THE KNICKERBOCKER.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

BY THOMAS CARLYLE.

The following article has been compiled from the different works of
Thomas Carlyle, and embodies all he has written, or at least published,
about Napoleon Bonaparte. We offer it in the absence of a more elaborate
work on this subject, which we hope one day to see from the pen
of this gifted and earnest writer. It is a glimpse of the insight of the
clearest-headed Seer of our age, into the noisiest great man of the last,
about whom we listen with pleasure to each new voice, perhaps critically
and doubtingly, yet for our own part colored by that absorbing,
painful interest, which induced us when a boy to close the book which
first told us of his doings, after having traced his meteoric flight to the
‘monster meeting’ at Moscow, unable to proceed to the catastrophe;
and it was months before we could bring ourselves to read on, of the
heroism which charmed, or the glitter which dazzled us, to its final
chaos and night. On Napoleon’s right to the title great, the character
of his greatness, and what would be left if the smoke-clouds, battle-glory
and so on were torn away, we will offer but a few words. Of the
title in its best sense but few now believe him worthy, perhaps no thinker
or reflecting man. He is a volcano rather than a sun, a destroyer more
than a creator; and our sympathy is mingled with little of that which
we feel for the martyr; who dies rather than sell his birthright, heaven,
for any mess of earth’s pottage, or for him who spends his life in the
search for truth, and in speaking it to mankind, taking no heed for himself
what he shall eat and wherewithal he shall be clad. No! the
feeling is far more akin to that which we have for a deep-playing gambler,
whom we know to have some noble impulses. How eagerly, yet
sorrowingly we watch his movements! The dice rattle, they are thrown,
and again thrown; thousands after thousands he wins and lays aside;
and at last, in the madness of the game, stakes the whole sum, with his
house, estate, all on the hazard of one cast. With beating heart we
listen to the rattling of the dice, and with strained gaze watch the blow.
The box is lifted—all is lost. Now we are excited by the daring of this
being, and feel deeply, more so if we know him to have something of a
better nature, some nobler impulses, but the interest is still in the great
gambler, not in the great man; and though his boldness startles, and
for the moment carries us away, yet ever with our admiration comes a
still small voice from the ‘inner sanctuary,’ which whispers of those
whom his winnings ruined, or the dependents who were reduced to beggary
by his loss. Would the great man have played the game at all?

We have always felt that Napoleon stepped down from his greatness
when he let them hurry him away alive to that island-prison; and there
is reasoning in this feeling itself, which most persons feel on reading of
his career, which his worshippers would do well to consider in its various
bearings; for if Napoleon, (when the royal guard, his last hope, was
cut to pieces at Waterloo, and crying to Bertrand, ‘It is finished,’ he
turned and fled,) had placed himself before the last cannon which sent
destruction to his foes, and let its ball end his career and life together,
who is there but would feel that he was acting truer to his greatness,
than to ‘eat his heart away’ a captive? If throughout his career we
had seen the brave fighter for country, for principle, for right, instead
of for self, this feeling would never arise. Place Washington in a
similar situation; imagine him to have believed it best to gather all his
country could give him of hardy defenders, and on the result of one battle
let his country’s fate be decided. The battle is fought and lost; his
army is routed and cut to pieces; he has asked for liberty with his whole
strength, with his whole soul, and the answer is ‘No!’ written with
bayonets in blood, and voiced by the enemy’s cannon. Would Washington
have been true to his greatness in placing himself before the last
cannon? No! emphatically, no! With Napoleon he might have
cried, ‘It is finished,’ but then with the same calm brow yet bursting
heart, he would have resigned his sword to his conquerors; and if the
scaffold were his fate, met it with quiet dignity; or if the dungeon,
there calmly await the Almighty’s time when he might again raise his
right arm for his country; still as great in the prison or on the scaffold,
as when he was at the head of conquering armies. Napoleon’s intellectual
character was perceptive rather than deep; and there is an intense
concentrativeness about him, a power of throwing the whole effort
of his soul into the environment of the moment, which is remarkable;
and not less so the facility with which he changes that concentration
from place to place, from subject to subject. Probably no man ever
had his whole mind so much under the control of his will, at his fingers’
ends, as it were; ‘the eye to see and the will to do.’ But revert we to
Carlyle.

Some call for Barras to be made commandant; he conquered in Thermidor.
Some, what is more to the purpose, bethink them of the Citizen
Bonaparte, unemployed artillery officer who took Toulon. A man of
head, a man of action: Barras is named Commandant’s Cloak; this
young artillery officer is named Commandant. He was in the gallery
at the moment, and heard it; he withdrew some half hour to consider
with himself: after a half-hour of grim compressed considering, to be
or not to be, he answers yea. And now, a man of head being at the
head of it, the whole matter gets vital. Swift to camp of Sablon, to
secure the artillery; there are not twenty men guarding it! A swift
adjutant, Murat is the name of him, gallops, gets thither some minutes
within time, for Lepelletier was also on march that way: the cannon
are ours. And now beset this post and beset that; rapid and firm; at
Wicket of the Louvre, in Cul-de-sac Dauphin, in Rue St. Honoré, from
Pont Neuf all along the North Quays, southward to the Pont ci-devant
Royal, rank round the sanctuary of the Tuilleries, a ring of steel discipline;
let every gunner have his match burning, and all men stand to
their arms. Lepelletier has seized the Church of Saint Roche; has
seized the Pont Neuf, our piquet there retreating thence without fire.
Stray shots fall from Lepelletier, rattle down on the very Tuilleries’
stair-case. On the other hand, women advance dishevelled, shrieking
peace; Lepelletier behind them waving his hat in sign that we shall
fraternize. Steady! The artillery officer is steady as bronze; can, if
need were, be quick as lightning. Lepelletier making nothing by messengers
by fraternity or hat-waving, bursts out, along the southern Quai
Voltaire, along streets and passages, treble-quick in huge veritable onslaught!
Whereupon thou bronze artillery officer—? ‘Fire’! say the
bronze lips. And roar and thunder, roar and again roar, continual, volcano-like,
goes his great gun, in the Cul-de-sac Dauphin against the
Church of Saint Roch; go his great guns on the Pont Royal; go all
his great guns—blow to air some two hundred men, mainly about the
Church of Saint Roch! Lepelletier cannot stand such harsh play; no
sectioner can stand it; the forty thousand yield on all sides scour toward
covert. The ship is over the bar; free she bounds shoreward—amid
shouting and vivats! Citizen Bonaparte is ‘named General of the Interior
by acclamation;’ quelled sections have to disarm in such humor
as they may; sacred right of insurrection is gone forever! ‘It is false,’
says Napoleon, ‘that we fired first with blank charge; it had been a
waste of life to do that.’ Most false; the firing was with sharp and
sharpest shot: to all men it was plain that here was no sport; the rabbits
and plinths of Saint Roch Church show splintered by it to this hour.
Singular: in old Broglie’s time, six years ago, this whiff of grape shot
was promised; but it could not be given then; could not have profited
then. Now, however, the time has come for it and the man; and behold
you have it; and the thing we specifically call French Revolution is
blown into space by it and become a thing that was!

The French revolution did disclose original men: among the twenty-five
millions, at least one or two units. Some reckon in the present
stage of the business, as many as three: Napoleon, Danton, Mirabeau.
Whether more will come to light, or of what sort, when the computation
is quite liquidated, one cannot say. Meanwhile, let the world be
thankful for these three; as indeed, the world is; loving original men,
without limit, were they never so questionable, well knowing how rare
they are! To us, accordingly, it is rather interesting to observe how
on these three also, questionable as they surely are, the old process is
repeating itself; how these also are getting known in their true likeness.
A second generation, relieved in some measure from the spectral
hallucinations, hysterical ophthalmia, and natural panic-delirium of the
first contemporary one, is gradually coming to discern and measure
what its predecessor could only execrate and shriek over; for, as our
proverb said, the dust is sinking, the rubbish-heaps disappear; the built
house, such as it is, and was appointed to be, stands visible, better or
worse. Of Napoleon Bonaparte, with so many bulletins, and such self-proclamation
from artillery and battle-thunder, loud enough to ring
through the deafest brain, in the remotest nook of this earth, and now,
in consequence, with so many biographies, histories and historical arguments
for and against, it may be said he can now shift for himself; that
his true figure is in a fair way of being ascertained. Doubtless it will
be found one day, what significance was in him; how, (we quote from
a New-England book,) ‘the man was a divine missionary, though unconscious
of it; and preached through the cannon’s throat that great
doctrine, La carrière ouverte aux talens, (the tools to him who can handle
them,) which is our ultimate Political Evangel, wherein alone can
Liberty lie. Madly enough he preached it is true, as enthusiasts and
first missionaries are wont; with imperfect utterance, amid much frothy
rant; yet as articulately, perhaps, as the case admitted. Or call him
if you will, an American backwoodsman, who had to fell unpenetrated
forests, and battle with innumerable wolves, and did not entirely forbear
strong liquor, rioting, and even theft; whom, nevertheless, the
peaceful sower will follow, and, as he cuts the boundless harvest, bless.’
From ‘the incarnate Moloch,’ which the world once was, onward to
to this quiet version, there is a considerable progress.

What are the conquests and expeditions of the whole corporation of
captains, from Walter the Pennyless to Napoleon Bonaparte, compared
with these ‘moveable types’ of Johannes Faust? Truly, it is a mortifying
thing for your conqueror to reflect, how perishable is the metal
which he hammers with such violence; how the kind earth will soon
shroud up his bloody foot-prints; and all which he achieved and skilfully
piled together, will be but like his own ‘canvass city’ of a camp; this
evening loud with life, to-morrow all struck and vanished, ‘a few earth-pits
and heaps of straw!’ For here, as always, it continues true, that
the deepest force is the stillest; that, as in the fable, the mild shining
of the sun shall accomplish what the fierce blustering of the tempest has
in vain essayed. Above all, it is ever to be kept in mind, that not by
material but by mental power, are men and their actions governed.
How noiseless is thought! No rolling of drums, no tramp of squadrons
or immeasurable tumult of baggage-wagons, attends its movements;
in what obscure and sequestered places may the head be meditating
which is one day to be crowned with more than imperial authority; for
kings and emperors will be among its ministering servants; it will rule
not over, but in all heads, and with these, its solitary combinations of
ideas, as with magic formulas, bend the world to its will! The time
may come, when Napoleon himself will be better known for his laws
than for his battles; and the victory of Waterloo prove less momentous
than the opening of the first mechanic’s institute.

Brother Ringletule, the missionary, inquired of Ram-Dass, a Hindoo
man-god, who had set up for godhead lately, what he meant to do then
with the sins of mankind? To which Ram-Dass at once answers, he
had fire enough in his belly to burn up all the sins in the world. Ram-Dass
was right so far, and had a spice of sense in him; for surely it is
the test of every divine man this same, and without it he is not divine
or great; that he have fire in him to burn up somewhat of the sins of the
world, of the miseries and errors of the world: why else is he there!
Far be it from us to say that a great man must needs with benevolence
prepense, become a ‘friend of humanity;’ nay, that such professional
self-conscious friends are not the fatalest kind of persons to be met with
in our day. All greatness is unconscious or it is little and naught.
And yet a great man without such fire in him, burning dim or developed
as a divine behest in his heart of hearts, never resting till it be fulfilled,
were a solecism in nature. A great man is ever, as the transcendentalists
speak, possessed with an idea. Napoleon, himself not the
superfinest of great men, and balanced sufficiently with prudence and
egoisms, had nevertheless, as is clear enough, an idea to start with; the
idea that democracy was the cause of man, the right and infinite cause.
Nay, to the very last, he had a kind of idea, that, namely, of ‘the tools
to him that can handle them;’ really one of the best ideas yet promulgated
on that matter, or rather the one true central idea, toward which
all the others, if they tend any whither, must tend. Unhappily, it was
only in the military province that Napoleon could realize this idea of
his, being forced to fight for himself the while; before he got it tried to
any extent in the civil province of things, his head by much victory grew
light, (no head can stand more than its quantity,) and he lost head, as
they say, and became a selfish ambitionist and quack, and was hurled
out, leaving his idea to be realized, in the civil province of things, by
others! Thus was Napoleon; thus are all great men: children of the
idea; or, in Ram-Dass’ phraseology, furnished with fire to burn up the
miseries of men.

Napoleon, Danton, Mirabeau, with fire-words (of public speaking)
and fire whirlwinds (of cannon and musketry,) which for a season darkened
the air, are perhaps at bottom but superficial phenomena.

Napoleon was the ‘armed soldier of democracy,’ invincible while he
continued true to that. ••• He does by no means seem to me so
great a man as Cromwell. His enormous victories, which reached over
all Europe, while Cromwell abode mainly in our little England, are but
as high stilts on which the man is seen standing; the stature of the man
is not altered thereby. I find in him no such sincerity as in Cromwell;
only a far inferior sort. No silent walking, through long years, with
the Awful, Unnameable, of this universe; ‘walking with God’ as he
called it; and faith and strength in that alone: latent thought and valor,
content to lie latent, then burst out as in a blaze of heaven’s lightning!
Napoleon lived in an age when God was no longer believed; the meaning
of all Silence, Latency, was thought to be Nonentity: he had to begin
not out of the Puritan Bible, but out of poor, sceptical encyclopedias.
This was the length the man carried it. Meritorious to get so far. His
compact, prompt, every way articulate character, is in itself perhaps
small compared with our great chaotic inarticulate Cromwell’s. Instead
of ‘dumb prophet struggling to speak,’ we have a portentious mixture
of the Quack! Hume’s notion of the Fanatic-Hypocrite, with such
truth as it has, will apply much better to Napoleon than it did to Cromwell,
to Mahomet or the like, where indeed, taken strictly, it has hardly
any truth at all. An element of blameable ambition shows itself from
the first in this man; gets the victory over him at last, and involves him
and his work in ruin.

‘False as a bulletin’ became a proverb in Napoleon’s time. He
makes what excuse he could for it: that it was necessary to mislead the
enemy, to keep up his own men’s courage, etc. On the whole these are
no excuses. A man in no case has any liberty to tell lies. It had been
in the long run better for Napoleon too if he had not told any. In fact,
if a man have any purpose beyond the hour and day, meant to be found
extant next day, what good can it ever be to promulgate lies? The lies
are found out; ruinous penalty is exacted for them. No man will believe
the liar next time, even when he speaks truth, when it is of the
last importance that he be believed. The old cry of the ‘wolf!’ A lie
is no-thing; you cannot of nothing make something; you make nothing
at last, and lose your labour in the bargain.

Yet Napoleon had a sincerity: we are to distinguish between what is
superficial and what is fundamental insincerity. Across these outer
manœuvrings and quackeries of his, which were many and most
blameable, let us discern withal that the man had a certain instinctive
ineradicable feeling for reality; and did base himself upon fact so long
as he had any basis. He has an instinct of nature better than his
culture was. His savans, Bourrienne tells us, in that voyage to Egypt
were one evening busily occupied arguing that there could be no God.
They had proved it to their satisfaction by all manner of logic. Napoleon,
looking up into the stars, answers, ‘Very ingenious, Messieurs;
but who made all that?’ The Atheistic logic runs off from him like
water; the great Fact stares him in the face. ‘Who made all that?’
So too in practice; he, as every man that can be great, or have victory
in this world, sees through all entanglements, the practical heart of the
matter; drives straight toward that. When the steward of his Tuilleries
Palace was exhibiting the new upholstery, with praises and demonstrations,
how glorious it was and how cheap withal, Napoleon, making little
answer, asked for a pair of scissors, clipped one of the gold tassels
from a window-curtain, put it in his pocket, and walked on. Some days
afterward he produced it at the right moment, to the horror of the
upholstery functionary: it was not gold but tinsel! In Saint Helena, it
is notable how he still, to his last days, insists on the practical, the real.
‘Why talk and complain? Above all, why quarrel with one another?
There is no resultat in it; it comes to nothing that we can do. Say nothing
if one can do nothing!’ He speaks often so to his poor, discontented
followers; he is like a piece of silent Strength in the middle of
their morbid querulousness there.

And accordingly, was there not what we can call a faith in him, genuine
as far as it went? That this new enormous Democracy, asserting
itself here in the French revolution is an insuppressible fact, which the
whole world, with its old forces and institutions cannot put down: this
was a true insight of his, and took his conscience along with it—a
faith. And did he not interpret the dim purport of it well? ‘The implements
to him who can handle them.’ This actually is the truth, and
even the whole truth; it includes whatever the French revolution, or
any revolution could mean. Napoleon, in his first period, was a true
Democrat. And yet by the nature of him, fastened too by his military
trade, he knew that democracy, if it were a true thing at all, could not
be an anarchy: the man had a heart-hatred for anarchy. On that
twentieth of June, (1792,) Bourrienne and he sat in a coffee-house as
the mail rolled by. Napoleon expresses the deepest contempt for persons
in authority that they do not restrain this rabble. On the tenth of
August he wonders there is no one to command these poor Swiss; they
could conquer if there were. Such a faith in democracy, yet hatred of
anarchy it is, that carries Napoleon through all his great work.
Through his brilliant Italian campaigns, onward to the peace of Luben,
one would say his inspiration is: ‘Triumph to the French revolution;
assertion of it against these Austrian Simulacra that pretend to call it a
simulacrum!’ Withal, however, he feels, and has a right to feel, how
necessary a strong authority is; how the revolution cannot prosper at
all without such. To bridle in that great devouring, self-devouring
French revolution; to tame it, so that its intrinsic purpose can be made
good; that it may become organic, and be able to live amongst other
organisms and formed things, not as a wasting destruction alone; is not
this still what he partly aimed at, as the true purport of his life; nay,
what he actually managed to do? Through Wagrams, Austerlitzes;
triumph after triumph; he triumphed so far. There was an eye to
see in this man, a soul to dare and do. He rose naturally to be the
king. All men saw that he was such. The common soldiers used to
say on the march: ‘These babbling avocats up at Paris: all talk and
no work? What wonder it runs all wrong! We shall have to go and
put our petit corporal there!’ They went and put him there; they and
France at large. Chief-consulship, emperorship, victory over Europe;
till the poor lieutenant of La Fère, not unnaturally, might seem to himself
the greatest of all men that had been in the world for some
ages.

But at this point the fatal charlatan-element got the upper-hand. He
apostatized from his old faith in facts, took to believing in semblances;
strove to connect himself with Austrian dynasties, popedoms, with the
old false feudalities which he once saw clearly to be false; considered
that he would found ‘his dynasty’ and so forth; that the enormous
French revolution meant only that! The man was ‘given up to strong
delusion that he should believe a lie;’ a fearful but most sure thing.
He did not know true from false now when he looked at them; the fearfulest
penalty a man pays for yielding to untruth of heart. Self and
false ambition had now become his god: self-deception once yielded to,
all other deceptions follow naturally, more and more. What a paltry
patch-work of theatrical paper-mantles, tinsel and mummery, had this
man wrapped his own reality in, thinking to make it more real thereby!
His hollow Pope’s-Concordat, pretending to be a reëstablishment of Catholicism,
felt by himself to be the method of extirpating it, ‘la vaccine de
la religion;’ his ceremonial coronations, consecrations by the old Italian
chimera in Notre Dame there; ‘wanting nothing to complete the pomp
of it but the half million who had died to put an end to all that!’ Cromwell’s
inauguration was by the sword and Bible; what we must call a
genuinely true one. Sword and Bible were borne before him, without
any chimera. Were not these real emblems of Puritanism; its true
decoration and insignia? It had used them both in a very real manner,
and pretended to stand by them now! But this poor Napoleon mistook;
he believed too much in the dupeability of men; saw no fact
deeper in man than hunger and this. He was mistaken. Like a
man that should build upon cloud; his house and he falls down in confused
wreck, and depart out of the world.

Alas! in all of us this charlatan-element exists; and might be
developed, were the temptation strong enough. ‘Lead us not into temptation!’
But it is fatal, I say, that it be developed. The thing into which
it enters as a cognizable ingredient is doomed to be altogether transitory;
and, however huge it may look, is in itself small. Napoleon’s
working, accordingly, what was it with all the noise it made? A flash
as of gunpowder wide spread; a blazing up as of dry heath. For an
hour the whole universe seems wrapt in smoke and flame; but only for
an hour. It goes out. The universe, with its old mountains and
streams, its stars above and kind soil beneath, is still there.

The Duke of Weimar told his friends always to be of courage; this
Napoleonism was unjust, a falsehood, and could not last. It is true
doctrine. The heavier this Napoleon trampled on the world, holding it
tyrannously down, the fiercer would the world’s recoil against him be,
one day. Injustice pays itself with frightful compound interest. I am
not sure but he had better lost his best park of artillery, or had his best
regiment drowned in the sea, than shot that poor German bookseller,
Palm! It was a palpable, tyrannous, murderous injustice, which no man,
let him paint an inch thick, could make out to be other. It burnt deep
into the hearts of men, it and the like of it; suppressed fire flashed in
the eyes of men, as they thought of it, waiting their day! Which day
came: Germany rose round him. What Napoleon did will amount in
the long run to what he did justly; what Nature with her laws will
sanction. To what of reality was in him; to that and nothing more.
The rest was all smoke and waste. La carrière ouverte aux talens:
that great true message, which has yet to articulate and fulfil itself
every where, he left in a most inarticulate state. He was a great
ébauche, rude-draught; as indeed what great man is not? Left in too
rude a state, alas!

His notions of the world, as he expresses them there at St. Helena,
are almost tragical to consider. He seems to feel the most unaffected
surprise that it has all gone so; that he is flung out on the rock here,
and the world is still moving on its axis. France is great, and all great;
and at bottom, he is France. England itself he says is by nature only
an appendage of France; ‘another isle of Oberon to France.’ So it
was by nature, by Napoleon-nature; and yet look how in fact—here
am I! He cannot understand it; that France was not all great, that he
was not France. ‘Strong delusion,’ that he should believe the thing to
be which is not! The compact, clear-seeing, decisive Italian nature of
him, strong, genuine, which he once had, has enveloped itself, half dissolved
itself, in a turbid atmosphere of French fanfaronade. The world
was not disposed to be trodden down under foot; to be bound into masses,
and built together as he liked, for a pedestal for France and him: the
world has quite other purposes in view! Napoleon’s astonishment is
extreme. But alas, what help now! He had gone that way of his; and
Nature had also gone her way. Having once parted with reality, he
tumbles helpless in vacuity; no rescue for him. He had to sink there
mournfully as man seldom did; and break his great heart and die—this
poor Napoleon; a great implement too soon wasted, till it was useless;
our last Great Man!

THE FLORAL RESURRECTION.

BY THE SHEPHERD OF SHARONDALE.

THE LEGEND OF DON RODERICK.

NUMBER THREE.

The scattered fugitives of the Christian army spread terror throughout
the land. The inhabitants of the towns and villages gathered around
them as they applied at their gates for food, or laid themselves down,
faint and wounded, beside the public fountains. When they related the
tale of their defeat, old men shook their heads and groaned, and the
women uttered cries and lamentations. So strange and unlooked-for a
calamity filled them with consternation and despair; for it was long
since the alarm of war had sounded in their land: and this was a warfare
that carried chains and slavery, and all kinds of horrors, in its
train.

Don Roderick was seated with his beauteous queen, Exilona, in the
royal palace which crowned the rocky summit of Toledo, when the
bearer of ill-tidings came galloping over the bridge of the Tagus.
‘What tidings from the army?’ demanded the king, as the panting
messenger was brought into his presence. ‘Tidings of great wo!’
exclaimed the soldier. ‘The prince has fallen in battle. I saw his
head and surcoat upon a Moorish lance; and the army was overthrown
and fled!’

At hearing these words, Roderick covered his face with his hands,
and for some time sat in silence; and all his courtiers stood mute and
aghast, and no one dared to speak a word. In that awful space of time
passed before his thoughts all his errors and his crimes, and all the evil
that had been predicted in the necromantic tower. His mind was filled
with horror and confusion, for the hour of his destruction seemed at
hand: but he subdued his agitation by his strong and haughty spirit;
and, when he uncovered his face, no one could read on his brow the
trouble and agony of his heart. Still, every hour brought fresh tidings
of disaster. Messenger after messenger came spurring into the city,
distracting it with new alarms. The infidels, they said, were strengthening
themselves in the land; host after host were pouring in from
Africa: the sea-coast of Andalusia glittered with spears and scimitars.
Bands of turbaned horsemen had overrun the plains of Sidonia, even
to the banks of the Guadiana. Fields were laid waste, towns and cities
plundered, the inhabitants carried into captivity, and the whole country
lay in smoking desolation.

