The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 39, January, 1861 / A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Date: 2004-02-02T00:00:00+00:00
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Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 39, January, 1861

Author: Various

Release date: February 1, 2004 [eBook #11118]
Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, VOLUME 07, NO. 39, JANUARY, 1861 ***

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. VII.—JANUARY, 1861.—NO. XXXIX.

WASHINGTON CITY.

Washington is the paradise of paradoxes,—a city of magnificent distances, but of still more magnificent discrepancies. Anything may be affirmed of it, everything denied. What it seems to be it is not; and although it is getting to be what it never was, it must always remain what it now is. It might be called a city, if it were not alternately populous and uninhabited; and it would be a wide-spread village, if it were not a collection of hospitals for decayed or callow politicians. It is the hybernating-place of fashion, of intelligence, of vice,—a resort without the attractions of waters either mineral or salt, where there is no bathing and no springs, but drinking in abundance and gambling in any quantity. Defenceless, as regards walls, redoubts, moats, or other fortifications, it is nevertheless the Sevastopol of the Republic, against which the allied army of Contractors and Claim-Agents incessantly lay siege. It is a great, little, splendid, mean, extravagant, poverty-stricken barrack for soldiers of fortune and votaries of folly.

Scattered helter-skelter over an immense surface, cut up into scalene triangles, the oddity of its plan makes Washington a succession of surprises which never fail to vex and astonish the stranger, be he ever so highly endowed as to the phrenological bump of locality. Depending upon the hap-hazard start the ignoramus may chance to make, any particular house or street is either nearer at hand or farther off than the ordinary human mind finds it agreeable to believe. The first duty of the new-comer is to teach his nether extremities to avoid instinctively the hypothenuse of the street-triangulation, and the last lesson the resident fails to learn is which of the shortcuts from point to point is the least lengthy. Beyond a doubt, the corners of the streets were constructed upon a cold and brutal calculation of the greatest possible amount of oral sin which disappointed haste and irritated anxiety are capable of committing; nor is any relief to the tendency to profanity thus engendered afforded by the inexcusable nomenclature of the streets and avenues,—a nomenclature in which the resources of the alphabet, the arithmetic, the names of all the States of the Union, and the Presidents as well, are exhausted with the most unsystematic profligacy. A man not gifted with supernatural acuteness, in striving to get from Brown's Hotel to the General Post-Office, turns a corner and suddenly finds himself nowhere, simply because he is everywhere,—being at the instant upon three separate streets and two distinct avenues. And, as a further consequence of the scalene arrangement of things, it happens that the stranger in Washington, however civic his birth and education may have been, is always unconsciously performing those military evolutions styled marching to the right or left oblique,—acquiring thereby, it is said, that obliquity of the moral vision—which sooner or later afflicts every human being who inhabits this strange, lop-sided city-village.

So queer, indeed, is Washington City in every aspect, that one newly impressed by its incongruities is compelled to regard Swift's description of Lilliputia and Sydney Smith's account of Australia as poor attempts at fun. For, leaving out of view the pigmies of the former place, whose like we know is never found in Congress, what is there in that Australian bird with the voice of a jackass to excite the feeblest interest in the mind of a man who has listened to the debates on Kansas? or what marvel is an amphibian with the bill of a duck to him who has gazed aghast at the intricate anatomy of the bill of English? It is true that the ignorant Antipodes, with a total disregard of all theories of projectiles, throw their boomerangs behind their backs in order to kill an animal that stands or runs before their faces, or skim them along the ground when they would destroy an object flying overhead. And these feats seem curious. But an accomplished "Constitutional Adviser" can perform feats far more surprising with a few lumps of coal or a number of ships-knees, which are but boomerangs of a larger growth. Another has invented the deadliest of political missiles, (in their recoil,) shaped like mules and dismantled forts, while a third has demolished the Treasury with a simple miscalculation. Still more astonishing are the performances of an eminent functionary who encourages polygamy by intimidation, purchases redress for national insult by intercepting his armies and fleets with an apology in the mouth of a Commissioner, and elevates the Republic in the eyes of mankind by conquering at Ostend even less than he has lost at the Executive Mansion.

In truth, the list of Washington anomalies is so extensive and so various, that no writer with a proper regard for his own reputation or his readers' credulity would dare enumerate them one by one. Without material injury to the common understanding, a few may be mentioned; but respect for public opinion would urge that the enormous whole be summed up in the comparatively safe and respectful assertion, that the one only absolutely certain thing in Washington is the absence of everything that is at all permanent. The following are some of the more obnoxious astonishments of the place.

Traversing a rocky prairie inflated with hacks, you arrive late in the afternoon at a curbed boundary, too fatigued in body and too suffocated with dust to resent the insult to your common-sense implied in the announcement that you have merely crossed what is called an Avenue. Recovered from your fatigue, you ascend the steps of a marble palace, and enter but to find it garrisoned by shabby regiments armed with quills and steel pens. The cells they inhabit are gloomy as dungeons, but furnished like parlors. Their business is to keep everybody's accounts but their own. They are of all ages, but of a uniformly dejected aspect. Do not underrate their value. Mr. Bulwer has said, that, in the hands of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword. Suffer yourself to be astonished at their numbers, but permit yourself to withdraw from their vicinity without questioning too closely their present utility or future destination. No personal affront to the public or the nineteenth century is intended by the superfluity of their numbers or the inadequacy of their capacities. Their rapid increase is attributable not to any incestuous breeding in-and-in among themselves, but to a violent seduction of the President and the Heads of Department by importunate Congressmen; and you may rest assured that this criminal multiplication fills nobody with half so much righteous indignation and virtuous sorrow as the clerks themselves. Emerging from the palace of quill-drivers, a new surprise awaits you. The palace is surmounted by what appear to be gigantic masts and booms, economically, but strongly rigged, and without any sails. In the distance, you see other palaces rigged in the same manner. The effect of this spectacle is painful in the extreme. Standing dry-shod as the Israelites were while crossing the Red Sea, you nevertheless seem to be in the midst of a small fleet of unaccountable sloops of the Saurian period. You question whether these are not the fabulous "Ships of State" so often mentioned in the elegant oratory of your country. You observe that these ships are anchored in an ocean of pavement, and your no longer trustworthy eyes search vainly for their helms. The nearest approach to a rudder is a chimney or an unfinished pillar; the closest resemblance to a pilot is a hod-carrying workman clambering up a gangway. Dismissing the nautical hypothesis, your next effort to relieve your perplexity results in the conjecture that the prodigious masts and booms may be nothing more than curious gibbets, the cross-pieces to which, conforming rigidly to the Washington rule of contrariety, are fastened to the bottom instead of the top of the upright. Your theory is, that the destinies of the nation are to be hanged on these monstrous gibbets, and you wonder whether the laws of gravitation will be complaisant enough to turn upside down for the accommodation of the hangman, whoever he may be. It is not without pain that you are forced at last to the commonplace belief that these remarkable mountings of the Public Buildings are neither masts nor booms, but simply derricks,—mechanical contrivances for the lifting of very heavy weights. It is some consolation, however, to be told that the weakness of these derricks has never been proved by the endeavor to elevate by means of them the moral character of the inhabitants of Washington. Content yourself, after a reasonable delay for natural wonderment, to leave the strange scene. This shipping-like aspect of the incomplete Departments is only a nice architectural tribute to the fact that the population of Washington is a floating population. This you will not be long in finding out. The oldest inhabitants are here to-day and gone tomorrow, as punctually, if not as poetically, as the Arabs of Mr. Longfellow. A few remain,—parasitic growths, clinging tenaciously to the old haunts. Like tartar on the teeth, they are proof against the hardest rubs of the tooth-brush of Fortune.

As with the people, so with the houses. Though they retain their positions, seldom abandoning the ground on which they were originally built, they change almost hourly their appearance and their uses,—insomuch that the very solids of the city seem fluid, and even the stables are mutable,—the horse-house of last week being an office for the sale of patents, or periodicals, or lottery-tickets, this week, with every probability of becoming an oyster-cellar, a billiard-saloon, a cigar-store, a barber's shop, a bar-room, or a faro-bank, next week. And here is another astonishment. You will observe that the palatial museums for the temporary preservation of fossil or fungous penmen join walls, virtually, with habitations whose architecture would reflect no credit on the most curious hamlet in tide-water Virginia. To your amazement, you learn that all these houses, thousands in number, are boarding-houses. Of course, where everybody is a stranger, nobody keeps house. It would be pardonable to suppose, that, out of so many boarding-houses, some would be in reality what they are in name. Nothing can be farther from the fact. These houses contain apartments more or less cheerless and badly furnished, according to the price (always exorbitant, however small it may be) demanded for them, and are devoted exclusively to the storage of empty bottles and demijohns, to large boxes of vegetable- and flower-seeds, to great piles of books, speeches, and documents not yet directed to people who will never read them, and to an abominable odor of boiling cabbages. This odor steals in from a number of pitch-dark tunnels and shafts, misnamed passages and staircases, in which there are more books, documents, and speeches, other boxes of seeds, and a still stronger odor of cabbages. The piles of books are traps set here for the benefit of the setters of broken legs and the patchers of skinless shins, and the noisome odors are propagated for the advantage of gentlemen who treat diseases of the larynx and lungs.

It would appear, then, that the so-called boarding-houses are, in point of fact, private gift-book stores, or rather, commission-houses for the receiving and forwarding of a profusion of undesirable documents and vegetations. You may view them also in the light of establishments for the manufacture and distribution of domestic perfumery, payment for which is never exacted at the moment of its involuntary purchase, but is left to be collected by a doctor,—who calls upon you during the winter, levies on you with a lancet, and distrains upon your viscera with a compound cathartic pill.

It is claimed, that, in addition to the victims who pay egregious rents for boarding-house beds in order that they may have a place to store their documents and demi-johns, there are other permanent occupants of these houses. As, for example, Irish chambermaids, who subtract a few moments from the morning half-hour given to drinking the remnants of your whiskey, and devote them to cleaning up your room. Also a very strange being, peculiar to Washington boarding-houses, who is never visible at any time, and is only heard stumbling up-stairs about four o'clock in the morning. Also beldames of incalculable antiquity,—a regular allowance of one to each boarding-house,—who flit noiselessly and unceasingly about the passages and up and down the stairways, admonishing you of their presence by a ghostly sniffle, which always frightens you, and prevents you from running into them and knocking them down. For these people, it is believed, a table is set in the houses where the boarders proper flatter their acquaintances that they sleep. It must be so, for the entire male population is constantly eating in the oyster-cellars. Indeed, if ocular evidence may be relied on, the best energies of the metropolis are given to the incessant consumption of "half a dozen raw," or "four fried and a glass of ale." The bar-rooms and eating-houses are always full or in the act of becoming full. By a fatality so unerring that it has ceased to be wonderful, it happens that you can never enter a Washington restaurant and find it partially empty, without being instantly followed by a dozen or two of bipeds as hungry and thirsty as yourself, who crowd up to the bar and destroy half the comfort you derive from your lunch or your toddy.

But, although, everybody is forever eating oysters and drinking ale in myriads of subterranean holes and corners, nobody fails to eat at other places more surprising and original than any you have yet seen. In all other cities, people eat at home or at a hotel or an eating-house; in Washington they eat at bank. But they do not eat money,—at least, not in the form of bullion, or specie, or notes. These Washington banks, unlike those of London, Paris, and New York, are open mainly at night and all night long, are situated invariably in the second story, guarded as jealously as any seraglio, and admit nobody but strangers,—that is to say, everybody in Washington. This is singular. Still more singular is the fact, that the best food, served in the most exquisite manner, and (with sometimes a slight variation) the choicest wines and cigars, may be had at these banks free of cost, except to those who choose voluntarily to remunerate the banker by purchasing a commodity as costly and almost as worthless as the articles sold at ladies' fairs,—upon which principle, indeed, the Washington banks are conducted. The commodity alluded to is in the form of small discs of ivory, called "chips" or "cheeks" or "shad" or "skad," and the price varies from twenty-five cents to a hundred dollars per "skad."

It is expected that every person who opens an account at bank by eating a supper there shall buy a number of "shad," but not with the view of taking them home to show to his wife and children. Yet it is not an uncommon thing for persons of a stingy and ungrateful disposition to spend most of their time in these benevolent institutions without ever spending so much as a dollar for "shad," but eating, drinking, and smoking, and particularly drinking, to the best of their ability. This reprehensible practice is known familiarly in Washington as "bucking ag'inst the sideboard," and is thought by some to be the safest mode of doing business at bank.

The presiding officer is never called President. He is called "Dealer,"—perhaps from the circumstance of his dealing in ivory,—and is not looked up to and worshipped as the influential man of banking-houses is generally. On. the contrary, he is for the most part condemned by his best customers, whose heart's desire and prayer are to break his bank and ruin him utterly.

Seeing the multitude of boarding-houses, oyster-cellars, and ivory-banks, you may suppose there are no hotels in Washington. You are mistaken. There are plenty of hotels, many of them got up on the scale of magnificent distances that prevails everywhere, and somewhat on the maritime plan of the Departments. Outwardly, they look like colossal docks, erected for the benefit of hacks, large fleets of which you will always find moored under their lee, safe from the monsoon that prevails on the open sea of the Avenue. Inwardly, they are labyrinths, through whose gloomy mazes it is impossible to thread your way without the assistance of an Ariadne's clue in the shape of an Irishman panting under a trunk. So obscure and involved are the hotel-interiors, that it would be madness for a stranger to venture in search of his room without the guidance of some one far more familiar with the devious course of the narrow clearings through the forest of apartments than the landlord himself. Now and then a reckless and adventurous proprietor undertakes to make a day's journey alone through his establishment. He is never heard of afterwards,—or, if found, is discovered in a remote angle or loft, in a state of insensibility from bewilderment and starvation. If it were not for an occasional negro, who, instigated by charitable motives or love of money, slouches about from room to room with an empty coal-scuttle as an excuse for his intrusions, a gentleman stopping at a Washington hotel would be doomed to certain death. In fact, the lives of all the guests hang upon a thread, or rather, a wire; for, if the bell should fail to answer, there would be no earthly chance of getting into daylight again. It is but reasonable to suppose that the wires to many rooms have been broken in times past, and it is well known in Washington that these rooms are now tenanted by skeletons of hapless travellers whose relatives and friends never doubted that they had been kidnapped or had gone down in the Arctic.

The differential calculus by which all Washington is computed obtains at the hotels as elsewhere, with this peculiarity,—that the differences are infinitely great, instead of infinitely small. While the fronts are very fine, showy, and youthful as the Lecompton Constitution, the rears are coarse, common, and old as the Missouri Compromise. The furniture in the rooms that look upon Pennsylvania Avenue is as fresh as the dogma of Squatter Sovereignty; that in all other rooms dates back to the Ordinance of '87. Some of the apartments exhibit a glaring splendor; the rest show beds, bureaus, and washstands which hard and long usage has polished to a sort of newness. Specimens of ancient pottery found on these washstands are now in the British Museum, and are reckoned among the finest of Layard's collections at Nineveh.

The dining rooms are admirable examples of magnificent distance. The room is long, the tables are long, the kitchen is a long way off, and the waiters a long time going and coming. The meals are long,—so long that there is literally no end to them; they are eternal. It is customary to mark certain points in the endless route of appetite with mile-stones named breakfast, dinner, and supper; but these points have no more positive existence than the imaginary lines and angles of the geometrician. Breakfast runs entirely through dinner into supper, and dinner ends with coffee, the beginning of breakfast. Estimating the duration of dinner by the speed of an ordinary railroad-train, it is twenty miles from soup to fish, and fifty from turkey to nuts. But distance, however magnificent, does not lend enchantment to a meal. The wonder is that the knives and forks are not made to correspond in length with the repasts,—in which case the latter would be pitchforks, and the former John-Brown pikes.

The people of Washington are as various, mixed, dissimilar, and contrasted as the edifices they inhabit. Within the like area, which is by no means a small one, the same number of dignitaries can be found nowhere else on the face of the globe,—nor so many characters of doubtful reputation. If the beggars of Dublin, the cripples of Constantinople, and the lepers of Damascus should assemble in Baden-Baden during a Congress of Kings, then Baden-Baden would resemble Washington. Presidents, Senators, Honorables, Judges, Generals, Commodores, Governors, and the Ex's of all these, congregate here as thick as pick-pockets at a horse-race or women at a wedding in church. Add Ambassadors, Plenipotentiaries, Lords, Counts, Barons, Chevaliers, the great and small fry of the Legations, Captains, Lieutenants, Claim-Agents, Negroes, Perpetual-Motion-Men, Fire-Eaters, Irishmen, Plug-Uglies, Hoosiers, Gamblers, Californians, Mexicans, Japanese, Indians, and Organ-Grinders, together with females to match all varieties of males, and you have vague notion of the people of Washington.

It is an axiom in physics, that a part cannot be greater than the whole; and it will be recollected, that, after Epistemon had his head sewed on, he related a tough story about the occupations of the mighty dead, and swore, that, in the course of his wanderings among the damned, he found Cicero kindling fires, Hannibal selling egg-shells, and Julius Caesar cleaning stoves. The story holds good in regard to the mighty personages in Washington, but the axiom does not. Men whose fame fills the land, when they are at home or spouting about the country, sink into insignificance when they get to Washington. The sun is but a small potato in the midst of the countless systems of the sidereal heavens. In like manner, the majestic orbs of the political firmament undergo a cruel lessening of diameter as they approach the Federal City. The greatest of men ceases to be great in the presence of hundreds of his peers, and the multitude of the illustrious dwindle into individual littleness by reason of their superabundance. And when it comes to occupations, it will hardly be denied that the stranger who beholds a Senator "coppering on the ace," or a Congressman standing in a bar-room with a lump of mouldy cheese in one hand and a glass of "pony whiskey" in the other, or a Judge of the Supreme Court wriggling an ugly woman through the ridiculous movements of the polka in a hotel-parlor, must experience sensations quite as confounding as any Epistemon felt in Kingdom Come.

In spite of numberless receptions, levees, balls, hops, parties, dinners, and other reunions, there is, properly speaking, no society in Washington. Circles are said to exist, but, like that in the vortex of the whirlpool, they are incessantly changing. Divisions purely arbitrary may be made in any community. Hence the circles of Washington society may be represented sciagraphically in the following diagram.

[Illustration]

The Circle of the Mudsill includes Negroes, Clerks, Irish Laborers, Patent and other Agents, Hackmen, Faro-Dealers, Washerwomen, and Newspaper-Correspondents. In the Hotel Circle, the Newest Strangers, Harpists, Members of Congress, Concertina-Men, Provincial Judges, Card-Writers, College-Students, Unprotected Females, "Star" and "States" Boys, Stool-Pigeons, Contractors, Sellers of Toothpicks, and Beau Hickman, are found. The Circle of the White House embraces the President, the Cabinet, the Chiefs of Bureaus, the Embassies, Corcoran and Riggs, formerly Mr. Forney, and until recently George Sanders and Isaiah Rynders. The little innermost circle is intended to represent a select body of residents, intense exclusives, who keep aloof from the other circles and hold them all in equal contempt. This circle is known only by report; in all probability it is a myth. It is worthy of remark that the circles of the White House and the Hotels rise higher and sink lower than that of the Mudsill, but whether this is a fact or a mere necessity of the diagram is not known.

Society, such as it is, in the metropolis, is indulgent to itself. It intermeddles not, asks no impertinent questions, and transacts its little affairs in perfect peace and quietude. Vigilant as the Inquisition in matters political, it is deaf and blind, but not dumb, as to all others. It dresses as it pleases, drinks as much as it chooses, eats indiscriminately, sleeps promiscuously, gets up at all hours of the day, and does as little work as possible. Its only trouble is that "incomparable grief" to which Panurge was subject, and "which at that time they called lack of money." In truth, the normal condition of Washington society is, to use a vernacular term, "busted." It is not an isolated complaint. Everybody is "busted." No matter what may be the state of a man's funds when he gets to Washington, no matter how long he stays or how soon he leaves, to this "busted" complexion must he come at last. He is in Rome; he must take the consequences. Shall he insult the whole city with his solvency? Certainly not. He abandons his purse and his conscience to the madness of the hour, and, in generous emulation of the prevailing recklessness and immorality, dismisses every scruple and squanders his last cent. Then, and not till then, does he feel himself truly a Washington-man, able to look anybody in the face with the serene pride of an equal, and without the mortification of being accused or even suspected of having in all the earth a dollar that he can call his own.

Where morals are loose, piety is seldom in excess. But there are a half-dozen of churches in Washington, besides preaching every Sunday in the House of Representatives. The relative size and cost of the churches, as compared with the Public Buildings, indicates the true object of worship in Washington. Strange to say, the theatre is smaller than the churches. Clerical and dramatic entertainments cannot compete with the superior attractions of the daily rows in Congress and the nightly orgies at the faro-banks. Heaven is regarded as another Chihuahua or Sonora, occupied at present by unfriendly Camanches, but destined to be annexed some day. In the mean time, a very important election is to come off in Connecticut or Pennsylvania. That must be attended to immediately. Such is piety in Washington.

The list of the unique prodigies of Washington is without limit. But marvels heaped together cease to be marvellous, and of all places in the world a museum is the most tiresome. So, amid the whirl and roar of winter-life in Washington, when one has no time to read, write, or think, and scarcely time to eat, drink, and sleep, when the days fly by like hours, and the brain reels under the excitement of the protracted debauch, life becomes an intolerable bore. Yet the place has an intense fascination for those who suffer most acutely from the tedium vitae to which every one is more or less a prey; and men and women who have lived in Washington are seldom contented elsewhere. The moths return to the flaming candle until they are consumed.

In conclusion, it must be admitted that Washington is the Elysium of oddities, the Limbo of absurdities, an imbroglio of ludicrous anomalies. Planned on a scale of surpassing grandeur, its architectural execution is almost contemptible. Blessed with the name of the purest of men, it has the reputation of Sodom. The seat of the law-making power, it is the centre of violence and disorder which disturb the peace and harmony of the whole Republic,—the chosen resort for duelling, clandestine marriages, and the most stupendous thefts. It is a city without commerce and without manufactures; or rather, its commerce is illicit, and its manufacturers are newspaper-correspondents, who weave tissues of fiction out of the warp of rumor and the web of prevarication. The site of the United States Treasury, it is the home of everything but affluence. Its public buildings are splendid, its private dwellings generally squalid. The houses are low, the rents high; the streets are broad, the crossings narrow; the hacks are black, the horses white; the squares are triangles, except that of the Capitol, which is oval; and the water is so soft that it is hard to drink it, even with the admixture of alcohol. It has a Monument that will never be finished, a Capitol that is to have a dome, a Scientific Institute which does nothing but report the rise and fall of the thermometer, and two pieces of Equestrian Statuary which it would be a waste of time to criticize. It boasts a streamlet dignified with the name of the river Tiber, and this streamlet is of the size and much the appearance of a vein in a dirty man's arm. It has a canal, but the canal is a mud-puddle during one half the day and an empty ditch during the other. In spite of the labors of the Smithsonian Institute, it has no particular weather. It has the climates of all parts of the habitable globe. It rains, hails, snows, blows, freezes, and melts in Washington, all in the space of twenty-four hours. After a fortnight of steady rain, the sun shines out, and in half an hour the streets are filled with clouds of dust. Property in Washington is exceedingly sensitive, the people alarmingly callous. The men are fine-looking, the women homely. The latter have plain faces, but magnificent busts and graceful figures. The former have an imposing presence and an empty pocket, a great name and a small conscience. Notwithstanding all these impediments and disadvantages, Washington is progressing rapidly. It is fast becoming a large city, but it must always remain a deserted village in the summer. Its destiny is that of the Union. It will be the greatest capital the world ever saw, or it will be "a parched place in the wilderness, a salt land and not inhabited," and "every one that passeth thereby shall be astonished and wag his head."

MIDSUMMER AND MAY.

[Concluded.]

Spring at last stole placidly into summer, and Marguerite, who was always shivering in the house, kept the company in a whirl of out-door festivals.

"We have not lived so, Roger," said Mrs. McLean, "since the summer when you went away. We all follow the caprice of this child as a ship follows the little compass-needle."

And she made room for the child beside her in the carriage; for Mr. Raleigh was about driving them into town,—an exercise which had its particular charm for Marguerite, not only for the glimpse it afforded of the gay, bustling inland-city-life, but for opportunities of securing the reins and of occasioning panics. Lately, however, she had resigned the latter pleasure, and sat with quiet propriety by Mrs. McLean. Frequently, also, she took long drives alone or with one of the children, holding the reins listlessly, and ranging the highway unobservantly for miles around.

Mrs. Purcell declared the girl was homesick; Mrs. Heath doubted if the climate agreed with her: she neither denied nor affirmed their propositions.

Mr. Heath came and went from the city where her father was, without receiving any other notice than she would have bestowed on a peaceful walking-stick; his attentions to her during his visits were unequivocal; she accepted them as nonchalantly as from a waiter at table. On the occasion of his last stay, there had been a somewhat noticeable change in his demeanor: he wore a trifle of quite novel assurance; his supreme bearing was not mitigated by the restless sparkle of his eye; and in addressing her his compliments, he spoke as one having authority.

Mrs. Laudersdale, so long and so entirely accustomed to the reception of homage that it cost her no more reflection than an imperial princess bestows on the taxes that produce her tiara, turned slowly from the apparent apathy thus induced on her modes of thought, passivity lost in a gulf of anxious speculation, while she watched the theatre of events with a glow, like wine in lamplight, that burned behind her dusky eyes till they had the steady penetration of some wild creature's. She may have wondered if Mr. Raleigh's former feeling were yet alive; she may have wondered if Marguerite had found the spell that once she found, herself; she may have been kept in thrall by ignorance if he had ever read that old confessing note of hers: whatever she thought or hoped or dreaded, she said nothing, and did nothing.

Of all those who concerned themselves in the affair of Marguerite's health and spirits, Mr. Raleigh was the only one who might have solved their mystery. Perhaps the thought of wooing the child whose mother he had once loved was sufficiently repugnant to him to overcome the tenderness which every one was forced to feel for so beautiful a creation. I have not said that Marguerite was this, before, because, until brought into contrast with her mother, her extreme loveliness was too little positive to be felt; now it was the evanescent shimmer of pearl to the deep perpetual fire of the carbuncle. Softened, as she became, from her versatile cheeriness, she moved round like a moonbeam, and frequently had a bewildered grace, as if she knew not what to make of herself. Mr. Raleigh, from the moment in which he perceived that she no longer sought his company, retreated into his own apartments, and was less seen by the others than ever.

Returning from the drive on the morning of Mrs. McLean's last recorded remark, Mr. Raleigh, who had remained to give the horses in charge to a servant, was about to pass, when the tableau within the drawing-room caught his attention and altered his course. He entered, and flung his gloves down on a table, and threw himself on the floor beside Marguerite and the children. She appeared to be revisited by a ray of her old sunshine, and had unrolled a giant parcel of candied sweets, which their mother would have sacrificed on the shrine of jalap and senna, the purchase of a surreptitious moment, and was now dispensing the brilliant comestibles with much ill-subdued glee. One mouth, that had bitten off the head of a checkerberry chanticleer, was convulsed with the acidulous tickling of sweetened laughter, till the biter was bit and a metamorphosis into the animal of attack seemed imminent; at the hands of another a warrior in barley-sugar was experiencing the vernacular for defeat with reproving haste and gravity; and there was yet another little omnivorous creature that put out both hands for indiscriminate snatching, and made a spectacle of himself in a general plaster of gum-arabic-drop and brandy-smash.

"Contraband?" said Mr. Raleigh.

"And sweet as stolen fruit," said Marguerite. "Ursule makes the richest comfits, but not so innumerable as these. Mamma and I owe our sweet-tooth and honey-lip to bits of her concoction."

"Mrs. Purcell," asked Mr. Raleigh, as that lady entered, "is this little banquet no seduction to you?"

"What are you doing?" she replied.

"Drinking honey-dew from acorns."

"Laudersdale as ever!" ejaculated she, looking over his shoulder. "I thought you had 'no sympathy with'"——

"But I 'like to see other folks take'"——

"Their sweets, in this case. No, thank you," she continued, after this little rehearsal of the past. "What are you poisoning all this brood for?"

"Mrs. Laudersdale eats sweetmeats; they don't poison her," remonstrated
Katy.

"Mrs. Laudersdale, my dear, is exceptional."

Katy opened her eyes, as if she had been told that the object of her adoration was Japanese.

"It is the last grain that completes the transformation, as your story-books have told; and one day you will see her stand, a statue of sugar, and melt away in the sun. To be sure, the whole air will be sweetened, but there will be no Mrs. Laudersdale."

"For shame, Mrs. Purcell!" cried Marguerite. "You're not sweet-tempered, or you'd like sweet dainties yourself. Here are nuts swathed in syrup; you'll have none of them? Here are health and slumber and idle dreams in a chocolate-drop. Not a chocolate? Here are dates; if you wouldn't choose the things in themselves, truly you would for their associations? See, when you take up one, what a picture follows it: the plum that has swung at the top of a palm and crowded into itself the glow of those fierce noon-suns; it has been tossed by the sirocco, it has been steeped in reeking dew; there was always stretched above it the blue intense tent of a heaven full of light,—always below and around, long level reaches of hot shining sand; the phantoms of waning desert moons have hovered over it, swarthy Arab chiefs have encamped under it; it has threaded the narrow streets of Damascus—that city the most beautiful—on the backs of gaunt gray dromedaries; it has crossed the seas,—and all for you, if you take it, this product of desert freedom, torrid winds, and fervid suns!"

"I might swallow the date," said Mrs. Purcell, "but Africa would choke me."

Mr. Raleigh had remained silent for some time, watching Marguerite as she talked. It seemed to him that his youth was returning; he forgot his resolves, his desires, and became aware of nothing in the world but her voice. Just before she concluded, she grew conscious of his gaze, and almost at once ceased speaking; her eyes fell a moment to meet it, and then she would have flashed them aside, but that it was impossible; lucid lakes of light, they met his own; she was forced to continue it, to return it, to forget all, as he was forgetting, in that long look.

"What is this?" said Mrs. Purcell, stooping to pick up a trifle on the matting.

"C'est à moi!" cried Marguerite, springing up suddenly, and spilling all the fragments of the feast, to the evident satisfaction of the lately neglected guests.

"Yours?" said Mrs. Purcell with coolness, still retaining it. "Why do you think in French?"

"Because I choose!" said Marguerite, angrily. "I mean—How do you know that I do?"

"Your exclamation, when highly excited or contemptuously indifferent, is always in that tongue."

"Which am I now?"

"Really, you should know best. Here is your bawble"; and Mrs. Purcell tossed it lightly into her hands, and went out.

It was a sheath of old morocco. The motion loosened the clasp, and the contents, an ivory oval and a cushion of faded silk, fell to the floor. Mr. Raleigh bent and regathered them; there was nothing for Marguerite but to allow that he should do so. The oval had reversed in falling, so that he did not see it; but, glancing at her before returning it, he found her face and neck dyed deeper than the rose. Still reversed, he was about to relinquish it, when Mrs. McLean passed, and, hearing the scampering of little feet as they fled with booty, she also entered.

"Seeing you reminds me, Roger," said she. "What do you suppose has become of that little miniature I told you of? I was showing it to Marguerite the other night, and have not seen it since. I must have mislaid it, and it was particularly valuable, for it was some nameless thing that Mrs. Heath found among her mother's trinkets, and I begged it of her, it was such a perfect likeness of you. Can you have seen it?"

"Yes, I have it," he replied. "And haven't I as good a right to it as any?"

He extended his arm for the case which Marguerite held, and so touching her hand, the touch was more lingering than it needed to be; but he avoided looking at her, or he would have seen that the late color had fled till the face was whiter than marble.

"Your old propensities," said Mrs. McLean. "You always will be a boy. By the way, what do you think of Mary Purcell's engagement? I thought she would always be a girl."

"Ah! McLean was speaking of it to me. Why were they not engaged before?"

"Because she was not an heiress."

Mr. Raleigh raised his eyebrows significantly.

"He could not afford to marry any but an heiress," explained Mrs.
McLean.

Mr. Raleigh fastened the case and restored it silently.

"You think that absurd? You would not marry an heiress?"

Mr. Raleigh did not at once reply.

"You would not, then, propose to an heiress?"

"No."

As this monosyllable fell from his lips, Marguerite's motion placed her beyond hearing. She took a few swift steps, but paused and leaned against the wall of the gable for support, and, placing her hand upon the sun-beat bricks, she felt a warmth in them which there seemed to be neither in herself nor in the wide summer-air.

Mrs. Purcell came along, opening her parasol.

"I am going to the orchard," said she; "cherries are ripe. Hear the robins and the bells! Do you want to come?"

"No," said Marguerite.

"There are bees in the orchard, too,—the very bees, for aught I know, that Mr. Raleigh used to watch thirteen years ago, or their great-grand-bees,—they stand in the same place."

"You knew Mr. Raleigh thirteen years ago?" she asked, glancing up curiously.

"Yes."

"Well?"

"Very well."

"How much is very well?"

"He proposed to me. Smother your anger; he didn't care for me; some one told him that I cared for him."

"Did you?"

"This is what the Inquisition calls applying the question?" asked Mrs. Purcell. "Nonsense, dear child! he was quite in love with somebody else."

"And that was——?"

"He supposed your mother to be a widow. Well, if you won't come, I shall go alone and read my 'L'Allegro' under the boughs, with breezes blowing between the lines. I can show you some little field-mice like unfledged birds, and a nest that protrudes now and then glittering eyes and cleft fangs."

Marguerite was silent; the latter commodity was de trop. Mrs. Purcell adjusted her parasol and passed on.

Here, then, was the whole affair. Marguerite pressed her hands to her forehead, as if fearful some of the swarming thoughts should escape; then she hastened up the slope behind the house, and entered and hid herself in the woods. Mr. Raleigh had loved her mother. Of course, then, there was not a shadow of doubt that her mother had loved him. Horrible thought! and she shook like an aspen, beneath it. For a time it seemed that she loathed him,—that she despised the woman who had given him regard. The present moment was a point of dreadful isolation; there was no past to remember, no future to expect; she herself was alone and forsaken, the whole world dark, and heaven blank. But that could not be forever. As she sat with her face buried in her hands, old words, old looks, flashed on her recollection; she comprehended what long years of silent suffering the one might have endured, what barren yearning the other; she saw how her mother's haughty calm might be the crust on a lava-sea; she felt what desolation must have filled Roger Raleigh's heart, when he found that she whom he had loved no longer lived, that he had cherished a lifeless ideal,—for Marguerite knew from his own lips that he had not met the same woman whom he had left.

She started up, wondering what had led her upon this train of thought, why she had pursued it, and what reason she had for the pain it gave her. A step rustled among the distant last-year's leaves; there in the shadowy wood, where she did not dream of concealing her thoughts, where it seemed that all Nature shared her confidence, this step was like a finger laid on the hidden sore. She paused, a glow rushed over her frame, and her face grew hot with the convicting flush. Consternation, bitter condemnation, shame, impetuous resolve, swept over her in one torrent, and she saw that she had a secret which every one might touch, and, touching, cause to sting. She hurried onward through the wood, unconscious how rapidly or how far her heedless course extended. She sprang across gaps at which she would another time have shuddered; she clambered over fallen trees, penetrated thickets of tangled brier, and followed up the shrunken beds of streams, till suddenly the wood grew thin again, and she emerged upon an open space,—a long lawn, where the grass grew rank and tall as in deserted graveyards, and on which the afternoon sunshine lay with most dreary, desolate emphasis. Marguerite had scarcely comprehended herself before; now, as she looked out on the utter loneliness of the place, all joyousness, all content, seemed wiped from the world. She leaned against a tree where the building rose before her, old and forsaken, washed by rains, beaten by winds. A blind slung open, loose on a broken hinge; the emptiness of the house looked through it like a spirit. The woodbine seemed the only living thing about it,—the woodbine that had swung its clusters, heavy as grapes of Eshcol, along one wall, and, falling from support, had rioted upon the ground in masses of close-netted luxuriance.

Standing and surveying the silent scene of former gayety, a figure came down the slope, crushing the grass with lingering tread, checked himself, and, half-reversed, surveyed it with her. Her first impulse was to approach, her next to retreat; by a resolution of forces she remained where she was. Mr. Raleigh's position prevented her from seeing the expression of his face; from his attitude seldom was anything to be divined. He turned with a motion of the arm, as if he swung off a burden, and met her eye. He laughed, and drew near.

"I am tempted to return to that suspicion of mine when I first met you, Miss Marguerite," said he. "You take shape from solitude and empty air as easily as a Dryad steps from her tree."

"There are no Dryads now," said Marguerite, sententiously.

"Then you confess to being a myth?"

"I confess to being tired, Mr. Raleigh."

Mr. Raleigh's manner changed, at her petulance and fatigue, to the old air of protection, and he gave her his hand. It was pleasant to be the object of his care, to be with him as at first, to renew their former relation. She acquiesced, and walked beside him.

"You have had some weary travel," he said, "and probably not more than half of it in the path."

And she feared he would glance at the rents in her frock, forgetting that they were not sufficiently infrequent facts to be noticeable.

"He treats me like a child," she thought. "He expects me to tear my dress! He forgets, that, while thirteen years were making a statue of her, they were making a woman of me!" And she snatched away her hand.

"I have the boat below," he said, without paying attention to the movement. "You took the longest way round, which, you have heard, is the shortest way home. You have never been on the lake with me." And he was about to assist her in.

She stepped back, hesitating.

"No, no," he said. "It is very well to think of walking back, but it must end in thinking. You have no impetus now to send you over another half-dozen miles of wood-faring, no pique to sting, Io."

And before she could remonstrate, she was lifted in, the oars had flashed twice, and there was deep water between herself and shore. She was in reality too much fatigued to be vexed, and she sat silently watching the spaces through which they glanced, and listening to the rhythmic dip of the oars. The soft afternoon air, with its melancholy sweetness and tinge of softer hue, hung round them; the water, brown and warm, was dimpled with the flight of myriad insects; they wound among the islands, a path one of them knew of old. From the shelving rocks a wild convolvulus drooped its twisted bells across them, a sweet-brier snatched at her hair in passing, a sudden elder-tree shot out its creamy panicles above, they ripped up drowsy beds of folded lily-blooms.

Mr. Raleigh, suddenly lifting one oar, gave the boat a sharp curve and sent it out on the open expanse; it seemed to him that he had no right thus to live two lives in one. Still he wished to linger, and with now and then a lazy movement they slipped along. He leaned one arm on the upright oar, like a river-god, and from the store of boat-songs in his remembrance sang now and then a strain. Marguerite sat opposite and rested along the side, content for the moment to glide on as they were, without a reference to the past in her thought, without a dream of the future. Peach-bloom fell on the air, warmed all objects into mellow tint, and reddened deep into sunset. Tinkling cow-bells, where the kine wound out from pasture, stole faintly over the lake, reflected dyes suffused it and spread around them sheets of splendid color, outlines grew ever dimmer on the distant shores, a purple tone absorbed all brilliance, the shadows fell, and, bright with angry lustre, the planet Mars hung in the south and struck a spear, redder than rubies, down the placid mirror. The dew gathered and lay sparkling on the thwarts as they touched the garden-steps, and they mounted and traversed together the alleys of odorous dark. They entered at Mr. Raleigh's door and stepped thence into the main hall, where they could see the broad light from the drawing-room windows streaming over the lawn beyond. Mrs. Laudersdale came down the hall to meet them.

"My dear Rite," she said, "I have been alarmed, and have sent the servants out for you. You left home in the morning, and you have not dined. Your father and Mr. Heath have arrived. Tea is just over, and we are waiting for you to dress and go into town; it is Mrs. Manton's evening, you recollect."

"Must I go, mamma?" asked Marguerite, after this statement of facts. "Then I must have tea first. Mr. Raleigh, I remember my wasted sweetmeats of the morning with a pang. How long ago that seems!"

In a moment her face told her regret for the allusion, and she hastened into the dining-room.

Mr. Raleigh and Marguerite had a merry tea, and Mrs. Purcell came and poured it out for them.

"Quite like the days when we went gypsying," said she, when near its conclusion.

"We have just come from the Bawn, Miss Marguerite and I," he replied.

"You have? I never go near it. Did it break your heart?"

Mr. Raleigh laughed.

"Is Mr. Raleigh's heart such a delicate organ?" asked Marguerite.

"Once, you might have been answered negatively; now, it must be like the
French banner, _percé, troué, criblé,"—

"Pray, add the remainder of your quotation," said he,—"sans peur et sans reproche."

"So that a trifle would reduce it to flinders," said Mrs. Purcell, without minding his interruption.

"Would you give it such a character, Miss Rite?" questioned Mr. Raleigh lightly.

"I? I don't see that you have any heart at all, Sir."

"I swallow my tea and my mortification."

"Do you remember your first repast at the Bawn?" asked Mrs. Purcell.

"Why not?"

"And the jelly like molten rubies that I made? It keeps well." And she moved a glittering dish toward him.

"All things of that summer keep well," he replied.

"Except yourself, Mr. Raleigh. The Indian jugglers are practising upon us, I suspect. You are no more like the same person who played sparkling comedy and sang passionate tragedy than this bamboo stick is like that willow wand."

"I wish I could retort, Miss Helen," he replied. "I beg your pardon!"

She was silent, and her eye fell and rested on the sheeny damask beneath. He glanced at her keenly an instant, then handed her his cup, saying,—

"May I trouble you?"

She looked up again, a smile breaking over the face wanner than youth, but which the hour's gayety had flushed to a forgetfulness of intervening years, extended her left hand for the cup, still gazing and smiling.

Various resolves had flitted through Marguerite's mind since her entrance. One, that she would yet make Mr. Raleigh feel her power, yielded to shame and self-contempt, and she despised herself for a woman won unwooed. But she was not sure that she was won. Perhaps, after all, she did not care particularly for Mr. Raleigh. He was much older than she; he was quite grave, sometimes satirical; she knew nothing about him; she was slightly afraid of him. On the whole, if she consulted her taste, she would have preferred a younger hero; she would rather be the Fornarina for a Raffaello; she had fancied her name sweetening the songs of Giraud Riquier, the last of the Troubadours; and she did not believe Beatrice Portinari to be so excellent among women, so different from other girls, that her name should have soared so far aloft with that escutcheon of the golden wing on a field azure. "But they say that there cannot be two epic periods in a nation's literature," thought Marguerite hurriedly; "so that a man who might have been Homer once will be nothing but a gentleman now." And at this point, having decided that Mr. Raleigh was fully worth unlimited love, she added to her resolves a desire for content with whatever amount of friendly affection he chose to bestow upon her. And all this, while sifting the sugar over her raspberries. Nevertheless, she felt, in the midst of her heroic content, a strange jealousy at hearing the two thus discuss days in which she had no share, and she watched them furtively, with a sharp, hateful suspicion dawning in her mind. Now, as Mrs. Purcell's eyes met Mr. Raleigh's, and her hand was still extended for the cup, Marguerite fastened her glance on its glittering ring, and said abruptly,—

"Mrs. Purcell, have you a husband?"

Mrs. Purcell started and withdrew her hand, as if it had received a blow, just as Mr. Raleigh relinquished the cup, so that between them the bits of pictured porcelain fell and splintered over the equipage.

"Naughty child!" said Mrs. Purcell. "See now what you've done!"

"What have I to do with it?"

"Then you haven't any bad news for me? Has any one heard from the
Colonel? Is he ill?"

"Pshaw!" said Marguerite, rising and throwing down her napkin.

She went to the window and looked out.

"It is time you were gone, little lady," said Mr. Raleigh.

She approached Mrs. Purcell and passed her hand down her hair.

"What pretty soft hair you have!" said she. "These braids are like carved gold-stone. May I dress it with sweet-brier to-night? I brought home a spray."

"Rite!" said Mrs. Laudersdale sweetly, at the door; and Rite obeyed the summons.

In a half-hour she came slowly down the stairs, untwisting a long string of her mother's abandoned pearls, great pear-shaped things full of the pale lustre of gibbous moons. She wore a dress of white samarcand, with a lavish ornament like threads and purfiles of gold upon the bodice, and Ursule followed with a cloak. As she entered the drawing-room, the great bunches of white azalea, which her mother had brought from the swamps, caught her eye; she threw down the pearls, and broke off rapid dusters of the queenly flowers, touching the backward-curling hyacinthine petals, and caressingly passing her finger down the pale purple shadow of the snowy folds. Directly afterward she hung them in her breezy hair, from which, by natural tenure, they were not likely to fall, bound them over her shoulders and in her waist.

"See! I stand like Summer," she said, "wrapped in perfume; it is intoxicating."

Just then two hands touched her, and her father bent his face over her. She flung her arms round him, careless of their fragile array, kissed him on both cheeks, laughed, and kissed him again. She did not speak, for he disliked French, and English sometimes failed her.

"Here is Mr. Heath," her father said.

She partly turned, touched that gentleman's hand with the ends of her fingers, and nodded. Her father whispered a brief sentence in her ear.

"Jamais, Monsieur, jamais!" she exclaimed; then, with a quick gesture of deprecation, moved again toward him; but Mr. Laudersdale had coldly passed to make his compliments to Mrs. Heath.

"You are not in toilet?" said Marguerite, following him, but speaking with Mr. Raleigh.

"No,—Mrs. Purcell has been playing for me a little thing I always liked,—that sweet, tuneful afternoon chiding of the Miller and the Torrent."

She glanced at Mrs. Purcell, saw that her dress remained unaltered, and commenced pulling out the azaleas from her own.

"I do not want to go," she murmured. "I need not! Mamma and Mrs. McLean have already gone in the other carriage."

"Come, Marguerite," said Mr. Laudersdale, approaching her, as Mr. Heath and his mother disappeared.

"I am not going," she replied, quickly.

"Not going? I beg your pardon, my dear, but you are!" and he took her hand.

She half endeavored to withdraw it, threw a backward glance over her shoulder at the remaining pair, and, led by her father, went out.

Marguerite did her best to forget the vexation, was very affable with her father, and took no notice of any of Mr. Heath's prolonged remarks. The drive was at best a tiresome one, and she was already half-asleep when the carriage stopped. The noise and light, and the little vanities of the dressing-room, awakened her, and she descended prepared for conquest. But, after a few moments, it all became weariness, the air was close, the flowers faded, the music piercing. The toilets did not attract nor the faces interest her. She danced along absent and spiritless, when her eye, raised dreamily, fell on an object among the curtains and lay fascinated there. It was certainly Mr. Raleigh: but so little likely did that seem, that she again circled the room, with her eyes bent upon that point, expecting it to vanish. He must have come in the saddle, unless a coach had returned for him and Mrs. Purcell,—yes, there was Mrs. Purcell,—and she wore that sweet-brier fresh-blossoming in the light. With what ease she moved!—it must always have been the same grace;—how brilliant she was! There,—she was going to dance with Mr. Raleigh. No? Where, then? Into the music-room!

