being shot down upon me.
Both of us here lost our batons. We had
been carried over a crevasse, had hit its
lower edge, and, instead of dropping
into it, were pitched by our great velocity
beyond it. I was quite bewildered
for a moment, but immediately
righted myself, and could see the men
421
in front of me, half-buried in the snow,
and jolted from side to side by the ruts
among which we were passing.”

Presently a second crevasse was
reached. Jenni knew that it was there,
and did a brave thing. He deliberately
threw himself into the chasm, thinking
that the strain thus put upon the rope
would stop the motion. But, though he
was over a hundred and eighty pounds
in weight, he was violently jerked out
of the fissure, and almost squeezed to
death by the pressure of the rope.

And so they continued to slide on.
Below them was a long slope, leading
directly downwards to a brow where
the glacier fell precipitously; and at
the base of the declivity the ice was cut
by a series of profound chasms, where
they must fall, and where the tail of the
avalanche would cover them up forever.

The three foremost men rode upon
the forehead of the avalanche, and were
at times almost wholly hidden by the
snow; but behind, the sliding layer
was not so thick, and Jenni strove
with desperate energy to arrest his
progress.

“Halt! Herr Jesus! halt!” he
shouted, as again and again he drove
his heels into the firmer surface underneath.

And now let Professor Tyndall tell
the rest:

“Looking in advance, I noticed that
the slope, for a short distance, became
less steep, and then fell as before.
Now or never we must be brought to
rest. The speed visibly slackened, and
I thought we were saved. But the momentum
had been too great; the avalanche
crossed the brow and in part
regained its motion. Here Hutchinson
threw his arm round his friend, all hope
being extinguished, while I grasped
my belt and struggled to free myself.
Finding this difficult, from the tossing,
I sullenly resumed the strain upon the
rope. Destiny had so related the downward
impetus to Jenni’s pull as to give
the latter a slight advantage, and the
whole question was whether the opposing
force would have sufficient time to
act. This was also arranged in our
favor, for we came to rest so near the
brow that two or three seconds of our
average motion of descent must have
carried us over. Had this occurred, we
should have fallen into the chasms and
been covered up by the tail of the avalanche.
Hutchinson emerged from the
snow with his forehead bleeding, but
the wound was superficial; Jenni had
a bit of flesh removed from his hand by
collision against a stone; the pressure
422
of the rope had left black welts on my
arms, and we all experienced a tingling
sensation over the hands, like that produced
by incipient frost-bite, which continued
for several days. This was all.
I found a portion of my watch-chain
hanging round my neck, another portion
in my pocket; the watch was gone.”

Very similar in many respects was
the famous accident of the Haut de
Cry, in which J. J. Bennen perished in
February, 1864. So sure of foot was
Bennen that it used to be said of him,
as it was said of Johann Lauener, who
died upon the Jungfrau, that nothing
could bring him to grief but an avalanche.
And the hour came when the
snowfield which he was crossing with
his Herren split suddenly and the
ground on which they stood began to
move, and Bennen solemnly called out
the words, “Wir sind alle verloren,”
and never spoke again.

The avalanche was deeper than the
one which swept Professor Tyndall
down the glacier of the Piz Morteratsch.
“Before long,” writes Mr. Gossett,
one of the survivors of the accident,
“I was covered up with snow and
in utter darkness. I was suffocating,
when, with a jerk, I suddenly came to
the surface again. To prevent myself
sinking again I made use of my arms
much in the same way as when swimming
in a standing position. At last I
noticed that I was moving slower;
then I saw the pieces of snow in front
of me stop at some yards distance;
then the snow straight before me
stopped, and I heard on a large scale
the same creaking sound that is produced
when a heavy cart passes over
hard, frozen snow in winter.”

But the snow behind pressed on and
buried Mr. Gossett. So intense was
the pressure that he could not move,
423
and he began to fear that it would be
impossible to extricate himself. Then,
while trying vainly to move his arms,
he suddenly became aware that his
hands, as far as the wrist, had the
faculty of motion. The cheering conclusion
was that they must be above
the snow. So Mr. Gossett struggled on.
At last he saw a faint glimmer of light.
The crust above his head was getting
thinner, and let a little air pass; but
he could no longer reach it with his
hands. The idea struck him that he
might pierce it with his breath. He
tried, and after several efforts he succeeded.
Then he shouted for help,
and one of his guides, who had escaped
uninjured, came and extricated him.
The snow had to be cut with the axe
down to his feet before he could be
pulled out. Then he found that his
travelling companion, M. Boissonnet,
was dead, and that no trace of Bennen
could be seen. His body, however,
was afterwards recovered. The story
is told in a letter from Mr. Gossett to
Professor Tyndall.

“Bennen’s body,” he writes, “was
found with great difficulty the day
after Boissonnet was found. The cord
end had been covered up with snow.
The Curé d’Ardon informed me that
poor Bennen was found eight feet
under the snow, in a horizontal position,
the head facing the valley of
the Luzerne. His watch had been
wrenched from the chain, probably
when the cord broke; the chain, however,
remained attached to his waist-coat.
This reminds me of your fall on
the Morteratsch glacier.”

It may be said that the principal
danger of climbing rock-mountains is
the danger of falling off them. For the
art consists largely in traversing the
faces of precipices by means of narrow
and imperfect ledges, which afford more
facilities for falling off than will readily
be believed by any one who has not
tried to stand on them. The climbers,
of course, are always securely roped together
in such places, and the theory is
that two of them shall always be so
firmly anchored that they can instantly
check any slip that the third may make.
But that is not always feasible. It is
not feasible, for instance, at the difficult
corner on the Dent Blanche, where Mr.
Gabbett and the two Lochmatters came
to grief.

As all three climbers were killed on
that occasion, no details of the accident
are known. But the elder Lochmatter
was known to be an exceptionally heavy
man, and the presumption is that it was
he who fell, and dragged the rest of the
party after him. How he came to fall
may be understood from the following
description of the “Mauvais Pas,”
given by a traveller who traversed it a
little afterwards:

“Here,” he writes, “we must get
round past a perpendicular ledge by
creeping out on an overhanging rock,
and then turning sharp round, with
head and arms on one side of the rock,
while the legs are still on the other;
then we must at once cling to a hardly
visible fissure, and draw round the rest
of the body, gently, cautiously, little
by little, and hang there by the points
of our fingers until our toes find their
way to a second fissure lower down.
I made this passage,” he adds, “like a
bale of goods at the end of a rope,
without being conscious of the danger,
and I really do not know how I escaped
in safety.”

The description gives some idea of
what stiff rock-climbing is really like;
and it should be remembered that in
the Dolomites more awkward places
even than the Lochmatters’ corner
have often to be passed, and that when,
as often happens, the rocks are glazed
with ice, the danger of climbing them
is more than doubled.

It is always assumed that the Dent
Blanche is inaccessible in such a case.
Yet the story is told of an inexperienced
climber who managed to get to the
summit in spite of the ice.

He was on his first visit to Switzerland;
and as soon as he got to Zermatt
he engaged the best available
guide.

“What are considered the hardest
mountains here?” he asked.

The guide told him: “The Dent
Blanche, the Weisshorn, and the Ober
Gabelhorn.”

“Very well,” said the novice; “we’ll
begin with the Dent Blanche.”

The guide protested. Did not his
424
Herr think it would be better to begin
with something easier—with the Rothhorn,
for instance, or the Strahlhorn,
or the Unter Gabelhorn?

“No,” was the reply; “you’ve got to
take me up the Dent Blanche. I’ve
climbed in Wales, and I’ll undertake to
climb any rock you show me.”

So the guide yielded, and the two
started, with a porter, and for a certain
distance got on very well. But at last
they came to a point where all the hand-holds
within reach were frozen up; the
nearest practicable hand-hold could
only just be found by stretching out
the ice-axe. The guide explained the
situation, and insisted that they must
turn back. But his employer had been
roused to such a pitch of excitement
that he would not hear of it.

“Look here,” he said, “you’re a
bachelor; I’m a married man with a
family. If I can afford to risk my life
you can afford to risk yours. You’ve
got to go on up this mountain. Otherwise
I’ll throw myself over the precipice,
and as you’re roped to me you’ll
have to come, too.”

The man was absolutely mad. There
was no question that, in his excitement,
he would do what he threatened if he
were not obeyed. So the guide sullenly
struck his ice-axe into the fissure,
and climbed up it hand over hand, and
took his lunatic up and down the Dent
Blanche at a time when its ascent
ought by all the laws of ice-craft to
have been impossible.

CROSSING GLACIERS.

To turn from rock to snow climbing.
Accidents are constantly happening on
glaciers; yet the observance of the
most elementary precautions ought to
make such accidents absolutely impossible.

An open glacier, of course, is safe
enough under any circumstances. The
one thing needful is to look where you
are going and not try to make flying
leaps across crevasses. But even when
the crevasses are masked by snow all
425
danger may still quite easily be obviated.
The simple rule is that the party
crossing the glacier should never consist
of less than three, and that the
three should be roped together in such
a way that, if one falls into a crevasse,
the other two can pull him out. And
this, of course, involves the further
rule that the rope must always be kept
taut, so that a fall may be checked before
it has gained an impetus which
would make it difficult to resist.

By experience it is possible to recognize
a crevasse, with tolerable accuracy,
in spite of its snow covering; and by
sounding with the ice-axe before treading
on it, one ought to be able to tell
whether the snow bridge will bear one’s
weight. But, now and again, it will
happen that the most experienced man’s
judgment is at fault. Relying upon
their instinctive perception of such
things, the Swiss peasantry constantly
traverse glaciers alone in mid-winter.
But accidents are very frequent, and
when guides, tourists, or porters have
attempted the same thing, accidents
have constantly befallen them as well.
As an illustration may be quoted the
case of a reporter, who foolishly ventured
to return alone over the Loetschen
pass. A snow bridge broke and
he fell into a crevasse, where only his
knapsack saved him from breaking his
neck. He lay on his back, wedged into
the ice in such a way that he could not
move, and it was by the merest accident
that he was discovered in time,
and rescued by a party journeying in
the same direction.

So much, as Herodotus would say,
for crevasses. Another serious Alpine
danger is the danger of bad weather;
and bad weather, as Leslie Stephen has
pointed out, may make the Righi at one
time as dangerous as the Matterhorn
at another.

To a certain extent, of course, bad
weather can be foreseen; but meteorology
is not yet an exact science, and
even the acquired instinct of the guides
is sometimes at fault, so that grave
mistakes, often followed by fatal consequences,
are made almost every year.

DANGERS OF BAD WEATHER.

Mont Blanc is probably the mountain
in which bad weather makes the greatest
difference. On a fine day, the ascent
426
of it is scarcely more dangerous
than the ascent of Primrose Hill; but
in a storm you will lose your way, and
wander round and round, until you sink
down exhausted, and freeze to death.

In September, 1870, a party of eleven
persons, eight of whom were guides
or porters, were lost in this way.
When their bodies were recovered, a
memorandum was found in the pocket
of one of them, J. Beane, of the United
States of America, finished apparently
just before his death, and giving a
brief summary of the circumstances of
the calamity. This is how it read:

“Tuesday, September 6.—I have
made the ascent of Mont Blanc, with
ten persons; eight guides, Mr. Corkendal
and Mr. Randall. We arrived
at the summit at 2.30 o’clock. Immediately
after leaving it, I was enveloped
in clouds of snow. We passed the
night in a grotto excavated out of snow,
affording very uncomfortable shelter,
and I was ill all night.

“September 7 (morning).—Intense
cold; much snow falls uninterruptedly:
guides restless.

“September 7 (evening).—We have
been on Mont Blanc for two days in a
terrible snow-storm: we have lost our
way and are in a hole scooped out of
the snow, at a height of fifteen thousand
feet. I have no hope of descending.
Perhaps this book may be found and forwarded.
(Here follow some instructions
on his private affairs.) We have
no food; my feet are already frozen
and I am exhausted; I have only
strength to write a few words. I die
in the faith of Jesus Christ, with
affectionate thoughts of my family.
My remembrance to all. I trust we may
meet in heaven.”

Says Leslie Stephen, commenting on
the incident in the “Alpine Journal:”

“The main facts are so simple that
little explanation is needed. The one
special danger of Mont Blanc is bad
weather. The inexperienced travellers
were probably ignorant of the fearful
danger they were encountering, and
had not the slightest conception of the
risk to life and limb which accompanies
even a successful ascent of the mountain
under such circumstances. I once
ascended Mont Blanc on a day so
unusually fine that we could lie on the
summit for an hour, light matches in
the open air, and enjoy the temperature.
427
Yet, in two or three hours before sunrise,
the guide of another party which
ascended the same day was so severely
frost-bitten as to lose his toes. Such
things may happen in the finest weather,
when proper precautions are neglected;
but in bad weather it is simple madness
to proceed. Why, one cannot
help asking, did not the guides oppose
the wishes of their employers?”