Roderick heard all these tidings with an undaunted aspect; nor did
he ever again betray sign of consternation: but the anxiety of his soul
was evident in his warlike preparations. He issued orders that every
noble and prelate of his kingdom should put himself at the head of his
retainers, and take the field; and that every man capable of bearing
arms should hasten to his standard, bringing whatever horse, and mule,
and weapon he possessed: and he appointed the plain of Cordova for
the place where the army was to assemble. Throwing by, then, all the
trappings of his late slothful and voluptuous life, and arming himself for
warlike action, he departed from Toledo at the head of his guard, composed
of the flower of the youthful nobility. His queen, Exilona,
accompanied him; for she craved permission to remain in one of the
cities of Andalusia, that she might be near her lord in this time of peril.

Among the first who appeared to hail the arrival of the king at Cordova,
was the Bishop Oppas, the secret partisan of the traitor Julian.
He brought with him his two nephews, Evan and Siseburto, the sons of
the late king Witiza; and a great host of vassals and retainers, all well
armed and appointed, for they had been furnished, by Count Julian,
with a part of the arms sent by the king to Africa. The bishop was
smooth of tongue, and profound in his hypocrisy: his pretended zeal
and devotion, and the horror with which he spoke of the treachery of
his kinsman, imposed upon the credulous spirit of the king, and he was
readily admitted into his most secret council.

The alarm of the infidel invasion had spread throughout the land, and
roused the Gothic valor of the inhabitants. On receiving the orders of
Roderick, every town and hamlet, every mountain and valley, had sent
forth its fighting men, and the whole country was on the march toward
Andalusia. In a little while there were gathered together, on the plain
of Cordova, near fifty thousand horsemen, and a countless host of foot-soldiers.
The Gothic nobles appeared in burnished armor, curiously
inlaid, and adorned with chains and jewels of gold, and ornaments of
precious stones, and silken scarfs, and surcoats of brocade, or velvet
richly embroidered; betraying the luxury and ostentation with which
they had declined from the iron hardihood of their warlike sires. As to
the common people, some had lances and shields and swords and crossbows,
but the greater part were unarmed, or provided merely with slings,
and clubs studded with nails, and with the iron implements of husbandry;
and many had made shields for themselves from the doors and windows
of their habitations. They were a prodigious host, and appeared, say
the Arabian chroniclers, like an agitated sea; but, though brave in
spirit, they possessed no knowledge of warlike art, and were ineffectual
through lack of arms and discipline.

Several of the most ancient and experienced cavaliers, beholding the
state of the army, advised Don Roderick to await the arrival of more
regular troops, which were stationed in Iberia, Cantabria, and Gallia
Gothica; but this counsel was strenuously opposed by the Bishop Oppas;
who urged the king to march immediately against the infidels. ‘As
yet,’ said he, ‘their number is but limited; but every day new hosts
arrive, like flocks of locusts, from Africa. They will augment faster
than we; they are living, too, at our expense, and, while we pause, both
armies are consuming the substance of the land.’

King Roderick listened to the crafty counsel of the bishop, and determined
to advance without delay. He mounted his war horse, Orelia,
and rode among his troops assembled on that spacious plain, and wherever
he appeared he was received with acclamations; for nothing so
arouses the spirit of the soldier as to behold his sovereign in arms. He
addressed them in words calculated to touch their hearts and animate
their courage. ‘The Saracens,’ said he, ‘are ravaging our land, and
their object is our conquest. Should they prevail, your very existence
as a nation is at an end. They will overturn your altars; trample on
the cross; lay waste your cities; carry off your wives and daughters,
and doom yourselves and sons to hard and cruel slavery. No safety
remains for you but in the prowess of your arms. For my own part,
as I am your king, so will I be your leader, and will be the foremost to
encounter every toil and danger.’

The soldiery answered their monarch with loud acclamations, and
solemnly pledged themselves to fight to the last gasp in defence of their
country and their faith. The king then arranged the order of their
march: all those who were armed with cuirasses and coats of mail were
placed in the front and rear; the centre of the army was composed of
a promiscuous throng, without body armor, and but scantily provided
with weapons.

When they were about to march, the king called to him a noble
cavalier named Ramiro, and delivering him the royal standard, charged
him to guard it well for the honor of Spain; scarcely, however, had
the good knight received it in his hand, when he fell dead from his horse,
and the staff of the standard was broken in twain. Many ancient courtiers
who were present looked upon this as an evil omen, and counselled
the king not to set forward on his march that day; but, disregarding all
auguries and portents, he ordered the royal banner to be put upon a
lance, and gave it in charge of another standard-bearer; then commanding
the trumpets to be sounded, he departed at the head of his host
to seek the enemy.

The field where this great army assembled was called, from the
solemn pledge given by the nobles and the soldiery, El campo de la
verdad; or, The field of Truth; a name, says the sage chronicler Abul
Cassim, which it bears even to the present day.

The hopes of Andalusia revived, as this mighty host stretched in
lengthened lines along its fertile plains; from morning until night it continued
to pour along, with sound of drum and trumpet; it was led on
by the proudest nobles and bravest cavaliers of the land, and, had it
possessed arms and discipline, might have undertaken the conquest of
the world.

After a few days’ march, Don Roderick arrived in sight of the Moslem
army, encamped on the banks of the Guadalete, where that beautiful
stream winds through the fertile land of Xeres. The infidel host was
far inferior in number to the Christians; but then it was composed of
hardy and dexterous troops, seasoned to war, and admirably armed.
The camp shone gloriously in the setting sun, and resounded with the
clash of cymbal, the note of the trumpet, and the neighing of fiery Arabian
steeds. There were swarthy troops from every nation of the
African coast, together with legions from Syria and Egypt, while the
light Bedouins were careering about the adjacent plain. What grieved
and incensed the spirits of the Christian warriors, however, was to behold,
a little apart from the Moslem host, an encampment of Spanish
cavaliers, with the banner of Count Julian waving above their tents.
They were ten thousand in number, valiant and hardy men, the most
experienced of Spanish soldiery, most of them having served in the
African wars; they were well armed and appointed also, with the
weapons of which the count had beguiled his sovereign; and it was a
grievous sight to behold such good soldiers arrayed against their country
and their faith.

The Christians pitched their tents about the hour of vespers, at a short
league distant from the enemy, and remained gazing with anxiety and
awe upon this barbaric host that had caused such terror and desolation
in the land: for the first sight of a hostile encampment in a country
disused to war, is terrible to the newly enlisted soldier. A marvellous
occurrence is recorded by the Arabian chroniclers as having taken
place in the Christian camp; but discreet Spanish writers relate it with
much modification, and consider it a stratagem of the wily Bishop
Oppas, to sound the loyalty of the Christian cavaliers.

As several leaders of the army were seated with the bishop in his
tent, conversing on the dubious fortunes of the approaching contest, an
ancient pilgrim appeared at the entrance. He was bowed down with
years, his snowy beard descended to his girdle, and he supported his
tottering steps with a palmer’s staff. The cavaliers rose and received
him with great reverence as he advanced within the tent. Holding up
his withered hand, ‘Wo, wo to Spain!’ exclaimed he, ‘for the vial of
the wrath of heaven is about to be poured out. Listen, warriors, and
take warning. Four months since, having performed my pilgrimage to
the sepulchre of our Lord in Palestine, I was on my return toward my
native land. Wearied and wayworn, I lay down one night to sleep beneath
a palm tree, by the side of a fountain, when I was awakened by
a voice saying unto me, in soft accents, ‘Son of sorrow, why sleepest
thou?’ I opened my eyes, and beheld one of a fair and beauteous
countenance, in shining apparel and with glorious wings, standing by
the fountain; and I said, ‘Who art thou who callest upon me in this
deep hour of the night?’

‘‘Fear not,’ replied the stranger, ‘I am an angel from heaven, sent
to reveal unto thee the fate of thy country. Behold the sins of Roderick
have come up before God, and his anger is kindled against him, and he
has given him up to be invaded and destroyed. Hasten then to Spain, and
seek the camp of thy countrymen. Warn them that such only shall
be saved as shall abandon Roderick; but those who adhere to him shall
share his punishment, and shall fall under the sword of the invader.’’

The pilgrim ceased, and passed forth from the tent; certain of the
cavaliers followed him to detain him, that they might converse further
with him about these matters, but he was no where to be found. The
sentinel before the tent said, ‘I saw no one come forth, but it was as if
a blast of wind passed by me, and there was a rustling as of dry
leaves.’

The cavaliers remained looking upon each other with astonishment.
The Bishop Oppas sat with his eyes fixed upon the ground, and shadowed
by his overhanging brow. At length, breaking silence, in a low
and faltering voice, ‘Doubtless,’ said he, ‘this message is from God;
and since he has taken compassion upon us, and given us notice of his
impending judgment, it behooves us to hold grave council, and determine
how best we may accomplish his will and avert his displeasure.’

The chiefs still remained silent, as men confounded. Among them
was a veteran noble named Pelistes. He had distinguished himself in
the African wars, fighting side by side with Count Julian, but the latter
had never dared to tamper with his faith, for he knew his stern integrity.
Pelistes had brought with him to the camp his only son, who had
never drawn a sword except in tourney. When the young man saw
that the veterans held their peace, the blood mantled in his cheek, and,
overcoming his modesty, he broke forth with a generous warmth: ‘I
know not, cavaliers,’ said he, ‘what is passing in your minds, but I believe
this pilgrim to be an envoy from the devil; for none else could
have given such dastard and perfidious counsel. For my own part, I
stand ready to defend my king, my country, and my faith. I know no
higher duty than this, and if God thinks fit to strike me dead in the
performance of it, his sovereign will be done!’

When the young man had risen to speak, his father had fixed his eyes
upon him with a grave and stern demeanor, leaning upon a two-handed
sword. As soon as the youth had finished, Pelistes embraced him with
a father’s fondness. ‘Thou hast spoken well, my son,’ said he; ‘if I
held my peace at the counsel of this losel pilgrim, it was but to hear
thy opinion, and to learn whether thou wert worthy of thy lineage and
of the training I had given thee. Hadst thou counselled otherwise than
thou hast done, hadst thou shown thyself craven and disloyal, so help me
God, I would have struck off thy head with this weapon which I hold
in my hand. But thou hast counselled like a loyal and a Christian
knight, and I thank God for having given me a son worthy to perpetuate
the honors of my line. As to this pilgrim, be he saint or be he devil, I
care not; this much I promise, that if I am to die in defence of my
country and my king, my life shall be a costly purchase to the foe.
Let each man make the same resolve, and I trust we shall yet prove
the pilgrim a lying prophet.’ The words of Pelistes roused the spirits
of many of the cavaliers; others, however, remained full of anxious
foreboding, and when this fearful prophecy was rumored about the
camp, as it presently was by the emissaries of the bishop, it spread awe
and dismay among the soldiery.

On the following day, the two armies remained regarding each other
with wary but menacing aspect. About noontide, King Roderick sent
forth a chosen force of five hundred horse and two hundred foot, the
best armed of his host, to skirmish with the enemy, that, by gaining
some partial advantage, they might raise the spirits of the army. They
were led on by Theodomir, the same Gothic noble who had signalised
himself by first opposing the invasion of the Moslems.

The Christian squadrons paraded with flying pennons in the valley
which lay between the armies. The Arabs were not slow in answering
their defiance. A large body of horsemen sallied forth to the encounter,
together with three hundred of the followers of Count Julian. There
was hot skirmishing about the field, and on the banks of the river; many
gallant feats were displayed on either side, and many valiant warriors
were slain. As the night closed in, the trumpets from either camp summoned
the troops to retire from the combat. In this day’s action the
Christians suffered greatly in the loss of their distinguished cavaliers;
for it is the noblest spirits who venture most, and lay themselves open
to danger; and the Moslem soldiers had instructions to single out the
leaders of the adverse host. All this is said to have been devised by
the perfidious Bishop Oppas, who had secret communications with the
enemy, while he influenced the councils of the king; and who trusted
that by this skirmishing warfare the power of the Christian troops would
be cut off, and the rest disheartened.

On the following morning, a larger force was ordered out to skirmish,
and such of the soldiery as were unarmed were commanded to stand
ready to seize the horses and strip off the armor of the killed and wounded.
Among the most illustrious of the warriors who fought that day was
Pelistes, the Gothic noble who had sternly checked the tongue of the
Bishop Oppas. He led to the field a large body of his own vassals and
retainers, and of cavaliers trained up in his house, who had followed
him to the wars in Africa, and who looked up to him more as a father
than a chieftain. Beside him was his only son, who now for the first time
was fleshing his sword in battle. The conflict that day was more general
and bloody than the day preceding; the slaughter of the Christian
warriors was immense, from their lack of defensive armour; and as
nothing could prevent the flower of the Gothic chivalry from spurring
to the combat, the field was strewed with the bodies of the youthful nobles.
None suffered more, however, than the warriors of Pelistes. Their
leader himself was bold and hardy, and prone to expose himself to danger;
but years and experience had moderated his early fire; his son,
however, was eager to distinguish himself in this, his first essay, and
rushed with impetuous ardor into the hottest of the battle. In vain his
father called to caution him; he was ever in the advance, and seemed
unconscious of the perils that surrounded him. The cavaliers and vassals
of his father followed him with devoted zeal, and many of them
paid for their loyalty with their lives. When the trumpet sounded in
the evening for retreat, the troops of Pelistes were the last to reach the
camp. They came slowly and mournfully, and much decreased in
number. Their veteran commander was seated on his war-horse, but
the blood trickled from the greaves of his armour. His valiant son
was borne on the shields of his vassals; when they laid him on the
earth near to where the king was standing, they found that the heroic
youth had expired of his wounds. The cavaliers surrounded the body
and gave utterance to their grief; but the father restrained his agony,
and looked on with the stern resignation of a soldier.

Don Roderick surveyed the field of battle with a rueful eye, for it
was covered with the mangled bodies of his most illustrious warriors;
he saw, too, with anxiety, that the common people, unused to war, and
unsustained by discipline, were harassed by incessant toils and dangers,
and were cooling in their zeal and courage.

The crafty Bishop Oppas marked the internal trouble of the king, and
thought a favorable moment had arrived to sway him to his purpose.
He called to his mind the various portents and prophecies which had
forerun their present danger. ‘Let not my lord the king,’ said he,
‘make light of these mysterious revelations, which appear to be so disastrously
fulfilling. The hand of Heaven appears to be against us.
Destruction is impending over our heads. Our troops are rude and
unskilful, but slightly armed, and much cast down in spirit. Better is
it that we should make a treaty with the enemy, and, by granting part
of his demands, prevent the utter ruin of our country. If such counsel
be acceptable to my lord the king, I stand ready to depart upon an
embassy to the Moslem camp.’

Upon hearing these words, Pelistes, who had stood in mournful silence,
regarding the dead body of his son, burst forth with honest indignation.
‘By this good sword,’ said he, ‘the man who yields such dastard counsel
deserves death from the hand of his countrymen rather than from
the foe; and, were it not for the presence of the king, may I forfeit salvation
if I would not strike him dead upon the spot.’

The bishop turned an eye of venom upon Pelistes. ‘My lord,’ said
he, ‘I too, bear a weapon, and know how to wield it. Were the king
not present you would not dare to menace, nor should you advance one
step without my hastening to meet you.’

The king interposed between the jarring nobles, and rebuked the impetuosity
of Pelistes, but at the same time rejected the counsel of the
bishop. ‘The event of this conflict,’ said he, ‘is in the hand of God;
but never shall my sword return to its scabbard while an infidel invader
remains within the land.’

He then held a council with his captains, and it was determined to
offer the enemy general battle on the following day. A herald was
despatched defying Taric ben Zeyad to the contest, and the defiance was
gladly accepted by the Moslem chieftain. Don Roderick then formed
the plan of action, and assigned to each commander his several station,
after which he dismissed his officers, and each one sought his tent, to
prepare by diligence or repose for the next day’s eventful contest.

Taric ben Zeyad had been surprised by the valor of the Christian
cavaliers in the recent battles, and at the number and apparent devotion
of the troops which accompanied the king to the field. The confident
defiance of Don Roderick increased his surprise. When the herald
had retired, he turned an eye of suspicion on Count Julian. ‘Thou
hast represented thy countrymen,’ said he, ‘as sunk in effeminacy and
lost to all generous impulse: yet I find them fighting with the courage
and the strength of lions. Thou hast represented thy king as detested
by his subjects, and surrounded by secret treason, but I behold his tents
whitening the hills and dales, while thousands are hourly flocking to
his standard. Wo unto thee if thou hast dealt deceitfully with us, or
betrayed us with guileful words.’

Don Julian retired to his tent in great trouble of mind, and fear came
upon him that the Bishop Oppas might play him false; for it is the lot
of traitors ever to distrust each other. He called to him the same page
who had brought him the letter from Florinda, revealing the story of
her dishonor.

‘Thou knowest, my trusty page,’ said he, ‘that I have reared thee in
my household, and cherished thee above all thy companions. If thou
hast loyalty and affection for thy lord, now is the time to serve him.
Hie thee to the Christian camp, and find thy way to the tent of the
Bishop Oppas. If any one ask thee who thou art, tell them thou art of
the household of the bishop, and bearer of missives from Cordova.
When thou art admitted to the presence of the bishop, show him this ring,
and he will commune with thee in secret. Then tell him Count Julian
greets him as a brother, and demands how the wrongs of his daughter
Florinda are to be redressed. Mark well his reply, and bring it word
for word. Have thy lips closed, but thine eyes and ears open; and
observe every thing of note in the camp of the king. So speed thee on
thy errand—away, away!’

The page hastened to saddle a Barbary steed, fleet as the wind, and
of a jet black color, so as not to be easily discernible in the night. He
girded on a sword and dagger, slung an Arab bow with a quiver of
arrows at his side, and a buckler at his shoulder. Issuing out of the
camp, he sought the banks of the Guadalete, and proceeded silently
along its stream, which reflected the distant fires of the Christian camp.
As he passed by the place which had been the scene of the recent conflict,
he heard, from time to time, the groan of some expiring warrior
who had crawled among the reeds on the margin of the river; and
sometimes his steed stepped cautiously over the mangled bodies of the
slain. The young page was unused to the sights of war, and his heart
beat quick within him. He was hailed by the sentinels as he approached
the Christian camp, and, on giving the reply taught him by Count Julian,
was conducted to the tent of the Bishop Oppas.

The bishop had not yet retired to his couch. When he beheld the
ring of Count Julian, and heard the words of his message, he saw that
the page was one in whom he might confide. ‘Hasten back to thy lord,’
said he, ‘and tell him to have faith in me, and all shall go well. As
yet I have kept my troops out of the combat. They are all fresh, well
armed, and well appointed. The king has confided to myself, aided by
the princes Evan and Siseburto, the command of a wing of the army.
To-morrow, at the hour of noon, when both armies are in the heat of
action, we will pass over with our forces to the Moslems. But I claim
the compact made with Taric ben Zeyad, that my nephews be placed in
dominion over Spain, and tributary only to the Caliph of Damascus.’
With this traitorous message the page departed. He led his black steed
by the bridle to present less mark for observation, as he went stumbling
along near the expiring fires of the camp. On passing the last outpost,
when the guards were half slumbering on their arms, he was overheard
and summoned, but leaped lightly into the saddle and put spurs to his
steed. An arrow whistled by his ear and two more stuck in the target
which he had thrown upon his back. The clatter of swift hoofs echoed
behind him, but he had learnt of the Arabs to fight and fly. Plucking a
shaft from his quiver, and turning and rising in the stirrups as his
courser galloped at full speed, he drew the arrow to the head and launched
it at his pursuer. The twang of the bow-string was followed by the
crash of armour, and a deep groan, as the horseman tumbled to the
earth. The page pursued his course with further molestation, and arrived
at the Moslem camp before the break of day.

A light had burned throughout the night in the tent of the king, and
anxious thoughts and dismal visions troubled his repose. If he fell into
a slumber, he beheld in his dreams the shadowy phantoms of the necromantic
tower, or the injured Florinda, pale and dishevelled, imprecating
the vengeance of Heaven upon his head. In the mid-watches of the
night, when all was silent except the footstep of the sentinel, pacing before
his tent, the king rose from his couch, and walking forth looked
thoughtfully upon the martial scene before him. The pale crescent of
the moon hung over the Moorish camp, and dimly lighted up the windings
of the Guadalete. The heart of the king was heavy and oppressed;
but he felt only for himself, says Antonio Agapida, he thought nothing
of the perils impending over the thousands of devoted subjects in the
camp below him; sleeping, as it were, on the margin of their graves.
The faint clatter of distant hoofs, as if in rapid flight, reached the monarch’s
ear, but the horsemen were not to be descried. At that very
hour, and along the shadowy banks of that river, here and there gleaming
with the scanty moonlight, passed the fugitive messenger of Count
Julian, with the plan of the next day’s treason.

The day had not yet dawned, when the sleepless and impatient monarch
summoned his attendants and arrayed himself for the field. He then
sent for the venerable Bishop Urbino, who had accompanied him to the
camp, and, laying aside his regal crown, he knelt with head uncovered,
and confessed his sins before the holy man. After this a solemn mass
was performed in the royal tent, and the eucharist administered to the
monarch. When these ceremonies were concluded, he besought the
archbishop to depart forthwith for Cordova, there to await the issue of the
battle, and to be ready to bring forward reinforcements and supplies.
The archbishop saddled his mule and departed just as the faint blush of
morning began to kindle in the east. Already the camp resounded with
the thrilling call of the trumpet, the clank of armor, and the tramp
and neigh of steeds. As the archbishop passed through the camp, he
looked with a compassionate heart on this vast multitude, of whom so
many were soon to perish. The warriors pressed to kiss his hand, and
many a cavalier full of youth and fire received his benediction, who
was to lie stiff and cold before the evening.

When the troops were marshalled for the field, Don Roderick prepared
to sally forth in the state and pomp with which the Gothic kings
were wont to go to battle. He was arrayed in robes of gold brocade;
his sandals were embroidered with pearls and diamonds; he had a sceptre
in his hand, and he wore a regal crown resplendent with inestimable
jewels. Thus gorgeously apparelled, he ascended a lofty chariot of
ivory, the axle-trees of which were of silver, and the wheels and pole
covered with plates of burnished gold. Above his head was a canopy
of cloth of gold embossed with armorial devices, and studded with precious
stones. This sumptuous chariot was drawn by milk-white horses,
with caparisons of crimson velvet, embroidered with pearls. A thousand
youthful cavaliers surrounded the car; all of the noblest blood and
bravest spirit; all knighted by the king’s own hand, and sworn to defend
him to the last.

When Roderick issued forth in this resplendent state, says an Arabian
writer, surrounded by his guards in gilded armour and waving plumes
and scarfs and surcoats of a thousand dyes, it was as if the sun were
emerging in the dazzling chariot of the day from amidst the glorious
clouds of morning.

As the royal car rolled along in front of the squadrons, the soldiers
shouted with admiration. Don Roderick waved his sceptre, and addressed
them from his lofty throne, reminding them of the horror and
desolation which had already been spread through the land by the invaders.
He called upon them to summon up the ancient valor of their
race, and avenge the blood of their brethren. ‘One day of glorious
fighting,’ said he, ‘and this infidel horde will be driven into the sea, or
will perish beneath your swords. Forward bravely to the fight; your
families are behind you praying for your success; the invaders of your
country are before you; God is above to bless his holy cause, and your
king leads you to the field.’ The army shouted with one accord, ‘Forward
to the foe, and death be his portion who shuns the encounter!’

The rising sun began to shine along the glistening waters of the
Guadalete as the Moorish army, squadron after squadron, came sweeping
down a gentle declivity to the sound of martial music. Their turbans
and robes, of various dyes and fashions, gave a splendid appearance
to their host; as they marched, a cloud of dust arose and partly hid
them from the sight, but still there would break forth flashes of steel
and gleams of burnished gold, like rays of vivid lightning, while the
sound of drum and trumpet, and the clash of Moorish cymbal, were as
the warlike thunder within that stormy cloud of battle.