The music-room lay beyond an anteroom of flowers and prints, and was closed against the murmur of the parlors by great glass doors. Marguerite, from her position, could see Mr. Raleigh seated at the piano, and Mrs. Purcell standing by his side; now she turned a leaf, now she stooped, and their hands touched upon the keys. Marguerite slipped alone through the dancers, and drew nearer. There were others in the music-room, but they were at a distance from the piano. She entered the anteroom and sat shadowed among the great fragrant shrubs. A group already stood there, eating ices and gayly gossiping. Mr. Laudersdale and Mr. Manton sauntered in, their heads together, and muttering occult matters of business, whose tally was kept with forefinger on palm.

"Where is Raleigh?" asked Mr. Manton, looking up. "He can tell us."

"At his old occupation," answered a gentleman from beside Mrs.
Laudersdale, "flirting with forbidden fruit."

"An alliterative amusement," said Mrs. Laudersdale.

"You did not know the original Raleigh?" continued the gentleman. "But he always took pleasure in female society; yet, singularly enough, though fastidious in choice, it was only upon the married ladies that he bestowed his platonisms. I observe the old Adam still clings to him."

"He probably found more liberty with them," remarked Mrs. Laudersdale, when no one else replied.

"Without doubt he took it."

"I mean, that, where attentions are known to intend nothing, one is not obliged to measure them, or to calculate upon effects."

"Of the latter no one can accuse Mr. Raleigh!" said Mr. Laudersdale, hotly, forgetting himself for once.

Mrs. Laudersdale lifted her large eyes and laid them on her husband's face.

"Excuse me! excuse me!" said the gentleman, with natural misconception. "I was not aware that he was a friend of yours." And taking a lady on his arm, he withdrew.

"Nor is he!" said Mr. Laudersdale, in lowest tones, replying to his wife's gaze, and for the first time intimating his feeling. "Never, never, can I repair the ruin he has made me!"

Mrs. Laudersdale rose and stretched out her arm, blindly.

"The room is quite dark," she murmured; "the flowers must soil the air.
Will you take me up-stairs?"

Meanwhile, the unconscious object of their remark was turning over a pile of pages with one hand, while the other trifled along the gleaming keys.

"Here it is," said he, drawing one from the others, and arranging it before him,—a gondel-lied.

There stole from his fingers the soft, slow sound of lapsing waters, the rocking on the tide, the long sway of some idle weed. Here a jet of tune was flung out from a distant bark, here a high octave flashed like a passing torch through night-shadows, and lofty arching darkness told in clustering chords. Now the boat fled through melancholy narrow ways of pillared pomp and stately beauty, now floated off on the wide lagoons alone with the stars and sea. Into this broke the passion of the gliding lovers, deep and strong, giving a soul to the whole, and fading away again, behind its wild beating,—with the silence of lapping ripple and dipping oar.

Mrs. Purcell, standing beside the player, laid a careless arm across the instrument, and bent her face above him like a flower languid with the sun's rays. Suddenly the former smile suffused it, and, as the gondel-lied fell into a slow floating accompaniment, she sang with a swift, impetuous grace, and in a sweet, yet thrilling voice, the Moth Song. The shrill music and murmur from the parlors burst all at once in muffled volume upon the melody, and, turning, they both saw Marguerite standing in the doorway, like an angry wraith, and flitting back again. Mrs. Purcell laughed, but took up the thread of her song again where it was broken, and carried it through to the end. Then Mr. Raleigh tossed the gondel-lied aside, and rising, they continued their stroll.

"You have more than your share of the good things of life, Raleigh," said Mr. McLean, as the person addressed poured out wine for Mrs. Purcell. "Two affairs on hand at once? You drink deep. Light and sparkling,—thin and tart,—isn't it Solomon who forbids mixed drink?"

"I was never the worse for claret," replied Mr. Raleigh, bearing away the glittering glass.

The party from the Lake had not arrived at an early hour, and it was quite late when Mr. Raleigh made his way through ranks of tireless dancers, toward Marguerite. She had been dancing with a spirit that would have resembled joyousness but for its reckless abandon. She seemed to him then like a flame, as full of wilful sinuous caprice. At the first he scarcely liked it, but directly the artistic side of his nature recognized the extreme grace and beauty that flowed through every curve of movement. Standing now, the corn-silk hair slightly disordered and still blown about by the fan of some one near her, her eyes sparkling like stars in the dewdrops of wild wood-violets, warm, yet weary, and a flush deepening her cheek with color, while the flowers hung dead around her, she held a glass of wine and watched the bead swim to the brim. Mr. Raleigh approached unaware, and startled her as he spoke.

"It is au gré du vent, indeed," he said,—"just the white fluttering butterfly,—and now that the wings are clasped above this crimson blossom, I have a chance of capture." And smiling, he gently withdrew the splendid draught.

"Buvez, Monsieur," she said; "c'est le vin de la vie!"

"Do you know how near daylight it is?" he replied. "Mrs. Laudersdale fainted in the heat, and your father took her home long ago. The Heaths went also; and the carriage has just returned for the only ones of us that are left, you and me."

"Is it ready now?"

"Yes."

"So am I."

And in a few moments she sat opposite him in the coach, on their way home.

"It wouldn't be possible for me to sit on the box and drive?" she asked.

"I should like it, in this wild starlight, these flying clouds, this breath of dawn."

Meeting no response, she sank into silence. No emotion can keep one awake forever, and, after all her late fatigue, the roll of the easy vehicle upon the springs soon soothed her into a dreamy state. Through the efforts at wakefulness, she watched the gleams that fell within from the carriage-lamps, the strange shadows on the roadside, the boughs tossing to the wind and flickering all their leaves in the speeding light; she watched, also, Mr. Raleigh's face, on which, in the fitful flashes, she detected a look of utter weariness.

"Monsieur," she exclaimed, "il faut que je vous gêne!"

"Immensely," said Mr. Raleigh with a smile; "but, fortunately, for no great time."

"We shall be soon at home? Then I must have slept."

"Very like. What did you dream?"

"Oh, one must not tell dreams before breakfast, or they come to pass, you know."

"No,—I am uninitiated in dream-craft. Mr. Heath"——

"Monsieur," she cried, with sudden heat, "il me semble que je comprends les Laocoons! J'en suis de même!"

As she spoke, she fell, struck forward by a sudden shock, the coach was rocking like a boat, and plunging down unknown gulfs. Mr. Raleigh seized her, broke through the door, and sprang out.

"Qu'avez vous?" she exclaimed.

"The old willow is fallen in the wind," he replied.

"Quel dommage that we did not see it fall!"

"It has killed one of the horses, I fear," he continued, measuring, as formerly, her terror by her levity. "Capua! is all right? Are you safe?"

"Yah, massa!" responded a voice from the depths, as Capua floundered with the remaining horse in the thicket at the lake-edge below. "Yah, massa,—nuffin harm Ol' Cap in water; spec he born to die in galluses; had nuff chance to be in glory, ef 'twasn't. I's done beat wid dis yer pony, anyhow, Mass'r Raleigh. Seems, ef he was a 'sect to fly in de face of all creation an' pay no 'tention to his centre o' gravity, he might walk up dis yer hill!"

Mr. Raleigh left Marguerite a moment, to relieve Capua's perplexity. Through the remaining darkness, the sparkle of stars, and wild fling of shadows in the wind, she could but dimly discern the struggling figures, and the great creature trampling and snorting below. She remembered strange tales out of the "Arabian Nights," "Bellerophon and the Chimaera," "St. George and the Dragon"; she waited, half-expectant, to see the great talon-stretched wings flap up against the slow edge of dawn, where Orion lay, a pallid monster, watching the planet that flashed like some great gem low in a crystalline west, and she stepped nearer, with a kind of eager and martial spirit, to do battle in turn.

"Stand aside, Una!" cried Mr. Raleigh, who had worked in a determined characteristic silence, and the horse's head, sharp ear, and starting eye were brought to sight, and then his heaving bulk.

"All right, massa!" cried Capua, after a moment's survey, as he patted the trembling flanks. "Pretty tough ex'cise dat! Spect Massam Clean be mighty high,—his best cretur done about killed wid dat tree;—feared he show dis nigger a stick worf two o' dat!"

"We had like to have finished our dance on nothing," said Mr. Raleigh now, looking back on the splintered wheels and panels. "Will you mount? I can secure you from falling."

"Oh, no,—I can walk; it is only a little way."

"Reach home like Cinderella? If you had but one glass slipper, that might be; but in satin ones it is impossible." And she found herself seated aloft before quite aware what had happened.

Pacing along, they talked lightly, with the gayety natural upon excitement,—Capua once in a while adding a cogent word. As they opened the door, Mr. Raleigh paused a moment.

"I am glad," he said, "that my last day with you has been crowned by such adventures. I leave the Lake at noon."

She hung, listening, with a backward swerve of figure, and regarding him in the dim light of the swinging hall-lamp, for the moment half-petrified. Suddenly she turned and seized his hand in hers,—then threw it off.

"Cher ami," she murmured hastily, in a piercing whisper, like some articulate sigh, "si tu m'aimes, dis moi!"

The door closed in the draught, the drawing-room door opened, and Mr. Laudersdale stepped out, having been awaiting their return. Mr. Raleigh caught the flash of Marguerite's eye and the crimson of her cheek, as she sprang forward up the stairs and out of sight.

The family did not breakfast together the next day, as politeness chooses to call the first hour after a ball, and Mr. Raleigh was making some arrangements preliminary to his departure, in his own apartments, at about the hour of noon. The rooms which he had formerly occupied Mrs. McLean had always kept closed, in a possibility of his return, and he had found himself installed in them upon his arrival. The library was today rather a melancholy room: the great book-cases did not enliven it; the grand-piano, with its old dark polish, seemed like a coffin, the sarcophagus of unrisen music; the oak panelling had absorbed a richer hue with the years than once it wore; the portrait of his mother seemed farther withdrawn from sight and air; Antinoüs took a tawnier tint in his long reverie. The Summer, past her height, sent a sad beam, the signal of decay, through the half-open shutters, and it lay wearily on the man who sat by the long table, and made more sombre yet the faded carpet and cumbrous chair.

There was a tap on the door. Mr. Raleigh rose and opened it, and invited Mr. Laudersdale in. The latter gentleman complied, took the chair resigned by the other, but after a few words became quiet. Mr. Raleigh made one or two attempts at conversation, then, seeing silence to be his visitor's whim, suffered him to indulge it, and himself continued his writing. Indeed, the peculiar relations existing between these men made much conversation difficult. Mr. Laudersdale sat with his eyes upon the floor for several minutes, and his countenance wrapped in thought. Rising, with his hands behind him, he walked up and down the long room, still without speaking.

"Can I be of service to you, Sir?" asked the other, after observing him.

"Yes, Mr. Raleigh, I am led to think you can,"—still pacing up and down, and vouchsafing no further information.

At last, the monotonous movement ended, Mr. Laudersdale stood at the window, intercepting the sunshine, and examined some memoranda.

"Yes, Mr. Raleigh," he resumed, with all his courtly manner, upon close of the examination, "I am in hopes that you may assist me in a singular dilemma."

"I shall be very glad to do so."

"Thank you. This is the affair. About a year ago, being unable to make my usual visit to my daughter and her grandmother, I sent there in my place our head clerk, young Heath, to effect the few transactions, and also to take a month's recreation,—for we were all overworked and exhausted by the crisis. The first thing he proceeded to do was to fall in love with my daughter. Of course he did not mention this occurrence to me, on his return. When my daughter arrived at New York, I was again detained, myself, and sent her to this place under his care. He lingered rather longer than he should have done, knowing the state of things; but I suspected nothing, for the idea of a clerk's marriage with the heiress of the great Martinique estate never entered my mind; moreover, I have regarded her as a child; and I sent him back with various commissions at several times,—once on business with McLean, once to obtain my wife's signature to some sacrifice of property, and so on. I really beg your pardon, Mr. Raleigh; it is painful to another, I am aware, to be thrust upon family confidences"——

"Pray, Sir, proceed," said Mr. Raleigh, wheeling his chair about.

"But since you are in a manner connected with the affair, yourself"——

"You must be aware, Mr. Laudersdale, that my chief desire is the opportunity you afford me."

"I believe so. I am happy to afford it. On the occasion of Mr. Heath's last visit to this place, Marguerite drew attention to a coin whose history you heard, and the other half of which Mrs. Purcell wore. Mr. Heath obtained the fragment he possessed through my wife's aunt, Susanne Le Blanc; Mrs. Purcell obtained hers through her grandmother, Susan White. Of course, these good people were not slow to put the coin and the names together; Mr. Heath, moreover, had heard portions of the history of Susanne Le Blanc, when in Martinique.

"On resuming his duties in the counting-house, after this little incident, one day, at the close of business-hours, he demanded from me the remnants of this history with which he might be unacquainted. When I paused, he took up the story and finished it with ease, and—and poetical justice, I may say, Mr. Raleigh. Susanne was the sister of Mrs. Laudersdale's father, though far younger than he. She met a young American gentleman, and they became interested in each other. Her brother designed her for a different fate,—the governor of the island, indeed, was her suitor,—and forbade their intercourse. There were rumors of a private marriage; her apartments were searched for any record, note, or proof, unsuccessfully. If there were such, they had been left in the gentleman's hands for better concealment. It being supposed that they continued to meet, M. Le Blanc prevailed upon the governor to arrest the lover on some trifling pretence and send him out of the island. Shortly afterward, as he once confessed to his wife, he caused a circumstantial account of the death and funeral obsequies of each to reach the other. Immediately he urged the governor's suit again, and when she continued to resist, he fixed the wedding-day, himself, and ordered the trousseau. Upon this, one evening, she buried the box of trinkets at the foot of the oleanders, and disappeared the next, and no trace of her was found.

"When I reached this point, young Heath turned to me with that impudently nonchalant drawl of his, saying,—

"'And her property, Sir?'

"'That,' I replied innocently, 'which comprised half the estate, and which she would have received, on attaining the requisite age, was inherited by her brother, upon her suicide.'

"'Apparent suicide, you mean,' said he; and thereupon took up the story, as I have said, matched date to date and person to person, and informed me that exactly a fortnight from the day of Mademoiselle Susanne Le Blanc's disappearance, a young lady took rooms at a hotel in a Southern city, and advertised for a situation as governess, under the name of Susan White. She gave no references, spoke English imperfectly, and had difficulty in obtaining one; finally, however, she was successful, and after a few years married into the family of her employer, and became the mother of Mrs. Heath. The likeness of Mrs. Purcell, the grandchild of Susan White, to Susanne Le Blanc, was so extraordinary, a number of years ago, that, when Ursule, my daughter's nurse, first saw her, she fainted with terror. My wife, you are aware, was born long after these events. This governess never communicated to her husband any more specific circumstance of her youth than that she had lived in the West Indies, and had left her family because they had resolved to marry her,—as she might have done, had she not died shortly after her daughter's birth. Among her few valuables were found this half-coin of Heath's, and a miniature, which his mother recently gave your cousin, but which, on account of its new interest, she has demanded again; for it is probably that of the ancient lover, and bearing, as it does, a very striking resemblance to yourself, you have pronounced it to be undoubtedly that of your uncle, Reuben Raleigh, and wondered how it came into the possession of Mrs. Heath's mother. Now, as you may be aware, Reuben Raleigh was the name of Susanne Le Blanc's lover."

"No,—I was not aware."

Mr. Laudersdale's countenance, which had been animated in narration, suddenly fell.

"I was in hopes," he resumed,—"I thought,—my relation of these occurrences may have been very confused; but it is as plain as daylight to me, that Susanne Le Blanc and Susan White are one, and that the property of the first is due to the heirs of the last."

"Without doubt, Sir."

"The same is plain, to the Heaths. I am sure that Marguerite will accept our decision in the matter,—sure that no daughter of mine would retain a fraudulent penny; for retain it she could, since there is not sufficient proof in any court, if we chose to contest; but it will beggar her."

"How, Sir? Beggar her to divide her property?"

"It is a singular division. The interest due on Susanne's moiety swells it enormously. Add to this, that, after M. Le Blanc's death, Madame Le Blanc, a much younger person, did not so well understand the management of affairs, the property depreciated, and many losses were encountered, and it happens that the sum due Mrs. Heath covers the whole amount that Marguerite possesses."

"Now, then, Sir?" exclaimed Mr. Raleigh, interrogatively.

"Now, then, Mrs. Heath requests my daughter's hand for her son, and offers to set off to him, at once, such sum as would constitute his half of her new property upon her decease, and allow him to enter our house as special partner."

"Ah!"

"This does not look so unreasonable. Last night he proposed formally to Marguerite, who is still ignorant of these affairs, and she refused him. I have urged her differently,—I can do no more than urge,—and she remains obdurate. To accumulate misfortunes, we escaped 1857 by a miracle. We have barely recovered; and now various disasters striking us,—the loss of the Osprey the first and chief of them,—we are to-day on the verge of bankruptcy. Nothing but the entrance of this fortune can save us from ruin."

"Unfortunate!" said Mr. Raleigh,—"most unfortunate! And can I serve you at this point?"

"Not at all, Sir," said Mr. Laudersdale, with sudden erectness. "No,—I have but one hope. It has seemed to me barely possible that your uncle may have communicated to you events of his early life,—that you may have heard, that there may have been papers telling of the real fate of Susanne Le Blanc."

"None that I know of," said Mr. Raleigh, after a pause. "My uncle was a very reserved person. I often imagined that his youth had not been without its passages, something to account for his unvarying depression. In one letter, indeed, I asked him for such a narration. He promised to give it to me shortly,—the next mail, perhaps. The next mail I received nothing; and after that he made no allusion to the request."

"Indeed? Indeed? I should say,—pardon me, Mr. Raleigh,—that your portion of the next mail met with some accident. Your servants could not explain it?"

"There is Capua, who was major-domo. We can inquire," said Mr. Raleigh, with a smile, rising and ringing for that functionary.

On Capua's appearance, the question was asked, if he had ever secretly detained letter or paper of any kind.

"Lors, massa! I alwes knew 'twould come to dis!" he replied. "No, massa, neber!" shaking his head with repeated emphasis.

"I thought you might have met with some accident, Capua," said his master.

"Axerden be ——, beg massa's parden; but such s'picions poison any family's peace, and make a feller done forgit hisself."

"Very well," said Mr. Raleigh, who was made to believe by this vehemence in what at first had seemed a mere fantasy. "Only remember, that, if you could assure me that any papers had been destroyed, the assurance would be of value."

"'Deed, Mass Roger? Dat alters de case," said Capua, grinning. "Dere's been a good many papers 'stroyed in dis yer house firs' an' last."

"Which in particular?"

"Don' rekerlek, massa, it's so long ago."

"But make an effort."

"Well, Massa Raleigh,—'pears to me I do remember suthin',—I do b'lieve—yes, dis's jist how 'twas. Spect I might as well make a crean breast ob it. I's alwes had it hangin' roun' my conscious; do'no' but I's done grad to git rid ob it. Alwes spected massa 'd be 'xcusin' Cap o' turnin' tief."

"That is the last accusation I should make against you, Capua."

"But dar I stan's convicted."

"Out with it, Capua!" said Mr. Laudersdale, laughing.

"Lord! Massa Lausdel! how you do scare a chile! Didn' know mass'r was dar. See, Mass Roger, dis's jist how 'twas. Spec you mind dat time when all dese yer folks lib'd acrost de lake dat summer, an' massa was possessed to 'most lib dar too? Well, one day, massa mind Ol' Cap's runnin' acrost in de rain an' in great state ob excitement to tell him his house done burnt up?"

"Yes. What then?"

"Dat day, massa, de letters had come from Massa Reuben out in Indy, an' massa's pipe kinder 'tracted Cap's 'tention, an' so he jist set down in massa's chair an' took a smoke. Bimeby Cap thought,—'Ef massa come an' ketch him!'—an' put down de pipe an' went to work, and bimeby I smelt mighty queer smell, massa, 'bout de house, made him tink Ol' Nick was come hissef for Ol' Cap, an' I come back into dis yer room an' Massa Reuben's letters from Indy was jist most done burnt up, he cotched 'em in dese yer ol' brack han's, Mass Roger, an' jist whipt 'em up in dat high croset."

And having arrived at this confusion in his personal pronouns, Capua mounted nimbly on pieces of furniture, thrust his pocket-knife through a crack of the wainscot, opened the door of a small unseen closet, and, after groping about and inserting his head as Van Amburgh did in the lion's mouth, scrambled down again with his hand full of charred and blackened papers, talking glibly all the while.

"Ef massa'd jist listen to reason," he said, "'stead o' flyin' into one ob his tantrums, I might sprain de matter. You see, I knew Mass Roger'd feel so oncomforble and remorseful to find his ol' uncle's letters done 'stroyed, an 'twas all by axerden, an' couldn' help it noways, massa, an' been done sorry eber since, an' wished dar warn't no letters dis side de Atlantic nor torrer, ebery day I woke."

After which plea, Capua awaited his sentence.

"That will do,—it's over now, old boy," said Mr. Raleigh, with his usual smile.

"Now, massa, you a'n't gwine"——

"No, Capua, I'm going to do nothing but look at the papers."

"But massa's"——

"You need not be troubled,—I said, I was not."

"But, massa,—s'pose I deserve a thrashing?"

"There's no danger of your getting it, you blameless Ethiop!"

Upon which pacific assurance, Capua departed.

The two gentlemen now proceeded to the examination of these fragments. Of the letters nothing whatever was to be made. From one of them dropped a little yellow folded paper that fell apart in its creases. Put together, it formed a sufficiently legible document, and they read the undoubted marriage-certificate of Susanne Le Blanc and Reuben Raleigh.

"I am sorry," said Mr. Laudersdale, after a moment. "I am sorry, instead of a fortune, to give them a bar-sinister."

"Your daughter is ignorant?—your wife?"

"Entirely. Will you allow me to invite them in here? They should see this paper."

"You do not anticipate any unpleasant effect?"

"Not the slightest Marguerite has no notion of want or of pride.
Her first and only thought will be—sa cousine Hélène." And Mr.
Laudersdale went out.

Some light feet were to be heard pattering down the stairs, a mingling of voices, then Mr. Laudersdale passed on, and Marguerite tapped, entered, and closed the door.

"My father has told me something I but half understand," said she, with her hand on the door. "Unless I marry Mr. Heath, I lose my wealth? What does that signify? Would all the mines of Peru tempt me?"

Mr. Raleigh remained leaning against the corner of the bookcase. She advanced and stood at the foot of the table, nearly opposite him. Her lips were glowing as if the fire of her excitement were fanned by every breath; her eyes, half hidden by the veiling lids, seemed to throw a light out beneath them and down her cheek. She wore a mantle of swan's down closely wrapped round her, for she had complained ceaselessly of the chilly summer.

"Mr. Raleigh," she said, "I am poorer than you are, now. I am no longer an heiress."

At this moment, the door opened again and Mrs. Laudersdale entered. At a step she stood in the one sunbeam; at another, the shutters blew together, and the room was left in semi-darkness, with her figure gleaming through it, outlined and starred in tremulous evanescent light. For an instant both Marguerite and Mr. Raleigh seemed to be half awe-struck by the radiant creature shining out of the dark; but directly, Marguerite sprang back and stripped away the torrid nasturtium-vine which her mother had perhaps been winding in her hair when her husband spoke with her, and whose other end, long and laden with fragrant flame, still hung in her hand and along her dress. Laughing, Marguerite in turn wound it about herself, and the flowers, so lately plucked from the bath of hot air, where they had lain steeping in sun, flashed through the air a second, and then played all their faint spirit-like luminosity about their new wearer. She seemed sphered in beauty, like the Soul of Morning in some painter's fantasy, with all great stars blossoming out in floral life about her, colorless, yet brilliant in shape and light. It was too much; Mr. Raleigh opened the window and let in the daylight again, and a fresh air that lent the place a gayer life. As he did so, Mr. Laudersdale entered, and with him Mr. Heath and his mother. Mr. Laudersdale briefly recapitulated the facts, and added,—

"Communicating my doubts to Mr. Raleigh, he has kindly furnished me with the marriage-certificate of his uncle and Mademoiselle Le Blanc. And as Mr. Reuben Raleigh was living within thirteen years, you perceive that your claims are invalidated."

There was a brief silence while the paper was inspected.

"I am still of opinion that my grandmother's second marriage was legal," replied Mr. Heath; "yet I should be loath to drag up her name and subject ourselves to a possibility of disgrace. So, though the estate is ours, we can do without it!"

Meanwhile, Marguerite had approached her father, and was patching together the important scraps.

"What has this to do with it?" said she. "You admitted before this discovery—did you not?—that the property was no longer mine. These people are Aunt Susanne's heirs still, if not legally, yet justly. I will not retain a sous of it! My father shall instruct my lawyer, Mrs. Heath, to make all necessary transfers to yourself. Let us wish you good-morning!" And she opened the door for them to pass.

"Marguerite! are you mad?" asked her father, as the door closed.

"No, father,—but honest,—which is the same thing," she responded, still standing near it.

"True," he said, in a low tone like a groan. "But we are ruined."

"Ruined? Oh, no! You are well and strong. So am I. I can work. I shall get much embroidery to do, for I can do it perfectly; the nuns taught me. I have a thousand resources. And there is something my mother can do; it is her great secret; she has played at it summer after summer. She has moulded leaves and flowers and twined them round beautiful faces in clay, long enough; now she shall carve them in stone, and you will be rich again!"

Mrs. Laudersdale sat in a low chair while Marguerite spoke, the nasturtium-vine dinging round her feet like a gorgeous snake, her hands lying listlessly in her lap, and her attitude that of some queen who has lost her crown, and is totally bewildered by this strange conduct on the part of circumstances. All the strength and energy that had been the deceits of manner were utterly fallen away, and it was plain, that, whatever the endowment was which Marguerite had mentioned, she could only play at it. She was but a woman, sheer woman, with the woman's one capability, and the exercise of that denied her.

Mr. Laudersdale remained with his eyes fixed on her, and lost, it seemed, to the presence of others.

"The disgrace is bitter," he murmured. "I have kept my name so proudly and so long! But that is little. It is for you I fear. I have stood in your sunshine and shadowed your life, dear!—At least," he continued, after a pause, "I can place you beyond the reach of suffering. I must finish my lonely way."

Mrs. Laudersdale looked up slowly and met his earnest glance.

"Must I leave you?" she exclaimed, with a wild terror in her tone. "Do you mean that I shall go away? Oh, you need not care for me,—you need never love me,—you may always be cold,—but I must serve you, live with you, die with you!" And she sprang forward with outstretched arms.

He caught her before her foot became entangled in the long folds of her skirt, drew her to himself, and held her. What he murmured was inaudible to the others; but a tint redder than roses are swam to her cheek, and a smile broke over her face like a reflection in rippling water. She held his arm tightly in her hand, and erect and proud, as it were with a new life, bent toward Roger Raleigh.

"You see!" said she. "My husband loves me. And I,—it seems at this moment that I have never loved any other than him!"

There came a quick step along the matting, the handle of the door turned in Marguerite's resisting grasp, and Mrs. Purcell's light muslins swept through. Mr. Raleigh advanced to meet her,—a singular light upon his face, a strange accent of happiness in his voice.

"Since you seem to be a part of the affair," she said in a low tone, while her lip quivered with anger and scorn, "concerning which I have this moment been informed, pray, take to Mr. Lauderdale my brother's request to enter the house of Day, Knight, and Company, from this day."

"Has he made such a request?" asked Mr. Raleigh.

"He shall make it!" she murmured swiftly, and was gone.

That night a telegram flashed over the wires, and thenceforth, on the great financial tide, the ship Day, Knight, and Company lowered its peak to none.

The day crept through until evening, deepening into genuine heat, and Marguerite sat waiting for Mr. Raleigh to come and bid her farewell. It seemed that his plans were altered, or possibly he was gone, and at sunset she went out alone. The cardinals that here and there showed their red caps above the bank, the wild roses that still lined the way, the grapes that blossomed and reddened and ripened year after year ungathered, did not once lift her eyes. She sat down, at last, on an old fallen trunk cushioned with moss, half of it forever wet in the brook that babbled to the lake, and waited for the day to quench itself in coolness and darkness.

"Ah!" said Mr. Raleigh, leaping from the other side of the brook to the mossy trunk, "is it you? I have been seeking you, and what sprite sends you to me?"

"I thought you were going away," she said, abruptly.

"That is a broken paving-stone," he answered, seating himself beside her, and throwing his hat on the grass.

"You asked me, yesterday, if I confessed to being a myth," she said, after a time. "If I should go back to Martinique, I should become one in your remembrance,—should I not? You would think of me just as you would have thought of the Dryad yesterday, if she had stepped from the tree and stepped back again?"

"Are you going to Martinique?" he asked, with a total change of face and manner.

"I don't know. I am tired of this; and I cannot live on an ice-field. I had such life at the South! It is 'as if a rose should shut and be a bud again.' I need my native weather, heat and sea."

"How can you go to Martinique?"

"Oh, I forgot!"

Mr. Raleigh did not reply, and they both sat listening to the faint night-side noises of the world.

"You are very quiet," he said at last, ceasing to fling waifs upon the stream.

"And you could be very gay, I believe."

"Yes. I am full of exuberant spirits. Do you know what day it is?"

"It is my birthday."

"It is my birthday!"

"How strange! The Jews would tell you that this sweet first of August was the birthday of the world.

"''Tis like the birthday of the world,
When earth was born in bloom,'"—

she sang, but paused before her voice should become hoarse in tears.

"Do you know what you promised me on my birthday? I am going to claim it."

"The present. You shall have a cast which I had made from one of my mother's fancies or bas-reliefs,—she only does the front of anything,—a group of fleurs-de-lis whose outlines make a child's face, my face."

"It is more than any likeness in stone or pencil that I shall ask of you."

"What then?"

"You cannot imagine?"

"Monsieur" she whispered, turning toward him, and blushing in the twilight, "est ce que c'est moi?"

There came out the low west-wind singing to itself through the leaves, the drone of a late-carousing honey-bee, the lapping of the water on the shore, the song of the wood-thrush replete with the sweetness of its half-melody; and ever and anon the pensive cry of the whippoorwill fluted across the deepening silence that summoned all these murmurs into hearing. A rustle like the breeze in the birches passed, and Mrs. Purcell retarded her rapid step to survey the woods-people who rose out of the shade and now went on together with her. It seemed as if the loons and whippoorwills grew wild with sorrow that night, and after a while Mrs. Purcell ceased her lively soliloquy, and as they walked they listened. Suddenly Mr. Raleigh turned. Mrs. Purcell was not beside him. They had been walking on the brook-edge; the path was full of gaps and cuts. With a fierce shudder and misgiving, he hurriedly retraced his steps, and searched and called; then, with the same haste, rejoining Marguerite, gained the house, for lanterns and assistance. Mrs. Purcell sat at the drawing-room window.

"Comment?" cried Marguerite, breathlessly.

"Oh, I had no idea of walking in fog up to my chin," said Mrs. Purcell; "so I took the short cut."

"You give me credit for the tragic element," she continued, under her breath, as Mr. Raleigh quietly passed her. "That is old style. To be sure, I might as well die there as in the swamps of Florida. Purcell is ordered to Florida. Of course, I am ordered too!" And she whirled him the letter which she held.

Other letters had been received with the evening-mail, and one that made Mr. Raleigh's return in September imperative occasioned some discussion in the House of Laudersdale. The result that that gentleman secured one more than he had intended in the spring; and if you ever watch the shipping-list, the arrival of the Spray-Plough at Calcutta, with Mr. and Mrs. Raleigh among the passengers, will be seen by you as soon as me.

Later in the evening of this same eventful day, as Mr. Raleigh and Marguerite sat together in the moonlight that flooded the great window, Mrs. Laudersdale passed them and went down the garden to the lake. She wore some white garment, as in her youth, and there was a dreamy sweetness in her eye and an unspoken joy about her lips. Mr. Raleigh could not help thinking it was a singular happiness, this that opened before her; it seemed to be like a fruit plucked from the stem and left to mature in the sunshine by itself, late and lingering, never sound at heart. She floated on, with the light in her dusky eyes and the seldom rose on her cheek,—floated on from moonbeam to moonbeam,—and the lovers brought back their glances and gave them to each other. For one, life opened a labyrinth of warmth and light and joy; for the other, youth was passed, destiny not to be appeased: if his affection enriched her, the best he could do was to bestow it; in his love there would yet be silent reservations.

"Mr. Raleigh," said Marguerite, "did you ever love my mother?"

"Once I thought I did."

"And now?"

"Whereas I was blind, now I see."

"Listen! Mrs. Purcell is singing in the drawing-room."

"Through lonely summers, where the roses blow
Unsought, and shed their tangled sweets,
I sit and hark, or in the starry dark,
Or when the night-rain on the hill-side beats.

"Alone! But when the eternal summers flow
And refluent drown in song all moan,
Thy soul shall waste for its delight, and haste
Through heaven. And I shall be no more alone!"

"What a voice she sings with to-night!" said Marguerite. "It is stripped of all its ornamental disguises,—so slender, yet piercing!"

"A needle can pain like a sword-blade. There goes the moon in clouds.
Hark! What was that? A cry?" And he started to his feet.

"No," she said,—"it is only the wild music of the lake, the voices of shadows calling to shadows."

"There it is again, but fainter; the wind carries it the other way."

"It is a desolating wind."

"And the light on the land is like that of eclipse!"

He stooped and raised her and folded her in his arms.

"I have a strange, terrible sense of calamity, Mignonné!" he said.
"Let it strike, so it spare you!"

"Nothing can harm us," she replied, clinging to him. "Even death cannot come between us!"

"Marguerite!" said Mr. Laudersdale, entering, "where is your mother?"

"She went down to the lake, Sir."

"She cannot possibly have gone out upon it!"

"Oh, she frequently does; and so do we all."

"But this high wind has risen since. The flaws"——And he went out hastily.

There flashed on Mr. Raleigh's mental sight a vision of the moonlit lake, one instant. A boat, upon its side, bending its white sail down the depths; a lifted arm wound in the fatal rope; a woman's form, hanging by that arm, sustained in the dark transparent tide of death; the wild wind blowing over, the moonlight glazing all. For that instant he remained still as stone; the next, he strode away, and dashed down to the lake-shore. It seemed as if his vision yet continued. They had already put out in boats; he was too late. He waited in ghastly suspense till they rowed home with their slow freight. And then his arm supported the head with its long, uncoiling, heavy hair, and lifted the limbs, round which the drapery flowed like a pall on sculpture, till another man took the burden from him and went up to the house with his dead.

* * * * *

When Mr. Raleigh entered the house again, it was at break of dawn. Some one opened the library-door and beckoned him in. Marguerite sprang into his arms.

"What if she had died?" said Mrs. Purcell, with her swift satiric breath, and folding a web of muslin over her arm. "See! I had got out the shroud. As it is, we drink skål and say grace at breakfast. The funeral baked-meats shall coldly furnish forth the marriage-feast. You men are all alike. Le Roi est mort? Vive la Reine!"

* * * * *

PAUL REVERE'S RIDE.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend,—"If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch
Of the North-Church-tower, as a signal-light,—
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm."

Then he said good-night, and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somersett, British man-of-war:
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon, like a prison-bar,
And a huge, black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

Meanwhile, his friend, through alley and street
Wanders and watches with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack-door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers
Marching down to their boats on the shore.

Then he climbed to the tower of the church,
Up the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry-chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,—
Up the light ladder, slender and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town,
And the moonlight flowing over all.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead
In their night-encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still,
That he could hear, like a sentinel's tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, "All is well!"
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay,—
A line of black, that bends and floats
On the rising tide, like a bridge of boats.

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride,
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere
Now he patted his horse's side,
Now gazed on the landscape far and near,
Then impetuous stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle-girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry-tower of the old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely, and spectral, and sombre, and still.

And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height,
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns!

A hurry of hoofs in a village-street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed that flies fearless and fleet:
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.

It was twelve by the village-clock,
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer's dog,
And felt the damp of the river-fog,
That rises when the sun goes down.

It was one by the village-clock,
When he rode into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, blank and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.

It was two by the village-clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning-breeze
Blowing over the meadows brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket-ball.

You know the rest. In the books you have read
How the British regulars fired and fled,—
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard-wall,
Chasing the red-coats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,—
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,—
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beat of that steed,
And the midnight-message of Paul Revere.

A NIGHT UNDER GROUND.

My dear Laura Matilda, have you ever worked your way under ground, like the ghost Hamlet, Senior? On the contrary, you confess, but a dim idea of that peculiar mode of progression abides in the well-ordered mansion of your mind?

Well, I do not wonder at it; you are civilized beyond the common herd; your mamma, careful of her own comfort and the beauty of her child, guards both. Your sunny summer-times go by in the shade of sylvan groves, or amid the whirl of Saratoga or Newport ball-rooms. I accept your ignorance; it is a pretty blossom in your maiden chaplet. For myself, I blush for my own familiarity with rough scenes chanced upon in wayward wanderings.

Let me tell you of a path among the "untrodden ways." Transport yourself with me.

Fancy a low, level, drowsy point of land, stretching out into the unbroken emerald green of Lake Superior, at the point where a narrow, yellowish river offers its tribute. The King of Lakes is exclusive; he disdains to blend his brilliant waters with those of the muddy river; a wavy line, distinctly and clearly defined, but seeming as if drawn by a trembling hand, undulates at their junction,—no democratic, union-seeking boundary, but the arbitrary line of division that separates the Sultan from the slave, the peer from the peasant.

Along this shore are scattered various buildings that seem to nod in the indolent sunshine of the bright, clear, quiet air of midsummer. One of these, differing from the rest in its more modern construction, is a spacious hotel that holds itself proudly erect, and from its summit the gay flag of my country floats flauntingly.

We must pass this by, and go down a plank-covered walk to reach the sandy-golden beach where the green waves dash with silent dignity, in these long calms of July. Before the hotel the river flows also sleepily; but both shores are vocal with ladies' laughter and the singing of young girls, the lively chatter of a party of pleasure-tourists.

The fine steamer that brought us to this point has gone,

"Sailing out into the west,
Out into the west, as the sun went down";

but no "weeping and wringing of hands" was there; we knew it must "come back to the town,"—that we are merely transient waifs cast upon this quiet beach, flitting birds of passage who have alighted in the porticos of the "Bigelow House," Ontonagon, Michigan.

A long, low flat-boat, without visible sails, steam-pipes, or oars,—a narrow river-craft, with a box-like cabin at one end, the whole rude in its ensemble, and uncivilized in its details,—is the object that meets the gaze of those who would curiously inspect the means by which the adventurous novelty-seeking portion of our party are to be conveyed up this Ontonagon river to the great copper-mines that form the inestimable wealth of that region. For the metallic attraction has proved magnetic to the fancies of a few. A mine is a mystery; and mysteries, to the female mind, are delights.

What is the boat to us but a means? If it seem prosaic, what care we? Have we escaped the French fashions of à-la-mode watering-places, to be fastidious amid wigwams and unpeopled shores?

We all know what it is to embark for a day's travel, but we do not all understand the charm of being stowed away like freight in a boat such as the one here faintly sketched; how seats are improvised; how umbrellas are converted into stationary screens, and awnings grow out of inspiration; how baskets are hidden carefully among carpet-bags, and camp-stools, and water-jugs, and stowed-in-shavings ice; how the long-suffering, patient ladies shelter themselves in the tiny, stifling cabin, while those of the merry, complexion-careless sort lounge in the daylight's glare, and one couple, fond of seclusion and sentiment, discover a good place for both, at the rudder-end.

There is an oar or two on board, it appears, as we push off in the early dawn; and these are employed for a mile or so at the mouth of the river; then the current begins to quicken in a narrower bed, and a group of sinewy men betake themselves to their poles, lazily at first, until——

But you do not know exactly what these implements are?

They are heavy, wooden, sharp-pointed poles, ten or twelve feet long. On either side of the boat runs a "walk," arranged as if a ladder were laid horizontally; but in reality the bars or rungs are firmly fastened to the walk, to be used as rests for the feet. Here the men, five on a side, march like a chain-gang, backward and forward; placing one end of the pole in the bed of the stream, resting the other in the hollow of the shoulder near the arm-pit, and bracing themselves by their feet against these bars, they pry the boat along.

Progression by such means is unavoidably slow; but no steamboat-race on our Western rivers, blind and reckless, boiler-defying and life-despising, ever produced more excitement than this same poling.

Wait till the current runs rapidly, fretting and seething in its angry haste, when for a moment's delay the boat must lose ground; when the poles are plunged into the rocky bed like harpoons into the back of an escaping whale; when the athletic forms of the men are bent forward until each prostrates himself in the exertion of his full powers; when not a false step—each step a run—can be hazarded; when that monotonous unanimity of labor is at its height, in which each boatman becomes possessed as if by a devil of strife; when their faces lose every gentle semblance of humanity, and become distorted to a simple expression of stubborn brute force; when the muscles of their arms are knitted, rope-like, and every nerve stretched to its utmost;—wait till you have seen all this, and you will confess that a woman's lazy life can know no harder toil than that of the mind's sympathetic coexertion,—that is, if she be excitable or impressible.

The stream is tortuous, erratic, shallow, and narrow. Sometimes, as we glide, always noiselessly, beneath the overhanging foliage and tangled vines along shore, what myriads of gayly winged insects—brilliant dragon-flies, mammoth gnats, preposterous mosquitoes—swarm about our heads, disturbed from their gambols by the laughter and songs aboard our moving craft!

Only one halt in our journey, and that to dine. Just above this point we pass the swiftest rapids on the route, where the river widens, and each side of the bank is beautiful in its wooded picturesqueness, while the waters rush, in foaming, surging, tumbling confusion, over the rugged rocks, or dart between them like a merry band of water-sprites chasing each other in gleesome frolic.

It seems a desecration of these rapids thus to subdue and triumph over them. They are as if placed there by Nature as a sportive check to man's further intrusion; and as the waters come hurrying down, led, as it were, by some Undine jealous for her realm, their murmurings seem to say, in playful, yet earnest remonstrance,—"Let our gambols divert you; we will hasten to you; but approach no nearer! Permit us to guard the sanctuary of our hidden sources, our beloved and holy solitudes!"

But vain appeal! Our men pole frantically onward, and so the day passes. By mid-afternoon their labors cease, and we come to anchor at the bank, having achieved seventeen miles in nine hours! Let those of us to whom lightning-express-trains have been slow grumble hereafter at their fifty miles an hour!

A country-wagon receives most of the ladies; the majority of their attendant cavaliers walk; of two horses, the side-saddled one has about one hundred pounds avoirdupois for his share, and, in spite of the lack of habit and equestrian "pomp and circumstance" generally, I cannot term it the most unpleasant three miles I ever travelled. The road is a wild, rugged ascent up a well-wooded hill-side. There is a tonic vigor in the atmosphere, which communicates itself irresistibly to one's mental state; the gladdened lungs inhale it eagerly, as a luxury. When one walks in this air, one seems to gain wings; to ride is to float at will.

Presently, at the top, a low village comes in sight; yelping curs start from wayside cabins; coarse, dull-featured women gape at half-opened doors or sit idly on rude steps; and the men we chance to meet wear that cadaverous pallor inseparable from the mere idea of a miner. We do not regret that the pert dogs have imparted speed to our horses' heels;—a swift, exhilarating gallop brings us in sight of a large, comfortable house, perched like a bird-box in the hills; then others are discerned; and in a few more bounds, we are at the gate. Here, where all visitors to the Minnesota Mines are received and entertained, we prove avant-couriers of the slowly advancing wagon-load,—"the largest party of ladies ever met there," they tell us, as we forewarn our hosts of the band so boldly invading their copper-bound country.

Very soon we are rambling over the hills,—those of Nature's rearing, and others formed by the accumulation of refuse brought up from the mine. We discover and secure some fine specimens of the metal; sundry of the knowing ones, after mysterious interviews with rascally-looking miners, appear with curious bits of pure silver ore mingled with crystals of quartz and tinted with tiny specks of copper. These, being the most valuable curiosities of the region, are usually secreted by the miners for the purpose of private speculation.

We feel a reverence for this ground, so teeming with metallic wealth,—and yet a certain timorousness, as we remember that we walk on a crust, that beneath us are great caves and subterranean galleries.

This outer shell, this surface-knowledge of what lies below, does not content me. I have also a brave friend who shares my feeling. We agree, that, despite the interest of this crust, to know of the fruit beneath and not taste it is worse than aggravating; we grow reckless in our thirst for the forbidden knowledge.

We have entertained a little plot in our headstrong minds all the way, which we have hardly dared to name before. It is surely not feminine to look longingly on those ladders made for the descent of hardy miners only; visitors beneath the surface are rare; only gentlemen interested in seeing for themselves the richness of these vaunted mines have essayed the tour; even many of these failing to penetrate farther than the first level, and bravely owning their faint-heartedness. In spite of this, we feel our way cautiously. A descent is to be made this night, when the Captain of the Mine goes his nightly round of inspection; a gentleman, the head and front of our expedition, whom we shall call the "Colonel," proposes to accompany him.

Why may we not form an harmonious quartette? We have nerve; has it not been tested throughout the somewhat arduous journey of the preceding weeks? We have presence of mind; we are passable gymnastes.

In fact, viewing Mon Amie and me from our own point of view, than ourselves never did there exist two mortals more manifestly fashioned straight from the hand of Nature, and educated by previous physical culture and mental discipline for the performance of a feat at once perilous and daring, one unknown to the members of "our set," and which might have been thought impracticable by all who had known us only in the gas-light glare of Society, and the circumspection of crinoline's confining circle.

Does it matter by what cunning wiles of pretty pleading and downright demonstrations of the project's reasonableness we succeeded (for we did succeed) in being allowed to take our fates in our own hands or trust them to our own sure-footedness? I think not.

"For when a woman will, she will, you may depend on't."

But you should have seen the robing! We are to start at ten, P.M. Previously we betake ourselves to our chambers, and, entertaining a vague notion that Fashion's expanse may prove inconvenient, we are looping up our trailing robes in fantastic folds, when a tap at the door.

Voila! a servant with two full suits of new, but coarse, miners' clothes,—with a modest intimation from our companions of their advisability,—in fact, their absolute necessity. We pause aghast! Ah! the renewed shouts of laughter from those merry, but more timorous damsels, who, from their secure surroundings,—those becoming barriers adopted at the dictate of Parisian caprice and retained with feminine pertinacity,—had poked fun at our forlorn limpness!