FALLING ICE.

Among other dangers that the mountaineer
has to reckon with are ice avalanches
and cornices.

A cornice is a mass of snow projecting
over the edge of a precipice, and
resting upon empty space. Occasionally
it will bear the weight of one, or
even several, men; but more often it
gives way when trodden on, carrying a
whole party to destruction. This was
the case in the famous accident on the
Lyskamm—a mountain where the cornices
are particularly treacherous—when
Messrs. William Arnold Lewis
and Noel H. Paterson, with the guides
Niklaus, Johann, and Peter Joseph
Knubel, met their deaths in the year
1877. “The cornice,” writes Mr. Hartley,
who visited the scene of the accident
immediately afterwards, “had
broken away in two places, leaving
some ten feet in the middle still adhering
to the mountain. The length of
the parts which broke away was, perhaps,
forty feet on each side of the
remaining portion. The distance of
the fall we estimated at from twelve
hundred to fifteen hundred feet. The
bodies, from the nature of the injuries
they had received, had evidently fallen
upon their heads on the rocks, and
then, in one great bound, had reached
almost the spot where they were found.”

A typical instance of the ice-avalanche
accident happened to, and has
been recorded by, Mr. Whymper. Accompanied
by A. W. Moore and the
guides Croz and Almer, he was trying
to discover a shorter route than those
usually taken between Zinal and Zermatt.
After spending the night in a
châlet on the Arpitetta Alp, they started,
and struck directly up the centre of the
Moming glacier. The route proved
impracticable, and it became necessary
to cut steps across an ice-slope immediately
below the great pillars and buttresses
of the ice-fall, which were liable
to break away and descend upon them
at any moment.

“I am not ashamed to confess,”
wrote Mr. Moore in his journal, “that
during the whole time we were crossing
the slope my heart was in my mouth,
and I never felt so relieved from such a
load of care as when, after, I suppose,
a passage of about twenty minutes, we
got on to the rocks and were in safety.
I have never heard a positive oath
come from Almer’s mouth, but the language
in which he kept up a running
commentary, more to himself than to
me, as we went along, was stronger
than I should have given him credit
for using. His prominent feeling
seemed to be one of indignation that
we should be in such a position, and
self-reproach at being a party to the
proceeding; while the emphatic way
in which, at intervals, he exclaimed,
‘Quick; be quick,’ sufficiently betokened
his alarm.”

And now, let the rest of the story be
told in Mr. Whymper’s graphic words.
Croz, it should be remembered, was
leading, and had advised the perilous
route.

“It was not necessary,” Mr. Whymper
says, “to admonish Croz to be
quick. He was fully as alive to the
risk as any of the others. He told me
afterwards that the place was not only
the most dangerous he had ever crossed,
but that no consideration whatever
would tempt him to cross it again.
Manfully did he exert himself to escape
from the impending destruction. His
head, bent down to his work, never
turned to the right or to the left. One,
two, three, went his axe, and then he
stepped on to the spot where he had
been cutting. How painfully insecure
should we have considered those steps
at any other time! But now we thought
of nothing but the rocks in front, and
of the hideous ‘séracs’ lurching over
above us, apparently in the very act of
falling.”

At last they reached the rocks in
safety, and, says Mr. Whymper, “If
they had been doubly as difficult as
they were, we should still have been well
content. We sat down and refreshed
the inner man; keeping our eyes on
the towering pinnacles of ice which we
had passed, but which now were almost
beneath us. Without a preliminary
warning sound, one of the largest—as
high as the Monument, at London
Bridge—fell upon the slope below.
The stately mass heeled over as if
upon a hinge (holding together until
it bent thirty degrees forward), then
it crushed out its base, and, rent into a
thousand fragments, plunged vertically
down upon the slope that we had
crossed. Every atom of our track that
was in its course was obliterated; all
the new snow was swept away, and
a broad sheet of smooth, glassy ice
showed the resistless force with which
it had fallen.”

Wyndham Thos.
Wyndhamquin,
fourth
Earl of Dunraven
and Mount Earl,
was born fifty-two
years ago. His
father, who was a
convert to Roman
Catholicism, devoted much time to
scientific pursuits, and wrote a book
on Irish architecture, which is generally
recognized as the standard work
on the subject. His mother was a
Protestant, and a daughter of Sergeant
Goold, the eminent Dublin lawyer,
who, although past forty when
called to the bar, made both a name
and a fortune for himself in his profession.
His grandfather on the paternal
side supported the Union, but
Sergeant Goold, like so many of the
leading men in Dublin at that time,
more especially barristers, opposed it.
Here, then, we have a very fair example
of the fact that the prominent men in
the counties desired to see the fusion
of the two countries, while the chief
representatives of the cities held the
opposite opinion.

Viscount Adare, the title belonging
to the eldest son in the Dunraven
family, was educated privately, and
although fond of athletics, had few
opportunities of joining in cricket,
football, rackets, and similar public-school
games. At an early age he
was sent abroad with a tutor, and
while still in his teens had visited and
explored many of the principal cities
of Europe. In compliance with his
father’s wishes he stayed some time at
Rome. But neither the influence of
the priests nor the attractions of the
Vatican were sufficient to induce him
to become a Roman Catholic. Soon
after he returned to England he went
to Oxford and matriculated at Christ
Church, where he spent the next three
years of his life. At college, except
holding a commission for a year in the
’Varsity volunteers, he did nothing to
distinguish himself from the ordinary
undergraduate, and, like many others
of his set, came down without taking a
degree. He then joined the First Life
Guards, and spent much of his spare
time steeplechasing. Pluck and nerve,
combined with light weight, secured
him many mounts from Captain Machell
and others. He was christened
“Fly” by his brother officers, a name
by which he is still known among his
most intimate friends.

So energetic a nature soon tired of
the London soldier’s life, and when
war broke out with Abyssinia he applied
to the proprietors of the “Daily
Telegraph” to be allowed to act as
430
their special correspondent. His offer
being accepted, he resigned his commission
and started for North Africa.
Colonel Phayre, who was Quartermaster-General,
attached him to his staff,
and so he obtained the earliest and
most authentic information. Mr. H.
M. Stanley, who was doing similar duty
for the “New York Herald,” shared a
tent with the amateur journalist, and
was much struck with the workmanlike
character of the despatches which he
sent off on every available opportunity.
At the close of the campaign he returned
to England and fell in love
with Lord Charles Lennox Kerr’s
daughter, whom he shortly afterwards
married. In 1869 he started with his
wife for a tour in the United States,
where he remained for some time and
made many friends.

In journalistic circles he was well
received, and particularly so by the
late Mr. Louis Jennings, then editor
of the “New York Times,” Mr. Hurlbert,
who at that time had charge of
the “New York World,” and the late
“Sam” Ward. At the outbreak of war
between France and Germany he went
to Berlin for the “Daily Telegraph,”
and followed the campaign right
through. As a matter of course he
carried his life in his hand, but though
he had some narrow escapes he met
with no accident, until just before the
capitulation of Paris, when he broke
his arm and was invalided home, with
the result that he missed the days of
the Commune.

For twelve years or more he crossed
the Atlantic annually and travelled in
the States, Canada, Nova Scotia, and
Newfoundland. He was the first private
individual to investigate the Yellowstone
region, and wrote a capital
book on the expedition called “The
Great Divide,” which met with a good
reception both in America and England.
He hunted and shot with Buffalo
Bill and Texas Jack long before
they ever went east of the Mississippi,
and his name was well known among
the Indians, who allowed him to travel
about their territory without interruption.
His articles in the “Nineteenth
Century Review” on moose and caribou
hunting, and his stories of animal
life, drafted on the spot, were much
appreciated in sporting circles. In
Colorado he purchased a tract of land
called Estes Park, which is about to
be transferred to an English company.
When the branch railway is made and
the proposed irrigation works inaugurated,
the estate should be a valuable
property.

Lord Dunraven’s yachting may be
said to date from his college days,
since he generally spent the long vacation
with his friend Lord Romney,
voyaging in a small sloop he purchased
from a Cardiff pilot. In this craft,
with a man and boy for a crew, he
used to cruise in all sorts of weather
round the coasts of Scotland and Ireland.
Very funny indeed are some of
the yarns about the dangers and difficulties
which the “Cripple”—as the
yacht was named—and those on board
met with from time to time. In this
way he picked up some knowledge of
navigation, learned how to manage a
boat, and became well acquainted with
the discomforts of seafaring life. From
the days of the “Cripple” until 1887
Lord Dunraven took but little interest
in yachting or yacht racing. But in
August of that year he chanced to be
at Cowes, and went for a sail in the
“Irex.” As usual with Mr. Jameson,
the conversation turned on yacht
building. In a very short time Lord
Dunraven was persuaded to return to
his old love, and before a month was
over Mr. Richardson, of Liverpool,
431
who designed the “Irex,” had received
instructions to build him a cutter.
The result was the “Petronilla,” but,
in spite of several alterations, the
yacht was a failure, although she was
steered by Gomes, who during the last
two seasons has had charge of “Meteor”
(née “Thistle”) for the German
Emperor.

Disheartened, but not defeated, he
gave a commission to Mr. Watson,
of Glasgow, who designed the first
“Valkyrie.” She was a signal success,
and was sailed by Thomas Diaper, better
known as Tommy Dutch, and afterwards
by William Cranfield, who had
been so fortunate with the “Yarana,”
now the “Maid Marian,” for Mr. Ralli.
Like the present ship, she was built for
the express purpose of racing for the
America Cup. The challenge sent by
the Royal Yacht Squadron was accepted
by the New York Yacht Club. But
as conditions, considered distasteful
by the Squadron, were imposed as to
the future holding of the cup, and the
New York Yacht Club declined to
yield in any way, the match was reluctantly
abandoned. The following year
the Watson cutter came out again and
did as well as before. In the winter
of 1891-92 Lord Dunraven took her
to the Mediterranean, where, after winning
every race she sailed in, she was
sold to the Archduke Carl Stephan,
and delivered at Pola.

The next order was given to Mr.
Alfred Payne, of Southampton, who
was bidden to design a yacht which
should serve the twofold purpose of a
fast cruiser and a reliable, seaworthy
fishing boat. “L’Esperance” was built
with that object in view, and fully
realized the expectations of her owner,
though, of course, she was not fast
enough to hold her own with the first-class
racers. During the two seasons
the yacht was afloat she carried off
several prizes in handicap matches.

Last year Lord Dunraven determined
to have a second try to bring
off a race for the America Cup, and
gave an order to Mr. Watson to build
him another cutter. The success of the
Clyde designer’s last venture was probably
the reason for calling the new
vessel “Valkyrie.” The Royal Yacht
Squadron again challenged in Lord
Dunraven’s behalf, and the challenge
was duly accepted. Fortunately, no
difficulties arose on this occasion, and
the 5th of October is fixed for the first
match.

The new ship was built by Messrs.
Henderson, of Glasgow, side by side
with the “Britannia,” the Prince of
Wales’s yacht. It is a mistake, however,
to suppose, as some do, that the
432
two vessels are copies, one of the
other. The “Valkyrie” was designed
first, and her building begun, before
Mr. Watson considered with Mr. Jameson
the lines of the “Britannia.” “Valkyrie’s”
registered tonnage is 106.55,
and her length on the load water line
86.82 feet, which is 1.82 feet above the
length of the load water line given in
the challenge, but doubtless she will be
altered to meet the conditions governing
the race. Her length from the
fore part of stem under the bowsprit
to the aft side of the head of the stern-post
is 97.75 feet, and her length over
all 116.25. Her racing rating is 148,
and her sail area 10,200 square feet,
being 3,500 square feet more than the
first “Valkyrie.” She carries a crew
of thirty hands all told, and her cabins
are prettily fitted up in cedar and cretonne.

The second “Valkyrie” has been
tried in all weathers and in various
waters with the “Britannia,” the “Satanita,”
the “Calluna,” and the “Iverna.”
Therefore her capabilities against
British yachts of her own class are
pretty well known. Up to the time of
writing, namely, the eve of the Royal
Yacht Squadron regatta at Cowes—the
regatta in which the schooner
yacht “America” won the cup which
Lord Dunraven hopes to bring back to
England—the “Valkyrie” has sailed
in twenty matches and won fourteen
flags, eleven first and three second, representing
a total value of £930. Her
first match was in the Thames on May
25, when she had bad luck and only
came in third, “Britannia” being first
and “Iverna” second. In the middle
of the race she broke her bowsprit off
short in the stem, and in a few minutes
was, for all sailing purposes, practically
a wreck. In the second Royal
Thames match it was doubtful whether
“Britannia” or “Valkyrie” won. The
Prince of Wales’s yacht was first in, but
according to some watches she only
won by seven seconds, whereas the
official timekeeper made it seventeen
seconds, thus covering “Valkyrie’s”
time allowance. In the Royal Cinque
Ports regatta several vessels collided,
with the result that the “Britannia”
did not race at all, and Lord Dunraven’s
yacht was detained at the start
twelve and a half minutes, and so was
not placed. During the Royal Ulster
match one of “Valkyrie’s” men fell
overboard, and the time lost in picking
up the man could not be recovered.
It is, however, but fair to say that
when “Valkyrie” won the second
433
Royal Western match, “Britannia”
came to grief, while in the second race
on the Clyde the prince’s yacht was
disqualified.