As the armies drew near each other the sun disappeared among gathering
clouds, and the gloom of the day was increased by the columns of
dust which rose from either host. At length the trumpet sounded for
the encounter. The battle commenced with showers of arrows, stones,
and javelins. The Christian foot-soldiers fought to disadvantage, the
greater part being destitute of helm or buckler. A battalion of light
Arabian horsemen, led by a Greek renegado named Magued el Rumi,
careered in front of the Christian line, launching their darts, and then
wheeling off beyond the reach of the missiles hurled after them. Theodomir
now brought up his seasoned troops into the action, seconded by
the veteran Pelistes, and in a little while the battle became furious and
promiscuous. It was glorious to behold the old Gothic valor shining
forth in this hour of fearful trial. Wherever the Moslems fell, the
Christians rushed forward, seized upon their horses, and stripped them
of their armour and their weapons. They fought desperately and successfully,
for they fought for their country and their faith. The battle
raged for several hours; the field was strown with slain, and the Moors,
overcome by the multitude and fury of their foes, began to falter.

When Taric beheld his troops retreating before the enemy, he threw
himself before them, and, rising in his stirrups, ‘Oh, Moslems! conquerors
of Africa!’ cried he, whither would you fly? The sea is behind
you, the enemy before; you have no hope but in your valor and
the help of God. Do as I do and the day is ours!’

With these words he put spurs to his horse and sprang among the
enemy, striking to right and left, cutting down and destroying, while his
steed, fierce as himself, trampled upon the foot soldiers and tore them
with his teeth. At this moment a mighty shout arose in various parts
of the field; the noontide hour had arrived. The Bishop Oppas with
the two princes, who had hitherto kept their bands out of the fight, suddenly
went over to the enemy, and turned their weapons upon their astonished
countrymen. From that moment the fortune of the day was
changed, and the field of battle became a scene of wild confusion and
bloody massacre. The Christians knew not whom to contend with, or
whom to trust. It seemed as if madness had seized upon their friends
and kinsmen, and that their worst enemies were among themselves.

The courage of Don Roderick rose with his danger. Throwing off
the cumbrous robes of royalty, and descending from his car, he sprang
upon his steed Orelia, grasped his lance and buckler, and endeavored
to rally his retreating troops. He was surrounded and assailed by a
multitude of his own traitorous subjects, but defended himself with wondrous
prowess. The enemy thickened around him; his loyal band of
cavaliers were slain, bravely fighting in his defence; the last that was
seen of the king was in the midst of the enemy, dealing death at every
blow.

A complete panic fell upon the Christians; they threw away their
arms and fled in all directions. They were pursued with dreadful
slaughter, until the darkness of the night rendered it impossible to distinguish
friend from foe. Taric then called off his troops from the pursuit,
and took possession of the royal camp; and the couch which had
been pressed so uneasily on the preceding night by Don Roderick, now
yielded sound repose to his conqueror.

On the morning after the battle, the Arab leader, Taric ben Zeyad,
rode over the bloody field of the Gaudalete, strewed with the ruins of
those splendid armies, which had so lately passed like glorious pageants
along the river banks. There Moor and Christian, horseman and horse,
lay gashed with hideous wounds; and the river, still red with blood,
was filled with the bodies of the slain. The gaunt Arab was as a wolf
roaming through the fold he had laid waste. On every side his eye
revelled on the ruin of the country, on the wrecks of haughty Spain.
There lay the flower of her youthful chivalry, mangled and destroyed,
and the strength of her yeomanry prostrated in the dust. The Gothic
noble lay confounded with his vassals; the peasant with the prince; all
ranks and dignities were mingled in one bloody massacre.

When Taric had surveyed the field, he caused the spoils of the dead
and the plunder of the camp to be brought before him. The booty was
immense. There were massy chains, and rare jewels of gold; pearls
and precious stones; rich silks and brocades, and all other luxurious
decorations in which the Gothic nobles had indulged in the latter times
of their degeneracy. A vast amount of treasure was likewise found,
which had been brought by Roderick for the expenses of the war.

Taric then ordered that the bodies of the Moslem warriors should be
interred; as for those of the Christians, they were gathered in heaps,
and vast pyres of wood were formed, on which they were consumed.
The flames of these pyres rose high in the air, and were seen afar off in
the night; and when the Christians beheld them from the neighboring
hills they beat their breasts and tore their hair, and lamented over them
as over the funeral fires of their country. The carnage of that battle
infected the air for two whole months, and bones were seen lying in
heaps upon the field for more than forty years; nay, when ages had past
and gone, the husbandman, turning up the soil, would still find fragments
of Gothic cuirasses and helms, and Moorish scimitars, the relics
of that dreadful fight.

For three days the Arabian horseman pursued the flying Christians,
hunting them over the face of the country; so that but a scanty number
of that mighty host escaped to tell the tale of their disaster.

Taric ben Zeyad considered his victory incomplete so long as the
Gothic monarch survived; he proclaimed great rewards, therefore, to
whomsoever should bring Roderick to him, dead or alive. A diligent
search was accordingly made in every direction, but for a long time in
vain; at length a soldier brought to Taric the head of a Christian warrior,
on which was a cap decorated with feathers and precious stones.
The Arab leader received it as the head of the unfortunate Roderick,
and sent it, as a trophy of his victory, to Musa ben Nosier, who, in like
manner, transmitted it to the caliph at Damascus. The Spanish historians,
however, have always denied its identity.

A mystery has ever hung and ever must continue to hang, over the
fate of King Roderick, in that dark and doleful day of Spain. Whether
he went down amidst the storm of battle, and atoned for his sins and
errors by a patriot grave, or whether he survived to repent of them in
hermit exile, must remain matter of conjecture and dispute. The learned
Archbishop Rodrigo, who has recorded the events of this disastrous
field, affirms that Roderick fell beneath the vengeful blade of the traitor
Julian, and thus expiated with his blood his crime against the hapless
Florinda; but the archbishop stands alone in his record of the fact. It
seems generally admitted that Orelia, the favorite war-horse of Don
Roderick, was found entangled in a marsh on the borders of the Gaudalete,
with the sandals and mantle and royal insignia of the king lying
close by him. The river at this place ran broad and deep, and was encumbered
with the dead bodies of warriors and steeds; it has been supposed
therefore, that he perished in the stream; but his body was not
found within its waters.

When several years had passed away, and men’s minds, being restored
to some degree of tranquillity, began to occupy themselves about
the events of this dismal day, a rumor arose that Roderick had escaped
from the carnage on the banks of the Gaudalete, and was still alive. It
was said, that having from a rising ground caught a view of the whole
field of battle, and seen that the day was lost, and his army flying in
all directions, he likewise sought his safety in flight. It is added, that
the Arab horsemen, while scouring the mountain in quest of fugitives,
found a shepherd arrayed in the royal robes, and brought him before the
conqueror, believing him to be the king himself. Count Julian soon dispelled
the error. On being questioned, the trembling rustic declared
that while tending his sheep in the folds of the mountains, there came a
cavalier on a horse wearied and spent and ready to sink beneath the
spur; that the cavalier with an authoritative voice and menacing air commanded
him to exchange garments with him, and clad himself in his
rude garb of sheep-skin, and took his crook and his scrip of provisions,
and continued up the rugged defiles of the mountains leading towards
Castile, until he was lost to view.

This tradition was fondly cherished by many, who clung to the belief
in the existence of their monarch as their main hope for the redemption
of Spain. It was even affirmed that he had taken refuge with many of
his host, in an island of the ‘Ocean sea,’ from whence he might yet return,
once more to elevate his standard, and battle for the recovery of
his throne.

Year after year, however, elapsed and nothing was heard of Don
Roderick; yet, like Sebastian of Portugal, and Arthur of England, his
name continued to be a rallying point for popular faith, and the mystery
of his end to give rise to romantic fables. At length, when generation
after generation had sunk into the grave, and near two centuries had
passed and gone, traces were said to be discovered that threw a light on
the final fortunes of the unfortunate Roderick. At that time, Don Alphonso
the Great, King of Leon, had wrested the city of Viseo in Lusitania
from the hands of the Moslems. As his soldiers were ranging
about the city and its environs, one of them discovered in a field, outside
of the walls, a small chapel or hermitage, with a sepulchre in front,
on which was inscribed this epitaph in Gothic characters:

It has been believed by many that this was the veritable tomb of the
monarch, and that in this hermitage he had finished his days in solitary
penance. The warrior, as he contemplated the supposed tomb of the
once haughty Roderick, forgot all his faults and errors, and shed a soldier’s
tear over his memory; but when his thoughts turned to Count
Julian, his patriotic indignation broke forth, and with his dagger he inscribed
a rude malediction on the stone.

‘Accursed,’ said he, ‘be the impious and headlong vengeance of the
traitor Julian. He was a murderer of his king; a destroyer of his
kindred; a betrayer of his country. May his name be bitter in every
mouth, and his memory infamous to all generations.’

Here ends the legend of Don Roderick.

LINES

WRITTEN UNDER A PORTRAIT OF JUPITER AND DANAE.

J. Smith.

THE DOG-STAR SPIRIT.

SUGGESTED BY CERTAIN PAPERS ENTITLED ‘MIND AND INSTINCT,’ IN THE KNICKERBOCKER.

Pittsburgh, March, 1844. Sancho.

A DREAM.

Upon a certain clear and starry night of unbroken tranquility and
peace, in the month of September, in the year of Grace one thousand
eight hundred thirty and two; I, John Waters of man’s Estate, Gentleman,
dreamed a Dream. And lest I might be forced, like the great
Babylonian monarch of yore, to say ‘the thing is gone from me,’ I resolved
while a vague remembrance yet rested in my thoughts, to record
if possible some lasting memorial of it.

Now, more than one half of the average number of years, assigned
by computation to a generation of our race, have, since that point of
time, rolled into the rearward hemisphere of Eternity; trials and
changes, deep and stern and manifold, have rent and desolated this house
not made with hands, and have exercised and broken the spirit that is
supposed to be contained within it; yet the slight memorandum, written
at that time, lies unchanged before me, and gives evidence of the comparatively
impassible duration of inert matter over man; whose home,
and whose abiding-place is not of earth!

It is not that I can hope to describe my sensations of that night, in
such a manner as to impart them to the contemplative spirit that may
read this sketch, and to afford pleasure at all comparable with that which
I enjoyed; but I have thought that I might by the recital awaken some
gratifying recollections of still higher flittings of the imagination into
the regions of unlimited Fancy; where the pleasure has been, as was
mine, alike unbounded and pure.

In an Existence like ours, where so much is ideal; where so many
things are feared, that never come to pass; hoped for, that are never realized;
enjoyed, that are impalpable to sense; where that, which by
common convention is called substantial and real, is very far inferior
to that which is falsely termed illusory and vain; where life borders on
immortality; and the spiritual world so closely overhangs the natural,
that it is as difficult to separate them as it is in Switzerland to know
which is Alps and which is Heaven;—there may oftentimes be much
pleasure, perhaps some instruction, in a Dream.

What should we say of dreams, if our eyes could but once have been
opened upon the bright intellectual fancies, and anticipations; or upon
the spiritual movements, of some of those by the side of whose supine and
deserted forms it may have been our privilege to watch; but who, on
waking into restored consciousness, remember not what they may have
seen, or imagined, or may perhaps have accomplished, in their sleep?

How often, within the compass of our own minds, do we not find
thoughts and images that spring from sources that we cannot trace!
Have we not more than once been called upon to perform some act of
life, important to ourselves, or perchance to others; or been in some incidental
circle of friends, or of persons who were strangers until then;
or walked upon some lonely path in Europe—all for the first time as
we suppose, and yet have we not had it irresistibly borne in upon our
minds, that we have done all this before! signed the same paper in the
same presence! heard the same voices speak the same words! noticed
the same faces in the same positions! or recognized the mountains perhaps,
and the trees, the landscape, the rocks, the very brook, as acquaintances
of old; although the broad Atlantic had never yet been crossed
by us before—except in spirit!

Did you never in the day or night dream yourself to be upon some
lofty overhanging precipice? did you never in imagination look down
over its extreme verge upon the dark coast that skirts the foot of it, so
far below you that you only distinguish the Rocks themselves by the
white foam of the blue wave that breaks over them? Did you never
hold by a bush while you were bending over this awful verge, listening
to the low roar of the deep and distant waters, and perceive the Eagle
itself soaring mid-way only up the cliff—and while you grew chill
with the thoughts of depth, and danger, and distance from relief, did
you never feel the bush give way and the gravel slide from beneath
you, and the whole mass come thundering down from earth to ocean?

One throb is given to madness and in the next you wake and find the
body in security although perhaps in pain. Have you been in actual
danger? do you believe that you have been? If not, why do you immediately
pray to God and bless Him at such moments for his protection
and care of you? Is it not that while the body has been quiescent,
the excursive Soul has been in spiritual presence on the edge of
that beetling and stupendous height?

Suppose, as the mother sits beside the small bed, drinking with her eyes
that draught of ecstatick pleasure which only Woman’s heart can taste,
she could perceive the spirit of her boy, rising from the body that it
leaves behind in roseate sleep, a thousand times more beautiful than it
and yet the same; and still her own; and taking upon himself, as of
his proper right, the grace and charm of ‘a young and rose-lipped cherub,’
should chase, (and all within her sight,) the rainbow-butterflies of
Paradise across its swards of velvet, and laugh in music to express his
joy!

Suppose that to the husband it should be given to behold his Wife—the
pure in heart!—walking like a seraph in the Spiritual Life, as the earliest
light of morning moves along the hill-tops; her countenance ‘beautified
with salvation’ and joy unfolding itself at her approach: he sees
and follows her as she enters into grottoes of shells, compared with which
all flowers of Earth are mere attempts at colour! She listens to choirs
of angels, joining worthily with them in the celestial chaunt! and when
the hearts of both are elevated by the anthem strain, she kneels in solitude
and prays for him in words that rise to Heaven, a grateful and
accepted incense!

Regard in silence those features of the young and beautiful upon the
bed of slow consuming death; with what a grace do they not awake
from the momentary trance of sleep! thoughts, not given to be revealed,
have been garnered by that precious spirit as it hath soared upward toward
the Heaven that is now bending with a summons unto everlasting
Life! How gently yet how touchingly do not its glances and its last
regrets pass through the diaphanous covering that remains to it of mortality,
upon the friend who gazes in equal love and wonder at its side!
how like the light within the vase! how sublimated the expression! how
intent, how occupied that long look! how effulgent that passage of hope!
how intimate, how exalted must have been the communion, when gleams
of Faith and Joy, too beautiful for utterance, indicate the redeemed soul
just fluttering to ascend in ‘robes made white in the blood of the
Lamb!’

Are not these and such as these, imaginations, communions, capacities,
employments of the soul in Dreams? Ah! if what is called the
Sleep of Death be mysterious, be awful, be sublime, be beautiful at
times; how much more so,—when the form lies waiting to be revivified
by the quick return of the excursive spirit,—how much more so is the
Sleep of Life!

I was lying in my bed, in a deep delicious repose, in my own bed,
without either care, or cold, or gout, to molest me even in my dreams;
I had been occupied during the evening with some elementary algebraical
processes in the company of my dear son who was to prepare them
for examination at school on the following day and who had succeeded
in arriving at correct results, had copied off his work, and packed it in
his satchel for the morning.

Methought, while I slept, my son and I stood together hand in hand in
the Church where we were accustomed to worship. We were very
near the altar, but with our faces directed toward the organ and front
gallery. There is in my mind some recollection of another person, I
believe our Rector, near us but a little behind us.

Presently the surface of the gallery extended itself in breadth and
height, so greatly as to cover the entire organ-loft with it’s increased
plane, and it became an immense practising-board, such as, upon a small
scale, teachers of mathematics use to resolve problems upon for the instruction
of a class, and it immediately assumed the deep slate-coloured
hue that such boards are frequently painted.

And now there arranged themselves upon this board, in white characters,
problem after problem in Equation; the Rule in which we had been
exercising. I cannot describe the celerity with which these problems
were stated upon the board, and worked out to the intense gratification of
my son and myself; the most difficult and apparently unequal quantities
being with the rapidity of thought interchanged neutralized reduced
and determined, so that what seemed at the outset extremely involved,
became lucid as day, and the unknown quantities made specific to our
perfect satisfaction in an instant of time.

We were delighted with the lesson. I felt the hand of my son gently
pressing mine, as he was accustomed to do when he would evince his
satisfaction at any thing we examined successfully together; and we
agreed with each other to cherish the recollection of these elucidations
for future practice.

Turning again toward the board, we found it entirely freed from any
trace of what had been wrought upon it. And now, in a manner which
I have no possible means of imparting to the Reader, the good and evil
of Life formed the specific and the unknown quantities that were wrought
out upon the board. Problem succeeded problem, formed out of various
conditions of life, with the same rapidity as those in Arabicks had been,
and though vastly more complicated, with the same satisfactory result.
Every variety and combination of circumstances in life seemed exhibited;
positive negative neutral in a moment; until certain trials and
occurrences led to certain virtues, with the same precision as in the preceding
series of demonstrations x had for example been shewn to be
equal to 8. Our joy was beyond expression in words; we embraced
each other and I well remember saying, ‘My dear Hal, this is Truth;
positive Truth; moral, but as certain and as irrefragible, as any mathematical
Truth is or ever can be shewn to be.’

We turned again toward the Board, and another course altogether of
demonstrations passed over the surface of it, and was made scrutable to
our perceptions. By one process the illimitable power of God was
borne in upon my apprehension with a vividness of conception that I had
never felt before.

By another I well remember Truth and Wisdom were shewn to be
one and the same, and all Truth to proceed from and to be an attribute of
God. By another, Infinite Justice, deduced from Infinite Power and Infinite
Truth, was arrived at, as His essential and necessary quality.
Again, the revealed Word of God as declared in the Bible was established
in my mind as the irresistible result of another process; and,
although several had intermediately passed over the Board, this was I
think the last. The Board faded, the figure at our side disappeared, we
were out of church, and presently I awoke, and lo! it was a Dream!
But the recollection of that dream has never faded from my memory,
and I trust that the influences of it may never be lost.

My mind for some time previous had been much afflicted with considerations
and doubts respecting the free agency of man, and the truth
of the Scriptures so far as they relate to everlasting punishment, and to
the prescience of God. These doubts had been infused in conversation
by the reasoning of an eminent lawyer. If you believe in the doctrine
of everlasting punishment said he, and believe also in the prescience
of God, and in His Omnipotence, must you not admit that God might
prevent the sinner from entering at all into this world of probation? into
this world of trial which is to prove too severe for his powers of resistance?
If I know that a candle that I purpose lighting will, from any
accident, or by any other hand after I shall have lighted it, be made to
burn my neighbor’s house; am I not in some degree participant or
accessary to the consequence if I persist in the intention? Why is
man to be made subject to consequences more direful to him than if he
had never been born at all into this world of evil? He has had no voice
in determining his mission into it, nor has his will been consulted in the
creation of his spirit, nor in the qualities with which that spirit is endued;
his existence also in a state of indulgence of wicked impulse, how
short and limited it has been; and how frequently mingled with the disposition
if not with repeated Effort toward goodness; shall he for twenty
years of vice, be subjected to everlasting punishment? how can this
consist with Divine Justice and Mercy? You say that he has had the
free option of good and evil; possibly so; but he has not chosen the
good, he has not adopted the course that leads to everlasting happiness,
and his everlasting misery might have been prevented; why then should
he have been called into being? Is not this misery ordained to him,
since it is not prevented, and since it has always been apparent as the
result of life to the creative power which must know, and which could
prevent, and has yet determined to create?

Now these doubts were weighing on my heart when I first stood before
that board; and when I had left the church, they were all removed.
They had made themselves—air, into which they vanished.
My hands were clasped together in pleasure at the relief; and when I
awoke, a sensation, the purest perhaps that life affords, had entire possession
of my heart, my mind, my soul. It was that gentle, yet etherial
sensation—that yellow-green of the ransomed spirit—when gratitude
that has never drawn a chain behind it, gratitude free as joy, gratitude
beautiful as hope, melts into love toward Him, ‘who first hath loved us!’

John Waters.

LINES TO BLUMINE.

Brooklyn, L. I. Hans Von Spiegel.

EPISTLE TO THE EDITOR.

W. P. P.

EARLY SPRING AT THE HOMESTEAD.

BY HANS VON SPIEGEL.

Lo! here is Spring again, the dainty goddess come back to see what
Winter has been doing for so many months in forest and meadow, on the
broad hill-side and in the valley. The old ice-king has had a merry
time of it, playing with the long branches of the graceful maiden-like
elm, and wrestling with the gnarled and haughty oak. You might have
heard him roaring in the depths of the woods, had you been here, venerable
Deidrich, day and night for a sevennight, apparently just for the
sake of making a noise, and compelling the obeisance of the forest.
Like any other demagogue, he gains attention by his blusterings. How
lowly that young poplar bent before him, while the old hemlocks scarcely
deigned a show of reverence! When you were in your youth, and the
world seemed larger than now, did you not feel more of respect and
awe for the great man than you now do? Ah! well-a-day! how little
is the world’s esteem worthy of care! Ambition climbs the dizzy steeps
of fame; the young and inexperienced, whose admiration is not worth
a straw, applaud; but the wise, for whose good-will Ambition toils, look
on with indifference; for they know the emptiness of human greatness.
But while we stop to moralize, the reader grows a-weary; and even
thou, Deidrich, who art so constitutionally polite, compressest thy labial
muscles, and thumpest nervously the floor with thy gold-headed walking
stick. What a pity that we cannot talk nonsense gracefully!

There, now, all this time has the damsel Spring been awaiting our
commands, shivering mayhap in her scanty drapery, while we have
been prating. So it is the world over. The best intentioned forget the
claims of others, listening to the sweet music of their own sweet voices.
Deidrich, you ought to be here in the country to see what Hans and
Peter are doing ‘at this present.’

Just back of the house, (we are at the old Homestead,) the snow has
melted away, and an impatient crocus is just peeping up to get a look
at the warm sun. The spruce, at whose foot it grows all the winter
long, has kindly extended one of its lower branches over it, to shield it
from the frost, and now straitens it up again to give the poor little plant
a glimpse or two of the warm blue sky and the golden sun. And here,
on the southern side of the house, the windows are thrown up, and the
door of the wing swung open for the first time in four long months.
There, Peter, in the side of the wing where you see the ends of two or
three bricks protruding from a circular hole in the clapboards, is the
nest of a pair of wrens that year after year come back to rear a new
family, and chirp and chatter away the summer, when their labors have
ceased. If it were a few weeks later, you might get acquainted with
the comical little occupants, who are as brisk and busy as if they were
not in reality great grand-parents to a whole republic of wrens. See!
on the top of the wood-shed, how proudly the old rooster struts along
the weather-board, enjoying the discomfiture of his wives, who have
been trying for this half-hour from the corn-house steps to reach the
same desirable elevation. And ever and anon he crows to answer the
tumultuous cackle of the plebeian fowl in the barn-yard, with whom he
never mingles, save when a hawk threatens them with common danger;
and then, forgetting all his aristocracy, he seeks the same sheltering
apple-tree or clump of briars in the fence-corner, where the enemy cannot
penetrate. Friend Peter, just buckle on your over-shoes and come
with me through the back gates which have stood open all winter to
allow ingress to huge sled-loads of fire-wood. Tread carefully over
the soft snow which ‘slumps’ at every step, and let us take a look at the
barn-yard down yonder, across the way from the farm-house.