This climax of costume is startling, but the laughter rouses our courage. We stand on the brink of our Rubicon. Shall trousers deter us from the passage? Shall a coat be synonymous with cowardice? No,—we rise superior to the occasion; we pant to be free; we in-breathe the spirit of liberty, as we don our blouses. We loop our long tresses under such head-coverings as would drive any artist hatter to despair; to us they prove a weighty argument against hats in general, as we feel their heavy rims press on our tender brain-roofs. However, when the saucy eyes of Mon Amie look out sparkling from under her begrimed helmet, the effect is not bad; on the contrary, the masquerade is piquant. No need to mention the ribbons that we knot under our wide, square collars for becomingness, our coquetry "under difficulties," nor the gauntleted gloves wherewith we protect our hands, nor the daintiness of the little boots that peep from the loose trousers, which have something Turkish in their cut. Mon Amie, with her rosy blushes, reminds me of a jocund miller's boy;—as for myself, well, I do not think the Bloomer dress so very bad, after all!

A torch-bearing band have stationed themselves at the doors to bid us god-speed,—to make merry at our droll masquerade,—to quiz our odd head-gear,—to criticize us from head to foot, in short,—but between all, to offer words of caution. Then we go out into the starlit, but not over-bright night,—such a one as is friendly to lovers and to thieves, friendly to religion and to thought, the beloved of sentimentalists, and the adored of this particular group of adventurous miners. In Indian file, lantern-led, we traverse the narrow, beaten path that leads to one of the openings of the mine. These are covered by a rough-plank house,—too much like a shed to merit that pretentious term, which implies something fit to live in; in the centre of this shelter is an open space, perhaps a yard square, and similar in appearance to a trap-door in a roof. Here we wait a few moments, while the Captain of the Mine and the Agent of the Mining Company,—who has joined our party at the last moment, to afford us the undivided services of the Captain as guide,—are engaged in some mysterious process of moulding; an odor, not attar of rose, nor yet Frangipanni, salutes our nostrils; then our companions approach. Both the Colonel and the Agent are "lit up,"—in fact, all-luminous with the radiance of tallow "dips"; one of these, stuck in a lump of soft clay, adheres to the front of each hat, and in their hands they have others.

We also are to wear a starry flame on our brows; and, not content with this, are invested with several short unlighted candles, which are to dangle gracefully by their wicks from a buttonhole of our becoming blouses. Thus our costume is complete; and I doubt if Buckingham sported the diamond tags of Anne of Austria with more satisfaction than do we our novel and odorous decoration: we dub ourselves the Light Guard on the instant.

In the delay before starting, we observe several miners descend through the black and most suggestive trap-door, each bearing a tin can in his mouth, as a good dog carries a basket at the bidding of his master.

The flame of the candle, bright in the density of the pit's darkness, as its bearer descends step by step with the rapidity which custom has made easy, becomes in a few seconds like the tiniest glow-worm: one can follow the spark only; the man disappears within the moment.

I cannot describe, nor, indeed, convey the least idea of this peculiar effect. We feel our hearts tremble at the thought that whither that light has gone we must follow. For the first time I realize that we are about to go into the earth,—that we shall presently crawl like insects, burrow like underground vermin, beneath the surface, man's proper place. But such thoughts are not for long indulgence.

"Now let us descend!" says the Colonel.

Grasping the round of the ladder where it rose slightly above the floor, the Captain, our guide, with that air of assurance which practice bestows, swings himself from sight. To him succeeds the Colonel. Next comes my own turn. This is not the first time my feet have tried ladder-bars; in the country-spent vacations of my school-days, how many times have I alertly scaled the highest leading to granaries, to barn-lofts, to bird-houses, to all quasi-inaccessible places, whither my daring ignorance—reckless, because unconscious of danger—had tempted me! But mounting a clean, strong, wide ladder, in the full flood of day, light below, above, around, promising you security by its very fulness of effulgence, is a far different thing from groping your way, step by step, down a slimy, muddy frame which hangs in a straight line from the very start. I shake off a first tremor, draw a full breath, and with fortitude follow my leader carefully. As I look above, after fairly getting committed, I can behold Mon Amie's feet, whose arched in-steps cling round each bar with a pretty dependence that is in the highest degree appealing. Above her I hear the deep voice of the Agent.

And so the quintette, in grim harmony of enterprise, go down, down, down, like so many human buckets, into a bottomless well.

Alas, and alas! our own arms, with their as yet untried muscles, must be our only windlass to bring us to the surface again! Down, down, down, deeper, deeper, deeper! Will this first ladder never end?

Ah, at last! At the foot, on either side, stand the Captain and the Colonel, like sentries. We have reached a shelf of rock, and we may rest. Here we perch ourselves, like sea-birds on a precipice that overlooks the sea.

By the light of our flickering candles we behold each other's faces, and we can talk together. We are but two hundred feet under ground. A desolate stillness reigns here; no sound reaches us, either of labor or the steps of passing workmen. A cold stream of water trickles from a cleft rock behind us; we bathe our foreheads in it, and betake ourselves to the ladder again.

From our next resting-place we proceed through a gallery, an exhausted vein, kept open as a passage from one shaft to another. As we turn a corner, we seem to plunge into a rocky cavern; our feet tread on roughly imbedded rocks; the sides of the cave jut out in refuse boulders,—harsh, dark-colored, ashen; overhead are beams of hard wood, bracing and strengthening the excavation. We traverse this gallery hastily.

Now that we are here, we are conscious of excitement. Mon Amie manifests hers by her steady, deliberate tones, a sort of exaltation foreign to her usually vibrating voice, her tremulous cadences; she seems borne along, despite and above herself. For my own part, as my lungs inflate themselves with this pure, dry, bracing air, exquisitely redolent of health, and testifying at once to a total exemption from noxious exhalations or mephitic vapors, I grow tête-montée, rattle-brained; my laugh echoes through these stony chambers, wild snatches of song hover on my lips, odd conceits flit through my brain, I joke, I dash forward with haste; my excitement endows me with a superfeminine self-possession.

But now we hear an ominous rattle, a clanking of chains, a rumbling as of distant thunder; we are approaching a shaft. The shafts in this mine are not sunk perpendicularly, but are slightly inclined: the huge buckets, lowered and raised by means of powerful machinery, are but ancient caldrons, counterparts of those in which the weird witches in "Macbeth" might have brewed their unholy decoctions, or such as the dreadful giants that formed the nightmare of my childhood might have used in preparing those Brobdignagian repasts among the ingredients of which a plump child held the same rank as a crab in ours.

The sounds grow nearer; presently our guide disappears; then I behold the Colonel, in whose steps I follow, faithful as his shadow, crouch sidewise: we must pass behind this inclined plane, which rests on roughly hewn rocks, that protrude till it appears impossible that any living thing, except a lizard, can find a passage. I am sure we must shrink from the original rotundity with which Nature blessed us. I feel as the frog in the fable might have felt, if, after successfully inflating himself to the much-envied dimensions of the ox, he had suddenly found himself reduced to his proper proportions. Edging sidewise, accommodating the inequalities of the damp surfaces to the undulations of our forms, deafened, crazed by the roar of the caldrons that dash madly from side to side, we fairly ooze through.

More ladders! This time they are not hung quite perpendicularly, are shorter, and some lean, a little, which affords rest; others have one side higher than the other: to these my already aching palms cling with desperation. So have I seen insects adhere, through sheer force of fear, to a shaken stem, or a perilous branch beaten by a storm-wind.

The voices of my companions come to me from above, though I cannot see the soles of Mon Amie's friendly feet, which at first preserved an amiable companionship with my own hands; but, looking far upward, I behold a tiny, star-like spark. When I was a child, I used to think that fire-flies were the crowns of the fairies, which shone despite their wearers' invisibility: this idea was recalled to me.

Hark! booming from unthought-of depths, a roar rolls up in majestic waves of echoing thunder. At this resonant burst, I tremble,—I think a prayer.

"They are blasting below us," cries the Colonel, de profundis.

Then up rushes a volume of thick, white smoke, and we are enveloped as in shrouds. I have no more fear,—but the odor, ah! that sulphureous, sickening, deathly odor! Faintness seizes me,—the ladder swims before my eyes,—I am paralyzed,—Death has me, I think!

But the very excess of the danger has in it something of reviving power. I remember, that, just as I left my room,—whose quiet safety never before appeared so heavenly,—prompted by some instinctive impulse, I had placed a small vial of ammonia in the breast-pocket of my coat.

I have wellnigh swooned with ecstasy, as I have inhaled the overcoming odors of some rare bouquet, love-bestowed and prized beyond gems; my senses have reeled in the intoxication of those wondrous extracts whose Oriental, tangible richness of fragrance holds me in a spell almost mystical in its enthralment; but I dare aver that no blossom's breath, no pungent perfume distilled by the erudite inspiration of Science, ever possessed a tithe of the delicious agony of that whiff of unromantic ammonia, which, powerful as the touch of magic, and thrilling as the kiss of love, snatched me back to life, arrested my tottering senses, as they blindly staggered on the very brink of certain death.

When we reach the next level, and our faces are revealed to each other, with one voice they exclaim, "How frightfully pale you are!" But I say nothing. In fact, their familiar features, wearing no longer their daylight semblance, present an aspect at once grim and grotesque, and more like the spirits of my friends than their incorporated substances.

Traversing the wild, rude corridors, we find that the path grows more perilous, the way more intricate; we have words of warning from our protectors, who often look back anxiously. They have begun to realize what they have done in yielding to a woman's odd caprice.

In this level we are shown the spots from which famous masses of copper have been removed, and are granted useful, but fleeting statistics of weight; we are also so fortunate as to discover some chips of the wonderful block, raised in '54, I think, which weighed five hundred tons. Then we chance upon chasms, which, seen so dimly, though dreadful enough in reality, are made a thousand times more so by the terrors of imagination; we creep along the brinks of these, scarcely daring to look down; above, the heavy boulders lie heaped in frightful confusion. When we have crawled past these death-traps and stand in safety once more, we throw down bits of stone, and seconds elapse before we hear the dull thump with which each signals its arrival in the depths. Along the edges of some of these gloomy pits we cannot pick our way; therefore a plank is thrown across, and, trusting to so slender a bridge, we pass, one by one. A single false step were enough to dash one to atoms,—so to be transformed to a bruised and mangled mass, to perform one's own sepulture, and lie in a grander grave than will ever be hollowed by mortal hands to hide our useless bodies.

The deeper one penetrates into these mines, the wilder, more dangerous the paths. It is as though the upper regions were kept in "company" order, but lower down we meet with the every-day roughnesses of veritable miners'-life; we follow their hazardous, but familiar steps; we behold all the hardships these toiling, burrowing workers undergo, that the hidden coffers of Earth may yield their tribute of treasure to Man, its self-appointed, arrogant master.

Occasionally we meet a passing miner. Grasping his ponderous tools, he flits by like a phantom; even in the momentary glance, we can perceive how livid his sunless labor has left him; he is blanched as a ghoul, and moves as noiselessly, with feather-light step. Each with a motion salutes the Captain; but they do not heed the little group of strangers who have braved so many dangers to behold the wonders which to them are as commonplace as the forge to a blacksmith, or to a carpenter his work-bench.

Still farther below us we hear the clink and clatter of real work. Down we plunge,—another ladder, "long drawn out." Some of its rounds are wanting; others are loose and worn to a mere splinter. Warned by the voice below me, I proceed with a trembling caution, tenfold more exciting to the strained nerves than the wildest bound on a mettled racer, the fiercest rush that ever tingled through every fibre of the rider's frame.

The water has saturated the banks by which our crazy ladder hangs, and every round is damp and slimy with clayey mud. Alas, for my poor pretty gantlets! Mon Amie has thrown away hers, as useless.

Finally the ladder ceases abruptly. My feet in vain seek a resting-place. There is none.

A voice says,—that kindly, earnest voice, the symbol of protective care, and our smoother of all difficulties,—"We have swung ourselves down by a chain that hangs from the side of the last round. We are too far below to reach or assist you. Take the chain firmly; it is the only route, and we cannot return!"

Que faire? Behold a pleasant predicament for two city-bred ladies, not "to the manner born," of swinging themselves from the end of a ladder by means of a rusty iron chain, from which they would alight—where? Surely, we know not.

I am very sure I could not reproduce in description, and probably not by practice, the inevitable monkey-contortions, the unimaginable animal agility, by which I transfer my weight to the clumsy links of this almost invisible chain. The size of the staple from which it hangs dissipates all fears in respect to its strength. Hand over hand, my feet sliding on the slippery bank, remembering sailors in the shrouds, and taking time to pity them, at last I reach friendly hands, and stand breathless on another level.

How the soft, white, dimpled palms of Mon Amie testify to the hardship of this episode, as she bathes them in the cooling water! But, because one's hands are tender, cannot one's nerves be strong, one's will indomitable?

Again on the tramp. The cavernous passages are sublime in height, the chasms fearful in their yawning gulfs. We pick our way daintily, at intervals pausing to listen to the distant reverberations of exploding blasts. The atmosphere here, as above, is fairly heavenly in its purity and invigorating freshness; it girds us with singular strength, and clothes us as in a garment of enchanted armor that defies all soul-sinking.

Creeping behind another shaft, we reach still another chasm, above which piles of dark rocks lie heaped in such confusion as might result from a great convulsion. There is a narrow path along its edge, and here the stones are small; but, as we look up, the mighty masses frown down upon us with threatening grandeur. Along this path, treading lightly, as if gifted with wings, the Captain passes; then the Agent (for we had slightly altered our order of march); Mon Amie follows. She is half-way past the danger, when an ominous pause,—we are ordered to stop.

Down into the chasm rolls a stone, displaced by an unlucky step of our pioneer. One stone is nothing,—but more follow that had been supported by this: small ones at first,—but the larger rocks threaten a slide. If they are not arrested in their course, she is lost!

What a moment that is! I dare not breathe. Mon Amie stands statue-like, awaiting the death which she believes is upon her. Not many words are spoken. I think I feel all that her one glance conveys. But the brave men beyond her, with instant unanimous action bracing themselves against the sliding rocks, oppose their feeble force to the down-sweeping agents of destruction; a moment more, and they would have been too late. With the step of a frightened antelope Mon Amie trembles past them. I see her safe, and hasten on. "Step lightly!" says a voice full of suspense and fear, despite its calmness.

Step, indeed! As if I rest on those treacherous stones! My feet brush them no more than the wing of a butterfly grazes the roses among which it flutters. Step, forsooth! If ever the angels concerned themselves for this atom in Creation's myriads, they hover round me now, they bear me up, they teach me how to fly! Deprived now of their human props, how the angry fragments leap and tumble and chase one another through the echoing abyss below! These reverberations seem freighted with elfin voices that jeer the insensate rocks for their baffled scheme of mischief.

But they chanted a far different chorus, and the darkness saw another sight, when, a few moons later, they dashed themselves down in irresistible array, and bore with them in their desperate plunge the lifeless bodies of two passing miners, in whose hearts, it may be, dwelt at the moment only happy thoughts of the homes 'neath the blue skies to which they were hurrying, the dear familiar sunlit Paradise that would succeed the endless night of their Inferno of toil.

"But men must work, and women must weep;
And the sooner 'tis over, the sooner to sleep!"

Well, we take up our march again presently, and, led by a monotonous hammering, proceed toward the sound. Some of the miners are at work here, clearing a mass of ore from the stubborn rock. Their strokes fall as regularly as those of machinery, and the grim men who wield the ponderous hammers accompany each blow with a peculiar loud indrawing of the breath, like the pant of a blacksmith at his anvil. So strong is this resemblance, that we burst forth all together in the strains of the "Anvil Chorus"; and the accompaniment is beaten with tenfold more regularity and effect than on the stage, in the glare of the footlights, by "Il Trovatore's" gypsy-comrades. I doubt if Verdi's music was ever so rendered before, amid such surroundings. The compliment may be the higher, coming from so low a region.

Beyond this group are a few miners resting from toil. One of these, as he stands leaning his folded arms on a jutting rock, upon which he has placed his candle, elicits our spontaneous admiration. His beauty is Apollo-like,—every chiselled feature perfect in its classic regularity; his eyes sad, slumberous, and yet deep and glowing, are quite enough for any susceptible maiden's heart; about a broad expanse of forehead cluster thick masses of dark brown hair; his shirt, open at the throat, reveals glimpses of ivory; altogether he is statuesque and beautiful. Even his hands, strongly knit as they are, have not been rendered coarse by labor; they bear the same pallid hue as his face, and he looks like some nobly-born prisoner. "What untoward fate cast him there?" I often ask myself. He exists in my memory as a veritable Prince Charming, held captive in those gloomy caves of enchantment that yielded up to me their unreal realities in that nightmarish experience. I never fancy him on upper earth living coarsely, even, it may be, talking ungrammatically, defying Horne Tooke and outraging Murray, among beings of a lower order of humanity; but he rises like a statue, standing silent and apart.

Some one throws away a nearly burnt-out candle at this spot. It falls but a few inches from a can of gunpowder, which is not too securely closed. As I utter a quick word of warning to the careless one, a miner starts. "Good Heaven!" I hear him exclaim, as we disappear,—"that was a woman!"

When we reach the next shaft, the Captain deposits himself in the descending bucket, and, irregularly tossing from side to side, goes down to overlook some work, and leave fresh orders with the miners. We await his return before again betaking ourselves to the ladders.

On the next level, we behold scores of men in busy action. I can think only of ants in an ant-hill: some are laden with ore; others bearing the refuse rocks and earth, the débris of the mine, to the shafts; others, again, are preparing blasts,—we do not tarry long with these; others with picks work steadily at the tough ore. In some places, the copper freshly broken glitters like gold, and the specks on the rocks, or in the earth-covered mass, as our candle-light awakens their sparkles, gleam like the spangles on a dancer's robe or stars in a midnight sky. All the while we hear the dreadful rattle of the down-sinking caldrons, or the heavy labor of the freighted ones, as they ascend from level to level.

Suddenly our path conducts us past a seated bevy of miners taking their "crib," as it is termed, from the food-can, which stands at hand,—a small fire blazing in the midst of them. Weary and sore, we seat ourselves near them, while our hardier companions talk with the respectful group.

They work eight hours at a time, they tell us,—ascending at the expiration of that period to betake themselves to their homes, which are mostly in the little village where the yelping curs also reside. They enjoy unusual health, and pity the upper-world of surface-laborers, whom they regard with a kind of contempt. Accidents are not frequent, considering the perils of their occupation. The miners here are generally Cornish-men, with some Germans.

I sit silent, thinking of my Prince Charming, with many vague conjectures.

At first, these men have paused in their repast in presence of the strangers; but now, with rude courtesy, noticing our weariness, they offer a portion to us. Faint and famishing, we by no means disdain it. I wonder what Mrs. Grundy would say, could her Argus-eyes penetrate to the spot, where we,—bound to "die of roses in aromatic pain,"—in miners'-garb, masculine and muddy, sit on stones with earthy delvers, more than six hundred feet under ground,—where the foot of woman has never trod before, nor the voice of woman echoed,—and sip, with the relish of intense thirst, steaming black tea from an old tin cup!

Eh, bien! for all that, let me do it justice. Never was black tea less herb-like; never draught of sillery, quaffed from goblet of rare Bohemian glass, more delicious! And so, with thank-yous that were not only from the lip, we toil on some distance yet, to the shaft by which we are to ascend,—one quite remote from that by which we began our trip.

Halting at the foot of the ladder, we pour forth the "Star-spangled Banner" with the full strength of lungs inflated by patriotism, until the stirring staves ring and resound through those dim caves. The miners, who hold the superstition, that to whisper bodes ill-luck, must have imagined we were exorcising evil spirits with an incantation.

Then begins our weary way upward. We sing "Excelsior" in our hearts, and forget our aching limbs, for the most laborious portion of the night's toil is before us. The almost perpendicular ladder is just beside the powerful pump, which, worked by a steam-engine, exhausts the water from the mine, and its busy piston, in monotonous measure, keeps time to our climbing.

Two rests during the entire distance, which we travel in brave silence. Indeed, we cannot speak,—the oppressive strain upon the chest is so great. Step after step, hand over hand, up we go. At last, warmer air greets us, lights flicker from above; the trap-door is reached; we are on the surface again; we are out of the depths,—and our hearts whisper a Te Deum of thanksgiving.

I think well of the establishment of a chapel, such as exists at the entrance to the Valenciana mine in Mexico, where each miner spends half an hour, going to or returning from his labors. Such a union of work and worship seems a proper adjunct to the profit and the peril.

There is a faint glimmer of coming dawn far away in the east, as we go forth into the midsummer-night, and we catch the distant notes of chanticleer, as he sounds his shrill réveille to the day.

As my confused brain seeks repose, and my weary limbs sink into the softness of the never-so-welcome bed, my thoughts fly to distant ones, to whom I would whisper,—as I do to you who have so patiently burrowed with me,—"Only love me for the dangers I have passed!"

But it is in vain that you long for a similar experience, my dear Laura Matilda. Being the first, we are also the last women to whom these subterranean passages will yield their mysteries, their windings, and their wonders. Against all of my own sex the Pandemonian depths of the Minnesota Mines are henceforth as obstinately barred as ever were the golden gates of the Mohammedan Paradise.

A LONELY HOUSE.

"Some weighty crime that Heaven could not pardon,
A secret curse, on that old building hung,
And its deserted garden."

HOOD'S Haunted House.

One autumn evening, not very long ago, I was driving out with my uncle. I had been spending several weeks at his house, and in that time had driven with him very often, so that I supposed myself familiar with nearly all the roads that stretched away from the pleasant village where he resided; but on this occasion he proposed taking me in an entirely new direction, over a tract of country I had never before seen.

For a mile or two after we left home, we bowled rapidly along on a well-travelled turnpike; then a sudden turn to the right brought us, with slackened speed, into a quiet country-road. Passing through the fields that bordered the highway, we came into a wild, romantic region of hill and dale that fully deserved all that my uncle had said in its praise.

Giving ourselves up to the sweet influences of the scene, we trotted our horses slowly, past dusky bits of forest that made the air fragrant with the damp smell of the woods, and by occasional shining pools adorned with floating pond-lilies, and shaded with thick, low bushes of witch-hazel. The sunlight had that orange glow that comes only on autumn evenings, the long, slant rays striking across the yellow fields and lighting up the dark evergreens which dotted the landscape with a tawny illumination, like dull flames. The locusts hummed drowsily, as if they were almost asleep, and the frogs in the ponds sent out an occasional muffled croak. Altogether, it was deliciously calm and deserted; we did not meet a human being or a habitation for miles, as we wound along the secluded path, now up and now down, but on the whole gradually ascending, till we reached the summit of a hill larger and steeper than the rest.

Here there stood a lonely house.

Pausing to allow our horses a moment's rest, my eye was caught by its deserted and dilapidated appearance. It had evidently been uninhabited for years. The fence had gone to decay, the gate lay rotting on the ground, and a forlorn sleigh, looking strangely out of place in contrast with the summer-flowers that had over-grown it, was drawn up before the entrance. The grass had obliterated every trace of the path that once led to the decayed steps, bushes had grown up thickly around the lower story of the house, and tangled vines, creeping in through the broken panes of the windows, hung in festoons from the moss-covered sills. The door had dropped from its hinges, and on one side of the front the boards had fallen off, so that I could see quite into the interior, where I noticed, with surprise, some furniture yet remained, though in great confusion, a broken chair and an overturned table being the most prominent objects. Outside, the same disorder was manifest in the great farm-wagon, left standing where it had last been used, and the neglected out-buildings fast going to decay. About the whole place there was an aspect of peculiar gloom, and the house itself stood on this bleak hill looking out over the lonesome landscape with a sort of tragic melancholy in its black and weather-beaten front.

Now such a sight as this is very rare in our busy New England, where everything is turned to advantage, and where the thrifty owner of a tenement too old for habitation is sure to tear it down and convert the materials of which it is built to some other use. My curiosity was, therefore, at once excited regarding this place, and I turned to my uncle with an inquiry as to its history.

"It is a very sad one," he answered,—"so sad that it gives a terrible dreariness to this solitary spot."

"Then I am sure you will tell me the causes which led to its desertion.
You know how much I like a story."

My uncle complied with the request, and, as we wended our way home through the deepening twilight, related a series of strange facts, which, at the time, took a powerful hold on my imagination, and which I have since endeavored to group into a continuous narrative.

* * * * *

This house, now so forlorn, was once a neat and happy home. It was built by a young farmer named James Blount, who went into it with his young wife when he brought her home from the distant State where he had married her. For several years they seemed very prosperous and happy; then a heavy affliction came. The healthy young farmer was thrown from his horse, and carried to his home only to linger a few terrible hours and expire in great agony. Thus early in its history was the doomed house overshadowed with the gloom of sudden and violent death.

Every one was heartily sorry for the widow with her two little boys, and the people of the country-side did all that they could to cheer her loneliness and lighten her grief. But, as I have said, she was a stranger among them, and she seems to have been naturally of a reserved disposition, preferring solitude in her affliction; for she so repelled their attentions, that, one by one, even her husband's friends deserted her. Then, too, her house was three miles from the nearest neighbor, and this was necessarily a barrier to frequent social intercourse. She very rarely went into the village, even to church, and thus people came to know very little of her manner of life; it was only guessed at by those few acquaintance who, at rare intervals, made their way to the Blount farm-house.

Among them it was remarked, that the widow, still quite young, was unnaturally stern and cold, and that her two sons, who were growing up in this sad isolation, were strangely like their mother, not only in appearance, but in manners. Their names were James and John. There was but little over a year between them, and they were so much alike that most persons found a difficulty in distinguishing one from the other. Both had fierce, black eyes, short, crisp, black hair, and swarthy skins,—quite unlike our freckled-face Yankee boys,—so that the older villagers declared, with a sigh, that there was not a trace of the good-hearted father about them; they wholly resembled their strange mother. The boys themselves did nothing to lessen this disagreeable impression; they were unusually grave and reserved for their years, taking no interest in the sports of other children; and after a time, it became painfully evident to those who watched them that they had no fondness for each other; on the contrary, that affection which would naturally have sprung from their nearness in age and their constant companionship seemed to be entirely wanting, and its place usurped by an absolute dislike.

When this was first discovered, it was supposed to account for the widow's aversion to society. This idea, being once started, made those idle busybodies there are in every village eager to discover if the suspicion were correct. Through the men hired to work on the farm, it was ascertained that the poor mother, with all her sternness and her iron law, had difficulty in keeping peace between the boys. Twenty times a day they would fall into angry dispute about some trifle; and so violent were these altercations, that it was said that she durst not for a moment have them both out of her sight, lest one should inflict some deadly injury upon the other. That this was no ill-founded fear was evinced by a quarrel that took place between them, when John was perhaps eleven, and James twelve years old.

It was witnessed by a village lad named Isaac Welles. He was an alert, active person, who liked to earn a penny or two on his own account, out of work-hours. With this notable intention, he arose soon after dawn of a pleasant summer-morning, for the purpose of picking blackberries. Now he knew that they were very plentiful in a field near the Blount farmhouse, and, thinking such small theft no robbery, he made his way thither with all speed, and was soon filling his basket with the dew-sprinkled fruit. Early as it was, however, he soon discovered that there was some one up before him. He heard a sound of talking in low, caressing tones, and, glancing in the direction whence it came, he saw John Blount sitting under a tree near by, and playing with a little black squirrel, which appeared to be quite tame. Not caring to be discovered and warned off, Isaac went on with his work quietly, taking care to keep where he could see without being seen.

John was not long left alone in his innocent amusement, for in a few moments James Blount came running down from the house towards him. As he approached, John's face darkened; he caught up the squirrel, and made an endeavor to hide it under his jacket.

"No, you don't!" said James, as he came up, breathless. "I see you have got him, plain enough; he sha'n't get away this time,—so you might as well give him to me."

"No, I won't!" replied John, sullenly.

"You won't?"

"No!" said John, more fiercely, and then burst out, passionately,—"I don't see why you want to tease me about it; he a'n't your pet; I have found him and tamed him; he knows me and loves me, and he don't care for you; besides, you only want him to torment him. No! you sha'n't have him!"

"Sha'n't I? we'll see!" And James made a step forward.

John drew back several paces, at the same time trying to soothe the squirrel, which was becoming impatient of its confinement. His face quivered with excitement, as he went on, passionately,—

"I know what you want him for: you want him to hurt some way. You wrung my black kitten's neck, and now you want to kill my squirrel. You are a bad, wicked boy, and I hate you!"

With the last words he started to run; but he had not gone far when his foot struck a stone, and he fell. At this, the squirrel, terrified, jumped from his arms; but James was close by, and before it could escape, he had caught it. John was up in an instant, and James, seeing that he could not avoid him, gave the poor little creature's neck a sudden twist and flung it gasping at his brother's feet, exclaiming,—

"There, now, you may have it!"

For one moment John stood still, white with rage and grief; then he uttered a sort of choking howl, and sprang at James,—

"You cruel coward!"

The words were accompanied with a half-articulate curse, as he struck at him, blindly, fiercely, and they closed in what seemed a deadly struggle. John, being the younger, had a slight disadvantage in size and weight, but wrath gave him more than his usual strength; while James fought desperately, as if for life. After a few moments they rolled on the ground together.

It was a fearful sight, those two brothers, boys though they were, fighting in that mad way. Their faces, so much alike that they seemed almost reflections of each other, were crimson with anger; their eyes shot fire; their breath came in sobbing pants; and very soon blood was drawn on both. After a brief contest, John, with a tremendous effort, threw James under him. With one hand he pinioned his arms, while the other was at his throat, where it closed with a deadly gripe. James made one last effort to save himself; with a violent wrench he succeeded in fixing his teeth in his brother's arm, but he failed in making him relax his hold, though they met in the firm flesh. John's brow grew darker, but he only tightened his clasp closer and closer, muttering,—

"So help me, God! I will kill you!"

His words were near being verified; already the fallen boy's mouth had unclosed, the red of his face turned to livid purple, and his eyes stared wildly, when Mrs. Blount, pale, with disordered attire, as if she had but just risen and dressed hastily, ran, screaming, down the hill. Seizing John around the waist, she dragged him back, and flung him to the ground, exclaiming,—

"Oh, my sons! my sons! are you not brothers? Will you never be at peace?"

At this moment, Isaac arrived, breathless with running, at the spot. When she saw him, the widow ceased speaking, and made no further allusion to the quarrel while he remained. However, she gladly accepted his offered assistance in lifting James, who lay gasping, and wellnigh dead. As they turned towards the house, John rose, sullenly, and wrapping a handkerchief round his wounded arm, which was bleeding profusely, he glanced scowlingly at his brother.

"He will get over this," he muttered, with an oath; "but, sooner or later, I swear I will kill him!"

Without noticing his mother's appealing look, he walked back to the tree where the dead pet lay.

The half-strangled boy was carried to his bed, and a few simple remedies restored him to consciousness. As soon as possible, Mrs. Blount dismissed Isaac, declining his offers of going for a doctor, with cold thanks. As he went back to resume his interrupted blackberrying, he saw John sitting at the foot of the tree. He had dug a hole in which to bury the poor squirrel; it lay on his knee, a stream of dark gore oozing through its tiny white teeth. John was vainly endeavoring to wipe this with the handkerchief already stained with his own blood, while his hot tears fell fast and heavy.

As John had said, James recovered from the choking, and the only apparent results of the fight were that both boys were scarred for life. John bore on his right wrist the impression of his brother's teeth; and James's throat was disfigured by two deep, black marks, on each side, which were quite visible till his beard concealed them. Yet, I doubt not, that desperate struggle, in that dawning summer-day, laid the foundation of the inextinguishable hatred that blasted those men's lives and was to be quenched only in death.

Several years passed after this, in which very little was known of what passed at the lonely house. The boys were old enough to perform most of the work of the farm, so that they no longer hired laborers except at harvest. Mrs. Blount had herself given her sons all the instruction they had ever received, and, being a woman of attainments beyond those usual in her station, she seemed quite competent to the task. Nothing more was heard of their quarrels; they were always coldly civil to each other, when in the presence of others, and were regarded by their companions with respect, though, I imagine, never with any cordial liking. So they grew up to be grave, taciturn men, still retaining the same strong resemblance of face and figure, though time had somewhat altered the features, by fixing a different expression on each, giving to John a fierce resolution, and to James a lurking distrustfulness of look. These years made less change in Mrs. Blount than in her sons; she was the same active, black-eyed woman, only that her sternness and reserve seemed to increase with her age, and a few silver threads appeared in her raven hair.

I have said that it was three miles from the Blount place to the nearest house. This was at the toll-gate, which was kept by a man named Curtis. He was a person of progressive tastes, supposed to have aristocratic inclinations. As he was a well-to-do man, these were evinced in a Brussels carpet and a piano-forte which figured in his small parlor, and by his sending his only child, a daughter, to a city boarding-school. She returned, as might have been expected, with ideas and desires far beyond the hill-side cottage where she was condemned to vegetate. Now she was very pretty, with dancing blue eyes and a profusion of golden curls; she had, too, a most winning manner, hard for any one to resist; and these personal attractions, added to style of dress that had never been seen or imagined among the simple country-folk, rendered her a most important person, so that no "tea-fight" or merry-making was complete without Nelly Curtis.

However, it might have been long enough before the recluse young Blounts would have encountered the gay little belle, had it not been that they were of necessity obliged to pass through the toll-gate, and sometimes forced to stop there. From some of her friends Nelly heard what a secluded life the two brothers led, and how especially averse they seemed to female society, and, with the appetite for conquest of a true flirt, she at once determined on adding them to the list of her victims. It was not long before she had an opportunity for beginning her wiles.

One fine spring morning, John Blount started on horseback to go to the village. The sun shone very brightly, the hedge-rows blushed with early blossoms, and the birds sang a song of rejoicing. It was one of those clear, soft days when one feels new life and vigor at the thought of the coming summer. Arrived at the toll-gate, John was surprised at seeing no one there to open it; he waited a moment, somewhat impatiently, and then called out,—

"Holloa!"

At this, as if startled at his voice, there appeared in the cottage door-way a slender, rosy-cheeked maiden, who looked blooming and graceful enough to be the incarnation of the fresh and beautiful May.

"Excuse me," she said, with a little curtsy; "I did not see you come up."

This, as Nelly informed the friend to whom she related the adventure, was a fib,—for Mr. Curtis was away, and she had been watching all the morning, in hopes one of the Blounts would pass; but she considered it a justifiable stratagem, as likely to secure his attention.

Meantime John was gazing spellbound at this apparition, which appeared to him charming beyond anything he had ever imagined. He was so far carried away, that he was quite speechless and wholly oblivious of the toll, until she came up to the side of the horse and held out her hand. Then he colored, and, with awkward apology, gave her the change.

"Thank you, Sir."

Nelly smiled sweetly, and was just about to undo the latch of the gate, when John anticipated her by springing from his horse, and laying his powerful brown hand over her small white one, saying,—

"You can't do anything with this great, heavy gate. Stand aside, and let me open it."

Of course the offer was kindly accepted, and Nelly fairly overwhelmed him with her thanks, being herself somewhat touched by the unusual civility. John appeared quite overcome with confusion, and, remounting his horse, he rode off with a gruff "Good day." However, I fancy, that pleasant voice, and the accidental touch of that little hand, made an impression that never was effaced.

Having thus enslaved John, it was not long before a similar opportunity occurred for captivating James; though it would seem from Nelly's confessions to her confidante that this was not so easily accomplished with him as with his brother. The first time she opened the gate for him, he paid but little more heed to her than he would have to her father, and she never considered her conquest complete until one day when Mr. Curtis availed himself of a vacant seat in James's wagon to get Nelly taken into the village: that ride, she fancied, insured the wished-for result. Whether this was a correct supposition or not, certain it is that not many weeks elapsed before both the Blounts were completely fascinated by the gay coquette.

For some time the passion of each brother remained a secret to the other. Accident revealed it.

One soft summer-evening, John rode down to the village for letters. As he passed through the toll-gate, he succeeded in making an appointment with Nelly for a walk on his return. He came back an hour later, and soon after sunset the two strolled down a shady path into the woods. It was moonlight, and Nelly was doubtless very charming in the mysterious radiance,—certainly her companion thought so,—for, when their walk was over, he induced her to sit with him on a fallen log that lay just within the shade of the trees, instead of returning to the house. They had been chatting there perhaps half an hour, when they were interrupted by the girl the Curtises kept to do "chores."

"Please, Miss Nelly, there's a gentleman wants to see you."

"Very well, tell him I will be there in a moment."

When the girl was gone, Nelly suddenly exclaimed, rather regretfully,—

"How stupid of me, not to ask who it was!"

John's answer is not reported, only that he succeeded in lengthening the "moment" into a quarter of an hour, and then half an hour; and it might, perhaps, have lasted the whole evening, had they not, in the midst of a most interesting conversation, been startled by a rustling in the bushes behind them.

"There is some one watching us!" cried John, excitedly, and half rising.

"Nonsense!" said Nelly; "it is only a cat. Sit down again."

This invitation was not to be declined. John sat down again, though still a little restless and uneasy. For some moments all was still. John had concluded that Nelly's suggestion was a correct one, and they had begun to chat quite unconcernedly, when they were again interrupted. This time the sound was that of an approaching footstep, and for an instant a dark shadow fell across the moonlit path in front of them. Nelly was now fairly frightened, she uttered a faint shriek, and clung to John for protection. Doubtless this was a very pleasant appeal to the young farmer, but just now wrath mastered every other feeling. He was ever easily angered, and, to be sure, the thought that they were watched was by no means agreeable. So, with a quick caress, he loosened her clasp and started to his feet, exclaiming,—

"Don't be frightened, dear! I'll punish the rascal!"

He made a dash in the direction whence the sound had come. In the shade of the trees stood the intruder quite still, making no attempt to avoid the furious onset. Mad with rage, John seized him by the collar, and, striking him repeatedly, and muttering curses, dragged him towards the bench where Nelly sat trembling. A few staggering steps, and they were on the path, with the pure, peaceful light of the moon falling full on the stranger's face.

"Good God!" cried John, loosening his hold,—"it is my brother!"

James drew himself up, tossing back his disordered hair, and for a moment the two men regarded each other with stern, fixed looks, as if they were preparing for another encounter. By this time, Nelly, who was completely terrified, had begun to weep convulsively, and her sobs broke the ominous silence, as she gasped,—

"Oh, John, please don't strike him again!"

At these words, John started, as if stung, and, looking at her with indignant sadness, said,—

"There, you needn't cry, Nelly! I won't hurt him; I will leave him to you safely."

Then, overcome by the rush of recollection, he burst out, passionately,—

"Oh, James! James! you have rendered my life miserable by your treacheries, and now you have robbed me of her! This is no place to settle our quarrels; but I have sworn it once, and I swear it again now, some day I will be revenged!"

He would not stop to hear Nelly's entreating voice; but, full of the one dreadful thought, that all her anxieties had been for another, while he was indifferent to her, he mounted his horse, without one backward look, and galloped fast away. I can fancy there was a wild whirl of emotion in his passionate heart: deadly hatred, jealousy, and crossed love are enough to drive any man mad.

Meantime, James apologized to Nelly for his intrusion, on the ground, that, becoming tired of waiting, and hearing she had gone out for a wait, he had started to meet them, but was about to turn back, fearing to interrupt them, when John's rudeness compelled him to appear. The excuse was accepted; and James soon occupied the seat recently vacated by poor John. So well did he avail himself of the circumstances, that he succeeded in convincing Nelly that his brother was a very ill-tempered person, whom it would be well for her to avoid. On this, with the true instinct of a flirt, she endeavored to persuade him that she had never really cared for John's attentions. James was but too willing to be convinced of this; and he parted from her, feeling satisfied that his suit would be successful.

Knowing well that his life was scarcely safe, if he were for a moment alone with John, after that night, James constantly exercised such caution as prevented the possibility of an encounter. He was determined as soon as possible to leave that neighborhood, always provided that Nelly would go with him. For some time he considered this as certain. John carefully avoided her, and no new suitor appeared.

I fear that pretty Nelly was a thorough coquette; for, having nearly broken one brother's heart, she very soon tired of the other, for whom she had never really cared a straw. These two men being the last to fall into her toils, she began to sigh wearily over her too easily captured victims, when her fickle fancy was caught by game more worthy so expert a sportsman.

It happened that at this time there came to the village a gentleman from New York, named Brooke, a bachelor of known wealth. He was perhaps forty years old, and had run through a course of reckless dissipation which had rendered him thoroughly tired of city ways and city women. On the very first Sunday after his arrival, as he stood idly lounging at the church-door, his eye was caught by Nelly's fresh, rosy face. He followed her into church, and spent the time of service in staring her out of countenance. It will be readily imagined that she was not slow to follow up this first impression; and but few days elapsed before their acquaintance had ripened into intimacy.

Of course, his unceasing attentions could not fail of attracting notice and exciting remark; and it was not long before they came to the ears of the Blounts. John received the news with sullen indifference. It mattered little to him whom she liked now. James, however, refused to believe that there could be anything in it, regarding it as a mere passing caprice. In this view most of the village-people coincided; they considered it absurd to suppose that there could be anything serious in Mr. Brooke's devotion. Time would probably have proved the correctness of this supposition, had it not been, fortunately for Nelly, that she had a father with more steadiness of mind than her giddy brain was capable of. Mr. Curtis succeeded in turning the rapid attachment to such advantage, that in three weeks from the time of their first meeting they were not only engaged, but actually married.

It had been Nelly's intention, with the vanity of a true woman, to postpone the wedding a month longer, and then to have it on such a scale as would excite the admiration and envy of all her companions; but Mr. Curtis was too shrewd for this. He durst not put this rapid love to the test of waiting; and he so worked upon his daughter's fears, that she consented to a more hasty union. Mr. Brooke, too, showed some aversion to any public demonstration. Perhaps he was conscious that his friends would think he was doing a foolish thing, and he was therefore desirous of having it over before they had time to remonstrate. So, on a fine bright Sunday, early in September, the drowsy congregation, who were dozing away the afternoon-service, were aroused by the publication of the banns of marriage between Henry Brooke and Nelly Curtis. It occasioned great whispering and tittering. But no one suspected that the wedding was near at hand; and there were very few lingerers after the service was over, when Kelly came in at the side-door with her father, was joined by Mr. Brooke, and actually married then and there.

The Blount brothers never went to church, but they almost always came into the village of a Sunday afternoon, and on this memorable day they were there as usual, but not together. John was earnestly discussing a new breed of cattle with a neighboring farmer, wholly oblivious of the false Nelly. James was standing with a group of young men on the village-green, when Isaac Welles, the whilom blackberry-boy, rushed up, breathless, to say that he had been detained in the church and had actually seen Nelly and Mr. Brooke married.

In the first eager questions that followed this announcement, no one noticed James, until they were astonished to see him fall heavily to the ground. He had fainted. They had not mentioned the publication of the banns to him, and he was wholly unprepared for this utter annihilation of all his hopes. Welles sprang to his side, and they raised him quickly. He was a strong man, and before they could bring any restoratives he had recovered.

"It is nothing," he said, with a sickly smile. "I think it must have been a sunstroke. It is confoundedly hot."

This lame explanation was accepted, and James refused to go into any of the neighbors' houses, though he consented to seat himself, for a few moments, on a rustic bench in the shade of the trees.

Half an hour later, John, having finished his chat, strolled to the green and approached the group. He looked surprised when he caught sight of his brother, who of late had so carefully avoided him. His astonishment increased when James rose, and, advancing a step, said,—

"John, Nelly Curtis is married to that Brooke!"

An angry flush rose to John's brow, and his black eyes flashed ominously, as he answered, in a hoarse, low voice,—

"So much the better, for now she will never be your wife."

"Neither mine nor yours," said James, maliciously;—then, after a moment, he added, "She was a worthless thing, and we are well rid of her."

At this, a tornado of passion seemed to seize John. He sprang forward, crying,—

"She was not worthless, and I will kill the first man who dares to say so."

There was an interval of dead silence; the brothers regarded each other for a moment, then James shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, and turned away. John glanced around him defiantly on the astonished crowd, and, seeing no one there likely to dispute with him, he seemed to have formed a sudden resolution, for he walked off rapidly after his brother.

Isaac Welles had stood by, no unobservant witness of this scene. He noted something in those two men's eyes that recalled the fierce quarrel of the two boys; and as soon as it was possible for him to get away, he went off after the Blounts, determined, if possible, to prevent mischief.

Meantime John had not met his brother; but, seeing James's horse was gone, he mounted his own and rode away towards home, determining to catch James before he could reach there. However, he did not overtake him. James was too cunning to ride directly to the farm-house, and John's headlong speed availed only to bring him there in time to find his mother alone and dangerously ill.

In a moment all other thoughts were laid aside. The pent-up affection of John's heart had centred itself on his only parent. She had always been cold and stern with her sons, yet they loved her with a tender devotion which reclaimed natures that might otherwise have been wholly bad.

With all the tenderness of a woman, John assisted his mother to her bed, and, not daring to leave her, awaited eagerly the coming of the only other person who could summon aid,—his brother James.

At last he came,—riding slowly, with bowed head, up the lonely road. John went out to meet him. James looked up angry and astonished, and immediately threw himself into a position of defence. John shook his head.

"James," he said, "I cannot settle our quarrel now. Mother is very ill,—perhaps dying."

James started forward.

"Where is she? What is the matter?" he cried, eagerly.

"I do not know," answered John. "I will go for the doctor, now that you are come. I durst not leave her before. But, James, stop one moment. As long as she lives, you are safe,—I will not hurt you by word or act; but when she is gone,—beware!"

James did not answer, except by a nod, and John, turning, saw Isaac Welles standing at the gate. He had overheard the conversation and felt that there was no danger of a quarrel, and he now came eagerly forward with offers of assistance. They were gratefully accepted; for even the taciturnity of the brothers seemed to give way before the pressing fear that beset them.

There is ever great good-will and kindness in the scattered community of a village, and, despite the unpopularity of the Blounts, neighbors and friends soon came to them, ready and willing to aid them by every means in their power.

Mrs. Blount's illness proved to be quite as alarming as John had feared. The physician, from the first, held out very little hope of her recovery. The strong, healthy woman was stricken, as if in a moment; it was the first real illness she had ever had, and it made fearful progress. Yet her naturally iron constitution resisted desperately, so that, to the astonishment of all who saw her sufferings, she lingered on, week after week, with wonderful tenacity of life. The summer faded into autumn, and autumn died into winter, and still she lived, failing slowly, each day losing strength, growing weaker and weaker, until it seemed as if she existed only by the force of will.

Of course it had long ago been found necessary to have some other dependence than the kindness of neighbors, and a stout Irish girl had been hired for the kitchen, while Mrs. Clark, a good, responsible woman, occupied the post of nurse. From these persons, and from Isaac Welles, the rest of the story is collected.

During all these months of her illness, the two brothers had been unfailing in their devotion to their poor suffering mother. Night and day they never tired, watching by her bedside for hours, and seeming scarcely to sleep. Of course they were much together, but no words of harshness ever passed their lips. When out of Mrs. Blount's presence, they spoke to each other as little as possible; in her presence, there was a studied civility that might have deceived any one but a mother. Even she was puzzled. She would lie and watch them with burning, eager eyes, striving to discover if it was a heartfelt reconciliation or only a hollow truce. It was the strong feeling she had that only her life kept them apart, which gave her power to defy death. Perhaps on this very account his stroke was all the more sudden at last.