It now remains to see how she acquits
herself in contest with the American
vessels which have been built to meet
her. The long notice required gives
a distinct advantage to the other side;
although only one boat can sail against
the challenger,
there is
nothing to
prevent any
number of
boats being
designed by
the party
challenged.
The Americans
have
built four cutters
to select
from, hence
the chances
against the
“Valkyrie”
may be roughly
calculated
at four to
one.

There is no
doubt that
Lord Dunraven’s
ship
is a great improvement
on
anything
hitherto built
in England,
and, given
her time allowance,
is
the fastest
vessel afloat on British waters. She has
gone much better since she had her top-mast
clipped and topsails cut. Her
strong point is going to windward, and
her best chance is in light weather. She
leaves England on or about August 20,
in charge of William Cranfield, than
whom it would be difficult to find a more
experienced skipper on either side of the
Atlantic. He has sailed her all through
her trial matches and will steer her in
the races for the cup.

But it must not be supposed that
Lord Dunraven is always racing in
large yachts. On the contrary, he is
perhaps even more interested in small
boat sailing, and has, since 1889, built
four “fives,” all of which have given a
very good account of themselves. This
year he brought out a twenty-rater,
but so far she has not proved a success,
and has succumbed to “Dragon”
on almost every occasion. He is commodore
of
the Castle
Yacht Club,
a sporting
little racing
club on the
South Coast,
where races
take place
every Saturday
and often
twice a week.
The commodore
generally
enters his
boat for these
matches, and
always steers
himself. Besides
belonging
to the
Royal Yacht
Squadron and
the Castle
Yacht Club,
Lord Dunraven
is a
member of
the Austrian
Imperial
Yacht Squadron;
the
Royal Cork,
London,
Southern, Southampton, Clyde, Western,
and Victoria; the New Thames,
Bristol Channel, Portsmouth, Corinthian
and many other yachting clubs.

The same year that he returned to
yachting he took up racing again, and
started a stable in partnership with
Lord Randolph Churchill, having Mr.
R. W. Sherwood as trainer, and “Morny”
Cannon and Woodburn as jockeys.
On the whole his horses have been
fairly successful. L’Abbesse de Jouarre
won the Oaks in 1889, and Inverness
434
has secured some good stakes.
Strange to say, on the day the mare
won at Epsom, Lord Randolph was in
Norway, and Lord Dunraven was sailing
in his five-rater at Calshot Castle.
Under these circumstances it is quite
permissible to draw the conclusion that
he prefers yachting to horse racing.
After four years of partnership racing,
Lord Dunraven bought Lord Randolph’s
share of the stud and now races
entirely on his own account. He is a
good fisherman,
and as
equally at
home with his
salmon rod
as with a
deep-sea
line. He
knows nearly
every fishing
ground round
the coast,
and, after the regattas
are over, generally goes
trawling. His favorite
places are off Plymouth,
the Scilly and the Channel
Islands. Both with rifle and gun
he is a first-rate shot, and although he
always shoots in spectacles, seldom
misses his game.

Lord Dunraven took his seat in the
House of Lords as a supporter of Mr.
Gladstone, who subsequently offered
him a minor post in the government.
But at that time the young traveler
took but little part in politics, and so
declined the flattering invitation. His
real entry into public life, and, in fact,
the foundation of his subsequent career
as a politician, are due to an article
which he wrote in the “New York
World” on Mr. Gladstone’s famous
attack on Lord Beaconsfield. The
article obtained much attention at
the time, and attracted the notice of
the Conservative chief, who was much
struck at the clever criticism of the
young Liberal peer. An acquaintance
sprang up between Lord Beaconsfield
and the writer, which later on ripened
into friendship, and probably had something
to do with Lord Dunraven
joining the Conservative party.

His early speeches were chiefly
on foreign policy, and the intimate
knowledge he showed respecting
treaties of all
kinds was an additional
link between him and
the leader of his new
party. His favorite
theme was Egypt, and
he rarely missed an
opportunity of condemning
Mr. Gladstone’s
policy in respect
to that country.
Later on he interested
himself more especially
in colonial affairs.
Here his personal
acquaintance
with the North American colonies
stood him in good stead, and gained
him the ear of the House of Lords.
Thus it was scarcely surprising that
when Lord Salisbury came into office
he chose him as Under Secretary of
State for the colonies, a post he again
filled on the return of the Conservatives
to power in 1886.

Soon after he had taken office the
second time, the Newfoundland Government
passed an act prohibiting the
French fishermen from purchasing bait
435
in the colony. This act the imperial
government at first declined to ratify.
Lord Dunraven sided with the local
legislators, on the ground that Newfoundland
was a self-governing colony.
He pressed this view of the case at
Downing Street, and, as the government
declined to yield, resigned his
Under Secretaryship. Some say he
resigned merely to support his friend,
Lord Randolph Churchill, who had just
given up the post of Chancellor of the
Exchequer and leader of the House of
Commons, but, although the two resignations
may have had some connection,
the immediate cause of Lord
Dunraven’s leaving the Colonial Office
was as I have stated. Being out of
office and out of favor with his chief,
Lord Dunraven turned his attention to
social questions, and, when Mr. Burnett’s
report on the Sweating System
at the East End of London was presented
to Parliament, he moved the
House of Lords for a select committee
to inquire into the subject. The request
was granted, and he was appointed
chairman. For more than two
years the committee sat, and during all
that time Lord Dunraven worked most
energetically, examining and cross-examining
the various witnesses sent up
from all parts of the United Kingdom,
for he was not long in discovering that
the system was practised quite as much
in the provincial cities as in the East
End of London, and quickly took steps
to have the reference extended. With
much care he drafted an exhaustive
report, giving, as the chief causes of
the existence of sweating, unrestricted
foreign immigration and over-competition.
Lord Derby and Lord Thring
declined to accept this view, and Lord
Dunraven, finding himself in a minority,
retired from the chairmanship. Subsequent
events have shown that Lord
Dunraven was not so far out in his
diagnosis as his colleagues supposed.
The evil effects of foreign immigration
upon the unskilled labor market so impressed
him that, on his own initiative
and at his own expense, he formed a
society for the express purpose of
making these effects known to the
public, and of forcing them upon the
attention of Parliament.

The working-man may have good
436
reason to thank Lord Dunraven,
but it is doubtful
whether the capitalist will
regard his efforts in the same
light. The Sweating Committee
brought Mr. Alderman
Ben Tillett to the front,
and Mr. Alderman Ben Tillett,
in conjunction with Mr.
John Burns, M.P., were the
promoters of the dock strike.
The dock strike started
“new unionism,” and new
unionism gave an impetus
to the eight-hour-day movement.
Lord Dunraven and
Lord Randolph Churchill
were the first prominent
politicians to openly advocate
an eight-hour day for
miners, and Lord Dunraven’s speech
on the eight-hours’ case generally, before
the members of the Chamber of
Commerce at Liverpool, attracted much
comment at the time. The Factories
and Workshops act was really an extension
of the very able bill which Lord
Dunraven introduced into the House
of Lords, in order to carry into force
certain amendments in the law which
he had suggested in his draft on the
sweating inquiry. Together with Lord
Sandhurst, the present Under Secretary
for War, he championed the cause
of the laundresses. Indeed, there is
scarcely a question affecting the interests
of the working classes in which he
has not taken an active part, and when
a separate state department for labor
is established, as it must be eventually,
Lord Dunraven, supposing the
Conservatives to be in power, will
probably be invited to act as its first
minister.

There is scarcely a subject on which
he is not well informed. His difficulty
seems to be in making a choice. In
matters of sport he has thrown his
heart and soul into yachting, and, as
a consequence, on that subject he is
naturally considered the first authority.
What he has done in yachting he must
do in politics, if he is ever to reach the
position to which his abilities entitle
him.

The rough-and-tumble work of the
House of Commons would have been
a far better
school for
him than
the Upper
House of
Parliament,
and
had he not
been a peer he would probably by
this time have reached a far higher
rung on the political ladder than he
has done. Although nervous, he is a
good speaker, and never misses his
points. He seldom addresses the
House without a thorough knowledge
of his subject, and as a consequence is
generally listened to and considered.
Naturally quick, he soon masters his
facts. He has great power of concentration,
but, like most Irishmen, lacks
application. Unlike his race, however,
he is not impulsive, and seldom speaks
without thinking. He has more the
memory of a barrister than that of a
permanent official, and should he forget
the details, always remembers the
line of argument. With a little more
patience he would make a good judge,
as he knows well how to sift evidence,
and is just in dealing with the opinions
of others. Thorough himself, he expects
thoroughness in those about him.
Cant and hypocrisy he will have none
of. Nor does he believe in employing
second-rate intellect. The best man
and the best price is Lord Dunraven’s
motto. There is no niggardliness
437
about him, yet at the same time he intends
to get his money’s worth. Mistakes
are not overlooked, but forgiven.
As a result he is much liked by all who
have any dealings with him.

The principal family estates are in
Ireland and Wales. Adare Manor, the
Irish home where the present peer was
born, is situated in one of the prettiest
parts of County Limerick. The house,
which had fallen into decay during the
last century, was entirely rebuilt by
Lord Dunraven’s grandfather. It is
of gray stone and in the style of the
Tudor period. The most imposing
apartment is the gallery, which is
panelled in old oak and has a beautifully
carved ceiling. This room is approached
from the hall by means of a
stone stair-case let into the wall, and is
entered through richly carved double
doors brought from an old church at
Antwerp. It is one hundred and thirty-two
feet long and twenty-one feet
wide. Along the sides hang the family
pictures, and a few choice paintings
by old masters. The hall is lofty, and
lighted by colored windows, which, together
with the organ, hidden away in
a recess, gives the place more the appearance
of a cathedral than the entrance
to a private house. The river
Maigne flows past the manor on the
south side, and, when at home, the subject
of our sketch may often be seen
fishing for a salmon or shooting a weir
in his canoe, after the manner of Canadian
log men down the rapids. Not
far from the manor house, on the
banks of the river, are the ruins of a
Franciscan abbey, built in 1464 for the
Observant Brothers by a former Earl
of Kildare, while adjoining lie the ruins
of Desmond Castle, so celebrated in
Irish history.

Lord Dunraven is much attached to
Ireland and the Irish. He devotes
large sums of money annually towards
improving and keeping up Adare, and
spends all the income derived from the
estate in giving employment to the
people of the district. This fact alone,
seeing that he has only a life interest
in the place, shows his large-mindedness.
His property is probably the
only one in the south of Ireland on
which no outrage has ever been committed,
and it speaks well for his popularity
that when he came amongst his
own tenants a few months ago to deliver
a speech against Mr. Gladstone’s
Home Rule bill, not only was he
listened to, but, for the time, received
the support of many Home Rulers in
the district. At Adare, Lord Dunraven
entertained Lord Spencer and
438
the vice-regal court in state, and subsequently
received Lord Londonderry
and Lord Houghton.

Dunraven Castle, in Glamorganshire,
is built on the edge of a cliff, and overlooks
the Bristol Channel. The coast
is very dangerous, and many a ship
has struck and gone to pieces on the
treacherous rocks in sight of the castle.
There is no safe anchorage anywhere
near, so Lord Dunraven is in the peculiar
position of having a home by
the sea, but is unable to approach it
in his yacht. Lately the castle has
been enlarged, and a new wing and
courtyard added. During the last few
years, owing probably to the unsettled
state of Ireland, Lord and Lady Dunraven
have done most of their entertaining
here. Not long ago the Duke
and Duchess of Teck and the Princess
May (Duchess of York) made a long
stay at the castle. The gardens are
well kept, but the want of shelter prevents
the shrubs and coverts from
growing, and gives the more exposed
part of the estate rather a barren appearance.
The shooting is fairly good,
and the park well stocked with deer.

Kenry House, in the vale of Putney,
was until recently used as the town
residence, but when Lord Dunraven’s
daughters grew up it was necessary to
take a house in London. Still Kenry
is a favorite Saturday to Monday resort
of Lord Dunraven during the
parliamentary session.