Now is there not some poetry here? That yoke of brindle-oxen
standing under the dripping eaves chewing their cud; can you not see
gladness in their broad faces? There is old Line-back, the cow that
fifteen years ago used to have the same corner. I wonder if she recognizes
me? She is graver than the other cows; red and black, around
her butt; the tuft of wool on her horns shows that she retains her old
spirit, and does not allow the dainty sheep that crowd around us, to pick
out the most savory portions of her hay, without asserting her rights of
priority. There, flocking in the hay-loft door, over the cow-house, are
the cackling multitude which we heard awhile ago. They were probably
instigated to their clamor by the ‘cut-cut-ca-da-cut’ of some
young hen who had laid the first egg of the season. The rest replying,
no doubt, that they severally had done the same at some spring-time
anterior, but now for the first time thought of mentioning so trifling a
circumstance. Peter sagely opines that they are holding a tea party!
Let us drop into the ‘grain-barn’ and see what Hans’ little brothers are
raising such a children’s noise about. There goes Jim from the highest
scaffold into the straw at the bottom of the ‘deep bay.’ Billy is just
preparing to jump too; and Sid, a little more lazy, is but half up the
upper ladder. Sid sees us, and without saying a word, begins to climb
down again. This draws Billy’s attention, and crying ‘Hans has come
home! Hans has come!’ springs off, half smothering poor Jim in his
descent. There, now, Peter, after seeing me kiss my brothers, don’t
accuse me of possessing a cold heart, merely because I don’t happen to
love the women. What is a woman, but flesh and blood after all? Do
you think those black, flashing eyes and rosy cheeks and swelling bosom,
and those warm lips which breathe soft deceit the while you press them,
are any thing more than ‘common clay?’ I have seen many lovely
ones, yet as Byron hath it:

I wish, friend Peter, that we could stay a fortnight to enjoy the opening
of spring, but as we must wend our way eastward day after tomorrow,
we will resign ourselves to fate, and make the best of it. Look
down into the valley where Green Brook comes singing and bubbling
out from the deep shade of the hemlocks into the open meadows! The
snow has melted away from its margin, and the brown sward is smiling
in the cheerful afternoon sun. There, on that tall stump, on the other
side, sits a sentinel crow, while his companions are strolling about
catching up dainties which the frost and snow have hid from their vision
the winter long. Hurra! hurra! see over the edge of Pine Hill come
the first pigeons of the season from the warm south! Look how they
rise and fall again in their easy flight, as they pass up the valley and go
whirring in among the dense evergreens. I told you we should see
pigeons soon, but you thought it too early. We will have sport to-morrow,
if it is warm. For the present, let us see whether Hans’ old
fowling-piece is still safe from rust. Here it stands behind his bed-room
door, dressed up like an old maid for a sailing party, all in flannels.
There, Peter, is a true ‘stubb-and-twist,’ and the locks, although rather
out of fashion, are still as elastic as ever. This Hans himself will use
to-morrow; for it is an old friend and might feel hurt to be entrusted
to the care of a stranger. Here, Jim, run down to Colonel Hyde’s and
borrow his long double-barrel; but don’t tell him that pigeons have been
seen, or he will want to use it himself. Get a cannister of Dupont,
and half a dozen pounds of No. 4 shot. None of the fine mustard-seed
or robin, but the heavy duck-shot, that will enter at twenty rods. That
is the kind for pigeons, their feathers are so compact; for if you fire at
them flying, you might as well toss turnip-seed at them as to shoot fine
shot that will glance from their sleek feathers like drops of rain.

Here comes Jim, with the colonel’s gun. Is it not a grand one? Now
for cleaning the pieces, and filling the flasks and shot-belts. Look out,
or you will scald your fingers with the hot water. A little more soap,
and the barrels are as clean as a silver thimble. Snap! These are
fine caps: put this box into your pocket, or we shall forget it. Let us
look out at the sunset before tea, and then go to bed early, that we may
be up in season for to-morrow’s sport.

How broadly and slowly the sun sinks behind the forest! The glowing
points of his diadem reach to the zenith, and the purple clouds that float
around the west, dazzle the eye as they lie in contrast with the soft blue
sky. How bland the air is, like that of summer! We can almost drink it.

Well, mother, I am glad to be at home again at the tea-table. Here,
Peter, don’t look sad now because you are not at your own home. We
will go up in the summer and view Lake Erie in its beauty and vastness,
and stroll along the beach, beneath the overhanging cedars and larches,
and the broad-leafed chestnuts. Whose voice is that in the entry? Why,
Kate, how do you do! Never mind, if you are married, you needn’t
start so. I’m an old friend, you know, and your lips are as tempting
as ever! Ah! I forgot there were strangers by. Madam Von Rosenbacker:
Herr von Geist, a man after my own heart. Well, Kate, you
haven’t altered much from what you were when we used to pick blackberries
together. Indeed, I have lost the bottle of wine; you only
escaped though by three days over the six months that I limited your
marriage to. You shall have the champaigne, and I will come up in
the summer to bring it, and will buy an indulgence from the tee-total
society long enough to drink it with you. Now that she is gone, Peter,
let me ask if you don’t think her a glorious woman? Her large blue
eyes, her soft flaxen hair and rosy cheeks, and tall graceful figure, make
her ‘splendid.’ Peter, she was the first girl that I ever ‘set my face
against,’ as poor Power used to say; and now, old bachelor as I am, I
envy her husband.

To bed we go, and Somnus touches our eyes with his wand of poppies.
Ye gods! how sweet and soft a bed at home is, after travelling till one’s
bones ache with jolting stages and jarring rail-cars!

·····

Up! up! friend Peter; here we are abed, while daylight is glimmering
through the blinds. Just put your head out here at this window
and snuff the fresh spring air. Hear the roaring of Fish Creek as it
comes up over the wooded hills. By no means! Don’t suppose for the
sixtieth part of a minute that I intend to hurry you away without breakfast;
but you must step down into the kitchen, where the girl has prepared
us a strong cup of coffee; as good, no doubt, as Mother Bee used
to provide for our matin meal on College Hill. Here, Dancer, you must
have some breakfast too.

Well, are we all ready? Powder, shot, and caps enough, and every
thing in order? Eh! Peter, what are you twisting your mouth about?
Ah, yes, indeed, I forgot. Here’s a dozen Principes to use as occasion
may offer, and especially after dinner; which is to be sent up with the
rest into the sugar-bush, where we will rendezvous about one o’clock,
and in the afternoon help ‘sugar off.’ See the sunlight on the barns
yonder; how warm it looks! Look off on that hill-side, where the snow
lies so deep! How like a speck of gold it shimmers to the eye! and
there goes Dancer on the crust, as if he enjoyed the freshness of the
air, and the warm sunlight. Let us try the crust too, and if it will bear
us, we shall save time by going across lots. Here we go, with our heels
crunching the glittering pavement, leaving scarcely a vestige of our
tread, the frost of last night has so effectually congealed it. Yonder
across this valley which the hills prevent our seeing from the house, is
the sugar-bush, sloping to the south. The canal we first crossed leads
to the old mills down to the right yonder, where you see that grove of
black-cherry trees, and the little house on the knoll. The mist that you
see to the left, rises from the mill-dam, the monotonous hum of whose
falling waters you have heard for some time. This is Furnace Creek,
whose swift current harbors the most beautiful trout. That crow yonder
on the dry hemlock is calling to his mate, and the speckled wood-pecker
is tapping away at that old beech, that the nice insects within its decayed
interior may come out to make him a breakfast. Hark! do you not hear
the drum of that partridge? He is up there in that thicket of young
beeches and hemlocks, on the other side of the road. As you hear the
slow, measured drum which he gives at first, and which he hastens into
a whirr like distant thunder, does not ‘The old Man’s Counsel’ come fresh
to your memory, and almost ringing in your ear? Ah! this is the glory
of true poetry, that it clothes the commonest things with a new interest, and
forever after they become objects of love, at least of meditation. Who
that has read the same author’s ‘Lines to a Waterfowl,’ does not gaze
with other than a sportsman’s pleasure upon even a wild duck, if it flies
past him after sunset. But there goes a flock of pigeons, and here over
our heads; one! two! three! more than a hundred in each! What a
rushing sound their wings make! They fly too high for us just now:
but wait till we get on the cleared hill yonder to the right of the sugar-bush,
and we shall have rare sport as they emerge from the trees and
skim along the edge of the ‘clearing.’

Here we are in the sugar-bush. Are these not noble trees? For
how many years have they stood thus interlocking their strong boughs
like brethren! While Columbus was asking a supper for his boy at
the convent door, three centuries and a half ago, these same trees were
here, scarcely younger than now. Yonder is the hill we saw from the
rude bridge below the mill-dam. Let us clamber over the log-fence and
get into the clearing.

Well, Peter, this hill that we are on is just one mile from home, though
it looks not half the distance. Is this not a glorious view? Hill and
valley spread out like a map before us! The snow lies in patches upon
the fields, and the sun is lighting up the tinned spire of the village
church, which, as the stage passed it yesterday, you thought looked like
a superannuated old man with a martin-cage upon his crooked back.
There is the old homestead looking at us through the locusts that surround
it, and there are the orchards off to the right, which in a few
weeks will be white with blossoms. Now, steady, my boys! Do you
see that flock of pigeons? Wait till they pass us, that our shot may
take effect on their backs. Whang! hack!! bang!!! What! three
barrels off and only a handful of tail-feathers! How they opened as
we fired, as if to let the shot go through. Hist! don’t stir! Look up
softly into the dry top of this hemlock, right over our heads: four, five,
six! all in a huddle. I’ll fetch some of them with my last barrel.
Snap! fiz! confound the cap! Hold still, they see us. I’ve got a fresh
cap on: bang! Here comes one, tumbling through the limbs on to the
snow. Is he not a handsome bird; with his glossy purple breast and
slender blue neck! Load quickly, and let us be ready for the next
flock.

Hear them scream and coo in the wood to the right. Hear the leaves
crackle down on that slope where the snow is off under those tall beeches.
The ground is fairly blue with them. Softly there over the dry brush!
See them turning up the leaves for beech-nuts: they are all moving
this way. Down, behind this log: they are not twenty yards off. Cock
both barrels; and now fire! What a stunning sound they make, like
the roaring of a tornado! Look, they have settled down again on the
other side of the ravine. Well, here, Peter, what do you think of the
fun now?—fourteen cock pigeons and one hen, to be divided between us.
This is what I call sport: none of your reed-birds and meadow-larks,
such as cockney sportsmen frighten away from the fields of Jersey or
Long-Island. Here they come again by scores. Now let us see how
good a shot you are. Two cocks on the topmost branch of that old
maple, full forty yards to the trunk. No, no! don’t get any nearer, for
they see you. Well done! Hear him thump on the leaves; and here
comes the other, fluttering round and round like a shuttlecock. Ten
to one that you shot him through the head. There! I told you so! His
wings are not hurt, but a shot has cut away his bill. Here, Dancer,
don’t bite him so, but bring him here! Chick, chick, churr! Mister
Red-squirrel, we’ll ‘give you a few,’ as Jared used to say. On that
knot in the green hemlock, he sits with his tail spread out over his head,
for all the world like a young miss in a high-backed, old-fashined easy-chair.
Well, we wont harm him, for the sake of the associations his
comical appearance awakens.

Dancer is barking down in the ravine. There he comes! as if he were
crazy; he is on the track of a hare! Do you see that pair of slender
ears pricked up behind the roots of that fallen tree? Let me try my
skill at a long shot. I’ve hit them, that’s poz! No, I haven’t either;
for the nimble-footed thing is scudding away round the hill as safe as
if I had not wasted my loading on her.

This sunken cask down here where the water wells up through the
white sand, used to be the father of the cool spring water for the uses
of the Homestead, and was conveyed the whole distance in ‘pump-logs.’
You can see the end of one, with an iron band sunk into it, sticking out
of the earth. This spring, however, has been long exchanged for one
on higher ground, and the wooden logs for lead pipe, half as expensive,
and not half so healthy. Just pop over that chip-munk, whose head is
peeping out of the ground at the foot of the maple sapling. Too cruel!
Well done! you are growing compassionate all at once. Look out for
your head! I declare, you escaped narrowly! That dead limb would
have dispersed all your theology, had it struck your head. Well, Dancer,
what are you staring at? Do you think the old tree dropped one of its
limbs on purpose? Ah, ha! I see! Peter, do you see that tuft of dark
moss in the crotch of that largest maple: well, I am going to shoot at
it for sport, so here goes! I thought it was a black squirrel; how
he leaps from the top boughs. Hurrah! here we go over logs and
through bushes; the squirrel still ahead of us, springing from tree top
to tree top. How he rattles down the dry splinters as he scratches up
that dead hemlock. Now we’ve got him! Go round on the other side
of the tree and he will dodge back this way, and I shall get a crack at
him. But he don’t though! He must have a hole up there. Sure
enough, there is one! Let me get this old bough broken in two, and I
will start him. Now be ready, and shoot him as he comes out. The
old tree is hollow all the way up; it sounds as I strike like an old bass-drum.
There! he’s out! blaze away! Not that time did you
hit him. That’s better! see him hang by one leg! here he comes!
‘dead as a door nail!’ Thump! how he struck the ground. What a
tail he has!

·····

And now we are at the ‘boiling place.’ Two strong beech crotches
are driven into the ground, about twelve feet apart, and a strong pole is
laid over them, some five feet from the ground. The huge back-log
was the butt of that tremendous beech you see lying just at the top of
the knoll. The cauldron you see is filled with the fresh sap two or
three times a day, and before filling each time, the boiling liquid is
dipped out into the largest kettle alongside of it, and that in turn is
emptied into a smaller one, that no time may be lost in boiling it away.
Taste the syrup in this smaller kettle; it is almost molasses. Try on
that ‘neck-yoke’ and come, let us help carry sap before dinner. The
spiles you see sticking from augur-holes in every maple are made of
young sumacs, which are sawed off the right length, and then the pith
is punched out with a wire. The clean white-pine buckets, without
bails, into which the sap drips from the spiles, are made expressly for
this use, and so is that enormous hogshead where the sap is poured before
it is strained for the cauldron. For the present let us to dinner.
Well, Herr Peter, although our dinner was laid on a beech log, and our
table-cloth nothing but a piece of coarse linen, and our knives and forks
such as Adam and Eve used before us! was it not excellent! Wie
schmackt es! How smacked it! as it passed through our devouring
jaws; and how sweet was the pure spring water from the bright tin
dipper! Now for a quiet smoke on the plank settle in the bough-house,
while Joe and Hiram are getting ready to ‘sugar off.’ Here, if there
comes up a storm, they sit and watch the kettles; and sometimes when
the weather is clear they sit up all night. So at last you do love a cigar
better than a meerschaum? I confess it is the same with me! How old
Deidrich would frown, if he heard such an admission from those who
boast as we do the pure Deutchen-blut, the true Dutch blood!

What! two o’clock so soon! They have hung the ten-pail kettle
that contains the thick syrup upon a pole between two slender crotches,
and have already kindled a fire. How it bubbles and ‘blubbers’ up,
like thick hasty-pudding, with a dignified slowness that is inimitable.
Now it rises to the top of the kettle and will boil over! O, you needn’t
turn up your nose at the slice of clean fat pork that Joe has just thrown
in, for that has saved our sugar. See, it gradually subsides till it rests
a third way down. You have heard that oil will still the surface of
the sea; and the oily part of the pork answers the same purpose with
the boiling syrup. Now it begins to granulate, swing it off. Here, drop
some of it into this bucket of cold water, and then poke it out with that
pine stick, while I run up on the side-hill yonder and get a pail of snow,
which will cool it faster. Ha, ha, ha! you do look handsome; suppose
Meeta could see you with your jaws stuck fast together with the candy,
and your face looking like the head of Medusa. While you are getting
over the lock-jaw, I will trail some on this snow to take home to little
Sue, who begged me to bring her back some maple candy. Now let us
ride down home on the ox-sled, with the huge tin pails full of the hot
syrup, which wont get half cold before it is safe in the farm-house pantry,
in a half dozen well-buttered milk-pans to harden for future use.

Once more in bed after a hearty supper; and once more out of it,
too, for the stage horn is blown. We must hurry or we are left; for
it stops only fifteen or twenty minutes to change the mail.

·····

Yes, Peter, this Brookline is a little cleaner than Broadway.

RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY.

BY FLACCUS.

March, 1844.

THE ENGLISH STATE TRIALS.

DURING THE POPISH PLOT.

The recent Irish State Trials seem to have been conducted on the
part of the government with something of the same violence and partiality
that dishonor the ancient records of Great Britain’s criminal
jurisprudence. The exclusion of Roman Catholics from the jury was
an arbitrary and unwarrantable act; unjust in itself, disrespectful
to the larger portion of the Irish people, and calculated to destroy the
moral effect of the verdict, by producing the impression on the public
mind that the prisoners did not have a fair trial. We would not be understood
as complaining of the verdict. We do not see how, with a
strict adherence to the law and to the evidence, the jury could well have
decided otherwise. It is the eagerness to convict the prisoners manifested
on the part of the law-officers of the crown that is the object of
just reprehension.

Trials for offences against the State have happily been almost unknown
in this country, and we therefore find it difficult to conceive of
the dangers to which a prisoner is exposed, when the whole power of
the government is arrayed against him. But to one familiar with the
iniquitous manner in which they were conducted in Great Britain during
the seventeenth, and the earlier part of the eighteenth century, the proceedings
against O’Connell and his associates seem almost models of
judicial fairness and impartiality. To one not thus familiar, it is difficult
to convey an adequate idea of the extent to which legal tribunals
prostituted their functions to purposes of oppression and revenge. The
judges holding their offices by the slight tenure of royal favor, and generally
owing their elevation to the zeal they had shown to defend the
royal prerogatives, were, with a few honorable exceptions, willing instruments
in the hands of power. The interpreters of the law, who,
like the prophets of old, were bound to curse, or to bless, in obedience
to higher impulses than their own wills, became the mere mouth-pieces
of the government; the injustice of the decisions imperfectly concealed
by the sanctity of the office. Justice, and the favor of the court were
identical. The law and the royal pleasure were inseparably associated
in the mind of the judge.

We would not be understood as meaning that the English judges were
unjust, or partial in the trials between private citizens. In these cases
it was not often that there was any obstacle interposed to the administration
of even-handed justice. It was when the government came in as
a party; when political offenders were to be tried, that they too often
proved false to their trust. The temptations of office; the love of ease,
wealth, and distinction; the fear of ministerial enmity, of royal disgrace,
were too powerful for poor Honesty. The hour in which their
aid was most needed by the friendless prisoner, was that in which it was
withdrawn; for surely if men ever need an upright, able, and impartial
administration of the law, it is when they contend single-handed
against the influences of flattery, bribery, and intimidation, which those
in authority are ever able to employ. The odds are fearful in such a
contest. The prejudices of juries, the subservience of lawyers, the
servility of judges, gave scarce a hope that justice would not be wrested
to serve the purposes of the crown; that considerations of state policy
would not prove stronger than any abstract belief of the prisoner’s innocence
or guilt. That we have not misrepresented the degraded condition
of the English tribunals during the period we have mentioned, a
referencé to the state trials passim, will abundantly prove. Nor is it at
all strange that such should have been the case. During the dynasty
of the Tudors, and the reign of the first of the Stuarts, the duty alike
of the courts, and of parliament was simply to register the royal edicts.
If the formalities of law were observed, it was rather through the good-nature
of the sovereign, than from any consciousness of his inability to
break through their restraints. But after the rebellion, and especially
after the revolution, when the limits of prerogative became marked out
with some degree of precision, and monarchs could no longer effect their
purposes by open violence, then more subtle means were resorted to,
but scarcely less dangerous, to destroy those who were so unfortunate
as to become the objects of royal or ministerial enmity. The king, if
he could not make the law, could still appoint the judges of the law;
and the right of interpretation was hardly less powerful than the power
of legislation. Even when, after a lapse of time, the judges became in
a great measure independent of the crown, still it was not until many
years later, when the voice of an outraged people became more terrible
to them than the frowns of kings or ministers, that those accused of political
offence could hope for justice at their hands.

The reign of Charles the Second, in every respect the most disgraceful
in English history, is that period to which we wish now particularly to
ask the reader’s attention. During the latter part of it, the chief justice’s
seat was filled first by Scroggs, and afterwards by Jeffries; the
former came to the bench a little before the disclosures that took place
respecting the Popish Plot, and presided at the trials that took place in
consequence of that event. It is to these trials that we shall now confine
ourselves; only premising certain facts necessary to the perfect
understanding of the extracts which we are about to make.

It is unnecessary to go minutely into the details of the Popish Plot. A
general outline will answer our present purpose. The first who pretended
any knowledge of it, or made any disclosure respecting it, was
Titus Oates. He, when examined before the council in October, 1678,
stated that at a consult held by the Jesuits on the 24th of April preceding,
at the White Horse Tavern in London, resolutions had been adopted
to kill the king, overthrow the established church, and restore popery.
Upon this many arrests were made, and among others was Coleman,
who had been secretary to the late Duchess of York. His papers were
seized, and there was found a correspondence he had carried on several
years before with the confessor of Louis XIV., having reference mainly
to the restoration of the Catholic religion in England. These letters,
although in no way confirmatory of the alleged Plot, except so far as
they indicated an anxious desire on the part of the members of that
church to regain their lost ascendency in Great Britain, and their intention
to use every effort for that purpose, things already well known,
yet produced great excitement, and were regarded by many as conclusive
proof of the truth of Oates’ statements. Another event, which
happened about the same time, raised the excitement to its highest
pitch. Sir Edmundbury Godfrey, a London magistrate, before whom
Oates had made his depositions, was found murdered, and under such
circumstances as precluded the idea of suicide. Suspicion now deepened
into certainty. No one longer dared to doubt the reality of the
plot. To doubt, was to confess one’s self an accomplice. Nothing was
talked of but the Plot. The wildest rumors were caught up and
repeated, and soon grew into well-authenticated facts. The name
Papist, or Roman Catholic, became synonymous with assassin. Many,
not content with carrying arms, clothed themselves in armor. At the
funeral of Sir Edmondbury Godfrey, says North, in his Examen, ‘the
crowd was prodigious, both at the procession, and in and about the
church, and so heated, that any thing called Papist, were it a cat or a
dog, had probably gone to pieces in a moment. The Catholics all kept
close in their houses and lodgings, thinking it a good compensation to
be safe there, so far were they from acting violently at that time. But
there was all that which upheld among the common people an artificial
fright, so that every one almost fancied a popish knife just at his throat;
and at the sermon, beside the preacher, two thumping divines stood upright
in the pulpit, to guard him from being killed while he was preaching,
by the Papists.’

Oates immediately became a man of great consequence. He was
called the saviour of the nation, had lodgings given him at Whitehall,
and a pension from parliament of £1200 a year. But the more cool and
circumspect could not forget the notorious infamy of his character, or
implicitly rely on the word of a man who openly confessed that he had
gone among the Jesuits, and declared himself a convert to their faith
merely to betray them. But with the populace his credit was unbounded.
The more incredible his fictions, the better they suited the vulgar appetite.
In this sort of narrative, as Hume truly remarks, a fool was
more likely to succeed than a wise man. Accompanied by his guards,
for being supposed to be a special object of popish enmity, guards had
been assigned him, he walked about in great dignity, attired as a priest,
and ‘whoever he pointed at was taken up and committed; so that many
people got out of his way as from a blast, and glad they could prove
their two last years’ conversation. The very breath of him was pestilential,
and if it brought not imprisonment or death over such on whom
it fell, it surely poisoned reputation, and left good Protestants arrant
papists, and something worse than that, in danger of being put in the
plot as traitors.’1

Parliament was opened three days after Godfrey’s murder, and immediately
voted that it was of opinion that there had been, and was ‘a
damnable and hellish plot;’ and every day, both forenoon and afternoon,
a session was held at which the whole matter was discussed. The
arrests were numerous, and among others were several papist lords,
and Sir George Wakeman, the physician to the queen. Even the Duke
of York and the Queen herself were accused by Oates as traitors and
accomplices. These stories meeting such general credence, and rewards
being heaped upon the author, others, as might have been expected,
soon followed his example. The most notorious of these minor perjurers
was one Bedlow, who pretended to know the secret of Godfrey’s murder.
When first examined he knew nothing of the Plot, but told a ridiculous
story about forty thousand men who were coming over to England from
Spain. The next day, however, his knowledge was greatly increased,
and he pretended to be as fully informed of all the particulars of the
Plot as Oates himself. As we shall see by and by, whatever the bolder
villain swore to, his subordinate confirmed.

Such was the state of things when the first victim of this extraordinary
popular delusion were brought to trial. The earliest trial,
although the accused was not charged with being concerned in the plot,
was that of Stayley, a goldsmith or broker, on the 21st of November,
1678. The charge against him was that he had called the king a heretic,
and threatened to kill him. The chief witness against him was
one Castars. Bishop Burnet, who was well acquainted with him, says,
that when he heard who the witnesses were, he thought he was bound
to do what he could to stop it: ‘so I sent both to the lord chancellor and
the attorney general to let them know what profligate wretches these
witnesses were. Jones, the attorney general, took it ill of me that I
should disparage the king’s evidence. Duke Lauderdale, having heard
how I had moved in this matter, railed at me with open mouth. He
said I had studied to save Stayley for the liking I had to any one that
would murder the king.’ The trial proceeded, and one of the witnesses
testified to the following words as spoken by the prisoner: ‘The King of
England is the greatest heretic, and the greatest rogue in the world;
here’s the heart and here’s the hand that would kill him; I myself.’