It was a dark, lowering afternoon in December when the summons came. Mrs. Blount had been lying in a half-doze for more than an hour. Her sons had taken advantage of this sleep to attend to some necessary duties. The nurse sat beside the fire, watching the flames flicker on the dark walls, and idly wondering if the leaden-hued sky portended a snow-storm. Her musings were broken by the voice of the invalid, very faint, but quite distinct,—

"Nurse! nurse! Call my sons. I am dying!"

Mrs. Clark ran to the bed.

"Quick! quick!" cried Mrs. Blount. "Do not stop for me. You cannot help me now. Call my sons before it is too late!"

Her tone and action were so imperative that they enforced obedience, and the nurse ran down-stairs with all speed. She found no one but the hired girl in the kitchen, who said, in answer to her hurried inquiries, that both brothers were out, gone to bring in the cattle before the storm. Mrs. Clark sent her in all haste to recall them, and then returned to the sick-room. As she entered, the dying woman looked up quickly, her face clouded with disappointment when she saw that she was alone. The nurse said all in her power to assure her that her sons would soon be there, but she could not allay the strange excitement into which their absence seemed to have thrown her.

"My strength is failing," she said, sadly; "every moment is precious; if I die without that promise which they could not refuse to a dying mother's prayer, God knows what will become of them!"

Mrs. Clark urged the necessity of quiet, but the sufferer paid no heed to the caution. She talked on, wildly, and sometimes incoherently, about the hopes she built upon the reconciliation her death-bed would effect,—showing, in these few moments of unnatural loquacity, how deeply she had felt the animosity between her sons, and how great had been the effort to conquer it. This excitement could not continue long; her voice soon grew weaker, and at last she ceased speaking, appearing to sink into a stupor of exhaustion.

An instant after, the door opened and John ran eagerly to the couch, closely followed by James. Already the poor widow's eyes were closed; the livid hue that is so fatally significant overspread her face; her breath came in quick gasps.

"Mother! mother!" cried John, flinging himself on his knees beside her, and seizing the thin, hard hand.

At that sound, she opened her eyes, but it was too late; she no longer had the power of utterance. She glanced from one brother to the other with a piteous, entreating look; her mouth moved convulsively; in the effort to speak, she sat upright for an instant, ghastly and rigid, and then fell heavily back.

All was over; her life of labor was changed for eternal rest; and the two men, whom only her power had restrained, stood with the last barrier between them removed, avowed and deadly enemies.

Yet, for all that, they were sincere mourners for the sole parent they had ever known, though it seemed, that, jealous even in their grief, neither cared to have the other see how much he suffered; for, after the first few moments, when the heart refuses to be satisfied of the certainty which it knows only too well, they turned away, and each sought his own room. Afterwards, when all was prepared and the room decently arranged, they returned, and alternately through the long night kept their vigil beside the corpse. It is strange, that, in those quiet hours of communion with the loved dead, no thought of relenting towards each other ever suggested itself.

The snow that had been hanging all day in the dark clouds above them towards evening began to fall. Stilly and continually the tiny flakes came down, hiding all the ruggedness of earth under a spotless mantle, even as the white shroud covered the toil-worn frame of the released sufferer.

In the morning the news spread rapidly, and neighbors came to the afflicted house. But the brothers seemed to resent their offers of assistance as an intrusion, refusing to allow any other watchers, themselves continuing night and day to watch beside the corpse; and that awful vigil, instead of softening their hearts, seemed to harden them into a more deadly hatred.

The third afternoon, when all the country-side was ghastly in its winding-sheet of snow, and the clouds hung heavy as a pall over the stricken earth, the little funeral held its way from the lonely farm-house to the village-churchyard. As a last tribute of respect to their mother, the two brothers drove side by side in the same sleigh. Those who saw them said that it was a sight not to be forgotten,—those two black figures, with their stern, pale faces, so much alike, yet so unsympathizing, sitting motionless, not even leaning on each other in that moment of grief. So they were together, yet apart, during the ceremony that consigned the wife to the grave where five-and-twenty years before they had laid the husband. So they were together, yet apart, when they turned their horse's head towards their home and rode away silently into the sombre twilight.

The last person who saw them that night was Mrs. Clark. The brothers had insisted that both she and the Irish girl should leave early in the day,—replying to all offers of putting the house in order, that they preferred to be alone. But on her way home after the funeral, Mrs. Clark passed the house in a friend's sleigh and stopped a moment for her bundle, which in the hurry of the morning had been forgotten. To her surprise, as she approached the door, she saw that there were no lights visible in any of the windows, although it was already very dark. Thinking the brothers were in the back part of the house, she pushed open the door, which yielded to her touch, and was just about to make her way towards the kitchen, when she heard a sound in the parlor, and then these words, quite distinctly:—

"Are you ready, James?"

"Yes,—only one word. It is a long account we have to settle, and it must be final."

"It shall be. Mine is a heavy score. Years ago I swore to wipe it out, and now the time has come."

Mrs. Clark's knock interrupted them. There was an angry exclamation, and the door was opened. To her intense surprise, no light came from within. She could not understand how they could settle their accounts in the darkness; but they gave her no time for reflection; an angry voice, in answer to her inquiries, bade her go on to the kitchen, and she hastened off. There she found a single candle burning dimly; by its light she picked up her bundle, and, leaving the door open to see her way, returned to the front of the house. Though not a nervous woman, she felt an undefined fear at the mysterious darkness and silence; and as she passed the brothers standing in the doorway, she was struck with fresh terror at the livid pallor of those two stern faces that looked out from the black shadow. When she was going out, she heard the door of the parlor bolted within, and she rejoined her friends, right glad to be away from the sad house.

So those two men were left alone, locked into the dark room together, in the horrible companionship of their inextinguishable hatred and their own bad hearts. It will forever remain unknown what passed between them through the long hours of that awful night, when the wind howled madly around the lightless house, and the clouds gathered blacker and thicker, shrouding it in impenetrable gloom.

Three days passed before any living creature approached the spot,—three days of cold unparalleled in the annals of that country,—cold so severe that it compelled even the hardy farmers to keep as much as possible by the fireside. On the fourth day, Isaac Welles began to think they had been quite long enough alone, and he started with a friend to visit the Blount brothers. Arrived at the farm-house, they saw the sleigh standing before the door, but no sign of any one stirring. The shutters of the windows were closed, and no smoke came out of the chimney. They knocked at the door. No answer. Surprised at the silence, they at length tried to open it. It was not locked, but some heavy substance barred the way. With difficulty they forced it open wide enough to go in.

To this day those men shudder and turn pale, as they recall the awful scene that awaited them within that house, which was, in fact, a tomb.

The obstacle which opposed their entrance was the dead body of John Blount. He lay stretched on the floor,—his face mutilated by cuts and disfigured with gore, his clothes disordered and bloody, and one hand nearly severed from the arm by a deep gash at the wrist; yet it was evident that none of these wounds were mortal. After that terrible conflict, he had probably crawled to the door and fallen there, faint with loss of blood; the silent, cruel cold had completed the work of death.

Following the blood-track, the two men entered the parlor, with suspended breath and hearts that almost ceased to beat. There they found the dead body of James Blount,—his clothes half torn off, in the violence of the strife that could end only in murder. A long, deep cut on the throat had terminated that awful struggle, though many other less dangerous wounds showed how desperate it had been. He lay just as he fell,—his features still contracted with a look of defiance and hatred, and in his right hand still clasped a long, sharp knife. He had succumbed in that mortal conflict, which quenched a lifelong quarrel, and was to prove fatal alike to victor and vanquished. Thus the vow of John Blount was fulfilled,—the pent-up hatred of years satisfied in his brother's murder.

The room was in the wildest disorder,—chairs thrown down and broken, tables overturned, and the carpet torn. In one corner they found a second long, sharp knife. It had been at least a fair fight.

They laid the two ghastly corpses side by side: they had been chained together all their lives; they were chained together in death. The two fratricides are buried in one grave.

This terrible tragedy blighted the spot where it took place. No one would ever inhabit that house again. The furniture was removed, except from the one room which to this day remains unchanged, and the building left to fall to decay. The superstitious affirm, that, in the long winter nights, oaths and groans steal out, muffled, on the rising wind, from the dark shadows of the Lonely House.

* * * * *

BARBARISM AND CIVILIZATION.

In the interior of the island of Borneo there has been found a certain race of wild creatures, of which kindred varieties have been discovered in the Philippine Islands, in Terra del Fuego, and in Southern Africa. They walk usually almost erect upon two legs, and in that attitude measure about four feet in height; they are dark, wrinkled, and hairy; they construct no habitations, form no families, scarcely associate together, sleep in trees or in caves, feed on snakes and vermin, on ants and ants' eggs, on mice, and on each other; they cannot be tamed, nor forced to any labor; and they are hunted and shot among the trees, like the great gorillas, of which they are a stunted copy. When they are captured alive, one finds, with surprise, that their uncouth jabbering sounds like articulate language; they turn up a human face to gaze upon their captor; the females show instincts of modesty; and, in fine, these wretched beings are Men.

Men, "created in God's image," born immortal and capable of progress, and so differing from Socrates and Shakspeare only in degree. It is but a sliding scale from this melancholy debasement up to the most regal condition of humanity. A traceable line of affinity unites these outcast children with the renowned historic races of the world: the Assyrian, the Egyptian, the Ethiopian, the Jew,—the beautiful Greek, the strong Roman, the keen Arab, the passionate Italian, the stately Spaniard, the sad Portuguese, the brilliant Frenchman, the frank Northman, the wise German, the firm Englishman, and that last-born heir of Time, the American, inventor of many new things, but himself, by his temperament, the greatest novelty of all,—the American, with his cold, clear eye, his skin made of ice, and his veins filled with lava.

Who shall define what makes the essential difference between those lowest and these loftiest types? Not color; for the most degraded races seem never to be the blackest, and the builders of the Pyramids were far darker than the dwellers in the Aleutian Islands. Not unmixed purity of blood; since the Circassians, the purest type of the supreme Caucasian race, have given nothing to history but the courage of their men and the degradation of their women. Not religion; for enlightened nations have arisen under each great historic faith, while even Christianity has its Abyssinia and Arkansas. Not climate; for each quarter of the globe has witnessed both extremes. We can only say that there is an inexplicable step in progress, which we call civilization; it is the development of mankind into a sufficient maturity of strength to keep the peace and organize institutions; it is the arrival of literature and art; it is the lion and the lamb beginning to lie down together, without having, as some one has said, the lamb inside of the lion.

There are innumerable aspects of this great transformation; but there is one, in special, which has been continually ignored or evaded. In the midst of our civilization, there is a latent distrust of civilization. We are never weary of proclaiming the enormous gain it has brought to manners, to morals, and to intellect; but there is a wide-spread impression that the benefit is purchased by a corresponding physical decay. This alarm has had its best statement from Emerson. "Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other…. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New-Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and the undivided twentieth part of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that his aboriginal strength the white man has lost. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad-axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch; and the same blow shall send the white man to his grave."

Were this true, the fact would be fatal. Man is a progressive being, only on condition that he begin at the beginning. He can afford to wait centuries for a brain, but he cannot subsist a second without a body. If civilization sacrifice the physical thus hopelessly to the mental, and barbarism merely sacrifice the mental to the physical, then barbarism is unquestionably the better thing, so far as it goes, because it provides the essential preliminary conditions, and so can afford to wait. Barbarism is a one-story log-hut, a poor thing, but better than nothing; while such a civilization would be simply a second story, with a first story too weak to sustain it, a magnificent sky-parlor, with all heaven in view from the upper windows, but with the whole family coming down in a crash presently, through a fatal neglect of the basement. In such a view, an American Indian or a Kaffir warrior may be a wholesome object, good for something already, and for much more when he gets a brain built on. But when one sees a bookworm in his library, an anxious merchant-prince in his counting-room, tottering feebly about, his thin underpinning scarcely able to support what he has already crammed into that heavy brain of his, and he still piling in more,—one feels disposed to cry out, "Unsafe passing here! Stand from under!"

Sydney Smith, in his "Moral Philosophy," has also put strongly this case of physiological despair. "Nothing can be plainer than that a life of society is unfavorable to all the animal powers of men…. A Choctaw could run from here to Oxford without stopping. I go in the mail-coach; and the time the savage has employed in learning to run so fast I have employed in learning something useful. It would not only be useless in me to run like a Choctaw, but foolish and disgraceful." But one may well suppose, that, if the jovial divine had kept himself in training for this disgraceful lost art of running, his diary might not have recorded the habit of lying two hours in bed in the morning, "dawdling and doubting," as he says, or the fact of his having "passed the whole day in an unpleasant state of body, produced by laziness"; and he might not have been compelled to invent for himself that amazing rheumatic armor,—a pair of tin boots, a tin collar, a tin helmet, and a tin shoulder-of-mutton over each of his natural shoulders, all duly filled with boiling water, and worn in patience by the sedentary Sydney.

It is also to be remembered that this statement was made in 1805, when England and Germany were both waking up to a revival of physical training,—if we may trust Sir John Sinclair in the one case, and Salzmann in the other,—such as America is experiencing now. Many years afterwards, Sydney Smith wrote to his brother, that "a working senator should lead the life of an athlete." But supposing the fact still true, that an average red man can run, and an average white man cannot,—who does not see that it is the debility, not the feat, which is discreditable? Setting aside the substantial advantages of strength and activity, there is a melancholy loss of self-respect in buying cultivation for the brain by resigning the proper vigor of the body. Let men say what they please, they all demand a life which shall be whole and sound throughout, and there is a drawback upon all gifts that are paid for in infirmities. There is no thorough satisfaction in art or intellect, if we yet feel ashamed before the Indian because we cannot run, and before the South-Sea Islander because we cannot swim. Give us a total culture, and a success without any discount of shame. After all, one feels a certain justice in Warburton's story of the Guinea trader, in Spence's Anecdotes. Mr. Pope was with Sir Godfrey Kneller one day, when his nephew, a Guinea trader, came in. "Nephew," said Sir Godfrey, "you have the honor of seeing the two greatest men in the world." "I don't know how great you may be," said the Guinea-man, "but I don't like your looks; I have often bought a man, much better than both of you together, all muscles and bones, for ten guineas."

Fortunately for the hopes of man, the alarm is unfounded. The advance of accurate knowledge dispels it. Civilization is cultivation, whole cultivation; and even in its present imperfect state, it not only permits physical training, but promotes it. The traditional glory of the savage body is yielding before medical statistics: it is becoming evident that the average barbarian, observed from the cradle to the grave, does not know enough and is not rich enough to keep his body in its highest condition, but, on the contrary, is small and sickly and short-lived and weak, compared with the man of civilization. The great athletes of the world have been civilized; the long-lived men have been civilized; the powerful armies have been civilized; and the average of life, health, size, and strength is highest to-day among those races where knowledge and wealth and comfort are most widely spread. And yet, by the common lamentation, one would suppose that all civilization is a slow suicide of the race, and that refinement and culture are to leave man at last in a condition like that of the little cherubs on old tomb-stones, all head and wings.

It must be owned that the delusion has all the superstitions of history in its favor, and only the facts against it. If we may trust tradition, the race has undoubtedly been tapering down from century to century since the Creation, so that the original Adam must have been more than twice the size of the Webster statue. However far back we go, admiring memory looks farther. Homer and Virgil never let their hero throw a stone without reminding us that modern heroes only live in glass houses, to have stones thrown at them. Lucretius and Juvenal chant the same lament. Xenophon, mourning the march of luxury among the Persians, says that modern effeminacy has reached such a pitch, that men have even devised coverings for their fingers, called gloves. Herodotus narrates, that, when Cambyses sent ambassadors to the Macrobians, they asked what the Persians had to eat and how long they commonly lived. He was told that they sometimes attained the age of eighty, and that they ate a mass of crushed grain, which they termed bread. On this, they said that it was no wonder, if the Persians died young, when they partook of such rubbish, and that probably they would not survive even so long, but for the wine they drank; while the Macrobians lived on flesh and milk, and survived one hundred and twenty years.

But, unfortunately, there were no Life Insurance Companies among the Macrobians, and therefore nothing to bring down this formidable average to a reliable schedule,—such as accurately informs every modern man how long he may live honestly, without defrauding either his relict or his insurers. We know, moreover, precisely what Dr. Windship can lift, at any given date, and what the rest of us cannot; but Homer and Virgil never weighed the stones which their heroes threw, nor even the words in which they described the process. It is a matter of certainty that all great exploits are severely tested by Fairbanks's scales and stop-watches. It is wonderful how many persons, in the remoter districts, assure the newspaper-editors of their ability to lift twelve hundred pounds; and many a young oarsman can prove to you that he has pulled his mile faster than Ward or Clark, if you will only let him give his own guess at time and distance.

It is easy, therefore, to trace the origin of these exaggerations. Those old navigators, for instance, who saw so many fine things which were not to be seen, how should they help peopling the barbarous realms with races of giants? Job Hartop, who three times observed a merman rise above water to his waist, near the Bermudas,—Harris, who endured such terrific cold in the Antarctics, that once, perilously blowing his nose with his fingers, it flew into the fire and was seen no more,—Knyvett, who, in the same regions, pulled off his frozen stockings, and his toes with them, but had them replaced by the ship's surgeon,—of course these men saw giants, and it is only a matter for gratitude that they vouchsafed us dwarfs also, to keep up some remains of self-respect in us. In Magellan's Straits, for instance, they saw, on one side, from three to four thousand pigmies with mouths from ear to ear; while on the other shore they saw giants whose footsteps were four times as large as an Englishman's,—which was a strong expression, considering that the Englishman's footstep had already reached round the globe.

The only way to test these earlier observations is by later ones. For instance, in the year 1772, a Dutchman named Roggewein discovered Easter Island. His expedition had cost the government a good deal, and he had to bring home his money's worth of discoveries. Accordingly, his islanders were all giants,—twice as tall, he said, as the tallest of the Europeans; "they measured, one with another, the height of twelve feet; so that we could easily,—who will not wonder at it?—without stooping, have passed between the legs of these sons of Goliath. According to their height, so is their thickness." Moreover, he "puts down nothing but the real truth, and upon the nicest inspection," and, to exhibit this caution, warns us that it would be wrong to rate the women of those regions as high as the men, they being, as he pityingly owns, "commonly not above ten or eleven feet." Sweet young creatures they must have appeared, belle and steeple in one. And it was certainly a great disappointment to Captain Cook, when, on visiting the same Island, fifty years later, he could not find man or woman more than six feet tall. Thus ended the tale of this Flying Dutchman.

Thus lamentably have the inhabitants of Patagonia been also dwindling, though, there, if anywhere, still lies the Cape of Bad Hope for the apostles of human degeneracy. Pigafetta originally estimated them at twelve feet. In the time of Commodore Byron, they had already grown downward; yet he said of them that they were "enormous goblins," seven feet high, every one of them. One of his officers, however, writing an independent narrative, seemed to think this a needless concession; he admits, indeed, that the women were not, perhaps, more than seven feet, or seven and a half, or, it might be, eight, "but the men were, for the most part, about nine feet high, and very often more." Lieutenant Cumming, he said, being but six feet two, appeared a mere pigmy among them. But it seems, that, in after-times, on some one's questioning this diminutive lieutenant as to the actual size of these enormous goblins, the veteran frankly confessed, that, "had it been anywhere else but in Patagonia, he should have called them good sturdy savages and thought no more on't."

But, these facts apart, there are certain general truths which look ominous for the reputation of the physique of savage tribes.

First, they cannot keep the race alive, they are always tending to decay. When first encountered by civilization, they usually tell stories of their own decline in numbers, and after that the downward movement is accelerated. They are poor, ignorant, improvident, oppressed by others' violence, or exhausted by their own; war kills them, infanticide and abortion cut them off before they reach the age of war, pestilences sweep them away, whole tribes perish by famine and smallpox. Under the stern climate of the Esquimaux and the soft skies of Tahiti, the same decline is seen. Parkman estimates that in 1763 the whole number of Indians east of the Mississippi was but ten thousand, and they were already mourning their own decay. Travellers seldom visit a savage country without remarking on the scarcity of aged people and of young children. Lewis and Clarke, Mackenzie, Alexander Henry, observed this among Indian tribes never before visited by white men; Dr. Kane remarked it among the Esquimaux, D'Azara among the Indians of South America, and many travellers in the South-Sea Islands and even in Africa, though the black man apparently takes more readily to civilization than any other race, and then develops a terrible vitality, as American politicians find to their cost.

Meanwhile, the hardships which thus decimate the tribe toughen the survivors, and sometimes give them an apparent advantage over civilized men. The savages whom one encounters are necessarily the picked men of the race, and the observer takes no census of the multitudes who have perished in the process. Civilization keeps alive, in every generation, multitudes who would otherwise die prematurely. These millions of invalids do not owe to civilization their diseases, but their lives. It is painful that your sick friend should live on Cherry Pectoral; but if he had been born in barbarism, he would neither have had it to drink nor survived to drink it.

And again, it is now satisfactorily demonstrated that these picked survivors of savage life are commonly suffering under the same diseases with their civilized compeers, and show less vital power to resist them. In barbarous nations every foreigner is taken for a physician, and the first demand is for medicines; if not the right medicines, then the wrong ones; if no medicines are at hand, the written prescription, administered internally, is sometimes found a desirable restorative. The earliest missionaries to the South-Sea Islands found ulcers and dropsy and hump-backs there before them. The English Bishop of New Zealand, landing on a lone islet where no ship had ever touched, found the whole population prostrate with influenza. Lewis and Clarke, the first explorers of the Rocky Mountains, found Indian warriors ill with fever and dysentery, rheumatism and paralysis, and Indian women in hysterics. "The tooth-ache," said Roger Williams of the New England tribes, "is the only paine which will force their stoute hearts to cry"; even the Indian women, he says, never cry as he has heard "some of their men in this paine"; but Lewis and Clarke found whole tribes who had abolished this source of tears in the civilized manner, by having no teeth left. We complain of our weak eyes as a result of civilized habits, and Tennyson, in "Locksley Hall," wishes his children bred in some savage land, "not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books." But savage life seems more injurious to the organs of vision than even the type of a cheap edition; for the most vigorous barbarians—on the prairies, in Southern archipelagos, on African deserts—suffer more from different forms of ophthalmia than from any other disease; without knowing the alphabet, they have worse eyes than if they were professors, and have not even the melancholy consolation of spectacles.

Again, the savage cannot, as a general rule, endure transplantation,—he cannot thrive in the country of the civilized man; whereas the latter, with time for training, can equal or excel him in strength and endurance on his own ground. As it is known that the human race generally can endure a greater variety of climate than the hardiest of the lower animals, so it is with the man of civilization, when compared with the barbarian. Kane, when he had once learned how to live in the Esquimaux country, lived better than the Esquimaux themselves; and he says expressly, that "their powers of resistance are no greater than those of well-trained voyagers from other lands." Richardson, Parkyns, Johnstone, give it as their opinion, that the European, once acclimated, bears the heat of the African deserts better than the native negro. "These Christians are devils," say the Arabs; "they can endure both cold and heat." What are the Bedouins to the Zouaves, who unquestionably would be as formidable in Lapland as in Algiers? Nay, in the very climates where the natives are fading away, the civilized foreigner multiplies: thus, the strong New-Zealanders do not average two children to a family, while the households of the English colonists are larger than at home,—which is saying a good deal.

Most formidable of all is the absence of all recuperative power in the savage who rejects civilization. No effort of will improves his condition; he sees his race dying out, and he can only drink and forget it. But the civilized man has an immense capacity for self-restoration; he can make mistakes and correct them again, sin and repent, sink and rise. Instinct can only prevent; science can cure in one generation, and prevent in the next. It is known that some twenty years ago a thrill of horror shot through all Anglo-Saxondom at the reported physical condition of the operatives in English mines and factories. It is not so generally known, that, by a recent statement of the medical inspector of factories, there is declared to have been a most astounding renovation of female health in such establishments throughout all England since that time,—the simple result of sanitary laws. What science has done science can do. Everybody knows which symptom of American physical decay is habitually quoted, as most alarming; one seldom sees a dentist who does not despair of the republic. Yet this calamity is nothing new; the elder branch of our race has been through that epidemic, and outlived it. In the robust days of Queen Bess, the teeth of the court ladies were habitually so black and decayed, that foreigners used constantly to ask if Englishwomen ate nothing but sugar. Hentzner, who visited the country in 1697, speaks of the same calamity as common among the English of all classes. Two centuries and a half have removed the stigma,—improved physical habits have put fresh pearls between the lips of all England now; and there seems no reason why we Americans may not yet be healthy, in spite of our teeth.

Thus much for general considerations; let us come now to more specific tests, beginning with the comparison of size. The armor of the knights of the Middle Ages is too small for their modern descendants: Hamilton Smith records that two Englishmen of average dimensions found no suit large enough to fit them in the great collection of Sir Samuel Meyrick. The Oriental sabre will not admit the English hand, nor the bracelet of the Kaffir warrior the English arm. The swords found in Roman tumuli have handles inconveniently small; and the great mediaeval two-handed sword is now supposed to have been used only for one or two blows at the first onset, and then exchanged for a smaller one. The statements given by Homer, Aristotle, and Vitruvius represent six feet as a high standard for full-grown men; and the irrefutable evidence of the ancient doorways, bedsteads, and tombs proves the average size of the race to have certainly not diminished in modern days. The gigantic bones have all turned out to be animal remains; even the skeleton twenty-five feet high and ten feet broad, which one savant wrote a book called "Gigantosteologia" to prove human, and another, a counter-argument, called "Gigantomachia," to prove animal,—neither of the philosophers taking the trouble to draw a single fragment of the fossil. The enormous savage races have turned out, as has been shown, to be travellers' tales,—even the Patagonians being brought down to an average of five feet ten inches, and being, moreover, only a part of a race, the Abipones, of which the other families are smaller. Indeed, we can all learn by our own experience how irresistible is the tendency of the imagination to attribute vast proportions to all hardy and warlike tribes. Most persons fancy the Scottish Highlanders, for instance, to have been a race of giants; yet Charles Edward was said to be taller than any man in his Highland army, and his height was but five feet nine. We have the same impression in regard to our own Aborigines. Yet, when first, upon the prairies of Nebraska, I came in sight of a tribe of genuine, unadulterated Indians, with no possession on earth but a bow and arrow and a bear-skin,—bare-skin in a double sense, I might add,—my instinctive exclamation was, "What race of dwarfs is this?" They were the descendants of the glorious Pawnees of Cooper, the heroes of every boy's imagination; yet, excepting the three chiefs, who were noble-looking men of six feet in height, the tallest of the tribe could not have measured five feet six inches.

The most careful investigations give the same results in respect to physical strength. Early travellers among our Indians, as Hearne and Mackenzie, and early missionaries to the South-Sea Islands, as Ellis, report athletic contests in which the natives could not equal the better-fed, better-clothed, better-trained Europeans. When the French savans, Péron, Regnier, Ransonnet, carried their dynamometers to the islands of the Indian Ocean, they found with surprise that an average English sailor was forty-two per cent, stronger, and an average Frenchman thirty per cent, stronger, than the strongest island tribe they visited. Even in comparing different European races, it is undeniable that bodily strength goes with the highest civilization. It is recorded in Robert Stephenson's Life, that, when the English "navvies" were employed upon the Paris and Boulogne Railway, they used spades and barrows just twice the size of those employed by their Continental rivals, and were regularly paid double. Quetelet's experiments with the dynamometer on university students showed the same results: first ranked the Englishman, then the Frenchman, then the Belgian, then the Russian, then the Southern European: for those races of Southern Europe which once ruled the Eastern and the Western worlds by physical and mental power have lost in strength as they have paused in civilization, and the easy victories of our armies in Mexico show us the result.

It is impossible to deny that the observations on this subject are yet very imperfect; and the only thing to be claimed is, that they all point one way. So far as absolute statistical tables go, the above-named French observations have till recently stood almost alone, and have been the main reliance. The just criticism has, however, been made, that the subjects of these experiments were the inhabitants of New Holland and Van Diemen's Land, by no means the strongest instances on the side of barbarism. It is, therefore, fortunate that the French tables have now been superseded by some more important comparisons, accurately made by A.S. Thomson, M.D., Surgeon of the Fifty-Eighth Regiment of the British Army, and printed in the seventeenth volume of the Journal of the London Statistical Society.

The observations were made in New Zealand,—Dr. Thomson being stationed there with his regiment, and being charged with the duty of vaccinating all natives employed by the government. The islanders thus used for experiment were to some extent picked men, as none but able-bodied persons would have been selected for employ, and as they were, moreover, (he states,) accustomed to lifting burdens, and better-fed than the majority of their countrymen. The New Zealand race, as a whole, is certainly a very favorable type of barbarism, having but just emerged from an utterly savage condition, having been cannibals within one generation, and being the very identical people among whom were recorded those wonderful cures of flesh-wounds to which Emerson has referred. Cook and all other navigators have praised their robust physical aspect, and they undoubtedly, with the Fijians and the Tongans, stand at the head of all island races. They are admitted to surpass our American Indians, as well as the Kaffirs and the Joloffs, probably the finest African races; and a careful comparison between New-Zealanders and Anglo-Saxons will, therefore, approach as near to an experimentum crucis as any single set of observations can. The following tables have been carefully prepared from those of Dr. Thomson, with the addition of some scanty facts from other sources,—scanty, because, as Quetelet indignantly observes, less pains have as yet been taken to measure accurately the physical powers of man than those of any machine he has constructed or any animal he has tamed.

TABLE.

HEIGHT. Number measured. Average.
New-Zealanders………………. 147 5 feet 6-3/4 inches.
Students at Edinburgh………… 800 5 " 7-1/10 "
Class of 1860. Cambridge (Mass.). 106 5 " 7-3/5 "
Students at Cambridge (Eng.)….. 80 5 " 8-3/5 "

WEIGHT.
New-Zealanders………………. 146 140 pounds.
Soldiers 58th Regiment……….. 1778 142 "
Class of 1860. Cambridge (Mass.). 106 142-1/2 "
Students at Cambridge (Eng.)….. 80 143 "
Men weighed at Boston (U.S.)
Mechanics' Fair, 1860 ……… 4369 146-3/4 "
Englishmen (Dr. Thomson)……… 2648 148 "
Cambridge, Eng. (a newspaper
statement) ……………….. —— 151 "
Revolutionary officers at West
Point, August 10th, 1778,
given in "Milledulcia," p. 273.. 11 226 "

AREA OF CHEST.
New-Zealanders………………. 151 35.36 inches.
Soldiers 58th Regiment……….. 628 36.71 "

STRENGTH IN LIFTING.
New-Zealanders………………. 31 367 pounds.
Students fit Edinburgh, aged 25.. —— 416 "
Soldiers 58th Regiment……….. 33 422 "

NOTE. The range of strength among the New-Zealanders was from 250
pounds to 420 pounds; among the soldiers, from 350 pounds to 504 pounds.

But it is the test of longevity which exhibits the greatest triumph for civilization, because here the life-insurance tables furnish ample, though comparatively recent statistics. Of course, in legendary ages all lives were of enormous length; and the Hindoos in their sacred books attribute to their progenitors a career of forty million years or thereabouts,—what may safely be termed a ripe old age; for if a man were still unripe after celebrating his forty-millionth birthday, he might as well give it up. But from the beginning of accurate statistics we know that the duration of life in any nation is a fair index of its progress in civilization, Quetelet gives statistics, more or less reliable, from every nation of Northern Europe, showing a gain of ten to twenty-five per cent, during the last century. Where the tables are most carefully prepared, the result is least equivocal. Thus, in Geneva, where accurate registers have been kept for three hundred years, it seems that from 1560 to 1600 the average lifetime of the citizens was twenty-one years and two months; in the next century, twenty-five years and nine months; in the century following, thirty-two years and nine months; and in the year 1833, forty years and five months: thus nearly doubling the average age of man in Geneva, within those three centuries of social progress. In France, it is estimated, that, in spite of revolutions and Napoleons, human life has been gaining at the rate of two months a year for nearly a century. By a manuscript of the fourteenth century, moreover, it is shown that the rate of mortality in Paris was then one in sixteen,—one person dying annually to every sixteen of the inhabitants. It is now one in thirty-two,—a gain of a hundred per cent, in five hundred years. In England the progress has been far more rapid. The rate of mortality in 1690 was one in thirty-three; in 1780 it was one in forty; and it stands now at one in sixty,—the healthiest condition in Europe,—while in half-barbarous Russia the rate of mortality is one in twenty-seven. It would be easy to multiply these statistics to any extent; but they all point one way, and no medical statistician now pretends to oppose the dictum of Hufeland, that "a certain degree of culture is physically necessary for man, and promotes duration of life."

The simple result is, that the civilized man is physically superior to the barbarian. There is now no evidence that there exists in any part of the world a savage race who, taken as a whole, surpass or even equal the Anglo-Saxon type in average physical condition; as there is also none among whom the President elect of the United States and the Commander-in-chief of his armies would not be regarded as remarkably tall men, and Dr. Windship a remarkably strong one. "It is now well known," says Prichard, "that all savage races have less muscular power than civilized men." Johnstone in Northern Africa, and Cumming in Southern Africa, could find no one to equal them in strength of arm. At the Sandwich Islands, Ellis records, that, "when a boat manned by English seamen and a canoe with natives left the shore together, the canoe would uniformly leave the boat behind, but they would soon relax, while the seamen, pulling steadily on, would pass them, but, if the voyage took three hours, would invariably reach the destination first." Certain races may have been regularly trained by position and necessity in certain particular arts,—as Sandwich-Islanders in swimming, and our Indians in running,—and may naturally surpass the average skill of those who are comparatively out of practice in that speciality; yet it is remarkable that their greatest feats even in these ways never seem to surpass those achieved by picked specimens of civilization. The best Indian runners could only equal Lewis and Clarke's men, and they have been repeatedly beaten in prize-races within the last few years; while the most remarkable aquatic feat on record is probably that of Mr. Atkins of Liverpool, who recently dived to a depth of two hundred and thirty feet, reappearing above water in one minute and eleven seconds.

In the wilderness and on the prairies, we find a general impression that cultivation and refinement must weaken the race. Not at all; they simply domesticate it. Domestication is not weakness. A strong hand does not become less muscular under a kid glove; and a man who is a hero in a red shirt will also be a hero in a white one. Civilization, imperfect as it is, has already procured for us better food, better air, and better behavior; it gives us physical training on system; and its mental training, by refining the nervous organization, makes the same quantity of muscular power go much farther. The young English ensigns and lieutenants who at Waterloo (in the words of Wellington) "rushed to meet death, as if it were a game of cricket," were the fruit of civilization. They were representatives, indeed, of the aristocracy of their nation; and here, where the aim of all institutions is to make the whole nation an aristocracy, we must plan to secure the same splendid physical superiority on a grander scale. It is in our power, by using even very moderately for this purpose our magnificent machinery of common schools, to give to the physical side of civilization an advantage which it has possessed nowhere else, not even in England or Germany. It is not yet time to suggest detailed plans on this subject, since the public mind is not yet fully awake even to the demand. When the time comes, the necessary provisions can be made easily,—at least, as regards boys; for the physical training of girls is a far more difficult problem The organization is more delicate and complicated, the embarrassments greater, the observations less carefully made, the successes fewer, the failures far more disastrous. Any intelligent and robust man may undertake the physical training of fifty boys, however delicate their organization, with a reasonable hope of rearing nearly all of them, by easy and obvious methods, into a vigorous maturity; but what wise man or woman can expect anything like the same proportion of success, at present, with fifty American girls?

This is the most momentous health-problem with which we have to deal,— to secure the proper physical advantages of civilization for American women. Without this there can be no lasting progress. The Sandwich Island proverb says,—

"If strong be the frame of the mother,
Her son shall make laws for the people."

But in this country, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that every man grows to maturity surrounded by a circle of invalid female relatives, that he later finds himself the husband of an invalid wife and the parent of invalid daughters, and that he comes at last to regard invalidism, as Michelet coolly declares, the normal condition of that sex,—as if the Almighty did not know how to create a woman. This, of course, spreads a gloom over life. When I look at the morning throng of schoolgirls in summer, hurrying through every street, with fresh, young faces, and vesture of lilies, duly curled and straw-hatted and booted, and turned off as patterns of perfection by proud mammas,—it is not sad to me to think that all this young beauty must one day fade and die, for there are spheres of life beyond this earth, I know, and the soul is good to endure through more than one;—the sadness is in the unnatural nearness of the decay, to foresee the living death of disease that is waiting close at hand for so many, to know how terrible a proportion of those fair children are walking unconsciously into a weary, wretched, powerless, joyless, useless maturity. Among the myriad triumphs of advancing civilization, there seems but one formidable danger, and that is here.

It cannot be doubted, however, that the peril will pass by, with advancing knowledge. In proportion to our national recklessness of danger is the promptness with which remedial measures are adopted, when they at last become indispensable. In the mean time, we must look for proofs of the physical resources of woman into foreign and even into savage lands. When an American mother tells me with pride, as occasionally happens, that her daughter can walk two miles and back without great fatigue, the very boast seems a tragedy; but when one reads that Oberea, queen of the Sandwich Islands, lifted Captain Wallis over a marsh as easily as if he had been a little child, there is a slight sense of consolation. Brunhilde, in the "Nibelungen," binds her offending lover with her girdle and slings him up to the wall. Cymburga, wife of Duke Ernest of Lithuania, could crack nuts between her fingers, and drive nails into a wall with her thumb;—whether she ever got her husband under it is not recorded. Let me preserve from oblivion the renown of my Lady Butterfield, who, about the year 1700, at Wanstead, in Essex, (England,) thus advertised:—"This is to give notice to my honored masters and ladies and loving friends, that my Lady Butterfield gives a challenge to ride a horse, or leap a horse, or run afoot, or hollo, with any woman in England seven years younger, but not a day older, because I won't undervalue myself, being now 74 years of age." Nor should be left unrecorded the high-born Scottish damsel whose tradition still remains at the Castle of Huntingtower, in Scotland, where two adjacent pinnacles still mark the Maiden's Leap. She sprang from battlement to battlement, a distance of nine feet and four inches, and eloped with her lover. Were a young lady to go through one of our villages in a series of leaps like that, and were she to require her lovers to follow in her footsteps, it is to be feared that she would die single.

Yet the transplanted race which has in two centuries stepped from Delft Haven to San Francisco has no reason to be ashamed of its physical achievements, the more especially as it has found time on the way for one feat of labor and endurance which may be matched without fear against any historic deed. When civilization took possession of this continent, it found one vast coating of almost unbroken forest overspreading it from shore to prairie. To make room for civilization, that forest must go. What were Indians, however deadly,—what starvation, however imminent,—what pestilence, however lurking,—to a solid obstacle like this? No mere courage could cope with it, no mere subtlety, no mere skill, no Yankee ingenuity, no labor-saving machine with head for hands; but only firm, unwearying, bodily muscle to every stroke. Tree by tree, in two centuries, that forest has been felled. What were the Pyramids to that? There does not exist in history an athletic feat so astonishing.

But there yet lingers upon this continent a forest of moral evil more formidable, a barrier denser and darker, a Dismal Swamp of inhumanity, a barbarism upon the soil, before which civilization has thus far been compelled to pause,—happy, if it could even check its spread. Checked at last, there comes from it a cry as if the light of day had turned to darkness,—when the truth simply is, that darkness is being mastered and surrounded by the light of day. Is it a good thing to "extend the area of freedom" by pillaging some feeble Mexico? and does the phrase become a bad one only when it means the peaceful progress of constitutional liberty within our own borders? The phrases which oppression teaches become the watchwords of freedom at last, and the triumph of Civilization over Barbarism is the only Manifest Destiny of America.

WHO WAS CASPAR HAUSER?

Recent publications have again attracted our attention to a subject which about thirty years ago was the cause of great excitement and innumerable speculations. The very extraordinary advent, life, and death of Caspar Hauser, the novelty and singularity of all his thoughts and actions, and his charming innocence and amiability, interested at the time all Europe in his behalf. Thrown upon the world in a state of utter helplessness, he was adopted by one of the cities of Germany, and became not only a universal pet, but a sight which people flocked from all parts to see. It became a perfect fever, raging throughout Germany, and extending also to other countries. The papers teemed with accounts and conjectures. Innumerable essays and even books were written, almost every one advancing a different theory for the solution of the mystery. But his death was still more the occasion for their appearance, and for some time thereafter they literally swarmed from the press. Every one who had in any way come in contact with him, and a great many who knew him by reputation only, thought themselves called upon to give their views, so that in a little while the subject acquired almost a literature of its own.

But this excitement gradually disappeared, and with it most of the literature which it had called forth. There are a few names, however, which occur frequently in connection with that of Caspar Hauser, to whose opinions we shall subsequently call attention. They are Feuerbach, Daumer, Merker, Stanhope, Binder, Meier, and Fuhrmann.[A] Of these, Binder was his earliest protector; Feuerbach conducted the legal investigations to which Caspar's mysterious appearance gave rise; Daumer was for a long time his teacher and host; Stanhope adopted him; Meier afterwards filled Daumer's place; and Fuhrmann was the clergyman who attended his death-bed. Merker, though never thrown very closely in contact with Caspar, was a Prussian Counsellor of Police, and as such his opinion may perhaps have more than ordinary weight with some. Most of them published their various opinions during Caspar's life or soon after his death, and the subject was then allowed to sink to its proper level and attract no further attention. Within a few years, however, it has again been brought into prominent light by some new publications. One of these is an essay written by Feuerbach and published in his works edited by his son, in which he endeavors to prove that Caspar Hauser was the son of the Grand Duchess Stephanie of Baden; another is a book by Daumer, which he devotes entirely to the explosion of all theories that have ever been advanced; and a third, by Dr. Eschricht, contends that Caspar was at first an idiot and afterwards an impostor. Before considering these different theories, let us recall the principal incidents of his life. These have, indeed, been placed within the reach of the English reader by the Earl of Stanhope's book and by a translation of Feuerbach's "Kaspar Hauser. Beispiel eines Verbrechens am Seelenleben des Menschen,"[B] published in Boston in 1832; but, as the former has, we believe, obtained little circulation in this country, and the latter is now probably out of print, a short account of the life of this singular being may not be deemed amiss.

[Footnote A: Daumer, in his Disclosures concerning Caspar Hauser, refers to a great many more than these; but it is impossible to follow his example in so limited a space.]

[Footnote B: Caspar Hauser. An Example of a Crime against the Life, of
Man's Soul.]

On the 26th of May, 1828, a citizen of Nuremberg, while loitering in front of his house in the outskirts of the town, saw, tottering towards him, a lad of sixteen or seventeen years, coarsely and poorly clad. He held in his hand a letter, which he presented to the citizen; but to all questions as to who he was, whence he came, and what he wanted, he replied only in an unintelligible jargon. The letter was addressed to the captain of a cavalry company then stationed at Nuremberg, to whom he was taken. It stated substantially, that a boy had been left at the writer's door on the 7th of October, 1812, that the writer was a poor laborer with a large family, but that he had nevertheless adopted the boy, and had reared him in such strict seclusion from the world that not even his existence was known. The letter said further, that, so far from being able to answer, the lad could not even comprehend any questions put to him. It therefore discouraged all attempts to obtain any information in that way, and ended with the advice, that, according to his desire, he should be made a dragoon, as his father had been before him. Inclosed in this letter was a note, professedly by the mother, and pretending to have been left with him, when, as an infant, Caspar Hauser was first cast upon the world, but, in reality, as it was afterwards proved, written by the same person. This note gave the date of his birth, pleaded the poverty of the mother as an excuse for thus abandoning her child, and contained the same request as to his joining a cavalry regiment when he should arrive at the age of seventeen.

The first impression produced by Caspar's appearance and behavior was, that he was some idiot or lunatic escaped from confinement; it remained only to be shown whence he had escaped. In the mean time he was placed under the protection of the police, who removed him to their guard-room. There he showed no consciousness of what was going on around him; his look was a dull, brutish stare; nor did he give any indication of intelligence, until pen and paper were placed in his hand, when he wrote clearly and repeatedly, "Kaspar Hauser." Since then he has been known by that name.

When it became evident that the first conjectures concerning him were wrong, strenuous efforts were made by the police to sound the mystery, but without the slightest success. He himself could give no clue; for he neither understood what others said nor could make himself understood. With the exception of some six words, the sounds Caspar uttered were entirely meaningless. He recognized none of the places where he had been, no trace could be obtained of him elsewhere, and the most vigilant search brought nothing to light. The surprise which his first appearance produced increased as he became better known. It then became more and more evident that he was neither an idiot nor a lunatic; at the same time his manners were so peculiar, and his ignorance of civilized life and his dislike for its customs so great, that all sorts of conjectures were resorted to in order to explain the mystery.

It was ascertained that he must have been incarcerated in some dungeon, entirely shut out from the light of the sun, which gave him great pain. The structure of his body, the tenderness of his feet, and the great difficulty and suffering which he experienced in walking, indicated beyond a doubt that he had been kept in a sitting posture, with his legs stretched straight out before him. His sustenance had been bread and water; for he not only evinced great repugnance to any other food, but the smallest quantity affected his constitution in the most violent manner. It was also evident that he had never come in contact with human beings, beyond what was necessary for supplying his immediate wants, and, strange to say, teaching him to write.

That these inferences were well-founded was proved by the subsequent disclosures of Caspar himself, after he had acquired a sufficient command of language. The account he then gave was as follows.

"He neither knows who he is nor where his home is. It was only at Nuremberg that he came into the world. Here he first learned, that, besides himself and 'the man with whom he had always been,' there existed other men and other creatures. As long as he can recollect, he had always lived in a hole, (a small, low apartment, which he sometimes calls a cage,) where he had always sat upon the ground, with bare feet, and clothed only with a shirt and a pair of breeches. In his apartment, he never heard a sound, whether produced by a man, by an animal, or by anything else. He never saw the heavens, nor did there ever appear a brightening (daylight) such as at Nuremberg, he never perceived any difference between day and night, and much less did he ever get a sight of the beautiful lights in the heavens. Whenever he awoke from sleep, he found a loaf of bread and a pitcher of water by him. Sometimes his water had a bad taste; whenever this was the case, he could no longer keep his eyes open, but was compelled to fall asleep; and when he afterwards awoke, he found that he had a clean shirt on, and that his nails had been cut.[C]

[Footnote C: When he resided with Professor Daumer, a drop of opium in a glass of water was administered to him. After swallowing a mouthful, he exclaimed, "That water is nasty; it tastes exactly like the water I was sometimes obliged to drink in my cage."]