Few men in like position have led so
varied a life as the owner of “Valkyrie,”
and as a consequence he has
come into contact with most men and
women worth knowing. In social circles
he is very popular, and no smart
entertainment is complete without him.
In clubland he is always welcome, and
is as equally at home at the Beefsteak
or the Savage as at the Marlborough or
the Turf. While Parliament is sitting
he is often found at the Carlton, discussing
with his party the latest move
on the political chess-board, or talking
science and literature with his friends
at the Athenæum. His energy is
boundless. He will work all the morning,
legislate in the afternoon, dine
out, and then spend the evening in
amusement. Travelling to him is nothing.
He never tires. He is an early
riser, and no matter what time he goes
to bed is always up and attending to
his correspondence at the usual hour
the next morning. In this way he gets
through a great amount of work, and
is able to find time for the same
amount of pleasure. He is very generous,
and as a result is often imposed
upon. Not only is he called upon to
give money toward the charities in his
own neighborhoods, but people write
to him from all parts of the United
Kingdom to help them in their distress.
Often he yields, and many a
home has been made happy by a gift
of money or money’s worth. Scarcely
a church or chapel on his Welsh estate
is self-supporting. All expect, and
many get, grants from Lord Dunraven.
In Ireland, too, he is equally liberal;
and Father Flanagan, the priest at
Adare, could tell many a tale of want
relieved and assistance given to the
Catholics on the estate.

London, England.

Reproduced, by special arrangement,
from “Under the Hawthorn, and Other Verse,”
by Augusta de Gruchy.

London: Edwin Matthews and John Lane, 1893.

I.

It was Sunday evening in July—an
evening aglow with warmth and
splendor; an evening when even the
streets of London were glorious with
the light of the splendid west; an
evening when, if you are young (as I
sincerely hope you are), only to wander
hand-in-hand over the grass and under
the trees with your sweetheart should
be happiness enough. One ought to be
ashamed to ask for more. Nay, a
great many do not ask for more.

They are engaged. Some time, but
not just yet, they will marry. They
work separately all the week, but on
the Sunday they are free to go about
together. Of all the days that make
the week they dearly love but one day—namely
the day that lies between the
Saturday and Monday. Now that the
voice of the Sabbatarian has sunk to a
whisper or a whine; now that we have
learned to recognize the beauty, the
priceless boon, the true holiness of the
Sunday, which not only rests body and
brain, but may be so used as to fill the
mind with memories of lovely scenes,
of sweet and confidential talk, of love-making
and of happiness, we ought to
determine that of all the things which
make up the British liberties, there is
nothing for which the working man
should more fiercely fight or more
jealously watch than the full freedom
of his Sunday—freedom uncontrolled
441
to wander where he will, to make his
recreation as he chooses.

If the church doors are open wide,
let the doors of the public galleries and
the museums and the libraries be opened
wide as well. Let him, if he choose,
step from church to library. But if he
is wise, when the grass is long and the
bramble is in blossom, and the foliage
is thick and heavy on the elms, he will,
after dinner, repair to the country, if it
is only to breathe the air of the fields,
and lie on his back watching the slow
westering of the sun and listening to
the note of the blackbird in the wood.

Two by two they stroll or sit about
Hempstead Heath on such an evening.
If you were to listen (a pleasant thing
to do, but wrong) to the talk of these
couples you would find that they are
mostly silent, except that they only
occasionally exchange a word or two.
Why should they talk? They know
each other’s cares and prospects; they
know the burden that each has to bear—the
evil temper of the boss, the uncertainties
of employment, the difficulties
in the way of an improved screw,
and the family troubles—there are always
family troubles, due to some inconsiderate
member or other. I declare
that we have been teaching morality
and the proper conduct of life on quite
a wrong principle—namely, the selfish
principle.

We say, “Be good, my child, and
you will go to heaven.” The proposition
is no doubt perfectly true. But it
proposes a selfish motive for action. I
would rather say to that child, “Be
good, my dear, or else you will become
an intolerable nuisance to other people.”
Now, no child likes to consider
himself an intolerable nuisance.

These lovers, therefore, wander
about the Heath, sometimes up to
their knees in bracken, sometimes sitting
under the trees, not talking
much, but, as the old phrase has it,
“enjoying themselves” very much
indeed. At the end of the Spaniards’
Road—that high causeway whence
one can see, in clear weather, the
steeple of Harrow Church on one side
and the dome of St. Paul’s on the other—there
is a famous clump of firs, which
have been represented by painters over
and over again. Benches have been
placed under these trees, where one can
sit and have a very fine view indeed,
with the Hendon Lake in the middle
distance, and a range of hills beyond,
and fields and rills between.

On one of these benches were sitting
this evening two—Adam and Eve,
boy and girl—newly entered into paradise.
Others were sitting there as
well—an ancient gentleman whose
thoughts were seventy years back, a
working man with a child of three on
his knee, and beside him his wife,
carrying the baby. But these lovers
paid no heed to their neighbors. They
sat at the end of the bench. The boy
was holding the girl’s hand, and he was
talking eagerly.

“Lily,” he said, “you must come
some evening to our debating society
when we begin again and hear me
speak. No one speaks better. That
is acknowledged. There is to be a
debate on the House of Lords in October.
I mean to come out grand.
When I’m done there will be mighty
little left of the Lords.” He was a
handsome lad, tall and well set up,
straight featured and bright eyed.
The girl looked at him proudly. He
was her own lad—this handsome chap.
Not that she was bad-looking either.
Many an honest fellow has to put up
with a girl not nearly so good-looking,
if you were to compare.

He was a clerk in the city. She was
in the post-office. He attended at his
office daily from half-past nine to six,
doing such work as was set before him
for the salary of a pound a week. She
stood all day long at the counter, serving
out postal orders, selling stamps,
weighing letters, and receiving telegrams.
When I add that she was civil
to everybody you will understand that
she was quite a superior clerk—one
of the queen’s lucky bargains. It is
not delicate to talk about a young
lady’s salary, therefore I shall not say
for how much she gave her services to
the British Empire.

He was a clever boy, who read and
thought. That is to say, he thought
that he thought—which is more than
most do. As he took his facts from
the newspapers, and nothing else, and
442
as he was profoundly ignorant of English
history, English law, the British
Constitution, the duties of a citizen,
and the British Empire generally, his
opinions, after he had done thinking,
were not of so much value to the
country, it is believed. But still a
clever fellow, and able to spout in a
frothy way which carried his hearers
along, if it never convinced or defeated
an opponent.

To this kind of clever boy there are
always two or three dangers. One is
that he should be led on to think more
and more of froth and less of fact;
another, that he should grow conceited
over his eloquence and neglect his
business. A third temptation which
peculiarly besets this kind is that he
should take to drink. Oratory is thirsty
work, and places where young men
orate are often in immediate proximity
to bars. As yet, however, Charley was
only twenty. He was still at the first
stage of everything—oratory, business,
and love; and he was still at the stage
when everything appears possible—the
total abolition of injustice, privilege,
class, capital, power, oppression, greed,
sweating, poverty, suffering—by the
simple process of tinkering the constitution.

“Oh,” he cried, “we shall have
the most glorious, the most splendid
time, Lily! The power of the people
is only just beginning; it hasn’t begun
yet. We shall see the most magnificent
things….” He enumerated
them as above indicated. Well,
it is very good that young men should
have such dreams and see such visions.
I never heard of any girl being thus
carried out of herself. The thing belongs
exclusively to male man in youth,
and it is very good for him. When he
is older he will understand that over
and above the law and the constitution
there is something else more
important still—namely, that every
individual man should be honest,
temperate, and industrious. In brief,
he will understand the force of the admonition:
“Be good, my child, or else
you will become an intolerable nuisance
to everybody.”

The sun sank behind Harrow-on-the-Hill.
The red light of the west flamed
in the boy’s bright eyes. Presently
the girl rose.

“Yes, Charley,” she said, less sympathetic
than might have been expected;
“yes, and it will be a very
fine time, if it comes. But I don’t
know. People will always want to get
rich, won’t they? I think this beautiful
time will have to come after us.
Perhaps we had better be looking after
our own nest first.”

“Oh, it will come—it will come!”

“I like to hear you talk about it,
Charley. But if we are ever to marry—if
I am to give up the post-office,
you must make a bigger screw. Remember
what you promised. The
shorthand and the French class. Put
them before your speechifying.”

“All right, Lily dear, and then we
will get married, and we will have the
most splendid time. Oh, there’s the
most splendid time for us—ahead!”

II.

It is six months later and mid-winter,
and the time is again the evening.
The day has been gloomy, with a fog
heavy enough to cause the offices to
be lit with gas, so that the eyes of all
London are red and the heads of all
London are heavy.

Lily stepped outside the post-office,
work done. She was going home.

At the door stood her sweetheart,
waiting for her. She tossed her head
and made as if she would pass him
without speaking. But he stepped
after and walked beside her.

“No, Lily,” he said, “I will speak
to you; even if you don’t answer my
letters you shall hear me speak.”

“You have disgraced yourself,” she
said.

“Yes, I know. But you will forgive
me. It is the first time. I swear it is
the first time.”

Well, it was truly the first time that
she had seen him in such a state.

“Oh, to be a drunkard!” she replied.
“Oh, could I ever believe
that I should see you rolling about the
street?”

“It was the first time, Lily, and it
shall be the last. Forgive me and
443
take me on again. If you give me up
I shall go to the devil!”

“Charley”—her voice broke into a
sob—“you have made me miserable—I
was so proud of you. No other
girl, I thought, had such a clever
sweetheart; and
last Tuesday—oh!
it’s dreadful to
think of.”

“Yes, Lily, I
know. There’s
only one excuse. I
spoke for more than
an hour, and I was
exhausted. So
what I took went
to my head. Another
time I should
not have felt it a
bit. And when I found myself staggering
I was going home as fast as
possible, and as bad luck would have
it, I must needs meet you.”

“Good luck, I call it. Else I might
never have found it out till too late.”

“Lily, make it up. Give me another
chance. I’ll swear off. I’ll take the
pledge.”

He caught her hand and held it.

“Oh, Charley,” she said, “if I can
only trust you.”

“You can, you must, Lily. For your
sake I will take the
pledge. I will do
whatever you ask
me to do.”

She gave way, but not without
conditions.

“Well,” she said, “I will try to think
no more about it. But, Charley, remember,
I could never, never, never
marry a man who drinks.”

“You never shall, dear,” he replied,
earnestly.

“And then, another thing, Charley.
This speaking work—oh! I know it is
clever and that—but it doesn’t help us
forward. How long is it since you
determined to learn shorthand, because
it would advance you so much? And
French, because a clerk who can write
French is worth double? Where are
your fine resolutions?”

“I will begin again—I will practise
hard; see now, Lily, I will do all you
want. I will promise anything to please
you—and do it, too. See if I won’t.
Only not quite to give up the speaking.
Think how people are beginning to
look up to me. Why, when we get a
444
reformed House, and the members are
paid, they will send me to Parliament—me!
I shall be a member for Camden
Town. Then I shall be made Home
Secretary, or Attorney General, or something.
You will be proud, Lily, of your
husband when he is a distinguished
man. There’s a splendid time for us—ahead!”

“Yes, dear. But first you know you
have got to get a salary that we can
live on.”

He left her at her door with a kiss
and a laugh, and turned to go home.
In the next street he passed a public-house.
He stopped, he hesitated, he
felt in his pocket, he went in and had a
go, just a single go—Lily would never
find out—of Scotch, cold. Then he
went home and played at practising
shorthand for an hour. He had promised
his Lily. She should see how well
he could keep his promise.

III.

“It is good of you to come, my dear.
Of course, I understand that it is all
over now. It must be. It is not in
nature that you should keep him on
any longer. But I thought you would
see my poor boy once more.”

It was Charley’s mother who spoke.
He was the only son of a widow.

“Oh, yes, I came—I came,” Lily
replied, tearfully. “But what is the
good? He will promise everything
again. How many times has he repented
and promised—and promised?”

“My poor boy! And we were so
proud of him, weren’t we, dear?” said
the mother, wiping away a tear. “He
was going to do such great things with
his cleverness and his speaking. And
now—I have seen it coming on, my
dear, for a year and more, but I durstn’t
speak to you. When he came home
night after night with a glassy eye and
a husky voice, when he reeled across
the room, at first I pretended not to
notice it. A man mustn’t be nagged
or shamed, must he? Then I spoke in
the morning, and he promised to pull
himself up.”

“He will promise—ah! yes—he will
promise.”

“If you could only forgive him he
might keep his promise.”

Lily shook her head doubtfully.

“I went to the office this morning,
my dear. They have been expecting
it for weeks. The head clerk warned
him. It was known that he had fallen
into bad company—in the city they
don’t like spouters. And when he came
back after his dinner he was so tipsy
that he fell along. They just turned
him out on the spot.”

“Mother,” said Lily, “it’s like this.
I can’t help forgiving him. We two
must forgive him, whatever he does.
We love him, you see, that’s what it is.”

“Yes, dear, yes.”