Prisoner. ‘Here’s the hand, and here’s the heart that would kill
myself; not would kill him myself.’

L. C. J. ‘What Jesuit taught you this trick? It is like one of
them. It is the art and interest of a Jesuit so to do.’

In this, as in all the subsequent trials, the existence of the Plot was
taken for granted as an incontestable fact. Another fact was also assumed,
most improperly indeed, but not without some show of reason, that
it was an admitted doctrine of the Romish church, that however sinful
an act might be in itself, it lost its sinfulness if the interests of the church
demanded its performance. Therefore it was argued, to kill a heretic-king,
to swear falsely, to deceive an enemy, is to do nothing wrong in
the eyes of a Papist, if the pope or the bishops command it. Such a
man it is proper for us to regard as an enemy, for his principles would
lead him to employ any means for the destruction of those whom he was
taught to regard as the enemies of his church.

It is unnecessary for us to stop to point out the fallacy of this mode of
reasoning. Our business at present is only to show the effect it had upon
the minds both of the court and the jury. Thus the Chief Justice
reasoned in his charge at the trial: ‘You, and we all, are sensible of
the great difficulties and hazards that is now both against the king’s
person, and against all Protestants, and our religion too; which will
hardly maintain itself, when they have destroyed the men; but let ’em
know that many thousands will lose their religion with their lives, for
we will not be Papists, let the Jesuits press what they will, (who are the
foundations of all this mischief,) in making proselytes by telling them,
Do what wickedness you will, it’s no sin, but we can save you; and if
you omit what we command, we can damn you. Excuse if I am a little
warm, when perils are so many, their murders so secret, that we
cannot discover the murder of that gentleman whom we all knew so
well, when things are transacted so closely, and our king in so great
danger, and our religion at stake. ’Tis better to be warm here than in
Smithfield. When a Papist once hath made a man a heretic, there is no
scruple to murder him. Whoever is not of their persuasion are heretics,
and whoever are heretics may be murdered if the pope commands
it; for which they may become saints in heaven; this is that they have
practised. If there had been nothing of this in this kingdom, or other
parts of the world, it would be a hard thing to impose it upon them; but
they ought not to complain when so many instances are against them.
Therefore discharge your consciences as you ought to do; if guilty, let
him take the reward of his crime, and you shall do well to begin with
this man, for perchance it may be a terror to the rest. Unless they
think they can be saved by dying in the Roman faith, though with such
pernicious and traitorous words and designs as these are, let such go to
Heaven by themselves. I hope I shall never go to that Heaven, where
men are made saints for killing kings.’

The flimsy logic and cool-blooded cruelty of this charge are too obvious
to require mention. According to the chief justice, no Papist
could complain that he was hanged for treason because some members
of his church had massacred the Protestants on Bartholomew’s day.
The recommendation ‘to begin with this man, that it may be a terror to
the rest,’ marks well the character of the judge, and the temper of the
jury that could advance or approve such a detestable doctrine.

Stayley was convicted and thus sentenced: ‘You shall return to prison,
from thence shall be drawn to the place of execution, where you
shall be hanged by the neck, cut down alive, your quarters shall be
severed, and be disposed of as the king shall think fit, and your bowels
burnt, and so the Lord have mercy on your soul.’

This sentence was executed five days after.

The next victim was Coleman. The evidence against him was of a
twofold nature; his own letters, and the testimony of Oates and Bedlow.
As to the first, they disclose clearly enough the existence of a Plot, but
a Plot in which Charles himself was the chief conspirator; a Plot not
only to restore popery, but to destroy English liberty. This Plot was
of an early date, and began indeed almost at the restoration of the king.
The monarch of France and the Duke of York were his accomplices.
Coleman’s part in it seems to have been merely that of an ambitious, intriguing,
bigotted partizan, pleased with being entrusted with the secrets
of the great; and much disposed to magnify the importance and value
of his services. His letters, that were produced on his trial, related to
the years 1674 and ’5. If there was any correspondence of a later
date, it was never discovered. In fine, we may say of these letters that
if there was enough in them to convict Coleman of high treason, the
king, the duke, and several of the most prominent statesmen of that period
were equally guilty.

The testimony of Oates was so strange and improbable, that it never
could have obtained credence for a moment, except at a time when men
had ‘lost their reason.’ The basis of his whole narration, was his
statement relating to the consult of the Jesuits in April, which we give in
his own words. ‘They were ordered to meet by virtue of a brief from
Rome, sent by the father general of the society. They went on to these
resolves: That Pickering and Grove should go on, and continue in
attempting to assassinate the king’s person by shooting, or other means.
Grove was to have fifteen hundred pounds. Pickering being a religious
man, was to have thirty thousand masses, which at twelvepence a
mass amounted to much that money. This resolve of the Jesuits was
communicated to Mr. Coleman in my hearing at Wild House. My
lord, this was not only so, but in several letters he did mention it, and in
one letter, (I think I was gone a few miles out of London,) he sent to me
by a messenger, and did desire the duke might be trepaned into this Plot
to murder the king.’

But one consult of fifty Jesuits, all eager to carry their diabolical
plans of assassination and murder into execution, was not enough for
Dr. Oates, and he went on to relate the proceedings that took place at
another, held at the Savoy in the month of August, when the Benedictine
monks were present with the Jesuits. ‘In this letter,’ (one written
by Archbishop Talbot, the titular archbishop of Dublin,) ‘there were
four Jesuits had contrived to despatch the Duke of Ormond. (These
were his words.) To find the most expedient way for his death Fogarthy
was to be sent to do it by poison, if these four good fathers did not
hit of their design. My lord, Fogarthy was present. And when the
consult was almost at a period, Mr. Coleman came to the Savoy to the
consult, and was mighty forward to have father Fogarthy sent to Ireland
to despatch the duke by poison. This letter did specify they were then
ready to rise in rebellion against the king for the pope.’

Att. Gen. ‘Do you know any thing of arms?’

‘There were forty thousand black bills; I am not so skilful in arms
to know what they meant, (military men know what they are,) that
were provided to be sent into Ireland for the use of the Catholic party.’

In addition to the forty thousand black bills, Oates stated that there
had been £200,000 contributed by the Catholics, and that he heard Coleman
say ‘that he had found a way to transmit it for the carrying on of
the rebellion in Ireland.’

Here certainly was treason enough concocted, if one could believe the
witnesses, to have hung a hundred men. No less than seven men had
engaged to kill the king; all of whom, through some strange infelicity,
did not find an opportunity even to make the attempt. Not satisfied
with this number of assassins, Coleman would have had the Duke of
York brought into the Plot, and made the murderer of his brother.
Could human folly frame a set of lies more gross and palpable?

Beside Coleman’s general knowledge of the Plot, Oates mentioned
several circumstances showing the special interest that he had taken in
it; that he had written letters which the witness had carried to St.
Omers, in which were these ‘expressions of the king, calling him tyrant,
and that the marriage between the Prince of Orange and the Lady Mary,
the Duke of York’s eldest daughter, would prove the traitor’s and tyrant’s
ruin;’ that ‘this letter was written in plain English words at
length;’ that he had sent another letter in which he promised ‘that the
ten thousand pounds’ (sent by the Jesuits,) ‘should be employed for no
other intent or purpose but to cut off the King of England;’ and that he
had given money that ‘the four Irish ruffians,’ who were to kill the king
at Windsor, might be speedy in their business.

In all these trials there is nothing that more strikingly shows the infamous
manner in which these witnesses were allowed to testify, than the
withholding of such parts of their evidence as they pretended it was
improper at that time to bring forward. Thus they protected themselves;
for no one durst accuse them lest he himself should be charged as a party
to the conspiracy. At this trial Oates said, without a word of dissent
from the Chief Justice, ‘I could give other evidence but will not, because
of other things which are not fit to be known yet.’

It is impossible that the Chief Justice, or the other judges, should have
believed such a story as this even for a moment. We make all necessary
allowance for the influence of great popular excitement. We
know that judges are but men, and are not exempt more than other men
from the contagion of those occasional outbursts of frenzy, which seem
to destroy all individual independence, and all sense of individual responsibility;
and which for a time makes a nation like a herd of maddened
buffaloes, ignorant whither it is going, but unable to stop in its
furious career. Yet by their position judges are, of all classes of men,
the farthest removed from popular influences of this nature. Their
habits of legal investigation, fit them in an eminent degree to weigh
with scrupulous accuracy the characters of witnesses; to detect improbabilities
and contradictions. Stories that may deceive even intelligent men
unacquainted with the laws of evidence, and the bearings of testimony,
stand revealed at first glance to the practised eye of the judge as a tissue
of falsehoods. Here the judges could not have been deceived.
Who could believe that the Jesuits, a body of men not less celebrated
for their profound knowledge of the politics of every kingdom in Christendom,
than for the wisdom with which they adapted their plans of
proselytism to the changing circumstances of the times, should have
formed a plan to restore popery in England by massacre and conquest?
The thing is too preposterous to merit a moment’s attention.

Still more ridiculous are the details of the Plot as disclosed by Oates.
Would the Jesuits, even if they had formed such plans, confide them to
a penniless, friendless vagabond; a man of notoriously bad character,
who was, while at St. Omers, the butt and laughing stock of the whole
college? Such secrets are not usually revealed to any but tried men,
and the Jesuits were the last of all conspirators to bestow their confidence
rashly. Yet here was a conspiracy whose disclosure would have
brought a certain and speedy death to every one engaged in it, known we
know not to how many hundreds, and many of these too found in the
lowest ranks of the populace. The manner of its execution is of a
piece with all the rest. First, two men were employed to kill the king.
For two years they could find no opportunity to do it. Then four Irish
ruffians were employed. Who they were, or what became of them, no
one knew. Then the physician of the queen was hired to poison him.
To this horrible plan of assassination, were consenting not only the highest
dignitaries of the Romish church, but some of the noblest peers of
England and of France. But we have neither time nor patience to proceed
farther with such miserable fabrications. We say then that the
judges never could have believed in the existence of such a Plot, and
that the prisoners tried before them were immolated upon the altar of
their own personal popularity. Rather than resist the current of popular
feeling, and dare to award justice and uphold the supremacy of
impartial law, they chose to swim with the tide, and sacrifice men whom
they knew in their hearts to be innocent. It is this that adds tenfold
guilt to the brutality of their conduct. We cannot forget that they were
dishonest in their very cruelty; that they insulted their victims, browbeat
the witnesses, trampled on judicial forms to gain the favor of an
infuriated mob, whose madness they laughed at and derided.

At the commencement of the trial, Coleman thus alluded to the law
of England, forbidding counsel to prisoners accused of criminal offences,
and to the prejudice that then prevailed against those of his religion:
‘I hope, my lord, if there be any point of law that I am not skilled in,
that your lordships will be pleased not to take the advantage over me.
Another thing seems most dreadful, that is, the violent prejudice that
seems to be against every man in England that is confessed to be a Roman
Catholic. It is possible that a Roman Catholic may be very innocent
of these crimes. If one of those innocent Roman Catholics should
come to this bar, he lies under such disadvantages already, and his prejudices
so greatly biasseth human nature, that unless your lordships will
lean extremely much on the other side, justice will hardly stand upright
and lie upon a level.’

L. C. J. ‘You need not make any preparations for us in this matter;
you shall have a fair, just and legal trial; if condemned it will be
apparent you ought to be so; and without a fair proof there shall be no
condemnation. Therefore you shall find we will not do to you as you
do to us, blow up at adventure, kill people because they are not of your
persuasion: our religion teacheth us another doctrine, and you shall find
it clearly to your advantage.’

This was fairness and impartiality in the eyes of the Chief Justice!

Coleman did not conduct his defence with so much ability as his reputation
might lead us to expect. He seems to have been dismayed at the
dangers that threatened him, and hopeless of a fair trial, bowed before
the storm. An attempted alibi was feebly supported, although Oates
was so indefinite in regard to time that to attempt to convict him of
falsehood was of little avail. The chief points of his defence were the
improbability of the whole story, and the fact that Oates on his examination
before the council had said that he did not know him. Oates
thus excused himself: ‘My lord, when Mr. Coleman was upon his
examination before the council board, he saith I said that I never saw
him before in my life; I then said that I would not swear that I had
seen him before in my life, because my sight was bad by candle-light,
and candle-light alters the sight much; but when I heard him speak,
I could have sworn it was he, but it was not then my business. I cannot
see a great way by candle-light.’

Being asked why he had not accused Coleman at the same time when
he accused Wakeman and the Jesuits, he pretended that it was ‘for
want of memory. Being disturbed and wearied in sitting up two nights,
I could not give that good account of Mr. Coleman, which I did afterwards
when I consulted my papers;’ as if in giving the names of many
meaner persons, he should from forgetfulness overlook one so considerable
as Coleman. The testimony of Oates was confirmed by Bedlow,
who did not hesitate to swear to any thing that the more inventive genius
of his fellow-witness had devised.

In summing up, the Chief Justice animadverted with considerable force
upon the nature of the letters that had been read as proof of a design to
restore popery in England; this he most unjustifiably argued, could not
be effected by peaceable means: ‘Therefore,’ he says, ‘there must be
more in it, for he that was so earnest in that religion would not have
stuck at any violence to bring it in; he would not have stuck at blood.
For we know their doctrines and their practises, and we know well with
what zeal the priests push them forward to venture their own lives, and
take away other men’s that differ from them, to bring in their religion
and to set up themselves.’

After speaking of the general ignorance of the Papists, and the general
diffusion of knowledge among the Protestants, ‘insomuch that scarce
a cobbler but is able to baffle any Roman priest that ever I saw or met
with,’ he goes on; ‘and after this I wonder that a man who hath been
bred up in the Protestant religion, (as I have reason to believe that you,
Mr. Coleman, have been, for if I am not misinformed your father was a
minister in Suffolk,) for such a one to depart from it, is an evidence
against you to prove the indictment. I must make a difference between
us and those who have been always educated that way. No man of
understanding, but for by-ends, would have left his religion to be a
Papist. And for you, Mr. Coleman, who are a man of reason and
subtilty, I must tell you, (to bring this to yourself,) upon this account,
that it could not be conscience; I cannot think it to be conscience.
Your pension was your conscience, and your secretary’s place your bait.
I do acknowledge many of the popish priests formerly were learned men,
and may be so still beyond the seas; but I could never yet meet with
any here, that had any other learning or ability but artificial, only to
delude weak women and weaker men.

‘They have indeed ways of conversion and conviction by enlightening
our understandings with a faggot, and by the powerful and irresistible
arguments of a dagger. But these are such wicked solecisms in their
religion, that they seem to have left them neither natural sense nor natural
conscience. Not natural sense, by their absurdity in so unreasonable
a belief as of the wine turned into blood: not natural conscience, by
their cruelty, who make the Protestant’s blood as wine, and these priests
thirst after it. Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.

‘Mr. Coleman, in one of his letters, speaks of rooting out our religion
and our party; and he is in the right, for they can never root out the
Protestant religion but they must kill the Protestants. But let him and
them know, if ever they shall endeavor to bring popery in by destroying
of the king, they shall find that the Papists will thereby bring destruction
upon themselves, so that not a man of them would escape.

‘Ne catulus quidem relinquendus.’

‘Our execution shall be as quick as their gunpowder, but more effectual.
And so, gentlemen, I shall leave it to you to consider what his
letters prove him guilty of directly, and what by consequence what he
plainly would have done, and then how he would have done it, and
whether you think his fiery zeal had so much cold blood in it as to spare
any others.

‘For the other part of the evidence, which is by the testimony of the
present witnesses, you have heard them: I will not detain you longer
now; the day is going out.’

Mr. Justice Jones. ‘You must find the prisoner guilty, or bring in
two persons perjured.’

The verdict was what might have been anticipated from such a
charge. Coleman was found guilty, and the next day sentenced. After
sentence had been pronounced, he protested his innocence, but was
brutally interrupted by the Chief Justice: ‘I am sorry, Mr. Coleman, that
I have not charity enough to believe the words of a dying man.’

In answer to Coleman’s request that his wife might visit him in prison,
he at first seemed disposed to deny it, and said: ‘You say well, and it is
a hard case to deny it; but I tell you what hardens my heart: the insolencies
of your party, (the Roman Catholics I mean,) that they every
day offer, which is indeed a proof of their Plot, that they are so bold and
impudent, and such secret murders committed by them as would harden
any man’s heart to do the common favors of justice and charity that to
mankind are usually done. They are so bold and insolent that I think
it is not to be endured in a Protestant kingdom.’

His request however was granted. He was executed the third of
December following.

We have dwelt with some particularity upon this trial, not because it
is by any means the most flagrant for the contemptuous disregard shown
by the judges, not only to the legal rights, but to the feelings of the prisoner,
but because it came first in the order of time, and serves in a good
measure to explain all the trials that follow it. Comment upon it is
needless. Such a mockery of justice would disgrace the tribunals of
savages. Whatever seems unfavorable to the prisoner is pressed home
by the Chief Justice, most strongly against him. Whatever makes for
him is kept out of sight. To have been born a Roman Catholic is a
crime; to have deliberately adopted that faith, is a damnable sin; one
for which there is no expiation. The absurd fictions of Oates and Bedlow
are commended to the jury as worthy of implicit credence. The
whole weight of judicial authority and influence is thrown into the scale
of condemnation.

On the seventeenth of the same December, Whitebread, Fenwick,
Ireland, Pickering and Grove, were brought to trial. The chief witnesses
against them were Oates and Bedlow. The counsel for the crown
thus opened the case: ‘May it please your lordships, and you gentlemen
of the jury, the persons here before you stand indicted of high treason;
they are five in number; three of them are Jesuits, one is a priest,
the fifth is a layman; persons fitly prepared for the work in hand.’
After a few other observations, he proceeds to institute a comparison between
this Plot and the famous Gunpowder Plot. The second and third
points of resemblance in the two, he thus states: ‘Secondly, the great
actors in the design were priests and Jesuits, that came from Valladolid
in Spain, and other places beyond the seas. And the great actors in
this Plot are priests and Jesuits that are come from St. Omers and other
places beyond the seas, nearer home than Spain.

‘Thirdly, that Plot was chiefly guided and managed by Henry Garnet,
superior and provincial of the Jesuits then in England; and the
great actor in this design is Mr. Whitebread, superior and provincial of
the Jesuits now in England.’

The evidence of Oates was the same in substance that he gave at
Coleman’s trial, but with such additional particulars as he judged necessary
to keep the popular excitement alive. Thus, in answering the
question, what he knew of any attempts to kill the king at St. James’
park, he said: ‘I saw Pickering and Grove several times walking in
the park together, with their secured pistols, which were longer than
ordinary pistols, and shorter than some carbines. They had silver bullets
to shoot with, and Grove would have had the bullets to be champt
for fear that if he should shoot, if the bullets were round, the wound
that might be given might be cured.’

Att. Gen. ‘Do you know any thing of Pickering’s doing penance,
and for what?’

‘Yes, my lord. In the month of March last, (for these persons have
followed the king several years;) but he at that time had not looked to
the flint of his pistol, but it was loose, and he durst not venture to give
fire. He had a fair opportunity, as Whitebread said; and because he
missed it through his own negligence he underwent penance, and had
twenty or thirty strokes of discipline, and Grove was chidden for his
carelessness.’

Of the ‘four Irish ruffians’ that went to Windsor to kill the king,
Oates could give no account. How he could reconcile it with his duty
to His Majesty to let these assassins lie in wait from August to October,
without notifying any one of their murderous intentions, he did not see
fit to explain, and of course the attorney general and the judges forgot
to ask him.

Not the least wonderful part of his evidence is that which he speaks
of the ill usage he received from Whitebread in September, who
charged him with having betrayed them: ‘So, my lord, I did profess a
great deal of innocency, because I had not then been with the king, but
he gave me very ill language, and abused me, and I was afraid of a
worse mischief from them. And though, my lord, they could not prove
that I had discovered it, yet upon the bare suspicion, I was beaten and
affronted, and reviled, and commanded to go beyond sea again; nay,
my lord, I had my lodgings assaulted to have murdered me if they
could.’

This is certainly the strangest way to conciliate a disaffected conspirator,
that we ever heard of! Most men would have preferred to use
bribes and caresses; but the Jesuits, it seems, knew their man, and chose
to beat him into secrecy and submission!

Bedlow’s evidence, as usual, was mainly confirmatory of the statements
of Oates, embellished by such new incidents as his feebler powers
of invention could frame. He was, however, not quite satisfied with
this subordinate part; and therefore at the close of his evidence pretends
to recollect that he had omitted one thing very material: ‘At the same
time that there was a discourse about these three gentleman being
to destroy the king at New-Market, there was a discourse of a design to
kill several noble persons, and the several parts assigned to every one.
Knight was to kill the Earl of Shaftsbury, Pritchard, the Duke of Buckingham,
Oniel, the Earl of Ossory, Obrian, the Duke of Ormond,’
An assassination of noblemen on a truly magnificent scale!

Nothing appearing in Bedlow’s evidence to implicate Fenwick and
Whitebread, and two witnesses being necessary to prove the charge, they
were sent back to prison. When they were subsequently brought up
for trial for the same offence, and pleaded that they could not a second
time be tried, their plea was overruled, although founded on one of the
commonest principles of law, and sanctioned by a thousand precedents.
The reasoning of Scroggs and North, the Chief Justice of the Common
Pleas, is so curious that it is worth quoting. Whitebread, after objecting
that he is informed that no man can be put in jeopardy of his life
the second time for the same cause: ‘I speak it not for my sake only,
but for the sake of the whole nation; no man should be tried twice for
the same cause; by the same reason a man may be tried twenty or
one hundred times.’

Scroggs. ‘You say well, it is observed, Mr. Whitebread; but you
must know that you were not put in jeopardy of your life for the same
thing, for first the jury were discharged of you; it is true, it was supposed
when you were indicted that there would be two witnesses against
you, but that fell out otherwise, and the law of the land requiring two
witnesses to prove you guilty of treason, it was thought reasonable that
you should not be put upon the jury at all, but you were discharged, and
then you were in no jeopardy of your life.’

‘Under favor, my lord, I was in jeopardy, for I was given in charge
to the jury; and ’tis the case in Seyer, 31 Eliz., he was indicted for a
burglary committed the 31st of August, and pleaded to it, and afterward
another indictment was preferred, and all the judges did declare that he
could not be indicted the second time for the same fact, because he was
in jeopardy of his life again.’

C. J. North. ‘The oath the jury take is, that they shall well and
truly try, and true deliverance make of such prisoners as they shall have
in charge; the charge of the jury is not full ‘till the court give them a
a charge at last, after evidence had; and because there was a mistake
in your case, that the evidence was not so full as might be, the jury before
they ever considered concerning you at all they were discharged,
and so you were not in jeopardy; and, I in my experience, know it to be
often done, and ’tis the course of law.’

In this opinion all the judges coincided. Sad indeed was the condition
of things in poor England when all her judges could resort to such
miserable quibbles; or worse than this, could deliberately falsify the
law, to condemn to an ignominious death two defenceless prisoners!

To return from this digression. The three remaining prisoners were
found guilty. The Chief Justice in charging the jury was even more
violent against the Papists than in his charge at Coleman’s trial: ‘Some
hold that the pope in council is infallible; and ask any Popish Jesuit of
them all and he will say the pope is himself infallible in council or he
is no true Jesuit; and if so, whatever they command is to be justified by
their authority; so that if they give a dispensation to kill a king, that
king is well killed. They indulge all sorts of sins, and no human bonds
can hold them.

‘They have some parts of the foundation ’tis true, but they are adulterated
and mixed with horrid principles and impious practises. They
eat their God, they kill their king, and saint the murderer. This is a
religion that quite unhinges all piety, all morality, all conversation, and
to be abominated by all mankind.

‘I return now to the fact which is proved by two witnesses, and by
the concurrent evidence of the letter and the maid; and the matter is as
plain and notorious as can be, that there was an intention of bringing in
popery by a cruel and bloody way; for I believe they never could have
prayed us into their religion. I leave it therefore for you to consider
whether you have not as much evidence from these two men as can be
expected in a case of this nature; and whether Mr. Oates be not rather
justified by the testimony offered against him, than discredited. Let
prudence and conscience direct your verdict, and you will be too hard
for their art and cunning.

‘Gentlemen, if you think you shall be in long we will adjourn the
court till the afternoon and take your verdict then.’

Jury. ‘No, my lord, we shall not be long.’