"He never saw the face of the man who brought him his meat and drink. In his hole he had two wooden horses and several ribbons. With these horses he had always amused himself as long as he was awake; and his only occupation was, to make them run by his side, and to arrange the ribbons about them in different positions. Thus one day had passed the same as another; but he had never felt the want of anything, had never been sick, and—once only excepted—had never felt the sensation of pain. Upon the whole, he had been much happier there than in the world, where he was obliged to suffer so much. How long he had continued to live in this situation he knew not; for he had had no knowledge of time. He knew not when or how he came there. Nor had he any recollection of ever having been in a different situation, or in any other than in that place. The man with whom he had always been never did him any harm. Yet one day, shortly before he was taken away, when he had been running his horse too hard, and had made too much noise, the man came and struck him upon his arm with a stick, or with a piece of wood; this caused the wound which he brought with him to Nuremberg.

"Pretty nearly about the same time, the man once came into his prison, placed a small table over his feet, and spread something white upon it, which he now knows to have been paper; he then came behind him, so as not to be seen by him, took hold of his hand, and moved it backwards and forwards on the paper, with a thing (a lead pencil) which he had stuck between his fingers. He (Hauser) was then ignorant of what it was; but he was mightily pleased, when he saw the black figures which began to appear upon the white paper. When he felt that his hand was free, and the man was gone from him, he was so much pleased with this new discovery, that he could never grow tired of drawing these figures repeatedly upon the paper. This occupation almost made him neglect his horses, although he did not know what those characters signified. The man repeated his visits in the same manner several times.

"Another time the man came, lifted him from the place where he lay, placed him on his feet, and endeavored to teach him to stand. This he repeated at several different times. The manner in which he effected this was the following: he seized him firmly around the breast, from behind, placed his feet behind Caspar's feet, and lifted these, as in stepping forward.

"Finally, the man appeared once again, placed Caspar's hands over his shoulders, tied them fast, and thus carried him on his back out of the prison. He was carried up (or down) a hill. He knows not how he felt; all became night, and he was laid upon his back."—By the expression, "all became night," he meant that he fainted away. The little which Caspar was able to relate in regard to his journey is not of any particular interest, and we omit it here.

This is all that is known with any certainty of the early life of this unfortunate being. The conjectures to which it has given rise will be considered later. Let us first finish his history.

As was to be expected, Caspar Hauser's faculties developed very gradually. His mind was in a torpor, and, placed suddenly amid, to him, most exciting scenes, it was long before he could understand the simplest phenomena of Nature. The unfolding of his mind was exactly like that of a child. Feuerbach, in his book on Caspar Hauser, gives the main features of this gradual development. We can only pick out a few.

It is remarkable that in the same proportion as he advanced in knowledge and acquaintance with civilized life, the intensity of all his faculties diminished. It was so with his memory. He was at first able to exhibit most surprising feats. As an experiment, thirty, forty, and, on one occasion, forty-five names of persons were mentioned to him, which he afterwards repeated with all their titles,—to him, of course, entirely meaningless. So, too, with his power of sight. At first, he was able to see in the dark perfectly well, and much better than in the light of the sun, which was very painful to him. He very frequently amused himself at others groping in the dark, when he experienced not the slightest difficulty. On one occasion, in the evening, he read the name on a door-plate at the distance of one hundred and eighty paces. This keenness of vision did not, however, retain its entire vigor, but decreased as he became more accustomed to the sun. For some time after he made his appearance he had no idea of perspective, but would clutch like a child at objects far off. Nor had he any conception of the beauties of Nature, which he afterwards explained by saying that it then appeared to him like a mass of colors jumbled together. Nothing was beautiful, unless it was red, except a starry heaven,—and the emotion which he felt, on first beholding this, was truly touching. Until then, he had invariably spoken of "the man with whom he had always been" with feelings of affection; he longed to return to him, and looked upon all his studies as merely a temporary thing; some day he would go back and show the man how much he had learned. But when he first looked upon the heavens, his tone became entirely changed, and he denounced the man severely for never having shown him such beautiful things.

All his senses were thus at first wonderfully keen. It was so with his hearing and smell. The latter was the source of most of his sufferings; for, being so exceedingly sensitive, even the most scentless things made him sick. He liked but one smell, that of bread, which had been his only food for seventeen years. It was a long time, indeed, before he could take any other food at all, and he only became accustomed to it very gradually.

The effect produced upon Caspar Hauser by contact with or proximity to animals was also very curious. He was able to detect their presence under singularly unfavorable circumstances. Metals, too, had a very powerful effect upon him, and possessed for him a strong magnetic power. But it is impossible to give all the details, however interesting; for them we must refer to Feuerbach.

His mind, as has been already said, was at first sunk in almost impenetrable darkness. He knew of but two divisions of earthly things,—man and beast, "bua" and "ross." The former was a word of his own. The latter, which is the German for horse, included everything not human, whether animate or inanimate. Between these he for a long time saw no difference. He could not understand why pictures and statues did not move, and he regarded his toy-horses as living things. To inanimate things impelled by foreign forces he ascribed volition.

Religion he, of course, had none. He possessed naturally a very amiable character, and his thoughts and conduct were as pure as though guided by the soundest system of morality. But he knew nothing of a God, and one of the greatest difficulties Daumer had to encounter was instructing him on this point. His untutored mind could not master the doctrines of theology, and he was constantly puzzled by questions which he himself suggested, and which his instructor often found it impossible to answer satisfactorily.

Physically he was very weak. The shortest walk would fatigue him. At first he could scarcely shuffle along at all, on account of the tenderness of his feet, and because his body had always been kept in one position. He so far overcame this, however, as to be able to walk a little, though always with an effort. But on horseback he never became tired. From the first time that he mounted a horse, he showed a love for the exercise, and a power of endurance utterly at variance with all other exhibitions of his strength; and he very soon acquired a degree of skill which made him an object of envy to all the cavalry-officers stationed in the neighborhood. So inconsistent and incomprehensible was everything about Caspar Hauser!

In October, 1829, while residing in the family of Professor Daumer, an attempt was made upon his life, which was only so far successful as to give a very violent shock to his delicate constitution. The perpetrator of the crime was never discovered. Caspar was afterwards adopted by the Earl of Stanhope, and by him removed to Anspach. Feuerbach gives a very interesting description of him, as he appeared at this time.

"In understanding a man, in knowledge a little child, and in many things more ignorant than a child, the whole of his language and demeanor shows often a strangely contrasted mingling of manly and childish behavior. With a serious countenance and in a tone of great importance, he often utters things which, coming from any other person of the same age, would be called stupid or silly, but which, coming from him, always force upon us a sad, compassionate smile. It is particularly farcical to hear him speak of the future plans of his life,—of the manner in which, after having learned a great deal and earned money, he intends to settle himself with his wife, whom he considers as an indispensable part of domestic furniture."

"Mild and gentle, without vicious inclinations, and without passions and strong emotions, his quiet mind resembles the smooth mirror of a lake in the stillness of a moonlight night. Incapable of hurting an animal, compassionate even to the worm, which he is afraid to tread upon, timid even to cowardice, he will nevertheless act regardless of consequences, and even without forbearance, according to his own convictions, whenever it becomes necessary to defend or to execute purposes which he has once perceived and acknowledged to be right. If he feels himself annoyed in any manner, he will long bear it patiently, and will try to get out of the way of the person who is thus troublesome to him, or will endeavor to effect a change in his conduct by mild expostulations; but, finally, if he cannot help himself in any other manner, as soon as an opportunity of doing so offers, he will very quietly slip off the bonds that confine him,—yet without bearing the least malice against him who may have injured him. He is obedient, obliging, and yielding; but the man who accuses him wrongfully, or asserts to be true what he believes to be untrue, need not expect, that, from mere complaisance, or from other considerations, he will submit to injustice or to falsehood; he will always modestly, but firmly, insist upon his right; or perhaps, if the other seems inclined obstinately to maintain his ground against him, he will silently leave him."

But the fate which had been pursuing this unfortunate being, and without which the tragedy of his life would have been incomplete, overtook him at last. On the 15th of December, 1833, he was induced by some unknown person to meet him in a retired spot in the city of Anspach, under the pretence that he should then have the secret of his parentage revealed to him. The real object was his murder, and this time it was successful. Caspar was stabbed to the heart. He still had sufficient strength left to walk about a thousand paces; and, indeed, the wound was outwardly so insignificant, that it was at first believed to be a mere scratch. This strengthened an opinion which was then gradually gaining ground, that Caspar was an impostor; for it was firmly believed by some that he had inflicted this wound upon himself, as well as the one received in 1829, in order to quicken the somewhat languishing interest taken in him. Nor did they give up this opinion when the wound was found to be fatal. They then boldly asserted that he had wounded himself more severely than he had intended. And not content with simply maintaining this absurd opinion, they taunted him with it on his death-bed, so that he was not even allowed to die in peace. Nothing was wanting to fill his bitter cup. How terrible must have been the mental torture to wring from so resigned a soul the exclamation, "O God! O God! to die thus with contumely and disgrace!" The German is still more expressive,—"Ach, Gott! ach, Gott! so abkratzen müssen mit Schimpf und Schande!"

Such was the life of Caspar Hauser. For nearly seventeen years the inmate of a dreary prison, shut out from the light, without a single companion in his misery, drugged when it was necessary to change his linen, with no food but bread,—for seventeen years did he thus exist, —his mind a perfect blank. Suddenly cast upon the world, amid strange beings whom he could not understand and by whom he was not understood, he long knew scarcely a sensation save that of pain. And when at last he did become accustomed to civilized life, and the darkness which enshrouded him disappeared before the rays of light that found entrance into his intellect, it was only to awake to a knowledge of the utter misery of his position. He then saw himself a helpless orphan, the inferior of all with whom he came in contact, and a dependant upon the charity of others for his support. He awoke to find that he had lost seventeen years of this beautiful life, seventeen years which he never could recall,—that he never could take his stand amongst men as their equal, but would always be regarded as an unhappy being meriting their pity,—much like that felt for the pains of some suffering brute. Nor was this all. During the few years that were granted him in our world, persecuted by some unknown person, against whom he was helpless,—knowing that his life was aimed at by some one, but unable to protect himself, and at last falling a victim to the threatened blow,—and, worst of all, charged on his death-bed with being an impostor,—such was the life of Caspar Hauser!

Among the different opinions which have existed in regard to his origin, the most noticeable are those advanced by Stanhope and Merker, and by Daumer, Eschricht, and Feuerbach. The Earl of Stanhope's connection with Caspar Hauser was a rather peculiar one. He made his appearance in Nuremberg at the time the first attempt was made upon Caspar's life, but took no particular notice of him, and left without having shown any interest in him. On a second visit, about seven months later, he suddenly became passionately attached to Caspar, showed most unusual marks of fondness for him, and finally adopted him. He then removed him to Anspach, and remained his protector until his death in December, 1833. The day after his burial, Stanhope appeared in Anspach, and took particular pains to proclaim then, and subsequently at a judicial investigation in Munich, and in several tracts, his belief that Caspar was an impostor. This had already been maintained by Merker, the Prussian Counsellor of Police. The theory which Stanhope now advanced was, that Caspar was a journeyman tailor or glover, from some small village on the Austrian side of the river Salzach. The reasons which he assigns for his belief in the imposture are all derived from Caspar's supposed want of integrity and veracity. They impeach the character of Caspar living, and not of Caspar dead. Why, then, did Stanhope wait for his death before he proclaimed the imposture? Why did he remain his protector, and thus make himself a party to the fraud? His conduct is not easily explained. On the other hand, there is little ground for Daumer's conclusions. These are given at length in his "Disclosures concerning Caspar Hauser," published in 1859, a book called forth by attacks made upon him by Eschricht. Considering Stanhope's conduct, and his endeavor after Caspar's death to induce Daumer to support his views as to the imposture, and, upon his indignant refusal, making him twice the object of a personal attack, Daumer thinks that there is reason to believe Stanhope personally interested. He thinks that Caspar was the legitimate heir to some great English estate and title, that he was removed in order to make way for some one else, and that his murder was intrusted to some person who had not the courage or the wickedness to perpetrate it, but removed him first to Hungary and afterwards to Germany, and supported him in the manner indicated, hoping that he would not long survive. When, however, he grew up, his support became irksome and he was cast upon the world. There he attracted so much attention, that the instigator of the crime, dreading a disclosure, sought his life again. When this proved unsuccessful, he was removed to Anspach; Feuerbach, who had shown the greatest determination to sound the mystery, was removed from the world, and at last the tragedy was made complete in Caspar's own death. All this points to Stanhope. And yet Daumer has not taken the trouble to inquire whether it agrees with the family history. It is possible that he may be right; but his story carries with it so much the air of improbability, that we cannot give it credit without further proof.

In the seventh volume of Hitzig's "Annals of Criminal Jurisprudence," there is a communication from Lieutenant von Pirch, disclosing Caspar's acquaintance with certain Hungarian words. A little while before this announcement was made, a story had gone the rounds of the papers of Germany, that a governess residing in Pesth had fainted away, when the account of Caspar Hauser's appearance was related to her. All this naturally attracted attention to Hungary as the probable place of his birth; and it is for these reasons, that Feuerbach, Daumer, and others, suppose that he spent some part of his childhood in that country. After his death, Stanhope sent Lieutenant Hickel to Hungary to investigate the matter, but no traces were discovered,—a proof, as Stanhope has it, that these conclusions were groundless, and, according to Daumer, another proof of Stanhope's complicity. He believes that the very superficial search made by the order of Stanhope was intended to lull suspicion and prevent a more strict search being made.

To return to the opinion advanced by Merker, and subsequently adopted by Stanhope,—the thing is simply impossible. In the first place, it would have been impossible for an impostor to elude discovery. To trace him would have been the easiest thing in the world. With a vigilant police, in a thickly settled country, how could a man leave his place of abode, and travel, were it for ever so short a distance, without being known? But this is the least consideration. Caspar's whole life, his intellect, his body, the feats which he accomplished, when submitted to the most searching tests, were a refutation of the charge. But when it is added that he wounded himself in order to do away with suspicion, the accusation becomes so absurd as scarcely to merit refutation. It is answered by the fact, that it was proved, from the nature of the wounds, in both cases, that self-infliction was impossible. Nor is it conceivable that any one should have been able so long to deceive people who were constantly with him and always on the alert. And it is remarkable that they who saw most of Caspar, and knew him best, were most firmly convinced of his integrity,—whilst his traducers were, almost without an exception, men who had never known him intimately. Feuerbach, Daumer, Binder, Meier, Fuhrmann, and many others, maintain his honesty in the strongest terms.

On the other hand, it is said, that it is equally impossible for a person to have been kept in any community in the manner in which it is asserted that he was kept; discovery was inevitable. But it must be remembered that this instance does not stand alone. If search were made, many cases of the same kind might be collected. It is by no means so rare an occurrence for persons to be kept secluded in such a manner as to conceal their existence from the world. Daumer mentions two similar cases which happened about the same time. The very year that Caspar Hauser appeared, the son of a lawyer, named Fleischmann, just deceased, was discovered in a retired chamber of the house. He was thirty-eight years old, and had been confined there since his twelfth year. The other case, also mentioned by Feuerbach, was still more distressing. Dr. Horn saw, in the infirmary at Salzburg, a girl, twenty-two years of age, who had been brought up in a pig-sty. One of her legs was quite crooked, from her having sat with them crossed; she grunted like a hog; and her actions were "brutishly unseemly in human dress." Daumer also relates a third case, which was made the subject of a romantic story published in a Nuremberg paper, but which, he says, lacks confirmation. It was the discovery, in a secret place, of the grown-up son of a clergyman by his housekeeper. Whether this be true or not, both Feuerbach and Daumer believe that many similar instances do exist, which never come to light. It is not impossible, therefore, that Caspar Hauser was confined in a cellar to which none but his keeper sought entrance. Who would suspect the existence of a human being, taught to be perfectly submissive and quiet and to have no wants, in such a place, when even the existence of the subterranean, prison itself was probably unknown? The cases mentioned above were certainly more singular in this respect.

But Eschricht's opinion is the most peculiar of all. In his "Unverstand mid schlechte Erziehung," he maintains that Caspar was an idiot until he was brought to Nuremberg, that his mind was then strengthened and developed, and that he was then transformed from an idiot into an impostor. This is still more impossible than Stanhope's theory; for in this case Daumer, Feuerbach, Hiltel the jailer, Binder the mayor, and indeed all Caspar's earliest friends, instead of being victims of an imposture, are made partakers in the fraud. No one acquainted with the irreproachable character of these men could entertain the idea for a minute; and when we remember that it was not one, but many, who must have been parties to it, it becomes doubly impossible.

We come now to consider the opinion of Feuerbach; and we shall do it the more carefully, because in it, we feel confident, lies the true solution of the question. He was at the time President of the Court of Appeal of the Circle of Rezat. He had risen to this honorable position gradually, and it was the reward of his distinguished merit alone. His works on criminal jurisprudence, and the penal code which he drew up for the kingdom of Bavaria, and which was adopted by other states, had placed him in the first rank of criminal lawyers. It was he who conducted the first judicial investigations concerning Caspar Hauser. He was, therefore, intimately acquainted with all the circumstances of the case, and had ample opportunity to form a deliberate opinion. How the idea originated, that Caspar Hauser belonged to the House of Baden, it is difficult to say. Feuerbach never published it to the world. In his book on Caspar Hauser he makes no mention of it; but in 1832 he addressed a paper to Queen Caroline of Bavaria, headed, "Who might Caspar Hauser be?" in which he endeavors to show that he was the son of the Grand-Duchess Stephanie. This paper was, we believe, first published in 1852, in his "Life and Works," by his son.[D] The first part of it treats of Caspar's rank and position in general, and he comes to the following conclusions. Caspar was a legitimate child. Had he been illegitimate, less dangerous and far easier means would have been resorted to for concealing his existence and suppressing a knowledge of his parentage. And here we may add, that the supposition has never prevailed that he was the offspring of a criminal connection, and that these means were taken for suppressing the mother's disgrace. A note which Caspar brought with him, when he appeared at Nuremberg, indicated that such was the case, but it was so evidently a piece of deception that it never obtained much credit. The second conclusion at which Feuerbach arrives is, that people were implicated who had command of great and unusual means,—means which could prompt an attempt at murder in a crowded city and in the open day, and which could over-bribe all rewards offered for a disclosure. Third, Caspar was a person on whose life or death great interests depended, else there would not have been such care to conceal his existence. Interest, and not revenge or hate, was the motive. He must have been a person of high rank. To prove this, Feuerbach refers to dreams of Caspar's. On one occasion, particularly, he dreamt that he was conducted through a large castle, the appearance of which he imagined that he recognized, and afterwards minutely described. This Feuerbach thinks was only the awakening of past recollections. It would be interesting to know whether any palace corresponding to the description given exists. In the absence of such knowledge, this point of Feuerbach's argument appears a rather weak one. From the above propositions he concludes that Caspar was the legitimate child of princely parents, who was removed in order to open the succession to others, in whose way he stood.

[Footnote D: ANSELM RITTER VON FEUERBACH'S Leben und Wirken, aus seinen ausgedruckten Briefen, Tagebüchern, Vorträgen und Denkschriften, veröffentlicht von seinem Sohne, LUDWIG FEUERBACH. Leipzig, 1852.]

The second division of the paper relates to the imprisonment, and here he takes a ground entirely opposed to the opinions of others. He believes that he was thus kept as a protection against some greater evil. His wants were supplied, he was well taken care of, and his keeper is therefore to be looked upon as his protector. Daumer sees in the keeper nothing but a hired murderer, whose courage or whose wickedness failed him. It is certainly difficult to imagine a kind friend immuring one in a dark subterranean vault, feeding one on bread, excluding light, fellowship, amusement, thoughts,—never saying a word, but studiously allowing one's mind to become a dreary waste. It is a friendship to which most of us would prefer death. We are therefore inclined to think that Daumer is here in the right. But whatever the nature of his imprisonment, the principal argument does not lose its force.

In the third place, Feuerbach speaks of the family to which Caspar must have belonged. Just about the time of Caspar's birth, the eldest son of the Grand-Duchess of Baden died an infant. His death was followed in a few years by that of his only brother, leaving several sisters, who could not inherit the duchy. By these deaths the old House of the Zähringer became extinct, and the offspring of a morganatic marriage became the heirs to the throne. It was, therefore, for their interest that the other branch should die out. In addition to this, the mother of the new house was a woman of unbounded ambition and determined character, and had a bitter hatred for the Grand-Duchess. Without laying too much stress, then, upon the nearness in date of the elder child's death and Caspar's birth, as given in the letter, there is reason to suppose that they were the same person. There was every feeling of interest to prompt the deed, there was the opportunity of sickness to accomplish it in, and there was an unscrupulous woman to take advantage of it. Is it, then, impossible that she, having command of the house-hold, should have been able to substitute a dead for the living child? Accept the proposition, and the mystery is solved; reject it, and we are still groping in the dark. Nevertheless, there are circumstances which, even then, are incapable of explanation; but it is the most satisfactory theory, and certainly has less objections than the others. Feuerbach came to this conclusion early; for his paper addressed to Queen Caroline of Bavaria was written in 1832, the year before Caspar's death. Delicacy forbade the open discussion of the question; but, even at the time, this theory found many supporters. Some even went so far as to say that Feuerbach's sudden death the same year was owing to the indefatigable zeal with which he was ferreting out the mystery.

Of all the different explanations, then, which have been given, that of Feuerbach seems to be the most satisfactory. At the same time, like the rest, it is founded on conjecture. Its truth may never be proved. They whose interest it was to suppress the matter thirty years ago, and who resorted to such extreme measures in doing so, no doubt took ample precaution that every trace should be erased. It is barely possible that some confession or the discovery of some paper may cast light upon the subject; but the length of time which has elapsed renders it exceedingly improbable, and the mystery of Caspar Hauser, like the mysteries of the Iron Mask and Junius, will always remain a fruitful source of conjecture only.

It may not be uninteresting to close this sketch with the consideration of a point of law raised by Feuerbach in connection with the subject. It will be recollected that he calls his book "Caspar Hauser. An Example of a Crime against the Life of Man's Soul." The crime committed against Caspar Hauser was, according to the Bavarian code, twofold. There was the crime of illegal imprisonment, and the crime of exposure. And here Feuerbach advances the doctrine, that it was not only the actual confinement which amounted to illegal imprisonment, but that "we must incontestably, and, indeed, principally, regard as such the cruel withholding from him of the most ordinary gifts which Nature with a liberal hand extends even to the most indigent,—the depriving him of all the means of mental development and culture,—the unnatural detention of a human soul in a state of irrational animality." "An attempt," he says, "by artificial contrivances, to seclude a man from Nature and from all intercourse with rational beings, to change the course of his human destiny, and to withdraw from him all the nourishment afforded by those spiritual substances which Nature has appointed for food to the human mind, that it may grow and flourish, and be instructed and developed and formed,—such an attempt must, even quite independently of its actual consequences, be considered as, in itself, a highly criminal invasion of man's most sacred and most peculiar property,—of the freedom and the destiny of his soul. …Inasmuch as the whole earlier part of his life was thus taken from him, he may be said to have been the subject of a partial soul-murder." This crime, if recognized, would, according to Feuerbach, far outweigh the mere crime of illegal imprisonment, and the latter would be merged in it.

Tittmann, in his "Hand-Book of Penal Law," also speaks of crimes against the intellect, and particularly mentions the separation of a person from all human society, if practised upon a child before it has learned to speak and until the intellect Las become sealed up, as well as the intentional rearing of a person to ignorance, as reducible to this head. This was written before Caspar's case had occurred. He says, also, that they are similar to cases of homicide; because the latter are punished for destroying the rational being, and not the physical man. Murder and the destruction of the intellect are, therefore, equally punishable. The one merits the punishment of death as well as the other. Nor are we to take the possibility of a cure into consideration, any more than we do the possibility of extinguishing a fire. But where the law does not prescribe the punishment of death irrespectively of the possibility of recovery, the punishment would rarely exceed ten years in the House of Correction. We must understand Tittmann's remarks, however, to refer entirely to the law of Saxony,—that being the government under which he lived, and the only one in whose criminal code this crime is recognized.

Feuerbach wished to have this murder of the soul inserted in the criminal code of Bavaria as a punishable crime; but he was unsuccessful, and the whole doctrine has subsequently been condemned. Mittermaier, in a note to his edition of Feuerbach's "Text-Book of German Criminal Law," denies that there is any foundation for the distinction taken by him and Tittmann. He says, that, in the first place, it has not such an actual existence as is capable of proof; and, secondly, all crimes under it can easily be reached by some other law. The last objection does not, however, seem to be a very serious one. If, as Feuerbach says, the crime against the soul is more heinous than that against the body, it certainly deserves the first attention, even if the one is not merged in the other. The crime being greater, the punishment would be greater; and the demands of justice would no more be satisfied by the milder punishment than if a murderer were prosecuted as a nuisance. The fact, therefore, that the crime is reducible to some different head, is not an objection. We meet with the most serious difficulty when we consider the possibility of proof. Taking it for granted that the crime does exist in the abstract, the only question is, whether it is of such a nature that it would be expedient for government to take cognizance of it. The soul being in its nature so far beyond the reach of man, and the difficulty of ever proving the effect of human actions upon it, would seem to indicate that it were better to allow a few exceptional cases to pass unnoticed than to involve the criminal courts in endless and fruitless inquiry. Upon the ground of expediency only should the crime go unnoticed, and not because it can be reached in some other way. For proof that it does exist, we can point to nothing more convincing than the life of Caspar Hauser itself. No one can doubt that his soul was the victim of a crime, for which the perpetrator, untouched by human laws, stands accused before the throne of God.

* * * * *

PAMPENEA.

AN IDYL.

Lying by the summer sea,
I had a dream of Italy.

Chalky cliffs and miles of sand,
Ragged reefs and salty caves,
And the sparkling emerald waves
Faded; and I seemed to stand,
Myself a languid Florentine,
In the heart of that fair land.
And in a garden cool and green,
Boccaccio's own enchanted place,
I met Pampenea face to face,—
A maid so lovely that to see
Her smile is to know Italy.

Her hair was like a coronet
Upon her Grecian forehead set,
Where one gem glistened sunnily,
Like Venice, when first seen at sea.
I saw within her violet eyes
The starlight of Italian skies,
And on her brow and breast and hand
The olive of her native land.

And knowing how, in other times,
Her lips were ripe with Tuscan rhymes
Of love and wine and dance, I spread
My mantle by an almond-tree:
"And here, beneath the rose," I said,
"I'll hear thy Tuscan melody!"

I heard a tale that was not told
In those ten dreamy days of old,
When Heaven, for some divine offence,
Smote Florence with the pestilence,
And in that garden's odorous shade
The dames of the Decameron,
With each a happy lover, strayed,
To laugh and sing, at sorest need,
To lie in the lilies, in the sun,
With glint of plume and golden brede.

And while she whispered in my ear,
The pleasant Arno murmured near,
The dewy, slim chameleons run
Through twenty colors in the sun,
The breezes broke the fountain's glass,
And woke Aeolian melodies,
And shook from out the scented trees
The bleachèd lemon-blossoms on the grass.

The tale? I have forgot the tale!—
A Lady all for love forlorn;
A Rosebud, and a Nightingale
That bruised his bosom on a thorn;
A pot of rubies buried deep;
A glen, a corpse, a child asleep;
A Monk, that was no monk at all,
I' the moonlight by a castle-wall;—
Kaleidoscopic hints, to be
Worked up in farce or tragedy.

Now while the sweet-eyed Tuscan wove
The gilded thread of her romance,
(Which I have lost by grievous chance,)
The one dear woman that I love,
Beside me in our seaside nook,
Closed a white finger in her book,
Half-vexed that she should read, and weep
For Petrarch, to a man asleep.
And scorning me, so tame and cold,
She rose, and wandered down the shore,
Her wine-dark drapery, fold in fold,
Imprisoned by an ivory hand;
And on a ridge of granite, half in sand,
She stood, and looked at Appledore.

And waking, I beheld her there
Sea-dreaming in the moted air,
A Siren sweet and debonair,
With wristlets woven of colored weeds,
And oblong lucent amber beads
Of sea-kelp shining in her hair.
And as I mused on dreams, and how
The something in us never sleeps,
But laughs or sings or moans or weeps,
She turned,—and on her breast and brow
I saw the tint that seemed not won
From kisses of New England sun;
I saw on brow and breast and hand
The olive of a sunnier land!
She turned,—and lo! within her eyes
The starlight of Italian skies!

Most dreams are dark, beyond the range
Of reason; oft we cannot tell
If they be born of heaven or hell;
But to my soul it seems not strange,
That, lying by the summer sea,
With that dark woman watching me,
I slept, and dreamed of Italy!

THE PROFESSOR'S STORY.

CHAPTER XXV.

THE PERILOUS HOUR.

Up to this time Dick Venner had not decided on the particular mode and the precise period of relieving himself from the unwarrantable interference which threatened to defeat his plans. The luxury of feeling that he had his man in his power was its own reward. One who watches in the dark, outside, while his enemy, in utter unconsciousness, is illuminating his apartment and himself so that every movement of his head and every button on his coat can be seen and counted, especially if he holds a loaded rifle in his hand, experiences a peculiar kind of pleasure, which he naturally hates to bring to its climax by testing his skill as a marksman upon the object of his attention.

Besides, Dick had two sides in his nature, almost as distinct as we sometimes observe in those persons who are the subjects of the condition known as double consciousness. On his New England side he was cunning and calculating, always cautious, measuring his distance before he risked his stroke, as nicely as if he were throwing his lasso. But he was liable to intercurrent fits of jealousy and rage, such as the light-hued races are hardly capable of conceiving,—blinding paroxysms of passion, which for the time overmastered him, and which, if they found no ready outlet, transformed themselves into the more dangerous forces that worked through the instrumentality of his cool craftiness.

He had failed as yet in getting any positive evidence that there was any relation between Elsie and the schoolmaster other than such as might exist unsuspected and unblamed between a teacher and his pupil. A book, or a note, even, did not prove the existence of any sentiment. At one time he would be devoured by suspicions, at another he would try to laugh himself out of them. And in the mean while he followed Elsie's tastes as closely as he could, determined to make some impression upon her,—to become a habit, a convenience, a necessity,—whatever might aid him in the attainment of the one end which was now the aim of his life.

It was to humor one of her tastes already known to the reader, that he said to her one morning,—"Come, Elsie, take your castanets, and let us have a dance."

He had struck the right vein in the girl's fancy, for she was in the mood for this exercise, and very willingly led the way into one of the more empty apartments. What there was in this particular kind of dance which excited her it might not be easy to guess; but those who looked in with the old Doctor, on a former occasion, and saw her, will remember that she was strangely carried away by it, and became almost fearful in the vehemence of her passion. The sound of the castanets seemed to make her alive all over. Dick knew well enough what the exhibition would be, and was almost afraid of her at these moments; for it was like the dancing mania of Eastern devotees, more than the ordinary light amusement of joyous youth,—a convulsion of the body and the mind, rather than a series of voluntary modulated motions.

Elsie rattled out the triple measure of a saraband. Her eyes began to glitter more brilliantly, and her shape to undulate in freer curves. Presently she noticed that Dick's look was fixed upon her necklace. His face betrayed his curiosity; he was intent on solving the question, why she always wore something about her neck. The chain of mosaics she had on at that moment displaced itself at every step, and he was peering with malignant, searching eagerness to see if an unsunned ring of fairer hue than the rest of the surface, or any less easily explained peculiarity, were hidden by her ornaments.

She stopped suddenly, caught the chain of mosaics and settled it hastily in its place, flung down her castanets, drew herself back, and stood looking at him, with her head a little on one side, and her eyes narrowing in the way he had known so long and well.

"What is the matter, Cousin Elsie? What do you stop for?" he said.

Elsie did not answer, but kept her eyes on him, full of malicious light. The jealousy which lay covered up under his surface—thoughts took this opportunity to break out.

"You wouldn't act so, if you were dancing with Mr. Langdon,—would you,
Elsie?" he asked.

It was with some effort that he looked steadily at her to see the effect of his question.

Elsie colored,—not much, but still perceptibly. Dick could not remember that he had ever seen her show this mark of emotion before, in all his experience of her fitful changes of mood. It had a singular depth of significance, therefore, for him; he knew how hardly her color came. Blushing means nothing, in some persons; in others, it betrays a profound inward agitation,—a perturbation of the feelings far more trying than the passions which with many easily moved persons break forth in tears. All who have observed much are aware that some men, who have seen a good deal of life in its less chastened aspects and are anything but modest, will blush often and easily, while there are delicate and sensitive women who can turn pale, or go into fits, if necessary, but are very rarely seen to betray their feelings in their cheeks, even when their expression shows that their inmost soul is blushing scarlet.

Presently she answered, abruptly and scornfully,—

"Mr. Langdon is a gentleman, and would not vex me as you do."

"A gentleman!" Dick answered, with the most insulting accent,—"a gentleman! Come, Elsie, you've got the Dudley blood in your veins, and it doesn't do for you to call this poor, sneaking schoolmaster a gentleman!"

He stopped short. Elsie's bosom was heaving, the faint flush on her cheek was becoming a vivid glow. Whether it were shame or wrath, he saw that he had reached some deep-lying centre of emotion. There was no longer any doubt in his mind. With another girl these signs of confusion might mean little or nothing; with her they were decisive and final. Elsie Venner loved Bernard Langdon.

The sudden conviction, absolute, overwhelming, which rushed upon him, had wellnigh led to an explosion of wrath, and perhaps some terrible scene which might have fulfilled some of Old Sophy's predictions. This, however, would never do. Dick's face whitened with his thoughts, but he kept still until he could speak calmly.

"I've nothing against the young fellow," he said; "only I don't think there's anything quite good enough to keep the company of people that have the Dudley blood in them. You a'n't as proud as I am. I can't quite make up my mind to call a schoolmaster a gentleman, though this one may be well enough. I've nothing against him, at any rate."

Elsie made no answer, but glided out of the room and slid away to her own apartment. She bolted the door and drew her curtains close. Then she threw herself on the floor, and fell into a dull, slow ache of passion, without tears, without words, almost without thoughts. So she remained, perhaps, for a half-hour, at the end of which time it seemed that her passion had become a sullen purpose. She arose, and, looking cautiously round, went to the hearth, which was ornamented with curious old Dutch tiles, with pictures of Scripture subjects. One of these represented the lifting of the brazen serpent. She took a hair-pin from one of her braids, and, insinuating its points under the edge of the tile, raised it from its place. A small leaden box lay under the tile, which she opened, and, taking from it a little white powder, which she folded in a scrap of paper, replaced the box and the tile over it.

Whether Dick had by any means got a knowledge of this proceeding, or whether he only suspected some unmentionable design on her part, there is no sufficient means of determining. At any rate, when they met, an hour or two after these occurrences, he could not help noticing how easily she seemed to have got over her excitement. She was very pleasant with him,—too pleasant, Dick thought. It was not Elsie's way to come out of a fit of anger so easily as that. She had contrived some way of letting off her spite; that was certain. Dick was pretty cunning, as Old Sophy had said, and, whether or not he had any means of knowing Elsie's private intentions, watched her closely, and was on his guard against accidents.

For the first time, he took certain precautions with reference to his diet, such as were quite alien to his common habits. On coming to the dinner-table, that day, he complained of headache, took but little food, and refused the cup of coffee which Elsie offered him, saying that it did not agree with him when he had these attacks.

Here was a new complication. Obviously enough, he could not live in this way, suspecting everything but plain bread and water, and hardly feeling safe in meddling with them. Not only had this school-keeping wretch come between him and the scheme by which he was to secure his future fortune, but his image had so infected his cousin's mind that she was ready to try on him some of those tricks which, as he had heard hinted in the village, she had once before put in practice upon a person who had become odious to her.

Something must be done, and at once, to meet the double necessities of this case. Every day, while the young girl was in these relations with the young man, was only making matters worse. They could exchange words and looks, they could arrange private interviews, they would be stooping together over the same book, her hair touching his cheek, her breath mingling with his, all the magnetic attractions drawing them together with strange, invisible effluences. As her passion for the schoolmaster increased, her dislike to him, her cousin, would grow with it, and all his dangers would be multiplied. It was a fearful point he had reached. He was tempted at one moment to give up all his plans and to disappear suddenly from the place, leaving with the schoolmaster, who had come between him and his object, an anonymous token of his personal sentiments which would be remembered a good while in the history of the town of Rockland. This was but a momentary thought; the great Dudley property could not be given up in that way.

Something must happen at once to break up all this order of things. He could think of but one Providential event adequate to the emergency,—an event foreshadowed by various recent circumstances, but hitherto floating in his mind only as a possibility. Its occurrence would at once change the course of Elsie's feelings, providing her with something to think of besides mischief, and remove the accursed obstacle which was thwarting all his own projects. Every possible motive, then,—his interest, his jealousy, his longing for revenge, and now his fears for his own safety,—urged him to regard the happening of a certain casualty as a matter of simple necessity. This was the self-destruction of Mr. Bernard Langdon.

Such an event, though it might be surprising to many people, would not be incredible, nor without many parallel cases. He was poor, a miserable fag, under the control of that mean wretch up there at the school, who looked as if he had sour buttermilk in his veins instead of blood. He was in love with a girl above his station, rich, and of old family, but strange in all her ways, and it was conceivable that he should become suddenly jealous of her. Or she might have frightened him with some display of her peculiarities which had filled him with a sudden repugnance in the place of love. Any of these things were credible, and would make a probable story enough,—so thought Dick over to himself with the New-England half of his mind.

Unfortunately, men will not always take themselves out of the way when, so far as their neighbors are concerned, it would be altogether the most appropriate and graceful and acceptable service they could render. There was at this particular moment no special reason for believing that the schoolmaster meditated any violence to his own person. On the contrary, there was good evidence that he was taking some care of himself. He was looking well and in good spirits, and in the habit of amusing himself and exercising, as if to keep up his standard of health, especially of taking certain evening-walks, before referred to, at an hour when most of the Rockland people had "retired," or, in vulgar language, "gone to bed."

Dick Venner settled it, however, in his own mind, that Mr. Bernard Langdon must lay violent hands upon himself. He even went so far as to determine the precise hour, and the method in which the "rash act," as it would undoubtedly be called in the next issue of "The Rockland Weekly Universe," should be committed. Time,—this evening. Method,—asphyxia, by suspension. It was, unquestionably, taking a great liberty with a man to decide that he should become felo de se without his own consent. Such, however, was the decision of Mr. Richard Venner with regard to Mr. Bernard Langdon.

If everything went right, then, there would be a coroner's inquest to-morrow upon what remained of that gentleman, found suspended to the branch of a tree somewhere within a mile of the Apollinean Institute. The "Weekly Universe" would have a startling paragraph announcing a "SAD EVENT!!!" which had "thrown the town into an intense state of excitement. Mr. Barnard Langden, a well known teacher at the Apollinean Institute, was found, etc., etc. The vital spark was extinct. The motive to the rash act can only be conjectured, but is supposed to be disappointed affection. The name of an accomplished young lady of the highest respectability and great beauty is mentioned in connection with this melancholy occurrence."

Dick Venner was at the tea-table that evening, as usual.—No, he would take green tea, if she pleased,—the same as her father drank. It would suit his headache better.—Nothing,—he was much obliged to her. He would help himself,—which he did in a little different way from common, naturally enough, on account of his headache. He noticed that Elsie seemed a little nervous while she was rinsing some of the teacups before their removal.

"There's something going on in that witch's head;" he said to himself.
"I know her,—she'd be savage now, if she hadn't got some trick in hand.
Let's see how she looks to-morrow!"

Dick announced that he should go to bed early that evening, on account of this confounded headache which had been troubling him so much. In fact, he went up early, and locked his door after him, with as much noise as he could make. He then changed some part of his dress, so that it should be dark throughout, slipped off his boots, drew the lasso out from the bottom of the contents of his trunk, and, carrying that and his boots in his hand, opened his door softly, locked it after him, and stole down the back-stairs, so as to get out of the house unnoticed. He went straight to the stable and saddled the mustang. He took a rope from the stable with him, mounted his horse, and set forth in the direction of the Institute.

Mr. Bernard, as we have seen, had not been very profoundly impressed by the old Doctor's cautions,—enough, however, to follow out some of his hints which were not troublesome to attend to. He laughed at the idea of carrying a loaded pistol about with him; but still it seemed only fair, as the old Doctor thought so much of the matter, to humor him about it. As for not going about when and where he liked, for fear he might have some lurking enemy, that was a thing not to be listened to nor thought of. There was nothing to be ashamed of or troubled about in any of his relations with the school-girls. Elsie, no doubt, showed a kind of attraction towards him, as did perhaps some others; but he had been perfectly discreet, and no father or brother or lover had any just cause of quarrel with him. To be sure, that dark young man at the Dudley mansion-house looked as if he were his enemy, when he had met him; but certainly there was nothing in their relations to each other, or in his own to Elsie, that would be like to stir such malice in his mind as would lead him to play any of his wild Southern tricks at his, Mr. Bernard's, expense. Yet he had a vague feeling that this young man was dangerous, and he had been given to understand that one of the risks he ran was from that quarter.

On this particular evening, he had a strange, unusual sense of some impending peril. His recent interview with the Doctor, certain remarks that had been dropped in his hearing, but above all an unaccountable impression upon his spirits, all combined to fill his mind with a foreboding conviction that he was very near some overshadowing danger. It was as the chill of the ice-mountain towards which the ship is steering under full sail. He felt a strong impulse to see Helen Darley and talk with her. She was in the common parlour, and, fortunately, alone.

"Helen," he said,—for they were almost like brother and sister now,—"I have been thinking what you would do, if I should have to leave the school at short notice, or be taken away suddenly by any accident."

"Do?" she said, her cheek growing paler than its natural delicate hue,—"why, I do not know how I could possibly consent to live here, if you left us. Since you came, my life has been almost easy; before, it was getting intolerable. You must not talk about going, my dear friend; you have spoiled me for my place. Who is there here that I can have any true society with, but you? You would not leave us for another school, would you?"

"No, no, my dear Helen," Mr. Bernard said; "if it depends on myself, I shall stay out my full time, and enjoy your company and friendship. But everything is uncertain in this world; I have been thinking that I might be wanted elsewhere, and called when I did not think of it;—it was a fancy, perhaps,—but I can't keep it out of my mind this evening. If any of my fancies should come true, Helen, there are two or three messages I want to leave with you. I have marked a book or two with a cross in pencil on the fly-leaf;—these are for you. There is a little hymn-book I should like to have you give to Elsie from me;—it may be a kind of comfort to the poor girl."

Helen's eyes glistened as she interrupted him,—

"What do you mean? You must not talk so, Mr. Langdon. Why, you never looked better in your life. Tell me now, you are not in earnest, are you, but only trying a little sentiment on me?"

Mr. Bernard smiled, but rather sadly.

"About half in earnest," he said. "I have had some fancies in my head,—superstitions, I suppose,—at any rate, it does no harm to tell you what I should like to have done, if anything should happen,—very likely nothing ever will. Send the rest of the books home, if you please, and write a letter to my mother. And, Helen, you will find one small volume in my desk enveloped and directed, you will see to whom;—give this with your own hands; it is a keepsake."

The tears gathered in her eyes; she could not speak at first.
Presently,—

"Why, Bernard, my dear friend, my brother, it cannot be that you are in danger? Tell me what it is, and, if I can share it with you, or counsel you in any way, it will only be paying back the great debt I owe you. No, no,—it can't be true,—you are tired and worried, and your spirits have got depressed. I know what that is;—I was sure, one winter, that I should die before spring; but I lived to see the dandelions and buttercups go to seed. Come, tell me it was nothing but your imagination."

She felt a tear upon her cheek, but would not turn her face away from him; it was the tear of a sister.

"I am really in earnest, Helen," he said. "I don't know that there is the least reason in the world for these fancies. If they all go off and nothing comes of them, you may laugh at me, if you like. But if there should be any occasion, remember my requests. You don't believe in presentiments, do you?"

"Oh, don't ask me, I beg you," Helen answered. "I have had a good many frights for every one real misfortune I have suffered. Sometimes I have thought I was warned beforehand of coming trouble, just as many people are of changes in the weather, by some unaccountable feeling,—but not often, and I don't like to talk about such things. I wouldn't think about these fancies of yours. I don't believe you have exercised enough;—don't you think it's confinement in the school has made you nervous?"

"Perhaps it has; but it happens that I have thought more of exercise lately, and have taken walks late in the evening, besides playing my old gymnastic tricks every day."

They talked on many subjects, but through all he said Helen perceived a pervading tone of sadness, and an expression as of a dreamy foreboding of unknown evil. They parted at the usual hour, and went to their several rooms. The sadness of Mr. Bernard had sunk into the heart of Helen, and she mingled many tears with her prayers that evening, earnestly entreating that he might be comforted in his days of trial and protected in his hour of danger.

Mr. Bernard stayed in his room a short time before setting out for his evening walk. His eye fell upon the Bible his mother had given him when he left home, and he opened it in the New Testament at a venture. It happened that the first words he read were these,—"Lest, coming suddenly, he find you sleeping." In the state of mind in which he was at the moment, the text startled him. It was like a supernatural warning. He was not going to expose himself to any particular danger this evening; a walk in a quiet village was as free from risk as Helen Darley or his own mother could ask; yet he had an unaccountable feeling of apprehension, without any definite object. At this moment he remembered the old Doctor's counsel, which he had sometimes neglected, and, blushing at the feeling which led him to do it, he took the pistol his suspicious old friend had forced upon him, which he had put away loaded, and, thrusting it into his pocket, set out upon his walk.

The moon was shining at intervals, for the night was partially clouded. There seemed to be nobody stirring, though his attention was unusually awake, and he could hear the whirr of the bats overhead, and the pulsating croak of the frogs in the distant pools and marshes. Presently he detected the sound of hoofs at some distance, and, looking forward, saw a horseman coming in his direction. The moon was under a cloud at the moment, and he could only observe that the horse and his rider looked like a single dark object, and that they were moving along at an easy pace. Mr. Bernard was really ashamed of himself, when he found his hand on the butt of his pistol. When the horseman was within a hundred and fifty yards of him, the moon shone out suddenly and revealed each of them to the other. The rider paused for a moment, as if carefully surveying the pedestrian, then suddenly put his horse to the full gallop, and dashed towards him, rising at the same instant in his stirrups and swinging something round his head,—what, Mr. Bernard could not make out. It was a strange manoeuvre,—so strange and threatening in aspect that the young man forgot his nervousness in an instant, cocked his pistol, and waited to see what mischief all this meant. He did not wait long. As the rider came rushing towards him, he made a rapid motion and something leaped five-and-twenty feet through the air, in Mr. Bernard's direction. In an instant he felt a ring, as of a rope or thong, settle upon his shoulders. There was no time to think,—he would be lost in another second. He raised his pistol and fired,—not at the rider, but at the horse. His aim was true; the mustang gave one bound and fell lifeless, shot through the head. The lasso was fastened to his saddle, and his last bound threw Mr. Bernard violently to the earth, where he lay motionless, as if stunned.