“It isn’t the poor, tipsy boy we love,
but the real boy—the clever boy behind.
We must forgive him. But”—her
lips quivered—“I cannot marry
him. Do not ask me to do that unless—what
will never happen—he reforms
altogether.”

“If you would, dear, I think he
might keep straight. If you were
always with him to watch him.”

“I could not be always with him.
445
And besides, mother, think what might
happen as well. Would you have me
bring into the world children whose
lives would make me wretched by a
drunken father? And how should we
live? Because, you see, if I marry I
must give up my place.”

The mother sighed. “Charley is in
his own room,” she said, “I will send
him to you.”

Lily sat down and buried her face in
her hands. Alas! to this had her engagement
come. But she loved him.
When he came into the room and stood
before her and she looked up, seeing
him shamefaced and with hanging
head, she was filled with pity
as well as love—pity and
shame, and sorrow for the
boy. She took his hand and
pressed it between her own
and burst into tears. “Oh,
Charley, Charley!” she
cried.

“I am a brute and a
wretch,” he said. “I don’t
deserve anything. But
don’t throw me over—don’t,
Lily!”

He fell on his knees before
her, crying like a little school-boy.
A tendency to weep
readily sometimes accompanies
the consumption of
strong drink.

Then he made confession,
such confession as one makes
who puts things as prettily
as their ugliness allows. He
had given way once or twice;
he had never intended to get
drunk; he had been overtaken
yesterday. The day
was close, he had a headache
in the morning. To cure
his headache he took a single
glass of beer. When he
went back to the office he
felt giddy. They said he
was drunk. They bundled
him out on the spot without
even the opportunity of explaining.

Lily sighed. What could
she say or answer? The
weakness of the man’s nature
only came out the more clearly
by his confession. What could she
say? To reason with him was useless.
To make him promise was useless.

“Charley,” she said at length, “if
my forgiveness will do any good take
it and welcome. But we cannot undo
the past. You have lost your place
and your character. As for the
future——”

“You have forgiven me, Lily,” he
said; “oh, I can face the future. I can
get another place easily. I shall very
soon retrieve my character. Why, all
they can say is that I seemed to have
taken too much. Nothing—that is
nothing!”

“What will you do? Have you got
any money?”

“No. I must go and look for another
place. Until I get one I suppose
there will be short commons. I deserve
it, Lily. You shall not hear me grumble.”

She took out her purse. “I can
spare two pounds,” she said. “Take
the money, Charley. Nay—you must—you
shall. You must not go about
looking half
starved.”

He hesitated
and changed
color, but he took
the money.

Half an hour
later he was laughing,
as they all
three sat at their
simple supper, as
light-hearted as if
there had never
been such a scene.
When a man is
forgiven he may
as well behave accordingly.
Only,
when he lifted his
glass of water to
his lips he gasped—it
was a craving
for something
stronger than
water which tightened
his throat
like hydrophobia.
But it passed; he
drank the water
and set down the
glass with a nod.

“Good water,
that,” he said.
“Nothing like
water. Mean to stick to water in
future—water and tea. Lily, I’ve
made up my mind. For the next six
months I shall give up speaking, though
it’s against my interests. Shorthand
and French in the evening. By that
time I shall get a post worth a hundred—ay,
a hundred and twenty—pounds
a year, if I’m lucky, and we’ll get married
and all live together and be as
happy as the day is long. You shall
never repent your wedding-day, my
dear. I shall keep you like a lady.
Oh, we will have a splendid time.”

At ten o’clock Lily rose to go home.
He sprang to his feet and took his hat
and went.

“No, no,” he said. “Let you go
alone? Not if I know it.”

She laid her hand on his arm once
more, and tried to believe that his
promise would be kept this time. He
led her home, head in air, gallant and
brave. At the
door he kissed
her. “Good-night,
my dear,”
he said. “You
know you can
trust me. Haven’t
I promised?”

On the way
home he passed a
public-house.
The craving came
back to him, and
the tightness of
his throat and the
yearning of his
heart; his footsteps
were drawn
and dragged toward
the door.

At eleven
o’clock his
mother, who was
waiting up for
him, heard him
bumping and
tumbling about
the stairs on his
way up. He came
in—his eyes fishy,
his voice thick.
“Saw her home,”
he said. “Good
girl, Lily. Made—(hic)—faithful
promise—we are going
to have—splendid time!”

IV.

The two women stood outside the
prison doors. At eight o’clock their
man would be released; the son of
one, the lover of the other. The elder
woman looked frail and bowed, her
face was full of trouble—the kind of
447
trouble that nothing can remove. The
younger woman stood beside her on
the pavement; she was thinner, and
her cheeks were pale; in her eyes, too,
you could read abiding trouble.

“We will take him home between
us,” said the girl. “Not a word of reproach.
He has sinned and suffered.
We must forgive. Oh, we cannot
choose but forgive!”

Alas! the noble boy—the clever
boy she loved—was further off than
ever. He who loses a place and his
character with it never gets another
berth. This is a rule in the city. We
talk of retrieving character and getting
back to work. Neither the one
nor the other event ever comes off.
The wretch who is in this hapless
plight begins the weary search for
employment in hope. How it ends
varies with his temperament or with
the position of his friends. All day
long he climbs stairs, puts his head
into offices, and asks if a clerk is
wanted.

No clerk is wanted. Then he comes
down the stairs and climbs others, and
asks the same question and gets the
same reply. If ever a clerk is wanted
a character is wanted with him; and
when the character includes the qualification
of drink, as well as of zeal and
ability, the owner is told that he may
move on.

I am told there is a never-ending
procession of clerks out of work up
and down the London stairs. What
becomes of them is never known. It
is, however, rumored that short commons,
long tramps, and hope deferred
bring most of them to the hospitals,
where it is tenderly called pneumonia.

Charley began his tramp. After a
little—a very little while—his money,
the money that Lily lent him, was all
gone. He was ashamed to borrow
more, because he would have to confess
how that money was chiefly spent.

Then he pawned his watch.

Then he borrowed another pound of
Lily.

Every evening he came home drunk.
His mother knew it, and told Lily.
They could do nothing. They said
nothing. They left off hoping.

Then his mother perceived that
things began to disappear. He stole
the clock on the mantel-shelf first, and
pawned it.

Then he stole other things. At last
he took the furniture, bit by bit, and
pawned it, until his mother was left
with nothing but a mattress and a pair
of blankets. He could not take her
money, because all she had was an annuity
of fifteen shillings a week, otherwise
he would have had that too. He
then borrowed Lily’s watch and pawned
it, and her little trinkets and pawned
them; he took from her all the money
she would give him.

Both women half starved themselves
to find him in drink and to save him
from crime. Yes, to save him from
crime. They did not use these words—they
understood. For now he had
become mad for drink. There was
no longer any pretence; he even left
off lying; he was drunk every day; if
he could not get drunk he sat on the
bare floor and cried. Neither his
mother nor Lily reproached him.

An end—a semicolon, if not a full
stop—comes to such a course. Unfortunately
not always the end which
is most to be desired—the only effectual
end.

The end or semicolon which came
to this young man was that, having
nothing more of his mother’s that he
could pawn, one day he slipped into
the ground floor lodger’s room and
made up quite a valuable little parcel
for his friend the pawnbroker. It contained
a Waterbury watch, a seven and
sixpenny clock, a mug—electro-plate,
won at a spelling competition—a bound
volume of “Tit Bits,” and a Bible.

When the lodger came home and
found out his loss he proved to be of
an irascible, suspicious, and revengeful
disposition. He immediately, for instance,
suspected the drunken young
man of the first floor. He caused
secret inquiry to be made, and—but
why go on? Alas! the conclusion of
the affair was eight months’ hard.

“Here he comes,” said Lily. “Look
up, mother; we must meet him with a
smile. He will come out sober, at any
rate.”

He was looking much better for his
period of seclusion. He walked home
448
between them, subdued, but ready, on
encouragement, for their old confidence.

In fact, it broke out, after an excellent
breakfast.

“I have made up my mind,” he said,
“while I was thinking—oh! I had
plenty to think about and plenty of
time to do my thinking in. Well, I
have made up my mind. Mother, this
is no country for me any longer. After
what has happened I must go. You
two go on living together, just for
company, but I shall go—I shall go
to America. There’s always an opening,
I am told, in America, for fellows
who are not afraid of work. Cleverness
tells there. A man isn’t kept down
because he’s had a misfortune. What
is there against me, after all? Character
gone, eh? Well, if you come to
that, I don’t deny that appearances were
against me. I could explain, however.

“But there nobody cares about
character nor what you’ve done here”—(this
remarkable belief is widely
spread concerning the colonies, as well
as the United States)—“it’s what can
you do? not, what have you done?
Very well. I mean to go to America,
mother. I shall polish up the shorthand
and pick up the French grammar
again. I mean to get rich now. Oh,
I’ve sown my wild oats! Then you’ll
both come out to me, and then we’ll
be married; and, Lily, we’ll have a
most splendid time!”

V.

Five years later Lily sat one Sunday
morning in the same lodgings. The
poor old mother was gone, praying
her with her last breath not to desert
the boy. But of Charley not a word
449
had come to her—no news of any
kind.

She was quite alone—in those days
she was generally alone; she had kept
her place at the post-office, but everybody
knew of her trouble, and somehow
it made a kind of barrier between
herself and her sister clerks. The sorrows
of love are sacred, but when they
are mixed up with a criminal and a
prison there is a feeling—a kind of a
feeling—as if, well, one doesn’t like
somehow to be mixed up with it. Lily
was greatly to be pitied, no doubt; her
lover had turned out shameful; but she
ought to have given up the man long
before he got so bad.

She was alone. The church bells
were beginning to ring. She thought
she would go to church. While she
considered this point, she heard a woman’s
step on the stairs, and there was a
knock at the door.

It was a nurse or probationer, dressed
in the now familiar garb—a young
nurse.

“You are Lily Chesters?” she asked.
“There is a patient just brought in to
the London Hospital who wants to see
you. He is named Charley, he says,
and will give no other name. He
wrote your address on paper. ‘Tell
her,’ he said, ‘that it is Charley.’”

Lily rose quietly. “I will go to
him.”

“He is your brother?”

“He is my lover. Is he ill?”

“He is very ill. He came in all in
rags, dirty and penniless—he is very ill
indeed. Prepare yourself. He is dying
of pneumonia.”

I told you before what they call it.

Lily sat at the bedside of the dying
man.

“It is all over,” he whispered. “I
have reformed, Lily. I have quite
turned over a new leaf. I have now
resolved to taking the pledge. Kiss
me, dear, and tell me that you forgive
me.”

“Yes, yes, Charley. God knows that
I forgive you. Why, you will come
back to yourself in a very little while.
Thank God for it, dear! Your own
true self. You will be my dear old boy
again—the boy that I have always
loved; not the drinking, bad boy—the
clever, bright boy. Oh, my dear, my
dear! you will see mother again very
soon, and she will welcome her boy,
returned to himself again.”

“Yes,” he said, “that’s it. A serious
reform this time. Lily, I dare say I
shall be up and well again in a day or
two. Then we will see what to do
next. I am going out to Australia,
where everybody has a chance—America
is a fraud. I shall get rich there,
and then you and mother will come to
me, and we shall get married, and—oh!
Lily, Lily, after all that we have
suffered, we shall have—I see that we
shall have”—he paused, and his voice
grew faint—“we shall have—the most
splendid time!”

“He is gone,” said the nurse.

I.
LOVE IN A COTTAGE.

After a brief honeymoon, spent
at Warrenpoint, Alice Brontë returned,
on her brother’s invitation, to
her old home, and Hugh went back to
complete his term of service in Loughorne.
It soon became desirable that
his wife should have a home of her
own, and he took a cottage in Emdale,
in the parish of Drumballyroney,
with which Drumgooland was united
at the time.

The house stands near crossroads
leading to important towns. In a
direct line it is about three and three-quarters
statute miles from Rathfriland,
seven and three-quarters from Newry,
twelve from Warrenpoint, and five and
a quarter from Banbridge. The exact
position of the house, is on the north-west
side of the old road, leading, in
Hugh Brontë’s day, to Newry and
Warrenpoint. Almost opposite, on the
other side of the road, there was a
blacksmith’s shop, which still continues
to be a blacksmith’s shop. The
Brontë house remains, though partially
in ruins.

The house is now used as a byre,
but its dimensions are exactly the
same as when it became the home of
Hugh Brontë and his bride. The rent
then would be about sixpence per
week, and would, in accordance with
the general custom, be paid by one
day’s work in the week, with board,
the work being given in the busy season.

The house consisted of two rooms.
That over which the roof still stands
was without chimney, and was used as
bedroom and parlor, and the outer
room, from which the roof has fallen,
was used as a corn-kiln, and also as
kitchen and reception-room.