After a very short recess the jury returned with a verdict of guilty
against all.

C. J. ‘You have done, gentlemen, like very good subjects and very
good Christians; that is to say, like very good Protestants. And now,
much good may their thirty thousand masses do them!’

Before the court pronounced sentence Ireland loudly complained that
he had had no time to call his witnesses: ‘So that we could have none
but only those that came in by chance, and those things they have declared,
though true, were not believed.’ His objection was overruled,
and the Recorder, Sir George Jeffries, proceeded to pass sentence. The
spirit that pervaded his speech may be seen in this extract: ‘I am sure
this was so horrid a design, that nothing but a conclave of devils in hell,
or a college of such Jesuits as yours on earth, could have thought
upon.’

At the trial of Berry, Green and Hill, for the murder of Sir Edmondbury
Godfrey, the improbabilities of the testimony and the contradictions
of the witnesses were so glaring that it seems incredible that any
man could believe them. As a specimen: Praunce, the chief witness,
said that the body was taken to Hill’s lodgings where it remained two
days in a certain room he mentioned. In defence, it was shown by all
the family, that that room was an open one; that scarcely an hour
passed but some one went through it. But instead of receiving this testimony,
the Chief Justice told the witnesses that it was very suspicious
they had not seen the body, and that it was well for them they were not
indicted. But we have not space to quote further. The extracts we
have already made will be sufficient to show Scrogg’s utter contempt
for those duties which the law imposed upon him as the counsel for the
prisoners; his abusive and threatening demeanor toward their witnesses;
his appeals to the passions of the jury, their bigotry and their fears; and
in a word, his total destitution of every quality that marks the honest,
fair-minded, and impartial judge.

We intended to speak of the disgraceful and cowardly part which
Charles the Second bore in these proceedings. Convinced that the Plot
was a mere fiction, he saw day by day his innocent and faithful subjects
led to the gallows without making an effort for their safety, or
giving utterance to a word of disapprobation. It was not until the
Queen was attacked, that the selfish monarch interfered. A word from
him turned the abuse of Scroggs into an opposite channel, and Oates
and Bedlow were now as bitterly reviled as the Jesuits had been before.
We believe that Charles was a willing spectator if not an active promoter
of these legal butcheries, hoping that thereby a vent would be given
to the popular fury, and he himself, by such a sacrifice, regain the lost
affections of his people.

We intended also to speak of the conduct of the leading English
statesmen during this period; of Lauderdale, of Shaftsbury, of Danby,
and of Buckingham; but our limits are already overpassed.
We can only say that the character of the monarch was truly reflected
in the character of his counsellors; that as England has
never had so faithless and profligate a king, she has never been disgraced
by such unscrupulous, despicable, and short-sighted ministers.

THE INFANT’S BURIAL.

BY THE SHEPHERD OF SHARONDALE, VALLEY OF VIRGINIA.

A PISCATORIAL ECLOGUE.

VEL ISAACUS WALTON IN NOVAM SCALAM REDIVIVUS.

BY PETER VON GEIST.

Piscator. You are happily met, my fair young lady!

Discipula. A very good morrow to you, Mr. Piscator. You are
early a-foot, with your rod and lines.

Piscator. A veteran of the angle will be stirring early; there is a
brace of fish waiting for my hook on the other side of our lake. But
you, my gentle maiden, have you come down to the beach to see the
sun rise? and mayhap to pluck a rose with the dew on’t? I think you
have found it; for I think I can see the rose on your cheek, and the
dew in your eye. It is sweet to be up betimes in the morning, when
the air and the new sunlight are as clear and calm as your own
thoughts.

Discipula. It is even so, as you and I know right well. A pleasant
sail to you; God send a dozen fish, and may you kill them merrily.
But honest Mr. Piscator, do you go alone to-day?

Piscator. I think so to do; for you are to note, a companion of patience
and sober demeanor, free from profane jests and scurrilous discourse,
is worth gold, but is not so easy to be come at. And none other
than such jumps with my humor.

Discipula. And when, my good Mr. Piscator, will you give me another
lesson in the art of angling? For you must know the last has only
increased my desire to learn something more of it. Or do you think
that we women can never attain skill in that noble and gentle art?

Piscator. That it is a noble and a gentle art I am ready to maintain;
and that women have attained skill in it is not to be doubted; as
you will read in books of old time, that ladies both hunted, and hawked,
and fished.

Discipula. But the lesson, my honest master? When shall I have
another lesson?

Piscator. You shall even suit your own convenience. And some
fine morning, when you are so disposed, we will take a walk down the
river; when I will teach you to cast your line for trout; for indeed, it
requires a sharp wit and much practice to throw your fly so that the
trout will rise at it.

Discipula. Not in the river, if it please you, good Mr. Piscator, not
in the river! Teach me to fish in the lake.

Piscator. Without doubt, my fair young lady, it must be as you
desire. And yet, it is not every woman that would have the courage to
cross the pond in a skiff that rocks to every ripple.

Discipula. Trust me for that. You should know that I am not
wont to be frightened at trifles.

Piscator. Truly, it is so; and I do not question your courage.
Then on any day that you will appoint, God willing, I will give you a
sail; or indeed, this morning, if duty does not incline you in another
direction, and you will step with me into my little boat yonder.

Discipula. That shall I with right good will. But I shall have to
make you wait while I get my fishing tackle.

Piscator. Of necessity you shall not do that; for I remember now,
I can fit you with a spare harness of my own.

Discipula. Then let us be going, say I. And is this the skiff?
What a painted little cockle-shell of a boat, with its two masts! I suppose
it will bear us both?

Piscator. It will bear twenty like you and me. Please let me help
you to step in; and though you feel it to give under your feet, and as it
were, slide away from beneath you, yet now when you are set down on
the bench, you perceive it is perfectly steady.

Discipula. Oh, I shall not be in the least afraid. What a tiny little
schooner! But is it not bold to spread both sails? And see, now
that we come round to the wind, how the skiff keels over.

Piscator. It is entirely safe, my fair scholar; for since you have
chosen me to be your instructor and master in the science of the angle,
you must be content to be called my scholar. It is entirely safe; and
you must observe, that however much it may keel over, it cannot upset;
for if struck by a sudden squall, or flaw of the wind, the masts will go
by the board, and so it will right.

Discipula. Excellently well contrived. But has not the breeze suddenly
died away? Yet the sails are distended, and miniature waves
are thrown off from either side of the bow.

Piscator. The breeze seems to have decreased, because we are
moving in the same direction with it; and you will see, now when I
bring the boat more toward the wind, that it blows as strong as before,
and our motion is well nigh stopped.

Discipula. That I can very well see; and I pray you, my master,
not to bring the skiff so far into the wind to prove your proposition to me
as to capsize it. The masts bend over toward the water more than it is
pleasant to see.

Piscator. There is no danger; and after half an hour’s experience
you will become used to it, and lose all apprehension. I think I will
alter our course a couple of points; so if you have a mind, since I
cannot well leave the tiller, you may unloose the cord that fastens the
forward sail to the side of the boat; wait a moment till we come round,
and the sail hangs loose in the wind; now loose the rope, and let it out
about a foot; so, wind it round as it was before. Neatly done! Next,
let out the other sail in the same way and to the same length. It was
well executed! Really, you are destined to become a sailor’s wife
after all.

Discipula. Marry, I hope so. But why ‘after all?’

Piscator. Nay, I meant nothing; except, that whereas I formerly
thought you rather affected the land, now I find that you are courageous
on the water; and therefore, I say you deserve a Commodore. Observe
now, we are running more nearly with the wind, and move faster.
It is a favorable breeze; for our fishing-ground is in the south-eastern
corner of the lake, behind that highland which you see yonder; and this
blows from the western quarter. We shall soon be there.

Discipula. Be in no hurry; I am in none. Is it not a fine morning?
Those white, high-flying clouds, rolled up into fleeces like wool, with
ragged patches of the sky between them, above us, and the broad blue
bosom of the lake, with the multitude of little waves leaping up and
dancing all over its surface beneath us, and our boat, in the midst of
both sky and water, gliding calmly along like a bird with his wings
spread floating in the air! Is it not a lovely morning? Yes, yes; I
must be a sailor’s wife, and live on the ocean! Or perhaps, rather, a
fisherman’s wife, and sail on a lake like this. If I should happen to
meet with one of the latter class, of approved character, somewhat mature
in years and grave in demeanor, kind of disposition and manly of
countenance, one who would let me go sailing with him every day, (of
course I am not describing you, Mr. Piscator,) I think—yes, I am quite
certain, that he would content me.

Piscator. Nay, nay, my fair young lady, you are pleased to mock!
‘Mature in years and grave in demeanor,’ said you? A gallant young
sailor for you, say I! There are many who sigh for the favor which
you have so freely granted me to-day. Ah, you should not jeer.

Discipula. I tell you, Mr. Piscator, none but you for me this day!
I am not going to think of any body but you; for I tell you plainly, I
like you very much.

Piscator. Ah, yes, yes; certainly—without doubt, I hope so;
surely, why should you not?

Discipula. And what a beautiful island! The grass grows down
almost to the water’s edge, leaving a narrow belt of white sand; how
it glistens in the sun-light! and those half-a-dozen tall trees in the centre,
how do you suppose they came to grow there alone so?

Piscator. That is a question which I have often asked, but have
never been able to satisfy myself, as to how they came there. They
have stood for more generations than one, and will cast their shadows
on the water when other boats than ours sail past them, and other eyes
than ours wonder at them. Now we are nearly at our journey’s end;
when we pass through the opening between that island ahead of us, and
the main land, we shall be on our fishing-ground.

Discipula. Is it possible that we have reached here so quick? It is
not half so far as I thought it was. And yet, on looking back, there is
a wide waste lying between us and the cove from which we started.
How diminutive the house on the high ground back of the landing-place
looks; like a mole-hill, and the trees around it like shrubs! Well sped,
little bark! A swift and an easy-paced courser are you; steadily
now, through this narrow strait; steadily and gently, for your race is
almost run.

Piscator. The channel begins to widen again; and lo! here we
are in a lake by itself as it were; a sheet of water full a mile long and
a quarter of a mile wide. And herein the fish mostly do congregate. I
will hold on to near the middle, and then drop the anchor.

Discipula. It is indeed a fine sheet; smooth as any mirror; clearer
than glass. I suppose the fish assemble here when they get tired of the
roughness and commotion of the lake without, because it is so calm and
still. Is it not so?

Piscator. It may be so; it is a good reason, and I will believe that
it is so, since you have supposed it. This is as good a place as any,
and here we will cast our lines; and there is so little wind stirring, that
we shall only need to furl our sails, and the boat will remain at rest.
Now then, here is your rod, nicely put together, with a fly on the hook.
A pike will rise as quick at an artificial fly as at a live one; a greedy
fish is that pike; and if we should have occasion, I have other kinds of
bait. Take it, and throw your line out as I taught you before. But
what are you regarding so intently?

Discipula. I am looking at the shadow of the trees in the water; an
inverted forest in the lake. Fish a little while alone, and let me look.

Piscator. It has become so late in the day that I have not much
hope of taking many now. However, I can but try. This same rod
and line have done me good service in this same place, before to-day.
Ah, I see a pike! I’ll have him! Look! look how slowly and warily
he comes up toward the bait! When he gets within a few feet of it, he
will make a dash, and gorge it without stopping to think. Ah, there he
goes with it; and here he comes back with it, straight up into the boat.
Upon my word, a reasonable fish; he wont weigh short of three pounds.

Discipula. Oh, Mr. Piscator! here’s a new heaven and a new earth
beneath us! Waving trees with birds flitting among their branches,
and far down below, flying clouds and blue sky. A perfect hemisphere,
and we are hanging over it, without any thing to support us! I
shouldn’t be surprised, to feel myself this minute tumbling down into it,
down to the new heaven! I have been expecting to, for some time past;
and what a fall would that be! Do you suppose we should stop when
we got there?

Piscator. If we did not, where should we go to?

Discipula. Ah, where!

Piscator. These fish do not seem inclined to bite this morning.
Yet there is one larger than that I caught before. I must have him,
too. Observe how wistfully he eyes the bait; let the fly skim slowly
along the water, just over him; that is the way, Sir, to swallow a hook;
and now come up, and slide into the basket, out of sight, and keep your
brother company.

Discipula. Mr. Piscator, when you make such a splashing in the
water, you ruffle and wrinkle my submarine prospect. Please don’t.

Piscator. I think it will be profitless trying to take any more this
forenoon; toward night they will bite again. And what shall we do in
the mean time? Usually, when I come out here alone, I go ashore, and
rest myself during these hours, amid the fragrant shades of the thick
trees, that screen me from the mid-day heat. Would you like to take
such a ramble?—or are you inclined to stay here, and gaze into the water?

Discipula. I suppose the picture will keep till we come back. Let
us go ashore, and wander around in the woods, and find romantic grottoes,
and weave flower-wreaths, and build castles in the air.

Piscator. And half a mile inland, you can see its summit from here,
is a hill that commands a vast tract of lake and woodland.

Discipula. Yes, yes; let us go!

Piscator. Well, scholar, here we are again, after our long tramp.
You see I am a better land-pilot than you just now took me to be; for
I have brought us out to the right spot; more by token, yonder is the
boat, safe and sound. I am afraid you are fatigued with our long
travels?

Discipula. Not much; but I would like to sit down on the green
carpet, under this shade, for a few minutes.

Piscator. It must be, at the least, four of the clock; and although
your nature, my fair young lady, is probably too ethereal to think of
such homely matters, I do not profess mine to be such, and am ready to
acknowledge, that a little dinner would not be unacceptable.

Discipula. Unacceptable? No; but where are we to get it?

Piscator. I always bring with me, on my excursions, a hand-basket,
containing——

Discipula. Why in the world!—why didn’t you let me know that
before? Let us have it as quick as possible!

Piscator. It is in the boat, and if you will remain a moment, I will
bring it up here.

Discipula. Oh yes, do! And be quick, my good master!—as
quick as you can!

Piscator. Nimble as any page, that waits on lady bright. Here
we have the provisions; and if we could manage to find something for
a table-cover, we might dispense with knives and—— Right, scholar,
put your hand into the basket and help yourself.

Discipula. Ham sandwich! Oh, Mr. Piscator, this is good! Is
there enough of it?

Piscator. Enough for us two; and therefore you need not fear to
help yourself heartily, as I am glad to see that you are not. Never was
sumptuous feast to an epicure on gala-day better than my simple fare
to me on this beach, after a morning’s sail and ramble.

Discipula. Most excellent! I’ll come out here every time I can
get a chance, for the sake of dining with you under the old beech tree.

Piscator. It brings to my mind the story of the king, who, after
the chase, took some bread and water at the hut of a woodsman; which,
as it is no doubt well known, I shall not repeat unto you. But the bottom
of the basket begins to appear. What! done already? Good
despatch! And now, scholar, we will immediately to our sport, for we
have no time to waste.

Discipula. Yes, yes, immediately to work; I long to try my hand.
Here’s the boat; I should think it would have got tired waiting so long
for us. But it looks very patient.

Piscator. You may get in, while I loose, and shove off. There
appears to be a sharp breeze blowing on the lake without, yet our pond
is as unruffled as when we left it. We will return to the same spot we
were in before, and cast out our lines.

Discipula. Is this my rod? Fix the bait for me skilfully, and I’ll
catch them.

Piscator. I cannot promise you great success at first, considering
your inexperience——

Discipula. Oh, I’m going to catch an hundred!

Piscator. I hope you may; certainly—I hope you will; and you
can only try. There, your fly is fastened to the hook as well as my art
is able. Come, and sit on this side, and I will give you some instructions
how to use it. First, see that the line is clear of the rod; then
give it one swing round your head; so—and cast it quickly but softly,
as far from you as you can on the water. Neatly done! Now draw
it slowly along the surface, and you shall presently see a fish rise at it.
Be more moderate; you draw it too rapidly. Ha! there it goes under!
Wait till you feel him pulling on the line; now give him a little jerk
to the right; there you have him, fairly hooked! You must be careful,
or you’ll lose him yet. No; he’s not very heavy, and you may raise
him strait out of the water, and land him in the boat; so!

Discipula. Ah, my master, will you tell me that I can’t catch fish?
Poor little fish! Oh, but he’s a small one: take him off, master, and
put him into the hold. I hunt for nobler game.

Piscator. Not a good thought, not a good thought for an angler.
Hunt for nobler game, if you like; but a fisherwoman must not despise
the smallest that comes to her net. Every thing counts.

Discipula. Despise? No; oh no! I would like to catch fifty just
such; that is, if there are no larger ones to angle for.

Piscator. Well, your bait is set again. Cast out as before, and I
wish you better luck.

Discipula. Now I am going to catch a large one—a foot long.
But, Mr. Piscator, why do you not use your line?

Piscator. I will not interfere with your sport; and beside, I may
want to give you advice how to manage yours. It is not, in general, a
good plan to let the fish see you when you are angling; they are apt to
be frightened away. However, in this case, I shall say nothing against
it; because if they have an eye for beauty, as is commonly believed,
your showing yourself should have a contrary effect. In truth, the influence
of beauty is much to be marvelled at. I remember myself when
I was young, and had not yet learned their vanity, how easy I was to be
led away and bewitched by a fair face and a sparkling eye. That was
some time ago; you draw your fly too fast; it was some years ago;
and yet I am fain to confess, that even now, in nothing do I take more
pleasure, than in looking on a ruddy cheek, a polished brow, the long
lashes of a soft blue eye, and upon heavy folds of auburn hair; and it
is for this reason that I have placed you opposite to me now.

Discipula. Why, Mr. Piscator! Did you mean that for a compliment?

Piscator. Certainly no. I seldom speak but what I think, for flattery
I like neither to give nor receive. Ah, yes; there are witches in
the world yet. And their witchcraft consists not in magic filters, and
potent herbs gathered at midnight under the full moon; far more subtle
and powerful is it. Like the poisons of eastern countries, it is communicated
by a touch, by a look, by the breath of a word. This is the
witchcraft that they use; therewith lure they men to commit folly. It
would seem to be their chief delight, their main occupation. But I am
willing to believe that you are not so evil-minded; and that when you
bewitch men, it is not because you love to do it, but that it is altogether
involuntary.

Discipula. Oh, of course, altogether involuntary. If I had my
way, I never would cause a single flutter in any body’s breast—not I.
But you see how it is, I can’t help it, and therefore it is not my fault.
These fish do not bite well. There is one, he will weigh four pounds,
that has been playing round and round the hook, but won’t touch it.
Haven’t you got some kind of sweet smelling oil or perfume to scent
the bait with?

Piscator. I have some lavender-leaves, and if you will draw up the
line, I will rub the fly over with them, for fish love the smell of lavender.
Try him with that. Ah, I see him—a respectable fish. He is
coming up toward the hook; I think he will take it.

Discipula. He stops and eyes it, as though he half suspected that
it would not be pleasant to the taste, for all its fair looks. But I’ll have
him, in spite of his wits. You scrutinize too closely, Sir Pike! You
had better take it at once, without useless inspection. What a noble
fellow! How gracefully he moves through the water! I will make it
float carelessly away from him, dancing on the silver surface, as though
it had just fallen fresh from Heaven; and beside, distance lends enchantment.
Ha! see him make a dive at it! There you have it, Sir!
and there I have you!

Piscator. Take care, or you’ll be over! Hold hard, or he’ll have
you too! Upon my word, I was afraid you would go overboard! You
should not, in your eagerness, lean out over the water so far. But you
have got the better of him, and now pull him into the boat and let me
take him off.

Discipula. I came near losing my balance; I thought I was gone!
Lucky escape!—but my heart beats yet.

Piscator. A fine fish. He has swallowed the bait whole; your
large fish always do. O! I don’t know as I can take it out, without
hurting him.

Discipula. Poor fish! He does not look quite so spruce and independent
as he did a little while ago. Did your mouth water for that
tempting fly. It will never water again! What deep sighs heave his
little breast! but they will soon be over. Fix the bait, Mr. Piscator,
and rub some more lavender on it. I’ll catch another, in less than a
minute.

Piscator. It is done already. And this time, do not lean over so
far, or you will be in danger of being pulled in, by some fish of greater
strength than usual. Really, I think you are a good angler; you seem
to possess the skill by intuition. Is it not fine sport? I see by the increased
flush and light of your countenance, that you are of the same
opinion. It is truly a gentle, a feminine sport.

Discipula. There is one with the beautifulest eyes, and covered all
over with gold and silver. But he is exceedingly shy. Come, Sir, if
you are so distant, I shall have to approach you myself. I desire a
nearer acquaintance with your beautiful eyes, and your gold and silver
scales. Oh! if you move off in that direction, I shall retire in this!
Ah, you’ve thought better of it, and are coming back. I knew you
would. Observe, Mr. Piscator, how he turns round and hesitates and
doubts what to do. There is no use in his deliberating; it is inevitable;
he has got to do it. Now he turns back. He seems to have made up
his mind that he must have it at all hazards. And see him shut his
eyes and make a dash. I am afraid he finds it unpalatable! Too rash!
too rash! You should have considered better! Take him off, master;
he is nothing very great, after all.

Piscator. I see a large one, lying here at the left, deep in the water;
of the kind which we call sucker. It is his nature to lie perfectly still
as though asleep, and not to move till he is touched. Reach here the
hook, while I fasten some pieces of lead to it, enough to sink it; and
then I will tell you how to hook him.

Discipula. I see! I know! I can do it myself, I will let the bait
sink gently down into the water, a little forward of him, thus. Ah, it
fell right on his back! He must be asleep, for he doesn’t stir, nor seem
to notice it. Now then, a little forward of him; and so, slowly, softly,
float up toward his nose. He appears to be inspecting the fly; he
sleeps with his mouth wide open; as a natural history philosopher might
examine a butterfly; and since it is so closely presented, suppose you
try the sense of taste too, Sir! It is pleasant to the eye, you will find
it also good for food, and to be desired to make one wise. Allow it to
fall imperceptibly into your mouth; nay, you cannot judge of its merits
from a half trial, like that; it must be taken entirely in. Don’t exert
yourself, in the least; another inspiration, and you are possessed. Ha!
is it not good?—is it not sweet? He must be very fond of it, he holds
on to it so hard! Astonished fish! he wakes up, and opens his eyes
with wonder; there is more in it than he dreamed of! Strait up to the
light here, and show your agitated countenance. Now please to open
your lips, and disclose the cause of all your sorrows, while kind Mr.
Piscator extracts it.

Piscator. Well hooked! Indeed, scholar, it was well done of you.
But the heavens are becoming overcast; it threatens storm. Would it
not be wise to set out on our return?

Discipula. Oh no, no! I can’t think of going yet? ‘Wise!’ It seems
to me that it would be very foolish, while the lake contains so many
more fish as good as any that we have already caught.

Piscator. You do not expect to take them all?

Discipula. All in this place; what should hinder?

Piscator. They will not bite for ever in the same place. They are
a cunning animal, and get frightened.

Discipula. Then let us remove to another spot.

Piscator. That we might do, if there were time; but the sun is entirely
hidden by clouds, and is near his going down. We shall presently
have a thunder-storm. And then a stiff breeze from the south, which
will waft us speedily toward our landing place; had we not better begin
to think of leaving?

Discipula. Wait till I catch one fish more; I had a nibble just then.

Piscator. You should handle your rod more gently. The wind
blows up fresher and fresher; it will be dark as pitch too, when night
fairly comes on. Shall we not spread our sails, and speed merrily
homeward?

Discipula. Well, as you will, master; though really I don’t see
any occasion for all this hurry. Look at that fish! He rose almost to
the surface after my hook, and yet wouldn’t take it. Oh, my poor fly!
my poor bait! See it, master! All faded and worn and torn, no painting
or patching can renew its comeliness! And there sticks out the
hook, plain to view; a blind fish might see it! Oh, my poor fly, that
couldn’t conceal the hook any longer! Mr. Piscator, lend me your
knife, while I cut the bait from the line, rags, paint, iron and all, and
throw it back into the water, thus. Now then, little fish! silly fish!
come all of you, and see what has befooled you! What some of your
tribe have swallowed because they thought it was good, and some because
they were careless, and others because they were hungry and
must have something! What many of ye have taken in, and more
have nibbled at, and all have gazed at, and admired and longed for!
Oh, rare sport have ye made me, foolish things! And longer would I
have played with you, but the evening comes on, and I must bid you
a happy farewell. So we are under way again, are we?