In the mean time, Dick Venner, who had been dashed down with his horse, was trying to extricate himself,—one of his legs being held fast under the animal, the long spur on his boot having caught in the saddle-cloth. He found, however, that he could do nothing with his right arm, his shoulder having been in some way injured in his fall. But his Southern blood was up, and, as he saw Mr. Bernard move as if he were coming to his senses, he struggled violently to free himself.

"I'll have the dog, yet," he said,—"only let me get at him with the knife!"

He had just succeeded in extricating his imprisoned leg, and was ready to spring to his feet, when he was caught firmly by the throat, and, looking up, saw a clumsy barbed weapon, commonly known as a hay-fork, within an inch of his breast.

"Hold on there! What 'n thunder 'r' y' abaout, y' darned Portagee?" said a voice, with a decided nasal tone in it, but sharp and resolute.

Dick looked from the weapon to the person who held it, and saw a sturdy, plain man standing over him, with his teeth clinched, and his aspect that of one all ready for mischief.

"Lay still, naow!" said Abel Stebbins, the Doctor's man; "'f y' don't,
I'll stick ye, 'z sure 'z y' 'r' alive! I been aäfter ye f'r a week, 'n'
I got y' naow! I knowed I'd ketch ye at some darned trick or 'nother
'fore I'd done 'ith ye!"

Dick lay perfectly still, feeling that he was crippled and helpless, thinking all the time with the Yankee half of his mind what to do about it. He saw Mr. Bernard lift his head and look around him. He would get his senses again in a few minutes, very probably, and then he, Mr. Richard Venner, would be done for.

"Let me up! let me up!" he cried, in a low, hurried voice,—"I'll give you a hundred dollars in gold to let me go. The man a'n't hurt,—don't you see him stirring? He'll come to himself in two minutes. Let me up! I'll give you a hundred and fifty dollars in gold, now, here on the spot,—and the watch out of my pocket; take it yourself, with your own hands!"

"I'll see y' darned fust! Ketch me lett'n' go!" was Abel's emphatic answer. "Yeou lay still, 'n' wait t'll that man comes tew."

He kept the hay-fork ready for action at the slightest sign of resistance.

Mr. Bernard, in the mean time, had been getting, first his senses, and then some Jew of his scattered wits, a little together.

"What is it?"—he said. "Who 'a hurt? What's happened?"

"Come along here 'z quick 'z y' ken," Abel answered, "'n' haälp me fix this fellah. Y' been hurt, y'rself, 'n' the' 's murder come pooty nigh happenin'."

Mr. Bernard heard the answer, but presently stared about and asked again, "Who's hurt? What's happened?"

"Y' 'r' hurt, y'rself, I tell ye," said Abel; "'n' the''s been a murder, pooty nigh."

Mr. Bernard felt something about his neck, and, putting his hands up, found the loop of the lasso, which he loosened, but did not think to slip over his head, in the confusion of his perceptions and thoughts. It was a wonder that it had not choked him, but he had fallen forward so as to slacken it.

By this time he was getting some notion of what he was about, and presently began looking round for his pistol, which had fallen. He found it lying near him, cocked it mechanically, and walked, somewhat unsteadily, towards the two men, who were keeping their position as still as if they were performing in a tableau.

"Quick, naow!" said Abel, who had heard the click of cocking the pistol, and saw that he held it in his hand, as he came towards him. "Gi' me that pistil, and yeon fetch that 'ere rope layin' there. I'll have this here fellah fixed 'n less 'n two minutes."

Mr. Bernard did as Abel said,—stupidly and mechanically, for he was but half right as yet. Abel pointed the pistol at Dick's head.

"Naow hold up y'r hands, yeou fellah," he said, "'n' keep 'em up, while this man puts the rope raound y'r wrists."

Dick felt himself helpless, and, rather than have his disabled arm roughly dealt with, held up his hands. Mr. Bernard did as Abel said; he was in a purely passive state, and obeyed orders like a child. Abel then secured the rope in a most thorough and satisfactory complication of twists and knots.

"Naow get up, will ye?" he said; and the unfortunate Dick rose to his feet.

"Who's hurt? What's happened?" asked poor Mr. Bernard again, his memory having been completely jarred out of him for the time.

"Come, look here naow, yeou, don' stan' aäskin' questions over 'n' over;—'t beats all I ha'n't I tol' y' a dozen times?"

As Abel spoke, he turned and looked at Mr. Bernard.

"Hullo! What 'n thunder's that'ere raoun' y'r neck? Ketched ye 'ith a slippernoose, hey? Wal, if that a'n't the craowner! Hol' on a minute, Cap'n, 'n' I'll show ye what that 'ere halter's good for."

Abel slipped the noose over Mr. Bernard's head, and put it round the neck of the miserable Dick Venner, who made no sign of resistance,—whether on account of the pain he was in, or from mere helplessness, or because he was waiting for some unguarded moment to escape,—since resistance seemed of no use.

"I'm go'n' to kerry y' home," said Abel; "th' ol' Doctor, he's got a gre't cur'osity t' see ye. Jes' step along naow,—off that way, will ye?—'n I'll hol' on t' th' bridle, f' fear y' sh'd run away."

He took hold of the leather thong, but found that it was fastened at the other end to the saddle. This was too much for Abel.

"Wal, naow, yeou be a pooty chap to hev raound! A fellah's neck in a slippernoose at one eend of a halter, 'n' a boss on th' full spring at t'other eend!"

He looked at him from head to foot as a naturalist inspects a new specimen. His clothes had suffered in his fall, especially on the leg which had been caught under the horse.

"Hullo! look o' there, naow! What's that 'ere stickin' aout o' y'r boot?"

It was nothing but the handle of an ugly knife, which Abel instantly relieved him of.

The party now took up the line of march for old Doctor Kittredge's house, Abel carrying the pistol and knife, and Mr. Bernard walking in silence, still half-stunned, holding the hay-fork, which Abel had thrust into his hand. It was all a dream to him as yet. He remembered the horseman riding at him, and his firing the pistol; but whether he was alive, and these walls around him belonged to the village of Rockland, or whether he had passed the dark river, and was in a suburb of the New Jerusalem, he could not as yet have told.

They were in the street where the Doctor's house was situated.

"I guess I'll fire off one o' these here berrils," said Abel.

He fired.

Presently there was a noise of opening windows, and the nocturnal headdresses of Rockland flowered out of them like so many developments of the Night-blooming Cereus. White cotton caps and red bandanna handkerchiefs were the prevailing forms of efflorescence. The main point was that the village was waked up. The old Doctor always waked easily, from long habit, and was the first among those who looked out to see what had happened.

"Why, Abel!" he called out, "what have you got there? and what's all this noise about?"

"We've ketched the Portagee!" Abel answered, as laconically as the hero of Lake Erie in his famous dispatch. "Go in there, you fellah!"

The prisoner was marched into the house, and the Doctor, who had bewitched his clothes upon him in a way that would have been miraculous in anybody but a physician, was down in presentable form as soon as if it had been a child in a fit that he was sent for.

"Richard Venner!" the Doctor exclaimed. "What is the meaning of all this? Mr. Langdon, has anything happened to you?"

Mr. Bernard put his hand to his head.

"My mind is confused," he said. "I've had a fall.—Oh, yes!—wait a minute and it will all come back to me."

"Sit down, sit down," the Doctor said. "Abel will tell me about it. Slight concussion of the brain. Can't remember very well for an hour or two,—will come right by to-morrow."

"Been stunded," Abel said. "He can't tell nothin'."

Abel then proceeded to give a Napoleonic bulletin of the recent combat of cavalry and infantry and its results,—none slain, one captured.

The Doctor looked at the prisoner through his spectacles.

"What's the matter with your shoulder, Venner?"

Dick answered sullenly, that he didn't know,—fell on it when his horse came down. The Doctor examined it as carefully as he could through his clothes.

"Out of joint. Untie his hands, Abel."

By this time a small alarm had spread among the neighbors, and there was a circle around Dick, who glared about on the assembled honest people like a hawk with a broken wing.

When the Doctor said, "Untie his hands," the circle widened perceptibly.

"Isn't it a leetle rash to give him the use of his hands? I see there's females and children standin' near."

This was the remark of our old friend, Deacon Soper, who retired from the front row, as he spoke, behind a respectable-looking, but somewhat hastily dressed person of the defenceless sex, the female help of a neighboring household, accompanied by a boy, whose unsmoothed shock of hair looked like a last-year's crow's-nest.

But Abel untied his hands, in spite of the Deacon's considerate remonstrance.

"Now," said the Doctor, "the first thing is to put the joint back."

"Stop," said Deacon Soper,—"stop a minute. Don't you think it will be safer—for the women-folks—jest to wait till mornin', afore you put that j'int into the socket?"

Colonel Sprowle, who had been called by a special messenger, spoke up at this moment.

"Let the women-folks and the deacons go home, if they're scared, and put the fellah's j'int in as quick as you like. I'll resk him, j'int in or out."

"I want one of you to go straight down to Dudley Venner's with a message," the Doctor said. "I will have the young man's shoulder in quick enough."

"Don't send that message!" said Dick, in a hoarse voice;—"do what you like with my arm, but don't send that message! Let me go,—I can walk, and I'll be off from this place. There's nobody hurt but I. Damn the shoulder!—let me go! You shall never hear of me again!"

Mr. Bernard came forward.

"My friends," he said, "I am not injured,—seriously, at least. Nobody need complain against this man, if I don't. The Doctor will treat him like a human being, at any rate; and then, if he will go, let him. There are too many witnesses against him here for him to want to stay."

The Doctor, in the mean time, without saying a word to all this, had got a towel round the shoulder and chest and another round the arm, and had the bone replaced in a very few moments.

"Abel, put Cassia into the new chaise," he said, quietly. "My friends and neighbors, leave this young man to me."

"Colonel Sprowle, you're a justice of the peace," said Deacon Soper, "and you know what the law says in cases like this. I a'n't so clear that it won't have to come afore the Grand Jury, whether we will or no."

"I guess we'll set that j'int to-morrow mornin'," said Colonel Sprowle,—which made a laugh at the Deacon's expense, and virtually settled the question.

"Now trust this young man in my care," said the old Doctor, "and go home and finish your naps. I knew him when he was a boy, and, I'll answer for it, he won't trouble you any more. The Dudley blood makes folks proud, I can tell you, whatever else they are."

The good people so respected and believed in the Doctor that they left the prisoner with him.

Presently, Cassia, the fast Morgan mare, came up to the front-door, with the wheels of the new, light chaise flashing behind her in the moonlight. The Doctor drove Dick forty miles at a stretch that night, out of the limits of the State.

"Do you want money?" he said, before he left him.

Dick told him the secret of his golden belt.

"Where shall I send your trunk after you from your uncle's?"

Dick gave him a direction to a seaport town to which he himself was going, to take passage for a port in South America.

"Good-bye, Richard," said the Doctor. "Try to learn something from to-night's lesson."

The Southern impulses in Dick's wild blood overcame him, and he kissed the old Doctor on both cheeks, crying as only the children of the sun can cry, after the first hours in the dewy morning of life. So Dick Venner disappears from this story. An hour after dawn, Cassia pointed her fine ears homeward, and struck into her square, honest trot, as if she had not been doing anything more than her duty during her four hours' stretch of the last night.

Abel was not in the habit of questioning the Doctor's decisions.

"It's all right," he said to Mr. Bernard. "The fellah's Squire Venner's relation, anyhaow. Don't you want to wait here, jest a little while, till I come back? The' 's a consid'able nice saddle 'n' bridle on a dead hoss that's layin' daown there in the road, 'n' I guess the' a'n't no use in lettin' on 'em spile,—so I'll jest step aout 'n' fetch 'em along. I kind o' calc'late 't won't pay to take the cretur's shoes 'n' hide off to-night,—'n' the' won't be much iron on that hoss's huffs an haour after daylight, I'll bate ye a quarter."

"I'll walk along with you," said Mr. Bernard;—"I feel as if I could get along well enough now."

So they set off together. There was a little crowd round the dead mustang already, principally consisting of neighbors who had adjourned from the Doctor's house to see the scene of the late adventure. In addition to these, however, the assembly was honored by the presence of Mr. Principal Silas Peckham, who had been called from his slumbers by a message that Master Langdon was shot through the head by a highway-robber, but had learned a true version of the story by this time. His voice was at that moment heard above the rest,—sharp, but thin, like bad cider-vinegar.

"I take charge of that property, I say. Master Langdon 's actin' under my orders, and I claim that hoss and all that's on him. Hiram! jest slip off that saddle and bridle, and carry 'em up to the Institoot, and bring down a pair of pinchers and a file,—and—stop—fetch a pair of shears, too; there's hoss-hair enough in that mane and tail to stuff a bolster with."

"You let that hoss alone!" spoke up Colonel Sprowle. "When a fellah goes out huntin' and shoots a squirrel, do you think he's go'n' to let another fellah pick him up and kerry him off? Not if he's got a double-berril gun, and t'other berril ha'n't been fired off yet! I should like to see the mahn that'll take off that seddle 'n' bridle, excep' the one th't hez a fair right to the whole concern!"

Hiram was from one of the lean streaks in New Hampshire, and, not being overfed in Mr. Silas Peckham's kitchen, was somewhat wanting in stamina, as well as in stomach, for so doubtful an enterprise as undertaking to carry out his employer's orders in the face of the Colonel's defiance.

Just then Mr. Bernard and Abel came up together.

"Here they be," said the Colonel. "Stan' beck, gentlemen!"

Mr. Bernard, who was pale and still a little confused, but gradually becoming more like himself, stood and looked in silence for a moment.

All his thoughts seemed to be clearing themselves in this interval. He took in the whole series of incidents: his own frightful risk; the strange, instinctive, nay, Providential impulse which had led him so suddenly to do the one only thing which could possibly have saved him; the sudden appearance of the Doctor's man, but for which he might yet have been lost; and the discomfiture and capture of his dangerous enemy.

It was all past now, and a feeling of pity rose in Mr. Bernard's heart.

"He loved that horse, no doubt," he said,—"and no wonder. A beautiful, wild-looking creature! Take off those things that are on him, Abel, and have them carried to Mr. Dudley Venner's. If he does not want them, you may keep them yourself, for all that I have to say. One thing more. I hope nobody will lift his hand against this noble creature to mutilate him in any way. After you have taken off the saddle and bridle, Abel, bury him just as he is. Under that old beech-tree will be a good place. You'll see to it,—won't you, Abel?"

Abel nodded assent, and Mr. Bernard returned to the Institute, threw himself in his clothes on the bed, and slept like one who is heavy with wine.

Following Mr. Bernard's wishes, Abel at once took off the high-peaked saddle and the richly ornamented bridle from the mustang. Then, with the aid of two of three others, he removed him to the place indicated. Spades and shovels were soon procured, and before the moon had set, the wild horse of the Pampas was at rest under the turf at the wayside, in the far village among the hills of New England.

* * * * *

THE TEST.

Musa loquitur.

I hung my verses in the wind;
Time and tide their faults may find.
All were winnowed through and through;
Five lines lasted sound and true;
Five were smelted in a pot
Than the South more fierce and hot.
These the Siroc could not melt,
Fire their fiercer flaming felt,
And their meaning was more white
Than July's meridian light.
Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
Nor Time unmake what poets know.
Have you eyes to find the five
Which five thousand could survive?

RECOLLECTIONS OF KEATS.

BY AN OLD SCHOOL-FELLOW.

In the village of Enfield, in Middlesex, ten miles on the north road from London, was my father, John Clarke's school. The house had been built by a West India merchant, in the latter end of the seventeenth or beginning of the eighteenth century. It was of the better character of the domestic architecture of that period,—the whole front being of the purest red brick, wrought, by means of moulds, into rich designs of flowers and pomegranates, with heads of cherubim over two niches in the centre of the building. The elegance of the design and the perfect finish of the structure were such as to secure its protection, when a branch railway was brought from the Ware and Cambridge line to Enfield. The old school-house was converted into the station-house, and the railway company had the good taste to leave intact one of the few remaining specimens of the graceful English domestic architecture of long-gone days. Any of my readers who may happen to have a file of the London "Illustrated News," may find in No. 360, March 3, 1849, a not prodigiously enchanting wood-cut of the edifice.

Here it was that John Keats all but commenced and did complete his school-education. He was born on the 29th of October, 1795; and I think he was one of the little fellows who had not wholly emerged from the child's costume upon being placed under my father's care. It will be readily conceived difficult to recall from the "dark backward and abysm" of nearly sixty years the general acts of perhaps the youngest individual in a corporation of between seventy and eighty youngsters; and very little more of Keats's child-life can I remember than that he had a brisk, winning face, and was a favorite with all, particularly with my mother.

His maternal grandfather, Jennings, was proprietor of a large livery-stable, called "The Swan and Hoop," on the pavement in Moorfields, opposite the entrance into Finsbury Circus. He had two sons at my father's school. The elder was an officer in Duncan's ship in the fight off Camperdown. After the battle, the Dutch Admiral, De Winter, pointing to young Jennings, told Duncan that he had fired several shots at that young man, and always missed his mark;—no credit to his steadiness of aim; for Jennings, like his own admiral, was considerably above the ordinary dimensions of stature.

Keats's father was the principal servant at the Swan and Hoop Stables,—a man of so remarkably fine a common-sense and native respectability, that I perfectly remember the warm terms in which his demeanor used to be canvassed by my parents after he had been to visit his boys. He was short of stature and well-knit in person, (John resembling him both in make and feature,) with brown hair and dark hazel eyes. He was killed by a fall from his horse, in returning from a visit to the school. John's two brothers, George, older, and Thomas, younger than himself, were like the mother,—who was tall, of good figure, with large, oval face, sombre features, and grave in behavior. The last of the family was a sister,—Fanny, I think, much younger than all,—of whom I remember my mother once speaking with much fondness, for her pretty, simple manners, while she was walking in the garden with her brothers. She married Mr. Llanos, a Spanish refugee, the author of "Don Estéban," and "Sandoval, the Free-Mason." He was a man of liberal principles, attractive manners, and more than ordinary accomplishments.—This is the amount of my knowledge and recollection of the family.

In the early part of his school-life, John gave no extraordinary indications of intellectual character; but it was remembered of him afterwards, that there was ever present a determined and steady spirit in all his undertakings; and, although of a strong and impulsive will, I never knew it misdirected in his required pursuit of study. He was a most orderly scholar. The future ramifications of that noble genius were then closely shut in the seed, and greedily drinking in the moisture which made it afterwards burst forth so kindly into luxuriance and beauty.

My father was in the habit, at each half-year's vacation, of bestowing prizes upon those pupils who had performed the greatest quantity of voluntary extra work; and such was Keats's indefatigable energy for the last two or three successive half-years of his remaining at school, that, upon each occasion, he took the first prize by a considerable distance. He was at work before the first school-hour began, and that was at seven o'clock; almost all the intervening times of recreation were so devoted; and during the afternoon-holidays, when all were at play, I have seen him in the school,—almost the only one,—at his Latin or French translation; and so unconscious and regardless was he of the consequences of this close and persevering application, that he never would have taken the necessary exercise, had he not been sometimes driven out by one of us for the purpose.

I have said that he was a favorite with all. Not the less beloved was he for having a highly pugnacious spirit, which, when roused, was one of the most picturesque exhibitions—off the stage—I ever saw. One of the transports of that marvellous actor, Edmund Kean—whom, by the way, he idolized—was its nearest resemblance; and the two were not very dissimilar in face and figure. I remember, upon one occasion, when an usher, on account of some impertinent behavior, had boxed his brother Tom's ears, John rushed up, put himself in the received posture of offence, and, I believe, struck the usher,—who could have put him into his pocket. His passions at times were almost ungovernable; his brother George, being considerably the taller and stronger, used frequently to hold him down by main force, when he was in "one of his moods" and was endeavoring to beat him. It was all, however, a wisp-of-straw conflagration; for he had an intensely tender affection for his brothers, and proved it upon the most trying occasions. He was not merely the "favorite of all," like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his high-mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one who had known him, superior or equal.

The latter part of the time—perhaps eighteen months—that he remained at school, he occupied the hours during meals in reading. Thus his whole time was engrossed. He had a tolerably retentive memory, and the quantity that he read was surprising. He must in those last months have exhausted the school—library, which consisted principally of abridgments of all the voyages and travels of any note; Mayor's Collection; also his Universal History; Robertson's Histories of Scotland, America, and Charles the Fifth; all Miss Edgeworth's productions; together with many other works, equally well calculated for youth, not necessary to be enumerated. The books, however, that were his constantly recurrent sources of attraction were Tooke's "Pantheon," Lemprière's "Classical Dictionary," which he appeared to learn, and Spence's "Polymetis." This was the store whence he acquired his perfect intimacy with the Greek mythology; here was he "suckled In that creed outworn"; for his amount of classical attainment extended no farther than the "Aeneid"; with which epic, indeed, he was so fascinated, that before leaving school he had voluntarily translated in writing a considerable portion. And yet I remember that at that early age,—mayhap under fourteen,—notwithstanding and through all its incidental attractiveness, he hazarded the opinion to me that there was feebleness in the structure of the work. He must have gone through all the better publications in the school-library, for he asked me to lend him some of my own books; and I think I now see him at supper, (we had all our meals in the school-room,) sitting back on the form, and holding the folio volume of Burnet's "History of his own Time" between himself and the table, eating his meal from beyond it. This work, and Leigh Hunt's "Examiner" newspaper,—which my father took in, and I used to lend to Keats,—I make no doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil and religious liberty. He once told me, smiling, that one of his guardians, being informed what books I had lent him to read, declared, that, if he had fifty children, he would not send one of them to my father's school.

When he left us,—I think at fourteen years of age,—he was apprenticed to Mr. Thomas Hammond, a medical man, residing in Church Street, Edmonton, and exactly two miles from Enfield. This arrangement appeared to give him satisfaction; and I fear that it was the most placid period of his painful life; for now, with the exception of the duty he had to perform in the surgery, and which was by no means an onerous one, his whole leisure hours were employed in indulging his passion for reading and translating. It was during his apprenticeship that he finished the latter portion of the "Aeneid."

The distance between our residences being so short, I encouraged his inclination to come over, when he could be spared; and in consequence, I saw him about five or six times a month, commonly on Wednesdays and Saturdays, those afternoons being my own most leisure times. He rarely came empty-handed; either he had a book to read, or brought one with him to be exchanged. When the weather permitted, we always sat in an arbor at the end of a spacious garden, and, in Boswellian phrase, "we had good talk."

I cannot at this time remember what was the spark that fired the train of his poetical tendencies,—I do not remember what was the first signalized poetry he read; but he must have given me unmistakable tokens of his bent of taste; otherwise, at that early stage of his career, I never could have read to him the "Epithalamion" of Spenser; and this I perfectly remember having done, and in that (to me) hallowed old arbor, the scene of many bland and graceful associations,—all the substances having passed away. He was at that time, I should suppose, fifteen or sixteen years old; and at that period of life he certainly appreciated the general beauty of the composition, and felt the more passionate passages; for his features and exclamations were ecstatic. How often have I in after-times heard him quote these lines:—

"Behold, whiles she before the altar stands,
Hearing the holy priest that to her speaks,
And blesses her with his two happy hands,
How the red roses flush up in her cheeks!
And the pure snow, with goodly vermil stain,
Like crimson dyed in grain,
That even the angels, which continually
About the sacred altar do remain,
Forget their service, and about her fly,
Oft peeping in her face, that seems more fair,
The more they on it stare;
But her sad eyes, still fastened on the ground,
Are governèd with goodly modesty,
That suffers not one look to glance awry,
Which may let in a little thought unsound."

That night he took away with him the first volume of the "Faery Queen," and went through it, as I told his biographer, Mr. Monckton Milnes, "as a young horse would through a spring meadow,—ramping!" Like a true poet, too,—a poet "born, not manufactured,"—a poet in grain,—he especially singled out the epithets, for that felicity and power in which Spenser is so eminent. He hoisted himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said,—"What an image that is,—'Sea-shouldering whales'!"

It was a treat to see as well as hear him read a pathetic passage. Once, when reading the "Cymbeline" aloud', I saw his eyes fill with tears, and for some moments he was unable to proceed, when he came to the departure of Posthumus, and Imogen's saying she would have watched him

"till the diminution
Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle;
Nay, followed him till he had melted from
The smallness of a gnat to air; and then
Have turned mine eye and wept."

I cannot quite reconcile the time of our separating at this stage of his career,—which of us first went to London; but it was upon an occasion when I was walking thither, and, I think, to see Leigh Hunt, who had just fulfilled his penalty of confinement in Horsemonger-Lane Prison for the trivial libel upon the Prince Regent, that Keats, who was coming over to Enfield, met me, and, turning, accompanied me back part of the way to Edmonton. At the last field-gate, when taking leave, he gave me the sonnet entitled, "Written on the Day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison." Unless I am utterly mistaken, this was the first proof I had received of his having committed himself in verse; and how clearly can I recall the conscious look with which he hesitatingly offered it! There are some momentary glances of beloved friends that fade only with life. I am not in a position to contradict the statement of his biographer, that "the lines in imitation of Spenser,

"'Now Morning from her orient charger came,
And her first footsteps touched a verdant hill,' etc.,

"are the earliest known verses of his composition"; from the subject being the inspiration of his first love—and such a love!—in poetry, it is most probable; but certainly his first published poem was the sonnet commencing,

'O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell';
and that will be found in the "Examiner," some time, as I conjecture, in 1816,—for I have not the paper to refer to, and, indeed, at this distance, both of time and removal from the means of verification, I would not be dogmatical.

When we both had come to London,—he to enter as a student of St. Thomas's Hospital,—he was not long in discovering that my abode was with my brother-in-law, in Little Warner Street, Clerkenwell; and just at that time I was installed housekeeper, and was solitary. He, therefore, would come and revive his loved gossip, till, as the author of the "Urn Burial" says, "we were acting our antipodes,—the huntsmen were up in America, and they already were past their first sleep in Persia." At this time he lived in his first lodging upon coming to London, near to St. Thomas's Hospital. I find his address in a letter which must have preceded my appointing him to come and lighten my darkness in Clerkenwell. At the close of the letter, he says,—"Although the Borough is a beastly place in dirt, turnings, and windings, yet No. 8, Dean Street, is not difficult to find; and if you would run the gauntlet over London Bridge, take the first turning to the left, and then the first to the right, and, moreover, knock at my door, which is nearly opposite a meeting, you would do me a charity, which, as St. Paul saith, is the father of all the virtues. At all events, let me hear from you soon: I say, at all events, not excepting the gout in your fingers." I have little doubt that this letter (which has no other date than the day of the week, and no post-mark) preceded our first symposium; and a memorable night it was in my life's career.

A copy, and a beautiful one, of the folio edition of Chapman's Homer had been lent me. It was the property of Mr. Alsager, the gentleman who for years had contributed no small share of celebrity to the great reputation of the "Times" newspaper, by the masterly manner in which he conducted the money-market department of that journal. At the time when I was first introduced to Mr. Alsager, he was living opposite Horsemonger-Lane Prison; and upon Mr. Leigh Hunt's being sentenced for the libel, his first day's dinner was sent over by Mr. Alsager. He was a man of the most studiously correct demeanor, with a highly cultivated taste and judgment in the fine arts and music. He succeeded Hazlitt, (which was no insignificant honor,) and for some time contributed the critiques upon the theatres, but ended by being the reporter of the state of the money-market. He had long been accustomed to have the first trial at his own house of the best-reputed new foreign instrumental music, which he used to import from Germany.

Well, then, we were put in possession of the Homer of Chapman, and to work we went, turning to some of the "famousest" passages, as we had scrappily known them in Pope's version. There was, for instance, that perfect scene of the conversation on Troy wall of the old Senators with Helen, who is pointing out to them the several Greek captains, with that wonderfully vivid portrait of an orator, in Ulysses, in the Third Book, beginning at the 237th line,—

"But when the prudent Ithacus did to his counsels rise";
the helmet and shield of Diomed, in the opening of the Fifth Book; the prodigious description of Neptune's passage in his chariot to the Achive ships, in the opening of the Thirteenth Book,—

"The woods, and all the great hills near,
trembled beneath the weight
Of his immortal moving feet."

The last was the whole of the shipwreck of Ulysses in the Fifth Book of the "Odyssey." I think his expression of delight, during the reading of those dozen lines, was never surpassed:—

"Then forth he came, his both knees faltering, both
His strong hands hanging down, and all with froth
His cheeks and nostrils flowing, voice and breath
Spent to all use, and down he sunk to death.
The sea had soaked his heart through; all his veins
His toils had racked t' a laboring woman's pains.
Dead weary was he."

On an after-occasion I showed him the couplet of Pope's upon the same passage:—

"From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran,
And lost in lassitude, lay all the man."

Chapman supplied us with many an after-feast; but it was in the teeming wonderment of this, his first introduction, that, when I came down to breakfast the next morning, I found upon my table a letter with no other inclosure than his famous sonnet, "On first looking into Chapman's Homer." We had parted, as I have already said, at day-spring; yet he contrived that I should receive the poem, from a distance of nearly two miles, before 10, A.M. In the published copy of this sonnet he made an alteration in the seventh line:—

"Yet did I never breathe its pure serene."

The original, which he sent me, had the phrase,

"Yet could I never tell what men could mean";
which he said was bald, and too simply wondering. No one could more earnestly chastise his thoughts than Keats. His favorite among Chapman's Hymns of Homer was the one to Pan, and which he himself rivalled in the "Endymion."

In one of our conversations about this period, I alluded to his position at St. Thomas's Hospital,—coasting and reconnoitring, as it were, that I might discover how he got on, and, with the total absorption that had evidently taken place of every other mood of his mind than that of imaginative composition, what was his bias for the future, and what his feeling with regard to the profession that had been chosen for him,—a circumstance I did not know at that time. He made no secret, however, that he could not sympathize with the science of anatomy, as a main pursuit in life; for one of the expressions that he used, in describing his unfitness for its mastery, was perfectly characteristic. He said, in illustration of his argument,—"The other day, for instance, during the lecture, there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray; and I was off with them to Oberon and Fairy-land." And yet, with all this self-styled unfitness for the pursuit, I was afterwards informed, that at his subsequent examination he displayed an amount of acquirement which surprised his fellow-students, who had scarcely any other association with him than that of a cheerful, crochety rhymester.

It was about this period, that, going to call upon Mr. Leigh Hunt, who then occupied a pretty little cottage in the "Vale of Health," on Hampstead Heath, I took with me two or three of the poems I had received from Keats. I did expect that Hunt would speak encouragingly, and indeed approvingly, of the compositions,—written, too, by a youth under age; but my partial spirit was not prepared for the unhesitating and prompt admiration which broke forth before he had read twenty lines of the first poem. Mr. Horace Smith happened to be there, on the occasion, and was not less demonstrative in his praise of their merits. The piece which he read out, I remember, was the sonnet,—

"How many bards gild the lapses of time!"

marking with particular emphasis and approbation the last six lines:—

"So the unnumbered sounds that evening store,—
The songs of birds, the whispering of the leaves,
The voice of waters, the great bell that heaves
With solemn sound, and thousand others more,
That distance of recognizance bereaves,—
Make pleasing music, and not wild uproar."

Smith repeated, with applause, the line in Italics, saying, "What a well-condensed expression!" After making numerous and eager inquiries about him, personally, and with reference to any peculiarities of mind and manner, the visit ended in my being requested to bring him over to the Vale of Health. That was a red-letter day in the young poet's life,—and one which will never fade with me, as long as memory lasts. The character and expression of Keats's features would unfailingly arrest even the casual passenger in the street; and now they were wrought to a tone of animation that I could not but watch with intense interest, knowing what was in store for him from the bland encouragement, and Spartan deference in attention, with fascinating conversational eloquence, that he was to receive and encounter. When we reached the Heath, I have present the rising and accelerated step, with the gradual subsidence of all talk, as we drew towards the cottage. The interview, which stretched into three "morning calls," was the prelude to many after-scenes and saunterings about Caen Wood and its neighborhood; for Keats was suddenly made a familiar of the household, and was always welcomed.

It was in the library at Hunt's cottage, where an extemporary bed had been made up for him on the sofa, that he composed the framework and many lines of the poem on "Sleep and Poetry,"—the last sixty or seventy being an inventory of the art-garniture of the room. The sonnet,

"Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there,"

he gave me the day after one of our visits, and very shortly after his installation at the cottage.

"Give me a golden pen, and let me lean,"

was another, upon being compelled to leave "at an early hour." But the occasion that recurs to me with the liveliest interest was the evening when, some observations having been made upon the character, habits, and pleasant associations of that reverenced denizen of the hearth, the cheerful little fireside grasshopper, Hunt proposed to Keats the challenge of writing, then, there, and to time, a sonnet "On the Grasshopper and the Cricket." No one was present but myself, and they accordingly set to. I, absent with a book at the end of the sofa, could not avoid furtive glances, every now and then, at the emulants. I cannot say how long the trial lasted; I was not proposed umpire, and had no stop-watch for the occasion: the time, however, was short, for such a performance; and Keats won, as to time. But the event of the after-scrutiny was one of many such occurrences which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my affectionate regard and admiration, for unaffected generosity and perfectly unpretentious encouragement: his sincere look of pleasure at the first line,—

"The poetry of earth is never dead";

"Such a prosperous opening!" he said; and when he came to the tenth and eleventh lines,—

"On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence";

"Ah! that's perfect! bravo, Keats!"—and then he went on in a dilation upon, the dumbness of all Nature during the season's suspension and torpidity. With all the kind and gratifying things that were said to him, Keats protested to me, as we were afterwards walking home, that he preferred Hunt's treatment of the subject to his own.

He had left the neighborhood of the Borough, and was now living with his brothers in apartments on the second floor of a house in the Poultry, over the passage leading to the Queen's Head Tavern, and opposite one of the City Companies' Halls,—the Ironmongers', if I mistake not. I have the associating reminiscence of many happy hours spent in this lodging. Here was determined upon, in great part written, and sent forth to the world, the first little, but vigorous, offspring of his brain:—

POEMS BY JOHN KEATS.

"What more felicity can fell to creature
Than to enjoy delight with liberty?"

Fate of the Butterfly,—SPENSER

LONDON:
PRINTED FOR
C. AND J. OLLIER, 3, WELBECK STREET,
CAVENDISH SQUARE.
1817.

Here, on the evening that the last proof-sheet was brought from the printer, and, as his biographer has recorded, upon being informed, if he purposed having a Dedication to the book, that it must be sent forthwith, he went to a side-table, and, in the midst of mixed conversation (for there were several friends in the room,) he brought to Charles Ollier, the publisher, the Dedication-Sonnet to Leigh Hunt. If the original manuscript of that poem—a legitimate sonnet, with every restriction of rhyme and metre—could now be produced, and the time—recorded in which it was written, it would be pronounced an extraordinary performance; added to which, the non-alteration of a single word in the poem (a circumstance noted at the time) claims for it, I should suppose, a merit without a parallel.

"The poem which commences the volume," says Mr. Monckton Milnes, "was suggested to Keats by a delightful summer's day, as he stood beside the gate that loads from the battery on Hampstead Heath into a field by Caen Wood"; and the lovely passage beginning,

"Linger awhile upon some bending planks,"

and which contains the description of the "swarms of minnows that show their little heads," Keats told me was the recollection of our having frequently loitered over the rail of a foot-bridge that spanned a little brook in the last field upon entering Edmonton. He himself thought the picture was correct, and liked it; and I do not know who could improve it.

Another example of his promptly suggestive imagination, and uncommon facility in giving it utterance, occurred one day upon his returning home and finding me asleep upon the sofa, with my volume of Chaucer open at the "Flower and the Leaf." After expressing his admiration of the poem, which he had been reading, he gave me the fine testimony of that opinion, in pointing to the sonnet he had written at the close of it, which was an extempore effusion, and it has not the alteration of a single word. It lies before me now, signed, "J.K., Feb., 1817."

If my memory does not betray me, this charming out-door fancy-scene was Keats's first introduction to Chaucer. Certain I am that the "Troilus and Cresseide" was an after-acquaintance; and clearly do I remember his approbation of the favorite passages that I had marked. I desired him to retrace the poem, and with his pen confirm and denote those which were congenial with his own feeling and judgment. These two circumstances, connected with the literary career of this cherished object of his friend's esteem and love, have stamped a priceless value upon that friend's miniature 18mo copy of Chaucer.

The little first volume of Keats's Muse was launched amid the cheers and fond anticipations of all his circle. Every one of us expected that it would create a sensation in the literary world; and we calculated upon, at least, a succession of reprints. Alas! it might have emerged in Timbuctoo with stronger chance of fame and favor. It never passed to a second edition; the first was but a small one, and that was never sold off. The whole community, as if by compact, determined to know nothing about it. The word had been passed that its author was a Radical; and in those blessed days of "Bible-Crown-and-Constitution" supremacy, he might with better chance of success have been a robber,—there were many prosperous public ones,—if he had also been an Anti-Jacobin. Keats had made no demonstration of political opinion; but he had dedicated his book to Leigh Hunt, a Radical news-writer, and a dubbed partisan of the French ruler, because he did not call him the "Corsican monster," and other disgusting names. Verily, "the former times were not better than these." Men can now write the word "Liberty" without being chalked on the back and hounded out.

Poor Keats! he little anticipated, and as little deserved, the cowardly and scoundrel treatment that was in store for him upon the publication of his second composition, the "Endymion." It was in the interval of the two productions that he had moved from the Poultry, and had taken a lodging in Well Walk, Hampstead,—in the first or second house, on the right hand, going up to the Heath. I have an impression that he had been some weeks absent at the sea-side before settling in this domicile; for the "Endymion" had been begun, and he had made considerable advances in his plan. He came to me one Sunday, and I walked with him, spending the whole day in Well Walk. His constant and enviable friend Severn, I remember, was present on the occasion, by the circumstance of our exchanging looks upon Keats's reading to us portions of his new work that had pleased himself. One of these, I think, was the "Hymn to Pan"; and another, I am sure, was the "Bower of Adonis," because his own expression of face will never pass from me (if I were a Reynolds or a Gainsborough, I could now stamp it forever) as he read the description of the latter, with the descent and ascent of the ear of Venus. The "Hymn to Pan" occurs early in the First Book:—

"O thou, whose mighty palace-roof doth hang
From jagged trunks," etc.

And the "Bower of Adonis," in the Second Book, commences,—

"After a thousand mazes overgone."

Keats was indebted for his introduction to Mr. Severn to his school-fellow Edward Holmes, who also had been one of the child-scholars at Enfield; for he came to us in the frock-dress. They were sworn companions at school, and remained friends through life. Mr. Holmes ought to have been an educated musician from his first childhood; for the passion was in him. I used to amuse myself with the piano-forte after supper, when all had gone to bed. Upon some sudden occasion, leaving the parlor, I heard a scuffle on the stairs, and discovered that my young gentleman had left his bed to hear the music. At other times, during the day, and in the intervals of school-hours, he would stand under the window, listening. He at length intrusted to me his heart's secret, that he should like to learn music. So I taught him his notes; and he soon knew and could do as much as his tutor. Upon leaving Enfield, he was apprenticed to the elder Seeley, a bookseller in Fleet Street; but, hating his occupation, left it, I believe, before he was of age. He had not lost sight of me; and I introduced him to Mr. Vincent Novello, who had made himself a friend to me, and who not merely, with rare profusion of bounty, gave Holmes instruction, but received him into his house, and made him one of his family. With them he resided some years. I was also the fortunate means of recommending him to the chief proprietor of the "Atlas" newspaper; and to that journal, during a long period, he contributed a series of essays and critiques upon the science and practice of music, which raised the journal into a reference and an authority in the art. He wrote for the proprietors of the "Atlas" that elegant little book of dilettante criticism, "A Ramble among the Musicians in Germany." He latterly contributed to the "Musical Times" a whole series of masterly essays and analyses upon the Masses of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. But the work upon which his reputation will rest was a "Life of Mozart," which was purchased by Chapman and Hall.

I have said that Holmes used to listen on the stairs. In after-years, when Keats was reading to me his "Eve of St. Agnes," (and what a happy day was that! I had come up to see him from Ramsgate, where I then lived,) at the passage where Porphyro in Madeleine's chamber is fearfully listening to the hubbub of the icing and the music in the hall below, and the verse says,—

"The boisterous midnight festive clarion,
The kettle-drum and far-heard clarionet,
Affray his ears, though but in dying tone:
The hall-door shuts again, and all the noise is gone,"—

"That line," said he, "came into my head when I remembered how I used to listen, in bed, to your music at school." Interesting would be a record of the germs and first causes of all the greatest poets' conceptions! The elder Brunei's first hint for his "shield," in constructing the tunnel under the Thames, was taken from watching the labor of a sea-insect, which, having a projecting hood, could bore into the ship's timber, unmolested by the waves.

I fancy it was about this time that Keats gave that signal example of his courage and stamina, in the recorded instance of his pugilistic contest with a butcher-boy. He told me—and in his characteristic manner—of their "passage of arms." The brute, he said, was tormenting a kitten, and he interfered, when a threat offered was enough for his mettle, and they set to. He thought he, should be beaten; for the fellow was the taller and stronger; but, like an authentic pugilist, my young poet found that he had planted a blow which "told" upon his antagonist. In every succeeding round, therefore, (for they fought nearly an hour,) he never failed of returning to the weak point; and the contest ended in the hulk being led or carried home. In all my knowledge of my fellow-beings, I never knew one who so thoroughly combined the sweetness with the power of gentleness and the irresistible sway of anger as Keats. His indignation would have made the boldest grave; and those who have seen him under the influence of tyranny, injustice, and meanness of soul will never forget the expression of his features,—"the form of his visage was changed."

He had a strong sense of humor; yet, so to speak, he was not, in the strict sense of the term, a humorist. His comic fancy lurked in the outermost and most unlooked-for images of association,—which, indeed, maybe said to be the components of humor; nevertheless, I think they did not extend beyond the quaint, in fulfilment and success. But his perception of humor, with the power of transmitting it by imitation, was both vivid and irresistibly amusing. He once described to me his having gone to see a bear-baiting,—the animal, the property of a Mr. Tom Oliver. The performance not having began, Keats was near to and watched a young aspirant, who had brought a younger under his wing to witness the solemnity, and whom he oppressively patronized, instructing him in the names and qualities of all the magnates present. Now and then, in his zeal to manifest and impart his knowledge, he would forget himself, and stray beyond the prescribed bounds, into the ring,—to the lashing resentment of its comptroller, Mr. William Soames; who, after some hints of a practical nature, to "keep back," began laying about him with indiscriminate and unmitigable vivacity,—the Peripatetic signifying to his pupil,—"My eyes! Bill Soames giv' me sich a licker!"—evidently grateful, and considering himself complimented, upon being included in the general dispensation. Keats's entertainment with this minor scene of low life has often recurred to me. But his subsequent description of the baiting, with his position, of his legs and arms bent and shortened, till he looked like Bruin on his hind-legs, dabbing his fore-paws hither and thither, as the dogs snapped at him, and now and then acting the gasp of one that had been suddenly caught and hugged, his own capacious mouth adding force to the personation, was a memorable display. I am never reminded of this amusing relation, but it is associated with that forcible picture in Shakspeare, (and what subject can we not associate with him?) in the "Henry VI":—

"as a bear encompassed round with dogs, Who having pinched a few and made them cry, The rest stand all aloof and bark at him."

Keats also attended a prize-fight between two of the most skilful and enduring "light-weights,"—Randal and Turner. It was, I believe, at that remarkable wager, when, the men being so equally matched and accomplished, they had been sparring for three-quarters of an hour before a blow had been struck. In describing the rapidity of Randal's blows while the other was falling, Keats tapped his fingers on the window-pane.

I make no apology for recording these events in his life; they are characteristics of the natural man,—and prove, moreover, that the indulgence in such exhibitions did not for one moment blunt the gentler emotions of his heart, or vulgarize his inborn love of all that was beautiful and true. His own line was the axiom of his moral existence, his political creed:—"A thing of beauty is a joy forever"; and I can fancy no coarser consociation able to win him from this faith. Had he been born in squalor, he would have emerged a gentleman. Keats was not an easily swayable man; in differing with those he loved, his firmness kept equal pace with the sweetness of his persuasion; but with the rough and the unlovable he kept no terms,—within the conventional precincts, I mean, of social order.

From Well Walk he moved to another quarter of the Heath,—Wentworth Place the name, if I recollect. Here he became a sharing inmate with Mr. Charles Armitage Brown, a gentleman who had been a Russia merchant, and had retired to a literary leisure upon an independence. I do not know how they became acquainted; but Keats never had a more zealous, a firmer, or more practical friend and adviser than Brown. His robust eagerness and zeal, with a headstrong determination of will, led him into an undue prejudice against the brother, George, respecting some money-transactions with John, which, however, the former redeemed to the perfect satisfaction of all the friends of the family. After the death of Keats, Armitage Brown went to reside in Florence, where he remained some few years; then he settled at Plymouth, and there brought out a work entitled, "Shakespeare's Autobiographical Poems. Being his Sonnets clearly developed; with his Character, drawn chiefly from his Works." It cannot be said that in this work the author has clearly educed his theory; but, in the face of his failure upon that main point, the book is interesting, for the heart-whole zeal and homage with which he has gone into his subject. Brown was no half-measure man; "whatsoever his hand found to do, he did it with his might." His last stage-scene in life was passed in New Zealand, whither he emigrated with his son, having purchased some land,—or, as his own letter stated, having been thoroughly defrauded in the transaction. Brown accompanied Keats in his tour in the Hebrides, a worthy event in the poet's career, seeing that it led to the production of that magnificent sonnet to "Ailsa Rock." As a passing observation, and to show how the minutest circumstance did not escape him, he told me, that, when he first came upon the view of Loch Lomond, the sun was setting; the lake was in shade, and of a deep blue; and at the farther end was "a slash across it, of deep orange." The description of the traceried window in the "Eve of St. Agnes" gives proof of the intensity of his feeling for color.

It was during his abode in Wentworth Place that the savage and vulgar attacks upon the "Endymion" appeared in the "Quarterly Review," and in "Blackwood's Magazine." There was, indeed, ruffian, low-lived work,—especially in the latter publication, which had reached a pitch of blackguardism, (it used to be called "Blackguard's Magazine,") with personal abuse,—ABUSE,—the only word,—that would damage the sale of any review at this day. The very reverse of its present management. There would not now be the inclination for such rascal bush-fighting; and even then, or indeed at any period of the Magazine's career, the stalwart and noble mind of John Wilson would never have made itself editorially responsible for such trash. As to him of the "Quarterly," a thimble would have been "a mansion, a court," for his whole soul. The style of the articles directed against the Radical writers, and those especially whom the party had nicknamed the "Cockney school" of poetry, may be conceived by its provoking the following observation from Hazlitt to me:—"To pay those fellows, Sir, in their own coin, the way would be, to begin with Walter Scott, and have at his clump-foot." "Verily, the former times were not better than these."