A farmer’s wife, whose ancestors
lived close to the Brontë house long
before the Brontës were heard of in
County Down, pointing to a spot in
the corner of the byre opposite to the
window, said: “There is the very spot
where the Reverend Patrick Brontë was
born.” Then she added, “Numbers of
great folk have asked me about his
birthplace, but och! how could I tell
them that any dacent man was ever
born in such a place!” This feeling
on the part of the neighbors will
probably account for the fact that
everything written thus far regarding
Patrick Brontë’s birthplace is wrong,
neither the townland, nor even the parish
of his birth, being correctly given.

In the lowly cottage in Emdale, now
known as “The Kiln,” and used as a
cowhouse, Patrick Brontë was born,
on the 17th of March, 1777. Men have
risen to fame from a lowly origin, but
few men have ever emerged from
humbler circumstances than Patrick
Brontë.

Many a reader of Mrs. Gaskell’s
life of Charlotte Brontë has been saddened
by the picture of the vicar’s
daughters amid their narrow and grim
surroundings, but the gray vicarage of
Haworth was a palace compared with
the hovel in which the vicar himself
was born and reared.

Besides, the Haworth vicarage was
never really as sombre as Mrs. Gaskell
painted it, for Miss Ellen Nussey was
a constant visitor, and she assures me
that the girls were bright and happy
in their home, always engaged on
some project of absorbing interest,
and always enjoying life in their own
sober and thoughtful way.

The Brontë cottage in Emdale was
very poor, but it was brightened with
the perennial sunshine of love. It
was love in a cottage, in which the
bare walls and narrow board were
golden in the light of Alice Brontë’s
smile. It was said in the neighborhood
that Mrs. Brontë’s smile “would
have tamed a mad bull,” and on her
deathbed she thanked God that her husband
had never looked upon her with
a frown.

In their wedded love they were very
poor, but very happy. Hugh’s constant,
steady work provided for the
daily wants of an ever-increasing family,
but it made no provision for the
strain of adverse circumstances. In
fact, the Emdale Brontës lived like
birds, and as happy as birds.

Hugh Brontë was one of the industrious
poor. The salt of his life was
honest, manly toil. He had forgotten
the luxury of his childhood’s home,
and he did not feel any degradation in
his lowly lot.

In our artificial civilization we have
come to place too much store on the
accident of wealth. Our Blessed Saviour,
whom all the rich and luxurious
call “Lord,” was born in as lowly a
condition of comfortless poverty as
Patrick Brontë. Cows are now housed
in Brontë’s birthplace, but our Lord
was born among the animals in the
caravansérai. And yet, in our social
code, we have reduced the Decalogue to
this one commandment, “Thou shalt
not be poor.”

Hugh Brontë did not choose poverty
as his lot, but, being a working man, like
the carpenter of Nazareth, he did the
daily work that came to his hand, and
then, side by side with Alice, he found
the fulness of each day sufficient for
all its wants.

The happy home was soon crowded
with children, and the family removed
to a larger and better house, in the
townland of Lisnacreevy. The parish
register of Drumballyroney Church, to
which the Brontës belonged, unfortunately
goes no farther back than 1779,
two years after the birth of Patrick.
The register, which is now kept in
the parish church of Drumgooland,
belonged to the united parishes of
Drumballyroney and Drumgooland, in
which, when united, the Reverend Mr.
Tighe was vicar for forty-two years.
When Patrick Brontë was two years
old, less one day, his brother William
was baptized, and about every two
succeeding years either a brother or a
sister was added until the family numbered
ten.

II.
THE DAILY ROUND.

Hugh Brontë and his wife could
not live wholly on love in a cottage,
and Hugh had to bestir himself. He
was an unskilled laborer, but he understood
the art of burning lime. There
was no limestone, however, in that part
of County Down to burn, and as he
could not have a lime-kiln, he resolved
to have a corn-kiln.

At the beginning of this century a
corn-kiln in such a district in Ireland
was a very simple affair. A floor of
earthenware tiles, pierced nearly
through from the underside, was arranged
on a kind of platform or loft.
Beneath there was a furnace, which
was heated by burning the rough, dry
seeds, or outer shelling, ground off the
oats. In front of the furnace there
was a hollow, called “the logie-hole,”
in which the kiln man sat, with the
shelling or seeds heaped up within
arm’s length around him, and with his
right hand he beeked the kiln, by throwing,
every few seconds, a sprinkling of
seeds on the flame. In this way he
kept up a warm glow under the corn till
it was sufficiently dried for the mill.

Such was the simple character of the
ordinary corn-kiln in County Down at
the beginning of the century. But I
have been assured by the old men of
the neighborhood that Hugh Brontë’s
kiln was of a still more primitive structure.
453
The platform, or corn-floor, was
constructed by laying iron bars across
unhewn stones set up on end. On these
bars straw matting was spread, and on
the matting the corn was placed to dry.
Such a structure was the immediate
precursor of the pottery floored kiln.
The design was the same in both, but
the matting was always liable to catch
fire, and required careful attention.

The kiln was erected in the part of
the Brontë cottage now roofless, and,
like the cottage itself, must have been
a very humble affair. It has been suggested
that the kiln may have stood
elsewhere, but it is now established
beyond all doubt, on the unanimous
testimony of the inhabitants, that the
Brontë kiln stood in the ruined room
of the Brontë cottage, and, in fact, it is
known by the name of “the Brontës’
kiln.”

Within those walls, now roofless, the
grandfather of Charlotte Brontë began
in 1776 to earn the daily bread of himself
and his bride, by roasting his
neighbors’ oats. His wage was known
by the name of “muther,” and consisted
of so many pounds of fresh
oats taken from every hundredweight
brought to him to be kiln-dried. The
miller, too, was paid in kind, but his
muther was taken by measure, after the
shelling, or seeds, had been ground off
the grain.

When Hugh Brontë had accumulated
a sackful of muther he dried it on his
kiln, took it to the mill, and paid his
muther in turn to the miller, to have it
ground into meal.

The meal, when taken home, was
stored in a barrel, and with the produce
of the rood of potatoes which
Hugh had sod on his brother-in-law’s
farm, became the food of himself and
family. As the Brontës could not consume
all the muther themselves, the
surplus would be sold to provide clothing
and other necessaries, and though
there remains no trace of pig-stye or
fowl-house, there can be little doubt
that Mrs. Brontë would have both pigs
and fowl to eke out her husband’s
earnings.

Mrs. Brontë was a famous spinner,
and she handed down the art to her
daughters. She had always a couple
of sheep grazing on her brother’s land.
She carded and span the wool, her
spinning-wheel singing all day beside
her husband, as he beeked the kiln.
Then, during the long, dark evenings,
when they had no light but the red eye
of the kiln, she knitted the yarn into
hose and vest and shirt, and even head-gear,
so that Hugh Brontë, like his sons
in after years, was almost wholly clad
in “homespun.”

This, probably, had something to do
with the general impression, which still
remains in the neighborhood, of the
stately and shapely forms of the Brontë
men and women. The knitted woollen
garments fitted close, unlike the fantastic
and shapeless habiliments that
came from the hands of local tailors in
those days.

Alice Brontë also span nearly all the
garments which she wore, and her tall
and comely daughters after her were
dressed in clothes which their own
hands had taken from the fleece.

On principle, as well as from necessity,
the Brontës wore woollen garments,
and the vicar carried the same taste
with him to England, where his dislike
of everything made of cotton was attributed
by his biographer to dread of
fire. The absurd servants’ gossip as
to his cutting up his wife’s silk gown
had possibly a grain of truth in it,
owing to his preference for woollen
garments; but the atrocity spun out
of the gossip by Mrs. Gaskell was probably
an exaggeration of an innocent
act. At any rate, the old man characterized
the statement, I believe truly,
by a small but ugly word.

All the Brontës, father, mother, sons,
and daughters, to the number of twelve,
were clad in wool, and they were the
healthiest, handsomest, strongest, heartiest
family in the whole country. They
were a standing proof of the excellency
of the woollen theory, and it is interesting
to note how Hugh Brontë’s theory
and practice have received approval in
our own day. For a time the Brontës
had to look to others to weave their
yarn into the blankets and friezes that
they required, but Patrick was taught
to weave as soon as he was able to
throw the shuttle and roll the beam,
and then his father’s house manufactured
454
for themselves everything they
wore, from the raw staple to the gracefully
fitting corset.

Even the scarlet mantle for which
“Ayles” Brontë is still remembered
in Ballynaskeagh was carded, spun,
knitted, and dyed by Mrs. Brontë’s
own hands. The spirit of independence
manifested by the Brontës in
England was a survival of a still
sturdier spirit that had had its origin
in one of the humblest cabins in
County Down.

As time passed Hugh Brontë became
a famous ditcher. There is a very old
man called Hugh Norton, living in
Ballynaskeagh, who remembers him
making fences and philosophizing at
the same time. It is very probable
that the introduction of corn-kilns
constructed of burnt pottery may
have left him without custom for his
straw-mat kiln, just as the introduction
of machinery at a later period
left the country hand-looms idle.

In Hugh Brontë’s time more careful
attention began to be given to the land.
Bogs were drained, fields fenced, roads
constructed, bridges made, houses
built, with greater energy than had
ever been known before, and, although
the landlord generally raised the rent
on every improvement effected by the
tenant, the wave of prosperity and
improvement continued. Hugh Brontë
was a good, steady workman, and
found constant employment, and at
that time wages rose from sixpence
per day to eightpence and tenpence.
The sod fences made by him still
stand as a monument of honest work,
and there are few country districts
where huntsmen would find greater
difficulty with the fences than in
Emdale and Ballynaskeagh.

As Hugh Brontë advanced in life he
continued to prosper. He removed
from the Emdale cottage to a larger
house in Lisnacreevy, and from thence
he and his family went home to live
with Red Paddy, Mrs. Brontë’s brother.
On the Ballynaskeagh farm the children
found full scope for their energies,
and they continued to prosper and
purchase surrounding farms until they
were in very comfortable circumstances.
The Brontës were greatly
advanced in their prosperity by a discovery
made by one of their countrymen.
John Loudon Macadam was a
County Down surveyor. He wrote
several treatises on road-making of a
revolutionary character. His proposal
was to make roads by laying down
layers of broken stones, which he said
would become hardened into a solid
mass by the traffic passing over them.

For a time he was the subject of
much ridicule, but he persevered, and
proved his theory in a practical fashion.
The importance of the invention was
acknowledged by a grant from the
government of ten thousand pounds,
which he accepted, and by the offer of
a baronetcy, which he declined. He
lived to see the world’s highways
improved by his discovery, and the
English language enriched by his
name.

The old, unscientific road-makers
were too conservative to engage in the
construction of macadamized roads, but
the Brontës were shrewd enough to see
the value of the new method, and they
tendered for county contracts, and
their tenders were accepted. Then the
way to fortune lay open before them.
They opened quarries on their own
land, where they found an inexhaustible
supply of stone, easily broken to
the required size. With suitable stone
ready to their hands they had a great
advantage over all rivals, and for a
generation the macadamizing of the
roads in the neighborhood was practically
a monopoly in the Brontë family.

I remember the excellent carts and
horses employed by the Brontës on the
road, and I also distinctly recollect that
the names painted on the carts were
spelled “Brontë,” the pronunciation
being “Brontë,” never “Prunty,” as
has been alleged.

With the lucrative monopoly of road-making
added to their farm profits the
Brontës grew in wealth. They raised
on their farm the oats and fodder
required by the horses, and, as the
brothers did a large amount of the
work themselves and had nothing to
purchase, the money received for road-making
was nearly all profit.

In those days the Brontës added
field to field, until they farmed a considerable
455
tract of land, which they held
from a model landlord called Sharman
Crawford. That was the period at
which a two-storied house was built,
and there were houses occupied by the
Brontës, from the two-storied house
down to the thatched cottage. In fact,
the house of Red Paddy McClory, in
which Alice was born and reared, stood
about half-way between the two-storied
house and the cabin. The foundations
of the house in which Charlotte Brontë’s
Irish grandmother was born are still
visible.

Shortly after the death of old Hugh,
and in the time of the Brontë prosperity,
one of the brothers, called Welsh,
opened a public-house in the thatched
cabin referred to, and from that moment,
as far as I have been able to make
out, the tide of the Brontë prosperity
turned.

Everything the Brontës did was genuine.
Their whiskey was as good in
quality as their roads, and I fear it
must be added that they were among
the heartiest customers for their own
commodities. They ceased to work
on the roads, their hard-earned money
slipped through their fingers, and the
public-house became the meeting-place
for the fast and wild youth of the
locality.

Then another brother, called William,
but known as Billy, opened on the
Knock Hill another public-house, which
also became a centre of demoralization
to the young men of the district, and
a source of degradation to the keeper.
I remember both these pests in full
force. They were much frequented by
Orangemen, who, when tired playing
“The Protestant Boys,” used to slake
their thirst and fire their hatred of
the Papishes by drinking Brontë’s
whiskey.