Piscator. We are again under way; and I have hope of reaching
home before yonder cloud comes over us. And trust me, when it does
come, it will bring more wind with it.

Discipula. Once more on the open bosom of the lake! How the
little black angry waves dance up one after another, and roll past us
toward the northern shore. And see that dim hill at the other extremity
of the pond, how gigantic and broken it looks. Oh, Mr. Piscator, let’s
go and see it! let’s go and see it! And those high perpendicular rocks,
that stand out so boldly. Yes, yes, put up the helm! we’ll go and see
how they look in the twilight.

Piscator. But my dear child, it will take an hour and a half longer
to go round by the rocks, and before that time, I fear the storm will increase.

Discipula. Oh, never fear the storm. I’ll risk it! And when we
get up there, we can take a short cut across to our port; so put up the
helm!—good Mr. Piscator, kind Mr. Piscator! do let us run up to the
hill! I can assure you there is no danger.

Piscator. I cannot well deny any thing that you ask of me; but
much I doubt, Mr. ——

Discipula. Nay, nay, doubt nothing. We shall get home safe,
trust me for that. And that cloud, that you are so fearful of, is not
coming over us, at all; it is coming down on the other shore of the lake.
Please, Mr. Pilot, to keep in a little nearer the land, or we shall pass the
rocks so far out, that we shall not be able to see them with distinctness.

Piscator. A wilful woman must even have her own way. My
child! you will catch your death with cold, to take off your bonnet so!

Discipula. I’m not afraid of it; I want to feel the air.

Piscator. And where are you going now?

Discipula. Going to sit down in the bow of the boat. This view is
much finer! Oh, this is grand!

Piscator. But, good scholar! good scholar! you will certainly fall
out there! I believe you are crazy, you look so wild!

Discipula. How the boat pitches over the little waves! And, Mr.
Piscator, direct the boat toward the shore, so as to make it rock more.
The heavens are all grey, and the waters are all black, and the wind is
high and wild in its sport like an imprisoned bird let loose. Oh master,
spread the other sail, and see if we can’t fly faster! Here are the rocks
so grim; but it is growing dark, and I can only just make them out.
Why, Mr. Piscator, you are not going near enough! Run close in under
them!

Piscator. I shall say to you plainly, what you ask is impossible.
It would be running an unwarrantable hazard; as indeed coming up
here at all was unwarrantable.

Discipula. At least then, good master, keep along up at this distance,
if that pleases you best; for there is a bluff just ahead, which projects
farther out than the others, and we shall pass close by it.

Piscator. It is high time that we commenced our return in good
earnest. And therefore, scholar, for I must remind you that you are my
scholar till I see you safe ashore; therefore, if you please, you may
stand by the sail to tack.

Discipula. But just look once, how boldly and sternly it lifts up its
calm front out of the boiling waters!

Piscator. It is without doubt, very fine; but it is impossible to hold
on a foot farther. So if you will stand by the sail——

Discipula. I wish I had a boat of my own to sail out here alone in
and go where I choose! Well, what shall I do? how shall I go to work?
Oh, Mr. Piscator! honest Mr. Piscator! let me hold the helm while you
take care of the sails.

Piscator. Willingly, if your hand is strong enough. Try it; shall
you be able to hold it as it is?

Discipula. With the greatest ease. Now then, are you ready?
What are you letting down the sail for? That three-cornered rag from
the bow-sprit wont be enough!

Piscator. It would be unsafe to set the main-sail, and I think with
this breeze the fore-stay-sail will drive us sufficiently fast.

Discipula. Well, suit yourself. Now are you ready?

Piscator. Ready, certainly, when I take the helm. But what are
you doing? If you undertake to let the skiff fall off before the wind
you will upset us, as sure as——

Discipula. Just see if I do. Let me hold the helm. Oh yes, let
me!

Piscator. But scholar! good scholar! dear scholar!

Discipula. No, no, I wont give it up! you can’t have it! Honest
Mr. Piscator, let me steer the boat, only a little way! Oh, but I will;
and there is no use in your trying to prevent me. See there now,
haven’t we come round to our course in good style?

Piscator. A taste of power to those who are unaccustomed to it is
always dangerous, and I blame myself for permitting you to usurp the
post of pilot. Though, as you seem determined to maintain it, I cannot
choose but to sit down here quietly, and trust our lives to your skill.
My life indeed! But yours? Seriously now, my fair young lady,
would it not be wiser——

Discipula. Seriously now, my careful master, I don’t think it would.
Why, what would you have? Are we not skimming over the waves
like a sea-bird free? And see those two birds, how they dash by us,
and wheel round over us, and breast the gale! Oh master! wouldn’t
you like to be a sea-bird, and swing sideways, with your face to the
wind that almost took your breath away, swing down, down, glance
against the water, then on the other side, swing up, up? And wouldn’t
it be sweet too to struggle your way up through the storm, high over
that cloud yonder, with the thunder on its inside and the lightning on its
out—then fold your wings, close your eyes, and fall calmly down on
to its dark, soft, bosom? Oh, wouldn’t it be sweet?

Piscator. My dear scholar, our landing place lies here, toward the
north-east, and you are running directly north.

Discipula. Don’t be under any apprehensions; I am only going to
run out half a mile farther, that we may get before the wind, and then
we’ll scud straight toward home. And beside, we rock more, going in
this direction. I wish it would blow harder, and make more swell!
You know now, Mr. Piscator, how a wild swan feels when he sits on the
water and is buoyed up on the heaving wave, and in a breath sinks into
the black abyss. If I were a wild swan I would go to sleep and let
the winds blow and the waters heave! How the boat careens over and
plunges down when the blast whistles against the masts! Drive on!
Drive on! my light gallant bark! Oh, my master! shall I sing you
a song? a little song of the sea? a pirate song?

Piscator. You look at this present moment as if you might sing a
pirate song, or be a pirate yourself. I observe that since you have taken
off your bonnet, the wind has somewhat disarranged your hair.

Discipula. Wouldn’t you like to be a pirate, though? I would;
and roam over the ocean at my own free will; and through the storm
and spray, and lightning-glances of the wild midnight, dash on my fleeing
victim like the eagle on his prey! All hands on deck to get on
more sail! Stand by to unfurl the main-sail to the tempest!

Piscator. Will it please you, my fair pilot, to inform me whither
you are taking us?

Discipula. I am going to run into that cloud yonder; the one before
us, with the thunder on its inside and the lightning on its out.

Piscator. What you call a cloud appears to me to be a hill, that
rises a few rods back from the shore.

Discipula. Oh, it’s a cloud—a cloud! And there is a star that
glimmers through it.

Piscator. I see nothing but the twinkling of a taper, from the window
of some dwelling.

Discipula. I tell you it’s a star—a star! The cloud has settled
down into the water like a mountain; and through its base penetrates a
tunnel, through which the ray of that star comes—a long, straight
cavern, arched overhead and on either side by wreathed and rolling
pillars of smoke. I’ll put up the helm and run into it! Bear up! bear
up! bear stoutly up, my brave, bold bark! and plunge forward like the
horse into the smoke of battle, through this path to the subterranean
abodes!

Piscator. Let me take the tiller! Let it go! Put it around quick
then; you are running on the beach!

Discipula. Why don’t you see we are just entering the dark mouth
of the tunnel? We shall soon be into it.

Piscator. Hark! here it comes! Now hold hard, for there we are,
grounded and staved!

Discipula. Tartarian rocks and whirlpools!

Piscator. Quick! ashore! The boat is going to pieces!

Discipula. Ha! ha! ha! Was it well done, my master? was it
well done?

Piscator. It was well done, you little water-witch!

LINES

ON SEEING MY SISTER FILL A LITTLE BEGGAR-BOY’S BASKET WITH COLD VICTUALS.

BY R. S. CHILTON.

THE QUOD CORRESPONDENCE.

Harry Harson.

CHAPTER XXVI.

At the dead of the night, when all others were at rest, Michael Rust
glided out of his office. It was a strange hour, but he had become a
strange man. Through the silent streets he stole, with a step so noiseless
that it awoke no echo. Along Broadway, passing where the city
ended and the fields began, mile after mile he went. He met no one.
Every house that he passed was as silent as the grave; excepting a
solitary one, standing by itself, with a light shining through an upper
window, as if some one kept watch at a sick bed. Sometimes the road
ran between high trees, whose skeleton outlines stood grimly up between
him and the stars, stiff and motionless. At other times, it coursed
along dreary wastes; then again, it was buried in dense shadow; now
ascending, now descending. At times he caught a glimpse of the distant
gray river, gleaming in the darkness, with here and there the light on
board some vessel at anchor, glittering like a star. In some places,
where it was shut in by high banks, the road seemed inky black; and
parts of it were so solitary, that even a stout heart might have shrunk
from traversing it at that dreary hour. But Rust thought not of fear.
What had he to do with that feeling, who sought only revenge and a
grave?

It was yet night, when he reached a house in the upper part of the
island, and near the river. Little except its dim outline was visible in
the obscurity; and as he opened the gate, and passed beneath an avenue
of tall trees which led to it, the darkness was such that he could scarcely
see. But he was familiar with the ground, and without hesitation went
directly to the door of the house. It was locked. He drew a key from
his pocket, unlocked it, went in, and closed it after him. He groped
his way along the entry, until he came to the door of a room, which he
opened. A few embers were smouldering on the hearth, sufficient to
throw out a dim light. Lighting a candle, which stood on a table, he
drew a chair to the fire and sat down. The chamber was large, fitted
up as a library, and filled with massive book-cases of dark wood, elaborately
carved, which gave a sombre appearance to the room. Nothing
that money could buy had been spared; for this was the home of Rust’s
daughter, and that hard, reckless, griping man had been alive but to
one feeling—love to his child. In her were garnered up all his affections,
and upon her he had lavished all that his means could obtain.

For a long time he sat without changing his position, his eye fixed,
his mouth compressed, his brow knit, not a sound escaping him. At
last he started from his fit of abstraction, with a slight shiver; passed
his hand once or twice before his eyes, as if to dispel something that
clouded his sight; and said, in a whisper. ‘Can all this be real?’ The
clock struck three. He rose, cast a stealthy glance over his shoulder,
and taking the candle in his hand, held it up over his head, examining
the room with a suspicious look, as if he momentarily expected some
form to start from behind the heavy furniture. As his eye was wandering
round the room, it rested upon a picture in a carved frame, which
hung against the wall. He went to it, and held the light so that its
rays fell full upon it. It was the portrait of a girl of about seventeen.
Could the child-like, innocent face which gazed out from the canvass
upon that fierce, passion-worn old man, be that of his child? Could
aught so pure and beautiful have sprung from such as him? And worse
than all, could she have lost that purity which was stamped on every
line of her face?

With fixed and rigid features; with a hand that did not tremble, with
a heart that scarcely beat, he contemplated the picture; and then,
slowly, as if in a dream, replaced the candle, and took his seat. There
was that at work within him, however, which banished bodily repose;
for in one minute afterward, he was up and pacing the room, muttering
and gesticulating to himself; the next, he went to a mirror, and looked
at his own face. He started as he did so; for he had not seen it in a
week; and in that time so altered and wasted had it become, with its
long unshorn beard, and ghastly white complexion, that he could scarcely
recognize it.

‘What a bird of prey the mind is!’ muttered he; ‘how it devours the
body!’ He turned away, and once more his eye rested on the picture
which hung against the wall. Some strange feeling seemed to spring
into existence as he did so; for his breath came thick and hard; his
heart beat, until its pulsations could be heard, loud and strong like the
blows of a hammer; his hand shook, but at the same time, his brow
darkened, and its look of anxious and half-wandering thought gave
place to an expression that was perfectly fiendish. He muttered a few
words; then taking the light, cautiously opened the door, and stole up
the broad flight of stairs which led to the upper story. At the head
of it was a door; he tried it; it was not locked but yielded to his push.
It opened into a bed-room, luxuriously furnished with mirrors, and
various nick-nacks, and articles of taste, such as a young and
wealthy female gathers about her; and in the bed lay a beautiful girl,
the original of the picture below, sound asleep, her long hair, which had
become unbound as she slept, lying in loose tresses upon the pillow.
How bright and beautiful she was! How gentle and calm her breathing
was! And well might the stern old man, as he looked at her angel face,
have misgivings as to the truth of Grosket’s tale. Rust’s hard features
worked convulsively as he stood over his child, as if powerful feelings
were tugging at his heart-strings; but it was only for a moment, for he
choked them down; and going out, in the cautious manner in which he
had entered, he closed the door and descended to the room below.

He resumed his seat; and although hour after hour elapsed, until
day-light stole in the room, his attitude remained the same; until a
servant came in to light the fire, and uttered an exclamation of surprise
at seeing him. This aroused him; and rising hastily, he said, ‘I’m
going out. Tell your mistress that I’ll be here at ten o’clock.’ He
left the house; and after wandering up and down the road, he crossed
the fields, until he came to the edge of the river, and when he had
sauntered along it for some time, he sat down upon a rock, and commenced
casting pebbles in the water.

How long a time he passed in this way, he could not tell, but it must
have been several hours; for on looking at his watch, he found that
it was late in the day. Suddenly, recollecting his message to his
daughter; he rose and went directly to the house. He crossed the
lawn in front of it; but before he had time to reach the door, a light
figure sprang out, and his child’s arms were about his neck.

‘Dear father! it’s a very long time since I saw you!’ said she, putting
back the hair which hung over his face, and pressing her lips to
his cheek. ‘I’m very happy at having you here once more. But you
are ill—very ill! What ails you?’ said she, suddenly, as she observed
the inroads which the last few days had made in his whole form. Rust
withdrew himself from her embrace, and without answering her question,
said in a cold tone: ‘Come in the house.’

Though his words were simple, there was that in his manner (or it
might have been the consciousness of guilt on the part of the girl) which
caused her cheek to grow pale, and her step to falter; and she accompanied
him to the library, with the silent and downcast look of a criminal.
He took a chair, drew it to the fire, and pointing to another, said
in the same cold tone: ‘Be seated.’

The girl obeyed without a word. At that moment a servant opened
the door, and told Rust that a man was inquiring for him.

Rust got up, and went out. In the entry were two men. One of
them, a powerfully-built fellow, of about five-and-thirty, with light hair
and a prominent eye, asked, ‘Are you Michael Rust?’

Rust scanned him from head to foot. He suspected his errand; for
he had seen him before, and he replied simply: ‘I am.’

‘Then, Sir, we’ve come for you.’ At the same time, the man produced
a slip of paper, and tapped Rust on the shoulder. ‘Here’s the
warrant, if you’d like to look at it, and the vehicle’s in the road there.’
He gave a nod in the direction.

Rust evinced neither surprise nor trepidation. He merely said, in a
musing tone, ‘I should have stipulated for a longer time, for the lawyer
has lost none.’ Then addressing the officer, he added: ‘My daughter
is in the room. Before going with you, I should like to speak with her
in private. You may examine the room, to see that there are no means
of escaping from it.’

The man took him at his word; went in the room; glanced round
without noticing the girl, who regarded him with some surprise; then
went to an inner door, locked it, and put the key in his pocket.

‘Are you satisfied?’ asked Rust.

The other again stared round the room: went to the window; looked
out to see how high it was from the ground; said that he was, and then
inquired: ‘How long?’

‘Ten minutes,’ was the reply.

‘Good!’ said the man; and with a knowing look at Rust, and a
shambling bow to the girl, he went out, and seated himself on a chair
in the hall, having taken the precaution to send his companion to keep
an eye on the windows, which were within leap of the ground.

Rust returned to his seat. ‘Come hither, Ellen,’ said he.

His daughter rose, and came to him; but in dead silence.

‘Look at me. Am I much altered?’ inquired Rust.

The girl raised her eyes to his. They quailed before his stern,
searching glance; but she replied in a low voice: ‘You’re very much
altered; you’re wearing yourself out.’

A smile of strange meaning crossed Rust’s face. He turned, and
pointed to the picture which hung against the wall.

‘Was that ever a good likeness of you?’ asked he.

His daughter glanced at it, with some surprise at the sudden question,
and then replied: ‘I’ve often been told so, father—a very good
one.’

‘They told you the truth. It was a good one; and now,’ said he,
turning to her, and fixing his eyes on her face: ‘Do you think I am as
much changed from what I was, as you are from what you were, when
that picture was painted? Mark it well!’ said he, speaking quickly and
earnestly, and leaning forward until his face almost touched hers.
‘Look at every feature. See what innocence, what purity of soul and
thought is in every line of that face. An angel might have envied its
innocence. There is a mirror,’ said he, pointing to the looking-glass;
‘Now look at yourself.’ He half rose, and his voice was cold and
cutting as he concluded.

The girl grew red; then deeper and deeper crimson; then deadly,
ghastly pale; the perspiration stood upon her forehead, and her eyes
were blinded with tears; but she could not meet his glance.

His voice sank almost to a whisper, as he asked ‘Then what I have
heard is true?’

The girl seemed absolutely stunned.

‘Be it so. Now you know the cause of my illness. Look at me.
Look at this face, scored with wrinkles; these hollow cheeks, and this
frame, broken down by premature old age. Look at them, I say, and
you will see but a faint image of the utter, hopeless waste that has
been going on in my heart.’

The girl made an attempt to speak; sank on the floor; and clasping
his knees, pressed her head against them, and sobbed aloud. But Rust
moved not. There was no trace of compassion in either tone or manner,
as he continued: ‘From your childhood, until you were grown
up, you were the person for whose welfare I toiled. I labored and
strove for you; there was not a thing that I did, not a thought that I
ever harbored, which had not your happiness for its aim; and to your
love and devotion I looked for my reward; and as I brooded over my
own guilty life, blackened as it was with the worst of crimes, I thought
that it was some palliation to be the parent of one pure and spotless as
you were. Well, you turned out as hundreds of others have done, and
my labor was lost. I loved you as never child was loved; and in proportion
as my love once was great, so now is my hate and scorn!’

‘Oh! my God!’ gasped the girl. She sank down as if crushed.
Rust looked at her unmoved, and did not stir to assist her. She raised
her hands to him, and said in a supplicating tone: ‘Father! as you
hope for mercy, hear me!’

‘If I received not mercy from my own child,’ said Rust, sternly, ‘to
whom can I look for it? I hope for it no where; I ask for it no where;
I am at bay to the whole world.’

One of those dark, withering expressions which had once been so
common to his features, but which his anguish had for the last few
days in a great measure banished from them, swept across his face.

The girl wrung her hands, as she received his harsh answer. At last
she said, in a broken voice: ‘Father, I am sadly guilty; but hear me,
for God’s sake, do hear me!’

At that moment, the door was opened, and the officer’s head was
thrust in.

‘Time’s up.’

‘I must have ten minutes more,’ said Rust.

‘You can’t.’

‘I must, I will,’ exclaimed Rust, sternly.

He tossed him a dollar, which the man caught in his hand with professional
dexterity; and then, with a grin, said: ‘Well, if you’re so
very anxious, of course you must be accommodated;’ and disappearing,
shut the door.

‘You said that you were guilty,’ resumed Rust, turning to his daughter.
‘I know it. There’s but one more so. You know to whom I
allude. What is his name?’

The girl grew very pale, and hung down her head in silence.

‘Who is he?’ again demanded her father, seizing her arm with a
strong grasp.

Still she made no reply.

‘Be it so,’ said Rust flinging her hand from him. ‘Perhaps silence
is best. Now, one other question. Where is he?’

She shook her head, and replied in a scarcely audible tone that she
did not know.

‘When was he last here?’

‘About a week since.’

‘And when did he promise to return?’

‘On the same day,’ answered the girl, in a low tone.

‘And he has not kept that promise. The first of a series of black-hearted
lies!’ exclaimed Rust, bitterly, speaking more to himself than to
her. ‘In these cases, lies come first, and the truth last.’ He again
addressed her: ‘Does he speak of marriage? and do you urge it upon
him?’

‘I do, indeed I do!’ replied the girl, apparently anxious to hit upon
something to conciliate the stern mood of her parent. ‘Often and often,
I beg him to do it, and remind him of his promise.’

‘And what is his answer?’ demanded Rust, with a half-mocking
smile.

‘He says that he cannot marry me just now, but that he will soon.
He wishes to obtain the consent of his father, who is very ill, and cannot
be spoken to about it; but that he will soon be better, and that then
it will all be settled.’

‘How long has he been making these excuses?’

‘A very long time—a very long time,’ said the girl, sadly: ‘A
month and more.’

‘How often did he come here at first?’

‘Every day,’ said the girl.

‘And now?’

His daughter was silent; for she began to see the drift of this cold
examination, and it sent a chill to her heart.

Rust was satisfied; and he said in a half-musing tone: ‘The same
stale, hackneyed story. She is on her way to where the first misstep
always leads. Already he is wearied, and wants but an excuse to fling
her off; and I—I—I—her avenger,’ exclaimed he with a burst of
fierce impatience, ‘I am shackled; a prisoner, and can do nothing!’

He made a hasty step to the door, opened it, and beckoned to the officer
to come in. As he did so, he shut it after him, took the man by the
arm, and drew him to one end of the room:

‘I want a week,’ said he, in a quick tone. ‘I’ll give a thousand dollars
to gain one week; and at the end of that time will surrender myself
a prisoner.’

The man shook his head: ‘It can’t be done, Sir,’ said he.

‘What’s the reward offered for my apprehension?’

‘A cool five hundred,’ replied the officer.

‘I’ll double it to escape,’ said Rust, ‘or to gain a week, but a single
week.’

The man shook his head. ‘Too many knows that we’re arter you.
It wouldn’t do.’

‘But at the expiration of that time I would surrender myself, and
you could secure the reward too.’

The man gave vent to a low chuckle; and placed his finger on the side
of his nose, accompanying the motion with a sly expression, signifying
an utter disbelief in Rust’s promises.

Rust gnawed his lip with fierce impatience, then taking the man by
the arm, he led him into the hall, and shut the door.

‘I must speak out,’ said he, ‘and trust to your honor not to betray
me. A villain has seduced my child. I want time to find him, and to
compel him to make her his wife. Now you know why I ask a week.’

The officer at first whistled, then muttered something about its being
a hard case; but concluded by saying, in a positive tone: ‘It can’t be
did, Sir; I’m sorry for it; upon my word, I am; but I must keep you
now that I’ve got you. I wish you’d given me the slip at first; but I
can’t let you go now. It’s impossible—quite.’

Rust eyed the man, as if endeavoring to find in his hard features
some loop-hole to his more kindly feelings; but apparently he met with
no success.

‘Well, if it can’t be done, there’s an end of it,’ said he, abruptly terminating
his scrutiny. ‘I’ve some other matters to speak of, and want
a few moments more. I’ll not detain you long, and will call you when
I’m ready.’

‘I’ll give you all the time I can,’ said the man, civilly.

Rust turned to enter the room, but as he did so he heard a quick step
behind him; and looking round, found himself face to face with a young
man of two or three and twenty, elegantly dressed, who eyed him carelessly,
and then passing him, entered the room with the air of one perfectly
at home. A suspicion of who he was flashed across Rust’s mind.
That he himself was unknown to the other was not strange, for he had
been so much absent, and when he visited his child it was at such irregular
intervals, and for such short periods, that a person might have
been even a frequent visitor at his house, without encountering him.
Nor was there any thing in the outward appearance of the slovenly,
haggard old man to attract attention. But the indifference of the other
was not reciprocated; for Rust followed him, and closed the door after
him, with feverish haste, as if he feared his prey might escape him.
He observed the deep blush that sprang to the cheek of his daughter, at
the entrance of the stranger; her guilty, yet joyous look as he addressed
her; and above all, he perceived his careless, cold, indifferent reply to
her warm salutation; and a feeling of revenge, the deadliest that he
had ever felt, sprung up in his heart against that man; not so much
because he had blasted the happiness of his child, as because he had
torn from him all that he had clung to in life.

Rust walked to the fire-place, turned his back to it, and without uttering
a word, faced the stranger, who eyed him from head to foot with a
cool, supercilious stare; then looked at the girl, as if seeking an explanation.

The pause, however, was broken by Rust himself, as he pointed with
his thin finger to their visitor, and inquired of his daughter: ‘Is that
the man?’

The girl’s face became ghastly pale; her lips moved, but she dared
not raise her eyes; for she could not encounter the keen, inquiring look
which she knew was fixed upon her.

‘Answer my question,’ said he, sternly. ‘This is no time for tampering
with my patience.’

His daughter attempted to speak. She trembled from head to foot;
but not a word escaped her. So intense was her anguish, that it awoke
a spark of better feeling in the young man; for confronting Rust, he
said in a bold voice: ‘If you have any questions to ask respecting me,
address them to me, not to her.’

‘I will,’ replied Rust, fixing upon him an eye that fairly glowed;
‘for you should best know your own character. Are you the cold-blooded
scoundrel who, taking advantage of that girl’s confiding disposition,
of the absence of her father, stole like a thief into his house; by
lies, by false oaths, and damning hypocritical professions of love, won
her affections; blighted her, and then left her what I blush to name?
You wish the question addressed to you; you have it. I’ll have your
reply.’

Withering like a parched leaf; shrinking as if a serpent were in his
path; with a face which changed from white to red, from red to white,
the stranger met these questions. But Rust’s eye never left his face.
There was no trace of anger nor emotion, in his marble features. He
merely said: ‘I want your answer.’

With a face heavy with guilt; with a voice that shook even while it
assumed a tone of boldness; the stranger demanded: ‘Who are you?
and what right have you to question me thus?’

‘Not much right,’ replied Rust; ‘I’m not even a rival suitor; I’m
only this girl’s father. Perhaps you will answer me now.’

The other was silent. Rust turned to his daughter, and said: ‘This
man has suddenly become dumb. Is this he of whom we spoke? An
answer I must have, and a true one. Do not add a lie to the infamy
which already covers you.’

The girl hesitated, and then uttered something in a voice so low as
to be scarcely audible; but faint as it was, Rust caught the words,
‘It is!’

‘It is well,’ replied he, facing the stranger, and drawing his person
up erect. ‘I have no time to waste in words, and will state what I have
to say as concisely as possible, and will act as promptly as I speak.
This is my only child. She was once unsullied, and I was proud of her:
that she is not so now, is your fault. There is but one mode of repairing
what you’ve done. Will you marry her?’

‘I certainly intend to do so,’ said the young man, with a guilty look,
which gave the lie to his words.

‘I want deeds, not intentions,’ replied Rust. ‘What you do must be
done now—before you leave this room. A clergyman resides within a
mile. In half an hour he can be here.’

The girl clasped her hands joyfully, and looked eagerly at him; but
there was nothing responsive in the expression of his face; and he
answered:

‘I can’t see the necessity of this haste; beside, it would ruin all my
prospects.’

‘You can’t see the necessity of this haste!’ exclaimed Rust, in a voice
of thunder. ‘Ruin your prospects! What has become of her prospects?
What—what—— But no matter,’ added he, choking down a
fierce burst of passion, and suddenly assuming a tone so unnaturally
calm that it might have been a warning to the other that it was but a
lull in the storm. ‘Michael Rust presents his compliments to his unknown
friend, and begs to know if he will do him the honor of marrying,
on the spot, his daughter whom he has polluted?’

He paused for an answer; his lips were deadly white, and quivering;
and his eye glowed like a serpent’s. The young man quailed before it;
but apparently he was only waiting for an opportunity to throw off the
mask; for he answered boldly: ‘No, I will not.’

‘You had better,’ said Rust, in a low, warning tone. ‘Think of it
again.’

‘You have my answer,’ was the reply.

‘Then take Michael Rust’s thanks!’ A flash and report followed;
and when the smoke cleared away, the seducer was lying on the floor,
stone dead. A bullet had passed through his head. The policeman
rushed in the room.

‘If I could have had a week, I might have avoided this,’ said Rust,
coldly. ‘As it was, I had no alternative.’

He rang the bell, and a servant came in. He pointed to his daughter,
who was lying senseless at his feet.

‘Look to your mistress!’

Turning to the police men who stood by with blanched faces, he said:
‘Now then, I am ready!’

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN.

In a small room, containing a box-bedstead, a single chair, and a common
wooden table, on which was a pitcher of water, sat Michael Rust.
The heavy iron bars which grated the windows, and the doors of thick
oaken plank, secured by strong bolts of iron, indicated beyond a doubt
the nature of his abode—a prison. He was sitting on the edge of his
bed, with his arms resting on the table, which was drawn close to it,
and his head leaning upon them. At times he straightened himself up,
looked listlessly about the room, and then resumed his old position.

A key turned in the door; the heavy bolt was drawn back, and a
head was thrust in.

‘Some one wants to see you. Shall he come in?’

‘Yes.’

The head was withdrawn, and the door being opened, admitted no less
a person than Mr. Kornicker, somewhat faded in appearance since we
last saw him, but still wearing an air of dashing pretension. He stood
at the door, shaking his head, winking to himself, and fumbling in his
pocket, evidently in a state of great mental perplexity, probably from
his entertaining doubts as to what would be the character of his reception;
or from his being equally uncertain as to the best mode of opening
the conversation. Nor was he at all relieved by Rust, who without
moving, fastened his eye upon him with a cold, steadfast stare.

Kornicker, however, seemed to have fixed upon his course of action
at last; for he walked up to him, and stretching out his hand, said:

‘Wont you give us your flipper, my old fellow? You’re in trouble,
but I’ll stand by you to the last. If I don’t, damme!’ He struck his
other hand on the table, and nodded and winked with great vehemence.

‘So there is yet one who has not turned his back on the felon,’ said
Rust, partly addressing Kornicker and partly speaking to himself; ‘one
true man; a rare thing in this world; a jewel—a jewel, beyond all
price; and like all costly stones, found only in the poorest soils; but,’
added he, ‘what have I done to gain friends, or to link one solitary heart
to my fortunes?—what?’

He shook his head; and although his face was unmoved, and he
spoke in the low, half-soliloquizing manner of one who rather brooded
over the past than regretted it, yet there was something so sad in his
tone, and in his melancholy gesture, that it did more to call forth the
warm feelings of Kornicker than the most eloquent language.

‘What have you done?’ demanded he, earnestly; ‘I’ll tell you what
you did. When I was at low water mark, with scarce a rag to my
back or a crust to my stomach, and without a prospect of getting one,
you took me by the hand, and in a d——d gentlemanly way gave me a
h’ist out of the gutter. That’s what you did; and if you did flare up
now and then, and haul me over the coals; it was soon over, and soon
forgotten. I don’t bear malice, old fellow; no, no. It isn’t my way;
and as you’re in trouble now, if I can help you, I will. Never desert
any one; am unfortunately bloody short of cash; but you can have
what I’ve got, and when I get more, you shall have that too.’

As he spoke, he plunged his hand to the bottom of his pocket, drew
out a very shabby-looking pocket-book, deposited it on the table.

‘It isn’t much; but you’ll find it useful here, and you’re welcome
to it. This isn’t the shop where nothing put out at interest produces a
heavy income.’

This offer had a powerful effect upon Rust; and it seemed as if some
long dormant feelings were working their way to the surface from the
depths of his heart. He gazed earnestly at his clerk, and once or twice
opened his mouth to speak; but finally he got up, and taking the pocket-book
from the table, handed it back to Kornicker, saying:

‘I’m not in want of money. Gold is but dross now. I’ve plenty of
it; but its value in my eyes is gone.’

‘But,’ remonstrated Kornicker, holding his hands behind him, and
looking obstinately in another direction, partly to avoid taking the
pocket-book and partly to resist the solicitations of his own necessities,
which were strenuously urging him to do so, ‘but you may want a
lawyer to fight for you at your trial.’

‘For that farce I am prepared. I have one. He’s paid for it, and
he’ll fight,’ said Rust. ‘It will avail nothing, for I did slay the man.
It was a cold-blooded, deliberate murder. I planned it; I went up to
that place with the stern determination to commit it; and I did commit
it. It was no hasty act, done in a moment of fierce and sudden passion;
but a deed duly and deliberately meditated, and one that I would repeat.
What he had done, it’s useless to mention. I had no redress, except
what my own hand could give me. He has paid his forfeit, and I’ll
pay mine. I’ll fight to the last; because,’ added he, with that expression
of stern purpose which so often settled on his face, ‘Michael Rust
never yields; and then, let the law do its worst. Take your money;
I don’t need it.’

Kornicker hesitated; and then thrusting it in his pocket, said: ‘I
suppose, if you should happen to be short, you’ll let me know.’

‘I will,’ replied Rust; ‘but I’ve enough to last until my sand is run
out. They’ll hang me.’

‘Don’t talk so,’ exclaimed Kornicker, with a feeling not a little akin
to fear, at the cold, indifferent manner in which the other spoke. ‘You
may escape—who knows?’

Rust looked at him steadily, and then said, in a low, calm voice: ‘If
it were not that man and law were leagued against me to force me to
my doom, not one dollar would Michael Rust give to add an hour to his
life. He looks to the grave only as that dark abyss which knows neither
thought nor care; where the past is forgotten; where the future ends.
Death is but a deep dreamless sleep, which has no waking. Yet even
this boon he will not accept, if it’s forced upon him.’

‘But the disgrace, the disgrace of such an end,’ exclaimed Mr. Kornicker,
twisting his fingers together, and in his earnestness cracking the
knuckles of all of them. ‘Think of that, my old fellow. Think of
the stain that will always rest upon your memory.’

A smile, without a trace of pleasure, but cold and icy, passed across
Rust’s face.

‘What is my memory to me? What care I for the whispers and
sneers and surmises of the reptiles who crowd this world, and who will
soon be as I then shall be? What are these very men themselves?
Shadows!—shadows! Go—my course is chosen. You can do nothing
for me.’

Still Kornicker did not show any intention of quitting the room, but
shifted from one leg to the other, in a fidgety manner, as if he had something
farther to communicate, upon which however he did not like to
venture. At last he said: ‘Your daughter?’

Rust turned a quick keen eye on him, but farther than this evinced
no emotion.

‘Perhaps she may need a friend, when—when——’

‘I’m dead,’ said Rust, concluding what seemed to be rather an embarrassing
sentence to Kornicker.

‘I’m not exactly the fellow to make the offer,’ said Kornicker, adopting
the conclusion which Rust had given to the phrase; ‘but—but I’ll
keep an eye on her, and will lend her a helping hand if she gets in
trouble.’

Rust’s countenance expressed neither pleasure nor anger, as he answered:

‘Nothing can be done for her. Her fate is sealed; her path is marked
out. There is neither turn nor winding in it, nor escape from the destiny
to which it leads. She has taken the first step in it, and must follow
it to the end. Look at the reckless and abandoned of her sex, who
crowd our thoroughfares at night. Their fate must be her fate; an
outcast—then the tenant of a public prison where her associates will
be the thief and the felon. That’s her second step. The third is—to
her coffin; broken down; beggared, perhaps starving, she’ll die surrounded
by the offscouring of the earth—happy if she reaches her
grave before she has run her full course.’

There was something in the apathetic manner in which the old man
pointed out the future fate of his own child, that actually silenced Kornicker.
He knew not what to say. There was no grief to console;
no anger to deprecate; no wish to be fulfilled. He had however come
to the prison with his mind made up to do something, and he did not like
to be thwarted in his purpose. But before he had fairly determined what
course was to be pursued next, Rust interrupted the current of his ideas
by saying, as he pressed his hand upon his heart:

‘You can do nothing for me. The disease is here; and the only
physician who can heal it is Death. Could you blot the past from my
memory and leave it one vast blank; could you gild the future with
hopes which this heart did not tell me were utterly hollow; then perhaps
Michael Rust might struggle on, like thousands of others, with
some object in view, always to be striven for, but always receding
as he advanced, or turning to ashes in his grasp. But it cannot be.
I’ve played my part in the great drama of life, and the curtain will soon
fall.’

A spirit of callous indifference pervaded all that he said and did;
and making a gesture to Kornicker, forbidding all farther remark, he
threw himself on the bed, and drew the clothes about his head, as if
determined to shut out all sound.

Kornicker made one or two efforts to draw him again into conversation,
but the communicative mood was past; and finding that nothing farther
was to be done, he left him to his meditations.

From that time Kornicker, true to his maxim of deserting no one,
was constant in his visits and endeavors to comfort and assist him in
preparing for his trial. But never had man a more arduous task than
he found in this self-imposed duty; for the hidden transactions of Rust’s
past life had become public, and had turned the full tide of popular
feeling against him; and far and wide, through town and country, with
all that could excite public animosity, rang that bloody tale, (for the dead
man had powerful friends to battle for vengeance.) It was in every
mouth, and whispered in every ear. In the broad glare of day, and
before the eyes of the whole world, was paraded every secret of Rust’s
life. Witnesses who had been forgotten and had sunk from sight, and
were supposed to be dead, sprang into life, all having some dark deed to
record. Pamphlets, teeming with exaggerated details of the murder,
were hawked through the streets; peddled at every corner; hung in
every shop window. Rust’s own black life had prejudged him, and
had turned public opinion into public hate; until every voice called out
for blood. It was under this feeling that his trial came on.

Early on that morning, long before the court was opened, a stream of
people was thronging toward the City Hall by twenties and thirties and
hundreds. The iron gates were barred to keep them out; still they
contrived to get in, and swarmed through the halls. And when the
court was opened, officers armed with staves were stationed on the stairs,
to fight them down, for there was no room for them. The court-room
was crammed with men heaped upon men, climbing one on the other;
heads upon heads, swarming like bees, and packed and wedged together,
leaving not a foot to spare. And in the midst of all that living mass sat
Rust, unmoved, unflinching; returning look for look, defiance for defiance;
reckless as to his fate, but resolute not to yield.

There was one however at that trial who was not so indifferent. He
was a man of about fifty, tall and thin, with a grave, dignified face,
which yet bore a strong resemblance to that of Rust. He was deadly
pale, and sat next to Rust’s lawyers, conversing with them in a low
earnest tone; and at times, as the trial went on, suggesting questions to
them. This was Rust’s brother; the father of the two children, who,
generous to the last, had forgiven all, and was battling for the life of
him who had done his utmost to blast his. If Rust’s cold eye sank, or
his spirit quailed, it was only when he encountered the mild, sad eye
of that brother.

The jury was empanelled. The District Attorney opened for the
prosecution; and then the examination of witnesses commenced. Foot
by foot and inch by inch was the ground contested by Rust’s counsel.
Exceptions to testimony were taken, points of law raised, and every informality
or technicality, which afforded a loop-hole for objection, was
taken advantage of. The day dragged heavily on, and Rust grew weary.
The constant stir about him; the hum of voices, occasionally hushed
into silence at the cry of the officer, or the tap of the judge on his desk;
the hot, stifling air of the room; the wranglings of the lawyers, all
tended to bewilder him. All excitement had long since left him. A
leaden heaviness had settled upon all his faculties, and leaning his head
upon the table, even while life and death were in the scale, he slept
soundly.

He was aroused by his lawyer, touching his arm. He sat up, and
gazed vacantly about him.

‘Who’s that?’ said he, pointing to the witness’s stand.

Rust half started to his feet; then clasping his hands hard together,
sat down, and leaned his head on the table, but said not a word.

The clerk called out her name.

‘Ellen Colton.’

‘Who is she?’ demanded the lawyer.

Rust drew himself up; and many who had been watching him, observed
that his face had become perfectly corpse-like; his breathing
oppressed, and that his eyes seemed starting from their sockets, as he
fixed them on the witness.

‘My own flesh and blood,’ muttered he; ‘my own child!’

The girl was sworn; but it was evident that a terrible struggle was
going on, and she had to be supported to a chair. The lawyer for the
prosecution took down her name, and then asked her a question. He
received no answer. He repeated it; but the girl was silent. She
held down her head, and seemed half fainting.

‘You must reply,’ said the judge.

The girl raised her eyes, and said, in a low supplicating tone, ‘He’s
my father.’

The judge shook his head. ‘It’s a very painful task,’ said he, ‘but
there’s no alternative.’

The girl uttered not a word, and the court-room became so hushed
that even the hard breathing of the witness was audible.

‘I must have a decided answer,’ said the judge, gravely, yet mildly,
for he respected the feelings which dictated her course. ‘Will you
answer the question put by the district attorney?’

‘I will not,’ was the firm reply.

The face of the judge grew a little flushed, and he compressed his
lips, as if the duty which now rested with him were an unpleasant one.
But before he had time to speak, the district attorney rose, and muttering
in a tone loud enough to be heard, ‘I will not slay the parent through
the child,’ said: ‘If the court please, I withdraw the question. I’ll
call another witness.’

The judge bowed, and the girl was led away.

Rust had risen to his feet as if to speak, but he sat down, and the
trial proceeded. The whole of that day passed in the examination of
witnesses; so did the day following. Then came the summing up of
the lawyers, and the charge of the judge to the jury. During the
whole time the crowd came and went, but at all times the room was
thronged. The jury went out; still the crowd hung about the Hall.
It grew dark; but they could not go to their homes until they knew
the result; but round and round the Hall, and through the avenues of
the Park, they wandered, watching the dim light in the jury room, and
wondering what the verdict would be. One of them stole up to the
gray-headed constable who watched at the door, and inquired what the
chance was; and as the old man shook his head, and muttered that
they leaned toward a fatal verdict, he rubbed his hands with glee, and
hastened to communicate the tidings to those below. Twelve—one—two—three
o’clock at night came; still the twelve men held out, and
still the judge, an upright, conscientious, patient man, maintained his
post, waiting for the verdict, and ready to solve any doubts or points of
law that might arise. The court-room grew cold; the fires went out,
except one near the bench, and where the prisoner was. Sixty or
seventy persons were sitting in the dim recesses of the room, looking
like dark shadows, resolved to await the result. A few stretched themselves
on the benches, and others gathered in knots near the fire, and
whispered together; and now and then there was a loud laugh, suddenly
hushed, as the person who uttered it remembered where he was.
At last the judge went out, and left word with the officer to send for
him if the jury agreed, or wanted his advice. The night waned; the
sky grew gray in the east; and presently the day broke—but no verdict.
At an early hour the judge returned, and the court-room filled
again. Nine—ten—eleven. Suddenly there was a hum—a shuffling
in the hall. The door was thrown open by the gray-headed constable,
and the jury entered.

‘The jury’s agreed,’ cried the officer. There was a dead silence;
and the foreman gave in the verdict:

‘Guilty of Murder in the first degree!’

Rust moved not; no change of color or feature was perceptible, except
a slight smile, and that too faded in a moment.

The trial was over; and the crowd poured through the streets, yelling
with delight, and stopping those whom they met, to tell them that
Michael Rust was doomed to die.

Rust sat without stirring, until an officer touched him, and told him
that he must go. He then rose, and followed him without a word.
The crowd gathered around him, as he went out; but he did not notice
them. His brother walked at his side, but he heeded him not; and
when he reached his prison, without uttering a word, he flung himself
wearily upon his bed, and was soon sound asleep.

He awoke, a different man; and when his lawyer called to see him
on the following day, he found him as fierce as a caged beast. He
endeavored to utter some remark of consolation; but Rust impatiently
motioned him to be silent. He spoke about a clergyman; but the
reply was a laugh, so mocking and scornful, that he was glad to drop
the theme.

‘Is the game ended?’ at last inquired Rust. ‘Is there no farther
cast of the die left?’

The lawyer looked at him, as if in doubt of his meaning.

Rust, in response to the look, repeated the question. ‘Is there nothing
more to be done, in that farce called the law? Is there no farther blow
to be struck for life?’

‘We can appeal,’ replied the lawyer; ‘but there is little chance of
success.’ He took Rust by the hand, and said in a soothing tone: ‘My
poor friend, you must be prepared for the worst; for I cannot promise
to save your life.’

Rust rose and stood directly in front of him; and pointing to a small
coin which lay on the table, said: ‘Not the tenth part of that would
Michael Rust give to have one hour added to his life; but I will not
be driven from it. I will not be beaten down and crushed.’ He stamped
furiously on the floor.

‘Fight!’ said he, fixing his glaring eye on the lawyer; ‘fight to the
last; leave nothing untried; spare not gold; bribe—corrupt—suborn;
do any thing; but do not leave the triumph to my enemies. It’s that
that is tearing away at my heart. It’s that which is killing me,’
exclaimed he, bitterly, shaking his hands over his head.

‘We shall leave nothing untried,’ said the lawyer. ‘Perhaps too
we may obtain a pardon, for if ever a murder was justifiable, that was.’

‘Pardon!’ exclaimed Rust with a sneer; ‘pardon! Because I defended
my own flesh and blood; because the laws had forced upon me
the task which they should perform! I must die, or sue for pardon.
A noble thing is law!’

The lawyer was silent. He felt that Rust’s own previous criminal
life had been his worst enemy, and that it was the disclosure of his
own evil plans which had been in every mouth long before the trial,
that had done much to harden the feelings of the jury, who in another
case might have stretched a point to save him.

Merely repeating what he had already said, that every thing should
be tried, he took his leave.

·····

Several weeks elapsed. The appeal was made, and was unsuccessful;
the decision of the court below was affirmed; and nothing
was left but that the sentence of the law should be enforced. Rust
still maintained his indifferent bearing. All attempts to move him to
any thing like repentance were unavailing. Pious men had conversed
with him, but he had turned a deaf ear to their words; clergymen, too,
anxious even at the last hour to turn his thoughts to holier things, had
called upon him, but were equally unsuccessful; and at last he forbade
them admission.

It was just about dusk, on the day previous to that fixed for his execution,
that he was sitting in his cell, when he was aroused by the
opening of the door. He looked up, and observed a dim figure just
inside the door, cowering as if with fear; but it was so dark that he
could not distinguish more than its mere outline.

‘What do you want?’ demanded he, harshly. ‘Am I a wild beast,
that you have come to stare at me?’

The only reply was a low, suppressed cry, as of one endeavoring to
stifle down severe pain.

Rust rose up, advanced to the figure, and with a sudden jerk threw
off the cloak which enveloped it. It was his own child.

‘So it’s you!’ said he, bitterly, as he turned from her. ‘And you’ve
come to see your work. Look at me well. You’ve succeeded to your
heart’s content.’

The girl endeavored to clasp his hand, but he flung her from him;
and facing her, said: ‘What you have to say, say at once, and be
gone. There is little policy in seeking me out now, for I have nothing
to give.’

The girl cast herself at his feet, in a passion of grief. ‘Oh! father!
dear father! I ask nothing, except your forgiveness. Give me that, for
the love of God! I ask nothing more. Do not refuse me that, as you
hope for forgiveness of your own sins!’

‘There was a time,’ said Rust, ‘when I could not have resisted
those tones, when I could have refused you nothing. My very heart’s
blood was yours; but I am changed—changed indeed; since not a
single spark of tenderness for you is left; not even the shadow of the
love which I once bore to you. You are a stranger to me; or worse
than that, you are she, whose wanton conduct has placed me here, and
to-morrow will lead me to the gallows.’

The girl rose up hastily, and said in a quick husky voice:

‘Farewell, father; I will not stay until you curse me, for I fear it
may come to that. May God forgive both you and me! I have done
wrong, and most bitterly have I suffered for it.’

She caught his hand, pressed it to her lips, which were hot as fire,
and left the cell.

That was the last time that the father and daughter ever met.

The gaoler soon afterward brought in a light, and asked Rust if
he wanted any thing; and on being answered in the negative, went
out.

The night wore on heavily. Rust heard the clock, as its iron tongue
struck the successive hours from his life. At last the hour of midnight
sounded. He took out his watch, wound it up, and set it.

‘Your life will last longer than mine,’ said he, as he held it to the
light, and examined the face. He then placed it on the table, and
leaning his head on his hand, contemplated it for a long time. Time
was hurrying on; for while he was sitting thus, the clock struck—one.
He looked about the room; went to the door, and listened; then resumed
his seat, and thrusting his hand in his bosom, drew out a small
vial, containing a dark liquid. He held it to the light; shook it;
smiled; and applying it to his lips, swallowed its contents.

‘I’ll disappoint the sight-seers,’ said he. He raised the light; took
a long and earnest survey of the room; undressed himself; sat on the
edge of his bed, for a moment, apparently in deep thought; then got
into bed and drew the cover closely about him.

‘Now, then,’ said he, ‘the dream of life is past. I’ll soon know
whether there is any waking from it.’

These were his last words; for when the cell was opened in the
morning, he was dead in his bed. As in life, so in death, his own evil
acts clashed with his interests; for at an early hour in the morning a
messenger arrived with a pardon. In consideration of the heinous
nature of the provocation, which had led to the commission of Rust’s
crime, and of the inadequate punishment inflicted by the laws for such
offences, the governor had remitted his sentence.

NIAGARA.

The Falls, 1842. Claude Halcro.

TO MARY.

Horace.