To say that these disgusting misrepresentations did not affect the consciousness and self-respect of Keats would be to underrate the sensitiveness of his nature. He felt the insult, but more the injustice of the treatment he had received; he told me so, as we lay awake one night, when I slept in his brother's bed. They had injured him in the most wanton manner; but if they, or my Lord Byron, ever for one moment supposed that he was crushed or even cowed in spirit by the treatment he had received, never were they more deluded. "Snuffed out by an article," indeed! He had infinitely more magnanimity, in its fullest sense, than that very spoiled, self-willed, and mean-souled man,—and I have authority for the last term. To say nothing of personal and private transactions, pages 204-207 in the first volume of Mr. Monckton Milnes's life of our poet will be full authority for my estimate of his Lordship. "Johnny Keats" had, indeed, "a little body with a mighty heart," and he showed it in the best way: not by fighting the ruffians,—though he could have done that,—but by the resolve that he would produce brain-work which not one of their party could approach; and he did.

In the year 1820 appeared the "Lamia," "Isabella," "Eve of St. Agnes," and "Hyperion," etc. But, alas! the insidious disease which carried him off had made its approach, and he was going to, or had already departed for, Italy, attended by his constant and self-sacrificing friend, Severn. Keats's mother died of consumption; and he nursed his younger brother in the same disease, to the last,—and, by so doing, in all probability, hastened his own summons. Upon the publication of the last volume of poems, Charles Lamb wrote one of his own finely appreciative and cordial critiques in the "Morning Chronicle." This was sent to me in the country, where I had for some time resided. I had not heard of the dangerous state of Keats's health,—only that he and Severn were going to Italy; it was, therefore, an unprepared shock which brought me the news that he had died in Rome.

Mr. Monckton Milnes has related the anecdote of Keats's introduction to Wordsworth, with the latter's appreciation of the "Hymn to Pan," which its author had been desired to repeat, and the Rydal Mount poet's snow-capped comment upon it,—"Uhm! a pretty piece of Paganism!" Mr. Milnes, with his genial and placable nature, has made an amiable defence for the apparent coldness of Wordsworth's appreciation,—"That it was probably intended for some slight rebuke to his youthful compeer, whom he saw absorbed in an order of ideas that to him appeared merely sensuous, and would have desired that the bright traits of Greek mythology should be sobered down by a graver faith." Keats, like Shakspeare, and every other true poet, put his whole soul into what he imagined, portrayed, or embodied; and hence he appeared the young Greek, "suckled in that creed outworn." The wonder is, that Mr. Wordsworth forgot to quote himself. From Keats's description of his Mentor's manner, as well as behavior, that evening, I cannot but believe it to have been one of the usual ebullitions of the egoism, not to say of the uneasiness, known to those who were accustomed to hear the great moral philosopher discourse upon his own productions and descant upon those of a contemporary. During this same visit, he was dilating upon some question in poetry, when, upon Keats's insinuating a confirmatory suggestion to his argument, Mrs. Wordsworth put her hand upon his arm, saying,—"Mr. Wordsworth is never interrupted." Again, during the same interview, some one had said that the next Waverley novel was to be "Rob Roy"; when Mr. Wordsworth took down his volume of Ballads, and read to the company "Rob Roy's Grave,"—then, returning it to the shelf, observed, "I do not know what more Mr. Scott can have to say upon the subject." When Leigh Hunt had his first interview with Wordsworth, the latter lectured to him—finely, indeed—upon his own writings; and repeated the entire sonnet,

"Great men have been among us,"—
which Hunt said he did "in a grand and earnest tone." Some one in a company quoting the passage from "Henry V.,"—

"So work the honey-bees,"

and each "picking out his pet plum" from that perfect piece of natural history, Wordsworth objected to the line,

"The singing masons building roofs of gold,"

because, he said, of the unpleasant repetition of the "ing" in it! Where were his ears and judgment on that occasion? But I have more than once heard it said that Wordsworth had not a genuine love of Shakspeare,—that, when he could, he always accompanied a "pro" with his "con," and, Atticus-like, would "just hint a fault and hesitate dislike." Truly, indeed, we are all of "a mingled yarn, good and ill together."

I can scarcely conceive of anything more unjust than the account which that ill-ordered being, Haydon, left behind him in his "Diary," respecting the idolized object of his former intimacy, John Keats. At his own eager request, after reading the manuscript specimens I had left with Leigh Hunt, I had introduced their author to him; and for some time subsequently I had frequent opportunities of seeing them together, and can testify to the laudations that Haydon trowelled on to the young poet. Before I left London, however, it had been said that things and opinions had changed,—and, in short, that Haydon had abjured all acquaintance with, and had even ignored, such a person as the author of the sonnet to him, and those "On the Elgin Marbles." I say nothing of the grounds of their separation; but, knowing the two men, and knowing, I believe, to the core, the humane principle of the poet, I have such faith in his steadfastness of friendship, that I am sure he would never have left behind him an unfavorable truth, while nothing could have induced him to utter a calumny of one who had received pledges of his former regard and esteem. Haydon's detraction was the more odious because its object could not contradict the charge, and because it supplied his old critical antagonists (if any remained) with an authority for their charge against him of Cockney ostentation and display. The most mean-spirited and trumpery twaddle in the paragraph was, that Keats was so far gone in sensual excitement as to put Cayenne pepper upon his tongue, when taking his claret! Poor fellow! he never purchased a bottle of claret, within my knowledge of him; and, from such observation as could not escape me, I am bound to assert that his domestic expenses never could have occasioned him a regret or a self-reproof.

When Shelley left England for Italy, Keats told me that he had received from him an invitation to become his guest,—and, in short, to make one of his household. It was upon the purest principle that Keats declined the noble proffer; for he entertained an exalted opinion of Shelley's genius, in itself an inducement; he also knew of his deeds of bounty; and lastly, from their frequent intercourse, he had full faith in the sincerity of his proposal; for a more crystalline heart than Shelley's never beat in human bosom. He was incapable of an untruth or of a deceit in any ill form. Keats told me, that, in declining the invitation, his sole motive was the consciousness, which would be ever prevalent with him, of his not being, in its utter extent, a free agent,—even within such a circle as Shelley's,—himself, nevertheless, the most unrestricted of beings. Mr. Trelawney, a familiar of the family, has confirmed the unwavering testimony to Shelley's bounty of nature, where he says, "Shelley was a being absolutely without selfishness." The poorest cottagers knew and benefited by the thoroughly practical and unselfish character of his Christianity, during his residence at Marlow, when he would visit them, and, having gone through a course of study in medicine, in order that he might assist them with his advice, would commonly administer the tonic which such systems usually require,—a good basin of broth, or pea-soup. And I believe I am infringing on no private domestic delicacy, when I repeat, that he has been known, upon a sudden and immediate emergency, to purloin ("convey the wise it call") a portion of the warmest of Mrs. Shelley's wardrobe, to protect some poor starving sister. One of the richer residents of Marlow told me that "they all considered him a madman." I wish he had bitten the whole squad.

"No settled senses of the world can match
The 'wisdom' of that madness."

Shelley's figure was a little above the middle height, slender, and of delicate construction, which appeared the rather from a lounging or waving manner in his gait, as though his frame was compounded merely of muscle and tendon, and that the power of walking was an achievement with him, and not a natural habit. Yet I should suppose that he was not a valetudinarian, although that has been said of him, on account of his spare and vegetable diet: for I have the remembrance of his scampering and bounding over the gorse-bushes on Hampstead Heath, late one night,—now close upon us, and now shouting from the height, like a wild school-boy. He was both an active and an enduring walker,—feats which do not accompany an ailing and feeble constitution. His face was round, flat, pale, with small features; mouth beautifully shaped; hair, bright-brown and wavy; and such a pair of eyes as are rarely seen in the human or any other head,—intensely blue, with a gentle and lambent expression, yet wonderfully alert and engrossing: nothing appeared to escape his knowledge.

Whatever peculiarity there might have been in Shelley's religious faith, I have the best authority for believing that it was confined to the early period of his life. The practical result of its course of action, I am sure, had its source from the "Sermon on the Mount." There is not one clause in that divine code which his conduct towards his fellow-mortals did not confirm, and substantiate him to be a follower of Christ. Yet, when the news arrived in London of the death of Shelley and Captain Williams by drowning, the "Courier" newspaper—an evening journal of that day—capped the intelligence with the following remark:—"He will now know whether there is a hell or not!"—I believe that there are still one or two public fanatics who would think that surmise, but not one would dare to utter it in his journal. So much for the progress of liberality, and the power of opinion.

At page 100 of the "Life of Keats," Vol. I., Mr. Monckton Milnes has quoted a literary portrait of him, which he received from a lady who used to see him at Hazlitt's lectures at the Surrey Institution. The building was on the south or right-hand side, and close to Blackfriars' Bridge. I believe that the whole of Hazlitt's lectures, on the British Poets, the Writers of the Time of Elizabeth, and the Comic Writers, were delivered in that Institution, during the years 1817 and 1818; shortly after which time the establishment appears to have been broken up. The lady's remark upon the character and expression of Keats's features is both happy and true. She says,—"His countenance lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and brightness; it had an expression as if he had been looking on some glorious sight." That's excellent.—"His mouth was full, and less intellectual than his other features." True again. But when our artist pronounces that "his eyes were large and blue" and that "his hair was auburn," I am naturally reminded of the fable of the "Chameleon":—"They're brown, Ma'am,—brown, I assure you!" The fact is, the lady was enchanted—and I cannot wonder at it—with the whole character of that beaming face; and "blue" and "auburn" being the favorite tints of the human front divine, in the lords of the creation, the poet's eyes consequently became "blue," and his hair "auburn." Colors, however, vary with the prejudice or partiality of the spectator; and, moreover, people do not agree even upon the most palpable prismatic tint. A writing-master whom we had at Enfield was an artist of more than ordinary merit; but he had one dominant defect: he could not distinguish between true blue and true green. So that, upon one occasion, when he was exhibiting to us a landscape he had just completed, I hazarded the critical question, why he painted his trees so blue? "Blue!" he replied,—"what do you call green?"—Reader, alter in your copy of Monckton Milnes's "Life of Keats," Vol. I., page 103, "eyes" light hazel, "hair" lightish-brown and wavy.

The most perfect, and withal the favorite portrait of him, was the one by Severn, published in Leigh Hunt's "Lord Byron and his Contemporaries," and which I remember the artist's sketching in a few minutes, one evening, when several of Keats's friends were at his apartments in the Poultry. The portrait prefixed to the "Life," also by Severn, is a most excellent one-look-and-expression likeness,—an every-day, and of "the earth, earthy" one;—and the last, which the same artist painted, and which is now in the possession of Mr. John Hunter, of Craig Crook, Edinburgh, may be an equally felicitous rendering of one look and manner; but I do not intimately recognize it. There is another, and a curiously unconscious likeness of him, in the charming Dulwich Gallery of Pictures. It is in the portrait of Wouvermans, by Rembrandt. It is just so much of a resemblance as to remind the friends of the poet,—though not such a one as the immortal Dutchman would have made, had the poet been his sitter. It has a plaintive and melancholy expression, which, I rejoice to say, I do not associate with him.

There is one of his attitudes, during familiar conversation, which, at times, (with the whole earnest manner and sweet expression of the man) presents itself to me, as though I had seen him only last week. The attitude I speak of was that of cherishing one leg over the knee of the other, smoothing the instep with the palm of his hand. In this action I mostly associate him in an eager parley with Leigh Hunt, in his little cottage in the "Vale of Health." This position, if I mistake not, is in the last portrait of him at Craig Crook; if not, it is in a reminiscent one, painted after his death.

His stature could have been very little more than five feet; but he was, withal, compactly made and—well-proportioned; and before the hereditary disorder which carried him off began to show itself, he was active, athletic, and enduringly strong,—as the fight with the butcher gave full attestation.

The critical world,—by which term I mean the censorious portion of it; for many have no other idea of criticism than, that of censure and objection,—the critical world have so gloated over the feebler, or, if they will, the defective side of Keats's genius, and his friends, his gloryingly partial friends, have so amply justified him, that I feel inclined to add no more to the category of opinions than to say, that the only fault in his poetry I could discover was a redundancy of imagery,—that exuberance, by-the-by, being a quality of the greatest promise, seeing that it is the constant accompaniment of a young and teeming genius. But his steady friend, Leigh Hunt, has rendered the amplest and truest record of his mental accomplishment in the Preface to the "Foliage," quoted at page 150 of the first volume of the "Life of Keats"; and his biographer has so zealously, and, I would say, so amiably, summed up his character and intellectual qualities, that I can add no more than my assent.

Keats's whole course of life, to the very last act of it, was one routine of unselfishness and of consideration for others' feelings. The approaches of death having come on, he said to his untiring nurse—friend,—"Severn,—I,—lift me up,—I am dying:—I shall die easy; don't be frightened;—be firm, and thank God it has come."

There are constant indications through the memoirs, and in the letters of Keats, of his profound reverence for Shakspeare. His own intensity of thought and expression visibly strengthened with the study of his idol; and he knew but little of him till he himself had become an author. A marginal note by him in a folio copy of the Plays is an example of the complete absorption his mind had undergone during the process of his matriculation;—and, through life, however long with any of us, we are all in progress of matriculation, as we study the "myriad-minded's" system of philosophy. The note that Keats made was this;—"The genius of Shakspeare was an innate universality; wherefore he laid the achievements of human intellect prostrate beneath his indolent and kingly gaze: he could do easily men's utmost; his plan of tasks to come was not of this world. If what he proposed to do hereafter would not in the idea answer the aim, how tremendous must have been his conception of ultimates!"

THE EUROPEAN CRISIS.

It is not long since we listened to an interesting discussion of this question:—Which was the more important year to Europe,—1859 or 1860? The question is one that may be commended to the attention of those ingenuous young gentlemen, in debating-societies assembled, who have not yet settled whether Brutus, Cassius, & Co. were right in assassinating "the mighty Julius," or whether Mary Stuart was a martyred saint or a martyred sinner, or whether the cold chop to which Cromwell treated Charles I. on a memorable winter-day was either a just or a politic mode of touching for the king's evil. It would have the merit of novelty,—and Americans are as fond of new things in their day of power as ever were the Athenians in the day of their decline. A yet rarer merit it would have, in the fact that a great deal could justly be said on both sides of the question. An umpire would probably decide in favor of 1859,—because, he might say, had the events of that year been different, those of 1860 must have undergone a complete change.

The romantic conquest of Sicily by Garibaldi, and his successes in Naples, whereby a junior branch of the Bourbon family has been sent to "enjoy" that exile which has so long been the lot of the senior branch,—and the destruction of the Papalini by the Italian army of Victor Emanuel II., which asserted the superiority of the children of the soil over the bands of foreign ruffians assembled by De Merode and Lamoricière for the oppression of the Peninsula in the name of the venerable head of the Church of Rome,—these are events even more striking than those by which the iron sceptre of Austria was cut through in the earlier year, because they have been accomplished by Italian genius and courage, the few foreigners in the army of Garibaldi not counting for much in the contest. They prove the regeneration of Italy. But it is evident that nothing of the kind could have been done in 1860, if 1859 had been as quiet a year for Italy as its immediate predecessor. Before the leaders and the soldiers of Italy could obtain the indispensable place whereon to stand, it was imperatively necessary that the power of Austria should be broken down, through the defeat and consequent demoralization of her army. For a period of forty-four years, Austria had had her own way in the Peninsula. From the fall of Napoleon's Italian dominion, in 1814, to the day when the third Napoleon's army entered Sardinia, there was, virtually, no other rule in Italy but that which Austria approved. The events of 1848, which at one time promised to remove "the barbarians," had for their conclusion the re-establishment of her ascendency in greater force than ever; and the last ten years of that ascendency will always be remembered as the period when its tyrannical character was most fully developed. The hoary proconsul of the Lorraines, Radetzky, if not personally cruel, was determined to do for his masters what Castilian lieutenants had done for the Austro-Burgundian monarchs of Spain and her dependencies, the fairest portions of Italy being among those dependencies, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,—to destroy the public spirit of Italy. Could he have completed a century of life, or had there been no European nation ready to prevent the success of the Germanic policy under which Italy was to wither to provincial worthlessness, he might have been successful. But Austria lost her best man, the only one of her soldiers who had shown himself capable of upholding her Italian position, when he had reached to more than ninety years; and it pleased Providence to raise up a friend to Italy in a quarter to which most men had ceased to look for anything good.

Well has it been said, that "it is not the best tools that shape out the best ends; if so, Martin Luther would not have been selected as the master-spirit of the Reformation." Napoleon III. may deserve all that is said against him by men of the extreme right and by men of the extreme left,—by Catholics and infidels,—by Whites, and Reds, and Blues,—but it cannot be denied that he gave to the Italians that assistance without which they never could have obtained even partial deliverance from the Austrian yoke, and which they could have procured from no other potentate or power. Bankrupt though she was, Austria's force was so superior to anything that Italy could present in the shape of an army, that Sardinia must have been conquered, if she had contended alone with her enemy; and a war between Austria and Sardinia was inevitable, and would probably have broken out long before 1859, had the former country been assured of the neutrality of France.

There has been a great inkshed, and a large expenditure of oratory, on the question of the origin of the Italian war of 1859; and, as usual, much nonsense has been written and said of and concerning the ambition of France and the encroachments of Sardinia. But that war was brought about neither by French ambition nor by Sardinian desire for territorial aggrandizement. That it occurred in 1859 was undoubtedly owing to the action of France, which country merely chose its own time to drub its old foe; but the point at issue was, whether Austrian or Sardinian ideas should predominate in the government of Italy. Austria's purpose never could be accomplished so long as a constitutional polity existed in the best, because the best governed and the best organized, of all the Italian States; and Sardinia's purpose never could be accomplished so long as Austria was in a condition to dictate to the Italians the manner in which they should be ruled. A war between the two nations was, as we have said, inevitable. The only point about which there could be any dispute was, whether Sardinia would have to fight the battle of Italy unaided, or be backed by some power beyond the mountains.

It shows how much men respect a military monarchy, how deferential they are to the sword, that even those persons who assumed that France must espouse the Sardinian cause were far from feeling confident that Austria would be overmatched by an alliance of the two most liberal of the Catholic nations of Europe. That monarchy is the type of force to all minds; and though she has seldom won any splendid successes in the field over the armies of enlightened nations, and has been repeatedly beaten by Prussia and France, men cling to old ideas, and give her great advantages at the beginning of every war in which she engages. The common opinion, in the spring of 1859, was, that Austria would crush Sardinia before the French could reach the field in force, and that her soldiers, flushed by successes over the Italians, would hurl their new foes out of the country, or leave them in its soil. As before, Italy was to be the grave of the French,—only that their grave was to be dug at the very beginning of the war, instead of being made, as in other days, at its close. But it was otherwise ordered. The Austrians lost the advantage which certainly was theirs at the opening of the contest, and, that lost, disaster after disaster befell their arms, until the "crowning mercy" of Solferino freed Italy from their rule, if it did not entirely banish them from her land. That Solferino was not so great a victory to the Allies as it was claimed to be at the time, that it resembled less Austerlitz than Wagram, may be admitted, and yet its importance remain unquestioned; for its decision gained for Italy the only thing that it was necessary she should have in order to work out her own salvation. Henceforth, she was not to tremble at the mere touch of the hilt of the sword worn by the Viceroy at Milan, but was to have the chance, at least, of ordering her own destinies. If not thoroughly free, she was no longer utterly enslaved.

The peace of Villafranca surprised every one, from the Czar on the Neva to the gold-gatherers on the Sacramento. Strange as had been the doings—the world called them tricks—of Napoleon III., no man was prepared for that; and even now, though seventeen eventful months have rolled away since the first shock of it was experienced, the summer-day it was received seems more like one of those days we see in dreams than like a day of real life. Doubt, laughter, astonishment, and disgust followed each other through the minds of millions of men. If curses could kill, the man who had escaped the bombs of Orsini and the bullets of the Austrians would certainly have died in the month that followed the interview he had flogged his imperial brother into granting him. In America,—where we are always doing so much (on paper) for the cause of freedom, and for the deliverance of "oppressed nationalities" of the proper degrees and shades of whiteness, in the firm conviction that the free man is the better customer,—in America the reaction of opinion was overwhelming; and there were but few persons in the United States who would not have shouted over news that Henri Cinq was in Paris, and that the French Empire had a third time made way for the Kingdom of France. Time has not altogether removed the impression then created; for, if it has not justified the belief that the French Emperor had abandoned the Italian cause, it has convinced the world that he lost a noble opportunity to effect the destruction of Austria. There may be—most probably there are—facts yet unknown to the public, knowledge of which would partially justify the conduct of the victor toward the vanquished, in 1859; but, if we judge from what we know, which is all that any monarch can demand of the formers of opinion, Napoleon III. was guilty of a monstrous political and military blunder when he forced a truce upon Francis Joseph.

There is no evidence that any European power was about to interfere in behalf of Austria. Prussia, it is true, had taken a stern attitude, and showed a disposition to place herself at the head of those German States which were for beginning a march upon Paris at once, though M. le Maréchal Duc de Malakoff was ready with two hundred thousand men to receive them, and Paris itself was not the feeble place it had been in 1814 and 1815. It is altogether likely that Prussia was, as is usual with her at every European crisis, shamming. She had no interest in the maintenance of Austria's territorial integrity, and it was rather late in the day to assume that Berlin was affected by the mortifications of Vienna. Could the hearts of kings and the counsels of cabinets be known with that literal exactness which is so desirable in politics, and yet so unattainable, we should probably find that Prussia's apparent readiness to lead Germany was owing to her determination that German armies should be led nowhere to the assistance of Austria. England had just changed her Ministry, the Derby Cabinet giving way to Lord Palmerston's, which was recognized on all sides as a great gain to the cause of Italian independence; and Lord John Russell had written one of those crusty notes to the Prussian government for which he is so famous, and which was hardly less Italian in its sentiments than that in which, written in October last, he upheld the course of Garibaldi and Victor Emanuel. Russia had evinced no disposition to interfere in behalf of Austria, and perhaps the news of Magenta and Solferino was as agreeable to the dwellers in St. Petersburg and Moscow as it was to the citizens of New York and Boston. She was, indeed, believed to be backing France. Politically, so far as we can judge, there was no cause or occasion for the throwing up of the cards by the French, after Solferino.

Nor were the military reasons for the cessation of warlike operations of a nature to convince men of their irresistible weightiness. A great deal was said about the strength of "the Quadrilateral," and of the impregnability of the position which it formed,—as if there ever had existed a military position which could not be carried or turned, or out of which its defenders could not be bought, or forced, or starved! The strength of the Quadrilateral was as well known to the Emperor in January as it was in July, and he must have counted its powers of resistance before he resolved upon war. Victory he had organized, like Carnot; and victory in Lombardy was sure to take his army to the Mincio. Verona and Venetia were to be the complement of Milan. Then there was the story that he frightened the Kaiser into giving his consent to the truce by proving to him that the fortresses upon which he relied were not in good defensible condition, his commissaries having placed the funds in their pockets that should have been devoted to the purchase of stores,—a story that wears a very probable air, in view of the discovery subsequently made of the malversations of some of the highest persons at Vienna, and which had much to do with the suicide of the Minister of Finance. It is known, too, that the force which Napoleon III. had assembled in the Adriatic was very strong, and could have been so used as to have promoted an Hungarian insurrection in a sense not at all pleasant to the Austrians, to have attacked Dalmatia and Istria, and to have aided in the deliverance of Venice. That force was largely naval in its character, and the French navy was burning to distinguish itself in a war that had been so productive of glory to the sister-service: it would have had a Magenta and a Palestro of its own, won where the Dorias and the Pisani had struggled for fame and their countries' ascendency. Instead of the Quadrilateral being a bar to the French, it would have been a trap to the Austrians, who would have been taken there after the manner in which Napoleon I. took their predecessors at Ulm. After the war was over, it came out that Verona was not even half armed.

If Napoleon III. was bent upon carrying that imitation of his uncle, of which he is so fond, to the extent of granting a magnanimous peace to a crushed foe, he may be said to have caricatured that which he sought to imitate. The first Napoleon's magnanimity after Austerlitz has been attributed to the craft of the beaten party,—he allowing the Russians to escape when they had extricated themselves from the false position in which their master's folly had caused them to be placed. But the third Napoleon did allow the Austrians to avoid the consequences of their defeat, and so disappointed Italy and the world. He was magnanimous, and most astonishing to the minds of men was his magnanimity. Most people called it stupidity, and strange stories were told of his nervous system having been shattered by the sights and sounds of those slaughter-fields which he had planned and fought and won!

We live rapidly in this age, when nations are breaking up all around us, when unions are dissolving, when dynasties disappear before the light like ghosts at cock-crowing, and when emperors and kings rely upon universal suffrage, once so terrible a bugbear in their eyes, for the titles to their crowns. Opinion is rapidly formed, and is as rapidly dismissed. We may be as much astonished now at the peace of Villafranca as we were on the day when first it was announced, and while looking upon it only as a piece of diplomacy intended to put an end to a contest costly in blood and gold; but we cannot say, as it was common then to say, that the war which it closed has decided nothing. That war established the freedom and nationality of Italy, and the peace so much condemned was the means of demonstrating to the world the existence of an Italian People. How far the French Emperor was self-deceived, and to what extent he believed in the practicability of the arrangements made at Villafranca and Zurich, are inscrutable mysteries. Que sais-je? might be the form of his own answer, were any one entitled to question him concerning his own opinion on his own acts of 1859. But of the effects of his attack on Austria there can be no doubt. That Lorraines and Bourbons have ceased to reign in Italy,—that the Kingdom of Victor Emanuel has increased from six millions of people to twenty-four millions,—that the same constitutional monarch who ruled at Turin is now acknowledged in Milan, in Ancona, in Florence, in Naples, and in Palermo, being King of Lombards, and Tuscans, and Romans, and Neapolitans, and Sicilians,—and that the Austrians are no longer the rulers of the Peninsula,—these things are all due to the conduct of the French Emperor. Had the peace of Europe not been broken by France, the Austrian power in Italy would have been unbroken at this moment, and Naples have been still under the dominion of that mad tyrant whose supreme delight it was to offend the moral sense of the world, and who found even in the remonstrances of his brother-despots occasion for increasing the weight of the chains of his victims, and of adding to the intensity and the exquisiteness of their tortures.

These solid advantages to Italy, this freedom of hers from domestic despotism and foreign control, are the fruits of French intervention; and they could have been obtained in no other way. There was no nation but France to which Italy could look for aid, and to France she did not look in vain. Of the motives of her ally it would be idle to speak, as there is no occasion to go beyond consequences; and those consequences are just as good as if the French Emperor were as pure-minded and unselfish as the most perfect of those paladins of romance who went about redressing one class of wrongs by the creation of another. What Italy desired, what alone she needed, was freedom from foreign intervention; and that she got through the interposition of French armies, and that she could have got from no other human source. This single fact is an all-sufficient answer to the myriads of sneers that were called forth by the failure of Napoleon III. to redeem his pledge to make Italy free from the Alps to the Adriatic. What other potentate did anything for that country in 1859, or has done anything for it since that memorable year? Neither prince nor people, leaving Napoleon III. and the French aside, has so much as lifted a hand to promote the regeneration of Italy. America has enough to do in the way of attending to domestic slavery, without concerning herself about the freedom of foreigners; and she has given the Italians her—sympathies, which are of as much real worth to her as would be a treatise on the Resolutions of '98 to a man who should happen to tumble into the Niagara, with the Falls close upon him. England would have had Italy submit to that Austrian rule which had been established over her by English influence in 1814, when even the perverse, pig-headed Francis II. could see sound objections to it; and all because want of submission on her part would disturb the equilibrium of Europe, and might tend to the aggrandizement of France,—two things which she by no means desired to see happen. Russia, like America, gave Italy her sympathies; but she had a better excuse than we had for being prudent, as her monarch was engaged in planning at least the freedom of the serfs. If the Russians desired the overthrow of the Austrians, it was not because they loved the Italians, but from hatred of their oppressors; and that hatred had its origin in the refusal of Austria to join Russia when she was so hard pressed by France and England, Turkey and Piedmont. Prussia, us we have seen, sided with Austria; and though it is impossible to believe in her sincerity, her moral power, so far as it went, was adverse to the Italian cause. The other European nations were of no account, having no will of their own, and being influenced only by the action of the members of the Pentarchy. Save France, Italy had no friend possessed of the disposition and the ability to afford her that assistance without which she must soon have become in name, as she was fast becoming in fact, a mere collection of Austrian provinces.

We dwell upon those well-known facts because an opinion seems to prevail that no nation or government shall interfere for the protection of the weak against the strong, unless it shall be able to show that it is perfect itself, and that its intentions are of the most unselfish nature. Peoples are to be delivered from oppression only as the Israelites were delivered, by the direct and immediate interposition of Heaven in human affairs; and the delivering agent must be as high-minded and generous as Moses, who was allowed merely to gaze upon the Promised Land. Men who thus reason about human action, and the motives of actors on the great stage of life, must have read history to very little purpose, and have observed the making of history round about them to no purpose at all. The instruments of Providence are seldom perfect men, and the broad light in which they live brings out their faults in full force. Napoleon III. is not above the average morality of his time; and if he had been so, probably he never would have become Emperor of the French. But in this respect differs he much from those men who have wrought great things for the world, and whom the world is content to reverence? Robert Bruce, who saved Scotland from the misery that befell Ireland; Henry IV., who renewed the life of France; Maurice of Saxony, who prevented the Reformation from proving a stupendous failure; and William III., without whose aid the Constitutionalists of England must have gone down before the Stuarts: not one of these men was perfect; and yet what losses the world would have experienced, if they had never lived, or had failed in their great labors! It has been claimed for Gustavus Adolphus that he was the only pure conqueror that ever lived; but his purity may safely be placed to the account of the balls of Lützen: he was not left unto temptation. We should extend to Napoleon III. the same charity that we extend to men who have long been historical characters, and judge him by his actions and their results, and not criticise him by the canons of faction.

Italy was delivered by the war of 1859, and that war was terminated by the peace of Villafranca. For the moment, it seemed as if there were to be a restoration of the petty princes who had fled from Tuscany and Parma and Modena, and that an Italian Confederation had been resolved upon, in which the noxious influences of Austria and Naples and Papal Rome should stifle the pure principles upheld by Sardinia. A few months sufficed to show that these evils existed in apprehension only. The Italians, by the withdrawal of the French, were thrown upon their own resources, and by their conduct they dissipated the belief that they were unequal to the emergency. Had the war been continued, had Venetia been conquered, and had the last of the Austrians been driven beyond the Isonzo, Italy would have been the prize of French valor and genius; for all this must have been done on the instant, and before the Italians, less the Sardinians, could have taken an effective part in the war. The most devoted believer in the patriotism and bravery of the Italians must perforce admit that they had little to do with the war of 1859. Leaving the Sardinians aside, the Italian element in that contest was scarcely appreciable. This we say without meaning any reflection on the Italians. There were many good reasons why they should remain quiet. In common with the rest of the world, even France herself, the war took them by surprise, Austria bringing it on weeks, if not months, before Napoleon III. had meant it to begin. They, too, had seen their country so often abused by those who had conquered there, that they had some excuse for waiting the progress of events. The most industrious and studied efforts had been made to convince them that the object of the ruler of France was the realization of another Napoleonic idea, namely, the restoration of that Kingdom of Italy which perished in 1814; and though the rule of Napoleon I. was the best that Italy had known for three hundred years, it was hardly worth while to enter upon a doubtful fight for its restoration. Hence the majority of the people of Italy were not so active as they might have been; and their coolness is said to have had much effect on the mind of the victor, who must have thought that the people he had come to deliver were taking things very easily, and who could not have felt much flattered, when assured, in the politest terms, that those people believed him to be a selfish liar. His work, therefore, was but partially performed. Instead of halting on the shores of the historical Adriatic, his armies drew up on the banks of the classic Mincius. Trance had done her part; let Italy do the rest, if it were to be done. Thus abdicating his original purpose, and probably feeling much as William III. felt when the English were so slow in joining him that he talked of returning to his ships, Napoleon III. gave up his power to dictate the future of Italy. He had no right, thereafter, to say that the Bourbons should continue to govern in the Two Sicilies, that the Dukes should be restored to their Duchies, and that Venetia should be guarantied to Austria. He felt this, as the terms of the treaties that were made very clearly show; for he was careful to abstain from pledging himself to anything of a definite character. If he had perfected his original work, and been possessed of the power to effect a new settlement of Italy, he would, we presume, have stipulated for the continuance of the Bourbon power in the southern portion of the Peninsula and in Sicily; while the much talked-of purpose of creating an Italian Kingdom or Duchy for Prince Napoleon would probably have been carried out, and that gentleman have been established on the Arno. To the Sardinian monarchy would have been assigned the spoils taken from Austria,—Venice and Lombardy. The change in his political plans was the consequence of the change in his military plan,—though either change may be pronounced the cause or the effect, according to the point from which the observer views the entire series of transactions. Thus the peace of 1859 may be considered to have been a benefit to Italy, just as the war it terminated had been. The war freed her from Austrian dominion; the peace, from its character, and from the circumstances under which it was made, left her people at liberty to act as they pleased in the fair field that had been won for their exertions by the skill and courage of the French and Sardinian armies.

The destinies of Italy being placed in her own hands, the Italians were as prompt as politic considerations would allow them to be in promoting the unification of their country. Central Italy soon became a part of the constitutional monarchy which had grown up under the shadow of the Alps. This could not have happened, if Napoleon III. had chosen to veto the proceedings of the Italians, which had virtually nullified one of his purposes. That he consented to this large addition to the power of Sardinia on the condition of receiving Savoy and Nice is by no means unlikely; and we do not think that Victor Emanuel was either unwise or wanting in patriotism in parting with those countries for the benefit of Italy. Taking advantage of the troubles in Sicily, Garibaldi led a small expedition to that island, which there landed, and began those operations which had their appropriate termination, in five months, in the addition of all the territories of the wretched Francis II., except Gaëta, to the dominions of the Sardinian King. The importance of Garibaldi's undertaking it is quite impossible to overrate; but of what account could it have been, if the Austrians had stood to Italy in the same position that they held at the opening of 1859? Of none at all. Garibaldi is preeminently a man of sense, and he would never have thought of moving against Francis II., if Francis Joseph had been at liberty to assist that scandalous caricature of kings. Or, if he had been tempted to enter upon the project, he would have been "snuffed out" as easily as was Murat, when, in 1815, he sought to recover the Neapolitan throne. If Austrian ships had not prevented him from landing in Sicily, Austrian troops would have destroyed him in that island. Nay, it is but reasonable to believe that Bomba's navy and army would have been amply sufficient to do their master's work. That his men were not wanting in courage and conduct has been proved by their deeds since the tyrant left his capital, on the Volturno and around Capua and at Gaëta. It was not want of bravery that led to their failure in Sicily, but the belief that their employer's system had failed, and that he and they were given up to the vengeance of Italy, supposing the Italians to be strong enough to do justice on them. They took courage when European circumstances led them to conclude that Austria would be advised, at the Warsaw Conference, to use her forces for the restoration of the old order of things in Italy, and receive the support of Russia and Prussia. To deserve such aid from the North, the Neapolitan army struggled hard, but in vain. The Absolutist cause was lost in Naples when the sovereigns met in the Polish capital; and though, forty years earlier, this would have been held an additional reason for the entrance of the barbarians into Italy, the successes of the patriots must have had their proper weight with the Prince Regent of Prussia and the Czar, who are understood to have been as deaf as adders to the charming of their young brother from Vienna. What was resolved upon at Warsaw the world has no positive means of knowing, and but little reliance is to be placed upon the rumors that have been so abundant; but, as Austria has not moved against the Italians, and as the instructions to her new commander-in-chief in Venetia (Von Benedek) are reported to be strong on the point of non-intervention, we are at liberty to infer that she accepts all that has been done as accomplished facts, and means to stand upon the defensive, in the hope of gaining moral support by her moderation in being outwardly content with less than half the spoil which was given to her at the expense of Italy, when Europe was "settled," for the time, four-and-forty years ago.

The action of the Sardinian government, in sending its soldiers against the legal banditti whom Lamoricière had sought to drill into the semblance of an army, which was a direct attack on the Pope, and the subsequent employment of those soldiers, and of the Sardinian fleet, against the forces of Francis II., were model pieces of statesmanship, and worthy of the great man whose name and fame have become indissolubly associated with the redemption of Italy. The decision thus to act could not have been taken without the consent of Napoleon III. having first been had and obtained; and there is probably much truth in the story, that, when Lamoricière had the coolness to threaten his conquerors with the vengeance of the Emperor, they told him, half-laughingly, that, they had planned the campaign with that illustrious personage at Chambéry, which must have convinced him that the cause of the Keys had nothing to expect from France beyond the sort of police aid which General Goyon was affording to it in the name of his master. Lamoricière also expected help from Austria, and professed to be able to number the few days at the expiration of which the white-coats would be at Alessandria, which would have been a diversion in his favor, that, had it been made, must have saved him from the mortification of surrendering to men whom he affected to despise, but who brought him and his army under the yoke. The faith of the commander of the rabble of the Faith in Austrian assistance was a Viennese inspiration, and was meant to induce him to resist to the last. Nor was it altogether false; for the Kaiser and Count Rechberg appear to have believed that they could induce the governments of Russia and Prussia to support them in a crusade in behalf of Rome and Naples, which was to rely upon Lutherans and supporters of the Eastern Church for the salvation of the Western Church and its worst members. The first interview between Rechberg and Gortschakoff, if we can believe a despatch from Warsaw, led quickly to a quarrel, which must have taken place not long after their chiefs, the Kaiser and the Czar, had been locked in each other's arms at the railway-station. It is but just to the Austrians to state, that they probably had received from St. Petersburg some promises of assistance, which Alexander found himself unable to redeem, so determined was Russian opinion in its expression of aversion to Austria when its organs began to suspect that the old game was to be renewed, and that Alexander contemplated doing in 1861 what Nicholas had done in 1849,—to step between Francis Joseph and humiliation, perhaps destruction. If it be true that the Czar has ordered all Russians to leave Italy, that piece of pitiful spite would show how he hates the Italian cause, and also that it is not in his power seriously to retard its progress at present. Instead of ordering Russians from Italy, he would send them to that country in great masses, could he have his way in directing the foreign policy of his empire.

The entire success of Victor Emanuel and Garibaldi has brought Italian matters to a crisis. Carrying out the policy of Cavour, the King and the Soldier have all but completed the unification of their country, at the very time when the United States are threatened with disunion. The Kingdom of Italy exists at this time, virtually, if not in terms, and contains about twenty-four million people. It comprises the original territories of Victor Emanuel, minus Savoy and Nice, the Two Sicilies, Lombardy, almost the whole of the Papal States, and Tuscany, Parma, and Modena. If we except the fragment of his old possessions yet held by the Pope, and the Austrian hold on Venetia, all Italy now acknowledges the rule of Victor Emanuel, who is to meet an Italian Parliament in January, 1861. No political change of our century has been more remarkable than this, whether we look to its extent, or have regard to the agencies by which it has been brought about. Two years ago, there was more reason to believe that the King of Sardinia would be an exile than that the Bourbon King of Naples would be on his travels. No man would have dared to prophesy that the former would be reigning over seven-eighths of the Italians, while the latter should be reduced to one town, garrisoned by foreign mercenaries. That these changes should be wrought by universal suffrage, had it been predicted, would have been thought too much to be related as a dream. Yet it is the voice of the Italian People, speaking under a suffrage-system apparently more liberal than ever has been known in America, which has accomplished all that has been done since the summer of 1859 in the Peninsula and in Sicily. It was because Napoleon III. would not place himself in opposition to the opinion of the people of Central Italy, that the petty monarchs of that country were not restored to their thrones, and that they became subjects of Victor Emanuel; and the voting in Sicily and Naples has confirmed the decision of arms, and made it imperative on the reactionists to attack the people, should their policy lead them to seek a reversal of the decrees of 1860. The new monarch of the Italians expressly bases his title to reign on the will of the people, expressed through the exercise of the least restricted mode of voting that ever has been known among men; and the people of Southern Italy never could have had the opportunity to vote their crown to him, if Garibaldi had not first freed them from the savage tyranny of Francis II.; and Garibaldi himself could not have acted for their deliverance, if Italy had not previously been delivered from the Austrians by France. Thus we have the French Emperor, designated as a parvenu both in England and America, and owing his power to his name,—the democrat Garibaldi, whose power is from his deeds, and whose income is not equal to that of an Irish laborer in the United States,—the rich and noble Cavour, whose weekly revenues would suffice to purchase the fee-simple of Garibaldi's island-farm,—the King of Sardinia, representing a race that was renowned before the Normans reigned in England,—and the masses of the Italian people,—all acting together for the redemption of a country which needs only justice to enable it to assume, as near as modern circumstances will permit, its old importance in the world's scale. That there should have been such a concurrence of foreign friendship, democratic patriotism, royal sagacity, aristocratic talent, and popular good sense, for Italy's benefit, must help to strengthen the belief that the Italians are indeed about to become a new Power in Europe, and in the world, and that their country is no more to be rated as a mere "geographical expression."

The Italian crisis is a European crisis; for matters have now reached a pass in which the foreigner must have something to say of Italy's future: and it will be well for the general peace, if he shall use only the words of justice, in giving his decision; for his right to speak at all in the premises is derived only from an act of usurpation, long acquiescence in which has clothed it with a certain show of legality. In all that the Italians have thus far done, since the conclusion of the with Austria, they have not necessarily been brought into conflict with any foreign nation, though they may have terribly offended those legitimate sovereigns who have been accustomed either to give law to Europe or to see public opinion defer considerably to their will. Not a single acquisition thus far made by Victor Emmanuel can be said to have proceeded from any act at which Europe could complain with justice. Lombardy was given to him by his ally of France, whose prize it was, and who had an undid dispose of it in a most righteous manner. That Central Italy was acquired by him was due partly to the cowardice of the old rulers thereof, and partly to intelligence, activity, and patriotism of its people. No foreign rights, conventional or otherwise, were assailed or disregarded, when it passed under the Sardinian sceptre. When go much of the Pope's temporal possessions were taken from him by the people themselves, who had become weary of the worst system of misgovernment known to the west of Bokhara, no doubt many pious Catholics were shocked; but, if they knew anything of the history of the Papal temporal rule and power, they could not complain at what was done, on the score of illegality; and the deeds of Cialdini and Fanti and Persano were performed against foreigners who had intruded themselves into Italy, and who were employed to uphold the political supremacy of a few persons at Rome, while they had no more connection with the religion of the ancient Church than they had with that of Thibet. The King of the Two Sicilies, by his tyranny, and by his persistence in the offensive course of his house, had become an outlaw, as it were, and every Italian at least was fairly authorized to attack him; and in doing so he could not be said to assail European order, nor could any European power send assistance to a monarch who had refused to listen even to the remonstrances of Austria against his cruelties. The stanchest of English conservatives, while they said they must regard Garibaldi as a freebooter, did not hesitate to express the warmest wishes for the freebooter's success. When the Sardinians marched to Garibaldi's aid, they did so in the interest of order, which has been promptly restored to Southern Italy through their energetic course.

Thus far, that which has been done in Italy has been of a local character; but nothing more can be done, in the way of completing the independence and unity of Italy, without bringing the patriots into conflict with Austria. That power still is supreme in Venetia, which is one of the best portions of Italy, and which can be held by no foreign sovereign without endangering the whole Peninsula. Were there no other reason for seeking to redeem Venetia from Austrian oppression, the safety of the rest of Italy would demand that that redemption should be accomplished. Venetia, as she now is, is a place of arms for the chief, we may say the only, foreign enemy that the Italian Kingdom has or can have; and that enemy has a deep and a peculiar interest in seeking occasion to bring about the new kingdom's destruction. If Austria should succeed in conciliating the Hungarians,—which she might do, if she were to act justly toward them,—and a change of government were to take place in France,—and changes in the French government have occurred so often since 1789 as not to be improbable now,—she would, through possession of Venetia, be enabled to commence a new Italian war with the chances of success greatly in her favor. The Italians, therefore, are compelled to round and complete their work, in getting possession of Venetia, by that desire for safety and for self-preservation which actuates all men and all communities. A nobler feeling, too, moves them. They feel the obligation that exists to extend to the Venetians that freedom which is now enjoyed by all Italians except the Venetians and a small portion of the Pope's subjects. They would be recreant to the dictates of duty, and disregardful of those of honor, were they to leave Venetia in the hands of Austria. What their feelings on this momentous subject are may be gathered from Garibaldi's address to his companions-in-arms, when, having completed his immediate work, he withdrew from active service for the time, in November last. His words point as directly to an attack on Venetia as his landing in Sicily indicated his intention to overthrow Francis II.; and that attack, according to the Patriot Soldier, is to be made under the lead of the Patriot King, Victor Emanuel. A million of Italians are called for, that it may be successfully made; and that number ought to be raised, if so vast a host shall be found necessary to perfect the independence of Italy. After what we have seen done by the Italians, we should not distrust their power to do even more, if no delay should be permitted, and full advantage be taken of the spirit of enthusiastic patriotism which now animates them. That Garibaldi means no delay is proved by his naming next March as the date for the renewal of the mighty crusade in the course of which already such miracles have been wrought.

That Italy, as she stands to-day, would be found more than the equal of Austria, no doubt can be felt by any one who is acquainted with the condition of the two powers. Italy would enter upon a contest with Austria under circumstances of peculiar advantage. She would have so decided a naval superiority, that the Austrian flag would disappear from the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, and she would be able to operate powerfully from the sea against Venice. It is a military axiom, that, wherever there is a sea-side, there is a weak side; and Venetia presents this to an assailing force in quite a striking manner. Command of the Adriatic and the neighboring waters would enable the Italians to threaten many points of the Austrian territory, which would require to be watched by large collections of soldiers; and aid could be sent to the Hungarians, should they rise, by the way of Fiume. Italy could raise a larger army to attack Venetia than Austria could employ for its defence, with Hungary on the eve of revolution, Bohemia discontented, Croatia not the loyal land it was in '48, and even the Tyrol no longer a model of subserviency to the Imperial House. The Italians are at any time the equals of the Austrians as soldiers, and at this time their minds are in an exalted state, under the dominion of which they would be found superior to any men who could be brought against them, if well led; and among the Imperial commanders there is no man, unless Von Benedek be an exception, who is to be named with the generals who have led the way in the work we have seen done since last spring. In a military sense, and in a moral sense, Italy is the superior of the beaten, bankrupt monarchy of Austria, and capable of wresting Venetia from the intrusive race, which holds it as much in defiance of common sense as of common right.