I am bound to say distinctly that
I do not believe any of Charlotte
Brontë’s Irish uncles ever became confirmed
drunkards. They took to the
drink business too late in life to be
wholly overmastered by the passion
for alcohol. Besides, their father’s example,
and the industrious habits of
their youth and early manhood, had
combined to give moral fibre to the
stubborn Brontë character, which saved
them from precipitate descent on the
down grade.

I never saw any of the Brontës drunk,
and I believe the occasional drinking
of the family was limited to the two
brothers who sold drink, and who
would always feel bound in honor “to
taste a drop” with their customers.
The other brothers would drink like
other people, in fairs and markets,
where every transaction was ratified by
a glass of grog, but I do not believe
they often drank to excess.

In those days everybody drank. At
births, at baptisms, at weddings, at
wakes, at funerals, and in all the other
leading incidents of life, intoxicating
liquors were considered indispensable.
If a man was too hot he drank, and if
he was too cold he drank. He drank
if he was in sorrow, and he drank when
in joy. When his gains were great he
drank, and he drank also when crushed
by losses. The symbol of universal
hospitality was the black bottle.

Ministers of the Gospel used to visit
their people quarterly. On these visitations
the minister was accompanied
by one of his deacons. Into whatever
house they entered they were immediately
met by the hospitable bottle
and two glasses, and they were always
expected to fortify themselves with
spirituous draughts before beginning
their spiritual duties. As the visitors
called at from twelve to twenty houses
on their rounds, they must have been
“unco fou” by the close of the day.

It is interesting to remember that when
the drinking habits of the country were
at their height the temperance reformation
was begun in Great Britain, by
the best friend the Brontës had, the
Reverend David McKee. It is of still
greater interest, in our present investigation,
to know that Mr. McKee was
moved to the action which has resulted
in the great temperance reform by the
Brontë public-houses at his door, and
by the demoralization they were creating.

The little incident which has led to
such momentous results came about in
this way: the Reverend David McKee
of Ballynaskeagh was the minister of
the Presbyterian Church of Anaghlone.
He had built his church, and he was
456
largely independent of his congregation.
One Sunday he thought fit to
preach on The Rechabites. In the sermon
he ridiculed and denounced the
drinking habits of the time. The sermon
fell on the congregation like a thunderbolt
from a cloudless sky. Blank
amazement in the audience was succeeded
by hot indignation.

On the following morning an angry
deputation from the congregation
waited on Mr. McKee. He listened to
them with patient courtesy while they
urged that the sermon should be immediately
burnt, and that an apology
should be tendered to the congregation
on the following Sunday.

When the deputation had exhausted
themselves and their subject, Mr. McKee
began quietly to draw attention to
the happy homes which had been desolated
by whiskey, the brilliant young
men whom it had ruined, the amiable
neighbors whom it had hurried into
drunkards’ graves, and then he pointed
to the Brontës as an example of the
baneful influence of the trade on the
sellers of the stuff themselves.

The deputation, some of them Orangemen,
were in no mood to listen to
radical doctrines, subversive of their
time-honored customs, and they began
to threaten.

Mr. McKee, who was six feet six
inches high, and of great muscular
power, drew himself up to his full
stature, and calling to his servant, then
at breakfast in the kitchen, told him
to saddle his best mare, as he wished to
ride in haste to Newry, to publish his
sermon in time for circulation on the
following Sunday. Then, turning to
the deputation, he thanked them for
their early visit, which he hoped would
bear fruit, and bowed them out of his
parlor.

He rode the best horse in the whole
district, and he never drew rein till he
reached the printing-office in Newry,
and he had the sermon ready for circulation
on the following Sunday, and
handed it to his people as they retired.

In 1798 Mr. McKee, then a youth,
watched from a hill in his father’s land
the battle of Ballynahinch. He had in
his arms at the time a little nephew
who had been left in his charge. The
little nephew became the great Doctor
Edgar of Belfast, who used to boast
playfully that he was “up in arms” at
the battle of Ballynahinch.

Mr. McKee sent a copy of The
Rechabites to his eloquent nephew.
Doctor Edgar read the sermon, and
then, rising from his seat, proceeded
swiftly to carry all the whiskey he had
in the house into the street, and empty
it into the gutter. With that drink
offering Doctor Edgar inaugurated the
great temperance reform. From Ireland
he passed to Scotland, and from
Scotland to England. The whole
kingdom was mightily stirred, and the
temperance cause has ever since continued
to flourish. The little seed,
stimulated at first by the Brontë public-houses,
has become a great tree, the
branches of which extend to all lands.

We have now seen the Brontës in the
daily round of their common pursuits.
In the next chapter we hope to see old
Hugh in the light of his Brontë genius.

III.
THE IRISH RACONTEUR OR STORY-TELLER.

The
Hakkawāti
is the oriental story-teller,
the man who beyond all others
relieves the tedium and wearisomeness
of oriental life. I have often watched
the oriental
Hakkawāti,
seated in the
centre of a large crowd, weaving stories
with subtile plots and startling surprises,
using pathos and passion and
pungent wit, and always interspersing
his narratives with familiar incidents,
and laying on local color, to give an
appearance of vraisemblance, or reality,
to the wildest fancies.

The Arabian
Hakkawāti
generally
tells his stories at night, when the
weird and wonderful are most effective.
He has always a fire so arranged as to
light up his countenance with a ruddy
glow, so that the movements and contortions
of a mobile face may add support
to the narrative. He sometimes
proceeds slowly, stumbling and correcting
himself, like D’Israeli, as if his one
great desire was to stick to the literal
truth.

Without any apparent effort to please,
the
Hakkawāti
keeps his finger on the
pulse of his audience. Should they
show signs of weariness, he makes them
smile by some pleasantry, and as the
Arab holds that “smiles and tears are
in the same khury,” or wallet, he brings
something of great seriousness on the
heels of the fun, and works himself into
a white heat of passion over it, the
veins rising like cords on his forehead,
and his whole frame convulsed
and throbbing, the rapt audience following,
in full sympathy with every
mood.

I have seen the Arabs shivering and
pale with terror, as the
Hakkawāti
narrated
the fearful deeds of some imaginary
jinn, and I have seen them feeling
for their daggers, and ready to spring
to their feet, to avenge some dastard
act of imaginary cruelty; and a few
seconds after I have seen them melted
to tears at the recital of some imaginary
tale of woe. I never wearied
in listening to the
Hakkawāti,
or in
watching the artlessness of his consummate
art; and I have always looked
on him as the most interesting of all
orientals, a positive benefactor to his
illiterate countrymen.

Hugh Brontë was an Irish
Hakkawāti,
the last of an extinct race. I
knew several men who had heard him
when he was at his best. He would sit
long winter nights in the logie-hole of
his corn-kiln, in the Emdale cottage,
telling stories to an audience of rapt
listeners who thronged around him.
Mrs. Brontë plied her knitting in the
outer darkness of the kitchen, for there
was no light except the glow from the
furnace of the kiln, which lighted up
old Hugh’s face as he beeked the kiln,
and told his yarns.

The Reverend William McAllister,
from whom I got most details as to
Brontë’s story-telling, had heard his
father say that he spent a night in
Brontë’s kiln either in the winter of
1779 or 1780. Brontë’s fame was then
new. The place was crowded to suffocation.
At that time he reserved a
place near the fire for Mrs. Brontë, and
Patrick, then a baby, was lying on the
heap of seeds from which the fire was
fed, with his eyes fixed on his father,
and listening, like the rest, in breathless
silence.

Hugh Brontë seems to have had the
rare faculty of believing his own stories,
even when they were purely imaginary,
and he would sometimes conjure up
scenes so unearthly and awful that
both he and his hearers were afraid
to part company for the night. Frequently
his neighbors could not face
the darkness alone after one of Hugh’s
gruesome stories, and lay upon the
shelling seeds till day dawned.

The farmers’ sons of the whole neighborhood
used to gather round Brontë
at night to hear his narratives, and he
continued to manufacture stories of all
descriptions as long as he lived.

I have always understood that Hugh
Brontë’s stories, though sometimes
rough in texture and interspersed with
emphatic expletives, after the manner
of the time, had always a healthy
moral bearing. As a genuine Irishman
he never used an immodest word,
or by gesture, phrase, or innuendo
suggested an impure thought. On
this point all my informants were
unanimous. He neither used unchaste
words himself, nor permitted any one
to do so in his house. Tyranny and
cruelty of every kind he denounced
fiercely. Faithlessness and deceit always
met condign punishment in his
romances, and in cases where girls had
been betrayed, either the ghost of the
injured woman, or the devil himself,
in some awful form, wreaked unutterable
vengeance on the betrayer.

Hugh Brontë was a great moral
teacher and a power for good, as far
as his influence extended. There are
still some old men living in his neighborhood
who never understood him,
and who are disposed to think he was
in league with the devil.

It is always at his peril that any
man dares to live before his time, or
to leave the beaten track of the commonplace.
The reformers have all,
without exception, been mad, or worse,
in the eyes of dull conservatism.
Brontë dared to teach his neighbors
by allowing them to see as well as
hear, and those who were too stupid
to understand were clever enough to
denounce.

By a very great effort Hugh Brontë
learned to read, late in life. He began
at Mount Pleasant, with no higher aim
than that of being able to write letters
to Alice McClory, when he could
no longer visit her. He made rapid
strides in learning under the tutelage
of his master’s children, when he lived
in Loughorne, and when he went to
live in Emdale he knew the sweetness
and solace of good books, and he had
always a book on his knee, which he
read by the light of the kiln fire, when
he was alone. He knew the Bible,
Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and
Burns’s poems, well. Those were bookless
days. The newspaper had not
yet found its way to the people, and
in a neighborhood of mental stagnation
it was something to have one
man who could hold the mirror up to
nature, and lead his illiterate visitors
into enchanted ground.

Many of Hugh’s stories were far removed
from the region of romance, but
he had the literary art of giving an artistic
touch to everything he said, which
added a charm to the narration, independent
of the facts which he narrated.

The story of his early life, which I
have tried to reduce to simple prose,
was delivered in the rhapsodic style of
the ancient bards, but simple enough
to be understood by the most unlettered
peasant. None of Brontë’s stories
were so acceptable as the simple record
of his early hardships.

Mingled with all his stories, shrewd
maxims for life and conduct were interwoven;
but in his oration on tenant-right
he broke new ground, and
showed that under different circumstances
he might have been a great
statesman, and saved his country from
unutterable woe.

Hugh Brontë was superstitious, but
while his superstitious character descended
to all his children, the faculty
of story-telling was inherited, as far
as I have been able to ascertain,
by Patrick alone. All the sons and
daughters talked with a dash of
genius—as one of their old acquaintances
said, “They were very cliver
with their tongues”—but I have never
heard of any of them except Patrick
trying to tell a story.

Patrick, at the age of two or three,
used to lie on the warm shelling seeds
and listen to his father’s entrancing
stories, and he seems to have caught
something of his father’s gift and
power. Miss Nussey, Charlotte’s
friend, “Miss E.,” has often told me
of Patrick’s power to rivet the attention
of his children, and awe them with
realistic descriptions of simple scenes.
All the girls used to sit in breathless
silence, their prominent eyes starting
out of their heads, while their father
unfolded lurid scene after scene; but
the greatest effect was produced on
Emily, who seemed to be unconscious
of everything else except her father’s
story, and sometimes the descriptions
became so vivid, intense, and terrible
that they had to implore him to desist.

Miss Nussey had opportunities for
observing the Brontë girls that no other
person had. She became Charlotte’s
friend at school, when both were homesick
and needed friends. She continued
to be her fast friend through life.
Gentle Anne Brontë died in her arms,
and she was Charlotte’s true consoler
when the heroic Emily passed swiftly
away. She early discovered the ring
of genius in Charlotte’s letters, and preserved
every scrap of them, and it is
chiefly through those letters that the
Brontës are known in England. She
was Charlotte’s confidante in all private
transactions and love matters, and she
might have been a nearer friend still
had Charlotte not refused an offer of
marriage from her brother—an incident
in the novelist’s life here for the first
time made public.

Miss Nussey was not only Charlotte’s
devoted friend, but she was a
constant visitor at Haworth, and a
keen observer. She had a great power
of discernment in literary matters, and
a very considerable literary gift herself.
She had not to wait till “Jane Eyre”
and “Wuthering Heights” were published
to learn that Charlotte and
Emily Brontë were endowed with
genius. We owe it to her penetrating
sagacity that we know so much of the
vicar’s daughters. She watched their
growth of intellect and everything that
ministered to it, and she believes firmly
that the girls caught their inspiration
459
from their father, and that Emily got
not only her inspiration but most of her
facts from her father’s narratives.[4]

“The dirty, ragged, black-haired
child,” brought home by Mr. Earnshaw
from Liverpool, is none other
than the real dirty, naked, black-haired
foundling, discovered on the boat between
Liverpool and Drogheda, and
taken home by Charlotte’s great-grandfather
and great-grandmother to the
banks of the Boyne. The artist, however,
is not a mere copyist, and hence,
while the story starts from existing
facts, and follows the general outline
of the real, it is not the very image of
the real, and makes deviations from
the original facts to meet the exigencies
of art.

There is no difficulty, however, in
recognizing the original of the incarnate
fiend Heathcliff in the man Welsh,
who tormented Hugh Brontë, Patrick’s
father, in the old family home near
Drogheda. Had Welsh never played
the demon among the Brontës, Emily
Brontë had never placed on the canvas
Heathcliff, “child neither of lascar
nor gypsy, but a man’s shape
animated by demon life—a ghoul, an
afrit.” Nelly Dean, the benevolent
but irresolute medium of romance and
tragedy, is Hugh’s Aunt Mary, clear-eyed
as to right and duty, but ever
slipping down before the force of circumstances.
And old Gallagher, on
the banks of the Boyne, with “the
Blessed Virgin and all the saints” on
his side, is none other than the original
of the old hypocrite, Joe. Gallagher
is Joe speaking the Yorkshire dialect.

And Edgar Linton is the gentle and
forgiving brother of Alice, our friend
Red Paddy McClory, who took his sister
home after her runaway marriage
with a Protestant, and finally took the
whole Brontë family under his roof,
and gave them all he possessed. Even
Catherine Linton’s flight and marriage
has solid foundation in fact, either in
Alice Brontë’s romantic elopement
with Hugh, or in the more tragic circumstances
of Mary Brontë’s marriage
with Welsh.

It is not credible that Patrick Brontë,
in his story-telling moods, never narrated
to his listening daughters the
romance of their grandfather and
grandmother. It is true Miss Nussey
never heard any reference to the story,
nor did the Brontës ever in her presence
refer to their Irish home or
friends or history, though, at the very
time she was visiting Haworth, they
were in constant communication with
their Irish relatives, and, as we shall
see, one of the uncles actually visited
them, as Charlotte’s champion, and
one of them had visited Haworth at an
earlier date.

They were too proud to talk even to
their most intimate friends of their
Irish home, much less to expose the
foibles of their immediate ancestors to
phlegmatic English ears; but Patrick
Brontë would not omit to tell his story-loving
daughters the thrilling adventures
of their ancestors, and the girls,
having brooded over the incidents, reproduced
them in variant forms, and
in the sombre setting of their own
surroundings.

The originals lived and died, acted
and were acted upon, in Louth and
Down; but on the steeps of “Wuthering
Heights” they strut again, speaking
the Yorkshire dialect, and braced
by the tonic air of the northern downs.

None of the stories betray their origin
so clearly as “Wuthering Heights,”
just as none of the novelists were so
fascinated with their father’s tales as
Emily. But the stories are all Brontë
stories, an echo of the thrilling narratives
related by old Hugh, and retold,
I believe, a hundred times by
Patrick. Of course, all the stories are
made to live again under new forms,
each writer giving the stamp of her
own character to the new creations.
Artists of the Brontë stamp are not
portrait painters, nor mere reproducers.

They never were content to be mere
lackeys of nature. They were above
nature, and everything without and
within themselves they placed under
contribution.

Even the rough and rugged characters
that have come from the hand of
Emily show the work of the artist.
She added to the repulsive Heathcliff
qualities of her own. She is perfectly
serious when she says: “Possibly some
people might suspect him [Heathcliff]
of a degree of under-bred pride. I
have a sympathetic chord within me
that tells me it is nothing of the sort.
I know by instinct his reserve springs
from an aversion to showy display of
feeling, to manifestations of mutual
kindliness. He’ll love and hate equally
under cover, and esteem it a species
of impertinence to be loved or hated
again. No! I’m running on too fast.
I bestow my own attributes over-liberally
on him.”

Knowing the model from which
Emily Brontë worked, there are few
passages which throw more light on
the artist than this. Catherine Linton
was modelled on the lovely Alice McClory,
who bequeathed to her clever
granddaughters all the personal attractions
they possessed; but here
again Emily bestows attributes of herself
and sisters on her stately and lily-like
grandmother.

“She [Catherine] was slender, and
apparently scarcely past girlhood. An
admirable form, and the most exquisite
little face I had ever had the pleasure
of beholding; small features, very
fair; flaxen ringlets, or rather golden,
hanging loose on her delicate neck;
and eyes, had they been agreeable in
expression, that would have been irresistible.”

The picture is neither that of a
Brontë of the Haworth vicarage nor
is it a portraiture of the flower plucked
in Ballynaskeagh by Hugh Brontë, but
it is Alice McClory diluted with a dash
of the Penzance Branwells, and the
effect is a perfect and beautiful picture,
more pleasing, indeed, than a life-like
portrait, with all the radiant
beauty of the charming Alice, when
she rode off to Magherally Church
with the dashing Hugh Brontë.

IV.
HUGH BRONTË AS A TENANT-RIGHTER.

Hugh Brontë worked up to his
tenant-right doctrines by a series of
assertions, negative and positive, on
religious, political, and economic questions.
His address, in which he set
forth his views on such matters, approximated
to the form of a lecture
more nearly than any of his other
talks, which were generally in the narrative
form. The following are the
chief points of the discourse, as given
to me by my old tutor and friend, and
the propositions were never varied,
except in the mere wording, although
the statement had never been formally
written out.

Hugh Brontë always began with a
little black Bible in his hand, or on his
knee, and his first negative assertion
was:

I. “The church is not Christ’s.”

Laying his hand on the little book
he would declare that he found grace
in the Bible, but in the church only
greed. Once and only once he had
appealed to a parson. He was hungry,
naked, and bleeding, but the great
double-chinned, red-faced man had
looked on him as if he were a rat, and,
without hearing his story, had him
driven off by a grand-looking servant,
who cracked a whip over his head and
swore at him.

In Hugh Brontë’s eyes the parsons
got their livings for political services,
and not for learning or goodness.
Enormous sums were paid them to do
work that they did not do. They rarely
visited their parishes, and their duties
were performed by hungry and ill-paid
curates. When they did return occasionally
to their livings they were
heard of at banquets, where they ate
and drank too freely, and at other resorts,
where they gambled recklessly.
They were seen riding over the country
after foxes and hounds, and sitting
in judgment on the men whose grain
they had trampled down, and sending
them to penal servitude for trapping
hares in their own gardens. They
were said to be ignorant, but they were
known to be irreligious, immoral, arrogant,
461
and cruel. They acted as the
ministers of the gentry, before whom
they were very humble, and they utterly
despised the people who paid for their
luxuries, and supported their own
priests besides.

They gave the sanction of the
church to violence, craft, and crime
in high places, and they were as far
removed as men could be, in origin,
position, and practices, from the apostles
of the New Testament. And yet,
he added, they claimed, in the most
haughty manner, that they and they
alone were the successors of the apostles,
although they showed no signs of
apostolic spirituality or apostolic service.

Hugh Brontë declared that he could
not submit to the Protestant parson,
who despised him because he was poor,
and could not aid in his promotion,
nor could he yield obedience to the
Catholic priest, who demanded utter
subjection and prostration of both
body and mind, and enforced his
church’s claims by a stout stick. With
these views it is not to be wondered at
that Hugh Brontë did not belong to
any church.

To us, now, his statements appear
exaggerated and too sweeping, but it
must be remembered that he spoke of
the Irish clergy in the closing decades
of the last century. He expressed
himself fiercely regarding the parsons,
and in return they dubbed him “atheist.”

His second negative assertion was:

II. “The world is not God’s.”

He knew from the Bible that God
had made all things very good, and
that he loved the world, but he held
that a number of people had got in
between God and his world, and made
it very bad and hateful. They were
known as kings and emperors, and
they had seized on the world by fraud
and force. They lived on the best of
everything that the land produced, and
when they disagreed among themselves
they sent their people to kill each other
on their account, while they sat at
home in peace and luxury.

These usurpers not only held sway
over the possessions and lives of men,
but they decreed the exact thoughts
men were to entertain concerning God,
and the exact words they were to speak
concerning God; and when men presumed
to obey God rather than men
they were tied to stakes and burned to
death as blasphemers. For such sentiments
as these Hugh Brontë was denounced
as a socialist—a very bad and
dangerous name at the beginning of
the present century.

His third negative proposition was:

III. “Ireland is not the king’s.”

He understood that King George III.
was not a wise man, but that he was a
humane man. Ireland was not governed
by King George III., but by a
gang of rapacious brigands. They
constantly invoked the king’s name,
but only to serve more fully their own
selfish ends. By the king’s authority
they carried out their policy of systematic
outrage, until he hated the very
name of the king whom he always
wished to love.

The chief business of the king’s representatives
was to plunder his majesty’s
poorer subjects. For this purpose
the country was parcelled out and
divided among a number of base and
greedy adventurers, in return for odious
services. Each of these adventurers
became king, or landlord, in his own
district, and lived on the wretched natives.
Every meskin of butter made
on the farm, every pig reared in the
cabin, every egg laid by the hens that
roosted in the kitchen, went to support
the land-king.

The cottages were mud hovels. The
land was bog and barren waste. The
men and women were in rags. The children
were hungry, pinched, and bare-footed.
But the landlord carried off
everything, except the potato crop,
which was barely sufficient to sustain
life.

The landlord was a very great man.
He lived in London, near the king, in
more than royal splendor. Or he passed
his time in some of the great cities of
Europe, spending as much on gay women
as would have clothed and fed all
the starving children on his estate. In
English society his pleasantries were
said to be most entertaining, regarding
the poverty, misery, and squalor of his
tenants, whom he fleeced; but he took
462
care never to come near them, lest his
fine sensibilities should be shocked at
their condition. His serious occupation
was the making of laws to increase
his own power for rapacity, and to take
away from the people every vestige of
rights that they might have inherited.

“The landlord takes everything and
gives nothing,” was Hugh Brontë’s
simple form of the fine modern phrase
regarding landlords’ privileges and
duties.

Hugh Brontë maintained that the
landlord was a courteous gentleman,
graced with polished manners, and that
if he had lived among his people he
might in time have developed a heart.
At least, he could hardly have kept up
a gentlemanly indifference, in the presence
of squalor and misery. But he
kept quite out of sight of his tenantry,
or he would not have made so much
merriment about the pig, which was
being brought up among the children,
to pay for his degrading extravagances.
The landlord’s place among the people
was taken by an agent, an attorney,
and a sub-agent. The agent was a
local potentate, whose will was law.
The attorney’s business was to make
the law square with the agent’s acts.
And the under agent was employed to
do mean and vile and inhuman acts,
that neither the agent nor attorney
could conveniently do.

The duty of the three was to find
out, by public inspection and by private
espionage, the uttermost farthing the
tenants could pay, and extract it from
them legally. In getting the rent for
the landlord each got as much as he
could for himself. The key of the
situation was the word “eviction.”

Then Hugh told the story of his ancestors’
farm. The Brontës had occupied
a piece of forfeited land, with well-defined
obligations to a chief, or landlord.
Soon the landlord succeeded in
removing all legal restraints which in
any way interfered with his absolute
control of the place. Remonstrance
and entreaty were alike unavailing.
The alterations in title were made by
the authority of “George III., by the
grace of God King of England!”

Hugh’s great-grandfather drained
the bog and improved the land, at
enormous expense. Every improvement
was followed by a rise in the
rent. His grandfather built a fine
house on the land, by money made in
dealing, and again the rent was raised,
on the increased value given to the
place by the tenant’s industry. Then,
the vilest creature in human form having
ingratiated himself with the agent,
by vile services, the place was handed
over to him, without one farthing of
compensation to the heirs of the man
whose labor had made the place of
value. All these things were done in
the name of George III., though the
king had no more to do with the nefarious
transactions than the child unborn.

From this conclusion Hugh Brontë
proceeded to his fourth negative proposition:

IV. “Irish law is not justice.”

He expressed regret that he was unable
to respect the laws of the country.
According to his views, the laws were
made by an assembly of landlords,
purely and solely to serve their own
rapacious desires, and not in accordance
with any dictates of right or
wrong. As soon might the lambs respect
the laws of the wolves as the
people of Ireland respect the laws of
the landlords.

From this point he naturally arrived
at his fifth negative proposition:

V. “Obedience to law is not a
duty.”

He said it might be prudent to obey
a bad law, cruelly administered, because
disobedience might entail inconvenient
consequences; but there was
no moral obligation impelling a man
to obey a law which outraged decency,
and against which every righteous and
generous instinct revolted. Human
laws should be the reflection of divine
laws; but the landlord-made laws of
Ireland had neither the approval of
honest men nor the sanction of divine
justice.