But would Italy be permitted to settle her quarrel with her old oppressor without foreign intervention? We fear that she would not. Venetia is held by Austria in virtue of the Vienna settlement of Europe, in the first place, and then under the treaty that followed the war of 1859. Some English statesmen would appear to be of opinion that Venetia must remain among the possessions of Austria, without reference to the interests of Italy, the party most concerned in the business. In his first note to Sir James Hudson, British Minister at Turin, which note was to be read to Count Cavour, Lord John Russell, Foreign Secretary, writes more like an Austrian than an Englishman, going even to the astounding length of declaring that a war to defend her right to Venetia would be on Austria's part a patriotic war,—such a war, we presume the Honorable Secretary of State must have meant, as Wallace waged against Edward I., or that which the first William of Orange carried on against Philip II.! Lord Palmerston seems inclined to indorse his colleague's views: for he referred directly to this very note in terms of approbation, in the speech which he made at the dinner of the "Worshipful Company of Salters," on the 14th of November. It is true, that, in a later note from Lord John Russell to Sir James Hudson, extreme ground in favor of what had been done in Naples by the Sardinians is taken, and sustained with eminent ability; and in the speech of Lord Palmerston referred to, the object of the first note was said to be the prevention of a rash course that "might have blighted all the best hopes of Italian freedom." We do not for a moment suppose that the English people would ever allow their government to do anything to help Austria to maintain possession of Venetia; but the relations between Austria and England are of old date, and an opinion prevails in the latter country that the former should be kept strong, in order that she may be preserved as a counterpoise, on the one side to Russia, and on the other to France. England has a difficult part to play, and her course, or rather that of her government, sometimes makes considerable demand on the charitable construction of the world; but her people are sound, and for a long series of years their weight has been felt on the right side of European contests. The Italian cause is popular with all classes of Englishmen, and their country will never do anything to the prejudice of that cause. But it may refuse aid at a time when such aid shall be much needed, and when even France may stand aloof, and refrain from finishing the business which she commenced.

There is said to be an opinion growing up in France that Italy may be made too strong for the good of her friend and ally. A new nation of twenty-seven million souls—which would be Italy's strength, should Rome and Venetia be gained for her—might become a potent enemy even to one of its chief creators; and the taking of Savoy and Nice has caused ill-feeling between the two countries, in which Garibaldi heartily shares. Napoleon III. might be depended upon, himself, to support Italy hereafter against any foreign enemy, but it is by no means clear that France would support him in such a course; and he must defer to the opinion of his subjects to a considerable extent, despotic though his power is supposed to be. It is opinion, in the last resort, that governs every where,—under an absolute monarchy quite as determinedly as under a liberal polity like ours or England's. There is a large party in France, composed of the most incongruous materials, which has the profoundest interest in misrepresenting the policy of the Imperial government, and which is full of men of culture and intellect,—men whose labors, half-performed though they are, must have considerable effect on the French mind. The first Napoleon had the ground honeycombed under him by his enemies, who could not be suppressed, nor their labors be made to cease, even by his stern system of repression. It may be so with the present Emperor, who knows that one false step might upset his dynasty as utterly as it was twice over-thrown by the armies of combined Europe. What was then done by the lions and the eagles might now be done by the moles. The worms that gnawed through the Dutch dykes did Holland more damage than she experienced from the armies of Louis XIV. Let the French mind become possessed with the idea that the Emperor is helping Italy at the expense of France, and we may see a third Restoration in that country, or even a third Republic. The elder Bourbons were driven out because they were as a monument in Paris to Leipzig and Vittoria and Waterloo, erected by the victors on those fatal fields. The Orléans dynasty broke down because it had become an article in the belief of most Frenchmen that it was disgracing France by the corruption of its domestic policy and the subserviency of its foreign policy. Napoleon III. could no more sustain himself against the belief that he was using France for the benefit of Italy than the King of the French could sustain himself against the conviction that he was abusing the country he ruled over for the advancement of his family. He has already offended the Catholic clergy by what he has done for Italy, which they regard as having been done against their Church; and as they helped to make him, so they may be able to unmake him. To satisfy grumblers, he took Savoy and Nice. For some time past, rumor has been busy in attributing to him the design of demanding the island of Sardinia. If he should ask for Sardinia, and receive it, might he not ask also for Sicily, the country of which he offered to become King in 1848, and did not receive one vote, an incident that may still weigh upon the imperial heart, no man ever forgetting a contemptuous slight? If he should make these demands, or either of them, would the other European Powers permit the Italians to comply with them? These are questions not to be answered hurriedly, but they closely concern the Italian question, a solution of which must soon be had, for the world's peace.

The third act of the drama approaches, and 1861 may be a more important year to Italy than was either 1859 or 1860. The successful antagonist of Austria she can be; but could she, without foreign aid, withstand an alliance that should be formed against her in the name of order, while her former ally should remain quiet and refuse to take any part in the war? Austria, it has been intimated, might be induced to sell Venetia to Italy, and this is possible, though such a settlement of the question in dispute would be an extraordinary confession of weakness on the part of the aristocratical military monarchy of the Lorraines, and a proceeding of which it would be more ashamed than it would be even of a generous action.

* * * * *

A VISIT TO THE ASYLUM FOR AGED AND DECAYED PUNSTERS.

Having just returned from a visit to this admirable Institution in company with a friend who is one of the Directors, we propose giving a short account of what we saw and heard. The great success of the Asylum for Idiots and Feeble-minded Youth, several of the scholars from which have reached considerable distinction, one of them being connected with a leading Daily Paper in this city, and others having served in the State and National Legislatures, was the motive which led to the foundation of this excellent Charity. Our late distinguished townsman, Noah Dow, Esquire, as is welt known, bequeathed a large portion of his fortune to this establishment,—"being thereto moved," as his will expressed it, "by the desire of N. Dowing some publick Institution for the benefit of Mankind." Being consulted as to the Rules of the Institution and the selection of a Superintendent, he replied, that "all Boards must construct their own Platforms of operation. Let them select anyhow and he should be pleased." N.E. Howe, Esq., was chosen in compliance with this delicate suggestion.

The Charter provides for the support of "One hundred aged and decayed Gentlemen-Punsters." On inquiry if there was no provision for females, my friend called my attention to this remarkable psychological fact, namely:—

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FEMALE PUNSTER.

This remark struck me forcibly, and on reflection I found that I never knew nor heard of one, though I have once or twice heard a woman make a single detached pun, as I have known a hen to crow.

On arriving at the south gate of the Asylum grounds, I was about to ring, but my friend held my arm and begged me to rap with my stick, which I did. An old man with a very comical face presently opened the gate and put out his head.

"So you prefer Cane to A bell, do you?" he said,—and began chuckling and coughing at a great rate.

My friend winked at me.

"You're here still, Old Joe, I see," he said to the old man.

"Yes, yes,—and it's very odd, considering how often I've bolted, nights."

He then threw open the double gates for us to ride through.

"Now," said the old man, as he pulled the gates after us, "you've had a long journey."

"Why, how is that, Old Joe?" said my friend.

"Don't you see?" he answered; "there's the East hinges on one side of the gate, and there's the West hinges_ on t'other side,—haw! haw! haw!"

We had no sooner got into the yard than a feeble little gentleman, with a remarkably bright eye, came up to us, looking very seriously, as if something had happened.

"The town has entered a complaint against the Asylum as a gambling establishment," he said to my friend, the Director.

"What do you mean?" said my friend.

"Why, they complain that there's a lot o' rye on the premises," he answered, pointing to a field of that grain,—and hobbled away, his shoulders shaking with laughter, as he went.

On entering the main building, we saw the Rules and Regulations for the Asylum conspicuously posted up. I made a few extracts which may be interesting.

Sect. I. OF VERBAL EXERCISES.

5. Each Inmate shall be permitted to make Puns freely from eight in the morning until ten at night, except during Service in the Chapel and Grace before Meals.

6. At ten o'clock the gas will be turned off, and no further Puns, Conundrums, or other play on words, will be allowed to be uttered, or to be uttered aloud.

9. Inmates who have lost their faculties and cannot any longer make Puns shall be permitted to repeat such as may be selected for them by the Chaplain out of the work of Mr. Joseph Miller.

10. Violent and unmanageable Punsters, who interrupt others when engaged in conversation, with Puns or attempts at the same, shall be deprived of their Joseph Millers, and, if necessary, placed in solitary confinement.

Sect. III. OF DEPORTMENT AT MEALS.

4. No Inmate shall make any Pun, or attempt at the same, until the Blessing has been asked and the company are decently seated.

7. Certain Puns having been placed on the Index Expurgatorius of the Institution, no Inmate shall be allowed to utter them, on pain of being debarred the perusal of Punch and Vanity Fair, and, if repeated, deprived of his Joseph Miller.

Among these are the following:—

Allusions to Attic salt, when asked to pass the salt-cellar.

Remarks on the Inmates being mustered, etc., etc.

Associating baked beans with the _bene_factors of the Institution.

Saying that beef-eating is befitting, etc., etc.

The following are also prohibited, excepting to such Inmates as may have lost their faculties and cannot any longer make Puns of their own:—

"——your own hair or a wig"; "it will be long enough, "etc., etc.; "little of its age," etc., etc.;—also, playing upon the following words: _hos_pital; mayor; pun; pitied; bread; sauce, etc., etc., etc. See INDEX EXPURGATORIUS, printed for use of Inmates.

The subjoined Conundrum is not allowed:—Why is Hasty Pudding like the Prince? Because it comes attended by its sweet;—nor this variation to it, to wit: Because the 'lasses runs after it.

The Superintendent, who went round with us, had been a noted punster in his time, and well known in the business-world, but lost his customers by making too free with their names,—as in the famous story he set afloat in '29 of four Jerries attaching to the names of a noted Judge, an eminent Lawyer, the Secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions, and the well-known Landlord at Springfield. One of the four Jerries, he added, was of gigantic magnitude. The play on words was brought out by an accidental remark of Solomons, the well-known Banker. "Capital punishment!" the Jew was overheard saying, with reference to the guilty parties. He was understood as saying, A capital pun is meant, which led to an investigation and the relief of the greatly excited public mind.

The Superintendent showed some of his old tendencies, as he went round with us.

"Do you know"—he broke out all at once—"why they don't take steppes in
Tartary for establishing Insane Hospitals?"

We both confessed ignorance.

"Because there are nomad people to be found there," he said, with a dignified smile.

He proceeded to introduce us to different Inmates. The first was a middle-aged, scholarly man, who was seated at a table with a Webster's Dictionary and a sheet of paper before him.

"Well, what luck to-day, Mr. Mowzer?" said the Superintendent.

"Three or four only," said Mr. Mowzer. "Will you hear 'em now,—now I'm here?"

We all nodded.

"Don't you see Webster ers in the words cent_er_ and theat_er_?

"If he spells leather lether, and feather fether, isn't there danger that he'll give us a bad spell of weather?

"Besides, Webster is a resurrectionist; he does not allow u to rest quietly in the mould.

"And again, because Mr. Worcester inserts an illustration in his text, is that any reason why Mr. Webster's publishers should hitch one on in their appendix? It's what I call a Conntect-a-cut trick.

"Why is his way of spelling like the floor of an oven? Because it is under bread.

"Mowzer!" said the Superintendent,—"that word is on the Index!"

"I forgot," said Mr. Mowzer;—"please don't deprive me of Vanity Fair, this one time, Sir.

"These are all, this morning. Good day, Gentlemen. Then to the
Superintendent,—Add you, Sir!"

The next Inmate was a semi-idiotic-looking old man. He had a heap of block-letters before him, and, as we came up, he pointed, without saying a word, to the arrangements he had made with them on the table. They were evidently anagrams, and had the merit of transposing the letters of the words employed without addition or subtraction. Here are a few of them:—

TIMES. SMITE! POST. STOP!

TRIBUNE. TRUE NIB. WORLD. DR. OWL.

ADVERTISER. (RES VERI DAT. (IS TRUE. READ!

ALLOPATHY. ALL O' TH' PAY. HOMEOPATHY. O, THE—! O! O, MY! PAH!

The mention of several new York papers led to two or three questions. Thus: Whether the Editor of the Tribune was H.G. really? If the complexion of his politics were not accounted for by his being an eager person himself? Whether Wendell Fillips were not a reduced copy of John Knocks? Whether a New York Feuilletoniste is not the same thing as a Fellow down East?

At this time a plausible-looking, bald-headed man joined us, evidently waiting to take a part in the conversation.

"Good morning, Mr. Riggles," said the Superintendent. "Anything fresh this morning? Any Conundrum?"

"I haven't looked at the cattle," he answered, dryly.

"Cattle? Why cattle?"

"Why, to see if there's any corn under 'em!" he said; and immediately asked, "Why is Douglas like the earth?"

We tried, but couldn't guess.

"Because he was flattened out at the polls!" said Mr. Riggles.

"A famous politician, formerly," said the Superintendent. "His grandfather was a seize-Hessian-ist in the Revolutionary War. By the way, I hear the freeze-oil doctrines don't go down at New Bedford."

The next Inmate looked as if be might have been a sailor formerly.

"Ask him what his calling was," said the Superintendent.

"Followed the sea," he replied to the question put by one of us. "Went as mate in a fishing-schooner."

"Why did you give it up?"

"Because I didn't like working for two mast-ers," he replied.

Presently we came upon a group of elderly persons, gathered about a venerable gentleman with flowing locks, who was propounding questions to a row of Inmates.

"Can any Inmate give me a motto for M. Berger?" he said.

Nobody responded for two or three minutes. At last one old man, whom I at once recognized as a Graduate of our University, (Anno 1800,) held up his hand.

"Rem a cue tetigit."

"Go to the head of the Class, Josselyn," said the venerable Patriarch.

The successful Inmate did as he was told, but in a very rough way, pushing against two or three of the Class.

"How is this?" said the Patriarch.

"You told me to go up jostlin'," he replied.

The old gentlemen who had been shoved about enjoyed the Pun too much to be angry.

Presently the Patriarch asked again,—

"Why was M. Berger authorized to go to the dances given to the Prince?"

The Class had to give up this, and he answered it himself:—

"Because every one of his carroms was a tick-it to the ball."

"Who collects the money to defray the expenses of the last campaign in
Italy?" asked the Patriarch.

Here again the Class failed.

"The war-cloud's rolling Dun," he answered.

"And what is mulled wine made with?"

Three or four voices exclaimed at once,——

"Sizzle-y Madeira!"

Here a servant entered, and said, "Luncheon-time." The old gentlemen, who have excellent appetites, dispersed at once, one of them politely asking us if we would not stop and have a bit of bread and a little mite of cheese.

"There is one thing I have forgotten to show you," said the Superintendent,—"the cell for the confinement of violent and unmanageable Punsters."

We were very curious to see it, particularly with reference to the alleged absence of every object upon which a play of words could possibly be made.

The Superintendent led us up some dark stairs to a corridor, then along a narrow passage, then down a broad flight of steps into another passage-way, and opened a large door which looked out on the main entrance.

"We have not seen the cell for the confinement of 'violent and unmanageable' Punsters," we both exclaimed.

"This is the sell!" he exclaimed, pointing to the outside prospect.

My friend, the Director, looked me in the face so good-naturedly that I had to laugh.

"We like to humor the Inmates," he said. "It has a bad effect, we find, on their health and spirits to disappoint them of their little pleasantries. Some of the jests to which we have listened are not new to me, though I dare say you may not have heard them often before. The same thing happens in general society,—with this additional disadvantage, that there is no punishment provided for 'violent and unmanageable' Punsters, as in our Institution."

We made our bow to the Superintendent and walked to the place where our carriage was waiting for us. On our way, an exceedingly decrepit old man moved slowly towards us, with a perfectly blank look on his face, but still appearing as if he wished to speak.

"Look!" said the Director,—"that is our Centenarian."

The ancient man crawled towards us, cocked one eye, with which he seemed to sec a little, up at us, and said,—

"Sarvant, young Gentlemen. Why is a—a—a—like a—a—a—? Give it up?
Because it's a—a—a—a—."

He smiled a pleasant smile, as if it were all plain enough.

"One hundred and seven last Christmas," said the Director. "He lost his answers about the age of ninety-eight. Of late years he puts his whole Conundrums in blank,—but they please him just as well."

We took our departure, much gratified and instructed by our visit, hoping to have some future opportunity of inspecting the Records of this excellent Charity and making extracts for the benefit of our Readers.

* * * * *

THE QUESTION OF THE HOUR.

Dean Swift, in a letter to Lord Bolingbroke, says that he does not "remember to have ever heard or seen one great genius who had long success in the ministry; and recollecting a great many in my memory and acquaintance, those who had the smoothest time were, at best, men of middling degree in understanding." However true this may be in the main,—and it undoubtedly is true that in ordinary times the speculative and innovating temper of an original mind is less safe than the patience of routine and persistence in precedent of a common-place one,—there are critical occasions to which intellect of the highest quality, character of the finest fibre, and a judgment that is inspired rather than confused by new and dangerous combinations of circumstances, are alone equal. Tactics and an acquaintance with the highest military authorities were adequate enough till they were confronted with General Bonaparte and the new order of things. If a great man struggling with the storms of fate be the sublimest spectacle, a mediocre man in the same position is surely the most pitiful. Deserted by his presence of mind, which, indeed, had never been anything but an absence of danger,—baffled by the inapplicability of his habitual principles of conduct, (if that may be called a principle, which, like the act of walking, is merely an unconscious application of the laws of gravity,) —helpless, irresolute, incapable of conceiving the flower Safety in the nettle Danger, much more of plucking it thence,—surely here, if anywhere, is an object of compassion. When such a one is a despot who has wrought his own destruction by obstinacy in a traditional evil policy, like Francis II. of Naples, our commiseration is outweighed by satisfaction that the ruin of the man is the safety of the state. But when the victim is a so-called statesman, who has malversated the highest trusts for selfish ends, who has abused constitutional forms to the destruction of the spirit that gave them life and validity, who could see nothing nobler in the tenure of high office than the means it seemed to offer of prolonging it, who knows no art to conjure the spirit of anarchy he has evoked but the shifts and evasions of a second-rate attorney, and who has contrived to involve his country in the confusion of principle and vacillation of judgment which have left him without a party and without a friend,—for such a man we have no feeling but contemptuous reprobation. Pan-urge in danger of shipwreck is but a faint type of Mr. Buchanan in face of the present crisis; and that poor fellow's craven abjuration of his "former friend," Friar John, is magnanimity itself, compared with his almost-ex-Excellency's treatment of the Free States in his last Message to Congress. There are times when mediocrity is a dangerous quality, and a man may drown himself as effectually in milk-and-water as in Malmsey.

The question, whether we are a Government or an Indian Council, we do not propose to discuss here; whether there be a right of secession tempered by a right of coercion, like a despotism by assassination, and whether it be expedient to put the latter in practice, we shall not consider: for it is not always the part of wisdom to attempt a settlement of what the progress of events will soon settle for us. Mr. Buchanan seems to have no opinion, or, if he has one, it is a halting between two, a bat-like cross of sparrow and mouse that gives timidity its choice between flight and skulking. Nothing shocks our sense of the fitness of things more than a fine occasion to which the man is wanting. Fate gets her hook ready, but the eye is not there to clinch with it, and so all goes at loose ends. Mr. Buchanan had one more chance offered him of showing himself a common-place man, and he has done it full justice. Even if they could have done nothing for the country, a few manly sentences might have made a pleasing exception in his political history, and rescued for him the fag-end of a reputation.

Mr. Buchanan, by his training in a system of politics without a parallel for intrigue, personality, and partisanship, would have unfitted himself for taking a statesmanlike view of anything, even if he had ever been capable of it. His nature has been subdued to what it worked in. We could not have expected from him a Message around which the spirit, the intelligence, and the character of the country would have rallied. But he might have saved himself from the evil fame of being the first of our Presidents who could never forget himself into a feeling of the dignity of the place he occupied. He has always seemed to consider the Presidency as a retaining-fee paid him by the slavery-propagandists, and his Message to the present Congress looks like the last juiceless squeeze of the orange which the South is tossing contemptuously away.

Mr. Buchanan admits as real the assumed wrongs of the South Carolina revolutionists, and even, if we understand him, allows that they are great enough to justify revolution. But he advises the secessionists to pause and try what can be done by negotiation. He sees in the internal history of the country only a series of injuries inflicted by the Free upon the Slave States; yet he affirms, that, so far as Federal legislation is concerned, the rights of the South have never been assailed, except in the single instance of the Missouri Compromise, which gave to Slavery the unqualified possession of territory which the Free States might till then have disputed. Yet that bargain, a losing one as it was on the part of the Free States, having been annulled, can hardly be reckoned a present grievance. South Carolina had quite as long a list of intolerable oppressions to resent in 1832 as now, and not one of them, as a ground of complaint, could be compared with the refusal to pay the French-Spoliation claims of Massachusetts. The secession movement then, as now, had its origin in the ambition of disappointed politicians. If its present leaders are more numerous, none of them are so able as Mr. Calhoun; and if it has now any other object than it had then, it is to win by intimidation advantages that shall more than compensate for its loss in the elections.

In 1832, General Jackson bluntly called the South Carolina doctrines treason, and the country sustained him. That they are not characterized in the same way now does not prove any difference in the thing, but only in the times and the men. They are none the less treason because James Buchanan is less than Andrew Jackson, but they are all the more dangerous.

It has been the misfortune of the United States that the conduct of their public affairs has passed more and more exclusively into the hands of men who have looked on politics as a game to be played rather than as a trust to be administered, and whose capital, whether of personal consideration or of livelihood, has been staked on a turn of the cards. A general skepticism has thus been induced, exceedingly dangerous in times like these. The fatal doctrine of rotation in office has transferred the loyalty of the numberless servants of the Government, and of those dependent on or influenced by them, from the nation to a party. For thousands of families every change in the National Administration is as disastrous as revolution, and the Government has thus lost that influence which the idea of permanence and stability would exercise in a crisis like the present. At the present moment, the whole body of office-holders at the South is changed from a conservative to a disturbing element by a sense of the insecurity of their tenure. Their allegiance having always been to the party in power at Washington, and not to the Government of the Nation, they find it easy to transfer it to the dominant faction at home.

The subservience on the question of Slavery, which has hitherto characterized both the great parties of the country, has strengthened the hands of the extremists at the South, and has enabled them to get the control of public opinion there by fostering false notions of Southern superiority and Northern want of principle. We have done so much to make them believe in their importance to us, and given them so little occasion even to suspect our importance to them, that we have taught them to regard themselves as the natural rulers of the country, and to look upon the Union as a favor granted to our weakness, whose withdrawal would be our ruin. Accordingly, they have grown more and more exacting, till at length the hack politicians of the Free States have become so imbued with the notion of yielding, and so incapable of believing in any principle of action higher than temporary expedients to carry an election, or any object nobler than the mere possession of office for its own sake, that Mr. Buchanan gravely proposes that the Republican party should pacify South Carolina by surrendering the very creed that called it into existence and holds it together, the only fruit of its victory that made victory worth having. Worse than this, when the Free States by overwhelming majorities have just expressed their conviction, that slavery, as he creature of local law, can claim no legitimate extension beyond the limits of that law, he asks their consent to denationalize freedom and to nationalize slavery by an amendment of the Federal Constitution, that shall make the local law of the Slave States paramount throughout the Union. Mr. Buchanan would stay the yellow fever by abolishing the quarantine hospital and planting a good virulent case or two in every village in the land.

We do not underestimate the gravity of the present crisis, and we agree that nothing should be done to exasperate it; but if the people of the Free States have been taught anything by the repeated lessons of bitter experience, it has been that submission is not the seed of conciliation, but of contempt and encroachment. The wolf never goes for mutton to the mastiff. It is quite time that it should be understood that freedom is also an institution deserving some attention in a Model Republic, that a decline in stocks is more tolerable and more transient than one in public spirit, and that material prosperity was never known to abide long in a country that had lost its political morality. The fault of the Free States in the eyes of the South is not one that can be atoned for by any yielding of special points here and there. Their offence is that they are free, and that their habits and prepossessions are those of Freedom. Their crime is the census of 1860. Their increase in numbers, wealth, and power is a standing aggression. It would not be enough to please the Southern States that we should stop asking them to abolish slavery,—what they demand of us is nothing less than that we should abolish the spirit of the age. Our very thoughts are a menace. It is not the North, but the South, that forever agitates the question of Slavery. The seeming prosperity of the cotton-growing States is based on a great mistake and a great wrong; and it is no wonder that they are irritable and scent accusation in the very air. It is the stars in their courses that fight against their system, and there are those who propose to make everything comfortable by Act of Congress.

It is almost incredible to what a pitch of absurdity the Slave-holding party have been brought by the weak habit of concession which has been the vice of the Free States. Senator Green of Missouri, whose own State is rapidly gravitating toward free institutions, gravely proposes an armed police along the whole Slave frontier for the arrest of fugitives. Already the main employment of our navy is in striving to keep Africans out, and now the whole army is to mount guard to keep them in. This is but a trifle to the demands that will be made upon us, if we yield now under the threats of a mob,—for men acting under passion or terror, or both, are a mob, no matter what their numbers and intelligence.

A dissolution of the Union would be a terrible thing, but not so terrible as an acquiescence in the theory that Property is the only interest that binds men together in society, and that its protection is the highest object of human government. Nothing could well be more solemn than the thought of a disruption of our great and prosperous Republic. Even if peaceful, the derangement consequent upon it would cause incalculable suffering and disaster. Already the mere threat of it, assisted by the efforts of interested persons, has caused a commercial panic. But would it be wisdom in the Free States to put themselves at the mercy of such a panic whenever the whim took South Carolina to be discontented? That would be the inevitable result of a craven spirit now. Let the Republican party be mild and forbearing,—for the opportunity to be so is the best reward of victory, and taunts and recriminations belong to boys; but, above all, let them be manly. The moral taint of once submitting to be bullied is a scrofula that will never out of the character.

We do not believe that the danger is so great as it appears. Rumor is like one of those multiplying-mirrors that make a mob of shadows out of one real object. The interests of three-fifths of the Slave-holding States are diametrically opposed to secession; so are those of five-sixths of the people of the seceding States, if they did but know it. The difficulties in the way of organizing a new form of government are great, almost insuperable; the expenses enormous. As the public burdens grow heavier, the lesson of resistance and rebellion will find its aptest scholars in the non-slave-owning majority who will be paying taxes for the support of the very institution that has made and keeps them poor. Men are not long in arriving at just notions of the value of what they pay for, especially when it is for other people. Taxes are a price that people are slowest to pay for a cat in a bag. If matters are allowed to take their own course for a little longer, the inevitable reaction is sure to set in. The Hartford Convention gave more uneasiness to the Government and the country than the present movement in the South, but the result of it was the ruin of the Federal Party, and not of the Federal Union.

Even if the secessionists could accomplish their schemes, who would be the losers? Not the Free States, certainly, with their variety of resources and industry. The laws of trade cannot be changed, and the same causes which have built up their agriculture, commerce, and manufactures will not cease to be operative. The real wealth and strength of states, other things being equal, depends upon homogeneousness of population and variety of occupation, with a common interest and common habits of thought. The cotton-growing States, with their single staple, are at the mercy of chance. India, Australia, nay, Africa herself, may cut the thread of their prosperity. Their population consists of two hostile races, and their bone and muscle, instead of being the partners, are the unwilling tools of their capital and intellect. The logical consequence of this political theory is despotism, which the necessity of coercing the subject race will make a military one. Already South Carolina is discussing a standing army. If history is not a lying gossip, the result of the system of labor will be Jamaica, and that of the system of polity, Mexico. Instead of a stable government, they will have a whirligig of pronunciamientos, or stability will be purchased at a cost that will make it intolerable. They have succeeded in establishing among themselves a fatal unanimity on the question of Slavery,—fatal because it makes the office of spy and informer honorable, makes the caprice of a mob the arbiter of thought, speech, and action, and debases public opinion to a muddy mixture of fear and prejudice. In peace, the majority of their population will be always looked on as conspirators; in war, they would become rebels.

It is time that the South should learn, if they do not begin to suspect it already, that the difficulty of the Slavery question is slavery itself,—nothing more, nothing less. It is time that the North should learn that it has nothing left to compromise but the rest of its self-respect. Nothing will satisfy the extremists at the South short of a reduction of the Free States to a mere police for the protection of an institution whose danger increases at an equal pace with its wealth.

It was the deliberate intention of Mr. Calhoun that the compact should be broken the moment the absolute control of Government passed out of the hands of the slaveholding clique. He was willing to wait till we had stolen Texas and paid a hundred millions for Cuba; but if the game seemed to be up, then secede at once. In a hasty moment, he started his revolution, when there was a stronger man than he to confront him. South Carolina was to all appearance as united then as now. But a few months brought a reaction, and no one was more relieved than Mr. Calhoun that matters stopped where they did. Whether the stirrers of the present excitement, which finds vacillation in the Executive and connivance In the Cabinet, will be wise enough to let it go out in the same way, remains to be seen; but the greatest danger of disunion, would spring from a want of self-possession and spirit in the Free States.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

Collection of Rare and Original Documents and Relations concerning the Discovery and Conquest of America, chiefly from the Spanish Archives. Published in the Original, with Translations, Illustrative Notos, Maps, and Biographical Sketches. By K.G. SQUIER, M.A., F.S.A., etc., etc. New York: Charles B. Norton. 1860.

No. I. Carta dirigida al Key de Espana, por el Licenciado Dr. Don DIEGO
GARCIA DE PALACIO, Oydor de la Real Audiencia de Guatemala, Ano 1576.
Being a Description of the Ancient Provinces of Guazacapan, Izalco,
Cuscatlan, and Chiquimula, in the Audiencia of Guatemala: with an
Account of the Languages, Customs, and Religion of their Aboriginal
Inhabitants, and a Description of the Ruins of Copan. Square 8vo. pp.
132.

This tract is the first number of a series of Rare and Original Documents, relating to the first settlement of America by the Spaniards, which Mr. Squier proposes to edit and publish. The undertaking is one of interest to all students of American history, and deserves a generous encouragement from them. Its success must depend not on the usual machinery of bookselling so much as on the ready support of individuals.

Mr. Squier's proposed collection resembles in its scope the well-known "Recueil des Documents et Memoires Originaux" of M. Ternaux-Compans. Familiar, by long residence and longer study, as few men are or ever have been, with those portions of our continent of which the Spaniards first took possession, acquainted with their antiquities and former condition, and a curious investigator of their present state and prospects, Mr. Squier is peculiarly fitted to select and edit—with judgment such documents of historical interest as his unrivalled opportunities have enabled him to collect.

The Letter of Palacio is now for the first time published in the original, although it was largely used by Herrera in his "Historia General." "To me," says Mr. Squier, "the relation has a special interest. I have been over a great part of the ground that was traversed by its author, and I am deeply impressed with the accuracy of his descriptions…. His memoir will always stand as one of the best illustrations of an interesting country, as it was at the period immediately succeeding the Conquest." It appears, that, under an order from the Crown, Palacio was deputed to visit a number of the Provinces of Guatemala, and to report upon them, especially in respect to the condition of their native inhabitants. The memoir now published relates chiefly to the territory comprised in the present Republic of San Salvador. It shows Palacio to have been an intelligent observer, and a kindly, well-disposed man,—not free from the superstitions of his time and race, but less credulous than many of his contemporaries. His report is full of matter of value to the historical inquirer, and of entertainment for the general reader. His stories of the manners of the people, and his accounts of the animals of the district are brief, but characteristic. But the most interesting part of his narrative is that which relates to the wonderful ruins of Copan. It is a remarkable fact, stated by Mr. Squier in his Prefatory Note, that these ruins do not appear to have been noticed by any of the chroniclers of the country down to the time of Fuentes, who wrote in 1689, more than one hundred years after Palacio. It was not, indeed, until 1841, when Stephens published his account of them, that an accurate description was given to the world of these most interesting and most puzzling remains of a forgotten people and an unknown antiquity. Even in Palacio's time, only vague traditions existed regarding them. His account has a permanent value from being the earliest known, and as proving that within fifty years after the Spanish Conquest they presented very nearly the same appearance as at present.

Mr. Squier has enriched Talacio's Letter with numerous and important notes. He claims a lenient judgment of his translation, which is printed side by side with the original, on account of the obscurities of the manuscript, and the uncertainty as to the meaning of some of the writer's expressions. But, allowing for these difficulties, we regret that Mr. Squier did not bestow a little more pains on this part of his work. He has fallen into some slight errors, which might easily have been corrected, and he has, as we think, lost something of the spirit of the original by too free a version. The book is one which in typographic beauty would meet the demands of the most exacting bibliographer. We regret the more that the pages are disfigured with misprints, many of which are left uncorrected in the long list of Errata, while others occur in the very list itself.

1. Le Panlatinisme, Confédération Gallo-Latine et Celto-Gauloise, Contre-Testament de Pierre le Grand et Contre-Panslavisme. Paris: Passard, Libraire-Éditeur. 1860. 8vo. pp. 260.

2. Testament de Pierre le Grand, ou Plan de Domination Européenne laissé par lui à ses Descendants et Successeurs au Trône de la Russie. Édition suivie de Notes et de Pièces Justificatives. Paris: Passard. 1860. 8vo.

We seem to be living in an age of pamphleteers. More than ever, both in France and Germany, are pamphlets the order of the day. In Paris alone, the year 1860 has given birth to hundreds of these writings of circumstance,—political squibs, visionary remodellings of European states,—vying with each other for ephemeral celebrity. They fill the windows of the book-shops, and are spread by scores along the stands in the numerous galleries which the Parisian population throngs of evenings. Those issued in the early part of the year have gradually descended from the rank of new publications, and may be found on every quay, spread out, for a few centimes, side by side with old weather-beaten books, odd volumes, refuse of libraries, which book-lovers daily finger through in the hope of finding some pearl, some rarity, in the worthless mass.

Thus we have seen the interminable Rhine question discussed in its every possible phase,—still more that of Italy. Between come the Druses, the Orient, the Turks. Then Italy again, Garibaldi, Naples, the Pope.

To state in general terms the tendency of these rockets of literature, or to arrive at the spirit which seems to pervade them, is not quite so easy as it would seem. They are written by authors of all party-colors, within certain impassable limits prescribed by the parental restrictions of Government. Still it seems to be the old story of soothing; and many a conclusion—as where England is smoothed down by a few flatteries and told that her most natural ally is France, or where Germany is heartily assured that she has nothing to fear, that all the changes proposed are for the good of the Teutonic race—reminds us very strongly of that widely known verse in child-literature,—

"Will you walk into my parlor," etc.

We have before us, however, a work which, from its size and from the labor bestowed upon it, deserves to be ranked above the various productions that have scarcely called forth more than a passing notice in the daily press.

The pamphlet named at the head of this article, and which is but a complement to the volume, is one of the numerous reconstructions and rearrangements of European limits made in the quiet of the study. Were it this alone, it would deserve but little attention. It is more. The author bases his theories upon other than political reasons, having labored hard to establish many debatable points of Ethnography in the interesting notes appended to the work, and which form by far the most remarkable part of it. So we have the question of Races discussed at full length. There is certainly some philological legerdemain, as may be seen from some of the convenient conclusions of the author concerning the Celts and the Gauls. He is full of such paragraphs as this in his argumentation:—

"It has seemed to us proved, that the names,
Volces, Volsks, Bolgs, Belgs, Belgians, Welsh,
Welchs, Waels, Wuelchs or Walchs, Walls,
Walloons, Valais, Valois, Vlaks, Wallachians,
Galatians, Galtachs, Galls, Gaels or Caels,
Gaelic, Galot, Gallegos, Gaul, and even Ola,
Olatz, and Vallus, were but one and the same
word under different forms."

The point to be established at all hazards is, that the French, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Belgians, and even the English and Greeks, form but one great family, of one hundred and fifteen million individuals,—the Gallo-Roman. This Neo-Latin world the author would wish combined in one grand confederation, like the States of America. Hence his use of the term Panlatinism, in opposition to the so much debated one of Panslavism. The merit of the work under consideration is, that, though decidedly French in all its views, it condenses in a few paragraphs the present mooted question of race. The idea of Panslavism, or the uniting of eighty millions of Sclavonians under one banner, was, in its origin, republican and federal, whatever it may have become since. Few words have acquired more diametrically opposite meanings, according as they were uttered by radical or conservative. Hence the confusion, hence the many strange phrases to be met with in the periodical press. The author of the present work has sought to throw some light on this important point. Leaving aside his prophetic fears of future shocks with American or Asiatic powers as visionary, we can say for the work that it presents in a clear light the question of races as referring to European politics. The notes are good, and no research seems to have been spared by the writer to establish the position he maintains.

1. Ancient Danish Ballads. Translated from the Originals, by R.C. ALEXANDER PRIOR, M.D. London: Williams & Norgate. Leipzig: R. Hartmann. 1860, 3 vols. pp. lx., 400, 468, 500.

2. Edinburgh Papers. By ROBERT CHAMBERS, F.R.S.E., etc., etc. The Romantic Scottish Ballads, their Epoch and Authorship. W. & R. Chambers: London and Edinburgh. 1859. pp. 40.

3. The Romantic Scottish Ballads, and the Lady Wardlaw Heresy. By NORVAL CLYNE. Aberdeen: A. Brown & Co. 1859. pp. 49.

The expectations raised by the title of Dr. Prior's volumes are in a great measure disappointed by their contents. The book is of value only because it gives for the first time, in English, the substance of a large number of Danish ballads, and points out the relations between them and similar productions in other languages. Of the spirit and life of these remarkable poems a person hitherto unfamiliar with them would find but scanty indication in Dr. Prior's versions. He has merely done them into English in a somewhat mechanical way, and one scarcely gets a better notion of the more imaginative ones in his bald reproductions than of the "Iliad" from the analysis of that poem in the "Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum." It seems to require almost as peculiar powers to translate an old ballad as to write a new one.

Dr. Prior complains of Jamieson, that his versions from the Danish are done in a broad Scotch dialect, almost as unintelligible to ordinary readers as the language of which they profess to give the meaning. But if any one compare Jamieson's rendering of "The Buried Mother" with Dr. Prior's, (Prior, vol. i. p. 368,) he will, we think, see cause to regret that Jamieson did not do what Dr. Prior has attempted, and that he has not left us a greater number of translations equally good. Jamieson's fault was not so much his broad Scotch as his over-fondness for archaisms, sometimes of mere spelling, which give rise to a needless obscurity. We think that he was theoretically right; but he should not have pushed his theory to the extent of puzzling the reader, where his aim was to give only that air of strangeness which allures the fancy. As respects ballads dealing with the supernatural, Jamieson's notion of the duty of a translator was certainly the true one. There is something almost ludicrous in a ghost talking the ordinary conversational language of every-day life, which might, to be sure, serve very well for some of Jung Stilling's spirits in bottle-green hunting-coats with brass buttons, but hardly for the majesty of buried Denmark. Dr. Prior may claim that his renderings are more literal; but it is the vice of literal translation, that the phrases of one language, if exactly reproduced in another, while they may have the same sense, convey a wholly different impression to the imagination. It is to such cases that the Italian proverb, Tradutiore traditore, applies. Dryden, citing approvingly Denham's verses to Fanshawe,

"They but preserve his ashes, thou his flame,
True to his sense, but truer to his fame,"

says, with his usual pithiness, "Too faithfully is indeed pedantically."

In Dr. Prior's version of the "The Buried Mother" we find a case precisely in point. The Stepmother says to the poor Orphans,—

"In blind-house shall ye lie all night."

Jamieson gives it,—

"Says, 'Ye sall ligg i' the mirk all night.'"

Now, the object in all translations of ballad-poetry being to reproduce simple and downright phrases with equal simplicity and force, to give us the same effects and not the same words, we vastly prefer Jamieson's verse to Dr. Prior's, in spite of the affectation of ligg for lie. If blind-house be the equivalent for dark in the original, Dr. Prior should have told us so in a note, giving us the stronger (because simpler) English word in the text. He might as well write hand-shoe for glove, in a translation from the German. Elsewhere Jamieson errs in preferring groff to great, and the more that groff means more properly coarse than large.

The following couplet is also from Dr. Prior's translation of this ballad:—

"They cried one evening till the sound
Their mother heard beneath the ground."

Jamieson has it,—

"'Twas lang i' the night, and the bairnies
grat [cried],
Their mither she under the mools [mould]
heard that."

Again, Dr. Prior gives us,—

"Her eldest daughter then she sped
To fetch Child Dyring out of bed";

instead of Jamieson's—

"Till her eldest dochter syne [then] said she,
'Ye bid Child Dyring come here to me.'"

And, still worse,—

"Out from their chest she stretch'd her bones
And rent her way through earth and stones";

where Jamieson is not only more literal, but more forcible,—

"Wi' her banes sae stark a bowt she gae
Hath riven both wall and marble gray."

The original is better than either,—

"She upward heaved her mighty bones
And rived both wall and gray marble-stones."

Jamieson had the true instinct of a translator, though his own verses defy the stanchest reader; and, reasoning by analogy, Dr. Prior's translations are so bad that he ought to be capable of very good original poetry.

However, with all its defects, Dr. Prior's book is of value for the information it gives. Under the dead ribs of his translations the reader familiar with old ballads can create a life for himself, and can form some conception of the spirit and strength of the originals.

Mr. Chambers's pamphlet is one that we should hardly have expected from the editor of the best collection of ballads in the language before that of Professor Child. Directly in the teeth of all probability, he attributes the bulk of the romantic Scottish ballads to Lady Wardlaw, who wrote "Hardyknute." This is one of those theories (like that of Lord Bacon being the author of Shakspeare's plays) which cannot be argued, but which every one familiar with the subject challenges peremptorily. Without going very deeply into the matter, Mr. Norval Clyne has put in a clever plea in arrest of judgment. The truth is, that, in the present state of our knowledge, "Hardyknute" could not pass muster as an antique better than "Vortigern," or the poems of "Master Rowley"; and the notion that Lady Wardlaw could have written "Sir Patrick Spens" will not hold water better than a sieve, when we consider how hopelessly inferior are the imitations of old ballads written by Scott, with fifty times her familiarity with the originals, and a man of genius besides.

* * * * *

Miss Gilbert's Career. An American Story. By J.G. HOLLAND. New York: Charles Scribner.

There is scarcely a more hazardous experiment for any novelist than "a novel with a purpose." If the moral does not run away with the story, it is in most cases only because the author's lucky star has made the moral too feeble, in spite of his efforts, to do that or anything else,—in other words, because his book has fortunately defeated its own object. That any clever girl will be kept from the perilous paths of authorship by the warnings, however strongly inculcated, of any novel whatever, we are not prepared to assert: we venture to say no one will be deterred by the history of Miss Fanny Gilbert. If a woman's happiness is to be found in love, and not in fame, the question nevertheless recurs,—What is she to do before the love comes? Our author only shows that his heroine's restless unhappiness was owing to her having to wait for her heart to be awakened: to prove what he desires to prove, he should demonstrate that it was owing to her having adopted authorship during the time of her waiting. During that time, Miss Fanny Gilbert wrote novels, and was unhappy: would she have been happy, if, in the interval, she had chronicled small beer? And even admitting that her authorship caused her unhappiness, we can scarcely believe Dr. Holland prepared to say, after having allowed his heroine a real talent, as one condition of the problem, that she ought to have concealed that talent in the decorous napkin of silence.

What the moral loses the story gains. Our author has lost nothing of that genuine love of Nature, of that quick perception of the comic element in men and things, of that delightful freshness and liveliness, which threw such a charm about the former writings of Timothy Titcomb. No story can be pronounced a failure which has vivacity and interest; and the volume before us adds to vivacity and interest vigorous sketches of character and scenery, droll conversation and incidents, a frequent and kindly humor, and, underlying all, a true, earnest purpose, which claims not only approval for the author, but respect for the man.

Dr. Holland describes admirably whatever he has himself seen. Unfortunately, he has not seen his hero or his heroine. About Arthur Blague there is nothing real or distinctive. There is a life and reality in many scenes of his experience; but the central figure of the group stands conventional and inanimate,—the ordinary walking gentleman of the stage,—the stereo-typed hero of the novel,—hero only by virtue of his finally marrying the heroine. The one merit of the delineation—that it is a portrait of a delicate Christian gentleman—is sadly marred by the vulgar smartness of Arthur's repartees with the scampish New-Yorker. A victory in such a contest was by no means necessary to vindicate the hero's superiority; and if he so far forgot himself as to engage at all in the degrading warfare, a defeat would have been more creditable. His retorts are undeniably smart; but "smartness" is the attribute of a "fellow," not of a "gentleman."

Miss Fanny Gilbert is a warm-hearted, high-spirited girl, clever and ambitious, and disposed at first to look contemptuously on poor Arthur, whose humble labors appear in most dingy and sordid colors, when contrasted with the fair Fanny's gorgeous dreams. She is not a very fascinating nor a very real heroine; but she is better than most of our heroines, and some of her experiences are very pleasantly told.

Arthur's miserly employer is very good, and his shrewd friend Cheek is capitally drawn. It was a peculiarly happy thought to make Cheek into a railroad-conductor, and finally into a "gentlemanly and efficient" superintendent. Nothing else would have suited his character half so well. The business-like religionists, Moustache and Breastpin, are not so good as the author meant to have them. The young bookseller is very well done, and Dr. Gilbert very natural and lifelike. The story of the Doctor's awakened interest in his daughter's success, and of his journey to New York, is very well told. We like especially the lesson which the triumphant authoress, in the full glory of her fame, receives, on finding that her father sets a higher value on his son's least achievement than on his daughter's highest success,—that, however a woman may deserve a man's place, the world will never award it to her. It would have been more effective, however, if Dr. Holland had not been quite so anxious that no one should fail to perceive the moral,—if he had had a little more confidence in his readers. But we can give unqualified praise to the scene between Miss Gilbert and the little crippled boy, which is one of the most beautiful and touching pictures ever yet presented.

It is a real satisfaction to find a book which one may venture to criticize fearlessly, knowing that it will bear the test,—especially at present, when one needs be as chary of trying any book fairly as Don Quixote was of proving his unlucky helmet. And an additional satisfaction is caused by the fact, that the book, not only in origin, but in essence, is American from cover to cover.

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Table of Contents

- A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

- WASHINGTON CITY.

- MIDSUMMER AND MAY.

- PAUL REVERE'S RIDE.

- A NIGHT UNDER GROUND.

- A LONELY HOUSE.

- BARBARISM AND CIVILIZATION.

- WHO WAS CASPAR HAUSER?

- PAMPENEA.

- THE PROFESSOR'S STORY.

- CHAPTER XXV.

- THE TEST.

- RECOLLECTIONS OF KEATS.

- THE EUROPEAN CRISIS.

- A VISIT TO THE ASYLUM FOR AGED AND DECAYED PUNSTERS.

- THE QUESTION OF THE HOUR.

- REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
- RECENT AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE